The Purity of Vengeance (14 page)

Please, he prayed silently, eyes turned heavenward, if you don’t help me now, there’s a child here who’s going to be slung over my knee in ten seconds.

The bell that saved him was neither an attractive grandmother’s sense of occasion nor a young mother’s reprimand. Instead, it was the buzz of the mobile phone in his back pocket, signaling, thank God, that the evening might be over.

“Excuse me just a second,” he said, raising one hand in an appeal for silence and reaching into his pocket with the other.

“Assad, what is it?” he said, seeing his assistant’s name on the display. Right now he would answer any question whatsoever in any way imaginable, if only it could get him out of here.

“I am sorry for my disturbance, Carl, but can you tell me how many people are reported missing every year in Denmark?”

A cryptic opener, to say the least, and one that could only provoke an equally cryptic response. It was perfect.

“About fifteen hundred, I’d say. Where are you now?” The latter utterance always sounded good.

“Rose and I are still in the basement here. And how many of these fifteen hundred do you think are still missing at the end of the year, Carl?”

“It varies. But about ten, I reckon.”

Carl got up from the table and tried to look totally immersed.

“Has there been a new development in the case?” he asked. Another excellent line.

“I’m not sure,” Assad replied. “You must tell me. But in the same week when this brothel woman Rita Nielsen disappeared, two others were also reported missing, then another the week after, and none of them have ever been found again. Don’t you think this is very strange?
Four
in such a few days, Carl. What do you say? This is just as many as normal for half a year.”

“Right, stay where you are, I’m on my way!” A fantastic exit line, though Assad was probably a bit bewildered. When had Carl ever reacted so promptly?

He turned back to the table. “I’m really sorry,” he said. “You’ve probably noticed I’m a little preoccupied today. For one thing, I’ve got a dreadful cold, so I hope I haven’t passed it on to anyone.” He sniffled once for emphasis, only to discover his nostrils to be completely dried out. “The other thing is we’ve got four missing persons on our hands, as well as an exceptionally grisly murder out in Amager that we need to get a handle on. I do apologize, but I’m afraid I have to be on my way, otherwise there’s no telling what kind of mess we’re going to end up with.”

He locked his eyes onto Mona’s. She seemed genuinely worried. Not at all like when she was counseling him.

“Is it the shooting again?” she asked, ignoring his lavish compliments on a lovely evening. “Do be careful, won’t you? You’re still very much affected by all that, Carl.”

He nodded. “Yeah, same old case. No need to worry on my account, though. I’m not planning on getting mixed up in anything. And I’m
fine
, really.”

Mona frowned. What a crap evening. Two steps backward was what it was. An unfortunate entry into the family, to say the least. Her daughter hated him. Carl hated the grandson. He’d hardly even tasted the goose before dribbling his snot into the gravy, and now Mona was bringing up the nail-gun case again. No doubt she’d have that twerp of a shrink called Kris on his back again now.

“I’m
fine
,” he reiterated, then popped a parting finger-gun shot at little Ludwig and flashed him a smile.

Next time he’d have to make sure to be more informed as to the nature of Mona’s surprises.

11

August 1987

Tage heard the snap
of the letter box and swore. Ever since he had affixed the
No Junk Mail
sticker, all he ever received were letters from the tax authorities and it was seldom they wished him well. He’d never understood why they couldn’t leave him alone with the small change he picked up on the side mending bicycles and stripping down the carburetors of young punks’ mopeds. Would they prefer him to go cap in hand to the social services in Middelfart, or maybe start doing break-ins in the summer houses at Skårup Strand like the blokes he did his drinking with?

He reached down and picked up one of the wine bottles between the bed and the upturned beer crate he used as a bedside table, checked to see if he’d used it during the night, then held it to his crotch and pissed until it was full. Then he wiped his hands on the duvet cover and slowly got to his feet. He was getting tired of having stuttering, mousy Mette lodging with him. The bathroom was behind her room in the main house, and here in the workshop where he was bedded down, the boards were rotten and the wind whistled in through all the cracks, and winter would be back in no time.

He gazed around the room. There were old, crumpled pin-ups of topless girls with engine grease smeared across their breasts. Wheel hubs, tires, and assorted moped parts were dumped all over the place, and the concrete floor was blackened with the crud of old motor oil. It wasn’t the kind of place most people would be proud of, but it was his.

He reached up and found the ashtray on the shelf on the wall full of good stubs. He selected the best of them, lit up, and inhaled deeply. The red glow raced the final millimeters toward his begrimed fingers before he stubbed it out.

Hitching up his underpants, he tiptoed across the cold floor to the door. One step out and his fingers could just reach the letter box. It was a decent box, knocked together out of particleboard, with a lid that had ballooned to twice the thickness compared to when he’d made it back at the dawn of time.

He looked up and down the road, but no one was there. He didn’t want anyone kicking up a fuss again about him standing in the middle of Brenderup with his beer gut and filthy undies on show. “Bourgeois cows who couldn’t cope with the sight of a full-grown man in the prime of his life,” as he told his drinking mates on the bench. It was a good word and he liked to use it. Bourgeois. French, it was.

To his surprise, the letter he retrieved from the box wasn’t a bill from the taxman or anything official from the local authority, just an ordinary white envelope with a stamp on. He hadn’t received a letter like that for years.

He straightened his back. As though at this very moment he was being watched by the sender, or perhaps rather as though the letter itself had eyes and could tell if the receiver was worthy of its message.

He did not recognize the hand but saw his name written with meticulous, curly letters that lifted themselves elegantly from the paper. It suited him fine.

Then he turned it over, immediately sensing the surge of adrenaline in his veins. Like a person in love, he felt his cheeks blush. And like a hunted man, his eyes grew wide.

Nothing could have been more unexpected than this. A letter from Nete. Nete Hermansen, his cousin. With her address and everything. Nete, who he never thought he would ever hear from again. And with good reason.

He took a deep breath and for a moment considered dropping the envelope back in the letter box. As if the elements and the box itself would be able to consume it, tear it from his hands in order that he might escape being confronted by its contents.

Such was the effect.

 • • • 

From his practical experience working on their father’s smallholding, Nete’s older brother, Mads, had learned that, like all other living creatures, human beings could be divided into two kinds, male and female. And as long as a person knew that, there wasn’t much more to learn. Everything else would come of its own accord. The fundamentals of life were divided between these two groups. Matters of work, and all that went on within the four walls of the home. It was all designed so that one group or the other would take care of any given issue.

Mads gathered his younger siblings and his male cousin in the yard in front of the farmhouse, pulled down his pants, and pointed to his member.

“If you’ve got one of these, you’re one sort. And if you’ve got a slit instead, then you’re another. That’s all there is to it.”

His brothers and cousin Tage had laughed, whereupon Nete had pulled her knickers down as though to demonstrate some kind of childlike solidarity and understanding.

Tage in particular found this uplifting. Where he came from, undressing was something that took place in private, and if truth be told he had never quite grasped this singular way in which men and women differed.

It was Tage’s first summer spent at his uncle’s. So much better than hot days by the harbor in Assens and in the narrow lanes where he and the other boys could hide with their Eiffel cigarettes and dream of one day heading off to sea.

They got on well, Nete and Tage. The twins were his good friends, too, but Nete was his favorite, even though she was almost eight years his junior. She was so easy to get along with, laughing if only he pulled a face, and throwing herself with abandon into the daftest of situations at the drop of a hat.

It was the first time in Tage’s life a person ever looked up to him, and he loved it. For that reason he worked hard to help Nete with whatever was asked of her.

When Mads and the twins eventually moved out, Nete was left with only her father and summer days with Tage, and he vividly recalled how hard it impacted on her. Not least in view of the recurring smear campaigns in the village, and her father’s increasingly unpredictable moods and occasionally unjust behavior.

They were not in love, Tage and Nete, only close friends, and yet in the intimacy between them lingered all the tantalizing questions about the two groups into which human beings could be divided, and how they sometimes behaved in each other’s company.

Thus it was Tage who taught Nete how humans mate, and therefore it was he who, without intention, took everything away from her.

 • • • 

He sat down heavily on the bed, glanced at the bottle on the workbench, and wondered for a moment what would help him more, drinking the cherry wine before or after he read the letter.

As he sat, he heard the sound of his lodger, Mette, coughing in the front room. It wasn’t the kind of noise usually associated with a woman, but he had got used to it. She was all right under the duvet, too, on a cold winter’s day, as long as the social services didn’t get any ideas about them living together as a couple and fiddling their benefits.

He weighed the envelope in his hand and pulled out the contents. A fine sheet of writing paper folded twice with flowers on it. He was expecting to see the handwriting again when he unfolded it, only to find the letter to be machine printed and easily legible. He read it quickly through to get the anguish over with, and was about to succumb to the temptation of the cherry wine when he got to the place where it said she would give him ten million kroner if at a given time he would come to her address in Copenhagen.

He let go of the letter and saw it descend to the concrete floor. It was only then that he saw the check attached to the bottom of the page with paper clips, made out in his name to the amount of two thousand kroner.

Never before had there been so much money in his hands at this time of the month. It was all he could think of. The rest was just too unreal. The millions. Nete’s illness. The whole situation!

Two
thousand kroner! Not even when he’d been at sea had he ever had so much money at the end of the month. Not even when he worked at the trailer factory before it moved to Nørre Aaby and got rid of him because of his drinking.

He pulled the check from the letter and felt it between his fingers.

It was bloody real and all.

 • • • 

Nete was fun and Tage was game. When the bull was drawn over to the smallholding’s only cow she asked if he could get a boner just as big, and when he showed her, she fell about laughing as if at one of the jokes her twin brothers were always rattling off. Even when they kissed she was unceremonious and amenable, and Tage was pleased. He was there to try himself out on her, for this was how he thought about her all the time, even though she had only just begun to take shape. He looked smart in his brown soldier’s uniform, garrison cap tucked under his shoulder strap, narrow in the waist. And it worked, thanks to the bull and the cow performing their inescapable annual ritual.

Nete found Tage to be all grown up and just as she wanted, and when he asked her to take off her clothes in the hay loft and make him happy, she didn’t hesitate. Why should she? Everyone had said this was how it worked, that such was the way of the male and the female.

And when nothing bad happened, they did it again on other occasions, repeating what they had learned: that nothing could compete with the joy of human bodies close together.

When she was fifteen she became pregnant. And although she was glad and told Tage that now they would be together for the rest of their days, he refused to acknowledge his paternity. If he really was the father of her bastard child, he shouted, it would get him into trouble because she was underage and their liaison had been against the law. No way was he going to prison for her.

Nete’s father believed her explanation, until he thrashed the daylights out of Tage with no effect but her cousin continuing to deny his part in Nete’s predicament. Since his own sons had always succumbed to such brutal interrogation, he naturally supposed the young man to be speaking the truth.

After that, Tage never saw Nete again. He heard about her on occasion, and from time to time he felt ridden by deep feelings of shame.

Eventually, he chose to forget everything.

 • • • 

He spent two days getting ready. Bathing his hands in lubricating oil and rubbing and scrubbing until the chapped skin was pink and vital. He shaved several times until his cheeks once again became smooth and bright. At the barber’s they received him like a prodigal son, washing and cutting his hair, dabbing him with scent as only professionals are able. He polished his teeth with bicarbonate of soda until his gums bled, and when all was done he looked at himself in the mirror and saw the echo of better days. If he was going to receive ten million kroner, he would do so in style. Nete was to look upon him as though he had led a worthy life. He wanted her to see him as the young man who had once made her laugh and to approach him with pride.