The Elephant Keepers' Children (36 page)

The nameplate says
Abakosh
, and twirled around the name are engraved vines, but there's no button to press on the intercom. Instead, I position myself in front of the cameras, and as I wait I'm forced to concede that I may have bitten off more than I can chew.

It's a rare feeling. Ask anyone on Finø and they'll tell you that Peter Finø never exceeds the bounds of his natural reticence.

If anyone should mention the time I joined the Mr. Finø contest on the harbor promenade, I would once again stress that this was due to malicious conspiracy, and let me now sweep rumor aside once and for all and share with you the exact circumstances of this unfortunate event. It came about because Tilte invited Karl Marauder Lander, who is in the same class as her, into her walk-in wardrobe with the aim of letting him try out the coffin, and her doing so can only be explained with reference to her wish to help people improve their characters, a wish that occasionally blurs her vision when it comes to some of the more hopeless individuals in our midst.

Nevertheless, in order to help Tilte out and to enhance Karl Marauder's chances of learning to search his conscience—if indeed he possesses such a thing—I had recorded a few sequences from
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
and transferred them onto an MP3 player at two-thirds normal speed and then concealed the device inside the lining of the coffin, later to play back the recording by means of a remote control when Karl Marauder had made himself comfy and the lid had been closed on top of him.

It was a very expressive recording. And at two-thirds normal speed, my voice sounded like the Prince of Darkness suddenly coming right at you. I was certain it would have the desired effect.

And indeed it seemed to do the job. Karl Marauder came out of the coffin like a rocket on New Year's Eve, bathed in a cold sweat. But rather than exploiting the situation to delve into his soul and inquire of himself as to the source of his anxiety, this being the recommended procedure in all spiritual traditions, he instead ran back across the road and snitched to his parents, who turned up in unison at the rectory fifteen minutes later, which was to be the decisive factor in Tilte being instructed to return the coffin to Bermuda Jansson.

Instead of recognizing my good intentions, Tilte was angry with me, so angry, in fact, that she entered into an alliance with Karl Marauder, and this must surely rank alongside the great treacheries of world history.

Their spiteful conspiracy involved Karl enticing me onto the football field, promising to stand in the goal while I practiced bending free kicks with the outside of my right foot, just as the Mr. Finø finals commenced. All of a sudden, Tilte comes running to say that Einar Flogginfellow is looking for me on account of my being awarded the Finø FC Player of the Year trophy, and in order that I might receive the full honor I so deserve, Einar is planning to hand me the trophy on stage, for which reason he wants me in football shorts, football shoes, and preferably topless so as to provide a visualization of what such an award costs a player in terms of perspiration.

I believe in the good of all people, and in that innocent belief I entered the stage completely unaware that the crowd of more than a thousand locals and tourists had just been entertained by Norwegian swimmers and Danish rowing
champions weighing in at two hundred kilos, posing and flexing with olive oil rubbed into their glistening bodies.

So basically that time doesn't count. Normally, I feel my way along with my fingertips.

“We don't accept newspapers or door drops.”

The woman's voice from the telephone crackles on the intercom. The loudspeaker must be in the nameplate.

“You're in luck, then,” I tell her. “Because if there's two things I haven't got, it's newspapers and door drops. But I do have an appointment with Pallas Athene. So I think you should let me in.”

The gate opens. But I sensed hesitation.

I don't know if the houses
of Gammel Strand have always been half-timbered with sash windows on the outside and Greek temples on the inside, but that's what this particular house looks like now.

The stairway is as wide as a road and flanked by pillars, everything in marble. It leads up to a reception area with more marble. Behind a desk sits a woman with blond hair, clad in Greek sandals and a toga whose neckline is so plunging that it's difficult to say whether she is naked or clothed.

The walls are adorned with murals, though their style is quite different from those of Finø Town Church, because these depict naked men and women drinking wine from what look like soup bowls, or else having their bottoms birched, or just sitting around on benches and chairs with mournful expressions, perhaps because they think it ought to be their turn to drink wine or have their bottoms birched, or simply because they don't know who has taken their clothes away from them.

“You look young.”

There's a school of philosophy that has established itself on Finø and elsewhere in Denmark that believes blondes with plunging necklines to be warm-hearted, though empty-headed.
The woman in front of me dispels that theory at once. She's as cool as a refrigerator and her aura suggests she is continually processing information at high speed.

“Most of those who said that,” I tell her, “are now pushing up daisies.”

She giggles and yet is obviously in a dilemma, the specifics of which remain unclear to me, so I'm still dribbling the ball in the dark.

“Andrik will show you in,” she says.

The man behind me has appeared so silently I failed to hear him approach. He too is wearing a toga, and his hair is done in the way of Greek statues. I'm not sure which of the deities he's supposed to be, as I was absent the day we did Greek mythology in school, but the god of murderers would certainly be a decent guess if there is one. He has the build of a decathlete and baby-blue eyes, and reminds me of the most lethal individuals you can encounter on the football field, people with no end of fine talents, all of which they've placed at the disposal of malice.

He opens a door for me and we enter a room that erases all hopes of the house bearing any relation to historical Copenhagen. It's a space of some two hundred square meters with a glass ceiling through which one may observe the blue sky, and all around are enough green plants to fill up the great greenhouses of the botanical gardens at Århus.

But apart from that, all resemblance to those gardens is purely coincidental, because the plants here are arranged so as to form enclosures, each of which contains a marble bath
in which men lie outstretched while being washed behind the ears by women who could be, but most probably are not, twin sisters of the woman in reception. In the middle of the room is a table on which bottles of champagne have been placed in coolers. There's no time to find out which one might be nonalcoholic, and anyway I'm not thirsty. There's also a thing that looks like a refrigerator, only with lamps and a humidity gauge and a glass door, behind which can be seen boxes of Havana cigars, and I bet that if you could see the bands around them they'd be the same as the one on Count Rickardt's cigar.

Andrik opens another door, this one leading into a changing room done out in marble.

“Take off your clothes here,” he says. “Then go straight through.”

On a bench is a white bath towel the size and thickness of a polar bear skin. As soon as Andrik has gone, I drape it around my shoulders and go through into the next room.

This is where the marble stops. Instead, everything's golden and red, and there are two raised areas. On one is a double bed, on the other a bidet.

On a small table, someone has placed a steaming cup of coffee, and next to it are a pair of reading glasses and an address book bound in brown leather.

I sidle over to the table. From an adjoining room I hear the sound of a person brushing her hair. I flick through the address book to H for
Home
. Everybody's got a mobile phone now, and none of us can remember our landline numbers anymore, at least we can't at the rectory.

And neither, it seems, can Pallas Athene. Under
Home
are eight digits that I enter into my mobile in the hope that police intelligence haven't accessed my list of contacts. There's no address. I close the book. I don't know what motivated me, but maybe it was to see if goddesses, too, have private addresses.

I sit down on a chair, nervously on the edge.

Pallas Athene enters.

I'd make her about one meter eighty-eight in her stockinged feet. Which means that if she's any good with a ball she could step right in as a guard on Finø FC's women's basketball team.

But she's not in her stockinged feet; she's in red stilettos that add about fifteen centimeters to her height. And besides that, she's wearing a red wig, and on top of the wig is the kind of Greek helmet now familiar to me from the house's own Havana cigars.

But apart from that, all she's wearing is a pair of skimpy red panties, a liberal quantity of lipstick, and a broad smile that turns out to be of only limited durability, because as soon as she sets eyes on me it disappears completely.

I should like to draw attention to the fact that I would never normally describe a naked woman in any detail to anyone, not even to myself. The reason I now endeavor to do so is purely pedagogical, the intention being to enlighten you as to the exact nature of what I am faced with.

I shall therefore mention to you that the woman's breasts are not merely large, they are the size of basketballs and so well inflated one could put them on a string and sell them as helium balloons to the kids at a theme park.

She towers above me, picks up a kimono from the bed, and puts it on. And then she sits down, removes her helmet, and places it on the table.

Her expression tells me we're no longer frolicking in the Mediterranean sun but have relocated north of the Arctic Circle.

“At your age,” she says, “we need a signature from your parents.”

“That'll be a tall order,” I tell her. “They've gone missing, you see. That's why I'm here. They left the name of this place behind them.”

I hand her the piece of paper with my mother's note on it. She picks the reading glasses up off the table and puts them on, casts a glance at what's written, and hands it back to me.

“What are your parents' names?”

I tell her. She shakes her head, her gaze not releasing me for a moment.

“Never heard of them. Where did you get the address?”

Not wishing to give the count away, I say nothing.

“And then there's the password,” she muses. “Where's that from?”

I can't answer her without telling her about Mother's and Father's misdemeanors. So I remain silent.

“It's very important to us, that password,” she says.

There's something menacing about her voice that would make anyone forget all about the outfit and the red lips. Now one senses oneself to be sitting in front of a person who not only possesses a great deal of willpower but also knows how to use it.

She must have pressed a button somewhere, because all of a sudden the murderer is standing beside me, and once again I failed to hear him approach.

“Andrik,” she says, “the boy has a password that doesn't belong to him. He won't tell me where he got it from.”

Andrik nods and looks concerned, which means I am now faced with two individuals, both of whom wear the same expression.

“I could ask him about it in the steam baths,” says Andrik.

One can only hazard a guess as to Andrik's techniques of inquiry. But it seems unlikely that he would coax the answers out of me with mint humbugs and little words of encouragement. He probably wants to coax them out of me by holding my head under a jet of steam and then slamming it against the tiled floor.

“I'm a dishwasher,” I tell him. “One of the guests in the restaurant left the band of a cigar behind and on it were an address and a phone number. The password was written on the inside.”

They stare at me. Then the woman nods.

“Sounds plausible, I suppose,” she says. “Andrik, would you be kind enough to see the young gentleman out? By the back stairs.”

The man doesn't touch me. He doesn't need to. All he does is take a step closer and that's enough for me to leap out of the chair. The woman opens a door at the other end of the room.

The so-called back stairs are classy enough for most people to dream of having them at their main entrance. As we step out onto the landing, the woman clears her throat.

“How long have your parents been missing?”

“A few days.”

Andrik and I begin our descent. She clears her throat again.

“Andrik, he's just a child.”

The man nods. I sense some disappointment.

We cross a courtyard
with palms in great pots and a red vintage Jaguar parked at one side. Andrik must have a remote, because now a double gate opens and then we're standing in a narrow street. Andrik looks both ways. The street is deserted. He puts his hand around my upper arm and squeezes tight.

“Crybaby, are you?” he says.

On this point, however, he is mistaken. If I shed a tiny tear it is only at the thought of the revenge I will take for him squeezing so hard.

“I think this should be the first and last time we enjoy the pleasure of the young gentleman's company,” he says. “Do you know what I mean?”

“I do,” I say. “But what about them?”

I peer into the darkness of the gateway we have just left.

It's the oldest trick in the book. But it's also one of the best. If correctly employed, it provides ample illustration of something Tilte and I have studied at length. Great mystics all agree: words make reality.

More than that, it's the very basis of what all Danish football and handball players will know as the dustman's trick: look one way, then go the other.