One, Two ... He Is Coming for You (2 page)

2

Didrik Rosenfeldt thought of a lot of things when he got out of the car
and went up the stairs to his summer residence. He thought about the day he
just had. The board meeting in his investment company went very well. He fired
3000 people in his windmill company early in the afternoon without even
blinking. The hot young secretary gave him a blow job in his office afterwards.
He thought about his annoying wife who kept calling him all afternoon. She was
having a charity event this upcoming Saturday and kept bothering him with stupid
details, as if she would ever be sober enough to go through it. Didn’t she know
by now that he was too busy to deal with that kind of stuff? He was humming
when he reached the door to the house by the sea.

A tune ran through his head, his favorite song since he was a kid. “Money
makes the world go round. A mark, a yen, a buck, or a pound. That clinking
clanking sound can make the world go ‘round.” Didrik sighed and glanced back at
his shiny new silver Jaguar. Money did indeed make the world go around. And so
did he.

A lot of thoughts flitted through Didrik’s head when he put the key in
the old hand-carved wooden door and opened it. But death was not one of them.

 “You!” was his only word when his eyes met the ones belonging to a
guy he remembered from school. A boy really, he always thought of him. The boy
had nerve to be sitting in his new leather chair—“The Egg” designed by
Arne Jacobsen—and wearing his despicable grubby old blazer from the
boarding school.  The boy was about to make a complete fool of himself.
Didrik shut the door behind him with a bang.

“What do you want”? He placed his briefcase on the floor, took off his
long black coat and hung it on a hanger in the entrance closet.  He sighed
and looked at the man with pity.

“So”?

All the girls at Herlufsholm boarding school had whispered about the boy
when he first arrived there in ninth grade. Unlike most of the rich high-society
boys, including Didrik Rosenfeldt who was both fat and red headed, the boy was
a handsome guy. He had nice brown hair and the most sparkling blue eyes. He was
tall and the hard work he used to do at his dad’s farm outside of Naestved had
made him strong and muscular and Didrik and his friends soon noticed that the
girls liked that … a lot.

The boy wasn’t rich like the rest of them. In fact his parents had no
money. But in a strange way that made him exotic to the girls. The poor
countryside boy, the handsome stranger from a different culture who might take
them away from their boring rich lives. They thought he could rescue them from
ending up like their rich drunk mothers. How his parents were able to afford
the extremely expensive school, no one knew. Some said he was there because his
mother used to do it with the headmaster, but Didrik knew that wasn’t true.
This boy’s family was—unlike everybody else’s at the school—hardworking,
earnest people. The kind who people like Didrik had no respect for whatsoever,
the kind his father would exploit and then throw away. He and his type were
expendable. They were workers. And that made it even more fun to pretend he
would be the boy’s friend.

Despite that he was younger than they were, they had from time to time
accepted him as their equal in the brotherhood.

But because of his background he would always fall through. And they
would laugh at him behind his back, even sometimes to his face. Like the time
when they were skeet shooting on Kragerup Estate, and Didrik put a live cat in
the catapult. Boy, they had their fun telling that story for weeks after. How
the poor pretty boy had screamed, when he shot the kitty and it fell bleeding
to the ground. What a wimp.

“So, what do you want? Can’t you even say anything? Are you that afraid of
me?” Didrik said arrogantly.

The pretty boy stood up from the $7000 chair and took a step toward him,
his right hand hidden behind his back. Didrik sighed again. He was sick and
tired of this game. It led nowhere and he was wasting his time. Didrik was
longing to get into his living room and get a glass of the fine $900 cognac he
just imported from France. He was not going to let a stupid poor boy from his
past get in the way of that. That was for certain. He loosened his tie and
looked with aggravation at the boy in front of him.

“How did you even get in here?”

“Smashed a window in the back.”

Didrik snorted. Now he would have to go through the trouble to get
someone out here to fix it tonight.

“Just tell me what you want, boy.”

The pretty blue eyes stared at him.

”You know exactly what I want.”

Didrik sighed again. Enough with these games! Until now he had been
patient with this guy. But now he was about to feel the real Rosenfeldt anger.
The same anger Didrik’s dad used to show when Didrik’s mother brought him into
his study and he would beat Didrik half to death with a fire poker. The same
anger that his dad used to show the world that it was the Rosenfeldts who made
the decisions. Everybody obeyed their rules because they had the money and the
power.

“You’re making a fool of yourself. Just get out of here before I call
someone to get rid of you. I’m a very powerful man, you know. I can have you
killed just by pressing a number on my phone,” he said taking out a black iPhone
from his pocket.

“I know very well how powerful you and your family are. But we are far
away from your thugs; and I will have killed you by the time they get here.”

Didrik put the phone back in his pocket. He now sensed the boy was more
serious than he first anticipated.

“Do you want to kill me? Is that it?”

“Yes.”

Didrik laughed out loud. It echoed in the hall. The boy did not seem intimidated.
That frightened him.

“Don’t be ridiculous. You are such a fool. A complete idiot. You always
were.” Didrik snorted. “Look at you. You look like a homeless person in that
old school blazer. Your clothes are all dirty. And when did you last shave?
What happened to you?”

“You did. You and your friends. You ruined my life.”

Didrik laughed again. This time not nearly as loud and confident.

“Is it that old thing you are still sobbing about?”

“How could I not be?”

“Come on. It happened twenty-five years ago. Christ, I didn’t even come
up with the idea.” Didrik snorted again. “Pah! You wouldn’t dare to kill me.
Remember I am a nobleman and you are nothing but a peasant who tried to be one
of us for a little while. You can take the boy away from the farm but you can’t
take the farm out of the boy. You have always been nothing but a stupid little
farmer boy.”

Didrik watched the boy lift his right hand, revealing a thing from his
past, something he couldn’t forget. With a wild expression in his eyes, he then
moved the blades of the glove and took two steps in Didrik’s direction with
them all pointing at him. . It scared the shit out of him. It had been years
since he last saw the glove and thought it had been lost. But the pretty boy
had found it. Now the game was in the boy’s court.

“I can give you money.” Desperately, he clung to what normally saved him
in troubled times. ”Is it money you want? I could call my secretary right now
and make a transfer.”

He took out the iPhone again.

“I could give you a million. Would that be enough? Two million? You
could buy yourself a nice house, maybe get some nice new clothes, and buy a new
car.”

The boy in front of him finally smiled showing his beautiful bright
teeth. Phew! Money had once again saved him. At least he thought. But only for
a second.

”I don’t want your blood money.”

Didrik didn’t understand. Who in the world would say no to money? ”But
…”

”I told you. I want you dead. I want you to suffer just as I have been
for twenty-five years. I want you to be humiliated like I was.”

Didrik sighed deeply. “But why now?”

“Because your time has run out.”

“I don’t understand.”

The boy with the pretty blue eyes stepped closer and now stood face to
face with Didrik. The four claws on his hand were all pointing towards Didrik’s
head. The boy’s eyes were cold as ice, when he said the words that made
everything inside Didrik Rosenfeldt shiver: “The game is over.”

3

Lari Soerensen enjoyed her job as a housekeeper for the Rosenfeldt family.
Not that she liked Mr. Rosenfeldt in particular but she liked taking care of
his summer residence by the sea. They barely ever used it, only for a few weeks
in the summer and whenever Mr. Rosenfeldt had one of his affairs with a local
waitress or his secretary. He would escape to the house in Karrebaeksminde for “a
little privacy” as he called it.

But otherwise there wasn’t much work in keeping the house clean, and
Lari Soerensen could do it at her own pace. She would turn on the music in the
living room and sing while she polished the parquet floor. She would eat of the
big box of chocolate in the kitchen. She would take the money in the ashtrays
and the coins lying on the shelves and put it in her pocket knowing the family would
never miss it. Sometimes she would even use the phone to call her mother in the
Philippines, which normally was much too expensive for her. Her Danish husband
didn’t want to pay for her phone calls to her family anymore, and since he took
all the money she got from cleaning people’s houses, she couldn’t pay for the
calls herself.

It was a cold but lovely morning as she walked pass the port and glanced
at all the yachts that would soon be put back in the water when spring arrived.
All the rich people would go sailing and drinking on their big boats.

She took in a breath of the fresh morning air. She had three houses to
clean today and she would begin with Mr. Rosenfeldt’s since he probably
wouldn’t be there. It was only five thirty, and the city had barely awakened.
Everything was so quiet, not even a car.

She had taken a lot of time to get used to living in the little kingdom
of Denmark. Being from the Philippines, she was used to a warmer climate and
people in her homeland were a lot more open and friendly than what she
experienced here. Not that they were not nice to her—they were. But it
was hard for her to get accustomed to the fact that people didn’t speak to you
if they didn’t know you. If she would talk to a woman in the supermarket she
would answer briefly and without looking at Lari. It wasn’t impolite; it was custom.
People were busy and had enough in themselves.

But once people got to know somebody they would be very friendly. They
wouldn’t necessarily stop and talk if they met in the street. Often they were
way too busy for that, but they would smile. And Lari would smile back, feeling
accepted in the small community. If people became friends with someone they
might even invite them to dinner and would get very drunk, and then the Danes
wouldn’t stop talking until it was early in the morning. They would tell a lot
of jokes and laugh a lot. They had a strange sense of humor that she had to get
used to. They used sarcasm all the time, and she had a hard time figuring out
when they actually meant what they said or when they were just joking.

But Lari liked that they laughed so much. She did too. Smiled and
laughed. That’s how she got by during the day, the month, the year. That’s what
she did when the rich white man from Denmark came to her house in the
Philippines and told her mother, that he wanted to marry Lari and take her back
to Denmark and pay the family a lot of money for her. That’s what she did when
she signed the paperwork and they were declared married and she knew her future
was saved. She smiled when she got on the plane with her ugly white husband who
wore clogs and dirty overalls. She even smiled when he showed her into the
small messy house that hadn’t been cleaned for ages and told her that was her
new home. That her job would be to cook and clean and be available to him at
any time. She was still smiling, even at the end of the day when she handed
over the money that she earned from housecleaning while her husband sat at home
and was paid by the government to be unemployed. And when Mr. Rosenfeldt
grabbed her and took her into his bed and had oral sex with her she still
smiled.

Yes, Lari Soerensen always smiled. And she still did today when she
unlocked the door to Mr. Rosenfeldt’s summer residence.

But from that moment on she would smile no more.

4

I awoke feeling like I was lying under a strange comforter in a foreign
place in an unknown city. Slowly my memory came back to me, when I looked at my
sleeping daughter in the bed next to me. When I came home from work she told me
the first day of school had been a little tough. The teachers were nice, but
the other kids in the class didn’t want to talk to her and she had spent the
day alone and made no new friends. I told her she would be fine, that it would
soon be better, but inside I was hurting. This was supposed to be a fresh start
for the both of us, a new beginning. I now realized it wouldn’t go as smoothly
as I had hoped.

My dad had prepared a nice breakfast for us when we came downstairs.
Coffee, toast and eggs. Soft boiled for me and scrambled for Julie. We dove
into the food.

Before mom died he wouldn’t go near the kitchen, except to eat, but
things had changed since then.
He’s actually gotten pretty good at cooking
,
I thought while secretly observing him from the table. Ever since his fall down
the stairs last year, he had to use a cane, but he still managed to get around
the kitchen and cook for us.

“You know, Dad, with me in the house you could catch a break every once
in a while. I could take care of you, and cook for you instead.”