The Marco Effect: A Department Q Novel (49 page)

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.

Of course he had switched hotels, but not his name. So what good had it done?

Now the man in the coat was walking a mere twenty or thirty meters behind him, so René walked faster. Ahead lay another three or four narrow streets that led up to one of the wide avenidas, so all he had to do was keep up a good pace.

Then all of a sudden he had the impression he’d seen this man before. Was he the one who’d been standing at the counter in the police station when he had given a statement about a minor traffic accident on Calle Marino? Were they starting to catch on, in spite of everything? The thought sent a shudder down his spine.

Now he began to run, and despite his age and years of total physical inactivity, a personal trainer and a routine of early-morning jogging on the beaches had given his legs new life, enabling him to dart around corners and down a narrow alley without his pursuer being able to keep up.

Feeling victorious and quite pleased with himself, he hid behind a stack of cardboard boxes and promised himself he would forget about Yosibell at Choroní Beach and grab a flight south that very evening.

He stayed there for a while, until feeling certain the man was caught up in the lattice of small streets and had lost the scent.

But as he stepped out, there the man was at the end of the lane, aiming a gun at him.

His panicked brain screamed for a solution. Police salaries were miserable and René had the means to sort things out. So he approached the man, intending to make a deal.

But as he was about to put forward his proposal, the man instructed him to take off his watch and hand it to him.

René was startled. Had he fled from a simple thief? Was that all this was about? With ill-concealed annoyance he unfastened the timepiece, thinking the son of a bitch had no idea he was now in possession of something only ten other people in the world owned. May it put a curse on him.

“The bag, too,” said the man, pointing the barrel of his gun at the plastic bag containing René’s old Tag Heuer.

He handed it over.

“And your wallet.”

Dammit. This was getting out of hand and was going to cause him a lot of bother, cancelling credit cards and waiting around for new ones. He was going to be here longer than he’d wanted.

“C’mon,” said the man impatiently, eyes following René’s hand as he reached into his inside pocket and handed him his alligator skin wallet.

The man opened it, satisfying himself that it was full of credit cards and plenty of bolívars and dollars.

The fucking bastard just stood there smiling at him. Had it not been for the gun, he would have given him the same treatment he gave Brage-Schmidt’s black slave.

“Now the cell phone,” he said.

No, goddammit, nothing more. That was it.

“Sorry, I haven’t got one,” René said.

The man seemed not to believe him.

“Give it to me now,” he said.

“I’ve already told you I haven’t got one. I’ve given you everything else, so if I had a phone I’d give you that, too. I’m not stupid.”

The man frisked him quickly, but missed the back pocket where his phone was.

“OK, so you don’t have a cell phone,” he said. Then he stepped back and for a moment looked like he was about to shoot. But instead he smiled toothlessly. “You’ve been cooperative, so I’m letting you go. Not everyone is that lucky.”

He began retreating backward, and as he reached the end of the alleyway, he stuck the pistol into his pocket and disappeared around the corner.

And at that moment the phone rang.

René reached instantly into his pocket and muted the ringtone. Then he put the phone to his ear.

“Hey, Richard, it’s Yosibell. The water up here is as clear as glass and my skin is moist. When will you be here?”

He was about to answer that he might be delayed, but he never got that far.

“You told me you had no cell phone!” a voice yelled from the far end of the lane, footsteps picking up speed.

René looked back over his shoulder. The man stopped a few meters away from him. Heart pounding, he turned and stared into the man’s eyes. They were totally calm, tranquil almost, just like the hand pointing the gun at him.

“You know what?” he said coldly. “I hate people like you. People who lie.”

He shook his head, rather like an exasperated father scolding a naughty child.

“So now you have to pay the price,” he said, and fired the gun.

René heard Yosibell’s voice berating him as he fell to the ground.

The last thing René E. Eriksen sensed was the pounding of heavy footsteps on the ground next to him. And then, finally, the phone being eased from his
hand.

I would like to thank my tireless and patient wife, Hanna, for keeping my nose to the grindstone and helping me through the long process of writing. Thanks to our marvelous assistant, Elisabeth Ahlefeldt-Laurvig, for her research and innumerable talents. Thanks to Kjeld Skærbæk for transport and all manner of help. Thanks also to Eddie Kiran, Hanne Petersen, Micha Schmalstieg, and Karlo Andersen for valuable and insightful comments, and to my inestimable editor, Anne C. Andersen, for her keen eye, boundless energy reserves, and overview. Thanks to Karsten Dybvad and Anne G. Jensen for showing me around Copenhagen’s House of Industry in the early stages of its conversion. Thanks to Gitte and Peter Q. Rannes of the Danish Centre for Writers and Translators at Hald Hovedgaard for their hospitality. Thanks to Peter Garde for use of his magnificent house in Kera, Crete. Thanks to the girls of the Maeva publishing house in Barcelona for their sterling efforts in various situations, to Mathilde Sommeregger for purchase of a writing desk and rental of an swivel chair, and to Alba for recovering my lost suitcase with the book’s synopsis and all my research inside it. Thanks to Gordon Alsing for use of his retreat in Liseleje. Thanks to Police Superintendent Leif Christensen for corrections relating to police matters, as well as to Police Superintendent and Press Coordinator Lars-Christian Borg. Thanks to physiotherapist Mette Andresen and to Leo Poulsen of the Royal Library in Copenhagen.

Special thanks go to Henning Kure for his fantastic editorial work, cutting and trimming and thereby giving me back my enthusiasm and clear-sightedness when it was most needed.

Thanks to Dirk Henning for his hospitality in Yaoundé. Thanks to our
guide, Louis Fon, who has given name to one of the characters in this book; to my friend and traveling companion Jesper Helbo; and our nine strong and good-humored scouts, as well as to our Bantu ranger and cook for an amazing expedition into the Da jungle of Cameroon.

With the publication of this novel, adlerolsen.de has provided support to the Baka Sunrise Association in recognition of that foundation’s important efforts to provide schooling to the children of the Baka people.

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