The Invoice (14 page)

“A little tip,” he said. “If it turns out that your ‘friend' here has interacted with you in an inappropriate way, it may well be that we won't be able to retain her services. Do you understand? I can't imagine that you want that. You want her to keep her job, don't you?”

I think I nodded. He leaned back in his chair. We sat there in silence for a while.

Eventually the new man returned.

“She's on her way up,” he said.

This time there were four of them. Plus the two foreign gentlemen. Another man, slightly overweight and with very little hair, just some above his ears, had taken a seat at one side of the table, where a number of documents relating to my case had been laid out. I sat down on the same chair as on the previous two occasions.

The bald, thickset man introduced himself as Pierre, and he must have been superior to all the others, because whenever he spoke they all listened breathlessly. He frowned and fixed his eyes on me. He sat there for a long time just staring at me.

“I hear you've had a decent life?”

I nodded.

“Without paying your way.”

I nodded again. He called the two foreigners over to him. He pointed at something in the documents, and the other two men raised their eyebrows. One of them let out a whistle. “Wow,” the other one said, and nodded appreciatively in my direction. When they had returned to their seats, Pierre turned back to me.

“And you've built up quite a sizable debt,” he said.

There was a modest knock on the door.

And there she was at last.

Outside the glass stood a woman with dark blond hair in a ponytail. She was wearing a black polo-necked top and a jacket with plenty of practical little pockets. A dark corduroy skirt and black tights. She had her arms clasped in front of her stomach, her hands clutching the handle of a briefcase. They opened the door for her and she took a couple of steps into the room, nodded to her colleagues, and when Georg went over to say hello I saw her straighten up and almost stand on tiptoe, so that the heels of her matte black shoes with white buckles lifted slightly off the ground.

She turned toward me. I found myself getting to my feet.

Georg indicated a chair next to mine. She walked toward me, put the briefcase in one hand, and held the other one out to me.

“What's this person doing here?” Pierre hissed to the woman with the bank name.

“She's his contact here,” she said. “He's requested that she be here.”

Pierre looked skeptically from Maud to me.

“Really?” he mumbled.

“Maud,” she said quietly, and I realized that I was smiling as I heard her voice. She was smiling as well. It was like she was smiling at my smile, and I at hers, then she was smiling back at mine a bit more, and so on, ad infinitum. The smile revealed a neat but slightly irregular row of teeth. One of them was crooked and seemed to be winking at me as she smiled. A short curl of hair that wasn't tied up hung down one side of her face, and looked as if it was gently tickling her soft, slightly blushing cheeks whenever she moved her head. She smelled vaguely of coffee and deodorant.

“Nice to meet you,” she said to me.

“Same here,” I said.

She had a small necklace outside the wonderful polo-necked sweater, I guessed it was probably half cotton, half polyester. The necklace had what looked like a silver dolphin on it, but it could have been any fish really. The skin just under her chin moved slightly when she spoke. It looked soft, smooth. I wanted to touch it.

“So,” Pierre said. “Are we all ready, then?”

He tapped his pen impatiently on the tabletop, evidently extremely put out by the small delay. He pursed his lips silently as he waited for Maud to take her place beside me. She put her briefcase down on the floor next to her chair, took out a pen and notepad, and did a quick scribble in one corner to check that the pen was working.

“As I was saying,” Pierre said to me as soon as she was ready, “you've built up a fairly sizable debt, to put it mildly.”

He looked round the room.

“You are now what we call a 6:3. For that reason we have conducted a home inventory, which came up with…nothing.”

He gestured lazily toward one of the documents on the table, it was impossible to tell which one. “Absolutely nothing,” he said to the gentlemen at the other end of the table, and to make his point even more clearly he addressed me in a rather loud voice and with exaggerated pronunciation: “You own nothing of value.”

I wasn't sure how to respond, so I just nodded slightly to indicate that I'd heard what he said.

“No education, so no immediate prospect of increased earnings…”

“If I don't win the lottery,” I said, in a nervous attempt at a joke.

I looked at Maud, who registered no reaction.

Pierre gave a supercilious smile and adopted my tone.

“Quite. And of course we can't kill you,” he said.

He smiled toward the foreign representatives, and they smiled back. All of a sudden I became aware that my palms were sweating. He leaned across the table toward me.

“Are there any more people you've socialized with but not declared?” he said.

I shook my head.

“You're sure about that?”

I couldn't help glancing at Maud, who was looking straight ahead the whole time.

“Not as far as I'm aware,” I said. “Is it important?”

Pierre maintained eye contact the whole time he spoke. As if he really did want to see how I reacted to what he said.

“With this type of positive perception, there's reason to suppose that people in the immediate vicinity will register a certain—how can I put it?—passive gain. It could raise their E.H. score dramatically. After their cases have been reevaluated, of course.”

I noticed that one of the surveillance cameras up at the ceiling suddenly moved slightly. Presumably there were even more people watching us. Maybe via direct streaming to other countries?

He sat and fiddled with his pen for a while. Suddenly he clapped his hands together and gestured to the other people in the room, who all stood up. Then he turned to Maud.

“Would you please stay here with the subject while we have a short meeting in private?” he said.

Maud nodded.

They all walked out, leaving just the two of us alone in the room. As soon as they had gone I turned to face her, but she quickly cleared her throat and glanced up at one of the cameras as if to remind me that we were probably still being observed, and that this wasn't a place where we could talk freely. So I turned back and we sat there in silence, next to one another, like passengers on a train, listening to the sound of the ventilation in the ceiling.

After a while she put one arm on the table to adjust one of the documents. The sleeve of her jacket had slid up toward her elbow, so most of her lower arm was lying bare on the table, right next to me. I waited a while, maybe thirty seconds, before putting my arm alongside hers. Not close, but not too far away.

We sat like that for a bit. Nothing happened. Maud leafed through the papers in front of her with her other hand, and I understood how the rustling sound I had heard over the phone was made. She would fold back a few pages to check something, then let them go again before checking something else. All with the same hand. The arm next to mine remained still. We could both hear the discussions taking place outside. Several voices, in a number of different languages. It wasn't possible to see any of the people speaking, but it sounded as if more or less the whole department was involved in the same noisy conversation. Only inside the room containing Maud and me was everything calm and still.

Eventually she pushed one of the documents closer to me, and the arm nearest to me joined in. We were now very close. I took a deep breath and turned my hand over, so that the back of it touched the back of her hand. At that precise moment she stopped and remained absolutely still. There was nothing but the voices outside, the faint drumming of the rain, and the dust drifting slowly through the air. Neither of us said anything. We kept looking forward, into the frosted-glass wall in front of us, as if there was actually something interesting to see there. And then a tiny movement, barely visible to the naked eye, and absolutely impossible to detect from a surveillance camera up by the ceiling, for instance, as her little finger slowly touched the back of my hand, and our breathing synchronized in the same rhythm.

The doors opened and the delegation came back into the room. Our hands moved apart as quickly and silently as they had come together. Everyone but Pierre went back to their previous places. Pierre folded his arms and wandered up and down along the side of the table. When he had done this a couple of times he sat down opposite us and smiled at Maud. Then he looked at me and his smile died away.

“Sorry to make you wait,” he said, then took a deep breath and slowly blew the air out again as he leaned forward and clasped his hands together above the table. He rested his chin on his knuckles and sat like that for a while just looking at me, waiting for all movement in the room to stop before he resumed speaking in a calm, confidential tone of voice.

“You see, we are faced with an extremely costly investment which would appear to stand very little chance of collecting any significant repayment.”

He looked around the table at the others before his eyes settled on me again.

“Naturally we could carry on and impose further…but I can't really see that that would be worthwhile…Can you?”

I nodded. It seemed best to agree with him.

“Unless,” he went on in a more lighthearted tone, “you see any possibility of promotion at, er…‘Jugge's Flicks'?”

I shook my head. He smiled, but his eyes remained cold.

“No, I thought as much,” he said.

He closed his eyes for a moment, as if he were trying to work out how to phrase something. Then he snapped them open again and looked straight at me.

“The cost of keeping you isolated—and yes, I see here that you have an ability, even in the most trying of circumstances, to maintain a certain, how can I put it…?”

His eyes flitted about, trying to find a particular document. The woman with the bank name and the others hurried to find the right one, but when they eventually found it and put it in front of him, he waved it away and went on staring at me.

“You know what people say: If you owe the bank a million, it's your problem, but if you owe a hundred million…”

I nodded. Yes, I'd heard that one. He lowered his voice even more and sharpened his tone. Everyone in the room held their breath.

“So what I'm going to suggest must stay between us. Do you understand? Under no circumstances must this get out.”

He fixed his eyes on me and I wasn't sure if I'd stopped nodding from last time, so I nodded extra hard to show that I was keeping up.

Without looking away from me, he gestured to a woman outside who, with some help, pushed a wheeled trolley into the room. On top of the trolley was a pile of papers twenty centimeters thick.

“Please be aware,” he said, as the trolley laden with documents was parked immediately next to me, “that the debt remains. In case you were, against all expectation, to win the lottery…” He gave me a wry smile.

“But for the time being…”

He leaned forward even farther. I could feel his breath. A faint smell of curry and gastric acid. He stroked his chin with one finger, as if he still hadn't quite made up his mind.

“…we won't make any efforts to call it in. It will simply be frozen. Do you understand?”

I said nothing.

Pierre went on, “Are we in agreement?”

I glanced at Maud, but she was sitting there straight-backed, writing something down, so I turned back to Pierre. I could see a trace of sweat on his top lip, shimmering in the glow of the fluorescent lighting. I noticed that Maud had started to gather her papers together, and she might have brushed against me briefly under the table as she leaned over to put some documents back in her briefcase. I'm not entirely sure.

“Does this mean…?” I began.

All three men were looking at me now, and I could feel Maud tense up next to me. It was as if they were suddenly all worried that I was about to throw a spanner in the works. The two foreign gentlemen straightened up.