Now, after years of ignoring his wife, his wife didn’t give a shit if he ignored her or not. Harry hoped it wasn’t too late to save his marriage and maybe in the process even save himself.
Chapter 33
And Then She Falls Off the Mountain
Sanya had never before lain down on the couch when she met with Arthur. She always sat on the couch. She sat cross-legged, Indian style, and put a cushion on her lap when she spoke with him. But this time she felt she needed to lie down, change her perspective.
“I had a dream. It was cold, winter, and snowy,” she said to Arthur, looking at the ceiling, which was typical of old Copenhagen apartments, decorated with intricate molding. “I was on top of a mountain and I slipped. I struggled, grasping to hold on to something, and then suddenly I decided to not. I let myself fall. I closed my eyes and thought of Sara and whispered, ‘I love you,’ and then I opened my eyes, in the dream I mean. If I was going to fall, then I was going to be relaxed about it and enjoy it, I told myself. The snow that was falling changed into little white flowers, and then as I reached the ground . . . the dream shifted and I can’t remember anything after that.”
She turned to look at Arthur, who smiled his little smile. “And why is this dream more important than any other you’ve had?”
“It just is,” she said. “I let go. I never let go. But I did and I decided to fall. Do we die in real life if we die in our dreams?”
“No,” Arthur said.
“But they say that if you dream you’ve died, like this, like you fell down and died, then your brain thinks you died and you’re dead, finito,” Sanya said.
“No, that doesn’t happen,” Arthur said. “You’re dodging the real issue. So let’s get back to the importance of the dream.”
“Do dreams say what’s happening in our heads even though we don’t know clearly what’s happening?” she asked.
“Yes and no,” Arthur said. “Dreams don’t have significance as popular myth says they do. So if you have a snake dream, it doesn’t mean you have a nasty aunt or whatever it’s supposed to indicate. But this dream that you had, it seems symbolic to you.”
She sat up. This lying-on-the-couch business wasn’t working.
“You’ve definitely had an eventful few days. First, you meet this boy, Asgar, and tell him about your nervous breakdown. Second, you unravel the mystery your husband’s company has not been able to solve, and you confirm that Ravn is a crook, and third, you had this dream that you feel is a sign,” Arthur said.
Sanya nodded.
“You appear to be very restless,” Arthur said.
“I’m meeting him today,” she said. “I’m going to meet him at a café. And I think my falling off the mountain means that I want to have sex with Ravn.”
Arthur nodded. “But you’re evading the bigger moral question. What will you do with the information you have about Ravn’s illegal dealings?”
“I know what I have to do, but that doesn’t mean I want to do it,” Sanya said. “What do you think I should do?”
“I can’t tell you what to do,” Arthur said. “That’s not what we’re here for.”
“So you don’t recommend that I jump off the mountain?” she asked.
“I want you to make an educated and intelligent decision. After that, if you want to jump off the mountain or hump it, that’s up to you,” Arthur said.
She knew what she had to do. She was maybe in love with Ravn, but it didn’t change what needed to be done. Old Sanya would have smoothed it over with rationalizations. New Sanya left Arthur’s office and called Anette Sørensen, the journalist with Børsen who was investigating Mark Barrett, and asked to meet her for coffee at Café Victor, an hour before she was to meet Ravn there.
She had decided to jump off the mountain.
Chapter 34
A Penny for Your Thoughts
Harry had to give Penny credit. She didn’t miss a beat. She just sipped her champagne and popped a plump tomato from the chef’s salad she had ordered into her mouth.
She should’ve looked ridiculous with that bandage on her nose, her sprained wrist in a cast, but she still managed to carry herself with grace. You could take the model off the catwalk, but you couldn’t take the walk away.
They were sitting outside at Café Victor because it was nearly eighty degrees, a veritable summer day in Denmark.
“You need to talk to the police before Mark is arrested,” Harry said. “Make a deal. Protect yourself.”
Penny took a deep breath and then looked at Harry speculatively. “Why are you telling me this?”
“You mean why am I helping you?” Harry asked, and when Penny nodded, he smiled. “Because I want to do the right thing. You knew nothing about any of this.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you were ready to sleep with me to get information. Ravn’s wife and you have been interrogating my wife to get information. Obviously you know nothing,” Harry said.
Penny nodded again. “I expect this kind of shit from Mark, because he’s a goddamn weasel. But Ravn, now that I didn’t expect. He was always the righteous one. The good one. When we went to the south of France on holiday as a family and the parents would stay in the house and drink themselves silly and the cousins would head to Cannes to party, Ravn would be the designated driver. He’d drink sparkling water all night so that he could drive us all safely home. It was always my brother and me, two brothers who were family friends, and another cousin of ours who now lives in San Francisco. We all looked up to Ravn. He wasn’t the oldest, just the wisest. We all leaned on him. When Ellie, our cousin in San Francisco, was going through her divorce and needed money, she didn’t call her parents, she called Ravn. We all have always relied on Ravn. He’s the rock.”
“Maybe that pressure of being everyone’s rock forced him into this,” Harry suggested.
Harry understood Ravn’s dilemma. Everyone was always counting on him. He had to make it work. He had to succeed because failure wasn’t an option.
“But Ravn has family money, Harry,” Penny said, and then shrugged. “Maybe it’s all gone. Maybe there really wasn’t much, and Ravn made the money. We should’ve known. I should’ve known. Last year, Ravn asked my brother, Peter, to get his money out of IT Foundry, right around the time that Mark leased those Swedish properties out. I didn’t know he leased them to Ravn. I didn’t know they didn’t exist. Peter was pissed. He felt that Ravn was screwing him.”
“Maybe Ravn knew that Peter needed to be protected, and Mark, well, maybe Mark was a casualty he could afford,” Harry said.
“You and he are very alike,” Penny said. “Down to how attracted you both are to your wife.”
Harry didn’t let her bait him. “My wife wouldn’t be interested in a man like Ravn. She has high integrity.”
Penny smiled. “It’s the scar that gets the girls. He used to tell tall tales about it. Sharks, fights, whatnot. What did he tell your wife?”
“I don’t know,” Harry said. “Maybe it never came up.”
“Oh, it always comes up,” Penny said. “He got it when he was a kid. He fell into a well at our family farm. But it’s so boring that I think he tells the big stories to get attention. After all, even big bad successful Ravn is insecure.”
Aren’t we all, sweetheart, Harry wanted to say. All us big bad successful men are driven because we’re insecure fools. We’re always waiting to be found out. We’re waiting for the world to see that we’re frauds, and Ravn’s time is up. Even though he hated the man’s guts, Harry felt Ravn’s colossal embarrassment, the burn inside when the real Ravn was revealed.
“I’m nothing like your cousin,” Harry said.
Penny dropped her fork on her salad plate. She gave up the pretense of eating. “Whatever helps you sleep at night is fine by me. I do appreciate your telling me, though. I didn’t expect you to be this nice.”
Harry opened his wallet and dropped a few hundred kroner on the table and pulled out a business
card.
“You should have your lawyer contact Chief Inspector Hans Møller immediately,” Harry said.
“And I shouldn’t tell him you talked to me?” Penny asked.
Harry shrugged. “Say what you like. Hans Møller can’t charge me with a crime. I met with a friend and advised her that she should extricate herself from a situation that she had discussed with me in the past, the situation being her marriage. I haven’t told you anything else.”
“Doing the right thing but carefully?”
“I’m a good man—rather, I want to be a good man, Penny, but that doesn’t mean I should take leave of my senses,” Harry said. “If you don’t mind, I have a conference call.”
“Of course,” Penny said and watched Harry leave.
Chapter 35
Penny Deals In
Penny sat still for a moment, not sure what to do.
She called her lawyer first and asked him to contact this chief inspector. She needed to make a deal. Both Mark and she couldn’t end up in prison. Who’d take care of the girls? Mandy? She was going to be a basket case once Ravn was arrested. Even though Harry hadn’t said the words, Penny knew. She hadn’t taken leave of her senses, either.
She felt sorry for Mandy. What would poor Mandy do? And Katrine? And Jonas? She felt a pang of fear for her niece and nephew. They were good kids. Jonas was a lot like Mandy, a little calculating but in general not so bright. Katrine was all Ravn. She talked like him and she thought like him. Katrine would be devastated. Her father was her hero. Her superman and now the hero would fall.
Penny played with her iPhone and looked up her favorites in the contact list. Before she could put her finger on Anders Ravn’s name, she put the phone down. Should she? Shouldn’t she? Ravn had always been there for her. He had held her hand through every shitty situation that had come her way. And there had been a few. The time she was arrested in Bulgaria with cocaine, he and Mandy had come running and had not lifted an accusatory finger, but managed with money and a local lawyer to get her out and get her record cleaned up.
She couldn’t call him. No. That could get her into trouble with the police, who could and would check phone records. So what could she do?
She looked at the napkin on her lap and pulled out a pen from her white Valentino bag. She wrote carefully on the napkin: They know about Mark and you. Take care of yourself.
She didn’t ask for the check, knowing that the money Harry had left would cover their meal and tip with some to spare. She walked down the street, past the Louis Vuitton store and then the Burberry store, past Magasin and came to Kongens Nytorv.
And then, just to be sure, because she worried someone might be following her, she went back and entered Magasin and became part of the crowd. She sprayed some perfume on her wrist as if trying it out and then walked through the lingerie department to the exit. She was being silly, she realized. No one was following her. She wasn’t relevant enough.
Penny came out of the department store and then walked down Gammel Mønt, the street with the posh shops and the IT Foundry offices. She would have to be careful so no one saw her.
She went into the underground car park, balancing carefully in her Stuart Weitzman sandals. The parking garage was packed with cars but no people.
She spotted Ravn’s Audi A8 by the elevators. She folded the napkin and put it in his windshield. And then she all but ran out of the parking garage as gracefully as her sandals with five-inch heels would let her. Once out on the street, she cut to Pistolstræde and started to breathe again.
Penny had never paid much attention to Politigården, the police headquarters, which was also known as the Yard. It was close to Hovedbanegården, the main train station. It was an impressive building.
“Neoclassical style, I think,” she said to Leo Vestergård, her lawyer, trying to keep an air of indifference when she came to the building with him the day after she had met with Harry.
“Excuse me?” Leo said. He was one of those pretty-boy lawyers from one of the top law firms in Copenhagen, Lexsos. Penny had been assured by her divorce lawyer, whose services she had acquired after speaking with Harry and who was from the same firm, that Leo Vestergård was a badass lawyer with a reputation of managing “situations such as these” with ease.
“I was talking about the architecture of the building,” Penny said.
Leo stopped walking through the main corridor they had entered before getting to the reception desk, where they would have to leave everything electronic and go through a security gate.
“Mrs. Barrett, I know you’re nervous. But there isn’t any need. We’re not the criminal parties. You’re here of your own volition,” he said.
Penny eyed the blond, blue-eyed man carefully. Ah, that chiseled mouth. He was probably a tiger in bed, or maybe he was the selfish type; the pretty ones usually were. It was the ugly ones who tried hard because they knew they had to.
“I’m not nervous,” Penny said. “I’m anxious. There is a difference.”
She spoke authentically and with strength, and she could see that she had changed Leo Vestergård’s opinion of her, from a fashion floozy to a woman of substance.
Chief Inspector Hans Møller asked them if they wanted coffee or anything else to drink, and even before they could decline, he said, “Okay then, let’s get started and get this show on the road.”
Penny’s hands were trembling, and she was afraid, not just for herself but for her kids, for Mandy and Ravn and their children. Her family was unraveling. Everything was falling apart. This beautiful life they had built, this high-society living was all coming to an end. Would people still buy her clothes after all this?
The chief inspector appreciated that Penny wanted to get in front of this and assured her that she was not under investigation.
Leo whispered to Penny then, “Are you ready?”
Penny nodded. During their prep meeting at Leo’s office, Penny had given Leo everything she had found when she went snooping after her conversation with Harry and found that Mark’s underwear drawer had a false bottom. She discovered everything she needed there: the real estate deeds to the Swedish properties that didn’t exist; the papers about the shell corporation Lala; and the papers that Lala had rented the nonexistent properties to another corporation, Cirque Fernando.
She had checked and Ravn was in the clear, but not Mark. It was obvious he had made up the real estate deeds and whitewashed them through Lala. She hoped that Ravn was smart enough to not be connected to Lala, the shell corporation Mark had set up, because that would be proof he knew the real estate properties didn’t exist.
“My client is showing her goodwill, and we’re prepared to hand over everything, but we need to ensure that she has immunity,” Leo said.
“What does she have?” the chief inspector asked.
“We would like to speak with a state’s prosecutor,” Leo said.
The chief inspector seemed to know this was where the conversation would go and stepped out of his office and had a muffled conversation with a secretary and came back in.
It took all of three hours. Just three hours, Penny thought, to sell out her husband. Three hours to save her and her children’s lives.
Penny got her deal. Immunity.
She signed papers and nodded like a robot throughout the process. She held her face strong as she had during a modeling shoot a million years ago in Provence. It was dusk, and the photo shoot was at some uppity villa by a pool. She was being bitten by mosquitoes while she maintained her pose of pouting sexiness in a bikini. After the shoot she needed to put calamine lotion all over her body, which was puffy and red with mosquito bites. They had bitten her everywhere, even her face. But the pictures for H&M, which were in all the major magazines, had been flawless.
“Good job,” Leo said when they both were seated in his Audi TT, driving away from Polititorvet, where they had parked, and past the Tivoli Gardens on H. C. Andersens Boulevard.
Penny put her face in her hand
s and burst into tears.
Chapter 36
Kidnapped
Her meeting with Anette Sørensen didn’t take very long, even though it was fruitful for Anette, who gave Sanya a hug and told her how grateful she was before she left.
Sanya waited for Ravn with a glass of champagne under the green awning on the patio of Café Victor with other patrons who were enjoying the summer. She paid for the champagne right after she ordered it, as instructed by Ravn in one of the many text messages he had been sending her for the past hour.
Tell no one. You have to promise to tell no one.
And when she promised, he responded, like a schoolboy who was wet behind his ears and in love, in that incandescent way that only a schoolboy can have.
I can’t wait. I just can’t.
And then there was the message that brought tears to her eyes. Not out of pain or fear or even excitement but in response to his passion, like she was some ingénue who was going to be deflowered by her very first lover. It didn’t help that she had already betrayed him.
Sometimes I think about you in the middle of the day, and that is the hardest because I have to get through the rest of the day without you. Because at night, I can close my eyes and pretend that you’re mine.
We’ll run like the wind. It’ll take us far. Will you come?
She typed as her breath caught in her throat, Yes.
Yes, damn it. This was it. This was the passion that she’d been missing her entire life. This was what she didn’t have with Harry. It was all so sensible. So damned proper, and she didn’t want proper. She wanted sex against the wall. She wanted passion, the kind you see in the movies, like Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin have in The Big Easy, which she bumped into the other night while cable trawling.
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