Invisible Murder

KOU-LARSEN WAS STANDING in his garden, looking at those damned minarets. He couldn’t believe they had been allowed to build them that tall, right next to a residential neighborhood. Someone in his old office had completely dropped the ball, he decided. The zoning laws called for low residential structures and scattered recreational areas. Not a word about prayer towers.

Maybe he could call and complain? After all, he still knew a few people at the planning office.

“Jørgen?” Helle called.

“Yes?” he replied.

“Coffee.”

He obediently slunk back in through the sliding glass doors—the trim around them needed painting again, he noted—and took his place by the coffee table. There was marble cake, but it didn’t look homemade. And Helle seemed a little absent-minded, pouring their coffee into their everyday mugs from the Arabia set.

“I talked to the lawyer,” he said. “That young Ahlegaard. He says he knows a decent law firm in Marbella if we want to sue.”

“Why would we?” she asked.

“To get the money back,” he said patiently.

“But I’m happy about the apartment.”

Skou-Larsen gave up. He couldn’t make her understand that there was no apartment and there wasn’t going to be one, at least not at the address specified in that fancy brochure she had. He poured cream into his coffee and took a sip. It tasted strange.

“What’s in the coffee?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“It doesn’t taste the way it usually does.”

“That’s because it’s decaf. And that’s fat-free milk, not cream.”

He felt oddly deceived.

“Decaf?”

“Yes, it doesn’t cause as much stomach acid.”

Lately he had been having a little bit of a burning sensation just behind his breastbone, and the doctor had said it was something called reflux. He thought that sounded like some kind of cleaning product. Reflux: cleans like a white tornado! But it turned out it was the acid in his stomach rising up and irritating his esophagus, and he had been instructed to cut back on coffee, tea, alcohol, chocolate, and orange juice. And what was that other thing? Peppermint. He never ate peppermint. Who the heck ate so much peppermint that it could be a problem? And in the bedroom they had put wooden blocks under the legs of the bed at the headboard to elevate it, so now he felt like he was constantly sliding down toward the foot of the bed.

“It doesn’t taste like real coffee,” he said, setting down his cup.

She stood up abruptly.

“Well then don’t drink it,” she snapped, disappearing into the kitchen.

He sat there for a bit, looking at the coffee table. At the meticulously arranged slices of marble cake and the bowl of currant cookies, the cream jug, which had now become a skim milk jug instead, the napkins, the cake plates. It had been wrong of him to complain about the coffee. She had only done it because she cared about his health.

So go out and apologize, he told himself. But he just couldn’t make himself do it. It wasn’t just Helle and the decaf. It was the damn minarets in the garden, the scam artist brochures on the nightstand, those darned wooden blocks that made him wake up with a sore back, and then of course the biggest injustice of them all, death.

Just when exactly had he stopped calling the shots in his own life?

Maybe he never had. Maybe free will had been an illusion the whole time, the biggest scam of them all.

He got up and went into the hallway.

“I’m going for a walk around the lake,” he called, in the direction of the kitchen door. He waited for a while to see if there would be a response. There wasn’t.

HE DIDN’T GO down to the lake after all. He wasn’t in the mood for all those joggers. Instead he walked defiantly over to the construction site. They were pulling the tarpaulins off the domed roof now. The gate was ajar, and there was no one in the little trailer that served as a kind of guard hut by the entrance. It didn’t make much of a difference, anyway. Skou-Larsen had noticed that holes had been cut in the wire fence in two different locations on the side facing Lundedalsvej. There was a sign that said NO TRESPASSING, but he didn’t feel like he was trespassing. This building was very much his business. It was marring his view and upsetting his wife.

“Well, I’ll be damned. It’s Mr. Skou-Larsen, right?”

He turned around, feeling a little guilty in spite of the justifications he had just been reviewing in his mind. An alien in a cylindrical helmet and hazmat suit that covered his entire body stood before him.

“Ah, yes, excuse me,” the alien said, flipping off his helmet. “It’s not easy to recognize someone in this getup. We’re just removing asbestos panels from the old ceilings.”

Skou-Larsen contemplated the ruddy face and the thinning flaxen hair that came into view. Everything about the face was a little plump and round, like those cartoons of hysterically happy pigs that used to decorate the sides of butchers’ vans in the old days. As if nothing could be funnier than being strung up by your hindquarters and having your throat slit.

“Ah, yes. Hello,” he said tentatively. “It’s been a long time.”

“It certainly has. Are you still working in the planning office?”

“No. I’ve been retired for several years.”

“How time flies! I switched over to the private sector myself. Have my own company now. We specialize in asbestos removal.” The man gestured toward one of the cars haphazardly parked in the area in front of the future cultural center. Jansen Enterprises, it said, which finally jogged Skou-Larsen’s memory. Preben Jansen, he worked in maintenance and engineering. Or at least he had back when Skou-Larsen used to occasionally run into him in the course of duty.

“Congratulations,” Skou-Larsen said.

“Thanks. To what do we owe the honor?”

That was, of course, a polite way of saying, “What are you doing here?,” but then Skou-Larsen valued politeness.

“Uh, I live nearby,” he said, pointing toward Elmehøjvej. “So I’m curious to see what all this is turning into. I mean, when you’ve worked with construction and building permits your whole life.…” A thought suddenly hit him. What if they didn’t have a permit to build this high, after all? It had happened before. People sometimes thought absolution was easier than permission. Or maybe they had broken other rules—fire safety or some such, anything at all that could be used to file a complaint.… Maybe he could still find some grounds for objection that would stop the project, or at least delay it. “Do you think I could come in to see how it’s coming along? People say it’s going to be really stunning. A little multicultural gem.” Was he laying it on too thick? No, Jansen just nodded.

“The architect is brilliant. He’s done several mosques in Europe.” His round, hurray-I’m-about-to-be-slaughtered pig face was still furrowed with hesitation, but then he appeared to make a decision. “Oh, sure, why not. It’s about time for us to call it a day anyway. Just follow me, Mr. Skou-Larsen, and I’ll see if we can’t give you a little tour.”

THE OLD FACTORY building formed the flat-roofed reception area, now significantly renovated with arched windows, gleaming pine woodwork, and ornamental tiles. The cloakroom and lavatories were being installed at one end of the reception hall; at the other end was quite a plain-looking meeting room with a small kitchenette. Skou-Larsen inspected and made mental notes. They weren’t done with the ceilings yet, and there were still drop cloths and plastic covering the tile floor.

“We’re a little behind on the ceilings,” Jansen said. “They didn’t realize there was asbestos in the old panels until quite late—they hadn’t been properly registered, I guess. And that’s when we were called in.”

“Did they do an expanded workplace health hazard evaluation?” Skou-Larsen asked automatically. As soon as asbestos was involved a special workplace evaluation was mandatory.

“Hey, I thought you were retired?” Jansen said with a smile, which Skou-Larsen hurriedly returned.

“Old habits,” he said. “Sorry. Of course it’s none of my business.” But now the asbestos rules were swirling around in his head; there were so many potential oversights and minor legal violations. If a seventeen-year-old apprentice so much as walked through the site, for example.…

“I understand. But you can sleep soundly. The site manager knows his stuff, and … well, I’m not exactly an amateur, either.”

“No, of course not.…”

They walked down a long, dark passage, where the windows were still covered by black plastic sheeting, and into the dome itself.

Skou-Larsen loved buildings. Even though his job had mostly consisted of making sure they obeyed local plans and regulations, he had a love of bricks and mortar, too, of space and architecture and craftsmanship. Maybe that was why it hit him so hard.

He stood still. And remained still. For a small eternity.

The dome was the heavens. It soared above him as if stone and copper weighed nothing at all, and the mosaics on the walls glowed with the bright colors of creation itself. He tried to make himself think about emergency exits and soil pipes and ordinances, but it was no use. The light enveloped him, and his aging heart swelled in his chest so that in that moment awareness of his impending death left him.

Oh, he sighed. They have built a cathedral.

“Mr. Skou-Larsen? Is something wrong?”

He shook his head. “It’s just.…”

“Yes, it’s nice, isn’t it? Makes you envy those Muslims, huh?” Jansen grinned knowingly, with an admiration that Skou-Larsen assumed he otherwise reserved for expensive cars or the highlights of the soccer games he watched on TV. There was no sign he was having his foundation rocked.

“What are you doing here?”

The man’s voice was angry and tense, in a stressed-out way that might also be covering a certain amount of fear.

When Skou-Larsen turned around, he spotted a well-dressed older gentleman—well, twenty years younger than you are, he corrected himself—clutching a length of copper piping in one hand and a mobile phone in the other.

“Everything’s under control, Mr. Hosseini,” Jansen said quickly. “My firm is responsible for the ceilings in the entrance hall. Preben Jansen. We’ve met.”

“And him?” The suspicion had not completely left the man, but his grip on the pipe relaxed somewhat.

“This is Mr. Skou-Larsen, from the city,” Jansen said, conveniently forgetting to mention that Skou-Larsen’s tenure in that role had ceased a number of years ago. “We’re just taking a look around.”

The man set down the copper pipe and held out his hand.

“Forgive me,” he said, formally. “But the site is closed now, and we’ve had our fair share of vandalism and the like.… It puts one on one’s guard.”

“Of course,” Skou-Larsen said, clasping the outstretched hand.

“Mahmoud Hosseini. I’m the chairman of the organizing committee.”

“Jørgen Skou-Larsen,” said Skou-Larsen, and then added, because it had to be said: “You are building a beautiful place, Mr. Hosseini.”

Back home the coffee still sat untouched and a sugar-drunk housefly was crawling around on the marble cake. Helle wasn’t home. He didn’t know if he should take that as a good sign. It was hard for her to go out alone, even in the middle of the day when her anxiety was at its lowest ebb. On the other hand, it probably meant she was still mad at him about that business with the coffee. He started clearing the table, and while he was rinsing the Arabia cups before loading them into the dishwasher—she always insisted on that, as if they needed to avoid sullying the inside of the dishwasher—she came slowly up the garden path with her old Raleigh bicycle. He could just make out a grocery bag in the bike’s basket.

“Where have you been?” he asked when she walked in the front door.

“Out buying slug bait,” she said grumpily, setting a five-kilo package of Ferramol on the kitchen counter. “You keep promising, but you never actually manage to get anything done, do you?”