by Jo Nesbo
‘But he wouldn’t stop, the idiot,’ Greco sighed. ‘Before I shot him he managed to tell me that a characteristic of narcissists is they have a highly developed sense of envy. Like the first narcissist in literature, Cain. You know, the guy in the Bible who killed his own brother out of jealousy. Well, I guess that just about sums me up in a nutshell.’
I didn’t know whether this shooting his psychologist was a joke, and I had no intention of asking. Nor did I propose to point out the futility of taking revenge for something you know you can never get back. Maybe because that was exactly what I was doing with my own life.
‘Now do you see, Lukas? I am the victim of a personality disorder that makes me want to see you suffer. I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do about it.’
‘I suffer every day, Greco. For God’s sake, kill me and let the boy go.’
He smacked his lips three times, the way a teacher responds when a pupil gets the addition wrong on the blackboard.
‘Dying is easy, Lukas. And your suffering is less now, because the Queen is good medicine, don’t you think? OK, I want to open that wound up again. I want to see you squirming on my fork. I want to see you trying to save the boy. And failing again. I hear that when your son had smoke poisoning you drove him to the hospital but you got there too late.’
I didn’t answer. When we smelled the smoke in the middle of the night and ran into Benjamin’s room where he was lying next to that smouldering bedside lamp, he’d already stopped breathing. I drove as fast as I could, but I’m no racing driver and the hospital was too far away and as usual I was a knight on the wrong side of a chessboard.
‘The boy’s vocal cords,’ I said. I had to swallow. ‘Was it you who cut them?’
‘To make him more like your son. So blame God for the fact that your wife gave birth to a mute.’
I looked at the boy.
Where had Greco found him? Probably in a slum on the outskirts of the city, a place where the sudden disappearance of a small child wouldn’t excite much attention.
‘I can just jump out of the window,’ I said. ‘And put an end to the whole game.’
‘If you do the boy’s guts will be destroyed by gas.’
‘Gas?’
‘Just one touch on the keypad.’ Greco held a small remote control up to the camera. ‘It’s a new invention by one of the cartel’s chemists. A type of mustard gas that slowly corrodes the mucous membranes. It is extremely painful and can take several hours. You puke up your own guts before you bleed to death internally.’
I looked around the apartment.
‘Forget it, Lukas, it’ll come through the ceiling and the walls, you won’t be able to stop it. In one hour exactly I’ll press the start button. Sixty minutes, Lukas. Tick-tock.’
‘Fire engines are on the way – the firefighters will hear us shouting.’
‘The fire’s already out, Lukas. It was only a thin coating of spirits across a fire-retardant plus a burning fridge. No one’s coming. Believe me, the two of you are alone.’
I believed him. I looked at my watch and coughed. ‘We are all alone, Greco.’
‘You and I are alone at least, now that she’s been taken from us both.’
I looked up at that Guy Fawkes face of his again. Taken from us. What did he mean?
‘So long, Lukas.’
The connection was broken and I was staring at a blank screen. Things freeze from the outside, but the cold I felt came from inside and was spreading outwards. He couldn’t have…?
No. It had to be something he wanted to trick me into believing.
But why?
So I’d get on the line to Judith at once to check that she was safe, so that he could trace the signal to her hiding place? No, he knew enough about things to know that, like him and like Judith, I had a phone that could switch arbitrarily between such a large network of the cartels’ satellites and private base stations that it would make the signal impossible to track.
I stared at the ceiling and the walls. Looked at my watch, at the second hand that jerked remorselessly onwards.
Tried to think clearly, to work out my next move, but it was impossible to know if my brain was functioning rationally, like the climber on Everest, knowing that the lack of oxygen at altitude enfeebles his powers of judgement and yet not being helped by that knowledge, confusion is confusion.
Sixty minutes. No. Fifty-nine.
I had to know.
I called her number, my heart pounding furiously as I waited.
One ring. Two.
Pick up. Pick up!
Three rings.
Part 2: The Middlegame
In another of Murakami’s games his opponent lost it all in the middlegame. Not because Olsen played badly, but because he was under pressure after falling into the Murakami Trap in the opening. The pleasant-mannered but always silent Olsen had used up valuable time in trying to work out his response and it left him struggling against the clock as well as Murakami’s strongly positioned and numerically superior major pieces. A frequently rehearsed argument revolves around the issue of whether Olsen sacrificed his queen, or Murakami took it. Most people, myself included, think it obvious that Olsen would not voluntarily have sacrificed her, and that all he achieved when Murakami took the piece was a postponement of the inevitable. In an ordinary game Olsen would have resigned and handed the victory to Murakami, but in lightning chess there’s always the chance your opponent will be stressed into making a catastrophic mistake. So Olsen chose to suffer on and allow himself to be cut up, piece by piece; all the while his one remaining black knight hopped about like a headless chicken. Playing that game over again, move by painful move, was like enduring a Greek tragedy. You know how it’s going to end; the object is only to find the most beautiful way of getting there, what the drivers call the scenic route.
* * *
—
I met Judith Szabó while she was still Gio Greco’s fixer and girlfriend. It was at a ball at the Sforzesco Palace that Luca Giualli, head of the Lombardy cartel, had purchased from the commune and turned into his own private fortress. In addition to hiring a small army to take care of the family’s security he had employed me to look for holes in the security routines and pick up signs of any imminent planned attacks.
I was standing by the piano in the atrium looking out across the crowds of the rich and the powerful in their tuxedos and ballgowns. I noticed her, even though she tried to carry herself just like any other guest. Not only because she was so strikingly beautiful in her bright red gown and long, raven-dark hair, but because she had been unable to resist approaching me like a professional.
‘You’re not doing your job especially well,’ was the first thing she said to me.
She was a couple of centimetres taller than my 175.
‘You must be Judith Szabó,’ I said.
‘See, that’s better. How did you work that out?’
‘I hear things. And you walk around like a queen and look around like a driver. Your name isn’t on the guest list, so how did you get in?’
‘I am on the guest list. As Anna Fogel, from the Tokyo cartel. There’s an invitation in the same name. It was just too easy to hack the system, and the check on my fake ID was embarrassingly feeble.’ She flashed a bank card at me.
I nodded. ‘And why wouldn’t I just sound the alarm now and have you cuffed?’
She smiled briefly before nodding in the direction of Luca Giualli, who stood conversing with the mayor of Milan, a man who had spoken enthusiastically of returning to the city-state model of Italy.
‘Because –’ said Judith Szabó, and I knew more or less what she was about to say – ‘to do so would reveal that you had allowed a potential assassin to get so near your employer that she – had she so wished – could have killed him.’
‘Then why are you here?’
> ‘To deliver a message. From you know who.’
‘The Greek. Broccoli head.’
She smiled thinly. ‘He just wants to find out whether you’re as good as they say you are.’
‘Better than him, you mean?’
Her smiled broadened. Her eyes were so lovely. Cold and blue. And I thought at the time, she has a psychopath’s pulse, her heart would beat slowly in a life-or-death situation. Later I would discover I was mistaken, that she was simply a consummate actress. And that the reason she was able to act the psychopath so well was that she was living with one.
‘And now at least we know you aren’t the best, Herr Meyer.’ She looked into my eyes as she brushed something from the lapel of my Brioni tuxedo, though I knew there was nothing there.
‘Excuse me, Herr Meyer, I’ve got someone waiting for me.’
She must have seen how I lifted my gaze above her shoulder and slowly shook my head, because she tensed, turned and looked up at one of the interior balconies in the atrium. It was too dark for her to see whether there was anyone in the darkness behind the open balcony door, but when she lowered her gaze she saw the red dot of a laser beam dancing across her gown.
‘How long has that been there?’ she asked.
‘Red on red,’ I said. ‘I doubt whether any of the guests have noticed it yet.’
‘And how long have you known that Anna Vogel doesn’t exist?’
‘Three days. I asked for every name on the list to be double-checked, and when Anna Vogel cropped up and there’s no one of that name in the Tokyo cartel it naturally made me curious about who you might be. And it looks as if my guess was right.’
That smile of hers was no longer quite so steady.
‘What happens now?’
‘Now you go back to the person waiting for you and tell him that he’s the one who’s been sent a message.’
Judith Szabó stood there, studying me. I knew what she was wondering about. Whether I had planned to let her go or had made my mind up on the spot.
Whatever, two weeks later I would have reason to regret that decision.
* * *
—
Fourth ring.
She always has a phone close by, always. Please, Judith.
Fifth ring.
Don’t be dead.
I called her two weeks after that meeting at the Sforzesco Palace.
‘Hello,’ was all she said.
I recognised her voice at once. Probably because I’d been thinking about her.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I’m calling because you rang this number. Can I ask how you got it?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘But you can ask if I’m free for dinner this evening.’
‘Are you?’
‘Yes. The table’s booked. Seven o’clock at Seta.’
‘That’s early. Will I survive?’
‘If you’re punctual.’
I smiled at what I took to be a joke.
* * *
—
But I was on time. And she was already seated at the table when I arrived. As before, I was struck by the austerity of her beauty. No sweetness, just healthy, symmetrical and properly proportioned. But then those eyes of hers. Those eyes…
‘You’re a widower,’ she said, once we had got a little shop talk out of the way without revealing any secrets.
‘What makes you think that?’
She nodded in the direction of my hand. ‘No driver wears a wedding ring. It tells you something about them. It makes them potentially vulnerable, knowing that there’s someone they love.’
‘Maybe I wear it as a distraction. Or maybe I’m divorced.’
‘Maybe. The pain in your eyes tells me something different.’
‘Maybe that’s from all the victims I have on my conscience.’
‘Is it?’
‘No.’
‘Well then?’
‘Tell me something about yourself first.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘There’s probably quite a difference between what I want to know and what I’m permitted to know. Start anywhere you like.’
She smiled, tasted the wine and nodded to the wine waiter who, without asking, had known who would be doing the tasting.
‘I’m from a well-to-do family. My every material need was met, but none of my emotional needs. The closest to that was my father, who abused me regularly from the age of eleven. What d’you think a psychologist would make of that and my ending up in this business?’
‘You tell me.’
‘I’ve got three university degrees, no children, I’ve lived in six countries and always earned more than my lovers and my ex-husband, and I was permanently bored. Until I started in this business. First as a client. Then as…a little more. Right now I’m Gio Greco’s girlfriend.’
‘Why not the other way round?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Why don’t you say Gio Greco is your boyfriend? You use the passive form.’
‘Isn’t that what strong men’s women usually do?’
‘You don’t strike me as someone who’s easy to dominate. Right now, you say: that makes it sound like a purely temporary arrangement.’
‘And you sound like a person preoccupied with semantics.’
‘The mouth overflows with what the heart is full of – isn’t that what they say?’
She raised her glass and we drank a toast.
‘Am I mistaken?’ I asked.
She shrugged. ‘Aren’t all relationships temporary arrangements? Some end when the love is gone, or the money, or the entertainment value. Others when there’s no life left. What happened in your case?’
I twirled the thick-bellied wine glass between my fingers. ‘The latter.’
‘Competitors’ drivers?’
I shook my head. ‘It was before I entered the business. She took her own life. Our son died in a fire the year before.’
‘Grief?’
‘And guilt.’
‘And was she? Guilty?’
I shook my head. ‘The guilty one was the maker of the Mickey Mouse lamp in the bedroom. It was made of a cheap and highly inflammable material in order to undercut the competition. The maker denied any guilt. He was one of the richest men in France.’
‘Was?’
‘He died in a fire.’
‘We aren’t by any chance talking about François Augvieux who burned to death on board his yacht in the harbour at Cannes?’
I didn’t answer.
‘So that was you. We always wondered who it was. There was no very obvious client. An impressive debut. Because it was your debut, wasn’t it?’
‘The world doesn’t need people who refuse to use their power to do something good.’
Again she put her head on one side, as though to study me from another angle. ‘Is that the reason you’re in this business? To kill unscrupulous profiteers and revenge your son and wife?’
It was my turn to shrug. ‘You’d have to ask a psychologist about that. But tell me, what would the Greek make of you and me sitting here and dining together this evening?’
‘What would? What makes you think he doesn’t know?’
‘Does he?’
She smiled quickly. ‘He’s out on a job. And I’m on a job too. I’d like to have you in my stable.’
‘You make me sound like a racehorse.’
‘You got anything against that?’
‘Not the analogy. But I don’t need a fixer.’
‘Oh, but you do. You’re too easily outmanoeuvred without one. You need someone who’s got your back.’
‘The way I recall it, you were the one who got outmanoeuvred.’
‘I hope you don’t take this personally, Lukas, but you shouldn’t be here right now, you
should be with your client.’
I could feel my pulse quicken.
‘Thanks, Judith, but Giualli’s safe enough in his fortress; and there are no traitors in our crew, I’ve made sure of that personally.’
Judith Szabó took something out of her Gucci bag and placed it on the tablecloth in front of me. It was a drawing or a print. It showed a cat running with something that looked like a lit explosive charge fastened to its body. In the background was a castle.
‘This is a 500-year-old illustration of an offensive tactic used by the Germans back in the sixteenth century. They would capture a cat or a dog that had found its way out through one of those little escape routes animals always find as a way out of the fortress or village they come from, then tie an explosive charge to it and drive it home. And hope the animal would get back up through its tunnel before the fuse burned down.’
I felt a prickling between my shoulder blades. I already had a pretty good idea of what was coming next. It was something I hadn’t – and should have – thought of.
‘Gio is…’ She seemed to be looking for the words. And as well as not being weak, Judith Szabó didn’t strike me as a person who had trouble finding her words. When finally she did, she spoke quietly, and I had to lean forward to hear.
‘I’ve got no problem with the method as such – it’s our job, after all, and we do what we have to do. But there are limits. At least, there are for some of us. Like when that boy who lives with his mother at Sforzesco, Anton…’
The name made me jump. Paolo Giualli and his wife, twenty years younger than him, were good people. Good, at least, considering how rich and powerful they were. They had three well-brought-up children who treated me with a distant courtesy which I reciprocated. Things were a little different with Anton, the five-year-old son of the cook, who lived in one of the service flats below stairs and was so like Benjamin I had to make a conscious effort to control my feelings for him. Judith Szabó stopped, maybe noticing that the name had a particular resonance for me. She coughed before continuing: ‘So Anton is going to be the cat,’ she said.
