The Seventh Child (62 page)

Maybe he was sleepwalking. But, if so, it was peculiar that a sleepwalker could enter the garage, lift the large chainsaw from the shelf, sharpen its rusty teeth, and manage to fill it with oil and gasoline without spilling a drop.

His parents awoke when the saw roared to life, and they clutched one another in the darkness as if they knew what was about to happen. But neither got out of bed.

The next morning, they cautiously tiptoed downstairs and out into the garden. They could see that their son had been sitting on the white bench under the elm. The way he had as a boy.

The chainsaw lay in the grass next to the bench, and not a single twig or branch had been sliced from the old tree. The elderly couple nearly cried in relief.

Then they turned around.

Inge screamed as though
she’d
tripped on the edge of an abyss and would never find a foothold again. Perhaps she thought that the black branches stretching toward her were the skeletal arms of some terrible creature—or maybe she just immediately understood what her boy had done. The neat little cypresses and the Japanese cherry trees—which
she’d
nurtured to the great admiration of numerous guests, and at the expense of her son’s childhood—lay slashed on the lawn, each and every one of them. It looked as though a tornado had ravaged the garden.

Laust stood frozen behind her, and it was lucky that Inge didn’t turn around and glance at her husband just then, because in his eyes was neither anger nor compassion.

That morning, in that yard, they had the answers to all of their son’s questions.

For a moment everyone had been struck dumb.

“I won’t ask again,” was Peter Trøst’s ultimatum.

The wind carried his voice up over the rooftop terrace and into the breeze that, in just a few seconds, would reach the small towns of Brordrop, Salløv, and Havdrup as it moved toward the sound.

There was a storm moving in from the northwest.

“Are you going to support me, or are you going to support the chairman?” The question was simple and to the point. The Professor was standing a little ways apart, leaning against the east-facing balustrade. There hadn’t been a station-wide meeting in Eden since the Saint Hans dinner, when a careless but spirited union representative had shouted, “Maybe we ought to bury our dead up here too!” After that outburst, he ended up dragging out his existence as a culture researcher, buried deeply in the basement.

Most of the station’s employees stood or sat in the park among little waterfalls and exotic trees, and the general mood had turned decidedly against the Professor. If the surroundings hadn’t been so idyllic, you would have thought a mutiny was under way. Peter Trøst had arrived early in the morning, and a few hours later, he circulated an e-mail describing the segment
he’d
just finished editing. In the segment, the Ministry of National Affairs chief of staff, Orla Pil Berntsen, revealed how Minister Almind-Enevold and the prime minister had colluded to turn public opinion against the eleven-year-old Tamil boy
who’d
been deported to Sri Lanka. If the segment didn’t air, Peter Trøst would resign that day and take a job at a competing station—one that was willing to air the story. He had filmed it himself. And he had a copy.

The message had sent shock waves rippling through the TV station. No one had ever experienced anything like this. In the staff’s eyes, mutiny was evident and the outcome certain. Trøst’s story was the biggest of the year; it should air during the morning news.

As soon as the ultimatum left Trøst’s lips, a forest of arms shot into the air, and no count was necessary to conclude that the Professor, for the first time in his career, had been outmaneuvered. And by his own employees, at that. “On behalf of my colleagues, I want to ask whether even
contemplating
another decision wouldn’t require immediate intervention from the counseling office,” yelled the union representative
who’d
emerged from the basement for the occasion, no doubt smelling revenge. “How can we trust a leader who demonstrates such an odd assessment of a piece of credible journalism?”

All eyes turned toward the balustrade.

“I only asked that you consider the man’s motives and current state of mind!” the Professor shouted in response to the muted growl that had been triggered by the union representative’s words. And even though the mutineers were emboldened by their numbers, the vulture looked so terrifying at that moment that most took an instinctive step back. No one knew if he was referring to the man in the segment—Orla Pil Berntsen—or to their colleague Peter Trøst.

With a well-honed sense of even the most microscopic shifts in mood, the Professor took the floor. “But this manipulation is too much—simply too much. We’re talking about a man who points to a defenseless, eleven-year-old boy and says: this boy didn’t do what we thought he did
…
he lied to us
…
his parents lied to us
…
his family and friends lied to us
…
and then what’s left?” The Professor gestured appealingly to the crowd, and to his horror, Peter noticed that this nonsense statement—which had no rhyme or reason—had somehow hurtled his colleagues back into the fog of doubt. They had become so accustomed to words without content that they simply reacted to the presentation of the words, to the tone, the rhythm, and the intonation.

“If you’re hesitating, you might as well all jump right now!” Trøst shouted to drown out the Professor’s nonsense. He stepped toward the railing. Something about his posture sent a shiver through every single person in Eden. Even the Professor appeared worried. Just the thought of the scandal that would ensue was paralyzing. Not to mention the immense Schadenfreude among competing stations if entire columns of deranged employees jumped like lemmings to their death in protest over the Professor’s dictatorial reign. Maybe the powerful leader even imagined being clutched by willing hands, carried to his last, dizzying media platform, and given one last sensational push into eternity.

“That segment is going to ruin us—it will ruin everything we’ve created!” the Professor cried, playing his last card, because of course it would be difficult to betray an employer that for so many years had offered so many benefits.

But the decreasing ratings and increasing number of nervous breakdowns over the past months had greatly diminished the influence of the Professor’s final argument. Now for the first time, he found himself powerless, and his opponent took advantage of his vulnerability.

“Who do you prefer? Who ought to jump straight to Hell—us or him?” Trøst said.

The Professor already knew the answer. He turned on his heels and fled from Eden and from the Abyss.

The Witch Doctor snapped off the television and turned to the gathered crowd, his back taut.

Orla Berntsen had stared directly into the camera without blinking and said, “Using a Sri Lankan residing in Denmark, we made up a story about a complex network that would frighten the press from writing about the eleven-year-old Tamil boy.” No one in the ministry pressroom doubted that he was speaking the truth. He hadn’t even sniffled.

“Yes, the prime minister knew about it too. But it was the National Ministry that concocted the plan,”
he’d
said.

“Concocted
…
that was
him
doing that,” the Almighty One whispered furiously, sinking into a white plastic chair intended for visiting reporters. “First we would deport the boy to distract the media’s attention from the Kongslund Affair—and then it would be justified with a false story
…
That was all
his
idea.”

Bog Man turned to the window, his red-rimmed eyes fixed on the gleaming fountain. The little garden
he’d
so looked forward to growing, with his full pension safely secured, evaporated in the water’s mist.

“Ever since that damned anonymous letter arrived, everything’s changed,” Ole Almind-Enevold said. “Even Orla Berntsen
…
that stupid letter turned him against me. He set me up.” For the first time ever, the minister appeared to be on the verge of tears.

“As far as I can tell, it all falls back on the prime minister—and he’s practically dead already,” Malle said, his muted cynicism eliciting a stifled bark from Bog Man. “You just have to deny any knowledge of the plan,” Malle continued. “Anyone can see that Berntsen must be deranged if he gets in front of the cameras like that—and if there even is a case here, it’s the Ministry of State that has deceived the public
…
Nothing has been leaked from us.”

The Witch Doctor lowered his shoulder a bit and whispered, “Carl is absolutely right.
Nothing
has been leaked from our office.”

The minister nodded as though his mind was elsewhere. It wasn’t. He was thinking about the office
he’d
aspired to occupy for so long and how the prime minister now must know that his closest ally and appointed successor had betrayed him in a most unforgivable way.

“Where is Orla?” Ole Almind-Enevold asked.

“I came here straight from Søborg,” Malle said. “He isn’t there anymore.”

He’d
rung the doorbell in Glee Court—as
he’d
done a very long time ago—and then entered the little row house. No locks had barred him, and even in the foyer he sensed that the house had been vacated once and for all. When
he’d
stepped into the living room
he’d
paused, dumbstruck, despite his many years in the force. Furniture and paintings were strewn about the floor, curtains, pillows, vases, glasses, and bureau drawers lay scattered, everything had been smashed in what was clearly an unrestrained rage. If this had been Orla’s work, Malle now had evidence that Berntsen had gone stark raving mad.

“
He’d
ravaged the entire living room.
He’d
smashed to smithereens the corner where his mother used to sit,” Malle told the others, and the Witch Doctor, whose own childhood had been entirely streamlined and free of melodrama of any kind, smiled spontaneously.

Malle had found a small passport-sized photo under chunks of the blue lounge chair, and he remembered the day it had been taken. Orla’s mother had insisted on holding it as a keepsake when she realized he would never leave his wife and daughter.
She’d
never revealed that they had been anything more than distant neighbors. Malle had torn the picture into a thousand pieces. Afterward he stood in the backyard looking at the dead blackbird on the flagstones. The bird lay on its side, its beak open toward the sky. Above the hedges that separated the backyards—where the nosy neighbors had always stood on tiptoes to listen—you could hear musical notes from the pianist in No. 14 dancing in and out of the open patio doors.

“It sounded as though he broke something,” a neighbor, who stood on the other side of the hedge craning his neck, had reported. “Are you here as a police officer?” There was a faint hope in the man’s voice, a suggestion that he wanted to be close to one of life’s rare tragedies. Then his voice was drowned out by the sound of the piano, as always, when the pianist beat his strong fingers on the keys and let the bass tone linger in the sunshine longer than
you’d
think possible. But the neighbor didn’t seem to mind. After all, the man played on the radio at least once a week, in between news from Iraq and Afghanistan and street uprisings in Copenhagen and Paris. The residents of Glee Court appreciated his efforts to blow away the gloom of evil from the aging neighborhood, despite the infinite number of Brahms sonatas they’d endured.

“He shouted something indecipherable—and then there was the sound of things breaking.” The neighbor’s voice had trembled in cadence with the piano.

“Yes, but he isn’t there anymore,” Malle assured him.

“He’s not there anymore?”

“No. He left. There’s no one there.”

“But I didn’t see him leave
…
” Disappointment registered in the man’s voice like someone
who’d
missed a miracle.

“Well, he’s certainly gone.”