He asked the secretaries to set their stacks of folders on either end of the desk. “Do I happen to see a twinkle in your eye, or do you always look so fantastic, Lis?” he asked the blonde.
The brunette gave her colleague a look that could have made even Einstein feel like a fool. It had probably been a long time since she herself had been the recipient of such a remark.
“Carl, dear,” said the fair-haired Lis, as she always did. “The twinkle in my eye is reserved for my husband and children. When are you going to accept that?”
“I’ll accept it the day the light vanishes and eternal darkness swallows me up along with the rest of the earth,” he replied, not exactly understating his case.
Even before the two secretaries had turned down the corridor and headed for the stairs, the brunette was voicing her indignation.
For the first couple of hours Carl didn’t even glance at the case files. But he did muster the energy to count the folders; that was a form of work, after all. There were at least forty, but he didn’t open any of them. Plenty of time for that. At least another twenty years before retirement, he figured, as he played a couple more games of Spider Solitaire. If he won the next game, he’d consider taking a look at the pile of folders on his right.
After he made his way through at least two dozen games, his cell phone rang. He looked at the display but didn’t recognize the number: 3545-and-something. It was a Copenhagen number.
“Yeah,” he said, expecting to hear Vigga’s overwrought voice. She was always able to find some sympathetic soul to lend her a cell phone. “Get your own phone, Mum!” Jesper was always saying. “It’s fucking annoying that I have to call your neighbors to get hold of you.”
“Yes, hello,” said the voice, and it sounded nothing like Vigga. “This is Birte Martinsen. I’m a psychologist at the Clinic for Spinal Cord Injuries. I’m just ringing to inform you that when one of the assistant nurses gave Hardy Henningsen some water this morning, he tried to suck it down into his lungs. He’s OK, but very depressed, and he’s been asking for you. Could you possibly come and visit? I think it would help him.”
Carl was allowed to be alone in the room with Hardy, even though the psychologist clearly would have liked to listen in on their conversation.
“So, did you just get sick and tired of it all, old boy?” he said, taking Hardy’s hand. There was a tremor of life in it. Carl had noticed that before. Right now the tips of his middle and index fingers curled slightly, as if they wanted to beckon Carl closer.
“What is it, Hardy?” he said, bending his face down to his colleague’s.
“Kill me, Carl,” he whispered.
Carl pulled away and looked him right in the eye. His tall partner had the bluest eyes in the world, and at that moment they were filled with sorrow and doubt and an urgent plea.
“For God’s sake, Hardy,” he whispered. “You know I can’t do that. You need to get back on your feet. You need to get up and walk again. You’ve got a son who wants his father home. Don’t you realize that, Hardy?”
“He’s twenty years old. He’ll be fine,” whispered Hardy.
That was just like him. He was perfectly lucid. And Hardy meant what he said.
“I can’t do it, Hardy. You’re going to have to tough it out. You’re going to get well.”
“I’m paralyzed, and that’s how I’m going to stay. They gave me the prognosis today. No chance of recovery. Not a chance in hell.”
“I imagine that Hardy Henningsen probably asked you to help him take his own life,” said the psychologist, inviting Carl’s confidence. Her professional demeanor required no reply. She was convinced she was right. She’d seen it before.
“No, he didn’t!”
“Oh really? I was positive he would.”
“Hardy? No, that wasn’t what he wanted.”
“I’d be most interested to hear what he did say to you, if you wouldn’t mind telling me.”
“I could do that.” Carl pursed his lips and looked out the window at Havnevejen. Not a soul in sight. Damned strange.
“But you’re not going to?”
“It would make you blush if you heard what he said. I can’t repeat something like that to a lady.”
“You could try.”
“I don’t think so.”
9. 2002
Merete had often heard about
the little café on Nansengade called Bankeråt, with the strange, stuffed animals, but until that evening she had never been inside.
There, amid the buzz of conversation, she was welcomed with a warm smile and a glass of ice-cold white wine. The evening was off to a promising start.
She had just finished saying that she would be going to Berlin with her brother on the following weekend. That they made the trip once a year, and they’d be staying close to the Zoo.
Then her cell phone rang. “Uffe was really upset,” the home help told her.
For a moment Merete sat motionless, her eyes closed, swallowing the bitter pill of what she’d just heard. It wasn’t often that she allowed herself to go out on a date. Why did he have to ruin things?
In spite of the slippery roads she made it home in less than an hour.
Uffe had been shaking and crying almost all evening. That’s what happened occasionally if Merete didn’t come home at the usual time. Uffe didn’t communicate in words, so it could be difficult to decipher what was going on with him. Sometimes it even felt like nobody was there, inside his body. But that wasn’t true at all. Uffe was very much present.
Unfortunately, the home help was clearly distressed. Merete knew she wouldn’t be able to count on her again.
Not until Merete persuaded Uffe to come upstairs to the bedroom and put on his beloved baseball cap did he stop crying, but he was still upset. His eyes looked worried. She tried to calm him down further by describing all the people in the restaurant and the peculiar stuffed animals mounted on the walls. She recounted everything she’d done and thought during the day, and she could see how her words began to soothe him. It was what she had always done in similar situations, ever since he was ten or eleven. Whenever Uffe cried, the sobs came from deep in his subconscious. At those moments, the past and the present became linked inside Uffe. As if he remembered his life before the accident, back when he was a perfectly normal boy. No, that wasn’t right. Not normal. Back then he was an extraordinary boy with a brilliant mind filled with fabulous ideas, and excellent prospects for the future. He’d been an amazing boy. And then came the accident.
For the next couple of days Merete was tremendously busy. And even though her thoughts had a tendency to drift away much of the time, there was no one else who could do her work for her. She arrived at the office at six each morning, and after a hard day she would race along the highway to make it home by six in the evening. Not much time to sort everything out.
So it did nothing to improve her concentration when she found a big bouquet of flowers on her desk.
Her secretary was obviously annoyed. She came from the Danish Association of Lawyers and Economists, where people were evidently much better at drawing the line between work and their personal life. If Marianne had still been Merete’s secretary, she would have swooned and hovered around the flowers as if they were the crown jewels.
No, Merete couldn’t expect much support from this new secretary in terms of personal matters, but maybe that was for the best.
The following day she got a valentine telegram from TelegramsOnline. It was the first valentine card she’d ever received in her life, but it didn’t really feel right since it was almost two weeks past February fourteenth. Pictured on the front was a pair of lips and the words “Love & Kisses for Merete.” Her secretary looked indignant when she handed it over.
Inside the telegram it said: “Need to talk to you!”
She sat there for a moment, shaking her head as she stared at the lips.
Then her thoughts shifted back to the evening at the Café Bankeråt. Even though the memory stirred up a wonderful feeling inside her, she knew this just wasn’t going to work. The only thing to do was to put a stop to the situation before anything really developed.
She spent some time formulating what she wanted to say, then punched in his number and waited for voicemail to pick up.
“Hi, this is Merete,” she said lightly. “I’ve been giving things a lot of thought, but it’s just no good. My work and my brother make too many demands on me, and I don’t think that’s ever going to change. I’m really sorry. Please forgive me!”
Then she picked up her appointment diary from the desk and crossed out his number in the phone section.
At that moment her secretary came in and stopped abruptly in front of the desk.
When Merete lifted her head, she saw the woman smiling in a way that she’d never seen before.
He was standing coatless outside on the steps in the courtyard of the parliament building, waiting. It was bitterly cold, and the color of his face was not healthy. In spite of the greenhouse effect, February weather was not conducive to spending much time outdoors. He gave Merete a pleading look and didn’t see the press photographer who had just come through the gate from the palace square.
She tried to pull him toward the courtyard entrance, but he was too big and too desperate.
“Merete,” he said, putting his hands on her shoulders. “Don’t do this. I’m totally devastated.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. She saw the sudden change in his expression. There it was again, that deep, insinuating look in his eyes that made her uneasy.
Behind him the press photographer had raised his camera to his cheek. Damn it. If there was one thing she didn’t need right now it was a tabloid photographer taking their picture.
“I’m afraid I can’t help you!” she shouted and ran toward her car. “It’s just not possible.”
Uffe had looked at her with wonderment when she started to cry as they ate dinner, but it didn’t really affect him. He lifted his spoon as slowly as he always did and smiled every time he swallowed a mouthful. His eyes were fixed on her lips, but he remained far away.
“Damn it!” she sobbed, slamming her fist on the table and looking at Uffe with bitterness and frustration etched deep in her soul. Recently that feeling had begun to come over her more and more often. Unfortunately.
She awoke with the dream burned into her consciousness. So vivid, so cherished, so terrible.
That day had begun with a wonderful morning. A slight frost and a thin layer of snow, just enough to enhance the holiday season atmosphere. They were all so full of life. Merete was sixteen, Uffe thirteen. Her father and mother had spent a night together that made them cast dreamy glances at each other from the moment they loaded the car with packages until the moment it all ended. Christmas Eve morning — what an oddly linked and joyous chain of words that was. So filled with promise. Uffe had talked about getting a compact disc player; it was the last time in his life that he expressed any specific sort of wish.
Then they took off. They were happy, and she and Uffe were laughing. Everyone was expecting them at their destination.
Uffe had given her a shove in the backseat. He was more than forty pounds lighter than his sister, but as pushy as a wild little puppy, diving in among the rest of the litter to suckle. Merete shoved him back, taking off her Peruvian cap to use it to bat him on the head. It was then that things got out of hand.
As the car went around a curve in the woods, Uffe hit her again, and Merete grabbed hold of her brother to force him back onto the seat. He kicked and howled and shrieked with laughter, and Merete pushed him down harder. At that instant, as her father chuckled and reached back his hand to give them both a swat, Merete and Uffe looked up. Their car was in the middle of overtaking another vehicle. The red Ford Sierra right next to them had a gray spattering of salt on its side doors. A man and woman in their forties were sitting in front, staring straight ahead. On the backseat sat a boy and a girl, just like them, and Uffe and Merete smiled at the pair. The boy looked like he was a couple of years younger than Merete; his hair was cut short. He caught her gleeful glance as she knocked her father’s arm aside and she laughed back at him, not noticing her father had lost control of the car until the boy’s expression suddenly changed in the light flickering through the spruce trees. For a second the boy’s terrified blue eyes were riveted on hers, and then he was gone.
The sound of metal grinding against metal coincided with the shattering of the side windows on the other vehicle. The children sitting on the backseat fell over just as Uffe toppled against Merete. Behind her, glass was breaking, and in front of her the windshield was covered by dark shapes bumping against each other. She couldn’t tell whether it was their car or the other vehicle that made the trees along the edge of the road come toppling down, but by then Uffe’s body had twisted around and he was about to be strangled by the seat belt. Then came a deafening crash, first from the other car, then from theirs. The blood on the upholstery and front windshield was mixed with dirt and snow from the forest floor, and a tree branch pierced the calf of Merete’s leg. A broken tree trunk rammed the bottom of the vehicle and tossed them up in the air for a moment. The crash when they landed with the nose of the car on the road merged with the screeching sound of the Ford Sierra knocking over a tree. Then their car flipped over with a jolt and slid along on its side, into the thickets. Uffe’s arms were sticking up in the air, and his legs were pressed against the back of their mother’s seat, which had been wrenched from the floor. At no time did Merete see her mother or father. She saw only Uffe.
She woke with her heart pounding so hard in her chest that it hurt. She was ice-cold and clammy with sweat.