Copenhagen Noir

by Bo Tao Michaelis

  I don’t know why he keeps going on about what I said. He doesn’t usually do that. But I don’t dare say anything more. Not after yesterday. Instead I bend over, and without looking too closely at her messed-up face I grab the blanket and wrap it around her head. Close and tight. I don’t want to take chances.

  “What are you doing?” Kris asks. Again, that nice and easy voice.

  “I’m covering her up. He doesn’t have to get as far as taking his dick out or anything. We just need to get him, right? It doesn’t really matter about her. If she lays here much longer, the crows will eat her. If we get the guy, the police or their fucking CSI team or whatever will take care of the rest. Okay? You’ll still get to be the hero.”

  Kris doesn’t answer, and I take that to mean it’s okay. I feel him staring at me while I wrap the blanket around her. The blanket isn’t nearly big enough, and after I’ve wrapped her head up I notice her legs sticking out from the knees down. I think about starting over, but I leave her like she is. Protecting her head is the most important thing right now. Protect the open wounds. Crows’ beaks aren’t strong enough to rip holes in skin. Only eagles and vultures and that kind of bird can. Crows need an open wound. Or an eye.

  I take three steps away and throw up. Kris laughs at me. I squat down, lean against the barrier. Stay sitting, stare up at the sky. At the black spots. They disappear after a while. A train goes by. We hide behind the barrier. The slope is slippery. I kick the branch away. The one I landed on yesterday. Kris laughs again. Something is wrong about this. Something deeply, deeply wrong. I don’t say anything. We wait. We listen. Trains pass by. Cars drive along down on the road. Buses. Kris goes for food. He hands me a burger. I don’t eat it. I’m not hungry. I wait and listen. Stay crouched down with the burger in my hands. Kris takes a look. It’s getting dark, getting dark fast. I did a good job with the blanket. The crows don’t come back. The guy doesn’t either.

  I go home. Kris stays behind. “See you tomorrow,” he says. “Get a good night’s sleep and come back ready to go.” The smell sticks to me. My clothes. My hair, my skin. I breathe through my mouth, but I can taste it on my tongue.

  I don’t eat dinner. Take a long bath, but the smell is still there. I go right to bed. I see her half-eaten eyes in the dark. There is something deeply, deeply wrong here.

  I breathe icy air, and it hurts all the way inside my chest, but I keep going. I don’t know if anyone at home saw me run out, and I don’t care either. I run, slip on the ice a few times, fall, and brush myself off with my hands. It hurts, but it’s not that bad.

  I’m thinking: crows and their fucking beaks, they can’t do what eagles and vultures can, but what about foxes? What about fucking foxes and their teeth?

  From where I live it’s easiest to get up on the tracks from Vigerslev Allé. From the station. There’s nobody on the street this time of night anyway. I fly up the steps, onto the platform, and down to the tracks.

  There. Right there. I see two, maybe three, before I trip over a crosstie. They look up at me. “Hey, goddamnit!” I throw a rock. They run off, flee. I go down to the girl. They’ve been eating her.

  They’ve been eating her. Her foot. Feet. They’ve eaten her feet. Her legs. All the way up to her thighs. Big chunks of meat bitten off. I start to cry. I can’t help it. The tears stream out.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “Sorry, I didn’t know. I got here as fast as I could. I’m sorry, sorry.” I wrap the blanket around her legs as tightly as I can. Just like I did with her head yesterday.

  The foxes, they’re still here. They’re waiting at a distance, quiet. They’re staring at us. At me and the girl. What should I do? I realize I left my phone at home. I can’t leave her here. The foxes will be back on her as soon as I leave.

  “Hey,” I say. “We can’t stay sitting out here.” The blanket is wrapped tight around her. It’s cold and wet and heavy, and my fingers hurt, but I can’t stop now. I can’t leave her here. “You’re safe now,” I say, and lift her up on my shoulder. “Nothing’s going to happen to you. Not anymore. I’m going to take care of you.”

  At first it’s surprisingly easy to carry her, but slowly I feel the weight of her dead body. The first time I slip on a crosstie she almost falls. I can’t carry her all the way to the street. It’s too far. But I can’t leave her here, either.

  The community gardens, the cottages. There’s a hole in the fence there somewhere, I know there is.

  The foxes keep their distance. More have shown up, but they stay away. I slip on the slope, fall backward, and hit my head on the barrier. Lose her when I fall. I look around. She’s lying at the bottom of the slope, by the fence. I crawl down to her on all fours. No more falling. If something happens to me, who will save the girl?

  I manage to get her through the hole in the fence and carry her down a gravel path, alongside hedges and past garden gates. Which cottage is it? The little green one. I look back at the slope to judge just where we are. A fox stands there staring at us. Fucking shitty animals.

  I turn around. The cottage must be right along here on the left. Up a wide garden walk. I grab the doorknob. Locked. Try the potted plants. One after the other. At first I put them back carefully, but it gets to be too difficult with the girl on my shoulder. So I kick the pots over with my foot, one by one. Finally. The key. It’s under the fifth or sixth one. I unlock the door and glance back quickly. No one in sight. Nobody has followed us. No foxes. No sex murderer.

  I carry the girl inside and close the door behind us. Lay her on a small sofa, farthest back in the room to the left. I sit on the floor beside her. “I just need to rest a little,” I say, to the air. “I just need to catch my breath, then I’ll go out and call the police. I just need a break.”

  I open my eyes and immediately begin to shiver. The cottage is like ice. It’s getting light outside. I must have slept, I feel stiff all over. I stand up slowly and look at the girl on the sofa. She’s lying there like some kind of gift, wrapped up tightly in a much-too-short blanket. The bite marks on her legs stand out. They’ve taken quite a bit of her calves.

  I turn and step over to the door. Through the window I see Kris standing up on the slope, looking out over the community gardens. No doubt about it, he’s looking for us. I open the door, but he’s already disappeared again behind the noise barrier. I run down the walk. My legs hurt. Through the hole in the fence and up the slope. I run around the barrier. And smack into Kris.

  I fall over. He looks at me for a moment, puzzled, then recognizes me. “She’s gone. He’s been here and took her.” I can see he’s been crying.

  “No. She’s down in the community gardens,” I say, getting back to my feet.

  “You moved her?”

  “Yeah, the foxes—”

  “You moved her. How are we going to catch him now?”

  “Kris, it’s too late. He’s not coming back anymore.”

  He takes a step closer. His fists are clenched, and he nearly snarls at me. “How are we going to catch him now? How are we going to—” He doesn’t finish his sentence. Instead he attacks me. I hit the ground hard, it knocks the breath out of me. He straddles me and shakes me by the collar.

  “We were supposed to wait for him!” he screams. “That was the deal we made. Don’t you remember?”

  I’m hurting. Really bad. All over my body. My legs. My hands. My head. I can’t take anymore. I moan: “She’s down in the house. She’s safe.” But he can’t hear me. He’s crying, it’s flooding out of him, his words come in short bursts. How I’d promised that the murderer would show up again, that we would be heroes. Tears drip down on my face, and I try to push him away. His hands press down on my throat.

  Kris, stop!

  Not a sound gets past my lips. I try to push him off but he’s way too heavy. My hands reach around for something, anything. I get hold of a rock and hit him with it, but it glances off his arm and gets knocked out of my hand.

  I can’t breathe.

  My finger
s close around something long. A handle. The hammer. The one I lost that first day. It’s heavy, but I lift it and swing it at Kris. Hit him in the temple.

  Kris loosens his grip. He looks at me through his tears, surprised.

  I swing at him once more, hit the same spot, harder this time. He lets go and holds his temple, gapes at me. He crawls away.

  “Are you okay?” I gasp. Cough, spit mucus out.

  “We just had to wait one more day,” I hear him say as he moves off on his hands and knees. “Just one more day, he’s on his way now, for sure.”

  Slowly I get to my feet, the hammer in one hand, rubbing my throat with the other.

  “He’s coming,” he murmurs, and sits back against the barrier. “He’s coming. Wait and see. He’s coming.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Okay, goddamnit. We’ll wait for him. I’ve had enough of your goddamn shit, but okay. We’ll wait for him. We’ll wait till afternoon, then we call the police. Okay?”

  Kris nods. He’s still holding a hand against his temple. “Yeah. He’s coming. Just wait.”

  I walk over and sit beside Kris, lean against the barrier. Even though it’s cold, it feels nice to rest. I’ve been on the go for too long. Too tired right now to continue. I lift the hammer and dry the blood and hair off on my pants, and then we start waiting for the man.

  THE GREAT ACTOR

  BY BENN Q. HOLM

  Frederiksberg Allé

  I walked down the stairs. It was over. Utterly and completely over. I was tired. The red carpet muffled the sound of my footsteps. He lived on the fourth floor, and I finally made it all the way down and out to the portal, dark and cold as a sepulchre. You could hear the wind whistling outside on Frederiksberg Allé.

  The old allé was completely deserted, it was four, four-thirty in the morning. I walked through the ironlike cold under the naked trees, past the cars covered with frost, got in the Mercedes, grabbed the thermos from the glove compartment. Dregs of lukewarm coffee with a few drops of aquavit. What the hell, I could still feel the shots of whiskey. I fished a cigarette out of his pack, only two left, shit. I could smoke a whole tobacco farm, drink an entire barroom. My hands shook, my body. The brief, blazing explosion of fire and light, smoke deep in my lungs. Soon I’ll start the car, disappear.

  Normally I wouldn’t dream of taking a shift on that particular Sunday in February, when the film industry holds its big annual awards program. But I was broke, and several of the other drivers were down with the flu. All evening I had avoided the area around Vesterport Station and the Imperial Theater, stayed near the airport. Fortune smiled upon me: I picked up an elderly suntanned couple just in from the Grand Canaries, dropped them off in Helsingør, about as far from the awards gala as I could get. After I’d driven for over nine hours, my back ached, and it was a little past midnight when I dropped two stewed Chinese off at the SAS Hotel. Time to call it a day, at last. The red, castlelike main station, Hovedbanegård, hugged itself behind the sooted moat of railway cutting. It was as if the city was coated with a thin membrane of gray-white frost; a few frozen souls hurried by. The neon ads blinked uselessly. In twenty minutes I would be back home in Rødovre, popping open a beer, smoking a cigarette, watching some TV. I’d go to bed, sleep. I switched the meter off and felt deeply relieved.

  Because of some late-night streetwork on Vesterbrogade I spotted too late, I had to turn up Trommesalen. Suddenly I was perilously close to Imperial. Damn. And sure enough: the rest of the city was empty, but here the slick sidewalks looked like a veritable penguin march on inland ice. The big party had just ended. Cars and people shot out. Couples in evening dress waved in the bitter cold; had my taxi been stuffed with customers, with a pink elephant tied to the top, they would have hailed me anyway, that’s how it goes. I ignored the no-left-turn sign, found a nonexistent gap in the traffic, bounded over an island, and swung past the crowded slipstream, away from Imperial, continuing at a snail’s pace past Hotel Scandic, which the old Sheraton was now called, and there in the windswept space between the concrete high-rise and Sct. Jørgens Lake, I saw him.

  Involuntarily I slowed down even more, my curiosity simply overwhelmed me. Was it really him? Erik Rützou himself, the pompous ass? My archenemy. Yes, it was.

  He walked slightly stooped, fighting off the gale that tugged open his black overcoat, exposing his tux underneath. It looked as if he was poling his way forward in a boat. The moment he caught sight of my taxi he eagerly began flagging me. A long whitish thingy shimmered at the end of his raised arm; a torch, it looked like, but it had to be a Bodil statuette. It could hardly be less, in Erik Rützou’s case. I cursed the streetwork, my curiosity, and was about to floor it when a bicycler without lights swung out on the street. Against my will I stomped on the brakes.

  Knock-knock.

  Rützou pounded on the window, chalk-white knuckles, a cuff link blinked, he stared inside the taxi, his clenched fist reminding me of a baby’s skull impatiently banging the glass; his slight overbite, which in some odd way served only to reinforce his beautiful, aristocratic face, and his black overcoat made him look like a drunken Count Dracula. Our eyes met, and time stood still. Erik Rützou’s gaze wandered, but he didn’t seem surprised to see me. In fact, he showed no sign of recognizing me. All he showed was that during the course of the evening he had consumed a considerable amount of alcohol, which in all likelihood he hadn’t been obliged to pay for. Champagne and tall drinks in steady streams, served by stunning, blue-eyed blondes. He had sat there in the enormous warm-hearted movie theater in one of the first rows, together with the other luminaries from the film’s cast and their spouses or “good friends,” clips from the nominees had been shown, the entire theater had applauded, the entire theater had held its collective breath while some highly paid stand-up comic convincingly fumbled with the envelope and finally screamed “ERIK RÜTZOU!!” and an avalanche of enthusiastic applause rang throughout the theater, Scandinavia’s largest, it felt as if the roof lifted like some gigantic manhole cover and he rose in feigned surprise, walked up on stage, gave a brief, incisive thank-you speech with a few jokes and wisecracks worked in, thanked the director and the rest of the crew, thanked his old private tutor who was sitting up in heaven drinking port, walked down off the stage, was cheek-kissed along the way by divine women and hugged by male colleagues, and sat down, beaming. Some people are simply born lucky.

  All these stupid thoughts led to my not activating the central lock—he had already flung the door open, sunk down in the passenger seat, and said: “Frederiksberg Allé.”

  I mumbled lamely: “I’m not working.”

  “It will only take five minutes,” he growled arrogantly. “Are you aware of just how goddamn cold it is!? We’ll do it off the meter.”

  A car behind me honked. I took off automatically, as if I was in a trance, and wheeled past the thick cylinders of the Planetarium.

  Erik Rützou sat preoccupied, fingering his Bodil, presumably received for Best Male Actor. During the Christmas season the entire metropolitan area had been plastered with billboards and posters for the film. We hadn’t seen each other for at least fifteen years, maybe more—when time starts flying nothing can stop it—but I saw him constantly: on TV, on the front pages. On the side of a bus at a red light somewhere. He looked like himself, apparently I didn’t. Otherwise he would have recognized me immediately. I mean, we’d acted together, goddamnit. Had been in the same circles for a while.

  We drove in silence, or so I thought, but then, through the buzz of my humiliation, I realized that Rützou was sitting there humming. Was he completely sloshed?

  Down narrow Værnedamsvej to Osbornehjørnet and the knife-sharp border of Vesterbro, then I blasted up majestic Frederiksberg Allé as if my ass was on fire, Rützou still saying nothing, just humming low, the heavy German cab steamrolling the paving stones on Skt. Thomas Plads, the large, round, eerily deserted square. The grand old buildings slumbered, unworried behind the double row of lindens and the all�
�’s outer lanes, crowded with parked cars. We passed Café Promenaden, where I hadn’t dared show my face for years; it was still illuminated inside with a yellowish light, a few customers hanging on the bar, I noticed thirstily, and then we were already there: Rützou silently pointed out his destination. I turned and slowly rolled down the narrow lane between the broad sidewalk and the allé itself. We had just glanced off the corner of Vesterbro and all of its pushers, kebab shops, rowdy late-night bars, and porn shops: here, everything radiated peace and quiet and safety. Cars were bigger in this neighborhood, the apartments too, not to mention the gigantic old villas on the side streets, hidden behind high walls. But it was also a lie. A myth. Because suddenly you’d see auto garages, dreary apartment buildings. And though I tried to appear calm and unaffected by the situation, I was a smoldering, gloomy apartment building myself, an ocean of domestic disturbances. I was a lie too. Because I was scared. Scared, yes. Not of him, but of myself.

  Take it easy, Klaus, I told myself, it will be over in a few moments, you’re not going to prison for murder here, you’ll drive home to Rødovre and drink a beer, maybe two, have a goodnight smoke, maybe two, and then you’ll go to bed. And if you can’t sleep, no matter how tired and burned out you are, you’ll take a sleeping pill, maybe two. If that doesn’t help, you’ll put on a movie, or call for some company. Most of all I wanted to sleep, drive out into a new day tomorrow evening. The only thing I was any good at. Driving. Up and down deserted roads, snaking in and out of traffic jams, flying across side streets while blind-drunk students disgorged alcohol in the backseat, drive and drive, pick people up, drive far and long, through the city, day after day, but mostly at night. I had become a night person, and I liked winters, the long dense dark. Autumn was my spring, the sublime overture of darkness.

  Meanwhile, Rützou had begun frisking himself, hesitatingly, halfheartedly. The bum. Turned his pockets inside out, but all he found was a silver Dunhill lighter and a small set of keys. The damp, well-tailored smile almost turned serious. He was and is hopeless. He was and is a great performer. Our greatest living actor, according to the papers I tried not to read.