All In (33 page)

45

D
avid strolled the short distance from the National Museum back to his office, deeply lost in thought. His meeting with Natalia had been bewildering, to say the least. He'd deserved that slap in the face. He hadn't been particularly nice. He rubbed his cheek. She was strong.

David opened the front door to the office and greeted Malin, who was standing in the reception area.

“Are people still with us?” he asked. It was five-thirty. As soon as the market closed, everything would be totally calm.

She nodded. “Nothing's going to happen now. Everyone's waiting for the meeting.”

Malin was right. He nodded as he glanced through a report she handed him. Nothing would happen from now until after the weekend was over.

“I'm leaving in half an hour,” she said as Michel appeared in the doorway. Malin walked off to make a phone call.

“Where have you been?” David asked.

“The gym,” Michel responded, setting his bag on the floor. He pulled off his sunglasses and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Where have
you
been? And where's your car?”

David had completely forgotten about Jesper and the car. “Can you come into my office for a minute?” he asked. “There's something I need to tell you.”

David waited in his office while Michel put away his bag. Michel came in carrying two bottles of water and shut the door behind him with his elbow. He handed one of the bottles to David. They sat down on either side of the desk.

“Jesper took my car,” David explained. “Have you noticed that we're under surveillance? I didn't want to be followed.”

“Mmm, I see. It's not like this is the first time.” It wasn't the first time they'd been tailed; the financial world sometimes stooped to out-and-out espionage. After all, it was an industry where information was the hardest currency of all.

“I'm sorry I ran off without saying anything,” David said. “I had to take care of something.”

“It's alright.”

“I saw Natalia,” he said.

“Was that really a good idea?” Michel asked, fingering his water bottle.

“No,” David agreed. “But I had to clear something up. And now I want to tell you.”

“I'm all ears,” Michel said with a sigh.

So David told him the whole story.

About the meeting between Carolina and Natalia in the park yesterday, about the assault at Skogbacka and Peter's role in it, everything. He told Michel absolutely everything. And it felt great. Just as it had to tell Natalia. For a little while there, inside the museum's icon exhibit, David had felt at peace. For a little while, before they wound up bogged down in conflict yet again, he had felt calm and harmonious. He'd finally told someone about Caro. Natalia had listened, and it had been like confessing. He hadn't realized what a burden the secret was.

Natalia had been shocked, of course, and he wondered if there was anybody he'd deceived as many times as he'd deceived Natalia. If he'd read her right, she was never going to forgive him, never going to trust him, and that hurt more than he could bear to think about. But he was glad he'd told her about Caro. At least she'd heard it from him and hadn't read it in some tabloid exposé. Most of the media attention had blown over by now. Journalists still asked about Skogbacka and hazing, but not that often. Neither the rape nor the whipping had been reported to the police, after all, so the worst of the details remained hidden. And none of the people involved had any interest in the story being made public.

He glanced at Michel, who sat silent with a shocked look on his face.

“This is absolutely incredible,” he said, stunned.

“Yes.”

“You have a secret sister. That's insane.”

“Yes.”

“And you never told anyone about her.”

“No.”

“And Peter De la Grip did . . . that to her.” He stopped.

“Yes.”

“This whole deal has been so weird,” Michel said. “With you and Natalia and all the various personal vendettas. And now you have a sister I've never heard of, that
no one
has ever heard of.”

“I'm sorry,” David said. “But it was all for her own safety.”

“I understand that,” Michel said, waving his hand dismissively. He seemed to be thinking. “You said there was a threat against her?”

“That was a long time ago, but you can't be too careful.”

“So why is she here? In Stockholm?”

“My sister owns Investum shares,” David said with a smile. He'd bought them for her over the years. By now she owned quite a bit.

“Is she going to vote?”

“Yes. I tried to get her to send a proxy instead, but she wanted to come in person. She can be really stubborn.”

Michel raised an eyebrow. He set down his bottle of water. “I have to digest this for a bit.”

“I understand.”

“But that's all? You don't have any more secrets? No more hidden relatives I need to be aware of, I mean?”

There was a knock on the door.

David shook his head and said, “No more,” before he called, “Come in!”

Malin stuck her head in. “David?”

“Yes?”

“There's a man here to see you.”

“At this time of day? Who?”

Malin gave him an embarrassed look. She glanced at Michel and then back at David again. Her eyes flitted back and forth, as if she were watching a tennis match. She cleared her throat. “I don't know how to say this.”

“Say what?” David asked.

Michel gave Malin a puzzled look as well.

She looked from one to the other a few more times. Then she said, with a heavy sigh and in an apologetic tone, “He says he's your father.”

46

T
he silence that filled David's office was palpable. Michel slapped both hands onto the desktop so that his heavy rings clunked. One gem sparkled, menacingly. Slowly he stood up, leaned forward, and gave David a dark look. “You go right ahead. This is all yours,” he said, his voice sounding so choked it was almost cracking. “Mister venture capitalist, founder, and superhero.” His jaw was clenching and unclenching, and then he continued, emphasizing each syllable separately, “But then you and I are going to talk. For real. About the future, your and my future.” He gave David one last furious look, took his hands off the desk, grabbed his empty water bottle, and crumpled it up. He nodded at Malin on the way out.

“Send him in,” David said once Michel was gone.

He stood up.
This won't take long.

Malin mumbled something, and then he saw the man.

“You can go on in,” Malin said, and David's normally confident communications director looked uncertain as she showed the visitor in.

David crossed his arms over his chest and studied the man who walked in. “Carl-Erik Tessin,” Malin said. “
Count
Tessin,” she, the woman who was never nervous, added nervously.

“Thanks, Malin,” David said. “You can go home. This won't take long.” He was deliberately impolite, allowing some of the rage he felt to be heard in his voice. How
dare
this man even think about coming here?

Malin quietly closed the door on them, and they were alone.

“Hi, David,” Carl-Erik said. He spoke in that quiet, articulate voice that David more than anything else associated with the upper class and abuses of power.

“What the hell are you doing here? And what the
fuck
do you want?”

Carl-Erik's face quivered. “I've tried to reach you.”

“So?”

Still no anger from the man, but then Carl-Erik had always been a cowardly, evasive person.

“I wrote to you,” he said quietly. “And called. You don't answer.”

“No,” David said tersely, didn't say anything more than that, didn't want to prolong this conversation, didn't want to
have
this conversation. There was nothing Carl-Erik could say that David wanted to hear. He hated this man, his count of a father. Just that word—father,
dad
—the most meaningless and noncommittal word there was, turned his stomach. This count with his genteel southern Swedish dialect and his rarified pedigree was the man who had had two children—not one, but two—with a young, beautiful Helena Hammar. The man who had met the uneducated waitress out on the town in Stockholm in the late seventies and started a relationship. Got her pregnant and never thought about separating from his wife, a woman with the right background for a count. There were no words to describe the disdain David felt for Count Tessin. He stared blankly at him, made himself cold, and radiated unavailability. If anyone knew what it felt like when an outstretched hand was met with indifference, it was he.

“I saw you in BÃ¥stad,” Carl-Erik continued.

David had also seen him, but in the same way that Carl-Erik once had refused to recognize his illegitimate children, David refused to acknowledge Carl-Erik's existence.

“And I read about you in the papers. I read everything.”

There had been a time when this whole business of having a father had been important in David's life. There had been times as a child when he'd wondered what he'd done wrong, since his own father hadn't wanted him. One time he'd taken the bus, without telling his mother, all the way down to Skåne, a bus ride of many, many hours, and stood outside the fence of the mansion where his father lived with his wife and his
legitimate
children. Tired and sad, he'd returned home and then shut the door on his past for good.

Years had gone by, and Carl-Erik might as well have been dead now. To David he
was
dead. Aside from the fact that David hated him, and a rational part of him realized that you couldn't hate someone who was dead. But he hated this man standing before him with a mixture of remorse and hope in his eyes every bit as much as he hated Gustaf and Peter. This man who always backed away, who exploited and left, who disappointed and was weak. David wanted to believe that there wasn't a single cell in him that was like Carl-Erik Tessin.

“Like I said, what do you want?” David inhaled, tried to contain his anger, didn't want to show that he cared. “I'm giving you two seconds, then I would like to see you get out of here. For good.” He loathed that he was so angry. He wanted to be indifferent.

His mother had loved this man. If Carl-Erik had been there for her, everything would have been different. Carolina wouldn't have been hurt, his mother wouldn't have had to work so hard. Maybe they would have lived happily ever fucking after.

“I would really like to get to know you, to have a relationship.”

David didn't say anything.

“I wasn't there for you when you were little, and I have to live with the guilt of that. But now . . .”

“Now?” David interrupted. “There is no
now
.”

“If you only knew how much I wish I'd done things differently, that I'd been there for you more, for your mother, for Helena. But she wouldn't let me into her life.”

David remembered the tears and the bitterness. “Maybe that has something to do with the fact that you were married to another woman,” he said icily. He had no memory of anything good when it came to this man who had the balls to claim to be his father.

“I couldn't get divorced, but I wanted to help her. She refused to take almost everything I offered her, I could only . . .”

“Is that all?” David asked coldly.

“I came to ask for your forgiveness. And your sister's . . .”

“Caro?” David blurted out, despite having decided to remain silent no matter what the old man said. “What does she have to do with any of this?”

Carl-Erik's face softened. “Carolina and I see each other sometimes. I've visited her at her home in Denmark. And we had coffee together in town yesterday.”

David tried not to show how shocked he was. They were in touch with each other? Carolina had never told him that. He'd always thought Carolina told him
everything
. He tried not to feel betrayed.

“Carolina is a grown woman, David,” Carl-Erik said with a friendly smile, a smile that made David want to punch his aristocratic face. Of course he knew Carolina was an adult; he just hadn't quite understood that she had her own life. Maybe sometimes he thought her life revolved just around him, but he certainly knew she was an adult. It was just a shock to find out about her independence this way. Coffee in the city, no less.

“Carolina wants me in her life, and I'm extremely grateful for that.”

David clenched his teeth so hard he heard them grind together. His patience was at its limit now.

“She's worried about your hostile takeover. She's worried about you.”

The fury was like an explosion in his body. Carl-Erik had no right to discuss Carolina with him, no right at all. The rage sat in his chest like a seething black mass.

“Go,” David said in a quiet voice. It was either that or scream. He had trouble thinking and choked out the word: “Go!” The anger came in waves now, as if it was breaking against a rocky shore, as if he might lose control at any moment. “Get out of here,” he said. “Out. Now.”

“David . . . ,” Carl-Erik pleaded, holding up his hands beseechingly.

Something broke inside of David.

The tension, the rage, all the old feelings he'd been convinced he was done with were given new fuel, and he lost control. He stepped forward, grabbed Carl-Erik's clothes, an extremely firm grasp that made the elderly man blanch. With the count in one hand, David opened the door with his other and threw—literally
threw
—him out of the room. Then he slammed the door shut with so much force that the whole wall shook.

He had to lean against the door frame and bend over to get the blood to his head. He never lost his temper, hated people who berated and yelled to demonstrate their power, but he'd come close to murdering an old man.

He took another deep breath and felt something akin to reason returning. It was evening and the office was empty. He couldn't keep throwing people out haphazardly. The old man might have had a heart attack and died out there.

David ran both hands through his hair. He adjusted his clothes and put his hand on the doorknob. He made a face, furious with himself and this whole farce. He opened the door and looked out, but the corridor was empty.

Carl-Erik Tessin had left.