Free The Elephant Keepers' Children by Peter Høeg

be particularly serious, and where the acts of crime that are committed …”
    The bishop nods. “Looking back, it’s no wonder,” she muses.
    Vera the Secretary nods as though she were looking back, too.
    â€œI was thinking,” says Anaflabia, “that while I was here I should take the opportunity of paying a short visit to the rectory. But it seems the police have sealed it off and locked the doors.”
    She lowers her voice to a volume that would still be audible in a football stadium.
    â€œI was going to see if your parents had left any clues as to their whereabouts, something that might be useful in tracking them down and getting in touch with them again. So that we might deal with this without the police being involved.”
    For people who think deeply about existence, it strikes me that big surprises always seem to arrive in clusters. If clusters can arrive at all.
    Even before I have begun to digest the pack of lies Tilte has just delivered concerning my person, the shock of it all is at once superseded by a sense of honor at being seated here with two of the truly great female strategists. It’s clear that what the bishop wants is what she succeeded in achieving the last time she was here: she wants to avoid a scandal. And in order to find inspiration for her project she wishes to tear the rectory apart in search of evidence.
    It’s what Tilte wants, too, though for entirely different reasons.
    Bishop Anaflabia Borderrud casts a glance at her watch with a movement she tries to conceal. At that moment, the door of the room opens and a voice booms out, “Well, I never! What a fascinating coincidence!”

11
    I don’t know if you’ve heard
of the philosopher Nietzsche. I have to say that he has yet to appear on the curriculum for the seventh class of Finø Town School, and perhaps one should be thankful. At least if the photograph on the front cover of the book of his that Tilte and I found at the library is anything to go by. It shows Nietzsche with a mustache like a broom and a look in his eyes that suggests the man may well be a genius but he’d need to run into an exceptionally good day just to be able to button his own trousers.
    The man now standing in the door is the spitting image of Nietzsche except that his mustache is white and he’s as bald as an egg, which makes you think that God didn’t have a single hair left by the time he’d finished doing the mustache.
    â€œWell, indeed,” he reiterates. “What spieth my little eye? Familiar faces.”
    Tilte and Basker and I rise. Tilte curtsies, I bow, and Basker begins to growl, compelling me to give him a kick with an outstretched foot like a ballet dancer’s.
    By outrageous coincidence—so outrageous that we cannot for a moment assume it to be coincidence at all—we find ourselves standing before one of the very few people withwhom you are guaranteed to get very far indeed by calling him sir. And who is he? This is a man renowned well beyond the borders of Denmark. This man is Professor Thorkild Thorlacius-Claptrap, consultant physician and head of the Department of Neural Research at Århus New Regional Hospital.
    Like the bishop of GrenÃ¥, Thorkild Thorlacius-Claptrap is a family acquaintance. He headed up the small group of forensic psychiatrists who conducted the extensive mental examinations of Father and Mother that resulted in both of them being declared more or less normal, an outcome that was a clear precondition of Father being able to resume his position of pastor following what had happened, which I am awaiting the opportunity to tell you about as soon as the events with which we are concerned begin to level out.
    Next to Thorkild stands his wife, whom we also remember from that same occasion, she being his secretary, and, I might add, one of his warmest female admirers.
    Anaflabia Borderrud claps her hands together in glee, thereby once and for all