by Jo Nesbo
“I haven’t asked yet,” I said. “But—”
“I’ll pay you five times your usual fee,” Hoffmann said. “So you can take the person in question on a never-ending Christmas holiday afterwards if you want.”
I tried to do the math. But like I said, I’m pretty useless.
“Here’s the address,” Hoffmann said.
I had worked for him for four years without knowing where he lived. But then, why should I have known? He didn’t know where I lived. And I’d never met his new wife either, just heard Pine going on about how hot she was, and how much he’d be able to rake in if he had a bitch like that on the streets.
“She’s on her own in the house most of the day,” Hoffmann said. “At least that’s what she tells me. Do it whatever way you like, Olav. I trust you. The least I know, the better. Understood?”
I nodded. The less I know, I thought.
“Olav?”
“Yes, sir, understood.”
“Good.”
“Let me think about it till tomorrow, sir.”
Hoffmann raised one of his neatly manicured eyebrows. I don’t know much about evolution and stuff like that, but didn’t Darwin say there were only six universal facial expressions for human emotions? I’ve no idea if Hoffmann had six human emotions, but I think what he was hoping to communicate with his raised eyebrow—in contrast to what he would have meant by an open-mouthed stare—was mild annoyance combined with reflection and intelligence.
“I’ve just given you the details, Olav. And now—after that—you’re thinking about refusing?”
The threat was barely audible. No, actually, if that was the case then I probably wouldn’t have picked up on it. I’m completely tone-deaf when it comes to noticing the undertones and subtexts in what people say. So we can assume that the threat was obvious enough. Daniel Hoffmann had clear blue eyes and black eyelashes. If he was a girl I’d have said it was make-up. I don’t know why I mention that, it’s got nothing to do with anything.
“I didn’t have time to respond before you gave me the details, sir,” I said. “You’ll have an answer by this evening, if that’s okay, sir?”
He looked at me. Blew cigar smoke in my direction. I sat there with my hands in my lap. Fiddling with the brim of the labourer’s cap I didn’t actually have.
“By six,” he said. “That’s when I leave the office.”
I nodded.
—
As I walked home along the city streets through the snowstorm, four o’clock came and darkness settled over the city again after just a few hours of grey daylight. The wind was still strong, and there was an unsettling whistling sound from dark corners. But like I said, I don’t believe in ghosts. The snow crunched under the soles of my boots, like the snapping spines of dusty old books, but I was thinking. I usually try to avoid doing that. It’s not an area where I see any hope of improvement with practice, and experience has taught me that it rarely leads to anything good. But I was back in the first of those two calculations. The fix itself ought to be fine. To be honest, it would be easier than the other jobs I had done. And the fact that she was going to die was fine as well: like I said, I think all of us—men and women alike—have to accept the consequences when we make mistakes. What worried me more was what was bound to happen afterwards. When I was the guy who had fixed Daniel Hoffmann’s wife. The man who knew everything and had the power to determine Daniel Hoffmann’s future once the police started their investigation. Power over someone who wasn’t capable of subordination. And a man Hoffmann owed five times the usual fee. Why had he offered that for a job that was less complicated than normal?
I felt like I was sitting at a poker table with four heavily armed, innately suspicious bad losers. And I’d just managed to get a hand of four aces. Sometimes good news is so improbably good that it’s bad.
Okay, so what a smart poker player would do here is get rid of the cards, soak up the loss and hope for better—and more appropriate—luck in the next round. My problem was that it was far too late to fold. I knew Hoffmann was going to be behind the murder of his wife, regardless of whether it was me or someone else who did it.
I realised where my steps had taken me, and stared into the light.
She had her hair pulled up in a bun, the way my mum used to. She was nodding and smiling at customers who spoke to her. Most of them probably knew she was deaf and dumb. Wishing her “Happy Christmas,” thanking her. The typical pleasantries that people say to each other.
Five times the usual fee. A never-ending Christmas holiday.
CHAPTER 3
I rented a room in a small hotel right opposite the Hoffmanns’ apartment in Bygdøy Allé. The plan was to watch what the wife did for a couple of days, see if she went anywhere while her husband was at work, or if she had any visitors. Not that I was interested in finding out who her lover was. My aim was simply to work out the best, least risky time to strike, when she was on her own at home and wasn’t likely to be disturbed.
The room turned out to be the perfect vantage point not only to watch Corina Hoffmann coming and going, but also to see what she got up to inside the apartment. Evidently they never bothered to close the curtains. Most people don’t, in a city where there’s no sun to shut out, and people outside are more interested in getting into the warm somewhere than they are in standing and staring.
For the first few hours I didn’t see anyone in there. Just a living room bathed in light. The Hoffmanns weren’t exactly sparing with the electricity. The furniture wasn’t English; it looked more French, especially the strange sofa in the middle of the room that only had a back at one end. Presumably it was what the French call a chaise longue which—unless my French teacher was having me on—means “long chair.” Ornate, asymmetrical carving, with some sort of nature-inspired upholstery. Rococo, according to my mum’s art history books, but it could just as well have been knocked together by a local craftsman and painted in the traditional style out in the Norwegian countryside for all I knew. Either way, it wasn’t the sort of furniture someone young would choose, so I guess it was Hoffmann’s ex-wife’s. Pine had said Hoffmann threw her out the year she turned fifty. Because she’d turned fifty. And because their son had moved out and she no longer filled any function in his home. And—according to Pine—he had said all this to her face, and she had accepted it. Along with a flat by the sea and a cheque for one and a half million kroner.
To pass the time I took out the sheets of paper I’d been writing on. It was really just a form of scribbling. Well, that’s not quite true, I suppose it was more of a letter. A letter to someone whose identity I didn’t know. Actually, maybe I did. But I’m not exactly much good at writing, so there were a lot of mistakes, a lot that had to be cut. To be honest, a lot of paper and ink had gone into every word that I’d kept. And things went so slowly this time that I eventually just put the paper down, lit a cigarette and did some daydreaming instead.
Like I said, I’d never seen any member of Hoffmann’s family, but I could see them in my mind’s eye as I sat there looking into the apartment on the other side of the street. I liked looking in on other people. Always had done. So I did what I always did, and imagined family life in there. A nine-year-old son, home from school, sitting in the living room reading all the strange books he’d taken out from the library. The mother singing quietly to herself as she prepared dinner in the kitchen. The way mother and son tense for a moment when there’s a noise from the door. Then how they suddenly relax when the man in the hall calls out “I’m home!” in a clear, cheerful voice, and they run out to greet him and give him a hug.
While I was sitting there immersed in happy thoughts, Corina Hoffmann walked into the living room from the bedroom, and everything changed.
The light.
The temperature.
The calculations.
—
That afternoon I didn’t go to the supermarket.
I didn’t wait for Maria the way I sometimes did, I didn�
�t follow her to the underground at a safe distance, I didn’t stand right behind her in the crowd in the middle of the train, where she always liked to stand even if there were empty seats. That afternoon I didn’t stand there like a madman, whispering things to her that only I could hear.
That afternoon I sat bewitched in a darkened room, staring at the woman on the other side of the street. Corina Hoffmann. I could say whatever I wanted, as loudly as I wanted—there was no one to hear me. And I didn’t have to look at her from behind, look at her hair so hard that I managed to see a beauty in it that wasn’t actually there.
Tightrope-walker. That was the first thing I thought when Corina Hoffmann walked into the room. She was wearing a white terry-cloth dressing gown, and she moved like a cat. By that I don’t mean that she ambled along like some mammals do, cats and camels, for instance. Moving both legs on one side before moving the others. Or so I’ve heard. What I mean is that cats—if I’ve got this right—walk on tiptoe, and that they put their back paws on the same spot as their front paws. That was what Corina was doing. Setting her naked feet down with her ankles straight, and putting the second foot down close to the first. Like a tightrope-walker.
Everything about Corina Hoffmann was beautiful. Her face, with its high cheekbones, Brigitte Bardot lips, her blonde, mussed-up, glossy hair. The long, thin arms emerging from the wide sleeves of the dressing gown, the tops of her breasts, so soft that they moved as she walked and when she breathed. And the white, white skin of her arms, face, breasts, legs—bloody hell, it was like snow glittering in sunlight, the way that can make a man snow-blind in just a few hours. Basically, I liked everything about Corina Hoffmann. Everything except her surname.
It looked like she was bored. She drank coffee. Talked on the phone. Leafed through a magazine, but ignored the newspapers. She disappeared into the bathroom, then came out again, still wearing the dressing gown. She put a record on, and danced along to it rather half-heartedly. Swing, it looked like. She had something to eat. Looked at the time. Almost six. She changed into a dress, fixed her hair and put a different record on. I opened the window and tried to hear, but there was too much traffic. So I picked up the binoculars again and tried to focus on the record-sleeve that she’d left on the table. It looked like there was a picture of the composer on the front. Antonio Lucio Vivaldi? Who knows? The point is that the woman Daniel Hoffmann came home to at quarter past six was a completely different one from the woman I had spent the whole day with.
They skirted around each other. Didn’t touch each other. Didn’t talk to each other. Like two electrons pushing away from each other because they’re both negatively charged. But they ended up behind the same bedroom door.
I went to bed, but couldn’t sleep.
What is it that makes us realise we’re going to die? What is it that happens on the day when we acknowledge it isn’t just a possibility, but an unavoidable fucking fact that our life will come to an end? Obviously everyone will have different reasons, but for me it was watching my father die. Seeing how banal and physical it was, like a fly hitting a windscreen. What’s actually more interesting is: What is it—once we’ve reached that realisation—that makes us doubt again? Is it because we’ve gotten smarter? Like that philosopher—David Something-or-other—who wrote that just because something keeps happening, there’s no guarantee that it’s going to happen again. Without logical proof, we don’t know that history is going to repeat itself. Or is it because we get older and more scared the closer it gets? Or is it something else entirely? As if one day we see something that we didn’t know existed. Feel something that we didn’t know we could feel. Hear a hollow sound when we bang on the wall, and realise that there might be another room behind it. And a hope is sparked, a terrible, draining hope that gnaws away at you and can’t be ignored. A hope that there might be an escape route from death, a short cut to a place you didn’t know about. That there is a point. That there is a narrative.
—
The next morning I got up at the same time as Daniel Hoffmann. It was still pitch-black when he left. He didn’t know I was here. Didn’t want to know, as he’d been careful to point out.
So I turned off the light, sat in the chair by the window and settled down to wait for Corina. I took out my papers again and looked through my letter project. The words were more incomprehensible than usual, and the few I did understand suddenly seemed irrelevant and dead. Why didn’t I just throw the whole lot away? Because I’d spent so long composing those wretched sentences? I put it all down and studied the lack of activity on Oslo’s deserted winter streets until she finally appeared.
The day passed much like the previous one. She went out for a while and I followed her. From following Maria I had learned the best way to do it without being noticed. Corina bought a scarf in a shop, drank coffee with someone who seemed to be a girl friend to judge from their body language, and then went home.
It was still only ten o’clock, and I made myself a cup of coffee. I watched her lying on the chaise longue in the middle of the room. She’d put a dress on, a different one. The fabric shifted around her body whenever she moved. A chaise longue is a strange piece of furniture, neither one thing nor the other. When she moved to find a more comfortable position it happened slowly, elaborately, consciously. As if she knew she was being watched. Knew that she was desired. She looked at the time, leafed through her magazine, the same as the day before. Then she tensed up, almost imperceptibly.
I couldn’t hear the doorbell.
She stood up, went over to the door in that languid, soft, feline way, and opened it.
He was dark-haired, fairly thin, the same age as her.
He went in, shut the door behind him, hung up his coat and kicked off his shoes in a way that suggested this wasn’t his first visit. Nor his second visit. There was no doubt about that. There had never been any doubt. So why had I doubted? Because I wanted to?
He hit her.
I was so shocked at first I thought I’d seen wrong. But then he did it again. Slapped her hard across the face with the flat of his hand. I could see from her mouth that she was screaming.
He took hold of her throat with one hand and pulled her dress off with the other.
There, under the chandelier, her naked skin was so white that it seemed to be a single surface, no contours, just an impenetrable whiteness, like snow in the flat light of an overcast or foggy day.
He took her on the chaise longue. Stood there at the foot of it with his trousers round his ankles while she lay on the pale, embroidered images of virginal, idealised European woodland landscapes. He was skinny. I could see his muscles moving under his ribcage. The muscles in his buttocks tensed and relaxed like a pump. He was shuddering and shaking, as if he were furious that he couldn’t do anything…more. She lay there, legs open, passive, like a corpse. I wanted to look away, but couldn’t. Seeing them like that reminded me of something. But I couldn’t work out what.
Maybe I remembered what it was that night, once everything had calmed down. Either way, I dreamed about a picture I’d seen in a book when I was a boy. Animal Kingdom 1: Mammals, from the Deichman Library. It was a picture of the Serengeti savannah in Tanzania, somewhere like that. Three furious, scrawny, wound-up hyenas that had either managed to bring down their own prey, or had chased the lions away from theirs. Two of them, their buttocks tensed, had their jaws dug into the zebra’s gaping stomach. The third was looking at the camera. Its head was smeared with blood and it was baring its jagged row of teeth. But it was the look in its eyes I remembered most. The look that those yellow eyes were directing into the camera and out of the page of the book. It was a warning. This isn’t yours, it’s ours. Get lost. Or we’ll kill you too.
CHAPTER 4
When I stand behind you in the underground, I always wait until our carriage goes over a join in the rails before saying anything. Maybe it’s a set of points where the track divides. Either way, somewhere deep underground where metal rattles and clatte
rs against metal, a sound that reminds me of something, something to do with words, things falling into place, something to do with fate. The train lurches, and anyone who isn’t a regular passenger momentarily loses their balance and has to reach out for support, anything that can help them stay upright. The change of tracks makes enough noise to drown out anything I might want to say. I whisper whatever I want to whisper. Right at that point when no one else can hear me. You wouldn’t be able to hear me anyway. Only I can hear me.
What do I say?
I don’t know. Just things that come into my head. Things. I don’t know where they’ve come from, or if I really mean them. Well, maybe I do, there and then. Because you’re beautiful, you too, as I stand there in the crowd right behind you, looking at just the bun in your hair and imagining the rest.
But I can’t imagine that you’re anything but dark-haired, because you are. You’re not fair like Corina. Your lips aren’t so full of blood that I want to bite them. There’s no music in the sway of your back and the curve of your breasts. You’ve only been there until now because there hasn’t been anyone else. You filled a vacuum that I never used to know existed.
You asked me back to yours for dinner that time, just after I’d got you out of trouble. I assumed it was as a thank-you. You wrote the invitation on a note and gave it to me. I said yes. I was going to write that down, but you smiled to let me know that you understood.
I never came.
Why not?
If I knew the answer to things like that…
I am me, and you are you? Maybe that was it.
Or was it even simpler? Like the fact that you’re deaf and dumb and walk with a limp. I’ve got more than enough handicaps of my own. Like I said, I’m good for nothing apart from one thing. And what the hell would we have said to each other? You would doubtless have suggested that we write things down for each other, and I—as I’ve said—am dyslexic. And if I haven’t said it before, I’m saying it now.
