Beneath the Neon Egg (25 page)

He moves toward the shadow of the wall, looking away, but a bulky man weaves swiftly across the road, calling to him, “Hey, skipper, what time’s it? Got the time?” Accented English. Polish?

And Bluett sees the impasse where the wall beside him narrows to a closed angle, and someone is behind him as well.

The bulky man has a blond face. “You got an ugly big fuckin’ snotter,” he says. “Flatten it for you.”

And the fist catches Bluett full on his nose before he even sees it. He groans and falls back against the wall, feels his skull smack the stone as the color and pain of the blow open in his brain and he is on the ground.

“Big-nosed fuckin’ Jew, keep your snotter out of other people’s business,” the voice above him says and a shoe tip thumps hard into his belly. He doubles around it, swinging the flat of his arm in a blow he himself sees as pathetic.

“I’m not even a Jew, you fucking Nazi,” he tries to say and hears how meaningless and pointless his words are. His nose, at first numb from the blow, now a sharp arc of pain across his face, his eyes, and another foot lands in the small of his back. Rage flares up in him and instantly fades into surrender, powerlessness. He remembers then advice from somewhere and brings his arms up around his head, curls into a fetal posture, and surrenders with a grunt to the next kick in his back and the next beneath his arm and the next, the next . . .

He loses count, knows only that he is on an icy pavement being kicked. His glasses are gone, and he worries about them for a moment, then he begins to think of his head, wondering if he can keep his brain from damage, whether he will end in a wheelchair, smashed to a street-organ player, as the Danes say. The echo of the expression in his brain almost tricks a smile, but his face hurts very much, the numbness of the blows has opened to pain, and he feels shame at the sound of his voice, through his blood-filled nose, telling which pocket contains his wallet, begging them to take it, but they continue to kick him until one very pointed boot catches him full in the chest and he hears the crack of bone drive a high-pitched scream up through his mouth.

Then the cold and the pain and the humiliation are gone into a fading screen of black-and-white dots, the sounds of footsteps echoing away across the road.

Part IV

Psalm

Tonight Charlie Parker roars on a Harley past himself on the sidewalk

and simultaneously parks a sedan on the Cathedral square

even while he receives the alkies for the evening meal in

the sacristy . . .

—Dan Turèll, “Charlie Parker on Isted Street”

14. A Love Supreme

In the dream he is to climb a steep hill in the great park for an interview with the holy monkey. He trudges up the slick grass slope but is exhausted when he reaches the peak where the monkey waits for him—a tall, skinny, scrawny ape with patchy long hair who cries in tones as shrill as a soprano sax, “Blessed be His name!” Then the monkey looks closely at Bluett, tells him he is too tired for an interview, suggests they nap first and lies down comfortably on the rough earth. Bluett is envious, rolls into an uncomfortable ball, aching against the stony rubble beneath him, but begins to doze off, realizing then he is actually waking up.

To sleep when you’re asleep is to wake, he thinks and senses the warning of an approach that opens his eyes in time to see two large hands reaching for his face.

“
Ja
,
ja
, just so,” a man’s voice says in Danish as fingers grasp and quickly twist his nose. He hears the crunch of bone in his brain, yells.

“
Præcis
,” the voice says. “Beautiful.
Smukt
.”

He hears the ripping sound of tape and then feels it pressed across the bridge of his nose. He wonders if there is brain damage. The entire front of his head feels as though it has been kicked by a horse.

“That should suffice,” the voice says and Bluett opens his eyes to look up into the blurry broad face of a man in a white jacket. “Straight as the proverbial arrow,” he says. Bluett turns his head to right and left. He lies bare-chested on a treatment table. He remembers the ambulance then, gingerly reaches to his nose, feels the tape, feels his glasses are missing.

“Why am I here?” he asks. “Where am I?”

“In the trauma center,” the doctor says. “You were jumped.”

Then he remembers how he lost his glasses, remembers being punched, kicked outside the Satin Club.

The doctor lays one palm flat on Bluett’s chest, taps the back of the one hand with the fingers of the other, evoking an involuntary moan from Bluett. He notices now that his ribs are taped on one side.

“
Ja
, it will be tender for a time. Cracked two of them but you’ll live, I give you something for the pain tonight, and the nurse at reception will call for a car for you. Or you might get yourself a ride home from the police out there. They want to talk to you.”

Bluett breathes in slowly, hears the air snaggle crookedly up his nose and remembers the police on the telephone when he left Christiania, remembers the large, hard-faced man in the Satin Club and that sense of his own powerlessness, and he knows the police can do nothing to help him now, feels somehow they will want him to release them, to validate their pointless bureaucracy that helps nothing. He feels they will try to make him say things that are not true in order to be free of this obstacle to the remainder of their shift. “I don’t want to talk to them.”

“That sounds suspicious,” says another voice from behind the doctor, and Bluett narrows his eyes to try to see. Two blurs stand in the doorway. He tightens the squint and sees uniforms.

“You reasonably drunk, are you?” the shorter blur asks.

“I was jumped.” He hears the thickness of his own voice, feels it in the throbbing of his nose, and he has no plan for what he will say, how much of it he will give them. “It was them. At the Satin Club. Outside. Svetlana Krylova.”

“You were jumped by someone called Svetlana Krylova?” asks the taller one. “A woman did this to you?”

“I was jumped after I left the Satin Club. After I asked for Svetlana Krylova.”

“Who is Svetlana Krylova?”

Bluett thinks, tries to think, waits for his mind to tell him something to say. “Who?” he says. “I don’t know. Maybe it was the Russian mafia. Or the bikers. Like at Christiania.”

“You were at Christiania, too? You on something? You smoke some hash maybe?”

“That was before.”

“You were on something before?”

“I was at Christiania before. Days ago, a week. I’ve just been kicked in the head. I can’t remember. It has nothing to do with this. Last week. But I saw someone beat up and called you guys and you wouldn’t come.”

The doctor says, “I think it is difficult for him to be talking just now.”

“You have so much money to piss away at the Satin Club?” the shorter policeman says.

The pain is localized in two blunt vertical lines at the center of the brain behind Bluett’s forehead, where an image remains of the tall, skinny, scrawny ape with patchy long hair, crying shrilly and musically, “Blessed be His name!” Somehow the words are comforting, although he feels very sorry for himself and tries to reason through this moment, to master the emotion that threatens to squeeze tears from his eyes. “Are we playing blame the victim here, then? Remember me? I’m the guy who got beat up and kicked around,” he says and hears a whimper in his voice.

“What were you doing in the Satin Club?”

“We never got any complaints from the Satin Club,” the other policeman says. “Never any complaints.”

Bluett thinks,
That must be because they pay you pretty good
. Then he thinks for some time about what he was doing in the Satin Club, tries to consider where to start, whether to start, but the two blunt dark lines behind his forehead cause the top of his head to throb, and he cannot focus, and his mind does not give him any words to produce other than “Blessed be His name!” so he says that and feels comfort in the syllables.

As though he does not want to be distracted or misled by the prayer, the shorter blur says, “I think he was pissing his money away, flashing it around. That what you were doing, flashing money around so someone thought it was an invitation to smash your face?”

Bluett hears himself ask, “You never get any complaints from the Satin Club, is that right? I wonder what that makes you.”

“What is this you say? You understand this man’s Danish, Svend? He trying to say something to us?”

“Not real good,” the other policeman says. “Talks like some kind of a Perker.”

“I’m American!”

“Oh, he’s American. Guess we better lick him up and down, then, huh?”

“Oh, fuck off,” Bluett hears himself mutter. “What are you playing with me for? Leave me alone.” And tries to find comfort in the monkey’s words and in the odd fact that he has been visited by a monkey in a dream.

“You drunk, then, are you?” the taller blur, Svend, asks.

“Sound reasonably drunk to me,” says the shorter one. The doctor leaves the room, and for some reason that frightens Bluett. No one is here to see.

“I think maybe he needs a night in the tank,” the shorter one says. “Shall you have a night in the tank? Meet some of the other fellows?”

“No, please, excuse me, I’m upset,” Bluett says, fear hot in his belly. He has to swallow to keep from throwing up. “I had a hard night.” He winces against the sharp bitter taste rolling down his throat.

“Okay, all we ask is cooperation. You will work together with us now?”

Bluett nods, eyes squinched shut, clinging to the words of the dream monkey.

“Who fell over you?”

“Two or three men, youngish. One was blond, and very big, the one who led them. He spoke English with an accent. Maybe Polish. I went into the Satin Club for a drink. It cost three hundred kroner for a vodka, so I got out of there, and outside I got jumped by these guys. The guy who spoke was maybe Polish, maybe Russian. There were one or two others, too, but they didn’t speak. Just with their feet. Maybe the others were foreign. Maybe Russian mafia.” Bluett thinks if he can plant that idea in them it might lead them to the source without his having to involve the information he has on Sam, yet he cannot quite get his mind around what is happening. He wonders if they would search his house, find Sam’s journals and receipts. Would the newspapers get it, would Sam’s children find out?

“You have some personal knowledge of the Russian mafia?”

“Not really, no.”

“‘Not really’ sounds like a little. You involved in something? Borrowed money? Bought some substances? Weapons? Women? If you bought something for your own personal use, you can tell us, we won’t go after you.”

“No,” he says. “Nothing like that. Nothing.”

“Then where have you heard about the Russian mafia?”

“I don’t know. In the papers.”

“Forget what you heard in the papers. Tell me what happened to you, what actually happened. Now, who jumped you? There on the street—not in the papers.”

“I don’t know. Two or three men I never saw before. Young, one of them was blond. Polish, Russian, I think.”

“Would you recognize them?” The taller one does the talking now. “We can take you around in the car to see if you can spot them on the street. Sometimes they stay out, go around looking for another victim.”

Bluett listens to the air in his nose. “My glasses are gone. I can’t see without them. And it was dark anyway. I couldn’t be sure.” He considers again telling them the whole story, but no words come to his mouth. He reaches around to his pocket, checks his wallet.

“They take your money?”

“Nothing. Guess they were just out to kick someone around.” He considers whether to suggest they jumped him to stop him from asking more questions in the Satin Club, considers whether that would lead to his showing the police the things Sam had in the box.

“Maybe they could not like the way you speak Danish,” says the shorter policeman.

Bluett tries to focus on him, thinks
Nazi fucker
, says, “Yeah, that would be a good reason to kick me in the chest, wouldn’t it? They called me a Jew now that I think of it. Called me a big-nosed Jew. The guy who broke my nose.”

“Were they foreigners?”

“I already told you he was maybe Polish, maybe Russian. The others might have been Russian mafia.”

“Russian criminals usally stick to their own,” the taller blur says. “Were they speaking Russian? Do you speak Russian?”

“No! I—they spoke Danish. The one I heard speak.”

“With accent?”

“Maybe, I don’t know for sure, I had a foot in my ear.”

“This gentleman is so humorous.”

“Maybe he’s drunk.”

It occurs to Bluett that everything is worse than he imagined. Perhaps they suspect him of something because he is a victim. Victims are guilty.
Blessed be His Name!

The foggy broad-faced doctor looks into the room again. “Don’t forget, Mr. Bluett, did I tell you? See a dentist about that loose tooth in the corner of your mouth. And don’t bite any apples meanwhile.”