The Purity of Vengeance

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  She laid the folder on the desk and put on a sour expression. “Shelved, just like the Esther Bak case last night will be, most probably. Have you seen anyone rushing around in a frenzy upstairs so they can nail the bastard who did that to the poor woman?”

  Carl gave a shrug. The only frenzy he’d seen that morning had been the one that had appeared in his stepson Jesper’s sullen face when he woke him up at seven o’clock and told him he’d have to make his own way to college in Gentofte.

  “The way I see it, there’s absolutely zero to indicate suicidal tendencies in this case,” Rose continued. “Rita Nielsen gets into her flash white Mercedes 500SEC and leaves home just like any other day! A couple of hours later she’s disappeared off the face of the earth, and that’s that.” She pulled out a photo and tossed it onto the desk in front of him. It showed the car parked at a curbside, its interior stripped.

  What a motor. Room for half the tarts of Vesterbro to sprawl and wriggle on its hood in the fake furs they’d scrimped and saved for. A far cry from his hand-me-down service vehicle.

  “The last anyone saw of her was on Friday the fourth of September 1987. Looking at her credit-card transactions we can follow her movements from the time she leaves her home address in Kolding at five in the morning. She drives across Fyn, where she fills up with petrol, takes the ferry over the Storebælt, and then carries on to Copenhagen, where she buys a pack of cigarettes in a kiosk on Nørrebrogade at ten past ten. No one sees her after that. The Mercedes turns up stripped a couple of days later on Kapelvej. Leather seats, spare wheel, radio-cassette, the lot. They even half-inched the steering wheel. All that was left basically was a couple of cassette tapes and some books in the glove compartment.”

  Carl scratched his chin. “There can’t have been many shops with direct-debit terminals back then, certainly not a kiosk in Nørrebro. Why go to all the bother of paying by card? Most likely it’ll have been a paper transaction, and all for a lousy pack of smokes. Who’d have the bloody patience?”

  Rose shrugged. “Maybe she didn’t like cash. Maybe she didn’t like the feel of it. Maybe she liked having her money in the bank and letting others pay the interest. Maybe she only had a five-hundred-kroner note and the kiosk didn’t have change. Maybe—”

  “Yes, all right, Rose, that’ll do.” Carl held up his hands. “Just tell me one thing. How come they reckoned it was suicide? Was she seriously ill? Or perhaps she was in financial difficulties? Was that why she paid for her ciggies by card?”

  Somewhere inside her drastically oversized gray sweater, which looked suspiciously like it had been knitted by Yrsa, Rose shrugged again. “Who knows? It’s all a bit odd, if you ask me. Rita Nielsen, alias Louise Ciccone, was quite a prosperous lady, and if her dodgy CV’s anything to go by she certainly wasn’t one to be knocked off her perch. According to her ‘girls’ in Kolding she was hard as nails, a survivor. She’d rather wipe out the entire world than risk going down herself, one of them said.”

  “Hmm!” The feeling had planted itself firmly in Carl’s psyche. It annoyed him, but his interest had been awakened. The questions were beginning to pop up, one after another. Like those cigarettes. Would a person buy cigarettes right before committing suicide? Well, maybe, to calm the nerves.

  His mind was churning now, and he hadn’t even asked for it. Bollocks! If he got started on this one, he’d have more work on his hands than was good for him.

  “So, unlike many of our colleagues,” he went on, “you think we’re dealing with a crime here. But is there anything at all to back that up?” He left the question in the air for a moment. “Apart from the case being shelved rather than closed, what more have you got to go on?”

  Another shrug from her sweater. It meant she had nothing.

  Carl stared at the folder. The photo of Rita Nielsen that was paper-

  clipped to the front showed a woman who exuded considerable strength. Broad cheekbones above more delicate facial features. Eyes sparkling with spirit and defiance. It was obvious she didn’t feel embarrassed by the mugshot board she held against her chest. It probably wasn’t the first time she’d had her photo taken for the police archives. No, women like her were immune to prison sentences. She was a survivor, like her girls said.

  Why on earth would she take her own life?

  He pulled the folder toward him across the desk, opened it, and ignored Rose’s told-you-so smile.

  Once again, the kohl-eyed beanstalk had set a new case in motion.

  2

  November 2010

  The green van came at 12:30 P.M. on the dot, exactly as agreed.

  “Still got five calls to do today, Mr. Wad,” the driver said. “I hope you’ve got everything ready for me.”

  He was a good man, Mikael. Ten years in the job without a single question. Good-looking, presentable, and polite. Just the kind of man the Purity Party wished to see representing it among the general public. It was men like Mikael who made others want to join. Quiet and reliable. Strong, blue eyes and wavy blond hair, always neat and tidy. Calm even in the most hectic of situations, like the fracas in Haderslev a month before at one of the party’s inaugural meetings. On that occasion, nine protesters bearing offensive placards had learned the hard way that upstanding men whose hearts beat for the fatherland were a force to be reckoned with.

  Thanks to people like Mikael, it was all over by the time the police turned up.

  They wouldn’t be seeing those demonstrators again in a hurry.

  Curt Wad opened the door to what once had been the stables of an old village school. He pushed aside an old metal fitting that hung from the wall above a small freezer and entered his nine-character code into the display as he had done so many times before. He waited a moment until he heard the familiar click and the sections of the end wall slid open.

  Inside the room that was now revealed were all the things he kept secret from everyone but his like-minded confidants. The deep freezer with its illegally aborted fetuses, the filing cabinets full of documents and membership lists, the laptop he used for conferences, and the notes and records from his father’s era, on which all their work was founded.

  Curt opened the freezer and pulled out a box containing plastic bags, which he handed directly to the driver. “Here are the fetuses we’re cremating ourselves. I hope the freezer in the van isn’t full.”

  The driver smiled. “No, still plenty of room.”

  “And here’s the courier mail for our people. You’ll see who it’s for.”

  “Right,” said the driver, skimming through the envelopes. “I’m afraid I won’t be at Fredensborg again until next week. I did the Nordsjælland area yesterday.”

  “It’s not that important. As long as you do Århus. You’re over there tomorrow, aren’t you?”

  The driver nodded and peered into the plastic box. “I’ll get rid of these. Have we any for Glostrup Crematorium?”

  Curt Wad closed the sliding door of the secret room and went over to the freezer in the anteroom. Mikael was allowed to look in that one.

  “Yes, we’ve these ones here,” he replied, lifting the lid and taking out a second box.

  He put the box on the floor and took a plastic folder from the shelf above the freezer. “The documents relating to these fetuses are here.” He handed the folder to the driver. “It’s all by the book.”

  The driver checked off each bag in the box against the accompanying documents. “All in good order. Shouldn’t be any bother,” he said, then carried it all out to the van, where he put the contents of the two boxes into two mini-freezers, sorted the internal mail into pigeonholes for the various organizational sections, doffed his cap, and politely took his leave.

  Curt Wad raised his hand and waved as the van disappeared down Brøndbyøstervej.

  How fortunate, he thought to himself with satisfaction, that I can still serve the cause even at my age.
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br />   “It’s hard to believe you’re eighty-eight,” people told him repeatedly, and they were right. When he looked at himself in the mirror, he, too, could see how easily he might be taken for a man fifteen years younger. What was more, he knew why.

  “Life is about living in harmony with one’s ideals,” was his father’s motto. Words of wisdom he himself had always upheld. It had its costs, of course, but as long as the mind was bright, so was the flesh.

  Curt crossed the garden and went in through the back door as always during consultation hours. When his successor in the clinic was at work, the front part of the house was no longer Curt’s. That was the agreement. Besides, he had plenty to do getting the party on its feet. The days were gone when he personally screened pregnant mothers and terminated lives. His protégé did it just as well and was every bit as zealous.

  He put some coffee into the machine, drawing a finger over the measuring scoop to make sure he used just the right amount. Beate’s stomach had become so sensitive of late, so this was important.

  “Coffee time, eh, Curt?”

  Karl-Johan Henriksen appeared in the doorway of the kitchen. Like his mentor, he set store by his appearance, and his white doctor’s coat was always washed and ironed. For no matter how unfamiliar one might be to one’s patients, they would regard anyone in a well-laundered smock as an authority to whom they would readily entrust their lives. They were simpletons, one and all.

  “Dodgy stomach, myself,” said Henriksen, taking a glass from the cupboard. “Hot chestnuts, butter, and red wine are all well and good at the time, though seldom the next day.”

  He smiled, filled the glass with water, and emptied a packet of antacid into it.

  “The driver was here, so both freezers are empty, Karl-Johan. You can start filling them up again now.”

  Curt smiled at his pupil, knowing his instructions were superfluous. Henriksen was perhaps even more efficient than Curt himself had ever been.

  “I’m just about ready. Three terminations today. Two regular and one special.” Henriksen smiled back. The contents of his glass sizzled.

  “And that would be?”

  “A Somali woman from the Tåstrupgård flats, referred by Bent Lyngsøe. Pregnant with twins, I believe,” Henriksen said, raising his eyebrows briefly before downing his bubbling remedy.

  Karl-Johan Henriksen was a good man, no doubt about it. For the party as well as for The Cause.

  • • •

  “Are you not feeling well today, Beate, my dear?” Wad inquired cautiously as he entered the living room with the tray.

  It had been more than ten years since she had been able to speak, but she could still smile, at least. Although she had become terribly frail and the beauty of her youth had long since left her, Curt was unable to bear the thought that one day, probably soon, he would have to live on without her.

  “May we both live to see the day the party’s gratitude to you can be expressed from the platform of parliament,” he murmured, taking her featherlight hand in his.

  He lowered his head and kissed her hand gently, feeling it tremble in his. It was all he needed to do.

  “Here, my love,” he said, and raised the cup to her lips after blowing on the surface of its contents. “Not too hot, not too cold. Just the way you like it.”

  She pursed her sunken lips, the lips that had kissed him and their two children so lovingly when they had needed it most, and sipped slowly, without a sound. Her eyes revealed that the coffee was good. These eyes that had seen so much and in which his own gaze had found solace when on rare occasions he had been consumed by doubt.

  “I’m going to be on television later today, Beate. With Lønberg and Caspersen. They’ll try to nail us up against the wall if they can, but they won’t succeed. Today we shall win votes and reap the rewards of decades of work. The votes of a great many people, Beate. People who think like us. The journalists will take us for three old wrinklies,” he chuckled, “which I suppose we are. They’ll believe our minds are unsound. They’ll think they can catch us out, being incoherent, spouting rubbish.” He stroked his hand across her hair. “I’ll put the TV on, so you can watch.”

  • • •

  Jakob Ramberger was a highly competent and well-prepared journalist. Anything else would have been unwise in light of the criticisms that had lately been leveled against so many toothless television interviews. A shrewd TV journalist feared his viewers more than his bosses. Ramberger was both shrewd and able. He had speared top politicians on live television and stripped union bosses, motorcycle gang leaders, irresponsible business executives, and sundry criminals to the skin.

  For this reason Curt was delighted that they were to be interviewed by Ramberger, because this time, for once, he would fail to tear his interviewees apart, a fact that would be destined to attract attention in tiny Denmark.

  Ramberger and his studio guests greeted one another politely in an anteroom where the journalist’s colleagues were preparing upcoming news stories, but as soon as Ramberger had released his victims’ hands, the two parties prepared for trench warfare.

  “Curt Wad, you have submitted to the Ministry of Home Affairs that the Purity Party has now collected the requisite number of signatures to make it eligible to stand in the next parliamentary election,” Ramberger began, after a less than flattering introduction. “Congratulations are in order, and yet in the same breath I’ll ask you what you believe the Purity Party has to offer the Danish voter that he can’t already find in the existing political parties.”

  “You say ‘he,’ and yet the majority of the electorate is comprised of women,” Curt Wad rejoined with a smile. He nodded toward the camera. “But to answer your question: Has the Danish voter any choice but to reject the established parties of old?”

  The interviewer fixed his gaze on him. “The Purity Party isn’t exactly represented here by fresh-faced youngsters, is it? An average age of seventy-one, I believe, and you, Dr. Wad, pushing the figure up with your eighty-eight years. Hand on heart, don’t you think that in your own case it might be forty or fifty years too late to seek influence in running the country?”

  “As far as I recall, Denmark’s most influential figure is almost ten years my senior,” Wad rejoined. “Everyone in the country shops in his supermarkets, heats their homes with his natural gas, and buys goods transported by his ships. When you are man enough to invite the fine individual in question into your studio and ridicule him on account of his age, then you will be welcome to invite me in again and ask me the same question.”

  The journalist nodded. “What I’m getting at is simply that it’s hard to see how the average voter might consider themselves adequately represented in parliament by men who are at least a generation or two older. No one buys milk past its sell-by date, do they?”

  “Just as no one buys fruit as unripe as the politicians who govern us at present. I suggest we drop the foodstuff metaphor, Mr. Ramberger. Besides, none of the three of us here today harbors any intention of standing for election to the Folketing. Our program states quite unequivocally that we shall be convening a first general assembly once the requisite number of signatures has been collected, and that the party’s parliamentary candidates will be selected by that assembly.”

  “Now that we’re on the subject of the party’s program, the main thrust seems to concern moral norms, ideas, and ideologies that lead the mind back to an age most of us would be loath to return to. To political regimes that deliberately persecute minorities and society’s weak: the mentally handicapped, ethnic minorities, the socially disenfranchised.”

  “But this is a fallacy; there’s no comparison at all,” Lønberg interjected. “On the contrary, our program is about assessing from a responsible and humanitarian point of view each individual case on its own terms and refraining from lumping things together in such a way as to preclude effective and comprehensive solutions.
For that reason, our slogan is simple: Change for the Better. Change of quite a different nature from what you are suggesting here.”

  The interviewer smiled. “That all sounds well and good, but of course it presupposes that the party gets as far as gaining influence. Let me go on. This isn’t my own allegation, but the newspapers have been full of articles concerning the Purity Party’s platform, the main thrust being that its most obvious corollary would be the kind of racial anthropology that informed the programs of the National Socialists in Germany. Ossified dogmas in which the world is construed as comprising genetically different peoples in eternal conflict with each other. The notion of higher and lower races, the higher race being—”

  “The higher race being wiped out if mixed with a lower one,” Caspersen interrupted. “I sense that both you and the newspapers have been googling Nazism, Mr. Ramberger,” he continued. “But our party does not condone discrimination, injustice, or inhumanity as the Nazis and like-minded parties once did and still do. On the contrary, we say only that we ought not to prolong life in cases where it has not the remotest chance of becoming even reasonably dignified. There has to be a limit to how much coercion doctors and ordinary citizens should be willing to accept from the authorities. A limit to how much suffering may be inflicted upon families, and how great a cost society is made to pay, simply because our politicians interfere in everything without making themselves aware of the consequences of their meddling.”

  The ensuing debate was long, followed by a phone-in where members of the public raised a whole variety of issues: compulsory sterilization of criminals and those who on account of mental illness or low intelligence were unable to take care of their offspring; social measures to strip families with large numbers of children of a range of benefits; criminalization of procuring the sexual services of prostitutes; closing national borders; denying entry into the country of uneducated immigrants, and a lot more besides.