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.
Friday. That gave me three days. Three days to dive down into a darkness I didn’t even know existed. Three days in the grip of jealousy. Each time I breathed out it tightened its grip a little more, made it harder to breathe in fresh air. Because that’s what jealousy is, it’s a boa constrictor. When I was a kid and my father took me to the cinema to see the Disney version of The Jungle Book, I got very confused because in the Rudyard Kipling book my mother read to me so many, many times Kaa the snake was nice! My father explained that all creatures have two faces, it’s just that we can’t always see the other one, not even in ourselves. But I had begun to see my other face. Because as the lack of oxygen over these three days destroyed my brain I began to think thoughts I had no idea were inside me, but which must have been there all the time, in the dregs of my personality. And I saw the other face of the good snake Kaa. The jealousy that tempted, manipulated, hypnotised with wild fantasies of revenge that sent thrilling shivers through the body and needed only another swig of whisky to keep it going.
When Friday came along and I shook off my depression, pronounced myself recovered and rose as though from the dead, I was no longer the same Nikos Balli. No one could see it in me, not even Trevor and Monique when I greeted them at lunch as though nothing had happened and said the weather forecast for the weekend looked great, we would have a fantastic weekend. As we ate I didn’t listen to Trevor and Monique as they spoke in codes they thought I couldn’t understand, instead I listened to a couple of girls on the other side of the table who were talking about one of their friends’ new boyfriend. I listened to the words they chose, the adjective that was a little too strong, the slightly too pleased response when one spoke disapprovingly to the other of their mutual friend, the anger that made the sentences shorter, more biting, without the flow that comes with calm thought. They were jealous. It was so simple. And I was not basing my new instinct on psychoanalysis but on pure, concrete verbal analysis. No, I was no longer the same. I had been somewhere. I had seen things there. Seen and learned. I had become the Jealousy Man.
‘Pretty sad story that,’ said Victoria Hässel as she pulled on her panties and started looking round for the rest of her clothes. ‘Did the two of them become a couple?’
‘No,’ I said. I turned in the bed and lifted first an empty then an almost empty bottle of Ouzo 12 from the bedside table and filled the dram glass. ‘It was Monique’s last year and her final exam was just a few days away. She didn’t do very well, but after that she went back home to France, and neither Trevor nor I ever saw her again. She married a Frenchman, had kids, and as far as I know lives somewhere in Brittany.’
‘And you — who studied literature and history — you became a policeman?’
I shrugged. ‘I had a year left at Oxford, but when I went back for the autumn the partying thing got out of hand again.’
‘Broken heart?’
‘Maybe. Maybe it was just that the closeness of the memories was too strong. Whatever, the only thing that seemed to matter was to keep getting smashed. Once I even thought of flight nine nineteen.’
‘Sorry?’
‘When things were at their worst I would squeeze this stone I had picked up from the ground somewhere in the Peak District.’ I held up a clenched fist to demonstrate. ‘Concentrated on transferring the pain into the stone, let it suck it all out.’
‘Did that help?’
‘At least I didn’t take flight nine nineteen.’ I emptied the dram glass. ‘Instead I dropped out in the middle of the autumn term and took a flight to Athens. Worked for a while in my father’s firm, and then enrolled at the Police Academy. My father and the rest of the family thought it was some kind of delayed adolescent rebellion. But I knew that I had been given something, a gift, or a curse, something that might possibly be of some use to me. And the discipline and training at the Academy helped keep me away from...’ I nodded towards the bottle of ouzo. ‘But that’s enough about me. Tell me about yourself.’
Victoria Hässel straightened up at the end of the bed and buttoned up a pair of freshly washed climbing pants and looked at me in disbelief. ‘In the first place I’m going climbing now. In the second place you got me to talk about myself and nothing else but myself for over four hours in the bar yesterday. Have you really forgotten that?’
I shook my head, smiling as I tried in vain to recall it. ‘I just wanted to know more,’ I lied, and saw that she knew I was lying.
‘Cute,’ she said, walked round the bed and kissed me on my high forehead. ‘Later, maybe. You smell of my perfume, just so you know.’
‘My sense of smell is terrible.’
‘And mine is wonderful. But don’t worry, I come out easily in the wash. See you later today? Adio.’
I wondered whether to tell her that finally, two days after the ferry and the planes had begun to leave Kalymnos again, I had booked a seat on a flight to Athens. But it wouldn’t have changed anything, would just have meant a little more play-acting.
‘Adio, Victoria.’
George picked me up as arranged an hour before my flight departed. It was a ten- or twelve-minute drive, and I still only had hand luggage.
‘Better now?’ he asked as I got into the car.
I had called Athens and explained that I was sick, that they should put someone else on the Tzitzifies case. I rubbed my face.
‘Yes,’ I said, and it was true, I didn’t feel at all bad. Maybe Ouzo 12 does taste like crap, but I’ll give it this, the hangover is nothing like as bad as you get with Pitsiladi. And I had drunk myself clear. For a while, the clouds were gone.
I asked him to drive slowly. I wanted to enjoy my last view of Kalymnos. It really was lovely here.
‘You should come in the spring, when the flowers bloom, and there’s more life and colour in the mountains.’
‘I like it the way it is,’ I said.
When we reached the airport, George announced that the plane from Athens was delayed, since there was no sign of it on the runway. He parked, and suggested we sit in his car until we saw the plane land.
We sat in silence and looked out on Palechora, the town made of stone.
‘People from Kalymnos used to hide out up there sometimes in the old days,’ said George. ‘From pirates. Sieges could last for weeks, months. They had to sneak out at night to fetch water from camouflaged wells. They say children were conceived and born up there. But it was a prison, no question about it.’
A swishing in the air above us. A swishing through my head.
The ATR-72 and the thought arrived at the same moment.
‘The prison of love,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Both Franz and Julian had dates with Helena in one of the buildings in Palechora. Franz said he had sentenced his brother to life imprisonment in his own prison of love. That could mean...’
The brief roaring of the propellers drowned out my words as the plane landed and was waved in behind us, but from the look on George’s face I could see he had already understood where I was heading.
‘I guess this means,’ he said, ‘that you won’t be taking the plane to Athens after all?’
‘Call Christine. Tell her to bring Odin with her.’
From a distance Palechora looked like a true ghost town. Grey-black, lifeless and petrified, something the Medusa had looked at. But now, close up — as happens in murder cases too — the details, the nuances and colours began to appear. And the smell.
George and I hurried through the ruins towards one of the houses that was still more or less intact. Christine was standing in the doorway holding Odin, who was barking and keen to get inside. She had been the first to arrive, along with two members of the mountain rescue team, and we’d been communicating over the walkie-talkie. We had stepped up our pace after she reported her find but still had a hundred-metre climb before we were there. They made the discovery in what was probably Palechora’s only cellar. Later I learned that the cellar had been used to store dead bodies in during sieges, since the soil inside the fortress walls wasn’t deep enough to bury them.