The Quiet Girl - Peter Hoeg

by Peter Høeg

  * * *

  The Jaguar rounded the corner and stopped. Kasper got out, walked back, peered cautiously over the wall. The Ford had started up and moved forward. The ballerina came out of the driveway, running like a twenty-year-old, and seated herself beside the driver.

  Kasper got into the Jaguar.

  "There's somebody after us," he said, "who surpasses your skills."

  The Jaguar shot forward as if a huge hand had grabbed it from underneath. Behind them, headlights swept over the houses and out to the promenade. The Jaguar's motor began a crescendo, Franz Fieber whipped the wheel to the right, the world tilted, the car raced up the slope toward Slotspark and broke through the hedge. Kasper found a couple of handles and clung to them; there were trees and bushes everywhere. He looked at the young man ahead of him--he was focused but relaxed. Hands and legs danced over the pedals and keys; this was what it must have been like to sit behind Helmut Walcha at the big grand piano in St. Laurent's Church in Alkmaar during his recording of Die Kunst der Fuge. Hundreds of pneumatic hammers pummeled the car from outside. The Jaguar began braking and ended with a crash that sounded as if they'd driven straight into a shredder. Everything grew dark.

  In the darkness beyond them were points of light, which condensed into a small circular area. The car had stopped in the middle of a rhododendron bush; the bush was as big as a garage.

  The dark Ford drove past the lighted area, searching.

  "We could have killed ourselves," said Kasper.

  "I pray constantly. Jesus hears me."

  Every automobile has an acoustic signature. Kasper heard the Ford coming back; it must have turned around. It passed them slowly.

  "An expert like you," said Kasper. "Tell me, if a customer was to be picked up inside the barricaded area, could you find out where and when?"

  "Have you got a name?"

  He gave Stina's name. Franz Fieber spoke briefly on his mobile phone.

  "The unions run taxi clubs. Cafeteria food, slot machines, wild rumors. And information. We'll have her in a couple of minutes."

  Kasper listened out across the Strand Road traffic. It was in a different galaxy than Glostrup after all. The sound around him was tasteful and muted. The soft click of the hydraulic pump in a RollsRoyce. The complex and yet gently controlled intensity in eight-cylinder common-rail engines. Cars that were manufactured not to be heard, but to appear, suddenly, out of the silence. And if the silence was ever broken, it was by something personal, a Ferrari's bestial rumble or the nostalgic roar of a veteran Volkswagen four-cylinder air-cooled boxer engine.

  And there was room for the sound between the houses; reverberation is proportional to the volume of the space. Kasper closed his eyes. He could have owned automobiles like Chaplin. Like Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. He could have employed people to drive them and repair them. Instead he sat here.

  It was time to lay a little golden egg.

  "Happiness," he said, "doesn't consist so much of what one has scraped together and gotten off the ground, but of what one has been able to let go of."

  He heard a nearly silent diesel motor, a Mercedes, the quietest of all cars. He heard the wind softly flapping a convertible top. A Mercedes coupe. The kind of car he would have bought if he had been Lona Bohrfeldt. It drove slowly and unevenly. As he would have driven if he had met himself. And then the police.

  The car entered the lighted area and passed in front of Cafe Jorden Rundt. A woman sat behind the wheel. Kasper put on his glasses. There was a little white cross on the license plate.

  Kasper pointed; the young man understood immediately. The Jaguar crept forward out of the rhododendron, then accelerated. Kasper could not understand which sense Franz Fieber used in driving; everything was dark. The car struck the hedge, slid across the bicycle path, and stopped for a moment on the road between the Ved Stalden restaurant and Denmark's aquarium. Two hundred people were sitting on the glass-enclosed terrace; they had stopped eating. The Jaguar started again, turned onto Strand Road. There were five cars behind the coupe.

  Franz Fieber spoke into his mobile phone.

  "She's to be picked up in forty-five minutes," he said. "And I took the trip."

  * * *

  The Jaguar kept its distance heading toward Strand Boulevard. The car in front of them turned on its left blinker; there was roadwork ahead, traffic directed into just one lane. Now there were ten cars between them and the little Mercedes; when they reached Middelfart Street, it had disappeared.

  Kasper remembered the area. He had walked around here to rest his ears during the first circus performances in the gasworks building, back when there scarcely were dressing rooms. He pointed; the Jaguar made a U-turn across the road, glided along the gasworks grounds, and stopped.

  Kasper was out of the car before it came to a complete stop. He jumped over the hedge along the railroad gradient, and clambered up the steep clayish slope to the train tracks above. He ran north, leaping from one railroad tie to the next, until he had the open playingfield on the left. Then he squatted down.

  He heard her before he saw her. She hadn't turned into Frihavn Harbor; she was headed out Skudehavn Road.

  The car disappeared behind the office buildings around the container harbor. But he knew where she was going. She was going out toward Tippen, at the end of the peninsula that juts into Skudehavn. Tippen wasn't there anymore. The nature preserve had disappeared since he last left Denmark. But something else had appeared instead.

  The new construction blocked the view to the sea. But in a space between two buildings he could see the landfill. It lay in front of a complex of four-story office buildings and extended fifty to a hundred yards out into the sea.

  It covered the area where the circles on Stina's four-centimeter-scale map had intersected. He had heard correctly after all.

  He walked back slowly. Copenhagen stretched out ahead of him. Long yellowish chains of light from the radial roads. Over the inner city, a calcium-white and diode-blue glow, with a black hole, a vacuum, where the barricaded area lay. Behind it, illuminated by halogen spotlights, the white walls of the incineration plant, monumental as temples. Farther back, Amager Island, like an orange circuit board of light. Framed by long lines of airplane headlights approaching Kastrup Airport, like shining bridges swaying just above the sea.

  He slid down the slope to the wire fence by the playing field; this brought him out on Middelfart Street behind the Jaguar. He walked hunched over. Outside the driver's side he straightened up. Put his elbows in the open window.

  "I still have some of my childhood hearing," he said. "Before, when you talked on the phone, when you got information about where she should be picked up. There wasn't anybody at the other end. So we've got two breaches of confidence. This latest one, and the question of how you got my order for a taxi. It grieves my heart."

  He yanked open the door, grabbed the front of the other man's shirt, and lifted him out of his seat. His body followed for about eight inches, then would go no farther. Kasper looked down; both of the man's legs were amputated just below the knee and strapped tightly to extended pedals. In the door were two plastic prostheses and two retracted telescopic crutches.

  He let go of the torso. Franz Fieber slid back into his seat. The yellow eyes gleamed.

  "You were an artist too," said the young man. "I know everything about you. A few more technical mishaps and it could have been you who had this disabled driver's license. You're looking at yourself."

  Kasper turned around and started to walk away, toward Strand Boulevard. The Jaguar pulled up beside him.

  "She's supposed to be picked up in thirty minutes. And only taxis can get in. So you can walk your grieving heart back to Glostrup. Or you can accept a lift. From a white liar."

  Kasper got in.

  * * *

  They stopped for a red light at Ørhus Street.

  "What have they built at Tippenr?" Kasper asked.

  "Some sort of bank. That's where the doctor was headed. I
've driven her. Over there. Twice."

  "You might be mistaken."

  The spine in front of Kasper straightened up like the Brave Soldier statue in Fredericia.

  Kasper looked at the vehicle's clock.

  "Can we manage to see the ocean in only thirty minutes?"

  A tidal wave of cars was approaching them from Oslo Square. Ahead of the wave, just before it broke, the Jaguar ran the red light.

  14

  They passed the entrance to Frihavn Harbor. The pension fund buildings, the Paustian furniture showroom and offices. When Kasper was a child a couple of smaller circuses had spent the winter season at the north and south harbors. At that time the area had the sound of poorly greased windlasses, coal cranes, wooden-soled boots, two-stroke diesel engines, steam whistles. Now he heard fast elevators. Muffled ventilation systems. The cosmic whisper of a thousand tons of I.T.

  They turned east. On the other side of Kalkbrænderi Harbor the Svanemølle power plant rose like an electric cathedral. The Jaguar pulled off to the side.

  "Welcome home," said Franz Fieber. "To where the money lives."

  Back then there had been a few rusty cutters on a grassy stretch leading down to the beach at Tippen. Now it had been built up.

  The road where they were parked was newly paved and straight as an arrow. The asphalt had a deep luster, like a dull black pearl. Toward the north, out toward the Sound, mixed-use buildings had been constructed. Expensive, timeless, in glass and granite, like seven-story gravestones. To the left were stores and restaurants that had opened recently; a few were not yet rented out. The Jaguar was parked outside a display window, sixteen by twenty-six feet, an unbroken piece of plate glass; behind it, on a dark background, one lonely tie was illuminated by a spotlight. Next door was a chocolate shop. In four windowpanes, against a dark-blue setting, huge filled Easter eggs, three feet long and two feet in diameter, rested on hemi-spherical brass bases nesting in monkey-tree boxes.

  Kasper listened to the music in front of him. From the restaurants. The people. In a few hours the area would close down. But right now it was at its best.

  "Jesus," said Franz Fieber, "drove the money changers out of the temple."

  "He had a bad day," said Kasper. "He'd probably spent all his cash."

  He pointed. The Jaguar rolled forward slowly. Kasper looked at the signs. The buildings housed advertising agencies, accounting firms, large law offices.

  The car stopped.

  "There," said Franz Fieber.

  It was the group of buildings Kasper had seen from the elevated train tracks. A complex of black and dark-gray buildings, some of them built on the landfill. The whole area was surrounded by a wall. It was low enough not to seem aggressive. But high enough to stop a pole vaulter. And to block most of the view. By the water's edge stood a tower; it was supported by pillars and as tall as the power plant chimneys, striving upward as if it were about to take off. It could have been a piece of scenery for the grail fortress in Parsifal.

  "Konon," said Franz Fieber. "It's some sort of bank. They work day and night. They use taxis a lot."

  "I like the name," said Kasper. "It has something to do with wholeness. For those of us who are fluent in Latin."

  A patrol car passed them slowly, decreased its speed, but drove on, reassured by the taxi sign. A delivery van drove past them, searching. The name JONEX was painted on it. Kasper sized up the buildings. Two thirds of the facades were glass.

  "We need to see where that truck goes," he said.

  The Jaguar rolled forward about three hundred feet. The van turned the corner, moving slowly. The street was bordered by magnolia trees that went all the way down to the water. Fifty yards down the road, a section of the wall swung open and the van drove in. Kasper caught a glimpse of a wrought-iron gate, surveillance cameras, and men in green uniforms. And far back in the darkness, something that could have been a Mercedes coupe.

  "When I was a child," he said, "the artists' children did whatever work came along. Before they were old enough to perform. I had a talent for climbing. So I cleaned windows. At that time too, the equipment came from Jonex, Inc., in Vesterbro. It's only your generation and later that have gotten everything handed to them on a platter."

  The Jaguar turned the corner. The wall hadn't swung back again. Through the gate came first one, and then a second, delivery van; they were black and well maintained, like hearses, LEISEMEER CATERING was written in gold letters on the sides.

  Kasper rolled down the window and listened as they drove by the building. He heard rubber against glass. A window washer's working cage stalled for the night. He estimated the facade had roughly sixty-five hundred square feet of glass.

  "I've been working from the time I was twelve," said Franz Fieber. "Until now. Constantly."

  * * *

  They turned down toward the building that housed the Berlingske newspaper offices. Franz Fieber tossed a fire blanket into the backseat. Kasper lay down on the floor of the car and pulled the blanket over him. The Jaguar stopped, he heard muted speaking outside, the car started again, drove slowly, stopped, drove, stopped. The motor got turned off. Kasper sat up. They were parked on a small unlighted parking lot surrounded by a plywood barrier. The ground shook; a sound he could not identify preceded the vibrations. He looked at the clock on the dashboard. There were ten minutes left before he was due to pick her up.

  Franz Fieber reached back with a bottle. Kasper sniffed it and drank; it was Armagnac. G. I. Gurdjieff's drink. Not as many overtones as Cognac. But with the soft rustic bass of its single distillation in continuous stills. Franz Fieber poured something from a thermos into a paper cup; Kasper drank it. It was scalding-hot espresso, more brutal than the brandy.

  "What do you hear when you listen to the city?"

  Very few people knew enough to ask him that question; the young man should not have been one of them.

  "Life and happy days."

  "And behind that?"

  The impudent light was turned off. The question came from deep down. When people ask something from a deep place, one must reply.

  "Angst," said Kasper. "The same angst that's in every human being. But multiplied by one and a half million."

  "And behind the angst?"

  "Who says there's anything behind it? Maybe the angst is the end."

  Kasper got out of the car.

  "We sent a note backstage," said Franz Fieber. "After the performance. All five evenings. We would have liked to shake your hand."

  The car door opened. Franz Fieber detached himself from the pedals, put on his prostheses, expanded his crutches, and got to his feet. All in one, flowing movement.

  "They weren't delivered," said Kasper.

  "I saw you for the first time in '99. In the Circus Building. That was one of the reasons I shifted to variety shows. Not just for the money. There were two thousand people. You heard every one of us."

  Kasper walked backward.

  "Nobody can hear two thousand people," he said.

  Franz Fieber followed him.

  "After maybe twenty minutes, there came a moment. Perhaps two minutes. It was love. You loved each one of us."

  "You must be crazy," said Kasper. "Nobody can love so many people."

  His back was toward the plywood. The young man was right in front of him.

  "I know that. That's why I drove race cars. Do you know what my method was? It was the curves. I started to brake there, where the other tracks ended. I could hear twenty thousand people gasp. And then scream. They knew I had done it for them. Not just for the money and myself. That was what I lived for. It was love. I'm a seeker. Looking for love."

  Fie smiled. It was a smile that, in Kasper's opinion, should have revoked his driver's license.

  The young man had a key in his hand. He opened a door in the barrier. Pointed to the left.

  "Five minutes. Be careful of her."

  Without losing his balance, and without losing his crutches, he took off his jacket with t
he taxi badge and handed it to Kasper. The yellow warning light was back in his eyes.

  "Think how many famous artists have died in traffic accidents," he said. "You leave a sidewalk. It's only thirty feet over to the other side. But you never reach it."

  He turned to leave.

  "I thought you were looking for love," said Kasper.

  "God's love," replied the young man without turning around.

  "One doesn't need an individual person."

  Kasper stared after his retreating back. It's unpleasant for a great artist not to have the final line.

  "Remember your prayers," he said. "Because suddenly one day you'll find that something has stuck with you again."

  He put on the uniform jacket and walked through the door.

  15

  He had seen hundreds of pictures; still, the scene took him unawares. He stopped short. With an aching heart. Because of the beauty and tragedy of the sight.

  The sea had overflowed Copenhagen. The canals were gone, the sidewalks were gone, the road. At his feet an unbroken surface of water stretched from Holmen Canal to the Renaissance facades of Strand Street. In that water, the Stock Exchange, Christiansborg Palace, and Holmen Church floated like the trunks of huge oak trees.

  He stood by the Public Guardianship office building. In front of him lay what must be the geological fault line; it was now a steep slope, perhaps ten feet deep, down to the water. Smooth. But with scraps of split cables and gas lines.

  The acoustics went straight to his heart. Smooth water surfaces are very reflective. The space in front of him was as filled with sound as the Musikvereinsaal in Vienna multiplied by one hundred. Without any traffic. Like Venice.

  The area was illuminated by work lights. He now could identify the vibrations beneath him. They must come from hundreds of hydraulic drainage pumps.

  Their deep bass was interrupted by louder booms, as sharp as explosions. From a floating platform outside the National Bank building several groups of men in orange security suits were pounding down sheet piling with a pile driver.

  A heavy fiberglass boat with a low railing set one of the orange figures ashore. It moved quickly up the slope, like a flame across gasoline. Kasper began to run.