Falling Sideways (27 page)
“My potential is
mine
.”
“To use for what?”
“For what
I
deem worthwhile. For what
I
deem worthwhile.”
“And what is that, pray tell?”
“
My
business.”
“I can’t believe we’re talking this way, son.”
“I wish we weren’t.”
Breathwaite sipped his drink, thinking about what he had to offer the boy, recognizing he would never get there from where they were now, recognizing that retreat was the only way to keep the option open now, and trying to envisage a way forward to retreat to. Then he thought he glimpsed a way. Lightly he said, “You remind me of Gilgamesh, son.”
“And how is that?” Jes asked with a cutting smile that Breathwaite rebutted with a smile of his own, one of rue and affection. “ ‘Gilgamesh,’ ” he recited, “ ‘Gilgamesh. Whither rovest thou? The life you seek you shall not find.’ ”
“Did
you
, Dad? Were you even seeking?”
“Jes, I am not your enemy. I’m your father.”
The boy made a flourish with his hand and affected a foreign accent, speaking with a formality apparently designed to convey more irony: “And when someone asked of the great prophet Muhammad, ‘Who is most deserving of my kindness?’ the Prophet replied, ‘Your mother.’ And the questioner asked, ‘Then who?’ And the Prophet answered, ‘Your mother.’ And he asked again, ‘And then who?’ And the Prophet replied, ‘Your mother.’ The questioner asked again, ‘Then who?’ The Prophet replied, ‘Your mother.’ And once again he asked, ‘Then who?’ And the Prophet answered, ‘Your father.’ ” Jes lifted his glass. “
Skål
, Dad.”
Breathwaite crossed back over Queen Louise’s Bridge through the chilly evening drizzle, thinking,
Mission aborted
. But he took comfort in the fact of the boy’s openness. At least he had not hidden behind false smiles and superficial politeness. That anyhow was something. In the anger and impatience he expressed, there could be some key to understanding, and that key might open a door to a place where he could see the value of what Breathwaite was about to offer him.
“Tell me,” he had asked the boy, “have you become a Muslim?”
“No, Dad, I just want to understand. That’s the problem today. Nobody wants to understand. We bomb them. They bomb us. We bomb them better, they bomb us sneakier. Who’s asking why? Who’s asking what’s happening? The other day I was talking to this guy in a bar, and he was spouting all sorts of ignorance about the Koran, and I asked him if he’d ever read it. ‘Why the hell would I?’ he says to me, and I ask him, ‘Can you even try to imagine yourself as a Muslim?’ He says, ‘Can you imagine a Muslim trying to imagine himself as a Dane?’ It’s so fucking hopeless.”
“It’s not really hopeless, son. It’s a matter of setting your hopes in line with your options.”
Again the smile that was not a smile opened on his teeth, and he lifted the martini glass. “Like you did, eh, Dad?
Skål.
”
One thing cheered him, though—that the boy was not angry at his mother. They would need each other when he was gone.
The light turned green, and Kampman gunned the BMW up onto the bridge ramp to cut around a slow-moving Volkswagen he didn’t want to be stuck behind. Through the drizzling window, he glimpsed Fred Breathwaite lumbering along the pedestrian pavement in the opposite direction. He wondered if Breathwaite was holding out on the Irish contact, angling for something he could hold for himself, possibly set up his own little consultancy firm and siphon off those contracts. Might try to keep his whole European Union network intact, invest that last piece of money into his own operation, run it from home. Then, as the BMW rolled past Sacrament Church on North Bridge Street, a thought surfaced, and he fished the cell phone from his shirt pocket.
He had overshot his corner, so he cut a quick right onto Chapel Way and pulled up to the curb alongside the yellow wall of Assistens Churchyard, beneath the dark trees jutting up from within. He found the number in Dublin and hit call, sat behind the wheel listening to the series of double rings on the other end. Then the ringing stopped, and it sounded as though the phone on the receiving end were being dropped down a chute. Just as he was about to ring off, a blurry, suspicious voice said, “Yes?”
English was not Kampman’s forte, but he plunged in, explaining who he was, whom he was trying to reach in connection with their Copenhagen visit.
Suddenly the blurry, suspicious voice rang clear. “Martin! Is that you, Martin Kampman?” As though the blurriness had been from Kampman’s end.
“Yess, Sean. It iss good to be hearing you. Vi look from to you wisiting with us.” Pleasantries taken care of, Kampman went for the point. “Sean, you know your old friend Fred Breathwaite—yess, Fred!—he is decided upon to be leaving us … Yess, ha ha, ha ha, you are right, he hass had enok of the Tank. I will tell you this for we are planning a little farvel cermony to him at the dinner this week. I am thinking you will wish to know this as old friend to Fred … Yess. We wish to say good-bye in the good way to our Fred … Yess, Freddy, ha ha.”
Kampman noticed in the rearview mirror that a strained smile was still plastered across his face even after the silent phone had been returned to the dark of his shirt pocket. He studied the smile, trying to determine whether he would look as idiotic to others as he appeared to himself—lips spread wide, teeth parted, cool eyes nestled in twin beds of incipient wrinkles. He let the smile drop, saw the normal control return to his features, and sat staring into the cool blue of his own eyes for several moments, thinking.
That should close that door for Fred. The question now was to be certain Jaeger was securely in place as a buffer between himself and the Irish. He did not really trust the Irish. They seemed a very foreign race to him, a people with little respect for the clean line, without Northern European values. They were as foreign, to his mind, as the Japanese, although the Japanese at least understood hierarchy. The Irish respect for hierarchy, he thought, was mere form without content, as opposed to the Danish, in which it was content without visible form; in principle, everyone here was on a first-name basis and you gave your hand to everyone in the room, but in descending order of importance.
The Irish were too sentimental, but he didn’t trust their sentiment. Their famous hospitality was dazzling but insincere, rooted in drink and late night contests over who could stay clear longer, although there seemed no important consequences for those who eventually succumbed, even for those who—as they said—became “drunk as a lord.”
When Kampman accompanied Breathwaite to Ireland the summer before, he was received with what seemed to be great warmth, but he was aware of the fact—had overheard it at breakfast one morning—that behind his back they referred to him as “Martin the Mortician.” As he was entering the buffet room in Killarney, he distinctly heard Sean ask Breathwaite, “And how is Martin the Mortician today, Freddy?”
Breathwaite snorted. “Not accustomed to late nights, Sean. He’ll be fine.”
Sean put the edges of his little teeth together and, hand on heart, pronounced in stentorian tones, “The Morte d’Arthur! Long live the Mortician.”
Breathwaite chuckled again, while Kampman—who had not yet been seen—backed out of the room and retreated to the lobby window, gazing over the sweep of lake and mountain behind the hotel, owned and administered, he knew, by Germans. That was the kind of people he was dealing with—Irish name-callers who left the administration of their properties to Germans.
He squared his shoulders and marched back into the buffet room, went directly to Sean’s table, beaming. “Morning, Sean, morning! How are you today?” Then he waved his hand in front of his own nose. “Big cigar smoke last night,” he said, referring to the fact that Sean and Breathwaite had still been slouched back in their lounge armchairs over long cigars and deep whiskeys when Kampman, unable to contain another fizzy water, had capitulated and gone to bed.
Sean set the edges of his little white teeth together and giggled while Kampman sent a message to Breathwaite—whose breakfast plate, he noted, was a mess of egg and sausage, tripe and blood pudding, and baked beans in red water—by turning his back without a greeting.
We will see who is used to what, Freddy boy.
On the Aer Lingus flight home, while Breathwaite drank complimentary champagne and Kampman sipped juice, he smiled at his subordinate and asked, “By the way, what is the word in English, you know, what is it for
bedemand
? You know, the ones who bury the dead people?”
Clearly caught by surprise, Breathwaite hesitated. “Ah … uhm … ah … mor … morticians?”
Kampman snapped his fingers. “Right! That’s it. Morticians. They’re the ones who bury dead people, right?” And he smiled into Breathwaite’s red eyes.
Now Kampman keyed the ignition and pulled away from the churchyard, continued down Chapel Way to Åboulevard, and cut left to come in from the other end of Blågårds Street. He parked on Kors, outside a greengrocer’s, and walked through the drizzly evening up to the square, looking for the address the au pair had given Karen and Karen had given him.
A tall, skinny man with dirty hands hobbled over to him with a strange, listing gait. “Excuse me. Can you spare three crowns?”
“No,” Kampman said, and looked away, heard the man immediately repeating his request to someone behind. Beggars were a thorn in his eye, an insult to the social welfare system, which itself had become an insult to the individual citizen.
The buildings on the square were an unattractive mix of workers’ quarters from various periods with a grubby little park in the middle. Kampman was only too aware of the sad history of this area with its activist squatters and autonomes covering their faces with ski masks and hurling unearthed cobblestones at the police. He knew a movement was under way to gentrify it, but it was far from gentrified yet, and it was no place for his son.
The address was in a six-story building between a café with unwashed windows and a secondhand bookshop that was still open, judging from the baskets of cut-rate paperbacks flanking the door.
From close beside him a woman’s voice said, “Hey?” and he turned to see the au pair, her face full of confused question. Good. Karen apparently had promised her that she wouldn’t repeat where Adam was staying. This little tart would quickly understand how he got the address and why he was here, and that would be the end of confidences between them. He recognized at once, too, that her being here was no coincidence. As he suspected, she and Adam were shacking up. Now that he had all his information, he could go right for the kill.
Kampman smiled. “Ah! Good. I have something for you.” From his inner pocket he removed a business envelope with the flap tucked in and Jytte’s name printed on the front. She took it from him automatically, which didn’t really surprise him.
“What is it?”
“Your contract calls for a month’s notice. That’s a check for a full month, to the end of November. And you won’t have to come in anymore—so really it’s almost six weeks’ severance. My wife is making other arrangements.”
Now
she
was holding the envelope out to
him
, but he didn’t accept it. “I was hired by Karen,” she said. “If she isn’t satisfied with me, I would prefer that she tell me so directly.”
Kampman’s smile broadened. He loved this. He loved this girl. “You may phone Mrs. Kampman if you wish. She and I agree that it was inappropriate for you to get involved with our son.”
Her eyes blazed. “What do you mean,
involved
!”
Kampman was still smiling. “You’re blushing, my girl.”
“I’m not your girl!” She shoved the envelope at him, but his hands were in his pockets. “It’s up to you, of course, my girl, but don’t you think you’ll have use for it?”
Their first Hof of the day dangling between their knees, Adam and Jes sat with their feet up at either end of Jes’s battered sofa. Jes wore a T-shirt with FUCK IT printed in block letters across the chest. Adam leaned over the stuffed sofa arm and picked through the teetering, tall stack of books atop a standing cinder block. He lifted as many as he could manage into his lap and ran his fingers over the covers, reading titles: Homer’s
Odyssey
,
Bullfinch’s Mythology
, James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, Søren Kierkegaard’s O
n the Concept of Irony
and
Fear and Trembling
, the Koran, the Old Testament of the Holy Bible, the New Testament, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Ibsen, Dostoyevsky, Joyce’s
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
…
“Man, you read a
lot
, Jes!”
“Read little, understand less.”
“But all these books!”
“I don’t read them, I rape them. I read ten books at a time.”
“Do you really read Kierkegaard?”
“Of course I read him! I’m a master of the rotation method and a knight of infinite resignation, too. KIR, as opposed to KMRDA—kiss my royal Danish arse. You mean
you don’t
read Kierkegaard?”
“We were supposed to read
Either/Or
last year, but I couldn’t, I just faked my way through it. I tried, though.”
“What kind of Christian are you if you don’t read Kierkegaard?”
“I’m Lutheran.”
“Ah! So you believe in Christmas pork and Easter beer.”
“What are you?”
“Me? I’m an agnostic-polytheistic Muslim and apostate-Catholic Commie-Jew champagne-socialist pseudo-sand-nigger mountain Turk.”
Adam was grinning. “What do
they
believe in?”
“Irony.”
“What are your parents?”
“My father was raised cuckold, but he’s lost his father faith and converted to materialism. My mother has a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, whom she identifies with me. When I was a kid and found out my father was Catholic, I asked if I could be a Catholic, too, like him, and he said, ‘If you want to be a Catholic like me, you don’t have to do a goddamned thing.’ That’s when I figured out his real religion, a contemporary variation of the ancient sect of Epicurus. Same as all the other sixty-eighters, rich now all of them and sitting on the power they seized in the name of something else but then found out they had in fact gained entrée to the wine cellars and larders and gold vaults. And they like it there. They like their pleasure and comfort. Tickles the palate. Last judgment be damned. Tell me, do you believe in the resurrection of the body and the soul and the last judgment?”