by Jo Nesbo
‘Second floor, second door on the right,’ he muttered, and rang the bell. Waited, looking at me with that little smile, but it wasn’t quite so annoying this time.
A voice crackled over the speakerphone. ‘Hello?’ said a piercing voice.
‘Good morning, fru Malvik,’ said Pijus, sounding like he was trying to imitate someone. Someone who spoke better Norwegian than he did. ‘My name is Iversen, I’m from the Oslo police. We’ve just had a call from the Oslo city sanitation services. They’re reporting an incident involving indecent exposure by someone on the second floor. Since we were on patrol in the area we’ve been asked to look into it. I am aware that there are several people living on the second floor, but let me ask you first: is this something you have any knowledge of, fru Malvik?
There was a long pause.
‘Fru Malvik?’
‘No. No, I don’t know anything about that.’
‘No? Well, in that case I won’t trouble you any further for the time being.’
There was a scraping sound as the woman hung up her entryphone and Pijus looked at me. We hurried out to the truck so the woman wouldn’t have time to look out her window into the street and see that it was us. We didn’t start laughing until we were up and driving. And then I laughed so hard I cried.
‘Something wrong, Ivar?’ asked Pijus, who had stopped laughing a long time ago.
‘Just hung-over,’ I said as I wiped my nose on my sleeve. ‘No way is that woman gonna call the boss now.’
‘No,’ said Pijus, stopping outside the 7-Eleven where we usually bought a coffee and took our first smoke break.
‘One question,’ I said, after I’d bought a large coffee and poured half of it into the extra paper cup I’d taken and handed it to Pijus. ‘If you can imitate someone who speaks better Norwegian than yourself, why don’t you do it all the time?’
Pijus blew on his coffee, but still pulled a face as he took the first swig.
‘Because I’m just imitating.’
‘Well, we all do that,’ I said. ‘That’s how we learn to speak.’
‘True,’ said Pijus. ‘So I don’t know. Because it feels fake, maybe. Phoney. As if it’s a deception. I’m a Latvian who has learned Norwegian, and that’s what I want to sound like, not like an impostor. If I speak so well you believe I am Norwegian, and then make some little phonetic or grammatical mistake that lets me down, then consciously or unconsciously people are going to feel they’ve been tricked and they won’t trust me any more. See? Best just to relax and speak my own version of New Norwegian.’
I nodded. That’s what they called it at work. Not to be confused with the actual New Norwegian people in the country districts of Norway speak, but a catch-all term covering all that Kebab-Norwegian, Norwenglish, Russian-Norwegian and all the rest of that weird jabberwock the immigrant workers here speak.
‘Why did you really come to Norway?’ I asked.
We’d be working together for nearly a year now and it was the first time I’d asked. Well, sure, I had asked before, but the difference this time was that really. I was asking for something more than the standard response, about the money being better, that it was hard even to find a job where he came from. Which was probably true, but not necessarily the whole truth. So this was the first time I’d asked out of genuine interest.
He didn’t answer immediately. ‘I had affairs with some of my patients.’ Took a deep breath and, as though wanting to make sure I didn’t get too alarmed, added: ‘Female patients. They opened themselves to their psychologist, they were vulnerable, and I exploited that.’
‘Not good,’ I said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Some of them were lonely and unhappy. But so was I, my wife had just died from cancer. I didn’t manage to resist the invitations from these women. We needed each other.’
‘So what was the problem?’
‘In the first place, a psychologist is not allowed to have romantic liaisons with his patients, no matter what his civil status. And in the second place, some of the women were married.’
‘Oh, I see…’ I said slowly.
He glanced over at me. ‘Someone talked,’ he said. ‘It came out and I was dismissed. I could always have got myself another job, for example lecturing at the university in Riga. But some of the husbands didn’t think they’d had enough revenge and hired a couple of Siberians to make sure I ended up in a wheelchair. One of the women warned me and I had no choice but to get out. Latvia is a small country.’
‘So you’re the type who burns the candle at both ends and then lays the blame for it all on a tragic tale.’
‘Yes,’ said Pijus. ‘I’m the bad version of a bad person, the kind who makes excuses for his own sleazy behaviour. If you look at it like that you’re a better person than me, Ivar.’
‘Oh?’
‘Your self-contempt is more honest than mine.’
I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about and concentrated on my coffee.
‘So who is it your wife’s been cheating on you with?’ he asked and I spluttered coffee all over the dashboard. The pressure in the head came straight back. ‘Easy now,’ he said. ‘Use your frontal lobe. That will tell you that I’m here to help. And that the best thing you can do is tell me. Remember, I’ve sworn an oath of confidentiality.’
‘Confidentiality!’ I said, the coffee cup in my hand trembling.
‘All psychologists have to.’
‘I know that, but you aren’t my shrink.’
‘Well, yes, I am not,’ said Pijus as he handed me the roll of paper we always kept between the seats.
I wiped the coffee from my hands, my chin, the dashboard. Crumpled the paper into a ball and hissed between my teeth. ‘Her boss at work. Nasty bastard. Ugly too. Trash, the whole man.’
‘So you know him?’
‘No.’ What the hell had I just said? That Lisa had been cheating on me with her boss at the sorting office? Had she? Was that what we had quarrelled about?
‘Never met him?’ asked Pijus.
‘No. Or actually yes. Or…’ I thought about it. Lisa had talked a lot about Ludvigsen, so much that I perhaps just had the feeling of having met him. Her new boss praised her for the job she was doing, something her old boss never did. And Lisa bloomed. She’d always been susceptible to flattery, so desperate for it you had to keep it under control so she didn’t get used to a level that was impossible for a husband or a boss to sustain. But Ludvigsen had just piled it on, and I’d probably thought that he wasn’t doing it just to inspire the workers. Besides being a lot sweeter than I could remember her being, Lisa had got herself a new, short hairdo, taken off a few kilos and stayed out late in the evenings going to all sorts of different cultural things with friends I didn’t even know she had. It was as though she’d suddenly got a life from which I was excluded, and that was probably why I checked her mobile phone. And found a message from this Ludvigsen. Or Stefan, which was how Lisa had him listed in her Contacts.
And so I sat there and told Pijus about it.
‘What did it say in the message?’ asked Pijus.
‘I MUST see you again.’
‘With the stress on must?’
‘In capital letters.’
‘Other messages?’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘She’d probably deleted them. The one I found was only a day old.’
‘And her reply?’
‘Nothing. Or else she’d deleted that.’
‘If she was afraid of someone seeing the reply she would probably have deleted his message too.’
‘Maybe she didn’t have time to reply.’
‘In a day? Hm. Or maybe she had no reason to feel guilty, maybe that was why she didn’t delete anything. Maybe he came on to her, but she wasn’t interested and didn’t answer his message either.’
&nb
sp; ‘That’s exactly what she said, the fucking –’ I took a breath. Slag. That’s the kind of word, once it’s out the bag, you can’t get it back in again.
‘You’re afraid,’ said Pijus.
‘Afraid?’
‘Maybe you should tell me what happened last night.’
‘Duh, now you sound more like a cop than a psychologist.’
Pijus smiled. ‘So then don’t tell me.’
‘Even if I wanted to I can’t remember. Booze.’
‘Or repression. Try.’
I looked at my watch. We were still well ahead of schedule, and as I say: we no longer had any reason to hurry on and get finished before one thirty.
So I tried. Because actually he was right, I was afraid. Was it because Lisa was lying on her side? Damned if I know, but there was something wrong, I just knew it. Something that had to come out, just like when the pressure rose in my head. I started to tell the story, but soon came to a halt.
‘Take it easy and start from the beginning,’ said Pijus. ‘Include all the details. Memory is like winding up a ball of yarn, one association leads to the next.’
I did as he suggested, and damned if he wasn’t right.
As I say, we were having a couple of drinks and Lisa suddenly said she was going out at the weekend. And I blew up and confronted her about the text message. I actually intended to let it go and just see what happened, but instead I lost it and began shouting that I knew her and Ludvigsen had something going on. She denied it, but she’s had so little practice at lying it was almost pathetic. I put a bit of pressure on and she cracked, sobbing and admitting that on the firm’s outing to Helsinki in the spring there was a lot of drinking and things happened. She claimed that was the reason she’d decided to give up drinking completely, so nothing like it would ever happen again. And I asked her if this wasn’t a MeToo thing. If it wasn’t Ludvigsen – who was her boss after all – who should take all the blame and not just half of it. And Lisa said well, yeah, maybe he was a little bit more to blame, because according to one of her colleagues he’d been plying her with drinks all evening. By this time I was really pissed off. I mean, you don’t spit in your glass when the boss offers to buy you a drink, do you? Getting it down is more or less part of the job.
‘And after that?’
‘He’s invited me to his house.’
‘And where’s that?’
‘Kjelsåsveien 612.’
‘So you’ve been there!’
‘No!’
‘Then how d’you know the address?’
‘Because he told me of course.’
‘But remembering it was 612, I mean, that’s really…it’s very suspicious.’
She started laughing, and that was when I called her a slag, grabbed the car keys and stormed out before I could do anything worse.
‘You mean worse than driving while intoxicated?’ asked Pijus.
‘Yes, worse than that,’ I said.
‘Please continue.’
‘I drove around and yes, I did think about driving back home and killing her.’
‘But you didn’t do that?’
‘That’s what…’ I raised my hand to my chin, squeezed my cheek between thumb and forefinger. My voice was thick and trembling. ‘That’s exactly what I do not know, Pijus.’
I don’t know if I’d ever called him by his name before. I’d thought of his name several times, must’ve done, but said it out loud? No, I’m pretty damn sure I never did.
‘But you feel you might have done?’
The stomach pains came so suddenly and so violently that I instinctively bent forward.
I remained doubled over for a while before I felt his hand on my back.
‘Come on now, Ivar, it’ll be all right.’
‘Will it?’ I gasped. Completely fucking out of control.
‘I could tell when you came to work today that something had happened. But I don’t believe you’ve killed your little wife.’
‘What the hell would you know about it?’ I bellowed from between my legs.
‘You walked away from your wife because you didn’t want to do anything rash,’ he said. ‘And that was after you’d received confirmation of something you’d suspected for some time. You left to give your frontal lobe a chance to process something you knew your amygdala couldn’t handle in the appropriate manner. That was a mature act, Ivar. It shows that you are beginning to understand how to deal with your anger. I think maybe you should call home and check your wife’s OK, OK?’
I lifted my head and looked at him. ‘Why do you care?’
‘Because you cared?’
‘Eh?’
‘When I had just started and was the driver’s mate on your truck. You helped me, told me in English what to do. Even though I could tell you hated speaking English.’
‘I don’t hate English, I’m just not good at it.’
Pijus smiled. ‘Exactly, Ivar. You were willing to seem a little stupid in order to help me be a little less stupid.’
‘Steady now, all I wanted was a driver’s mate who knew what to do, or it would have meant long days and hard work for me, understand?’
‘I understand. More than you know, maybe. You can tell when people are willing to help you. Don’t you notice it now? Or do you think I only want to help because I don’t want my driver’s mate to screw everything up for me?’
I shook my head. Sure, I knew Pijus was helping me. The way he always did. Today with that crazy old baggage on the balcony wasn’t the first time he’d covered for me. It’s just that it’s so fucking annoying when a foreigner comes and doesn’t just take your job but ends up your boss. It just doesn’t seem right. A guy can’t just come along and take over something he has no right to. Something I have a right to. That means war. Someone has to die. OK, OK, you’re not supposed to think like that, that’s the kind of thinking that gets me in trouble, I know, I know. But what the fuck.
‘I’ve got too much testerone,’ I said.
‘Testosterone,’ said Pijus. OK, so he said it with that irritating grin of his.
‘It makes you aggressive,’ I said.
‘Not necessarily,’ said Pijus.
‘More aggressive than horny, anyway. Maybe not surprising Lisa went looking somewhere else.’
‘Wrong, wrong and wrong again,’ said Pijus, and oh yeah, I could hear he was imitating me. ‘When tests done on animals seem to show that testosterone exclusively promotes aggression, that’s because the animals that have been given the testosterone are the ones that resort to aggression when a crisis occurs. But that’s because the animal brain doesn’t necessarily see any alternative solution. More up-to-date research actually shows that testosterone’s function is more general than that. It prepares you to do whatever is necessary in critical situations. Whether than means aggression and anger or the opposite.’
‘The opposite?’
‘Suppose there’s a diplomatic crisis that threatens world peace. What’s needed then is not aggression but a rapid changeover to self-negating generosity and empathy directed towards someone you actually hate. Or say your job is to control a rocket landing on the moon. The computer fails and you have to work out the speed, the angle of approach and the distance in your head. Anger isn’t the thing. And yet it’s testosterone that comes to our aid in such situations.’
‘Come on, you’re making this up,’ I said.
Pijus shrugged. ‘Remember up by Storo?’
‘Storo?’
‘The freezing rain. We’d reversed up to the wall and were about to empty the bins there.’
He looked at me. I shook my head.
‘Come on, Ivar. The truck was on a slope, and it began to slide down?’
I just shook my head again.
‘Ivar, I was standing with my back to the truck and I would ha
ve been crushed to death if you hadn’t lightning-quick turned the biggest wheelie bin up on its side between the truck and the wall.’
‘Oh, that. Well, you wouldn’t exactly have been crushed to death.’
‘My point is that you showed you are capable of reacting both spontaneously and rationally at the same time. It is not the case that you have to lose your head when you feel the rush of adrenaline and testosterone. Don’t worry, you’re smarter than you think, Ivar. So call her. Use your testosterone to show empathy. And calculation.’
Well, I’ll be damned. So I did call her.
No answer.
‘She’s probably asleep,’ said Pijus.
I looked at my watch. Eight. Of course it could be that she was on the bus on the way to work, she wouldn’t take the call then. I sent a text message. My feet were beating like drumsticks against the floor as I waited. The sun rose and was shining through the windscreen. It was going to be a hot day. A hot day in hell, I thought as I pulled off my jacket.
‘We better get moving,’ said Pijus and turned the key in the ignition.
* * *
—
I met Lisa at a party at a friend’s place when I was at training college.
I had a go at this guy from Ljan who thought there was something he could teach me about respect. I knew he’d provoked me because he’d heard I was easy to wind up and I knew he did it because he was a good fighter and wanted to show off in front of the girls there. But knowing all that is no help at all, not when the guy in question came out with the type of stuff that was just asking for a sock on the jaw. To make a short story even shorter, the guy beat me up. Lisa wiped the blood from my nose with a toilet roll, helped me to my feet and walked home with me to the students’ lodgings I had in Sogn. And stayed the night. And the next day. And the next week. In a word, she stayed.
We never had time to fall in love, never had time for the painful but at the same time wonderful uncertainty about whether or not the other one really does want you. The game, the doubt, the ecstasies – we gave it all a miss. We were a couple. Say no more. Some thought I’d got a woman who was too good for me, at least that’s what they thought as time went by, because Lisa was actually in those early days quiet and sort of mousy, without the figure she acquired later when she put on a few kilos, and without that radiance that others besides me noticed she had once she got over the worst of her shyness.