The Purity of Vengeance (15 page)

He trembled still at the thought. That he, at the age of almost fifty-eight, could rise from the very bowels of society and stand erect, a complete human, the eyes that came to rest on him no longer afraid that he would do them harm.

In the night he dreamed of respect and envy, of brighter times in new surroundings. Only a bloody masochist would stay on in this miserable place, where they squinted at him as if he had the plague. No fucking way was he going to hang about in a village of fourteen hundred inhabitants, where even the railway was dying out and whose pride and joy was a trailer factory that had long since moved, making way for nothing more than a knobhead institution called The Nordic School for Peace.

He picked out the biggest gentleman’s outfitters in Bogense and bought himself a glistening, blue-flecked suit that the assistant, with a wry smile, informed him was the highest fashion and which, being significantly marked down, left him with just enough money for some petrol for his moped and a return train ticket from Ejby to Copenhagen.

It felt like the moment of his life as he got on his VéloSoleX and chugged off through the town. The looks he attracted seemed quite unlike those he was used to.

Never before had he been so ready to meet the future.

12

August 1987

Much to his satisfaction,
Curt Wad had seen the political right increase its hold on the population throughout the eighties, and now, at the end of August 1987, the media were predicting almost without exception that the conservative bloc would stay in power after the election.

These were truly favorable days for Curt Wad and those who shared his opinions. The Upsurge Party railed against immigration, and gradually an increasing number of Christian groups and nationalist organizations had gathered around shrewd populist agitators who skillfully cracked the whip over depravation and moral decay, without demonstrating the slightest sensitivity to basic principles of human rights.

The general gist was that people were not born equal, nor were they meant to be, and the voters might just as well get used to the fact.

Favorable days indeed. Such thoughts had now wormed their way into parliament and certain NGOs, and at the same time funds came flowing in to Curt’s cherished Purity Party, which he worked hard to ensure would one day develop into a bona fide political party with a wide network of local branches and parliamentary representation in the seat of government, Christiansborg. With this moral shift in the population, it was almost like returning to the thirties, forties, and fifties. Certainly, it was a far cry from the depravity of the sixties and seventies when youngsters marched noisily in the streets, preaching free love and socialism. A time when wretched individuals, the dregs of society, had their pockets lined by the state and antisocial behavior was explained away as being the failure of both government and society.

Happily, such days were gone. Here, in the 1980s, every man was the architect of his own fortune. And many were indeed industrious, so much was evident, for each day new contributions to Curt Wad’s Purity Party came pouring in from upstanding citizens, foundations, and trusts.

The results showed. Two office ladies had already been taken on to deal with the party’s accounts and distribution of information, and at least four of the party’s nine branches were growing at a rate of five members a week.

At long last, aversion to homosexuality, drug addiction, juvenile crime, promiscuity, immigration, political asylum, and the propagation of poor genetic material had begun to sweep through large segments of the population. As if to underline the point, the AIDS virus had arrived, and served to remind of what Christian communities referred to as “the finger of God.”

The leverage such issues provided in helping do away with these evils had been superfluous in the fifties, but in those days there had been much better means by which to strike back.

No matter. These were promising times indeed. Though not uttered aloud, the guiding ethos of the Purity Party spread like wildfire: bad blood should never be mixed with good.

 • • • 

The association for the defense of the nation’s unblemished blood and moral values had gone by three different names since Curt’s father had founded the movement in his stubborn endeavors to ensure racial purity and the raising of public morals. In the 1940s he had called it the Anti-Debauchery Committee. Later it became the Community of Danes, then eventually the Purity Party.

What had been conceived in the mind of a general practitioner from Fyn, and since refined by his son, was no longer a private matter. The association now numbered some two thousand members, all of whom were only too happy to pay a tidy annual subscription. These were respected citizens ranging from lawyers, doctors, and police officers to care workers and priests. People who in their daily work were witness to much that was deplorable and possessed the insight and ability to do something about it.

Had Curt’s father still been alive he would have been proud to see how far his son had carried these thoughts and gratified by the way in which he had administered what the two of them eventually began to refer to as “The Cause.” This was the framework within which he and like-minded supporters clandestinely carried out the illegalities they were striving to legitimize through the activities of the Purity Party, most notably the separation of fetuses deemed not to be deserving of life from those that were.

Curt Wad had just completed a recorded radio interview in which he again expounded upon the official version of the Purity Party’s fundamental ideas, when his wife placed a pile of letters in front of him in a shaft of sunlight that shone on the middle of his oak wood desk.

The mail was always a mixed bag.

The anonymous letters went into the wastebasket without further ado. Which took care of about a third of what came in.

After that came the usual hate mail and threats. In such cases Curt carefully noted down the names and addresses of the senders, subsequently passing the letters on to the office in town. If the ladies there noticed repeated harassment by the same individuals, Curt would call local branch spokesmen, who would then make sure that no further correspondence ensued. Since most people had secrets they didn’t want to get out, there were many ways by which to tackle such matters, and local lawyers, doctors, and priests had access to a large number of archives. Some would call it blackmail. Curt called it self-defense.

Then there were those applying for membership, and these cases called for particular alertness. Infiltration could be a tricky matter once it had occurred, and for that reason one had to proceed with caution from the start. Which was why Curt Wad opened his mail himself.

Finally came the more typical expressions of opinion spanning a broad spectrum, from kudos to whining and rage.

Among the last of the day’s batch Curt Wad came upon the letter from Nete Hermansen. He couldn’t prevent himself from smiling when he saw the sender’s name on the back of the envelope. Not many cases over the years had turned out as successfully as hers. On two separate occasions in his life he had put a stop to this woman’s immoral behavior and depravation. The whore.

But what did this miserable specimen want with him now? Would it be tears or rebuke? If truth be told, he didn’t care. To him, Nete Hermansen was a nobody. Always had been and always would be. The fact that she was now on her own after that stupid husband of hers had got himself killed in a car crash the same night he’d bumped into her last prompted little more than a shrug.

She deserved no better.

He tossed the unopened envelope onto the pile of unimportant mail. He wasn’t even curious. Not like he’d been all those years ago.

 • • • 

The first time he heard about Nete was when the chairman of the school board came to Curt’s father’s surgery with reports of a girl who had fallen into the mill stream at Puge and suffered abdominal bleeding as a result.

“She may have aborted. Much would seem to indicate so,” said the chairman. “Any talk of schoolboys being responsible should not be taken seriously. It was an accident, and should you be called out to the home, Dr. Wad, please note that any sign of violence is due only to the girl’s falling into the stream.”

“How old is she?” his father asked.

“Just turned fifteen.”

“Hardly natural to be pregnant at that age,” said his father.

“Well, she’s hardly a natural girl,” the chairman rejoined with a snort. “She was thrown out of school years ago on account of various depravities. Lewd behavior, inviting fornication with the boys, foul language. Simple of mind and action, and violent toward her fellow pupils and schoolmistress.”

At this, Curt’s father leaned back his head and nodded in full understanding.

“Ah, one of those,” he said. “Retarded, I imagine.”

“Most certainly,” said the chairman.

“Would the good children whom this contemptible child might wish to accuse by any chance include a personal acquaintance of the chairman among their number?”

“Yes, as it happens,” the chairman replied, reaching to accept one of the cigars that lay neatly arranged in the box on top of the doctor’s desk. “One of the boys is the youngest child of my brother’s sister-in-law.”

“I see,” said Curt’s father. “A clash of social categories, if ever there was one.”

Curt was thirty years old at the time and already on his way to taking over his father’s practice, but he had yet to encounter a patient such as the girl in question.

“What does she do, this girl?” Curt inquired, receiving an encouraging nod from his father.

“Well, I’m not that informed, I’m afraid. But it seems she helps her father out on his smallholding.”

“And the father is?” Curt’s father asked.

“As far as I recall, his name’s Lars Hermansen. A common man, rather the brawny type, I believe.”

“I know him,” said Curt’s father. Of course he did. He had even assisted when the girl had been born. “A bit funny in the head, exacerbated by his wife’s death. In any case a strange, insular sort. No wonder if the girl’s a bit odd, too.”

And that was that.

As expected, Dr. Wad was called out to Nete’s father’s smallholding, there to conclude that the girl had foolishly slipped and fallen into the stream and then thrashed around in the current, thereby injuring herself on branches and rocks that lay beneath the embankment. Any other explanation she might provide could only be down to shock and distress. Her bleeding, however, was regrettable. Had she perhaps been pregnant? he asked the father.

Curt had been present, as on all his father’s house calls of late, and he clearly remembered how the girl’s father paled at the question and slowly shook his head.

Police involvement would be unnecessary in that respect, the father had said.

And thus the case was pursued no further.

 • • • 

Toward evening the association’s activities were again in motion and Curt Wad was looking forward. In ten minutes he would be meeting with three of the Purity Party’s most diligent members who were not only in close touch with prominent figures in the right-wing parties, but also well connected with civil servants in the ministries of justice and internal affairs who looked dimly upon the way the country was progressing, particularly when it came to immigration and family reunification policies. And the motivation for their involvement was the same as for all other members: far too many foreign elements, undesirable and lower-standing individuals, had already wangled their way into the country.

“A threat to society and the public in general,” came the cry from several quarters, and Curt Wad could not have agreed more. It was all a matter of genes, and people with slanting eyes or brown skin had no part in the idealized narrative of flaxen-haired girls and boys with strong, muscular frames. Tamils, Pakistanis, Turks, Afghans, Vietnamese, all had to be stopped in the manner of any other invasive impurity. Effectively and without hesitation.

They spoke at length that evening about what measures the Purity Party might take, and when two of the men had left, Curt remained with the one he knew best. An excellent man indeed, a doctor like himself with a lucrative practice north of the capital.

“We’ve talked about The Cause many times now, Curt,” the man said, studying him with a firm gaze before continuing. “I knew your father, of course. He made me aware of my responsibility back when I was a young physician at the university hospital in Odense. He was a fine man, Curt. I learned a great deal from him, professionally as well as in regard to ethical issues.”

They nodded to each other. It had been a source of considerable gratification to Curt that his father had lived until Curt’s sixty-second year. Now it was already three years since he had finally succumbed to advanced age, ninety-seven years old. Time passed so quickly.

“Your father told me I should come to you if ever I wanted to become active,” said his guest, pausing for a moment as though aware that whatever step he took next would lead him directly into a complex of difficult questions and treacherous pitfalls.

“I’m glad,” said Curt eventually. “But why
now
, if I may ask?”

The man raised his eyebrows and allowed himself time before answering. “For several reasons. Our talk here, tonight, is one. Another is that we’ve more than our fair share of foreigners in Nordsjælland, too. Immigrants, often closely related, and still they intermarry. As we know, unhealthy offspring are far from seldom in cases of inbreeding.”

Curt nodded. This was true. They were all over the place.

“Basically, I’d like to do my bit as far as that’s concerned,” the man said quietly.

Curt nodded again. Another able and upstanding citizen had joined the fold.

“You realize you’ll be taking on work which under no circumstances may be discussed with anyone other than those we’ve specifically approved, and that this restriction will apply for as long as you live?”

“Yes,” said the man. “I’d imagined that would be the case.”