Beneath the Neon Egg (19 page)

Trane leaves off and Reggie Workman takes it on the bass alone before Booker Little's trumpet and Coltrane joins him on soprano, on oboe, tuba, and the rhythms swing out of this forty-year-old sadness cut into wax.

Bluett drinks his bloody, refills the glass and stares at Coltrane's face on the CD jacket, grateful to that dignified face for these sounds. He leans back, tongue numb now, stands and does a little dance, slaps his thighs, turns to the bookshelves, grabs Kierkegaard's
Fear and Trembling
and slams it back, his hand charged with the touch of it as Coltrane's soprano blows “Africa,” lifting upward like a bird cry of thought. Bluett closes his eyes and smiles, leaning on the chairback, nodding to the rhythms.

He steps to the window, opens it to breathe in the icy air, gazes down one story to the bright, cold street. That gray-eyed foreign guy again on the corner. The unknown neighbor, standing aside in the freezing afternoon to let a young couple pass—a tall young man in a leather jacket with a woman, slightly older, who turns to smile at the foreigner, her blue eyes so light he can see their glow from here. “
Mange tak
,” she says with warmth, “Many thanks,” and they walk on away from the man, who stands in a strangely twisted posture, as though he has back pain, and watches the couple for a moment as they disappear up the street, and Bluett experiences a spooky moment of recognition, of a constellation of four lives, trajectories crossing at this moment of Coltrane's soprano, continuing away.

Then a banging reaches up through the music into his consciousness. He moves to the stereo, lowers the volume.

Someone is in the hall. He shuts off the sound and looks out. A young man stands at Sam's apartment doorway knocking, hammering at the door. The young man glances back at Bluett.

“Have you seen my father?”

“You must be Anders,” Bluett says. “Sam always talks about you. He's proud as hell of you.” Bluett can understand Sam's pride. The boy is good-looking, well-dressed, an intelligent face. Bluett introduces himself.

“My father is supposed to meet me today. I was supposed to meet him here twenty minutes ago.” The boy's English is accented, sibilant
esses
.

“Tried him before myself,” Bluett says, “but no luck. If he was supposed to meet you, he'll be home for sure any minute. You want to come in and wait here?”

The boy looks skeptical.

“Don't you have a key?” Bluett asks.

“Uh, I forgot it.”

“Well, listen, I can let you in. We hold keys for each other. Wait a sec . . .” He goes in and finds the key, which he has hung on a red cord beside the refrigerator, opens the door for the boy. “Give Sam my regards when he comes.”

He returns to his apartment, his table, stares at the CD player, the red half-empty pitcher, wonders if he can revive the mood, if he even wants to. Then there's a knock on his own door this time. Sam's son again, but Bluett can see at once something has happened.

The boy's face is drained, frightened, the same startled blue eyes as Sam's. His voice is very slight.

“Someone has . . . killed him. My father.”

10. Blood Count

The events of the day bring him down from his vodka cloud, but the chronology is jerky. Now he sits alone again at the end of a weekend, and it occurs to him that this is a continuous situation, fleeting days vanishing in a blur.

There was the boy Anders’s stricken face. What had at first seemed murder later was seen as suicide. In the boy’s hand was the note that Sam had addressed to him, telling about cancer, that he could not face a drawn-out eating away of himself, months of pain and dying and dependence, that it was better like this, that he hoped it wasn’t unfair but that he wanted his son to be the one to find him, to find this note so that he could read it for himself, so he could say once more how much he loved the boy, how proud he was of him and of his sisters Annette and Mie, that they should not think harshly of him if they could avoid it, this way they were spared something much worse, that they should take care of one another and know always how much their father treasured them.

Bluett did not want to see Sam’s body but wound up in the man’s bedroom nonetheless, and his immediate sense was that something was more than wrong. The room, the apartment was tidy and clean, and there was a plastic bag over Sam’s head. His hands lay on his breast with a necktie wound around his wrists. Bluett backed out as quickly as he could without startling Anders, who stood in the little hallway behind him.

Then the police were there, and Bluett waited for a moment alone with the dark-haired older policeman to ask about the bag and necktie around his wrists.

“It looks like he was killed. How could he have tied his own hands?”

The policeman’s blue eyes glanced at Bluett and turned away. “There was no knot. It was just wound around his wrists. They do that sometimes to make sure that if they wake up, their hands aren’t free to phone for help. When you’re drugged, even just having something wound around your wrists might be enough to stop you, apparently. Just wanted to be sure nothing got in the way, not even himself.”

Anders’s younger sister, Annette, was at the door, a strikingly beautiful girl, movie-star beautiful, and it occurred to Bluett that Sam’s ex-wife must be a real beauty as well. He had never met her and wondered if she would show up before the body was removed, but then another man was there, a doctor, and two Falck ambulance men with a stretcher and a body bag.

The younger policeman, with a scarred jaw, asked Bluett a few questions: Had Sam ever mentioned the cancer to him, did he seem unhappy, did Bluett know of other problems he might have been experiencing?

And Bluett found himself telling the policeman that Sam had told him about a woman he was involved with, a very beautiful Russian woman he was apparently in love with. They stood in the hall as they talked, and Anders, near the door of Sam’s apartment, looked up sharply at those words, and Bluett hated himself for not being more tactful.

He glanced at the boy, tried to express his grief in a look, but Anders turned away. The policeman asked if he knew the woman, knew where she could be contacted.

“I never actually met her,” Bluett said.

He did not mention that he had seen her once or that she and Sam had disappeared behind the door of the Satin Club. He did not know why he hadn’t mentioned it. Instinct. A feeling that if he told, the information could not be taken back. But why should he want to take the information back?

Next day, Saturday, he hears more activity in the apartment, people talking in the hall, descending the stairs. He goes to the window and looks down to the street. A car is parked there and stenciled on the side is the name of the realty firm from which Bluett had bought his apartment. A moment later, two people appear through the gate and stand by the car. The realtor and Sam’s Russian girlfriend. She wears a black raincoat and sunglasses, but there is no mistaking the beauty of her face. The realtor unlocks the door of his car and opens it for her, happens to glance up and sees Bluett there, throws a subdued wave. The woman glances up, lowering her sunglasses onto her sharp cheekbones, and for some reason Bluett does not understand he ducks back from the window, but not before their eyes meet.

In a box of papers at the top of his closet, Bluett finds the card the realtor gave him when he bought his own apartment here. It is eleven in the morning. He waits half an hour and makes the call, identifies himself, mentions he was Sam’s close friend, asks if the family has put the apartment on the market.

“His fiancée did,” the realtor says. “The apartment is in her name.”

“
What?
What about the kids?”

“They were not especially glad about it. She was in here already yesterday afternoon, and the papers were in order. He sold it to her. For a song. I met the son once, Anders, and felt like I ought to give him a call. Didn’t like to bother him with all that happened, but . . . Apparently Sam’s bank book was empty, too. Even of the song he sold the apartment to her for. Nothing left but a small annuity the kids will share. Maybe forty thousand crowns apiece. They were not glad. But all the paperwork was in order. There was nothing to do about it.”

“What’s the apartment worth?”

“She wants a quick sale. She’s asking one point eight. But she’ll go as low as a million and a half crowns.”

“Are you going to handle it for her?”

“I’m a businessman. That’s what I do.”

There is not much more of the weekend. A long, slow walk around the lake to watch the skaters on Sunday, a cappuccino at the Front Page and a stroll across Peace Bridge, where he buys
Politiken
, with which he spends the remainder of his afternoon, leafing slowly through the newspaper, a pot of Bewley’s afternoon tea at his side.

He reads the news and the sports and the weather. He glances through the TV listings, reads the Nicoline Werdeline comic strip about a woman who is unfaithful to her husband, the one by Strid. Strid usually makes him smile. This time he is interviewing a penguin in the zoological gardens. The penguin has been sponsored by the Danish National People’s Party and is irate. “They’re racists!” he says to Strid, who shushes the bird. “You’re not allowed to say that, it’s against the law, you could get a fine for defamation of character,” and the bird squawks, “I’m an animal, I don’t have to obey that law. They’re racists! Racists! Racists!”

Bluett chuckles, studies the drawing of the bird, begins to laugh, and the laughter takes hold of him so he cannot stop. Then he is trembling, staring with terror out at the frozen lake, fearing the emotion that wants to grip him. He breathes slowly, deeply.

It passes.

He turns back to the newspaper, reads the classifieds, ads for alcohol clinics, psychotherapy, clairvoyance, organic psychotherapy, spiritual advice, friendship, lovers, exhibitionist clubs, homophile/lesbian clubs, advice for men, the association of single fathers, astrological advice, self-help groups, S and M clubs, a support center against incest, an AIDS support group, a shelter for battered wives, an offer for cheap dental work in Sweden, for the association of transvestites . . .

Family paper. A Danish family paper.

On the last page is an ad for women’s underwear, a black-and-white picture of a very ordinary looking woman in very ordinary looking white panties and bra, her body sitting on a blank background, her ordinary face lit with an ordinary smile, and he sits staring with longing at the picture for many moments.

Then the last edge of sunlight is withering down behind the unlit neon chicken and the tilted monolith, and behind the tall state hospital, and he refolds the paper and carries the cold pot of tea out into the kitchen and sees the gray sheepdog standing at the door across the way, waiting to be let in again.

This time the dog does not look up at him.

He takes a drink after all, Stoli on the rocks, hesitates for a moment, with the neck of the bottle over the rim of the glass, thinking of his father, but feels content his own intake is nothing compared to what his poor dad’s was. Which makes him think of a joke he heard recently, from Sam, in fact: What’s the definition of an alcoholic? Someone who drinks more than his doctor. He pours five fingers for himself, and puts on one of his favorite cuts of his favorite CD: Stan Getz doing Billy Strayhorn’s “Blood Count,” recorded live in Club Montmartre, here in Copenhagen, not long before the C took Getz. Bluett holds vodka on his tongue, smooth Stoli, and listens to Getz’s tenor run the range of sorrow, of sorrow that is inevitable, unbreachable, thinks about the fact that Getz blew those notes in this city ten years earlier, four years before he died, wishes he had been in the club that night to hear it, wishes more, wishes to Christ Sam could be here with him right now, just for the four minutes and two seconds it takes for the melody to run through its last chord, Getz’s voice saying, “Thank you.” Then silence. End of the CD. Last number.

There are several things he regrets. That he did not get a telephone number for Anders and Annette and the other sister, that he did not invite them out to talk a little; even if they declined, he could have just asked them. He wonders whether Sam had many other friends, close friends. They both know a few drinking companions here and there around town. The two of them joined Dave and Per and Frej for pivos every other month at Fru Snorks alongside Enghave Plads. But who was there to give the kids a kind word now? His own situation is similar to Sam’s. All these years living in another country, your own people gone, no more friends left from the home country, not even any colleagues; both he and Sam worked independently as translators. Just half a handful of occasional friends. The kids are cheated of half a family.

He realizes in a large sense it is his own situation he grieves over, but he grieves over Sam’s as well, over Sam’s fine-looking kids and the sadness they must face alone now, over the sadness of life in general, the sadness at the heart of things. Keep it comic; don’t feel,
think
. Fall on your butt and laugh at yourself. Tell a tale about your sad times and laugh twice: Har. Hee.

He finds himself thinking about Sam’s suicide then, about the taboo against it, how formerly Christians were refused burial in hallowed ground, how in medieval times they were buried outside town at a crossroads, how even Buddhists judged that it invoked untoward cosmic consequences: Kill yourself and you come back instantly as a dung beetle.