by Willow Rose
Now, after dropping off my daughter at her new school and smoking two cigarettes in anxiety for my daughter’s first day, I found myself at my new workplace.
“You must be Rebekka Franck. Welcome to our editorial room,” said a sweet elderly lady sitting at one of the two desks piled high with stacks of paper. I looked around the room and saw no one else. The room was a mess, and so was she. Her long red hair went in all directions. She had tried to tame it with a butterfly hair clip, but it didn’t seem to do the job. She got up and waddled her chubby body in a flowered yellow dress over to greet me.
“I’m Sara,” she said. “I’m in charge of all the personal pages. You know, the obituaries and such. People come to me if they need to put in an announcement for a reception or a 50-year anniversary celebration. Stuff like that. That’s what I do.”
I nodded and looked confused at all the old newspapers in stacks on the floor.
“You probably would like to see your desk.”
I nodded again and smiled kindly. “Yes, please.”
“It’s right over there.” Sara pointed at the other desk in the room. Then she looked back at me, smiling widely. “It’s just going to be the two of us.”
I smiled back, a little scared of the huge possibility of going insane in the near future. I knew it was a small newspaper that covered all of Zeeland, and that this would only be the department taking care of the local news from Karrebaeksminde. But still … two people. Could that be all?
“Do you want to see the rest of your new workplace?” Sara asked and I nodded.
She took a couple of steps to the right and opened a door. “In here we have a small kitchen with a coffeemaker and the bathroom.”
“Let me guess. That’s it?” I tried not to sound too sarcastic. This was really a step down for me, to put it mildly.
Sara sat down and put on a set of headphones. I moved a stack of newspapers and found my chair underneath. I opened my laptop and up came a picture of Julie, me, and her dad on our trip to Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt. We all wore goggles and big smiles. Quickly I closed the lid of the laptop and closed my eyes.
Damn him, I thought. Damn that stupid moron.
I got up from the desk and went into the break room to grab a cup of coffee. I opened the window and lit a cigarette. For several minutes I stared down at the street. A few people rushed by. Otherwise it was a sleepy town compared to where I used to live. I thought about my husband and returning to Aarhus, but that was simply not an option for me. I had to make it here.
I drank the rest of the coffee and killed my cigarette on the bottom of the mug. Then I closed the window and stepped back into the editorial room.
I need to clean this place up, I thought but then regretted the idea. It was simply too much work for one person for now. Maybe another day. Maybe I could persuade Sara to help me. I looked at her with the gigantic headphones on her ears. It made her face look even fatter. It was too bad that she was so overweight. She actually had a pretty face and attractive brown eyes. She looked at me and took off the headphones.
“What are you listening to?” I asked and expected that it was a radio station or a CD of her favorite music. But it wasn’t.
“It’s a police scanner,” she said.
I looked at her surprised. “You have a police scanner?”
She nodded.
“I thought police everywhere in the country had shifted from traditional radio-scanners to using a digital system.”
“Maybe in your big city, but down here we still use the old-fashioned ones.”
“What do you use it for?”
“It is the best way to keep track of what is happening in this town. I get my best stories to tell my neighbors from this little fellow,” she said while she leaned over gave the radio a friendly tap. “We originally got this baby for journalistic purposes, in order to be there when a story breaks, like a bank has been robbed or something like that. But the past five or six years nothing much has happened in our town, so it hasn’t brought any stories to the newspaper. But I sure have a lot of fun listening to it.”
She leaned over her desk with excitement in her brown eyes.
“Like the time when the mayor’s wife got caught drunk in her car. That was great. Or when the police were called out to a domestic dispute between the pastor and his wife. As it turned out she had been cheating on him. Now that was awesome.”
I stared at the woman in front of me and didn’t know exactly what to say. Instead I just smiled and started walking back to my desk, when she stopped me.
“Ah, yes I forgot. We are not all alone. We do have a photographer working here too. He only comes in when there’s a job for him to do. His name is Sune Johansen. He looks a little weird, but you’ll learn to love him. He’s from a big city too.”
Chapter Two
Didrik Rosenfeldt thought of a lot of things when he got out of the car and went up the stairs to his summer residence. He thought about the day he just had. The board meeting in his investment company went very well. He fired 3000 people in his windmill company early in the afternoon without even blinking. The hot young secretary gave him a blow job in his office afterwards. He thought about his annoying wife who kept calling him all afternoon. She was having a charity event this upcoming Saturday and kept bothering him with stupid details, as if she would ever be sober enough to go through it. Didn’t she know by now that he was too busy to deal with that kind of stuff? He was humming when he reached the door to the house by the sea.
A tune ran through his head, his favorite song since he was a kid. “Money makes the world go round. A mark, a yen, a buck, or a pound. That clinking clanking sound can make the world go ‘round.” Didrik sighed and glanced back at his shiny new silver Jaguar. Money did indeed make the world go around. And so did he.
A lot of thoughts flitted through Didrik’s head when he put the key in the old hand-carved wooden door and opened it. But death was not one of them.
“You!” was his only word when his eyes met the ones belonging to a guy he remembered from school. A boy really, he always thought of him. The boy had nerve to be sitting in his new leather chair—“The Egg” designed by Arne Jacobsen—and wearing his despicable grubby old blazer from the boarding school. The boy was about to make a complete fool of himself. Didrik shut the door behind him with a bang.
“What do you want”? He placed his briefcase on the floor, took off his long black coat and hung it on a hanger in the entrance closet. He sighed and looked at the man with pity.
“So”?
All the girls at Herlufsholm boarding school had whispered about the boy when he first arrived there in ninth grade. Unlike most of the rich high-society boys, including Didrik Rosenfeldt who was both fat and red headed, the boy was a handsome guy. He had nice brown hair and the most sparkling blue eyes. He was tall and the hard work he used to do at his dad’s farm outside of Naestved had made him strong and muscular and Didrik and his friends soon noticed that the girls liked that … a lot.
The boy wasn’t rich like the rest of them. In fact his parents had no money. But in a strange way that made him exotic to the girls. The poor countryside boy, the handsome stranger from a different culture who might take them away from their boring rich lives. They thought he could rescue them from ending up like their rich drunk mothers. How his parents were able to afford the extremely expensive school, no one knew. Some said he was there because his mother used to do it with the headmaster, but Didrik knew that wasn’t true. This boy’s family was—unlike everybody else’s at the school—hardworking, earnest people. The kind who people like Didrik had no respect for whatsoever, the kind his father would exploit and then throw away. He and his type were expendable. They were workers. And that made it even more fun to pretend he would be the boy’s friend.
Despite that he was younger than they were, they had from time to time accepted him as their equal in the brotherhood.
But because of his background he would always fall through
. And they would laugh at him behind his back, even sometimes to his face. Like the time when they were skeet shooting on Kragerup Estate, and Didrik put a live cat in the catapult. Boy, they had their fun telling that story for weeks after. How the poor pretty boy had screamed, when he shot the kitty and it fell bleeding to the ground. What a wimp.
“So, what do you want? Can’t you even say anything? Are you that afraid of me?” Didrik said arrogantly.
The pretty boy stood up from the $7000 chair and took a step toward him, his right hand hidden behind his back. Didrik sighed again. He was sick and tired of this game. It led nowhere and he was wasting his time. Didrik was longing to get into his living room and get a glass of the fine $900 cognac he just imported from France. He was not going to let a stupid poor boy from his past get in the way of that. That was for certain. He loosened his tie and looked with aggravation at the boy in front of him.
“How did you even get in here?”
“Smashed a window in the back.”
Didrik snorted. Now he would have to go through the trouble to get someone out here to fix it tonight.
“Just tell me what you want, boy.”
The pretty blue eyes stared at him.
”You know exactly what I want.”
Didrik sighed again. Enough with these games! Until now he had been patient with this guy. But now he was about to feel the real Rosenfeldt anger. The same anger Didrik’s dad used to show when Didrik’s mother brought him into his study and he would beat Didrik half to death with a fire poker. The same anger that his dad used to show the world that it was the Rosenfeldts who made the decisions. Everybody obeyed their rules because they had the money and the power.
“You’re making a fool of yourself. Just get out of here before I call someone to get rid of you. I’m a very powerful man, you know. I can have you killed just by pressing a number on my phone,” he said taking out a black iPhone from his pocket.
“I know very well how powerful you and your family are. But we are far away from your thugs; and I will have killed you by the time they get here.”
Didrik put the phone back in his pocket. He now sensed the boy was more serious than he first anticipated.
“Do you want to kill me? Is that it?”
“Yes.”
Didrik laughed out loud. It echoed in the hall. The boy did not seem intimidated. That frightened him.
“Don’t be ridiculous. You are such a fool. A complete idiot. You always were.” Didrik snorted. “Look at you. You look like a homeless person in that old school blazer. Your clothes are all dirty. And when did you last shave? What happened to you?”
“You did. You and your friends. You ruined my life.”
Didrik laughed again. This time not nearly as loud and confident.
“Is it that old thing you are still sobbing about?”
“How could I not be?”
“Come on. It happened twenty-five years ago. Christ, I didn’t even come up with the idea.” Didrik snorted again. “Pah! You wouldn’t dare to kill me. Remember I am a nobleman and you are nothing but a peasant who tried to be one of us for a little while. You can take the boy away from the farm but you can’t take the farm out of the boy. You have always been nothing but a stupid little farmer boy.”
Didrik watched the boy lift his right hand, revealing a thing from his past, something he couldn’t forget. With a wild expression in his eyes, he then moved the blades of the glove and took two steps in Didrik’s direction with them all pointing at him. . It scared the shit out of him. It had been years since he last saw the glove and thought it had been lost. But the pretty boy had found it. Now the game was in the boy’s court.
“I can give you money.” Desperately, he clung to what normally saved him in troubled times. ”Is it money you want? I could call my secretary right now and make a transfer.”
He took out the iPhone again.
“I could give you a million. Would that be enough? Two million? You could buy yourself a nice house, maybe get some nice new clothes, and buy a new car.”
The boy in front of him finally smiled showing his beautiful bright teeth. Phew! Money had once again saved him. At least he thought. But only for a second.
”I don’t want your blood money.”
Didrik didn’t understand. Who in the world would say no to money? ”But …”
”I told you. I want you dead. I want you to suffer just as I have been for twenty-five years. I want you to be humiliated like I was.”
Didrik sighed deeply. “But why now?”
“Because your time has run out.”
“I don’t understand.”
The boy with the pretty blue eyes stepped closer and now stood face to face with Didrik. The four claws on his hand were all pointing towards Didrik’s head. The boy’s eyes were cold as ice, when he said the words that made everything inside Didrik Rosenfeldt shiver: “The game is over.”
Chapter Three
Lari Soerensen enjoyed her job as a housekeeper for the Rosenfeldt family. Not that she liked Mr. Rosenfeldt in particular but she liked taking care of his summer residence by the sea. They barely ever used it, only for a few weeks in the summer and whenever Mr. Rosenfeldt had one of his affairs with a local waitress or his secretary. He would escape to the house in Karrebaeksminde for “a little privacy” as he called it.
But otherwise there wasn’t much work in keeping the house clean, and Lari Soerensen could do it at her own pace. She would turn on the music in the living room and sing while she polished the parquet floor. She would eat of the big box of chocolate in the kitchen. She would take the money in the ashtrays and the coins lying on the shelves and put it in her pocket knowing the family would never miss it. Sometimes she would even use the phone to call her mother in the Philippines, which normally was much too expensive for her. Her Danish husband didn’t want to pay for her phone calls to her family anymore, and since he took all the money she got from cleaning people’s houses, she couldn’t pay for the calls herself.
It was a cold but lovely morning as she walked pass the port and glanced at all the yachts that would soon be put back in the water when spring arrived. All the rich people would go sailing and drinking on their big boats.
She took in a breath of the fresh morning air. She had three houses to clean today and she would begin with Mr. Rosenfeldt’s since he probably wouldn’t be there. It was only five thirty, and the city had barely awakened. Everything was so quiet, not even a car.
She had taken a lot of time to get used to living in the little kingdom of Denmark. Being from the Philippines, she was used to a warmer climate and people in her homeland were a lot more open and friendly than what she experienced here. Not that they were not nice to her—they were. But it was hard for her to get accustomed to the fact that people didn’t speak to you if they didn’t know you. If she would talk to a woman in the supermarket she would answer briefly and without looking at Lari. It wasn’t impolite; it was custom. People were busy and had enough in themselves.
But once people got to know somebody they would be very friendly. They wouldn’t necessarily stop and talk if they met in the street. Often they were way too busy for that, but they would smile. And Lari would smile back, feeling accepted in the small community. If people became friends with someone they might even invite them to dinner and would get very drunk, and then the Danes wouldn’t stop talking until it was early in the morning. They would tell a lot of jokes and laugh a lot. They had a strange sense of humor that she had to get used to. They used sarcasm all the time, and she had a hard time figuring out when they actually meant what they said or when they were just joking.
But Lari liked that they laughed so much. She did too. Smiled and laughed. That’s how she got by during the day, the month, the year. That’s what she did when the rich white man from Denmark came to her house in the Philippines and told her mother, that he wanted to marry Lari and take her back to Denmark and pay the family a lot of money for her. That’s what she did wh
en she signed the paperwork and they were declared married and she knew her future was saved. She smiled when she got on the plane with her ugly white husband who wore clogs and dirty overalls. She even smiled when he showed her into the small messy house that hadn’t been cleaned for ages and told her that was her new home. That her job would be to cook and clean and be available to him at any time. She was still smiling, even at the end of the day when she handed over the money that she earned from housecleaning while her husband sat at home and was paid by the government to be unemployed. And when Mr. Rosenfeldt grabbed her and took her into his bed and had oral sex with her she still smiled.
Yes, Lari Soerensen always smiled. And she still did today when she unlocked the door to Mr. Rosenfeldt’s summer residence.
But from that moment on she would smile no more.
Chapter Four
I awoke feeling like I was lying under a strange comforter in a foreign place in an unknown city. Slowly my memory came back to me, when I looked at my sleeping daughter in the bed next to me. When I came home from work she told me the first day of school had been a little tough. The teachers were nice, but the other kids in the class didn’t want to talk to her and she had spent the day alone and made no new friends. I told her she would be fine, that it would soon be better, but inside I was hurting. This was supposed to be a fresh start for the both of us, a new beginning. I now realized it wouldn’t go as smoothly as I had hoped.
My dad had prepared a nice breakfast for us when we came downstairs. Coffee, toast and eggs. Soft boiled for me and scrambled for Julie. We dove into the food.
Before mom died he wouldn’t go near the kitchen, except to eat, but things had changed since then. He’s actually gotten pretty good at cooking, I thought while secretly observing him from the table. Ever since his fall down the stairs last year, he had to use a cane, but he still managed to get around the kitchen and cook for us.
