They had known one another for thirty years, came from the same little village in the mountains; they were childhood friends. Still, he had never won the great man’s trust, other than as a friend, as a link to the past. Nonetheless, he accepted his role as a reserve without hesitation, his role as a substitute, as a surrogate. Even that was an honour.
He called him ‘the great man’. It was natural. But he never said it aloud. Doing so sounded pathetic, corny. But in his mind, his boss was never called anything other than ‘the great man’. There, it was anything but pathetic.
When the language changed once more, he decided that it was precisely this multilingualism which he admired most of all in his boss – it was there that he was ‘the great man’. This multilingualism was a requirement for his sprawling international business.
On the other hand, there were parts of the business that he just couldn’t come to terms with. The fact that the great man knew all too well how he felt about these areas was probably the main reason why he had never been part of the inner circle. Before now, when there was no other choice.
When it was also those parts of the business which had caused the problem.
The language now being spoken was fairly familiar. The gestures had become cockily natural. As though it was his mother tongue.
It was Swedish.
He realised that it was the ‘security consultants’ on the line.
‘Yes,’ the great man said from behind the desk, spinning round in the leather chair to look out of the window. ‘I understand. And you have no idea where he is? No. OK. That makes the situation unstable to say the least. Yes, the material may well be on the way and then we’ll have a real disaster on our hands. So in spite of everything, we’ve got to trust his greed. It’s the most reliable thing we’ve got. We’ve got to trust that he’s waiting until we’ve calmed things down. And that means we’ve got to find the briefcase fast. Number-one priority. Yeah, yeah, full throttle. Speak soon.’
The leather chair span 180 degrees. For the first time, his eyes were on the doorway. When the next exchange began, it was finally directed at the man by the door. And the language was that which had, at one point in time, had the courage to call itself Serbo-Croat.
‘Ljubomir,’ said the great man, waving him over. ‘No trace?’
Ljubomir strode across the large study, meeting the other man’s piercing gaze and shaking his head.
‘And the money’s really stuck?’ the great man continued.
‘Yes. It was probably a mistake letting Jovan open the bank account. Now that he’s dead, we don’t have either the key or the identification papers. The money’s stuck. Unless we rob the bank.’
The great man frowned slightly; that didn’t bode well.
‘We may be childhood friends, Ljubomir,’ he said softly, ‘but remember that you should never, and I mean never, say what was or wasn’t a mistake. That’s way beyond your authority. You should just arrange everything I ask. That’s your only job.’
Ljubomir looked down at the desk.
‘Have you got it?’ the great man asked.
Ljubomir nodded and placed a backpack on the desk. He opened the zip and pulled out a two-way radio. The great man contemplated it, and said: ‘Frequency?’
‘It’s programmed. It’s ready to go. Just press the button next to the microphone.’
That gaze again. And then, ice cooclass="underline" ‘I know how a two-way radio works.’
The great man sat quietly for a moment, the radio raised. In the few seconds which followed, Ljubomir imagined that he saw the great man’s true essence; it swept across his face like an icy north wind, tightening his features. The man about to speak was someone different. A ruler. A master. The most terrifying adversary you could imagine.
He pressed the button and changed languages once more. With clear, almost pedagogic emphasis, the great man began, in Swedish.
‘This is a message for the person who stole my briefcase. You know that I will find you, and you know what will happen then. To know roughly what will happen requires no more than a minimum amount of imagination. But not even the most well-developed imagination is enough to know exactly. So give the briefcase back now. If you think about it, it’s in everyone’s interests.’
Then he switched language once more, and repeated the tirade in English. Word for word.
Ljubomir shuddered.
He hoped it wasn’t obvious.
They were in bed again. He was pale, she was dark, and they were finally sleeping.
After the longest night of their short lives, they had fallen asleep in an embrace, still joined, as one. The morning sun was shining through the lowered blinds, and although it was almost thirty degrees in the tiny flat, neither of them had rolled away from the other. They refused to separate.
But soon it would be necessary.
It wasn’t what they had planned.
After they had practically danced over the threshold into the room, he had unpacked the champagne, torn off the foil, loosened the wire around the cork and prepared himself. She had gone into the bathroom and carefully cleaned the briefcase. Not a speck of blood could be left behind when they opened it. She came back out and they kissed briefly before she placed the briefcase on the table beside the champagne glasses. He was ready, holding the cork firmly in his right hand.
She lifted the lid of the briefcase.
No bundles of money.
Not a penny.
Only a key and a two-way radio, each in an individual holder.
The champagne cork popped by itself. It smashed the mirror in the hallway. Seven years’ bad luck. As though to finish the job, he threw the bottle after it. The neighbours banged on the ceiling.
He cried.
But she thought.
She was already thinking. It had always been her only defence mechanism.
She lifted the key from its little holder, turning it over and over. There was a number engraved on it. 401.
‘Safe-deposit box,’ she said. ‘Box 401.’
‘A safe-deposit box, for fuck’s sake,’ he whined. ‘Where the hell is it, though? Kiruna? Paris? Guatemala?’
‘Can you make a copy of it?’ she asked, reaching for paper and a pen and jumping onto the bed.
His desperation was knocked off course. He could see the purposefulness in her, the thing which had led them there, and it put a stop to his self-destructive streak. Reorientated it. Towards something constructive. Like it had done so many times before.
‘You know I can,’ he said honestly.
‘Can you do it now?’ she asked, starting to write a list on the piece of paper.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I can.’
‘Get going then,’ she said.
He took the key and went over to the walk-in cupboard where he had set up his workshop. Before he opened the door, he said: ‘What’re you doing?’
‘I’m trying to remember all the places he does business. It’s our only chance.’
He nodded and went into his compact little workshop. She stayed on the bed, writing. They worked like that through the night, each of them busy with their own task. Finally, the key was ready and the list was written. Then they could finally be united. And how they united. It was as though their bodies were meeting for the first time. All they had experienced on the longest night of their short lives took the form of desire. Of love. Love and desire were one and the same.
They fell asleep in an embrace. The list ran through her mind as she slept. All these places where escapism was in easy reach. This endless need for relief, for ecstasy, for expanding the senses. As though the senses we’re born with weren’t enough. As though their boundlessness wasn’t boundless enough. But the demand for a change of circumstances was also endless, and that meant that access was endless, and the circle was complete. The vicious circle. And the person who represented access, the one who made sure that the circle stayed vicious, that was him. The centre. The viper. And she’s a child again. It’s a recurring dream. She knows it in advance, she knows every part of it, every little variation, but she can’t stop it. It’s as though the dream has to have its turn. As though, for some reason, it has to have its turn. That little awakening in the midst of sleep. An old, innocent dream being interrupted, never to return. One that she can’t remember any more. That she won’t ever be able to remember again. To begin with, it’s just a flutter between the sheets. But then it’s eyes, a gaze that belongs to someone else, or rather to no one, no one human. And her legs are forced apart and she doesn’t know what is happening, doesn’t understand, can’t understand, hasn’t got any chance of understanding what is being forced into her, can only understand the most basic of things, and that is that her trust has been broken, that trust itself has betrayed her, that the person she should be able to trust most in the world has treated her the worst in the world. And that was only the beginning.