The Hanging Girl (18 page)

“Hang on a minute, Assad, not so fast,” he said. “Listen to what it says here:”

Hi bro. Trip to Østerlars Round Church this time. It’s meant to be fantastic with Knights Templar and everything, but the best thing was I met a sweet guy. He knew more about the church than the guide, and he was SO hot. Meeting him tomorrow outside school. More about that another time. Hugs and kisses, your sis, Alberte.

“Bloody hell, Carl! What’s the date?”

He turned it over and over but didn’t find anything.

“The mark from the stamp, can you make it out?”

They both squinted and scrutinized the stamp from all angles. There appeared to be a number 11, but it wasn’t possible to read any more.

“Then we’ll just have to ask the rector couple when they went on that trip.”

“Carl, I’m thinking. There must be someone from the school who took photos that day.”

Carl wasn’t sure. Compared to today’s digital reality, where everything was endlessly documented, and where everyone with even an ounce of self-respect had their smartphones and cell phones ever at the ready to capture all sorts of trivia and selfies, 1997 seemed like the Stone Age.

“Yes, let’s hope so. And that someone caught the guy she’s speaking about in the picture.”

They rooted around in the boxes for another half hour, but didn’t find anything else they could use. No name, no later postcard that could uncover the next chapter in this catastrophic saga, nothing.

“Did you find anything?” asked the man of the house as he followed them to the door.

“You had a son you can be proud of, that’s what we found out,” said Carl.

He nodded quietly. He knew it only too well. That’s what made it all the worse.

*   *   *

They reached Stefan von Kristoff’s studio at least an hour late, but the man was evidently not the type to worry about trivialities such as clocks and normal conventions.

“Welcome to the darkness,” he said, pulling down on a gigantic lever that turned on the lights in the machine room where, before the world had gone mad, at least sixty men had stood working metal.

“Big,” said Carl. And it damn well was.

“And a great name,” added Assad, pointing up at a welcome sign in metal, hanging under the glimmering fluorescent lights:
Stefan von Kristoff—Universitopia.

“Well, if Lars Trier can adorn his cap with borrowed feathers, so can I. The name’s Steffen Kristoffersen; the ‘von’ is just for show.”

“I was thinking of the name of the studio.”

“Oh, that. Everything in my world is called something with ‘topia’ at the end. You want to see
Fateopia,
I understand?”

He led them down to the far end of the machine room, where a pair of projectors lit up the back wall to a level verging on daylight.

“She’s here,” he said, pulling the cover from a man-size installation.

Carl swallowed. In front of them stood something nearing the most disturbing sculpture he’d ever seen. For the uninitiated, probably nothing special, but for those who knew of Alberte and her fate, it was heavy going. If her parents ever got wind of the monstrosity, the lawsuits would be never-ending.

“Great, isn’t it?” said the idiot.

“Where have you acquired all these things from? And how did you get information about what things you thought were important to include?”

“I was on the island when it happened. I have a summerhouse and studio in Gudhjem, and there was a lot written and talked about in relation to the case, as you can imagine. Absolutely every car was searched, including mine, so you couldn’t exactly ignore the furor. In Gudhjem alone, all the men from the National Guard ran about searching without even knowing what they were looking for. And so did the rest of us, for that matter.”

Carl glanced over the monstrosity. Everything was built around a woman’s bike with buckled wheels and twisted handlebars. Reinforced crossbars were welded to the frame, pointing out in all directions like bundles of rays. And at the end of each crossbar, evidence hung of the specific details and other related misery.

It wasn’t badly made, just a tasteless jumble of different techniques. Around the bike, in the middle of the installation, there were etchings in metal and brass, depicting all sorts of imaginable car accidents. In addition, there was a colorful rendition of the checks at the ferry in enamel, and etchings in copper of a pixilated image of Alberte, probably taken from the local paper. There were casts of bone remains, branches, and leaves, and, not least, hands outstretched in an attempt at protection. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was the plastic vessel he’d placed under the etching of Alberte’s smiling face, and that it was filled with blood.

“It’s not human blood, unfortunately,” laughed Kristoff. “It’s pigs’ blood that’s been treated to stop it rotting. It might smell a bit sweet just now, but I do change it sometimes.”

If they hadn’t been on duty, it would’ve been irresistibly tempting to dip his laughing face in the stuff.

Assad snapped away at the sculpture from every possible angle, while Carl stepped closer to the bike to assess it further.

It was a cheap bike, probably Chinese. Big wheels, huge prop stand, and high handlebars. Rust had eaten most of the yellow color away, and the rear rack was dangling. It wasn’t a very good bike.

“What have you done to it? Did it look like this at the time?”

“Yes. Apart from the fact that I’ve put it upright, it’s just as I found it.”

“Found it? You just as good as stole it from the police station in Rønne, didn’t you?”

“No, I found it in a pile of junk in a container on the road in front of the station. I actually went in to the guard and asked if I could take it. The lads in the office just said that if I did myself any injury getting it out, it was on my own head.”

Carl and Assad gathered their thoughts. On the last day in her life, Alberte had sat in this saddle and probably imagined that it would be a happy day.

Carl thought it was a good thing that people didn’t know the day or the hour when their time would come. It was a sad sight. Just as morbid as those plasticized bodies you could visit all over the place at almost no cost at all.

“You look like you want to buy the installation,” said Kristoff with a cunning smile. “I’ll do it at a mate’s price. What would you say to seventy-five thousand kroner?”

Carl smiled cynically. “Er, no, thank you. Right now we’re almost considering whether or not we should confiscate it.”

October 2013

“I feel you all,”
chanted Atu over the crowd in the hall.

“I feel you all, and you feel me. We feel Malena today, and we feel her pain and bring ourselves together now to pull it out of her.”

Pirjo was puzzled and looked around the assembly for Malena. She wasn’t there.

What on earth did Atu mean when he said “feel her pain”? Did it mean that right now that mare was lying in his chamber, trembling with desire? Was this a warning that those two were about to attach themselves more to one another than Pirjo could allow? Maybe it’d been a mistake not allowing the black woman to challenge that relationship.

She stood for a moment with her eyes tightly shut, pondering the thought.

She shook her head. No, it hadn’t been a mistake. Wanda Phinn had had to disappear. It couldn’t have been any different.

“Behold my hands,” said Atu, and everyone looked up.

“Those of you who in spite of the soul hours still feel inner unrest, I implore you to stretch your arms out in the air and prepare yourself to receive ablution.”

There were nine or ten people who reacted.

Then Atu moved his upper body back and forth with very small movements, while his arms hung still in the air.

“You who are ready, I implore you to channel your anxiety, anger, and broken meridian lines into my hands. Be at ease. When you sense warmth and peace coming to you, set yourselves free and let go.”

Now those who had been asked rocked back and forth, breathing heavily, and then collapsed, one by one.

“Abanshamash, Abanshamash, Abanshamash, Abanshamash . . .” chanted a few of the bowed heads. The miracle had again been revealed to them.

Atu let his arms fall, smiling gently to everyone in the room. Then he turned his palms to face up to the bundles of rays that hit him, which usually indicated that the séance was almost over. Sometimes it took ten minutes, other times half an hour. You never knew.

“Now you will return to your refuges to collect your best energy and direct it to Malena, who is in dire need of them,” he said finally. “After that, search the path to deep and unaffected balance and peace of the soul following the usual instructions. Do it with humility and pride in your heart; then you will be channeled toward all that nature has to offer. Draw the world’s particles to you. Absorb everything from which you come and what you will be. Let the light burn the loathing and hatred out of you. Let the darkness envelop all your uncontrollable thoughts so they wither away, and liberate yourselves. Let the sun and all its energy reign.”

He spread his arms out to bless and received with bowed head their parting greeting: “We are ready, Abanshamash, and we see. We see and we feel. Abanshamash, Abanshamash, Abanshamash.”

Pirjo nodded while the assembly collected themselves and slowly turned toward her. There were always many—perhaps especially male disciples—who treasured this tête-à-tête, and Pirjo relished it. When Atu couldn’t show her interest of the flesh, it was something that at least some of the others could. But Pirjo knew well enough that there was nothing wrong with her appearance, and that power and beauty in equal measure were the best cocktail when it came to awakening desire. Her problem was just that she wanted only him, and he didn’t want her enough.

“I think you look beautiful and serene today,” said a female voice in the crowd to her.

Pirjo caught Valentina’s face. She was the chameleon and IT genius of
the center, sometimes in an ecstatic rush of happiness, sometimes short-haired, long-haired, disheveled, or maybe outright the neatest individual, who could float across the blazing floor of the hall. This time she was on top. That much was clear. A man from the newly arrived recruits was standing with his hands on her shoulders, so there were obviously already new sensual vibrations to get used to. Good for Valentina, even though they didn’t allow the disciples to have sexual contact before their auras had been directed toward each other and subsequently joined in a sun ceremony.

“You seem so serene and pure,” continued Valentina. She’d always had a desire to stick out from the crowd, but perhaps that wasn’t so strange for someone with her past.

Pirjo straightened her back and smiled mechanically back at her. “Go in peace, all of you,” she said as always. “When your absorption is complete, the kitchen team from Fire House can go to the kitchen and start preparing.”

*   *   *

Like a cat creeping up on its prey, he was suddenly standing there looking over her shoulder.

Pirjo got a shock.

Just ten seconds earlier and he would’ve caught her red-handed deleting the day’s recordings from the cameras that monitored the driveway and the Stable of Senses. If it had sparked any questions, it would’ve paralyzed her.

She composed herself and turned slowly around in her office chair, looking reproachfully at him.

“You’ll give me a heart attack, creeping up on me in the office like that. I’ve told you before, Atu.”

He threw his hands in the air; it was a habit he had consciously adopted years back in place of saying sorry.

“We missed you this afternoon, Pirjo. Where were you? We looked for you.”

It was an awful question. Not because she hadn’t prepared an answer,
but because it was Atu who asked, and because he had X-ray vision when it came to what she was thinking. She was like an open book to him. There was a risk that even the simplest lie would be found out.

She realized that she had to turn the situation around so he didn’t probe any deeper, wondering if the time had also come to confront him with her desires.

“I just needed to get away for a bit from the academy,” she said. “Why do you ask? Haven’t you had enough of your own work to keep you busy?”

He sighed. “It’s been a terrible day, but maybe you don’t know? Malena aborted a few hours ago, and you weren’t there when I needed you. You should’ve gone with her in the ambulance to the hospital.”

“Aborted?” Pirjo averted her eyes. What should she think? Had Atu gotten her pregnant? Her? Malena?

She sat for a moment, trying to let it sink in. It couldn’t be true, not now. She couldn’t allow it, not any longer. It was serious now. Was she to share him with others while her fertility waned and the clock ticked faster and faster? No, not anymore. It was her child Atu should father. Her child who should be his successor. Her child who should be the new savior.

“She aborted and bled uncontrollably,” she heard Atu say.

Pirjo pulled herself together and tried to look neutral.

“Did she?”

“Yes. It was serious, so we needed you, Pirjo. Where were you?”

She blinked a couple of times before she directed her eyes toward him. Under no circumstances would she look remorseful, certainly not because of Malena. He just needed to think she was upset about it.

“I feel your energy. You aren’t feeling well,” he said. The message had been received.

“No, that’s right, I’m not feeling well. That’s why I drove up to Nordodden today. I do that sometimes when I’m feeling a bit down.”

“A bit down?” He said it as if it ought to be the last thing she had any reason to be.

“Yes, despondent. But I don’t want to discuss it with you, Atu. Especially not after what you’ve just told me.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know fine well.”

“We two can’t have secrets from each other, can we?”

And he asked that now.

“Since when?”

“What are you implying, my friend?”

“Shouldn’t you at least have told me that you were ready to impregnate one of your disciples? Didn’t we have an agreement that I’d be the first to know when you took that decision?”

“We certainly have an agreement that if something’s bothering you, you’ll come to me straightaway, right, Pirjo?”

She hesitated momentarily. “Why do you think I was up at Nordodden today? Can’t you figure it out?”

He reached for the door to his own room. “You’re my vestal, Pirjo. I cherish that, and that’s how I want it. And tomorrow you’ll drive to the hospital in Kalmar and look in on Malena. Can we agree on that?” he said, giving her a hug before disappearing into himself.

Pirjo nodded very slowly. She had to go into town anyway to remove Wanda Phinn’s suitcase from the locker. She was finally going to get a chance to be alone with that French gold digger.

She sat for a moment, contemplating her ammunition. It was sure to use up some of her resources, but what did it matter as long as the bitch disappeared from her life.

For a moment she found herself laughing out loud.

Was it really now that lady luck had decided to smile down on her?

Would she really manage to rid herself of her two worst rivals within the same day?