She wanted fire. She wanted the opposite of security. She wanted spontaneity. She wanted adventure. She wanted to have a story to tell her grandchildren.
When Grandma was old, like in her forties, she left Granddad and ran away with a pirate, she would say.
And little whoever would ask, Did the pirate have a false eye?
No, but he had the deadliest and meanest scar on his cheek.
Her wholesome grandchild would grin with glee and say, Wicked.
In between text messages from Ravn there was one from Harry. Sanya didn’t even look at it. She didn’t have the courage.
She was betraying Harry, and she had already betrayed Ravn. There was a good chance, Sanya thought, that by the end of this she’d have no man in her life. And . . . that would be okay as well, she thought.
Alec said that loyalty was all about opportunity, and the only reason people were loyal to their spouses was that they hadn’t had the opportunity to cheat on them. Because if, say, Scarlett Johansson took her clothes off and said, Take me, there weren’t a lot of red-blooded men who would say, No, please put your clothes on. I’m married and I don’t care how great your pussy looks. I won’t eat it.
Had she simply not had the opportunity? Arthur didn’t think so. He thought that she never paid attention. That she never looked at the men who looked at her. That had changed, because New Sanya was paying attention.
Ravn didn’t pick her up in his Audi but in a black Ford S-Max. She almost didn’t notice it. But then he honked, and she looked up at him.
“Get in,” he said, and he had the most unholy look in his eyes, and if he had a diamond on a tooth, it would’ve glinted.
Sanya got into the car.
“Hi,” she said, and gave him a brilliant smile. “Where are we going?”
“Is that your cell phone?” Ravn asked, and when she nodded he asked her to give it to him. And when she did, he threw the phone out of the window.
“What was that about?” she asked, shocked as he revved the engine.
“I’m kidnapping you,” he said.
Sanya then looked out of the windshield and saw J Yu on his bicycle; he saw Ravn and her in the car and had a bewildered look on his face. He screamed something to Sanya, but she couldn’t hear him over the din of traffic. The next thing she knew, Ravn was driving fast, making another bicyclist veer off and bang into J Yu, who was focused on them and not the road. As they sped away, violating several traffic laws, Sanya turned to see J Yu on the road next to Café Victor. She couldn’t make out if J Yu was hurt, and just as she was about ask Ravn to stop, she saw J Yu stand up and pull out his cell phone.
“Are you really kidnapping me?” she asked, because things like this didn’t happen in real life.
“Yes.”
“What’s the ransom?”
“Your husband destroys all the proof he has against me,” Ravn said.
She looked at Ravn and then out the window, wondering how Ravn would feel when she told him what she had done. They were hitting the motorway now, and he was starting to do 150 kilometers an hour in a 130 zone. But what was a speeding ticket under the circumstances?
“What if he doesn’t pay up?” she asked.
Ravn smiled. “Then I’ll have you all to myself. But don’t worry; he’ll pay up. A man like Harry needs his wife.”
“And you know this because you need yours?” she demanded, irritated that Ravn thought of her as Harry’s wife and not just her.
“Harry and I are not alike, Sanya,” Ravn said. “I’m not him.”
“What does that mean?”
“I want to be here with you; I don’t need to be here with you,” he said.
“Am I free to leave right now?” she asked. She wasn’t taking this kidnapping seriously, and she wondered why he had set this up the way he had.
“No, I’m afraid not,” he said.
“Where are we going?”
“Somewhere incredibly beautiful,” Ravn said.
And then she started to suspect what he was up to and smiled at him. She was hardly kidnapped, and she was already a victim of Stockholm syndrome. Pathetic!
“Maybe we’ll have some time together until he comes and gets you,” Ravn said softly.
“Ah . . . did you take me by force, so to speak, so that I could be relieved of the blame of running away with you?” Sanya asked. It was almost sweet. He wanted her to have an excuse for being with him. He made her. She didn’t have a choice. It was gallant.
Ravn grinned but didn’t respond.
“He won’t come; the police might,” Sanya said. Harry was no knight in shining armor. He wasn’t going to save her. He was going to call the cops and be sensible about the whole thing.
“We’ll deal with that when it happens. Why don’t you take a nap, and in a few hours I’ll bring you to paradise,” he said.
“I’m too excited to sleep,” Sanya said, and curled her legs under her on the seat. “So, you’re a criminal?”
“Yes,” Ravn said without hesitation. “I’ve always been. This time it got a bit out of hand, but if your husband would just keep his mouth shut . . .”
“Maybe he already called the police,” Sanya suggested.
“He did,” Ravn said, and his eyes lightened with mischief, like this was a game. “Penny warned me.”
Sanya laid her head on the leather headrest and closed her eyes. “Here we are. The kidnapper and the kidnapped. Two barren humans in the middle of a desert, looking at a chimera.” She opened her eyes and asked, “How’s your wife going to feel about this?”
“One thing has nothing to do with another,” Ravn said aggressively. “My wife has nothing to do with how I feel about you. I’m madly in love with you. I think about you and I feel drunk, like I’ve been sipping Scotch all day, fine, fine Scotch so that the drunk is elegant and refined, and it doesn’t give you a hangover but this delicious feeling of freedom.”
She closed her eyes again. She was in a movie. A romance film by Nicholas Sparks with a sappy title. Or maybe she was in a tragedy. No, she knew where she was; she was in a dark comedy. She stood at the precipice, and there was a crowd around her, egging her on.
JUMP. JUMP. JUMP. They all screamed. Do it now. Do it already.
And she had definitely taken the leap—all the way from a very tall mountain.
“I don’t want to be kidnapped,” Sanya said. “I would’ve come with you if you’d asked.”
He shifted his right hand from the gearshift and put it on Sanya’s left. “I’m not Harry. I’d never let you implode if you were mine.”
“This is important to you, isn’t it, this ownership business, this mine and yours and Mandy’s and Harry’s?” Sanya said, holding his hand in hers, letting her fingers run through bumps and creases. “This makes a difference to you. This is what stimulates your hair follicles and gets you up in the morning, this sense of ownership.”
Ravn didn’t reply. As he drove, they stayed quiet, holding hands. After an hour or so Ravn took an exit and drove into a gas station. He parked under a tree, a little away from the gas station building. Sanya could see people milling around, walking to the kiosk in the gas station, buying gas, getting coffee, getting on with life.
“Do you need the bathroom?” Ravn asked.
Sanya shook her head. She could escape, she thought. If this was a real kidnapping, she could escape, run away, but run away from what, and run away from whom? She could run away from Ravn, but she’d have to deal with her inner psyche sooner or later.
“I want a Mars bar,” she said suddenly, because she saw a child at a distance bite into one, and the memory of the taste of the gooey caramel exploded inside her mouth.
“And . . . ?”
“Coffee, a latte,” she said.
“I’ll be right back,” Ravn said.
He didn’t say, Don’t go anywhere or Don’t leave. He just left, as if confident that she wouldn’t leave. He hadn’t even locked the car doors. She could walk away. No harm,
no foul.
But she couldn’t go, not until she saw this through. Also, she had to tell him what she had done. And now there was another enchanting morsel of life to investigate: Would Harry actually come and rescue her? Not that she needed rescuing.
Ravn came back with a Mars bar, a latte, and a bottle of Dansk Kildevand uden brus, Danish springwater without bubbles.
“We have to change cars,” he said, and put his arm on her elbow and led her to the gas station parking lot.
“Are we getting a better car?” Sanya asked.
“Of course,” he said.
It was an old black beautifully maintained Mercedes convertible parked at the far end of the parking lot. The tan leather seats inside were immaculate and looked delightfully comfortable.
“Yours?”
Ravn shook his head. “I’m borrowing from a friend.”
“Does he know?”
“Know what?”
“Your friend, does he know that you’re borrowing his car?” she asked.
Ravn handed her the Mars bar and latte and ushered her into the car.
As they drove with the top down, the wind in her hair, Sanya ate the Mars bar greedily, washing it down with the gas station latte.
“This is the best kidnapping ever,” she said to Ravn.
Chapter 37
Off the Mark
“You’ve lost your mind,” Mandy said to Penny. “You’re in shock because of Mark.”
The day after Penny had that horrible meeting with Chief Inspector Hans Møller, both Mark and Ravn went missing. Mark never returned from Switzerland, and now Penny knew he never would. Ravn didn’t come home the previous night, and his cell phone was going directly to voice mail.
“Sometimes he just takes off; you know how moody he is,” Mandy said as she poured tea in her white-and-blue Royal Copenhagen cup with shaking hands. The teapot was also Royal Copenhagen. Everything in her house was Royal Copenhagen, Mandy thought bitterly, Royal Copenhagen and Georg Jensen and Erik Bagger and . . . all Danish design. She had done this. She had made this Danish home. And now her house of Danish cards was falling apart.
She sipped the soothing green tea, which unfortunately couldn’t soothe her nerves.
“I got a call from Harry Kessler, Mandy. Ravn has apparently kidnapped that Indian wife of his,” Penny said.
“That’s absurd,” Mandy said. “Your husband is a crook who has taken off with your nanny; that doesn’t mean my husband ran away with that drab fashion victim.”
Penny looked at her empty teacup, which stood on the large granite kitchen counter next to the teapot with green tea, as if wondering what to do with it.
“Screw it,” she said. She marched to the liquor cabinet, pulled out a bottle of Lagavulin, and poured a good measure of it into her cup.
She took a sip and sighed.
Mandy looked at her Chopard wristwatch pointedly. It was nine in the morning. But it was not a usual morning. Whiskey was made for mornings like this. She emptied her cup of its contents into the sink and poured whiskey into it instead.
“Skål,” she said to Penny. They raised their cups. “To husbands,” they said, and downed the whiskey.
“So Mark was having an affair with the nanny?” Mandy asked, as she, with a more steady hand than before, poured more whiskey into their teacups.
Penny raised her shoulders and let them drop. “His note said that he was in love with Jinny and that he would be somewhere in the Philippines. He loves the girls, but he wasn’t going to go to prison. And he added that Ravn is a corrupt asshole who should burn in hell.”
“I’m sorry,” Mandy said.
“The son of a bitch cleaned out some of our accounts. The joint ones,” Penny said. “Months ago. This was not a dash for freedom. He was planning this for months. And here I was feeling guilty about divorcing him and handing him over to the police.”
“Are you short of money?” Mandy asked, and then bit her lower lip. “Am I going to soon be short of money?”
“I don’t know. Ravn told Harry that if he wants his wife back, he needs to destroy all the evidence he has against him, which means the only evidence the police will have is what I gave them, and that’s against Mark. I have no idea what Harry has,” Penny said. “And if Harry agrees, Ravn might go free.”
“Will he?”
“I don’t know,” Penny said.
“And what will Ravn do if Harry doesn’t agree? Kill his wife?” Mandy demanded. “What the . . . ?”
Mandy’s words were already slurred. She wasn’t used to drinking hard liquor in the morning.
“He’s not going to kill Harry’s wife, Mandy,” Penny said, as simply as she could.
“Then what’s he going to do to her that’s going to make Harry listen to him?” Mandy demanded and then blinked. “No. No. No. She’s so plain. She’s so . . . weird.”
Penny drank more whiskey from her teacup.
“Oh my god . . . it’s been there all along, hasn’t it,” Mandy said. “I knew something was going on, but I didn’t think it was her. She dresses like a bag lady. And she told us she doesn’t even get waxed down there.”
“I don’t think Ravn gives a shit about that,” Penny said.
“Oh, he certainly cares about waxing. I can attest to that. So, he’s in love with her what . . . her mind?” Mandy demanded aggressively. She was now on her third teacup of whiskey.
“You should stop drinking,” Penny suggested, and then sighed. “Fuck it! You know what, if anyone deserves to get drunk this morning, it’s you and me. Two women on the brink of a nervous breakdown thanks to our thieving, cheating husbands. It’s pitiful.”
“Do the police know about the kidnapping?” Mandy asked. She slurred on the word kidnapping.
Penny, who knew how to drink and would not be slurring anytime soon, shook her head. “Harry said that Ravn had specifically told him not to tell anyone. He called me . . . because . . . well, he did me a favor and he hoped I’d do him one.”
Mandy sat down on one of the barstools by the kitchen counter. “I feel like saying, What will I tell the children? It’s such a goddamned cliché, you know? They say it in the movies all the time. But, Penny, what will I tell the children?”
“I don’t have to tell mine anything. Apparently Jinny and Mark talked to the girls before they ran away—the girls told me. They’re going to some beach in the Philippines for Christmas next year. But I don’t think that will be possible; the statute of limitations for his kind of white-collar crime is five years—I checked,” Penny said. “I told you, I saw some expensive lingerie in Jinny’s room and . . . I should’ve put two and two together.”
“You never suspected?” Mandy asked, even though she remembered having done exactly that. She wished she had said something to Penny.
Penny shook her head. “Mark has an okay dick. And now he’s even lost his looks. He’s got the potbelly, the balding head . . .”
“Ravn has a big dick,” Mandy said, and held her hands an arm’s length apart. “Huge. When I first gave him a blow job, my jaws hurt the next day.”
Penny stared at Mandy in disbelief. “Did you just say that?”
“Why? Am I not allowed to say things like this?” Mandy asked belligerently.
“Hey, feel free. I’m not one to take offense,” Penny said.
“Lately, we’ve still been having sex once a week as we always have, but it’s lost that . . . loving feeling,” Mandy said.
“You have sex once a week?” Penny asked.
“He’s busy . . . swindling money apparently, so we have to schedule,” Mandy said. “Plenty of people schedule. You can’t judge. Your husband was sleeping with your nanny. Talk about a cliché.”
“And he ran away and took all our money,” Penny said. “Well, as much as he could, so I can still keep the house, but the cars might have to go. I actually have no idea what my finances look like. My accountant has been calling, but I told him I was busy having a nervous breakdown and we would
have to talk some other time.”
They decided then that the barstools at the kitchen counter were not comfortable and went into the sunroom, where Mandy plopped onto an extra-soft beige sofa with her teacup and bottle of Lagavulin.
Penny sank into a couch across from her.
“I never gave Mark a blow job,” Penny said.
“Never, ever?” Mandy asked.
Penny shook her head. “I can’t have a man cum in my mouth.”
“It’s Ravn’s favorite thing,” Mandy said. “But now I have practice. My jaw doesn’t hurt so much.” And then she giggled. “All my life I’ve told myself that sex between Ravn and me was sensational, but you know what—it’s really not. Can I tell you a secret, Penny?”
“Sure,” Penny said.
“The best sex I ever had was with . . . remember Vladimir Markencho?” Mandy asked.
Penny shook her head.
“He was a violinist. The Russian ambassador then . . . forget his name . . . Ivan something or the other, he introduced us to him. One look, just one look, and I felt things that I’d never felt before,” Mandy said.
Penny gaped at her. “Not even in my wildest imagination where I’m married to George Clooney and winning an Oscar at the same time could I have thought that you would’ve cheated on Ravn. Bravo!”
“Do you remember him?”
“The violinist?” Penny shrugged. “I think so. Big guy with big hands. There was this quietness about him, or was that someone else? This was almost . . . what five, six years ago?” When Mandy nodded, she said, “Wow! That long ago, and yet so very recent.”
“I had sex with him in the Russian ambassador’s coat closet—the first time,” Mandy said. “He made me come with his mouth. I didn’t even know that was possible. Ravn just sort of does things down there, but he never makes me come. Vlad played my pussy like a violin. Why are you looking at me like that? Shocked, are you?”
“I don’t know, I use words like pussy, but coming from you it sounds dirtier, like Miss Manners is sitting with her legs uncrossed,” Penny said.
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