The next morning it had shat on the counter again.
It was testing me. This was no longer about having a furry little friend about the house, it was a merciless battle for territory.
The shop had two kinds of mousetraps.
One was familiar from cartoons, the other was Swedish and made of plastic and ventured claims of efficiency, killing the vermin humanely and without suffering.
It was shaped like a little pipe and in the middle was a guillotine. You lured the mouse inside with a bit of sausage and as soon as it touched the bait the guillotine deployed and broke its neck.
‘We’ve got Easter brew on offer,’ said the shopkeeper.
‘Easter brew?’
‘Beer like that’ll keep for years, even if drinking it now means thinking creatively.’
I gawped at him.
‘With it not being Easter anymore,’ he said.
‘It’ll come round again,’ I said.
‘Can’t be sure of anything these days, can you?’ he said.
Apart from an aggressive wasp or the occasional gnat I had never killed anything in my life. Would I be able to do it?
Was I going to take a life just to be able to write about the demise of coupledom?
I decided to investigate its behaviour when left alone, and so I crept up to the house and peered in through the kitchen window.
The mouse was pattering about on a plate, and that was where I drew the line.
I raised the guillotine, attached a little piece of salami to the trigger and placed the contraption in the cupboard under the sink. I pretended to be absorbed in the singular skills of Master Licker and froze at the slightest sound. I was waiting for death.
The trap went off after half an hour. First the abrupt snap, then three seconds of silence, followed by several minutes of thrashing about. I imagined the little creature’s agony in its final throes and not until I’d had three stiff whiskies later in the evening did I venture to open the cupboard and peep inside. The stiffened corpse lay outstretched in the trap. I shook it out on to the dustpan, went out to the bin and dropped it next to an empty tin of chickpeas and the plastic wrapping from the six-pack. Peace descended. I lit candles and wrote until I conked out on the sofa.
At 1.24 I was woken by a sound outside the window.
I held my breath and heard the wind in the trees. There it was again.
Someone was walking round the house. Someone was peering in from the darkness.
I rolled down on to the floor and crawled across to the wood burner. I picked up the poker, deciding to confront whoever it was in the open, where I could utilise my weapon to the full.
I opened the back door and stood for a second in the dark until my eyes adjusted.
I went left with the poker raised like a baseball bat, making sure to tread where the ground was soft and there were no twigs or leaves to make a sound beneath my feet.
My heart filled my entire frame. I paused briefly before turning the front corner. A person was standing by the door.
I shouted out, producing some incoherent sound, and charged forward. The figure jumped and shrank back in fright, almost falling down the step.
Helene had a basket on her arm, full of delicacies from Løgismose, and I gorged myself on blue cheese with egg yolk and raw onion for the first time since the eighties and talked incessantly before finally asking why she had come.
‘For dick and scrambled eggs,’ she said.
We drank a brutal south Italian red wine and half a bottle of Minervois, and then had uncomplicated, cheerful sex for an hour and a half.
‘I really like you,’ I said.
‘It’s mutual,’ she said, and looked down at her scrambled egg.
And then a whole lot went on without words.
‘Next time give me a ring first,’ I said as we stood by the car.
She looked like she was going to say something, but didn’t.
COPENHAGEN, OCTOBER 2008
I knew the damage Ida-Marie’s success had done to Diana. The real-life drawing project had shown her that she could take a different artistic direction if she wanted to, but that particular avenue had been closed off – no one would ever see that work as original now that Ida-Marie had got there first. Since work meant everything to Diana, Ida-Marie’s betrayal crushed her, and of course rational arguments could have been put forward to convince her that the end of the world was not nigh, but it wouldn’t have helped in the slightest.
We had talked three or four times on the phone while I was up at the cabin, albeit with nothing really to say, apart from breathing at each other, and now that I was back things didn’t seem to be any better. I missed her, even when she was sitting in front of me. She made an effort and asked about the book and I said I’d written eighty-two pages and needed another eighteen, and she refrained from commenting on my lack of enthusiasm.
‘My tapestry’s being auctioned tomorrow,’ she said.
‘Are you nervous?’
‘No, why should I be?’
I wondered whether I should tell her what we had planned for the auction the next day, but it had gone too far for me to be able to get my head round the consequences and I was stricken with fear at the thought of Moritz perhaps ringing while she was within earshot, and so I muttered something about getting some things in to make veggie burgers.
I phoned Moritz as soon as I was out on the street.
‘About time!’ he said.
‘Did you know Damien Hirst just raked in more than a billion kroner at Sotheby’s!’
‘He uses diamonds,’ I said.
‘The auction kicked off at the same time as the Lehman Brothers crash!’
‘And somewhere in Jutland a cow had a calf.’
‘Don’t you see what this means?’ he said. ‘The crisis is giving contemporary art a swerve! We’re too strong for it!’
‘What are we going to do about the auction tomorrow?’ I said.
‘The tapestry’s under the hammer at half-past six.’
‘How high do you want us to go?’
‘Minna and I have agreed to stop at ninety thousand.’
‘What if no one else bids?’
‘Diana’s a star. Of course they’ll bid.’
‘Do you want me in a suit?’
‘I want both of you well dressed but discreet. And another thing: don’t go in together and don’t sit next to each other. Someone might recognise you and we don’t need any rumours going around.’
‘Is what we’re doing actually against the law?’
‘Your friend can buy as much art as she wants.’
When I got back, Diana was listening to ‘At Seventeen’ and washing up.
‘I thought you were going shopping?’ she said.
I’d forgotten all about the veggie burgers and had to make up a story.
‘I ran into Blismann,’ I said.
‘Isn’t he in Madrid?’ she said.
‘What would he be doing there?’
She rummaged through a pile and handed me a postcard.
It was from the Prado, one of Goya’s grizzly Black paintings, Saturn devouring his newborn son.
I picked my way through the scrawl of his handwriting.
‘Thanks for the tussle, gorgeous. My son will be named Bob Blismann.’
A shudder went through my body and tears welled in my eyes.
‘You’ve got friends who can make you cry,’ said Diana.
‘You’ve got Jan,’ I said.
‘He’s a champagne friend.’
‘Lisa?’
‘A nice girl from the provinces.’
‘You’ve got me,’ I said.
We stood and hugged, keeping hold for a long time, until eventually she stepped back and gripped my shoulders with her arms outstretched.
‘Did Helene go to see you in the cottage?’
‘No,’ I said, and I was a bastard to lie to her.
‘You don’t want to start from scratch anymore,’ she said.
I picked my jacket off the back of the chair.
‘What about those veggie burgers?’ she said.
Clara’s outfit was perilously close to parody. She had been through Laura Appelgreen’s wardrobe and borrowed a dark blue cardigan, loafers from Tod’s and a prim city skirt, topping it off with a splashy silk scarf, done up like a yacht-club wife.
‘Spot-on, don’t you think?’
At Krut’s she went with a glass of white while I had two large beers.
‘I followed the auction online yesterday,’ she said. ‘It was their big Cobra night and it didn’t go well at all.’
‘Cobra numb the optic nerve,’ I said. ‘All that colour.’
‘Cobra always sell, but three out of four got pulled and they had to send thirty-five Jorn canvases back.’
‘I wonder what’ll happen if no one bids for Diana,’ I said.
‘Danish shares dropped eleven per cent yesterday,’ she said.
I tried to calm us down with a couple of cognacs, but to no avail.
It was a gorgeous evening otherwise. The air was still and relatively warm, and the trees showed their hues in the soft light. It was my fault that Clara felt so uncomfortable walking through Kongens Have, and so I told her about my old hippy friend, Franz, who back in the sixties had done a turn as a snake charmer on the lawns in front of the Herkulespavillon, stark naked, playing his pipe and making his dick rise to the music.
Normally she would have laughed.
‘I noticed the auctioneer started very low,’ she said. ‘He may kick off asking forty thousand, in which case I’ll bid, but I can’t go straight for ninety.’
‘Moritz says the crisis isn’t hitting contemporary art,’ I said.
‘Do stop saying contemporary art.’
People were standing around in clusters outside Bruun-Rasmussen and Clara gave my arm a little squeeze and went in. Judging by the chatter on the pavement, the day’s auction had carried on where yesterday’s disaster had left off.
All seats were taken, so I joined those standing at the rear. Retired doctors and solicitors were richly represented, people who played swing jazz with the old boys and collected Burgundy. There were a couple of furs, but otherwise the place was short on flamboyance.
Clara had seated herself in the third row. There were three lots before Diana’s tapestry.
First there was a recent Chinese painting, a big thing depicting a young couple not doing anything. The style was photographically precise and the soft lighting gave it a nicely apathetic touch.
‘Do I hear twenty-five thousand Danish kroner for this excellent painting by Xioao Wang-Lee? Twenty-five thousand, surely! Fifteen. Do I hear fifteen thousand kroner?’
A hand went up in the second row.
‘Fifteen thousand bid. Twenty? Do I hear twenty?’
The auctioneer peered out at the assembly with a look of resignation and raised his gavel.
‘Sold for fifteen thousand kroner.’
Then came two works by Olafur Eliasson.
The first was a photograph showing a dead Icelandic landscape with a hot spring and was quite incomprehensibly valued at seventy-five thousand, which it made by the skin of its teeth. The next up at least had a little house in it and went for eighty-five, and I couldn’t make up my mind whether following Eliasson would be to Diana’s advantage or not. I was still none the wiser when I noticed a platinum blonde with something strangely familiar about her. It was Rie Becker, sitting nine rows back with a gormless look on her face.
Two assistants held Diana’s cunt up so everyone could see.
‘Our next lot is a tapestry, not many of these on the market. The artist is Diana Kiss and the piece is dated this year. She’s represented by Galleri Moritz. Shall we begin at thirty thousand Danish kroner for this exceptional work?’
Clara raised her hand and was immediately outbid. As far as I could make out, it came from one of the assistants, which presumably meant an anonymous buyer had put down a maximum bid beforehand.
‘Forty thousand?’ said the auctioneer.
Clara bid again and the auction gathered momentum.
Fifty-five thousand, sixty, sixty-five, seventy thousand.
‘Eighty-five thousand I have!’ said the auctioneer. ‘Do I hear ninety?’
Clara made her final bid and the auctioneer peered out again.
‘Ninety thousand Danish kroner for this vivid tapestry by Diana Kiss, straight off the loom. Ninety thousand for the first time, ninety thousand for the second…’
A new assistant entered the fray with a mobile phone pressed to her ear.
‘I’m now bid ninety-five thousand,’ said the auctioneer. ‘One hundred thousand.’
The bidding ebbed and flowed between the two anonymous buyers and my fists were clenched in excitement. A hundred and five thousand, and the air was thick with tension. A hundred and ten!
Diana’s tapestry went for one hundred and seventy-five thousand kroner and I reeked of sweat as we came out on to Bredgade and Clara threw her arms around me.
‘What the hell happened there?’ she said. ‘They went mad!’
‘You were really good,’ I said.
‘Are you satisfied?’ said Rie Becker.
She had her fussy journo’s notepad in her hand.
‘Who’s this?’ said Clara.
‘So you were wanting to buy a Diana Kiss tapestry?’
‘She’s a brilliant artist,’ said Clara.
‘Are you a collector?’ said Rie Becker.
‘Sorry, Rie, we need to get going!’ I said, taking Clara by the arm.
We made off through the Sankt Annæ Passage and didn’t stop until we got to Byens Kro and ordered two sets of Urquell and old Caribbean rum.
‘Selling above valuation like that will be a fantastic PR boost for Diana’s work,’ Clara said. ‘Her gallery prices will seem like a snip now.’
The thought occurred to us both at the same time and I went outside and rang Moritz.
‘Was that you? You and Minna Lund?’
‘What are you talking about?’ he said.
‘You bumped up the price, didn’t you?’
‘Tomorrow you can read all about how Diana rode Olafur off her wheel. She deserves the success, Mikkel. What about your mate Kreuzmann? He’ll be rubbing his hands together, don’t you think?’
I bought the paper the next day and read through the first part of Rie Becker’s new series of articles under the title Art: From boom to doom. They’d made it a big feature, with its own graphics and a photo of the star journalist herself. The article was a broad-spectrum account of the art-world crisis, the controversial bit consisting in the rumour that the Valby galleries were about to go bust. The auction at Bruun-Rasmussen was cited in support of the general prophecy of doom, but Diana’s tapestry wasn’t mentioned.
Jan was up in arms. For one thing, he couldn’t bear the idea of one of Diana’s works pulling in a hundred and seventy-five thousand without her profiting from it, and for another he was jealous of her having stepped up on to the established stage with such success.
Diana herself was relieved and pretended we were getting on, while I went to prepare the talk my publishers had asked me to give to the booksellers in advance of my book coming out.
Clara called me.
‘I just got back from the classroom and sat down to lunch and there’s five messages from that Rie Becker. You’ve got to do something!’ said Clara.
I called Moritz.
‘Any anonymous purchase from Bruun-Rasmussen is always going to be shrouded in mystery. Rie Becker knows that full well. She hasn’t got a thing to go on.’
I biked down to the harbour and the exercise helped. It was still warm enough to sit out in the Design Museum’s garden. I had quesadillas and mint tea and had just regained some measure of calm when Clara rang again.
‘She’s waiting outside the school.’
‘Just smile and say nothing
.’
‘She knows we went to school together.’
‘I’ll get Kreuzmann to pick you up,’ I said. ‘He owes us a favour.’
Five minutes later Moritz called.
‘I’ve just had Laura Appelgreen on the phone.’
‘What did she want?’
‘Rie Becker has somehow got wind of the fact that Laura and your friend Clara know each other, and Laura didn’t know Clara was going to Bruun-Rasmussen yesterday.’
‘Did she tell Rie Becker that Clara had got done up at hers?’
‘You’ve got to get out there and shield Clara,’ said Moritz.
‘Kreuzmann’s just got in the car to pick her up.’
‘Kreuzmann the swindler? What were you thinking?’
I pedalled hell for leather all the way out to Christianshavns Gymnasium.
Rie Becker was guarding the arched gateway with her notepad in hand.
‘What’s with the tabloid approach?’ I said.
‘I called Moritz from the auction yesterday,’ she said. ‘His number was busy all the time.’
Kreuzmann rolled up in his white Mini, parked halfway up the pavement and jumped out with his mobile pressed against his ear.
‘Is this the one?’
‘Who are you?’ said Rie Becker.
‘Someone with nothing to lose.’
‘They’re the ones I’m writing about,’ she said.
Kreuzmann went through the gate.
‘That tapestry’s from her new series, right?’ said Rie Becker. ‘I didn’t realise Moritz was that desperate.’
Kreuzmann escorted Clara to his car.
‘What was your name again?’ said Rie Becker.
Kreuzmann opened the door for Clara and turned round. He looked straight at Rie Becker, holding her gaze for maybe half a minute until suddenly he snatched the notepad out of her hand, tossed it on to the pavement and urinated all over it.
‘Pity. Nice jugs,’ he said, and was gone.
I called Moritz and told him what had happened as I biked across the Knippelsbro bridge.
‘Rie Becker thinks you got Diana’s tapestry put up for auction so you could pump her prices up ahead of the exhibition.’
‘But that wouldn’t be against the law,’ he said. ‘In the business world, that sort of thing is a punishable offence, but the law still views art as philanthropy. Rather arrogant of it, wouldn’t you say?’
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