Copenhagen Noir

SAVAGE CITY, CRUEL CITY by Kristian Lundberg Malmø ^{Translated from Swedish by Lone Thygesen Blecher}

We must start at the very beginning.

Our story is simple. Just like life itself, it has no beginning and no end. We’re in Malmø, one of the larger suburbs of Copenhagen. Our story is about death. Death is at the core of everything. All stories about life and love contain a kernel of death.

Those who must die are getting ready. Those who must die prepare themselves. They read and write, breathe and watch. Those who must die set out on a journey. One showers to be clean, cleaning especially well to smell fresh. Another writes his will and testament-he has already made up his mind, days and weeks ago. A third measures out precisely as much of the drug necessary to make him disappear. The vein responds, his eyes cloud over, and in a matter of seconds the world is dark, black. Everything hangs in the balance for a moment, the living and the dead. We who are still here, and those who have given up.

From Västra Hamnen, this community within a community, one can see Copenhagen glitter like a string of diamonds in the night. The neighborhoods Nils Forsberg loved were the ones close to the discontinued ferry port, Nyhavn, home of the shabby beer taverns where a Swedish policeman was allowed to be exactly as intoxicated as he wanted to be.

We are all in the same space. All the invisible people. Everything that creates a city, with sounds and echoes, time passed and time to come, dreams and hopes, the unborn and those who are vanishing. We are all here. This is a story of guilt and redemption, of hope and despair.

We are human beings. We live, breathe, love. We are the ones who are going to die. You are the ones who are going to die. We are each others’ mirror images.

Those who are going to die look around the room, brush their hair, kiss their children, flush the toilet. They are the ones who know they are going to die, who long for death, for the great, soft darkness, the final hot flash, and then that final, last silence. And those who want to live, and who do all they can to stay here, who are frightened of the great darkness surrounding us. We are like each other, like day and night in the same city, alike as only human beings can be. Our story must start right there: in the city, with a description of death-the savage city, if you will. From a distance, and from far above, we might seem like insects, cockroaches, reptiles. We live off of each other. Out in the suburbs lights are coming on, slowly, one window at a time. It is morning, the first day for some, the last day for some, and in between we meet up. The commuter train shoots out between Malmø and Copenhagen, penetrating the morning like a flaming arrow.

Life.

All these breaths creating a chain of life, of time. We know we are being eaten by a hunger we can never escape, and yet we pretend we are not touched by it. That everything is as it should be. That time doesn’t count us in, that we are not worried by time. For every breath, for every day that lights up, we move closer and closer, and one day, just like this one, we stand face-to-face with our own destruction. Then what is it all worth? Nothing.

Death is no stranger who suddenly appears in your room. Death does not pull the curtains aside, revealing an empty backyard. Death does not appear like a shadow that grows darker and then black, like a bruise that deepens in color. Death is just another kind of light.

It happens that Nils Forsberg thinks this way. That on the other side of this light there may be another kind of light, a darker light which your eyes need time to get used to. On other days, most days, he doesn’t think at all, just wants to disappear, thinks that all that is left for him is to drink himself to death. At the center of the city the day deepens, the morning sings its city song. Everything we have will be taken from us, death can come like a thief in the night, he can come like an arrow shot from a distance.

Life.

Fragile as the delicate veins in fall leaves, strong as the stubborn pulse, strong as hope, stronger than love.

The water in the canal is still, translucent, and bottle-green. Every section of town seems to be linked by a bridge. Malmø is a town surrounded by water. The streetlights. Central Station. The taxi lines. The empty moments. Bicycle messengers steal a moment’s rest, between hope and despair. Everything is in movement, the city is breathing and living.

And here we all are, spinning, hopeless.

She who has to die this early morning is getting ready, planning the next few hours, trying to remember names, people, and places. She knows the time has come, that it has been here a long time. She quickly brushes her hair, removes a speck of food from between her front teeth. She knows how much she owes, knows she must pay. She cannot free herself of it. Her debt grows with every breath she takes, and yet there’s nothing new in this, she’s used to being hunted, she is prey. She no longer knows what it feels like not to be hunted.

The withdrawal distorts her thoughts. She’s not able to follow a straight line of thinking. There’s no beaten path she can follow along, or leave behind.

Debt.

It’s all about that.

The debt.

That she has to pay and cannot do so. She who has to die has tried in vain to settle her debt by offering herself as mule. She said: “I can fix it, I can take it. You know I can handle the pressure.”

It would be so simple, just a transport through Copenhagen to Hässleholm, but that prospect turned out to be futile as well.

She had been hoping for it, it had been a straw to cling to, that she could put her debt aside by carrying a kilo of amphetamines from the head supplier.

She has offered to transport goods from Poland to Sweden-but that’s just as futile. She has, to put it mildly, no credit left in her “trust account.” Istvan is many things, but generous and forgiving he is not. She’s still short four thousand kroner. A piddling amount, really. But every time she’s managed to save up something, it disappears just as fast. There are always new needs. The big problem is that the money runs right through her fingers, that she needs the drugs to be able to work and save up more money, and to do that she needs to use more and more.

It’s an evil cycle. She’s in the rat race, but unlike the rat, she knows she’s doing it-which of course makes everything worse. She knows there’s neither beginning nor end. She just runs.

She who must die gets dressed. Thinks of her mother who is still asleep, sees her in her mind’s eye as she lies in her bed, breathing. She who must die cannot this morning help thinking about how much she loves her mother, how she wishes she could give her what she dreams of. A daughter. That she would come back, return from this shadow world. Become alive again. Be a human being, at least for a little while. That’s by now the only wish the aging mother has-to get her daughter back.

Traffic is still almost nonexistent, but the city keeps changing. Roadwork is going to detour traffic from Exercisgatan during the early-morning hours. According to a report from the traffic department it has something to do with a minor gas repair job. These things happen all the time, everything changes.

She who must die thinks about yesterday when what she has feared for so long finally happened-a friend from her school years picked her up in the street. She didn’t notice until it was too late.

Rickard is his name. She remembers him. He always sat at the front of the class raising his hand and sucking up to the teacher. Even then he was an ass, a pig. Rickard. He didn’t recognize her, paid up front for a blowjob without a rubber. She’s almost the only one on Exercisgatan who does it.

Everyone knows about it. She doesn’t need to advertise her special products. For her it doesn’t mean anything anymore. It isn’t true that there are levels in hell. Everything is equally black and hopeless. After she threw up Richard’s sperm by the cemetery fence, she thought, for the umpteenth time, that it had to stop now. No more! she’d thought. Her eyes had teared and she still felt sick from the stale taste.

She who must die knows that it’s inescapable, that it must come to an end. Death from her own hand or an accident-it makes no difference, not any longer, she is tired, tired to the core. She looked into the mirror this morning and saw a ghost looking back at her: a skull with a thin film of skin stretched over the bones. She saw the badly healed scars all the way down from her upper arms. She saw the badly healed veins winding across her underarms. She is no longer a human being, she just doesn’t know what she has become. A reptile.

A cockroach.

She assumed that’s what she’d become.

He who this morning will do the work of death is calm and methodical. He doesn’t hurry, his hand never hesitates. He strangles her completely, without effort. He’s not a passionate man, he is calm and calculating. He knows what to do.

However, it takes longer than he’d expected. She resists-a kind of passive, hopeless resistance. It’s unbearably exciting, and he can’t help letting go of his grip a tiny bit, just so she can take a quick breath, just enough so she cannot scream, but enough oxygen to draw it out for a few more seconds. His pulse speeds up a touch, not much, but enough so that he’s irritated by his own weakness. He finishes his job, his assignment. He’s annoyed about his sudden weakness-that he couldn’t resist the impulse. It all takes just a few minutes. He wishes he could have dragged it out longer.

The murderer covers up her body with a blanket, not from caring, not because the exposed body tells of the unspeakable-he throws the blanket over her from mere habit. The dead body is then rolled into the backseat of the car; the blanket has a small checkered pattern. He’s reckless. It’s a preposterous thought that he should ever have to succumb to letting his car undergo a criminal technical examination. Although the woman’s body is covered with an abundance of DNA traces, he knows that there are neither trails nor suspicions anywhere, that he’s a free man. He eats when he’s hungry, drinks when he’s thirsty. Now he’s excited in this undefinable way that makes his body shake from inside out. To be like a god! Freedom is pleasurable. He sits still for a few seconds in the car, breathes deeply, thinks of the dead body in back, thinks that he must stay present now, that he can feel the whole world breathe against him, intensely and burning. He’s beginning to change, growing harder, more like an animal. This is what he’s been striving for, to become true to his instinct.

It takes time before one begins to see the pattern. The various parts do not make a whole, they’re not noticeable, though it’s so obvious-and perhaps it’s for just this reason that the simple becomes the difficult. The solution is so obvious that it becomes banal. We search for more depth, a more complex solution. But it doesn’t exist. Everything has to do with desires, with needs.

It’s like emerging from a dark basement and being surprised by the bright summer light. You know what you’re going to see, maybe you even feel it, but in the moment itself-just when the world is going to appear-you see nothing. You’re blinded, thrown to the ground, covering your eyes with your hand to protect against the sharp light. This is what truth is like.

This is the merciless light biblical texts speak of, a truth so penetrating that it’s almost impossible to survive. You must die in order to take part in eternal life. Therefore: better to squint than be blinded, better to be chosen, to be inside, than to be excluded.

Nils Forsberg wrote in one of his few letters to his former friend Father Pietro, as an answer to why he can no longer believe: I think it has to do with a kind of stinginess, your faith, your feeling of presumptuousness-that there should be an answer, incomprehensible for those of us still living in this world. Yes, you are right, I am a coward. My way is the coward’s way, but this way I only have myself to depend on. He knew he would never send the letter, that it didn’t really matter, and that the most important thing was to put his thoughts down on paper-that writing was a kind of mirror.

That’s how it was. It was in the writing that he was able to see himself. You think you have a mandate on truth, and through your very faith you make everyone else an exception. I spit on that!

Father Pietro had for a short time been Nils Forsberg’s father confessor. The aging priest, who’d been exiled to the edge of the world, had been Forsberg’s path into the church, into what he imagined was the world. And then the real world came along and changed everything. The world where death attacked like a splash of ink on a white sheet of paper. Between the inner and the outer world, boundaries were no longer possible.

Body and spirit.

The city is Malmø.

The year is 2008.

The old year left only senseless tragedies behind, incidents that could just as well have been stopped in time before the wheel of death started rolling.

Now it’s January. The month when everything stands in the balance. When everything is both too late and too early.

A series of deaths occur within a very limited time, and within a very limited geographical area.

Everyone is dumbfounded.

The general public. The police. The media.

The cruelty. The meaningless violence. The ominous sense of aggression. It has become like an itch that can never be stilled.

The press is full of meaningless speculations, not the least of which are supported by Alexander Hofman’s inflammatory editorials. There’s a rising sense of anxiety that always sets in when weaker groups become even weaker. Everything rolls along, takes on a life of its own. There’s a small part of the larger picture which at first you cannot see, a pattern not decodable at first. The light of truth is blinding, impossible to grasp.

A crime scene might very well be compared to an archeological excavation. You want to know what has happened and who is involved. There are clues, suggestions, a sense that something lies hidden.

The world is a riddle to be solved. We all become more or less suspect. Guilt is a disease, contagious, transmittable. He who turns his face away, he who starts walking faster, she who laughs off the facts, uncomfortably.

Nils Forsberg finished his letter to Father Pietro: There is no longer any reason for me to not say exactly, and I mean exactly, what I think. And that way is, as everyone knows, a blind alley. We lie because we don’t have the energy to tell the truth! Truth does not make us free, it makes us lonely.

Of course, a social and ethical explanation can be found to interpret the reasons why a particular person commits a crime. There are also psychological models. For Nils Forsberg the answer to the “Why” has crystalized into a “Therefore”: greediness, terror-because it was possible, because you could.

January is a month when everything hangs in the balance, when quick or well-thought-out decisions take on unknown consequences. To allow yourself to let go, or to deny yourself the right to act out your dark side. To kick someone lying down one more time, or to let it be. To jump out into it, or not to. Violence vibrates in the air: repressed hatred is like a dense fog rolling through all the alleys and squares of the city.

Life is unfair and cruel, and so is time. Cities grow, cities disappear, children grow older, stars fall and incinerate. Everything is in movement, the only constant is the actual feeling of meaninglessness. That we are on our way somewhere and that we don’t know why.

Between us, the living, there is a transparent wall. Stay or leave. We never touch each other, we just turn our faces away, look down at the ground.

In the end, that’s what it’s all about. That some disappear, while others stay around. That we are weighted down to earth, as though we are carrying an invisible yoke. The dead can be whirled off into time, be recreated, placed into some context, delivered the justice they are thirsting for, and then even the memory of them will be gone.

The final problem is, of course, that any kind of fundamental justice is lacking. That we cannot see the whole picture, only parts of it. That we grope for each other in the dark. And the murderer remains alone, blood singing in his body, images haunting him. He is who he is, he owns this bottomless thirst and this voraciousness that fills him. He knows it should not be this way, he also knows he cannot stop himself. It’s like an invisible wound that can never be healed, an itch you must not touch, and yet you cannot help yourself.

Is this how we become what we’re supposed to be? Nils Forsberg is doubtful, he still believes there is a hope for mercy, for change, that life is not static.

Nils Forsberg had crossed several boundaries in the course of his life. It was not a conscious choice but the sum of a series of events taking place beyond himself. It was possible that he once had been free to choose, but no longer. He’d given up, been tossed here and there, taken paths he had previously not even known were there.

Nils Forsberg had chosen to remain in his job, long after he should have left. When he should have left the dead to bury their dead, and he should have stayed with the living-and lived. The very first time he’d had to deliver the news of a death, he should have refused to pass on the information. He should have said that he could not be the messenger of the underworld, that the living and the dead should take care of each other, and leave him out of it.

But then who the hell would do it?

That’s how it always went. It was the responsibility. His feeling that he was more capable of dealing with the world than his colleagues. It was better that he did it than to have Nils Larsson come stomping into the home of the victims saying, “Your boy is dead, he fell onto the tracks…”

It’s all still there, all the thoughts and actions are there, deep down in him, buried in sediment. And every time he takes action the dregs are stirred up, just like when you throw a stone into water and everything muddies.

Now he was in a gray zone, neither alive nor dead, and yet-a bit of both. He looked at himself in the mirror in the bathroom and could hardly recognize the face looking back at him. At times he despised what he saw. New Year’s had passed, the nights were deep and dark, the days as short as a breath, gray and grainy. Nils Forsberg experienced a certain amount of pleasure in giving up, admitting defeat, with a tiny bit of self-pity mixed in. Tasting the whip of degradation! to quote his favorite author, Eric Hermelin, in one of his introductions to a book of Persian poetry. To summarize: in order to get back up you first must have fallen down. Forsberg had fallen down so many times by now, and he no longer had the strength to get back up. Nils Forsberg was a man who carried his story around with him, who was always telling and changing his life’s story. He was also a man whom no one wanted to listen to anymore.

The morning news in Malmø reports of break-ins in three nursery schools; four people are arrested in a stolen car; a twelve-year-old girl is chased out of her home by her own father-she runs crying around in the yard in front of the apartment building; a middle-aged man is found dead in a parked car on Östra Förstadsgatan. He sits with his head leaning against the steering wheel. The autopsy shows that he’s been dead for at least twelve hours before he was found, which means that he’s been sitting dead in his car during daylight hours on a busy street in the middle of Malmø. Everything is changing. Though we are as alike as only human beings can be, we are still strangers. The girl gets to sleep late in the afternoon, her father will stay away overnight, and the three break-ins at the nursery schools are never solved.

Death is waiting.

Death bides its time.

Everything is about waiting, about doors thrown wide open.

The only thing we can really know is that time measures us carefully, it waits until we have finished all we are here to do, all that is written with invisible letters in the book of life.

Time.

Drops of time, trickles of time. Time scratching, carving its deep lines in your face. Time for the poison to leave your body the same second it’s taken in. We’re like black flares in a world of sudden light. The soon to be dead get on the bus, log onto their online bank, wait for a traffic light to change. Everything continues as though nothing is going to happen. The soon to die take their stuff out from the pawnbroker, try to ameliorate a bad cold.

The police station down by Slussplan, right by the canal, lies mostly in darkness. It’s that time, right between night and morning, and slowly the city wakes up, revealing all the secrets of the night. Rain mixed with snow falls heavily. The water in the canal reflects the light, traffic lights blink yellow, again and again. Down by Midhem, at one of the many twenty-four hour gas stations, a small fire ignites and spreads quickly along the back wall-a neglected area where trash has accumulated for many years. Three or four homeless people who’ve been using the area as a shelter from the wind run off, leaving the fire behind. They stumble along Lundavägen like evil-smelling ghosts, on their way toward the dense bushes right opposite Hedberg’s car dealership. And then everything is recognizable yet again, from the acrid smell of burned plastic, damp leaves, scraps from a fast food place, a worthless windbreaker. The rancid smell of urine, alcohol, rotting food. Three of the four who run from the fire will not make it through February, the month of the death god. The youngest of them will be found dead in a gateway on Zenithgatan, right next to Rörsjöskolan. Life is in motion, it happens. We have so little to fight back with. We’ve created a world that turns its back on us.

Malmø is Sweden’s third largest city.

The city is growing, in constant motion. The boundaries between Copenhagen and Malmø are growing more and more diffuse with every year that passes. Transportation is fast now-and everything can be transported. Huge sums of money change hands every day. The economy, lust, and desire itself move freely, like underwater currents. You see the ripples on the surface but never the big currents, the big fish.

Stars can just be made out in the grayness; far away a siren is heard from an emergency vehicle. Everything is within everything. Even chaos creates its own pattern, like looking through a kaleidoscope. Down in Rosengård a basement fire starts up. In the last few weeks there have been several, almost always basement fires, lit with rubbing alcohol and matches. The rental agency has emptied all the storage rooms, nothing of value has been left behind, nothing that could be ignited. Which means that they drag the trash in there themselves and light it. Why? The answer is simple: because they can.

A security company makes rounds, drives slowly through the badly designed alleys. They’ve been ordered never to stop, never to leave their car, always to call, “Patrol in danger,” at the least sign of trouble. This of course contributes to aggravating the mood, to the feeling of being out on a dangerous assignment. The divisions become sharper and sharper. The difference between them and us more and more pronounced.

Windows in the stairwells are brightly lit. The city is besieged by its inhabitants, and a ghost walks through the city, a phantom.

Then the fire in the eastern parts of the city gets going. The night worker at Statoil strikes the alarm for the fire department and within a short time the gas station and the fast food restaurant have been shut down for customers. Someone also decides to block off the upper part of Lundavägen. Two big cranes block off the street. A lonely policeman is given the task of directing the scanty traffic. A rain storm is gathering, clouds quickly pile up above the city. This gray, miserable city of no mercy. On this day, in this city.

This morning finds Nils Forsberg sleeping at his kitchen table. A string of saliva has run down his chin. Forsberg doesn’t dream. He’s sunk into a deep black hole-the dreams are happening somewhere else. The alcohol rushes throughout his body, shakes and shivers in all his body’s nooks and crannies, searching for cells, thirsty cells wanting to be saturated again. Time will burn off the alcohol. Time is our only friend. It moves on, rushing like an ocean. Everything tears and jerks inside of him and he can’t see it or understand it. He’s like the living dead, what’s left over at the end. Finally, that’s what it’s all about: time. It changes us, it teaches us, if only we’ll listen.

In the end, it all comes down to one question: who is it you belong to?

Who do you belong to? Your car? Your job? The alcohol? The drugs? You allow yourself to be defeated, vanquished, conquered, beaten. Eventually, that’s the only thing Nils Forsberg can subscribe to: that he’s owned. To live becomes like being on fire for one moment. To flare up like a star in a black room, imploding, then disappearing with a faint hissing sound, like when you drop a burning match into a glass of water. One quick fizzle, then all is quiet.

“Even time is political,” Mats Granberg once said. Forsberg’s answer had been blunt, not to say aggressive. “Ah ha? And what the hell do you want me to do about it?” How do you answer something like that? Which of course only meant that Forsberg tried to make sense of it because he missed his friend. He also knew that he couldn’t admit it to himself. He couldn’t allow himself to be human. All his mistakes, his failures, his problems lived their own life in Forsberg’s consciousness, soaring and surging through his body like a separate ecosystem.

In the course of his career, Nils Forsberg had seen more dead people than he cared to think about. He had seen them in every condition, at all ages.

Children and adults, men and women. The dead all carried a common burden. Their spirits floated weightlessly, while the memory of them nailed them to this world. It was as though a special kind of energy had been released around the dead. A human being who disappears in a crime leaves a string of loose ends behind. Connections that are not cleared up, explained, will haunt the rest of us, force out an answer. Nils Forsberg lived in a dark maze, groping about and finding nothing, not even a flicker of light. Only the voices from the dead looking for answers, crying out to him when he tried to sleep, hesitantly reaching for him when he let his thoughts float. He knew he was not alone in this, that most police officers were haunted this way, yet it was rare that anyone said anything about it. As long as one didn’t speak of it, it didn’t exist, that particular problem.

A police report is at best a slow journey, two steps forward and one step back. At worst it’s a march in place. Most often it’s a balancing act between madness and discipline. This was a phrase Forsberg liked to repeat to anyone who cared to listen: “Madness and discipline! And all we have here is the discipline! Where’s the creativity! Where’s curiosity?”

The dead.

Some of these deaths he had shared with Gisela Eriksson. They had attempted to recreate times, places, and events to such an extent that the dead had become like distant friends, or relatives you haven’t seen for a long time. The dead. He knew Gisela Eriksson also walked around surrounded by the shadows. She’d been his closest friend, the only one whom he could share his thoughts with. And then he’d gone and ruined it all, pushed everything to its ultimate conclusion so that finally there wasn’t anything to be done but shut the door behind him. He’d always thought she’d be the one to take over after him. And that’s what happened, but not the way he’d wanted it. He hadn’t chosen to leave, he’d been kicked out. He had envisioned himself and Eriksson walking side by side through the city-jungle. Forsberg teaching what he knew, and Eriksson eagerly soaking it all up. Oh, what an idiot he was, what a naïve and narrow-minded view he’d had of himself, a complete idiot!

That’s what he was.

The dead. The missing.

You could say they were one and the same, that they all spoke the same language. There was nothing conciliatory about them, they just didn’t want to be forgotten, brushed aside. At night, and sometimes like a shadow in the middle of the day, Nils Forsberg could feel how they walked right next to him, whispering to him: You are one of us. On those days all he could do was drink, try to drown out the droning voices, just let them sink to the bottom, dragged down by alcohol, saturated. All those dead who sought to go back to their original context, who demanded justice, who wanted to be placed in a true context.

“And what about love?”

He’d never answered Granberg’s question, mostly because there was nothing to say. When everything turned bleak and black, Granberg used to remind him: “And what about love? Love can make the impossible happen!” There was nothing to say to that. Love is a flame that suddenly appears in a dark room-and then it disappears. He would never say that love could save us, it certainly couldn’t bring Mats Granberg back to life.

Death and time, love and the abyss.

Nils Forsberg had been a police officer his entire adult life. He’d never married nor become a father. He’d become a police officer, and he knew only two kinds of people: those who committed crimes and those who searched for the people who committed crimes. Obviously that’s a precarious situation-an unofficial health statistic published by the police authorities themselves states that more than 25 percent of police in active service find that they drink more than they should, while the average for the rest of the population is 4 percent. Also, suicides and divorces are overrepresented. To enter the abyss has its price, and it’s paid for in life, in time. To be the Virgil of our times, to step down into the inner circles of hell with only a lantern, very quickly takes its toll. It very soon grows lonely and dark.

Time is the master of death. Time is a flash of light in a dark forest. Time is kaleidoscopic: it’s what’s keeping you painfully awake locked in a cell with a hangover-it’s what’s whiled away during a conversation along Strandpromenaden in Malmø. Whoever owns time conquers death. Nils Forsberg often thought that it was a kind of irony of fate that the center of the city, the very inner kernel of Malmø, was occupied by a cemetery, a place where time is suspended and at the same time fixed. He frequently ended up in the cemetery on his walks. He would buy a cup of coffee at the newsstand café on Gustaf Adolf’s square and sit down among the other retirees, the ones who also lived in this no-man’s-land. He always mixed the hot coffee with the liquid from his hip flask. But it had been a long time since he last took a walk. A great exhaustion had besieged him.

Forsberg used to spend days and evenings on the benches in the cemetery. It was an absurd feeling sitting there, absorbed in rest, while buses and taxis passed by. He’d heard voices. Shouts. All the sounds of the city.

Here they all were, the dead he’d learned from when they were still alive, the ones who could no longer answer when he talked to them. He’d come to the cemetery when Granberg’s ashes were spread. Then he’d kept going back there for several days-probably not more than a week-until he could no longer do it, and the alcohol took over. He’d drowned himself from the inside out. The only people he was really able to talk to were the homeless whom he met on his random wanderings. They understood this particular condition, when you are suspended between life and death and lack any kind of anchor, when you are simultaneously hanging and falling, living at the outer edge of everything.

There are times when we want to escape, and times we want to hold on.

Greger’s Antiquarian Bookstore is just a short walk from the cemetery. Forsberg no longer goes there, nor to the Catholic church situated in the same area as the store. It feels like swimming against the current. Every thought and feeling contains endless resistance. Nils Forsberg spends his time in his own rooms, drinking, sleeping, dreaming, screaming, beating the walls. He writes a couple of lines in a notebook, draws what looks like a map, sorts papers and books. Again and again he arrives at one and the same name.

Nils Forsberg imagines that he’s following a trail, that he has an assignment. To anyone on the outside it’s obvious that we’re looking at a human being who’s lost all ability to act like a human being. He’s chasing the wind, a phantom. He sees a fundamental problem. It has to do with a pattern and intentions. It has to do with probabilities. The important question is: is it possible to see what’s going to happen? Yes, Nils Forsberg answers himself, if you can see what’s already happened.

Forsberg had thought a lot about Greger lately. In between the alcohol attacks, and during moments of clarity, it occurred to him that he should have gone there, that he ought to have visited Greger in his bookshop in the basement, at least shown him that he too was struggling. But he’d just not had the energy. Nils Forsberg simply sank. Of course, he also should have settled all his small debts. He didn’t do it. Sometimes he had the same dream, a recurring dream he’d had this past year: He was by a lake, the water was still, lake water, black water. The forest surrounded him, sighing, alive. In the middle of the lake floated a naked body, facedown. It was important, he had to get there, into the middle of the lake-but he couldn’t move. He saw the body, how it tipped downward, more and more until it completely disappeared-and then he screamed out into the silent forest. The dream kept coming back to him. It wouldn’t leave him alone. There was something that should have been said. He never got there in the dream. The naked body floated on in the black water.

The wind grew stronger, heavy rain-wet snowflakes spun through space and immediately melted away when they touched the ground. Nothing lasts forever.

Even when there were memorial services for people completely unknown to him, Forsberg still sat there. It was as though all the dead belonged to him, as though he carried so much grief that he was forced to unload it onto other people as well.

It’s January, and the rain comes sliding in over town, then blows off again. The homeless people look for refuge, in gateways, public shelters, bicycle storage rooms, huddled together in small camps, seeking protection from the violence, the gangs who come at them with bicycle chains and sticks. House façades are deteriorating, tree trunks are rotting. Forsberg has expanded his two earlier categories-those who commit crimes and those who have to prevent crimes-with those who long to get away and those who long to go home.

We want to be everywhere we’re not. That’s one of the reasons Malmø forces itself into a state of anonymity, of having no history. The new city has no room for the ugly, the limited, that which reminds us of the passing of time, of work and death. That which makes us what we are: live human beings.

We do not want to be broken, changed. It makes Nils Forsberg think of a flickering flame in a dark room. Life is like that.

Violence. Cruelty.

Faceless, meaningless, cruel violence runs through the city like quicksilver, pulsating, forcing out opinions, points of view. All the places Nils Forsberg loved had in some way been left to themselves: churches, libraries, parks, antiquarian bookstores. They were places that were in some ways open, in other ways-finished. They were places where there was room for the abandoned, the leftovers. Of all these places, it was especially the antiquarian bookstore that attracted Nils Forsberg. That’s where he felt at home, and often he thought about what this might mean. Why just antiquarian bookstores? Perhaps it had to do with the curious fact that time became a paradox within these rooms. It was both past and present, one layer on top of another, and unlike at a museum, it was possible to touch and smell everything. Every book carried an impression of its readers, but also carried a hope of being rediscovered.

Such light, happy days, and some darker, more profound days. Life could slide right along while he browsed his way through it, and love would suddenly be present, be real.

The city grows smaller and smaller, while at the same time it’s bursting its own embankments and boundaries. Everything is in flux. Of course, it’s all controlled by economic interests. Everything originates in greed. You eat sugar and fat and what you want is more sugar and fat. The changes in the city are also controlled by the economy, and eventually what will remain are only vapid cafés and anonymous shops.

Malmø’s oldest porn shop, The Cave, will finally be crowded out of the Herman neighborhood, along with a small furniture store, a hat shop, a photo shop, and a knick-knack boutique.

Because Värnhemstorget, this complete social and architectural mistake, is about to be restructured. A new area, Gateway to Malmø, will be built up right along the approach to the city. The homeless people have been forced into Rörsjöparken, near the city center. They too want to be near where the money is, it’s that simple, whether you’re a bicycle messenger or a CEO. The easternmost parts of the city are moving further and further in toward the canals. The boundaries are being erased.

All the falafel stands have had their rental agreements canceled. The only constant in the area are the junkies who circle back and forth. The address Hermansgatan number 8 has been junkie central ever since the square was built. If you’ve lost your bicycle or your stereo, you can be certain that’s where you can find it, number 8, third floor-the only apartment in the area with a glass-enclosed balcony.

Every evening and morning security guards patrol the area. Along the back of supermarket parking lots and construction sites found all over the area, the streets are filthy with construction dust and refuse. Everything with any kind of scrap value has already been stolen or carted away. The copper thieves come out at night, digging and drilling like moles for anything that can be melted down and transformed. Even here in the underground, everything is a constant hunt for money.

“It looks like a warzone…” the security guard Jan Brandberg thinks when he walks his nightly round, shining a beam behind the scaffolding with his powerful flashlight. The dog pulls at the leash, searching and straining-but no one’s out there, all is empty, the world is on standby. As usual, Brandberg turns at the end of Hermansgatan and walks back toward the park again. He usually stops by the tent camp to make sure no one’s about to freeze to death. He was taught to show this consideration by an older colleague: “It has to do with finding a balance…” He couldn’t help asking: “Which balance?” “You must try to be careful with human life.” And since then he’s made sure to check in on the rag piles-made sure there was life, that they moved when he poked them with the tip of his foot. “Even they are human beings, in a way…”

During the last few days the water in the canals has risen. Cans, twigs, and plastic float about on the surface. The water slowly rises toward the edges of the canal. Everything’s in movement. The public shelter has just opened its doors, and the first guests take off, always junkies first, the mentally ill last. It’s all driven by hunger, by need. The mornings are always chaotic, and everything’s again pushed to the extreme.

To live. To survive.

Rörsjöparken is empty. The pond in the middle of the park is filled with rainwater and garbage. The benches were moved inside the municipal storage buildings at the beginning of September. A siren cuts through the morning as the fog comes rolling in from Öresund. In the last few years the population has grown more and more quickly. At the same time, organized violent crime has become rampant in the city. We cluster together. Everything’s about ownership. The alternative being: to be owned. Between these poles we are tossed about, like balls in a pinball game, more or less out of control, at the mercy of the times we live in, of our desires.

Morning arrives. Pale gray, it comes like a swollen wave, at first silently, then with all its violent power. So much happens when a town wakes up, so much it’s not possible to catch, to describe, no matter how hard you try. Birds take off into the sky, light flickers on the water in the canal, traffic becomes heavier. All these sounds, all the sudden feelings. Life is suddenly in the balance: to jump or not, shoot up or not, sleep in or not. The big and the small, it’s all caught in a whirl of hope and despair.

There’s light and there’s darkness, the dry and that which is still damp. On this day, Christian Westin sits in the basement storage room belonging to his mother’s apartment at Allhemsgatan number 7. Westin has now been awake for seven days straight and the demons are getting closer and closer. They breathe and hiss in the dark basement. Westin’s mother usually comes down to check on him at some point during the day. There’s very little left of what was once the man Christian Westin. He’s quickly transforming into a chemical monster. Today he’s going to collapse in epileptic spasms and repeatedly beat his head against the cold basement floor. That’s to be expected, nothing out of the ordinary. At the edge of one of the larger and more spectacular investigations in Sweden, his name is going to appear momentarily in public when one of his knives is found near a crime scene and it is thought, or rather hoped, that Westin might be involved. It would have been the easiest explanation. But this is not to be. Nothing is as simple as you hope. The morning is like an arrow, shot into space at random.

And death, too, might seem this way.

On this early morning, while the sky slowly deepens and brightens, the gray growing slightly grayer, a woman will be murdered. She will be thrown into the backseat of a large sedan and transported to a place she hasn’t visited for quite a while-the outer edges of the housing ghetto Västra Hamnen. The last time here, she was in a professional capacity. And one might say that now she’s also here acting that role. She plays her part, even in death. She died somewhere else and the murderer has brought her to a one-way street out here in Kirseberg where he parks next to Sven-Olle’s car service. Alongside the construction sites, there are trailers where the company houses their employees: Poles, Latvians, Germans. The illegal workforce imported from surrounding countries is big business, worth millions. But as with everything else-it’s within the pyramid where power figurings and transformation take place, where undeclared, almost invisible money is laundered.

It was all about time.

Fragments of time, dark oceans of time. Time by the drop, time like water-filled underground cavities. Time that curses and time that liberates, that heals and tears apart. All that must be changed, all that holds the eternal.

There’s a time to love. A time to die.

Everything existed side by side, shoulder to shoulder.

The housing areas in and near the center of the city were being pushed further and further out toward the suburbs, while the inner core of the city was becoming populated by the wealthy and the homeless, all those who were free to move across boundaries. Everything was a question of time. He who owned his time, also owned his life-Gisela Eriksson often thought that what she really had to offer the anonymous police authorities in Malmø was her pound of flesh. She gave them her time, a part of her life, the only thing she could never get back. Within her, like rings in a tree, was all the time she’d experienced in her childhood, her youth, her early middle age. All time was in motion, sloshing back and forth. Whatever she’d experienced, whatever she’d thought or done, could all be used. There was a creative element to the job that she could not deny, and it was probably what made her stay. She was able to come up with solutions, not merely formulate problems.

Eriksson stood in the stairwell and watched as the aging mother slowly shut the door to her apartment, to “the crypt in which she would mummify herself.” The civilian car she was driving was parked halfway on top of the sidewalk downstairs, and traffic was increasing as the day went on. Exercisgatan functioned as a kind of thoroughfare, connecting various streets of the city, and when Eriksson stood outside the apartment house gate, she could glimpse the square by the Jewish synagogue, surrounded by tall walls.

The morning had slipped through her fingers. Her thoughts came and went, rattling like train cars on a rusty track. She didn’t know what to think, what she believed. Josman was still being processed. Her body, Eriksson had been informed, had been taken to the forensic department in Lund. There was always a rush, even with the dead. She reminded herself to call Hofman and Nordgren later today-always easier to pose the questions directly to them.

On the morning of the fourth of January rain was moving across Öresund, and you could see heavy clouds passing back and forth across the open expanse. Wind tore at the sea, throwing up water along the rock walls protecting walkways and lawns around the swimming area. Nature, yet again victorious. It was not possible to imagine nature’s power. It conquered all obstacles. The sea will still be around when we’re no more than a memory.

Time.

The time to leave, the time to come back.

Time to open one door, time to close another.

The wind increased in strength. There were places in Malmø that were in constant movement, where the wind always got in. The entire town was one big construction error from the beginning. There were no natural breaks, no given boundaries. Everything had been made by man. Time had changed the town, its inhabitants, its language. It was neither good nor bad, it was just the way it was.

Cruelty alongside consideration, life alongside death, love alongside hate. One thing depended on the other. In another part of town, on Fågelvägen, just a few hundred meters from Exercisgatan, was where Nils Forsberg stayed, more or less busy scrutinizing himself-always arriving at the same dreary conclusion.

That it was too late, that he had already lost, that now he had to listen completely to the inner voice telling him that the only thing he needed to do right now was to remain sufficiently drunk around the clock, then everything would take care of itself. If he’d counted right, then this was day sixteen. He had trouble in between rounds, telling where one day ended and the next began-so, for simplicity’s sake, he’d drawn a thick line on the refrigerator door with a black marker. He counted sixteen lines now. And he knew that Mats Granberg had been dead longer than that. Those days, the ones without Granberg when he was still sober, were white, frozen, inhuman. We’re not created to lose, nor for defeat-we’re made to win! he thought, and at that moment it seemed obvious to him that he’d committed his whole life to failures, to losses. He was his own loss, had created his own degradation. He knew that he was beyond human help, that he was like a stone, sinking deeper and deeper down into the water. “Oh, damn it all!” he wailed his mantra, over and over again.

Nils Forsberg had lived very close to his own edges. In one moment everything could be changed. He shifted his inner positions as regularly as the tides. A more psychologically astute staff manager might have demanded an explanation about him from the social insurance office a long time ago. It was not difficult to discover that Nils Forsberg was a bipolar personality type with autistic traits, a diagnosis he could be proud of, by the way, not least because Robert Johnson gave Einstein the same diagnosis in a biography of him.

It was all a question of circumstances and chance. In truth he was really just odd. That’s where his thoughts mostly went, deep down, to a feeling of embarrassment, about who he was-who he’d become. The difference between what played out in his mind and what took place in the real world was enormous. His main purpose, at least that’s how he saw it himself, was to create as much trouble as he possibly could. He’d made a final decision when he first met the personnel consultant, a woman who it appeared didn’t have all her marbles, but who made decisions about the world around her in the way she herself saw fit-if the shoe didn’t fit, then the world around her would just have to change. He’d almost succeeded in driving Annelie Bertilsson out of police headquarters. But in the end he’d had to admit defeat. Bertilsson was the new order and Forsberg was the time that had passed. Like blowing out a candle-right now. And then everything goes quiet and dark.

THE ELEPHANT’S TUSKS by Kristina Stoltz Nørrebro

He wasn’t the only one waiting for the author. Hannah, busy serving the other customers, had set the glasses and Sebastian Søholm’s favorite whiskey, a Laphroaig, on the bar. The speakers spewed out Nick Cave’s “There Is a Kingdom.” People were already packed in around the small wooden tables. The room was buzzing, and all the cigarette smoke lay like a heavy blanket due to the bad ventilation. Andreas, sitting at the end of the bar, held a hand over his mouth and coughed. Though he tried to be as discrete as possible, it still caught Hannah’s attention. She smiled and waved him over to three men sitting and talking together at the other end of the bar. Andreas knew very well who two of them were, a poet and a critically acclaimed novelist. He’d read them both but had never managed to get into a conversation with either of them. The third, a heavyset man in a checkered shirt, he’d never seen before. He walked hesitantly over to them. Hannah poured him a glass of whiskey. She said that it was Sebastian’s birthday. They were going to celebrate when he arrived. Andreas said hello to the men, and immediately they returned to their conversation.

He looked up at the clock above the espresso machine. It hung amongst postcards and snapshots of bar employees and some of the regulars. His eyes nearly always lingered on the photo of Hannah and Sebastian. They held their heads close to each other. Hannah wore a cowboy hat. Her tongue was sticking out. Sebastian was just smiling that smile of his. The photo had been taken at the summer party. The employees had dressed as cowboys, and a country band played. If he remembered right, the band was lousy. It was the night he’d talked to Sebastian for the first time. Since then they had spoken often. Sebastian had told him about his mother, who was so ill that he’d had to move in with her. They played chess now and then, and one evening, at Sebastian’s request, Andreas had brought along his writing. That had been over a month ago.

Hannah stuck a cigarette between her lips. Andreas reached down to feel in his pockets, but the poet was quick to strike a match. The smoke shrouded her face. Erased it for a few moments. Andreas stared at the small white particles that moved like some dancing organism in front of her. She waved the smoke away and poured a large draft for a man at the bar.

Normally you could set your watch to Sebastian. Hardly an evening went by without him stopping in, if not precisely at ten then never more than a few minutes past.

This evening the expected guest didn’t show until twentyfive minutes past. Andreas spotted him at once. As always, he wore an Iceland sweater and a deep-blue windbreaker. His dark hair had fallen over his eyes, and he ran his hand through it as he stepped in out of the murk. Stooped shoulders and a dragging gait. The usual preoccupied expression on his face.

“He’s here now,” Andreas said, turning to the others. “He just walked in.”

The poet raised up on his barstool and scanned the bar. “Well I don’t see him. Where is he?”

Andreas pointed toward the door. Sebastian must have slipped into the crowd, because he couldn’t see the author now.

“He was right here just a few seconds ago.”

The poet snorted and sat back down. Andreas squinted and tried to make out the figures. Most of them melted into the haze. Until he showed up again. Sebastian. There was no mistaking him. It looked as if he had fallen into conversation with some people at one of the tables. Without so much as glancing at the bar he unzipped his jacket, ran his fingers through his hair several times, and seemed to let himself be drawn deeper and deeper into the conversation. Slowly the clouds of smoke enveloped him, blurring him out.

“He’s here,” Andreas said. “I see him.”

“Then what in the world is keeping him?” the novelist said. “You’d think he’s trying to avoid us.”

“He is turning thirty-nine, poor guy,” the man in the checkered shirt said, laughing.

“Yeah, that’s just it,” the poet said, and asked Hannah to turn down the music. “Come on, boys.” He lifted his arms and prepared to conduct. “One, two, three: Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Sebastian, happy birthday to you. ”

The three men sang the birthday song at the top of their lungs, and soon the rest of the bar joined in. Except Andreas. He didn’t like it. Didn’t like singing. Actually, he never had.

Sebastian came into sight through the haze. He gazed stiffly at them. Possibly he considered turning and walking off. That would be just like him, to get up and leave, but no, he nodded to the people at the table and shuffled up to the bar. The men kept howling. Louder and louder.

When Sebastian mounted the one available barstool without batting an eyelid, the men fell silent.

“Happy birthday, old boy,” said the man in the checkered shirt, slapping Sebastian on the back.

“Happy birthday,” the novelist said, and poured whiskey into a glass.

“Happy twenty-five.” The poet burst out in loud laughter. The other two joined in, swept up in the moment.

Sebastian didn’t show any response. He laid a hand on Andreas’s shoulder. The hand was slender and cool. Bad circulation, perhaps, or else the raw cold outside had turned the thin pianist-like fingers quite red and stiff. The cold penetrated Andreas’s shirt and raised the hair on his body. In the six months they had known each other, this was the first physical contact they’d had. Maybe the hand on the shoulder was a spontaneous act, to show that he liked Andreas’s writing, or maybe he was just pleased that Andreas hadn’t joined in on the song. Who could know. Sebastian was not often easy to read.

He removed his hand and turned, smiling at Hannah behind the bar. That classic, boyish smile that was always written about in interviews. The perfect rows of chalky white teeth. A true Hollywood smile. The front teeth were broad and a bit longer than average. It was a splendid unit, that set of teeth.

“Happy birthday, Sebastian,” Hannah said with a gleam in her eye. She raised her glass. Andreas noticed that she had color in her cheeks. Sebastian nodded and held his smile. That’s all it took. That’s how easy it was for him.

The man in the checkered shirt pulled out a present and laid it in front of him.

“How touching,” Sebastian said. “It is touching, isn’t it?” Still smiling, he looked at Andreas. “On such close terms with the editor, indeed, indeed.” He began loosening the ribbon. His fingers were still freezing, almost blue. Though it was warm inside. Very warm.

Several women had bare arms and shoulders, and Andreas took his shirt off, which left him wearing only an old, dingy T-shirt with faded-out printing on the chest. I Love New York, it had once said, but now it was unreadable. As far as Andreas knew, Sebastian always kept his outer clothes on. He had never seen him wearing anything other than the Iceland sweater and the blue windbreaker that he always unzipped when he came in the bar and zipped up when he left.

“Would you look at this,” he said, and lifted a small elephant made from dark mahogany out of the box.

“I was thinking it could sit on your desk,” the editor said.

“On my desk, a cute little elephant on my desk, huh? That was what you thought?”

The editor cleared his throat. “Yes, that’s what I was thinking.”

Sebastian looked at Hannah.

“You get presents?” she asked, and leaned over the bar. Her low-cut blouse exposed the upper part of her breasts and made the pale skin appear even more radiant than usual. Sebastian gave her the elephant.

“Those tusks are really long,” she said. She held it up in front of her.

“Do you know how many sets of teeth elephants go through in a lifetime?” he said. “Six. When the last set wears out they starve to death.”

The editor grinned and nodded with satisfaction. “It’s a brilliant novel. The best you’ve written.”

“There is no novel,” Sebastian said, thin-lipped.

“What are you talking about? I have the second set of page proofs lying on my desk.”

“There will be no novel.” He held his glass out to Hannah, who filled it. She set the elephant on the bar, but Sebastian grabbed her wrists and closed her hands around the small wooden figure.

“Put it on your nightstand and think of me,” he said.

“I’d rather read your novel.”

“Do you read novels, sweet girl?”

Hannah smiled mischievously and set the elephant aside. She leaned forward again and nearly blinded them with her luminous breasts.

“I read almost everything,” she said. “But a novel about elephants is probably not something for me.”

Her cleavage was like a dark and warm cave between two snowdrifts. Andreas reached over and picked up his glass. The smoky whiskey burned his throat.

“It’s not about elephants,” the editor said.

“Small cute elephants.” Sebastian smiled and stepped down off the stool. “Small cute elephants to hide under your pillow, to rock yourself to sleep. Small cute elephants can go everywhere, they can be hidden between your legs, Hannah, they can rock you to sleep.”

He left the elephant where it was, sent the bartender a kiss with his fingers, and, without uttering another word, turned to go.

“There’s shooting down on Blågårds Square,” a man at the door yelled.

Sebastian disappeared into the crowd.

It was the second time that week. Andreas had seen it on television. Gangs at war, they said. It had happened just outside his apartment building’s door, but he hadn’t heard a thing.

People grew uneasy. Several stood up from their tables and gathered around the bar. Hannah blew smoke down over the elephant and turned the music off. It was for the best, given all the confusion. People were quick to turn panicky, even though nothing had happened. Several chairs were overturned and candles blown out. Perhaps it was like being on a boat about to capsize, knowing that you’ll be one of the few to survive. Andreas couldn’t help smiling. He looked toward the door, but the dim lighting and all the jittery customers made it impossible to see if Sebastian was still inside.

Like Andreas, the three other “birthday guests” were still seated at the bar. They were silent. Dejected, perhaps. But not scared. Andreas considered saying something about Sebastian-or the shooting. Hannah poured them more whiskey. He smiled at her. She smiled back. Wasn’t it times like these that you should go for it? He drank up and stepped down off the barstool. Put on his coat and turned to go. That was how it should be. So simple.

He had to push his way through the crowd. The sweat from all the bodies. A woman’s hair brushed his face. The smell of paraffin and smoke. There were sirens outside. The blue flashes lit up the dim bar.

He waited until the sound of the sirens had disappeared before leaving. It was drizzling, but it didn’t feel as cold as it had earlier. The water puddle at his feet reflected a blurry moon. He looked up, but he couldn’t spot it anywhere. Empty racks stood at the vegetable shop across the street. A few cardboard boxes lying in front of the shop were getting wet. Everything seemed normal, except there were no people. He turned and peered down the street at Blågårds Square. He was alone out here unless someone was hiding in a doorway. There were no police cars, either-maybe they’d already left the area. It had been a false alarm, no doubt about it. He considered going back inside the bar to assure everyone that the danger was past, but he decided not to. It seemed as if the panic had created a certain mood, a common bond among them. He wouldn’t be the one to break the illusion. Instead he headed toward the square.

Something must have happened, for even though midnight was more than half an hour away, all the cafés and restaurants were closed. The shop windows weren’t lit up as usual, either. Several streetlights had gone out. On a Saturday evening. Even the World Cup never left Blågårds Street deserted.

The square seemed lifeless too. The naked, dark trees surrounding it stood stock-still. Andreas walked over to Apoteket, where the intellectual alcoholics sat in the summer and listened to jazz under the linden trees. There was not a person in sight.

He eyed the ball court, which was lined by a low granite wall. Dark statues sat silent along the edge-he knew each one, but now they were indistinguishable from one another. He’d forgotten that the court was iced over in winter so the kids could skate. Now it seemed almost radiant in the dark. Andreas wanted to feel the ice under his feet. He walked down the stone steps and caught sight of someone out in the middle.

He saw at once who it was.

The rain had made the ice extremely slick, and he almost slipped. He jerked his hands out of his pockets and regained his balance. Idiotic. He headed toward the middle. The court couldn’t have been more than twelve meters wide, but it felt much bigger.

When Andreas reached him, Sebastian smiled his smile. “The story about the sick mother,” he said. “You’ve got something there.”

“The sick mother?”

“Yes, that’s the best one.”

“I haven’t written any story about a sick mother.”

“‘The Elephant’s Tusks.’”

“I thought that was the title of your novel.”

“Why did you think that?”

“I don’t know.”

Andreas looked over at the redbrick buildings at the end of the square. It could be called a ghetto of sorts, and almost all the people living there were immigrants.

“Who got shot?” he asked, and looked again at Sebastian. His teeth were the same color as the ice under their feet. Gleaming white.

“It was deserted when I got here,” Sebastian said. “There’s nobody here at all.”

Andreas looked down at his sneakers. His toes had begun to freeze.

“‘The Elephant’s Tusks’ is a good title, but there are a few things I’d like to discuss with you.”

Andreas nodded. He crossed his arms and slapped his body for warmth. “What about the other stories? I don’t remember the one about the mother.”

“The one about the mother is the best one. No doubt about it, the best.”

Andreas felt his lips stretching into a smile. This was what he’d been waiting for. Why couldn’t he remember the story about the mother, then, and that title? Sebastian took his arm and led him across the ice. Apparently his leather boots were better suited than sneakers for slippery surfaces.

They walked together back toward the bar. The drizzle was letting up. Blågårds Street still looked dark and deserted.

“Did you hear all those sirens too, just awhile ago?” Andreas said.

“No,” Sebastian replied. “It’s been quiet the entire time I’ve been outside.”

At the corner of Baggesens Street, right beside the bicycle shop, at number 10, Sebastian took a key from his pocket and opened the door.

“Are you living here? I live right across the street, number 13.”

“Yes, I know.” Sebastian turned the hallway light on and stepped inside. “Come on.”

“Won’t we wake your mother?”

“No, she’s a heavy sleeper.” He pulled down the zipper of his jacket. Andreas could feel his socks, wet now.

The apartment was on the top floor. The dark hallway smelled old and dusty. It was easier to get their bearings after Sebastian opened the door to the living room, but the smell persisted. It was a strange odor. Andreas took off his shoes. “You don’t have to do that in here,” Sebastian said.

In the living room, a door to another room stood open. The door couldn’t be closed because the end of a bed extended over the doorstep. A pair of feet. A pair of feet stuck out from under the blanket at the end of the bed.

“It’s my mother,” Sebastian said, his voice low. “She loves to have the bottom of her feet massaged. If you’ll do that, then I’ll go out and warm the soup.”

“The soup?”

“Yes, I’ve made soup for us.”

Andreas walked over to the feet. The nails were long and thick. A few of the toes were crossed, and the bunion on one foot stuck out like a sharp weapon. How could he have made soup for both of them when he hadn’t invited Andreas over? Sebastian had yet to budge from the doorway. He still wore his sweater and windbreaker.

“They’re horrible,” Andreas said.

“No, they’re just deformed,” Sebastian answered, and went into the kitchen.

They weren’t merely deformed. There was something threatening about them. He craned his neck to see inside the room. The bed took up the entire space. He could barely glimpse the bedstead in the dark. The mother’s face lay hidden somewhere in there. He looked again at her feet. He was alone with them now, and he realized he had begun shaking. His hands and knees. He could simply not do it. But he felt as if he didn’t have a choice. He reached out for the feet, brushed against the thick nails, then quickly pulled his hands away. Took a deep breath. Thought he smelled basil and thyme. That must be the soup.

Outside the window, a cloud slid off the moon and lit up the room. The pale feet seemed almost transparent. Blue-violet veins stood out, thick as earthworms, under her skin. He leaned over the foot of the bed, but still he could see only the white blanket that covered her entire body, hiding all of her limbs except her feet. He looked out at the moon and noticed the building across the street. For the first time he realized how close the two buildings were. Light shone from the upper-floor windows. He recognized the bookshelf in the living room. He could almost read the titles on the books’ spines. They stood in alphabetical order. Usually he cleaned them off with a feather duster-one of those old-fashioned ones, in cheery colors. Someone was walking around over there. He’d forgotten to turn off the lights. Andreas recognized every movement. The T-shirt with the faded printing. The temperature was different over there. The smell. But the body. The body was the same one. It surprised him that that was how it was.

He took a deep breath and turned back to the feet. The skin was thick and waxy. The heels rough and hard. They were cold, the feet. Ice cold. It didn’t help to massage them. He understood that immediately. Yet he put everything he had into it.

THE BOOSTER STATION by Seyit Öztürk Valby

Kris stops, and I barge right into him. The winter cold makes my nose hurt. “What the hell are you doing?” I yell, and I think I can taste blood in my mouth, but what do I know? After all, most of my face is numb from the cold.

Kris doesn’t answer. He reaches around, trying to grab something. His big hand rams the middle of my chest, and I’m about to topple backward, but he has a good grip on my coat. With his other hand he points at something down in the ditch ahead.

“What? What are you doing?” I ask, when I’ve regained my balance. “You trying to kill me?” It feels as if his hand has left a crater in my chest.

Kris stands completely still. His arm is still stretched out. I follow his index finger.

At first I can’t see what he’s pointing at. I can see the railroad, the rails that disappear around the curve, the noise barrier, the gray sky… what is it he sees? What is he pointing at?

Then I spot it. Right there. In the ditch, all the way down by the barrier, a naked pale foot is sticking out of some sort of bundle; at the opposite end, right at the barrier, a head is visible. Wet hair blocks off the face, but it’s a head. No doubt about it.

We stand, frozen. He still has hold of my coat, and I’m clutching his arms with both hands. The bundle lies motionless. A strange silence. A wrong silence.

“Is it a dead body?” Kris whispers, and he looks at me.

I shrug, I don’t know. He gives me a shove, wants me to go down and look. I shove him back, but Kris is bigger, that means I’ve got to do it.

Dickhead!

“If it’s a body, what are you afraid of?” I ask, and hop down in the ditch. I pull the hammer from my belt just in case it isn’t a body, but some psychopath luring teenage boys down there so he can eat their eyes out.

The brown bundle must be easy to overlook if you ride by on a train. How did Kris even spot it? It’s the same color as the brown stones it lies on. Almost the same color. It must be a body. You can’t lie there like that in this cold without being dead.

I look back at Kris, still on the tracks. He nods toward the bundle, moves his lips, like he’s egging me on to investigate, but not a sound comes out of him. It looks a little bit ridiculous. A boy Kris’s size. Afraid of a corpse.

I take a deep breath. In. And out. Have to remind myself to do even that. To remember to breathe. Slowly I approach, my hand grips the hammer, my teeth are cemented together. If it’s not a corpse, it would be nice if the person stood up now. A homeless person who fell asleep out here. Someone who went to a wild party, or a bachelor’s party. Sit down, boys, listen to this. Something or other. Give me something. Just so he sits up.

I reach the bundle. It looks like a girl. The foot sticking out is way too small and delicate and white to be a man’s. And the face… I still can’t see it from the hair, but it must be a girl.

Kris clears his throat behind me, and I wait, but nothing more comes. He doesn’t say anything. Just clears his throat.

She’s lying totally still, no sign of life from her. I hear myself say, “Hello?”

No answer. Of course.

I lean down and lift a corner of the brown felt blanket and glance underneath. It is a girl. A naked young girl. Small white breasts, chalk-white stomach, light pubic hair below. Hard to tell how old she is. Or was. With one finger I pull the hair off her face as best I can.

Fuck!

“What’s the matter?” Kris yells behind me. He hops down in the ditch and walks toward me.

“Nothing,” I say. “It’s just that her eyes are still open.”

Not just her eyes, but her mouth too, frozen in an expression her murderer left her with. Because she must have been murdered. Why else would she have been abandoned here?

I try to warm my hands by blowing into the little cave they form in front of my mouth, but it’s no good. Kris is still standing by the body. Leaning over it. It looks as if he’s investigating it. What does he think he’s doing? He must think he’s a detective or something. It can’t be someone he knows. We’ve grown up together here in Vigerslev, gone to the same schools, been around the same people. I’d know if he knew her.

The sound of a train rumbles in the distance. It will be here in a minute, for sure. Kris walks over to me. “It’s a woman. I packed her in again,” he says.

We jump back around the noise barrier. It’s pure reflex. We always hide up here when the trains come by. If the engineer sees two boys on the tracks, the police show up shortly after.

We stand on the slope behind the barrier and look down at the community gardens, while the train roars past behind us. It’s dead down there. Just like everything else in the winter. Like the girl behind us. I realize that I’ve lost my hammer somewhere back there. I have to remember to grab it before we leave.

“Do you think it was him?” Kris says all of a sudden.

“Who?”

“The guy down at the booster station?”

I stare at a cottage in the community gardens, a small green house with red shutters and wide flagstones set in herringbone, all the way through the garden to the door, which has a row of potted plants on each side, and hidden underneath one of them is a key, but I can’t remember which one. I think that the owner must switch them around to confuse potential burglars, to confuse me, and yeah, fuck yeah, it makes sense. The guy we saw down at the booster station.

“Of course it was him!” I say. “If he was an electrician or a guard or had something he was supposed to be doing down there, he would have been in something his company owns. He’d be driving some lousy van and not that shitty little car.”

“He had these big dark sunglasses on,” Kris says. “I figured it was because of the sun in his eyes, but there wasn’t any sun down there.”

I don’t think Kris is right. It was sunny, but I don’t say anything.

“The license plate! Did you get his number?” I ask, even though it’s a dumb question.

He shakes his head. I do the same. The idea was good enough: call the police and tell them about the body and hand them the murderer at the same time. Just like that! Heroes of the day. TV and newspapers. Local boys find dead body. How much pussy could a guy score from that at school? Or in town?

“Have you seen anything in the news? Anything about reports of missing girls?”

I shake my head. I don’t watch much TV and don’t read any papers, but I’m pretty sure there aren’t any girls missing. Not right now, anyway.

We’re back with the body. I lift the blanket up again. It’s soaked, heavy. It hasn’t rained for several days. Must be the night frost or something. She is so white, there’s nothing on her that isn’t white. She looks like a doll. Almost so much that it’s hard to believe she’s a corpse.

She doesn’t look very old, maybe a few years older than us, but no more.

Kris reads my mind. “She’s not a day over twenty.”

“How do you think she died?”

There is no visible sign of violence. Her body, her arms and legs, are the way they should be, there aren’t any broken bones, no bruises. She looks so perfect that it’s strange she isn’t.

“There,” Kris says, and points. There are marks on her throat. I lift her chin up a little, exposing a hand-sized dark spot that stretches around her throat. Kris shakes his head. “Twenty minutes. If we’d just been here twenty minutes earlier.” He has brought the screwdriver out again without me noticing it. “Just twenty minutes. It’s typical, why do bastards like this always get away with it? It would have been cool to catch him up here when he threw her off. Caught in the act. Fuckhead!”

I’m about to pull the blanket around her again when Kris grabs my wrist. He points the screwdriver at her stomach. “What the hell is that?”

“What? Her stomach?”

“No, on her stomach.”

I lean down a bit. Small white spots dot her stomach and breasts. It’s hard to see them because her skin is almost the same color, but they’re there. Sperm.

“Fucking sperm! So that fucker stood up here in broad daylight and came all over a girl he just killed?” Kris’s grip on the screwdriver turns his fist white, and he starts talking through clenched teeth. “Twenty minutes, man. Just twenty minutes earlier.”

I cover her with the blanket as best I can, and I try to throw up. But nothing comes.

It’s getting darker. We lean against the noise barrier. Even though I’m wearing three layers of clothes, I can feel the cold metal on my back. Kris is cooling off, but he’s still gripping the screwdriver. I can’t see the hammer anywhere. It won’t be easy to find now. But our little trip out into this residential area isn’t going to happen.

I try to pack her in better. The blanket really isn’t big enough, surely that’s why her head and foot were sticking out. I try to fold it around her anyway. It’s wet and heavy, and the tips of my fingers start to ache. It comes to me that she’s been out here longer than we thought.

“What if he comes back?” I say.

Kris looks at me. “What? Who?”

“Him. The killer. What if he comes back tomorrow to get off again? Isn’t that what they do, these sex killers?”

“What do you mean?”

“Think about it,” I say. “That blanket is soaking wet, and it hasn’t rained a fucking drop for several days at least. So it’s the frost at night that made it wet.”

“Wouldn’t the blanket be frozen stiff?”

“Not for sure. It’s warmer in the daytime. So she’s been laying here since at least yesterday, and he came up here again today to get off.”

We stand there for a second, looking at each other under the railroad lights. Our breath forms small clouds of steam. Kris comes closer. You can almost see the wheels turning in his head.

“So you think he’ll come back?”

“Don’t they always? They have to admire their work, or whatever. That’s how they get caught. Kris, we saw him down on the street. If we wait till tomorrow and catch him there, we’ll be fucking heroes.”

We look down at the girl. “So we just let her lay here till tomorrow?” he asks.

I shrug my shoulders. “She won’t be any less dead from laying there. And nobody’s coming up here, so she won’t be found.”

“So your plan is,” says Kris, and looks around, “we pretend we haven’t even been here today, and we just happen by tomorrow and catch a sex-crazed psycho?”

“Yeah, we won’t even have to overpower him or anything, if he has a gun on him. We just get his license plate.”

“But don’t you think he saw us down on the street? I mean, since we saw him, he must have seen us.”

I think that over a second. “We’re just a couple of boys out drinking some beer to him. It doesn’t mean we found the body. Especially since he hid her so far in from the rails.”

On the way back we agree that he’ll return to the body at the same time of day. He’s been afraid of drawing attention to himself in the daylight, so he’ll want to come late in the afternoon when it’s nearly dark. Nighttime is no good because it’s too dark for him to enjoy his work. He needs enough light to get off on it. He might also come at sunrise, but people are more alert at that time of day, before going to work. We don’t dare take any chances, though, and we decide to meet here early tomorrow morning in case he shows up.

“He’ll for sure be coming from the same direction,” Kris says. “It’s the only place he can park in private. He’ll definitely be coming from the booster station.”

Kris is already there when I return at eight the next morning. He’s waiting at the end of the barrier, but I see him sticking his head out once in a while.

“You’re early,” he says, then bursts out: “What? What is it? What are you laughing at?”

“I’m early? How long have you been here?”

He doesn’t answer, he just looks at me as if he needs a few seconds to think. “So okay, I’ve been here ten minutes, fifteen at the most. I couldn’t sleep last night, how about you?”

I shake my head, even though it’s not true. I have slept, not much, but long enough to dream something weird, where I was chasing someone who was constantly just out of reach. Just when I was about to grab him, he disappeared around the curve of the railroad tracks.

The bundle is exactly the way we left it yesterday. And yet something is different. Not with the blanket. With her. Her head. And her foot sticking out. Is it just me, or has she turned gray?

“Kris, is she starting to stink? Does she stink?”

Kris shakes his head. “My nose is stopped up, I can’t smell for shit.”

I take a deep breath in through my nose, and even though we’re several meters from her I can smell it. A weak odor of rot. Apparently that’s how death smells.

It’s completely light now, and we hide behind the noise barrier. We settle in to wait. We stand on the slope, shivering from the cold, but we don’t leave. We both thought the only times he might show up were morning and evening, but we stay anyway. Neither one of us suggests we go home and come back later. We stay.

The trains pass by. Those from Sydhavn roll toward Roskilde, the ones from Roskilde toward Sydhavn. We stay hidden, counting them. Two pass by toward Sydhavn. Then nothing happens. A third toward Sydhavn, then one toward Roskilde. When it’s totally quiet on the tracks we can hear traffic down on Vigerslev Allé. The cars and buses driving by. We can hear people down there. Kids yelling at each other.

“I’ve had enough of this,” I say. “Let’s get something to eat somewhere.”

“What the hell are you talking about? We can’t leave now, what if he shows up?”

“Kris. I’m freezing my ass off. He’s not coming now, it’s too light. Come on, let’s go down and get something to eat. We can be back in an hour.”

He shakes his head. “I’m staying right here.”

I turn and walk down the slope. “I’ll pick something up for you.”

“Let’s call the police.”

Kris stuffs the last of the burger in his mouth and washes it down with soda. “Why?”

He’s pissed at me because it took longer to bring the burgers back than he’d expected. Incredible, how paranoid you can get when you’re on surveillance. All the way to the pizzeria and back I tried to find a route where I wouldn’t be seen. In case the killer was on his way. I crawled along the slope by the community gardens, looking for the hole in the fence, and when I couldn’t find it I had to climb over. It was harder on the way back because I had a big bag of food with me.

It’s already getting dark. We eat the last of the french fries. “A whole day’s gone by since we found her,” I say. “And there’s no sign of him showing up.”

Kris shakes his head. “No way. You said he’d come back. Maybe he couldn’t make it today. The bastard might have a wife and kids and all that. Maybe he’ll be here tomorrow. He’ll come.”

“Let’s just call the police, we’ll still be the heroes of the day ’cause it’s us who found her.”

“Maybe, but we’ll be even bigger heroes if we catch the guy too,” Kris says.

I’m not happy about this, especially since her smell has gotten stronger all day. If we let her lie until morning, how much worse will it get? I wonder. “Kris, we can’t just keep standing here, waiting for someone who might not even come back. She’s not getting any prettier to look at.”

“The man’s a psychopath, maybe it’s what turns him on.”

“Okay, but if he’s a psychopath there’s not a lot we can do…” There must be something I can say to convince him.

“Just leave it to me,” he responds, and suddenly he pulls a knife out from the inside pocket of his coat.

“Fuck! Kris, goddamn! What are you… Fuck!”

“Take it easy, I’m not about to kill anybody or anything. We just need to scare him, maybe cut him a little.”

“Kris, no, fuck it, we’re calling the police.” I pull my phone out, and I’m about to punch numbers when I get hit hard. Kris falls on me. His hands are on my shoulders, pushing them down, holding me against the cold ground. I can’t see the knife. I try to catch my breath.

“Kris, goddamn. Get off, you’re crushing me.”

He leans over and looks me right in the eye. “You’re not calling the police!”

“Get off me, goddamnit.” There’s a branch or something under me, he’s pressing my backbone into it.

“I said, you’re not calling the police. Right?” He presses my shoulders even harder. I can’t get the bastard off me.

“Okay, okay. I’m not calling the police.”

“Promise?”

“Yes.”

“You promise?”

“YES, GODDAMNIT! I promise.”

He lets go, and slowly I get to my feet. The tree limb has poked a hole in my coat, down at my lower ribs. My phone is halfway down the slope. Even from here I can see the number 1 on the display. That’s as far as I got. Kris offers a hand, and I shove it away. I can get up by myself. I just have to catch my breath.

“Kris, you fat bastard!” I stick a hand in under my sweater. My back is sore, but it’s not any worse than that. Fucking asshole.

“He’ll come back,” he says, and looks away.

I can smell her long before I reach her. It hasn’t left me, the smell, it followed me yesterday when Kris and I left her. I tried washing it off but it was still there. My mother didn’t seem to notice anything, maybe it was just me. When I got up this morning it was still there. It was worse on my coat. The hole in the back is bigger than I thought at first, or else it’s ripped out more, but it’s the only coat I have. I put an extra sweater on to keep warm.

I meet Kris on the lawn by the booster station. We haven’t planned to meet here. We didn’t make any plans at all after yesterday. He’s smiling strangely. Both his hands are in his pockets. I can practically see from his look that the knife is back in his inside pocket. “Morning,” he says, and smiles.

I say nothing, just walk past him, farther up toward the booster station and the railroad behind it. Why is he so happy? He follows, I hear him a few meters behind me. We keep moving along the path. He says nothing, but I can feel his smile knifing me in the back. Why is he smiling this way? He would have said if the killer had been here. I could ask him, but I don’t want to. I don’t turn, I just keep walking. And he follows a few meters behind.

“Get the hell out of here!” I yell, while I run toward the crow with a rock in my hand. I don’t even come close to hitting it, but it’s enough to scare the crow. It flies over to the other side of the body for cover. I pick up another rock. The crow takes off again. This time it lands on the edge of the barrier. It looks down at us. Kris plods along over to me, his hands in his pockets. He doesn’t seem especially surprised. He’s not smiling anymore, but he’s not mad or all worked up.

“Shhh,” he says abruptly. “People can hear you when you yell that way.”

“Yeah? Fuck them. How many people you think yell ‘Get the hell out’ in one day in Valby?”

He shrugs and plods on, over to the body. The smell is much worse now. It feels warmer too. That, or else it’s because I’m wearing an extra sweater. The crow still sits there. I throw the rock, but it sees it coming. It flies up and away, disappears between the trees. If it has found her, other crows will for sure be coming along too. I look up. There are a few dark spots high up in the gray sky. But they fly away.

“Fuck! Look at this!” Kris is standing at the body. I stand beside him and look down. Her eyes, which had been staring at us before, staring at nothing, are punctured and almost gone.

My hand flies up to cover my own eyes, but I lower it immediately. It still smells like death here. The dark spots up in the sky are back. How well do crows see? Can they smell her from up there?

“Kris,” I say slowly, afraid that my voice is shaking.

“We’re not calling yet,” he says. “First he’s got to come, we’ll grab him, then we call.”

“Kris, if we let her lay here much longer, there won’t be anything left. Those crows are coming back as soon as we leave.”

“This was your idea. We find the killer and we’re heroes. It was your idea.”

“I know it. But fuck it, hey, I was wrong. If he doesn’t come back now, he’s not coming back.”

“No way. He’ll be back. It’s like you said. He’s got to get off one more time.”

I don’t know why he keeps going on about what I said. He doesn’t usually do that. But I don’t dare say anything more. Not after yesterday. Instead I bend over, and without looking too closely at her messed-up face I grab the blanket and wrap it around her head. Close and tight. I don’t want to take chances.

“What are you doing?” Kris asks. Again, that nice and easy voice.

“I’m covering her up. He doesn’t have to get as far as taking his dick out or anything. We just need to get him, right? It doesn’t really matter about her. If she lays here much longer, the crows will eat her. If we get the guy, the police or their fucking CSI team or whatever will take care of the rest. Okay? You’ll still get to be the hero.”

Kris doesn’t answer, and I take that to mean it’s okay. I feel him staring at me while I wrap the blanket around her. The blanket isn’t nearly big enough, and after I’ve wrapped her head up I notice her legs sticking out from the knees down. I think about starting over, but I leave her like she is. Protecting her head is the most important thing right now. Protect the open wounds. Crows’ beaks aren’t strong enough to rip holes in skin. Only eagles and vultures and that kind of bird can. Crows need an open wound. Or an eye.

I take three steps away and throw up. Kris laughs at me. I squat down, lean against the barrier. Stay sitting, stare up at the sky. At the black spots. They disappear after a while. A train goes by. We hide behind the barrier. The slope is slippery. I kick the branch away. The one I landed on yesterday. Kris laughs again. Something is wrong about this. Something deeply, deeply wrong. I don’t say anything. We wait. We listen. Trains pass by. Cars drive along down on the road. Buses. Kris goes for food. He hands me a burger. I don’t eat it. I’m not hungry. I wait and listen. Stay crouched down with the burger in my hands. Kris takes a look. It’s getting dark, getting dark fast. I did a good job with the blanket. The crows don’t come back. The guy doesn’t either.

I go home. Kris stays behind. “See you tomorrow,” he says. “Get a good night’s sleep and come back ready to go.” The smell sticks to me. My clothes. My hair, my skin. I breathe through my mouth, but I can taste it on my tongue.

I don’t eat dinner. Take a long bath, but the smell is still there. I go right to bed. I see her half-eaten eyes in the dark. There is something deeply, deeply wrong here.

I breathe icy air, and it hurts all the way inside my chest, but I keep going. I don’t know if anyone at home saw me run out, and I don’t care either. I run, slip on the ice a few times, fall, and brush myself off with my hands. It hurts, but it’s not that bad.

I’m thinking: crows and their fucking beaks, they can’t do what eagles and vultures can, but what about foxes? What about fucking foxes and their teeth?

From where I live it’s easiest to get up on the tracks from Vigerslev Allé. From the station. There’s nobody on the street this time of night anyway. I fly up the steps, onto the platform, and down to the tracks.

There. Right there. I see two, maybe three, before I trip over a crosstie. They look up at me. “Hey, goddamnit!” I throw a rock. They run off, flee. I go down to the girl. They’ve been eating her.

They’ve been eating her. Her foot. Feet. They’ve eaten her feet. Her legs. All the way up to her thighs. Big chunks of meat bitten off. I start to cry. I can’t help it. The tears stream out.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Sorry, I didn’t know. I got here as fast as I could. I’m sorry, sorry.” I wrap the blanket around her legs as tightly as I can. Just like I did with her head yesterday.

The foxes, they’re still here. They’re waiting at a distance, quiet. They’re staring at us. At me and the girl. What should I do? I realize I left my phone at home. I can’t leave her here. The foxes will be back on her as soon as I leave.

“Hey,” I say. “We can’t stay sitting out here.” The blanket is wrapped tight around her. It’s cold and wet and heavy, and my fingers hurt, but I can’t stop now. I can’t leave her here. “You’re safe now,” I say, and lift her up on my shoulder. “Nothing’s going to happen to you. Not anymore. I’m going to take care of you.”

At first it’s surprisingly easy to carry her, but slowly I feel the weight of her dead body. The first time I slip on a crosstie she almost falls. I can’t carry her all the way to the street. It’s too far. But I can’t leave her here, either.

The community gardens, the cottages. There’s a hole in the fence there somewhere, I know there is.

The foxes keep their distance. More have shown up, but they stay away. I slip on the slope, fall backward, and hit my head on the barrier. Lose her when I fall. I look around. She’s lying at the bottom of the slope, by the fence. I crawl down to her on all fours. No more falling. If something happens to me, who will save the girl?

I manage to get her through the hole in the fence and carry her down a gravel path, alongside hedges and past garden gates. Which cottage is it? The little green one. I look back at the slope to judge just where we are. A fox stands there staring at us. Fucking shitty animals.

I turn around. The cottage must be right along here on the left. Up a wide garden walk. I grab the doorknob. Locked. Try the potted plants. One after the other. At first I put them back carefully, but it gets to be too difficult with the girl on my shoulder. So I kick the pots over with my foot, one by one. Finally. The key. It’s under the fifth or sixth one. I unlock the door and glance back quickly. No one in sight. Nobody has followed us. No foxes. No sex murderer.

I carry the girl inside and close the door behind us. Lay her on a small sofa, farthest back in the room to the left. I sit on the floor beside her. “I just need to rest a little,” I say, to the air. “I just need to catch my breath, then I’ll go out and call the police. I just need a break.”

I open my eyes and immediately begin to shiver. The cottage is like ice. It’s getting light outside. I must have slept, I feel stiff all over. I stand up slowly and look at the girl on the sofa. She’s lying there like some kind of gift, wrapped up tightly in a much-too-short blanket. The bite marks on her legs stand out. They’ve taken quite a bit of her calves.

I turn and step over to the door. Through the window I see Kris standing up on the slope, looking out over the community gardens. No doubt about it, he’s looking for us. I open the door, but he’s already disappeared again behind the noise barrier. I run down the walk. My legs hurt. Through the hole in the fence and up the slope. I run around the barrier. And smack into Kris.

I fall over. He looks at me for a moment, puzzled, then recognizes me. “She’s gone. He’s been here and took her.” I can see he’s been crying.

“No. She’s down in the community gardens,” I say, getting back to my feet.

“You moved her?”

“Yeah, the foxes—”

“You moved her. How are we going to catch him now?”

“Kris, it’s too late. He’s not coming back anymore.”

He takes a step closer. His fists are clenched, and he nearly snarls at me. “How are we going to catch him now? How are we going to—” He doesn’t finish his sentence. Instead he attacks me. I hit the ground hard, it knocks the breath out of me. He straddles me and shakes me by the collar.

“We were supposed to wait for him!” he screams. “That was the deal we made. Don’t you remember?”

I’m hurting. Really bad. All over my body. My legs. My hands. My head. I can’t take anymore. I moan: “She’s down in the house. She’s safe.” But he can’t hear me. He’s crying, it’s flooding out of him, his words come in short bursts. How I’d promised that the murderer would show up again, that we would be heroes. Tears drip down on my face, and I try to push him away. His hands press down on my throat.

Kris, stop!

Not a sound gets past my lips. I try to push him off but he’s way too heavy. My hands reach around for something, anything. I get hold of a rock and hit him with it, but it glances off his arm and gets knocked out of my hand.

I can’t breathe.

My fingers close around something long. A handle. The hammer. The one I lost that first day. It’s heavy, but I lift it and swing it at Kris. Hit him in the temple.

Kris loosens his grip. He looks at me through his tears, surprised.

I swing at him once more, hit the same spot, harder this time. He lets go and holds his temple, gapes at me. He crawls away.

“Are you okay?” I gasp. Cough, spit mucus out.

“We just had to wait one more day,” I hear him say as he moves off on his hands and knees. “Just one more day, he’s on his way now, for sure.”

Slowly I get to my feet, the hammer in one hand, rubbing my throat with the other.

“He’s coming,” he murmurs, and sits back against the barrier. “He’s coming. Wait and see. He’s coming.”

“Okay,” I say. “Okay, goddamnit. We’ll wait for him. I’ve had enough of your goddamn shit, but okay. We’ll wait for him. We’ll wait till afternoon, then we call the police. Okay?”

Kris nods. He’s still holding a hand against his temple. “Yeah. He’s coming. Just wait.”

I walk over and sit beside Kris, lean against the barrier. Even though it’s cold, it feels nice to rest. I’ve been on the go for too long. Too tired right now to continue. I lift the hammer and dry the blood and hair off on my pants, and then we start waiting for the man.

THE GREAT ACTOR by Benn Q. Holm Frederiksberg Allé

I walked down the stairs. It was over. Utterly and completely over. I was tired. The red carpet muffled the sound of my footsteps. He lived on the fourth floor, and I finally made it all the way down and out to the portal, dark and cold as a sepulchre. You could hear the wind whistling outside on Frederiksberg Allé.

The old allé was completely deserted, it was four, four-thirty in the morning. I walked through the ironlike cold under the naked trees, past the cars covered with frost, got in the Mercedes, grabbed the thermos from the glove compartment. Dregs of lukewarm coffee with a few drops of aquavit. What the hell, I could still feel the shots of whiskey. I fished a cigarette out of his pack, only two left, shit. I could smoke a whole tobacco farm, drink an entire barroom. My hands shook, my body. The brief, blazing explosion of fire and light, smoke deep in my lungs. Soon I’ll start the car, disappear.

Normally I wouldn’t dream of taking a shift on that particular Sunday in February, when the film industry holds its big annual awards program. But I was broke, and several of the other drivers were down with the flu. All evening I had avoided the area around Vesterport Station and the Imperial Theater, stayed near the airport. Fortune smiled upon me: I picked up an elderly suntanned couple just in from the Grand Canaries, dropped them off in Helsingør, about as far from the awards gala as I could get. After I’d driven for over nine hours, my back ached, and it was a little past midnight when I dropped two stewed Chinese off at the SAS Hotel. Time to call it a day, at last. The red, castlelike main station, Hovedbanegård, hugged itself behind the sooted moat of railway cutting. It was as if the city was coated with a thin membrane of gray-white frost; a few frozen souls hurried by. The neon ads blinked uselessly. In twenty minutes I would be back home in Rødovre, popping open a beer, smoking a cigarette, watching some TV. I’d go to bed, sleep. I switched the meter off and felt deeply relieved.

Because of some late-night streetwork on Vesterbrogade I spotted too late, I had to turn up Trommesalen. Suddenly I was perilously close to Imperial. Damn. And sure enough: the rest of the city was empty, but here the slick sidewalks looked like a veritable penguin march on inland ice. The big party had just ended. Cars and people shot out. Couples in evening dress waved in the bitter cold; had my taxi been stuffed with customers, with a pink elephant tied to the top, they would have hailed me anyway, that’s how it goes. I ignored the no-left-turn sign, found a nonexistent gap in the traffic, bounded over an island, and swung past the crowded slipstream, away from Imperial, continuing at a snail’s pace past Hotel Scandic, which the old Sheraton was now called, and there in the windswept space between the concrete high-rise and Sct. Jørgens Lake, I saw him.

Involuntarily I slowed down even more, my curiosity simply overwhelmed me. Was it really him? Erik Rützou himself, the pompous ass? My archenemy. Yes, it was.

He walked slightly stooped, fighting off the gale that tugged open his black overcoat, exposing his tux underneath. It looked as if he was poling his way forward in a boat. The moment he caught sight of my taxi he eagerly began flagging me. A long whitish thingy shimmered at the end of his raised arm; a torch, it looked like, but it had to be a Bodil statuette. It could hardly be less, in Erik Rützou’s case. I cursed the streetwork, my curiosity, and was about to floor it when a bicycler without lights swung out on the street. Against my will I stomped on the brakes.

Knock-knock.

Rützou pounded on the window, chalk-white knuckles, a cuff link blinked, he stared inside the taxi, his clenched fist reminding me of a baby’s skull impatiently banging the glass; his slight overbite, which in some odd way served only to reinforce his beautiful, aristocratic face, and his black overcoat made him look like a drunken Count Dracula. Our eyes met, and time stood still. Erik Rützou’s gaze wandered, but he didn’t seem surprised to see me. In fact, he showed no sign of recognizing me. All he showed was that during the course of the evening he had consumed a considerable amount of alcohol, which in all likelihood he hadn’t been obliged to pay for. Champagne and tall drinks in steady streams, served by stunning, blue-eyed blondes. He had sat there in the enormous warm-hearted movie theater in one of the first rows, together with the other luminaries from the film’s cast and their spouses or “good friends,” clips from the nominees had been shown, the entire theater had applauded, the entire theater had held its collective breath while some highly paid stand-up comic convincingly fumbled with the envelope and finally screamed “ERIK RÜTZOU!!” and an avalanche of enthusiastic applause rang throughout the theater, Scandinavia’s largest, it felt as if the roof lifted like some gigantic manhole cover and he rose in feigned surprise, walked up on stage, gave a brief, incisive thank-you speech with a few jokes and wisecracks worked in, thanked the director and the rest of the crew, thanked his old private tutor who was sitting up in heaven drinking port, walked down off the stage, was cheek-kissed along the way by divine women and hugged by male colleagues, and sat down, beaming. Some people are simply born lucky.

All these stupid thoughts led to my not activating the central lock-he had already flung the door open, sunk down in the passenger seat, and said: “Frederiksberg Allé.”

I mumbled lamely: “I’m not working.”

“It will only take five minutes,” he growled arrogantly. “Are you aware of just how goddamn cold it is!? We’ll do it off the meter.”

A car behind me honked. I took off automatically, as if I was in a trance, and wheeled past the thick cylinders of the Planetarium.

Erik Rützou sat preoccupied, fingering his Bodil, presumably received for Best Male Actor. During the Christmas season the entire metropolitan area had been plastered with billboards and posters for the film. We hadn’t seen each other for at least fifteen years, maybe more-when time starts flying nothing can stop it-but I saw him constantly: on TV, on the front pages. On the side of a bus at a red light somewhere. He looked like himself, apparently I didn’t. Otherwise he would have recognized me immediately. I mean, we’d acted together, goddamnit. Had been in the same circles for a while.

We drove in silence, or so I thought, but then, through the buzz of my humiliation, I realized that Rützou was sitting there humming. Was he completely sloshed?

Down narrow Værnedamsvej to Osbornehjørnet and the knife-sharp border of Vesterbro, then I blasted up majestic Frederiksberg Allé as if my ass was on fire, Rützou still saying nothing, just humming low, the heavy German cab steamrolling the paving stones on Skt. Thomas Plads, the large, round, eerily deserted square. The grand old buildings slumbered, unworried behind the double row of lindens and the allé’s outer lanes, crowded with parked cars. We passed Café Promenaden, where I hadn’t dared show my face for years; it was still illuminated inside with a yellowish light, a few customers hanging on the bar, I noticed thirstily, and then we were already there: Rützou silently pointed out his destination. I turned and slowly rolled down the narrow lane between the broad sidewalk and the allé itself. We had just glanced off the corner of Vesterbro and all of its pushers, kebab shops, rowdy late-night bars, and porn shops: here, everything radiated peace and quiet and safety. Cars were bigger in this neighborhood, the apartments too, not to mention the gigantic old villas on the side streets, hidden behind high walls. But it was also a lie. A myth. Because suddenly you’d see auto garages, dreary apartment buildings. And though I tried to appear calm and unaffected by the situation, I was a smoldering, gloomy apartment building myself, an ocean of domestic disturbances. I was a lie too. Because I was scared. Scared, yes. Not of him, but of myself.

Take it easy, Klaus, I told myself, it will be over in a few moments, you’re not going to prison for murder here, you’ll drive home to Rødovre and drink a beer, maybe two, have a goodnight smoke, maybe two, and then you’ll go to bed. And if you can’t sleep, no matter how tired and burned out you are, you’ll take a sleeping pill, maybe two. If that doesn’t help, you’ll put on a movie, or call for some company. Most of all I wanted to sleep, drive out into a new day tomorrow evening. The only thing I was any good at. Driving. Up and down deserted roads, snaking in and out of traffic jams, flying across side streets while blind-drunk students disgorged alcohol in the backseat, drive and drive, pick people up, drive far and long, through the city, day after day, but mostly at night. I had become a night person, and I liked winters, the long dense dark. Autumn was my spring, the sublime overture of darkness.

Meanwhile, Rützou had begun frisking himself, hesitatingly, halfheartedly. The bum. Turned his pockets inside out, but all he found was a silver Dunhill lighter and a small set of keys. The damp, well-tailored smile almost turned serious. He was and is hopeless. He was and is a great performer. Our greatest living actor, according to the papers I tried not to read.

“Damnit, I left without my wallet.”

“Old habits…?” I couldn’t help it. So often in the past I had seen him bumming cigarettes off unpaid gofers or underpaid stagehands. He wasn’t actually stingy, he was just thoughtless. One time, many years ago, he’d asked if I had a smoke on me. “I’ve only got one left,” I answered, and showed him the pack to prove I wasn’t lying. “That’s all right.” He grabbed the pack out of my hand, asked for a light, slapped me on the shoulder, and went back to the shot. Strange, the memories you drag around with you.

He hadn’t heard me, it looked as though he was struggling to remember something. He was several years older than me, fast closing in on fifty, the bohemian, longish dark hair was salt-and-pepper in spots. A handsome man, as I’ve said, but much smaller in person. In photos he always looked like some tall, half-decadent aristocrat, but he was only five-seven. At least I had him there, I was almost six-three.

“Give me the lighter while you run up.”

Erik Rützou gaped at me, lifted the marble-white Bodil statuette. “You think I’ll run off on you? Do you not have any idea who I am!?” He fell over, laughing. “You can have this fucking statuette, I already have at least ten others. What do you say?” Light from the streetlamp fell across his face, cutting it in half to resemble a black-and-white mask. He was actually quite pale, I noticed. As if he had seen a ghost. But apparently he hadn’t. “Then you could brag that you won a Bodil. Tell the kids about the time you won the Bodil. Ha!”

As far as my children went, they’d probably prefer that their mother got the child support I owed her. It kept adding up.

“The lighter,” I repeated.

“How do I know you won’t run off!?”

“So a stupid lighter means more than this…” I couldn’t bring myself to utter the word “Bodil.” It was ridiculous, but I was a bit sensitive about the matter.

“Why don’t you come up with me? Have a shot. And get your money.” He already had the door open, his patent-leather shoes dangling out of the car, as if he was carefully testing the water’s temperature. We could drown in this dark, cold river.

“I can’t park here.” I rolled on further; the side door was still open, the cold rushed in, the parked cars were bumper to bumper, I ended up parking halfway up on the sidewalk in front of a classy little shop that sold homemade chocolate.

We walked back through a large passageway and up a neat, well-kept, red-carpeted stairway.

On one floor Rützou cast a knowing glance at the nameplate. “The old prime minister, you know.”

I didn’t answer, for I was wondering why he hadn’t brought some little sweet thing home with him. That wasn’t like him, but maybe someone was up there warming his bed. Moreover, he looked even smaller than what I remembered, as if he had shrunk. He gasped for breath. Finally we reached his floor. My breathing wasn’t normal, either. Winded, he pushed the door open and showed me into his entry, or hallway, where the ceiling was high, stuccoed everywhere. Rützou set his Bodil down distractedly on an antique bureau, as if it were his daily mail, ads. An umbrella stand lay overturned, a large gold-framed mirror hung crooked, and a massive floor vase had been knocked over in the next room; the tall, shriveled, reedlike flowers looked like spears or enormous pickup sticks, and I spotted something on the wall that looked like blood but was just red wine, of course, a flowing stain with a delta of thin blue-red vessels. Lights on everywhere, as if he’d left abruptly. On a low table between two mahogany chairs, though most of the pieces had fallen on the floor, a few pawns and a bishop still stood, lonely and confused on a chessboard.

“A damn mess in here.” Instead of lifting the floor vase back up, he stepped over it and crossed immediately to the bar, also dark mahogany. I had been expecting that he’d surrounded himself with Arne Jacobsen furniture and contemporary design, that cool, consistent Scandinavian style, but the rooms mostly resembled some English manor; all they lacked was a pair of cocker spaniels and a portrait of the family patriarch, the old major, above the mantel. Maybe that’s what living in conservative Frederiksberg does to you. Back then he was a real left-winger.

“Whiskey? Cognac? Or…?”

“Just whiskey, straight, thanks.”

He pushed a thick little glass over to me, flung his arms out, irritated.

“Stupid bitch. Well, it’s over now.” Oddly enough, he looked thoroughly happy at the thought. “Are you married, uh…?”

I hesitated, it was as if he’d been about to say something more. My name, maybe.

“I have a girlfriend.” Yes, I did. The problem was that she’d just gotten a job in Greenland as a social worker. They were badly needed up there. But I needed her too.

“I’m finished with women.” Rützou finally righted the floor vase, and with a simple, delicate operation arranged the dried flowers or whatever they were, took a pillow that for reasons unknown had ended up on a windowsill, and tossed it over on one of the large, plush sofas. I sipped my whiskey, stood over in the window bay, glanced down at the boulevard, the leafless trees. A single car lurched off, moments later a taxi shot by.

“This is a nice place here,” I said, not even trying to hide my sarcasm, “with the theaters and the cafés and the park up the street. Quiet. The perfect place for the perfect solitary life.”

“You think? Well.”

“And it’s only a ten-minute walk to Vesterbro. If a person needs drugs or sex.”

He laughed shortly. Drank. “Are you insinuating that I’m the type who beats off in a booth at the Hawaii Bio?”

“They have booths in there?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Really? Because we were in there together once, Erik.” Short pause, the famous theatrical pause. “After filming a scene.”

Boozily, half-focused, he stared at me.

I swore silently. The words had just jumped out of my mouth. I hadn’t meant to reveal myself, but the situation had gripped me, it was almost like standing on stage again, or in front of the whirring cameras. With a firm grip on the role. But the feeling was short-lived and empty. I drank greedily, as if I could somehow swallow the words back again.

“We were? Sorry, but I know a million people. And vice versa,” he added, not without a certain satisfaction.

I seethed.

“After filming, you say? Are you a soundman or something? Give me a hint…”

“Forget it,” I mumble.

“Okay, let’s forget it. Such are the times, and the people. Forgetful, and I must pee.” He stood up, brushed back his dark mane, more from old habit, I thought, sent me one of his impish smiles, and then I heard his steps dwindling down an apparently endless hallway.

I don’t know. I could have taken off. He was gone a long time. I could have grabbed his Bodil and smashed everything in sight and continued through the double doors into the dining room, I could… Instead I finished off the whiskey and poured another. I spotted a pack of Marlboros on the coffee table, mine were all gone, I fished one out, stuck the pack in my inside pocket; when I thought about how many he had bummed from me in his time, he’d survive…

Finally I heard the thin sound of a toilet flushing far away, a door slamming open, steps approaching. More steps.

I stuck my head out in the long hallway.

“Did you see where I put that idiotic Bodil?” he blustered, from somewhere. The kitchen, I thought.

“Out in the entryway. The hallway.”

“That’s right.”

He tottered out from a doorway, floundered past me, came back.

I sat down in the living room in a wing-back chair, sniffed the whiskey, drank. Could already make out the bottom.

“It could be I do remember you. Faintly. Søren, isn’t it? I remember being out on a drinking binge with a soundman once after a shoot. Think we ended up at a hooker bar in Vesterbro. Was that you?”

“Yeah, let’s say that.”

“And now you drive a cab?”

“You got it.”

“Do you recall us fucking any women that night, Søren?”

“Till they couldn’t walk.”

“Which is how it should be. Let’s drink to that.”

“But… now you’re finished with women?”

Rützou hesitated a moment, then smiled modestly. “Absolutely finished, you can never be; they’re standing in line. But this woman here,” he cast one of his knowing glances around the room, “I am thoroughly finished with.”

“Yeah,” I said, “luckily new women keep showing up, new roles. I mean, for someone like you…”

He coughed. “Sorry?”

I repeated what I had said, word for word. As if I were learning it again. Acting. For it may have been half an eternity since we had seen each other, since we, well, had acted together. Together from morning to night at rehearsals. Hit the town together, bent some arms, chased women. All of that. But if he really couldn’t remember me, he’d have had to be suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s. And despite everything, that didn’t appear to be the case. But something was wrong. He seemed to be a shadow of himself. We actually resembled each other. Again.

“Pouring in,” came the delayed response, as if he didn’t really care to tune into the conversation’s wavelength.

“But maybe it’s dangerous when a guy thinks he can walk on water,” I said softly.

“What do you mean by that, Søren?”

“Cut the Søren shit. I nearly fell for it, but… how stupid do you think I am?”

“I wouldn’t know. But you look like a half-brained overweight cab driver, I can see that much.”

“And you look like a sick cream puff. But I’m disappointed in you, Erik. Overplaying this way. Even if I’ve put on a few pounds since back then.”

“What could he be babbling about?” he emoted, speaking to the stucco rosette on the ceiling, hamming it up. Then breaking out in a horse laugh, bending over, slapping his knee. “Of course, Klaus, damnit. It’s you. Now I remember you! But I thought you were dead and gone…”

“You recognized me the first second. And you still didn’t say a thing…”

“Let’s say that, then.”

“Yeah, let’s.”

“Listen, my friend. That girl who biked right in front of you. I just wanted to get home. I couldn’t get a cab, I didn’t want to go into town with the others. Tap on the window, see a middle-aged fat guy who looks familiar. What’s his name? I’m thinking. But I meet people all the goddamn time. I’m sorry, Klaus, but you’ve been out of the picture for fucking twenty years!”

“Fifteen,” I replied childishly. “And now I’m the one who has to piss.”

Along the way I took the opportunity to explore the apartment, the rooms. The bedroom was no exception to the strange sense of disintegration that filled the apartment: clothes were scattered all over, shirts, suit jackets, wardrobe doors stood wide open revealing rows of suits, the big double bed was unmade. A large ceiling fan whirled around for no reason, weekly magazines and pages of dialogue lay on the floor. The office was a cave of relics from a long, successful life. A big framed film poster from one of his most famous roles, a few small paintings from a wild, well-known Danish artist, and high shelves, completely filled up. But the shelves held more than books: photo albums, piles of gossip mags, scrapbooks, a pith helmet, bits of kinky eroticism, including an enormous phallus. In one corner, a southern French village of wine in unopened gift boxes and solid wooden crates. A desk globe inside of which I envisioned a cosmos of liquor bottles, a brand-new set of golf clubs parked against an easy chair. A couple more Bodils stood in a windowsill. Despite everything, it hadn’t amounted to more than that. A gigantic desk with a laptop. Along with a horde of photos framed behind glass of Rützou alongside diverse beauties and famous colleagues, the desk was flooded with manuscripts, invitations, bank statements. I picked up a random letter from the bank-he was loaded, the bastard. Then I found another letter. The sender’s official name and logo was up in the corner. I picked it up…

When I returned, he abruptly said: “It’s your fault that I’m sitting here. In a tux and bow tie.”

“Really?”

“I preferred the stage. Sensing the audience in the theater, sitting in the dressing room, going out for a beer afterward with everyone. Film felt very lonesome to me. No, not lonesome, fragmented, you might say. You know: you show up, say your lines, walk off, and that’s it. You might meet with the actors at the premiere.” He inspected his well-groomed hands, the whiskey glass he had set down the chess table, a short and stout rook, golden brown. “But then you simply vanished that time, called in sick or whatever it was that happened…”

“When?”

“Playing the innocent, are we? That leading role in the Carlsen film was yours. Have you repressed that, man? You must think I’m senile. You disappeared off the face of the earth, so they called me instead.” Rützou flung out his arms again, theatrically, and there was nothing else he needed to say: that film was his breakthrough, the roles started pouring in afterward.

“You’ve performed at the Royal Theater between all the films, I know that much, Erik. Even at Kronborg! I think I’ve seen you in commercials too. And some really bad family films.” The kids loved them.

“Everything except the old bawdy films,” he laughed. “They were before my time. But you’re right.” He stifled a belch. “But anyway.”

“You raked in the roles and the money, man.”

“I have.” He nodded solemnly. “I have,” he repeated. “And ladies.” He tasted the word, stretched it out, lay-deeze. “But… what happened, really, back then?”

“Uh… yeah.” Another cigarette. “It was… it was nerves,” I admitted, after a second. I had nothing to lose. Maybe I even needed to talk about it; I had never told this to anyone, not even my wife back then, definitely not the kids. “The pressure was too much. I couldn’t handle it. The thought of playing that part, I couldn’t wait for it to start, I was so happy, and I was dying of fright. Not just performance anxiety, but real anxiety. The long and short of it is, I crashed.”

“And when you finally got up again, it wasn’t so easy to find parts,” he added sympathetically; that is, malevolently.

“No, it was easy enough, at first. Certain bit parts. Like the deranged bar type, and the disgusting apartment caretaker. Always halfway drunk. The guy nobody likes.”

“Oh yeah,” Rützou said. “It’s so tiresome playing yourself all the time. Don’t misunderstand me. It’s why I have always taken various parts. Hamlet one day, beer commercials the next. But listen, Klaus. You could have worked your way back, slowly. But you gave up.”

“Yeah, I did. It wasn’t fun anymore. And I couldn’t bring in enough to make a go of it, financially.”

“Financially! Bah! I have a good friend, a well-known writer. He’s not exactly swimming in money but he writes anyway. Because he can, won’t do anything else.”

“Does he have a rich wife?”

“No, Klaus. He’s got balls!”

I finished off the whiskey, hissed: “I’m groveling at your feet, Erik. You are the greatest. And the ride’s on me.” I got ready to stand up. “Thanks for the drink.”

“Plural, if I may say. You have put away two very serious drinks. Downed them. Doubt you can drive. You want to destroy your glorious taxi career too?”

“I was close to a Bodil for best off-meter driving, right?”

“Ooh, I had forgotten how screamingly funny you can be. Listen: you can still get it, Klaus.” He reached for the bottle of whiskey on the chess table between us, some expensive brand I’d never heard of. The Bodil stood there too, tall and elegant, as if it was silently listening. “Stay for a while, let’s have a nightcap.”

I sank down in the chair, held my empty glass out like some beggar. He had hit my weak spot. I’ve never been good at saying no. If I lost my driver’s license, then… Usually I drank only after work and on off-days. Except for the few drops of aquavit in my thermos.

“What can I still get?” I said, mad at myself.

“The lady here.” He stuck the statuette up in my face. I pushed his hand away, but he kept sitting there waving it around. “A special-award Bodil. For all you could have accomplished…”

Of course I wanted to smack him, but I had driven a cab for so long and met so many extremely drunk people or just plain brain-dead types that I had learned to control myself. People had vomited all over my gearshift and my clothes, they had put a stranglehold on me from the backseat, they had tried to run from the fare, even that stoned-out floozy from Skovlunde without any money who invited me up, yeah, I hadn’t even smacked her when she screamed that I’d raped her when her boyfriend suddenly appeared in the apartment, a big dude. I hit him, sure, but in self-defense. The judge couldn’t understand what I was doing in her apartment, and my wife couldn’t either.

Rützou fenced with the Bodil as if it were a sword or a scepter, right at the tip of my nose. I grabbed it and held it threateningly above him.

“What the hell are you doing, Erik?” Now it was me doing the acting.

“Getting you to wake up. You still have it in you. You are not a big zero. All this could have been yours. But you were an amateur. You blew it all. And look at yourself now, what you’ve become: a beer gut in a cheap leather jacket. It looks like something you bought on the black market in Moldavia. All that’s missing is the mustache. And by the way,” he added off-handedly, “you should do something about your eyebrows, they look like two goddamn bushes.”

He sat close to me now, leaning forward, a scruffy birdlike figure in a tux.

“What happened with your girlfriend?” I asked.

“Fuck her.”

“You threw her out, didn’t you? You’re throwing everything out, aren’t you? Cleaning house.” I laughed, pointed to the chaos in the room. “If you can call this cleaning house.”

“You blew it all, Klaus. When you pull out of here, I’m calling the police, you’ll be nailed for drunk driving. Fired, out of work. Maybe you can find a cleaning job.”

I sat the glass down carefully. I didn’t pity him, or only very little.

“It’s terminal, isn’t it? Where at? Lungs? Throat? Lymph nodes?”

“Life is terminal. Did you read the profile of me they published? Nobody will write about you, will they? You’re dead and buried. The papers haven’t been interested in you for a hundred years. I’ve even looked once in a while. Usually people show up in these ‘Where are they now’ type columns, but no. You are just a goddamn moving man driving humans around in an old diesel car. Meaningful work, eh? Challenging.”

“How long do you have left? Three months, six months?”

“I have a full calendar, Klaus. Lars von Trier calls me constantly, begging me. They call from Hollywood, goddamnit!”

“Yeah, I’m sure. But before long you won’t be able to answer the phone. You’re sick. You’re dying.” I threw the letter from the hospital in front of him, but he ignored it.

“Who calls you, eh? They call from offices and bars, say, ‘Yeah, hello, can we get a cab to Amagerbrogade, name’s Jensen.’”

I had put my glass down, but I still sat there with his Bodil. His idea was that I would use it to smash in his skull. That was his plan, however and whenever it had come to him. Invite me up, provoke me, humiliate me. Something like that. I set it on the chess table, and yes, he was still a great actor, for he didn’t bat an eye.

“I don’t know, Erik,” I drawled, because an idea had come to me. I stood up. My head buzzed a bit, too much whiskey in too short a time. But I was used to it. It would be all right. If he went for it, the revenge would be more than sweet. “Do you really want me to kill you, Erik? Just like that, without getting anything in return?”

For a long time he said nothing.

Then he cleared his throat and spoke with a surprisingly calm voice: “All right. I have a lot of cash on me. You can take some of the antiques. All the silver. Nobody saw us. You drove with the meter off. Nobody needs to know a thing. All you have to do is do it.” A crooked smile. “For once in your life just do it, Klaus.”

“Okay,” I said.

Surprised, Rützou stared at me.

After another moment of silence, I was afraid he was getting cold feet, but then, in the same composed, toneless voice as before, he said: “Do what you will, just do it quick. Goddamn quick. Understood?”

I nodded politely.

“One second.” He disappeared down the hall, rustled around in his office, and came back with a thick envelope that, excited now, he handed to me.

I looked. Nothing but large bills, lots of them. I stuck the envelope in my pocket and put the gloves on that I’d pulled out of my leather jacket.

Rützou had poured himself an extra large whiskey, and he drank so it ran down his chin and throat and stained the elegant white shirt under his tux.

“Let’s get it over with, goddamnit,” he gasped.

I started right in. Before any regrets came along. It’s not nearly as easy to strangle someone as you might think. It requires a lot of strength and grisly patience. But that I had! Rützou’s eyes started to bulge, the whites popped out, he gurgled and, I couldn’t believe it, turned an even more ghostly white than before. He put up a little resistance, but most likely that was a natural reflex. For the bastard really wanted to die. Though he wouldn’t be getting his wish, not yet.

“Shhoke harr-er, gaw-dammuh!” he babbled.

“Can you say please?”

“Puh-eeeze.”

His blue tongue hung halfway out of the preposterous, already putrefied chasm of his mouth, his eyes had shifted from white to violently bloodshot, life slowly faded from them; it was a fantastic sight, he hissed and gasped and drooled like a goddamn snake, and then I abruptly dropped my stranglehold.

“Did you really think I’d do it, you idiot?”

Rützou tumbled backward, grabbed his throat, and gasped deeply for breath. He stood and swayed in his ridiculous patent-leather shoes, completely groggy; he’d pissed his pants, I noticed, and I was already celebrating my little stunt when he suddenly threw himself upon me in a rage and bombarded my face with rock-hard punches, his anger apparently increasing his strength because I was starting to see black. Now it was me on the edge of being knocked unconscious. I had no choice but to hit back. I slugged him straight on the chin.

Rützou fell his entire length and banged his head on the sharp corner of the coffee table. It sounded ugly. My knuckles ached in my gloves. Rützou was on the floor, lifeless. I prayed that he was only unconscious, when I saw a thin trickle of blood appear. More of it came, and more, until it was a small, dark lake.

Desperate, I fell to my knees and shook him, but there was no doubt.

Rützou was dead.

The asshole had tricked me after all.

For several minutes I sat and stared into space, unable to think or act. Then I downed a shot and began removing all traces of my fingerprints: I was on file. One of the last things I did before leaving the apartment was to empty my glass and wash it carefully. It was like being in a film, or no, a grainy documentary…

Then I left.

Down the stairs, the wide, red stairs.

And there I sat. It was still pitch dark and incredibly cold. I took my gloves off and fumbled around for the pack of cigarettes, only two left. The moment the flame rose from the lighter, I saw a flash of my gaunt and battered face in the rearview mirror. It was the stupidest possible thing I could do, to sit here smoking; someone might see me. But I really needed that cigarette. The money in the envelope, I’d completely forgotten about it. What had I done with it? Yeah, the money was safe and sound in my pocket, and in a moment I would be gone, headed for the hills, nobody would connect me with his death. I stuck the key in the ignition.

But then another thought hit me, harder than Rützou’s fist. His girlfriend! They’d had a fierce fight earlier that evening. There were conspicuous signs of strangulation on his neck, anyone could see that he hadn’t just fallen down drunk. Suspicion would immediately fall on her. Maybe she had an alibi, maybe not. And if she didn’t, what would I do?

It was her or me. This would never end. Except for the one who was dead.

LAST TRAIN FROMCENTRAL STATION by Gunnar Staalesen Central Station ^{(Originally written in Norwegian)}

Istedgade lay like a painted corpse as I emerged from Central Station late in the afternoon one Friday in November, the year the U.S.A. elected its first black president and the world immediately looked much brighter than it had the previous eight years.

For a long time, Europe has begun for most Norwegians in Copenhagen, and Central Station is the gateway to the rest of the continent. There you can buy an aquavit in the cafe at eight in the morning, even on Sunday, and you realize at once that you have arrived in another world.

Norway’s capital was located in Denmark for four hundred years. The despotic Danish sovereigns ruled from Copenhagen with an iron hand. At the beginning of the 1700s, a young man traveled from Norway to Denmark and became the first modern Nordic writer: Ludvig Holberg. Danes claim him for their own, Norway says he is Norwegian, but we in Bergen don’t take the debate all that seriously. We know exactly where he came from. The Danish encyclopedias also put it quite correctly: Danish writer, born in Bergen.

I had followed in Holberg’s footsteps many times myself, not in the pursuit of happiness, but usually to search for some young person who had run away from home. Copenhagen was also the most natural place for those on the run to hide out. It wasn’t so difficult to get there, but still you felt you were far away from home.

After the regular ferry route between Oslo and Copenhagen had developed into a floating orgy of alcohol and the night train from Oslo had been discontinued, most traveled by air to Kastrup, Copenhagen’s airport. Generally I had taken the train. Now the only train ride was the one from the airport, but Central Station was still the customary place to get off. You took the escalator up from the platform to the main hall, where the big city’s noise and commotion hit you immediately. Arrivals and departures were announced over the speakers at regular intervals. Travelers of all nationalities and age groups passed by, some with backpacks, others with heavy suitcases that rolled on nifty little wheels, everyone on their way somewhere, even when waiting impatiently in groups. A railway station of this caliber is like a monument to the restlessness of the times, partings and farewells, greetings and embraces, teary smiles and sparkling laughter, noisy outbreaks of anger and murmured, intense confessions. All types of figures meet here, from the poorest beggar with outstretched hands to the richest businessman with the world’s fattest cigar clenched between his teeth like a lighthouse.

As for me, I didn’t stand out in any particular way. From the moment I walked into the hall, my gaze wandered from face to face, without much hope of finding the right one. After all, I hadn’t seen her for twenty-three years.

Heidi Davik was her name in 1985, and Heidi Davik was her name still. In the years between she had been married and divorced and changed her name back and forth. But both times it was her father who had given me the assignment.

The first thing he asked when he came to my office on that Thursday in November was if I remembered him. He was short, white-haired, and not too dissimilar from the candidate who had lost the American presidential election. But he was probably a few years younger, in his late sixties, I guessed. He was well-dressed, in a double-breasted suit.

“Faintly,” I answered.

“Thor Davik. You were in Copenhagen and found my daughter Heidi in the spring of 1985.” He opened the briefcase he’d brought with him and pulled out an old photo, yellowed and worn at the edges. “I gave you this shot back then.”

He handed me the photo, and I looked down and nodded. I recognized her. Back then she had been a sweet little girl, sixteen, with long, dark hair, a self-conscious gaze, and a nice smile. I had found her in Christiania, the free state, where she was living in the back room of what resembled a ceramics workshop, with a Dane two years older than her who had even longer hair and a short, scruffy beard, reddish-blond. There had been wailing and gnashing of teeth when I convinced her to accompany me back to Bergen, but it didn’t come to blows when she had to part with her soulmate. He looked rather miserable when I escorted Heidi out to Pusher Street and through the gateway of what had once been an abandoned military area, but which was still Scandinavia’s most popular hippie colony, though it had aged somewhat, just like the hippies.

“She doesn’t look like this now, I assume?”

“No, I just wanted to… Here!” He handed me a much more recent photo of an adult Heidi. I recognized her look and smile, but her hair was cut very short and bleached in blond streaks.

“So what’s the story?”

He gave me the short version. After returning home from Copenhagen, things had gone well for her. She studied to be a physical therapist, got a full-time job, married a colleague, and after seven years of marriage without children, she got a divorce. “Her name was Lorentzen when she was married, but she took her maiden name back after the divorce.”

“And what brings you here today?”

His gaze wavered. “It sounds almost like a bad remake of some film, but… she’s back in Copenhagen. She’s been there for fourteen days, and she doesn’t answer her phone. We don’t know where she’s staying, either. I… her mother is very worried.”

“But she’s an adult now.” I made a quick calculation. “Close to forty, if I’m not mistaken.”

“So what?” He seemed aggravated. “Your children are your children, all their lives.”

“And you won’t go down and try to find her yourself?”

“No. It’s impossible. She blames us for everything that’s gone wrong.”

“Everything that’s gone wrong? You’ve just described a more or less normal life.”

“Yes, well, except that we forced her to come home back then. She has never been able to forgive us for that.”

“The young man she was staying with down there… did she ever hear from him again?”

He scrunched his lips together. “We don’t know. But… we found this, among her papers, after she moved back in with us following her divorce. A small apartment in the basement. We can come and go…”

I realized he was trying to make excuses as best he could, and I held out my hand. He gave me a tourist postcard, conventional, with a photo of Tivoli on the front. I turned it over. There wasn’t much written: I’ll meet you here, as planned. If problems, call this number. Your Christian. Below it he had written a telephone number that began with 45, the country code for Denmark.

I looked at the more recent photo again. “Christian-and a phone number. Have you tried calling him?”

“Yes, but he said I must have the wrong number.”

“I see.”

“And we don’t have the strength for it. I want you to go to Copenhagen and see this man, Veum. We want to know what has happened to our daughter. Why she doesn’t answer us…”

I took the job, got on the Internet, and reserved a plane ticket for the next day. Meanwhile, I searched for the name and number and found what I was after: Christian Mogensen, with an address on Wesselsgade, which according to my well-worn map of Copenhagen lay right next to Sortedams Sø, one of the city’s lakes.

I thought about calling him before I left Bergen but decided that it would probably be more effective to wait until I was a short taxi ride from where he lived.

It worked. The man who answered the phone sounded flustered when I introduced myself as a private investigator from Bergen, but he admitted that he was indeed Christian Mogensen and that he had sent a card to an old girlfriend in Bergen. I said that if he didn’t provide information that would lead me to Heidi Davik, I would be at his door like some crazy Viking faster than he could say “three mackerels.”

He hesitated a few seconds, but when I added “or like a bulldog gone berserk,” he gave me an address on Lille Istedgade and said that’s where I would find her, if she was at home.

“Lille Istedgade?” I said, and he took my tone of voice in such a way that he quickly added, “Yes, but Istedgade isn’t like it used to be.”

“No?”

“Not at all.”

In many ways he was right. True, the street still had a porno shop or two, and a few of the girls strolling the sidewalk in what seemed to be a casual manner wore conspiculously short skirts for November. The long look I got from one of them told me that I could warm myself up with her if I was cold.

Nonetheless, there was a shined-up look to the street that hadn’t been there in 1985, and when I got to the address Christian Mogensen had given me, a side street to Sønder Boulevard, the building proved to be newly renovated, the stairway nice and clean, and the list of tenants in the vestibule indicated that it was an apartment building. The left-hand apartment on the fourth floor-the one Mogensen had told me to go to-was apparently unoccupied. At least there was no name on the list.

On the way up I met a couple descending the stairs. The woman was blond, with hair pulled back severely and gathered in a knot. She wore an elegant dark-blue coat and carried a small black envelope purse in her gloved hand. She stared straight ahead, not looking in my direction. Her companion did, however: a broad-shouldered man with short dark hair, in a black winter coat and dark pants. The look he sent me was angry and hostile, as if he were saying: Try taking her away from me, if you dare…

For a moment or two I considered whether the building might be something other than what it seemed, perhaps a refuge for sadomasochists or some other crazy group. Then they passed by me, leaving behind only the reek of her strong perfume. I assumed it was hers, but you can never be sure. Not nowadays.

No one opened when I rang at the fourth-floor door that had no tenant name. I tried several times, and the doorbell could be heard all the way out in the hall, but there was no reaction from inside. I studied the door. It was made of solid, heavy wood, and the lock seemed secure, not one you could work open with a hairpin and a credit card.

I grabbed my phone, called Mogensen again, and gave him my sob story.

“Well, she’s just out somewhere,” he said.

“Then I’ll pay you a visit instead.”

“No, no. Wait right there, Veum, I’ll come to you.”

“And how long will that take?”

“Less than a half hour. Get a cup of coffee in the meantime.”

I walked back to Istedgade, found a café on a corner, noticed the woman with the encouraging look at one of the tables but didn’t accept the invitation this time, either. I sat at the bar on a stool high enough to keep an eye on the entrance to the building I had just left, and I ordered a cup of black coffee and a Brøndums aquavit, the closest I could come to a Simers Taffel south of the Skagerrak.

After twenty-five minutes a black Mercedes pulled up and a man got out. He was tall and somewhat rangy, with red-blond hair and a beard. He looked around before crossing the street and entering the building.

I emptied my glass, nodded at the waitress, and followed him.

I stood in the hallway and listened. At first I heard nothing. Then a door slammed, followed by hurried footsteps down the stairs.

When he reached bottom he met my gaze. Now I recognized him. His hair was shorter, beard neat and well-trimmed, and he was distinctly better-dressed than the last time we’d met. But it was the same man I had found her with in Christiania twenty-three years earlier.

His voice shook when he said, “Veum?”

“That’s me. What’s going on?”

Before he could answer, his phone rang. He put it to his ear, and as he listened he gradually grew paler. “But… but you can’t…” He glanced up the stairway, as if he expected someone to come after him any second. “Yeah… all right, I’m coming. Track seven.”

Then he lowered the phone and looked at me again. His expression was darker than the night, it was as if someone had poured poison in his ear. “I have to go.”

“I’m going with you.”

He looked like he was going to object, but just shrugged his shoulders. We went out to the sidewalk. He walked past his car without a glance.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Central Station. Track seven.”

“And what’s going to happen?”

“We’re going to meet them.”

“Who?” Impatient, I grabbed his arm. “Heidi?”

He jerked loose from my grip and looked at me, his despair about to flow over. The darkness surrounding us had settled over Copenhagen. At the end of Istedgade rose Central Station, its steep gable like some heathen house of God. The wind that hit us came from frozen outposts. It was no merry evening in the King’s Copenhagen-or was it the Queen’s nowadays?

“No,” he snapped. “Svanhild.”

He rushed toward Central Station, and I did what I could to keep pace.

No more was said. At the street’s end we walked directly in through the nearest entrance and bolted up the steps to the main hall, where Christian Mogensen made a beeline for the stairs to track seven. I followed.

The tracks at Copenhagen’s Central Station lie in an excavated area underneath. On track seven, it was announced that an intercity train to Ǻrhus-Struer was arriving in five minutes. Mogensen ran down the steps as if the train was pulling out right in front of him. Without any hesitation I followed at his heels.

The platform was packed, but Mogensen shoved his way through until it thinned out in the crowd of travelers standing with suitcases and other luggage, ready to board as soon as the train pulled in.

They stood waiting for us at the far end of the platform, the blond woman and the broad-shouldered man I had met in the hallway an hour earlier. Mogensen stopped a few meters from them and stood with arms hanging, gasping for air. I stayed behind but off to one side of him for a clear view.

A few tracks away, an S train was headed out to the suburbs, maybe up to what Copenhageners called the “whiskey belt.” No one here on the platform at track seven was indulging in whiskey. But the looks they exchanged were as cold as ice cubes.

The woman I gathered to be Svanhild twisted her lips into the sourest smile I’d seen since Maggie Thatcher. “What’s wrong, darling?” she said to Mogensen.

“You’re both crazy! Was he the one who did it?”

The broad-shouldered man took a few steps to the side and raised his arm like a gunman before the last shootout. He nodded in my direction. “Who’s this clown?”

Mogensen turned halfway around, as if he’d forgotten that I had followed him. Then he pulled out his cell phone and held it in front of them. “I’m calling the police! I am-right now!”

“Remember to give them your confession,” Svanhild said, with an evil smile. “They’ll find your DNA when they test the sperm in her vagina. You gave me a nice-sized quantity of it this morning, have you forgotten? You didn’t say no, even when the gorgeous love of your life was waiting on Lille Istedgade—”

“You don’t mean—”

“A trip to the bathroom and a quick drain into a little bottle. That’s all it took. But we also grabbed a few hairs from your brush just to be safe and laid them on her pillow.”

I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. “What are we talking about here? You’re not saying that—”

Mogensen turned to me again, his face as white as a sheet. “They killed her. That woman there-that evil woman, my wife-she couldn’t let me live with another woman. The one I’ve wanted so much all these years.” He turned back to Svanhild. “Why didn’t you take me instead?”

I was inclined to believe him. Her smile was more evil than that of the queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

“It wouldn’t have hurt enough, darling. Not long enough.”

“And he helped you! My partner, your lover, Frederik Vesterlund.”

“It was a sheer pleasure. For him too. He raped her while I held her down. But don’t worry. He didn’t come. Only you did.”

I could hardly believe my ears. Christian and Frederik stood staring at each other, two kings on the same platform. Like some fake arbitrator I walked between them. “But you’re forgetting one thing,” I said.

“What the hell is this Norwegian doing here?” Vesterlund bellowed.

“He’s the crown witness for the prosecution,” I said. “I can testify that I saw you two leave the building before Mogensen arrived. And when he came, he wasn’t in there long enough to have done any of these things at the scene of the crime that you’re babbling about.”

The train for Ǻrhus and Struer whistled in the tunnel behind us.

It all happened within a few seconds.

Svanhild pointed at me, and as if she was commanding a dog, said: “Frederik, get him!”

Frederik Vesterlund lunged at me, but Mogensen stepped in before he reached me. Vesterlund swung at him, but Mogensen stepped to the side, grabbed his arm, and pushed him along. They stumbled toward the edge of the platform, and in the moments before the train was about to thunder past, they tottered at the very edge. The people behind us screamed in terror, the brakes screeched, and with a violent shove Christian Mogensen took Frederik Vesterlund with him down onto the track, where a fraction of a second later they disappeared under the massive train. Then it got quiet. Completely quiet.

Svanhild Mogensen stood like a limestone pillar in the middle of the platform. Then she began moving, slowly and studiously. She opened her handbag, found a pack of cigarettes, stuck one between her lips, and lit it with a gold lighter. She gazed at me through the blue smoke with the look of a cobra just before it strikes.

She walked toward me, her hips swinging discretely. As she passed, she blew a lungful of smoke in my direction. “Oh well,” she murmured. “I had no use for either one of them any longer.”

I stood and watched her leave. Several railroad employees passed. One of them stopped in front of me.

“Did you see what happened?”

“I saw the whole thing.”

“We have to call the police.”

“Do it.”

After I had given my statement to the police, they insisted I follow them down to Lille Istedgade.

They broke the lock, and I walked into the apartment. We found Heidi where they had left her. Lying in bed, naked and dead, with a blue and yellow necktie tight around her throat and a dead man’s sperm inside her.

Her face was blue-gray, her eyes empty and lips distorted in a grimace that showed she hadn’t left this world voluntarily. Someone had pushed her over the edge and let her dangle. It wasn’t a pretty sight, even for a hardened detective.

I said to myself: What if I hadn’t found her back in 1985? Would she be lying here now? Or would life have been entirely different for both her and Christian Mogensen?

I told the police the whole story, and I saw their skepticism grow with every word I spoke. “How the hell are we supposed to prove that?” groaned the policeman leading the interrogation.

“You have to bring her in for questioning.”

“We already are. She’s on her way.”

“If you need a witness, I’m more than willing to come back to Copenhagen.”

“You’re not too scared?”

“Not yet.”

The last hours before I left for the airport I spent at Jernbanecafe on Reventlowsgade, close to Central Station, where the service was first-class. I ordered a Tuborg Classic and so many Brøndums that I finally lost count. A small model railroad ran back and forth under the ceiling. I sat and followed it with my eyes to be sure. But no one threw himself in front of it. Not a single person.

It wasn’t pleasant news I brought back home with me to Bergen. No one put their arms around me when I told them what had happened, though I’m not exactly used to having that happen.

Several weeks later I stumbled onto a Danish paper at a kiosk in the park. A teaser on the front page piqued my curiosity. I flipped through to a spread inside the paper. There was a beautiful photo of Svanhild Mogensen, smiling cooly at the photographer. The short article explained that after the tragic death of her husband at Central Station earlier in the month, she reported that she intended to continue their successful Amager business and would lead it forward as its new director. Nothing was mentioned about any regrets she might have had; no doubt she didn’t have any.

It’s said that crime doesn’t pay. And who said this, I’d like to know? More on target was the man who said that hidden behind every great fortune is a crime.

I sent her a card with my name on it. But I never got an answer. She surely had better things to do. And so did I, for that matter.