The Seventh Child (65 page)

A couple of bulletins had arrived from Sri Lanka. Danish reporters had gone to Colombo to track down the little Tamil boy,
who’d
no doubt be discovered in a torture chamber in some state facility. So when the minister returned from his visit with the prime minister, who had barricaded himself in the office he had waited so long to occupy, he was furious.

The Witch Doctor, who was now in line to become the next chief of staff after Orla Berntsen’s sudden fall, attempted a concise, reassuring analysis: “No news holds people’s attention for more than two days, three max. It won’t take long before other stories take center stage.” Nobody knew if he was talking about the Kongslund Affair or the Tamil boy—or both topics in one breath.

A faint, raspy mumble could be heard from the other side of the table. It was Bog Man thinking out loud in the final moments of his career. “Yes, of course
…
we had to make our decisions in accordance with our political directions and the signals we were given.” He sounded as though he were already practicing his defense at an imaginary inquiry as visions of his retirement receded behind the rainbow.

“Calm down now,” the Witch Doctor said, a little too loudly. “No one here has done anything wrong, and there are very clear limits to the story’s popular appeal
…
a boy no one knows”—he burst into laughter—“and no one knows where he’s from
…
it doesn’t offer much fodder for the media!”

“Fodder?” The department head tasted the word, growing even paler as he did so. He didn’t understand the lingo the powerful but young advisors had introduced in the ministry.

Late that afternoon, the minister’s favorite chauffer, Lars Laursen, had driven Almind-Enevold to North Zealand in a mere forty minutes, then carried his briefcase into the summer residence, before leaving Gilbjerg Head to spend the night at Gilleleje Inn. Now the minister sat on the patio with his guests, studying the sun’s blood-red path down into the waters of Kattegat, and for some reason the sight made him think of the hydraulics in the prime minister’s enormous hospital bed. The officials had already begun gossiping about the grotesque situation, which could leak to the press in no time. But it would hardly lead to a crisis, because the reporters would no doubt give in to the temptation to celebrate the man’s historical steadfastness: the stout-hearted father of the nation
who’d
remained in his post until his dying day. That was the kind of stuff that legends are made of. What he actually did while in office meant very little by comparison. At the end of the day, Danish politics was not powered by boring intellectualism. On the contrary, it was all about brief flashes of action and resolve.

The national minister summarized for his guests the absurd scene in the makeshift hospital room, and they’d been shocked on behalf of the nation, but also on their own behalf—the triumvirate was forced to consider a new direction. The dying man could easily become a threat.

But there were other signs of danger their host insisted they consider.

“I’ve just read about the drowned chief inspector on
Independent Weekend
’s website,” Almind-Enevold said. “It seems to be
somewhat
…
” He would have said “troubling” but was immediately interrupted by Carl Malle.

“There’s no reason to worry, Ole. Nobody can connect him to anything
…
or anyone. An old drunk who falls into the water and drowns.
Splash
—exit.” Cynicism skipped across his statement like a stone over water.

“But he was the one who discovered the clues that you mentioned
…
during the investigation of the dead woman on the beach. Could he have told someone?”

The question could have hardly been phrased any more vaguely, and it immediately stirred the interest of the Professor. “Clues?” he said. “Who is this dead woman you’re talking about?”
He’d
been pecking at the venison Lykke Almind-Enevold had served in a spicy sauce with cowberry and red-currant jelly. Lykke had eaten with them in silence for five or six minutes before leaving the table unnoticed.

Malle threw a cautionary glance at the man
who’d
run dangerous errands for his older resistance buddies during the war, but the minister didn’t stop. He ignored the Professor and spoke directly to his old ally: “There was something about those
…
those clues
…
something that I don’t like, Carl. They symbolized something
…
something
disturbed
.” Drinking his Burgundy, he stared into the twilight sullenly.

“Yes, Ole,
disturbed
is the right word,” Malle said. “Or perhaps just coincidental
…
an old science-fiction novel
…
a rope
…
a woman with a smashed face
…
” He looked out toward the dark sea, where in the olden days distressed sailors headed for the coast of Hell. “I can’t for the life of me figure out the connection.”

“You’re forgetting the canary,” the minister said. For a moment he looked as though
he’d
eaten one himself.

Then, with a significant though nearly invisible effort, he shook off the unpleasant visions and turned to the Professor, who was listening to the peculiar conversation, mouth agape. It was a rare sight. He still reigned supreme over his television empire, but that position could very quickly come to an end if the American owners decided to pull the plug on their failed Danish experiment.

“Why didn’t you squelch that story about Kongslund a long time ago?” the minister asked. “Peter Trøst and all his idiotic exposés?”

“Because Peter Trøst threatened to take the story, and Orla Berntsen, to a competing station, and that would have been an even bigger disaster—for all of us. It would have crushed Channel DK, and none of us would have benefitted from that.” The Professor spoke in an unusually soft voice, as though someone had turned down the volume. “This case has made everyone
sick
…
everyone
…
it’s as though everybody’s just doing what they want.”

“Yes. Let’s toast to that,” Malle said, raising his empty glass. “Isn’t that everyone’s dream? And isn’t that what you preach on prime time?”

The Professor scowled at the obvious sarcasm, but allowed the faint rattle in his throat to stand as his only response.

“Release your prejudices,” Malle said, referring to a new Saturday evening show, which the Professor referred to down in the Concept Room as “bleeding-heart humanism.” All the country’s prejudices would be exposed and then turned unabashedly against those one had previously felt the need to defend: the unproductive, the outcasts, the nonconformists, the dissenters, the avant-garde, the provocateurs—and, of course, the foreigners. Everyone for whom the citizenry, for various reasons, harbored special gripes. These groups would be confronted boldly—in the television studio—live. “We will liberate tolerance,” the Professor had shouted to his Concept Lions before adding, “We will be witnesses to a whole new understanding of the world, a whole new world order, a whole new human type!” Only the youngest lion dared question his decree: “But isn’t tolerance one of the pillars of democracy?”

The Professor hissed back, “Isn’t it more undemocratic to repress the debate and maintain a taboo because no one dares talk about what is really going on?” The younger man had no rebuttal.

The national minister poured more wine into the three men’s glasses. During the popular wars (far from the nation’s own borders) and during the big debates on terror, Islam, and globalization, the Professor and the administration had maintained complete control of public opinion, and it had brought them votes and high ratings. But things had slowly changed. Granted, people still responded to lots of quick and often extreme fixes—both in television and in politics—but at the same time, they’d become restless. And many zapped impatiently between an ever-increasing number of quickly designed discount products—in television and politics—and it drove the Concept Lions and the Witch Doctor crazy. In the end they’d promoted ambition as the nation’s driving force in a globalizing world, and for thousands of former hippies and democratic socialists it had been a tremendous relief to slough off their distorted visions of the past—visions about equality and generosity. Channel DK had given them the courage to embrace their hidden urges.

Yet the ratings continued to drop.

“You, Ole, you’re the only one who can solve the problem in this country, as prime minister,” the Professor offered. The future of Channel DK depended on the favors it could cash in. “I’ll make sure that my reporters direct all their criticism at that
abomination
,” he added, referring to the nation’s ruler propped up in the hydraulic bed inside the parliament building.

Malle leaned over the table.
He’d
never cared for the cocky television man. “It’s strange, Bjørn, your TV station is so obsessed with eternal youth and beauty, yet when it comes to the top post in the country, you prefer an
…
” He paused before uttering the words
old man
—but it was in the air, and his impudence was a testimony to how important
he’d
become over the last few days.

The Professor’s head dropped. “That’s different, Carl. The young celebrate
dreams
…
and modern young people try to buy them. Without them, we wouldn’t be selling any commercials. But
power is never young
. It can never be conquered by dreamers.” The Professor glanced up. “Power is as old as we like it to be, and the people don’t care as long as we keep boredom and fear of the future at bay. My tools are seduction and inspiration; yours are surveillance and control, but our ends are the same.”

He stood, signaling he was ready to leave. The minister called his driver at the inn in Gilleleje, and even though it was late—almost midnight—Lars arrived in the royal-blue vehicle to take the Professor back to the Big Cigar.

When
he’d
left, Almind-Enevold said urgently to his remaining guest, “We
have to
talk more to those adoptive parents, Carl.”

Malle sat like an immovable shadow in the light of the oil lamp, which Lykke had soundlessly placed on the table. He shook his head. “As you know, I got nothing out of the Christoffersens, nothing at all. They don’t know a damn thing about Asger’s origins. I don’t think any of them know anything about their origins, and it could be risky to ask
…
we’ll just draw attention. We’ve got another problem to worry about.” Malle paused as though searching for the right words to deliver his message.

Even in the faint starlight over Kattegat, you could see the national minister lose his color.

Again Malle leaned across the wide table. “There’s a woman at Helgenæs who claims she knows something about Kongslund. Apparently, she adopted a son under very mysterious circumstances: a boy who was delivered to her discreetly, outside of official channels.”

“A
boy
?”

“Yes, but five years after the one we’re focused on,” Malle replied. The time difference meant that he didn’t think it necessary to mention the name of the woman or her adopted son. He found the incident mysterious, but on that night, perched above the coast of Hell, he couldn’t see how it might connect to the national minister.

When you consider Malle’s unparalleled reputation as his country’s primary problem solver, Fate must have single-handedly leaned over the beautiful patio railing and put its fingers on Malle’s lips. He should have reacted to its touch, tasted the treachery, and sensed the danger. That was a crucial mistake, and in the Kongslund Affair those kinds of silences had thus far proven fatal.

“Is she dangerous to us?” the minister asked. He was an experienced politician, and as such wanted no further details about yet another mystery that might later burden him, so he cut to the chase.

“She contacted Knud Taasing.”

“Oh
…
” the minister muttered. A confrontation was, apparently, unavoidable. Again.

“How do you know?”

Malle shrugged. “Wiretap,” he said indifferently.

29

LOOSE ENDS

June 27, 2008

They must have known how dangerous their position was, how close to the abyss they were, even though the weeks after the anniversary had passed without any significant revelations.

With a dying prime minister clinging to his last days of life, they couldn’t risk even the least bit of worry or doubt among the populous. The Almighty One had never been closer to attaining his dream; the only thing that stood in his way was a madman lying on his back at the Ministry of State.

It didn’t occur to him, or to Carl Malle, to fear the confrontations between the children from the Elephant Room and their adoptive parents.

They must have thought that door had closed a long time ago.

Asger’s mother stood in her usual spot by the panoramic window, pointing at the bird feeder that hadn’t budged an inch since they’d moved into the house on Atlasvej fifty years earlier. It had been repaired—and varnished—every single summer.

“Look,” she said to her son. “There’s a wagtail.”

She identified the bird in the characteristic singsong Funen dialect
she’d
never abandoned, and which made his parents’ increasingly rare visitors feel like they’d fallen into a time warp, transported to the 1960s where everything remained dreamlike and innocent.

Every single piece of furniture was from that era; everything stood as it had on that summer Sunday when Asger had arrived in the subdivision where the streets were named after stars in the sky.

In one corner of the living room sat the two red lounge chairs in which Asger’s parents had spent roughly 18,250 evenings in each other’s company, and where they’d engaged in at least 36,500 hours of profound conversation about the collapse of basic morality and the egotism of people, which could only be rectified by the guidance of conscientious teachers. They’d replaced the old telephone with a newer model, but it stood in the same spot in the windowsill as always. This is where
he’d
received the call from Marie Ladegaard back when
she’d
given him the name of his biological mother.

On that afternoon in the distant past, his father had hammered nails deep in the bird feeder’s triangular roof, and afterward Kristine had filled the little sheltered platform with breadcrumbs and sunflower seeds; she appeared as content as ever. Such care. Then Asger had realized that his father was suddenly behind him.
Had he caught the tail end of his conversation with Marie?
He could easily have read the name his son had jotted down.

Asger remembered the somewhat worried tone in his voice, and
he’d
followed him with his eyes, feeling the peculiar joy that this man wasn’t his real father anymore.

That was more than thirty years ago.

Out in the yard the wagtail flew from the bird feeder, and his mother watched it depart.
He’d
arrived in the late afternoon without calling, which was not unusual.

A little uneasily, they asked how things were going, and he answered evasively. They sat at the dinner table, and both Kristine and Ingolf ate their oven-roasted eggplant, in a slightly hunched position—as though they wanted to protect themselves against a puff of wind, or perhaps because they were better able to sense their son’s strange mood in this crouch. All the birds had flown to the treetops. Kristine glanced nervously toward the feeder, then back at her son.

There was a feeling of unease in the house, which she didn’t understand.

“You’ve read about the crisis at Kongslund,” Asger said suddenly, only two mouthfuls into the main course. His parents flinched in unison.

Ingolf sat up straight and nodded.

Kristine’s eyes were wide open; for weeks
she’d
feared that the Kongslund Affair would find a door they’d failed to lock or a window they hadn’t fastened, and would gain access to the rooms that she, for so many years, had managed to keep clear of the world’s bustle.

“That case has a special meaning to me,” Asger said, setting his knife and fork down on his plate. “Because
…
I received one of the anonymous letters the papers are writing about.”

Ingolf put a hand on Kristine’s arm.

She was wearing her Sunday dress with yellow and blue flowers. Fear was now evident in her eyes.

Asger carefully arranged his knife and fork diagonally, side by side, the way they’d taught him as a kid. “The boy they are looking for could be me,” he said.

Kristine’s eyes met his but without the measure of infinite terror
he’d
expected, and he immediately understood why: she already realized this.

“Who
…
?” he began. But he didn’t need to complete the sentence.

“There was a detective here
…
a security specialist,” Ingolf said. He blushed because he and his wife had kept this visit a secret from their son.

“Carl Malle?”

Ingolf coughed, then swallowed two mouthfuls of water from a tall, thin glass
he’d
gotten when Asger was still a boy. “Yes, I believe that was his name
…
he told us about the case. He works for the ministry, and he wanted to know if we knew anything about
…
the woman who was your biological
…
I mean, your
…
It was very important, he said.” In this breakneck fashion, he managed to avoid the word
mother
.

“But we didn’t know anything,” Kristine whispered, interrupting her husband for once. “They never told us anything.” She reached for her son’s hand, but Asger leaned back to avoid her touch.

“If
we’d
known anything, we would have told you.”

“Told me what?”

They were both silent.

“But that isn’t the issue anyway,” he said. “I know who my biological mother is—and where she lives.”

Now their shock was genuine. Tears appeared in his mother’s eyes.

“She lives in Brorfelde—if she’s still alive. I haven’t checked for over twenty years.” He turned to his father. “But you knew that, right? You knew that I’d found her
…
?”

Ingolf sank lower in his chair. Half a minute passed before he spoke, and he didn’t look at his wife when he did. “Yes. I was aware of that. The day you called
…
there was a woman’s name on your note, and that was a little while after
we’d
informed you that you were adopted. I heard the conversation
…
you called Kongslund.”

“Why did you tell me about the adoption?”

The question came out of nowhere, and Ingolf seemed surprised. “You know why. It was the right thing to do. You needed to know your life story.”

“But why did you tell me there, at the Coastal Sanatorium?”

Ingolf fell silent, staring at his glass.

Kristine interrupted again: “The doctors said that they
…
they knew everything about it
…
that your illness was hereditary. We couldn’t
…
I mean, your father and I, we wanted to
…
”

“You sent a man whom I thought was my father to see me, but he said he wasn’t, and then he returned home. From that point on, I was a stranger. And
you
stayed home hiding.”

To his surprise, Asger felt tears streaming down his cheeks. He removed his glasses and placed them parallel with the knife and fork, one fogged-up lens resting on a half-eaten hunk of eggplant.

His adoptive parents sat frozen. Through the fog, he saw Kristine’s face like a little yellow sun, while Ingolf’s scrawny torso had become a blurry outline that nearly blended into the chair.

“Your mom and I couldn’t have children
…
”
Asger’s voice reiterated Ingolf’s words that day at the sanatorium, muted, but clearly.

Neither of them reacted. They looked like two people
who’d
seen a ghost, and perhaps they had.

“That’s what you said:
That’s why your mother and
I decided to adopt a child. It’s the best decision we ever made
…
”

Now the foggy outline rose from the chair and moved deeper into Asger’s field of vision.

“Your mother and I will always be with you
…
”

He could make out a hand lifting his glasses off the plate.

“She wanted us to talk this through, man to man
…
we’ll call you Tuesday or Wednesday.”

The shadow pressed the glasses back on his nose; it was a strange, intimate act, and once again the room became clear inside the bubbles of his tears. His mother’s face floated above the half-eaten eggplant, and the black craters that must have been her eyes and mouth resembled knife-sharp edges. He sensed her dread.

From her side of the table, Kristine pulled her husband back and held him there, as she slowly closed her mouth tightly to trap any words that might escape. The most important moment in their son’s life would never be explained at this table.

For a long time Asger sat silent, absorbing this truth. “The anger I felt made me kill Ejnar,” he finally said. “My longing for a
…
I knew you hated him because he helped me explore space and because he lived at the observatory. You hated him, didn’t you?”

They huddled close to one another, still hunched over. They didn’t respond.

“He loved me. I knew what would happen—and I let it happen.”

“But Ejnar died in the
hole
,” Ingolf said sharply with a strikingly brutal emphasis on the last word.

The objection was so mundane and bizarre that Asger felt an urge to throw himself onto the table for a moment and pummel the blurry face, until his resolve weakened. “No,” he said.
“He died of longing.”

Ingolf and Kristine had to know that Asger’s gravest accusation was targeted at them—and against the home where they’d lived together.

“You didn’t want me to see him. You didn’t want me to go with him. You didn’t want me to be like him.” Even to his own ears, it sounded as though some strange creature was speaking through his mouth.

Kristine let go of her husband’s hand and yelled, “No! But you had to go find the only one, the only kid who
…
with all of his
…
whose whole head was filled with flying saucers
…
and all those goddamned planets
…
! I wasn’t going to let him
…
he wasn’t going to
…
” The last stutter ended in a loud fit of coughing, and Ingolf grabbed his water glass and held it toward her. But she pushed it to the side and it fell on the floor, where, strangely enough, it landed without breaking.

Then she threw herself onto the floor next to the glass, halfway under the table, and began to cry hysterically.

A second later, Ingolf was beside her, stroking her hair. One of the untouched eggplants had somehow landed next to them.

“Look what you’ve done,” he whispered between gasps.

Asger stood. He left them on the living room floor, and he packed a few of his things in his duffel.

As he opened the front door and departed the place where
he’d
been raised, he heard Kristine weeping and Ingolf trying to console her.

Taasing studied the little woman in the low-hung living room.
He’d
arrived in Aarhus around noon and then had taken the bus from there to the town of Rønde.
He’d
caught another bus early in the afternoon, bumping through the hills at Stødov on the Helgenæs peninsula, and then finally walking the last hundred yards to the little cottage as the bus driver had directed.

By the time he arrived, it was almost evening.

He banged on the low door—and then on a nearby kitchen window—before he sensed any movement in the house.

A small woman reluctantly opened the door and let him in. There were figurines and knickknacks in all the windowsills and a thick layer of dust on the furniture, which even a hermit like himself noticed. He had the feeling
he’d
stepped into a world where nothing had been touched in decades. Dorah Laursen’s discomfort at meeting him was so evident that for the first few minutes he was at an unusual loss for words. She sat curled up in a big green lounge chair, looking as though she both expected—and feared—him.