Farewell to Freedom (11 page)

“Well, if you think you're such a great damn journalist, then why didn't you so much as snap one single measly picture of Baby Girl with your handy-dandy phone?” And she hadn't been able to stop herself before she snatched the phone out of his hand and showed him the picture. He accused her of being disloyal to the paper, possessing poor judgment, and being incompetent—which was when she stormed out.

But before she made it out of the building, she called Høyer and told him it was true. Then she recused herself and said she couldn't cover the story since Markus was one of the witnesses. She said good-bye before he could respond, but she could hear Holck starting to rant in the background as she hung up.

Camilla jumped slightly as a man sat down on the other end of the bench.

After she had stormed out, she ended up heading out to the Bellahøj precinct anyway and had waited for three hours until she learned that there wasn't anything to the woman's statement. Officer Hem invited her to coffee and seemed tired as he explained that the reporter from the free paper had rung the witness's doorbell right after the 9:00 TV news the night before. The witness had let the reporter in, a charming, attractive man who seemed polite and interested. Because the reporter was so disappointed when she said she hadn't seen anything, without really intending to she told him she'd seen a young woman with a bundle in her arms. When he took her out for a stroll past the church, the words of her invented story just fell out, one after the other.

“Are you sure she's telling the truth now?” Camilla asked Hem.

Hem nodded, adding that they were pretty sure the mother had not opened the church door as the witness claimed because the CSI techs had dusted the handle thoroughly for prints, and there were no fingerprints—not even smudged prints from someone wearing gloves—which meant someone had gone out of their way to remove them, certainly not the mother.

Camilla had the feeling that the man who had sat at the other end of her bench was watching her, and for a second she felt the unease of trespassing into a world where she didn't belong. But what the fuck. She had as much right as anyone to sit here on a public bench drinking a beer, even if this wasn't her neighborhood.

When she turned to look at him, she realized he wasn't looking at her but at her bag of beer bottles. She smiled and offered him one.

“Thanks,” he said, taking it. They sat together in silence watching the traffic and passersby.

“That guy there is the Meat Meister,” the man said, raising his beer in the air in salute as a large Jaguar drove past them out of Kødbyen. The car returned his salute with a quick honk.

The Jaguar was certainly opulent compared to the man beside her in his gabardine pants, which must have been fashionable at some point in the distant past but were now threadbare. His shirt collar curled up through his worn blue sweater, and he seemed generally old-fashioned and unkempt.

Camilla turned toward him in curiosity. “How do you know the guy in the Jag?” she asked, pulling two more beers out of the bag.

He gallantly offered to open them and stuck the lids in his pocket instead of tossing them on the ground as so many before them had obviously done.

“I used to be one of his biggest customers. He was new back then and a little too expensive, but his product was better than anything else out there. So I had faith in him, and that laid the foundation for the business that has made him rich.”

Suddenly Camilla thought back to the drug kingpin with whom she herself had crossed paths—Klaus West trafficked a drug known on the streets as “green dust.” He might also have been driving around in a Jaguar if he hadn't wound up behind bars.

“Nice car,” Camilla said, watching it as it disappeared.

The man was lost in thought for a bit, but then he finished his beer and mumbled: “That was some fucking good meat. We drove a van with forty servings of
tournedos Rossini
with
foie gras
, truffles, and everything else down to the French Riviera for a big fête for Roger Vergé himself. Oh, the Moulin de Mougins!”

Suddenly then man turned to look at Camilla and his eyes seemed present again.

“What a chef,” he said, waiting to see if she had any idea who he was talking about. “I'm talking about Paul Bocuse, the Troisgros brothers, they were all there. But that night the Gastronomic Academy of Denmark was honoring Roger Vergé because his new cookbook had just been released in Danish. They even awarded him some sort of honorary degree.”

The man reached over and pulled another beer out of Camilla's bag. Again she could see that his mind was lost in the past.

“Monsieur Vergé came down to the kitchen afterward and admitted that he'd never had such good meat before.”

He took a practiced swig of his beer.

“There's a picture of the two of us together,” he remembered smiling.

Out of the corner of her eye, Camilla spotted two men talking to a young woman. She was fairly sure one of the men was Detective Michael Stig from Louise's squad, and standing a little farther over toward Halmtorvet she recognized two more police officers.

The man next to her kept talking and drinking her beer while she kept her eyes trained on the street. She could see a fair number of people on Sønder Boulevard from her vantage point with practically the whole of Kødbyen in front of her, and she had a good view up Skelbækgade. Istedgade ran parallel behind her, and Halmtorvet was to her left.

A car stopped and quickly picked up a girl before disappearing again. Camilla didn't stop watching until she noticed that the man next to her was holding out his hand.

“I'm Kaj,” he said, introducing himself, his hand wrapping around hers in a firm handshake.

“Camilla,” she said with a sigh when he asked what she did. “I'm a reporter,” she said. “And right now I'm so sick of it that I just might start making food or selling meat and getting rich myself.”

Kaj pulled out another beer. This time he passed it over to Camilla without taking one for himself.

“That's not something you just do,” he said with a sudden seriousness, turning toward her. “That's something you need a knack for. Like anything else you want to be good at. You need a knack for it, and skill. And then you need to put your heart into it. There are far too many young chefs out there who think it's just a matter of getting your name out there.”

He made a face, and Camilla couldn't help but smile.

“They make a little bit of food and then they do all they can to become famous, and then they make a little more food while they wallow in their fame. I mean, look at someone like Erwin Lauterbach—that's a totally different story. He made a hell of a lot of good food and became known for that, and then he continued to make a lot of fucking good food and now he is respected for that. That's how it should be. And just because those young chefs talk up a storm and attract a bunch of attention, they'll never be the next Søren Gericke. There's only one of him. And you should have seen him back in his glory days,” Kaj said, his thoughts slipping back in time. “They'll never even measure up to his sock suspenders. Not even if they're on the morning talk shows every other day.”

Camilla grinned and gave in. Here she'd been thinking the rest of the day would be full of prostitutes and pickpockets, but instead she gotten a regular rundown on major contemporary French and Danish chefs.

The bag had run out of beer, and Camilla asked if Kaj would stick around if she went and bought them another round.

“With the greatest of pleasure,” he called to her as she got up and walked over to a basement grocery store.

She noticed a Citroën C3 stopped and waiting to turn off Absalonsgade onto Skelbækgade. She recognized the prostitute in the passenger's seat from before, and when the driver turned his head, she made brief eye contact with Holck, the photo editor at the paper who had laid into her at work earlier. He quickly glanced away and zipped across Sønder Boulevard between a truck and a bus.

It took Camilla a moment to process what she'd just seen.

“You'll never guess,” she said when she returned to the bench with a full bag and reported whom she'd just seen.

“Yes, well, everyone comes here. You're a reporter—it shouldn't surprise you. We regularly have the pleasure of influential media people. And then there are the politicians. Everyone needs to let off some steam,” Kaj pointed out.

Holck was not exactly all that influential, but given the situation, she was way too distracted to ask Kaj who else he'd seen.

“What the hell?” she snapped. “He has a wife, children, grandchildren, and I don't even know what all else!”

Kaj grinned, revealing his darkened teeth.

Day had faded into evening, but Stig was still on the street talking to the girls as they showed up for work one by one. Camilla didn't see the other pair of officers who had been there before, but as she scanned the area for them, her eyes settled on a head of long, curly, dark hair that was pulled into a loose ponytail. The person was standing further up toward Halmtorvet with her back to Camilla.

Camilla had definitely had too many beers to want Louise to run into her here, sitting on a park bench next to an aging alcoholic, who she had to admit was remarkably good company. As a couple of large clouds slid in front of the low evening sun and she felt the first drops start to fall heavily, she got up.

“Come on,” Camilla said. “Let's go to the pub instead of sitting here and getting cold.”

At first Kaj tried to get her to sit back down, pointing to the bag, which wasn't empty yet, but Camilla remained standing.

“You can take those home,” she suggested, and when he still seemed reluctant, she added that it'd be her treat, of course.

Stig had vanished by the time they started walking up Skelbækgade. When Kaj pointed at Høker Café, she followed him.

Camilla went up to the bar to order. Kaj requested a double whisky, but remained in the background until she passed the glass to him. They looked around for an empty table and found a spot by the window, right across from the gate at the entrance into Kødbyen and the Copenhagen Hospitality College.

11

L
OUISE STOPPED
. S
HE SPOTTED
K
AJ STANDING UP FROM A BENCH
farther down the street and walking away, followed by a blonde woman in loose jeans who was carrying a plastic grocery bag.

Louise watched them stagger through Kødbyen.

“Hey, do you know if Mikkelsen ever talked to Kaj?” Louise asked, walking over to Lars.

Lars shrugged and said he hadn't spoken with Mikkelsen since they'd seen him last.

“Toft might have talked to Kaj instead. Otherwise, we'll have to remind Mikkelsen to make sure he follows through on that,” Louise said as they walked back toward their unmarked car parked around the corner.

They had fifteen minutes until their meeting with Miloš Vituk and Pavlína at Bella Center. They'd just finished a lengthy tour with some of their downtown precinct colleagues of the neighborhood's brothels, guided by Mikkelsen's meticulous notes. Some of the brothels were not easy to find, and the police were not particularly welcome at many of them, either, but the brothel operators eased up when they realized the police wanted only to see if anyone recognized the still-unidentified dead woman.