Blood on Snow
- Автор: Несбё Ю
- Серия: Blood on Snow #1
- Год: 2015
- Язык: английский
- Год: Knopf, Doubleday Publishing Group
- ISBN: 978-0-385-35419-6
- Переводчик: Neil Smith
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «Blood on Snow». Краткое содержание книги:
The flat was dark when I let myself in. On the bed I could make out Corina’s shape.
So quiet and motionless that I almost found it odd. I walked slowly over to the bed and stood above her. She looked so peaceful. And so pale. A clock began to tick inside my head, ticking as if it were working something out. I leaned closer to her, until my face was right above her mouth. Something was missing. And the clock was ticking louder and louder.
“Corina,” I whispered.
No reaction.
“Corina,” I repeated, a bit louder, and heard something I had never heard before in my own voice, a faint note of helplessness.
She opened her eyes.
“Come here, teddy bear,” she whispered, wrapping her arms around me and pulling me down onto the bed.
“Harder,” she whispered. “I won’t break, you know.”
No, I thought, you won’t break. We, this, won’t break. Because this is what I’ve been waiting for; this is what I’ve been practising for. Nothing but death can ruin this.
“Oh, Olav,” she whispered. “Oh, Olav.”
Her face was glowing, she was laughing, but her eyes were shiny with tears. Her breasts shone white beneath me, so white. And even if at that moment she was as close as you can ever be to another person, it was as if I was looking at her the way I had first seen her, from a distance, behind a window on the other side of the street. And I thought that you can’t see a person more nakedly than that, when they don’t know they’re being watched, studied. She had never seen me like that. Maybe she never would. Then it struck me. I still had those sheets of paper, the letter, the one I had never quite finished. And if Corina found it, she might misunderstand. All the same, it was odd that my heart started to beat faster because of a little thing like that. The sheets of paper were under the cutlery tray in the kitchen drawer, and there was no reason for anyone to move that. But I made up my mind to get rid of them at the earliest opportunity.
“That’s it, Olav, like that.”
Something loosened inside me when I came, something that had been lying there shut away. I don’t know what it was, but the pressure from my ejaculation shook it out and revealed it. I lay back, gasping for breath. I was a changed man, I just didn’t know in what way.
She leaned over me and tickled my forehead.
“How do you feel, my king?”
I answered, but my throat was full of saliva.
“What?” she laughed.
I cleared my throat and repeated: “Starving.”
She laughed even louder.
“And happy,” I said.
Corina couldn’t stand fish. She was allergic to it, always had been, something in her family.
The supermarkets were all shut now, but I said I could order a CP Special from Chinese Pizza.
“Chinese Pizza?”
“Chinese food and pizzas. Separately, I mean. I have dinner there almost every day.”
I got dressed again and went down to the phone box on the corner. I had never had a telephone installed in the flat, didn’t want one. I didn’t want people to have a way to hear me, find me, talk to me.
From the phone box I could see up to my window on the fourth floor. And I could see Corina standing there, her head circled in light like some fucking halo. She was looking down at me. I waved. She waved back.
Then the coin fell with a metallic gulp.
“Chinese Pizza, how can I help you?”
“Hi, Lin, it’s Olav. One CP Special, takeaway.”
“No eat here, Mistel Olav?”
“Not today.”
“Fifteen minute.”
“Thanks. One more thing. Has anyone been in asking about me?”
“Ask about you? No.”
“Great. Is there anyone sitting there that you’ve seen me eating with before? Anyone with a funny thin moustache that looks like it has been drawn on? Or in a brown leather jacket with a cigarette tucked behind his ear?”
“Let’s see. Nooo...”
There were only about ten tables, so I believed him. Neither Brynhildsen nor Pine was waiting for me. They’d been there with me on more than one occasion, but presumably they didn’t know just how much of a regular I was. Good.
I shoved open the heavy metal door of the phone box and peered up at the window. She was still standing there.
It took a quarter of an hour to walk to Chinese Pizza. The pizza was waiting in a red cardboard box the size of a camping table. CP Special. The best in Oslo. I was looking forward to seeing Corina’s face when she tasted her first bite.
“See you latel, all-a-gatol,” Lin called as usual as I headed out of the door, which swung shut behind me before I had time to reply with the crocodile rhyme.
I hurried away along the pavement and swung round the corner. I was thinking about Corina. I must have been thinking about Corina very hard. At least that’s the only excuse I have for the fact that I didn’t see them, hear them, or even think the obvious thought: that if they had worked out that it was my regular haunt, then they’d also have worked out that it might have occurred to me that they might have worked it out, and that I therefore wouldn’t go anywhere near it without a degree of caution. So they weren’t waiting inside in the warmth and light, but outside in the frozen darkness of space, where I could have sworn that even molecules were having trouble moving.
I heard two steps crunch on the snow, but the bastard pizza slowed me down and I didn’t have time to draw my pistol before I felt cold hard metal pressing against my ear.
“Where is she?”
It was Brynhildsen. His pencil-thin moustache moved when he spoke. He had a young guy with him who looked more scared than dangerous, and who might as well have had a “trainee” badge on his jacket, but he still did a thorough job of searching me. I guessed Hoffmann had the sense to get the young lad to help Brynhildsen without arming him. Maybe he had a knife or something hidden away. Pistols were confirmation gifts.
“Hoffmann says you can live if we can have his wife,” Brynhildsen said.
That was a lie, but I’d have said the same thing myself. I considered my options. The street was empty of traffic and people. Apart from the wrong people. And it was so quiet that I could hear the spring in the trigger mechanism complain gently as it stretched.
“Fine,” Brynhildsen said. “We can find her without you, you know.”
He was right, he wasn’t bluffing.
“Okay,” I said. “I only took her to have something to bargain with. I had no idea the guy was a Hoffmann.”
“I don’t know anything about that. We just want the wife.”
“We’d better go and get her, then,” I said.
Chapter 13
“We have to take the underground,” I explained. “Look, she thinks I’m protecting her. And I am. Unless I can use her in a deal like this. So I told her that if I wasn’t home in half an hour, something serious must have happened and she should take off. And it’ll take at least three-quarters of an hour by car to get to my flat through the Christmas traffic.”
Brynhildsen stared at me. “So call her and say you’re going to be a bit late.”
“I haven’t got a phone.”
“Really? So how come the pizza was waiting for you when you arrived, Johansen?”
I looked down at the big red cardboard box. Brynhildsen was no idiot. “Phone box.”
Brynhildsen ran his finger and thumb over either side of his moustache, as if he were trying to stretch the hairs. Then looked up and down the street. Presumably estimating the traffic. And wondering what Hoffmann would say if she got away.