Nemesis

A silver lighter bursts into flame at the end of the cigarillo.

'…and continues to read. So I say: Aren't you going to make a move? I watch his hand scribbling away with my pen as he answers: I don't need to. I'm writing down how this game will finish, move for move. You will knock over your king. I explain that it is impossible for him to know how the game will develop after just one move. Shall we have a bet? he says. I try to laugh it off, but he is insistent. So I agree to bet a hundred to put him into a benevolent frame of mind for my interview. He demands to see the note and I have to place it beside the board where he can see it. He raises his hand as if to make his move, then things happen very fast.'

'Lightning chess?'

Aune smiled and, deep in thought, exhaled a ring of smoke towards the ceiling. 'The next moment I was held in a vice-like grip with my head forced backwards so that I was looking up at the ceiling, and a voice whispered into my ear: Can you feel the blade, Gadjo? Of course I could feel it, the sharp, razor-thin steel pressed against my larynx, straining to cut through the skin. Have you ever experienced that feeling, Harry?'

Harry's brain raced through the register of related experiences, but failed to find anything altogether identical. He shook his head.

'It felt, to quote a number of my patients, rank. I was so frightened I was on the point of urinating in my trousers. Then he whispered in my ear: Knock over the king, Aune. He slackened his grip a little so that I could raise my arm and I sent my pieces flying. Then, equally abruptly, he let me go. He returned to his side of the table and waited for me to get on my feet and regain control of my breathing. What the hell was that? I groaned. That was a bank robbery, he answered. First the plan and then the execution. Then he showed me what he had written in the book. All I could see was my solitary move and White king capitulates. Then he asked: Does that answer your questions, Aune?'

'What did you say?'

'Nothing. I yelled for the guard to come. However, before he came, I asked Raskol one last question because I knew I would drive myself crazy thinking about it if I didn't get an answer there and then. I said: Would you have done it? Would you have cut my throat if I hadn't capitulated? Just to win an idiotic bet?'

'And what did he answer?'

'He smiled and asked if I knew what pre-programming was.'

'Yes?'

'That was all. The door opened and I left.'

'But what did he mean by pre-programming?'

Aune pushed his mug away. 'You can pre-programme your brain to follow a particular pattern of behaviour. The brain will overrule other impulses and follow the predetermined rules, come what may. Useful in situations when the brain's natural impulse is to panic. Such as when the parachute doesn't open. Then, I hope, parachutists have pre-programmed emergency procedures.'

'Or soldiers fighting.'

'Precisely. There are, however, methods which can programme humans to such a degree that they go into a kind of trance, unaffected by even extreme external influences, and they become living robots. The fact is that this is every general's wet dream, frighteningly easy, provided you know the necessary techniques.'

'Are you talking about hypnosis?'

'I like to call it pre-programming. There is less mystification. It is a matter of opening and closing routes for impulses. If you're clever, you can easily pre-programme yourself, so-called self-hypnosis. If Raskol had pre-programmed himself to kill me if I hadn't capitulated, he would have prevented himself from changing his mind.'

'But he didn't kill you, did he.'

'All programs have an escape button, a password which brings you out of the trance. In this case, it may have been knocking down the white king.'

'Mm. Fascinating.'

'And now I've come to my point…'

'I think I know it,' Harry said. 'The bank robber in the photo may have pre-programmed himself to shoot if the branch manager didn't keep to the time limit.'

'The rules of pre-programming have to be simple,' Aune said, dropping the cigarillo in the mug and putting the saucer on top. 'In order for you to fall into a trance they have to form a small yet logical closed system which rejects other thoughts.'

Harry put a fifty-kroner note beside the coffee mug and stood up. Aune watched in silence as Harry gathered up all the photographs before saying: 'You don't believe a word I've said, do you.'

'No.'

Aune stood up and buttoned up his jacket over his stomach. 'So, what do you believe?'

'I believe what experience has taught me,' Harry said. 'That villains by and large are as stupid as I am, go for easy options and have uncomplicated motives. In a nutshell, that things are very much what they seem to be. I would bet this robber was either out of his skull or panic-stricken. What he did was senseless and from that I conclude he is stupid. Take the gypsy whom you clearly consider to be very smart. How much time did he get in the slammer for attacking you with a knife?'

'Nothing,' Aune said with a sardonic smile.

'Eh?'

'They never found a knife.'

'I thought you said you were locked in his cell.'

'Have you ever been lying on your stomach on the beach and your chums tell you to lie still because they are holding red hot coals over your back? And then you hear someone say whoops and the next second you can feel the coals burning your back?'

Harry's brain sorted through his holiday memories. It didn't take long. 'No.'

'And it turned out it was a trick; it was just ice cubes?'

'And?'

Aune sighed. 'Now and then I wonder how you've spent the thirty-five years you maintain you've been alive, Harry.'

Harry ran a hand across his face. He was tired. 'OK, Aune, what's your point?'

'My point is that a good manipulator can make you believe that the edge of a hundred-kroner note is the edge of a knife.'

***

The blonde looked Harry straight in the eye and promised him sun although it would cloud over in the course of the day. Harry pressed the OFF button and the picture shrank into a small luminous dot in the centre of the 14-inch screen. When he closed his eyes, however, it was the image of Stine Grette which remained on his retina, and he heard the echo of the reporter's '…the police have no suspects in the case so far'.

He opened his eyes again and studied the reflection in the dead screen. Himself, the old green wing chair from Elevator and the bare coffee table, embellished with glass and bottle rings. Everything was the same. The portable TV had stood on the shelf between the Lonely Planet guide to Thailand and a Norwegian road atlas for as long as he had lived here, and it hadn't travelled one metre for several years. He had read about the Seven Year Itch and how people typically began to long for somewhere new to live. Or a new job. Or a new partner. He hadn't noticed anything, and he had had the same job for almost ten years. Harry looked at his watch. Eight o'clock, Anna had said.

As far as partners were concerned, his relationships had never lasted long enough for him to test the theory. Apart from the two which might have lasted that long, Harry's romances had terminated because of what he called the Six Week Itch. Whether his reluctance to get involved was due to his being rewarded with tragedies on the two occasions he had loved a woman, he didn't know. Or should his two unswerving loves-murder investigations and alcohol-bear the blame? At any rate, before he met Rakel two years ago, he had begun to lean towards the view that he wasn't cut out for long-term relationships. He thought of her large, cool bedroom in Holmenkollen. The coded grunts they made at the breakfast table. Oleg's drawing on the refrigerator door, three people holding hands, one of whom was a towering figure, as high as the yellow sun in the clear blue sky, with HARY written underneath.