The Rotten State: A John Flynn Thriller

by Stewart, A. J.

  Then the politician was done. He waved again like he was a popstar and stepped off the stage. The crowd turned away and dissolved into the market.

  Begitte joined them at the table. Thorsen said something to his wife and pointed at the empty plates, but she shook her head and sat beside her husband.

  “So that’s the guy who’s encouraging you to sell?” asked Gorski.

  Thorsen nodded. “He is a representative for this constituency in parliament. Not that he is here much.”

  “He doesn’t live here?”

  “Oh, no. He prefers Copenhagen.”

  “But he grew up here?” asked Flynn. “In a cohousing community?”

  Thorsen glanced at Begitte, who was staring at the table. “Yes.”

  “No,” she said. “He did not grow up here. He lived here for some years.” She looked at Flynn. “In our cohousing community.”

  “He lived in your community?”

  “Yes. His parents moved in when he was about fourteen. He left for Copenhagen for university, and his parents moved away maybe five years after that.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “Of course. We’re like an extended family.”

  “And now he wants to destroy the community and redevelop it?”

  “That’s not necessarily what he wants,” said Thorsen. “It’s what the developer, Lund, wants. Berg is just doing his bidding.”

  “Oh, it’s what he wants too,” said Begitte. “He hated the community.”

  “He did?” asked Flynn.

  “Yes. They came to the community because they wanted a more rural, more Danish life, so they said. But there was always a rumor that he had gotten into some trouble at his previous school and that they were getting him away from Copenhagen. He never liked it here and never fit in. His parents would take their turn with the communal chores, like cooking, but not him. When it was their turn, his mother and father would cook for the community, but he would not come to the dining room to eat.”

  “Why?”

  Begitte shrugged. “In a community like ours, you are you, but you are also one of many. He was one of those people who liked to be the center of attention, for things to revolve around him. We didn’t play his game. He never cared for it. He wouldn’t know these people, and he wouldn’t know Danishness if it ate him whole and spat him out. As soon as he could leave, he did.”

  “Did you know him well?”

  “Not really. He is a few years older than me, so I never saw him at school, and at home, like I say, he stayed to himself. My sister knew him a little, I think. At least she had words with him last time we saw him here doing one of his propaganda speeches.”

  “Words?” asked Flynn.

  “She told him exactly what she thought of what he was doing to our community. Luna could be quite to the point.”

  Flynn said nothing but wondered if she wasn’t the only one.

  “He’s certainly comfortable in the spotlight,” said Gorski.

  “Yes,” said Begitte.

  “And you think he’s helping this developer get you out as, what, a political favor?”

  “Sure,” she said. “I bet it’s a two for one. He gets to destroy a place he hated and earns a favor from a rich businessman.”

  “Or repays one,” said Flynn.

  Begitte looked at him but neither nodded nor spoke.

  “Well, the court says he has no standing,” said Thorsen. “So we forget him.”

  They cleared up their plates and rounded up the rest of the people from the community, then they loaded back into the van. As Begitte pulled around to head back home, Flynn leaned forward and spoke to Thorsen.

  “So what was all that about the ghettos?”

  “Hmm? Oh, Berg? You know that there have been many refugees coming to Europe.”

  Flynn glanced at Gorski. They knew very well about the refugees. “Yes.”

  “Well, the government put most of them into social housing projects—hundreds, even thousands of people all together. But now these people don’t have jobs and can’t speak our language and have no community other than their own, so the government says they are taking from the Danish system but are not giving anything back, not becoming Danish. So the government has declared these areas ghettos, where there is high unemployment and high dependency on social housing.”

  “Are they aware of the history of that word?”

  “Very. But they say it’s helpful because once an area is declared a ghetto, that place gets extra assistance from the government.”

  “So poor word choice but not a bad outcome.”

  “Depends on your view. See, once you are a foreigner living in a declared ghetto, you have to follow different rules.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you have to learn Danish, your children must take classes in what it means to be Danish.”

  “That doesn’t sound all bad,” said Gorski.

  “Part of it is not. But it also means your children must learn about Danish religion, which is Christianity, and of course, many of the refugees now are Muslim.”

  Flynn said nothing.

  “Plus, who decides what is and is not Danish? I can assure you, the people who live in the upper Jutland Peninsula don’t feel like they have a lot in common with københavners, people from Copenhagen.”

  “So he’s a nationalist.”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “I didn’t get the sense he had the people at the market convinced.”

  Thorsen frowned. Flynn recognized it as his version of a smile.

  “Danish people don’t really wear their emotions on their sleeves. Maybe at the football, after a few beers, but not otherwise. People here are reserved.”

  “Yes,” said Flynn. “I know.” He winked at Thorsen.

  Thorsen nodded. “People here care about their community, they care about other people. We are a capitalist country, we have property rights and free markets, but we are socialist in our health care and our welfare systems.”

  “And your taxes,” said Gorski.

  “Yes, and in our taxes. People like to complain about it, but most people don’t care about the high taxes. They like to know that everybody is cared for. We believe it makes for a stable society, better for everyone. So people here want to help refugees in trouble. But they also want to preserve this balance, this Danish sense of community. You can call it homogeneity if you want. Most Danish people come from the same stock. They look similar and they think similar. We are not a very religious people, but we are also not a secular state—the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark is our state religion, and the vast majority of Danish people are members of this church, even if they rarely go. So people worry that outsiders with other religions and other views will change Denmark, and people don’t want to change. So they are conflicted. Politicians like Berg feed that conflict.”

  “In my experience,” said Flynn, “ the only certainty is change.”

  “Of course. Danish people like their traditions, but they also like pizza and hot dogs and croissants. We drive German and Japanese cars and watch Chinese televisions and listen to American pop songs. At the market, people eat smørrebrød but also shawarma in pita bread. We don’t have these things if not for foreigners. But people are worried that in order to get what is good about the new ways, they must lose what they love about the old ways. It’s complicated.”

  Flynn agreed. It was complicated, and way above his pay grade. He leaned back and felt the tires bounce across the road, and he gazed at the fields of spring barley pass by. He had grown up a foreigner in a foreign land, the son of a Marine who flew the stars and stripes in front of their home, but a home that was never in the United States. He watched American football at home but played soccer in the streets, read Walt Whitman in school but went to French movies. It was, as Thorsen said, complicated.

  Chapter Eight

  Victor Berg was ready to go home. He had a dinner party to get to that evening back in the ca
pital that would involve a private cellar and some very expensive Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and he didn’t wish to be out in the stinking fields any longer than was absolutely necessary.

  Little rallies like the one he had attended were his lifeblood, even more so than social media. He wished it weren’t so—he would much prefer to have his assistant send out a few posts and let the internet take it from there, but he knew from experience that the people he depended on for votes liked to see their man in the flesh. It was a tedious but necessary evil. It also brought him into the home territory of one of his benefactors, which itself would require a meet and greet.

  The Mercedes pulled in through the gates of the large property and cruised down a crushed stone driveway. The driver was adept at keeping to a speed that would not raise any eyebrows but was sufficient to suggest an important person with vital business was on board.

  The driver pulled around the front of the house and stopped. The home was large enough to be grand but too small to be called a manor house. It was new but made to look old—the giveaway was that all the plumbing and electrical was inside the walls. The owner called it his country estate, which was accurate enough.

  A man in a sharp black suit and matching tie came down the steps to open the rear door, and Berg got out without acknowledging him in any way.

  He walked to the house as the man in the suit closed the car door and dashed up the steps to usher him inside. Berg waited in the large foyer, with a staircase that led up to a balcony. He had been to the house many times but had never ventured upstairs. He had, in fact, only ever seen the foyer and what was pompously referred to as the drawing room.

  It was the same room where the man in the suit deposited him to wait. He was directed to the same sofa as always and offered a drink. He requested water, sparkling.

  “Make sure it’s cold,” Berg said as the suit pulled the door closed.

  There was nothing much to look at. He was on a sofa facing another sofa. In one corner was a rolltop desk, and a fireplace took up one wall. None of it was tasteful, in Berg’s opinion. That was the trouble with builders. They thought whatever they created was Versailles, even when it was closer to a Holiday Inn, which was what the owner of this house had made his fortune constructing. He didn’t own the chain—that would be something worth talking about—he just owned the hammer.

  Berg hated waiting. Powerful people didn’t wait—they were waited upon—and that, he was sure, was the whole point of the exercise. He was facing the window, through which he could see mature green trees. It might have been a splendid view were it not for the fact that he had been seated there on purpose. His back was to the door, a most uncomfortable position, and as he was facing the outside sunshine, his host would be cast in silhouette when he took the opposite sofa. Berg considered—as he always did—moving to the other one, but he stayed where he was. He would eat humble pie for now. Eventually the tables—and the seats—would be turned.

  The door opened behind him. He didn’t turn to look. When he heard the heavy footfalls on the wooden floor he knew who it was, so he waited for the man to reach him before standing.

  Berg offered as much of a smile as he could muster. He had a good smile, a photogenic smile, he knew that. The face came naturally; however, the teeth took some orthodontics, and the smile took a lot of practice in front of the mirror. When he wasn’t concentrating, it had a habit of coming out as a snarl.

  The man opposite him didn’t care either way. He wasn’t into smiles or teeth or even how photogenic Berg was. Berg knew the man considered him a pawn. Berg considered Hans Lund a pig.

  Lund was a huge man, tall for sure but also wide. He was morbidly obese, a white shirt barely holding his girth at bay. He wore red suspenders that served no practical purpose, and a mustache that came to points at either end. As his host offered a handshake, Berg caught the scent of cured meat.

  “Berg,” the man said, quickly enveloping the politician’s hand in his own.

  “Lund. A pleasure.”

  Lund dropped his hand and flopped down onto the opposite sofa. Berg straightened his tie and sat down.

  “How are things?” asked Berg.

  “Things?” said Lund. He spat a laugh. “You had a rally today.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “Yes, in Østvand.”

  Lund grunted. “Østvand.”

  “Yes. Listen, Lund, I don’t mean to rush you, but I am expected back in the capital.”

  “Dinner with Kosciusko? He won’t miss you.”

  Berg flinched. It annoyed him that Lund always seemed to know exactly what he was doing and where. The man had ears everywhere. Almost everywhere.

  “Nevertheless.”

  “I sent surveyors to the commune this morning.”

  “Good.”

  “No, Berg, not good.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, three of my men came back broken.”

  “Broken?”

  “You don’t hear so well, Berg? Yes, broken. Two out for the season and one just enough to get the others home.”

  “What happened?”

  “They got attacked.”

  “Where? At the commune?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you sent security with the surveyors this time.”

  “It was the security that went down. The surveyors weren’t touched.”

  Berg frowned. He hated frowning. It didn’t look good on television. “You’re saying a bunch of commune dwellers beat up your guys?”

  “Not commune dwellers.”

  “Then who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  Lund pursed his lips and sunk back into his thick neck. Berg knew he wouldn’t call the police. There were probably police somewhere locally who were in his pocket, but even calling them would be to admit defeat of his guys, and defeat of his guys was a defeat for Lund.

  “My boys said they were foreign,” said Lund.

  “Foreign? Like Muslim?”

  “My guys say maybe American.”

  “American? What American?”

  “I don’t know, Berg, and I don’t like not knowing.”

  Berg shook his head. That damned commune—“Wait,” he said. “I saw them today.”

  “Who?”

  “Some of the commune.” He couldn’t bring himself to call them a community.

  “Where?”

  “At the market.”

  “They were at your rally?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s not a coincidence,” said Lund.

  Berg shrugged. It could have been a coincidence. It was a marketplace, after all. He had seen the woman. Begitte. He knew her face well, sort of. He hadn’t seen her since she was a girl. She might have just been shopping. He didn’t notice any others from the old days, but he wouldn’t recognize most of them now anyway.

  “What will you do?” asked Berg. He loathed being on the hook to guys like Lund, but guys like Lund opened doors that Berg could not open himself, even as a member of the Folketinget, even with his connections.

  “I will watch them,” said Lund. “I will find out who they are.”

  “And then?”

  “Then we will see. If they are foreign, what can you do?”

  Now Berg understood. “I can do plenty. But it would be better to handle it quietly.”

  “Always.”

  “You have some better men?”

  “There was nothing wrong with my men. They had no reason to know these guys would appear and do what they did. It was a sucker punch.”

  “Let’s hope they don’t get suckered again.”

  Chapter Nine

  The Thorsen household felt tense. Thorsen tried to keep the mood upbeat, but it was not his strong point. He was a serious and studious guy. That had been his strength when Flynn had commanded him. A lot of guys in the Legion were tough, their machismo always on display. Flynn’s special unit had guys like that. Bab
ar had been like that, Manu, too. Even Gorski had liked to act the tough guy. But Thorsen never got into that. Where plenty of other guys acted like they had something to prove to somebody who wasn’t there, Thorsen was just Thorsen. He was smart and thoughtful and added valuable insight whenever Flynn sought his counsel, and he was a whiz with technology—in fact, with anything electrical or mechanical.

  Begitte was silent and stood gazing out the window at the fields beyond, so Gorski retreated to his room in the common building and Flynn decided to take a walk. He wandered around his imaginary clock toward the nine, looking over the Danish architecture that had changed slightly with each house, each period of time. When he reached the end of the last house, he turned around and ambled back around the clock, drawn to the one place he had been trying not to think about.

  He stopped in front of the burned property, the house that he now knew to be where Begitte had grown up, where her dead sister had been living when the fire tore through it. He wondered to what extent one was related to the other.

  Flynn sank to his haunches and ran his fingers over a charred piece of lumber, fighting the compulsion to shiver. He breathed in deeply and looked at the wretched bones of what had once been a home. A home that was probably happy but had seen the other side as well. Flynn stared until his eyes stung, but he didn’t want to close them. He knew what closing his eyes would bring: visions of another house in another time, another charred wreck, another family lost.

  Flynn stood swiftly and turned away from the house, his heart racing. He took some deep gulps of air to stay the rising panic. He feared that if he closed his eyes, he might never open them again, so he stared into the middle distance and allowed his vision to cloud, concentrating on his breathing until he felt some semblance of control. Then he brought his vision back into focus.

  It was then that he saw the man with the camera.

  He was an older man, possibly in his eighties, and his camera was an old SLR with a stubby lens. He was standing on the lawn beside the communal building, among a bed of flowers that looked to have grown wild. The man was standing but was stooped some, and he was watching Flynn.