by Peter Høeg
Once Stina had stood behind him. Put her hands around his face. Looked at him in the mirror.
"A little of the Savior," she said. "A little of Holberg's The Pawned Farmer's Heifer. A little of Grev Danilo in The Merry Widow."
He would have liked to have said goodbye to Daffy, but the risk was too great. If the police were waiting for him, they would wait by the door. He went into the stable.
The lightbulb was burning in the ceiling; he took a couple of apples from the crate and stood outside Roselil's stall. The horse took a small leap toward him, like a little girl who wants to play. He placed his hands on the animal's neck. In fourteen days it would be killed.
Somewhere outside the light something moved that wasn't a horse.
He released the stall's double bolt. He would kick the door open, buzz like a Vespa crabro hornet, and they would get Roselil in the head like a thirteen-hundred-pound projectile.
Daffy emerged from the darkness. He must have stood very quietly.
He came over to the stall. Shoved the bolt into place. Laid the violin, the documents, and Klavierbüchlein in front of Kasper.
"I put on a big coat. And went into the trailer with them. This is what I had time to rescue."
One of the watchman's hands left the lath board. Disappeared out of sight. Reappeared with an apple.
"Your sentence back then," said Kasper. "What was it for?"
"For three million, at Nydahl's. During business hours."
Kasper had tried to give Stina a ring from Markus Nydahl, but she had refused; it had been difficult or impossible to get her to accept gifts. But the visit to the store had been spectacular. It was located on Ny Øster Street. There were two guards at the door. Jewelry and watches lay in bulletproof glass cases that were ready to sink into fireproof vaults under the floor if anyone so much as rustled a bag of candy.
"And the profession?" asked Kasper. "That you had to leave? What was that?"
"I was an apprentice to Boras."
Boras had been the Johann Sebastian Bach of gentlemen thieves. He'd had one student, an apostle, a dharma heir. Something stirred in Kasper's memory. The heir had begun to help himself to the inheritance. And then he had suddenly disappeared.
He opened the case; the violin was intact.
"Why run this risk?" he asked.
The watchman had paused in the doorway. He stood looking around the stable.
"They will be put out to pasture," he said. "I bought them this morning. For what the slaughterhouse and the riding school would have paid, minus the veterinarian's bill. Boras and I had some conversations before he died. I felt he gave me an unwritten will. I started buying the animals' freedom then. It didn't fit with an apprentice's salary. He said, 'You'll pull yourself together, Daffy. Life is no prayer meeting.'"
"That's nice," said Kasper. "You've acted compassionately. But I was hurt in my childhood, so I have a hard time accepting anything; there's always just one little thing. What can it be in this case?"
He spoke to an empty doorway, and a horse. Daffy was gone.
* * *
He looked out across the water. It was an unbroken surface, from the National Bank to where the Krinsen garden had been.
The statue of Christian V on horseback had been taken away. On the sidewalk leading to the barricade, a chamber orchestra was playing appetizing morsels from the Brandenburg Concertos to begin Copenhagen's municipal spring and summer entertainment. People streamed past the musicians into the city's night, as if they had a mission and direction in life.
He closed his eyes and listened inside the music. Inside the space around him. Under the surface there was enough fear to open a psych ward.
He opened his eyes and looked out across the water. It did not appear like the end of the world, Pompeii, Santorini, the Deluge. It could have been a natural lake. Or major water damage.
The city's anxiety had existed before the earthquakes too. He had heard it from the time he was a child, since the accident, since his hearing became more acute; it was an old acquaintance. From deaths, from serious accidents in the ring, from himself. It wasn't so much fear of the catastrophes themselves as for what they led to. The tragic events were doors that opened to understanding that we all are living on borrowed time and the things that are important to hold on to--life, happiness, death, love, inspiration--are completely out of control.
He felt a sudden anger at SheAlmighty. People around him could have been happy. He could have been happy himself. At Leisemeer's restaurant they could all have felt like absolute kings. Or better yet, like gods, for after eating and drinking and receiving royal service, the tableware disappeared, the footmen disappeared, the whole feudal illusion disappeared, and one was out in the carefree Copenhagen night.
Instead, one found natural catastrophes. Children mistreated. Kidnappings. Loneliness. Separation of people who love each other. His anger increased. The problem with anger against God is that it's impossible to go higher in the system to complain.
He turned his chair and tried to escape both the place and the view. That only made the situation worse. Across the zinc counter dividing the kitchen from the restaurant he caught sight of Leisemeer. When Kasper left Denmark the previous time, believing it was for forever, he had left behind, partly by accident, a huge unpaid bill here at Leisemeer's. He had been sure the debt must have been rescheduled. Because Leisemeer had risen beyond the restaurant work itself, into a white shirt and tie and the managing director's chair. Instead, here he was, bent over the convection oven, strong and coarse as a herdsman. Like circus owner Eli Benneweis, who had never learned to stay in his office either, but had continued to hang around the stables.
Kasper heard a sound he remembered, but couldn't identify. At the farthest end of the restaurant sat a woman and a man; the woman's back was to him; he zoomed in. It was the aristocrat from Strand Road. But now Our Lord or fate or the cosmetic industry had given her long black hair and a stylish suit. The man across from her was ten years younger than she and had shoulders nearly five feet across; his sound was awkward, as if he wasn't used to dining in a place where it cost five hundred kroner or more to eat one's fill.
Two-hundred-pound footsteps approached Kasper. A couple of champagne glasses were placed in front of him, and something was poured into one; he listened to the polyphony of the bubbles; it was Krug champagne.
He looked up at the completely bald head and waxed mustache, the same as Gurdjieff. It was Leisemeer.
"I've come to pay for everything," said Kasper.
The chef let the large drop-shaped bottle glide down into the wine bucket. Then he turned around.
Kasper reached him in a single movement. The chef would have walked away, but his left foot got stuck in a crook; the crook was Kasper’s left foot. Leisemeer began to fall. In order to stop falling he tried to move his right foot. That too was stuck, in a crook created by Kasper’s right foot.
It would have been a bad fall, but Kasper slid out of his chair, caught the massive figure, and drew it toward him.
“You’re not at work today You have a day off. I asked when I reserved a table.”
They had known each other for twenty--five years; there had always been mutual respect, warmth and courtesy. Now suddenly there was no courtesy anymore. That is one of the clowns tasks. To release the dark sides of the moment too.
"I wanted to be here myself. With a meat cleaver. To see if you would pay up completely?
“I didn’t give my own name.”
Leisemeer pulled himself free. They faced each other at close range.
“The police,” said the chef quietly. "They're waiting outside. They're going to nab you when you leave. They want to find out who you’re meeting.”
Kasper suddenly remembered that Gurdjieff wrote somewhere that he had been to an Easter meal. Incarnated as Judas.
"So you fingered me.”
Two red patches appeared on the smoothly shaven cheeks in front of Kasper, like warning lights. Leisemee
r grabbed his lapels; he had hands as big and thick as pizzas.
"Your regular customers are looking at us,” said Kasper. “And they don’t like what they see.”
Leisemeer let him go.
“They knew you were coming. Theres also somebody from the Ministry of Iustice. I didn’t have your telephone number. What would you have done?”
Kasper smiled reassuringly to the nearest tables. People fell back into the vaudeville act. Leisemeer left. Kasper looked out the windows. Out through the coatroom and the glass door. They could be anywhere in the crowd. In a car.
Something happened in the restaurant, on the deeper levels too; for a moment, the anxiety gave way I·Ie looked up, and saw Stina.
She was in the middle of the restaurant. On her way toward him. She moved awkwardly, as she always did in a group of people, like a schoolgirl at the last dance of the season.
Nevertheless, people had stopped eating for a moment. Even those who were choosing from Leisemeer’s dessert trolley. Behind her, two young waiters broke into a quick trot. Coming over to pull out her chair.
He could have sworn that a spotlight followed her. Until he realized it was his own attention, and that of the other guests, that illuminated her.
He stretched out his arms for an embrace. It was never completed. She looked at him. With a look that could have stopped a runaway circus elephant. He was left hanging in the air. Like a wounded bird. She was the one person for whom he could never time his entrance.
She sat down. Her being was E-major. The higher aspect of E-major. He had always heard a shining green color around her.
She removed a large divers watch from her left wrist and laid it on the table.
“Half an hour,” she said.
She had changed. He couldn’t say how. His preparations disappeared. All the time he hadn’t seen her disappeared. Ten years meant nothing. A whole life hadn't meant anything.
He nodded toward the dark--golden water.
“What’s happening there? What’s your involvement?"
At first he didn't think she would answer.
"When you walk on the beach," she said, “without shoes, what happens to the sand in front of your foot when you step down on it?”
“It’s years since I’ve been in the mood to walk on the beach.”
Her eyes narrowed.
"But if you did?”
He thought about it.
“The sand will become sort of dry.”
She nodded.
“The water is sucked away. Because increased pressure creates increased porousness around the pressure area. It’s called Vatanjans theory. The theory posits something to the effect that accumulation of stress in the Earth's crust will cause changes in groundwater conditions. We’re trying to refine that hypothesis. We work with figures related to water depths when wells are dug. Anywhere in Zealand. In order to predict whether new earthquakes will occur. And to understand the earlier ones."
He barely paid attention to the words. Just their color. During her explanation she glided toward her subdominant key, A-major; the mental aspect of her sound followed. Her color shifted toward a bluish tint.
"There won't be another earthquake," he said. "That's what the papers say. Holes in the limestone collapsed. They don't think there are any more holes."
"True," she said. "There are certainly no more holes."
Her sound had changed. Only very briefly, a quarter of a second. But that was a quarter of a second too long. It had shifted to F-minor. The suicidal key.
"What's wrong?" he said. "Something is wrong."
She looked over her shoulder. As if she were looking for a creditor. But that was impossible. She had always lived on next to nothing.
"What about the earthquakes?" she asked.
"They write that it's unclear. If it was earthquakes. Or just the collapse of cave systems. They write that there have always been earthquakes in Denmark. Something to do with crustal tension from the Ice Age. They just haven't attracted public attention."
"Where did you get that information?"
"From your group."
Her sound shifted again.
"This is a 'civil catastrophe.' All information is cleared by a special office of the Danish Police."
Something had been put on the table in front of them, appetizers, perhaps; she swept them aside.
"Put your hands on the table."
He complied.
"Earthquakes are measured according to the Richter scale. Magnitudes of three or less can't be felt. They are only recorded by a seismograph. And even those can be read only by a trained seismographer. At a magnitude of four there are noticeable vibrations. But in a city you'd confuse them with heavy traffic."
She shook the tabletop against his hands. The vibrations increased.
"At five on the Richter scale, cracks develop in masonry. With a magnitude of six, things begin to go badly. It starts as an explosion. At a particular spot. The epicenter. From there, irregular rings of secondary waves spread out. They are what cause damage."
The table thumped against his body.
"With magnitudes of seven and up, there's chaos. Everything except bits of buildings topples. There's a sound like thunder. But you can't locate its source."
The table twisted back and forth under his hands. His champagne glass tipped and broke. She leaned back.
"I was at the San Andreas fault. Some years ago. At UCLA. We sprayed high-pressure steam at the tectonic plate borders. To release the tension in the Earth's crust. It failed. We worked at Antonada. Twelve miles outside San Francisco. There was an earthquake. One moment there was life--everyday life, children. The next moment, death and destruction. Fire from burst gas pipes. That was a small earthquake. But it measured seven on the Richter scale."
He hadn't seen her like this before, not even when she left him. Her sound had become more dense.
"One determines the quake's epicenter by an ordinary trigonometric measurement. GEUS, the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, participates in the European seismographic warning system. They have the European numbers on the screen as soon as the blast wave strikes Zurich or Gothenburg. There weren't any waves. GEUS has a measuring station on the Vestvolden ramparts. They have RefTek seismic recorders there. Complete equipment. Radar there can register a spider's movement on the Knippel Bridge railing. It didn't register a thing."
He understood what she said. And at the same time, he didn't understand.
"Half a square mile of Earth crust and ocean floor sink," she said. "More than a hundred million tons of stone, chalk, and sand are set in motion. And it's all caused by an underground vibration."
"The flooding? There was water."
"There was a blast wave. That reached to Helsingør, and no farther. But no terrain movement. No trace of a mass transfer."
"The holes?"
"There were no holes."
She was now completely in F-minor. Just like Schubert's last string quartet. First E-major in its heavenly purity. And then suddenly F-minor. At that point something in Schubert must have known that he was soon to die.
"GEUS and Denmark's Space Center detonated over three thousand pounds of dynamite. Last summer. Two months before the first quake. In order to map the deeper strata beneath Copenhagen. They detonated in several places at the bottom of the Sound. And recorded the blast wave's movements with geophones. Do you remember them?"
He nodded. He had calibrated four hundred geophones for her, using his hearing. They were sensitive microphones designed to be sunk into the ground. He felt a stab of joy that she at least acknowledged this little piece of the past.
"The same procedure as was used in recording the Silkeborg anomaly in 2004. Sound waves have different rates of diffusion in various layers of sediment. There were no holes in the limestone. It wasn't a collapse."
"What was it then?"
She didn't reply. She just looked at him. She wanted to tell him something. He didn't understand what it was. B
ut for a brief moment she let her guard down.
He spread out the post office receipt between his hands. She read it slowly. Read her name. A child's handwriting. But still personal and very clear.
"KlaraMaria," he said. "A student of mine, a girl nine years old, turned up a year ago; now she's been kidnapped. I had brief contact with her. She gave me this."
Her face had been glowing. From her many outdoor activities. From excitement. Now all the color had drained out of it. She started to get up.
He grabbed her wrist.
"It's a child," he said. "She's in mortal danger. What sent her to you?"
She tried to pull her hand back. He tightened his grip.
There was movement near the door; it was one of the two monks and another man in civilian clothes. The woman with the dark hair and the man across from her had risen from their table. Their timing indicated they were working for the police.
There was no way out. It was Easter. He thought about the Savior. Things weren't much fun for Him on Friday evening either. But He had continued to make an effort nonetheless.
Kasper raised his voice.
"I've suffered," he said. "All these years, I've suffered beyond words."
She lifted the champagne bottle out of the cooler and held it like a juggler's mallet. It was his grip on her wrist, the sensation of physical pressure; she had never been able to stand that. He let her go.
"I've changed," he said. "I'm a new person. Reborn. I'm sorry for everything."
She began to turn around. The officers were headed toward him. It was hopeless to try to get past them.
"I can't pay," he said. "I'm completely broke."
The room had good acoustics. A bit dry, but the ceiling was grooved, which made for excellent dispersion of sounds with high frequencies. Sound needs to be frustrated; smooth ceilings are a nightmare. People at the nearest tables had stopped eating. Two waiters had started moving.
She swayed back and forth. Like a tiger in a menagerie crate. He raised the broken champagne glass. It was transformed into a wreath of razor blades on a crystal stem.
