“I’m sorry,” Carl interrupted. “Obviously, the case isn’t quite as clear-cut as that. The woman we’re looking for isn’t under suspicion, we’d simply like to speak—”
“Do you mind not interrupting just because a lady’s doing the talking? You pipe down, mister, I prefer to deal with your punk rocker here. It might teach you not to be such a male chauvinist worm in the future,” the woman responded amid a cloud of cigarette smoke.
Carl avoided Rose’s gaze. If there was a grin on her face, the war between them that was always lurking latently would break out with an almighty explosion.
“Do you know her?” Rose went on impassively. People could call her a punk rocker or whatever they liked, she didn’t care. Carl wouldn’t have either, if he possessed her inclination to change identity.
“Know her? I wouldn’t go that far. But perhaps I do recognize her. As far as I recall, she’s in here on the desk.”
She didn’t ask them in, but there was little doubt she expected them to follow her, so they did.
“She’s over here,” she said, as they stepped into the living room.
She picked up a framed photograph showing a small group of women standing with their arms around one another and handed it to Rose. “Yes, I thought so; that’s her on the far right. Nothing wrong with my memory, if I say so myself. Probably one of Birthe’s friends from the conservatory.”
Carl and Rose bent forward at once, squinting their eyes at the photo. It certainly looked like it could be her.
“She doesn’t seem that tall in this photo,” Rose noted.
“Which one’s Birthe Enevoldsen, the woman you work for?” Carl asked.
She pointed to the girl in the middle. A smiling blonde-haired woman who also seemed to be in most of the other photos on the desk.
“I’m assuming Birthe actually lives here?” said Carl.
The cleaning woman glared at him, then turned to Rose.
“I started working for her just after she moved in, when Carlo was still alive. So it must be ten years ago now.”
“Carlo was her husband?” inquired Carl.
“Good God, no. Carlo was my dog. A Small Münsterländer, lovely brown color he had.”
Yeah, and the same to you, lady.
Carl frowned. “How tall is Birthe Enevoldsen, would you say?”
“Good God again. You’ll be wanting her shoe size next.”
“I’m sorry, please excuse my assistant,” Rose broke in. “But is she taller than me, for instance?”
The woman hesitated for a moment, cigarette in hand, giving Rose the once-over. Then she turned triumphantly to Carl, who just stood there, wide-eyed and speechless.
Had Rose just called him her assistant?
“I’d say Birthe’s about the same height as your boss here, Mr. Plod.”
Carl ignored the smirk on Rose’s face as they got back in the car. “Two things, Rose. One: never again refer to me as your assistant. I have a sense of humor, but it stops right about there, OK? And two: try running those half-baked thoughts of yours through a filter before you spout them out like that. You were lucky today, but if you’re just as careless another time, you’ll have people shutting up on you like clams.”
“Yeah, yeah, Carl, I’m with you. But let me ask you this: which of us has got a hundred percent success rate and which of us hasn’t? Besides, I’m quite partial to clams, so try again.”
Carl took a deep breath. “For the moment, things are going fine, and that’s good. We know the woman they were looking for last week isn’t as tall as six-two, more like five-nine, if we compare the height of those women in the photo. So there must be an error in Sverre Anweiler’s height as stated in the police report. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was standing on tiptoes the first time he got hauled in and measured. But if we look at the still we got off the CCTV footage and compare the girlfriend’s height with Anweiler’s, he comes out more like five-five than five-nine in his shoes. A fairly short guy, in other words.”
“Quite a guy all round, if you ask me.” Rose snapped the folder shut. “If what the cleaning lady says is right, Birthe lends her apartment out to friends and other people she knows whenever she’s away. If this girlfriend of hers needed a place to crash for only a couple of days, then it’s hardly surprising if no one in Brumleby noticed her.”
Carl started the car. “OK, so far so good. Now you can get out again, Rose, and stay here until Birthe Enevoldsen gets home. We don’t want her slipping away from us, now, do we? Chin up, and get yourself a bratwurst over on Sankt Jakobs Plads if you’re feeling peckish. I’ll entertain Gordon while you’re away.”
He watched her black-plastered face in the mirror as he pulled out of the parking space.
That mascara would come to a boil if she didn’t watch out.
8
Winter 2010 and Spring 2011
“How much time will it take?” asked Marco, pointing down at his clothes. The elderly man in the dry cleaners threw up his hands and shook his head. What was the boy thinking? he seemed to say.
“How long to get this clean?” Marco repeated, and began to take off his sweater.
“Now hang on a minute, lad.” The man threw his head back as though he’d just caught a whiff of smelling salts. “We don’t clean clothes while you wait. You can’t sit here in the shop in the buff, you can understand that, surely?”
“But I haven’t got any other clothes.”
There was a rustle from behind the racks of clothes packed in plastic, and a row of coats was pushed aside.
The man now peering out at him wasn’t quite as effeminate as the first, but nearly. Marco could spot old gay couples at a glance. On the streets they went about with their little handbags strapped to their wrists and tucked tight under their arms. Always genuine leather clutched in soft, well-manicured hands and often with contents of considerable interest for an experienced pickpocket. But these gays tended to be more careful than most, which was the downside with this kind of prey. Perhaps years of hostile looks had taught them to be wary and take care. Perhaps they were just more fussy about their belongings than most. Marco had never really sussed them out.
“He’s probably quite lovely, otherwise, Kaj,” said the man behind the racks to his partner. “Shouldn’t we give it a go? Look, he’s even got a book with him, so he can’t be that bad.” He flashed a friendly smile at Marco, revealing a pair of rather protruding canines. “But what about paying? Have you any money at all, young man?”
Marco produced his hundred-kroner note. He had no idea if it was enough.
“A hundred kroner?” The man smiled. “Well, let’s see if we can find something else for you back here for the meantime. People these days are so busy that they systematically forget to collect their things. Or maybe they just can’t be bothered. That’s why we always want payment up front. Pretty slipshod, if you ask me.”
Marco was given clean clothes from the back room and allowed to keep his money. If he came back in a couple of days, his gear would be ready, even if, as the men said, it was the dirtiest pile of laundry they’d ever had to deal with. And he could keep the clothes they gave him since they’d been hanging in the back room for over a year.
He saw the two men nudge each other and giggle as he went out the door. Perhaps he had made their day.
They had certainly made his.
—
Living on the streets was hard, especially to begin with. Marco was hungry round the clock. But he learned to maneuver without breaking the law, taking every little job that came his way. He started the first one at five in the morning when he offered to clean the windows of a bakery. In return they gave him an enormous bag of bread rolls. He wandered over to a coffee bar and traded the rolls for a cheese sandwich, a warm drink, and the chance to wash all the floors. And all of a sudden he was fifty kroner better off.
Soon his
hustling between shops became a network of employers who would give him odd jobs to do. He ran errands, carried heavy shopping bags for people from the supermarket to waiting cars, split cardboard boxes apart and threw them in the trash, even though his lips turned blue and his hands trembled from the bitter cold that gripped the country like a vise that winter.
For weeks he slogged away in the snow and slush. From shop to shop and up one stairway after another. Often the jobs were difficult and laborious, and the customers demanding, like the madwoman whose week’s supply of groceries had to be lugged up to the fourth floor in a cardboard box. She never opened the door but shoved the money out through a malodorous letter slot. One time he lingered farther up the stairs until she opened the door to take in her groceries, half-naked, her skin pitted with filth.
“What are you staring at, you little freak?” she yelled, jabbing a crooked black fingernail at him.
It was a side of Denmark he had never seen before.
Marco balked at nothing and did his work well enough that the majority of those he helped out didn’t trick him. After a while he was raking it in, as Miryam would have said.
And all the money was his and his alone.
Work from eight in the morning until ten at night except on Sundays. Sixty kroner an hour for errands from the shops, seventy for putting up posters on the streets. It all added up. More than fifteen thousand a month, and he had neither rent to pay nor expenses for food and clothing. For the time being he wore what he’d been given by a woman who ran a pizzeria and thought he needed something less ill-fitting.
“You’re a proper Latino, sweetie,” she told him. “Don’t hide it. Put this on, it belonged to Mario. We sent him packing back to Naples last month.” And everyone behind the counter burst out laughing. As if any of them had ever been near Italy.
At night he bedded down on the street. This was nothing new to him. And yet he knew it couldn’t last long, for it wasn’t only the cold that was dangerous. Though most of his money was stashed elsewhere, there were still lunatics aplenty on the streets who would work him over for a lot less. His family, for example.
It was the gay couple from the dry cleaners who helped him away from such perilous sleeping arrangements. Perhaps they had seen him huddled in a corner of Nordhavn station, or maybe they had heard of his plight through others they knew. In any case, their faces were full of concern when they stopped him on the street one day in late January.
“You can do deliveries for us,” one of them said. “And in return you can stay with us until we find you something else.”
Marco recoiled instinctively, almost stumbling into a pile of snow. What they had in mind was definitely not on his agenda.
“Listen, young man. If we trust you not to do things to us that we don’t like, then you can trust us in the same way, don’t you think? You can’t stay out here in the cold at night, it’s asking for trouble.”
The one who did the talking was called Eivind. It was he who would later come to regret their arrangement the most.
—
Out here on the upmarket side of the City Lakes that curved through the western margin of Copenhagen’s center, Marco learned to view street life with new eyes. Whereas he had previously observed only objects ripe for theft, he now saw people of flesh and blood with jobs to do, errands to run and families to provide for, as well as plenty of people in whose lives all this was absent. Here he saw all facets of the city and its citizenry and realized that in most respects these people were no different from those he had seen walking the streets of other large cities. It was the empty, expressionless faces he noticed most. Unless their attention happened to be diverted by the display in a shop window, most people’s eyes were fixed far enough ahead to avoid dealing with anything close at hand. Positive distractions, however, like the sudden appearance of a friend or acquaintance, prompted folk to stop abruptly and immediately flash smiles at each other that neither the situation nor their frame of mind a moment before would have inspired.
When this happened, Marco stopped, too, and started his inner stopwatch. As a rule it took less than half a minute for him to predict when they would say their good-byes and part company with convincing excuses about how busy they happened to be just now. And when his predictions proved accurate to the second, he would laugh and shake his head, rather impressed with himself. But if these people with their distant gaze were distracted by something less positive, their reaction was often less than amiable. The homeless who sold their own newspaper made people automatically veer away, just as they did from the junkies, the winos, the crazies, the confused, unkempt, or outrageously dressed, or the man with the accordion outside the Netto supermarket whose music could make the paving stones sing and gave the street scene a splash of color.
The Dane was at his kindest and most attentive when he was in familiar surroundings with people of the same ilk, that much was obvious.
And this counted Marco out entirely.
The first time someone hurled abuse at him, telling him to piss off back to where he came from, he withdrew to an alleyway and felt confused, small, and alone.
“Fuck off back to wogland, you stink like hell!”
“What’s up, you fucking monkey, can’t find your tree?”
That kind of thing.
On days like that, it could be hard to get out of Marco why he was so quiet at the dinner table. But after a while Kaj and Eivind coaxed him into opening up, and they taught him some potent phrases in colloquial Danish with which to retaliate: “What are you doing here on the street, haven’t you got a home to go to?” “It takes one to know one.” “Find yourself a job to do, like the rest of us!”
It cheered him up a bit.
Respect was something you had to earn. The street taught him that. He only wished it didn’t have to be that way.
—
Weeks and months passed like this as Marco distanced himself from his past, and in spite of everything began to find faith in life and a future that consisted of more than just one aimless day after another. During these months in Kaj and Eivind’s tidy little ground-floor apartment he learned to look forward and make himself ready to lead a normal life. He accepted everything they suggested to him. He honed his pronunciation, extended his vocabulary, and learned elementary Danish grammar. And if he misunderstood a word or his accent was too thick, they jokingly called him Eliza, singing, “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.”
“All of us live with a certain number of words inside us,” Kaj told him, time and again. And in Marco’s case the number of words was growing all the time.
In this small apartment on one of the humbler streets, Marco not only learned to trust people, he also realized that daily routines could make life easier instead of being the constant humiliation he had witnessed at home with the clan. Time became more amenable when his days were organized. And the desire to be part of a family grew stronger by the day in this apartment with its heavy brocaded curtains and porcelain displayed in every niche and cranny.
There could be boisterous evenings playing cards, with laughter that never ceased, but there could be more serious evenings, too.
“We’ve been thinking, Marco,” said Eivind, one such evening. “You’re here in this country illegally, and we’re concerned about your future. Without the proper papers the day will inevitably arrive when all this will come to an abrupt end.”
Marco knew this. Of course he did. He thought about it every night when he turned out the light. So that evening he made a solemn promise and defined his goal. He wanted to be the same as everyone else in the country as soon as possible. To that end he needed a residence permit, and there was no way the authorities were going to give him one. He, too, read the papers and knew the lay of the land.
He would therefore have to find himself another identity and the papers to go with it. This was imperative if he were ever to
nurture hopes of leading a normal life with an education, a job, and a family. He needed this at any price. He’d have to find someone to get him the necessary documents.
Surely it was just a question of money.
—
The best paid job Marco found was putting up posters. To start with, the freezing cold made it hard work scraping the old ones off the poster columns and slapping on the thick paste, but once the leaves appeared on the trees and the warmth of spring set in, going round the city pasting up these colorful proclamations of coming events became Marco’s favorite activity.
He was out in all kinds of weather and did his job well. He donned his cap and didn’t cut corners by tossing half his posters in the nearest waste basket or pasting them all up on the nearest wall or billboard. Marco put his posters up in the designated areas, conscientiously scraping off the previous layers so the new ones would be less inclined to succumb to gravity. Few of the other poster boys could be bothered, so he had most of Østerbro and a good stretch up toward Hellerup to himself.
He found it fun, too. It was like scraping away layers of time. Often he found himself thinking how much he would have liked to have been part of all the events that had taken place. To have been in the audience at concerts, to have attended openings of art exhibitions, to have joined in the Workers’ Day celebrations. But such amusement was denied him, for no matter where he went, he ran the risk of being confronted by those who were searching for him. When Marco was out in the open he was always on the lookout, never able to simply relax and enjoy life like normal people. It was just the way it was, at least for the time being.
Perhaps a day would come when he’d be able to live like these people, for Marco had his plans. A day when he was more grown up and had perhaps changed his appearance. A day when the clan would no longer be driven by its thirst for vengeance. A day when they acknowledged he didn’t present a threat to them. But all this would take time.
For now, he would do all he could to secure his false identity papers. Hopefully it would be his final criminal act. Afterward he would earn his money aboveboard and begin to study. That, more than anything, drove him. It was the studying he was preparing himself for in his limited spare time.
The Marco Effect: A Department Q Novel Page 11
