Blood on Snow: A Novel Part 6

So quiet and motionless that I almost found it odd. I walked slowly over to the bed and stood above her. She looked so peaceful. And so pale. A clock began to tick inside my head, ticking as if it were working something out. I leaned closer to her, until my face was right above her mouth. Something was missing. And the clock was ticking louder and louder.

"Corina," I whispered.

No reaction.

"Corina," I repeated, a bit louder, and heard something I had never heard before in my own voice, a faint note of helplessness.

She opened her eyes.

"Come here, teddy bear," she whispered, wrapping her arms around me and pulling me down onto the bed.

"Harder," she whispered. "I won't break, you know."

No, I thought, you won't break. We, this, won't break. Because this is what I've been waiting for; this is what I've been practising for. Nothing but death can ruin this.

"Oh, Olav," she whispered. "Oh, Olav."

Her face was glowing, she was laughing, but her eyes were shiny with tears. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s shone white beneath me, so white. And even if at that moment she was as close as you can ever be to another person, it was as if I was looking at her the way I had first seen her, from a distance, behind a window on the other side of the street. And I thought that you can't see a person more nakedly than that, when they don't know they're being watched, studied. She had never seen me like that. Maybe she never would. Then it struck me. I still had those sheets of paper, the letter, the one I had never quite finished. And if Corina found it, she might misunderstand. All the same, it was odd that my heart started to beat faster because of a little thing like that. The sheets of paper were under the cutlery tray in the kitchen drawer, and there was no reason for anyone to move that. But I made up my mind to get rid of them at the earliest opportunity.

"That's it, Olav, like that."

Something loosened inside me when I came, something that had been lying there shut away. I don't know what it was, but the pressure from my e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n shook it out and revealed it. I lay back, gasping for breath. I was a changed man, I just didn't know in what way.

She leaned over me and tickled my forehead.

"How do you feel, my king?"

I answered, but my throat was full of saliva.

"What?" she laughed.

I cleared my throat and repeated: "Starving."

She laughed even louder.

"And happy," I said.

Corina couldn't stand fish. She was allergic to it, always had been, something in her family.

The supermarkets were all shut now, but I said I could order a CP Special from Chinese Pizza.

"Chinese Pizza?"

"Chinese food and pizzas. Separately, I mean. I have dinner there almost every day."

I got dressed again and went down to the phone box on the corner. I had never had a telephone installed in the flat, didn't want one. I didn't want people to have a way to hear me, find me, talk to me.

From the phone box I could see up to my window on the fourth floor. And I could see Corina standing there, her head circled in light like some f.u.c.king halo. She was looking down at me. I waved. She waved back.

Then the coin fell with a metallic gulp.

"Chinese Pizza, how can I help you?"

"Hi, Lin, it's Olav. One CP Special, takeaway."

"No eat here, Mistel Olav?"

"Not today."

"Fifteen minute."

"Thanks. One more thing. Has anyone been in asking about me?"

"Ask about you? No."

"Great. Is there anyone sitting there that you've seen me eating with before? Anyone with a funny thin moustache that looks like it has been drawn on? Or in a brown leather jacket with a cigarette tucked behind his ear?"

"Let's see. Nooo..."

There were only about ten tables, so I believed him. Neither Brynhildsen nor Pine was waiting for me. They'd been there with me on more than one occasion, but presumably they didn't know just how much of a regular I was. Good.

I shoved open the heavy metal door of the phone box and peered up at the window. She was still standing there.

It took a quarter of an hour to walk to Chinese Pizza. The pizza was waiting in a red cardboard box the size of a camping table. CP Special. The best in Oslo. I was looking forward to seeing Corina's face when she tasted her first bite.

"See you latel, all-a-gatol," Lin called as usual as I headed out of the door, which swung shut behind me before I had time to reply with the crocodile rhyme.

I hurried away along the pavement and swung round the corner. I was thinking about Corina. I must have been thinking about Corina very hard. At least that's the only excuse I have for the fact that I didn't see them, hear them, or even think the obvious thought: that if they had worked out that it was my regular haunt, then they'd also have worked out that it might have occurred to me that they might have worked it out, and that I therefore wouldn't go anywhere near it without a degree of caution. So they weren't waiting inside in the warmth and light, but outside in the frozen darkness of s.p.a.ce, where I could have sworn that even molecules were having trouble moving.

I heard two steps crunch on the snow, but the b.a.s.t.a.r.d pizza slowed me down and I didn't have time to draw my pistol before I felt cold hard metal pressing against my ear.

"Where is she?"

It was Brynhildsen. His pencil-thin moustache moved when he spoke. He had a young guy with him who looked more scared than dangerous, and who might as well have had a "trainee" badge on his jacket, but he still did a thorough job of searching me. I guessed Hoffmann had the sense to get the young lad to help Brynhildsen without arming him. Maybe he had a knife or something hidden away. Pistols were confirmation gifts.

"Hoffmann says you can live if we can have his wife," Brynhildsen said.

That was a lie, but I'd have said the same thing myself. I considered my options. The street was empty of traffic and people. Apart from the wrong people. And it was so quiet that I could hear the spring in the trigger mechanism complain gently as it stretched.

"Fine," Brynhildsen said. "We can find her without you, you know."

He was right, he wasn't bluffing.

"Okay," I said. "I only took her to have something to bargain with. I had no idea the guy was a Hoffmann."

"I don't know anything about that. We just want the wife."

"We'd better go and get her, then," I said.

CHAPTER 13.

"We have to take the underground," I explained. "Look, she thinks I'm protecting her. And I am. Unless I can use her in a deal like this. So I told her that if I wasn't home in half an hour, something serious must have happened and she should take off. And it'll take at least three-quarters of an hour by car to get to my flat through the Christmas traffic."

Brynhildsen stared at me. "So call her and say you're going to be a bit late."

"I haven't got a phone."

"Really? So how come the pizza was waiting for you when you arrived, Johansen?"

I looked down at the big red cardboard box. Brynhildsen was no idiot. "Phone box."

Brynhildsen ran his finger and thumb over either side of his moustache, as if he were trying to stretch the hairs. Then looked up and down the street. Presumably estimating the traffic. And wondering what Hoffmann would say if she got away.

"CP Special." This from the young lad. He was grinning broadly as he nodded towards the box. "Best pizza in the city, eh?"

"Shut up," Brynhildsen said, now finished with his moustache-stroking, having made up his mind.

"We'll take the underground. And we'll call Pine from your phone box and get him to pick us up out there."

We walked the five minutes it took to get to the underground station by the National Theatre. Brynhildsen pulled the sleeve of his coat down to cover the pistol.

"You'll have to get your own ticket, I'm not paying for it," he said as we stood at the ticket booth.

"The one I got when I came in is valid for an hour," I lied.

"That's true," Brynhildsen said with a grin.

I could always hope for a ticket inspection, and that they'd take me to some nice, safe police station.

The underground was as crowded as I had hoped. Weary commuters, gum-chewing teenagers, men and women wrapped up against the cold, with Christmas presents sticking out of plastic bags. So we had to stand. We positioned ourselves in the middle of the carriage, each of us with a hand on the shiny steel pole. The doors closed and the pa.s.sengers' breath began to build up on the windows again. The train pulled away.

"Hovseter. I wouldn't have had you down as living out west, Johansen."

"You shouldn't believe everything you believe, Brynhildsen."

"Really? You mean like the fact that I'd have thought you could get pizza out in Hovseter rather than having to come all the way into the city?"

"It's a CP Special," the young lad said respectfully, staring at the red box that was taking up a ridiculous amount of s.p.a.ce in the overfull carriage. "You can't get-"

"Shut up. So you like cold pizza, Johansen?"

"We reheat it."

"We? You and Hoffmann's wife?" Brynhildsen laughed his one-snort laugh-it sounded like an axe falling. "You're right, Johansen. We really shouldn't believe everything we believe."

No, I thought. You, for instance, shouldn't believe that a guy like me would seriously believe that a man like Hoffmann was going to let him live. And, given that someone like me didn't believe that, you shouldn't believe that he wouldn't take desperate measures to change the state of play. Brynhildsen's eyebrows almost met at the top of his nose.

Obviously I couldn't read what was going on in there, but I'd guess the plan was to shoot Corina and me in my flat. Then put the pistol in my hand and make it look like I'd shot her, then myself. A suitor driven mad by love, the old cla.s.sic. A better option than dumping us in a lake in a valley just outside Oslo. Because if Corina just disappeared, her husband would automatically be the main suspect, and there wasn't a lot about Hoffmann that would stand up to close scrutiny. Well, that's what I'd have done if I was Brynhildsen. But Brynhildsen wasn't me. Brynhildsen was a man with an inexperienced sidekick, a pistol hidden up one sleeve and the other hand loosely grasping a metal pole, but without the s.p.a.ce to spread his legs far enough to keep his balance. That's just the way it is when you're a first-timer on this line. I counted down. I knew every jolt of the rails, every movement, every comma and full stop.

"Hold this," I said, pushing the pizza box into the chest of the young guy, who automatically took it.

"Hey!" Brynhildsen shouted over the sound of shrieking metal, and raising the hand holding the pistol at the very second we hit the points. I started moving as the lurching of the train made Brynhildsen fling out his pistol arm in reflex as he tried to keep his balance. I grabbed the pole with both hands and levered myself past it with full force. I was aiming for the point where his eyebrows almost joined up at the top of his nose. I've read that a human head weighs about four and a half kilos, which, at a speed of seventy kilometres an hour, gives the sort of force that would take someone better at math than me to work out. When I leaned back again, there was a fine spray of blood coming from Brynhildsen's broken nose, and his eyes were almost all whites, just a little bit of the irises visible under his eyelids, and he was holding his arms out stiffly from his sides, like a penguin. I could see Brynhildsen was out for the count, but to prevent any potential revival, I grabbed both his hands in mine, so that one of my hands was holding the pistol up his sleeve, making it look like we were doing some sort of folk dance, the two of us. Then I repeated the previous move, seeing as it had had such a successful outcome the first time. I pulled him hard towards me, lowered my head and smashed into his nose. I heard something break that probably wasn't supposed to break. I let go of him, but not his pistol, and he collapsed in a heap while the other people standing around us gasped and tried to move away.

I spun round and aimed the pistol at the apprentice, as a nasal, studiously disinterested voice over the loudspeaker announced "Majorstua."

"My stop," I said.

His eyes were wide open above the pizza box, his mouth gawping so much that in a perverse way it was almost flirtatious. Who knew, maybe in a few years' time he'd be after me with more experience, better armed. Mind you, years? These youngsters learned all they needed to in three or four months.

The train braked as it pulled into the station. I backed towards the door behind me. All of a sudden we had plenty of s.p.a.ce-people were pressed up against the walls staring at us. A baby was babbling to its mother, but otherwise no one made a sound. The train stopped and the doors slid open. I took another step back and stopped in the doorway. If there was anyone behind me trying to get on, they very wisely chose a different door.

"Come on," I said.

The kid didn't react.

"Come on," I said, more emphatically.

He blinked, still not understanding.

"The pizza."

He took a step forward, listless as a sleep-walker, and handed me the red box. I stepped back onto the platform. I stood there, pointing the pistol straight at the youth to make sure he realised that this was my stop alone. I glanced at Brynhildsen. He was lying flat on the floor, but one shoulder was twitching slightly, like an electric charge in something that was f.u.c.ked but not quite ready to die.

The doors slid shut.

The kid stared at me from behind the filthy, wintry, salt-streaked windows. The train set off towards Hovseter and environs.

"See you latel, all-a-gatol," I whispered, lowering the pistol.

I walked home quickly through the darkness, listening for police sirens. As soon as I heard them, I put the pizza box on the steps of a closed bookshop and began to walk back towards the station again. Once the blue lights had pa.s.sed I turned round and hurried back. The pizza box was sitting untouched on the steps. Like I said, I was looking forward to seeing the look on Corina's face when she took her first bite.