The Quiet Girl - Peter Hoeg

by Peter Høeg

  She wasn't joking.

  "Why?"

  She tried to find an answer within herself.

  "Maybe," she said, "I've always wanted to show people what lay behind. What lay underneath. What the costs were."

  "Could they take it?"

  "Nobody could eat a bite. I had to take them off. Flush them down the toilet."

  * * *

  They had been walking for perhaps ten minutes. The gentle flow of the water indicated that the tunnel must slope down slightly. He heard the walls open outward. The sound expanded; they must have reached some sort of huge hollow.

  A faint light shone from overhead. As if from a skylight in a church dome. The roof opened into a shaft.

  "A ventilation canal and escape route," Stina said. "There are four hundred in this conduit alone."

  The light from her headlamp pointed out pipe openings on different levels.

  "Electricity, telephone, and broadband are closest to the surface; they don't require frost protection."

  The light shifted down about three feet to a deeper conduit. "Military cables. That one there is NATO's main cable for nondigital information. It goes along Roskilde Road to their administration building in Koldsås."

  The light moved downward.

  "Gas, water. District heating. And then the sewer system. Copenhagen's underground isn't solid. It's as porous as a beehive."

  The beam of light became horizontal. It rested on a metal door with a high-voltage warning.

  The African walked over to the door with a small crowbar. She pulled it open the way one opens a can of beer.

  The door was just decoration. Behind it was the real protection: forty square feet of stainless-steel armor plate that could have withstood a rocket attack.

  Franz Fieber gave a low whistle.

  "Everything is controlled from here," said Stina. "We need to get in."

  Franz Fieber opened his attache case; lying on black velvet were shiny instruments, as if for jaw surgery. He pointed to a metal box the size and shape of a hair dryer located about three feet to the right of the door.

  "The siren and the alarm," he said. "If we cut it, a telephone will ring to alert the police and Falck security services. We have to disable the phone line."

  His fingers glided over a push-button panel to the left of the door. "An electric one-channel lock. Which means that the pick gun won't work. And that the alarm covers the entire door."

  He handed Kasper a black rubber hammer, the kind doctors use to test reflexes in cases of delirium tremens.

  "Let's test your hearing."

  He pointed to the wall; Kasper knocked on it carefully. "We're looking for a contact unit for the panel. It connects the alarm to the station's network. And to a battery, in case of a power outage. If you can find that, I can go in through the wall."

  Kasper pounded carefully.

  "Can there be something in it that jingles?" he asked.

  Franz Fieber shook his head.

  "You must have found the key closet."

  Kasper continued on the other side of the door. All eyes were on him.

  He heard something.

  "Electronics?" he asked.

  "A circuit board."

  "What else?"

  "A battery. A loudspeaker for the alarm."

  "Small springs?"

  "Makes sense. The door must be spring-loaded. If it's opened, the sabotage alarm goes off."

  Franz Fieber attached a long masonry bit to a drill. Bored a hole. Guided a dentist's mirror and two small forceps attached to a rod through the hole. He snipped. Attached a diamond blade to a small battery-driven angle grinder. Placed it against the door hinges. The disc went through the tough steel as if it were butter. The African caught the heavy door as it slid out of the rabbet.

  The space behind the door was quite small. Kasper heard the dangerous hum of high-voltage electricity. Stina and Franz Fieber got to work with the circuit-breaker control panels.

  "The train needs to keep running," she said. "And the pump station. And the elevator up to the surface. We'll shut down everything else."

  She held a wire cutter; its insulation was as thick as a pair of heavy mittens. As she cut, a cascade of sparks poured over them. "The rest are on the circuit breakers," said Franz Fieber. "A higher-level four-hundred-kilovolt cable supplies Copenhagen. Under that lies a one-hundred-twenty-kilovolt system. Under that, thirty and ten kilovolts. The surveillance equipment draws directly from the one-hundred-twenty system, to reduce the chance of it shutting down."

  He turned off one circuit breaker after another as he spoke. "We will now say goodbye to the Copenhagen environmental protection agency."

  He switched off a circuit breaker.

  "To National Telecom's cable monitoring office."

  He turned off another.

  "To the maintenance department at E2 Energy."

  He turned off another.

  "To NATO's head office. With overall digital surveillance of Copenhagen's underground."

  Franz Fieber put two bypass wires across the circuit breaker. The tunnel became illuminated.

  What surrounded them was not a hollow. It was a large space. More than 500 by 150 feet. The sewer line went through it about six feet above the floor. Above them was a vaulted brick ceiling. Below them, remnants of masonry, as if from small cubicles.

  Stina followed his gaze.

  "Graves," she said. "More than five thousand. This was a cavern under one of the earliest Catholic convents."

  Close to their feet they saw two narrow tracks. And just ahead of them, a vehicle that looked like the roller coasters in Tivoli.

  "Tipper trolley tracks," said Stina. "They laid them when they dug out for the freight railway. They dug through the old garbage dumps. They had to get rid of twelve million metric tons of contaminated Class Three soil. So they laid the trolley tracks. And transported the soil out to North Harbor. Built the Lynetten sewage treatment plant on it. Filled out beyond Tippen."

  The tracks emerged from a black tunnel to their left.

  "They go out to the Tingbjerg neighborhood," she said. "To the Copenhagen water-supply headquarters. They service both the water mains and the sewage system. Copenhagen's sewers are almost worn out. So the maintenance crews are kept very busy. Trying to postpone the system's collapse."

  She opened the trolley doors. They all got in. Franz Fieber took the driver's seat. Somewhere a large electric motor came to life. The trolley began to move.

  It accelerated powerfully, like a jet airplane. Ahead of them the emergency lighting was out. The trolley shot into the dark. The tunnel curved and twisted.

  They were in total darkness, aside from a faint reflection from the instrument panel on Franz Fieber's face. Rasper's hearing registered an expansion of the tunnel, then a contraction. Registered that the material on the walls of the tunnel changed from brick to cement. Or else it was just the material inside his own nervous system that he heard.

  He leaned toward Stina.

  "You knew about me in advance. Before that time on the beach. You hadn't gotten separated from the boat. I was a pawn."

  They came to a lighted section; he could see her face.

  "Do they use drugs in the circus?" she said.

  He had no idea where she was going with that question.

  "Only in strength disciplines. Anabolic steroids. They're used in all international strength performances these days."

  "Sister Gloria showed us a list. From Physicians Weekly. About the most habit-forming drugs in the world. They're created in laboratories. The few people who have taken them--the discoverer and a couple of laboratory technicians--spend the rest of their lives trying to get money. A fix costs a hundred thousand kroner and up. The effect lasts from one to ten minutes. It's described as an extremely heightened feeling of clarity and love."

  The tunnel opened around them. Here the ceiling was arched like an airplane hangar. In the faint light he saw a vestige of something that looked like a
n altar.

  "The remnants," said Stina, "of foundations under the first Jewish synagogues. Built on top of a heathen sacrificial altar."

  She pointed to what looked like fallen timber.

  "Old water pipes. Made from hollowed-out trees."

  Kasper felt his impression of the city changing. He had thought it rested on lime and clay. It didn't. It rested on garbage and crumbling pieces of its religious past.

  He fine-tuned his prayer. The only thing you could depend on. Besides love. And even that wasn't certain.

  "Five thousand people."

  Stina whispered the words in his ear. He had always loved her breath; it changed according to her moods, or was it his moods?

  Right now it had a hint of petroleum.

  "That was Mother Maria's rough estimate. When Gloria told us about the drugs. There are five thousand people in the world who have taken them. Not the chemical drugs. But people who have experienced something similar. Who have discovered that reality is a birdcage. And who are looking for the gate that leads out of the cage."

  He turned and looked straight at her. She and the Blue Lady and KlaraMaria could have founded a company. And leased their forthright gaze to a demolition firm.

  "We saw you on television," she said. "The sisters and I. That's twelve years ago. During an intermission. When it was quiet. Mother Maria says: 'He's one who has tried those drugs. He's a seeker.' And then she looks at me. And says: 'You could meet him.' And I say: 'Why should I?' And she says: 'To help him by being a guide. And because he has a way with children.' That's why I came. In my own way."

  "Why the unfriendliness, then? Why did you run away on Strand Road? To begin with?"

  She hesitated.

  "When I faced you, I could sense all the things you weren't able to control. Your inner chaos. And also something else. So it suddenly felt unpredictable. Overwhelming."

  During the last few minutes he had heard some noise ahead. Like huge turbines. Now the sound got louder, became more powerful, like a waterfall. The trolley stopped. The tunnel ended in a cement wall. Below them the dark water was sucked through a grate.

  "Lunch break," said Stina. "For three minutes."

  Sister Gloria opened a backpack. Distributed bread and cheese. Kasper shifted the food from one hand to another. The sewer smell hadn't disappeared; one didn't get used to it as one could have hoped. In fact, it had gotten worse. And now it was mixed with the odor of rotting fatty substances, like the cesspool from a kitchen sink raised to brutal potency.

  On the wall of the tunnel was a metal cover; Stina knocked it off with the red crowbar. Behind the cover was a lighting control console unlike any Kasper had ever seen before. Franz Fieber plugged a laptop into the console. He and Stina bent over the computer screen. As she worked, Stina ate. Calmly. He remembered the first time she had come in while he was sitting on the toilet. He was having his morning bowel movement, his ritual time on the seat. From the little CD player on a shelf in the toilet Hans Fagius was playing BWV 565 on the restored baroque organ in St. Kristina's Church in Falun. Stina opened the door, walked in, and turned down the music. In one hand she was holding a sandwich, a little like now. Avocado and Camembert lait cru.

  "I've got something important to tell you," she said.

  He felt his abdomen contract. All living beings want to crap in peace. You can't expel from your body at the same time as you relax the bottom part of it. You can't do a head butt. Can't correspond with the tax authorities.

  She took a bite of her sandwich. Completely unaffected by the situation. He suddenly understood that even deep inhibitions were culturally determined. And that somehow or other she was free of them.

  "I discovered something this morning," she said. "Just as you opened your eyes. And the day was beginning. It seemed as if I were sitting at your deathbed."

  He couldn't say anything. He was on the toilet. And she spoke as if she were in some Shakespeare play. He had no familiar reference point from which to respond.

  "At that moment," she said, "I realized that I love you."

  What should he say to that? In such a situation?

  "Would you please leave," he said. "I need to wipe myself."

  * * *

  She turned her head away from the computer screen.

  "We're at the main pump station, before the pipes go down under the ocean. On the other side there should be a new conduit they haven't put into use yet. But we're going farther than the pump station."

  She turned back to the screen. Kasper heard his father beside him. Maximillian was leaning on a crutch, one of Franz Fieber's. The African had stuck the fluid bags into the breast pockets of his coveralls. Together the father and son watched the two women and the young man who were bent over the console and computer.

  "They're like soldiers," said Maximillian. "Elite soldiers. But they have no anger. What drives them?"

  Kasper heard his system synchronize with his father's. It happens in all families. Between all people who care about each other deeply. But it happens rarely. And usually no one discovers it. Discovers that for a brief moment the mask is gone. The neuroses. The inborn psychological traumas. For a brief time all the previous mistakes, which we carefully preserve in our memory for possible use against each other, are gone. They're gone for a moment, and one hears entirely ordinary humanity. Frail, but insistent. Among rats and pump stations and foul rivers of sludge.

  "They're filled with something," said the sick man. "Something so powerful they're willing to die for it. I can tell that. What is it?"

  Kasper heard the longing in his father's voice.

  "Your mother and Vivian," Maximillian continued. "Those two women. That's the closest I've come to letting go. But still. When it comes right down to it, I didn't dare. The same with my love for the circus. I didn't dare. And my love for you."

  They looked straight at each other. With no reservations. "Having you," said Maximillian. "That was the finest thing Helene and I did. Many other things were good. But you were the best."

  Kasper reached out his hand and laid it against the sick man's temple. Maximillian bore the intensity for a few moments, then turned away. But it was still the longest contact Kasper ever remembered having had with his father.

  "It will empty in one hundred eighty seconds," said the African.

  "After that, we'll go through."

  Kasper heard a change in the sound of the colossal pump. He turned toward the shiny cylinder; it was as big as a fermentation vat in a brewery. Its walls were gleaming with condensation. Where the water dripped onto the tunnel's cement, a plant with glossy darkgreen leaves was growing, completely contrary to nature. Stina leaned over and picked a leaf. She held it up to his face. On the shiny surface lay a drop of water.

  "It's a type of hazelwort. It can survive with just the emergency lighting."

  She stood very close to him.

  "I had a good childhood," she said. "Not one day in a wheelchair. Nothing more serious than two stitches and a little chlorhexidine in the emergency room. I had a game I played."

  The drop of water began to wander along the edge of the leaf. "I tried to understand a drop of water. Tried to understand what held it together. What kept it from separating into smaller parts."

  The movement must have come from her hands. But they were motionless. Larger than his. Veined. Cool at first. But when she had touched him, stroked his skin for just a minute, they became very warm. But always calm. As they were now. But under the calmness he heard trembling, like the underlying tone of a Hindu raga. It took him a moment to identify what it was. Then he heard; it was anxiety for the children. But she still kept a firm grip on reality.

  "What holds it together?" she said.

  He had loved her curiosity. It was a hunger that was insatiable. It was like the curiosity of a clown. And of children. An openness, an appetite for the world, where nothing is taken for granted.

  "I still play that game," she whispered. "Just a little differently. A l
ittle more concentration. A little broader scope. That's the only difference. Between the girl and the woman. Between the child and the adult. I collect in my mind everything we know about the bonding force in fluids as compared to air. The elasticity of the drop. Its attempt to find the least possible potential energy. Dirichlet's theorem. Normally we can hold only a couple of theorems at a time. I try to hold them all. As a form of professional intuition. And when I'm on the verge of understanding, am very, very close to it, and at the same time realize we'll never get there completely, and my mind is about to explode, I let go of all my understanding and go back to the drop."

  The leaf was quiet. The drop existed. Nothing moved. He heard the last of the water being pumped out.

  "And then, in brief, there seems to be no difference between the drop and me."

  Carefully, very carefully, she laid the leaf down on the gray concrete.

  "When that happens, on the rare occasions it happens, one has an inkling of what it will cost. To actually get there. It's a price no researcher can pay. And continue to be a researcher. Because it will cost understanding itself. You can't be right up next to something, and at the same time want to understand it. Do you know what I mean?"

  * * *

  There were steps on the outside of the cylinder. They went up about ten feet. Three conduits led from the pump station exit. The smallest had a diameter of about two and a half feet.

  The cylinder's cover had an electric lock; it had sprung open. Stina must have opened it from the light console.

  "Now they know in the surveillance center that something is wrong," she said. "In five minutes the city authorities will be here. Plus TDC telecommunications and the military. Falling all over each other. With dogs and firemen with their breathing apparatus. But by that time we'll be gone."

  She hoisted herself over the edge of the pump case. Kasper tried to follow her. His body would not move. She pulled him up after her. Two of the conduits were closed by electric valves. The third was open. Stina turned on her headlamp.