by Jo Nesbo
I was already halfway out of my seat.
‘It’s too late, Lukas. Sit down.’
I looked at her. Her voice was steady but I thought I could see tears in those blue eyes of hers. I knew nothing. Only that I was, once again, the knight.
* * *
—
Several days would pass before the testimony of witnesses and forensic examinations revealed what had happened. The Giualli children were accompanied by bodyguards wherever they went – at home, at school, at ballet, at karate, visiting triends – but the same thing didn’t apply to children of the staff. All employees were searched on arrival and departure – for treachery is, after all, a part of human nature. But the chances of their being kidnapped were regarded as remote, especially since all employees had signed a contract which clearly stated that, in any such eventuality, their employer was absolved of any responsibility.
When Anton returned home from school that afternoon, an hour later than usual, he was in a state of exhaustion and told his mother how he’d been stopped by a man on his way through the Sempione Park. The man had held a cloth against the boy’s face, everything went black and Anton said he had no idea how long he’d been out before waking up beneath one of the bushes in the park. His neck and throat were hurting, but apart from that he was feeling as well as could be expected. When asked to describe the man all Anton could remember was that, in spite of the heat of the day, he had been wearing an overcoat.
His mother had straight away spoken to Luca Giualli who at once rang the police and the doctor. The doctor had said the pains and the swelling around the neck could indicate that something – he declined to speculate on what it might be – had been forced down the boy’s throat. But he couldn’t say any more until he had taken a closer look.
According to the police report, four officers had been approaching the entrance to the fortress when the explosion occurred. The charge contained in the gelatine bag in the boy’s stomach would not have been powerful enough to kill Luca Giualli and his wife had they been in their part of the fortress and Anton in the service flat. But they were – as we said – good people, and they were not merely close by but actually in the same room, so that there was little left of any of them once the police and the fire brigade had made their way through the ruins.
* * *
—
These details were still unknown to me as I sat that evening in one of Milan’s best restaurants looking into Judith Szabó’s blue eyes. What I knew for sure was that Anton was dead, and probably Luca Giualli too. That I had failed to do my job, and that it was now too late. I realised too that Judith Szabó had not been joking when she said I might be dead if I turned up late.
‘At that ball,’ I said, ‘I should never have let you go.’
‘No, you shouldn’t have. But you wanted to send a message to Greco, didn’t you?’
I ignored that. ‘You invited me here so I wouldn’t be at the castle when the boy came home. Why?’
‘At the ball I realised you were good. You would have smelled the fuse and possibly saved Luca Giualli.’
‘Was it Greco’s decision to get me out here tonight for this meal?’
‘Greco takes all the operational decisions.’
‘But?’
‘But this was my suggestion.’
‘Why? As you see, you’ve overestimated my ability to sniff out anything at all. When you invited me here, I thought –’ I stopped and pressed my thumb and index finger into my eyes.
‘Thought what?’ she said quietly.
I breathed out heavily. ‘That you were interested in me.’
‘I understand,’ she said, and laid her hand over mine. ‘But you aren’t mistaken. I am interested in you.’
I looked down at her hand. ‘Oh?’
‘The main reason I got you out of the way is because I didn’t want you to die too. You let me go the last time we met. You didn’t need to – I don’t even think it was something you planned. So it was my turn to show a little mercy.’
‘Showing mercy is not the same as being interested.’
‘But I’m telling you I am. I need a new client. I think I’ve just lost the one I had.’
She looked down without moving her hand from mine. With her other hand she lifted the serviette from her lap and held it out to me.
‘You’re crying,’ she explained.
* * *
—
That was how things started between me and Judith. With tears. Was that the way it was going to end too?
Six rings.
Seven.
Eight.
I was about to hang up.
‘Hey, lover boy. I was in the shower.’
As I breathed in hard I realised I had been holding my breath.
‘What’s up?’ she asked, worried, as though she’d read my silence.
‘I’m in a locked apartment with a mute boy –’
‘Gio.’ She said it before I’d finished my sentence.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I was afraid he’d traced you too.’
‘He can’t find me here, I’ve already told you that.’
‘Everybody can be found, Judith.’
‘Where are you?’
‘That’s not important, you can’t help me. I just wanted to hear that you’re OK.’
‘Lukas, tell me where –’
‘Now you know he’s trying to reach you by using me. Stay hidden. I…’
Not even now, in this situation, could I make myself say it.
Love.
That was a word reserved for Maria and Benjamin. Over the course of the year in which Judith and I had been together it had occurred to me that maybe one day I would be able to say it and mean it. But no matter how much Judith fascinated and interested me and in all sorts of ways made me happy, that was one door that seemed locked shut.
‘…am so fond of you, my darling.’
‘Lukas!’
I hung up.
Leaned against the wall.
Looked at my watch. It was working against me, that much I realised. But why had he given me all this time? Why run the risk of my calling up my allies and summoning them to come to my assistance, rescue me? Or perhaps even the police?
Because he knew I had no allies, or none willing to go up against someone like Gio Greco. As for the police, when was the last time they got involved in a stand-off between drivers, with or without an innocent boy as bait?
I beat the wall with the palm of my hand and the boy looked startled.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’m just trying to think.’
I put my hand to my forehead. Greco wasn’t crazy, not in the sense that he acted irrationally. It was just that with his particular personality disorders – a more precise diagnosis would probably be malign narcissism, which isn’t far away from psychopath – he operated with a rationale that was completely different from that of so-called normal people. If I was to predict his next move then I needed to understand him. We were revengers, both of us, but that was where the similarity ended. My crusade against the cartels was not just a form of spiritual cleansing, a way of muting my own pain; it was also principled: I wanted to tear down a world order in which the greediest and most unscrupulous profiteers had all the power. Greco didn’t want to torture me as a matter of principle, but for the brief, passing and sadistic pleasure it gave him. And in pursuit of that pleasure he was prepared to sacrifice the lives of innocent people. That was it. That had to be the reason why he didn’t just start the torture or the killing straight away; the pleasure would have been too brief. He wanted first to enjoy the knowledge that I knew what lay in store for me. This – my fear – was just his starter.
I went over my reasoning again.
There was something there that didn’t quite add up.
The direction
in which I was thinking, that he just wanted to see me suffer – that was something he’d planted, it was exactly what he wanted me to think. It was too simple. He wanted something more. What does a narcissist want? He wants affirmation. He wants to know he’s best. Or, even more important, he wants everyone else to know he’s best. Naturally. He wants to show the whole business, the whole cartel world, that he’s better than me.
So far he’d managed to make me go along with everything he’d planned. I had run up the stairs to rescue the boy. I had managed to get us over to the other apartment. I had used the axe the way I was supposed to use it. I had…
I froze.
I had called Judith. He’d arranged it that way. He wanted me to call her. Why? Phone calls couldn’t be tracked and phones located the way people once could be. Silence.
I took the phone out again, tapped in her name. Pressed the phone to my ear. Silence.
The phone wasn’t ringing. I looked at the screen. The symbol showed not just a bad connection, it showed no connection at all. I crossed to the window, held the phone. Still no connection. We were in the middle of Milan, it wasn’t possible. Or, of course, it was possible. If someone installed a jamming apparatus in a room they could turn the jamming signal on and off at will.
I stared at the walls, trying to see where Greco might have hidden the box. On the ceiling, maybe? Was the box there to ensure I couldn’t call anyone once I had – predictably enough – called Judith? Greco probably thought that after all there just might be someone I could call who could possibly do something to upset his plans.
Accept. I had to accept that that possibility no longer existed. And I had to stop thinking about why it was he might possibly have wanted me to ring Judith, because there was nothing at all I could do about it. At least now she knew he was on the warpath, and I had to believe her when she said that she couldn’t be traced through the phone, and that he didn’t know where her apartment was, because not even I knew that.
I looked at my watch. And at the boy.
I had no doubt at all that Greco would use gas; he’d done so before. When the most brilliant inventor in the largest of the three electro-cartels took his vehicle in for repairs Greco had bribed a mechanic, entered the place by night and simply installed a gas pellet in the gearbox that would break open when the inventor put the gear lever into overdrive. The cartel’s security people had come for the car the following day, checked it for any explosive devices and then driven it through the heavily trafficked city streets to the house where he lived. It wasn’t until a few days later, when the inventor drove to his country home by Lake Como, that the car was out on a motorway and in due course he moved up into overdrive. The car went off the road close to one of the large bridges, rolled over and was crushed against the cobbles of a village square directly below. The death was recorded as a road accident. Not that insiders didn’t know gas was involved, for the death of everyone who is important for a company’s competitive success is always regarded as suspicious and involves an autopsy. But according to Judith the electro-cartel was anxious to play down the vulnerability of its security system as being bad for its reputation. The irony of it all was that within the drivers’ world I was the one given the credit for the attack, merely because on one occasion I had answered a query from another limo driver about how to eliminate this chemist who had an army to guard him and who rarely left his fortress home, and then only in a bulletproof car with his own personal driver and bodyguards for a skiing trip to the mountains at Bergamo. I suggested that one should track down the personal driver and hypnotise him without his knowing it, simply prime him with a trigger word which – when he heard or read it – would immediately put him into a trance. This type of hidden hypnosis leaves the person apparently exactly the same, and he feels exactly the same too. I suggested the trigger word should be a place name he would be bound to see along one of the fastest and most dangerous stretches of road between Milan and Bergamo.
I don’t know whether Greco was ever told of my suggestion and that was what inspired him, or what he thought about me being given the credit for the attack. The point is, I would never have carried out such a mission; I never do jobs in which innocent people can die.
Again I looked at my watch. The problem wasn’t that time was moving too fast. It moved slowly, but I was thinking even slower.
I had to get the boy out of the apartment before the gas was released.
If I could get the people down in the street to tear down one of the shop blinds, might they possibly be able to use it as a jumping sheet?
I crossed to the window and looked down.
A man in police uniform stood down there. Apart from him the street was empty.
‘Hey!’ I suddenly shouted. ‘I need help!’
The uniformed man looked up. He neither responded nor moved. And although he was too far away for me to see his face clearly, I noticed that the big man’s head seemed to have been beaten down between his shoulders. The pedestrian precinct was closed at both ends of the block by security tape, presumably fake too, like the uniform. I closed my eyes and cursed inwardly. Big as he was, and wearing that uniform, he probably had little trouble telling people to move on. The drama moreover was at an end; the fire had been put out and the boy and I presumably rescued. I looked across to the other side of the street. Tried to estimate the distance in metres. The fake policeman crossed the street and disappeared through the gate directly below me.
I stepped back inside and studied the apartment again. With the same result. There was just us in here, the four walls, a fire-axe and the decapitated body of the dog. I walked round the walls, hitting them with my fist. Brick.
‘You know how to write?’ I asked.
The boy nodded.
I took the Montegrappa pen from my inside pocket and handed it to him.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked, pulling up the sleeve of my coat so that he could write on the cuff of my white shirt. But it was saturated with blood from the bite wound, and before I could pull up the other sleeve he had turned to the wall and was writing on the pale blue wallpaper.
‘ “Oscar, eight years old”,’ I read aloud. Then I said: ‘Hi, Oscar, my name is Lukas. And you know what, we’re going to have to get out of here.’
I’d worked it out already. It was about eighteen metres down to the street. Tying together the coat, the shirt and my trousers I would be able to lower Oscar four metres down. Using his own clothes would make that six metres. I could probably let Oscar go from a height of four metres without him getting seriously injured. But even for that I would need another eight metres. And where was I going to find that in an apartment that had been completely stripped?
I stared at the dog. We had not had much anatomy during our psychology studies, but one of the things I did notice – apart from the paper-thin bone between the eye socket and the brain – was that the human body contained eight metres of intestines. Or intestine. Because from the anal aperture to the throat is one long tube. How much weight could an intestine bear? I thought of my uncle in Munich who served sausages linked in their skins and how as a kid I used to try to pull them apart. In the end I always had to use a knife.
I picked up the axe.
‘Think you can help me, Oscar?’
The boy looked wide-eyed at me but nodded. I showed him how I wanted him to hold the dog’s body between his knees and hold the front paws out to the sides and back, so that the dog’s stomach lay open and distended in front of me.
‘Close your eyes,’ I said.
It’s remarkable how delicate we mammals are. All I had to do was draw the sharp edge of the axe up through the fur and the belly opened, and the guts tumbled out. So did the stench. I immediately began to pull the intestine out, concentrating on breathing through my mouth.
It was hard to see in all the blood and slime, but I located what looked to me like two ends and cut
them off. Tied a knot in each end to seal off the openings. It didn’t look like eight metres, hardly even five. But the material seemed flexible, so maybe with a little weight on one end it would stretch to eight?
I took off my clothes and tied them together using a reef knot. It took a while, since it was a long time since I had practised the knots I learned from my father, in the days when I thought I was going to go in for competitive sailing, as he had done.
After several failed attempts I finally got it right, but when I tried to secure the intestine to the sleeve of the coat the two wouldn’t connect; the sleeve simply slipped out through the knot. I tried to think hard as I sat there on the floor in only my underwear, shivering in the cold draught coming from the window. It just didn’t work. I swore out loud and looked at my watch. It was now more than half an hour since Greco had begun his countdown.
I had another go, this time using a longer section of sleeve; but again the slippery, slimy gut just glided out through the knot. I threw the gut and the coat aside, lay back on the floor, pressed my stinking bloody hands to my face and felt the tears welling up.
He had me exactly where he wanted me.
A small hand lifted my own from my face.
I looked up and there was Oscar holding something up in the air. The gut and the coat sleeve. Knotted together. I took hold of it and pulled at the two ends, but they held fast. I stared in disbelief at the knot. And then I recognised it. It was a sheet bend. And I remembered what my father had said when I told him that Maria and I were going to get married. That with certain women the knot to use was a bowline, easy to tie and easy to untie. But getting married, the knot to use then was a sheet bend; the harder you pulled, the tighter it got.
‘Where did you learn…?’
Oscar saluted with two fingers held to his forehead.
‘Cubs?’
He nodded.
Just then the phone – which I had placed on the floor, along with my keys and wallet – began to vibrate. I picked it up. FaceTime again, and once again I had a full-strength signal.
