The Jealousy Man and Other Stories
- Автор: Несбё Ю
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: Alfred A. Knopf
- ISBN: 978-0-593-32100-3
- Переводчик: Robert Ferguson
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Jealousy Man and Other Stories». Краткое содержание книги:
A detective with a nose for jealousy is on the trail of a man suspected of murdering his twin; a bereaved father must decide whether vengeance has a place in the new world order after a pandemic brings about the collapse of society; a garbage man fresh off a bender tries to piece together what happened the night before; a hired assassin matches wits against his greatest adversary in a dangerous game for survival; and an instantly electric connection between passengers on a flight to London may spell romance, or something more sinister.
With Nesbø’s characteristic gift for outstanding atmosphere and gut-wrenching revelations, The Jealousy Man confirms that he is at the peak of his abilities.
‘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.