The Elephant Keepers' Children (43 page)

I look around the table at the three floaters. It's a satisfying sight. Surprising, but satisfying. Emotional, too. There are tears, and remorse. And even if Basker's bite looks severe, there's no reason to believe that Ibrahim won't be able to show off his legs on the beach again after some fairly straightforward plastic surgery.

One could be concerned as to the durability of such a swift conversion. But Tilte and I have often bumped into the concept of
instant enlightenment
in our studies at the Finø Town Library. So perhaps it may prove lasting. On the other hand, thinking about football and the family, it's hard not to muse upon the fact that all practical experience shows that life changes are gradual.

I'm too polite to share these learned considerations. But I do have another relevant question.

“Where's Henrik?”

This hits a soft spot. And provokes a flurry of confusion.

“He's the brains,” says the woman. “It was his idea.”

“The rest of us were brainwashed,” says Ibrahim. “And threatened. We're afraid of Henrik. And I'm more afraid than the others.”

I understand him immediately. It brings to mind the darker sides of my own childhood, episodes in which I was coerced into pinching apples and dried fish.

“We intend to come clean,” says the man from the warehouse. “About Henrik. There are lots of examples to suggest that cooperating with the authorities results in shorter sentences.”

It's hard, in such a state of emotional exposure, to keep a cool head. But someone has to.

“And where did you say Henrik was?” I ask.

They gaze at me emptily. Even Tilte.

“He was on the phone,” Tilte says. “Just after we came here. But then he disappeared.”

“He'll be apprehended,” says Hans. “Everything's under control. The incendiary's been disarmed. There's an iron ring around the castle. We can take it easy now.”

“Perhaps he sought solitude in order to repent,” Ibrahim says.

I recall a pile of dead rats. One hundred and twenty-eight of them. It suggests to me that Henrik doesn't leave a job of work until it's done.

“The explosives you took out of that crate. What did you do with them?” I ask.

They stare at me. Hans and I exchange glances. And now Tilte's with us again.

“We need to get there fast,” says Hans. “To Filthøj. The conference kicks off in an hour and a half. We can be there in one. We'll take the boat.”

“We'll need help sailing it,” I say.

We look at the three floaters, all of whom shake their heads.

“We're afraid of Henrik,” says Ibrahim.

“We're in the middle of a profound process of self-examination,” says the woman.

“What we need,” says the man with concussion, “is to rest.”

Now Pallas Athene leans across the table.

“Did we have a nice time yesterday, or what?” she says.

Often, one may fail to recognize a person in unfamiliar surroundings. The three floaters are acquainted with Pallas Athene as an individual in skimpy underwear, stiletto heels, and a red wig, occurring in a biotope of marble and Havana cigars. So they don't recognize her at all until now.

“Within me,” says Pallas Athene, “are many dark emotions to which I can never submit without running the risk of lifetime imprisonment. But now I sense an opportunity to release them upon you without fear of punishment.”

Silence. Then Ibrahim wipes away his tears.

“The first time I set eyes on you people here on the quayside,” he says, “even though I could see there might be a few little hurdles, I felt right away that we were a team. The dog included.”

There's no need for me to describe
Filthøj Castle, it being known to everyone, even if they might not be aware of the fact. Filthøj, you see, is always pictured among the wonders of Denmark whenever they try to sell the country abroad: it's all Filthøj Castle, bacon, beer, Niels Bohr—and Finø in bright sunshine in the middle of a blue sea.

Filthøj is situated on a little green island in the middle of a blue lake, and when shots are angled from below it looks like Disneyland, with towers and cupolas and symmetric rosebeds and beech hedging that must take a whole football team of gardeners to look after.

But seen from the Sound whence we arrive, it looks more like a cross between a den of thieves and a medieval monastery, because the high walls and the boathouse at the shore are almost all that can be seen.

If your conception of a boathouse is a wooden shack at the water's edge, you would in this instance be mistaken. The building in front of us resembles a five-star beach hotel built partly on stilts and finished with a great arched door facing the sea, and this construction is what we now torpedo.

The expansive space in which we find ourselves contains only one thing besides boats, and that is a large armchair, and in it sits Count Rickardt Three Lions practicing his archlute.

Some people would be put out to receive visitors in this manner, but Count Rickardt is not among them. He jumps to his feet as though we were the very thing he'd been waiting for.

“We who are profoundly joined in soul,” he says, “can only but heal the ruptures of the cosmos.”

We go ashore. There's no time for the usual pleasantries.

“Rickardt,” says Tilte, “where does the tunnel come out?”

Rickardt points. What he points at bears little resemblance to what might spring to mind when thinking of the mouth of a secret tunnel. A glass door stands open, and through it we can see the tunnel clearly, though it doesn't look like a tunnel at all but more like a corridor of a luxury hotel done out in subdued colors with lamps on the walls.

“Has anyone been through it today?” Tilte asks.

“Not a soul,” says Rickardt. “Apart from Henrik. You know, Black Henrik. He happened by. It turns out he's involved in security. But he was only here to check.”

We drive up to the main entrance in Rickardt's open Bentley, he himself at the wheel, and on the way I suddenly find myself asking Rickardt if he remembers Black Henrik's surname from when they played together as children, and Rickardt replies that he most certainly does, because Henrik bears that most Danish of surnames, which is Borderrud. He must be able to sense our reaction, because he says how important
it is not to judge Henrik, that he was always such a lovely boy, but fortune has not always been on his side. In fact, Rickardt recalls some terrifying stories about Henrik's mother, and take today, for instance, when Henrik needed to check the tunnel, it was a wonder he stayed on his feet, and Henrik reckoned someone must have poured soft soap all over the floor.

At this point, Tilte asks him to pull over.

“Rickardt,” she says, “did you say soft soap?”

Rickardt confirms this information, adding that while it would be highly unlikely for someone to fill a four-hundred-meter-long tunnel with soft soap, the story might be illustrative of Henrik's psychology, Henrik being a person easily led to believe that people are after him, and though Rickardt has never actually seen his horoscope, everything would seem to indicate that Henrik has Neptune on the ascendant and the moon in the twelfth house.

Although we're in a hurry, Tilte and I get out of the car and stand beside each other in silence for a moment.

“That's how Mother and Father were going to get the box away,” says Tilte. “They made a slide for it with soft soap.”

In order that you might gain a more complete understanding of the technical details involved here, I must reveal to you the nature of my family's research into the spiritual benefits of soft soap, and in so doing relate the story of Karl Marauder's conspiracy with Jakob Bordurio, an alliance for which I have found considerable difficulty forgiving Jakob, and even now I am uncertain as to whether such forgiveness actually has transpired. To this end, I must return to that Sunday
afternoon over postchurch coffee in the kitchen of the rectory, when Count Rickardt Three Lions confided to us about the first time he smoked heroin.

Normally, we in the rectory do not encourage Rickardt to relate events of his happy youth, the reason being that it so easily gets him going, and before you know it his eyes are alight with enthusiasm and there's no holding him back. But on this particular occasion we were unable to stop him before he had told us that the first time he smoked heroin was in the company of four good friends and pupils down at the harbor in Grenå, these four individuals to this day making up the core and the inner mandala of the Knights of the Blue Beam. Besides the heroin, they had equipped themselves with one hundred liters of diesel in fifteen-liter jerricans, a boombox, and Bach's
The Art of the Fugue
, all of which had been described in detail to Rickardt in the form of a vision delivered to him by the little blue men, and then they found an empty ship's container and smoked their heroin outside in the sun, took off all their clothes, poured the diesel onto the floor of the container, put Bach on the boom box, and for the next four hours, Rickardt told us, they were in Paradise, hurling themselves around in their lubricated environment, and it felt like they were weightless.

At that point we stopped him, but his story had already made an impression on me, particularly the part about feeling weightless. As it happened, we were fortunate enough at the time to have had a new floor put down in the parish community center, which as luck would have it was in the process
of being treated with soap. So the following evening, I and my good friend Simon, whom Tilte calls Simon the Stylite, poured fifty liters of soft soap onto the new floorboards and took off all our clothes, and it turns out that a thick film of soap is just as good as diesel, offering no resistance at all if one takes a run-up and flings oneself onto the floor, this being easily sufficient to slide twenty meters as though upon a cushion of air, and we went on the whole night.

When we returned the next day, Karl Marauder and Jakob Bordurio had invited the pupils of Finø Town School's classes six to nine to witness our experiment, and unbeknown to us they had all taken up position in the gallery. We lit candles and removed our clothes, and I recall taking a run-up and hurling myself along the floor on my back as I cried out Conny's name, and Simon cried out Sonja's, and the idea was that we should slide weightlessly and reach inside to the place at which the door begins to open. But as we slid along on our backs we looked up and saw fifty faces peering down at us, among them Sonja's and Conny's.

This is the kind of experience that throughout history has prompted individuals to renounce all hope of higher justice and to take matters into their own hands, and I must concede that the first thing Simon and I did afterward was to get our hands on a couple of lengths of lead piping and chase Jakob and Karl into the great woods, where they remained without daring to show themselves in any inhabited area for several days. Subsequently, however, kindness of heart prevailed, and Tilte spoke with me and gave me a go in the coffin, one of her
alternative sessions whereby the lid stays off and she instead massages one's feet and speaks of the importance of forgiveness if one is ever to proceed in one's spiritual development.

Simon and I intended to go back and clean up after ourselves in the community center, anticipating both a kangaroo court and a firing squad, but my mother and father said we needn't bother, because there were technical details of the soap treatment of wooden floors they wished to investigate, and when late one night I saw lights on in the community center and sneaked over there to take a look, I saw Mother and Father trying out the great soap slide, and they had brought with them two one-hundred-liter containers of soap, so their investigations must have been thorough indeed.

These recollections of past events, along with the fact that Mother's and Father's collected invoices included among them a bill for one ton of soft soap and a couple of pumps, are now collated by the shared perspicacity of Tilte and myself.

“Every night,” I say, “the displayed valuables are run down into the box. So Mother and Father were planning on waiting until nightfall. All they needed to do then was to sail up to the boathouse in their new fiberglass vessel and savor the sunset, and Mother would have had the remote control with her from the Grand Kite and Glider Day, and she would have pressed a button, and in some clever way that would have been as easy as pie for her she would have disconnected the box from the lift shaft. And with a thick film of soft soap on the floor, the box would have begun to slide, and it would have gone through the brick wall if Mother hadn't also attached some device to the
hidden door that made sure it opened like the one back home in the larder, and then the box would have come sliding all the way through the tunnel to the boathouse, where somehow they would have loaded it on board and sailed it away to some unknown destination where at some later stage they would have revealed it to the world along with a suitably concocted story and claimed their reward in accordance with section 15 of the Lost Property Act, Circular no. 76 of June 24, 2003.”

“And they would have gained themselves a great deal of attention,” says Tilte. “It would have been just like a little miracle. It would have brought them into the big league.”

We walk a little, immersed in bleak musings as to how wrong it all could have gone.

“It makes sense,” I say. “In its own frightening way. But there's still one question that needs an answer. How come the tunnel's full of soap now?”

Tilte stares at me with wide-open eyes. The answer appears to us at once.

“They're going ahead with the plan,” says Tilte. “They think there's still a chance. They're the heroes now the floaters have been uncovered. They stand to pocket a huge reward. And no one has found out about their little idea. So they say to themselves: Why make do with a reward when we can double up? Why piddle around with a hundred million when we can have two? So tonight, when Filthøj Castle closes and the lights go out, they'll sail out in their gondola and press the button on the remote and pull off the job as first planned.”