The Purity of Vengeance

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  Bollocks. He and Hardy would have no peace for a while yet.

  “There’s not much doubt this one’s connected with the murders of Georg Madsen and those other two in Sorø who were done in with a nail gun, too,” Ploug went on, dabbing his streaming eyes with a handkerchief that by rights ought to have been incinerated under expert supervision.

  “And what makes you think that?”

  “Whoever it was, there was a relatively long nail buried in his skull.”

  Carl nodded. Just like the others. It was a reasonable deduction.

  “I’d like you to go with me to the scene in half an hour.”

  “Me? What for? It’s not my case anymore.”

  If the expression on Terje Ploug’s face was anything to go by, Carl could just as well have said that from now on he was going to wear nothing but pink camel-wool sweaters and deal only with cases involving three-legged Dalmatians.

  “Marcus is of a different opinion,” was all Ploug said.

  Of course it was Carl’s case, too. A pale scar at his temple reminded him of it on a daily basis. The brand of Cain that told of cowardice and an inability to act decisively at the most crucial moment of his life.

  Carl passed his eyes over Ploug’s walls. They were covered with photos from crime scenes, enough to fill a medium-sized packing case.

  “OK,” he said eventually. “But I’ll drive myself,” he added, an octave lower than normal. No way was he going to ride shotgun in Ploug’s bacteriological blender. He’d even prefer to walk.

  “What on earth are you doing here?” inquired Ms. Sørensen from behind the counter, when Carl passed by the secretaries’ domain a few moments later, his head spinning with images from the fateful day when Anker lost his life and Hardy his mobility.

  In an odd, portentous sort of way, her voice seemed almost mild and accommodating. Carl turned slowly, sarcastic jibes honed and ready to counter.

  She was only a couple of meters away and yet she looked different somehow. He could just as easily have been looking at a dot in the distance.

  It wasn’t because she was dressed any differently than usual. She still looked like she’d wandered blindfolded into a secondhand shop. But her eyes, and her normally dry, now rather short hair, shone and glistened like patent leather shoes at a ball. Worst of all, two red blotches now spread across her cheeks, signaling not only excellent blood circulation, but also, and more alarmingly, that there might be more life in her than he had thought.

  “Nice to see you,” she said. As if life wasn’t surreal enough as it was.

  “Hmm,” Carl grunted. Who would dare say more? “Don’t suppose you know where Lis has got to? Is she ill like everyone else?” he asked with caution, prepared to be showered with invective and bile.

  “She’s over in the briefing room taking down notes, but she’ll be down in the archive later. Do you want me to tell her to pop by?”

  Carl swallowed. Did she say “pop by”? Did he really just hear Ilse the She-Devil, alias Ms. Sørensen, use such a breezy expression?

  In this moment of bewilderment he sent her a crumpled smile and steered purposefully toward the stairwell.

  • • •

  “Yes, boss,” Assad sniffled. “What did you wish to speak to me about?”

  Carl’s eyes narrowed. “It’s very simple, Assad. You’re going to tell me exactly what happened in that back room on Eskildsgade.”

  “What happened? Only that the man pricked up his ears.”

  “I see. But why, Assad? Who and what did you threaten him with? You don’t frighten the pants off a hard-case villain from the Baltics by reading him Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, do you?”

  “Oh, but they can be terrifying. Think for example about the one with the girl and the poisoned apple . . .”

  Carl gave a sigh. “Andersen didn’t write Snow White, Assad, OK? Now, who did you threaten him with?”

  Assad hesitated, before taking a deep breath and looking Carl straight in the eye. “I just told him I was keeping his driving license so as to fax it on to some people I worked with before, and that he should go home to his family and get them away from their house, because if there was anyone home when my contacts came, or if he was still in Denmark at that time, the house would go up in smoke.”

  “The house would go up in smoke? Do you know what, I don’t think we should mention that to anyone, Assad, are you with me?” Carl paused demonstratively, but Assad’s gaze didn’t waver.

  “But the guy believed you, so it seems,” Carl went on. “Why would he do that? Who did you tell him you were going to send that fax to? Who was he so afraid of?”

  Assad pulled a folded piece of paper out of his pocket. Carl saw Linas Verslovas’s name as Assad unfolded it. Beneath the name was a rather unflattering photo, albeit a good likeness, plus a few brief details and a lot of gibberish in a language Carl failed to recognize.

  “I pulled some information before we went and ‘had a word’ with the man,” Assad explained, scratching quotation marks in the air. “It’s from some friends of mine in Vilnius. They can go into the police archives when they want.”

  Carl frowned.

  “Are you saying you got this from people in Lithuanian intelligence?”

  Assad nodded, detaching a dribble of snot from the tip of his nose.

  “And these people read you a translation over the phone?”

  Another dribble.

  “I see. Not the most uplifting reading, I imagine. And then you threatened this Linas Verslovas with the secret police, or whatever they call themselves, saying they’d carry out reprisals against his family? Did he really have reason to believe they would?”

  Assad shrugged.

  Carl reached across the desk and pulled over a plastic folder of documents. “I’ve had your case file from the Danish Immigration Service lying around here ever since your first day in the basement, Assad. And now I’ve finally got round to having a look at it.”

  Carl felt a pair of dark eyes resting heavily on the top of his skull.

  “As far as I can make out, everything you’ve told me about your background is here to the last detail.” He looked up at his assistant.

  “Of course, Carl. What did you expect?”

  “But that’s all there is. There’s nothing here about what you did before you came to Denmark. Nothing about what made you eligible for residence here, or who took care of your remarkably swiftly approved asylum application. Nothing about your wife or children, when and where they were born, nothing about their backgrounds. Just the names, that’s all. To my mind, this is an oddly unrepresentative and incomplete set of data we’ve got here. A person might think it had been subjected to a bit of editing.”

  Assad shrugged again. These were shoulders that were apparently the seat of some universal syntax comprising a veritable abundance of nuances.

  “And now you’re telling me you’ve got friends in the Lithuanian intelligence service, and that you can get them to help you by issuing threats and giving up confidential information, and all you’ve got to do is lift the receiver. But you know what, Assad?”

  Another shrug, though this time his eyes were more alert.

  “This means you can do things not even the head of our own intelligence service can do.”

  Yet another shrug. “This may be true, Carl. But what do you want to say by telling me so?”

  “What do I want to say?” Carl straightened his back and tossed the folder back onto the desk in front of him. “What I want to say, Assad, is this: How come you’ve got so much fucking clout? That’s what I want to know, and this case folder here is telling me nothing.”

  “Carl, listen. Are we not happy down here together? Do we not get along? Why should we go into this?”

  “Because today you overstepped a mark beyond which ordinary curiosity no longe
r suffices.”

  “Say again?”

  “For fuck’s sake, Assad. Why don’t you just tell me you worked for Syrian intelligence and that you got your hands dirty doing all sorts of shit for which they’ll have your head on a plate if you ever go back? Tell me that here in Denmark you’ve been providing services for PET or FET, or some other similar bunch of snoops, so they felt they had to do the decent thing and let you stay on here, farting about in this basement so you could earn a decent wage. Come on, Assad, spill the beans, for Chrissake!”

  “This I could do, Carl, if only what you say were true, but I’m afraid it is not quite correct. What is true is that in a way I have done some work for Denmark. That is why I am here, and also why I cannot tell you any more. Perhaps one day, Carl.”

  “But you’ve got friends in Lithuania. Where else have you got friends, can you tell me that? They might come in handy one day if we knew who they were.”

  “I shall tell you when the time comes, Carl. The whole ship hang.”

  Carl’s shoulders drooped. “The whole shebang, Assad.” He forced a weary smile in the direction of his flu-ridden helper. “But from now on you don’t do anything like you did today without running it by me first, OK?”

  “Running by you first?”

  “Running it by me first. It means you have to ask before doing it, yeah?”

  Assad thrust out his lower lip and nodded.

  “There’s another thing, Assad. I think it’s about time you told me what you’re doing here at HQ so early in the mornings. Is it something I’m not supposed to know about, seeing as how you have to steal about in the dark of night? And how come you don’t want me stopping by to see you at home on Kongevejen? How come, while we’re at it, that on more than one occasion I’ve seen you arguing with men who I’d hazard a guess come from the Middle East? And why are you and Samir Ghazi from the Rødovre police always trying to beat the shit out of each other every time your paths cross?”

  “These are private matters, Carl.”

  He said it in a way that impacted immediately on Carl. It was an affront. Like a friend’s rejection of an extended hand. An unequivocal accentuation to the effect that no matter how much they shared at work, Carl not merely came second, he simply didn’t belong in his assistant’s sphere from the moment Assad clocked out at the gate. Trust was the key concept here, and he didn’t have it. Not by a long chalk.

  “I thought as much. Two gorgeous guys having a cozy chat,” came a familiar voice from the corridor.

  Lis parked her pearly whites in a seductive smile and winked at them from the doorway. Her timing was miserable.

  Carl looked at Assad, who had immediately resaddled and now seemed relaxed, his face beaming with delight.

  “Oh, look at you, poor thing,” said Lis, stepping forward and smoothing her hand over Assad’s dusky cheek. “Have you come down with it, too? Your eyes are almost drowning. And you, Carl, forcing him in to work. Can’t you see how helpless he is, the little dear?” She turned to face Carl with reproach in the blue of her eyes. “I’m to say from Ploug they’re waiting for you out in Amager.”

  6

  August 1987

  It wasn’t until she got to the end of Korsgade and sat down on the bench under the chestnut trees by the front door of the apartment building, her gaze directed toward Peblinge Lake, that she felt release from the city’s disapproval and the prison of her own body.

  The figures that graced the city streets of the 1980s were well shaped and comely. This she had noted, and on that point she was no longer able to compete.

  She closed her eyes, put a hand to her lower leg, and rubbed it gingerly. As the tips of her fingers massaged the irregular contour of her shin bone, her thoughts wandered back to her old mantra: “I am good enough . . . I am good enough.” But today it sounded hollow, no matter where she placed the emphasis. It had been a long time since she had repeated the words to herself.

  She tipped forward, folded her arms around her knees, and pressed her forehead into her lap, her feet tapping out little drum rolls. It often helped against the excruciating jolts that ran through her body.

  The walk to Daells Varehus department store and back to Peblinge Dossering was a tall order and led to pain. Pain in her shattered shin bone that forced her gait askew. Pain in the foot that for each step had to accommodate the centimeters by which her leg had been shortened. Pain in the hip that sought to relieve the pressure.

  It hurt, but that wasn’t the worst thing. Walking along Nørregade, she stared straight ahead, trying not to limp, knowing full well she would not succeed. It was hard to accept. Two years earlier she had been an attractive, nimble woman, and now she felt like a shadow of her former self.

  But shadows live well in the shade, so she had told herself until now. The city was somewhere she could make a fresh start. It was why she had fled to Copenhagen almost two years earlier. Away from the shame and the grief, and the icy stares of the locals back on Lolland.

  She had moved from Havngaard in order to forget, and now this.

  Nete pressed her lips together as a pair of young women with prams walked by, faces and voices brimming with joy and abandon.

  She looked away, first glaring at one of the neighborhood lowlifes who came strutting by with his ugly and unmanageable beast of a mongrel, then gazing out upon the flocks of birds that dotted the surface of the lake.

  What an awful life. Twenty seconds in a lift at Daells Varehus forty-five minutes earlier had shaken her very foundation. That was all it took. Twenty seconds.

  She closed her eyes and allowed her mind to replay what had happened. Her steps toward the lift on the fourth floor. Pressing the button. The relief at not having to wait more than a few seconds before the door slid open.

  But what had been relief was now a malicious virus inside her.

  She had taken the wrong lift. If only she had used the one at the other end she could have carried on with her life as before, letting herself be swallowed up among the edifices of Nørrebro, the bulwark of its streets.

  She shook her head. Now everything was changed. After those fateful seconds the last remnants of Nete Rosen were no more. She was dead and departed. Deleted from this world. Now she was Nete Hermansen again. The girl from Sprogø was risen.

  With all the consequences.

  • • •

  Eight weeks after the accident they had discharged her from the hospital without ceremony, and in the months that followed she lived alone at Havngaard. The lawyers were busy, for her husband had been a man of great means, and from time to time photographers lurked in the ditches and bushes. When one of Denmark’s most prominent businessmen lost his life in a car crash, the newspapers and gossip magazines smelled new sales opportunities, and what could be better than a wealthy widow on crutches with a pained expression on her face? But Nete drew the curtains and let the world race on without her. She knew what people were thinking: the little mite who had wormed her way from the laboratories into the bed of the CEO didn’t deserve to be where she was, and it was only because of her husband and his money that those around her had toadied to her all those years.

  That was the way it felt still. Even some of the community nurses who tended her at home had difficulty concealing their disdain, but she soon had them replaced.

  During these months the stories of Andreas Rosen’s fatal accident became spiced with rumor and the anecdotes of witnesses. She felt the past squeeze like a python, and when they took her in to the police station in Maribo the people of the village stood at their windows and smiled smugly. It was common knowledge by then that the family who lived in the house opposite the spot where the accident had occurred had seen something that looked like a tussle inside the car immediately before it careered through the windbreak and plunged into the water.

  But Nete did not break down and confess her sin, neither to the public nor
to the authorities. Only inside.

  They failed to knock her off balance, for she had long since learned to stand firm on her own two feet, even when storms were raging.

  And then she left it all behind.

  • • •

  She undressed slowly in front of the windows facing the lake and sat down calmly on the stool before the bedroom mirror. The scar above her pubis was more visible now that her pubic hair was less pronounced. A faint lavender-colored line that marked the division between good fortune and bad, life and death. The scar of her sterilization.

  She smoothed her hand over the loose skin of her barren abdomen and clenched her teeth. And then she rubbed until it hurt and her legs trembled, her breathing increasingly agitated as her thoughts ran aground.

  Only four hours earlier she had been sitting in her kitchen with the department store catalog and had fallen for a pink sweater on page five.

  Autumn Catalog 1987, the cover proclaimed, so full of promise. “Fashion knitwear” above the picture that grabbed her attention.

  She had admired the item over her steaming coffee and thought to herself that a pattern-knit sweater like that would go so well with a shoulder-padded Pineta shirt blouse and give her a fresh start. For although her grief was immense, there was a life that remained to be lived, and she would soon feel ready again.

  That was why she had stood in the lift almost two hours earlier, with her shopping bag in her hand and her heart full of cheer. Exactly one hour and fifty-nine minutes earlier the lift had stopped at the third floor and a tall man had stepped inside and stood next to her, so close she could smell him.

  He hadn’t bothered looking at her, but she had seen him. Had studied him as she held her breath, retreating uncertainly into the corner, her cheeks flaming with rage. Hoping he didn’t turn and catch her face in the mirror.

  Here was a person who was clearly pleased with himself and the world around him. In control, as they said. In control of his life and, despite advancing years, of the future, too.