by Jo Nesbo
‘We can make a run for it,’ I said when you had finished.
You looked at me. ‘How?’
‘You book into a single room at the Langdon. This evening you leave a note at Reception for the hotel manager. In it you tell him you’re going to drown yourself in the Thames. You walk down there this evening, to a place where no one can see you. You take off your shoes and leave them on the embankment. I come and pick you up in a hire car. We drive to France and take a plane from Paris to Cape Town.’
‘Passport,’ was all you said.
‘I can arrange that.’
‘You can?’ You continued to stare at me. ‘Just what kind of psychologist are you, exactly?’
‘I’m not a psychologist.’
‘You’re not?’
‘No.’
‘What are you?’
‘What do you think?’
‘You’re the man who’s going to kill me,’ you said. ‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You had the seat beside me booked even before I came to New York to sign the contract.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you really have fallen in love with me?’
‘Yes.’
You nodded slowly, holding on tightly to my arm as though you were afraid of falling.
‘How was it supposed to happen?’
‘In the passport queue. A needle. The active ingredient disappears completely or is camouflaged in the blood within an hour. The autopsy will indicate that you died of an ordinary heart attack. Heart attack has been the most common cause of death in your family, and the tests we did indicate that you are at risk of the same thing.’
You nodded. ‘If we run, will they come after you as well?’
‘Yes. There’s a lot of money involved, for all parties, including those of us who carry out the assignments. It means that they require us to sign a contract too, with a three-week deadline.’
‘A suicide contract?’
‘It allows them to kill us at any time, with no legal risk attached. It’s understood that if we are disloyal then they will activate the clause.’
‘But will they find us in Cape Town?’
‘They’ll pick up our trail, they’re expert at that, and that will lead them to Cape Town. But we won’t be there.’
‘Where will we be?’
‘Is it all right if I wait before telling you that? I promise you it’s a nice place. Sunshine, rain, not too cold, not too hot. And most people there understand English.’
‘Why are you doing this?’
‘Same reason as you.’
‘But you’re not suicidal, you probably earn a fortune doing what you do, and now you’re prepared to risk your own life.’
I tried to smile. ‘What life?’
You looked around, leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. ‘What if you don’t enjoy our lovemaking?’
‘Then I’ll dump you in the Thames,’ I said.
You laughed and kissed me again. A little longer this time, lips a little wider apart.
‘You will enjoy it,’ you whispered in my ear.
‘Yes, I’m afraid I will,’ I said.
You slept there, with your head against my shoulder. I put your seat back and spread a blanket over you. Then I put my own seat back, turned off the overhead light and tried to sleep.
* * *
—
When we landed in London I had put your seatback in an upright position and fastened your seat belt. You looked like a little child, asleep on Christmas Eve, with that little smile on your lips. The stewardess came round and collected the same glasses of water that had been standing on the shared armrest between us since before we took off from JFK, when you stared weeping through the window and we were strangers.
* * *
—
I was standing in front of the customs officer in bay 6 when I saw people in high-visibility jackets with red crosses running towards the gates and pushing a stretcher. I looked at my watch. The powder I emptied into your glass before we took off from JFK worked slowly but it was reliable. You had been dead for almost two hours now, and the autopsy would indicate a heart attack and not much else. I felt like crying, as I did almost every time. At the same time I was happy. It was meaningful work. I would never forget you, you were special.
‘Please look at the camera,’ the customs officer said to me.
I had to blink away a few tears first.
‘Welcome to London,’ said the customs officer.
THE JEALOUSY MAN
i glanced out at the propeller on the wing of the forty-seater ATR-72 plane. Beneath us, bathed in sea and sunshine, lay a sandy-coloured island. No visible vegetation, only yellowish-white chalk. Kalymnos.
The captain warned us we might be in for a rough landing. I closed my eyes and leaned back in my seat. Ever since I was a child I have known I was going to die in a fall. Or to be more precise, that I was going to fall from the sky into the sea and drown there. I can even recall the day on which this certainty came to me.
My father was one of the assistant directors in the family firm of which his older brother, Uncle Hector, was head. We children loved Uncle Hector because he always brought presents when he came to see us, and let us ride in his car, the only Rolls-Royce cabriolet in all Athens. My father usually returned from work after I had gone to bed, but this particular evening he was early. He looked worn out, and after tea he had a long, long telephone conversation with my grandfather in his study. I could hear that he was very angry. When I went to bed he sat on the edge of it and I asked him to tell me a story. He thought about it for a bit, then he told the tale of Icarus and his father. They lived in Athens, but they were on the island of Crete when his father, a wealthy and celebrated craftsman, made a pair of wings from feathers and wax with which he was able to fly through the sky. People were mightily impressed by this, and the father and his whole family were everywhere regarded with great respect. When the father gave the wings to Icarus, he urged his son to do exactly as he had done, and follow exactly the same route, and everything would be all right. But Icarus wanted to fly to new places, and to fly even higher than his father. And once he was airborne, intoxicated at finding himself so high above the ground as well as by the onlookers, he forgot that it wasn’t because of his supernatural ability to fly but because of the wings his father had given him. In his overweening self-confidence he flew higher than his father and came too close to the sun, and the sun melted the wax that held the wings in place. And with that Icarus fell into the sea. Where he drowned.
As I was growing up it always seemed to me that my father’s lightly adapted version of the Icarus myth was intended as an early warning to his oldest son. Hector was childless, and it was presumed that I would succeed him when the time came. Not until I was grown up did I learn that at around that time the firm had almost gone bankrupt as a result of Hector’s reckless gambling on the price of gold, that my grandfather had fired him, but for the sake of appearances allowed him to keep his title and office. In practice it was my father who ran the firm thereafter. I never found out whether the bedtime story he told me that evening referred to me or to Uncle Hector, but it must have made a deep impression on me because ever since I have had nightmares that involve falling and drowning. Actually, on some nights the dream seems like something warm and pleasant, a sleep in which everything painful ceases to exist. Who says you can’t dream of dying?
The plane shook and I heard gasps from the other passengers as we sank through so-called air pockets. For a moment or two I felt something like weightlessness. And that my hour had come. But it hadn’t, of course.
* * *
—
The Greek flag was blowing straight out from the flagpole by the little terminal building as we left the plane. As I passed the cockpit I heard the pilot say to the stewardess that the airport had just closed a
nd that it was unlikely they would be able to return to Athens.
I followed the queue of passengers into the terminal building. A man wearing a blue police uniform stood with arms folded in front of the luggage belt and studied us. As I headed towards him he gave me a quizzical look and I nodded my confirmation.
‘George Kostopoulos,’ he said, holding out a large hand, the back of it covered with long black hairs. His grip was firm, but not exaggeratedly so, as is sometimes the case when provincial colleagues feel they’re in competition with the capital.
‘Thank you for coming at such short notice, Inspector Balli.’
‘Call me Nikos,’ I said.
‘Sorry I didn’t recognise you, but there aren’t many pictures of you, and I thought you were…er, older.’
I had inherited – probably from my mother’s side – the kind of looks that don’t age particularly with the years. My hair was grey and the curls gone, and I had maintained a fighting weight of seventy-five kilos, though nowadays less of it was muscle.
‘You don’t think fifty-nine is old enough?’
‘Well, goodness me yes, of course.’ He spoke in a voice that I was guessing was a little deeper than his natural register and smiled wryly beneath a moustache of the type men in Athens had shaved off some twenty years earlier. But the eyes were mild, and I knew I wouldn’t be getting any trouble from George Kostopoulus.
‘It’s just that I’ve been hearing about you ever since I was at the Police Academy, and that seems like a pretty long time ago to me. Any more baggage I can help you with?’
He glanced at the bag I was carrying. And yet I had the feeling he was asking about something more than what I was actually bringing with me in a physical sense. Not that I would have been able to answer him. I carry more with me on my travels than most men, but my baggage is the type that is carried alone.
‘Only hand baggage,’ I said.
‘We’ve got Franz Schmid, the brother of the missing man, at the station in Pothia,’ said George as we left the terminal building and crossed to a small, dust-coated Fiat with a stained windscreen. I guessed he had parked beneath some stone pines to keep out of the direct sunlight and instead got a dose of that sticky sap that in the end you have to scrap off with a knife. That’s the way it is. You raise your guard to protect your face and you leave your heart exposed. And vice versa.
‘I read the report on the plane,’ I said, putting my bag on the back seat. ‘Has he said anything else?’
‘No, he’s sticking to his story. His brother Julian left their room at six in the morning and never returned.’
‘It said Julian went for a swim?’
‘That’s what Franz says.’
‘But you don’t believe him?’
‘No.’
‘Surely drownings can’t be all that unusual on a holiday island like Kalymnos?’
‘No. And I would have believed Franz if it hadn’t been for the fact that he and Julian had a fight the previous evening, in the presence of witnesses.’
‘Yes, I noticed that.’
We turned down a narrow, pitted track with bare olive trees and small white stone houses on both sides of what must have been the main road.
‘They just closed the airport,’ I said. ‘I suppose that’s because of the wind.’
‘It happens all the time,’ said George. ‘That’s the trouble with having the airport on the highest point of an island.’
I could see what he meant. As soon as we got between the mountains the flags hung limply down from the flagpoles.
‘Fortunately my evening flight leaves from Kos,’ I said. The secretary in the Homicide Department had checked the travel itinerary before my boss had given me permission to make the trip. Even though we give priority to the very few cases involving foreign tourists, a condition of the permission was that I was to spend only one working day on it. Usually I was given free rein, but even the legendary Detective Inspector Balli was subject to budget cuts. And as my boss put it: this was a case with no body, no media interest and not even reasonable grounds to suspect a murder.
There were no return flights from Kalymnos in the evening, but there was one from the international airport on the island of Kos, a forty-minute ferry ride from Kalymnos, so he had grunted his assent, reminding me as he did so of the cutback on travel expenses and that I should avoid the overpriced tourist restaurants unless I wanted to pay out of my own pocket.
‘I’m afraid the boats to Kos won’t be going either in this weather,’ said George.
‘This weather? The sun is shining and there’s hardly a breath of wind, except up there.’
‘I know it seems unlikely from here, but there’s a stretch of open sea before you reach Kos and there have been a number of accidents in sunny weather just like this. We’ll book a hotel room for you. Maybe the wind will have eased off by tomorrow.’
For him to say the wind would ‘maybe’ ease off instead of the more typically overoptimistic ‘bound to have eased off’ suggested to me that the weather forecast didn’t favour either me or my boss. I thought disconsolately of the inadequate contents of my bag, and a little less disconsolately of my boss. Perhaps I might be able to get a little well-earned rest out here. I’m the type who has to be forced to take a holiday, even when I know I need one. Maybe being both childless and wifeless is what makes me so bad at holidays. They feel like a waste of time and serve only to reinforce what is an admittedly voluntary loneliness.
‘What’s that?’ I asked, pointing towards the other side of the car. Surrounded on all sides by steep inclines lay what looked like a village. But there were no signs of life. It looked like a model someone had carved from grey rock, a gathering of small houses like Lego blocks, with a wall enclosing the whole, all of it in the same monotonous grey.
‘That’s Palechora,’ said George. ‘Twelfth century. Byzantine. If the inhabitants of Kalymnos spotted hostile ships approaching they would flee up there and barricade themselves. People hid up there when the Italians invaded in 1912 and when the Allies bombed Kalymnos, when it was used as a German base during the Second World War.’
‘Obviously a must-see,’ I said, without adding that neither the houses nor the fortifications looked especially Byzantine.
‘Hm,’ said George. ‘Or actually no. It looks better from a distance. The last time it was repaired was by the Knights Hospitaller in the sixteenth century. It’s overgrown, there’s rubbish, goats, even the chapels are used as latrines. You could get up there if you could manage the stone steps, but there was a landslide and now the climb is even more strenuous. But if you’re really interested I could get a guide for you. I can promise you you’ll have the entire stone village all to yourself.’
I shook my head. But I was, of course, tempted. I always find myself tempted by what rejects me, shuts me out. Unreliable narrators. Women. Logical problems. Human conduct. Murder cases. All the things I don’t understand. I am a man of limited intellect but limitless curiosity. It is, unfortunately, a frustrating combination.
Pothia turned out to be a lively labyrinth of houses, narrow one-way streets and alleys. Even though November was approaching, and the tourist season had ended some time ago, the streets were crowded with people.
We parked outside a two-storey house in the harbour area where fishing boats and yachts that were not too extravagantly luxurious lay alongside one another. A small car ferry and a speedboat with seating for passengers underneath and up the top were tethered to the quayside. Further along the quay stood a group of people, obviously foreign tourists, discussing something with a man in some kind of naval uniform. Some of the tourists had rucksacks with coils of rope sticking out from each side of the top flap. Several of those I had travelled on the plane with had been similarly equipped. Climbers. Over the last fifteen years, Kalymnos had changed from being a sun-and-surf island to a destination for sports climbers
from all over Europe; but that happened after I had hung up my climbing boots. The man in the seagoing uniform spread his arms wide as though to protest that there was nothing he could do about it, pointing to the sea. There were white crests here and there but, as I far as I could see, the waves weren’t dangerously high.
‘As I said, the problems arise further out, you can’t see from here,’ said George, who had obviously read the look on my face.
‘That’s often the case,’ I said with a sigh, and tried to come to terms with the fact that, for the time being at least, I was trapped on this little island which, for some reason or other, seemed even smaller now than it did from the air.
George entered the police station ahead of me, passed a counter, and I nodded greetings left and right as we made out way through a cramped and overcrowded open-plan office where not only the furniture seemed outdated but also the bulky computer screens, the coffee machine and the oversized photocopier.
‘George!’ called a woman from behind a partition. ‘A journalist from Kathimerini rang. They want to know if it’s true that we’ve arrested the brother of the missing man. I told them I would ask you to ring them.’
‘Call them yourself, Christine. Say there have been no arrests in the case and that at this moment in time we have no comment.’
I understood, of course. George wanted to work in peace and to keep hysterical journalists and other distracting elements at bay. Or did he perhaps just want to show me, the guy from the big city, that out here in the provinces they were professionals too? Best for our working relationship if that was the case, so I wouldn’t have to use my experience to explain to him that pedantic points of detail were, as a rule, a bad strategy to adopt when dealing with the press. And of course, since Franz Schmid voluntarily made himself available for questioning, he was not technically under arrest – indeed, had not even been apprehended. But once it emerged – and here there was no ‘if” about it – that Franz was being held behind closed doors at the station for hours and the police gave the impression of wanting to keep quiet about it, it would give rise to the type of speculations that were meat and drink to journalists. In that case, better to give a more open and friendly reply, something to the effect that the police were, of course, talking to anyone who could give them a better picture of what might have happened, and that included the missing man’s brother.