Falling Sideways (3 page)
The door rattled. “If you’re in such a devil-me rush for your devil-me meeting, you’d better shake your little devil-me backside in there!”
South and west again in Vesterbro, West Bridge, Claus Clausen sat at his little kitchen table spooning cornflakes and milk into his mouth, watching construction workers down in the street doling out bottles from their box of morning beer. He nearly gagged at the sight. He reached across the width of the narrow kitchen and took the jar of aspirin from the cupboard shelf, opened the refrigerator, still without rising, and lifted out a liter of orange juice, popped two pills into his mouth, and washed them down with juice straight from the carton.
He had been out with Harald Jaeger the night before—their first time out together since Harald’s promotion. His lips twitched back from his teeth as he considered again the fact that Harald was now his boss. The head of his department. How in the fuck had that happened? Okay, Harald had been there longer, but Claus was faster, more focused, and there was nothing Harald knew that he didn’t know just as well. In truth, all Harald was interested in was chasing pussy. How the hell had it happened? Claus suspected it was that fucking Fred Breathwaite. For some reason, he always held a hand over Harald. Why? What did he have against Claus? And how had he convinced the CEO that Harald should have the promotion over him? No warning, nothing. Just one day a memo goes around inviting everybody in for coffee and cake to celebrate Harald’s promotion.
And Claus had to go in and eat fucking dry cake and find out from a friend in accounting that Harald was now making 30 percent more than he was. Claus hated looking down into the little man’s face and being told what to do. The little peacock.
The little
fuck
! And he hated sitting at his metal desk in his crummy little windowless office—an alcove, really!—and watching Jaeger and the other department heads wander past his doorless door arch on their way to the department head meeting every Wednesday, knowing they sat there behind the CEO’s closed door discussing matters over which he himself had no control, decisions in which he had not a word to say, decisions that might deploy him in their projects. Then Harald would reappear and suddenly there would be a new plan, and Claus would have to take instructions from the little fucker and report back to him.
The little motherfucker bearded fuck.
With thumb and forefinger he blotted a tear from the corner of each eye. The only thing he wanted to do today was
not
be there as they walked past him on their way to the meeting. And that was exactly the thing that he
had
to do. Because if he wasn’t there, his absence would be noticed.
No, the thing to do was to be there long before they got there. To be there where the CEO could see he was the first one into the office, bent over his computer. Even the CEO must notice that Harald was
never
in by nine on any other day than the day of the department head meetings, while Claus was
always
in well before nine.
The little cunt-chasing fucker with his pseudoponderings, looking as though he thought he’d swallowed the stone of cleverness. “Tell me something, Claus,” he’d said last night in the northside dive where they’d ended up, the only available woman hanging close to Jaeger at the bar. “Tell me, what do we actually
do
in the Tank? Do you have any idea? Do we actually
do
anything?” Clausen had given him the bland puss, thinking to himself,
What we do, you asshole, is to keep the money moving from hand to hand. Know-how. Consumption. What do you expect, you jerk? We’re a little piece of a big picture.
But he’d said nothing, given nothing that might later be marshaled against him.
Now, remembering with embarrassment the rebuffed pass he’d made at that woman, Clausen chugalugged the rest of the juice and, gasping, dragged his butt into the shower.
The au pair was sick again, and Vita’s mother could not be there for an hour. So if the day was going to hang together, Vita had to get the girls ready for kindergarten herself. Already dressed in her golfing tweeds, she smoked a cigarette at the bathroom window, gazing down to the tight-cropped grass of the back garden while the girls splashed and giggled in the tub. The grass was impeccable. It made her think of the green where she was due for a lesson in less than two hours. The day was perfect for it. Crisp and sunny. Vita would never have believed what pleasure it gave her to be out on the course.
All her life she had despised golf as the snobby, snooty activity of people spoiled by privilege. She still referred to the game as
galf
in a mocking echo of the snobby, overclass pronunciation of the word, just as she referred to Gentofte as
Shantofta
—in parody of the accent of those who were born to it, born to money in their big villas, the type that went skiing in winter and to the sunny south islands for spring break and who got a brand-new Volvo or Mercedes sports car for their high school graduation, never having to earn anything for themselves.
To them, she was an
upcomling
. But her father’s success had come from his sweat and was new enough that she remembered life in the poorest streets of North Bridge, growing up in a two-room flat with no shower and a shared toilet—the very street that Harald lived on now. Her lips tightened at the thought of him. A cheat and a liar and a lech. They could have had a good life together. He’d had promise, and he earned enough and had a good background. When they moved into this house, she thought they would be happy together forever. With two beautiful little girls and so much that life could promise within their reach. Her father had seen it right from the start. “You sure he’s not a skirt chaser, honey?” She couldn’t see anything, but … But what? She could no longer remember whatever in the world she had ever seen in him. It was painful for her now to have to turn the girls over to him every other weekend. The mere
thought
of him got her piss cooking. She drew on her cigarette, inhaled deeply, and closed her eyes, chasing his image with a picture of herself on the green, driving from that fine third hole, the joy of her muscles in full flex, grace of swing, shock of impact—
thwack!
—follow-through, slice of the ball arcing into the sky as she exhaled the smoke.
“Pee-yew!” said Amalie from the tub, and Elisabeth giggled, picking up on it as she did on everything her older sister did. Amalie was six, Elisabeth four.
“Yeah, pee-yew, Mommy! That cigarette
stinks
!” The two of them were giggling now, egging each other on.
Vita ran the cigarette under the cold-water tap and flushed the butt down the toilet. “Okay, okay,” she said. “That’s more than enough. Are you all clean now, girls? We have got to hurry if Mommy is going to be on time.”
“You got to wash me unner here like Dad does,” Elisabeth said, pointing beneath her arm. “It tiggles.”
“Did your father give you a bath?”
“We were all mud,” said Amalie. “From the deer park. The big daddy deers were ready to make the little girl deers into mommies.”
“Yeah!” Elisabeth chipped in. “And Birgitte was there. She’s
nice
!”
Vita’s eyes narrowed. “Oh? Who is Birgitte? Did Dad bring a friend along?”
“Yeah, she’s
nice
. And she’s pretty.”
“But not as pretty as you, Mom.”
“Where did Dad wash you?”
“In his shower.”
“Where on your body?”
“Unner here,” Elisabeth said again. “And back here!”
She burst out giggling as she pointed behind her, but Amalie snapped, “He did not!”
“Did too!”
“He
never
did! He said
you
should!”
“Why are you objecting so strongly, Amalie? Did your father say you shouldn’t tell?”
The girl blinked, gazing at her mother, her mouth open as she shook her head no. “It was because we were all mud. From the deer park.”
Vita pointed at Elisabeth’s vagina. “Did he wash you there?”
“No, he told
me
to,” she said, and started giggling again. “He said, ‘You got to wash everything you own when you take a bath!’”
While the girls toweled themselves, Vita stepped into the hall with her cell phone: “Mom, it’s Vita. Would you ask Daddy if he could come by with you, too? Just for a few minutes. It’s rather important.”
Nine A.M. sharp: another Wednesday morning in the Mumble Club.
Jaeger sat sober-faced, occasionally caressing his trim blond beard, his shirt still damp with sweat beneath the arms and on the back from cycling full pump through rush-hour central Copenhagen traffic. He listened as the CEO’s quiet voice said important things. October light slanted golden through the big window at the CEO’s back so his face was invisible, his shadow cast like a Giacometti sculpture down the center of the steel-legged, crème-lacquered Piet Hein meeting table. Around the table sat the assembled department heads of the Tank, each in a crème-lacquered, steel-legged Arne Jacobsen “ant” chair with arms, while above hung an unlit Poul Henningsen pinecone lamp that looked to Jaeger like an unpleasant creature a diver might encounter hanging in the depths of the sea.
Out the window, the vast blue sky canopied the October trees of the botanical garden below. Jaeger pondered the CEO, Martin Kampman. He was two years younger than Jaeger. Which was strange, to have a guy born two years after you as your boss. Only thirty-nine years old. Made Jaeger feel kind of retarded. Maybe he was. Neither tall nor physically imposing in any way nor, for that matter, brutal or harsh of manner, Kampman had a way of keeping Jaeger unsure, even fearful to an extent. Jaeger’s own father had been something like that, and he found himself responding to Kampman sometimes as though he
were
his father, a guy two years younger! Somehow, almost passively, Kampman made it clear that he was not to be fucked with, that a wrong word would put you in a bad place. Jaeger would so like to understand how this was so, but he did not have the patience to concentrate on it for very long. The whole idea bored him. It was so unsexy.
Kampman had been CEO for not quite two years now, and their initial unrest, after the departure of Jørgen Fastholm, who had been tough but fair, had settled. Kampman’s reputation as a hard-nose had preceded him. But now it began to appear that Kampman would make no changes after all. People had begun to feel safe again.
The CEO had been speaking for some time now, addressing the assembled department heads—“chiefs,” they were called. “How,” said one of Jaeger’s colleagues to him the day he was promoted, raising his palm like an American Indian in greeting. “How, Chief.” And, “Ugh.” That was Claus Clausen, passed over for the job that had gone to Jaeger, who was a little bit older, maybe a little bit more productive, and, well, let’s face it, less physically imposing and thus maybe less threatening to Martin Kampman. So Claus Clausen was passed over, barred from these Wednesday morning department head meetings. The lucky devil! Jaeger hated having to be here, even as he recognized the importance that he was.
Before he was admitted to the circle, Jaeger used to worry about what was said behind the CEO’s closed door. He still wondered. The room was still but for the occasional grumble of an overcoffeed gut and the CEO’s murmuring voice.
Here,
thought Jaeger,
we speak quietly about important things, though unfortunately not distinctly enough to be understood.
At first he thought he was going deaf and consulted an ENT specialist, who clapped earphones on his head and had him respond to a series of electronic chimes in annoyingly decreasing amplitudes.
“Your hearing’s fine,” he said. “Perfect as a forty-year-old’s could be expected.”
“Then why do I have trouble hearing what people say?”
“We Danes do tend to mumble,” the doctor’s gravelly voice mumbled. “Especially when we’re afraid of being quoted.”
There were six of them around the table. Six chiefs and the CEO, Martin Kampman, who chaired. Four men, two women. Fingers caressed the handles of cups of steaming coffee, occasionally lifted to their lips, and their eyes were sleepy in enjoyment of the CEO’s shadow down the middle of the crème-lacquered table, the CEO’s face and torso dark with the golden light behind him, and the crème surface around the long thin shadow. His voice—soft, low in his throat—might have been an articulated Buddhist chant. Every second or third word rose clearly above the rumbling flow.
The subject, Jaeger knew from the agenda, was the annual time and resource consumption review, the report that would display in graphic fictional form a breakdown of precisely how much it cost for each department to produce its dubious results in the unclear (to Jaeger) overall interdisciplinary policy mission the Tank served. Jaeger knew only too well how much fiction went into the review—a born bullshitter, he had no problem fabricating the results of his own department—how much time was wasted on the review, how intangible the results of their work in fact were. Whether or not the results were meaningful was another matter—one he had not yet succeeded in coming clearly to terms with. But he assumed they were doing
something
since substantial state subsidies and profit revenues of a not inconsiderable amount continued to finance their efforts to keep doing it.
After fourteen years here, Jaeger was the third senior manager under the CEO, who had been here a little under two years, recruited for his impressive political network and his reputation as “the clean knife” that had sliced away 30 percent of the 750 staff members of his previous firm.
Jaeger was not worried. Not about his position. Not about losing it. He had already lost everything but his position—a position he had engineered for himself by making use of his strengths and avoiding his weaknesses—and the bulk of his respectable, though not dangerously enviable, salary went to pay alimony and child support and would continue to do so for the next twelve years unless his ex-wife remarried or found a job, neither of which was likely since her well-heeled father would never allow her to suffer want, given her gift of stoking guilt in him.