The Last Good Man

by A. J. Kazinsky

“What the hell are you doing in here?”

  The lights went on. Sharp and relentless, blinding Niels.

  The man was younger than Niels. Tall and broad-shouldered and furious.

  Niels couldn’t think of a single word to say. That was what often happened when someone was arrested. Silence. As if the person under arrest was in a state of shock. But that wasn’t always the case. Sometimes the person simply had nothing to say.

  “Don’t move. I’m calling the police.”

  Niels glanced around. There was no other exit. He had to get past the man. Now. Niels took a step closer.

  “Stay where you are!”

  Niels was standing right in front of him. The man reached out to grab Niels. Instinctively, Niels knocked his hands away. The man tried to punch Niels but landed only a glancing blow. Niels didn’t want to hit the man. He just wanted to get past. He tried to squeeze through the door. The man grabbed him, and for a few awful seconds, they staggered around like a couple of amateur wrestlers. The man was stronger than Niels, but he didn’t have desperation on his side. With a roar, Niels threw off his opponent. The man then dragged Niels into some freestanding shelves. For an instant—or was it Niels’s imagination?—the alarm stopped shrieking and yielded to the sound of the toppling cabinet. Then it started up again.

  Niels was the first to get up. He pushed the man away, noticing that a shard of glass was sticking out of his cheek just under his eye. He had blood on his face. Blood on his hair.

  Then Niels was out of there.

  He ran for the car. He almost lost his footing on the slippery, snow-covered sidewalk. Hannah already had the door open. They could hear police sirens in the distance.

  “Niels! What the hell!”

  He started the car.

  “What happened back there, Niels?”

  They took off.

  They were parked at the side of the road. The snow had retreated, presumably to gather its troops and return with renewed force. Not a sound could be heard in the whole world.

  Niels was staring out the windshield. Out into the dark. The dashboard clock showed that it was just past three A.M.

  “I’ve never done anything like that before,” he said.

  “If you keep on this way, maybe you’ll get out of showing up on Friday.”

  “What do you mean?” Niels turned to look at Hannah.

  “Maybe this is what you should be doing. Bad things. So you’ll no longer be considered a good person.”

  Niels didn’t answer. He emptied his pockets and read the labels on the stolen medicines. “I think I got everything.”

  “What are you planning to do with that stuff?”

  “Syringes, alcohol, and enough morphine to knock out an elephant.”

  He could tell that his words rolled right off her. She wasn’t listening. That didn’t stop him.

  “We’ve got a week left. A little less than a week. So—” He stopped abruptly.

  “What about it, Niels?”

  “So I’ll take the morphine, hide on some boat, and sail away.”

  “Sail away?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  He shrugged.

  “Where would you like to sail to?”

  “Argentina, I think.”

  “Argentina?” Was she smiling? “That’s quite a voyage.”

  “Buenos Aires. I have a friend there. She’s told me all about the green lakes in Patagonia. Green like emeralds.”

  “Who’s your friend?”

  He hesitated. “I don’t know. I’ve never actually met her.” He turned to look at Hannah. She was beautiful. Happy, scared, sad. Was that a tear sliding down her cheek? “No, it has to be with you, Hannah.”

  “I thought you couldn’t travel.”

  “Maybe I can. If I’m sound asleep.”

  “You don’t understand, Niels. You really don’t understand.” Yes, it was a tear. He could see it now. Hannah hurried to wipe it away. “The laws of nature don’t care whether you’re asleep or not.”

  3

  The Great Belt Bridge

  Niels could remember when the bridge across the waters of the Great Belt was opened in 1998, linking the Danish islands of Sjælland and Fyn. Kathrine had been glued to the TV screen, watching the ceremony with envy, fascinated by the eleven-mile-long monstrosity of a bridge that stretched as far as the eye could see. She knew the numbers: 230 feet to the surface of the water. More than 4,900 feet between the two pylons, which each rose up 820 feet into the sky. Nineteen bridge supports, each weighing 6,000 tons. Niels didn’t share her enthusiasm. He thought the bridge was a waste of money. And what was worse, it meant the loss of the ferryboats. The loss of an opportunity to meet people, to fall into a conversation with truck drivers and politicians and all sorts of people from every part of the country. Kathrine wanted to design a bridge one day. She sometimes spent whole evenings surfing the Internet, looking at the Golden Gate, Ponte Vecchio, Karlsbroen, Akashi Kaikyō, and the South Congress Bridge in Austin, from which a million and a half bats flew out at dusk every evening in search of food. She told Niels that he was wrong about the Great Belt Bridge. She said it would connect people. Get them talking to each other.

  Niels looked out at the traffic gathering around the toll machines at the foot of the bridge. Nobody was talking to one another. People rushed past faster than ever as the sun came up over the sea.

  The Great Belt Bridge

  Saturday, December 19

  The early-morning rays colored the water orange. The line of cars at the tollbooths hadn’t moved in at least ten minutes. Hannah was asleep. Niels looked at her. A peaceful expression, unmarred by worry. A barely perceptible trembling under her delicate eyelids. She was dreaming.

  At last he was able to move forward to the tollbooth.

  “Good morning.” Niels handed the man his credit card.

  “Be careful. It can get slippery.”

  “Thanks.”

  Niels headed the car for the island of Fyn.

  “Niels?” Hannah was only half awake. She sounded groggy.

  “Go back to sleep.”

  He turned on the radio. Christmas music. Then the news, which dealt mostly with the climate conference. The government was purporting it was a huge success, while the opposition parties thundered that it had been a disaster. The Chinese were scoundrels. Everyone agreed about that. One politician declared, “It was as if the Chinese thought they were on a different planet from everyone else. Otherwise why would they be so indifferent to the climate?” New topics: a politician demanding tax reform; another complaining about fraud with foodstuffs; fighting on the border of Gaza; an oil spill off the coast of Canada. Niels was looking for something else. Everything else. When he heard the news bulletin, it took a moment before he realized who the radio announcer was talking about. “Danish in appearance, approximately six foot one inch tall, wearing jeans and a dark coat. Considered dangerous.” It was the last word in particular that made an impression on Niels. He’d been called many things in his life—naive, cowardly, diplomatic, vague, aloof, smart, stupid, manic-depressive—but he had never been called dangerous.

  “Dangerous.” The word haunted him for several kilometers as he drove along the highway. He drove faster as he found himself casting paranoid glances in the rearview mirror. Had anyone seen their car as he ran from the community health clinic? Niels replayed the scene in his mind. At first he was convinced that there had been no witnesses except the man who discovered him inside the building. And he couldn’t have seen the car. Then Niels began to have doubts. Had the man gotten up and run over to the window? Had he reacted so quickly that he was able to see the car’s license plate? Niels wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure of anything but that he felt physically sick about the whole situation. Just as he turned off the highway and headed along a smaller road, he was almost certain he remembered the man standing at the window. Niels had caught a glimpse of his silhouette. If he’d managed to get their license number
, it wouldn’t take the police long to catch them. A few hours at most. Especially since Niels had been labeled dangerous. He felt a prickling sensation in his legs; he needed to get out and stretch. He decided to hell with it—he would find someplace to stop. He decided not to tell Hannah that the police were looking for them.

  They ended up down by the water at a small harbor area. Possibly Kerteminde Harbor.

  Hannah woke up as he stopped the car. “Where are we?”

  “Good morning. We’re going to get some coffee. And take some time to think.”

  Hannah stretched with a pleased expression. Niels couldn’t tell whether it was the thought of coffee that made her happy or because they were going to stop and think.

  They found a small harbor building with a kiosk. Hannah waited outside while Niels bought the coffee. The kiosk girl stared at him suspiciously. Or maybe he was imagining that. It was normal for the police to notify gas stations about people they were looking for. But what about this kiosk? Had the girl already received a description of him, and was it lying under the counter? Or had she seen it on the small laptop over by the window? Niels caught her eye. Was she looking at him and trying to determine his height? His weight? Niels tried to relax, attempting to make his shoulders and face less tense. The result, he was sure, was that he looked like a neurotic robot. As he left the kiosk, he imagined the girl rushing to call the nearest police station. He pushed the thought out of his mind and went over to Hannah.

  “I can’t believe how far we’ve driven,” she said, sounding tired.

  “Did you get some sleep?” He handed her the coffee cup.

  “A little.” She moved her head from side to side to ease the stiffness in her neck.

  “Is it too cold to stand out here?”

  “No, it’s fine.”

  They looked out at the water. Soon the clouds of water vapor on the surface would turn into tiny ice crystals and the bay would freeze over. Niels switched on his cell phone. No messages.

  “I once had a colleague at the institute,” Hannah said as she watched a couple of fishermen getting ready to head out in their boat. One of them waved. She waved back. “He found it impossible to say no. It was as if ‘no’ wasn’t part of his vocabulary. Whenever anyone asked him to do something, he always said yes.” She paused. “That became a real problem for him because he just couldn’t keep up. He couldn’t do everything he’d agreed to do. Committees, meetings, conferences, reports. So in the end . . .” She turned to look Niels in the eye. “In the end, opinion turned against him.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Goodness is a problem, Niels. That’s my point. His goodness became a problem for the whole institute. Pretty soon we started holding meetings without him. Just to spare him, so that he wouldn’t disappoint either us or himself. Do you understand?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What does it mean to be good, Niels?”

  He shook his head as he studied the gravel underfoot.

  She went on, “The philosopher Hannah Arendt talks about the banality of evil. In her view, most people possess evil lying dormant inside of them. All that’s required are the right—or rather the wrong—conditions for that evil to be released. But what about goodness? The banality of goodness. When I think about my colleague and about you, I’d almost say that you have no free will. You have no choice. You are good. So does that mean that goodness is still good?”

  “Hannah.”

  “No, wait a minute. This is important. You haven’t chosen to be good. In our understanding of goodness and the good deed, we think from an existential point of view that we have a choice. But you don’t. Just think of the story about Job! You’re a piece in a bigger puzzle, and someone else—or rather, something else—has made up the rules of the game. What’s paradoxical in the Job story is that there’s nobody else God thinks more about than Job, even though He takes everything away from him. It’s the same thing with all of you. With you personally, Niels. You’ve also been stripped of your free will, the possibility of moving freely.”

  “Stop right there!”

  “They say that most people in prison today suffer from ADHD. Varying degrees of autism. Neuropsychological disorders that we’re only just beginning to understand. What if we’re much less in control of our own lives than we imagine? What if most of our actions are biologically determined?”

  “Hannah! It’s very hard to forget about everything if you keep on talking about it. We’re on vacation. Okay?”

  “Okay.” She was smiling.

  “Let’s get going.”

  They walked back to the car and got in. They sat there, enjoying being out of the icy wind. Niels was about to start up the engine when Hannah said, “Who’s that?” She was looking past him.

  “Where?”

  “Behind us. They’re coming this way.”

  He turned around. Two police officers. One of them leaned forward and rapped hard on the window.

  4

  Nyborg

  The place really did have potential. At first Niels hadn’t seen it, but now he did.

  The cell looked almost like a dorm room, although the space was slightly bigger. There wasn’t much similarity with Alcatraz. No slamming iron gates, no sound of clattering key rings or the military stomp of boots belonging to sadistic prison guards. No psychopathic prisoners with tattoos on their faces, locked up for quadruple murders as a result of robberies gone wrong, just waiting to assault him while he slept. No anxious muttering from the corridor where prisoners on death row trudged the long way to the electric chair. Just a perfectly ordinary dorm room that stank of vomit. The cell was like a hotel. People arrived, checked in, stayed a brief time, and then moved on. Today’s guest was Niels Bentzon.

  Niels surveyed his surroundings: a bunk, a chair, a table, a cupboard, four bare walls. Somebody had used a marker to write The polees suck on the wall, spelling error and all. But the place had potential. He was locked up. All they had to do was give him a carton of canned food and throw away the key for a week.

  Where was Hannah? In a different jail? Being interviewed? Maybe they had let her go. Niels kept thinking about how the arrest had taken place. He wondered how they’d found him so quickly. Maybe it was because of the girl in the kiosk. As far as he knew, there were normally no surveillance cameras on the bridges. He gave up trying to figure it out. It had been years since he’d participated in any manhunts, and so much new technology had appeared in the past few years. Maybe a satellite had tracked them down.

  It was cold in the cell. The local police station must be trying to save on the heating bill. Or else it was part of a larger strategy. Since they couldn’t make life miserable for the prisoners by starving them or beating them, the police could always turn down the heat in the winter months. Niels was familiar with that tactic.

  He heard the sound of a door being unlocked. A woman came in. Lisa Larsson. That would be a good name for a porn actress, thought Niels when she introduced herself. Or a Swedish detective novelist. She smiled briefly, but there was nothing pleasant about her tone of voice when she asked him to come with her.

  “You’re a police officer?” Lisa Larsson—young, attractive, her expression chilly—sounded genuinely surprised. Niels’s eyes roamed over the Christmas elf figures on the windowsill.

  “Yes. I’m a police negotiator for hostage situations. And if people are threatening to commit suicide.”

  “Why didn’t you say so before?” The other officer, Hans Rishøj, was an older man who reminded Niels of a schoolteacher he’d had in another life. The man glanced down at some papers, looking confused as he scratched his short, well-trimmed beard, which was clearly meant to lend him the authority that he didn’t naturally possess.

  Niels shrugged. “How the hell did you find me so fast?”

  They ignored his question.

  “You work in Copenhagen?”

  “Yes.”

  They exchanged glances. Several painful seconds
of silence went by. Niels wouldn’t have been surprised if they decided to release him on the spot. A mistake must have been made—that thought was palpable. They obviously suffered from the widespread notion that police officers never got into trouble with the law. They were uncomfortable sitting across from a fellow officer under these circumstances. Niels could tell from the looks they kept giving each other. He fully understood how they felt. As if they were being uncollegial. Like traitors. Since everyone else hated the police, what would happen if they started arresting one another?

  “In Copenhagen?” Hans pushed up his glasses. “Under Sommersted?”

  “Yes. Do you know Sommersted?”

  “A little. We’re not exactly best friends, but we’ve run into each other on various occasions.”

  “Sommersted doesn’t have any friends.” Niels attempted a smile.

  “What happened at the community health clinic?” Lisa was less impressed by Niels’s status.

  Niels looked at her. Newly trained, eager to play by the book, and she could still remember what the rules were. He decided that he would look only at her during this conversation. He would like to follow the rules, and he didn’t feel like carrying on any small talk with Hans.

  “What did he tell you? The guy I punched?”

  “Allan . . .” She scanned the report. She was efficient and intelligent. Obviously, she had ambitions to rise through the ranks. It was not her intention to give up on the island of Fyn and risk being here twenty years from now, standing outside the pub and asking the locals to blow into a Breathalyzer as they staggered out the door after Christmas lunch. “He said that at approximately two-thirty A.M. you broke into the clinic, knocked him down, and then took off. With this.” She pointed at the morphine lying on the table along with some plastic syringes and the other pills Niels had collected. Clear evidence that he was a drug addict. Niels wasn’t planning to contradict that idea. The truth was too complicated—it almost always is.

  Silence. Hans stood up. “I’m just going to give Sommersted a call.” He went into the office next door but returned shortly. “Your boss wants to talk to you.”