Free The Quiet Girl by Peter Høeg Page B

It had been taken down. And replaced with a for sale sign. He looked up the road. Fifty yards ahead toward the racetrack stood a dark Ford.
    "Please park just around the corner," he said.
    * * *
    The Jaguar rounded the corner and stopped. Kasper got out, walked back, peered cautiously over the wall. The Ford had started up and moved forward. The ballerina came out of the driveway, running like a twenty-year-old, and seated herself beside the driver.
    Kasper got into the Jaguar.
    "There's somebody after us," he said, "who surpasses your skills."
    The Jaguar shot forward as if a huge hand had grabbed it from underneath. Behind them, headlights swept over the houses and out to the promenade. The Jaguar's motor began a crescendo, Franz Fieber whipped the wheel to the right, the world tilted, the car raced up the slope toward Slotspark and broke through the hedge. Kasper found a couple of handles and clung to them; there were trees and bushes everywhere. He looked at the young man ahead of him--he was focused but relaxed. Hands and legs danced over the pedals and keys; this was what it must have been like to sit behind Helmut Walcha at the big grand piano in St. Laurent's Church in Alkmaar during his recording of Die Kunst der Fuge . Hundreds of pneumatic hammers pummeled the car from outside. The Jaguar began braking and ended with a crash that sounded as if they'd driven straight into a shredder. Everything grew dark.
    In the darkness beyond them were points of light, which condensed into a small circular area. The car had stopped in the middle of a rhododendron bush; the bush was as big as a garage.
    The dark Ford drove past the lighted area, searching.
    "We could have killed ourselves," said Kasper.
    "I pray constantly. Jesus hears me."
    Every automobile has an acoustic signature. Kasper heard the Ford coming back; it must have turned around. It passed them slowly.
    "An expert like you," said Kasper. "Tell me, if a customer was to be picked up inside the barricaded area, could you find out where and when?"
    "Have you got a name?"
    He gave Stina's name. Franz Fieber spoke briefly on his mobile phone.
    "The unions run taxi clubs. Cafeteria food, slot machines, wild rumors. And information. We'll have her in a couple of minutes."
    Kasper listened out across the Strand Road traffic. It was in a different galaxy than Glostrup after all. The sound around him was tasteful and muted. The soft click of the hydraulic pump in a RollsRoyce. The complex and yet gently controlled intensity in eight-cylinder common-rail engines. Cars that were manufactured not to be heard, but to appear, suddenly, out of the silence. And if the silence was ever broken, it was by something personal, a Ferrari's bestial rumble or the nostalgic roar of a veteran Volkswagen four-cylinder air-cooled boxer engine.
    And there was room for the sound between the houses; reverberation is proportional to the volume of the space. Kasper closed his eyes. He could have owned automobiles like Chaplin. Like Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. He could have employed people to drive them and repair them. Instead he sat here.
    It was time to lay a little golden egg.
    "Happiness," he said, "doesn't consist so much of what one has scraped together and gotten off the ground, but of what one has been able to let go of."
    He heard a nearly silent diesel motor, a Mercedes, the quietest of all cars. He heard the wind softly flapping a convertible top. A Mercedes coupe. The kind of car he would have bought if he had been Lona Bohrfeldt. It drove slowly and unevenly. As he would have driven if he had met himself. And then the police.
    The car entered the lighted area and passed in front of Cafe Jorden Rundt. A woman sat behind the wheel. Kasper put on his glasses. There was a little white cross on the license plate.
    Kasper pointed; the young man understood immediately. The Jaguar crept forward out of the rhododendron, then accelerated. Kasper could not understand which sense Franz Fieber used in