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‘Had.’ O’Keefe raised his hands. ‘I
had
a band. We don’t meet up that much these days.’

‘I thought the film was great,’ said Edwards. ‘You’re one of my favourite actors.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Your singing was great in it. What was your band called again?’

‘The Black Sheep.’

Edwards pulled a face as if he was inches away from remembering the Black Sheep and all their hits. O’Keefe smiled.

‘Believe me, you’ve never heard of us.’

‘He hasn’t either.’ Ögi put his arm around his shoulders and lowered his voice. ‘Between ourselves, young man, they’re all kids. Bet you they don’t even know who Kurt Cobain
was
.’

Mimi Parker looked uncertainly from one to the other.

‘To be quite honest—’

‘You mean he really existed?’ Edwards said in amazement.

‘A historical figure.’ Ögi took out a cigar, cut it and set the tip thoughtfully alight. ‘Tragic hero of a generation infatuated with suicide. A romantic in nihilist’s clothing.
Weltschmerz
, a latent longing for death, nothing you wouldn’t find in Schubert and Schumann as well. Brilliant exit. How did you prepare for the part, Finn?’

‘Well—’

‘Did you try to be
him
?’

‘He’d have had to pump himself full of drugs,’ said Edwards. ‘That guy Cobain was permanently stoned.’

‘Perhaps he did,’ said Ögi. ‘Did you?’

O’Keefe shook his head with a laugh. How could he explain in a few words to a pool party how you played Kurt Cobain? Or anyone else?

‘Isn’t that called method acting?’ Mimi asked. ‘The actor gives up his identity for his character in the film, weeks and months before filming. He basically subjects himself to a kind of brainwashing.’

‘No, it’s not quite like that. I have a different way of working.’

‘How’s that?’

‘More mundanely. It’s a job, you understand. Just a job.’

Mimi looked disappointed. O’Keefe felt Heidrun’s violet gaze settling on him. He began to feel uncomfortable. Everyone was staring at him.

‘You were talking about a musical,’ he said to Ögi, to creep away from the focus of interest. ‘Which one would that be?’

‘
Nine Eleven
,’ said Ögi. ‘We saw it in New York last week. You?’

‘Not yet.’

‘We’re thinking of going,’ said Edwards.

‘Do that.’ Ögi gave off swirls of smoke. ‘As I said, extreme stuff! They could have let it drown in piety, but of course the material needs a powerful production.’

‘The set’s supposed to be amazing,’ Mimi raved.

‘Holographic. You think you’re sitting in the middle of it.’

‘I like the tune with the cop and the girl. It’s always on the radio. “Into Death, My Child” …’

She started humming a tune. O’Keefe hoped he wouldn’t have to express an opinion on the matter. He hadn’t seen
Nine Eleven
, and had no intention of doing so.

‘The slushy numbers on their own don’t justify a visit,’ Ögi snorted. ‘Yes, Jimeno and McLoughlin are constantly busy, and so are their wives, but it’s mostly worth it for the effects. When the planes come, you can’t believe it! And the guy who sings Osama bin Laden. He’s really OTT.’

‘Bass?’

‘Baritone.’

‘I’m going swimming,’ said Heidrun. ‘Who’s coming? Finn?’

Thanks, he thought.

He went to his room and got undressed. Ten minutes later they were competing at the crawl in the pool. Heidrun left him behind twice in a row, and it was only the third time that they reached the edge of the pool at the same time. She pulled herself up. Walo blew her a Havana-smoke kiss, before carrying on with a story accompanied by vigorous hand gestures. At that moment an athlete and a woman with a curvy figure and a fire-red ponytail arrived near the pool.

‘Do you know that guy?’ he asked.

‘Nope.’ Heidrun folded her arms on the edge of the pool. ‘They must just have arrived. Maybe it’s that Canadian investor. Something with an H, Henna or Hanson. I’ve seen the redhead before, I think. But I can’t remember where.’

‘Oh, yeah! Wasn’t she a murder suspect at some point?’

‘For a while, yes.’ O’Keefe shrugged. ‘She’s quite witty, once you’ve got used to the fact that she has names for her breasts and that she’s squandering an inheritance of thirteen billion dollars pretty much at random. No idea if there was anything to those accusations. It was in all the papers. She got off in the end.’

‘Where do you meet such characters? At parties?’

‘I don’t go to parties.’

Heidrun slipped lower into the water and lay on her back. Her hair spread into a faded flower. O’Keefe couldn’t help thinking of stories about mermaids, seductive creatures who had risen from the depths and dragged mariners underwater to steal their breath with a kiss.

‘That’s right. You hate being at the centre of things, don’t you?’

He thought for a moment. ‘I don’t really, no.’

‘Exactly. It only annoys you when there isn’t at least a screen or a barrier between you and the people who see your films. You enjoy the cult that’s organised around you, but even more than that you enjoy making people think you couldn’t care less.’

He stared at her in amazement. ‘Is that your impression?’

‘When
People
magazine voted you sexiest man alive, you pulled your cap over your forehead and claimed you really couldn’t understand why women cried at the sight of you.’

‘I don’t get it,’ O’Keefe said. ‘I really don’t.’

Heidrun laughed. ‘Me neither.’

She plunged under the surface of the water. Her outline fragmented into Cubist vectors as she darted away. O’Keefe wondered for a moment whether he liked her answer. The hammering of rotors reached him. He looked into the sky and found himself confronted with a single white cloud.

Lonely little cloud. Lonely little Finn.

We understand each other, you and I, he thought with amusement.

The rump of a helicopter entered his field of vision, crossed the pool and came down.

* * *

‘There are people in the water,’ Karla Kramp observed. She said it with analytical coolness, as if referring to the appearance of microbes under warm and damp conditions. It didn’t sound as if she wanted to join them. Eva Borelius looked out of the helicopter window and saw a pale-skinned woman gliding against a turquoise-coloured background.

‘Perhaps it’s finally time for you to learn to swim.’

‘I’ve already learned to ride for you,’ Karla replied expressionlessly.

‘I know.’ Borelius leaned back and stretched her bony limbs. ‘You never stop learning, my jewel.’

Facing her, Bernard Tautou was dozing with his head leaning back and his mouth half open. After spending the first half-hour of the flight giving an account of his exhausting everyday life, which seemed to play out between remote desert springs and intimate dinners at the Élysée Palace, he had fallen asleep, and was now giving them a view of his nasal cavities. He was short and slim, with wavy, probably dyed hair that was starting to lighten at the temples. His eyes, beneath their heavy lids, had something weary about them, which was further accentuated into melancholy by the long shape of his face. The impression vanished as soon as he laughed and his eyebrows rose clownishly, and Tautou laughed often. He delivered compliments and acted interested, just to use his interlocutor’s statements as a springboard for self-reflection. Every second sentence that he directed at his wife ended in a challenging
n’est-ce pas?
, Paulette’s sole function being to confirm what he had said. Only after he had gone to sleep did she become more lively, talked about his friendship and hers with the French president, the country’s first female head of state, and how
important it was to grant humanity access to the most precious of all scarce resources. She talked about how, as head of the French water company Suez Environnement, he had contrived to take over Thames Water, which had made the resulting company a leader in global water supply and saved the world, which as good as meant her husband had saved the world. In her account plucky Bernard was tirelessly laying pipelines to the areas where the poor and wretched lived, a guardian angel in the battle against thirst.

‘Isn’t water a free human resource?’ Karla had asked.

‘Of course.’

‘So it can’t be privatised?’

Paulette’s expression had remained unfathomable. With her hooded eyelids she looked like the young Charlotte Rampling, although without the actress’s class. The question just asked had been put to people in the water business with great regularity for decades.

‘Oh, you know, that debate is passing out of fashion, thank God. Without privatisation there would have been no supply networks, no treatment plants. What’s the use of free access to a resource if you have no chance of accessing it?’

Karla had nodded thoughtfully.

‘Could you actually privatise the air that we breathe?’

‘Sorry? Of course not.’

‘I’m just trying to understand. So Suez is building supply installations, for example in—’

‘Namibia.’

‘Namibia. Exactly. And are such planned constructions subsidised by development aid?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘And the plant operates on a profitable basis?’

‘Yes, it has to.’

‘That means that Suez is privately registering profits that have been subsidised by development aid?’

At that point Paulette Tautou had assumed a tortured expression, and Borelius had said quietly, ‘Enough, Karla.’ Right now she didn’t feel like getting involved in disasters as she usually did when Karla deployed the scalpel of her curiosity. After that they had exchanged harmless pleasantries and admired the platform in the sea. More precisely, her gaze and Karla’s had hung spellbound on that endless line, while Paulette eyed them rather suspiciously and made no move to shake her husband awake.

‘Aren’t you going to wake him?’ Borelius had asked. ‘I’m sure he’d love to see this.’

‘Oh, no, I’m happy for him to get some sleep. You can’t imagine how hard he works.’

‘We’ll be there in a minute. Then you’ll have to wake him anyway.’

‘He needs every second. You know, I’d only wake him for something really
important
.’

Something really important, Borelius thought. Okay …

Now that the helicopter was lowering itself onto the landing platform, Paulette forced herself to say ‘Bernard’ several times in a quiet voice, until he opened his eyes in confusion and blinked.

‘Are we there already?’

‘We’re landing.’

‘What?’ He jerked upright. ‘Where’s the platform? I thought we were going to see the platform.’

‘You were asleep.’

‘Oh!
Merde!
Why didn’t you wake me,
chérie
? I’d have loved to see the platform!’

Borelius forebore from commenting. Before they got out, she caught a glimpse of a stately, snow-white yacht far out on the sea. Then the skids touched the ground, and the side door of the helicopter swung open.

* * *

On the yacht Rebecca Hsu left her study, crossed the huge, marble-covered drawing-room and stepped out onto the deck, while she phoned her headquarters in Taipei.

‘I don’t give a damn what the French sales manager wants,’ she said harshly. ‘We’re talking about a perfume for twelve-year-old girls.
They
have to like it, not
him
. If
he
starts liking the stuff, we’ve made a mistake.’

Wild arguments came crackling down the line. Rebecca walked quickly to the stern, where the first officer, the captain and the speedboat were waiting for her.

‘It’s already clear to me that you want your own campaign,’ she said. ‘I’m not stupid, after all. You always want something of your own. These Europeans are terribly complicated. We’ve put the perfume on the market in Germany, Italy and Spain, without giving anyone special treatment, and we’ve been successful every time. I don’t see why France of all places— What? He said
what
?’

The information was repeated.

‘Nonsense, I love France!’ she yelled furiously. ‘Even the French! I’m just fed up with all that constant rebellion. They will have to learn to live with the fact that I’ve bought their beloved luxury company. I’ll leave them in peace as far as Dior and so on are concerned, but for our own creations I expect unconditional cooperation.’

She looked irritably across to the Isla de las Estrellas, which rose from the Pacific like a humpbacked sea serpent. No breeze stirred the air. The sea stretched like dark
aluminium foil from horizon to horizon. She ended the conversation and turned to the two liveried men.

‘And? Did you ask again?’

‘I’m extraordinarily sorry, madame.’ The captain shook his head. ‘No permit.’

‘I’m absolutely mystified about what’s going on.’

‘The Isla de las Estrellas and the platform can’t be approached by private ships. The same applies to air-space. The whole area is one single high-security zone. If it wasn’t you, we would even have to wait for their helicopter. Unusually, they have given us permission to ferry you across in our own speedboat.’

Rebecca sighed. She was used to rules not applying to her. On the other hand the prospect of a trip on the speedboat was too much fun for her to insist.

‘Is the luggage on board?’

‘Of course, madame. I hope you have a pleasant holiday.’

‘Thank you. How do I look?’

‘Perfect, as ever.’

That would be lovely, she thought. Since she had turned fifty, she had been fighting a losing battle. It was played out on various piece of fitness equipment, in swimming-pools with cross-current features, on private jogging paths and her 140-metre yacht, which she had had built in such a way that you could perform a circuit of it unimpeded. Since leaving Taiwan she ran there every day. With iron discipline she had even managed to get her extreme hunger under control, but still her body went on expanding. At least the dress emphasised what was left of her waist, and was appropriately extravagant. Her trademark bird’s-nest hairdo was characteristically chaotic, and her make-up was impeccable.

As soon as the speedboat cast off, she was back on the phone again.