Copenhagen Noir

by Bo Tao Michaelis

  She drooped and went quiet. Tried to recall the image of her mother but could remember only her scream and her frightened eyes.

  When her mother entertained customers, Claire had hidden in a cubbyhole behind the clothes hanging in the closet. That evening she’d fallen asleep in the cubbyhole, and when she crawled out the next morning her mother lay cold, dead on the sofa. The needle lay in the ashtray.

  Claire was put in an orphanage and later placed with a number of foster homes. She did okay for herself, and had never set foot again in Vesterbro.

  John Winther rattled his chains desperately.

  She continued: “At first I only thought divorce, but then it hit me: why should I divorce myself from a few billion kroner? A text from ‘the mistress’ gave me the idea. I’ve been waiting for you, waiting for this hour in this room. Before you die, I want you to know that Cindy, the girl you wanted to ship out of the country with a brain hemorrhage, was operated on tonight. She’ll be okay. I’m guessing that the only reason you bought this building was to have easy access to sexual services, and the income from the whores was just a little bonus that in your habitual greed you pocketed. But it’s a lot of money to them, so I plan to pay them back when your estate is settled. Goodbye, John.”

  All she had to do was tighten the noose around his neck.

  He climaxed as he died.

  The next morning, wearing her warm mink, the tall, elegant Claire Winther stood in the airport and waited for her husband. When he didn’t show up on the flight from Rio, she contacted the airline, then the police. She showed them the text message about his arrival and seemed to be on the verge of tears. A few hours later it was discovered that he had arrived the previous day.

  At approximately the same time, the police were notified of a brothel customer found dead in Vesterbro. The two incidents weren’t immediately seen as being connected. Claire Winther received a call on her secret cell phone with the prepaid card. The conversation was short, something about her making sure that the bill would be paid.

  Then she tossed the cell phone down one sewer drain and the card down another.

  Toward evening the police showed up at the coast road villa. There was reason to believe that Claire’s husband was dead, and would she like to sit down.

  Claire broke down when she identified the body, and she was offered emergency counseling, to which she said yes, please.

  The tabloids all carried essentially the same story the next day: One of Denmark’s unknown billionaires, the Danish-American John Winther, had died in a sex game gone awry at a brothel in Vesterbro. In connection with his death, the police are looking for a small Spanish-speaking woman answering to the name of Michelle. She is possibly from South America. According to the brothel’s other prostitutes, the woman had recently been hired for a trial period and was servicing John Winther in the brothel’s S&M room, where the accident occurred. John Winther, 46, earned his fortune as an international developer. Recently he had bought up and developed sites in Russia and Brazil, where his company was presently involved in new subdivisions. The company owned many properties, both in and outside of Denmark.

  The doctor had recommended to Claire that she check into a hotel to avoid the press storm, so she took a suite at D’Angleterre. The chairman of the board for John Winther Development, a prominent business lawyer, briefed her in the suite.

  The company was in good shape, it could carry on as if nothing had happened, with one difference—she was now the majority stockholder.

  “I’m going to spend the winter at our house in Florida, but I want to be kept informed of anything significant happening with the company, and to participate in all the board meetings,” she said.

  The chairman nodded: “Naturally.”

  Again she stood in the airport. Had just checked in her luggage, when someone tapped her on the shoulder. She turned and looked into a puffy, yeasty face with pores like craters.

  “Bonnie!”

  “You won’t forget us, right?”

  “Of course not. You know me! But things need to settle down a bit. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  They waved for as long as they could see each other.

  PART III

  CORPSES

  SAVAGE CITY, CRUEL CITY

  BY KRISTIAN LUNDBERG

  Malmø

  Translated from Swedish by Lone Thygesen Blecher

  We must start at the very beginning.

  Our story is simple. Just like life itself, it has no beginning and no end. We’re in Malmø, one of the larger suburbs of Copenhagen. Our story is about death. Death is at the core of everything. All stories about life and love contain a kernel of death.

  Those who must die are getting ready. Those who must die prepare themselves. They read and write, breathe and watch. Those who must die set out on a journey. One showers to be clean, cleaning especially well to smell fresh. Another writes his will and testament—he has already made up his mind, days and weeks ago. A third measures out precisely as much of the drug necessary to make him disappear. The vein responds, his eyes cloud over, and in a matter of seconds the world is dark, black. Everything hangs in the balance for a moment, the living and the dead. We who are still here, and those who have given up.

  From Västra Hamnen, this community within a community, one can see Copenhagen glitter like a string of diamonds in the night. The neighborhoods Nils Forsberg loved were the ones close to the discontinued ferry port, Nyhavn, home of the shabby beer taverns where a Swedish policeman was allowed to be exactly as intoxicated as he wanted to be.

  We are all in the same space. All the invisible people. Everything that creates a city, with sounds and echoes, time passed and time to come, dreams and hopes, the unborn and those who are vanishing. We are all here. This is a story of guilt and redemption, of hope and despair.

  We are human beings. We live, breathe, love. We are the ones who are going to die. You are the ones who are going to die. We are each others’ mirror images.

  Those who are going to die look around the room, brush their hair, kiss their children, flush the toilet. They are the ones who know they are going to die, who long for death, for the great, soft darkness, the final hot flash, and then that final, last silence. And those who want to live, and who do all they can to stay here, who are frightened of the great darkness surrounding us. We are like each other, like day and night in the same city, alike as only human beings can be. Our story must start right there: in the city, with a description of death—the savage city, if you will. From a distance, and from far above, we might seem like insects, cockroaches, reptiles. We live off of each other. Out in the suburbs lights are coming on, slowly, one window at a time. It is morning, the first day for some, the last day for some, and in between we meet up. The commuter train shoots out between Malmø and Copenhagen, penetrating the morning like a flaming arrow.

  Life.

  All these breaths creating a chain of life, of time. We know we are being eaten by a hunger we can never escape, and yet we pretend we are not touched by it. That everything is as it should be. That time doesn’t count us in, that we are not worried by time. For every breath, for every day that lights up, we move closer and closer, and one day, just like this one, we stand face-to-face with our own destruction. Then what is it all worth? Nothing.

  Death is no stranger who suddenly appears in your room. Death does not pull the curtains aside, revealing an empty backyard. Death does not appear like a shadow that grows darker and then black, like a bruise that deepens in color. Death is just another kind of light.

  It happens that Nils Forsberg thinks this way. That on the other side of this light there may be another kind of light, a darker light which your eyes need time to get used to. On other days, most days, he doesn’t think at all, just wants to disappear, thinks that all that is left for him is to drink himself to death. At the center of the city the day deepens, the morning sings its city song. Everything we have will be t
aken from us, death can come like a thief in the night, he can come like an arrow shot from a distance.

  Life.

  Fragile as the delicate veins in fall leaves, strong as the stubborn pulse, strong as hope, stronger than love.

  The water in the canal is still, translucent, and bottle-green. Every section of town seems to be linked by a bridge. Malmø is a town surrounded by water. The streetlights. Central Station. The taxi lines. The empty moments. Bicycle messengers steal a moment’s rest, between hope and despair. Everything is in movement, the city is breathing and living.

  And here we all are, spinning, hopeless.

  She who has to die this early morning is getting ready, planning the next few hours, trying to remember names, people, and places. She knows the time has come, that it has been here a long time. She quickly brushes her hair, removes a speck of food from between her front teeth. She knows how much she owes, knows she must pay. She cannot free herself of it. Her debt grows with every breath she takes, and yet there’s nothing new in this, she’s used to being hunted, she is prey. She no longer knows what it feels like not to be hunted.

  The withdrawal distorts her thoughts. She’s not able to follow a straight line of thinking. There’s no beaten path she can follow along, or leave behind.

  Debt.

  It’s all about that.

  The debt.

  That she has to pay and cannot do so. She who has to die has tried in vain to settle her debt by offering herself as mule. She said: “I can fix it, I can take it. You know I can handle the pressure.”

  It would be so simple, just a transport through Copenhagen to Hässleholm, but that prospect turned out to be futile as well.

  She had been hoping for it, it had been a straw to cling to, that she could put her debt aside by carrying a kilo of amphetamines from the head supplier.

  She has offered to transport goods from Poland to Sweden—but that’s just as futile. She has, to put it mildly, no credit left in her “trust account.” Istvan is many things, but generous and forgiving he is not. She’s still short four thousand kroner. A piddling amount, really. But every time she’s managed to save up something, it disappears just as fast. There are always new needs. The big problem is that the money runs right through her fingers, that she needs the drugs to be able to work and save up more money, and to do that she needs to use more and more.

  It’s an evil cycle. She’s in the rat race, but unlike the rat, she knows she’s doing it—which of course makes everything worse. She knows there’s neither beginning nor end. She just runs.

  She who must die gets dressed. Thinks of her mother who is still asleep, sees her in her mind’s eye as she lies in her bed, breathing. She who must die cannot this morning help thinking about how much she loves her mother, how she wishes she could give her what she dreams of. A daughter. That she would come back, return from this shadow world. Become alive again. Be a human being, at least for a little while. That’s by now the only wish the aging mother has—to get her daughter back.

  Traffic is still almost nonexistent, but the city keeps changing. Roadwork is going to detour traffic from Exercisgatan during the early-morning hours. According to a report from the traffic department it has something to do with a minor gas repair job. These things happen all the time, everything changes.

  She who must die thinks about yesterday when what she has feared for so long finally happened—a friend from her school years picked her up in the street. She didn’t notice until it was too late.

  Rickard is his name. She remembers him. He always sat at the front of the class raising his hand and sucking up to the teacher. Even then he was an ass, a pig. Rickard. He didn’t recognize her, paid up front for a blowjob without a rubber. She’s almost the only one on Exercisgatan who does it.

  Everyone knows about it. She doesn’t need to advertise her special products. For her it doesn’t mean anything anymore. It isn’t true that there are levels in hell. Everything is equally black and hopeless. After she threw up Richard’s sperm by the cemetery fence, she thought, for the umpteenth time, that it had to stop now. No more! she’d thought. Her eyes had teared and she still felt sick from the stale taste.

  She who must die knows that it’s inescapable, that it must come to an end. Death from her own hand or an accident—it makes no difference, not any longer, she is tired, tired to the core. She looked into the mirror this morning and saw a ghost looking back at her: a skull with a thin film of skin stretched over the bones. She saw the badly healed scars all the way down from her upper arms. She saw the badly healed veins winding across her underarms. She is no longer a human being, she just doesn’t know what she has become. A reptile.

  A cockroach.

  She assumed that’s what she’d become.

  He who this morning will do the work of death is calm and methodical. He doesn’t hurry, his hand never hesitates. He strangles her completely, without effort. He’s not a passionate man, he is calm and calculating. He knows what to do.

  However, it takes longer than he’d expected. She resists—a kind of passive, hopeless resistance. It’s unbearably exciting, and he can’t help letting go of his grip a tiny bit, just so she can take a quick breath, just enough so she cannot scream, but enough oxygen to draw it out for a few more seconds. His pulse speeds up a touch, not much, but enough so that he’s irritated by his own weakness. He finishes his job, his assignment. He’s annoyed about his sudden weakness—that he couldn’t resist the impulse. It all takes just a few minutes. He wishes he could have dragged it out longer.

  The murderer covers up her body with a blanket, not from caring, not because the exposed body tells of the unspeakable—he throws the blanket over her from mere habit. The dead body is then rolled into the backseat of the car; the blanket has a small checkered pattern. He’s reckless. It’s a preposterous thought that he should ever have to succumb to letting his car undergo a criminal technical examination. Although the woman’s body is covered with an abundance of DNA traces, he knows that there are neither trails nor suspicions anywhere, that he’s a free man. He eats when he’s hungry, drinks when he’s thirsty. Now he’s excited in this undefinable way that makes his body shake from inside out. To be like a god! Freedom is pleasurable. He sits still for a few seconds in the car, breathes deeply, thinks of the dead body in back, thinks that he must stay present now, that he can feel the whole world breathe against him, intensely and burning. He’s beginning to change, growing harder, more like an animal. This is what he’s been striving for, to become true to his instinct.

  It takes time before one begins to see the pattern. The various parts do not make a whole, they’re not noticeable, though it’s so obvious—and perhaps it’s for just this reason that the simple becomes the difficult. The solution is so obvious that it becomes banal. We search for more depth, a more complex solution. But it doesn’t exist. Everything has to do with desires, with needs.

  It’s like emerging from a dark basement and being surprised by the bright summer light. You know what you’re going to see, maybe you even feel it, but in the moment itself—just when the world is going to appear—you see nothing. You’re blinded, thrown to the ground, covering your eyes with your hand to protect against the sharp light. This is what truth is like.

  This is the merciless light biblical texts speak of, a truth so penetrating that it’s almost impossible to survive. You must die in order to take part in eternal life. Therefore: better to squint than be blinded, better to be chosen, to be inside, than to be excluded.

  Nils Forsberg wrote in one of his few letters to his former friend Father Pietro, as an answer to why he can no longer believe: I think it has to do with a kind of stinginess, your faith, your feeling of presumptuousness—that there should be an answer, incomprehensible for those of us still living in this world. Yes, you are right, I am a coward. My way is the coward’s way, but this way I only have myself to depend on. He knew he would never send the letter, that it didn’t really matter, and that the mo
st important thing was to put his thoughts down on paper—that writing was a kind of mirror.

  That’s how it was. It was in the writing that he was able to see himself. You think you have a mandate on truth, and through your very faith you make everyone else an exception. I spit on that!

  Father Pietro had for a short time been Nils Forsberg’s father confessor. The aging priest, who’d been exiled to the edge of the world, had been Forsberg’s path into the church, into what he imagined was the world. And then the real world came along and changed everything. The world where death attacked like a splash of ink on a white sheet of paper. Between the inner and the outer world, boundaries were no longer possible.

  Body and spirit.

  The city is Malmø.

  The year is 2008.

  The old year left only senseless tragedies behind, incidents that could just as well have been stopped in time before the wheel of death started rolling.

  Now it’s January. The month when everything stands in the balance. When everything is both too late and too early.

  A series of deaths occur within a very limited time, and within a very limited geographical area.

  Everyone is dumbfounded.

  The general public. The police. The media.

  The cruelty. The meaningless violence. The ominous sense of aggression. It has become like an itch that can never be stilled.

  The press is full of meaningless speculations, not the least of which are supported by Alexander Hofman’s inflammatory editorials. There’s a rising sense of anxiety that always sets in when weaker groups become even weaker. Everything rolls along, takes on a life of its own. There’s a small part of the larger picture which at first you cannot see, a pattern not decodable at first. The light of truth is blinding, impossible to grasp.