Headhunters (9 page)

‘Fine,’ said Greve, who didn’t seem to have picked up anything. ‘As long as it’s not tomorrow, that is,’ he added, getting to his feet.

‘That would be too short notice for them, anyway,’ I said. ‘I’ll ring the number you gave me.’

I escorted him out to reception. ‘Could you order a taxi, please, Da?’ I tried to read from Oda’s or Ida’s face whether she was comfortable with the abbreviation but was interrupted by Greve.

‘Thank you. I have my own car here. Regards to your wife, and I’ll wait to hear from you.’

He proffered his hand, and I shook it with a broad
smile
. ‘I’ll try to ring you tonight, because you’re busy tomorrow, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

I don’t know why I didn’t stop there. The rhythm of the conversation, the sense that an exchange was over told me that it was here I should say the closing ‘Goodbye’. Perhaps it was a gut feeling, a premonition; perhaps a terror that had already implanted itself in me, which made me extra careful.

‘Yeah, decoration is a pretty all-engrossing activity,’ I said.

‘It’s not that,’ he said. ‘I’m catching the early-morning plane to Rotterdam tomorrow. To get the dog. He’s been stuck in quarantine. I won’t be back until late evening.’

‘Oh yes,’ I said, releasing his hand so that he wouldn’t notice how I had stiffened. ‘What breed of dog is it?’

‘Niether terrier. Tracker dog. But as aggressive as a fighting dog. Good to have in the house when you have pictures like this up on the walls, don’t you think?’

‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘Indeed it is.’

A dog. I hated dogs.

‘I see,’ I heard Ove Kjikerud say at the other end of the line. ‘Clas Greve, Oscars gate 25. I’ve got the key here. Handover at Sushi&Coffee in an hour. The alarm is deactivated at seventeen hundred hours tomorrow. I’ll have to find a pretext for working in the afternoon. Why such short notice by the way?’

‘Because after tomorrow there’ll be a dog in the flat.’

‘OK. But why not during working hours, as usual?’

The young man in the Corneliani suit and geek-chic glasses came along the pavement towards the public telephone box. I turned my back on him to avoid a greeting and pressed my mouth closer to the receiver.

‘I want to be one hundred per cent sure that there are
no
builders there. So you ring Gothenburg this minute and ask them to get hold of a decent Rubens Reproduction. There are lots, but say that we must have a good one. And they must have it ready for you when you come with the Munch print tonight. It’s short notice, but it’s important that I have it for tomorrow, do you understand?’

‘OK, OK.’

‘And then you tell Gothenburg that you’ll be back with the original tomorrow night. Do you remember the name of the picture?’

‘Yes,
The Catalonian Boar Hunt
. Rubens.’

‘Close enough. You’re absolutely sure we can rely on this fence?’

‘Jesus, Roger. For the hundredth time, yes!’

‘I’m just asking!’

‘Listen to me now. The guy knows that if he pulls a fast one at any time, he’ll be out of the game for life. No one punishes thieving harder than thieves.’

‘Great.’

‘Just one thing: I’ll have to put off the second Gothenburg trip by a day.’

That was no problem, we had done it before; the Rubens would be safe inside the ceiling, but I could feel the hairs on my neck rising anyway.

‘Why’s that?’

‘I’ve got a visitor tomorrow evening. A dame.’

‘You’ll have to postpone it.’

‘Sorry, can’t.’

‘Can’t?’

‘It’s Natasha.’

I could hardly believe my ears. ‘The Russian harlot?’

‘Don’t call her that.’

‘Isn’t that what she is?’

‘I don’t call your wife a Barbie doll, do I?’

‘Are you comparing my wife with a tart?’

‘I said I
didn’t
call your wife a Barbie doll.’

‘All the better for you. Diana is a hundred per cent natural.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘Not at all.’

‘OK, I’m impressed. But I won’t be going tomorrow night all the same. I’ve been on Natasha’s waiting list for three weeks, and I want to film the session. Get it on tape.’

‘Film it? You’re taking the piss.’

‘I have to have something to look at before the next time. God knows when that’ll be.’

I laughed out loud. ‘You’re crazy.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘You’re in love with a whore, Ove! No real man can love a whore.’

‘What do you know about that?’

I groaned. ‘And what are you going to say to your beloved when you pull out a bloody camera?’

‘She’ll know nothing about it.’

‘Hidden camera in the wardrobe?’

‘Wardrobe? My house has total surveillance, man.’

Nothing Ove Kjikerud told me about himself could surprise me any longer. He had told me that when he wasn’t working, he mostly watched TV in his little place high up in Tonsenhagen, on the edge of a forest. And he liked to shoot at the screen if there was something he really didn’t care for. He had boasted about his Austrian Glock pistols, or ‘dames’ as he called them, because they didn’t have a hammer that stood up before ejaculation. Ove used blank cartridges to shoot at the TV, but once he had forgotten he had loaded a round of live ammunition and had shot a brand-new Pioneer plasma screen costing thirty thousand to smithereens. When he wasn’t
shooting
at the TV he took potshots through the window at an owl’s nesting box he himself had rigged up on a tree trunk behind the house. And one evening, sitting in front of the TV, he had heard something crashing through the trees, so he opened the window, took aim with a Remington rifle and fired. The bullet had hit the animal in the middle of the forehead, and Ove had had to empty the freezer, which was stuffed with Grandiosa pizzas. For the next six months it had been elk steaks, elk burgers, elk stew, elk meatballs and elk chops until he could stand it no longer and had emptied the freezer again and restocked it with Grandiosa. I found all these stories totally credible. But this one …

‘Total surveillance?’

‘There are certain fringe benefits to working at Tripolis, aren’t there?’

‘And you can activate the cameras without her noticing?’

‘Yep. I fetch her, we go into the flat, and if I don’t enter the password within fifteen seconds the cameras begin to work at Tripolis.’

‘And the alarm begins to howl in your flat?’

‘Nope. Silent alarm.’

Of course I was aware of the concept. The alarm just went off at Tripolis. The idea was not to frighten off the burglars while Tripolis rang the police, who were on the spot within fifteen minutes. The aim was to catch the thieves red-handed before they disappeared with the loot or, if this didn’t work, they could identify them on the video recordings.

‘I’ve told the boys on duty not to turn up, right. They can just sit back and enjoy the sight on the monitors.’

‘Do you mean to say the boys will be watching you and the Russ— Natasha?’

‘Have to share the delights, don’t I? But I have made sure the camera doesn’t show the bed, that’s a private
area
. But I’ll get her to undress at the foot of the bed, in the chair beside the TV, right. She’ll follow my stage directions, that’s the beauty of it. Get her to sit there touching herself. Perfect camera angle. I’ve done a bit of work on the lights. So that I can wank off-camera, right.’

Far too much information. I coughed. ‘Then you come and get the Munch tonight. And the Rubens the night after tomorrow, OK?’

‘OK. Everything alright with you, Roger? You sound stressed.’

‘Everything’s fine,’ I said, running the back of my hand across my forehead. ‘Everything’s absolutely fine.’

I put down the phone and went on my way. The sky was clouding over, but I hardly noticed. Because everything was OK, wasn’t it? I was going to be a multi-millionaire. To buy my freedom, freedom from everything. The world and everything in it – including Diana – would be mine. The rumbles in the distance sounded like hearty laughter. Then the first raindrops fell, and the soles of my shoes clattered cheerfully over the cobblestones as I ran.

IT WAS SIX
o’clock, it had stopped raining and in the west gold streamed into the Oslo fjord. I put the Volvo in the garage, switched off the ignition and waited. After the door had closed behind me, I put on the internal light, opened the black portfolio and took out the day’s catch.
The Brooch
.
Eva Mudocci
.

I ran my eyes over her face. Munch must have been in love with her, he couldn’t have drawn her like that otherwise. Drawn her as Lotte, caught the silent pain, the quiet ferocity. I swore under my breath, inhaled hard and hissed through my teeth. Then I pulled back the ceiling upholstery above my head. It was my own invention, designed for concealing pictures that had to be transported across national borders. I had just loosened the ceiling liner – the head liner as they say in car-speak – where it was attached to the top of the windscreen. Then I had stuck two strips of Velcro on the inside, and after a bit of careful cutting around the front ceiling light I had the perfect hidey-hole. The problem with moving large pictures, especially old, dry oil paintings is that they have to lie flat and must not be rolled up, because then there is a risk that the paint will crack and the picture will be ruined. In other words, transportation requires room and the cargo is somewhat conspicuous. But with a roof surface of approximately four square metres there
was
room for even the big pictures, and they were hidden from prying customs officers and their dogs, who luckily did not sniff around for paint or varnish.

I slid Eva Mudocci inside, fastened the lining with the Velcro, got out of the car and went up to the house.

Diana had stuck a note on the fridge saying that she was out with her friend Cathrine and would be home at about midnight. That was almost six hours away. I opened a San Miguel, sat down on the chair by the window and started to wait for her. Fetched another bottle and thought about something I remembered from the Johan Falkberget book Diana had read to me the time I had mumps: ‘We all drink according to how thirsty we are.’

I had been lying in bed with a temperature and aching cheeks and ears and looked like a sweaty pufferfish while the doctor checked the thermometer and said ‘it wasn’t too bad’. And it hadn’t felt too bad, either. It was only after pressure from Diana that he had mentioned ugly words like meningitis and orchitis, which he had even more reluctantly translated as an inflammation of the tissues round the brain and inflammation of the testicles, but straight away he had added that they were ‘highly unlikely in this case’.

Diana read to me and laid cold compresses on my forehead. The book was
The Fourth Night Watch
, and since I had nothing else to occupy my inflammation-threatened brain with, I listened carefully. There were two particular things that caught my attention. First there was Sigismund the priest who excuses a drunk with those words ‘We all drink according to how thirsty we are’. Maybe because I found comfort in such a view of humanity: If that’s your nature, then it’s fine.

The second was a quotation from what are known informally as ‘Pontoppidan’s Explanations’ in which he declares that a person is capable of killing another
person
’s soul, infecting it, dragging it down into sin in such a way that redemption is precluded. I found less comfort in that. And the thought that I might be defiling angel wings meant that I never let Diana in on all the things I was doing to acquire extra income.

She took care of me for four days and nights, and it was a source of both pleasure and annoyance. For I knew I would not have done the same for her, at least not if she had only had lousy mumps. So when I finally asked her why she had done it, I was genuinely curious. Her response was simple and straightforward.

‘Because I love you.’

‘It’s just mumps.’

‘Perhaps I won’t get a chance to show it later. You’re so healthy.’

It sounded like an accusation.

And, sure enough, the day afterwards I got out of bed, went for a job interview with a recruitment agency called Alfa and told them they would have to be idiots not to employ me. And I know how I was able to say that to them with such unshakeable self-assurance. Because there is nothing that makes a man grow beyond his own stature than a woman telling him she loves him. And however much she might have lied to him, there will always be a part of him that is grateful to her for this, and that will harbour some love for her.

I took one of Diana’s art books, read about Rubens and the little there was about
The Calydonian Boar Hunt
and studied the picture with great care. Then I put down the book and tried to think through the following day’s operation in Oscars gate step by step.

An apartment in a block meant of course a risk of bumping into neighbours on the stairs. Potential witnesses who could catch a glimpse of me. Just for a few seconds, though. They wouldn’t be suspicious then, wouldn’t
make
a note of my face as I would be wearing overalls and would let myself into an apartment that was being redecorated. So what was I frightened of?