“Marek!”
“Yeah?”
“This is for my sister.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You think you can run from us? And take your little whore with you?”
Their eyes met. Marek stood awkwardly; he had to turn his knee and shoulder to swing around, then he threw himself backward at Olek and stretched his arm out straight. But he hung in the air when the shot boomed out in the emptiness. Marek felt a hard blow to his head, then everything turned red and faded out as the bullet snapped around inside his brain like a bear trap and blasted out through his neck and made a starshaped crack in a Christmas plate, 1972.
Adina crab-crawled backward on her elbows, over to the door, and put her hands in front of her eyes. Olek walked over to her nice and easy and kneeled down. Sat there pointing the gun at her.
“Here. Here … take it. Take it, goddamnit, take the gun.”
“What?”
“I’m giving you a ticket to your freedom. Take it.”
Friday 5:15 p.m. Abel Cathrines Gade 5, Fifth Floor, 1654 Copenhagen V
By an act of pure will she raised herself up on her elbows and scooted across the floor. She wanted to see her executioner. He was stocky, balding, his head was shaved. He lay with his mouth open and pale eyes staring out; he looked like an idiot. Drool seeped out of the corner of his mouth and his right cheek was slush.
Olek was gone.
She searched the man’s pockets and found a wallet with four twenty-euro bills, a Danish five-hundred kroner bill, and a set of car keys. She stuck everything in her clothes when she heard Henry letting himself in the apartment. Moments later he appeared at the door with a sack from Soul Made on Vesterbrogade. He sat it down on the bureau, but then everything began to blur for her. He walked over to her but it all happened very slowly. Everything sounded loud, and there was a shrill tone in her one ear, the day’s last rays of sunlight slashing through the apartment. He stood looking down at her. He had beautiful eyes, she thought, he was actually a very handsome man. There was a glow to him. She was no longer afraid.
“Adina.”
“Yes.”
His lips curled as he squatted down. Was he smiling? What was it about his eyes? He stroked her forehead and everything began flickering. He lifted her up, carried her over to the sofa.
“It was one of Olek’s men, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“It was him or you?”
“Yes.”
“It’s good that you got him. I’m happy about that. But it’s best that you disappear now.”
“What do you mean?”
“You need to get out of the country. I’ll take care of all this. Give me the gun.”
She had completely forgotten the pistol she was hugging to her breast, but he untangled it from her stiff fingers. He sat a moment looking at her, he hummed a little tune, the melody from the film, Do not forsake me …
Adina ran down to the taxi. But of course it was gone. A rusty Mazda 323 with Polish plates was parked in front of the gate. She tried the key. She would have said more to Henry, explained. But he just kept on. It was all going to be okay, he said. He also wanted to give her half the money. She would leave first, he would follow in a few weeks when everything had settled down. He would get through all this. Wouldn’t be charged. He kept his wits about him surprisingly well, considering there was a dead Polack on his living room floor, shot in the face. She ended up taking seven thousand.
The key turned in the lock, and suddenly she was behind the wheel of her executioner’s car. She started it and flipped on the blinker and drove off. But she didn’t head for the airport. She drove out of the city. She just wanted to get away! She didn’t know where, but it felt good tearing out into nowhere. She held the ticket, Copenhagen—Frankfurt—Melbourne, in her free hand, checked the rearview mirror, no one, she doubted she could get anything for it. She rolled the window down. Do not forsake me, oh my darling … Then she heard a pop, and the car began swerving. She threw the ticket on the passenger seat and steered off onto the shoulder. But when she turned to get out of the car she saw a girl in the backseat, asleep under an old gray windbreaker. She grabbed hold of the girl and shook her.
“Who are you?”
“Ludmilla … Where’s Marek?”
“Marek is dead. What are you doing here?”
“I’m going to school in Sweden. I have money. See?” Ludmilla took a crumpled brown envelope out of her jacket pocket and waved it around.
“No, you were going to work as a prostitute for a bastard called Olek.”
“I don’t believe you. My mother said I was going to school in Sweden.”
“All right, fine.”
“You’re lying,” Ludmilla persisted. “Who the hell are you anyway? Where is Marek?”
The spare tire was in the trunk. Adina dropped it, and it rolled onto the sidewalk; something rattled when she took hold of it again. She grabbed it with both hands and shook. There was something inside. She removed her pocketknife from her bag, made a slit in the tire, and stuck her hand in, and there she stood with a roll of hundred-euro notes! She sat back inside the car and cut the tire all the way around—it was filled with rolls. Ludmilla still sulked in the backseat. She began slitting the brown envelope open with her finger, turned it upside down. A birth certificate, a physician’s statement, a stack of tourist brochures about Copenhagen in Polish. The girl looked unhappy and started hammering her knuckles into the front seat. Then she let her head fall between her knees. Adina laid an arm around her neck, squeezed her, and then stuffed the money into the bag; she could count it later. Ludmilla sat crying with her head in her hands.
“Come on,” Adina said, and she got out of the car and started looking for a taxi.
“Where are we going?” Ludmilla asked, following her outside. She was skinny as a reed.
Adina didn’t answer immediately. She felt strangely weightless, and the pale, thin girl made her feel sentimental. She wasn’t dead, Henry had saved her. The girl could sink to the bottom as quickly as a stone. She put her hand on Ludmilla’s cheek, wiped the tears away.
“Where are we going?” the girl asked again.
“I’m going to Australia, and you can come along.”
“What will we do there?”
“Wait for a man. A good man.”
ALL I WANT IS MY BABY,
WOAH WOAH,
WOAH WOAH WOAH WOAH
BY SUSANNE STAUN
City Center
So let us go then, you and I, down the dark streets we know so well we no longer see them, let us eat the last sidewalks of Knabrostræde and turn down Læderstræde, stomp off in the light from the last breathing windows of the night, you, my towering steaming rage, and I, who must recognize that things probably can’t be a whole lot different right now.
Unless you decide to bug off?
Before I do something stupid?
To be preferred.
But noooh, you won’t do it, you’ve dug in, you insist on reaming my ass like a dog, and I’m not talking poodles and puppies, I’m talking a big filthy doberman with long brown teeth, a rotten mouth, and a snout with no honor. Well good luck, and excuse me if I’m not wild about this. But I’m not, amigo, just like I’m not wild about how I wasn’t any good this evening. I was somewhere else, funny, sure, they laughed, got their money’s worth, but I was somewhere else, and I hate it when someone like you gets me way out there, which is also out where my rage grows so huge that my body can’t contain it and I have to ship off the rest to Nowheresville, where it belongs, a grim place, far from me and me.
So take a hike! Can’t you see what you’re making me do, cawing and glowering on an empty street, as if talking to myself? It’s so very lonely, I’m a thousand light years from home.
You’ve been following me for precisely a week, since last Saturday, when you said it, when it rolled right out of you like an old belch: You fucking look like Keith Richards, yo
u want a beer?
It was just past three in the morning. I was standing there, minding my own business and a large draft, trying to ease stage-adrenaline out of my body. But: your wit, your speech, your repartee, impressed me almost instantly. I’d been present, really present, on that stage, had them in the palm of my hand, never better. And then it slipped in, ruined my night, day, week, month:
You fucking look like Keith Richards, you want a beer?
And me? Didn’t say a word, stood there gawking, didn’t mention your gut, your watery eyes, and your fat cheeks. Not a word. Not that I’m polite, I’m not, but words just wouldn’t cut it, no matter how ugly. And I lacked the courage for the kind of brutality it would take. Plus I didn’t have the time. I was way too busy watching my life fall apart.
You fucking look like Keith Richards, you want a beer? But if you’d just smile a little …
I’m not smiling, not at you, at any rate. If the show must go on, let it go on without you. Bereaved of my illusions, I pondered whether it was the young Keith Richards, the one with the teen acne and all the scars, that you had in mind. The one who recorded people’s toilet visits on his tape player? Or the old sod with his Grand Canyon–junkie face, the silver skull ring and bandana and girlie crap in his hair? Is my face really already a map of the twentieth century?
And then I walked home. Not enraged, not enraged, not yet. Just speechless. It’s not easy facin’ up when your whole world is black: only seconds ago I thought I was young and beautiful.
When we pass by Kongens Have, in just a few moments, why don’t you go on in and run around in the dark a bit? To unwind, maybe? You never know, that fenced-in tar pit may hold people more bizarre than me, and honestly, I’d really rather not be Kill Bill tonight. Look! So gorgeously black and dark behind the grating. So seductively blue-black against the moon, so murky, too murky, just right for you. The ideal place to go up in smoke.
Right?
All right. But if I’m Keith, it seems so right to murder you tonight—not you, your ethereal remains, but you with the fat gut and the runny eyes who ruined my life with a sentence. Short and sweet. For we are both full of violence, separately and together. You may not know that I kicked a Glasgow bully in the head with the pointed toe of my boot. That I nearly strangled Ronnie Wood with my bare hands. Hammered my fist repeatedly into Stigwood. And why? Because he kept getting up. And for you I have a real buffet: blue and yellow and dead. In that order.
(But I’m still nice, given the chance. “I am a lover.”)
Ah, I see you stare at the park grating. Kongens Have beckons? Go! I’ll retreat. Tiptoe away. Ever so quietly. Cut diagonally across the street to where the shadows are even blacker. Hide in the crowd, blend into the façades, disappear. But the crowds have gone to sleep, the city is nearly empty. One couple walks by, like tears. Wrapped around each other, and her coat grazes me as they and their conversation slowly pass by, Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty girl, you’re a pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty girl, pretty, pretty, such a pretty, pretty, pretty girl, come on, baby, please, please, please, I love you, are you cold?—yes, please! I’ll have some of that, thank you. For here or to go? No matter, just need to file off the rough edges.
Now you cut across the street, dear towering steaming rage, and catch up with me on the corner where I thought I’d faded into the bricks so you couldn’t see me. You glower at me, I can’t miss it: Go on, go on.
All right then, let’s. Side by side we walk down Gothersgade, I paint you black so I can’t see you, step up the pace so to avoid your presence, and keep a steady rhythm without looking back. My feet move beneath me furiously, but I make no progress on this deserted street, and I sense you behind me, a thousand arms, a thousand legs twitching pointlessly, hear you grunt like a frenzied pig, grind your long, loose teeth and lose them, plink-plonk, on the sidewalk. Maybe this is a dream. No drunks in sight, it isn’t right. No drunks, no scum, and no slime. So wrong for this time of night. And no intense poetic airheads who write ART, who write sitting in the leftovers. World’s silence. All are drunk on ether hope. Also that will pass away. Violently. Suddenly. And now; no lame come on, baby, please please please; no T&A with metal heels; no old gals with teased, sprayed hair; not even the odd lost specimens who only want to find a head they can hop up and down on until all that’s left is cauliflower. Don’t you know the crime rate is going up, up, up, up, up, to live in this town you must be tough, tough, tough, tough, tough! Naw, we have the street all to ourselves, you and I, and I’m getting nowhere. And it’s as if you’re growing. And the more you grow, the more nowhere I get, the more I want to headbutt you, both of you. You fucking look like Keith Richards, you want a beer?
Have you ever heard a mouse roar? If you don’t get lost, your face ends up like mine: Fuckface with Beckett-like furrows. So take a long walk on a short pier, and if you don’t drown right away I’ll be at your service in no time flat. I have something in my pocket, it’s sharp, it can scratch and prick, deeply if need be, or just sever and slice, and I want to do so, badly, besides which I have leather gloves in my pocket that I’ll put on so I don’t hurt myself. My face has to go to work tomorrow, you see, and I hate to get blood on my clothes.
I cross the street toward the hot dog stand and order a grilled one while staring straight at Andy’s Bar opposite. They’re all in there. I don’t care how crowded it is. I can cut you up, rip your black heart out in full public view, and stomp on your head until it’s cauliflower, as is the custom nowadays. Surrounded by people, I can carry out my hideous but necessary project without unwelcome interruptions. No one will react. Not in McDonald’s, not in Nab-a-kebab, not in Andy’s—especially not in there.
The grilled dog arrives, but my towering rage runs around and around the hot dog stand, faster and faster, unnerves me. I fix my stare on Andy’s cheery colors, the cozy lights, silhouettes of rollicking, sloshy binges. If you’re not over there, in there, it’s death by rage for the World’s Most Elegantly Wasted Human Being, me:
So, my friend, where have you hidden tonight? Couldn’t find you yesterday, either. I’ve been looking for you for over a week, in the city streets, after streetlights came on, in front of dour houses with windows so black they ate the white curtains, the white sills, and what else, the occasional cactus? I’ve looked for you in the courtyards, on deserted stretches, out by the warehouses on Amager where they bet on dogs and girlz wrestling in mud, along the canals, the slopes, in noise and darkness, and in the still of artificial lights. I always think it’s your back I see framed in cold neon, always your boots tromping up the stairs, opening the door with a bang, your hands passing me things from inside.
Fuck, it was just the bitch who sold the tickets.
Andy’s is open. That means I’m drunk. If I wasn’t, Andy’s would be closed. So it is. Keith Richards with acne and/or wrinkles and heroin-assisted constipation in wonderland, where he eats a grilled dog with everything on it in front of the bewitched tavern that must have you aboard by now, you and your likeminded and their mass of wrong words, though the right ones exist, like Beautiful Delilah, sweet as apple pie, always gets a second look from fellas passin’ by … The better don’t allow me fool around with you, you are so tantalizing you just can’t be true, sounds so much better than You fucking look like Keith Richards, you want a beer? If you’d just smile a little …
I won’t! I smile only for money. Your heartless sentiment has been eating away at me for eight days, and I don’t even play the guitar.
I chew the last bite, swallow it with a dry throat while you run around and around, and I want to cry because you’ve ruined my dream about Come, let us go then, you and I. Come, let us go out and watch the evening stretch out under the sky like an ethereal figure longing for the light, let us go then, through half-empty streets, still cringing from the ringing sounds and echoes of the days, the smell of cheap restaurants, the agony of long menus; one street after another goes by like boring arguments that distrac
t you from overwhelming questions: What does your skin taste like? Where can my tongue go, everywhere or nowhere—where precisely? And don’t ask who I am, and what I do, no more questions like, What is it? There isn’t anything, so let us do everything I have dreamed about.
For all this time. That I have dreamed about, for all this time. But come along before the yellow fog arrives to turn your thoughts to things that aren’t going to work, to what you can’t do, what you may not do, like eyes in drafty windowsills, scanning the street with disgust and fear. Love is strong and you’re so sweet, and some day, babe, we got to meet, just anywhere out in the park, out on the street and in the dark.
Where shall we eat, you and I? Alone. Together. At Pastis? They already took the trash out.
I lick your lips and mine at the thought.
First thing in the morning, last thing before I go to sleep.
Leaves go, leaves come.
Wind rises. Summer’s over.
So follow me now, share a bottle of wine. With me and make my heart boil.
Look at me.
Across the rickety table.
Warm for a September evening, don’t you think?
But why not simply smash your face in? Trailer trash for an evening, no problem. Red necks, white trash, black & blue girls, I’m all that.
I toss the paper in the trash can, wipe my mouth, good dog!, and tremble when you jump in through my stomach and we become one flesh, one concentrated killing machine, bad company in every possible way. We cross the road blindly, walk up the steps, and I open the door with these luminous black eyes I always get when someone crosses me, and there it is: laughter, loneliness, and sex and sex and sex, fucked all night and sucked all night and taste that pussy till it taste just right, look at me, I’m finished, I’m totalled, Look at me! I’m in tatters, and well suited for the absolute armpit of the city, the final cockroach left alive in the debris, and I notice that I sway while I search the place for you, and fumble in my pocket for my scrap of metal.
Copenhagen Noir Page 7