Headhunters (10 page)

I knew what I was frightened of.

He had read me like an open book during the interview. But how many of the pages? Could he have suspected something? No. He had recognised a method of interrogation he had used himself in the military, that was all.

I grabbed my mobile phone and called Greve’s number to tell him that Diana was out and the name of a possible expert to check the picture’s authenticity would have to wait until he was back from Rotterdam. Greve’s answerphone voice said in English: ‘Please leave a message,’ and so I did. The bottle was empty. I considered a whisky, but dismissed the idea, didn’t want to wake up with a hangover tomorrow. A last beer, great.

The call was about to go through when I realised what I had done. I lowered my phone and hurriedly pressed the red button. I had dialled Lotte’s number, the one under the discreet L in the address book, an L which had made me tremble the few times it had appeared on the display as an incoming call. Our rule had been that I was to ring. I went into the address book, found L and pressed ‘Delete’.

‘Do you really want to delete?’ the phone replied.

I scrutinised the alternatives. The cowardly, faithless ‘no’ and the mendacious ‘yes’.

I pressed ‘yes’. Knowing that her number was printed in my brain in a way that defied deletion. What that meant I neither knew nor wanted to know. But it would fade. Fade and disappear. It had to.

Diana returned home at five minutes to midnight.

‘What have you been doing today, darling?’ she asked,
making
for the chair, squatting on the arm and giving me a hug.

‘Not much,’ I said. ‘I interviewed Clas Greve.’

‘How did it go?’

‘He’s perfect, except that he’s a foreigner. Pathfinder said they wanted a Norwegian as head; they’ve even said publicly they set great store by being Norwegian down to the last detail. So it will have to be a persuasion job.’

‘But you’re the world’s greatest at that.’ She kissed me on the forehead. ‘I’ve heard people talking about your record.’

‘Which record?’

‘The man who always has his candidate appointed, I suppose.’

‘Oh, that one,’ I said, acting surprised.

‘You’ll manage this time, too.’

‘How was it with Cathrine?’

Diana ran her hand through my thick hair. ‘Fantastic. As usual. Or, even more fantastic than usual.’

‘She’s going to die of happiness one day.’

Diana pressed her face into my hair and spoke into it. ‘She’s just found out she’s pregnant.’

‘So it won’t be that fantastic for a while.’

‘Nonsense,’ she mumbled. ‘Have you been drinking?’

‘A tiny bit. Shall we raise a glass to Cathrine?’

‘I’m heading for bed. I’m exhausted from all this happiness chat. Are you coming?’

Lying curled up behind her in the bed, enclosing her and feeling her spine against my chest and stomach, I suddenly realised something I knew I must have thought ever since the interview with Greve. That now I could make her pregnant. That I was finally on terra firma, on safe ground; a child could not supplant me now. With the Rubens I would at last be the lion, the master Diana talked about. The irreplaceable provider. It wasn’t that
Diana
had had any doubts before, but I had doubted. Doubted whether I could be the guardian of the nest that Diana deserved. And that a child of all things could cure her blessed blindness. But now she could go ahead and see, see all of me. More of me, at any rate.

The sharp, cold air from the open window was giving my skin goose Pimples on top of the duvet and I could feel an erection coming.

But her breathing was already deep and even.

I let go of her. She rolled onto her back, secure and defenceless like an infant.

I slipped out of bed.

The
mizuko
altar did not seem to have been touched since yesterday. It was rare for a day to pass without her making some kind of visible change: replacing the water, putting in a new candle, new flowers.

I went up to the living room, poured myself a whisky. The parquet floor by the window was cold. The whisky was a thirty-year-old Macallan, a present from a satisfied client. They were listed on the stock exchange now. I looked down at the garage, which was bathed in moonlight. Ove was probably on his way. He would let himself into the garage and get into the car with the spare keys he held. Remove the
Eva Mudocci
, put her in the portfolio and return to his car which was parked at a reassuringly safe distance, far enough away not to be connected with our house. He would drive to the art dealer in Gothenburg, deliver the picture and be back by the early morning. But the
Eva Mudocci
was no longer interesting now, an irritating filler job that just had to be dispatched. On Ove’s return from Gothenburg he would hopefully have a usable reproduction of Rubens’s
Boar Hunt
, which he would put under the ceiling of the Volvo before we or the neighbours were up.

In the past Ove had used my car to go to Gothenburg.
I
had never spoken to the dealer, and I hoped he didn’t know that anyone else apart from Ove was involved. That was how I wanted it, as few contacts as possible, as few people as possible who could point a finger at me. Criminals are caught sooner or later and so it was important to have the maximum distance between them and me. That was why I made a point of never being seen in conversation with Kjikerud publicly, and that was why I used a payphone when I called him. I didn’t want any of my phone numbers to be on Kjikerud’s calls log when he was arrested. The sharing out of money and the more strategic planning were done in an out-of-the-way cabin in the Elverum area. Ove rented the cabin from a hermit farmer and we always arrived in separate cars.

I had been on my way to this cabin when it had struck me just how risky it was to let Ove use my car to drive the pictures to Gothenburg. I had passed a speed trap, and there I had seen his almost thirty-year-old Mercedes, a stylish black 280SE, parked next to a police car. And I realised that Kjikerud was obviously one of those notorious drivers who are incapable of keeping to speed limits. I had drummed it into him that he should always remove the AutoPASS unit from the windscreen when he drove my Volvo to Gothenburg as any use was logged, and I was not interested in explaining to the police why I had driven up and down the E6 in the middle of the night several times a year. But when I passed Ove’s Mercedes in the speed trap on the way to Elverum I realised that was the greatest risk we ran: that the police would stop fast drivers and old acquaintances of theirs like Ove Kjikerud on his way to Gothenburg and wonder what on earth he could be doing with a car belonging to the Respectable, hmm, headhunter Roger Brown. And from thereon in it would be bad news all the way. Because Kjikerud versus Inbau, Reid and Buckley had only one outcome.

I thought I could make out something moving in the dark by the garage.

Tomorrow was D-Day. Dream Day. Domesday. Demob Day. If everything went to plan this would be the last coup. I wanted to be finished, free, the one who got away with it.

The town sparkled full of promise beneath us.

Lotte answered on the fifth ring. ‘Roger?’ Careful, gentle. As if she had been the one to wake me and not vice versa.

I hung up.

And drained the glass in one swig.

I AWOKE WITH
a splitting headache.

I supported myself on my elbows and saw Diana’s delicate, panty-clad backside sticking up in the air as she rummaged through her handbag and the pockets of the clothes she had been wearing the previous day.

‘Looking for something?’ I asked.

‘Good morning, darling,’ she said, but I could hear that it was not. And I agreed.

I dragged myself out of bed and into the bathroom. Saw myself in the mirror and knew the rest of the day could only get better. Had to get better. Would get better. I turned on the shower and stood under the ice-cold jets listening to Diana cursing under her breath in the bedroom.

‘And it’s gonna be …’ I howled in pure defiance: ‘PERFECT!’

‘I’m off,’ Diana called. ‘I love you.’

And I love you,’ I shouted, but didn’t know if she managed to catch it before the door slammed behind her.

At ten o’clock I was sitting in my office trying to concentrate. My head felt like a transparent, pulsating tadpole. I had registered that Ferdinand had had his mouth open for several minutes and had formed it into what I assumed were words of varying interest. And even though his
mouth
was still open, he had stopped moving it and instead was staring at me with what I interpreted as an expectant look.

‘Repeat the question,’ I said.

‘I said it’s great I’m doing the second interview with Greve and the client, but you have to tell me a bit about Pathfinder first. I haven’t been told anything, and I’m going to look a complete fool!’ At this point his voice rose into the obligatory hysterical falsetto.

I sighed. ‘They make tiny, almost invisible transmitters which can be attached to people and tracked via a receiver connected to the world’s most advanced GPS. Prioritised service from satellites of which they are part-owners, etc., etc. Ground-breaking technology, ergo buy-out potential. Read the annual report. Anything else?’

‘I’ve read it! Everything about the products is stamped secret. And what about Clas Greve being a foreigner? How am I going to get this obviously nationalistic client to swallow that?’

‘You won’t have to. I will. Don’t worry yourself about it, Ferdy.’

‘Ferdy?’

‘Yes, I’ve been giving it some thought. Ferdinand is too long. Is that alright?’

He stared at me in disbelief. ‘Ferdy?’

‘Not with clients present, of course.’ I beamed and could feel my headache lifting already. ‘Have we finished, Ferdy?’

We had.

Through to lunch I chewed Paralgin and stared at the clock.

At lunch I went to the jeweller’s opposite Sushi&Coffee.

‘Those ones,’ I said, pointing to the diamond earrings in the window.

I had funds to cover the card. For as long as they
lasted
. And the scarlet box’s chamois surface was as soft as puppy fur.

After lunch I continued to chew Paralgin and stare at the clock.

At five on the dot I parked the car in Inkognitogata. Finding a place was easy; both the people who worked and lived here were obviously on their way home. It had just rained and my shoe soles squelched on the tarmac. The portfolio felt light. The reproduction had been of average quality and of course horrendously overpriced at fifteen thousand Swedish kroner, but that was not very important at this moment.

As far as there can be said to be a fashionable street in Oslo, Oscars gate is it. The apartment buildings are a hotchpotch of architectural styles, mostly new Renaissance. Facades with neo-Gothic patterns, planted front gardens, this was where the directors and top civil servants had their estates at the end of the nineteenth century.

A man with a poodle on a lead was coming towards me. No hunting dogs here in the centre. He looked through me. City centre.

I walked up to number 25, according to the Internet search a block with ‘a Hanoverian variant of medieval-inspired architecture’. It was more interesting to read that the Spanish Embassy no longer had its premises here, hence there would hopefully be no annoying CCTV cameras. There was no one about in front of the property, which greeted me with silent black windows. The key I had been given by Ove was supposed to fit both the front and the apartment door. Anyway, it worked for the front door. I strode up the stairs. Purposeful. Not heavy, not light steps. A person who knows where he is going and has nothing to hide. I had the key ready so that I would
not
have to stand fumbling by the apartment door; that sort of noise travels in an old apartment building.

Second floor. No name on the door, but I knew it was here. Double door with wavy glass. I was not as calm as I had believed, for my heart was pounding inside my ribs and I missed the keyhole. Ove had once told me that the first thing that goes when you are nervous is motor coordination. He had read it in a book about one-on-one combat, how the ability to load a weapon fails you when you are faced with another gun. Nevertheless I found the keyhole at the second attempt. And the key turned, soundless, smooth and perfect. I pressed the handle and pulled the door towards me. Pushed it away from me. But it wouldn’t open. I pulled again. Bloody hell! Had Greve had an extra lock put on? Would all my dreams and plans be crushed by an extra bloody lock? I pulled at the door with all my strength, I almost panicked. It came away from the frame with a loud crack and the glass in the frame quivered as the echo resounded down the staircase. I slipped inside, carefully closed the door behind me and exhaled. And the thought that had struck me the previous evening suddenly seemed stupid. Would I miss this tension to which I had become so accustomed?

As I inhaled, my nose, mouth and lungs were filled with solvents: latex paint, varnish and glue.

I stepped over the paint pots and the rolls of wallpaper in the hall. Grey protective paper on chequered oak parquet floor, wainscoting, brick dust, old windows that were clearly going to be replaced. Rooms the size of small ballrooms in a line, one after the other.