Falling Sideways (31 page)
“Mr. Kampman was very unhappy about it.”
The girl glanced at the bracelet. “Yes, he was, I can see that.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“I won’t suggest a thing. I’m only here to return my key.” She clicked it down on the kitchen tabletop. “After all this, I’m happy not to be working here anymore. Your husband was not very polite when he drove me home the other evening.”
“Are you suggesting that he—”
“Mrs. Kampman, I am not suggesting anything at all. I am saying directly that he was not polite. He drove me to my door and he sat in his car for some time afterwards looking at my open window.”
Again their eyes locked, and the implication was clear. Martin could have seen the open window. He was certainly fit enough to climb onto a ground-floor window ledge. Karen could not help being impressed by the girl’s dignity, by her refusal to accuse directly, by her not lying about Adam. Yet this could also all very easily be calculated. The girl might be a schemer, an
intrigante.
For reasons she did not fully understand, she had not told Martin. When he came home from the office and asked whether the police had been by, she smiled and told him it hadn’t been necessary after all. “I found it.”
“Found what?”
“My bracelet. Here in the kitchen. I must have taken it off to do something and forgot about it.”
“Doesn’t sound like you.”
“Well. What else could it be?” She watched his face but saw nothing in it. She halfway expected him to suggest that Jytte had taken it but then lost her nerve and returned it. Somehow she hoped he would. It would be at least some kind of evidence or indication against him. But he said nothing.
“By the way,” she said, “Jytte came by to return her key. On her own accord. I thought that was admirable. Under the circumstances. So we won’t need the locksmith, either.”
“Let’s hope she didn’t have a copy made.”
Karen could see nothing in his face. She chuckled. “Every thief thinks everyone steals.”
“What?”
Now his eyes were cold, fixed on her.
“It’s just an expression, Martin. At least the bracelet is back and no one tried to steal it after all, so everything is fine.”
“Everything is fine? Is my son back?”
Now he fixed the stud to the collar button and stood back from the mirror to examine the effect. He lifted his white braces up onto his shoulders and adjusted them, fiddled with the cuff links on the starched French cuffs.
Is he watching me in the mirror?
she wondered. What was going on inside his mind? The placid, cool expression on his face seemed suddenly like some stranger’s, like a mask. Who
was
he? The envelope that the bracelet had been in was an ordinary one you could buy in the post office or a supermarket stationery section. Plain white, self-adhesive flap. The kind most everybody used. The kind
they
used. There was a bundle of them in the drawer of the telephone table downstairs. The cellophane had been torn open. One was missing. But she could not remember whether she had taken it. It was really too absurd to be thinking such things about him. Yet she remembered something else.
One evening after dinner, they sat with their coffee in front of the TV, watching the late news as was their custom. But this time Martin had taken three glasses of wine with dinner, very unusual for him, and he was talking more than usual. Entertaining her. He had her laughing and seemed to enjoy that. It was cozy. Then the commentator started interviewing a high executive from McKinney, and Martin said, “Ah! It’s Anders Madsen. I worked under him years ago. He taught me one of the most important lessons of my career.”
“What? What did he teach you?”
Martin glanced at her, a meditative smile on his lips, as though he were considering whether to say what he would say. “He taught me that if someone makes something difficult for you, you take the first opportunity to make it twice as difficult for him. It doesn’t matter what. And it isn’t important whether they know right off that it was you who did it. It will be known. The effect is cumulative. People know who they’re up against. They think twice.” He looked so pleased as he told her, his smile so expectant of her admiration and complicity in the revelation, that she mirrored his smile, not to hurt his feelings, not to deride the gift of his confidence. She chuckled. “You’re a tough guy all right.” And was touched by the rare openness of pleasure her admiration clearly mirrored in his own face—even if it was false admiration. But there were so many other things she had always admired about him.
Now he turned from the mirror, black butterfly in place at the throat of his pleated shirt, jacket roll-buttoned, immaculate white rectangle in his breast pocket, shiny stripe down the outer seams of his black tuxedo trousers, draped just so on glistening black shoes, gold wristwatch with crocodile band, ruffled shirt flat on his flat belly, his close-cropped hair immaculately brushed, faint scent of cologne from his lean jaw.
“The car will be here in ten minutes.”
She rose to display her long black Jaeger dress, piped with black spangles, black net gloves to the wrist, filmy dark shawl over her bare arms and shoulders.
“Elegant,” he said.
She could see nothing on his face.
In the D’Angleterre bar, half a dozen Tank personnel milled about inside the King’s New Square entrance, sipping Crémant, waiting for the others. Neither the guests of honor nor Jaeger had arrived yet, and Breathwaite kept an eye on both entries because the Irish delegation might very well appear from the sneaky little back door above the three-step stairway from the hotel lobby. Probably would, in fact. They were Kerrymen. Kerrymen were said to prefer to come up from behind so they could get ahead of you. Breathwaite had armed himself with a few such sayings in case they came in handy for the evening.
A Kerryman is the only person who can enter a swing door after you and come out first.
He had an idea, though he was never certain, that they enjoyed these things, unlike Århusians, who, it seemed to him, did not appreciate Copenhagen jokes about people from the Jutland capital.
How long does it take an Århusian to clean the basement windows? Three hours: one hour to dig the hole, one to find the ladder, and another to wash the windows.
Breathwaite considered springing that one on their jittery spin doctor, Ib Andersen, who hailed from Århus and was currently hopping around from couple to couple, dealing out witty comments no one could understand, while his wife trailed close behind, holding his arm like the string of a balloon that might float up and lodge itself against the ceiling.
Breathwaite mentally rehearsed another:
A Kerryman is standing on a country road, leaning against a fence, and a Rolls-Royce pulls up. The window lowers and a Brit in the backseat says, “My good man, can you tell me how to get to the Dingle Road?” The man scratches his head and says, “The Dingle Road. Well, let’s see now, you continue straight up this road, across the little bridge to the crossing where the great oak used to be, and … No, no, wait. You’ve got to back up here and turn around, drive about five miles toward the … No, no, no, that’s not it, either. You’ve got …” Whereupon the Brit says to his chauffeur, “Driver, move on, this man is obviously an idiot,” and the Kerryman says, “Well, sir, I may be an idiot, but you’re the one who’s lost!”
The PA system was playing Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds.” Breathwaite was worried. He had been on the phone with Kampman, and if Jaeger didn’t show, Kampman had threatened to let the spin doctor make the welcome speech, which would leave Breathwaite twice removed from the action. Kis was at his side, looking gorgeous in a narrow charcoal gray Jackie Kennedy–type cocktail dress. Breathwaite was trying to remember to keep his gut sucked in so as not to spread the lapels of his ruffled shirt across his belly, thinking that maybe he could make love to Kis later. He could try. She looked so good. She was holding her champagne glass by the edges of its base and snipped her fingernail against the bell. The ring was flat. She smiled at him, and he saw the smile was saying,
Cheap glass
. She had a valuable collection of antique glass herself.
“The glass expert,” he said to her. “You can see right through me.”
“And I like what I see. All the way through.”
“Think so?”
“Know so.”
Now Kampman stepped in with Karen on his arm, wearing his inscrutable smile. His wife looked elegant in a simple black dress, her tight blond curls, a simple gold necklace and bracelet. Breathwaite had always admired her. Kampman nodded, greeted the spin doctor, Birgitte Sommer, and her husband. Breathwaite recognized that the message was for him to go to the CEO if he wanted his existence to be acknowledged. He was not much for it, but thoughts of the job for Jes spurred him. He stepped across and smiled and had to put out his own hand and wait a moment before Kampman accepted it.
The edges of the CEO’s mouth spread into a narrow smile. “Do the Irish appreciate your hotel choice? An English hotel?”
“The Irish are pragmatic,” Breathwaite said. “They like it here.”
Kampman lifted one eyelid over his smile and chuckled, lifting and dropping his shoulders a couple of times. Breathwaite had never disliked the man but felt he was learning to. Then, from the corner of his eye, he saw the three Irish delegates appear at the top of the little stairway from the back door: Sean Cronin, Gussy Dunbar, and Anroi Dignam.
Breathwaite stepped quickly toward them and said loudly, “Three Kerrymen walk in the back door of a bar. The bartender says, ‘What’s this? A joke?’ ”
Cronin smiled with the edges of his little white teeth joined and giggled quietly. Gussy Dunbar gazed at him with a practiced look of bewilderment, while the twitch of Dignam’s lip was his smile. They shook hands all around as Sean Cronin told a story, smiling merrily:
“I had a lovely encounter with a beautiful young Danish woman today at an automobile rental office. It pleased me very much. As I was applying for the automobile, she inquired after my year of birth, and when I said 1943, she looked most skeptical and said gravely, ‘Oh, Mr. Cronin, I am thinking nineteen
fifty
-three.’ ” And he giggled merrily.
Gussy Dunbar continued to look bewildered, and Dignam leaned toward Breathwaite’s ear and muttered, “You will notice for the moment I am saying nothing.”
Cronin seized Kampman’s hand and exclaimed, “Ah, Morten, Morten, how good to see you again. Are you well?”
Kampman smiled his narrow smile. “Wery vell, sanks. And actually my name is Martin, not Morten.”
“Whatever made me say Morten? Well, it is good to be vell. Vell vell vell.”
Breathwaite was fearing the worst. No sign of Jaeger and Sean Cronin full of mischief. This whole thing could blow up in his face. Then he noticed that Sean was carrying what appeared to be a bottle wrapped in colorful paper, and the three Irishmen surrounded him while the company looked on.
Kampman, to Breathwaite’s surprise, struck the bell of his glass with the tines of a cocktail fork to call for silence.
“Now, Freddy,” Sean said, “we have heard the sad news that you have decided to withdraw from the Tank, and it has made us very sorrowful indeed. So sorrowful that we bought this bottle of spirits to cheer ourselves up. But then we got to thinking that, well, perhaps you will be sad at not seeing us anymore, either, so we decided to give the bottle to you instead.”
Breathwaite glanced at Kampman, who was smiling happily, then at Kis, whose mask, he could see, was close to slipping. The intensity of the hatred he felt for Kampman at that moment, for the pain and embarrassment he had caused Kis, was almost enough to make him throw it all over. But what could he do? He squeezed Kis’s hand. She returned the squeeze, but her blue eyes were hurt. He bent, smiling, to kiss her cheek and whispered, “It’s nothing. Don’t worry. I’ll explain,” cursing himself for not having done so earlier. He remembered then Kampman on the plane back from Dublin:
That’s it. Morticians. They’re the ones who bury dead people, right?
And felt the fury running down his arm toward his fist. He wanted to hammer it into that smug fucking face. But there was still Jes. That was a done deal. This was just an extra surcharge on the package.
At that moment, he glimpsed Jaeger drifting through the King’s New Square entry. He looked like hell. He was wearing not a tuxedo but a rumpled beige suit. His eyes were red, with gray puckered pouches sagging beneath them. There was a big, filthy bandage on one finger and something that looked like a glob of mayonnaise at the corner of his mouth, smeared into his obscene little red beard.
Breathwaite squeezed Kis’s hand again and reluctantly let it go as he moved over toward Jaeger. A strange-looking woman was trailing a few paces behind him and to one side, long and very thin, moving with slow, dreamy steps, her eyes fixed with dreamy tenderness on Jaeger’s profile. Breathwaite, smiling, said softly, “Got a handkerchief? Wipe the right corner of your mouth … Again!… More.” Then, “Do you remember the speech? Yeats. Not
Yeets
but
Yates
. William Butler. ‘Wine comes in at the mouth / And love comes in at the eye …’ ”
“I remember, I got it down,” Jaeger said, and his breath reeked of beer and mustard.
Breathwaite glanced at the strange woman, not certain whether to greet her, but she crossed to the bar and took a glass of Crémant from the tray held by a black-liveried waitress. She perched on a stool at the bar, crossing her thin legs so you could see clear up to Christmas. Breathwaite had Jaeger by the elbow, steering him toward the Irishmen. “Give it five minutes before you speak,” he whispered. “I’ll give the signal.”
They moved past Birgitte Sommer, whose arms were twined around her husband’s one arm, while he—Lars was his name, Breathwaite remembered—glared with narrow eyes at Jaeger.
Jaeger pumped Irish hands as Breathwaite washed down his bitterness with Crémant and introduced Jaeger as his successor, his left arm around Kis, massaging the nub of her shoulder. Bewildered Gussy Dunbar seemed to see Kis for the first time; he seized her hand and kissed it, gazing intensely into her eyes. “You are a magnificent figure of a woman,” he murmured, while Dignam muttered to Breathwaite, “Nothing spoken, no regret.”