The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

For a second or two I simply stood there. And only now did I realise that so far not a sound had come from the boy’s lips. I dropped to my knees, right in front of him. Took off my coat and wiped the blood from his face with it before placing a hand on his shoulder and making eye contact with him, then shaping my words with my hands:

You’re a mute, is that right?

He didn’t respond.

‘Are you a mute?’ I asked in a loud, clear voice.

The boy nodded.

‘I had a son who was a mute too,’ I said. ‘He used sign language, so I can understand that. Do you know sign language?’

The boy shook his head. Opened his mouth and pointed in towards the gap. Then he pointed to the axe blade.

‘Oh Jesus,’ I said.

The phone rang.

I took it from my jacket pocket. It was a FaceTime call, unknown number but I had a hunch who it was. I pressed the answer button and a face appeared on the screen. It looked like a Guy Fawkes mask, the mask once used by idealist revolutionaries the world over to protest against the powers that be, the nation state. With the thin moustache, the goatee beard and the unfailingly ironic smirk that contracted the eyes, Gio Greco looked a bit like a pig.

‘Congratulations,’ said Greco. ‘I see that the two of you have made it to the torture chamber.’

‘At least there’s no fire in here,’ I said.

‘Oh, when you see what I’ve got lined up for you’ll be wishing you’d died in the fire.’

‘Why are you doing this, Greco?’

‘Because the Abu Dhabi cartel are paying me two million. You should feel honoured, it’s a record price for a driver.’

I swallowed. Acquiring a reputation as a top driver carries its own risks, greater and smaller. Greater, because the price on your own head goes up; smaller, because other drivers won’t take a job where they know there’s a good chance they’ll be the ones that end up in a grave. I’d been relying on that smaller risk to give me some protection.

‘I could actually have pushed the price even higher,’ said Greco. ‘If they’d been the ones who approached me.’

‘So you were the one who went to them?’

‘The job was my suggestion, yes. And I knew I could offer them a price they couldn’t refuse.’

The sweat was prickling all over my body, as though it thought that getting rid of liquid like this would improve my chances of survival.

‘But why... all this? You could have just shot me at the pedestrian crossing.’

‘Because we had the budget for something a little more extravagant than a bullet, something that would get us talked about in the business. Creating a reputation is, after all—’

‘Why?’ I had shouted, and saw the boy looking at me with frightened eyes. There was silence at the other end, but I could almost hear his contented smiling.

‘Why?’ I said again, struggling to keep my voice calm.

‘Surely you must know that. You’re a psychologist, and you’re fucking the Queen.’

‘Is it jealousy? Is it as simple as that?’

‘Oh, but jealousy isn’t simple, Lukas. See, after Judith left me I sank into a pretty deep depression. I ended up seeing a psychologist, and he told me that in addition to depression I was suffering from narcissism. I don’t know whether it makes sense to say someone suffers from having a well-founded self-image, but I told him anyway I’d come for some happiness pills, not to get a fucking diagnosis about completely different things.’

I said nothing, but what Greco told me was classic narcissism, where the narcissist refused to recognise the personality disorder or seek treatment for it, and that it was typically through depression that those of us in the health service got to meet the half per cent of the population the diagnosis applied to.

‘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.