Read Online The Hanging Girl by Jussi Adler-Olsen - Free Book Online Page B

the last remaining disciple who’d followed Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi from the beginning when he’d been in a completely different place in life and was called Frank. But despite their long history together, and their cooperation and intimacy, and despite it having always been her innermost desire, he’d never made love to her, body to body.
    “We two make love with our souls, my friend,” he always said. “You give me my most important orgasms, sweetest Pirjo. I obtain my most significant energy from your gentleness and the great insight of your soul.”
    She hated Atu when he said things like that because she was neither gentle nor chaste. Nevertheless, she understood him. Over time they’d become more like brother and sister in spirit than anything else, and it was infinitely far from what she needed. She wanted to feel him like his other women felt him. To feel soft, moist, and penetrated by his lust and passion. If he’d lain with her just once in all these years and lusted after her as a wild and sexy woman, it would’ve been different. Just one single time and she wouldn’t have to obsess anymore that it was never going to happen.
    But for Atu she was nothing more than the vestal, the untouchable. The virgin symbol who guarded over him, his business, and everything. It was the way
he
had decided it should be, not Pirjo.
    And virgin she still was in some ways, now, at the age of thirty-nine. At least in her relationship with Atu. If she was going to make love to him, and if there was going to be a baby as a result, for which she had a burning desire, it would have to happen very, very soon.
    She clenched her teeth and imagined the woman in the atrium. She’d been picked up by Atu a couple of months ago in Paris. This Malena Michel had stood before him in towering heels and a tight, yet innocent, white dress and explained that her parents were Italian but that she had emigrated to France when she was six, and that she felt that her entire past and origin at that very moment melted together with the words he so generously ladled out. That she could feel that she had come into this world solely for Atu’s sake, and that she would serve him in everything he desired.
    Nobody understood how much it hurt when he fell for such a saccharine speech, or how undeserved it not only felt but in reality also was.
    The consequence of all this was that Malena was now here with them, never more than a few meters away, and totally caught in the net of his charisma. And it wasn’t the first time either that he had a woman like heramong his disciples. On the contrary, it happened more and more often as the years went by, and Pirjo had just about had her fill.
    Just a few weeks ago they’d been in London, recruiting disciples and participants for their fall course, when a beautiful young black woman had fainted.
    In an unusually insistent manner, which Atu normally didn’t exhibit, he asked Pirjo to ensure that the woman was taken to his private quarters to rest. What subsequently happened behind the closed door she couldn’t say, but Atu had had a new look in his eyes that neither his Parisian floozy nor Pirjo felt comfortable with as they took the plane back.
    Now a letter lay in front of Pirjo from the very same woman, stating that she wished to participate in Atu’s next nature absorption course on Öland, which according to the website started in a week.
    It was definitely bad news. The only thing that might momentarily console Pirjo was the thought that the French slave girl would, as a result, slip out of Atu’s intimate sphere.
    Apart from that, Pirjo knew instinctively that this time it could all go very badly. She’d noticed how the black woman had made an impression on Atu, and it was a very long time since that had happened to such a degree; Pirjo had seen to that.
    No, there was no doubt that this woman could have significantly more power over Atu than was good, if she was given the opportunity.
    So Pirjo was on