Copenhagen Noir

by Bo Tao Michaelis

  Empty vodka and beer bottles, full ashtrays. A horribly sweet, nauseating smell. Bedroom, living room, a tiny bathroom. An unmade double bed and a few mattresses on the floor. In the kitchen, a pile of dirty dishes, banana flies, pizza boxes, overflowing trash bags. I walk through the hall. I catch sight of myself in the mirror. I look like hell. I notice a kid’s drawing behind me, in a frame. I turn around. Lucille, 9 years old, written in a clumsy child’s hand. The drawing is a house with father, mother, and girl standing in front on the steps. Beside the house, a big lion, mouth wide open. Meticulously drawn flowers and butterflies. A shining sun, a cloud, a bird. In the lower left-hand corner, an odd little troll-like figure with fangs and horns. The drawing hangs crooked on the wall. A lump rises in my throat. Into the living room again. Behind some stacked chairs is the bundle they carried up last night. Packed in black sacks and heavily taped. I take a deep breath and kneel down. I manage to carefully strip off the tape in one spot. I peel the plastic sacks apart from each other, a small opening appears. A dead hand. A woman’s hand, already stiff and blue. A cheap ring with a fake stone of green glass on her ring finger. But it’s not Lucille’s hand. The skin is dark. I try to think quickly and clearly. I hear my teeth chattering. It must be one of the girls from Sydhavnen. Maybe even the one Maks smacked around. The stench is now unbearable. My hands shake as I tape it back up again, glance behind me, and see that I left the pocketknife on the floor beside the sacks; I pick it up and get out of there. My back is wet from a cold sweat. I wrestle with the door. Drop the pocketknife, finally tumble down the stairs. Four black men are waiting in the hallway, one is sitting on the steps. He doesn’t move as I pass by. I feign indifference. Say hello. One of the men standing there nods, but his expression doesn’t change. And when I reach the street and hurry off toward Ørstedsparken, the red Mazda returns. I crouch behind a street workers’ tent. The three Russians jump out of the car and are met by the four black men stepping out onto the street. Before I know it, the suntanned man has been knifed in the gut. He gets stabbed again and again. He slides down to the sidewalk. Dmitrij hammers his fist into the jaw of one of the four, Maks is fighting another one and kicks him in the groin, the man doubles over. No one makes a sound. Blood flows on the sidewalk, down into the gutter, the gray asphalt turns black. The knife is knocked out of the hand of the man who stabbed the Russian. Maks pulls out a gun. But Dmitrij gestures to him: don’t shoot. The knifer and his three partners jump into a black car with tinted windows and drive away. Dmitrij picks the knife up, pockets it, he and Maks carry the suntanned man, possibly dead, to the car and into the backseat, they take off—and they’re gone. Only now I hear myself, my breath, fluty, mournful, raspy. I’m paralyzed from fright and have no idea what to do to get myself up and out of here, away from this crime scene. I think: What would have happened if the four men had barged in on me in the apartment? I swallow. They could just as well have. Why didn’t they?

  Later I sit on a doorstep and drink coffee, while doing my best to consume a pitifully dry sandwich, turkey and mayonnaise. All I think about now is the hand in the sack. The body lying by itself back in the apartment, what will they do with that? Why haven’t they gotten rid of it? The relief that it wasn’t Lucille doesn’t hit me until late in the day. At that moment I grieve for the unknown dead girl. And it is clear to me that it must be some sort of mafia war going on here. The Russians versus the Gambian slavers. The Russians are presumably fighting for a share of the market. And now they’ve shown their muscle by killing one of the enemy’s girls. That’s my conclusion. At midnight something finally shows up on Internet news. A paragraph about an unidentified white male, dumped on the ground outside the emergency room at Bispebjerg Hospital, catches my attention. He has suffered multiple stab wounds and is in critical condition. Police are searching for family or others who know him. They are also requesting any information, if anyone has seen or heard anything, that could aid in clearing up this case. A description of the man. I turn the computer off. Lie on the bed. The water pipes sigh. Someone nearby is listening to Lou Reed. And then I think: It wasn’t her. It wasn’t Lucille. I nod off; all night long I’m tormented by troubled dreams and I wake at daybreak with a start, my body tense and stiff. I get up and drink some water. Get dressed and go out in the sleeping, duskgray city. It’s now Friday.

  Isabel was no beauty queen, but she had a warmth that was special. Something open, generous, overwhelmingly loving. That’s what I fell for. And that’s what later on I punished her for. She was so easily hurt, she was innocent, she didn’t understand my moodiness. Which in a way came about because I felt I was a worse, less giving person than she was. Which also happens to be true. I confused her, I played funny games, as Joe would say. When I met Isabel, Lucille had just turned three. She was trusting and her speech wasn’t yet fully developed—she could say idiot in Danish, and Salut and Je suis une très très grande fille. In the beginning I left her to Isabel. But that changed. I was the one who took her to school on her first day. Who biked with her across the commons on weekends, who taught her how to drink soda without getting it up her nose. And who told her stories at night when she lay in her bed. About small creatures with horns and fangs. I was also the one who in the end failed her and disappeared. The sense of Isabel’s sleeping body close to mine is sometimes so strong and real that I wake up in the night thinking she is there, though I still don’t believe she was the love of my life. Which has yet to happen for me. But her presence. Her being there and her ability to create—life, a kind of safeness, safe and sound. I wonder if Lucille looks like her. If her laughter is as bright as her mother’s. Not that there is much to laugh about just now, when I’m not even sure that she can laugh. I walk along the lakes toward Vesterbro. Past Hovedbanegården, the main station, where the pushers hang out, and down Istedgade, the porn street. An addict has just shot up in a basement stairwell. He falls forward. The last drunks stagger noisily down the street. In the gray dawn I see a group of young black women. They are huddled together on a corner, they laugh and talk loudly to each other in their native language. They look young and healthy, they don’t look like whores. But they are at the bottom of the pecking order and come out only after the other prostitutes have gone home. They get the worst customers. All the scum. The violent, the drunk, the sick. A car pulls up to the group and stops. Negotiations take place through the front windshield. A fat hand points at the girl it wants. She gets in the backseat. For a moment the group is silent. Then I recognize one of the four men from the fight last night on Turesensgade, he shows up all of a sudden. His jaw is swollen and cut. He speaks harshly to the girls and apparently orders them to spread out, and so they do, immediately. It looks sad: now each one of them is alone on this miserable November morning in a foreign country. I walk on up toward Halmtorvet and shuffle past Tivoli and Rådhuspladsen, the town hall square, cut through Ørstedsparken where there is still some action, then up Gothersgade and Bartholinsgade. I stop at the front lawn of the Kommunehospital, the old district hospital. I’ve bought coffee and warm croissants, I find a bench and rest. Moisture drips from the trees. Windows gradually begin to light up, people awaken; I notice that the rosebuds have been ruined by frost, that a fox sneaks through the bushes, I hear birds chirping and the wind rustling shriveled leaves. I came here often with Lucille, we played ball. I taught her how to catch and she was furious at me every time she missed. She stomped the ground and hid under the snowberry bushes. They’re still here, the bushes, with their perfectly succulent white and pink berries. It’s nine o’clock. I try to take stock of the situation. The body in the sack, the wounded Russian. A possible war over prostitution. And the hash traffic that might be much more than just that. But nothing leads me to Lucille. Nothing. I consider whether I should go to the police with my information. But they weren’t exactly helpful before. Besides, they have enough to keep busy elsewhere in the city; there are gang wars and shootings in Nørrebro again. I don’t know what to do. I fumble around
in my pocket for my phone and call Kirsten.

  The white wine is rich and golden in the glasses. She nibbles at her shrimp. Outside, people rush around—here inside we’re nestled in the restaurant’s plush chairs. A waiter arrives with the main courses; at my urging Kirsten has ordered lobster, I’m having baked turbot. The music is agreeably muted, business people and tourists are sitting all around us, dining. This is one of the city’s most expensive seafood restaurants, we have a view of the canals and Folketinget, the Parliament.

  Kirsten smiles at me, clinks her glass against mine. “To Lucille,” she says. We drink. She tells me that she is studying literature at the University of Copenhagen. She is especially involved with poetry. We talk some about American poetry, I mention that I write poems myself. That seems to make an impression on her. “Tell me about them,” she says, “tell me about your poems.” I say that there isn’t much to tell (“Life, death, love, you know”), but I love Walt Whitman—especially Leaves of Grass—and Eliot, of course (I recite from The Waste Land: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust”), but also the great Russians, Blok and Mayakovsky, not to mention Baudelaire. “Very predictable, all of them,” she says with a smile, “and you don’t even mention Anna Akhmatova?” She turns her glass in her hand. “What do you think about Sylvia Plath? You’ve read her, haven’t you?” “I’ve mostly read her husband,” I answer. “That’s a shame,” Kirsten says. She gives me a challenging look. “Listen to this: Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/and I eat men like air. ” She locks onto my eyes, then she smiles, sips her wine, and says: “You must be aware that she was much better than Hughes, wilder, much more talented and original, but she was the one who died and he had the last word. Have you read Birthday Letters?” I nod. “He abandoned her. It killed her,” she says, loudly. I think she’s being too simplistic, that if anything is predictable here—and stupid, and completely unfair—it’s blaming him for her suicide; we discuss, her cheeks turn red, I promise to read Plath. She names a number of younger poets I should also read. She thinks I’m hopelessly behind the times. Which I’m sure she is right about. “Why don’t you read Danish literature?” she asks. My hand is on the tablecloth, she covers it with hers. “Can’t you send me some of your writing? I want to read you.” I take this as a hidden invitation to something more than poems, my stomach tightens, I think I’m blushing. She goes to the ladies’ room. I order another bottle of wine. It feels as if I’m floating. I feel my body clearly, I feel it not at all. And we sit there for another hour and a half, I have a hard time getting the turbot down, I get a little bit smashed, she does too. I enjoy watching her eat her lobster, sucking it all out, we talk and talk, especially her, I can’t take my eyes off her, her sparklingly clear gaze, the smiles racing across her face, we toast again, this time to how she will come visit me in Brooklyn.

  I’m giddy from a tickling, prickling anticipation. The imprint her lipstick has left on the glass. The delicate curve of her nose. I forget that dead girl, Lucille, everything. Kirsten’s presence and the intimacy she offers me makes me light and carefree, almost ridiculously light and carefree (and I take note of that, but everything is radiant). Then we have coffee. I feel her pressing her leg against mine under the table. And I ask her if she would like to take a walk before picking up her daughter. She would like that.

  We walk slowly around Kongens Have, the King’s Garden, looking at the small castle, Rosenborg, that Kirsten (and Lucille) dreamed of moving into when they were grown up, because they would be princesses. The sky is soaring and blue. Kirsten links her arm into mine and shakes her hair into place. The cold air clears my head. I haven’t told Kirsten any of the horrible details of the “case,” instead I say that the college hasn’t heard from her for a long time, that she hasn’t been reported to the police as missing, and then I ask her to tell me more about Lucille. “She visited me at the hospital when I had Mia. That was three years ago. We hadn’t seen each other in a long time. Her mother had just died, and she was very thin and desperate. I’d sent her a letter when I read in the paper that Isabel was dead. But Lucille was just like herself too. She is so much fun.” “Is she?” “Yes! She has the sickest sense of humor—black. Even right then, when she was holding Mia and talking about Isabel’s funeral, she was funny. That’s how she is. And I couldn’t laugh because I’d had a cesarean. I bit the pillow. She said that she wanted to be a teacher and that she had traded Isabel’s apartment for one on Turesensgade. She seemed strong and clearheaded somehow, even while grieving.” “Did she know Dmitrij back then?” I ask. “She didn’t talk about it. But I don’t think so. The first several times I visited her she was living alone, anyway. And after he suddenly showed up, I stopped visiting her.” “Because he scared you?” “Yes, honestly, he scared me to death. The way he stared at me. I think Lucille was smoking a lot of dope then. She seemed distant and listless. Totally different from that day at the hospital. And I was alone with Mia and just didn’t have the energy to help her.” I feel a rush of joy when she says she was alone. “Because she must have needed help. She was way out there, I think, really messed up. Apparently I couldn’t see it. Or I didn’t want to.” She sighs and looks up at me. “If only I’d helped her. So all … this, maybe wouldn’t have happened. I mean, that—that she would be here. Now.” “But then we wouldn’t have met each other,” I say. “Do you have a boyfriend?” I ask, out of the blue. “A boyfriend?” She looks at me, confused. My ears are burning under my cap. Quickly I light a cigarette. “Does Lucille have many friends?” Kirsten looks up at the sky. “I don’t really know. I don’t know very much about her. She’s my childhood friend. Mostly we talked about those days. What happened at school, things like that. If we’d seen this person or that person. What he or she had made out of themselves. She never really asked much about me, either.”

  While we watch the ducks swimming around in the moat’s algae-green water, she slips her arm under mine again, and she leans her head lovingly on my shoulder. I sense for sure that she’s coming on to me. Something hugely electric between us. And I take hold of the back of her head, pull her toward me, and search for her mouth, try to kiss her. But she tears away from me, abruptly steps back and looks at me, angry and frightened. “What the hell are you doing?” And there’s no way to explain. I say I’m sorry, again and again. I say: “But I thought … that you …” Her eyes flash. She says: “You! You’re like a father! That’s how I remember you, like a … an adult. And you think it’s okay to kiss me? Is that really all you’re after? To get at me? I thought this might be the start of some kind of friendship. I thought this was about Lucille!” Now she shouts: “You are just a stupid old man!” And she moves off. Rushing and raging across the faded lawns with her shiny auburn hair swinging behind her head in the sunlight. And I know I’ve ruined it, I will never see her again. I misunderstood everything. I couldn’t control myself, she’s right, I am a stupid old man. I flop down on a bench and toss what’s left of the morning’s croissants to the ducks. Exactly like old men do. Feed the ducks, sit and stare.

  All I need is a cane. And a goddamn set of false teeth.

  The rest of the day depressed in the hotel room. I’m on the brink of going back home to Brooklyn, the hell with all this. First I get boiling mad (at Kirsten and at myself), then I’m resigned, apathetic. Then I yell: “Why am I running around here like an idiot playing goddamn DETECTIVE?” I alternate between lying on my side in bed and pacing around the room, punching the wall. Later I’m just plain exhausted. I step out to get something to eat. After wandering around for a half hour, unable to decide, I end up with a slice from the Sicilian pizzeria on the corner of Nansensgade and Ahlefeldtsgade. My pizza is thin and crispy like it should be. I eat at a high table by the window and look out in the dark while listening absent-mindedly to background conversations in Italian. I leaf through the local paper. I stop, then read: The man who was abandoned Thursday outside the emergency room at Bispebjerg Hospital died late yesterday. The deceased ha
s not yet been identified. He was in his late thirties, white but dark-complected, with a distinctive scar twenty centimeters long on his upper chest. Family of the deceased are requested to contact the police. The cooks laugh loudly at something in the kitchen. I look out at the street where a few boys practice wheelies on their bikes. I leave the rest of my pizza behind and stroll down toward Turesensgade. The second-floor windows are dark. But someone has hooked the front door wide open. I can’t stop myself, I walk cautiously up the stairs.

  No sound comes from the apartment. After a while I open the mail slot a crack, still no sound, nothing to see, no snoring men, no water running from a faucet; it’s deadly quiet. I pull out my knife from my inside pocket. But the door is unlocked. I hold my breath. It creaks when I push it with my foot. Still nothing happens. I step into the hall. Pitch dark. First I check the living room and bedroom to make sure I’m alone. The light from the street makes it possible to scan the two rooms, both are barren, the furniture cleared out. The kitchen is the same way. All that’s left are dirty dishes, they smell horrendous. The refrigerator door is open, it’s empty too. A small pool of water on the floor from the thawed freezer. In the living room, the stench from the corpse still hangs in the air, even though they have left the window open. But the sack is gone. I can just make out a stain on the floor where it was lying. I think: This was Lucille’s home. She lived here. Here is where she got up and put her clothes on, here is where she went to bed at night.

  Back in the dark hall, I fumble around for the frame. It’s there. I take the drawing down and leave the apartment with the door open.

  It seems as if there is nothing more to do. A few days go by rambling around erratically: another night in Vesterbro, a glimpse of the young prostitutes huddled together again, talking eagerly on a corner, a beer or three at various bars, shawarma and bad fast food, I visit the Russian restaurant in a basement on Israels Plads just one time, in hopes of something happening. I eat a fine bowl of borscht that tastes of more than boiled beets, but otherwise it’s just tables of families with young kids. Daytime I aimlessly follow the stream of light, blond people on the streets, homogenous in contrast to the motley street crowds I’m used to in New York. Suddenly I’m desperately homesick. I want to go home. And I discover I have already buried Lucille, I’ve passed the point of acknowledging that she is dead, that I will never find her. I don’t think anyone will find her. I think the Russians have shut her up for good, because she discovered that they were trafficking girls from Gambia. I think they’ve stowed her away forever. Buried her in a forest or dumped her in the sea, far from the Danish coast. Maybe they even murdered her in another land far away. The earth has swallowed Lucille. She called out to me and I was incapable of answering her. I didn’t grab her hand. I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope. Eliot again, Four Quartets. Wish I could. Wait calmly without hope. Once, at a distance, I see Kirsten bicycling up Vendersgade with Mia in her child’s seat. Another time I think I recognize Lucille in a packed bus at Nørreport Station. But it’s just my imagination. Finally, I call the airline and ask them to reserve a flight on my open ticket. I pack the framed drawing in with the few clothes I brought and put it all in the suitcase. I pay the sleepy man at the hotel reception desk. He hands me a brown package with clean clothes. The vomit clothes. The 28th of December, around ten a.m., I walk down to the metro that runs out to the airport, and I sense how relieved I am to leave this city that, for one reason or another, always ends up huddling in on itself, shutting out the world right in front of my eyes. It snows lightly. There is ice on the roofs. Sleet and salt on the sidewalks. I walk past the flower booths on the square where the vegetable market once stood, red-cheeked women and young girls with stocking caps pulled down over their foreheads. Buy a cup of coffee at Café Dolores, set my suitcase down in the slush, and light a cigarette. Once again, this is how I take leave of Copenhagen. And again I swear to never come back. But it’s not until after checking in, as I sit calmly at the gate, waiting to board, that Kirsten forwards a text message to me. Hi K. Sorry I haven’t called until now, have a new # ;) Living in Ǻrhus with Johan. D threatened me and beat me 2 times when he found out about J. Bastard. So I got out of there. Am totally in love. Do you know anybody who wants to buy a cheap apartment in Turesensgade? Hehe. bientôt, L.