The Quiet Girl (12 page)

"Our agreements," she said, "regarding institutions are related to how we evaluate the threat. If, for example, there were diplomats' children, it would mean tighter security."

"I'm a clown," Kasper said. "Do I sound like a terrorist?"

"I don't know what terrorists sound like. They say Nero loved circuses. Heliogabalus did too."

"May we stop by?" he asked. "Then you could experience our credibility firsthand."

"Call me tomorrow."

She hung up.

He helped himself to a piece of paper, took out his fountain pen. He drew Knippel Bridge. Lange Bridge. The National Museum, the Royal Library, and the Black Diamond, the library's modern extension on the waterfront. He put a check mark next to the government building on Christians Brygge Street. Pushed the paper over to Sonja.

"What do the police have here?"

Her sound grew uneasy.

"Their Intelligence Service," she said. "Most of it is located above the Gladsaxe police station. But some of the administrative offices are over on Slotsholm Island. They approve the circus security plans. For gala performances. When the royal family and government officials attend."

* * *

He took the binoculars from the window ledge. Borrowed cardboard and tape and wrapped up the other CD. Sonja didn't ask any questions.

"You'll have to go there alone," she said. "I've left the circus ring."

He wanted to leave--she blocked his way.

"I have more than you," she said. "Children. A home. Accounts all in order. More love. You have very little talent when it comes to being satisfied in everyday life. But your longing. Sometimes I envy you that."

She put her arms around him.

Touching doesn't help; we never reach each other anyway.

But still--
 
 

2

He parked behind the Stock Exchange after driving from Sonja's office. When he got out of the car the city wrapped itself around him like a wall of sounds. No harmony, no concentric waves, no tone center. One and a half million people, all with individual, uncoordinated refrains.

He turned down Christians Brygge Street. The building had a glass entranceway with an intercom. He remembered his childhood, when one could walk right in to see people and government authorities. Since then, life had become less free; now we all keep one another under surveillance. Or perhaps he remembered incorrectly. From the time we are forty we all gild our memories.

Beyond the entrance a civilian official was sitting in a glass booth. Kasper wished he had a partner; the task ahead was not a solo job. He walked along Frederiksholm Canal, across the Parliament grounds, past his own automobile, and back. Next to the Royal Danish Arsenal Museum and the Isted Lion sculpture was a daycare center; a boy about five or six years old was standing just behind the gate.

"Where are you going?" asked the boy.

"I'm going over to warm a cold angel."

Colored lights lit in the boy's eyes.

"Can I come along?"

The child's sound was interesting. The world is rarely able to block the openness of children before they are seven or eight years old. Kasper looked up and down the street; it was empty and deserted.

"The grown-ups will miss you."

"They just went for nap time. I'm the only one outside."

The boy's system interfered with Kasper's. But anyway. One needs to choose one's partners carefully.

"What if I'm a child molester?"

"They're different," said the boy. "They've tried to get me to go with them."

Kasper leaned forward and lifted him over the fence.

* * *

He pressed the button by the door; from somewhere inside behind many layers of glass he was asked to identify himself. He acted as if the intercom was broken, lifted the boy in his arms, and pointed at him. The presence of children casts a legitimate light on adults; the door buzzed and they were inside.

Kasper set the boy on the counter.

"Andrea Fink's son," he said. "He has a high fever. Over in the daycare center we think it may be gastroenteritis. We telephoned Andrea and agreed that we should come immediately."

The attendant behind the counter pushed his chair backward, away from the source of infection. The situation was uncertain; it could go either way. On the wall behind him was a list of offices. Andrea Fink's was on the third floor.

"I want my mommy," said the boy. "I'm hot. I don't feel well. I'm going to throw up."

The attendant reached for the telephone. Kasper shook his head. "She's in an important meeting. They don't want to be disturbed. She told us to go right up, and she'll come out."

* * *

He knocked, and walked in without waiting for an answer. The woman behind the desk was surprised, but composed. The room was not in keeping with his prejudice against the Intelligence Service; it was large and friendly. There was a potted palm about as tall as a man. The white paint on the walls had a hint of pink pigment. On the desk was a figure of Buddha.

He set the boy on the desk beside the statue and the telephone; as he put the child down, his fingers detached the phone cord. In a little while, when the attendant from the glass booth telephoned, his call would not go through.

"I'm Kasper Krone," he said. "I'm the one who called you earlier, about KlaraMaria."

The woman laid two open books on top of each other and moved them. Her face grew cold. The temperature in the room fell to something that called for caps and mittens.

"I inquired about you," she said. "You're not married. You don't have any children either."

Part of her mind was still on the open books. It was important that he get a look at them. He took the boy's arm. Ran a finger lightly over the Buddha.

"One of Buddha's teachings that I like very much," he said, "is that all living beings have been each other's mothers. In an earlier life. And will be again. I've thought about that. It must mean we have all been each other's lovers. And will be again. Including you and me."

She began to blush, faintly, like the walls.

"I don't know how you got in," she said. "But now you must leave."

* * *

Outside the office door he put the boy down and knelt beside him.

"Can you get her out here?" he said. "And keep her out here for a little while?"

The boy opened the door. Kasper crouched behind it.

"I have to pee," he heard the boy say. "My daddy left without me. I'm going to pee my pants."

The woman did not move.

"Can I pee in the palm tree?"

Kasper heard him unzip his trousers. The woman stood up.

"I'll take you to the bathroom."

They disappeared down the hall. Kasper slipped into the office.

The two books she had moved were Krak's map of Copenhagen and something that looked like an address book.

Behind the desk he saw a small scanner and copy machine; it was turned on. He put the opened pages on the machine, folded both copies, and stuck them in his pocket. A toilet flushed. He walked out into the hall and went to meet the woman and the child. She was pale. He took the boy by the hand and headed toward the stairway.

"I'll call for someone to show you out," she said.

The door to her office closed.

Kasper winked at the boy. Laid his finger to his lips. He took off  his shoes, stole across the herringbone parquet floor in stocking feet, and put his ear to her door.

She was about to dial a number. Every push button has a tone; sufficiently refined hearing would have been able to catch both the number she dialed and the voice that now answered on the other end. His could not.

But he heard her whisper.

"He's been here," she said. "He just left."

Something was said on the other end.

"Very Puccini," she said. "Seems like a bit of a Lothario to me. I got rid of him. He's out of the picture now."

Kasper stole back to the boy. Put on his shoes.

The attendant from the glass booth now stood behind them. Kasper picked up the boy in bis arms. The glass door opened automatically.

* * *

They were out in the open air; the city sounded better than before. In the deepest sense, do we ever hear anything but the pitch of our own voice?

"Why didn't you want to go to nap time?" asked Kasper.

"I can't lie still," said the boy.

"Why not?"

"They don't know why. They're investigating it. Maybe I've got DAMP syndrome. Or water on the brain."

Some children weren't children; they were very old. Kasper had begun to hear this twenty years ago. Some children were ancient souls with a thin infantile veneer. This boy was at least twelve hundred years old; his sound rang like one of Bach's great pieces.  Kasper lifted him back over the fence.

"You did well," he said. "For someone five years old. With water on the brain."

"Six," said the boy. "Six years old. And it's good to praise children. But money is good too."

His eyes were dark, with experience perhaps. There hadn't been a day in the last twenty years--with the possible exception of the three months with Stina--when Kasper hadn't wanted to give up at  some point. Withdraw his savings. Take off for the Fiji Islands. Develop an opium habit. Listen to cello sonatas on the stereo, and fade out on the beach.

It was eyes like those in front of him now that made him keep going. They had always been there. In the audience, in himself. Stina's eyes had sometimes been like that.

He felt in his pockets; there was no money, just his fountain pen. He handed it over the gate.

* * *

Back in the car, he spread out the two photocopies on the dashboard. The map covered Bagsværd Lake, Lyngby Lake, and the southern end of Pure Lake. The other page had more than forty addresses. Only one of them was in the map's postal district, and it was just a fragment: "Track 3, 2800 Lyngby," along with a telephone number. No institution name, street name, or house number. He called Information from his cell phone; the number was unlisted. He looked at his own Krak map. "Track 3" had a set of geographic coordinates, but no street name. At first he couldn't see anything on the map, but then he faintly saw three needle-thin lines. He opened the car door and held the book in direct sunlight. Every day that passes after one turns forty, the old folks' home and the lighted magnifying glass draw closer. Tracks 1 to 3 were three parallel paths in the wooded area between Bagsværd Lake and Pure Lake.

* * *

He had taken the last pieces of firewood out of KlaraMaria's hands and closed the potbellied stove. She had seated herself on the sofa. He had told her about Sonja and his visit to Slotsholm Island. About the policewoman from the Intelligence Service. She had listened without moving, absorbed in what he was saying.

"And the nuns?" she asked.

"I drove straight out there," he said. "I went according to the map."

3

He had parked by the Nybrogård psychiatric residence, taken Sonja's binoculars and the wrapped CD, and walked along Bagsværd Lake. The signs numbering the boat race lanes were newly painted. He had been here before, in the good years, twice. He had opened an exhibition of circus paintings at Sophienholm, together with the queen. And he had fired the opening pistol shot for an international regatta.

Track 3 was a gravel road north of Sophienholm, a fire lane cut into a hillside to reduce the incline for fire engines. The roadsides were steep; an oncoming car would have seen him. So he went into the woods and found an animal track above the road.  He knew from the map that there were three peninsulas. Buildings had been constructed on all three, but they were hidden behind the vegetation. As he neared the third peninsula he found a spot above a sharp drop on the hillside, laid his jacket on the ground, and crawled forward to the edge.

His mouth was dry from anxiety. The sound picture was unreal, but he couldn't have explained why. He let his hearing expand; he heard nothing that could cause his anxiety. Toward the east lay the prime minister's official residence, out in the open like a large summer house. Behind him were Fure Lake and the North Zealand forest preserves with their wild stock of corn-fed, ring-marked ducks waddling around on mowed grounds. In front of him lay Bagsværd Lake and small suburban houses. Beyond them, the low, bearable city. Everything was peaceful. Around him, within a radius of three miles, at this moment twenty thousand people lived and breathed who thought Bagsværd and Denmark were cozy little corners of the world and it was not they who would die, but other people.

He pulled himself to the edge of the drop-off.

The original building was a large house, perhaps a hundred years old. More recently, low white rectangular structures had been added to it. He heard the faint hum of a small transformer station and felt from somewhere underground the vibrations of a large natural-gas furnace. A small machine building had a chimney tall enough for a diesel-driven emergency generator, which suggested this was a hospital.

His anxiety had intensified. It would last a little while longer. The idyll was about to be compressed; soon it would leap an octave, and disintegrate.

To the right he could see a group of children playing. It would happen around them.

His hair was standing on end. He couldn't identify the individual children; he could only hear their collective sound. It was completely harmonious.

The children had established a family of sorts, or maybe a tribal solidarity. They had placed small bowls, made of clay perhaps, on a plank resting on two trestles. In another spot, where the ground was sandy, they had dug a hole. All eleven children were active. There was no adult in sight. The play was spontaneous, without any rules; it was improvised before his eyes.

He looked down at the impossible. No other person would have understood that, except maybe Stina. And it wasn't certain that even she would have understood.

Play is an interference phenomenon. Two children playing together create a balanced binary opposition. Three children is a more fluid, but also more dynamic, harmony. Four children polarize again in two doubled units, more stable than the triangle. Five is again fluid; six is normally the largest number of children that can play an improvised game that isn't organized by a dominant leader among them. Only once had Kasper seen seven children play together in a fair and balanced way. That had been artists' children who had traveled with the circus a whole summer; it had been at the end of the season, they had known they would be leaving each other, and it had lasted less than an hour. Games for more than seven children required rules set and supervised by adults, like ball games, for example.