The Quiet Girl (17 page)

It would have been a bad fall, but Kasper slid out of his chair, caught the massive figure, and drew it toward him.

“You’re not at work today You have a day off. I asked when I reserved a table.”

They had known each other for twenty--five years; there had always been mutual respect, warmth and courtesy. Now suddenly there was no courtesy anymore. That is one of the clowns tasks. To release the dark sides of the moment too.

"I wanted to be here myself. With a meat cleaver. To see if you would pay up completely?

“I didn’t give my own name.”

Leisemeer pulled himself free. They faced each other at close range.

“The police,” said the chef quietly. "They're waiting outside. They're going to nab you when you leave. They want to find out who you’re meeting.”

Kasper suddenly remembered that Gurdjieff wrote somewhere that he had been to an Easter meal. Incarnated as Judas.

"So you fingered me.”

Two red patches appeared on the smoothly shaven cheeks in front of Kasper, like warning lights. Leisemeer grabbed his lapels; he had hands as big and thick as pizzas.

"Your regular customers are looking at us,” said Kasper. “And they don’t like what they see.”

Leisemeer let him go.

“They knew you were coming. Theres also somebody from the Ministry of Iustice. I didn’t have your telephone number. What would you have done?”

Kasper smiled reassuringly to the nearest tables. People fell back into the vaudeville act. Leisemeer left. Kasper looked out the windows. Out through the coatroom and the glass door. They could be anywhere in the crowd. In a car.

Something happened in the restaurant, on the deeper levels too; for a moment, the anxiety gave way I·Ie looked up, and saw Stina.

She was in the middle of the restaurant. On her way toward him. She moved awkwardly, as she always did in a group of people, like a schoolgirl at the last dance of the season.

Nevertheless, people had stopped eating for a moment. Even those who were choosing from Leisemeer’s dessert trolley. Behind her, two young waiters broke into a quick trot. Coming over to pull out her chair.
He could have sworn that a spotlight followed her. Until he realized it was his own attention, and that of the other guests, that illuminated her.

He stretched out his arms for an embrace. It was never completed. She looked at him. With a look that could have stopped a runaway circus elephant. He was left hanging in the air. Like a wounded bird. She was the one person for whom he could never time his entrance.

She sat down. Her being was E-major. The higher aspect of E-major. He had always heard a shining green color around her.

She removed a large divers watch from her left wrist and laid it on the table.

“Half an hour,” she said.

She had changed. He couldn’t say how. His preparations disappeared. All the time he hadn’t seen her disappeared. Ten years meant nothing. A whole life hadn't meant anything.

He nodded toward the dark--golden water.

“What’s happening there? What’s your involvement?"

At first he didn't think she would answer.

"When you walk on the beach," she said, “without shoes, what happens to the sand in front of your foot when you step down on it?”

“It’s years since I’ve been in the mood to walk on the beach.”

Her eyes narrowed.

"But if you did?”

He thought about it.

“The sand will become sort of dry.”

She nodded.

“The water is sucked away. Because increased pressure creates increased porousness around the pressure area. It’s called Vatanjans theory. The theory posits something to the effect that accumulation of stress in the Earth's crust will cause changes in groundwater conditions. We’re trying to refine that hypothesis. We work with figures related to water depths when wells are dug. Anywhere in Zealand. In order to predict whether new earthquakes will occur. And to understand the earlier ones."

He barely paid attention to the words. Just their color. During her explanation she glided toward her subdominant key, A-major; the mental aspect of her sound followed. Her color shifted toward a bluish tint.

"There won't be another earthquake," he said. "That's what the papers say. Holes in the limestone collapsed. They don't think there are any more holes."

"True," she said. "There are certainly no more holes."

Her sound had changed. Only very briefly, a quarter of a second. But that was a quarter of a second too long. It had shifted to F-minor. The suicidal key.

"What's wrong?" he said. "Something is wrong."

She looked over her shoulder. As if she were looking for a creditor. But that was impossible. She had always lived on next to nothing.

"What about the earthquakes?" she asked.

"They write that it's unclear. If it was earthquakes. Or just the collapse of cave systems. They write that there have always been earthquakes in Denmark. Something to do with crustal tension from the Ice Age. They just haven't attracted public attention."

"Where did you get that information?"

"From your group."

Her sound shifted again.

"This is a 'civil catastrophe.' All information is cleared by a special office of the Danish Police."

Something had been put on the table in front of them, appetizers, perhaps; she swept them aside.

"Put your hands on the table."

He complied.

"Earthquakes are measured according to the Richter scale. Magnitudes of three or less can't be felt. They are only recorded by a seismograph. And even those can be read only by a trained seismographer. At a magnitude of four there are noticeable vibrations. But in a city you'd confuse them with heavy traffic."

She shook the tabletop against his hands. The vibrations increased.

"At five on the Richter scale, cracks develop in masonry. With a magnitude of six, things begin to go badly. It starts as an explosion. At a particular spot. The epicenter. From there, irregular rings of secondary waves spread out. They are what cause damage."

The table thumped against his body.

"With magnitudes of seven and up, there's chaos. Everything except bits of buildings topples. There's a sound like thunder. But you can't locate its source."

The table twisted back and forth under his hands. His champagne glass tipped and broke. She leaned back.

"I was at the San Andreas fault. Some years ago. At UCLA. We sprayed high-pressure steam at the tectonic plate borders. To release the tension in the Earth's crust. It failed. We worked at Antonada. Twelve miles outside San Francisco. There was an earthquake. One moment there was life--everyday life, children. The next moment, death and destruction. Fire from burst gas pipes. That was a small earthquake. But it measured seven on the Richter scale."

He hadn't seen her like this before, not even when she left him. Her sound had become more dense.

"One determines the quake's epicenter by an ordinary trigonometric measurement. GEUS, the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, participates in the European seismographic warning system. They have the European numbers on the screen as soon as the blast wave strikes Zurich or Gothenburg. There weren't any waves. GEUS has a measuring station on the Vestvolden ramparts. They have RefTek seismic recorders there. Complete equipment. Radar there can register a spider's movement on the Knippel Bridge railing. It didn't register a thing."

He understood what she said. And at the same time, he didn't understand.

"Half a square mile of Earth crust and ocean floor sink," she said. "More than a hundred million tons of stone, chalk, and sand are set in motion. And it's all caused by an underground vibration."

"The flooding? There was water."

"There was a blast wave. That reached to Helsingør, and no farther. But no terrain movement. No trace of a mass transfer."

"The holes?"

"There were no holes."

She was now completely in F-minor. Just like Schubert's last string quartet. First E-major in its heavenly purity. And then suddenly F-minor. At that point something in Schubert must have known that he was soon to die.

"GEUS and Denmark's Space Center detonated over three thousand pounds of dynamite. Last summer. Two months before the first quake. In order to map the deeper strata beneath Copenhagen. They detonated in several places at the bottom of the Sound. And recorded the blast wave's movements with geophones. Do you remember them?"

He nodded. He had calibrated four hundred geophones for her, using his hearing. They were sensitive microphones designed to be sunk into the ground. He felt a stab of joy that she at least acknowledged this little piece of the past.

"The same procedure as was used in recording the Silkeborg anomaly in 2004. Sound waves have different rates of diffusion in various layers of sediment. There were no holes in the limestone. It wasn't a collapse."

"What was it then?"

She didn't reply. She just looked at him. She wanted to tell him something. He didn't understand what it was. But for a brief moment she let her guard down.

He spread out the post office receipt between his hands. She read it slowly. Read her name. A child's handwriting. But still personal and very clear.

"KlaraMaria," he said. "A student of mine, a girl nine years old, turned up a year ago; now she's been kidnapped. I had brief contact with her. She gave me this."

Her face had been glowing. From her many outdoor activities. From excitement. Now all the color had drained out of it. She started to get up.

He grabbed her wrist.

"It's a child," he said. "She's in mortal danger. What sent her to you?"

She tried to pull her hand back. He tightened his grip.

There was movement near the door; it was one of the two monks and another man in civilian clothes. The woman with the dark hair  and the man across from her had risen from their table. Their timing indicated they were working for the police.

There was no way out. It was Easter. He thought about the Savior. Things weren't much fun for Him on Friday evening either. But He had continued to make an effort nonetheless.

Kasper raised his voice.

"I've suffered," he said. "All these years, I've suffered beyond words."

She lifted the champagne bottle out of the cooler and held it like a juggler's mallet. It was his grip on her wrist, the sensation of physical pressure; she had never been able to stand that. He let her go.

"I've changed," he said. "I'm a new person. Reborn. I'm sorry for everything."

She began to turn around. The officers were headed toward him. It was hopeless to try to get past them.

"I can't pay," he said. "I'm completely broke."

The room had good acoustics. A bit dry, but the ceiling was grooved, which made for excellent dispersion of sounds with high frequencies. Sound needs to be frustrated; smooth ceilings are a nightmare. People at the nearest tables had stopped eating. Two waiters had started moving.

She swayed back and forth. Like a tiger in a menagerie crate.  He raised the broken champagne glass. It was transformed into a wreath of razor blades on a crystal stem.

"I can't live without you," he said. "I'll kill myself!"

There were about one hundred people in the restaurant. They absorbed some of the sound. Nevertheless, he now had nearly everyone's attention. Three of the waiters plus Leisemeer had almost reached the table. The officers had come to a halt.

"Well, do it then!" she whispered. "Do it, goddamn it!"

The champagne in her glass on the table released a cloud of bubbles. He didn't understand that. Krug was made with more than 50 percent old wine. It didn't have the restlessness of modern champagnes. The glass began to dance. The small plates levitated; their liberated contents floated in the air: snails in parsley sauce on small pressed medallions of what looked like spring leeks, pieces of Danish lobster with Serrano ham.

Then the shaking began.

Porcelain and glass were swept off the table. People screamed. One of the large front windows cracked, broke into pieces, and fell to the ground in a cascade of pulverized glass.

He had been flung over the table. Those in the restaurant who had been standing up were now lying down. Except Stina. "It's a sign," he said. "That our fates are bound together. People have always taken earthquakes as a sign."

She straightened up effortlessly. If he tried to follow her he would end up on the floor. The room was swimming before his eyes. "It's karma," he said. "We were lovers in an earlier life."

He was grabbed from behind. Leisemeer and the waiters had reached him. The officers were still down on all fours. The way to the exit was open.

"Take me to the kitchen!" he shouted. "I'll wash dishes. I'll stay till I've paid for everything."

Leisemeer put his coat around Kasper's shoulders.

"We have dishwashing machines," he said.

They led Kasper toward the exit. He caught a glimpse of Stina's down jacket in the coatroom. The waiters formed a circle around him. Leisemeer's lips were by his ear.

"Half a minute," he whispered. "I'll block their way for half a minute. Now get going."

Kasper was pushed past Stina's jacket. The dark-haired woman and her companion struggled toward him, past overturned chairs and panicked customers. He put his hand into Stina's pocket, without looking directly at the jacket. Still ten seconds. And he wanted to be prepared.

"You are witnesses," he shouted. "To my confession. This woman. Whose life I devastated in the past. I had a hidden purpose when I forced her to come to this meeting."

Leisemeer clapped his hand over Kasper's mouth. It smelled of garlic and sage.

"I'll make bouillon out of you," whispered the chef.

The door opened. Kasper's heels left the earth.

They had pushed him with all their might. A person who hadn't learned falling routines would have broken something. Kasper met  the sidewalk with a forward rolling fall. The crowd made room around him.

Three groups of two men moved toward him. There was no open area between them.

He stripped off his jacket and shirt; people drew away from him, and the plainclothes policemen were pressed backward. With naked torso and outstretched arms he began moving sideways along the restaurant's broken window. Hundreds of faces stared at him from inside.