Farewell to Freedom

by Sara Blaedel

  50

  “PULL OVER!” LOUISE CRIED IMMEDIATELY AFTER THEY TURNED the corner from Absalonsgade onto Sønder Boulevard.

  It was almost 7 P.M. and they’d spent the day driving through the neighborhood at random, looking for the girls. They were in Louise’s old Saab 9000 to avoid drawing attention to themselves by using one of the police’s unmarked cars. Oddly enough, people always seemed to recognize those, even though they really were totally unmarked.

  Lars braked, causing the empty soda bottles on the floor of the car to slide forward.

  “Drive up to Skelbækgade and turn around, so we can get closer,” Louise ordered, pointing across the planting strip with bicycle parking in the middle of the street over to the big Bosch building which was on the corner across the street where Skelbækgade took off toward Dybbølsbro Station.

  Two girls were standing on the corner talking. One was skinny with dark hair, and the other had long blonde hair. Louise had straightened up and was now leaning forward a little. They hadn’t seen hide nor hair of them so far, but she was sure it was Pavlína and Hana.

  Her partner turned the Saab sharply to the right and just then Louise saw a silver-gray Citroën hatchback pull over to the curb at the corner across from them. Both girls walked over to the car and leaned up to the passenger’s side window, but the dark-haired one quickly jumped in next to the driver, and the one Louise was pretty sure must be Hana moved back and leaned against the wall with her hands in the pockets of her short jacket, which stopped just above her waist right over her tight jeans.

  They drove up to Skelbækgade, turned around, and drove back just in time to see the girl’s long hair disappearing into a little black Peugeot. She pulled the passenger’s door shut and the car pulled away at high speed.

  “There are obviously plenty of customers,” Louise noted dryly and nodded as Lars pointed across the street where a parking spot had just opened up.

  “We can wait there. Then we can see them if they come back here,” he suggested. Louise nodded, thinking that they would certainly come back. It wasn’t that late. It was a lovely warm spring evening, and there was no soccer game on TV.

  Lars parked and they settled in to wait. They were both prepared for it to be a long wait, until the girls’ work day was over, but they were determined to find out where Hana went after work.

  “They did a study that showed that the younger a man is the first time he has sex with a prostitute, the greater the chances that he’ll be a lifelong customer,” Louise said, breaking the silence.

  Her partner nodded and said that he’d looked into it and found out there were about 700 brothels in Denmark, 120 of which were in Copenhagen.

  “Well, I suppose there’s your proof that quite a few young men must have picked up the habit,” Louise remarked, looking across the street where the girls had returned and a new car had just stopped. Louise noticed the little pat Pavlína gave Hana’s shoulder before she climbed into the car.

  “Prostitutes can buy in at a brothel for somewhere between 800 and 1800 kroner a day, depending on how nice the place is,” Lars continued, his eyes following Pavlína. “For that price they get ads in the print and online editions of Ekstrabladet as well as condoms and maybe phone privileges—and then of course it covers their rent, electricity, and heat.”

  Louise looked at him, surprised.

  “I called The Nest,” he hurried to explain.

  “How much do they get per trick?” Louise wanted to know.

  “Between 500 and 1,500 kroner, again depending on how exclusive the place is and what the johns want. But out here on the street, the girls sell themselves for between 100 and 300 kroner. These are the foreign women and the drug addicts, who would go down on a dog. The latter just need enough for a fix, and once they’ve made their thousand kroner, they stop. But the women with pimps are on the street until they’ve made whatever their pimps demand. If they go down to South Harbor with the tricks, then they can only turn one an hour, but if they take them to Club Intim, they can do three. At The Nest, several people have overheard witnesses in Copenhagen’s Municipal Court testify that some of the young foreign women supposedly service twenty-five or thirty men a day—seven days a week—before their pimps leave them alone so they can get a little food and be allowed to sleep.”

  Just then the car came back and dropped Pavlína off.

  “I was under the impression that it’s mostly addicts, foreigners, and the mentally ill who turn tricks down here,” he continued. “The rest stick to the brothels and clubs, and a number of them are single mothers who can’t make ends meet.”

  Louise eyed him skeptically.

  “Isn’t that an old wives’ tale, invented by men?”

  Lars shook his head.

  “Picture a single mother with two kids and a job as a cashier, or maybe she’s getting unemployment. How’s she supposed to get her finances to work out if she has to pay rent, utilities, and daycare or after-school care, and if she also wants to give her kids a new cell phone or some cool clothes so they don’t get teased at school?”

  Louise shrugged.

  “If you don’t have much else, it gives you status, so you can easily imagine that the material things suddenly become important. And maybe she even wants to take her kids on vacation.”

  Louise was going to object, but knew that there actually were quite a few people living on what was basically the poverty line if they were sole providers on welfare.

  Her eyes wandered back over to the girls on the street corner. Hana was back now too, and Louise saw that she was laughing as she pulled her cigarettes out of her pocket. Based on her arm gestures, she guessed Pavlína was telling some story that had gotten Hana laughing even harder.

  There was something about her feigned laid-back attitude that made Louise think about survival. They had to keep the tone cheerful to get through it, because Louise didn’t believe the “happy whore” myth. That came exclusively from the way men wanted to see it. The same men who drained the household budget and pretended they were doing a good turn by spending a 500-kroner note on a whore, so she received some of the family’s wealth, too.

  In principle, Louise didn’t have anything against men visiting prostitutes, as long as the girls were doing it of their own free will and there was no pimp waiting in the shadows to cash in on the day’s earnings.

  “It’s just so bizarre that the men who come here are the same ones who dutifully donate to the Red Cross and the SPCA when they have fundraisers,” she said. “They kiss their wife and pet the dog when they leave for work, but they look away when they pick up a woman who’s the victim of human sex trafficking or a young Roma girl who’s been forced onto the street by her family. It’s enough to make you puke.”

  They were still parked there seven hours later. It was 2 A.M., and the girls had seen one or two johns an hour. Louise was trying to read their body language, but there was nothing that gave away how they were doing. In between johns, they stood around, relaxed and chatting, but paid a lot of attention to the cars that drove by. They reacted right away when a big four-wheel-drive vehicle with white plates started blinking its lights from a distance. They both moved over to the curb and were ready when the car pulled over a second later.

  Louise couldn’t see over the car’s roof, but when it drove away again, both of the girls were gone.

  “2:30 in the morning and there are still customers,” she noted a little later, starting to feel sleepy. She yawned and jumped at the offer when Lars suggested that she go home and go to bed. He would stay in the car and follow Hana when the girls decided to go home.

  “We have to find out where she moved,” he said.

  “If you follow her when she leaves here, you can text me the address. Then I’ll go out there tomorrow morning and keep an eye on it, see if she goes to meet anyone to pay up. But with the hours they work, they must stay in bed until sometime after noon, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to keep this up,” she added as yet anot
her yawn overcame her, and her own night without much sleep caught up to her.

  51

  THE APARTMENT WAS OUT BEHIND ENGHAVE SQUARE. THE TEXT message was waiting for her on her cell when she got up.

  Heavy winds were blowing through the streets, and even though the sky was still clear, it wasn’t hard to spot the dark clouds that were rapidly approaching from out past the Valby Hills.

  Maybe a raincoat would have been a good idea, Louise thought, warming her hands on the grande drip she’d gotten to go on her way out here. She looked up at the windows in the building Hana had gone into, not knowing which one was for the apartment where Hana was sleeping.

  Lars had written that the girls had gone home around four, almost immediately after Louise herself had left. He’d followed them down past the apartment on Valdemarsgade, where Pavlína stayed, while Hana had unlocked a bike and ridden to the outskirts of Vesterbro.

  It wasn’t even ten in the morning yet, but Louise didn’t want to risk Hana having a chance to leave the apartment before she arrived. She should have brought an extra jacket along, though, because the temperature had dropped a few degrees.

  She shivered slightly, finished the coffee, and was looking around for a trash can when the front door suddenly opened and Hana walked out and leaned over to unlock a bicycle. Her hair was in a tight braid that had been wrapped up into a bun. She was wearing the short-waisted jacket, but loose-fitting, casual pants.

  Louise deposited her empty coffee cup in a stranger’s bike basket before turning her bike around and following Hana down Enghavevej and out toward Vesterbrogade. She kept a good distance as they approached Pile Allé, and dropped back even further when she guessed where Hana was going.

  She let Hana park her bike by the gate and walk all the way past the graves before following.

  Her pulse was racing as she sat down on the bench, where she couldn’t be seen from the kitchen window. After a deep breath, she slowly exhaled to calm her heart rate. It had come as a shock, but she shouldn’t have been so surprised that the network met early in the day, before anyone was interested in what the girls were up to. Later in the morning it was probably harder to slip out without being discovered.

  It had been good to sleep. The worst of the fatigue had left her body, and the unexpectedly quick departure from Enghave Square had cleared the last of her sluggishness.

  Louise quickly hid behind the wall of the church when Hana came back a little later toward her bicycle. Hana walked past with her eyes on the ground, pale and tired. Louise thought she looked younger than eighteen. She still was just a big kid, even though not much was childish about the life she lived.

  Louise waited until Hana was almost to the gate before she started walking down the neatly tended gravel paths. She caught a glimpse of the girl’s hair over the church wall as Hana got onto her bike and headed back toward Enghave Plads.

  “She’s still in the apartment,” Louise confirmed when Willumsen called at 5 P.M. A couple hours earlier, Lars had stopped by with a sandwich, and they’d swapped so she had the car and he had taken her bike over to Valdemarsgade to keep an eye on Miloš Vituk and Pavlína. It had been nice to come in and sit, even though something in the heating system had broken, so it either blew fire-hot or ice-cold air. There was no longer anything in between.

  “I did a little digging into young Hana,” Willumsen said with more dedication than Louise had heard in him for a long time. “Would you believe, it turns out she’s actually registered as a prostitute. The same goes for the 22-year-old Pavlína Branková.”

  “You’re kidding!” Louise exclaimed, thinking that was smart of Miloš, because then the police didn’t have anything to get them on. But it didn’t make her look any less forward to the questioning session they were planning to drag him and the girls in for after the weekend was over, when hopefully they would have a pattern to present him with.

  Her thoughts slid back to that day at Police Headquarters and all his rubbish about how Pavlína had become his girlfriend. Maybe she was, but she was certainly back out on the street all the same.

  “What about the questioning session?” Louise asked, turning off the car’s engine when the heat had become too much.

  “We’re tapping the numbers Miloš gave you, both the cell phone and the land line, but there hasn’t been much so far, only three calls. Either nothing is happening, or he has another phone that we don’t know about.”

  That sounded most likely, Louise thought, fascinated by a young guy with a bandanna wrapped around his head that was almost black, it was so dirty. He was staggering his way toward the front door of a building with his key out in front of him, as if he were on horseback, jousting, holding a lance in his hand. A big black dog with an equally dirty bandanna around its neck was trotting along behind him.

  “Mikkelsen and his people rounded up a bunch of the women who work for Arian and Hamdi last night. They caught them with their pants down, literally, and none of them had their prostitution paperwork in order, so they were slapped with the 500-kroner fine and, as Mikkelsen put it, the admonition not to let it happen again. Oddly enough, not one of them knew anything about the two Albanians. But Mikkelsen is making plans to wake them all up early tomorrow and drag them to the downtown station. Then they’ll put them through their paces again and hope that something comes of it.”

  Louise heard a quick laugh before Willumsen rounded off the conversation by saying that their colleagues from Halmtorvet had also learned that the Albanians were now meeting their girls at a pizza place on Istedgade to collect their money.

  “You’ll be relieved by someone from the downtown precinct around eight, then you’ll be on again tomorrow.”

  Louise nodded toward the windshield, where the bandanna-wearing pair had finally managed to make it in the door.

  52

  THE FOAM WAS THICK AND DENSE ON THE TOP OF THE CZECH pilsner that had just been set on the table in front of Camilla. Svejk just wasn’t the same since the ban on indoor smoking had gone into effect for all pubs over forty square meters. It was certainly easier to breathe inside, but a little bit of the pub atmosphere that she otherwise so enjoyed had been lost. Two musicians were setting up, but otherwise there was only one other couple in the bar. She looked at her watch. There were two hours until the music started, it was only just after 8:00. She’d spent most of her day lying on her sofa, staring up into space.

  Her boss had called and left a couple of messages, but she’d just listened as he asked how she was doing. She couldn’t even muster the wherewithal to pick up the receiver and get the conversation over with, but she was prepared for the fact that he would try again.

  The psychologist from National Hospital had also called and left a message that he’d had a cancellation for Monday, which he would hold open for her. If he didn’t hear otherwise, he would plan to see her at 10:15. She’d written it down on a slip of paper and stuck it on the refrigerator door, but at the moment Monday felt far in the future because she still had her hands full getting by one day at a time.

  Markus was at Jonas’s place and she didn’t need to pick him up until tomorrow morning, so Camilla had called and asked Louise if she wanted to get a beer when she got off work.

  She looked up as Louise walked in the door and greeted the owner, who was manning the bar, before she headed for the table in the back of the room where Camilla was sitting. It would be the quietest corner once people started arriving. On the other hand, the odor from the urinal cakes in the men’s bathroom saturated the air.

  Camilla asked for another beer when Louise ordered and ignored the look aimed at her half-empty glass.

  “Light or dark?” the waiter asked.

  “A tall light,” she said.

  “Henrik and Alice didn’t have a child while they were at the camp,” Camilla began without any sort of lead-in, once the beers arrived at their table.

  Camilla didn’t elaborate until she saw the confused look on Louise’s face. Then she explai
ned that she’d called and talked to a woman at the Red Cross who’d lived with them at the refugee camp in Bosnia.

  “She was positive that Alice Holm was not pregnant and did not have a newborn during that period,” Camilla explained, adding that the woman had even lived in the same barracks with them. But the woman had thought there was something about Alice getting sick at one point.

  Camilla was a little irritated when Louise wasn’t really paying attention. She knew the police had new clues in their quest for the culprit behind the two murders, but she was totally preoccupied with the information Elsa Lynge had provided. She was feeling more and more certain that there was a connection between that dead baby in the church and the pastor’s own son.

  “There’s something wrong. Something he doesn’t want to say.”

  Louise raised one eyebrow, and Camilla was distracted for a second by a group of people who had just walked in and sat down at a table close to the bar. They looked like they were in their forties and could easily be co-workers closing out their week with a night on the town.

  Camilla turned back to Louise and looked at her earnestly, raising her voice a little to make herself heard over the music.

  “They didn’t have a child. Not one on the way and not one in their arms during the period of time when he claims his wife gave birth to Jonas. They left the camp at the end of the summer in 1998, and according to him his son was almost one when they returned home in August.”

  Camilla nudged her beer aside and leaned in over the table.

  “I called the Office of Civil Registration,” Camilla said. “But of course they can’t pass on confidential personal information to unauthorized civilians.”

  Louise shook her head, but Camilla could tell that she finally had Louise’s full attention.

  “What was that about Alice Holm getting sick and them leaving the camp?”