The Purity of Vengeance

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  Discussion was heated. Many viewers were unusually incensed, but just as many were appreciative of the viewpoints they had heard.

  The program had indeed been a profitable exercise for the party.

  “The decision-makers of tomorrow will be people of our own strength and conviction,” said Caspersen on the drive home.

  “Nothing ever stays the same,” said Lønberg. “Let’s just hope we’ve made an impression today.”

  “We most certainly have.” Caspersen laughed. “You, Curt, definitely did.”

  Curt knew what Caspersen was thinking about. The journalist had asked Wad if it was correct that he had been taken to task by the authorities on various occasions over the years. The question had angered him, though he hadn’t shown it. Instead he replied that if a doctor with a capable pair of hands and a good head on his shoulders did not at some point in his career find himself at odds with fundamental ethical principles, then he was not worthy of his role as God’s obedient servant.

  Lønberg smiled. “That shut Ramberger up for a minute, at least.”

  Wad did not return his smile. “The answer I gave was foolish. I was lucky he didn’t pursue the matter further. We must be on constant guard as to what they might dig up. Are you listening? Give it the slightest morsel, and the press will do everything in its power to bring us down. We cannot expect to have any friends outside our own ranks. The present situation is exactly the same for us as it was for the Upsurge Party and the Denmark Party when no one reckoned with them. We can only hope the press and the politicians allow us as much leeway to establish ourselves as they did in those cases.”

  Caspersen frowned. “I can’t see us not getting in at the next election, but it’s no-holds-barred until we do. You both know my stance, of course. Even if it means sacrificing our commitment to The Cause, it will be worth it.”

  Wad studied him. Every group had its Judas. Caspersen was known for his work as a lawyer and from local politics, so with his organizational experience he certainly had his place among them. But the day he began to count his pieces of silver he would be finished. Wad would make sure of it.

  No one interfered in the work of The Cause without his express permission.

  • • •

  Beate was sitting in front of the TV screen, where he had positioned her when he left. All the home help had needed to do was change her and make sure she had something to drink.

  He stood for a moment and considered her from a distance. The way the light from the crystal chandelier fell made her look like she had diamonds sparkling in her hair. Her expression had an ethereal quality, like the first time she had danced for him. Perhaps she was dreaming of other days, when her life still lay ahead of her.

  “Did you see the debate, my angel?” he asked in a soft voice, so as not to startle her.

  Beate smiled for a second, though her gaze still seemed distant. He knew the lucid moments were few. That the brain hemorrhage was like a wedge between Beate’s soul and the life that surrounded her. And yet he sensed she might have understood just a little.

  “I’ll put you to bed now. It’s way past your time.”

  He picked up her fragile frame in his arms. When they were young he had lifted her up like a snowflake. Then came years when his strength had not sufficed against the ampleness of the mature woman. But now he again lifted her as though she weighed nothing at all.

  He wondered if this ought to make him glad, but it didn’t, and when he put her down on the bed he trembled. How quickly she closed her eyes now. Almost before she touched the pillow.

  “I see it, my dear. Life ebbing out. Our turn soon to come.”

  When he returned to the living room he switched off the television, went over to the antique sideboard, and poured himself a brandy.

  “In ten years I’ll still be alive, Beate, I promise,” he said to himself. “Before we meet again, all our visions will be fulfilled.”

  He nodded and emptied the glass in one.

  “And no one, my dear, will stop us. No one.”

  3

  November 1985

  The first thing she registered was the foreign object in her nose. That, and the voices above her. Subdued voices, but authoritative. Gentle and mild.

  Behind her closed eyelids, her eyes rolled in her head as though seeking a place in which to find greater awareness. Then she drifted once more into unconsciousness, wrapping herself into the darkness and the calm of her breathing, images of blissful summer and unworried play.

  And then the pain struck hard, from the middle of her spine and down.

  A spasm jerked back her head and everything in her lower body compacted in one long, agonizing discharge.

  “We’ll give her five notches more,” said a voice, disappearing into a foggy distance, leaving her in the same void as before.

  • • •

  Nete was loved from the moment she was born. The family’s little afterthought and the only girl in a flock of siblings who, despite lack of means, were never left wanting.

  Her mother’s hands were good and able. Hands that caressed and took care of domestic chores, and Nete became her mirror. Tartan skirt and a gleam in her eye, poking her finger into everything that took place on the small farm.

  When she was four years old her father led a stallion into the yard and smiled as the oldest of her brothers walked the mare across the cobbles.

  The twin boys sniggered as the stallion’s long member began to quiver under its belly, and Nete drew back when the great beast mounted their sweet little Molly and thrust itself inside her.

  She wanted to yell at it to make it stop, but her father grinned toothlessly and said that soon they’d be a draft animal the better for it.

  Later, Nete understood that life often begins as dramatically as it can end, and the art is in doing one’s best to enjoy what comes between.

  “It’s had a good life,” her father always said when he put the knife to the throat of a writhing pig. He said the same about Nete’s mother when she lay in her coffin, only thirty-eight years old.

  The words weighed heavily on Nete’s mind when she eventually awoke in the hospital bed and glanced around in the darkness, bewildered.

  Blinking lights and apparatus surrounded her. She recognized nothing.

  Then she turned her body. Ever so slightly, yet the effect was astonishing. Her head jerked back, her lungs expanded suddenly with air that caused her larynx to erupt.

  She didn’t perceive the screams as her own, for the pain in her legs made everything else immaterial. But the screams were there.

  A door was flung open, and suddenly all was tumultuous light, flickering like fluorescent tubing, and resolute hands at work upon her body.

  “Just relax now, Nete,” said a voice, and then came the injection, soothing words, only this time she did not succumb to sleep.

  “Where am I?” she asked, as her lower body drifted away into warmth that felt almost shimmering.

  “You’re in the hospital in Nykøbing Falster, Nete. And you’re in good hands.”

  In a glimpse she saw the nurse turn her head toward her colleague and raise her eyebrows.

  That was when she remembered what had happened.

  • • •

  They pulled the oxygen tube from her nostrils and brushed back her hair. As though she were being made ready to receive her sentence: that life was over.

  Three doctors stood at the foot of her bed when the consultant conveyed the news, gray eyes beneath trimmed eyebrows. “Your husband was killed instantaneously, Mrs. Rosen,” were the first words to pass his lips. “We’re so sorry” came only much later. It was a matter of putting the right facts in the right places. Andreas Rosen was presumed to have been killed by the cylinder block that had slammed into the driver’s seat on impact. Instead of helping him, a man beyond aid, rescuers had concentra
ted on extricating Nete from the vehicle, and the work of the emergency unit had been exemplary. He shaped this last word as though she ought to smile when he said it.

  “We’ve saved your legs, Nete. Most likely you’ll walk with a limp, but that’s a lot better than the alternative.”

  And with that she stopped listening.

  Andreas was dead.

  Dead, without her having joined him on the other side, and now she would have to live on without him. The only man she had ever loved completely. The only person who had ever made her feel whole.

  And now she had killed him.

  “She’s dozing off now,” said one of the other doctors, but it wasn’t true. She was merely turning inward, to the place where despair, defeat, and their reasons all merged into one and Curt Wad’s face flared as clear as the flames of hell.

  Had it not been for him, everything in her life would have been different.

  Curt Wad and the others.

  Nete bridled the screams and tears that ought to have been given free rein, and promised herself that before she had given up her hold on life they would all be made to pay for everything of which they had robbed her.

  She heard the footsteps as they left the room to continue the round. Even now she was forgotten, their attention already turned to others.

  • • •

  After they buried Nete’s mother, the tone in the house became coarser. Nete was five years old and quick to learn. The word of God belonged to Sunday, her father said. And Nete learned vocabulary other girls did not encounter until later in life. The collaborators in Odense who worked for the German occupiers, repairing their equipment, were “filthy shitty-arsed swine,” those who abetted them were “effin’ bastards.” In their house, a spade was now a spade, and “fuck” was a word like any other.

  If people wanted to talk nice, they could go somewhere else.

  On her first day at school Nete found out what a slap in the face felt like. Sixty pupils were lined up in rows outside the building, Nete at the front.

  “I never seen so many bleedin’ children!” she exclaimed out loud, thereby incurring the permanent wrath and resentment of the mistress as well as the effective lash of her right hand.

  Later, when the blush on her cheek had become a bruise, she related, at the encouragement of a pair of lads of confirmation age, how her older brothers had told her boys could jiggle their dicks and make them squirt.

  That same evening she sat crying in the parlor, trying to explain to her father where the marks on her face came from.

  “No doubt you deserved it,” said her father, and that was the end of it. He had been up since three in the morning and now he was tired. He had been so ever since the eldest son had found an apprenticeship in Birkelse and the twins had joined a fishing boat up at Hvide Sande.

  Subsequently, the school’s complaints about Nete would come in occasional bursts, though her father never took them seriously.

  And little Nete understood none of it.

  • • •

  A week after the accident, one of the young nurses came to her bedside and asked if anyone should be contacted.

  “I think you’re the only one on the ward who doesn’t get visitors,” she said. Most likely it was meant to entice her out of the silent shell into which she had retreated, but all it did was make it more resilient.

  “No, there’s no one,” Nete told her, and asked to be left alone.

  That same evening a young lawyer from Maribo came and said he was the curator of her husband’s estate and that he would soon be needing some signatures so that legal matters could get under way. He said nothing of her injuries.

  “Have you thought about whether you’ll be continuing your husband’s business, Nete?” he inquired, as though it were something that had already been discussed.

  She shook her head. How could he even consider that? She was a laboratory assistant. She had met her husband as an employee of his company in that very capacity. The matter was pursued no more.

  “Will you be able to come to the funeral tomorrow?” he asked.

  Nete bit on her lower lip. She felt her breathing stop, and the world with it. The light on the ceiling was suddenly far too bright.

  “The funeral?” she repeated. The words were as much as she could muster.

  “Yes. Your husband’s sister, Tina, has made the arrangements along with our firm of lawyers. Your husband’s wishes were already known to us: the service will be at Stokkemarke Church tomorrow at one o’clock. He asked for it to be a quiet occasion, so only those closest will be in attendance.”

  It was all she could bear to hear.

  4

  November 2010

  The new phone in Assad’s office was in a league of its own, ear-splittingly reminiscent of clanging Bohemian church bells, and if Assad wasn’t there to answer it, the racket went on for an age before eventually dying out. Twice Carl had asked him to get rid of the infuriating contraption, but Assad maintained that the phone he’d had before was defective, and since he had this one lying around anyway, there was no sense in not putting it to use.

  A person’s worst enemies are among his friends, Carl thought, when the phone once again gave him the fright of his life, sending a jolt through his body that caused his legs to momentarily leave their resting place on the extended bottom drawer of his desk.

  “I thought I told you to get rid of that bloody thing!” he yelled, as the mumble of Assad’s voice reached him across the corridor.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” he inquired, when the sniffling moon of his assistant’s face appeared in the doorway.

  Assad didn’t reply. Perhaps the inconvenience of his superior’s question had prompted his ears to clog up.

  “That was Bak on the phone,” he said instead. “He says he is standing on Eskildsgade outside the basement flat where the Lithuanian who attacked his sister lives.”

  “What? Børge Bak? I hope you hung up on him, Assad!”

  “No, he hung up on himself. But not before he said that if we did not come, it would be worst for yourself, Carl.”

  “For me? What was he doing calling you, then?”

  Assad shrugged. “I was here last night when he came down and left the folder in Rose’s office. His sister has been attacked, you know that, do you not?”

  “You don’t say.”

  “He told me he knew who did it, and I said that if it was me I would not stand around and do nothing.”

  Carl stared into his assistant’s bleary dark eyes. What was inside that head of his? Camel’s wool?

  “For God’s sake, Assad! He’s not on the force anymore. In this country we call that taking the law into your own hands. It’s a criminal offense. Do you know what that means? It means free board and lodging at Her Majesty’s bed and breakfast. And when they let you out again there’s nothing left to go back to. Adios, amigo.”

  “I am not familiar with this establishment you mention, Carl. And why are you talking about food now? I cannot eat a thing when I’m so cold.”

  Carl shook his head. “When you’ve got a cold, Assad. The expression is to have a cold.” Had it now gone to his vocabulary?

  Carl reached for his phone and pressed the number of the homicide chief, only to discover Jacobsen to be likewise bunged up.

  “Yeah, all right,” he said, when Carl informed him of Bak’s call. “Bak was here in my office at eight this morning, wanting his old job back. Just a min—”

  Carl counted eight sneezes in quick succession before the poor sod returned to the phone. Yet another infected area Carl would be giving a wide berth.

  “The thing is, Bak’s probably right. This Lithuanian, Linas Verslovas, has a conviction for a similar assault in Vilnius, and there’s no doubt his income comes from prostitution. Unfortunately, we can’t prove it at the moment,” Jacobsen went on.
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  “OK. I heard on the police radio that she’s saying she can’t identify who attacked her, but I suppose we can assume she told her brother.”

  “Well, he swears she didn’t. However, she’s had trouble with this Verslovas before, and Bak knew that for certain.”

  “So now the former Børge Bak’s snooping around Vesterbro, playing policeman.”

  There was another fit of sneezing at the other end. “Maybe you should get out there and talk some sense into him, Carl. We owe that much to an old colleague, at least.”

  “Do we?” Carl shot back, but Jacobsen had already terminated the call. Even a homicide chief could be forced to capitulate to nasal congestion.

  “What now, Carl?” Assad asked, as if he hadn’t already worked it out. He was already standing there in his mausoleum of a down jacket. “I told Rose we will be away for a few hours, but she heard nothing. She has only this Rita Nielsen in her head.”

  Funny bloke, Assad. How could he even consider venturing out on a sopping wet day in November in his state of health? Was there something wrong with his genes? Had the drifting sands of the desert engulfed his senses?

  Carl sighed and picked up his coat from the chair.

  “Just one thing,” he said, as they trudged up the stairs. “How come you were here so early this morning? Four o’clock, a little bird tells me.”

  Carl had been expecting some simple explanation along the lines of: “I was Skyping with my uncle. It’s the best time for him.” Instead he got eyes that implored, like a man about to be subjected to all manner of torment.

  “It doesn’t matter, Carl,” he said, but Carl wasn’t the sort to let things go. “It doesn’t matter” was crap people said when things mattered a lot. Along with such effervescent expressions as “Absolutely!” and “Awesome!,” it was more than enough to put Carl in a very bad mood indeed.