“This is it, Hardy. Show Carl what you can do!” cried Morten.
–
Carl was still giddy with joy. The sight of Hardy propelling himself forward with a broad smile had reduced them all to tears.
The hugs and the heartfelt words of congratulation seemed like they would go on forever. As of today, a new era had announced its arrival at Carl’s house. Nothing less could describe it. Carl laid his head back on his pillow and tried to fall asleep, but couldn’t. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Hardy’s happy face and the empty bed in the living room. He sighed at the thought of all the things they could do together now, if only he could live up to it.
After another half hour spent musing about Hardy and the future, he reached out for the stack of junk mail he’d brought upstairs and tossed on to the duvet beside him.
A bit of consumer surfing and he’d be asleep in no time.
Much better than counting sheep, at any rate, he thought, sifting through the offers.
Then suddenly, in among the supermarket ads, there was a postcard.
Who in the world would ever send them a postcard? It had to be to Mika or Morten, surely. Maybe one of their friends who’d been at the party and just wanted to say thanks.
He looked at the name and saw it was his own. Only then did he notice that, besides the name and address, there was nothing written on the card. Instead, there was a little snippet of a text stuck on with glue:
The special exhibition of African jewelry was quite remarkable. The selection of handmade rings, bracelets and necklaces…
That was all. The rest was snipped off.
A wry smile appeared on Carl’s lips.
“Well, I’ll be…,” he said to himself, conjuring up the image of a boy with nut-brown skin.
He turned the card over and stared at the motif for a long time.
Aalborg Tower-more than just a view, read the caption.
EPILOGUE
Autumn 2012
“You’re not leaving already, are you, Richard?”
She turned herself over on the sheet, displaying her body from every angle as the hair under her arms quivered in the breeze stirred up by the fan on the ceiling.
“Look. Wouldn’t you like to put your tongue in here?” she coaxed, drawing the tip of her finger around her navel and arching her back.
He smiled and tossed two hundred-dollar bills onto the sheet beside her. She’d been one of the better ones, but once was enough. There were other fish in the sea, as they said. Plenty of them.
“Oh, Richard, two hundred! You’re so good to me!” she purred, fluttering the banknotes across her nipples. “Come again. Soon!”
The air outside was exceptionally dry, and the heat rose from the street in waves. Even the street vendors were dabbing their brows with greasy kerchiefs.
But René wasn’t bothered by the heat. A year and a half spent in ten different South American countries had taught him how to cope with a climate where most people from northern latitudes were forced to give up.
It was all a matter of listening to one’s body. Plenty of liquids, pauses in air-conditioned bars, elegant, airy clothing, helicopter journeys where others went by car, horseback rides where others were forced to trek. Throughout South America these amenities were there for the taking. Paraguay, Bolivia, Guyana. Wherever he traveled, there wasn’t a country where status and money couldn’t provide him with whatever he wanted.
René stretched and squinted up at the sun. It was still too early for his siesta; time for a quick manicure and perhaps a bit of shopping to see if anything caught his fancy. It usually did him a world of good.
A woman smiled to him from the sidewalk and waited a moment to see if he would take her up on the offer, but René was sated.
Since getting his dental implants and chestnut-brown hair transplant and having the bags removed from under his eyes, he looked like a million dollars, all set off by a deep copper tan. All those years of passionless embraces and dutiful sex were now definitively a thing of the past.
Maracay wasn’t among the most beautiful towns in Venezuela to hang out in, but it was here the women gave him the most value for money.
He nodded to himself. By now he’d become so accustomed to his new status that he had to sit and concentrate for a long time to recall how it had all come about.
He knew that theoretically there could be a warrant out for his arrest, but it didn’t worry him. If all traces of him had not been entirely erased by the blaze at Brage-Schmidt’s place, which he felt sure they had, he could always relocate. He never spent too long in one place, anyway. His next stop would be Uruguay, where it was said the women were absolutely stunning. Once he’d been to all the South American countries whose infrastructure seemed least forbidding, he would move on to Asia.
René intended to age in style. Slowly, and for a long, long time. All he had to do was look after himself.
He certainly had the means. The Curaçao stocks were worth a lot more than he had ever envisaged, so regardless of how extravagant his lifestyle was, he had more than enough money to keep him going for the rest of his days and then some.
He turned a corner onto one of the main thoroughfares, inhaling the scent of wealth and suitable company in the comfortable certainty that it was here he belonged.
A shop with a marble facade and armored glass prompted him to stop. It wasn’t the first time he’d walked past it, but this time he decided to go in. The Elephant Automatic watch by Fabien Cacheux was exactly what he was looking for. This subtle combination of simplicity and daring and the exceedingly brazen design of the strap appealed to him, as did the sign in the window that discreetly but firmly drew the attention of inquisitive souls to the fact that only eleven of this model existed in the entire world. For the modest sum of $47,300, René decided it was now time to become a member of this very exclusive club.
He smiled indulgently as he watched the reflections in the window of those less fortunate who could only stare at the timepiece. He turned around toward them and nodded to a man across the street who stood waiting for a bus, wearing an abundant overcoat that seemed completely out of place in all the heat.
There was a time when he’d been like that himself.
When he came out with the watch on his wrist and his old Tag Heuer in a little box in a plastic bag, he felt wealthier and better equipped than ever before. Tomorrow, when he drove the two hours to Choroní Beach for a loving farewell with Yosibell, a woman capable of more than most, he would allow her slender, red fingernails to stroke his watch strap.
And then it would be good-bye, Venezuela.
He noted that the man was still waiting at the bus stop as he strolled by the next shops along the street. But South America was like that. Sometimes everything functioned to excess and buses came hard on each other’s heels like stampeding animals. Other times one might just as well forget about it and walk.
Which apparently was what the man finally decided to do. But it was strange that he should choose to walk off in the opposite direction from that in which the bus ran, René thought as he turned down a side street that last time he was here had smelled so delightfully of perfume mixed with hibiscus, freesia and pitahaya that he had almost swooned.
By now the afternoon siesta had descended heavily upon the narrow street. Shutters were closed, behind which folks were in the process of eating or napping.
Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that he and the man in the overcoat were the only ones left on the street, and at the moment the man was gaining on him.
Easy now, René told himself, and then recalled how the waiter at the hotel the evening before last had suddenly asked him if the accent that flavored his English was Scandinavian, possibly Danish, because he’d once had a girlfriend from over there and she spoke the same way. And when René had said no, he’d done so rather harshly. After that, the waiter had had his eye on him.