The Seventh Child (64 page)

“I warned him
…
”

The old lady sat hunched over, her trembling hands folded in her lap, as if she was praying for an irresolute God to redo everything done on earth. Not least this, his latest deed.

“I warned him
…
but now
…
” She fell silent. “Now he’s
…
”

The young police officer reacted to this last, unspoken word. Not because of misplaced sentimentality—they taught you to avoid that at the Police Academy—but because the dead man was a former colleague.

“We don’t know for sure
…
” he began hesitantly. He wasn’t referring to the irreversibility of death but to the widow’s claim that someone had pushed the man over the railing at the quay.

The police car had been sent to her address, and they’d identified him immediately—the very moment they pulled his body from the water and flipped him over on his back. The deceased had, when he was chief inspector of the homicide department, supervised several of the men who now stood silently by the railing; they were shocked to see their former boss like this.

They’d found him in the black water below the Quay of Fog and the newspaper house, where the ailing
Independent Weekend
was located, among other presses. “He wouldn’t let go of that case,” his widow cried. “And now he’s
dead
.” This time she said the word out loud.

The police officer raised his brows. “What case?”

The widow would have liked to explain everything to the sympathetic police officer, but she was crying too much to do so. And she was afraid, as well.

She didn’t want to tell the officer about the case that the newspapers kept writing about and that her husband had decided to solve, even though
she’d
told him it was much too dangerous. Or about the clues
he’d
seen—a rock, a rope shaped like a noose, a bird, and a linden branch. The last thing
he’d
done was to call someone and arrange a meeting.

“Who is it that you’re going to meet?”
she’d
asked her husband fearfully.

“I can take care of myself,”
he’d
growled. They had loved one another over a lifetime. And yet in their last exchange, they’d completely talked past one another.

The young officer shrugged. He feared other people’s tears almost as much as his own. Besides, there wasn’t much to add, and he wanted to spare the old woman the details. They had found a single laceration on the nape of the victim’s neck, but it had probably occurred as he bopped senselessly around the quay; from the water they had retrieved an empty liquor bottle. His old colleagues had sniffed the dripping body carefully. The odor of liquor penetrated the brackish water; it appeared their former boss had spent a considerable portion of his retirement at the bottom of a bottle of aquavit.

Quite a few of the department’s retirees did that.

And no beat cop wanted to explain that to a crying widow who was babbling on about some old, unsolved case.

If unpleasant days could be returned to their Creator, Friday, June 27 would have been erased from the national minister’s memory and put to rest in the cemetery of unwanted days
.
But as things were, he could only complain about it to his two guests, and they didn’t look like people who were good at chasing away the unpleasant visions of others.

The three men were sitting on the large patio that wrapped around Ole Almind-Enevold’s luxurious hacienda at Gilbjerg Head in North Zealand; on a better day, they would have enjoyed the magnificent view of Kattegat. They let the group’s only woman serve their drinks, and Lykke Almind-Enevold didn’t have to ask her husband’s two guests their preferred brand, because they’d both visited the summer residence at least twenty times since the foundation of the Ministry on National Affairs in 2001.

As always, she played the part of the smiling minister’s wife to perfection, providing a comfortable environment for the important conversations the men were having. At the right moment, she would quietly withdraw without anyone noticing. If invisible creatures had a kingdom,
she’d
be their uncontested queen.
She’d
spent fifty-four years on her throne, in a marriage that consisted solely of routines, and she had long since learned to think of her name, Lykke, which meant joy, as one of Fate’s cruelest jokes. If the joy that had inspired her name had ever been within reach,
she’d
never noticed it, neither had she earned it. Because Lykke Almind-Enevold had committed the sin of denying her husband the child he had always dreamed of—and for that failure, she had assumed full responsibility, even though in reality no one knew whether the cause for their unhappiness was hers or his. She viewed infertility as her gender’s most unforgivable shame, and she had stayed with him because he had stayed with her in spite of this.

The three men sat in silence for several minutes, and their silence underscored the ominous nature of the meeting. Nobody spoke until Lykke had poured their drinks and disappeared. Then the national minister raised his glass. “Let’s toast to a god-awful day,” he said vehemently, emptying his elixir in one gulp.

The Professor, Bjørn Meliassen, followed his host’s example. His own life’s work was now beset by catastrophic ratings, which several editorials gleefully noted would mark the end of Channel DK, and he had no idea how to ensure, let alone finance, the survival of the Big Cigar. None of his miracle cures—the sensational concepts—worked any longer. People had become downright apathetic.

The national minister filled their glasses with the amber-colored malt whisky from the banks of Loch Lomond.
He’d
built this house immediately after the legendary election of 2001 and hadn’t skimped on any part of it.
He’d
managed to get the minister of the environment to rescind a problematic section of the conservation law that had been in place since 1950, and with that little trick it became possible to build the villa on the most beautiful lookout point at the very top of a one-hundred-foot cliff.

Below them the beach was littered with rocks, but that didn’t matter, because none of the powerful man’s visitors would ever dream of interrupting important conversations and meals to climb down a steep set of stairs to take a refreshing swim. To the west of the minister’s private stairs was a memorial stone to the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, whose work the minister had never read but whom he frequently quoted in the speeches the Witch Doctor wrote for him. The stone read:
What is truth but to live for an idea?
Kierkegaard had composed that aphorism thirteen years before the People’s King had slid down the slope near Kongslund and found a way out of his gloomy involvement with the democracy question.

Although ministerial summer residences were rarely mentioned in the press—there was, after all, no reason to tempt madmen or anarchists—Almind-Enevold’s place had become nationally known. Below the house, on the cliff, there had once been a small fishing village by the name of Krogskilde. When the fishing grew meager and was abandoned, the residents, in typical Danish entrepreneurial fashion, made a living by luring unsuspecting ships too close to the coast during nightly storms and then robbing them. One can almost imagine those industrious and energetic Krogskilde people, shoulder to shoulder, waving their storm lights—come closer—before pulling in the marooned crew with ropes, assaulting them, robbing them, and murdering them. For that reason the area was commonly referred to, for centuries, as Hell—and the national minister’s many political opponents had always considered it an apt term for the powerful man’s refuge.

The day had been derailed barely before it had even started. The prime minister had sent for him at eight o’clock in the morning, and the tone of the order was vexing. The Almighty One had rushed off without waiting for the Witch Doctor, and everything had gone wrong from there. The faces of the secretaries in the ante-office already reflected the trouble ahead for the minister. Their gazes expressed both grief and disbelief, and the most senior secretary, Mrs. Mortensen, was red-eyed from weeping. The officials who greeted him were expressionless, their movements stiff and awkward. They had no idea how to handle what had just become the country’s biggest problem.

And who would explain it to the foreign delegations scheduled to be in audience with the nation’s leader later that day?

The national minister entered his boss’s office but stopped abruptly in the doorway, studying the scene with an astonishment he couldn’t hide.

During the night, the prime minister’s official chamber had been transformed into a hospital room, fully equipped with all kinds of modern electronics and medical aids. There were tables on wheels and rattling trays, but first and foremost, there was a giant bed standing like a rampart in the middle of the room.

With a physical unease that bordered on disgust, Ole Almind-Enevold observed the transformation of the state’s epicenter. The once stately room was now littered with stands, tubes, bottles, and scanners. This was
his
office, which now, only a few days before the transfer of power, had been degraded to a sick room. This was
his
future dragged through the dirt.

The nation’s ruler was reclined in his bed with the clenched face of someone who had boiled his hardships down to one single, stubborn wish before the curtain fell. In this case, after his death, the patient wanted to be carried away from his life’s work—in full public view and with direct TV transmission from the Ministry of State, complete with helicopter shots of the hearse rolling through the main gate. No historian could ever charge that
he’d
abandoned ship at a crucial moment. At the sight of the Almighty One, the prime minister grabbed a small black remote and tapped a button that fired the hydraulics in his state-of-the-art bed. His body rose majestically into a sitting position. The sight was terrifying: the shriveled-up man looked like a long-deceased Pharaoh
who’d
suddenly emerged from his sarcophagus to issue his subjects a final, determined order.

“Enter,” the Pharaoh whispered mercifully.

In a prone position, the prime minister could see out the west-facing windows over Christiansborg and the roofs and spires of the city, and now he sat erect in his alabaster-white shirt with wide, short sleeves and the monogram of the Ministry of State stitched on the chest pocket. He nodded to his right-hand man without smiling.

“It is a beautiful place to die,” he said. Only those seven words—like a breath about to stop.

Ole Almind-Enevold didn’t have any idea how to respond, so he said nothing.

“That longing will come to you too someday. I believe it’s the mark of a real statesman.”

The Almighty One couldn’t decide whether the Boss was joking or whether Death had once and for all settled into his soul.

“I saw the interview with Orla Berntsen on Channel DK
…
” the dying man continued, whispering hoarsely and in a suddenly ominous tone that belied any weakness of mind. “About how you supposedly planted a deceitful story and let this ministry take the blame, but of course that is purely a falsehood.”

The national minister saw the condemnation in the dying man’s eyes.

“Of course,” he said.

“You’ll have to tell the Professor that those kinds of lies are unacceptable. And on
television
to boot
…
”

Ole Almind-Enevold nodded. His treachery couldn’t be explained, he realized. He bowed his head, as if in prayer, but was filled with a rage he didn’t dare express.

As if to demonstrate his last, stubborn vitality, the prime minister then said, “But what happens now
…
with that boy? Will you be saddled with another Tamil case?”

“No, no, no, that case is completely dead,” the national minister said, immediately regretting his choice of words.

“The Tamil situation
…
and the Kongslund Affair
…
are those two cases connected?”

The question was so poisonous that it could have been the precursor to a final strategic maneuver:
For personal reasons, the national minister has decided to decline an appointment as my successor
…

And Ole Almind-Enevold felt his desperation like a fiery tongue in a hot, dry mouth. “Absolutely not,” he said, a cough escaping his throat. “They are merely coinciding crises.”

The prime minister winked at him, and it could almost be construed as a cheerful gesture but for the sinister darkness in his eyes. Then he pressed the remote with the four buttons again, allowing the hydraulics to lower his headrest to a horizontal position. A thin stream of blood seeped from the corner of his mouth toward his neck, as though something inside of him had dissolved when he spoke, and the red stripe made it seem that he was smiling faintly.

Afterward, they held a crisis meeting in the Palace.

Bog Man and the Witch Doctor sat across from the Almighty One—their muscles coiled to flee at a moment’s notice—as they stared into the light drizzle that fell outside. Never before had the rainbow over the snake’s head looked more beautiful, and never had the minister’s two advisors been so stymied.