Blood on Snow: A Novel Part 1

Blood on Snow : a novel.

Jo Nesbo.

CHAPTER 1.

The snow was dancing like cotton wool in the light of the street lamps. Aimlessly, unable to decide whether it wanted to fall up or down, just letting itself be driven by the h.e.l.lish, ice-cold wind that was sweeping in from the great darkness covering the Oslo fjord. Together they swirled, wind and snow, round and round in the darkness between the warehouses on the quayside that were all shut for the night. Until the wind got fed up and dumped its dance partner beside the wall. And there the dry, windswept snow was settling around the shoes of the man I had just shot in the chest and neck.

Blood was dripping down onto the snow from the bottom of his shirt. I don't actually know a lot about snow-or much else, for that matter-but I've read that snow crystals formed when it's really cold are completely different from wet snow, heavy flakes, or the crunchy stuff. That it's the shape of the crystals and the dryness of the snow that make the haemoglobin in the blood retain that deep red colour. Either way, the snow under him made me think of a king's robe, all purple and lined with ermine, like the drawings in the book of Norwegian folk tales my mother used to read to me. She liked fairy tales and kings. That's probably why she named me after a king.

The Evening Post had said that if the cold carried on like this until New Year, 1977 would be the coldest year since the war, and that we'd remember it as the start of the new ice age scientists had been predicting for a while. But what did I know? All I knew was that the man standing in front of me would soon be dead. There was no mistaking the way his body was shaking. He was one of the Fisherman's men. It was nothing personal. I told him as much before he collapsed, leaving a smear of blood down the wall. If I ever get shot, I'd rather it was personal. I didn't say it to stop his ghost coming after me-I don't believe in ghosts. I just couldn't think of anything else to say. Obviously I could have just kept my mouth shut. That's what I usually do, after all. So there must have been something that made me so talkative all of a sudden. Maybe it was because there were only a few days to go before Christmas. I've heard that people are supposed to feel closer to each other around Christmas. But what do I know?

I thought the blood would freeze on top of the snow and end up just lying there. But instead the snow sucked the blood up as it fell, drawing it in under the surface, hiding it, as if it had some sort of use for it. As I walked home I imagined a snowman rising up from the snowdrift, one with clearly visible veins of blood under its deathly pale skin of ice.

On the way back to my flat I called Daniel Hoffmann from a phone box to tell him the job was done.

Hoffmann said that was good. As usual, he didn't ask any questions. Either he'd learned to trust me in the course of the four years I'd been working as a fixer for him, or else he didn't actually want to know. The job was done, so why would a man like him trouble himself with that sort of thing when what he was paying for was to have fewer problems? Hoffmann asked me to go down to the office the next day-he said he had a new job for me.

"A new job?" I asked, feeling my heart skip a beat.

"Yes," Hoffmann said. "As in a new commission."

"Oh, okay."

I hung up, relieved. I don't really do much more than commissions. I can't actually be used for much more than that.

Here are four things I can't be used for. Driving a getaway car. I can drive fast, that's fine. But I can't drive inconspicuously, and anyone driving a getaway car has to be able to do both. They have to be able to drive so they look just like any other car on the road. I landed myself and two other men in prison because I can't drive inconspicuously enough. I drove like a demon, switching between forest tracks and main roads, and I'd long since lost our pursuers, and was just a few kilometres from the Swedish border. I slowed down and drove in a steady, law-abiding way like a grandad on a Sunday outing. And we still got stopped by a police patrol. They said afterwards that they had no idea it was the car used in the robbery, and that I hadn't been driving too fast or breaking any of the rules of the road. They said it was the way I was driving. I've no idea what they meant, but they said it was suspicious.

I can't be used in robberies. I've read that more than half of all bank employees who experience a robbery end up with psychological problems afterwards, some of them for the rest of their lives. I don't know why, but the old man who was behind the counter of the post office when we went in was in a big hurry to develop psychological problems. He fell to pieces just because the barrel of my shotgun was pointed in his general direction, apparently. I saw in the paper the next day that he was suffering from psychological problems. Not much of a diagnosis, but either way, if there's one thing you don't want, it's psychological problems. So I went to visit him in hospital. Obviously he didn't recognise me-I'd been wearing a Santa Claus mask in the post office. (It was the perfect disguise. No one gave a second glance to three lads in Santa Claus outfits carrying sacks as they ran out of a post office in the middle of the Christmas shopping crowds.) I stopped in the doorway to the ward and looked at the old man. He was reading Cla.s.s Struggle, the Communist newspaper. Not that I've got anything against Communists as individuals. Okay, maybe I have. But I don't want to have anything against them as individuals, I just think they're wrong. So I felt a bit guilty when I realised that I felt a lot better because the guy was reading Cla.s.s Struggle. But obviously there's a big difference between feeling a bit guilty and a lot guilty. And like I said, I felt a lot better. But I stopped doing robberies. After all, there was no guarantee the next one would be a Communist.

And I can't work with drugs, that's number three. I just can't do it. It's not that I can't get money out of people who are in debt to my employers. Junkies only have themselves to blame, and in my opinion people should pay for their mistakes, plain and simple. The problem's more that I have a weak, sensitive nature, as my mum once put it. I suppose she saw herself in me. Either way, I have to stay well away from drugs. Like her, I'm the sort of person who's just looking for someone to submit to. Religion, a big-brother figure, a boss. Drink and drugs. Besides, I can't do math either, I can hardly count to ten without losing my concentration. Which is kind of stupid if you're going to sell drugs or collect debts-that ought to be pretty obvious.

Okay. Last one. Prost.i.tution. Same sort of thing there. I don't have a problem with women earning money whatever way they like, and the idea that a guy-me, for instance-should get a third of the money for sorting things out so the women can concentrate on the actual work. A good pimp is worth every krone they pay him, I've always thought that. The problem is that I fall in love so quickly, and then I stop seeing it in terms of business. And I can't handle shaking, hitting or threatening the women, whether or not I'm in love with them. Something to do with my mother, maybe, what do I know? That's probably why I can't stand seeing other people beating up women either. Something just snaps. Take Maria, for instance. Deaf and dumb, with a limp. I don't know what those two things have got to do with each other-nothing probably-but it's a bit like once you start getting bad cards, they just keep coming. Which is probably why Maria ended up with an idiot junkie boyfriend as well. He had a fancy French name, Myriel, but owed Hoffmann thirteen thousand for drugs. The first time I saw her was when Pine, Hoffmann's head pimp, pointed out a girl in a home-made coat and with her hair up in a bun, looking like she'd just left church. She was sitting on the steps in front of Ridderhallen, crying, and Pine told me she was going to have to pay back her boyfriend's drug debt in kind. I thought it best to give her a gentle start, just hand-jobs. But she jumped out of the first car she got into after barely ten seconds. She stood there in floods of tears while Pine yelled at her. Maybe he thought she'd hear him if he shouted loud enough. Maybe that was what did it. The yelling. And my mum. Either way, something snapped, and even if I could see what Pine was trying to get into her head by the use of very loud sound waves, I ended up decking him, my own boss. Then I took Maria to a flat I knew was empty, then went to tell Hoffmann that I was no use as a pimp either.

But Hoffmann said-and I had to agree with him-that he couldn't let people get away without paying their debts, because that sort of thing soon spreads to other, more important customers. So, well aware that Pine and Hoffmann were after the girl because she'd been stupid enough to take on her boyfriend's debts, I went out looking until I found the Frenchman in a squat up in f.a.gerborg. He was both wrecked by drugs and broke, so I realised I wasn't going to get a single krone out of him, no matter how much I shook him. I said that if he so much as approached Maria again I'd smash his nose into his brain. To be honest, I'm not sure there was much left of either of them. So I went back to Hoffmann, said the boyfriend had managed to get hold of some money, handed him thirteen thousand and said I presumed that meant hunting season on the girl was over.

I don't know if Maria had been a user while they were together, if she was the sort who looked for ways to be submissive, but she seemed pretty straight now, at least. She worked in a small supermarket, and I looked in every now and then to make sure things were okay, and that her junkie boyfriend hadn't popped up to ruin things for her again. Obviously I made sure she couldn't see me, just stood outside in the darkness looking into the well-lit shop, watching her sitting at the till, putting things in bags, and pointing at one of the others if anyone spoke to her. Every so often I suppose we all need to feel that we're living up to our parents. I don't know what Dad had that I could live up to-this is probably more about Mum. She was better at looking after other people than herself, and I suppose I saw that as a kind of ideal back then. G.o.d knows. Either way, I didn't really have much use for the money I was earning from Hoffmann. So what if I dealt a decent card to a girl who'd been given such a lousy hand?

Anyway. To sum up, let's put it like this: I'm no good at driving slowly, I'm way too soft, I fall in love far too easily, I lose my head when I get angry, and I'm bad at math. I've read a bit, but I don't really know much, and certainly nothing anyone would find useful. And stalact.i.tes grow faster than I can write.

So what on earth can a man like Daniel Hoffmann use someone like me for?

The answer is-as you might have worked out already-as a fixer.

I don't have to drive, and I mostly kill the sort of men who deserve it, and the numbers aren't exactly hard to keep track of. Not right now, anyway.

There are two calculations.

To start with, there's the one that's ticking away the whole time: When exactly do you reach the point where you know so much about your boss that he starts to get worried? And when do you know he's beginning to wonder if he ought to fix the fixer? Like one of those black widows. Not that I know much about arachnology or whatever it's called, but I think the widows let the males, who are much smaller, f.u.c.k them. Then, when he's finished and the female has no more use for him, she eats him. In Animal Kingdom 4: Insects and Spiders in the Deichman Library there's a picture of a black widow with the male's chewed-off pedipalp, which is like the spider's c.o.c.k, still hanging from her genitals. And you can see the blood-red, hourgla.s.s-shaped mark on the female's abdomen. Because the hourgla.s.s is running, you pathetic, randy little male spider, and you need to keep to your allotted visiting time. Or, to be more accurate, you need to know when visiting time is over. And then you get the f.u.c.k out of there, come what may, with a couple of bullets in the side or whatever-you just have to get away, to the only thing that can save you.

That's how I saw it. Do what you have to, but don't get too close.

And that's why I was seriously f.u.c.king worried about the new job Hoffmann had given me.

He wanted me to fix his wife.

CHAPTER 2.

"I want you to make it look like a break-in, Olav."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because it needs to look like something else, Olav, not what it really is. The police always get upset when civilians are killed. They put a little too much effort into their investigation. And when a woman who has a lover is found dead, everything points to her husband. Obviously, in ninety per cent of cases this is perfectly justified."

"Seventy-four, sir."

"Sorry?"

"Just something I read, sir."

Okay, we don't usually call people "sir" in Norway, no matter how superior they are. With the exception of the royal family, of course, who are addressed as Your Royal Highness. Daniel Hoffmann would probably have preferred that. The t.i.tle of "sir" was something Hoffmann had imported from England, together with his leather furniture, red mahogany bookcases and leather-bound books full of the old, yellowing, unread pages of what were presumably English cla.s.sics. But how should I know, I only recognised the usual names: d.i.c.kens, Bront, Austen. Either way, the dead authors made the air in his office so dry that I always ended up coughing a fine spray of lung cells long after my visits. I don't know what it was about England that fascinated Hoffmann, but I knew he'd spent a short time there as a student, and came home with his case stuffed full of tweed suits, ambition and an affected Oxford English with a Norwegian tw.a.n.g. No degree or certificates, just a belief that money is everything. And that if you're going to succeed in business, you have to concentrate on markets where the compet.i.tion is weakest. Which in Oslo at that time meant prost.i.tution. I think his a.n.a.lysis really was that simple. Daniel Hoffmann had worked out that in a market run by charlatans, idiots and amateurs, even a distinctly average man could end up king of the castle. It was just a matter of having the necessary moral flexibility required to recruit and send girls out into prost.i.tution on a daily basis. And, after giving the matter due consideration, Daniel Hoffmann concluded that he did. When he expanded his business into the heroin market a few years later, Hoffmann was already a man who regarded himself as a success. And since the heroin market in Oslo up to then had been run by jokers, idiots and amateurs, as well as junkies, and since it turned out that Hoffmann also possessed sufficient moral flexibility to despatch people into a narcotic h.e.l.l, this became another success. The only problem that Hoffmann now faced was the Fisherman. The Fisherman was a fairly recent compet.i.tor in the heroin market, and, as it turned out, he was no idiot. G.o.d knows, there were enough addicts in Oslo for both of them, but they were each trying their best to wipe the other off the face of the earth. Why? Well, I a.s.sume that neither of them was born with my innate talent for subordination. And things get a bit messy when people like that, who have to be in charge, who have to sit on the throne, find out that their women are being unfaithful. I think the Daniel Hoffmanns of this world would have better and simpler lives if they could learn to look the other way, and maybe accept that their wives had an affair or two.

"I was thinking of taking a holiday over Christmas," I said. "Asking someone to come with me, and go away for a while."

"A travelling companion? I didn't think you knew anyone that intimately, Olav? That's one of the things I like about you, you know. That you haven't got anyone to tell secrets to." He smiled and tapped the ash from his cigar. I didn't get upset-he meant well. The word "Cohiba" was printed on the cigar band. I read somewhere that at the turn of the century cigars were the most common Christmas present in the Western Hemisphere. Would that be a good idea? I didn't even know if she smoked. I hadn't seen her smoking at work, anyway.

"I haven't asked yet," I said. "But-"

"I'll pay you five times your usual fee," Hoffmann said. "So you can take the person in question on a never-ending Christmas holiday afterwards if you want."

I tried to do the math. But like I said, I'm pretty useless.

"Here's the address," Hoffmann said.

I had worked for him for four years without knowing where he lived. But then, why should I have known? He didn't know where I lived. And I'd never met his new wife either, just heard Pine going on about how hot she was, and how much he'd be able to rake in if he had a b.i.t.c.h like that on the streets.

"She's on her own in the house most of the day," Hoffmann said. "At least that's what she tells me. Do it whatever way you like, Olav. I trust you. The least I know, the better. Understood?"

I nodded. The less I know, I thought.

"Olav?"

"Yes, sir, understood."

"Good."

"Let me think about it till tomorrow, sir."

Hoffmann raised one of his neatly manicured eyebrows. I don't know much about evolution and stuff like that, but didn't Darwin say there were only six universal facial expressions for human emotions? I've no idea if Hoffmann had six human emotions, but I think what he was hoping to communicate with his raised eyebrow-in contrast to what he would have meant by an open-mouthed stare-was mild annoyance combined with reflection and intelligence.

"I've just given you the details, Olav. And now-after that-you're thinking about refusing?"

The threat was barely audible. No, actually, if that was the case then I probably wouldn't have picked up on it. I'm completely tone-deaf when it comes to noticing the undertones and subtexts in what people say. So we can a.s.sume that the threat was obvious enough. Daniel Hoffmann had clear blue eyes and black eyelashes. If he was a girl I'd have said it was make-up. I don't know why I mention that, it's got nothing to do with anything.

"I didn't have time to respond before you gave me the details, sir," I said. "You'll have an answer by this evening, if that's okay, sir?"

He looked at me. Blew cigar smoke in my direction. I sat there with my hands in my lap. Fiddling with the brim of the labourer's cap I didn't actually have.

"By six," he said. "That's when I leave the office."

I nodded.

As I walked home along the city streets through the snowstorm, four o'clock came and darkness settled over the city again after just a few hours of grey daylight. The wind was still strong, and there was an unsettling whistling sound from dark corners. But like I said, I don't believe in ghosts. The snow crunched under the soles of my boots, like the snapping spines of dusty old books, but I was thinking. I usually try to avoid doing that. It's not an area where I see any hope of improvement with practice, and experience has taught me that it rarely leads to anything good. But I was back in the first of those two calculations. The fix itself ought to be fine. To be honest, it would be easier than the other jobs I had done. And the fact that she was going to die was fine as well: like I said, I think all of us-men and women alike-have to accept the consequences when we make mistakes. What worried me more was what was bound to happen afterwards. When I was the guy who had fixed Daniel Hoffmann's wife. The man who knew everything and had the power to determine Daniel Hoffmann's future once the police started their investigation. Power over someone who wasn't capable of subordination. And a man Hoffmann owed five times the usual fee. Why had he offered that for a job that was less complicated than normal?

I felt like I was sitting at a poker table with four heavily armed, innately suspicious bad losers. And I'd just managed to get a hand of four aces. Sometimes good news is so improbably good that it's bad.

Okay, so what a smart poker player would do here is get rid of the cards, soak up the loss and hope for better-and more appropriate-luck in the next round. My problem was that it was far too late to fold. I knew Hoffmann was going to be behind the murder of his wife, regardless of whether it was me or someone else who did it.

I realised where my steps had taken me, and stared into the light.

She had her hair pulled up in a bun, the way my mum used to. She was nodding and smiling at customers who spoke to her. Most of them probably knew she was deaf and dumb. Wishing her "Happy Christmas," thanking her. The typical pleasantries that people say to each other.

Five times the usual fee. A never-ending Christmas holiday.

CHAPTER 3.

I rented a room in a small hotel right opposite the Hoffmanns' apartment in Bygdoy Alle. The plan was to watch what the wife did for a couple of days, see if she went anywhere while her husband was at work, or if she had any visitors. Not that I was interested in finding out who her lover was. My aim was simply to work out the best, least risky time to strike, when she was on her own at home and wasn't likely to be disturbed.

The room turned out to be the perfect vantage point not only to watch Corina Hoffmann coming and going, but also to see what she got up to inside the apartment. Evidently they never bothered to close the curtains. Most people don't, in a city where there's no sun to shut out, and people outside are more interested in getting into the warm somewhere than they are in standing and staring.

For the first few hours I didn't see anyone in there. Just a living room bathed in light. The Hoffmanns weren't exactly sparing with the electricity. The furniture wasn't English; it looked more French, especially the strange sofa in the middle of the room that only had a back at one end. Presumably it was what the French call a chaise longue which-unless my French teacher was having me on-means "long chair." Ornate, asymmetrical carving, with some sort of nature-inspired upholstery. Rococo, according to my mum's art history books, but it could just as well have been knocked together by a local craftsman and painted in the traditional style out in the Norwegian countryside for all I knew. Either way, it wasn't the sort of furniture someone young would choose, so I guess it was Hoffmann's ex-wife's. Pine had said Hoffmann threw her out the year she turned fifty. Because she'd turned fifty. And because their son had moved out and she no longer filled any function in his home. And-according to Pine-he had said all this to her face, and she had accepted it. Along with a flat by the sea and a cheque for one and a half million kroner.

To pa.s.s the time I took out the sheets of paper I'd been writing on. It was really just a form of scribbling. Well, that's not quite true, I suppose it was more of a letter. A letter to someone whose ident.i.ty I didn't know. Actually, maybe I did. But I'm not exactly much good at writing, so there were a lot of mistakes, a lot that had to be cut. To be honest, a lot of paper and ink had gone into every word that I'd kept. And things went so slowly this time that I eventually just put the paper down, lit a cigarette and did some daydreaming instead.

Like I said, I'd never seen any member of Hoffmann's family, but I could see them in my mind's eye as I sat there looking into the apartment on the other side of the street. I liked looking in on other people. Always had done. So I did what I always did, and imagined family life in there. A nine-year-old son, home from school, sitting in the living room reading all the strange books he'd taken out from the library. The mother singing quietly to herself as she prepared dinner in the kitchen. The way mother and son tense for a moment when there's a noise from the door. Then how they suddenly relax when the man in the hall calls out "I'm home!" in a clear, cheerful voice, and they run out to greet him and give him a hug.

While I was sitting there immersed in happy thoughts, Corina Hoffmann walked into the living room from the bedroom, and everything changed.

The light.

The temperature.

The calculations.

That afternoon I didn't go to the supermarket.

I didn't wait for Maria the way I sometimes did, I didn't follow her to the underground at a safe distance, I didn't stand right behind her in the crowd in the middle of the train, where she always liked to stand even if there were empty seats. That afternoon I didn't stand there like a madman, whispering things to her that only I could hear.

That afternoon I sat bewitched in a darkened room, staring at the woman on the other side of the street. Corina Hoffmann. I could say whatever I wanted, as loudly as I wanted-there was no one to hear me. And I didn't have to look at her from behind, look at her hair so hard that I managed to see a beauty in it that wasn't actually there.

Tightrope-walker. That was the first thing I thought when Corina Hoffmann walked into the room. She was wearing a white terry-cloth dressing gown, and she moved like a cat. By that I don't mean that she ambled along like some mammals do, cats and camels, for instance. Moving both legs on one side before moving the others. Or so I've heard. What I mean is that cats-if I've got this right-walk on tiptoe, and that they put their back paws on the same spot as their front paws. That was what Corina was doing. Setting her naked feet down with her ankles straight, and putting the second foot down close to the first. Like a tightrope-walker.

Everything about Corina Hoffmann was beautiful. Her face, with its high cheekbones, Brigitte Bardot lips, her blonde, mussed-up, glossy hair. The long, thin arms emerging from the wide sleeves of the dressing gown, the tops of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, so soft that they moved as she walked and when she breathed. And the white, white skin of her arms, face, b.r.e.a.s.t.s, legs-b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l, it was like snow glittering in sunlight, the way that can make a man snow-blind in just a few hours. Basically, I liked everything about Corina Hoffmann. Everything except her surname.

It looked like she was bored. She drank coffee. Talked on the phone. Leafed through a magazine, but ignored the newspapers. She disappeared into the bathroom, then came out again, still wearing the dressing gown. She put a record on, and danced along to it rather half-heartedly. Swing, it looked like. She had something to eat. Looked at the time. Almost six. She changed into a dress, fixed her hair and put a different record on. I opened the window and tried to hear, but there was too much traffic. So I picked up the binoculars again and tried to focus on the record-sleeve that she'd left on the table. It looked like there was a picture of the composer on the front. Antonio Lucio Vivaldi? Who knows? The point is that the woman Daniel Hoffmann came home to at quarter past six was a completely different one from the woman I had spent the whole day with.

They skirted around each other. Didn't touch each other. Didn't talk to each other. Like two electrons pushing away from each other because they're both negatively charged. But they ended up behind the same bedroom door.

I went to bed, but couldn't sleep.

What is it that makes us realise we're going to die? What is it that happens on the day when we acknowledge it isn't just a possibility, but an unavoidable f.u.c.king fact that our life will come to an end? Obviously everyone will have different reasons, but for me it was watching my father die. Seeing how ba.n.a.l and physical it was, like a fly hitting a windscreen. What's actually more interesting is: What is it-once we've reached that realisation-that makes us doubt again? Is it because we've gotten smarter? Like that philosopher-David Something-or-other-who wrote that just because something keeps happening, there's no guarantee that it's going to happen again. Without logical proof, we don't know that history is going to repeat itself. Or is it because we get older and more scared the closer it gets? Or is it something else entirely? As if one day we see something that we didn't know existed. Feel something that we didn't know we could feel. Hear a hollow sound when we bang on the wall, and realise that there might be another room behind it. And a hope is sparked, a terrible, draining hope that gnaws away at you and can't be ignored. A hope that there might be an escape route from death, a short cut to a place you didn't know about. That there is a point. That there is a narrative.

The next morning I got up at the same time as Daniel Hoffmann. It was still pitch-black when he left. He didn't know I was here. Didn't want to know, as he'd been careful to point out.

So I turned off the light, sat in the chair by the window and settled down to wait for Corina. I took out my papers again and looked through my letter project. The words were more incomprehensible than usual, and the few I did understand suddenly seemed irrelevant and dead. Why didn't I just throw the whole lot away? Because I'd spent so long composing those wretched sentences? I put it all down and studied the lack of activity on Oslo's deserted winter streets until she finally appeared.

The day pa.s.sed much like the previous one. She went out for a while and I followed her. From following Maria I had learned the best way to do it without being noticed. Corina bought a scarf in a shop, drank coffee with someone who seemed to be a girl friend to judge from their body language, and then went home.

It was still only ten o'clock, and I made myself a cup of coffee. I watched her lying on the chaise longue in the middle of the room. She'd put a dress on, a different one. The fabric shifted around her body whenever she moved. A chaise longue is a strange piece of furniture, neither one thing nor the other. When she moved to find a more comfortable position it happened slowly, elaborately, consciously. As if she knew she was being watched. Knew that she was desired. She looked at the time, leafed through her magazine, the same as the day before. Then she tensed up, almost imperceptibly.

I couldn't hear the doorbell.

She stood up, went over to the door in that languid, soft, feline way, and opened it.