Game of Revenge

by Charlotte Larsen

  Camilla looks around the room, faintly smelling tobacco and wool. She feels a ghost of pain. To her, the room might as well just be a part of a museum. Her own pain is so much greater, the loss of her life as she knows it. How can fifty-year-old history compare with that? But deep within her, she knows that what she has just seen and heard is but the surface of a despair and angst so profound that evil was redefined forever.

  Chapter 11

  “Thanks, Leif, I owe you one,” Francis drawls.

  “Cause not, old boy. Cause not. We are always happy to write about him, even though I still haven’t figured out his background. Why, it’s a bit like your story: English to the Danish core.”

  Francis laughs. “You always were one for great headlines. I like that, ‘English to the Danish core.’ May I adopt it as my own?”

  “Cause you may, Francis boy.”

  “And you won’t edit the article too hard? You’ll leave it pretty much as it is? It may be a bit fawning, you see.”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “That is what I want, Leif. Thank you.”

  “Did I hear you say that I have the full story about James Hampton exclusively? When you’re ready, of course.”

  “No, Leif, you didn’t hear me say that. You have the one article exclusively. You’re hearing me say that now.” Francis smiles to himself. The old editor is a cunning fox, but he himself had experience with journalism’s tricks. He waits.

  “Ah, my mistake, old boy.” The editor returns, “But if you see fit, I’ll be happy to help in any way possible, you know, in the understanding of an exclusive.”

  “All right, Leif. That’s a deal. You’ll have your exclusive, and you’ll provide me with all the background you have on James Hampton, his companies, staff, and partners. But it needs to be yourself that digs all this out. I don’t want your staff anywhere near this job, is that clear? You need to get your hands dirty for once.” Francis’s tone has required a sharp edge. The bonhomie is gone.

  Chapter 12

  She is wrapped in one of Mrs. Scott-Wren’s winter coats and wearing her old fashioned, fur-lined rubber boots, but even then, Camilla feels the cold. She has forced herself to go for a walk, stealing out of the house at a time when the two older women were busy.

  Every day, she seems to grow weaker, more tired. Her mind is foggy, her thinking strenuous. Perhaps, she considers, this is a kind of post-stress reaction? Perhaps she is falling to pieces after years of soul-destroying willpower, years with too little sleep, too many air miles, too little life? The thought scares her. What can she do, if not work? Where does she belong if not to an organization?

  Walking along the beach, following narrow streams through the marshland, she listens to the singing of the rushes, the chirping of the birds. She perceives the innocence of a world she doesn’t know how to access.

  A pale sun tries valiantly to penetrate the heavy fog but only succeeds in illuminating the mist, so the world appears enveloped in a sparkling blanket. The sparkles hurt her eyes, and she put on her sunglasses. The beach is deserted except for a family of angry-sounding seagulls.

  The latest storm has taken yet another bite of land, and a number of trees have been nearly uprooted and now hang precariously over the slope of the beach. Their naked branches reach out for help. Another storm will finish them off. She steps over the branches, hanging close to the wet sand.

  The cold, wet wind does her good, but she cannot shake the fog in her mind. She sees and hears everything as from a distance, her thoughts appearing in slow motion.

  How peaceful it is here, even if ferocious seagulls scream their painful indignation to the world at large, with herons bending their elegant necks and disappearing underwater, quick as lightning. And ducks skirt the water before settling down to majestically, lazy swimming.

  She sits down on one of the massive boulders lining the water, feeling the mist coalesce on her skin like little pinpricks of cold. Her thoughts drift off to nothing in particular, just floating away without direction or method.

  She is startled back to the present when a man’s voice reaches her.

  “Nice spot for a little daydreaming.”

  Before she can respond, a big German Shepherd bounces on her.

  “Carlos, down!” the man calls sharply.

  But the dog continues to muzzle her hand and thigh, even trying to lick her face. Despite herself, she laughs. To be assaulted by a big, shaggy dog on a misty morning, seemingly ecstatic to see her, is the best thing that has happened to her in weeks.

  “I’m sorry!” the man finally manages to pull the dog off. “He seems unusually glad to meet you. Good thing you didn’t get scared.”

  “Oh, no, I grew up with dogs.”

  “Anyway, this is Carlos. Seeing that he has kind of forced an introduction on us, I’m James.” He looks at her enquiringly.

  She stalls, not wanting to let herself be known to a stranger, “Did you say Carlos? As in the most famous terrorist?” The man is quite attractive, she notes automatically and would look a killer in a suit. And he is tall, at least a head taller than her, she estimates. And heavy—not fat, but solid. He moves with a boxer’s gait, deliberate, with purpose and force.

  “Yes. Exactly. Believe me; this one was a terror when he was young.”

  “He is not young now? Well, he certainly has the energy of a young dog.”

  The man throws a stick into the water and the dog leaps after it, swimming furiously with its head awkwardly above the water. She steals a glance at the man who has interrupted her solitude. His sleeves are rolled up despite the cold, and he’s probably in his early fifties, she decides, possibly a successful entrepreneur who has the luxury of taking a morning off to walk his dog. Or maybe he works from home, which may explain the cargo pants and generally casual look he sports.

  Camilla senses he is about to address her again and forestalls him by getting up and offering him her hand, “Well, it was nice meeting you both. Enjoy your walk.” And before he can respond, she pulls back her hand and turns around. Don’t run! Just walk at a normal pace. A sense of dread urges her on. Why does she sense this need to get away from him? She reminds herself that it had been weeks since she last spoke to anybody outside the Scott-Wren household and she probably was having a mild case of scopophobia due to her long, introspective period.

  “It was nice to meet you too, Camilla,” the man calls after her when she is a few steps away.

  She stops cold and turns around. A shadow of her old fighting spirit appears. “How do you know my name?”

  “Oh, I have seen you in the papers.”

  She knows he is lying. How can he recognize her when she is wrapped in a heavy winter coat, hair covered by a woolen hat, and sunglasses hiding her eyes? Is he a reporter? An investor? A goon hired to punish her?

  Her breathing is rapid now, her heart beating fast, and she feels dizzy. But she stands still too long, and he is in front of her, standing close. Much too close for comfort. She is intimated by his size and presence. His eyes stare into hers, unrelenting, eyes like the sea on a cloudy day; a storm brews in them as she watches him.

  “You are staying with Mrs. Scott-Wren up at the great white house.”

  Camilla acknowledges that he’s framed his response like a question but is really more of an announcement. Still, she feels she must ask, “How do you know?”

  “Oh, this community is small. News travels fast.” He smiles, and the hint of a threat appears.

  “I see. Anyway, I must get back,” she says, panicking. “It was nice—”

  “—Did you know that this place was a hub of resistance during the war?”

  And she very nearly asks, “Which war?” which nobody in Denmark ever does. There has only ever been one “war” for the Danes for the past seventy-five years. Every other war has a designated name. The “war” is, of course, the Second World War. She stops herself before the words escape her mouth. She shakes her head. No, she didn’t know.
<
br />   “It was. We are proud of this fact. All of us claim to have belonged to the resistance or descended from somebody who did something in the resistance movement. Not all tell the truth, of course. Few do, actually. But your hostess, Mrs. Scott-Wrenn, is the real deal.”

  “But it is all so long ago,” Camilla objects, her voice low and trembling, “we should forget about that old war and concentrate on what is going on in the world today instead.”

  He looks at her strangely, disbelievingly. She forges on, trying to find her own foothold, her opinions, herself, “Really, one gets so tired of the constant rerun of grainy black and white films on Hitler and the never-ending claims of Jews the world over.” But she knows she is in the wrong.

  He steps even closer. Their boots are touching now, yet Camilla clings to her own stubbornness, the one thing that hasn’t been lost in the fog.

  “It is rather awkward, watching nations humble themselves by belated apologies,” Camilla goes on.

  “You think?” his voice has gone ice cold. His eyes are boring into her skull, and she is rooted to the spot. She can’t move, can’t think. Her weak arguments have come to an end. She is a rabbit in the headlights of an approaching car. She is done for.

  Silence hangs between them.

  “Have you seen the room where Mrs. Scott-Wren hid opposition fighters and Jews during the war?”

  She nods.

  “Could you feel the suffering in the room?”

  She nods again.

  “Good,” he says, “you are not completely corrupted. Yet.”

  He takes a step back, and his face changes into the charming one she saw earlier.

  She escapes with an image on her retina of the faded numbers that became visible on the man’s left forearm when he flung out his arm. Six numbers in a line.

  Ms. Nielsen meets her at the door, her voice reproaching, “Why did you not ask me to come with you?” but when she looks closer at Camilla’s face, exclaims, “But whatever is the matter? Did something happen? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost. Go upstairs this minute and wrap up. I’ll bring you a nice, hot cup of tea.”

  When Camilla ask Ms. Nielsen about the man on the beach, Ms. Nielsen has never heard of him.

  “He may have moved here recently,” Camilla says.

  “I would know that. This is a small community. News travels fast.”

  A chill draft steals through the room.

  Chapter 13

  The elevator is busy. Jo can hear people moving furniture a few floors up. Chances are that they have jammed the door of the elevator while filling the cabin with furniture and removal boxes. What else should people do when moving out of or into the high rise? She glances at her shopping bags and debates with herself: take the ninth floor by stairs or wait? Somebody scolds a child. The child starts crying big, hiccupping sobs. Jo ascends the stairs. The smell of rotting garbage is overwhelming. Remarkable how they can build sophisticated high rises of glass and steel, yet not design a garbage system that works, she thinks irritably as she has done countless times before, aware of designating blame to “they,” some nameless, faceless incompetents.

  Reaching her own floor just a little out of breath, she steps over a couple of children’s bicycles thrown carelessly in the hallway. Her apartment is halfway down the corridor. She jerks up the doorknob before turning the key. An essential act, for some reason, before the key will be allowed to turn. Then the tinny but loud jingle of a bell, just like the sound of the doorbell over the door to the bakery where her mum used to buy their bread.

  Her flat is her safe haven and one of the safest places in town. Located on the ninth floor in a building of glass, which requires rappelers to clean the windows, the only way into her flat is through her front door. If it should happen, against all odds, she will be warned of their entry by the tiny bells above the door, which—due to her training—is sure to wake her, even from a deep sleep. By her bedside, in an IKEA cabinet, she keeps three get-away packets in the cabinet, each containing passports, papers, and credit cards in different identities as well as cash in Euros and US dollars.

  The scent of lilies with an undercurrent of the cigarillos she smokes occasionally greets her as she opens the door. Is that the smell of home? Of belonging? Hardly. Just the smell of a big city apartment inhabited by a single woman in an unpredictable pattern.

  She places the two shopping bags on the counter, where one of them immediately tilts over and spills some of its contents. Her irritation grows. She flings open the refrigerator and stuffs vegetables, fruits, cheese, and eggs into the gaping, empty shelves. Ascetic foods for an ascetic life, she thinks, selecting an apple and polishing it on her jean-clad thigh and taking a bite.

  Having finished putting away her shopping, she goes into the bathroom and turns on the shower. With the economy of movement of a yogi, she undresses and leaves a pile of clothes in the middle of the room. For twenty minutes, until the bathroom is like a steam bath, she stays in the hot shower, first standing, then sliding down until she is sitting on the floor, leaned against the wall, arms wrapped around herself, the water pounding her skull, shoulders, arms, and knees.

  Are there tears? Who can tell? Even as a child, she went her own way, not needing the company of friends. She craved solitude, which might be one of the reasons she has fashioned her life this way.

  An image of her father pops into her mind…the man who has shaped her and yet had been an enigma to her. Gradually, over the years, she had pieced together a sketchy outline of her father’s secret life. She learned he secretly worked for the government and had played a not-insignificant role in the later stages of the Cold War. She has inherited his talent for concealment, and she has refined it to an art form, using make-up and the movements of her body to become different characters. Now, though, she is herself, her naked, vulnerable, lonely self…longing to be seen, longing to be taken care of, longing not to be the smartest or strongest in the room.

  Her phone rings. The new one.

  Turning the water off, she grabs a towel and hurries into the kitchen where the mobile is angrily expected to be answered.

  “Yes!”

  “It’s me. How did it go?”

  She recognizes Francis’s voice on the first syllable. “I couldn’t find anything to concern us in the countryside. I tramped around all afternoon and had tea with the three ladies.” Jo had privately questioned Francis’ instruction that she check out Camilla since his own mother was already keeping an eye on the young woman. But Jo had concluded that Francis, being his usual controlling self, simply wanted a second opinion.

  Francis had long ago ruled that they would use mobile phones to stay in touch on cases, but never mention names, locations, or any other characteristics. Since they had only one open case that had anything to do with the countryside, she knew he immediately would understand she was talking about Camilla and Brejning.

  “How did you manage tea?” he asks.

  “I was looking for property.”

  “In general?”

  “No. I had actually gone to see the small cottage just further up the road. It has been for sale for a while now.”

  “I know the one. Good thinking. And how did the youngest lady seem to you?”

  “Very quiet. She clearly did not want to engage in conversation.”

  “And physically?”

  “Pale, dark circles under her eyes. Her clothes sat loosely on her.”

  “Well done. And yesterday. How did that go?” Francis had arranged for her to interview the board and executive team at Asnerock, in the disguise of being a management consultant who should write a report on the Camilla Bang-Henriksen situation for the benefit of the shareholders. She had shown up in a dark dress suit, white silk shirt, and high heels. Her face was almost transformed by a tight bun and big horn-rimmed glasses. All business-like and impatiently interrupting people as she was jotting down notes in her black notebook.

  “Nothing. Lots of slandering and gossiping and backsta
bbing. Nobody else was involved. She acted alone.”

  “And who gave her away?”

  “None of those I interviewed. They were a bunch of self-optimizing assholes. But innocent in that respect.”

  “Hmm!”

  She knew his hmms. They indicated that somebody had gone too far. Had they sat in front of each other, he would have chastised her for her language. But had he sat in front of her, she would have gone into more details and wouldn’t have needed to speak in flashy, concluding headlines.

  “What are your conclusions, then? Who betrayed her?”

  “Somebody from the outside. I can only think of two possibilities. Either somebody is already after her, for whatever reason—love, money, whatever. That person might already have access to her phone, which as Thomas will tell you, is easy to do. And then that person just happened upon the exchange about the price change and knew he had hit gold.”

  “He?”

  “He. She. It. I don’t know.”

  “Hmm! The other possibility?”

  “Somebody from accounting or some other minion snitched.”

  “What do you think?”

  “My gut tells me the first. Somebody was already on her tail, but why? That, I don’t know.”

  He hangs up.

  Chapter 14

  “Mr. Scott-Wren, may I bring you another glass of tea?” asks the silken voice of a waiter, so beautiful that his face might have been amongst the statues in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.