Marc looked apologetic. It wasn’t his style to be pushy, and she knew it. He was a sweet guy. It wasn’t his fault that she’d chosen to marry a man who reminded her so much of her father. Kathrine had spent a lot of time wondering how that could have happened. She hadn’t found an answer, but she’d learned to accept that grown people often ended up with a partner who was a copy of their mother or father—usually the parent with whom they still had issues. Just as she did with her father and his gloomy temperament.
Things hadn’t always been that way. In the beginning Niels hadn’t reminded her at all of her father. He may have had a calm disposition, but he didn’t fall into black holes. Back then they had laughed a lot together. All the time. And he seemed ambitious. Or was that something she had imagined? Kathrine asked herself: Do we human beings have some unknown sensory apparatus that’s capable of selecting those people who later on in life will start to resemble the mother or father who was difficult? Or do we make our partners turn out that way? Could we make anybody at all assume the role?
Kathrine looked out the window. The crests on the waves looked like champagne bubbles. She got a text from Marc. Sorry. She turned around and saw him standing in the middle of the office landscape, looking completely dejected and deflated. He was a handsome man. At that instant her cell phone rang. Niels calling, it said on the display.
“I was just sitting here thinking about you,” she said.
“What were you thinking?”
“Not anything you’d want to hear.”
She smiled at Marc. He was infinitely more sexy when she had Niels on the line. But the thought of Marc as her lover totally turned her off.
“Now, listen here. The reason that I’m not coming to visit you is that—”
She interrupted him. “I think I know why, sweetheart.”
“No, you don’t. I’m working on a case. A homicide. And it’s a really complicated case.”
He paused for effect before he told Kathrine all about it. The murders, the crime scene locations, the numbers on the backs of the victims. Kathrine listened without saying a word. Even when he told her the theory about a death, an unreported murder in Khayelitsha. Then Niels fell silent. Waiting. He didn’t mention anything about Hannah.
“Have you changed departments?” she asked at last.
“No. Not exactly. It started out as a routine matter. I was just supposed to warn some Danish citizens who might be potential victims. That’s how I got involved.”
“And that’s why you’re not coming?”
Niels paused to think. He wanted to say yes. That his ambition demanded he stay home to work on the case. She would like hearing that. She’d often criticized him for a lack of ambition. That and much more.
“I think so.”
“You think so?”
“I don’t know what this is all about, Kathrine. But I have a feeling that it’s important, and I need your help.”
“You want me to go out to Khayelitsha?”
“Exactly.”
“Niels, it’s not really safe for a white woman. Khayelitsha is one of the worst slums in South Africa. And that’s saying a lot.”
Niels didn’t reply. The worst thing he could do would be to try and persuade Kathrine to do something. She had to persuade herself. It was not a comfortable silence. He was surprised when she said, without offering any further objections, “Okay.”
50
Vesterbrogade—Copenhagen
A little piece of China had wedged itself in between two clothes shops on Vesterbrogade.
The restaurant was called the Golden Bamboo. “Restaurant” was a fancy word for a place that had only a few plastic tables, a small open kitchen, and a sullen-looking smiley face in the window, which the owners had attempted to hide behind a plastic palm tree. The health inspector had written with an angry red pen: Requires improvement in food hygiene. Niels was trying to shield the cassette player from the snow as he stepped inside, where it was warm. Someone had told him that Asians were very polite. That was something these particular individuals had apparently forgotten, because a war was going on in the kitchen. The manager—the only one wearing a suit—was bawling out his kitchen staff.
Niels cleared his throat to no avail. So he went over to a small counter with a cash register and set down the cassette player. Then he waited. He looked around at the plastic plants in pots lining the windowsills. A map of China on the wall. A big poster advertising the Olympics in Beijing. A menu: noodles, bamboo shoots, spring rolls, Kung Pao beef. A TV was on, showing a report from the climate conference. A tall, hefty man from the island group of Vanuatu in the South Pacific had tears in his eyes as he raged against the industrial nations—especially China—and their exploitation of the environment. His words seemed to be falling on deaf ears, because there was a good deal of chatter going on in the front rows. A couple of Finnish delegates were snickering about something. Most of the conference participants looked as if the island group of Vanuatu and its problems were not going to rob them of any beauty sleep.
“They’re out to get us.”
Niels turned around and saw the elderly Chinese man, clad in a suit that was a bit too big for him.
“Why is it always us?” the man said. “It’s always China. China gets the blame for everything.” He gave Niels a bitter smile. “Do you want a table?”
“I’m from the Copenhagen Police.” Niels showed him his ID. He was looking for tiny signals in the man’s face, but he couldn’t read him at all.
“I need to have this translated.” Niels didn’t allow the man any time to think before he pressed the play button on the tape recorder.
“What’s that?”
“Can you tell me what they’re saying on the tape?”
They listened. It lasted about a minute. It seemed to be a phone conversation. That much Niels had guessed. A man calling a woman. Apparently asking for help. There was a growing sense of panic in his voice.
The tape stopped.
“Can you understand what they’re saying?”
“He’s in pain. The man on the tape.”
“I can hear that. But what is he saying?”
“He’s asking: ‘What’s happening?’ Do you understand?”
“No. I mean, yes, I understand what you’re telling me, but not what the significance is.”
The man interrupted Niels. “Play it again.”
Niels rewound the tape. Then the manager called to one of the kitchen staff. A young man came over to join them, looking submissive. After a conversation in Chinese, the manager pressed the play button.
“Louder,” said the manager.
Niels turned up the volume. It was hard to drown out the noise coming from the restaurant kitchen.
“Can you hear what they’re saying?” he asked.
The young man translated. And then the manager translated what he’d said into Danish. “The man on the tape is saying: ‘What’s happening? It’s so quiet. Dear God. What’s happening to me? It’s so quiet. Venus. And the Milky Way.’ ”
“Venus and the Milky Way?” Niels rewound the tape again to play it one more time. It wasn’t quiet on the tape. On the contrary. A bell was clanging in the background; there were loud voices and traffic sounds.
“There’s a lot of noise. It’s not quiet at all. Are you sure that’s what he’s saying?”
“Positive. He’s from Beijing,” said the manager, showing signs of losing interest in this conversation that had nothing to do with him.
“So he’s talking about how quiet it is even though there’s a lot of noise?”
Niels addressed his question to the younger man, who replied in somewhat broken Danish.
“That is what he says. ‘What’s happening? It’s so quiet. Dear God. What’s happening to me? It’s so quiet. Venus. And the Milky Way.’ ”
Niels was asking himself why Tommaso thought it was so important that he hear this tape.
It’s so quiet.
51
Between Cape Town and Khayelitsha—South Africa
Most people who had been to Africa talked about the phenomenon afterward, especially those who had traveled deep into the heartland. Away from the tourists, the greed, and the unavoidable European TV teams who wanted to make films of all the misery. It was a matter of coming to terms with death. In the heartland—the artery which beat so fiercely for human beings that we were allowed to crawl up out of the mire—it was possible to sense the very origins of the human race. Even though the original color had been washed off, it was here we came from. You could feel it. The earth. Home assumed a whole new meaning.
The first time Kathrine stood out in the savanna, she had wept. Wept like a daughter who had returned home to be embraced. She was ready to die here. Marc didn’t feel the same way. He had grown up in Africa. He loved the place, but he wasn’t ready to die. That was why he hired bodyguards to accompany them. Three Zulus showed up in the afternoon. With big smiles. No matter what Kathrine said to them, they would laugh loudly.
They carried machine guns and rifles. Bobby, Michael, and Andy. All Africans had different names for different situations, just like artists in Europe and America. One name for the whites, and then their real names, which they never revealed. They didn’t like to be asked.
“Khayelitsha?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you want to go there?” one of them had asked, laughing again. “Nothing there, nothing there,” he kept repeating.
“Is that really necessary?” Kathrine asked as Marc placed a pistol in the glove compartment of the dusty pickup.
“Kathy.” He turned to her with a smile. She didn’t like being called Kathy. “This is not peaceful Scandinavia. This is South Africa. You need a gun.” He had quite possibly the whitest teeth in the whole world.
“But . . .” She fell silent. Something in his expression made her hesitate. He didn’t even need to say it out loud. She knew what he was thinking: But what would a pampered woman from a fairy-tale country like Denmark know about it?
The Zulus followed close behind in their vehicle, and Marc made sure to keep them in his rearview mirror.
“A murder, eh?” he said.
Kathrine smiled and shrugged. “I know. There are lots of murders in South Africa.” She lit a cigarette. That was one good thing about Africa. Here you were allowed to smoke yourself to death without encountering a wall of reproachful glances. Here death was part of life. Death was present in an entirely different way than back home, where it almost came as a surprise to people when death one day showed up and knocked on the door. As if it had never occurred to them that one day the party would be over.
Lots of life and lots of death. That was Africa. In Denmark it was just the opposite: People didn’t really live. And officially, death didn’t exist. All that was left was an existence in which one day followed another, and nobody really noticed.
She coughed. The local cigarettes were strong. It had been a busy day. Meetings. Endless phone calls. She’d found 109 unanswered e-mails in her in-box when she turned on her computer in the morning. It would be the same thing tomorrow.
“Where in Khayelitsha?” Marc’s voice was raw and masculine. That was a plus.
She handed him a note with the GPS coordinates and an approximate address. It had required a major effort—and help from the company’s IT experts—to convert Niels’s GPS coordinates to an actual address.
“Okay.” He gave her an indulgent smile. He was everything that Niels was not. Marc had no hidden sides, no inexplicable shifts in mood, no mental chasms to fall into. He was just Marc. Extremely delectable and slightly annoying.
They drove along a twelve-lane highway on shiny black asphalt that had been newly laid. Marc sipped at his takeout coffee and turned on the radio but then changed his mind and switched it off. Kathrine glanced behind them. Andy waved, smiling broadly from the other vehicle. The temperature outside was 85 degrees, and the air was bone-dry, filled with exhaust fumes, dust, and sand, as it blew in from the vast savannas. Construction was going on everywhere. Cranes towered on the horizon, as if pollution had made Africa’s giraffes mutate and grow to grotesque heights. Roadwork, sweating laborers shifting earth and cement, the sounds of jackhammers and paving machines as bridges and roads were repaired and upgraded.
“Do you know Bill Shankly?” Marc drove through a red light.
“No.”
“A legendary soccer coach from Liverpool. He once said something like this: ‘Some people believe that soccer is a matter of life or death. I find that sort of attitude disappointing. I can assure all of you that it’s much more important than that.’ ” Marc looked at Kathrine and laughed. “If you look at what’s happening in South Africa right now, with the World Cup only seven months away, you have to admit that Bill Shankly was right. I mean, just because of a little round leather ball, the whole country is preparing to change. At least outwardly,” he added.
Kathrine looked out the window.
The modern Western metropolis was now—in an imperceptible transition—in the process of giving way to the big-city Africa so familiar in the media: slums, despair, garbage, heat, and dust. It was impossible to tell where Khayelitsha started. Maybe it was more of a mental border than a geographical one. They had driven across an invisible dividing line, and from that moment there was no longer any hope. All that was left was survival for survival’s sake. The daily battle to find something to eat and drink and to avoid falling victim to some random crime. In South Africa, there were fifty thousand murders a year. Every thirty seconds a woman was raped.
Khayelitsha—South Africa
Marc stopped the car and waited several seconds until the vehicle with the bodyguards was once again right behind them. The streets were getting narrower, the houses smaller: huts, sheds made of corrugated tin, primitive mud structures, dusty old jalopies, and dogs everywhere. With drooping tails, they limped along, growling and thirsty. In Khayelitsha children didn’t play. That was one of the first things Kathrine noticed. They just stood on the streets, staring and smoking cigarettes. A boy was kicking around a soccer ball. His homemade soccer jersey said MESSI on the back. A woman was yelling at her kids. They paid her no mind. What bothered Kathrine most was all the garbage. It was everywhere. Coke bottles. Tin cans. Plastic bags, car tires, discarded packaging. The stink of dust and heat and piss and hopelessness inevitably seeped inside the car.
Marc followed the GPS, turning first right, then left, and in no time dust covered the windshield like a brown film that lent everything an air of unreality.
Kathrine usually tried to avoid the poor sections of town as much as possible, which made South Africa a pleasant place for her to be. During the first few months, she spent her time largely at the office, in the hotel, and in restaurants and cafés in the financial district. She almost managed to forget where she was. It could have been New York or London during a hot summer.
Marc was talking about one of their colleagues, whom he considered an asshole. Kathrine listened with only half an ear. When Marc changed the subject, it was evident that she hadn’t been paying attention.
“Kathy?”
“Yes?”
“How about tonight?” He stopped the car and looked at her. “I know a very nice Indian restaurant.”
Kathrine looked at him. He had just asked her out on a date. He’d been on the verge of doing so for weeks. She had known it would come; she’d been expecting such an invitation, but it still took her by surprise. He smiled. Those white teeth. A smile that said there was more to the invitation than dinner in a restaurant. Kathrine had no doubt that if she said yes, she’d end up in bed with him. He was offering her the whole package. Food, drinks, sex. She wanted to say yes. Her body wanted to say yes. She had a warm feeling in the pit of her stomach.
“Why are we stopping?” she said.
She had expected him to demand an answer from her. The idea that she couldn’t avoid answering his question was titillating. His sh
irt was unbuttoned at the neck, revealing a tanned, muscular chest. So maybe she was a little disappointed when he accepted her unwillingness to reply and simply said, “We’re here,” as he pointed to the GPS.
Kathrine didn’t know what she’d expected, but there was nothing special about the house other than that it stood all by itself, apart from the rest of the slum—the only building within a radius of several hundred yards. Piles of garbage formed a border where nature began.
Her next thought was that Marc must have read the GPS wrong. Why would Niels direct her to this particular house—this unremarkable little shack of a house in the midst of the endless slum of millions of other houses? There must be some mistake. On the other hand, the only thing she knew about the house was that back in July a murder supposedly had been committed inside. Niels hadn’t told her anything else, but why shouldn’t that be plausible?
Marc stayed in the car. The three guards had climbed out of their vehicle, and one of them stayed a few yards behind Kathrine.
She walked across the road, which was little more than a bumpy, scorched stretch of land. The door looked like it had come from an old cabinet and was there mostly for appearance’s sake. Several youths were kicking at a bundle of rags outside the house. One of them shouted, “You wanna fuck, white woman?” and laughed with the others. Andy yelled something in Zulu, but that didn’t seem to frighten the boys.
Kathrine knocked on the door and waited. Nothing happened. She knocked again. She was afraid she might break the door. At last it was opened by a toothless old woman who stared right through Kathrine as if she were air.
“Hello,” said Kathrine, realizing that she had no idea what to say. “Do you live here?” No answer. It occurred to Kathrine that the woman was practically blind. A dull grayish cloud covered her eyes. Many people in Africa were blind. “Do you understand English?”
Kathrine was about to turn around to call for Marc when the woman said in English, “My son is not home.”
The Last Good Man Page 22