The Quiet Girl (34 page)

"All twelve are--or have recently been--on Konon's payroll."

"Kain," said Kasper. "With his past experience in the navy and with the Navigation and Hydrography Administration. He'd know something about floods."

"And about how to operate in catastrophic situations."

"The dates," said Kasper. "What are the dates when the companies were established?"

He could hear the paper rustle.

"Between September second and September twenty-fourth."

There was a silence. In the silence Kasper heard his father's shock; it started at a single point, at an epicenter, as a tone of intellectual awareness and from there it expanded into a sphere.

"Good God," said Maximillian. "That means . . . that they knew the earthquakes would occur."
 

7

Kasper awoke to the song of the Sirens, the "Ride of the Valkyries," in a churchlike mode. He had no idea where he was, perhaps in hell. He stumbled into the darkness and fell against the night table. Reality returned and found him lying on the bare floor, tangled up in cords.

The singing was filtered through perhaps ten feet of masonry and must have come from more than two hundred feet away. It sounded like there were between twenty and thirty women, and their intonations would lead one to believe they were on their way to Brocken Mountain. His watch lay beside him. It was three o'clock in the morning.

He ripped off the electrodes. Held on to the bed. And managed to get to his feet. For the first time in more than two weeks, he stood up.

He made his way over to the washbasin. Turned on the light above it. His electric shaver lay on the shelf. Along with shaving cream and a razor. And the leather strop to hone the blade. All laid out with wisdom and care. If one's mother had done it, one would have been happy. But his mother had been dead for twenty-eight years; she hadn't lived long enough to see him shave.

He shaved himself slowly and thoroughly.

He faced himself in the mirror. Every man who shaves wishes a woman would watch and evaluate the result. In his case, it was eleven years since anyone had watched him shave. Stina had been the last one. Since then the only observers had been the dressers at the theater.

There was someone now.

It was the Blue Lady. She was leaning against the door. He hadn't heard her arrive. He looked down at her feet. They weren't animal pads. They were bare feet in sandals. With nail polish. Clear nail polish. A gloss. The singing grew more powerful.

"The canonical hours," she said. "The second matins. From three to four in the morning."

He rinsed off the last foam with cold water.

"Two things," he said. "Will you look and see if it's smooth enough to enter Paradise?"

Her hands were cool, with a fragrance of something that might have been sandalwood.

"It's fine. And the other thing?"

"Why are they here? The women. What does it give them? Being up at this ungodly hour of day. Greek mantras. Wool directly on your skin. Ugly pictures of pale young men on a cross. Total obedience. What does it give them?"

She walked in and closed the door behind her before she replied. "Love," she said.

* * *

She pulled the wheelchair forward; he sat down in it. She seated herself across from him. They listened to the singing. No normal hearing would have been able to pick it up at this distance. But he knew that hers could.

"You'll come to understand," she said. "Why she disappeared, and also why she had the letter."

He didn't know how she could have known that. But he trusted her. Because of the tone of her voice. He could hear the expert knowledge. The world is filled with people who express themselves about things they don't understand. It was different with her. His trust felt like physical tension that pulled at his wounds.

"They were hard on you," she said. "Those last two days. Before we brought you here."

He could tell that a great performance was on its way. He had thirty years of experience in hearing beforehand that great performances were about to begin. But this one was without curtains. Without music. Without lights. Without an audience. Without blocking. Something came creeping up from the large orchestra pit. It was anxiety.

"They aged me," he said. "Those two days. They aged me fifteen years."

"On the other hand, they were certainly predictable, weren't they?"

He didn't believe his own ears.

"Wasn't it just a series of repetitions?" she said. "The same meeting. With the same two people?"

He listened into her system. There was nothing to hear. Body sounds, of course. But there was no sound of the mind. No whisper of thoughts. No aggression. No purpose. She was quiet, like complete absence.

But she was not absent. He met her glance. He tried to create a mental picture of her body. It was as solid as a cliff, as a block of bedrock. And at the same time, it was frail, like a flame that a draft can extinguish in an instant. His hair stood on end.

"In those two days," he said, "I met more people than I can remember. And I was in mortal danger. Everyone has been tracking me. Because I'm trying to save a child's life. And fulfill an agreement. It's been a series of nightmares. So what are we talking about?"

"Hasn't it just been a series of variations on a very simple theme?"

He stared at her.

"A man and a woman," she said. "To provide some variety for you, they are found in two versions. Those who help children. And those who harm children."

With great resistance, he listened to the two days in slow motion. He heard the meeting with Brodersen and the blond woman. Moerk and Asta Borello. Maximillian and Vivian the Terrible. Lona Bohrfeldt and the men around her. Kain and the woman in the sauna.

"In a few instances they may have been separated," she said. "So you met the man by himself, the woman by herself."

He heard Daffy. Franz Fieber. Stina. Sonja.

"But still, quite alike," she said. "With you, or against you. But otherwise quite alike."

"It wasn't only meetings," he said.

She nodded.

"There was escape. Into freedom. You're a refugee. And there was forced entry. Intrusion. You're a seeker. But always in the same tracks. How many essentially identical barriers have you gotten past in basically the same way?"

He heard the sound of Little Jack Horner at the tax office. The angel in the booth at the barricaded area. The Bad Mother at Lona Bohrfeldt's clinic. The entrance to Taarbæk Sanatorium. Women  who guarded telephones. Who guarded the Map and Land Registry. He heard the officer behind the counter at Slotsholm Island. The man in the glass booth at Konon.

His anxiety became concrete, became fear. Panic-stricken fear, panic-stricken and deaf. Fear of being shut in.

"It was like that only for those two days," he said. "Otherwise my life has been as varied as a painter's palette."

He heard his voice from outside. It belonged to a person he didn't know.

"I've done five hundred performances," he said.

"But they were all quite similar, weren't they?"

He looked her in the face. He had never seen such a look. It was absolutely calm. And absolutely alert.

"That's all right," she said. "We all try to camouflage the monotony. But it takes a lot of energy. To insist on being special all the time. When we're so much like one another anyway. Our triumphs are the same. Our pain. Try for a moment to feel what relief there is in the ordinary."

He looked at her. She was transparent, like a watercolor. As if she were about to dissolve in sound, in tones not yet created.

He heard how few themes there were in his life. How few strings there had always been to play on. He let them go.

It was silent around him. Within him. More silent than it had ever been before.

The door began to open. The door to the great music. He knew she could hear it as well.

"That door too," she said, "even that will become monotonous in the long run."

He let go. He was behind the concert stage. In the wings with SheAlmighty. There was a hole. In the sound wall. Silence flowed through the hole. For the first time ever, his hearing had peace.

* * *

He did not know how long it had lasted; there was no extent to the moment. Extent in time requires that a metronome ticks, a pendulum swings. The moment had been silent.

"What did you do?" he said.

He couldn't make himself look straight at her.

"In a way, nothing," she said. "Played the silence game."

He looked at her after all. She smiled. Her smile sounded the way Ella Fitzgerald sang. The sound of a playful child, but also of timeless maturity. Was she an old woman or a very little girl?

"Mother Rabia," she said, "my predecessor and teacher, often said she experienced people as being trapped inside bubbles. One or two tiny little holes were pricked in the bubbles. And only through those holes could the bubbles connect to one another, only through them could people communicate and experience reality. Those holes ensure that we always experience the same few basic situations. Each of us carries around our own reality. But we have very little contact with other people's reality. Now what was the reason you never answered her letter?"

He did not say anything.

"The desire to be something special," she said, "is very strong. In all of us. It doesn't matter that life is painful. If only it's a special kind of pain. But when you meet someone who is wiser. Who listens more deeply. Then you risk having to put your specialness into perspective. Was that it?"

"That was part of it," he said. "But I was also afraid. That it would . . . weaken my hearing."

He could tell that she understood him.

It had gotten light outside, though he hadn't noticed the daylight come. He heard children's voices, children and young people. He got goose bumps.

"They aren't ordinary children," he said. "I've seen them stop time."

The voices came nearer; they were below the window. He recognized two of them, which couldn't be true. All the same, he put on his glasses and rolled the wheelchair over to the window. Beneath it were permanent tables and benches; the children were eating breakfast outdoors.

The closest child was the boy from Slotsholm Island. With water on his brain. One year older. But the same boy. In the child's shirt pocket Kasper saw the predecessor of his fountain pen.

His fear returned. He could feel sweat running from his armpits and down his sides. The other sound came from a group of children farther away. A big boy was serving them--hardly a boy, a young man.

His voice was husky, deep-throated like those of the boys in the St. Annas choir. It was the boy from the Rungsted Hotel.

"I know two of them," he said.

"That must be a coincidence."

"I'm a card player. I know the odds of coincidence. This is outside those odds."

She sat where she had been sitting the whole time.

"Simon," she said. "He goes to the daycare center where you picked him up."

He shook his head to ward off her words.

"He was waiting for you," she said. "Not that moment. But sooner or later. All of us were waiting for you. Among the things I learned from Mother Rabia was that the tenacious people, those who lead, will come to us sooner or later. One can just wait for them."

"And the other youngster. The tall one. He served me at a hotel."

She shrugged her shoulders. Stood up.

He felt furious that she wanted to leave him. At this moment.

"We've just started," he said.

She shook her head.

"What we were looking at was a glimpse of the silence. Not a lexicon about the mysteries of life."

If he could have risen he would have grabbed her.

"You're a great egotist," she said. "In my opinion, that's positive. A great egotist is a great sinner. Great sinners have the opportunity for great remorse. Remorse is a springboard."

She drew down one shoulder of her smock. He stared at a piece of lacy black material, probably silk.

"I grew up accustomed to a degree of affluence," she said. "I could never live with wool next to my skin."

He managed to preserve his centeredness.

"And what about everyday life?" he said. "Two children have disappeared."

AH humor drained from her face.

"That," she said, "is even worse than you imagine."

* * *

The African brought some soup and sat with him while he ate. "Most things," he said, "are outside our control and in the hands of SheAlmighty. If a child disappears, or comes back again. Whether it lives or dies. Perhaps in the end we can do nothing either for or against it. But if we're going to be able to endure looking at our own powerlessness, there's one thing we must have done. We must have done our utmost."

He did not reach her; her mind was closed. She gathered up his dishes. In the doorway she paused.

"I'll get a car," she said. "Tonight."

"How about a bottle of Cognac? A couple of glasses. Some painkiller, a little morphine for when I have to perform?"
 

PART SIX

1

It was all over in three hours.

She arrived just after midnight, helped him into the wheelchair. The elevator took them down into a parking garage. He counted twelve parked vehicles: two four-wheel drives, the ambulance he had come in, another ambulance, a trailer truck, two pickups, a station wagon, three Volkswagen Polos, perhaps for the nuns' power shopping, and a delivery van.

Sister Gloria lowered the delivery van's lift, pushed him onto the platform, hoisted it, wheeled him into the van, and secured the wheelchair. Franz Fieber sat behind the steering wheel.

The garage door must have had a sensor or a remote control; it glided up by itself. Outside, the night was like a wall. The wrought-iron gate in the fence opened, the vehicle's headlights caught wisps of fog.

"We have three hours," said the African. "After that, somebody will begin to wonder about us."

* * *

"You said you had a driver," said Kasper, "who had a boat."