The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

‘Hello...’ he said, in that familiar, slow, clear, sing-song voice.

I forced myself to keep my eyes open and watch the screen.

A spasm passed through Oscar and his hand went up to his breast pocket, took out the Montegrappa pen clipped there and opened it in a single, fluid practised movement. Greco observed him with an amused smile.

‘...I’m Greco,’ he concluded, stressing each syllable.

Oscar had taken out the needle-shaped cartridge and was holding it upside down in his little hand. The whole thing had taken less than three seconds, same as the last few times we’d rehearsed the sequence of moves. And now he swung his hand. He was a bright boy and by the time we’d finished he was hitting the eye in the dog’s head every time, even when I held it high above him and moved it about. Hit it again and again, as calm and collected as a robot, the way hypnotised people are. Until we were down to two and a half seconds from when I gave him the trigger words, ‘Hello, I’m Greco,’ to him taking the pen out of his breast pocket, removing the cartridge and stabbing.

I saw the point of the cartridge penetrate Greco’s eye, and could sense how it slipped through the paper-thin bone at the rear of the socket and on into the brain. Oscar’s small, balled hand against Greco’s face like a growth, like broccoli. Greco was staring with the other eye, not at Oscar but at me. I don’t know what I saw there. Astonishment? Respect? Fear? Pain? Or perhaps nothing. Perhaps those muscular spasms passing across his face were the result of whichever centre of the brain the cartridge point penetrated, as I recalled from my student days how we could get dead frogs to move their legs by stimulating the nervous system.

Then Greco’s body suddenly relaxed, and he exhaled in a long gasp, his last S, and the light in the remaining good eye went out, like the red light on a piece of sloppily produced electronic equipment. Because in the final analysis perhaps that’s all we are. Frogs with conduits that transmit impulses. Complex robots. So advanced we even possess the power to love.

I looked at Oscar.

‘Hi, I’m Lukas,’ I said.

He emerged immediately from his trance, dropped the cartridge and looked at me. Next to him, his head lolling on the back of the sofa, lay Greco, the cartridge sticking out of his eye as he stared up at the ceiling.

‘Keep looking at me,’ I said.

I saw the men behind Oscar who had raised their machine guns but who now stood as though frozen to the spot. No shots had been fired. For there was no longer any danger to be averted. No longer a boss to be protected. And, their brains were telling them, though they could not have formulated the thoughts themselves: no one left to pay them for killing this boy, this child whose body would haunt them for the rest of their nights were they to kill him.