Miss Polly had a Dolly (Emma Frost #2) (27 page)

Didrik
Rosenfeldt
thought of a lot of things when he got out of
the car and went up the stairs to his summer residence. He thought about the
day he just had. The board meeting in his investment company went very well. He
fired 3000 people in his windmill company early in the afternoon without even
blinking. The hot young secretary gave him a blow job in his office afterwards.
He thought about his annoying wife who kept calling him all afternoon. She was
having a charity event this upcoming Saturday and kept bothering him with
stupid details, as if she would ever be sober enough to go through it. Didn’t
she know by now that he was too busy to deal with that kind of stuff? He was
humming when he reached the door to the house by the sea.

A tune ran through his head, his favorite song
since he was a kid. “Money makes the world go round. A mark, a yen, a buck, or
a pound. That clinking clanking sound can make the world go ‘round.” Didrik
sighed and glanced back at his shiny new silver Jaguar. Money did indeed make
the world go around. And so did he.

A lot of thoughts flitted through Didrik’s head
when he put the key in the old hand-carved wooden door and opened it. But death
was not one of them.

 “You!” was his only word when his eyes met
the ones belonging to a guy he remembered from school. A boy really, he always
thought of him. The boy had nerve to be sitting in his new leather
chair—“The Egg” designed by Arne Jacobsen—and wearing his
despicable grubby old blazer from the boarding school.  The boy was about
to make a complete fool of himself. Didrik shut the door behind him with a
bang.

“What do you want”? He placed his briefcase on
the floor, took off his long black coat and hung it on a hanger in the entrance
closet.  He sighed and looked at the man with pity.

“So”?

All the girls at Herlufsholm boarding school had
whispered about the boy when he first arrived there in ninth grade. Unlike most
of the rich high-society boys, including Didrik Rosenfeldt who was both fat and
red headed, the boy was a handsome guy. He had nice brown hair and the most
sparkling blue eyes. He was tall and the hard work he used to do at his dad’s
farm outside of Naestved had made him strong and muscular and Didrik and his
friends soon noticed that the girls liked that … a lot.

The boy wasn’t rich like the rest of them. In
fact his parents had no money. But in a strange way that made him exotic to the
girls. The poor countryside boy, the handsome stranger from a different culture
who might take them away from their boring rich lives. They thought he could
rescue them from ending up like their rich drunk mothers. How his parents were
able to afford the extremely expensive school, no one knew. Some said he was
there because his mother used to do it with the headmaster, but Didrik knew
that wasn’t true. This boy’s family was—unlike everybody else’s at the
school—hardworking, earnest people. The kind who people like Didrik had
no respect for whatsoever, the kind his father would exploit and then throw
away. He and his type were expendable. They were workers. And that made it even
more fun to pretend he would be the boy’s friend.

Despite that he was younger than they were, they
had from time to time accepted him as their equal in the brotherhood.

But because of his background he would always
fall through. And they would laugh at him behind his back, even sometimes to
his face. Like the time when they were skeet shooting on Kragerup Estate, and
Didrik put a live cat in the catapult. Boy, they had their fun telling that
story for weeks after. How the poor pretty boy had screamed, when he shot the
kitty and it fell bleeding to the ground. What a wimp.

“So, what do you want? Can’t you even say
anything? Are you that afraid of me?” Didrik said arrogantly.

The pretty boy stood up from the $7000 chair and
took a step toward him, his right hand hidden behind his back. Didrik sighed
again. He was sick and tired of this game. It led nowhere and he was wasting
his time. Didrik was longing to get into his living room and get a glass of the
fine $900 cognac he just imported from France. He was not going to let a stupid
poor boy from his past get in the way of that. That was for certain. He
loosened his tie and looked with aggravation at the boy in front of him.

“How did you even get in here?”

“Smashed a window in the back.”

Didrik snorted. Now he would have to go through
the trouble to get someone out here to fix it tonight.

“Just tell me what you want, boy.”

The pretty blue eyes stared at him.

”You know exactly what I want.”

Didrik sighed again. Enough with these games!
Until now he had been patient with this guy. But now he was about to feel the
real Rosenfeldt anger. The same anger Didrik’s dad used to show when Didrik’s
mother brought him into his study and he would beat Didrik half to death with a
fire poker. The same anger that his dad used to show the world that it was the
Rosenfeldts who made the decisions. Everybody obeyed their rules because they
had the money and the power.

“You’re making a fool of yourself. Just get out
of here before I call someone to get rid of you. I’m a very powerful man, you
know. I can have you killed just by pressing a number on my phone,” he said
taking out a black iPhone from his pocket.

“I know very well how powerful you and your
family are. But we are far away from your thugs; and I will have killed you by
the time they get here.”

Didrik put the phone back in his pocket. He now
sensed the boy was more serious than he first anticipated.

“Do you want to kill me? Is that it?”

“Yes.”

Didrik laughed out loud. It echoed in the hall.
The boy did not seem intimidated. That frightened him.

“Don’t be ridiculous. You are such a fool. A
complete idiot. You always were.” Didrik snorted. “Look at you. You look like a
homeless person in that old school blazer. Your clothes are all dirty. And when
did you last shave? What happened to you?”

“You did. You and your friends. You ruined my
life.”

Didrik laughed again. This time not nearly as
loud and confident.

“Is it that old thing you are still sobbing
about?”

“How could I not be?”

“Come on. It happened twenty-five years ago.
Christ, I didn’t even come up with the idea.” Didrik snorted again. “Pah! You
wouldn’t dare to kill me. Remember I am a nobleman and you are nothing but a
peasant who tried to be one of us for a little while. You can take the boy away
from the farm but you can’t take the farm out of the boy. You have always been
nothing but a stupid little farmer boy.”

Didrik watched the boy lift his right hand,
revealing a thing from his past, something he couldn’t forget. With a wild
expression in his eyes, he then moved the blades of the glove and took two
steps in Didrik’s direction with them all pointing at him. . It scared the shit
out of him. It had been years since he last saw the glove and thought it had
been lost. But the pretty boy had found it. Now the game was in the boy’s
court.

“I can give you money.” Desperately, he clung to
what normally saved him in troubled times. ”Is it money you want? I could call
my secretary right now and make a transfer.”

He took out the iPhone again.

“I could give you a million. Would that be
enough? Two million? You could buy yourself a nice house, maybe get some nice
new clothes, and buy a new car.”

The boy in front of him finally smiled showing
his beautiful bright teeth. Phew! Money had once again saved him. At least he
thought. But only for a second.

”I don’t want your blood money.”

Didrik didn’t understand. Who in the world would
say no to money? ”But …”

”I told you. I want you dead. I want you to
suffer just as I have been for twenty-five years. I want you to be humiliated
like I was.”

Didrik sighed deeply. “But why now?”

“Because your time has run out.”

“I don’t understand.”

The boy with the pretty blue eyes stepped closer
and now stood face to face with Didrik. The four claws on his hand were all
pointing towards Didrik’s head. The boy’s eyes were cold as ice, when he said
the words that made everything inside Didrik Rosenfeldt shiver: “The game is
over.”

Lari Soerensen
enjoyed her job as a housekeeper for the Rosenfeldt family. Not that she liked
Mr. Rosenfeldt in particular but she liked taking care of his summer residence
by the sea. They barely ever used it, only for a few weeks in the summer and
whenever Mr. Rosenfeldt had one of his affairs with a local waitress or his
secretary. He would escape to the house in Karrebaeksminde for “a little privacy”
as he called it.

But otherwise there wasn’t much work in keeping
the house clean, and Lari Soerensen could do it at her own pace. She would turn
on the music in the living room and sing while she polished the parquet floor.
She would eat of the big box of chocolate in the kitchen. She would take the
money in the ashtrays and the coins lying on the shelves and put it in her
pocket knowing the family would never miss it. Sometimes she would even use the
phone to call her mother in the Philippines, which normally was much too
expensive for her. Her Danish husband didn’t want to pay for her phone calls to
her family anymore, and since he took all the money she got from cleaning
people’s houses, she couldn’t pay for the calls herself.

It was a cold but lovely morning as she walked
pass the port and glanced at all the yachts that would soon be put back in the
water when spring arrived. All the rich people would go sailing and drinking on
their big boats.

She took in a breath of the fresh morning air.
She had three houses to clean today and she would begin with Mr. Rosenfeldt’s
since he probably wouldn’t be there. It was only five thirty, and the city had
barely awakened. Everything was so quiet, not even a car.

She had taken a lot of time to get used to living
in the little kingdom of Denmark. Being from the Philippines, she was used to a
warmer climate and people in her homeland were a lot more open and friendly
than what she experienced here. Not that they were not nice to her—they
were. But it was hard for her to get accustomed to the fact that people didn’t
speak to you if they didn’t know you. If she would talk to a woman in the
supermarket she would answer briefly and without looking at Lari. It wasn’t
impolite; it was custom. People were busy and had enough in themselves.

But once people got to know somebody they would
be very friendly. They wouldn’t necessarily stop and talk if they met in the
street. Often they were way too busy for that, but they would smile. And Lari
would smile back, feeling accepted in the small community. If people became
friends with someone they might even invite them to dinner and would get very
drunk, and then the Danes wouldn’t stop talking until it was early in the
morning. They would tell a lot of jokes and laugh a lot. They had a strange
sense of humor that she had to get used to. They used sarcasm all the time, and
she had a hard time figuring out when they actually meant what they said or
when they were just joking.

But Lari liked that they laughed so much. She
did too. Smiled and laughed. That’s how she got by during the day, the month,
the year. That’s what she did when the rich white man from Denmark came to her
house in the Philippines and told her mother, that he wanted to marry Lari and
take her back to Denmark and pay the family a lot of money for her. That’s what
she did when she signed the paperwork and they were declared married and she
knew her future was saved. She smiled when she got on the plane with her ugly
white husband who wore clogs and dirty overalls. She even smiled when he showed
her into the small messy house that hadn’t been cleaned for ages and told her
that was her new home. That her job would be to cook and clean and be available
to him at any time. She was still smiling, even at the end of the day when she
handed over the money that she earned from housecleaning while her husband sat
at home and was paid by the government to be unemployed. And when Mr.
Rosenfeldt grabbed her and took her into his bed and had oral sex with her she
still smiled.

Yes, Lari Soerensen always smiled. And she still
did today when she unlocked the door to Mr. Rosenfeldt’s summer residence.

But from that moment on she would smile no more.