Anxious People(45)

Silence. Betrayal.

“So the two of you… you and… the two of you… behind my back?” Roger said, with some effort.

“It’s not what you think,” Anna-Lena insisted.

“Not at all what you think,” the rabbit assured him.

“It really isn’t,” Anna-Lena added.

“Well… perhaps it is a little bit, depending on what you’re thinking,” the rabbit conceded.

“Be quiet now, Lennart!” Anna-Lena said.

“Then just tell him the truth,” the rabbit suggested.

Anna-Lena breathed in through her nose and closed her eyes.

“Lennart’s just a… we got in touch on the Internet. It wasn’t supposed… it just happened, Roger.”

Roger’s arms were hanging limply by his sides, lost. In the end he turned to the bank robber, pointed at the rabbit, and whispered: “How much do you want for shooting him?”

“Can everyone please just stop telling me to shoot people?” the bank robber pleaded.

“We can make it look like an accident,” Roger said.

Anna-Lena took several desperate steps toward Roger, trying to reach his fingertips.

“Please, darling… Roger, calm down…”

Roger had no intention of calming down. He held one hand out toward the rabbit and swore: “You’re going to die! Do you hear me? You’re going to die!”

Panic-stricken, Anna-Lena blurted out the only thing she could think of that would grab his attention: “Roger, wait! If anyone dies in here, this apartment will be a murder scene and then the price per square foot might go up! People love murder scenes!”

Roger stopped at this, his fists were quivering but he took a deep breath and managed to calm down slightly. The price was always the price, after all. His shoulders sank first, followed by the rest of him, both internally and externally. He looked down at the floor and whispered: “How long has this been going on? Between you and this… this bloody rabbit?”

“A year,” Anna-Lena said.

“A year?!”

“Please, Roger, I only did it for your sake.”

Roger’s jowls were shaking with despair and confusion, his lips were moving but all his emotions remained trapped inside. The man with the rabbit’s head appeared to see an opportunity to explain what was really going on, which he did in a tone that only a middle-aged man with a Stockholm accent as broad as a motorway could do: “Listen, Rog—you don’t mind me calling you Rog? Don’t feel bad about this! Women often turn to me, you know, because I’m happy to do the things they might not be able to persuade their husbands to do.”

Roger’s face was contorted into one large wrinkle.

“What sort of things? What sort of relationship are the two of you actually having?”

“A business arrangement, I’m a professional!” the rabbit corrected.

“Professional? Have you been paying to sleep with him, Anna-Lena?” Roger exclaimed.

Anna-Lena’s eyes doubled in size.

“Are you mad?” she hissed.

The rabbit stepped closer to Roger to sort out the misunderstanding.

“No, no, not that sort of professional. I don’t sleep with people. Well, not professionally, anyway. I disrupt viewings, I’m a professional disrupter, here’s my card.” The rabbit fished a business card out of one of his socks. No Boundaries Lennart Ltd., it said, the Ltd. indicating the seriousness of the business.

Anna-Lena bit the inside of her lip and said: “Yes, Lennart’s been helping me. Us!”

“What the hell…?” Roger exclaimed.

The rabbit nodded proudly.

“Oh, yes, Rog. Sometimes I’m an alcoholic neighbor, sometimes I just rent the apartment above the one where the viewing is taking place and watch an erotic film with the volume turned up really loud. But this is my most expensive package.” He gestured toward himself, from his white socks to his underpants, then his bare chest, until he reached the rabbit’s head, which he still hadn’t managed to remove. Then he announced proudly: “This is ‘the crapping rabbit,’ you see. The premium package. If you order this, I sneak into the apartment before everyone else and hide in the bathroom. Then when the other prospective buyers open the door, they catch sight of a naked, adult man with a rabbit’s head sitting on the toilet doing his business. People never really get over it. You can always get rid of scratched floors and ugly wallpaper when you move in, can’t you? But a crapping rabbit?” The rabbit tapped the temples of the rabbit’s head demonstratively: “It gets stuck in here! You wouldn’t want to live anywhere you saw that, would you?!” A thought that all of those present, as they looked at the rabbit, had nothing but sympathy for.

Anna-Lena reached her hand out to Roger’s arm, but he pulled it away as if she’d burned him. She sniffed: “Please, Roger, don’t you remember that viewing in the recently renovated turn-of-the-century building last year, when a drunk neighbor suddenly appeared and started throwing spaghetti Bolognese at all the prospective buyers?”

Roger was so insulted that he let out a loud snort.

“Of course I do! We bought that apartment for three hundred and twenty-five thousand below its market value!”

The rabbit nodded happily.