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:
“Mother!”
“I’m just saying, we don’t know how long we’re going to have Daniel.”
“We’ve got no intention of having anything to do with Daniel’s business, Mother. Just look at what happened to Benjamin.”
“Shh!”
Steps on the stairs.
Two figures came into the room.
One of them hugged the older woman. Nodded curtly to the younger one and the brother-in-law.
Daniel Hoffmann. And with him a Pine who was keeping his mouth shut for once.
They took up a position between us and the coffin, with their backs to us. Perfect. If I think a unit that I need to fix might be armed, I’ll go to almost any lengths to get myself in a position where I can shoot them in the back.
I clenched my fist round the handle of the pistol.
Waiting.
Waiting for the guy in the bearskin hat.
He didn’t come.
He must have been in position outside the church.
That would make things easier to start with, but he could be a potential problem that we’d have to deal with later.
My cue to the Dane and Klein was simple: when I yelled.
And there wasn’t a single logical reason in the world why that shouldn’t happen right then. But it still felt as if there was a right moment, one particular second squeezed in between all the other seconds. Like with the ski pole and my father. Like in a book, when an author decides precisely when something will happen, something you know is going to happen, because the author has already said it’s going to happen, but it hasn’t happened yet. Because there’s a proper place in a story, so you have to wait a bit, so that things can happen in the right order. I closed my eyes and felt the clock count down, a spring tensing, a drop still clinging to the point of an icicle.
And then the moment arrived.
I yelled and pushed the lid off.
Chapter 17
It was light. Light and cosy. Mum explained that I had a high temperature, and that the doctor who had been there said I had to stay in bed for a few days and drink a lot of water, but that there was nothing to worry about. That’s when I could tell she was concerned. But I wasn’t scared. I was fine. Even when I closed my eyes it was light, it was shining through my eyelids, a warm red glow. I had been put in Mum’s big bed, and it felt as if all the seasons were passing through the room. Mild spring turning into scalding hot summer, with sweat running like summer rain from my forehead onto sheets that stuck to my thighs, then at last the relief of autumn, with clear air, clear senses. Until it was suddenly winter again, with chattering teeth and a long drift through sleep, dream and reality.
She had been to the library and taken out a book for me. Les Misérables. Victor Hugo. “Concise edition,” it said on the cover, under a drawing of Cosette as a young girl, the original illustration by Émile Bayard.
I read, and dreamed. Dreamed and read. Added and cut scenes. In the end I wasn’t sure how much the author had come up with, and how much was my own invention.
I believed the story. I just didn’t think Victor Hugo was telling it truthfully.
I didn’t believe Jean Valjean had stolen bread, that that was why he had to make amends. I suspected that Victor Hugo didn’t want to risk readers not cheering the hero on if he told the truth. Which was that Jean Valjean had killed someone. That he was a murderer. Jean Valjean was a good man, so the person he had killed must have deserved it. Yes, that was it. Jean Valjean had killed someone who had done something bad, and had to pay for it. The business about stealing bread just annoyed me. So I rewrote the story. I made it better.
So: Jean Valjean was a deadly killer who was wanted throughout France. And he was in love with Fantine, the poor prostitute. So in love that he was willing to do anything for her. Everything he did for her, he did out of love, madness, devotion, not to save his own immortal soul or out of love for his fellow man. He submitted to beauty. Yes, that’s what he did. Submitted to and obeyed the beauty of this ruined, sick, dying prostitute with no teeth or hair. He saw beauty where no one could imagine it. And for that reason it was his alone. And he was its.
It took ten days for the fever to start to ease. For me it had felt like one day, and when I came back Mum sat on the edge of the bed, stroked my forehead, sobbed gently and told me how close it had been.
I told her I had been to a place that I wanted to go back to.
“No, you mustn’t say that, Olav, darling!”
I could see what she was thinking. Because she had a place that she always wanted to go back to, where she would travel in a bottle.
“But I don’t want to die, Mummy. I just want to make up stories.”
Chapter 18
I was up on my knees, both hands on the pistol.
I saw Pine and Hoffmann spin round, almost in slow motion.
I shot Pine in the back, speeding up his pirouette. Two shots. White feathers leaped from his brown jacket, dancing in the air like snow. He had pulled his pistol free of his jacket and fired, but didn’t manage to raise his arm. The bullets hit the floor and walls and ricocheted noisily around the stone room. From the corner of my eye I saw that Klein had got the lid off the coffin next to me, but hadn’t yet climbed out. Perhaps he wasn’t keen on the hail of bullets. The Dane had emerged from his coffin and had taken aim at Hoffmann, but because they’d put his coffin at the end of the crypt I was in his line of fire right behind Hoffmann. I jerked back at the same time as I swung my pistol towards Hoffmann. But he was surprisingly quick. He threw himself over the coffin, right at the young girl, and took her down with him as he landed by the long wall of the crypt, behind the rest of his family who were standing there like pillars of salt, mouths agape.
Pine was lying on the floor under the table Benjamin Hoffmann’s coffin was on, his pistol hand sticking stiffly away from his body, like a dipstick he’d lost control of. It swung round, firing out bullets at random. Blood and spinal fluid on the concrete floor. A Glock pistol. Plenty of bullets. Just a matter of time before one of them hit someone. I put another bullet in Pine. And kicked at Klein’s coffin as I raised the pistol towards Hoffmann again. I got him in the sights. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall and the young girl in his lap, holding her tight with one arm around her skinny ribcage. With the other hand he was aiming a pistol directly at her temple. She was sitting completely still, just looking at me with big brown eyes, not blinking.
“Erik...” It was the sister. She was looking at her brother, but talking to her husband.
And the man with the half bald head finally reacted. He took an unsteady step towards his brother-in-law.
“Don’t come any closer, Erik,” Hoffmann said. “These men aren’t after you.”
But Erik didn’t stop, he carried on stumbling forward, like a zombie.
“Fuck!” the Dane yelled, shaking and hitting his pistol. Obviously not working. A bullet had probably jammed. Bloody amateur.
“Erik!” Hoffmann repeated, aiming the pistol at his brother-in-law.
The father held out his arms towards his daughter. Moistened his lips. “Bettine...”
Hoffmann fired. The brother-in-law staggered back. Hit in the stomach.
“Come out, or I’ll shoot the girl!” Hoffmann shouted.
I heard a deep sigh beside me. It was Klein, who had got to his feet and was aiming his sawn-off shotgun in front of him, towards Hoffmann. But the table and Hoffmann junior’s coffin were in the way, so he had to take a step closer to the coffin to get a clear line of fire.
“Get back, or I’ll shoot her!” Hoffmann was screaming in falsetto now.