The Quiet Girl (19 page)

He continued down the stairs. The children followed him, hesitantly.

"Santa Claus?"

"Yes."

"Thank you for the money. And Merry Christmas."

The pitch of their voices changed. They disappeared up toward heaven. In a cascade of laughter. Kasper stepped onto the sidewalk. He began walking.
 

3

Kierkegaard wrote somewhere that if one just goes walking, everything goes well. He should have been along this evening. Behind every pair of approaching headlights he heard one of the police's Ford Mondeos. In every passing drunk he saw a plainclothes officer. He looked for a taxi.

A green light came toward him in the darkness; green is the color of hope and the heart; it was a taxi. The taxi stopped. It was a Jaguar. The back door opened; Kasper did not move. The traffic was heavy, flowing fast. There was no way an automobile could have followed a pedestrian.

"They've issued an arrest warrant," said Franz Fieber. "On the police home page. And broadcast a radio description to taxis and Greater Copenhagen Authority buses. If you continue on foot you'll be nabbed in ten minutes. I suggest you get in. One of my drivers has a motorboat in Sweden. He can have it ready in an hour. Ten thousand kroner, which includes his picking up the boat in Malmø. Late tomorrow afternoon you'll be lying low in Umeå."

A feeling of no escape is in D-minor. It was Mozart who discovered that. And developed it. In Don Giovanni. Around the statue. Before Mozart, there had always been a way out. One could always pray to God for help. Doubt about the Divine begins with Mozart.

Kasper got into the Jaguar.

"We're going out to Tippen," he said. "Through the inner city. Where we'll change cars."

Franz Fieber shook his head.

"I've got orders. To take you away."

Kasper folded his hands. He prayed. For forgiveness for what he would be forced to do. If the car didn't start in ten seconds.

Kierkegaard writes somewhere that there is something disturbing about praying for forgiveness. It's as though one doesn't really believe that God has already granted forgiveness. But what shall we do?

The Jaguar started up and moved into the flow of traffic.

"I can sense my passengers," said Franz Fieber. "Through the seats. You would have slugged me. If I hadn't cooperated."

The Jaguar drove down Studie Street. In the side streets adjacent to the barricaded area, homeland-security cars were parked with dark windows and their headlights turned off.

"There are two," said Franz Fieber.

"Two what?"

"Two children. They've disappeared."

If one listens into the truly big shocks one can hear what effort it takes to hold the world together. When for a moment we let ourselves feel deep, sudden joy or sudden sorrow, reality begins to disintegrate.

"How long ago?"

"Simultaneously--they disappeared simultaneously."

"Why hasn't this been in the media?"

"That was a police decision. Probably to protect the investigation."

Kasper listened backward, toward the place in his heart and mind that prayer came from. Slowly, reality returned.

"Tell me about the city," said Franz Fieber. "What it really sounds like."

Kasper heard himself speaking, perhaps to reassure the young man ahead of him, perhaps to reassure himself.

"It sounds like the way people treat their children."

Perhaps that was true. Perhaps it was part of the truth. The area was as full of motorcycle cops as during a state visit. The police's small Dutch armored cars, built to drive straight into a war zone, were parked at every other corner. To help prevent plundering in apartments and stores.

In the northern suburbs there is a tendency toward discipline without empathy. Coddling instead of love. Closer in, there is inferiority and bewilderment. The volume increases according to the population density. From Park Cinema on into the city center, Copenhagen sounds like an acetylene torch.

The yellow eyes regarded him in the rearview mirror.

Rasper kept his face expressionless. Generalizations have an inhuman touch. But without them it is difficult, or perhaps impossible, for great clowns to create energy. The Savior also painted with broad brushstrokes and plenty of tar on the palette.

"I earn two hundred fifty thousand a month," said Franz Fieber. "On the city. Is that a sin?"

"Before or after taxes?"

"After."

"It would be a sin not to earn it."

The mobile phone rang; Franz Fieber lifted the receiver, listened, hung up.

"They're searching for this vehicle," he said.

Kasper pointed; the Jaguar turned across Ny Adel Street and drove through an open gate. The two hearses still stood there. The back door of one was open.

"I'm borrowing a friend's van," said Kasper. "Still, I'm not sure the key is in the ignition. If not, could you help me?"

The Jaguar stopped. Franz Fieber took out a small toolbox from a space between the seats.

"I outshine every auto mechanic," he said. "Every auto electrician."

A young man in a cook's uniform came out from what had to be the kitchen's delivery entrance. He took a tray from the open van. It held puff-pastry canapes. Hunger hit Kasper like a blow.
 

"We've got perhaps a couple of minutes," he said. "I can take out the motor and do major repairs in that time."

They got out of the Jaguar; Kasper was just a little ahead of Franz Fieber. It was like watching the sorcerer's apprentice, as crutches and prostheses fell into place of their own accord. Kasper was about to get behind the wheel; the young man put his hand on the door handle.

"I'll drive."

They looked at each other. Then Kasper heard the sound. It's not just that people themselves can be identified by their tone. The feelings they awaken in others also create a watermark of sound. Kasper had always been able to hear Bach's love for Maria Barbara in works from 1710 and on. And in the "Chaconne," Bach's wild and yet transfigured sorrow over her death. Now in the system in front of him he heard the quiet girl. He let go of the door. Franz Fieber swung himself into the driver's seat. Kasper walked around the vehicle and got in the other side. The key was in the ignition. The van glided out through the gate.

A cell phone lay on the dashboard. Kasper leaned out the window and read the restaurant's telephone number on the side of the van. He dialed the number and was transferred to Leisemeer.

"This is Kasper. I had to borrow one of your delivery vans from the yard."

The chef breathed heavily into the receiver.

"It is," he said slowly, "a long way down the list from you to the customer who pissed next-most on me."

"It's also a long way down the list to the customer who comes next closest to loving your crisp fried vegetables as much as I do. And that's one reason you will wait an hour before reporting the van stolen."

"And the other reason?"

"When I get over these temporary difficulties, I'll attract customers. In droves. You can recognize a trendsetter when you see one."

"You won't get over them," said Leisemeer. "This isn't temporary. I can recognize a big loser when I see one."

The telephone hummed. The line was dead.
 
 

4

Night is not a time of day, night is not an intensity of light; night is a sound. The clock on the dashboard showed 9:30. Although a scrap of daylight still hung in the sky, it was no longer evening; night had fallen.

Kasper heard children fall asleep, dogs go to sleep, machines get turned off. He heard the strain on the electricity grid decrease, the water usage diminish. He heard television sets get turned on, and adults prepare to end a long working day.

He rolled down the window. The city sounded like a single organism. It had been up early, and now it was weary. Now it sank down into the furniture, heavy as a moving man. And under the weight he heard the uneasiness that is always there, because yet another day is over, and what was accomplished, where are we headed?

Or else it was his imagination. Do we ever hear anything other than our own monstrous ego and the immense filter of our personality? They stopped at Frihavn Harbor. Beyond the Oslo boat quay and UNICEF warehouses they could see the landfill. And behind the container ship harbor, the gray contours of Konon.

Around them and behind them rose the harbor's new construction. Stacks of apartments for seventy thousand kroner a month, designed like space stations on Mars.

The van was high enough that they could look into the first-floor apartments. Wherever there was light, people sat on sofas watching television. Kasper let his hearing sweep over the buildings like radar; there were hundreds of apartments. But the human sounds, of bodies, of personal contact, were very weak, barely audible behind the TV programs.

He heard the fabulous wealth. From the apartments, the auction houses, the offices. Right here was the greatest concentration of temporal liquidity anywhere in the country. It was a sound that made the affluent suburbs of Søllerød and Nærum sound like the Klondyke nightclub.

"Before I was born," he said, "my father left the circus to get out of poverty. He studied law and had a career; he opened his own law office. We had money, we were flush. It was the mid-sixties. My mother forced him to drive her and me on tour; we had a Vanguard Estate with a trailer and those yellow-and-black commercial plates. I can remember when we got a refrigerator--at that time the highway went only the first thirty miles toward Holbæk. Now that's all standard for welfare clients. And what do we do with our wealth? We watch television. One thing I've never understood: How do you go from the TV to the bed; how can you get something going with your beloved after staring into the electron cannon'?"

Kasper heard the other man's system contract with this sudden intimacy. Heard it expand in an attempt to relax.

"I've never had a TV set," said Franz Fieber. "I've never lived with a woman either. Not really."

Kasper could hear him blush, the sound of blood pricking the skin's surface. He leaned forward, to respect the other man's modesty. The intimacy between them was a realm in F-major; it expanded into the night.

"You work for the sisters," said Kasper.

"I drive for them. As much as I can. What are we waiting for?"

"I can hear the little girl. Sometimes I can hear people in ways beyond the physical sounds. I'm waiting for the right timing."

Kasper closed his eyes.

"Let us pray," he said. "Just for a couple of minutes."

Franz Fieber set the icon of Mary in front of the gearshift; he must have taken it from the Jaguar. He lit a votive candle by it. They closed their eyes.

The words that came were, "Grant me a -pure heart." That had been the favorite prayer of Saint Catherine of Siena; she lived to be only thirty-three, like the Savior. Kasper had already outlived them both by nine years. How much can one expect?

The prayer brought a memory. Kasper remembered how as a child he had fallen asleep in the Vanguard between his mother and father. On the days they moved the tent site they never left until after midnight. He had awakened just as his father carried him into the cool night air to go to the trailer. He looked up into Maximillian's face and saw a weariness that had been accumulating for ten years. A weariness caused first by working full-time and taking his final university exams, then by completing his law studies with top grades, then by being unable to persuade his wife to leave the circus, and then by always being stretched between two worlds, the artisan's and the bourgeoisie.

"I can walk myself," Kasper said.

Maximillian laid him carefully on the bed; it was summer. The trailer had the brittle sound of glass that's cooled and crackles; it was the sound of veneer on the wood panels giving way. His father tucked the duvet around him, and sat down on the bed.

"When I was a child," he said, "we had horse-drawn carriages and the work was very hard. I remember being seven or eight, as you are now, and being awakened at midnight to be carried inside. You know the fairy tales about people who promise the fairies something or other if only they can have a child. I promised myself something then. I promised that if I had a child who fell asleep in the carriage, I would always carry the child inside."

Maximillian had gotten up from the bed then. Kasper could feel him as if he stood beside him; it wasn't thirty-five years ago, but now. This was what Bach had meant with Actus Tragicus; it was in both the music and the text: "SheAlmighty's time is the best time"; there is no past, only the present.

He listened. It was as if the universe hesitated. There was nothing to do; one can't press SheAlmighty for a solution.

"Stina," said the young man. "How do you know her?"

He could have replied dismissively; he could have replied negatively; he could have not replied at all. Now, to his surprise, he heard himself answering with the truth. With one of the possible versions of the truth.

"She rose out of the sea," he said.
 
 

5

He had been sitting outside the trailer; it was three o'clock in the afternoon. A warm September day. He had tried to repair a couple of Cro-Magnon-like hangovers with Haydn's symphonies. They had a more powerful detoxifying effect than Mozart's, perhaps because of the surgical horns, perhaps because of the shock effects, perhaps because of Haydn's ability to create interferences that made the instruments sound like something unknown, Divinely sent, from another, better, less alcoholic world.

There had been a seal out in the water.

The seal had risen out of the sea; it was a diver. He waded toward the shore backward, removed his flippers in shallow water, turned around, and walked onto the beach. He took off his Aqua-Lung and air tanks, unzipped his wet suit. It was a woman. She looked around; she had lost her bearings.

Kasper got up and walked toward her. Somewhere Eckehart had written that even if we are transported to seventh heaven, if a traveler is lost we must be there immediately.

"The current," she said. "It's strong along the coast. The dive boat is outside Rungsted Harbor."