The Quiet Girl - Peter Hoeg

by Peter Høeg

  Then she was gone.

  5

  He was forced up toward consciousness; his hearing was being intimidated by one of the sounds he had gotten too old to tolerate: the outlandish cooling fan of a laptop computer.

  The African was sitting in the room in front of the screen.

  "Why the Eastern Orthodox Church?" he said. "Why not a little shamanism? Exorcism? Or Catholicism? If you need to have something."

  "It was because of the joy," she said. "The Orthodox Church is the most cheerful. The emphasis isn't on the Savior's suffering. It's on the transfiguration. The resurrection. Sanctification in this life. I could tell that from the time I was a child. There were all sorts of congregations in Addis Ababa. The Coptic congregation was the happiest."

  He heard a new aspect of her. An entrance to her rich spiritual depths. He would have loved the sound. If he had been feeling better. And if he hadn't needed to clear his mind of bitter jealousy while she was talking. Jealousy at the thought that women can find something approaching complete happiness without involving any man but the Savior. And perhaps not even Him.

  "I found something Kain wrote," she said. "On the Web."

  At first he didn't hear her. He had tuned into her sexuality. It had the energy of an Olatunji drum solo, of a gnu trampling through the rain forest. How had she survived the first thirty years of celibacy? Then her words reached him.

  She turned the computer toward him.

  He was too old for the Internet. Not that he didn't love the sound, a limitless cacophony; it had the tone of the cheapest popular entertainment imaginable performed on a public toilet close to the beaten track. All the sounds in the world. Linked together on the lowest organizational level possible. The con man in each of us adores the Internet.

  But to go from there to the point of abandoning natural dignity to acquaint oneself with how a computer works is still quite a leap.

  Text sounded onto the screen. He tried to focus, without success. He had always read at a snail's pace. Not musical scores. He could take in six staffs from Beethoven's Concerto in D-Major right from the page. But books were different. Musical notes were the only written language with which he had made peace.

  "Read it for me," he said. "Let it be my bedtime story."

  She scanned the text. He could hear how she formed a quick overview. Pulled out key words.

  "It's a fragment," she said. "The title and introduction are missing. Perhaps the intention was to delete the whole article, but that succeeded only partially. It's about warning procedures in Danish waters. A review of Lyngby Radio's NAVWARN; the Norwegian vessel traffic-management information system, NAVTEK; Shippos, the Danish Maritime Authority's ship-reporting system; and Denmark Radio's waterway information service and teletext. A description of changing transit routes through Danish waters. VTS, the Vessel Traffic Service; radar and reporting services in the Great Belt Strait and the Drogden Channel."

  He could hear the ease with which she oriented herself in a foreign language.

  "There's a description of the warnings that go through the Sea Sport Security Council in an emergency. Duties of the buoy service. Authority of naval officers, in particular the scope of their maritime policing powers. A review of assignments for the Coast Guard's MHV 951 cutters. The Danish Maritime Authority's responsibility for safe navigation during rerouting of all traffic from the Sound to the Great Belt. Procedures for transferring key personnel to the Naval Operations Command in Ørhus. Guidelines for maintaining traffic separation for vessels in the Great Belt. Assessment of the strait's capacity to handle a shutdown of the Sound. And so forth; it continues for fifteen more pages."

  "What is it?" said Kasper.

  "It's a memorandum," she said. "Written ten years ago. By Kain. For IMO, the International Maritime Organization. It's an analysis. Of the possible consequences of a natural catastrophe or terrorist act that would shut down the Sound."

  He listened into her.

  "It must be a secret document," he said. "You didn't find that on the Web."

  She stood up.

  "You got that from Moerk," he said. "He must have asked you to show it to me. Otherwise I wouldn't have seen it. Nobody ever tells me anything."

  She remained standing in the doorway.

  "He had good intuition," said Kasper. "Kain. If he was already on that trail ten years ago. Maybe he's clairvoyant. Maybe I'm the only one here who's shut up inside ordinary reality."

  She was gone.

  6

  He felt sun on his skin, like a caress. He opened his eyes. They had rolled his bed out into the yard. He half lay, half sat, with his face toward the pond. The water was hidden by rhododendron bushes. His mother had loved that particular plant. Because of its hardiness and fertility. Other men brought their wives bouquets; Maximillian had come home with thirty-five cubic feet of Azalea diabolica. Contrary to nature, it had budded and bloomed in the middle of January.

  Someone was sitting beside him. It was the Blue Lady.

  "We're inspired by the convent gardens in Alexandria," she said. "The principle is--in translation from the Coptic--hide and reveal. One always senses the water, the source. But never sees it. It's a kind of spiritual striptease. It's meant to give the seeker a passionate longing for God."

  "KlaraMaria?" he said.

  Her sound grew dark, affecting everything around them; it was as if a cloud covered the sky.

  "We had a telephone call. Heard her voice. And a man's voice. They say she's coming back soon."

  "Do you have a tape recording? Can I listen to it?"

  She did not reply.

  "When I came here," he said, "while they were operating on me, I was very close to saying farewell. It seemed that you were with me. On the departure path. Going to a place beyond. Was that a fact?"

  "Several of the Church's great female figures," she said, "have said that a sanctified person--that is to say, not insignificant agents like us, but people who have manifested the Divine--can act in three different forms, like three different aspects of the Savior. An acoustic form. A physical form. And as an aspect of love."

  "I was raised outside the Church," he said. "Am neither baptized nor confirmed. I don't know how politely one usually speaks to an abbess. But if I could speak candidly, I'd say you're beating around the bush."

  They listened to the splashing of the hidden water. He didn't know if he could trust her. Usually one can't trust people. Usually that doesn't matter. This time it was crucial.

  "When I was a child," he said, "my mother once took me to the Nevsky Church on Bred Street. She had a conversation with a woman who must have been your predecessor. A woman she must have met here as a little girl."

  "That would have been Mother Rabia."

  "Many years later I wrote to her. I was sick as a child. For a while I was blind and partially paralyzed. During that time my hearing changed. I had nowhere to go with what I heard. So I wrote to her. Twelve years later I saw my letter again. In the apartment of a woman who left me."

  "The letter must have been lying in an archive. She must have gotten it there. Is there anything wrong with that?"

  He could not turn his head. But he could tell that she was looking at him.

  "Was there violence involved?" she said.

  "I was pushed to the breaking point."

  "Women rarely like violence."

  "Women want to use me. That's my experience. That was the fear it awakened. The fact that she had the letter. Women want something. My money. The fame. The high energy."

  "Perhaps," she said, "they just want to be near your modesty."

  He managed to turn his head toward her. In spite of the pain. In spite of the electrodes.

  She was gone. On the chair where she had been sitting lay a cordless phone.

  * * *

  He got the telephone number for Rigshospital from Information. Maximillian answered the phone.

  "Are you in Spain?"

  The voice had no volume; there cou
ld not be much body left. "I didn't leave. I'm in the hospital. On a false medical statement. Healthy as a sea eagle."

  He could hear his father listening through the lie. He could hear his sorrow. Parents never stop worrying about their children.

  "You're on the trail of something or other," said Maximillian. "In Copenhagen, the inner city is owned by pension funds, real estate companies, and private individuals. So far, the pension funds have taken things calmly. That is to say, the engineers' pension fund, the Danish supplementary pension fund, the physicians' pension fund, the lawyers' and managers' pension funds. All their investments are long term, and they've got huge amounts of capital. We're not interested in flagship real estate--for example, the headquarters of banks, insurance companies, and so forth. For the time being, they won't be for sale. The biggest real estate companies are Norden Corporation, Gutenberghus Properties, Jeudan, and Danbo. They and the pension funds have urged the government to help by purchasing some of the damaged property. As the government would do, for example, if dikes had burst and flooding had reduced the value of farmland. The state has gone in and bought an estimated five to ten percent of the inner city and Frederiksstad. The price hasn't been disclosed, but it has undoubtedly been at the officially appraised value. The National Bank has coughed up funds and the Ministry of Justice has made the purchase. That leaves the private individuals, the owners of condominiums and rental properties. I've asked around. People say there have been many sales, some panicky, which was to be expected. But nobody has sounded an alarm; no one has tracked the overall purchases. So I contacted the Copenhagen Building and Technology office to see if they had gathered data on inquiries. Before setting a price for a piece of property in the inner city, one would investigate existing development, the condition of the foundation, and possible pollution, even in a situation like we have now. The Building and Technology office has been terribly busy. It's had inquiries from all sides. So I kept probing. From my deathbed. All transactions are registered with the Municipal Records office. Of course, your old father has a direct connection to the land registry in the Municipal Records office on Hestemølle Street. It turns out that twenty-seven companies have systematically bought up property since September last year, three foreign and twenty-four Danish. In no instance was the price disclosed. But we're talking about billions of kroner. Perhaps fifty. Perhaps a hundred. The price was determined before the rent catastrophe. Around Strøget Street it was about two hundred seventy thousand per square foot. Now comes the interesting part. I forgot about the foreign companies for the moment. And telephoned the central business registry. In Denmark we don't register who owns companies. But there needs to be a managing director and a board. I wrote down those names. Along with the date the company was established. So listen to this. The twenty-four Danish companies were founded during the month of September last year. And all the board and managing director positions are held by the same twelve people."

  Rasper's heart beat faster. The more rapid pulse sent a wave of pain through his head.

  "Don't they have to pay tax on their profits?" he asked.

  "They don't have to report any profits. Denmark has the right to tax income from real estate transactions. But not from the sale of companies. Our twenty-four companies bought the property for two billion, perhaps. But it's not the property that was sold. It's the companies. For sixty or a hundred billion. There's just one thing they need to avoid. Any evidence that there was a previous agreement about the deal before buying the companies."

  Kasper tried to think.

  "And that's not all," said Maximillian. "Though you'd hardly believe it, I still have some friends. One of them, a woman, is on the supervisory board at the Copenhagen Stock Exchange. I gave her the twelve names. Without saying where I got them. Asked her if she knew them, if she could think of anything that connected the twelve people."

  Kasper knew what was coming. But no empathetic artist would take from a partner in the ring the joy of bursting the balloon.

  "All twelve are--or have recently been--on Konon's payroll."

  "Kain," said Kasper. "With his past experience in the navy and with the Navigation and Hydrography Administration. He'd know something about floods."

  "And about how to operate in catastrophic situations."

  "The dates," said Kasper. "What are the dates when the companies were established?"

  He could hear the paper rustle.

  "Between September second and September twenty-fourth."

  There was a silence. In the silence Kasper heard his father's shock; it started at a single point, at an epicenter, as a tone of intellectual awareness and from there it expanded into a sphere.

  "Good God," said Maximillian. "That means . . . that they knew the earthquakes would occur."

  7

  Kasper awoke to the song of the Sirens, the "Ride of the Valkyries," in a churchlike mode. He had no idea where he was, perhaps in hell. He stumbled into the darkness and fell against the night table. Reality returned and found him lying on the bare floor, tangled up in cords.

  The singing was filtered through perhaps ten feet of masonry and must have come from more than two hundred feet away. It sounded like there were between twenty and thirty women, and their intonations would lead one to believe they were on their way to Brocken Mountain. His watch lay beside him. It was three o'clock in the morning.

  He ripped off the electrodes. Held on to the bed. And managed to get to his feet. For the first time in more than two weeks, he stood up.

  He made his way over to the washbasin. Turned on the light above it. His electric shaver lay on the shelf. Along with shaving cream and a razor. And the leather strop to hone the blade. All laid out with wisdom and care. If one's mother had done it, one would have been happy. But his mother had been dead for twenty-eight years; she hadn't lived long enough to see him shave.

  He shaved himself slowly and thoroughly.

  He faced himself in the mirror. Every man who shaves wishes a woman would watch and evaluate the result. In his case, it was eleven years since anyone had watched him shave. Stina had been the last one. Since then the only observers had been the dressers at the theater.

  There was someone now.

  It was the Blue Lady. She was leaning against the door. He hadn't heard her arrive. He looked down at her feet. They weren't animal pads. They were bare feet in sandals. With nail polish. Clear nail polish. A gloss. The singing grew more powerful.

  "The canonical hours," she said. "The second matins. From three to four in the morning."

  He rinsed off the last foam with cold water.

  "Two things," he said. "Will you look and see if it's smooth enough to enter Paradise?"

  Her hands were cool, with a fragrance of something that might have been sandalwood.

  "It's fine. And the other thing?"

  "Why are they here? The women. What does it give them? Being up at this ungodly hour of day. Greek mantras. Wool directly on your skin. Ugly pictures of pale young men on a cross. Total obedience. What does it give them?"

  She walked in and closed the door behind her before she replied. "Love," she said.

  * * *

  She pulled the wheelchair forward; he sat down in it. She seated herself across from him. They listened to the singing. No normal hearing would have been able to pick it up at this distance. But he knew that hers could.

  "You'll come to understand," she said. "Why she disappeared, and also why she had the letter."

  He didn't know how she could have known that. But he trusted her. Because of the tone of her voice. He could hear the expert knowledge. The world is filled with people who express themselves about things they don't understand. It was different with her. His trust felt like physical tension that pulled at his wounds.

  "They were hard on you," she said. "Those last two days. Before we brought you here."

  He could tell that a great performance was on its way. He had thirty years of experience in hearing beforehand that great pe
rformances were about to begin. But this one was without curtains. Without music. Without lights. Without an audience. Without blocking. Something came creeping up from the large orchestra pit. It was anxiety.

  "They aged me," he said. "Those two days. They aged me fifteen years."

  "On the other hand, they were certainly predictable, weren't they?"

  He didn't believe his own ears.

  "Wasn't it just a series of repetitions?" she said. "The same meeting. With the same two people?"

  He listened into her system. There was nothing to hear. Body sounds, of course. But there was no sound of the mind. No whisper of thoughts. No aggression. No purpose. She was quiet, like complete absence.

  But she was not absent. He met her glance. He tried to create a mental picture of her body. It was as solid as a cliff, as a block of bedrock. And at the same time, it was frail, like a flame that a draft can extinguish in an instant. His hair stood on end.

  "In those two days," he said, "I met more people than I can remember. And I was in mortal danger. Everyone has been tracking me. Because I'm trying to save a child's life. And fulfill an agreement. It's been a series of nightmares. So what are we talking about?"

  "Hasn't it just been a series of variations on a very simple theme?"

  He stared at her.

  "A man and a woman," she said. "To provide some variety for you, they are found in two versions. Those who help children. And those who harm children."

  With great resistance, he listened to the two days in slow motion. He heard the meeting with Brodersen and the blond woman. Moerk and Asta Borello. Maximillian and Vivian the Terrible. Lona Bohrfeldt and the men around her. Kain and the woman in the sauna.

  "In a few instances they may have been separated," she said. "So you met the man by himself, the woman by herself."

  He heard Daffy. Franz Fieber. Stina. Sonja.

  "But still, quite alike," she said. "With you, or against you. But otherwise quite alike."

  "It wasn't only meetings," he said.

  She nodded.

  "There was escape. Into freedom. You're a refugee. And there was forced entry. Intrusion. You're a seeker. But always in the same tracks. How many essentially identical barriers have you gotten past in basically the same way?"