‘Any day you wish.’
‘Good.’ My mind whirled as I looked down at my diary. Builders there from eight to four. ‘It suits Pathfinder best if they can come into Oslo after working hours. Horten’s a good hour’s drive away, so if we find a day this week at about six, would that be alright?’ I said it as lightly as I could, but my off-key tone grated.
‘Fine,’ said Greve, who didn’t seem to have picked up anything. ‘As long as it’s not tomorrow, that is,’ he added, getting to his feet.
‘That would be too short notice for them, anyway,’ I said. ‘I’ll ring the number you gave me.’
I escorted him out to reception. ‘Could you order a taxi, please, Da?’ I tried to read from Oda’s or Ida’s face whether she was comfortable with the abbreviation but was interrupted by Greve.
‘Thank you. I have my own car here. Regards to your wife, and I’ll wait to hear from you.’
He proffered his hand, and I shook it with a broad smile. ‘I’ll try to ring you tonight, because you’re busy tomorrow, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
I don’t know why I didn’t stop there. The rhythm of the conversation, the sense that an exchange was over told me that it was here I should say the closing ‘Goodbye’. Perhaps it was a gut feeling, a premonition; perhaps a terror that had already implanted itself in me, which made me extra careful.
‘Yeah, decoration is a pretty all-engrossing activity,’ I said.
‘It’s not that,’ he said. ‘I’m catching the early-morning plane to Rotterdam tomorrow. To get the dog. He’s been stuck in quarantine. I won’t be back until late evening.’
‘Oh yes,’ I said, releasing his hand so that he wouldn’t notice how I had stiffened. ‘What breed of dog is it?’
‘Niether terrier. Tracker dog. But as aggressive as a fighting dog. Good to have in the house when you have pictures like this up on the walls, don’t you think?’
‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘Indeed it is.’
A dog. I hated dogs.
‘I see,’ I heard Ove Kjikerud say at the other end of the line. ‘Clas Greve, Oscars gate 25. I’ve got the key here. Handover at Sushi &Coffee in an hour. The alarm is deactivated at seventeen hundred hours tomorrow. I’ll have to find a pretext for working in the afternoon. Why such short notice by the way?’
‘Because after tomorrow there’ll be a dog in the flat.’
‘OK. But why not during working hours, as usual?’
The young man in the Corneliani suit and geek-chic glasses came along the pavement towards the public telephone box. I turned my back on him to avoid a greeting and pressed my mouth closer to the receiver.
‘I want to be one hundred per cent sure that there are no builders there. So you ring Gothenburg this minute and ask them to get hold of a decent Rubens Reproduction. There are lots, but say that we must have a good one. And they must have it ready for you when you come with the Munch print tonight. It’s short notice, but it’s important that I have it for tomorrow, do you understand?’
‘OK, OK.’
‘And then you tell Gothenburg that you’ll be back with the original tomorrow night. Do you remember the name of the picture?’
‘Yes, The Catalonian Boar Hunt. Rubens.’
‘Close enough. You’re absolutely sure we can rely on this fence?’
‘Jesus, Roger. For the hundredth time, yes!’
‘I’m just asking!’
‘Listen to me now. The guy knows that if he pulls a fast one at any time, he’ll be out of the game for life. No one punishes thieving harder than thieves.’
‘Great.’
‘Just one thing: I’ll have to put off the second Gothenburg trip by a day.’
That was no problem, we had done it before; the Rubens would be safe inside the ceiling, but I could feel the hairs on my neck rising anyway.
‘Why’s that?’
‘I’ve got a visitor tomorrow evening. A dame.’
‘You’ll have to postpone it.’
‘Sorry, can’t.’
‘Can’t?’
‘It’s Natasha.’
I could hardly believe my ears. ‘The Russian harlot?’
‘Don’t call her that.’
‘Isn’t that what she is?’
‘I don’t call your wife a Barbie doll, do I?’
‘Are you comparing my wife with a tart?’
‘I said I didn’t call your wife a Barbie doll.’
‘All the better for you. Diana is a hundred per cent natural.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘Not at all.’
‘OK, I’m impressed. But I won’t be going tomorrow night all the same. I’ve been on Natasha’s waiting list for three weeks, and I want to film the session. Get it on tape.’
‘Film it? You’re taking the piss.’
‘I have to have something to look at before the next time. God knows when that’ll be.’
I laughed out loud. ‘You’re crazy.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘You’re in love with a whore, Ove! No real man can love a whore.’
‘What do you know about that?’
I groaned. ‘And what are you going to say to your beloved when you pull out a bloody camera?’
‘She’ll know nothing about it.’
‘Hidden camera in the wardrobe?’
‘Wardrobe? My house has total surveillance, man.’
Nothing Ove Kjikerud told me about himself could surprise me any longer. He had told me that when he wasn’t working, he mostly watched TV in his little place high up in Tonsenhagen, on the edge of a forest. And he liked to shoot at the screen if there was something he really didn’t care for. He had boasted about his Austrian Glock pistols, or ‘dames’ as he called them, because they didn’t have a hammer that stood up before ejaculation. Ove used blank cartridges to shoot at the TV, but once he had forgotten he had loaded a round of live ammunition and had shot a brand-new Pioneer plasma screen costing thirty thousand to smithereens. When he wasn’t shooting at the TV he took potshots through the window at an owl’s nesting box he himself had rigged up on a tree trunk behind the house. And one evening, sitting in front of the TV, he had heard something crashing through the trees, so he opened the window, took aim with a Remington rifle and fired. The bullet had hit the animal in the middle of the forehead, and Ove had had to empty the freezer, which was stuffed with Grandiosa pizzas. For the next six months it had been elk steaks, elk burgers, elk stew, elk meatballs and elk chops until he could stand it no longer and had emptied the freezer again and restocked it with Grandiosa. I found all these stories totally credible. But this one…
‘Total surveillance?’
‘There are certain fringe benefits to working at Tripolis, aren’t there?’
‘And you can activate the cameras without her noticing?’
‘Yep. I fetch her, we go into the flat, and if I don’t enter the password within fifteen seconds the cameras begin to work at Tripolis.’
‘And the alarm begins to howl in your flat?’
‘Nope. Silent alarm.’
Of course I was aware of the concept. The alarm just went off at Tripolis. The idea was not to frighten off the burglars while Tripolis rang the police, who were on the spot within fifteen minutes. The aim was to catch the thieves red-handed before they disappeared with the loot or, if this didn’t work, they could identify them on the video recordings.
‘I’ve told the boys on duty not to turn up, right. They can just sit back and enjoy the sight on the monitors.’
‘Do you mean to say the boys will be watching you and the Russ- Natasha?’
‘Have to share the delights, don’t I? But I have made sure the camera doesn’t show the bed, that’s a private area. But I’ll get her to undress at the foot of the bed, in the chair beside the TV, right. She’ll follow my stage directions, that’s the beauty of it. Get her to sit there touching herself. Perfect camera angle. I’ve done a bit of work on the lights. So that I can wank off-camera, right.’
Far too much information. I coughed. ‘Then you come and get the Munch tonight. And the Rubens the night after tomorrow, OK?’