Kerrigan in Copenhagen

by Thomas E. Kennedy

  Spying Gideon again next morning at the breakfast buffet where he sat nursing a Fernet Branca and soft-boiled egg, Kerrigan could not resist extending his compliments and inquiring whether Gideon’s proposal had brought him into contact with the lovely Turkish trotters.

  “It is all a dream in the dark,” said Gideon, inviting Kerrigan to join him in a Branca, the beginning of an extended friendship.

  The message now is: “Meet me, Kerrigan. Let me invite you out to dinner. I want you to meet this woman and tell me what you think. Meet me in the bar at the D’Angleterre. My plane gets in in two hours. Meet me there at three. I want you to tell me what you think of this sweet kid I met. Skin like milk! Be there!”

  But the subtext is: Legitimize the fact that I am having dinner with this sweet kid and then disappear so I can shag her.

  Gideon is the chairman of half a dozen different international companies. With kinky blond hair and thick lips, big dark-framed eyeglasses and black Armani suits and big glossy black shoes, he rules whatever he puts his hand to. To Gideon every woman is a challenge, but he is not content to look. He wants the comfort of their bodies, of their acquiescence.

  “Hey,” he says, “I’m a passionate guy. I need love.”

  He has just married his fourth wife, who is thirty years younger than he. He has seven children by various women. He is an intellectual businessman and has excellent taste in cigars with a budget to keep it busy.

  Kerrigan splashes several palmsful of cold water into his face, leans on the sink for a while, assessing how he feels. His lungs are heavy but seem to be functioning. So far.

  Moving barefoot to his dining table, he sees a fat stack of freshly written yellow pages, inspired by his reading of Arnold and Lucretius and the hashishination of his frontal lobe. He does not dare read them. He peeks. First sentence looks good. Second, third, fourth, too. Cheered, he decides not to read further just now.

  His head is light so he switches on the radio to the classical channel, hears Johann Strauss II (1825–1899), “Little Woman of the Danube,” and the swaying rhythms of the waltz soothe his mind. His gaze rests on the smooth lake, paddling ducks, bobbing joggers. A couple strolls beneath the green chestnuts and a woman passes pushing a stroller as memories carry on the strings of the Vienna Philharmonic—the New Year’s Day brunch Licia always prepared for the two of them to dine on as they watched the Vienna Concert on television, “Tales of the Vienna Woods,” “The Blue Danube,” “On the Beautiful Blue Danube,” “The Champagne Gallop,” Von Suppé’s “Charge of the Light Cavalry” …

  They ate scrambled eggs and drank champagne, and the year that had just begun could not have begun more elegantly. None of the petty cares of daily life mattered then, no quibbles, grievances, petty jealousies, nothing. There were only the Strausses, I and II, the century-and-a-half-old music, the bubbly, the winter sun through the living room’s plate window, the food on the smoked-glass coffee table—yellow eggs on a blue china platter, smoked eel in gray-white strips on a bone-white plate ready for the chives and pepper, delicate sausage slices, black pudding, cheese—of the cow, the goat, the sheep—fresh fruit, juices, toast, jams and marmalades, a basket of assorted rolls fresh from the bakery. And on the color screen of the TV the beautiful young Austrian women in their colorful gowns, the young cavaliers in their waistcoats and colored butterflies and cummerbunds, waltzing with such fluent grace.

  And Kerrigan with a good cigar, Cohiba perhaps, Esplendido or Robusto, gifts from the generous Gideon, or a Davidoff Tubo No. 2, hand-rolled in the Dominican Republic. A cigar that might have burnt for an eternity, its thick, redolent smoke coiling up into the motes of icy sunlight through the frosted window, a single candle in the Irish crystal stick he gave her for Christmas, his beautiful wife with her beautiful slender legs seeing to him, replenishing his plate and cup and flute, because this was her New Year’s gift to him, her husband, and if the gowns of the Austrian women were a tad gaudy, if their blue gazes were a tad vacuous, it did not matter, for these were moments of supreme success and there was no happiness like theirs then.

  Beneath the decorated tree, unwrapped gifts in large, colorful department-store boxes, yet-unread books of gleaming freshness, and out the window their cherished lawn now white with snow beneath a freezing perfect blue sky, the magnolia’s winter-bare black bones dusted with snow, a mere few years before it all would be taken away—the meaning of existence, of family, a net of human beings joined by blood and marriage, a tiny clan devoted to one another despite the occasional argument or jealousy, despite trouble, always stronger in the long run than the puny threats to it, stronger than all but one—blonde treachery.

  He has been through it all. Taking the kindest possible tack. That she no longer loved him, that she had to get away. An adult human has that right. But it didn’t hold. Because she planned it over a long while. She took half his money—okay, she had the legal right, but it was his inheritance, and she took Gabrielle, too, and she planned it and had it all ready to do when he was away in Scotland doing research. And she had to have had a man on the side who offered her a life in another country—maybe the United States, and he only hoped that the poor bastard fared better than he had. No matter what, Kerrigan felt, he did not deserve that.

  He showers, dresses, thinks, remembers the wise words of Karen Blixen: It is always advisable to take a little bubbly with your predicament. And your brunch.

  And there happens to be tucked away in his billfold two free drink chits from a new café that has opened a while back on the west side, on Istedgade, which happens to be the real street on which the fictional Ole “Jazz” Jastrau lived in Tom Kristensen’s Havoc, and the real street Dan Turèll wrote about in Big City Trilogy with “Life on Isted Street,” a long blues reflection on the life of this street in the 1960s and ’70s with its hookers, addicts, pushers, serving houses, the residents and the “tourists.” What better choice of a place for scrambled eggs and crisp bacon, cheese and bread, juice and the bubbly?

  So when he climbs down to East Lake Street, he can only conclude that the appearance of a taxicab at just that moment, green taxi lamp glowing in the mild early afternoon, means that the universe and all the laws of synchronicity salute and support his decision.

  “I love this street,” the freeloading fictional poet Stefan Steffensen says to Ole Jazz in Havoc, looking down Istedgade from the block where it starts.

  “Why?” Jazz asks, and Steffensen tells him, “Because it’s long.”

  Words Kerrigan ponders while listening to the jolly Pakistani cabdriver tell him about a friend, Akhtar, in Bangladesh who owns two things only: a shed and a coconut tree. From the sale of his coconuts, Akhtar earns enough to support himself in his shed for the entire year, and even has a surplus so that he can give something to the poor.

  The cabdriver laughs merrily. “Akhtar does not know, you see, that he himself is poor! And so he is wealthy!”

  The story seeps into Kerrigan’s consciousness, and he says softly to the driver, “That’s a beautiful story.”

  “It is a beautiful story!” the driver shouts. “I never forget this story!”

  “And I’ll never forget it either,” says Kerrigan as they cruise past Jernbanescafeen, turn right onto Istedgade.

  “I hear from your accent you are from a country other than this,” the driver says. “I am guessing you are from America, and I am guessing that I am right in my guess.”

  “You are right,” says Kerrigan, thinking of the parable of the coconut tree and the poor man wishing to give something to those poorer.

  Kerrigan watches porn shops zip past to left and right, drug addicts and hookers leaning in doorways, clustered on the street amid the shawarma grills and the gentrifying cafés and shop fronts.

  “I think,” says the driver, and looks at Kerrigan via the rearview mirror, “that you once loved a tree. Very much. You loved that tree.”

  Kerrigan tries to think of a way to calm the man, but picking through his m
ind, he remembers the peach tree. “How did you know?” he asks.

  “I know. What tree was it?”

  “A peach tree. It was the only tree that grew in our yard in New York and every summer we picked the peaches, and they were so delicious. We had peaches for breakfast and for dessert and for afternoon snacks. We had peach pie and peaches with cream and sugar. They were so delicious. I loved that tree. I did. Then there was a hurricane and it blew down. Our poor tree. I missed it so much.”

  “I think,” says the driver, “that everyone in the whole world should be required on their birthday to plant one tree. The tree is the cousin to the man, to the voman. I think you come from America and you have lost your tree, you must plant one tree in this country!”

  He pulls up alongside number 128, the long front of Café Strassen, which used to be Café Zach. Kerrigan pays, and the driver turns with a smile and solemn demeanor. “Remember,” he says, and raises one finger. “The tree. The tree is going to help you.”

  Then Kerrigan notices that the café’s windows are dusty and brown papered and rubble is piled outside. Across the street on this side of Istedgade at 126 is another corner establishment, this one not a café, however. Here he will not get brunch. Maybe he’ll get a knuckle sandwich. It is a dark, small-windowed place, billed as Copenhagen’s west side’s western bar, named McKluud’s in honor of the 1970s TV series about Marshal Sam McCloud, played by Dennis Weaver, aka Chester of the wooden leg in Wyatt Earp, with big James Arness and a whore named Kitty. This serving house of dark-brown wood is a low-light venue and a sign on the door says that it is open Monday to Sunday from two P.M. to two A.M., and on weekends the party continues until five A.M. at Isola RockMusicCafé.

  On the pavement, gazing at the horseshoe-shaped doorknob, he realizes they will not have champagne so decides to order a double Stoli which he does not really want. He is barely conscious of the fact that a small brown-complected man with crooked teeth stands alongside him, smiling with all his snaggled teeth.

  Kerrigan reflexively smiles back, then quickly nods dismissively as the man moves even closer, disagreeably close to Kerrigan’s face, and utters some strange foreign words.

  “The same to you, I’m sure, sir,” says Kerrigan dryly, withholding his gaze, and the man turns away, hobbles to the corner, turns, and is gone, yet even as he withdraws, the foreign words ring clear of their heavy accent. What he had said in Danish was, “I wish everything good for you in your life. We are all in the palm of God. And now I am going again.”

  Kerrigan steps quickly along the street to the corner, looks down the sidewalk, but the little brown man is nowhere to be seen. He feels inordinately sorry at his rude response to the man, finds himself gulping in air that does not quite fill his lungs. He looks across the street at the Café Blomsten, where he once saw two very large men drinking from a bottle of vodka and arm wrestling while two beautiful women necked at the bar. Then he thinks he might go around the corner of Enghaves Place to Dybbølsgade, where Café Snork is—a place with a good vibe—and where he once met two French girls and spoke to them, which made him feel he was inside a Bob Dylan song—”Stuck Inside of Mobile (with the Memphis Blues Again),” to be exact—speaking with some French girls … but maybe what he wants now is bubbly.

  He looks the whole long length of Istedgade toward the Central Station and begins walking toward it, but is quickly winded and has to lean on a mailbox to catch his breath, which doesn’t want to be caught, thinking that if he had a glass of champagne he would be fine.

  Champagne, he thinks, is an apt topic for the Café Petersborg, a mere twelve minutes by taxi, on Bredgade. It was here, one evening in 1845, that the light-music composer H. C. Lumbye (1810–1874), who lived nearby on Toldbodgade, heard a champagne cork pop and was inspired to begin to compose his famous “Champagne Gallop,” although he completed it farther up Toldbodgade at the Toldbod Bodega.

  Established in the mid-eighteenth century, Café Petersborg was named for the old imperial capital of Russia and in honor of the fact that the Russian Consulate was then housed in the same building; the Russian Orthodox church still stands across the street from it. Also where Hillary Clinton ate lunch when visiting Copenhagen as first lady of the U.S. a year or two before. But he decides to go down the street to the Toldbod Bodega, choosing a table in the second room, and orders a split of Moët. Named for the customs house where the Esplanade ends in Copenhagen harbor, near the royal landing dock, the bodega is some two hundred years old. In this building, the same H. C. Lumbye lived and composed.

  Even as Lumbye began to introduce the Viennese waltz and gallops and polkas to the emergingly affluent Copenhagen middle classes, Kerrigan thinks, a man named Ole Pedersen Kollerød, awaiting his execution for having slit the throat of a coachman named Lars Petersen, was writing the story of his life as a vagrant and petty criminal in and out of jail, entitled My story of the unhappy fate that has pursued me since my 6th year and until my 38th year, the age I have reached while I write this. He not only wrote but illustrated the story and, clearly, had his talent been nurtured as a child, he might have found useful work. He reported the time of writing his story as “the best time of my life, because I have known no pleasure or been allowed to do nothing useful since I was stupid enough to commit the first offense for which I was punished.” At the age of six. In Denmark, the death penalty was only employed for murderers at that time, unlike in England, where theft was a hanging offense.

  Kollerød ended his account: “… my tale is at its end and what does it amount to when death approaches now? From its dark throne the night wields its heavy sceptre. The world sleeps … darkness … the grave’s silence. My gaze stares. My ears listen in vain. Creation sleeps. The pulse of life will end. The wheel of the world fearsomely stands still and proclaims destruction. O, let the blade fall hard … Let it fall. No more can I say.”

  Ole Kollerød was executed by decapitation during the autumn of 1840, just over a year after the first Straussian concert, held on June 10, 1839, in the D’Angleterre Hotel on Kongens Nytorv, bringing Copenhagen at last up to date with Vienna, Paris, Berlin, and London, where the waltz and gallop craze already was well under way in replacing the staid music of the past.

  Following the Napoleonic Wars and the Danish bankruptcy of 1813, the spirit of Danish society was subdued, but in the late 1830s people were getting rich again and wanted to express their new wealth in the freedom and eros of the new dances. The waltz was what they needed, considered so sensuous that only the humorless Germans were said to be able to dance it without giving in to its erotic allure.

  H. C. Lumbye was a key person in the new lively music which, ironically, was seen to support the existing conservative order of absolute monarchy against the constitutionalists. People subscribed to the monthly publication of Lumbye’s piano sheet music, and on August 15, 1843, the Tivoli Gardens opened, heralded by the music of Lumbye’s Tivoli waltzes and polkas. (There is a statue of Lumbye in Tivoli playing violin, a group of naked, violin-playing boys at his feet.)

  The antiestablishment periodical the Corsair—then in the process of making a laughingstock of Kierkegaard (at first they praised his work, but he scorned their praise so they attacked him personally, his appearance, his bent posture)—also complained about Tivoli’s popularity at a time of censorship and other social ills. As to “The Champagne Gallop,” the Corsair commented that it was only for the rich and that Lumbye ought to compose a “Beer & Snaps Gallop” for the people.

  Kerrigan sips his champagne with “The Champagne Gallop” dancing in his head, thinking of Kollerød slitting Petersen’s throat, denying his guilt, and having his own head chopped off even as Lumbye’s cork popped and the bourgeoisie galloped gaily across the D’Angleterre dance floor, contemplating what tableaux might be painted of contemporary Denmark and contemporary Europe as popular sentiments swing further and further right and nationalist affinities approach pre–Second World War levels.

  He thinks of Morten
Gideon’s wealth. He is a champagne socialist who always traveled with at least two hard leather pocket humidors, Cohibas Exquisitos, cigars that cost thirty dollars apiece and were worth it—if you could afford it. Kerrigan remembers the day he sat in Gideon’s office in Gamla Stan in Stockholm smoking a corona while Gideon, with a young woman on his knee, spoke into the phone to the sixty-year-old chairman of the ethics committee of one of his organizations, reprimanding him quietly for a confessed indiscretion with one of the staff.

  “Bob, listen,” he said. “It is not that I give a fuck but we can’t be seen to do these things. You gotta get with the times.”

  Bob had, according to his account, accidentally placed his open palm on the woman’s breast while attempting to help her on with her coat; according to the account of the much younger woman in question, the palm in question had been inside the lapel of her blouse and midway down the cup of her bra. The girl was from New Jersey. She said, “He was coppin’ a feel!”

  “Bob, don’t help them on with their coats,” Gideon said, and puffed his cigar and kissed the secretary on her lips; she was having difficulty stifling her laughter and Gideon rested his cigar hand on her slender, stockinged thigh. “Let ‘em put on their own fucking coats and no one can accuse you of things you didn’t do.” Under the circumstances, Gideon had to request Bob to deliver a written apology, which he did, following which he was sued, the written apology serving as the prima facie evidence, and the matter was settled out of court for six American figures—expensive feel—although Bob still had to deal with his wife after that and with his own image of who he was.

  “The old pig,” laughed the young woman on Gideon’s knee when the phone call was completed.

  “Gimme a fuckin’ kiss, you’re beautiful,” said Gideon.

  “You know he wants to play doctor with me,” she said over her shoulder to Kerrigan, her slender arms laced around Gideon’s neck.