The Quiet Girl (43 page)

"I'll get a weapon," he said. "I'll force my way in. From the street. In some new way. There's never been a barrier I couldn't break through. I promised her."

He heard the compassion of the others. His father. Stina. The Blue Lady. He looked around. The abbess was not in the room. She must be somewhere inside him. Perhaps in his heart. It wasn't her voice he heard, but her opinion. That he had exhausted his energy. He would not survive the attempt.

Maximillian picked up a cell phone. His voice was too weak for them to hear what he was saying. They went closer.

"They telephoned," said Maximillian. "My lodge brothers from Holmen, that is. The Konon people are trying to land a helicopter on the roof. Even though the wind speed is forty-five miles per hour."

"How much time do we have?"

It was Stina who asked. He didn't understand why.

"One hour."

It was Franz Fieber who spoke.

"They can't land in this weather. But the wind is about to decrease. In an hour it will be okay."

"We can be inside in an hour," said Stina.

Kasper stared at her. Shook his head.

"You trusted me once," she said. "You can do it again."

Something in him gave up. Or leaped. Like a spring in a mechanical toy. Within him, a prayer began. To the feminine spirit. The Virgin Mary. Mary Magdalene.

"All right," he said.

She turned on her heel.

In front of Kasper, Maximillian was getting out of bed.

It was like looking straight into the grave. He was as skinny as a survivor of Auschwitz. Probably even less than a hundred pounds. Biological processes no longer drove him. It was his will, and a nonphysical enthusiasm.

"I'm going along," he said.

Kasper raised an arm to stop his father. Sister Gloria walked over to the sick man. Took his arm.

"Among my people," she said, "the Luo, we take at least one representative of wise old age when going to war."

"But do you choose someone with advanced Alzheimer's?" said Kasper.

They walked past him. Kasper shuffled after them. He took the hospital robe from the chair. Wrapped it around his father.
 

8

The convent's ambulance stood in the parking lot facing Fælled Park, next to the Patient Hotel. Now, for the first time, Kasper saw that it was identical to the Rigshospital ambulances, except for the Dagmar Crosses on the sides. Franz Fieber sat at the wheel.

Rasper's suitcase lay on the stretcher. Stina opened it. Rasper's things were no longer inside; there were several sets of thin blue coveralls, folded. Long thin gloves, folded.

Stina distributed the clothing. They put on the coveralls without asking any questions. Rasper too. Maximillian needed to take off his robe to get into his; he stood there for a moment in his underpants. Rasper had to look away.

Stina distributed headlamps, little plastic LED capsules that fastened around the head with an elastic band. Stina lighted hers. Even in daylight it filled the ambulance with a sharp blue glow.

She moved aside. The African took hold of a ring in the floor and pulled. A five-foot-square hatch swung open. Rasper looked down onto a shape he recognized, a meander pattern. The ambulance had stopped directly above a manhole cover.

Stina handed the African a long steel hook. She held a matching tool herself. The hooks fit into two holes on the massive iron plate. The women hoisted the cover into the vehicle and tossed it aside as if it were a piece of Tupperware.

Cold air from below filled the ambulance. Beneath the manhole cover a shaft descended into the darkness. A ladder was welded firmly to one side of the shaft.

Stina lowered herself into the hole and disappeared, as if by magic. Rasper looked down. She had grabbed the rungs of the ladder and was already ten feet below.

"Rasper is next," she said.

He could hear his confidence in her. It had never really been in question. Actually, he had always known that she was precisely the one whom he would dare to follow straight into the Underworld. The problem had been to get permission.

Nevertheless, he made the sign of the cross on his chest. Just a small one. Nothing extraordinary. He fine-tuned his prayer. Then he climbed down after her. It was colder than he had expected.

The African came next. She carried Maximillian in her left arm, effortlessly, like a rag doll. The two fluid bags attached to him with tubes and needles were firmly clasped under her arm.

* * *

The ladder ended on a narrow landing. Franz Fieber was the last one down. When they were all gathered, Stina turned around. The light from their headlamps revealed the surroundings.

The first thing Kasper noticed was the stench. It surpassed anything he had experienced aboveground, even in the circus. The next thing he saw was the beauty of the scene. It canceled out the stench in a way.

They were standing in a gigantic tunnel, the cross section of an oval. Along the bottom flowed a black, clayish river.

Stina sensed their silent prayers.

"It's a sewer line," she said. "Dug out by hand. At the end of the eighteen hundreds. Thirteen feet high, twenty feet wide. Concrete bottom. Brick sides. The tubes are small PVC sewer pipes."

Kasper saw them now, bundles of plastic tubes hung along the walls.

"A spillway structure," said Stina. "For the one time every ten years that the system backs up and the sewer overflows. The surplus runs directly into the Sound. The other main conduit goes from Nørrebro under Frederiksberg and the railroad yard, and flows into the old Teglværk clay pit."

She started walking, and they followed her slowly. In the darkness outside the beam of his headlamp Kasper saw small pearlshaped lights, like a multitude of stars just above the surface of thewater. He directed his lamp toward the galaxy, and saw the rats. There weren't hundreds of them, but thousands of them. On the cables, on the narrow path on the other side of the river, at the edge of the water. For the first time in his life he was aware of the creatures' elegance; he heard it, heard their agility, their broad intelligence, their ability to adapt. He recalled an experiment when he was a consultant for the Acoustics Institute at Danish Technical University; it had been carried out at the agricultural college's experimental station in Tåstrup. They had tested the effect of music on domestic animals. He suggested Handel for the cows. Large square barns of music. Saint-Saéns for the pigs. Somebody included rats in the experiment. The rats had loved Bach--Kasper could tell that. He heard it in their happiness. Bach's piano concertos had doubled the rats' fertility.

"I've always liked them."

Stina stood behind him.

"When I became chief engineer in my department, they put on a party. I was so young. And the first woman to hold that position. That morning I'd found two baby rats that had drowned in one of the system's depth pumps. I wore them for the party. As earrings. They hung by their tails. Swinging around my neck."

She wasn't joking.

"Why?"

She tried to find an answer within herself.

"Maybe," she said, "I've always wanted to show people what lay behind. What lay underneath. What the costs were."

"Could they take it?"

"Nobody could eat a bite. I had to take them off. Flush them down the toilet."

* * *

They had been walking for perhaps ten minutes. The gentle flow of the water indicated that the tunnel must slope down slightly. He heard the walls open outward. The sound expanded; they must have reached some sort of huge hollow.

A faint light shone from overhead. As if from a skylight in a church dome. The roof opened into a shaft.

"A ventilation canal and escape route," Stina said. "There are four hundred in this conduit alone."

The light from her headlamp pointed out pipe openings on different levels.

"Electricity, telephone, and broadband are closest to the surface; they don't require frost protection."

The light shifted down about three feet to a deeper conduit. "Military cables. That one there is NATO's main cable for nondigital information. It goes along Roskilde Road to their administration building in Koldsås."

The light moved downward.

"Gas, water. District heating. And then the sewer system. Copenhagen's underground isn't solid. It's as porous as a beehive."

The beam of light became horizontal. It rested on a metal door with a high-voltage warning.

The African walked over to the door with a small crowbar. She pulled it open the way one opens a can of beer.

The door was just decoration. Behind it was the real protection: forty square feet of stainless-steel armor plate that could have withstood a rocket attack.

Franz Fieber gave a low whistle.

"Everything is controlled from here," said Stina. "We need to get in."

Franz Fieber opened his attache case; lying on black velvet were shiny instruments, as if for jaw surgery. He pointed to a metal box the size and shape of a hair dryer located about three feet to the right of the door.

"The siren and the alarm," he said. "If we cut it, a telephone will ring to alert the police and Falck security services. We have to disable the phone line."

His fingers glided over a push-button panel to the left of the door. "An electric one-channel lock. Which means that the pick gun won't work. And that the alarm covers the entire door."

He handed Kasper a black rubber hammer, the kind doctors use to test reflexes in cases of delirium tremens.

"Let's test your hearing."

He pointed to the wall; Kasper knocked on it carefully. "We're looking for a contact unit for the panel. It connects the alarm to the station's network. And to a battery, in case of a power outage. If you can find that, I can go in through the wall."

Kasper pounded carefully.

"Can there be something in it that jingles?" he asked.

Franz Fieber shook his head.

"You must have found the key closet."

Kasper continued on the other side of the door. All eyes were on him.

He heard something.

"Electronics?" he asked.

"A circuit board."

"What else?"

"A battery. A loudspeaker for the alarm."

"Small springs?"

"Makes sense. The door must be spring-loaded. If it's opened, the sabotage alarm goes off."

Franz Fieber attached a long masonry bit to a drill. Bored a hole. Guided a dentist's mirror and two small forceps attached to a rod through the hole. He snipped. Attached a diamond blade to a small battery-driven angle grinder. Placed it against the door hinges. The disc went through the tough steel as if it were butter. The African caught the heavy door as it slid out of the rabbet.

The space behind the door was quite small. Kasper heard the dangerous hum of high-voltage electricity. Stina and Franz Fieber got to work with the circuit-breaker control panels.

"The train needs to keep running," she said. "And the pump station. And the elevator up to the surface. We'll shut down everything else."

She held a wire cutter; its insulation was as thick as a pair of heavy mittens. As she cut, a cascade of sparks poured over them. "The rest are on the circuit breakers," said Franz Fieber. "A higher-level four-hundred-kilovolt cable supplies Copenhagen. Under that lies a one-hundred-twenty-kilovolt system. Under that, thirty and ten kilovolts. The surveillance equipment draws directly from the one-hundred-twenty system, to reduce the chance of it shutting down."

He turned off one circuit breaker after another as he spoke. "We will now say goodbye to the Copenhagen environmental protection agency."

He switched off a circuit breaker.

"To National Telecom's cable monitoring office."

He turned off another.

"To the maintenance department at E2 Energy."

He turned off another.

"To NATO's head office. With overall digital surveillance of Copenhagen's underground."

Franz Fieber put two bypass wires across the circuit breaker. The tunnel became illuminated.

What surrounded them was not a hollow. It was a large space. More than 500 by 150 feet. The sewer line went through it about six feet above the floor. Above them was a vaulted brick ceiling. Below them, remnants of masonry, as if from small cubicles.

Stina followed his gaze.

"Graves," she said. "More than five thousand. This was a cavern under one of the earliest Catholic convents."

Close to their feet they saw two narrow tracks. And just ahead of them, a vehicle that looked like the roller coasters in Tivoli.

"Tipper trolley tracks," said Stina. "They laid them when they dug out for the freight railway. They dug through the old garbage dumps. They had to get rid of twelve million metric tons of contaminated Class Three soil. So they laid the trolley tracks. And transported the soil out to North Harbor. Built the Lynetten sewage treatment plant on it. Filled out beyond Tippen."

The tracks emerged from a black tunnel to their left.

"They go out to the Tingbjerg neighborhood," she said. "To the Copenhagen water-supply headquarters. They service both the water mains and the sewage system. Copenhagen's sewers are almost worn out. So the maintenance crews are kept very busy. Trying to postpone the system's collapse."

She opened the trolley doors. They all got in. Franz Fieber took the driver's seat. Somewhere a large electric motor came to life. The trolley began to move.

It accelerated powerfully, like a jet airplane. Ahead of them the emergency lighting was out. The trolley shot into the dark. The tunnel curved and twisted.

They were in total darkness, aside from a faint reflection from the instrument panel on Franz Fieber's face. Rasper's hearing registered an expansion of the tunnel, then a contraction. Registered that the material on the walls of the tunnel changed from brick to cement.  Or else it was just the material inside his own nervous system that he heard.

He leaned toward Stina.

"You knew about me in advance. Before that time on the beach. You hadn't gotten separated from the boat. I was a pawn."

They came to a lighted section; he could see her face.