The Snowman ( PDFDrive )

had that same feeling he had when he was small and everyone else was on holiday in Oppsal. This
was the last resort, the last desperate action, having rung the doorbells at all the other houses.
Tresko – or Asbjørn Treschow, which was his real name – opened up and stared sullenly at Harry.
Because he knew, now just as he had then. Last resort.
The front door led straight into a thirty-square-metre living space one might call, charitably, a
lounge with an open-plan kitchen, and uncharitably, a bedsit. The stench was breathtaking. It was
the smell of bacteria vegetating on damp feet and stale air, hence the vernacular but accurate
Norwegian term tåfis, or toe-fart. Tresko had inherited his sweaty feet from his father. Just as he
had inherited the sobriquet tresko, clogs, this dubious footwear he always wore in the belief that the
wood absorbed the smell.
The only positive thing you could say about Tresko Junior’s foot odour was that it masked the smell
of the dishes piled up in the sink, the overflowing ashtrays or the sweat-impregnated T-shirts drying
over chair backs. It occurred to Harry that in all probability Tresko’s sweaty feet had driven his
opponents to the edge of sanity on his passage through to the semi-finals of the world poker
championship in Las Vegas.
‘Been a long while,’ Tresko said.
‘Yes. Great that you had some time for me.’
Tresko laughed as if Harry had told him a joke. And Harry, who had no desire to spend any longer
than necessary in the bedsit, got straight to the point.
‘So why is poker just about being able to see when your opponent is lying?’
Tresko didn’t seem to mind skipping the social niceties.
‘People think poker’s about statistics, odds and probability. But if you play at the highest level all
the players know the odds off by heart, so that’s not where the battle takes place. What separates the
best from the rest is their ability to read others. Before I went to Vegas I knew I was going to be up
against the best. And I could see the best playing on the Gamblers’ Channel which I received on
satellite TV. I recorded it and studied every single one of the guys when they were bluffing. Ran it
in slow motion, logged what went on in their faces down to the tiniest detail, what they said and did,
every repeated action. And after I’d worked at it for long enough there was always something, some
recurrent mannerism. One scratched his right nostril; another stroked the back of the cards. Leaving
Norway, I was sure I was going to win. Sadly it turned out I had even more telltale tics.’
Tresko’s grim laughter sounded more like a kind of sobbing and caused his amorphous frame to
shake.
‘So if I bring a man in for questioning, you can see whether he’s lying or not?’
Tresko shook his head. ‘It’s not that simple. First of all, I need to have a recording. Second, I must
have seen the cards so that I know when he’s been bluffing. Then I can rewind and analyse what he
does differently. It’s like when you calibrate a lie detector, isn’t it? Before you run the test, you get
the guy to say something which is obviously true, such as his name. And then something which is
obviously a lie. And afterwards you read the printout so that you have points of reference.’
‘An obvious truth,’ Harry mumbled. ‘And an obvious lie. On a film clip.’