The Elephant Keepers' Children (7 page)

When Tilte addresses people like that she means something by it. Once, when Mother and Father had been arguing and visitors arrived, Tilte received the visitors outside before ushering them in and presenting Mother and Father with the words, “This is my father and my father's wife of his first marriage.”

Father has only ever been married once and that's to Mother, so needless to say we were all rather taken aback. Later, when Mother and Father asked Tilte what she meant, Tilte told them that one could never be sure how long a marriage would last, especially when it had entered the violent phase.

For that reason, a long time passed before Mother and Father argued again.

When she calls me Petrus, I need to be all ears, because that's what she often calls me when she wants to make me aware of the door.

And then we stand completely silent for a moment. We listen to the silence, even though it makes no sound. It's like that happy childhood I was talking about. You must never let your mind dwell on it, because if you do it'll be gone for good. All you should do is listen. Listen to what makes no sound.

The silence lasts only for a moment and is broken by someone's cheery voice.

“Tilte, my little bluebell! And Peter, scrumptious little Peter! You look marvelous!”

We turn toward the voice.

“Rickardt,” says Tilte. “You look like a rent boy from Milan.”

Which is the count to a tee.

Count Rickardt Three Lions
is sporting high-heeled cowboy boots of genuine snakeskin and yellow leather trousers that cling to him like the skin of a banana. He is wearing a snow-white shirt, which is open to the navel to allow the beholder a full look at his gold chains, as well as to note that he is so skinny it looks like he lost his appetite years ago and never got it back again.

Which is actually what happened. The first time we met Rickardt, he was being treated for a heroin addiction that had taken away his appetite, as it does with most everyone. Finding something as good as heroin is a bit like falling in love, because it means you've got no time to attend to such trifling needs as hunger.

Now he's clean and a qualified addiction therapist. What's more, he's bought up the whole rehab center and put himself on the board of directors. He could do that because all rehab centers in Denmark are privately owned and because he really is a count and has inherited more money than would ever normally be healthy for a former heroin addict to be anywhere near.

His inheritance has also allowed him to indulge his passion for clothes and thereby to develop his tastes from the
bizarre to the outrageous. Today, for instance, he is wearing something on his head that could only be described as over the top, even for him. It is a swimming hat with holes cut in it, and tufts of his hair protrude from the holes, and in between the tufts are electrodes flashing green and red.

“There's a neural scientist with us today,” he tells us. “We're in the middle of an experiment. My brain has caused something of a stir.”

The first time we met
the count was just after Mother and Father came home with the Maserati and the mink coat.

From having been a home in which we were given porridge to eat one day a week and fish, which is basically free on Finø, on two of the other days, we had entered a period in which the rectory overflowed with milk and honey. On my birthday I was given five crisp one-thousand-kroner notes, as were Tilte and Hans in case they should feel overlooked, and that morning we all went out and drank hot chocolate on the decking of the Nincompoop, and when we got home our money was gone.

All the doors and windows were locked, there were no signs of a break-in, and yet our money was gone.

We're all different when it comes to being tidy. My brother Hans, for instance, trusts in cosmic disorder, so his room looks like the big bang just went off and everything is still chaos. Tilte's room is rather more orderly, but since her style is extravagant and she owns enough clothes to start a theatrical
wardrobe, and over fifty pairs of shoes and two dressers full of cosmetics and earrings, plus a walk-in wardrobe with rails suspended on wires from the ceiling and crammed with her dresses and feather boas, one still gets the feeling of having suddenly landed in the bazaar in
Arabian Nights
.

I'm tidy. If you're born into a family like mine, in which, no offense intended, you're the only one besides Basker who's normal, then tidiness is the only option. It's for your own good.

So I like things to be in their proper places, and one such proper place is my windowsill where all my medium-sized trophies, like Player of the Year and the Kattegat Championships, are kept on permanent display. But on that particular day the trophy for Finø FC's annual summer tournament wasn't quite where it was supposed to be and there were fingerprints on it, which are always going to show up clearly on polished brass. And in the garden below the window lay a small rectangular piece of green plastic. We showed it to Mother, who explained to us that it was an adjustment wedge for the double glazing, and she took the wooden frame that holds the pane in place and it came away in her hands and revealed to us that someone had done some very neat work with a crowbar.

So at twelve o'clock precisely, when we knew they would all be having lunch at the rehab center, Tilte and Hans and Basker and I walked over to Big Hill and went inside. That was before they began to keep the doors locked, and we had the trophy with us and let Basker have a good sniff, and then we began to go through all the rooms systematically. We found the money in the third room, or rather Basker did. It
wasn't even hidden away but lay in an unlocked drawer in a wardrobe containing two hundred ties on pull-out racks.

So when the count returned from lunch we were sitting waiting for him in his room. He remained standing in the doorway, and then he said, “How nice to see you.” Whereupon Tilte replied, “Likewise. And nice to see our money again, too.”

That was our first encounter with the count, and after some initial difficulties and minor misunderstandings of the kind that are bound to occur when you've just nailed your interlocutor for breaking into your house and stealing fifteen thousand kroner, it was very pleasant indeed. We told him about life on Finø, and the count told us about his childhood in a castle in northern Sjælland with a moat around it and room enough to sleep two hundred and fifty guests at once, and he told us about how his parents had given him his own flat when he finished boarding school at Herlufsholm, and about how he immediately sold it and spent the proceeds on ketamine, which he explained to us was a bit like LSD only more fun, and that you inject it and two minutes later you find you've been catapulted through the top of your skull and out into space.

I sensed a tremor of excitement run through my brother Hans at the mention of being catapulted into space.

Every day for a year, the count went tripping away on ketamine, and when all the money was spent he discovered he was homeless. Fortunately, this coincided with the start of the mushrooming season, which prompted him to move into a tent in the woods. And there, so he told us, lived tiny elves who gathered psilocybin, which is just as good as mescaline, for
him, and then when the weather grew cold and he moved into a stairwell in Nørrebro, the elves brought him small portions of heroin, and chocolate milk and Valium, and so it was he was able to survive until finally he got arrested and was given a sentence and shipped out to Finø.

By the time we left the count late that evening we had become friends and each of us had given him a thousand kroner, and as we walked off down the driveway he stood in the window and sang for us.

He's kept up the singing ever since. Every fortnight or so he appears on the lawn of the rectory wearing a pink suit, perhaps, with white polka dots on it, and brandishing an archlute, which is a musical instrument that looks and sounds exactly like it came from outer space, and there he will sing for us for half an hour or more. The count is bisexual, so of course he's in love with Tilte and Hans like a rat is in love with two pieces of cheese, and to begin with I had some explaining to do whenever I had friends around and they heard the count with his archlute and noticed how every now and then he would lift one hand from the instrument so as to conduct the tiny blue people he says populate the space beneath our veranda and who always provide his accompaniment. But now we're used to him, and Tilte says, in the quiet, unassuming manner for which she is celebrated, that having your own kingdom involves having to be nice to subjects of many different kinds, and gradually the count has become almost like a member of the family.

Tilte now tests how far he has come in that process.

“Rickardt,” she says, “isn't this a wonderful view?”

The count nods. He thinks the view from the patio of Big Hill is wonderful, too. Especially now that it's been improved by Tilte's presence.

“I see there's a guard on duty at the gate,” Tilte says. “That's new since last time we were here. I'm sure it must give the residents and staff a sense of security.”

The count nods.

“And those white sensors,” says Tilte, “the ones on top of the garden wall. I suppose they register if anyone climbs over the wall, and that will give you a sense of security, too. Am I right?”

The count nods.

“Then there's these blue wristbands we've been given,” says Tilte.

The count rocks slightly on the balls of his feet.

“Would you not say, Rickardt, that Petrus and I are locked up like a pair of pigs on a factory farm, even though we have yet to see a solicitor or a magistrate?”

The count says nothing.

“And there's our room,” Tilte continues relentlessly. “Spacious and with such a view anyone would think we were at the finest of hotels. Not to mention being in the company of such good friends. On the one side we've got Lars, who was with us on the plane. And on the other we've got Katinka, who was also with us on the plane. Lars and Katinka. Wouldn't you say, Rickardt, drawing on all your experience, that they look like police officers?”

“They're only staying for a couple of days,” says the count.

A lot of people have been wondering why a multimillionaire like the count would buy up Big Hill and condescend himself to work. But for me and Tilte it's plain. It's because most of the residents have depth.

Among Danes at large, even on Finø, a great many people, adults and youngsters alike, though perhaps especially the former, hold the opinion that of all the humiliations and insults to which they have ever been subjected, life is by far the worst. This doesn't apply to the residents of Big Hill. Not one of them has escaped losing everything in the world, and for that reason they seem to recognize that once a year, at least, one perhaps ought to be slightly glad to be alive.

It is this spirit that so attracted the count, and it is why he leans toward being on the side of the residents, and right now, standing here in front of Tilte, the side of the residents is a decidedly dodgy side on which to be.

“Rickardt,” says Tilte, “we know that Basker is a lively dog. And Petrus is a troubled child. But would you say that two plainclothes police officers plus electronic tagging plus Big Hill, which is guarded like a prison camp, were necessary measures to provide for their care?”

The count says he was thinking the same thing himself.

Tilte pauses rhetorically, as they would say in Finø's Amateur Dramatic Society.

“Imagine the headlines, Rickardt.”

That's something Tilte learned from our great-grandmother on an occasion to which I shall later return, and you can
tell she's becoming more practiced because it sounds more ominous and more inevitable than it did in Hans's student accommodation.

“
Count aids police in illegal detention of clergyman's children
. How does that sound, Rickardt?”

The count doesn't think it sounds good at all. Substance abusers who have got clean and own hereditary titles and a castle and two manor farms and five hundred million kroner tend to be rather sensitive about their good name and reputation.

So now we're at the crux of the matter.

“We need your help,” says Tilte. “We need to get out of here for a while. We need to find out if Mother and Father have left something behind in the rectory.”

At this moment, the count's existence is in the balance. His voice is a hoarse whisper.

“Visitor to see you,” he says.

We stride across the patio
of Big Hill. Residents are lounging in the sun wearing swimming hats with wires sticking out, and we nod and smile at them and are far too polite to point out that with headgear like that they look like they weren't blessed with brains to take readings off in the first place.

To be exact, only Basker and I stride. The count tries to see if he can propel himself forward and wring his hands together and fall down on his knees in front of Tilte all at once.

“It's out of the question,” he says. “Don't even ask. I can't help. I'd lose everything.”

Now I step in between them. It's a technique Tilte and I have been developing. She's the tormentor, whereas I'm more like a nurse.

“You could fetch a pair of sharp scissors,” I suggest. “So we can lose the blue wristbands.”

The count is mute. Tilte takes his hand. I take the other.

“You'll never get through the gate,” he says.

We look down toward it. At the lowered barrier, the keen guard, the closed-circuit cameras, the wire fence. It's enough to make Houdini despair.

“Rickardt,” says Tilte, “what do the Knights of the Blue Beam say? About that door.”

“There's no door,” replies the count. “Keep on knocking.”

Rickardt Three Lions is the leader and founder of the Knights of the Blue Beam, which is a lodge of spiritual seekers meeting every Tuesday at the manor house called Finøholm, where they while away the time with tarot cards and numerology and trying to get in touch with the dead by means of Rickardt's song and dance, and all of them clad in costumes that make the swimming hats of neural research pale in comparison. But whoever thinks that such an assembly under the leadership of the count must surely be a matter for the secure psychiatric ward of Finø Hospital would be wise to keep their lips sealed and their heads down when Tilte and I happen to be around, because Rickardt is our friend and, like I said, as good as family.