The Quiet Girl (38 page)

They went through a small cafeteria; Kasper hastily took a dinner plate from a stack. You never know what you will have use for; haven't we all learned that from "Clumsy Hans"? Everything was quiet behind them, the elevator blocked.

They entered a beautiful room, large and rectangular like a gymnast's Reuther board, but packed like a spaceship. One wall was covered with flat screens showing ocean surfaces. Another with ten three-foot-square meteorological overview maps. Radar display consoles. Some thirty feet of granite slab holding perhaps fifty seismographs. A dozen barographs, the largest as big as the Danish Class Lottery's revolving drum. Three rows of computer tables. Sitting at the computers were young people with bodies for a tawdry music video and heads for a Ph.D. in Riemannian geometry. The remaining wall had a six-foot by twelve-foot aquarium window opening onto the harbor; the ocean floor was illuminated. In spite of the sludge, Kasper saw schools of fish.

The room had a dense sound, of ventilators, of megabytes, of swarms of numbers, of murmuring liquid-cooled processors. Kasper had a sudden feeling of joy. He stood in the twenty-first century's answer to the bridge of Captain Nemo's ship. He loved science. And it didn't matter that science did not love him. There can be great depths of love that are not reciprocated.

Stina looked at his bandages.

"I've been at a meeting," he said, "with a couple of individuals who have kidnapped KlaraMaria."

She braced herself against the granite slab.

"She's been gone for more than two weeks," he said. "The prognosis is poor for little girls who disappear for more than twenty-four hours. So I was wondering if you could help me."

Stina turned around mechanically and walked ahead of him along the row of monitors. She sat down. The African pushed
Kasper's wheelchair to face her.

This was her workplace. There was a bottle of Italian mineral water. A hyacinth in a Pyrex distillation flask; if she had received it as a gift, he didn't want to know from whom. Three short carpenter pencils, sharpened with a knife. Next to them lay the knife that had sharpened them. A basket of braided birch bark for the shavings. A small jar of moisturizing cream..

It was a desk like all other desks. Ten square feet of laminated wood. Nonetheless, it had an atmosphere that made the visitor want to set up camp. It had her aroma; he breathed it in.

"We're part of a web," she said. "We have connections to the Seismic Station in Uppsala, to the Institute of Solid Earth Physics in Bergen. To all the NORSAR seismological observatories. The British Geological Survey in Edinburgh. European-Mediterranean Seismological Center stations in Nice and Madrid. We have a seismic station on the Vestvold embankment. Another in the lime mines in Mønsted. Directly beneath us we have a measuring well, twenty-three hundred feet deep, drilled and installed after the first tremors.In it are seventeen hundred sensors. In the next room we have more equipment than San Francisco. RefTek recorders. Meissner seismographs. The army detonates eleven hundred pounds of dynamite for us each week, and the vibration is collected by eight hundred geophones. So we can measure the movement of pressure waves underground. We measure stress fields. Elastic pressure changes in the earth's strata. Local changes in magnetism. Groundwater changes and deformities in a square-yard net that stretches from Dragør to Farum. We have four biologists to observe changes in the behavior of small rodents in the woods around Copenhagen. Testing a Chinese theory--that animals react to earthquakes before they occur. We have a flying squad from GeoForschungsZentrum in Potsdam. I have a hundred assistant geophysicists, engineers, and technicians. They handle six million measurement results each day. Twice a week one of our geodesists with popular appeal appears on all the television channels and talks about the progress we've made toward understanding the situation. About the likelihood of new earthquakes. About the risk that large parts of Copenhagen and Zealand mightneed to be evacuated."

Someone must have removed the work glove. Kasper heard the elevator go up.

"We've put forward a series of possible explanations. Tomorrow evening I'm going on television to summarize them. This is what I'll say: Like Iceland, Denmark is headed southeast in a conditional geologic system. But we can go no farther; Africa is headed north and is pressing on Eurasia. The alpine collision zone is about to shift toward the north. This has created an explosion in the crystalline crust. About two miles beneath Copenhagen. The area where the explosion occurred is surrounded by a layer of heavy rock, similar to the Silkeborg anomaly. That prevented the pressure wave from spreading. Which is why the earthquake wasn't registered anywhere else. The only harm that occurred is the superficial collapse. We have reason to believe that there will be no further quakes. It's difficult to predict earthquakes. We have no guaranteed methods. We can't measure stress accumulations at great depths. We don't know what the earth's surface can withstand. Nevertheless, we're confident. We remain vigilant. But we see nothing to indicate that it should be necessary to evacuate. We don't think there will be further real earthquakes. That's what I'll say tomorrow evening."

"That will be reassuring," he said.

She leaned toward him. Under different circumstances he would have enjoyed every inch. But not now.

"Yes," she said quietly. "And that's the intention. But there's just one thing wrong. And that is: It's a lie."

For a moment Kasper's peripheral hearing had failed; during his lack of attention, the young man from the platform had reached them.

"He is to be deported," the man said to Stina. "He was supposed to have been flown out of the country."

Kasper now recognized him; it was Moerk's page.

"Lieutenant Colonel Brejning," said Stina, "is responsible for our security."

The officer stepped in front of Kasper.

"There's a warrant out for his arrest," he said. "He's violent."

They did not look at Kasper. That was careless. You should not take your eyes off great clowns. He still had the dinner plate. From a tray under one of the white boards he took a wooden pointer, spun the plate in the air, caught it with a nail delay, centered it on the pointer, set the pointer on the desk, and moved the wheelchair forward. The young people and the African watched the whirling gyroscope as if hypnotized.

He wheeled himself in front of Stina.

"We'll take him with us now," said the officer.

Behind Stina and the officer, the lively kitchen exploded; the plate wasn't earthenware--it was real porcelain and you could hear that the moment it broke into a cloud of ceramic splinters.

The instant the officer and Stina turned around, Kasper opened the top drawer of her desk. She had never locked anything, not then, and not now; she had a blind trust in the world. Unfortunately, such trust is not always well founded.

On top lay some kroner bills, under the bills a small pile of handkerchiefs that smelled like lavender. Under the lavender lay an old acquaintance. From a three-inch-square black-and-white photograph in a plastic pocket KlaraMaria stared up at him. He stuck it inside his bandage and closed the drawer.

They turned around and looked at him. The young people looked at him. The African looked at him. Nobody thinks that a man in a wheelchair, wrapped up like a sausage, has any vigor. The situation dissociated into unreality. In this limbo the clown functions well. "Could we be alone, please?" he said to Stina.

The officer shook his head.

"There are things," said Kasper, "a man can do for a woman only in private."

Behind Stina was something that looked like a sluice door. She pushed it up and stepped inside. The African lifted Kasper and the wheelchair over the doorsill; it was twelve inches high. She came in too. Closed the massive door as if it were cardboard.

"Brejning is from the Intelligence Service," said Stina.

"That's why I'm so nice to him," said Kasper. "We must try to help talented young people in the next generation have an easier time growing up and maturing than we did."

The space around them was like a huge broom closet with an industrial sink, water vacuums, shelves of cleaning materials, and narrow metal tables bolted along the wall. The walls were light-colored granite, as in a luxurious bathroom.

"This is the beginning of the basement," said Stina, "under the National Bank."

He took out the plastic pocket, removed the photograph, and laid it on a table.

"There was no earthquake," she said. "Not at any time."

Love has something to do with recognition. We can be fascinated by the unknown, we can be attracted by it, but love is something that grows, slowly, in an atmosphere of trust. From the first time he saw Stina, on the beach, he had heard it repeatedly, confidence and trust; it was there now too. But there was something else, now as then, which was strange, insurmountable, like an unexplored continent. It hadn't diminished with time.

"We felt the earthquake ourselves," he said. "At the restaurant."

"We felt a vibration in the earth's surface. Locally."

"But the big earthquakes. Eight on the Richter scale. I read about them in the newspaper."

"The Richter scale is a measurement of the combined energy discharge.  The sum of a series of locally variable constants, plus the logarithm multiplied by the oscillation amplitude measured on the seismogram divided by the number of oscillations. But there was no amplitude. No oscillation in the earth's crust. The two huge events were not earthquakes."

"Collapses, perhaps?"

"A collapse is uneven. It starts at one point and spreads exponentially. These were absolutely even movements."

She took hold of his lapels.

"The so-called fault zone. It's a rectangle. Five thousand feet by over two thousand feet, plus a depression through the whole Nyhavn area. Straight. Horizontal."

Her face was right in front of him. She had a tone he had never heard before. An amalgam of wonder and desperation.

"An earthquake is a sudden shift in the earth's crust, plus the consequences of the shift. Primary waves followed by ring-shaped secondary waves that cause the damage. In these instances, there was no explosive displacement. One moment everything is normal. The next, a seven-hundred-by-five-hundred-yard rectangle sinks ten feet. And is covered with water. And stands still."

"Holes in the lime?"

"Cave-ins are uneven. They don't go off according to a bricklayer's line. They don't end horizontally."

Someone pounded on the door. He laid the postal receipt in front of her on the table, on top of the photograph. Addressed to her. And signed with a ten-year-old girl's surprisingly steady hand. He wasn't sure she had seen it.

"Even so, we could perhaps explain ourselves out of it," she said. "That's how natural science works. We predict events backward. I'm sure we would have succeeded. If it hadn't been for the number of victims."

"No one was injured."

"True. No one was injured. What do you make of that?"

"It was a great blessing. One feels the hand of God."

She stopped short.

"That's new," she said. "In your vocabulary. About the hand of God."

"I'm growing. Developing rapidly."

He could hear the concentration in the next room. Someone was getting ready to do something vicious to the door. He thought about the Blue Lady. He could hear that one of his life's refrains was about to repeat itself: Just when one is establishing deep contact with feminine nature, the collective unconscious outside the door prepares itself with an angle grinder and a large diamond blade.

"Too great," she said. "The blessing, that is. Too fortunate. We asked the police, Civil Defense, and the Accident Investigation Board under the Council for Greater Traffic Security what the predicted consequences would be. We asked them to calculate the expected loss. Based on material from UCLA, which has experience with earthquakes in large cities. The estimate we got: at least ten thousand dead. Three times as many injured. Damage to the cable system, one billion kroner. To the sewer system, one billion. Ten billion in damage to buildings, primarily from fire and collapse. The first depression caused a ten-foot pressure wave. It cleared away sidewalks and streets along the canals. Dragged with it eight hundred fifty vehicles. More than a hundred fifty feet of roadway on Knippel Bridge. It glided along eight hundred buildings. With more than thirty thousand people in them. And nobody was hurt. Not a single baby drowned. Not one person had a car accident. Not even one old woman's corns got trampled."

The door began to vibrate. Powerful forces that wanted to prevent the prince from getting the princess had begun cutting.
Stina picked up the plastic pocket from the table; on the back of the photograph was a child's drawing.

"I got it two days before the first tremors. In a letter. Registered mail.

The drawing was colored very carefully. Kasper saw a castle. With three towers. Fish in the moat. Houses and cars. A baronial castle. A drawbridge.

"It's the new Foreign Ministry," Stina said.

He could see that. The steps. The bridge. It wasn't a bridge across a moat. It was Knippel Bridge. The castle wasn't a castle. It was the large white building on Amager Island that people called the Desert Fort. The city wasn't a city, it was part of a city; the area around Bremerholmen Harbor. She must have had a model, perhaps  a map of Copenhagen. In the right-hand corner she had signed it KlaraMarà¬a. Ten years old. And a date. September 24. That was unusual. He had seen thousands of children's drawings. Sometimes they had the year. But never the specific date.

The preciseness of the drawing was unusual too. There had been the same preciseness in the depiction of Lona Bohrfeldt's clinic. "It's a map," said Stina. "It's exact. When you examine it closely. There's the National Bank. The Svitzer maritime services headquarters in Nyhavn. The Admiral Hotel. The rigging sheers. The dry docks.

She brought her face close to his.

"It's a map of the first depression," she said. "Exact, in every detail. And mailed forty-eight hours before the event occurred."