The Rotten State: A John Flynn Thriller

by Stewart, A. J.

  Pressed up hard against the fence was the tiny house. It looked like a small log cabin built on a trailer. The tires were soft, and grass had grown around them. The wood siding had lost its natural brown and was gently edging toward a silver weathered look.

  Mr. Jensen walked to the side of the trailer and reached under the wheel arch. He retrieved a key, then he stepped around to the rear of the trailer where blocks of wood had been made into stairs that led up to the door of the house. He levered himself on his knees as he stepped up, unlocked the door, and then moved inside. Flynn allowed him to get fully into the room before following.

  The inside was like a miniature version of a house. The space was long and narrow, but plentiful windows let the light shine in. The walls were white, and the wood floor and cabinets and ceiling were blond wood, maybe birch or beech. Flynn didn’t know—he was no expert on timber. Immediately inside the door was a small sofa that faced a desk that doubled as a TV stand. Beyond the sofa, modular stairs led up to a loft, where he could see the edge of a mattress, all made up, ready to sleep. Under the loft was a kitchen, tight but fully functional, with a cooktop and a small fridge and a sink.

  Mr. Jensen stood in the kitchen. He hunched just a touch, as if the headspace was a little low. But he was as tall as Flynn, and Flynn felt no such compulsion. Mr. Jensen waited by the kitchen counter that ran along one wall, and Flynn poked his head into the bathroom at the front end of the house. Like everything else it was small, like a head on a ship, but built to look like a regular bathroom, with a toilet, a shower, and a wash basin.

  It was too tight for them to both stand in the kitchen, so Flynn edged back into the living area and looked around. He liked what he saw. It could have had a bit more headroom, but it was a cozy space.

  “Did your daughter ever see Luna when she was in Copenhagen?” he asked.

  Mr. Jensen shook his head. “I don’t think so. They went their own ways.”

  “Did she ever visit Luna when she came here?”

  “Freja doesn’t come back here.”

  He said it matter-of-factly, but it gave Flynn pause. “She doesn’t come back?”

  Mr. Jensen shook his head again. “Why would she? She has a life now.”

  Flynn glanced down the length of the room and into the bathroom space at the end. There was a window at the front of the house, and through it he could see the rear yard of the old Fisker place.

  “Were you here when the Fisker house burned down?”

  “Oh, yes. I called the fire brigade.”

  “Where was Luna?”

  “She was here. She raised the alarm.”

  “She was here in the tiny house?”

  “Yes. She ran inside and told us there were flames.”

  “Did you see them?”

  “Of course. I came outside to see.”

  “In the front or back?”

  He thought for a moment. “Both. In the back here first. That was where Luna had seen the flames. I wanted to make sure she had actually seen what she thought she had seen.”

  “And she had?”

  “Yes. The house was on fire.”

  “So you went back in and called the fire department.”

  “Yes. And then we went out the front, but there was not much to see, so I ran over to the Thorsens to tell them.”

  “There wasn’t much to see?”

  “No. You couldn’t really see the flames from the front so much. Not until the fire took hold.”

  “Did that take long?”

  Mr. Jensen shook his head like he had lost an old friend. “Not long. It was an old house, old wood. By the time the fire brigade got here, it was too late. They were only concerned about saving the houses on either side. Which, thankfully, they did.”

  Flynn took another look around the space. There was nothing else to see, so he thanked Mr. Jensen and stepped down out of the house. Jensen locked up and then led him back inside. Mrs. Jensen was in the kitchen. It was tidy and the least cluttered room in the house. She was wiping the counter regardless.

  “Thank you both for your time,” said Flynn.

  The two nodded in unison as if well practiced at nonverbal communication. As Flynn turned to leave, he thought of one last thing.

  “Oh, by the way. After the fire there was a reporter here.”

  Both the Jensens looked at him blankly.

  “The reporter didn’t speak with you?”

  “After the fire?” said Mr. Jensen. “No, we spoke to no reporter.”

  “You were next door and raised the alarm, and the reporter from the Politiken newspaper didn’t come and speak with you?”

  “Politiken?” Mr. Jensen furrowed his brow and looked at his wife.

  “No,” she said. “There was a reporter from the Politiken here, but that wasn’t after the fire.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  “No, it was maybe a week before.”

  Flynn realized that when the old man, Lars, had told him about the reporter, Flynn had assumed it was related to the fire because they had been talking about it. It was a bad assumption.

  “What did the reporter want?”

  “She didn’t really say what she was reporting on,” said Mrs. Jensen.

  “She just asked about the history of the place,” said Mr. Jensen. “I thought it was for one of those pieces you read in the Sunday magazine.”

  “But what did she ask you?”

  “Like my husband says, she asked about the history of this place. Who started it. Who lived here now, who had lived here before.”

  “Anyone in particular?”

  Mrs. Jensen shook her head. Then she stopped. “There was one person she asked about specifically. Victor Berg.”

  “Berg?”

  “Ja. He is a politician now, in the Folketinget, the parliament.”

  “Yes, I heard him speak at the market yesterday.”

  “He does that. He says it helps him connect to his constituents.”

  “And Luna confronted him once, at a rally?”

  “Oh, that. Yes, I think she gave him a piece of her mind, after the reporter came.”

  “The same reporter who asked about him specifically?”

  “Yes. Well, he lived here for some years, with his family. He is probably the only famous person to come from our community.”

  “Do you remember the reporter’s name?”

  “Poulsen,” said Mrs. Jensen. “Helle Poulsen.”

  Flynn thanked them for the coffee and walked to the door. He slipped on his boots, and Mrs. Jensen opened the door.

  “Goodbye,” she said.

  Flynn nodded his thanks, and she closed the door behind him.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Flynn stepped away from the Jensen house and then stopped. He knew what he needed to do, but it would take some energy. Not physical energy, of which he had plenty. This would require mental energy, of which he felt in short supply.

  He walked next door to the Fisker house. He could see his own footprints in the ash where he had stood the day before. He let the debris before him dissolve in his mind, replaced by a fully formed house. It was an amalgam of the homes around the community, since he had not seen the original building or a photograph of it. But the one in his mind had a front door, window boxes, and a small entry where the Fiskers would kick off their boots, and then a hallway that led out to a living space and a tight but functional kitchen.

  Now he did what he wished he didn’t have to do. He let his vision blur and captured the house he had built in his mind, and then he set his imaginary house on fire. He stood first where Mr. Jensen had stood in his backyard, and he watched the flames ebb and flow. Then like a spirit he flew over the Jensen house and landed where he now stood, in front of the burning house, where he no longer saw flames. He watched the scene unfold until his eyes watered.

  His brief walk around the community the previous day had revealed one consistency in the architecture through the years. Each of the homes had an electri
cal panel on the left side. Flynn moved slowly, training his eyes across the grays and blacks of burned wood, looking for a metal box.

  The box wasn’t metal—it was wood. That was Flynn’s assumption, because there was no sign of it. What he found was the panel itself. A pressed steel sheet with slots where the plastic breakers had once been. He picked it up and studied it. There were no residue marks, just ash and dust and dirt that he wiped off with his hand. He placed the panel to the side and rummaged through the debris. Underneath he found the remains of several plastic breaker switches. Some had been warped and twisted by the heat; others looked worn but almost functional.

  Flynn moved along the pile of the debris. No walls had remained standing, and Flynn wondered if they had collapsed in on themselves or had been pushed that way by firefighters trying to create a break between the fire and the neighboring homes. He moved around to the rear where he imagined the kitchen to be. He kicked some charred lumber away and found a steel sink.

  He looked from the rear of the burned structure toward the front, and then out toward the fields behind, and then he turned back again. The debris before him was black as coal. It had burned hot and fast, producing more charcoal than ash.

  Flynn stepped into the debris as though he was walking through what had once been the back door. He followed a line of blackened pieces of lumber until he reached almost the middle of the area, and then he looked right and left. The darker debris was spread out on both sides but not in front, where he saw more ash more solid pieces of burned lumber.

  To an extent, that all made sense. The fire would have burned longer inside and been shorter and cooler on the outside, where the firefighters had doused the structure with their hoses. Without chemical analysis he wouldn’t be able to prove what had happened here, and it was too late for that. But it didn’t matter. He didn’t need to prove it in a court of law. He just needed to prove it to himself. He just needed to know.

  Flynn strode back out of the debris toward the backyard. The grass near the house was singed, and he walked straight over it to the fence that separated the property from the fields beyond. He looked right and saw the tiny house in the Jensens’ yard, and then he looked forward into the field.

  He placed his hands on the fence and vaulted over like a gymnast. There was a gap between the fence and where the barley began. About three feet. Perhaps there was a limit to how close the tractors or harvesters could get to the fence. A buffer zone, to prevent damage.

  Flynn walked into the field. The barley was waist-high. Not like corn, where a person could disappear. No one made a maze out of barley. And where cornstalks were spread out and a person could shuffle between without damaging the crop, walking on barley was like walking on tall grass. Flynn crushed it underfoot as he moved. Not a discernible amount, nothing a farmer in a tractor would notice, not unless a hundred people walked back and forth along the same line.

  Flynn cut right, perpendicular to his line, parallel to the houses, in a rough arc level with the fence line. He walked for about a hundred meters until he was past the house on the far side of the Jensens’, then he turned and walked back the other way.

  He was behind the home on the other side of the burned house when he found what he was looking for. Not a path or a track, not by any stretch of the imagination. Nothing more than a few fallen, crushed sheaths. He turned away from the houses and found more of the same, here and there, as if every foot or two a sheath had decided to lie down.

  He followed the line of crushed barley toward the crest of the hill. It was barely that, more of an undulation than a hill. In cycling they might have called it a false flat. He reached the top of the crest and found himself maybe ten feet above the height of the backyards he looked down on.

  He was standing at the end of a track. Or the beginning, depending on your point of view. This one was well traveled. Two deep ruts with a grassy mound between, and two shallow ruts about four feet apart, leading away toward a distant gravel road that was hidden by the barley. The track was neither gravel nor graded, not maintained in any way except by the consistent pounding of tractor tires. It was how the farmer reached this section of field. And how they left.

  Flynn got down on his haunches and studied the track. The front tires of a tractor made deeper ruts in the center because they were thinner, whereas the rear tires were wide, usually about thirty centimeters—a foot—across. That width spread the load and allowed a tractor to cut across plowed field where a car would get bogged down. Flynn put his hand across the outer shallow rut on one side. Then he ran his fingers across the ground outside that rut. It was flat where the edges of the crop had been planted right up to the track but then crushed as vehicles came and went.

  Flynn stood and surveyed the fields from his perch. It was the highest point in the area for at least a couple of kilometers in every direction. The rest of the terrain was more or less flat. He looked down the track as it wound out of view. It was good for the purpose, at least in spring and summer. Not in winter, when the rain would settle in the ruts and make it tough going. Then he glanced back down to the houses.

  And he knew for certain that the fire department was wrong. The Fisker house fire was arson.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Thorsen and Gorski were mowing lawns when Flynn got back. Begitte was nowhere to be found. He wandered over to the communal building and found his way to the games room. There was a couple of boxes of kids’ toys, some soft chairs, and two boys playing a video game. The TV screen was split in two and they appeared to be working as a team, moving through a dilapidated building that reminded Flynn of Fallujah. The view was first person, and each player held a machine gun, which was regularly used to cut enemies down. The graphics were realistic but the procedure was not.

  Flynn asked if he could use the computer in the corner of the room, and one of the kids dropped his controller, turned on the computer, and then dashed back to his game before another enemy appeared.

  Flynn waited for the computer to boot up and then opened an internet browser. He brought up a mapping site and entered Møns Klint, and then entered in the village of Østvand and was presented with all kinds of options for getting between the two. Despite the excellent rail links in Europe, it appeared the best option was via car. A straight shot south, about ninety minutes or so. The method of transport he liked most—walking—was projected to take twenty-six hours, but he was certain he could do it in twenty.

  The public transport options were poor. He would have to go back into Copenhagen, then get a train and change to a bus, which still wouldn’t get him all the way there. But he wasn’t going all the way. His stop would be where the map said the bus would terminate, so it would do. He preferred not to drive—he wasn’t taking Thorsen’s van, and renting a car would mean a document trail he would rather not leave.

  Flynn found Thorsen and Gorski still mowing lawns. It looked like a full-time job. When he offered to help, Thorsen asked if he wouldn’t mind tending to the communal garden. Flynn was no horticulturalist. He had never had a garden, and none of his thumbs were green. His food had been supplied first by his mother and then by the Legion, and after that he had lived in the Bay Area, where a food co-op delivered a box of produce weekly. He never saw the farm. Of late his sustenance needs were met in cafés and greasy spoons and from galley cars on trains. But he could pull weeds. And there were a lot to pull—it seemed more weeds than plants.

  As he worked with Thorsen into the afternoon, he wondered about how much to tell him. Begitte had said that he had longed for peace, and Flynn understood that. He had searched for it himself and, for a time, had found it. Then his peace had been ripped from him, and he saw no way back now. But as he pulled weeds from the soil, he saw that Thorsen was in another place. He had peace, even if some of it was born of willful ignorance.

  After a few hours’ work they stopped for a break, sweat dripping off them both despite the mild afternoon. Thorsen filled two flasks with water and found some crackers
. They rested with their backs against the communal building.

  “What did you get up to this morning?” asked Thorsen.

  “Went for a run.”

  “Gorski said you guys had marched across Europe.”

  “Not quite, but we walked our fair share.”

  “I’m done with marching,” said Thorsen as he gulped his water. “We did a lifetime’s worth in the Legion, don’t you think?”

  “I do.”

  “Now I just want to get fat and old.”

  “You couldn’t get fat if your life depended on it.”

  “Perhaps, but I can try.”

  Flynn nodded and smiled. “You have a good place here. A good life.”

  “Yes. It’s quiet and boring. I had my fill of action in Africa.”

  “And Afghanistan.”

  “And Pakistan. Oh my God, did we serve anywhere with running water?”

  “We were on Corsica for a while,” said Flynn.

  “That was training. Doesn’t count.”

  “Then no, I don’t think so.”

  They each drank their water and ate another cracker.

  Thorsen looked at Flynn. “Did Begitte ask you to look into her sister’s death?”

  Flynn didn’t want him to think about it. He wanted to leave his friend in peace. But they had known each other so long, had served so closely, had been to so many places without running water together that Flynn knew he would see the lie in his face.

  “Yes,” he said.

  Thorsen nodded. “It troubles her.”

  “Yes.”

  “You can imagine. Somewhere, somehow, something went wrong with Luna. Her life was hard, and her death was harder, and Begitte feels guilt for that.”

  “For her sister’s death?”

  “And her own life. As if she got it easy, and the trade-off was that Luna had to struggle.”

  “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “No, but we think what we think, right?”

  Flynn nodded.