Copenhagen Noir (25 page)
In the living room, a door to another room stood open. The door couldn’t be closed because the end of a bed extended over the doorstep. A pair of feet. A pair of feet stuck out from under the blanket at the end of the bed.
“It’s my mother,” Sebastian said, his voice low. “She loves to have the bottom of her feet massaged. If you’ll do that, then I’ll go out and warm the soup.”
“The soup?”
“Yes, I’ve made soup for us.”
Andreas walked over to the feet. The nails were long and thick. A few of the toes were crossed, and the bunion on one foot stuck out like a sharp weapon. How could he have made soup for both of them when he hadn’t invited Andreas over? Sebastian had yet to budge from the doorway. He still wore his sweater and windbreaker.
“They’re horrible,” Andreas said.
“No, they’re just deformed,” Sebastian answered, and went into the kitchen.
They weren’t merely deformed. There was something threatening about them. He craned his neck to see inside the room. The bed took up the entire space. He could barely glimpse the bedstead in the dark. The mother’s face lay hidden somewhere in there. He looked again at her feet. He was alone with them now, and he realized he had begun shaking. His hands and knees. He could simply not do it. But he felt as if he didn’t have a choice. He reached out for the feet, brushed against the thick nails, then quickly pulled his hands away. Took a deep breath. Thought he smelled basil and thyme. That must be the soup.
Outside the window, a cloud slid off the moon and lit up the room. The pale feet seemed almost transparent. Blue-violet veins stood out, thick as earthworms, under her skin. He leaned over the foot of the bed, but still he could see only the white blanket that covered her entire body, hiding all of her limbs except her feet. He looked out at the moon and noticed the building across the street. For the first time he realized how close the two buildings were. Light shone from the upper-floor windows. He recognized the bookshelf in the living room. He could almost read the titles on the books’ spines. They stood in alphabetical order. Usually he cleaned them off with a feather duster—one of those old-fashioned ones, in cheery colors. Someone was walking around over there. He’d forgotten to turn off the lights. Andreas recognized every movement. The T-shirt with the faded printing. The temperature was different over there. The smell. But the body. The body was the same one. It surprised him that that was how it was.
He took a deep breath and turned back to the feet. The skin was thick and waxy. The heels rough and hard. They were cold, the feet. Ice cold. It didn’t help to massage them. He understood that immediately. Yet he put everything he had into it.
K
ris stops, and I barge right into him. The winter cold makes my nose hurt. “What the hell are you doing?” I yell, and I think I can taste blood in my mouth, but what do I know? After all, most of my face is numb from the cold.
Kris doesn’t answer. He reaches around, trying to grab something. His big hand rams the middle of my chest, and I’m about to topple backward, but he has a good grip on my coat. With his other hand he points at something down in the ditch ahead.
“What? What are you doing?” I ask, when I’ve regained my balance. “You trying to kill me?” It feels as if his hand has left a crater in my chest.
Kris stands completely still. His arm is still stretched out. I follow his index finger.
At first I can’t see what he’s pointing at. I can see the railroad, the rails that disappear around the curve, the noise barrier, the gray sky … what is it he sees? What is he pointing at?
Then I spot it. Right there. In the ditch, all the way down by the barrier, a naked pale foot is sticking out of some sort of bundle; at the opposite end, right at the barrier, a head is visible. Wet hair blocks off the face, but it’s a head. No doubt about it.
We stand, frozen. He still has hold of my coat, and I’m clutching his arms with both hands. The bundle lies motionless. A strange silence. A wrong silence.
“Is it a dead body?” Kris whispers, and he looks at me.
I shrug, I don’t know. He gives me a shove, wants me to go down and look. I shove him back, but Kris is bigger, that means I’ve got to do it.
Dickhead!
“If it’s a body, what are you afraid of?” I ask, and hop down in the ditch. I pull the hammer from my belt just in case it isn’t a body, but some psychopath luring teenage boys down there so he can eat their eyes out.
The brown bundle must be easy to overlook if you ride by on a train. How did Kris even spot it? It’s the same color as the brown stones it lies on. Almost the same color. It
must
be a body. You can’t lie there like that in this cold without being dead.
I look back at Kris, still on the tracks. He nods toward the bundle, moves his lips, like he’s egging me on to investigate, but not a sound comes out of him. It looks a little bit ridiculous. A boy Kris’s size. Afraid of a corpse.
I take a deep breath. In. And out. Have to remind myself to do even that. To remember to breathe. Slowly I approach, my hand grips the hammer, my teeth are cemented together. If it’s not a corpse, it would be nice if the person stood up now. A homeless person who fell asleep out here. Someone who went to a wild party, or a bachelor’s party. Sit down, boys, listen to this. Something or other. Give me something. Just so he sits up.
I reach the bundle. It looks like a girl. The foot sticking out is way too small and delicate and white to be a man’s. And the face … I still can’t see it from the hair, but it must be a girl.
Kris clears his throat behind me, and I wait, but nothing more comes. He doesn’t say anything. Just clears his throat.
She’s lying totally still, no sign of life from her. I hear myself say, “Hello?”
No answer. Of course.
I lean down and lift a corner of the brown felt blanket and glance underneath. It
is
a girl. A naked young girl. Small white breasts, chalk-white stomach, light pubic hair below. Hard to tell how old she is. Or was. With one finger I pull the hair off her face as best I can.
Fuck!
“What’s the matter?” Kris yells behind me. He hops down in the ditch and walks toward me.
“Nothing,” I say. “It’s just that her eyes are still open.”
Not just her eyes, but her mouth too, frozen in an expression her murderer left her with. Because she must have been murdered. Why else would she have been abandoned here?
I try to warm my hands by blowing into the little cave they form in front of my mouth, but it’s no good. Kris is still standing by the body. Leaning over it. It looks as if he’s investigating it. What does he think he’s doing? He must think he’s a detective or something. It can’t be someone he knows. We’ve grown up together here in Vigerslev, gone to the same schools, been around the same people. I’d know if he knew her.
The sound of a train rumbles in the distance. It will be here in a minute, for sure. Kris walks over to me. “It’s a woman. I packed her in again,” he says.
We jump back around the noise barrier. It’s pure reflex. We always hide up here when the trains come by. If the engineer sees two boys on the tracks, the police show up shortly after.
We stand on the slope behind the barrier and look down at the community gardens, while the train roars past behind us. It’s dead down there. Just like everything else in the winter. Like the girl behind us. I realize that I’ve lost my hammer somewhere back there. I have to remember to grab it before we leave.
“Do you think it was him?” Kris says all of a sudden.
“Who?”
“The guy down at the booster station?”
I stare at a cottage in the community gardens, a small green house with red shutters and wide flagstones set in herringbone, all the way through the garden to the door, which has a row of potted plants on each side, and hidden underneath one of them is a key, but I can’t remember which one. I think that the owner must switch them around to confuse potential burglars, to confuse me, and yeah, fuck yeah, it makes sense. The guy we saw down at the booster station.
“Of course it was him!” I say. “If he was an electrician or a guard or had something he was supposed to be doing down there, he would have been in something his company owns. He’d be driving some lousy van and not that shitty little car.”
“He had these big dark sunglasses on,” Kris says. “I figured it was because of the sun in his eyes, but there wasn’t any sun down there.”
I don’t think Kris is right. It was sunny, but I don’t say anything.
“The license plate! Did you get his number?” I ask, even though it’s a dumb question.
He shakes his head. I do the same. The idea was good enough: call the police and tell them about the body and hand them the murderer at the same time. Just like that! Heroes of the day. TV and newspapers.
Local boys find dead body
. How much pussy could a guy score from that at school? Or in town?
“Have you seen anything in the news? Anything about reports of missing girls?”
I shake my head. I don’t watch much TV and don’t read any papers, but I’m pretty sure there aren’t any girls missing. Not right now, anyway.
We’re back with the body. I lift the blanket up again. It’s soaked, heavy. It hasn’t rained for several days. Must be the night frost or something. She is so white, there’s nothing on her that isn’t white. She looks like a doll. Almost so much that it’s hard to believe she’s a corpse.
She doesn’t look very old, maybe a few years older than us, but no more.
Kris reads my mind. “She’s not a day over twenty.”
“How do you think she died?”
There is no visible sign of violence. Her body, her arms and legs, are the way they should be, there aren’t any broken bones, no bruises. She looks so perfect that it’s strange she isn’t.
“There,” Kris says, and points. There are marks on her throat. I lift her chin up a little, exposing a hand-sized dark spot that stretches around her throat. Kris shakes his head. “Twenty minutes. If we’d just been here twenty minutes earlier.” He has brought the screwdriver out again without me noticing it. “Just twenty minutes. It’s typical, why do bastards like this always get away with it? It would have been cool to catch him up here when he threw her off. Caught in the act. Fuckhead!”
I’m about to pull the blanket around her again when Kris grabs my wrist. He points the screwdriver at her stomach. “What the hell is that?”
“What? Her stomach?”
“No,
on
her stomach.”
I lean down a bit. Small white spots dot her stomach and breasts. It’s hard to see them because her skin is almost the same color, but they’re there. Sperm.
“Fucking sperm! So that fucker stood up here in broad daylight and came all over a girl he just killed?” Kris’s grip on the screwdriver turns his fist white, and he starts talking through clenched teeth. “Twenty minutes, man. Just twenty minutes earlier.”
I cover her with the blanket as best I can, and I try to throw up. But nothing comes.
It’s getting darker. We lean against the noise barrier. Even though I’m wearing three layers of clothes, I can feel the cold metal on my back. Kris is cooling off, but he’s still gripping the screwdriver. I can’t see the hammer anywhere. It won’t be easy to find now. But our little trip out into this residential area isn’t going to happen.
I try to pack her in better. The blanket really isn’t big enough, surely that’s why her head and foot were sticking out. I try to fold it around her anyway. It’s wet and heavy, and the tips of my fingers start to ache. It comes to me that she’s been out here longer than we thought.
“What if he comes back?” I say.
Kris looks at me. “What? Who?”
“Him. The killer. What if he comes back tomorrow to get off again? Isn’t that what they do, these sex killers?”
“What do you mean?”
“Think about it,” I say. “That blanket is soaking wet, and it hasn’t rained a fucking drop for several days at least. So it’s the frost at night that made it wet.”
“Wouldn’t the blanket be frozen stiff?”
“Not for sure. It’s warmer in the daytime. So she’s been laying here since at least yesterday, and he came up here again today to get off.”
We stand there for a second, looking at each other under the railroad lights. Our breath forms small clouds of steam. Kris comes closer. You can almost see the wheels turning in his head.
“So you think he’ll come back?”
“Don’t they always? They have to admire their work, or whatever. That’s how they get caught. Kris, we saw him down on the street. If we wait till tomorrow and catch him there, we’ll be fucking heroes.”
We look down at the girl. “So we just let her lay here till tomorrow?” he asks.
I shrug my shoulders. “She won’t be any less dead from laying there. And nobody’s coming up here, so she won’t be found.”
“So your plan is,” says Kris, and looks around, “we pretend we haven’t even been here today, and we just happen by tomorrow and catch a sex-crazed psycho?”