Copenhagen Noir (7 page)

With his free hand the man grabs Maria’s neck, jerks her throat around a few times. She makes a half-choked sound, as if she’s about to throw up.

More fumbling with the camera, he sets it back on the tripod, zooms in so it’s filming the sofa.

Then he steps into the picture. Still only his upper body and part of his legs.

The condom he puts on is pink. It’s hard to hear what he’s saying but it sounds like:
Doggy.

Maria kneels on the edge of the sofa, sticks her ass in the air. He lowers himself onto her. First time we see his face. A half profile, turned away from the camera. He has light-colored, curly hair. He’s thin, the way you’re thin if you’re badly fed as a child.

“I think …” Nabil says, but doesn’t finish the sentence.

The guy’s ass moves up and down. Dimples.

She says: Fuck me.

She says: Fuck me, it’s so good when you fuck me.

She says: Give me your cock, give me your big cock. Oh God.

She moans. An artificial moan. One she’s heard in other porno films and she’s imitating.

That’s how horny sounds.

“I’ve seen him before,” Nabil says.

The man on the screen turns Maria around on the sofa. Bends her legs backward as if she were a folding chair. Her head is lying on the sofa’s arm, feet next to her ears. He presses his hands into the hollows of her knees and starts banging away. She still moans, tries to sound horny, but it’s getting harder and harder for her to make it sound natural. Now more scream than moan.

He holds his hand over her mouth. “Be quiet,” he says. “I have neighbors.”

“Almost sure I’ve seen him,” Nabil says.

I think we’re all shocked when the guy on the screen hits Maria the first time. A hard smack with the back of his hand that leaves a big red mark on her cheek. She looks up at him, surprised. Then she tries to smile again. As if it was kinky, something she liked. “You want punished?” he asks. “You want punished?”

“Yes,” she says. “Yes, yes, yes.”

The next few slaps aren’t as hard as the first one. Each time she tries to moan and cry out,
Yes.

Then he starts using his fists.

I turn off the sound. Had hoped that these images would be easier to watch without sound. That they would be less real. Like old film, silent film. But it makes no difference.

It’s still Maria lying on the sofa. The man on top of her is punching her in the side, in the ribs. Several times in the stomach while he holds her by the throat so she can’t straighten up. Meanwhile his cock is still driving in and out of her.

He looks over at the camera a few times. Like to make sure it’s still taping. That it’s picking up everything he’s doing.

“I know I’ve seen him before.” Nabil is mostly talking to himself. The man on the screen slams a fist into Maria’s mouth. Her lip splits.

“I can’t take this anymore.” Christian is holding his hand over his mouth, the words slip out between his fingers. “You’ll have to watch the rest of it. You
have
to watch the rest of it, watch everything he does to her. And turn the volume up. I want to hear what he said. Get all of it.”

Christian walks out into the hallway. I turn the volume up when he’s out of the room.

On the screen the guy is covering Maria’s nose and mouth. She’s fighting off his hands. He lets go, and when she gasps for air he punches her in the side. It should stop now. But it doesn’t. He keeps going. It goes on and on. It gets rougher. Her eyes start to lose focus.

He slugs her a few more times, then he pulls out and gets up.

I hear a lighter somewhere off screen, a cigarette being lit. Then his naked feet on the hallway floor. He pisses long and hard, a small waterfall the camera’s mike captures. Maria is lying just like he left her. The girl on the sofa, I say to myself, just a girl on the sofa. She could be dead. Then an arm moves. The girl’s arm. Slowly she turns on her side. Stands up with great difficulty. Hobbles a half-step before she falls off screen, lying somewhere below the camera. The camera films an empty sofa and a framed poster on the wall above. Two dolphins jumping out of the water, the full moon is so big that their snouts almost seem to touch it. Then Maria comes back in the picture. Her head hangs down halfway to her chest, she’s sobbing very weakly. Falters a few steps forward on shaky legs. The sound of a toilet flushing. His naked feet on the hallway floor. Maria stops. Lifts her head just a little, eyes staring at a spot behind the camera, the doorway. It feels like minutes, not seconds. Her staring, the feet approaching. Then the sound of a cell phone. And the feet walk away again. Out into the kitchen, I’m guessing. He says hi, hey, how you doing. His voice cuts through clearly. First they talk soccer. A Brøndby match that didn’t go exactly the way it should have.

Maria tries to get into the red dress. One of her hands is useless.

“I’m working,” the guy says from out in the kitchen, and laughs loudly. “No,” he says. “It’s going to be one of the rough ones. Nobody buys the soft stuff anymore.”

Maria goes off screen. She’s gone a few moments. The sound of the man from the kitchen, he’s still laughing. Then we see the red dress close up, her arm rising, reaching toward the camera. The picture goes black. She’s taken the tape.

How she got past him and down the stairs, I don’t know. But after she reached the street he probably didn’t try to catch up with her. She looked too beat up. It would look like a rape, still in progress. And he wouldn’t have known she had the tape. So he’d let her go. All they’d been doing was making
one of the rough ones.

Nabil covers his mouth. “I’ve seen him before,” he says. He makes a face, to concentrate. An escape from the images on the screen. Then he snaps his fingers.

“I’ve seen him with Ali’s little brother. Down at Nørrebro City Center.” Nabil pulls out his cell phone, makes a few calls. Speaks half Arabic, half Danish. His voice switches between sounding chummy, they laugh together, and a little bit menacing. Our time is over. That time when we were the boys on Swallow Street. The boys. The big shots. But even now, nobody fucks with Nabil.

He puts the phone back in his pocket.

“I know where he lives.”

Christian is back in the room again. His eyes scare me.

“Let’s do it,” he says.

“Let’s go over to one of my friends’ first,” Nabil says. “He’s got some things lying around.”

I know what he means.

I had actually thought I would just follow along. Do what had to be done. But no more than that. I’m the one, though, who bends over and pulls the toolbox out of the closet. Opens it on the workbench, finds a sports bag. The one thing I learned in prison was to make sure I’d never return. Three young men, stopped in the middle of the night, the trunk filled with baseball bats, they spend the night in jail. And with my record I would be back in prison.

But a hammer, a wrench, a large screwdriver, and a pair of hobby knives, they’re all tools. Even if you’ve just finished doing time for a violent crime, the police can’t do shit. They have to let you drive away. I lifted weights with a man who always kept a set of golf clubs in his car. No balls, just the clubs.

We’re out riding again. The boys from the Bird. Even though we have the streets to ourselves, rainy November streets, I stay under the speed limit.

It was on a night like this that the police caught me. Almost four years ago. I tried to run, but when a big policeman from Jutland cuffed me, it was a relief. I knew it would happen. It had begun a year earlier and it had to end, one way or another.

While everyone else went into job training or the military or found girlfriends who wanted to go to Ikea and buy coffee tables you assemble yourself, and many of them began talking about home entertainment systems with large, flat screens and surround sound, so they could hold each others’ hands and watch
I, Robot
, I became a dedicated amphetamine abuser. A few months that came back to me in flashes as the indictment was being read. Like emptying the minibar in a hotel room and waking up hung over, then looking at the price list on top of the television.

Nabil enrolled in several areas of training at vo-tech schools, but always stopped after a short while. He talked about becoming a driving instructor. Next time I saw him he wanted to start up a cleaning service.

As quickly as Christian became part of the neighborhood, became one of the natives, he pulled out just as fast. He moved away, went to school. The last I heard he was about to become an auditor or bookkeeper or economist. Something with numbers and lots of money. When I met him he was wearing a polo shirt with a Gucci bag over his shoulder.

Now we’re in the car together. Our reunion.

Nabil guides us. Down this street, make a right ahead. Otherwise no one speaks.

We’re still in Northwest, close to Emdrup. “Here it is,” Nabil says, and points to a redbrick building. I drive by, park the car on the first side street. We get out. Everything happens so slowly, infinitely slowly. Like underwater. Three men, one with a sports bag in his hand. They walk down the street, come to a door. Slowly, slowly. There’s no intercom, one of them opens the door, and they continue up the stairs. So slowly, three men. Though I’m one of them, I’m watching from the outside. Feet climbing the stairway.

Nabil presses the buzzer.

If I hadn’t answered my phone I would be lying on the sofa right now. I would be asleep in front of the film I’d rented, a few empty beer bottles on the coffee table. Tomorrow I’d have woken up, watched the rest of the film while eating breakfast, fed my two birds, and went to work.

The door opens. I recognize him from the video, a sunkenchested young man in a T-shirt and jogging pants. When he sees us he tries to slam the door. He doesn’t stand a chance, the door rams his head. He stumbles back a few steps.

Then I see the knife in his hand. It must have been there in the hall, on the little table under the mirror, ready in case. He smiles for a moment, raises the knife. Then it happens. I wake up. No longer underwater, I feel the blood in my veins again. The world is suddenly hard and sharp. I can feel my hands, feel my legs, feel the air flowing in my nostrils and filling my lungs. I toss the sports bag full of tools in his face. Before he hits the floor Nabil has started hitting him. I was never hooked on amphetamines. At least not only. This was what I needed. What I was trying to snort up, to no avail. Now, in this moment, I know it. When I hear Christian close the door behind us, and we drag the guy through the hall and into the living room.

We’re the boys from the block again. The boys from the high-rise on Swallow Street. We’re together again.

I don’t know how long we keep at it. Not just an hour, a lot longer. With the stereo turned way up. We sweat, we laugh. I lose my sense of time. Remember only short flashes. Postcards of violence. One where I’ve raised the hammer above my head. One where I hold him and Christian sticks the handle of the screwdriver down his throat. One where Nabil jerks the guy’s pants down and reaches for the monkey wrench.

We might have been easier on him, stopped earlier, if the room hadn’t reminded us of the images from the video.

At some point he starts screaming. Screaming so loudly that he drowns out the stereo. This is after we’ve got his pants off. Which wasn’t easy, because he kept twisting, kicking. Nabil goes into the bedroom. He’s laughing when he comes back out. He’s holding a gag, a pink rubber ball hanging by two leather strings. In it goes, into the guy’s mouth. “One of the rough ones!” Christian yells, while he holds him by the throat. “This here is going to be one of the rough ones!”