Headhunters

EPILOGUE

THE FIRST SNOW had come and gone again.

I had read on the Net that a purchase option and the display rights for The Calydonian Boar Hunt had been sold at an auction in Paris. The buyer was the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which could now exhibit the painting – unless in the two-year option period an owner appeared from out of the blue and laid claim to the property – and could take up the option and acquire permanent possession. There were a few brief sentences about its origins and the discussions that had raged about whether it was a copy or an original by a different painter, since there were no sources proving that Rubens had ever painted any Calydonian boars. But the experts were now agreed that Rubens was the artist. There was nothing about how the picture had come to light, the fact that the Norwegian state was the vendor or any mention of price.

Diana had realised that it would be difficult to run the gallery alone now that she was a mother-to-be, and had therefore – after consulting me – decided to bring in a partner who could take care of the more practical aspects, such as the financial management, so that she could concentrate more on art and artists. Our house had, furthermore, been put up for sale. We had agreed that a slightly smaller terrace house in a more rural setting would be a better place for a child to grow up. And I had already received a very high offer. It was from someone who had rung me the second he had seen the ad in the newspaper and asked for a viewing that very evening. I had recognised him as soon as I opened the door. Corneliani suit and geek-chic glasses.

‘Not one of Ole Bang’s very best perhaps,’ he commented after racing from room to room with me in tow. ‘But I’ll take it. How much do you want?’

I mentioned the quote in the ad.

‘Plus a million,’ he said. ‘Deadline the day after tomorrow.’

I said we would consider his offer and escorted him to the door. He passed me his business card. No title, just his name and a mobile phone number. The recruitment agency’s name was written in such small letters that to all practical intents and purposes it was unreadable.

‘Tell me,’ he said on the doorstep, ‘didn’t you use to be king of the heap?’ And before I could reply: ‘We’re thinking of expanding. We may ring you.’

We. Small letters.

I let the deadline pass without mentioning the offer to the estate agent or Diana. I didn’t hear anything from ‘we’, either.

Since, on principle, I never start working before it is light, on this particular day I was – as on most other days – the last man to arrive in the car park outside Alfa. ‘The first shall be last.’ This is a privilege I have formulated myself and implemented, a privilege that can only be granted to the company’s best headhunter. The position also implies that no one can take your parking spot even though, on paper, it is subject to the same first-come-first-served rule as other company parking spaces.

But on this day there was a car there nonetheless. An unfamiliar Passat, probably one of our customers who thought it would be fine to park there because of the Alfa sign hanging from the chain behind the space, a halfwit who did not have the capacity to read the large sign by the entrance directing them to VISITOR PARKING.

All the same, I felt a little uncertainty. Could it be that someone in Alfa had come to the conclusion that I was no longer… I didn’t complete the thought.

While I was casting around for another spot, annoyed, a man strode out of the office building heading in the vague direction of the Passat. He had a Passat-owner gait, I determined, and breathed a sigh of relief. For this was definitely not a rival for the spot but a client.

I parked my car demonstratively in front of the Passat, waited and hoped. Perhaps it was a good start to the day after all, perhaps I could shout at an idiot. And, sure enough, the man tapped on my side window, and I looked into a coat at stomach height.

I waited a couple of seconds before pressing the window button, and the glass slid down slowly – yet still a little faster than ideally I would have liked.

‘Listen-’ he began before being interrupted by my studied drawl.

‘Well, how can I help you today?’ Without deigning to cast him a glance, I prepared to deliver a refreshing sign-reading lecture.

‘Would you mind moving your car a bit? You’re b-ocking my way out.’

‘I think you’ll find that you are blocking my way in, my good-’

At last the atmospheric noises reached my brain. I peered out of the window and up. My heart almost stopped beating.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Just a moment.’ I fumbled manically for the button to close the window. But my fine-motor-coordination skills seemed to have vanished.

‘Wait a sec,’ said Brede Sperre. ‘Haven’t we met before?’

‘I doubt it,’ I said, trying to produce a calm, relaxed bass voice.

‘Are you sure? I’m certain we’ve met.’

Shit, how could he have recognised the alleged third cousin of the Monsen brothers at the Pathology Unit? That version had been bald and dressed like a bumpkin. This one had luxuriant hair, an Ermenegildo Zegna suit and a freshly pressed Borelli shirt. But I knew I shouldn’t be too dismissive, put Sperre into defensive mode and set his brain whirring until he remembered. I took a deep breath. I was tired, more tired than I ought to have been today. This was a day when I had to deliver the goods. Show that I could live up to the reputation I had once enjoyed.

‘Who knows?’ I said. ‘To tell the truth there’s something familiar about you, too…’

At first he seemed a little bewildered by this counteroffensive. Then he put on the boyish winsome smile that made Sperre so well suited to the visual media.

‘You’ve probably seen me on TV. I hear that all the time…’

‘Right, that’s probably where you’ve seen me too,’ I said.

‘Oh?’ he said, curious. ‘Which programme was that, then?’

‘Must have been your programme. Since you think we’ve met. Because the TV screen is not actually a window through which we can see each other, is it? On your side of the camera it’s more like… a mirror maybe?’

Sperre looked slightly confused.

‘I’m joking,’ I said. ‘I’ll move. Have a great day.’

I activated the car window and reversed. There were rumours going round that Sperre was screwing Odd G. Dybwad’s new wife. Rumours that he had screwed the old one, too. And – for that matter – that he was screwing Dybwad.

As Sperre was driving out of the car park, he stopped before turning, so that for two seconds we were sitting in our cars windscreen to windscreen. I saw his eyes. He was looking at me as though he had just been tricked and only realised that now. I sent him a friendly nod. Then he accelerated and was off. And I looked in the rear-view mirror and whispered: ‘Hi there, Roger.’

I entered Alfa and roared a deafening ‘Good morning, Oda!’ and then Ferdinand came rushing towards me.

‘Well?’ I said. ‘Have they come?’

‘Yes, they’re ready,’ Ferdinand said, tripping down the corridor after me. ‘By the way, there was a policeman here. Tall, blond and quite, erm… good-looking.’

‘What did he want?’

‘He wanted to know what Clas Greve had said about himself in the interviews he had attended here.’

‘He’s been dead a long time,’ I said. ‘Are they still investigating the case?’

‘Not the murder case. It’s about the Rubens picture. They can’t work out who he stole it from. No one’s come forward. Now they’re trying to trace who he’s been in contact with.’

‘Didn’t you read the paper today? Now they’ve started to doubt whether it’s an original Rubens again. Perhaps he didn’t steal it; he might have inherited it.’

‘Bizarre.’

‘What did you say to the policeman?’

‘I gave him our interview report, of course. That didn’t seem to interest him much. He said he would contact us again, if there was anything.’

‘And you’re hoping he will, I suppose?’

Ferdinand gave his squeal of a laugh.

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘you take care of that, Ferdy. I trust you.’

I could see how he rose and sank, how the responsibility made him grow and the nickname made him shrink. Balance is everything.

Then we were at the end of the corridor. I paused in front of the door and checked the knot of my tie. They were sitting inside, ready for the final interview. The rubber-stamping. For the candidate had already been selected, was already appointed, it was just the client who wasn’t aware of it yet, who thought they still had some say in the matter.

‘Then send the candidate in exactly two minutes from now,’ I said. ‘One hundred and twenty seconds.’

Ferdinand nodded and studied his watch.

‘Just one tiny little thing,’ he said. ‘Her name’s Ida.’

I opened the door and stepped inside.

There was scraping of chairs as they stood up.

‘I apologise for the delay, gentlemen,’ I said, shaking the three hands held out to me. ‘But someone took my parking spot.’

‘Isn’t that wearing?’ the chairman of Pathfinder said, turning to his public relations manager who nodded in vigorous agreement. The shop steward representing the employees was there too, a guy in a red V-necked sweater with a cheap white shirt underneath, undoubtedly an engineer of the saddest variety.

‘The candidate has a board meeting at twelve, so perhaps we ought to get cracking?’ I said, taking a seat at the end of the table. The other end had already been prepared for the man they would, in one and a half hours’ time, happily agree would have to be Pathfinder’s new CEO. The lights had been set up in such a way that he would appear at his most favourable, the chair was of the same kind as ours, but its legs were a bit longer, and I had laid out the leather briefcase I had bought for him, bearing his initials, and a gold Montblanc pen.

‘Indeed,’ the company chairman said. ‘By the way, I have a confession to make. As you know, we very much liked Clas Greve after the interview he gave.’

‘Yes,’ said the public relations manager. ‘We thought you had found the perfect candidate.’

‘He was a foreigner, I know,’ said the chairman, his neck coiling like a snake’s, ‘but the man spoke Norwegian like a native. And we said, while you were escorting him out, that in the final analysis the Dutch have always had a better understanding of the export market than we do here.’

‘And that we might be able to learn from someone with a more international management style,’ the public relations manager added.

‘So when you came back and said you were not sure he was the right man after all, well, we were very surprised, Roger.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, we were quite simply of the opinion that your powers of judgement were wanting. I haven’t said this before, but we were considering withdrawing your commission and contacting Greve direct.’

‘So did you do that?’ I asked with a wry smile.

‘What we’re wondering,’ the public relations manager said, exchanging glances with the chairman and flashing a smile, ‘is how you could spot there was something amiss.’

‘How did you know instinctively what we were utterly blind to?’ asked the chairman, with a loud clearing of the throat. ‘How can anyone be such a good judge of character?’

I nodded slowly. Pushed my papers five centimetres up the table. And slumped into the high-backed chair. It rocked – not too much, only a little. I looked out of the window. At the light. At the darkness that was on its way. A hundred seconds. The room was quite silent now.

‘It’s my job,’ I said.

From the corner of my eye I saw the three of them exchange meaningful nods. And added: ‘Besides, I had already begun to consider a candidate who was even better.’

The three turned towards me. And I was ready. I imagine that is how it feels to be the conductor during the seconds before the concert starts, feeling the eyes of everyone in the symphony orchestra glued to your baton, hearing the expectant audience behind you settle in.

‘That’s why I’ve brought you here today,’ I said. ‘The man you will meet is the new shooting star, not just in the Norwegian but in the international management sky. In the last round I reckoned it would be quite unrealistic to wrench him away from the job he had. He is, after all, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost of the company.’

My gaze shifted from face to face.

‘But without promising too much now, I think I can go so far as to say that I may have unsettled him. And if we should get him…’ I rolled my eyes to suggest a wet dream, utopia, but nevertheless… And the chairman and the public relations manager had predictably and inevitably drawn closer. Even the shop steward who had been sitting with his arms crossed had placed them on the table and leaned forward.

‘Who? Who?’ whispered the public relations manager.

One hundred and twenty.

The door opened. And there he stood, a man of thirty-nine in a suit from Kamikaze in Bogstadveien where Alfa gets a fifteen per cent discount. Ferdinand had dabbed some skin-coloured talcum powder on his right hand before sending him in because, as we know, he suffered from sweaty palms. But the candidate knew what he had to do, for I had instructed him, set the scene down to the last detail. He had dyed his hair an almost imperceptible grey at the temples and had once owned a lithograph by Edvard Munch entitled The Brooch.

‘May I introduce Jeremias Lander?’ I said.

I’m a headhunter. It’s not particularly difficult. But I am king of the heap.