The Copenhagen Affair

by Amulya Malladi

  “Remember that time when Sara had been just born and you were worried that you looked like crap?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t say or do anything to make you feel better,” he said, and kissed her forehead. “I should’ve told you that you looked beautiful, that you always look beautiful. I’m sorry I forgot to tell you.”

  For nearly twenty years? Sanya wanted to kick him. It wasn’t fair that he’d ignored her for two decades, and now, when she was ambivalent, he was making apologies.

  They lay quietly for a while, during which time Harry fell asleep. Because the bed wasn’t big enough for both of them, Sanya snuck out, planning to sleep in Harry’s bed.

  But as she stood up, she realized she wasn’t at all sleepy. She could read, she thought. She could sit outside with a blanket and watch the sun and moon duel it out in the dark-blue sky. It was, after all, only one in the morning.

  She was wearing a pair of short pajama bottoms and a top, so she just wrapped one of the blankets in the room around her and went outside, slowly closing the door behind her. She brought her Kindle along.

  She could hear voices in the pool area, and when she peeked in she saw Otto and Lucky talking to Penny and Mark.

  She made sure they didn’t see her and went up to the kitchen. Light was spilling out of it. She stepped inside and saw Ravn sitting at the breakfast table with a cup of coffee, reading on his iPad. He wore a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt. His feet were bare. His hair was tousled. He didn’t look like a corporate executive. He looked . . . ruffled and sexy.

  Good god, Sanya, you have sex on the brain like a teenager.

  When he saw her, he set his iPad aside and smiled this happy smile that said he was hoping she would join him, and now that she had, everything was wonderful.

  “I was thirsty,” Sanya said.

  “What can I get for you?” he asked, standing up.

  She told him a glass of water would be fine. She sat down at the breakfast table next to his empty chair and put her Kindle down so that it touched his iPad.

  “You didn’t reply,” he said as he sat down.

  Sanya smiled. “It takes time to respond appropriately to Shelley.”

  “Do you have a response now?” he asked.

  She could see the scar on his face in the soft light of the kitchen.

  “I do,” she said. “I’ll counter Shelley with Mirabai, an Indian poet from the sixteenth century.”

  Only the wounded

  Understand the agonies of the wounded,

  When the fire rages in the heart.

  Only the jeweller knows the value of the jewel,

  Not the one who lets it go.

  She had just finished reciting the lines when they heard a scream, a very loud one.

  Chapter 21

  Bad Penny

  “She broke her nose,” Mandy said, putting her iPhone on the kitchen counter next to the industrial coffeepot.

  It had happened while Sanya had been reciting Mirabai to Ravn. Apparently Penny and Lucky had been alone by the swimming pool when Penny slipped on her Jimmy Choos and fell. The heel on the shoe broke and apparently so did her nose.

  “Mark and Ravn are going to fly with her back to Denmark, where her plastic surgeon will work on her nose at Rigshospitalet,” Mandy said.

  They had congregated in the kitchen with cups of coffee. No one slept that night, except Harry, who showed up bright and early at six in the morning, as was his routine, ready for a run, surprised by all the commotion. He didn’t miss his run.

  Lucky looked miserable. All eyes were on him. He’d been the last person with Penny before she fell, and everyone wanted details.

  “She just slipped,” he kept saying, but he wasn’t meeting anyone’s eyes.

  The weekend party as such was over. Mandy loaded up her Cayenne, Tara and Otto drove with Bjarke and Leah in their car, and Harry drove J Yu, Lucky, and Sanya in his Audi.

  “She hit on me,” Lucky said. He was sitting next to Sanya in the backseat.

  “So she doesn’t know you’re gay?” Sanya asked. She knew she was being brazen. No one had ever said it out aloud.

  Lucky stared at Sanya, then shook his head. “She pounced on me,” he said. “And I’m not hiding the fact that I’m gay. I just don’t mix business with pleasure.”

  Lucky told the story this way: Mark wanted Penny to come to bed with him. Lucky said he wanted to make some phone calls to the States, so he would stay by the pool.

  But Penny had been adamant that she wasn’t sleepy and told Mark to be on his way.

  Once the others had gone, Penny had slipped off her robe and started pulling at the straps on her teeny-weeny black bikini.

  “How about a late-night swim?” Penny suggested. “Let’s go skinny.”

  “I couldn’t believe it,” Lucky told them. “She lay down on me.”

  “Okay, back up here,” Harry said from the driver’s seat. “Just so I have the right mental picture. You were lying on the lounge chair with your phone, and she came and lay on top of you?”

  “Yes,” Lucky said miserably.

  “And she wasn’t wearing her black teeny-weeny bikini, but she was wearing her high heels?” Sanya asked to complete the mental picture.

  “And that gold chain around her waist,” J Yu inserted.

  “Yes,” Lucky continued. “She lay on top of me, and my phone slid onto the ground. I tried to push her away, but then she mashed her lips against mine.” Now he sounded disgusted.

  “Oh . . . well,” Harry said.

  “This kind of thing never happens to me,” J Yu said.

  “I don’t mind kissing a woman. I’ve done it, but it’s not a first choice,” Lucky added. “Then she has her hand on my crotch, and next thing she’s lying half on me and half on the ground. I pushed really hard because she wouldn’t give up the zipper of my pants, and she tried to stand up, lost her balance, and fell half into the pool and half on the tile . . . There was all this blood, ugh.”

  Sanya almost put her hand on Lucky’s, but they didn’t have that kind of a relationship so she refrained.

  “That’s how she broke her nose,” Lucky finished his story. “You think she’ll have me booked for assault?”

  “That wasn’t assault,” Harry said. “That was a man pushing a rather persistent woman away.”

  J Yu sighed. “I don’t understand why these things never happen to me. Women never throw themselves at me. Never, ever.”

  “I’m sorry. Next time a model type is all over me, I’ll make sure to tell her to try her charms on you,” Lucky said.

  “Would you?” J Yu said. “That would be really great.”

  Sanya thought about it for a moment and then wondered aloud, “Why is Penny so adamant about getting into your pants right after she tried to get into Harry’s?”

  The car fell silent.

  “She tried Harry also?” J Yu said.

  “How do you know?” Lucky asked.

  “I told her,” Harry said.

  “Maybe she’s the slutty type,” J Yu suggested.

  Sanya wasn’t sure.

  “Next thing you know she’s going to throw herself at Otto,” Lucky remarked.

  “Not until the nose heals,” J Yu said.

  That night after they’d arrived back at the apartment and Harry had gone to bed, Sanya opened her computer and the email Otto had sent her.

  Chapter 22

  Sanya Can’t Handle the Truth

  “What have you been doing all night?” Harry asked in the morning when he saw Sanya was awake and working on her computer.

  Sanya thought about telling him the truth and then decided she wasn’t going to, not yet. She needed time to digest this information.

  “Just browsing useless shit,” Sanya said. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” Sanya said.

  The lovely weeks of summer had made a sharp turn into gray skies and h
owling wind. The temperature had dropped to the sixties and it was pouring rain. Copenhagen was matching her mood, Sanya thought.

  Once Harry left for work, Sanya called Bjarke. She asked him for details about the shell corporation that Mark had leased the properties in Sweden to, the rent money he was in tax trouble for.

  “I’m just running a theory,” Sanya told him, when he asked her why she wanted to know.

  Bjarke was apparently no fool and didn’t mind her help in cracking the story. “I’ll connect you to the journalist who’s working on this. Anette Sørsensen. She’s a smart lady, just like you.”

  After she spoke with Anette at length, Sanya called Otto, her heart heavy.

  “I went through your files,” Sanya told him, but didn’t add that she had also gotten access to documents that Anette Sørsensen had been collecting, which helped her complete the picture. And the picture wasn’t pretty, not for Ravn.

  “What do you think?” Otto asked.

  “First, we keep this between you and me. Got it?” Sanya said.

  “Okay . . . but why?”

  “Otto, those are my terms,” Sanya said, and waited until he acquiesced.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Have you heard of a shell corporation called Lala Associates?” Sanya asked.

  She heard Otto typing away on his computer. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “How about Cirque Fernando?” Sanya asked.

  “That one I’ve heard of. It’s an IT Foundry shell company,” Otto said. “It’s legal and on the up and up.”

  “Have you heard of a Degas painting called Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando?” Sanya asked.

  She heard Otto sigh. “Are we talking about a painting? You’re not making any sense. What the fuck has any of this got to do with IT Foundry?”

  “Can you tell me what happened to the CFO of IT Foundry?” Sanya asked. “Lots of signatures by a Jens Jensen.”

  “That’s the thing that has us worried. Jens Jensen left the company a month after we started to show interest in buying them. Ravn doesn’t have a new CFO, and he’s acting CFO. We have tried to contact Jensen, but he’s off on holiday in Sardinia or something. IT Foundry paid for that trip outside of school vacation, and he has kids,” Otto said. “We can’t reach him and . . . we can’t validate several financial documents and reports. But we haven’t found anything illegal.”

  Sanya sighed. “You shouldn’t buy IT Foundry,” she said.

  “Why? What did you find?” Otto asked.

  Sanya hesitated. “Look, just find a way to stop it. I . . . I need some more time.” To do what, Sanya? she asked herself.

  “I can’t just stop this without proof, and the courts are not going to buy it that a CFO out on vacation and a few noncritical books not being validated are enough to stop this acquisition,” Otto said.

  “Do you know who Ole Mejby is?” Sanya asked.

  She could hear Otto’s frustration. “What the fuck do you know, Sanya?”

  “He’s a director of the board at the Dansk Sjællands Bank,” Sanya told him. “I looked him up. According to people who know the Ravn family, he’s good friends with Ravn and actually even distant family. Ole Mejby’s grandfather and Ravn’s grandfather were cousins.”

  “How do you know this?” Otto asked.

  “Because I do research,” Sanya said. “Mister Mejby is in the IT Foundry documents. He signed off on some very interesting debts that IT Foundry took on last year.”

  “Those loans are legitimate,” Otto said.

  “Look at them again,” Sanya said. “I think you’ll find that they’re not.”

  “But you won’t tell me?” Otto asked.

  “This is the best I can do right now,” Sanya said.

  I don’t want to lead the man I suspect I have fallen in love with to the gallows, she thought, and sighed. She was starting to sound like a heroine from a doomed opera.

  By the time Harry came back that evening, Sanya was back in her bed and under the comforter.

  “What’s wrong?” Harry asked her. “You’ve been doing so well.”

  “I’m tired,” Sanya said.

  “Is it because you were up all night?” Harry asked, as if that was what he was hoping for. Sanya felt an overwhelming urge to cry, and her voice cracked. “I want to be left alone, Harry.”

  She felt Harry’s hand stroke the top of the duvet. “Sweetheart, have you taken your pills?” he asked finally.

  “Don’t want to,” Sanya said childishly.

  “Did you see Arthur today?”

  “No, I told him I had the flu.”

  “Come on, Sanya,” Harry said. “Alec is coming soon.”

  “Alec is coming next weekend,” she responded. “That means I can spend five days in bed. Now please leave me alone.”

  It took a while, but she finally heard Harry’s footsteps leave their bedroom.

  Sanya had a trigger point, and it was being made to feel small by others—but this time she had made herself feel small. She had trusted New Sanya, and she had led her astray. How could she trust herself again? Here she was falling in love with a thief. A part of her was excited that Ravn wasn’t perfect at all like Harry, and yet another part was conflicted. Morality was a strange thing. Flexible at times but so rigid and unyielding at other times, and Sanya didn’t know what to do with how she felt. She knew, she’d known for a while, that she was in love with Ravn—the wild and irresponsible, head-over-heels kind of love. Or was this something else? Lust? Attraction? What did it mean to be in love anyway?

  Because she couldn’t figure out how to sort through her feelings, she stayed in bed. This was known territory.

  When Alec had asked her how she felt right after she’d come home from the hospital, she told him she was comfortable in the darkness of depression. “Once you stay in bed for a while, it becomes habit and the body starts to crave the rest. You doze off, you wake up, you use the bathroom, you go back to bed and you . . . repeat.”

  Nervous breakdowns can be so repetitive.

  Chapter 23

  Chaos Theory

  Sanya ignored Ravn when he sent text messages and didn’t pick up the phone when he called.

  The turmoil inside her was becoming too much for her to deal with, and after her sojourn under her comforter, she started to come out of it when Alec came to visit. The rain that had come stayed as long as Sanya stayed in bed, and once she shrugged the cobwebs off, the skies let the clouds go, giving way to long July summer days.

  When she told Alec everything she knew and how this knowledge was creating chaos, Alec told her that the chaos in chaos theory was not the chaos in the English language that means confusion. It actually meant a lack of order within a system that still somehow follows some of the rules.

  “You can predict random events from simple equations using chaos theory,” Alec said as they sat outside at the Cap Horn restaurant in Nyhavn, a glass of crisp Sauvignon Blanc in his hand, and a glass of champagne in Sanya’s.

  “So the chaos I’m feeling is actually a predictable random event?” Sanya asked.

  Alec took a sip of his wine. “You haven’t done anything yet. Nothing has really happened except that you’ve shared poetry. Stop behaving like you slept with the entire Danish soccer—excuse me, football, team.”

  “Isn’t it bad enough just to think it? Isn’t that cheating?” she asked. “And isn’t it worse that now I know, now that I have proof that he’s a bad guy?”

  “You’re so straitlaced sometimes. It’s almost endearing. Why call it cheating? Are you cheating Harry of anything and giving it away? And what does bad mean anyway? Smile, Sanya, it’s a beautiful day,” Alec said, raising his glass.

  In July in Copenhagen, Nyhavn was the place to be. Actually it was the place to be all summer. A string of restaurants and bars lined the cobblestone path—where people sat outside under colorful umbrellas. The most beautiful thing about Nyhavn was that the buildings were all different colors, from bright red a
nd bright blue to yellow and orange. It gave the harbor a touch of whimsy, and this was the place that showed up in pictures when you Googled Copenhagen.

  Nyhavn was, as the Danes would say—very hyggelig.

  “There is no literal translation for that word,” Sanya told Alec. “The closest is ‘cozy,’ but the meaning goes deeper than that.”

  “How Danish you’ve become,” Alec said.

  Sanya had met Alec at a rooftop pool party not long before the Silicon Valley bubble burst. Their hosts, Shawn and Cindy, were one rung up the power couple ladder from Harry and Sanya. Shawn’s company had just gone public, and Cindy was a partner in her law firm.

  Sanya was getting a glass of Scotch, her drink at the time, and as the bartender poured her a finger of Lagavulin, a man standing behind her asked for the same.

  “They’re all money crazy here,” he said to Sanya. He introduced himself as Alec, Cindy’s cousin, new at Stanford via the University of Chicago.

  “This is Silicon Valley,” Sanya said in agreement.

  “Did your company go public? Did Microsoft make a bid? How much are your stock options worth? Is that all people talk about around here?” Alec asked.

  “More or less. They also talk about what car they drive,” she said.

  “What do you drive?”

  “A Lexus,” she said.

  “So you’re one of them,” Alec said, with suspicion in his eyes.

  “I’m not sure about me, but my husband is definitely one of them,” she said. “He drives a Porsche.”

  “Right,” Alec said. “You’re one of those women who blames her husband for everything.”

  Sanya thought he was being a tad judgmental for someone she’d just met. “Yes, I believe so. Isn’t that what husbands are for?” she asked.

  “Why not take responsibility for where you are and what you are?” Alec suggested.

  “What’s the fun in that?”

  And that was how they’d become friends. He was judgmental and Sanya was flippant.

  They stayed friends after the Silicon Valley bubble burst—and became even closer through everything that had happened since.