Then the police were there, and Bluett waited for a moment alone with the dark-haired older policeman to ask about the bag and necktie around his wrists.
“It looks like he was killed. How could he have tied his own hands?”
The policeman’s blue eyes glanced at Bluett and turned away. “There was no knot. It was just wound around his wrists. They do that sometimes to make sure that if they wake up, their hands aren’t free to phone for help. When you’re drugged, even just having something wound around your wrists might be enough to stop you, apparently. Just wanted to be sure nothing got in the way, not even himself.”
Anders’s younger sister, Annette, was at the door, a strikingly beautiful girl, movie-star beautiful, and it occurred to Bluett that Sam’s ex-wife must be a real beauty as well. He had never met her and wondered if she would show up before the body was removed, but then another man was there, a doctor, and two Falck ambulance men with a stretcher and a body bag.
The younger policeman, with a scarred jaw, asked Bluett a few questions: Had Sam ever mentioned the cancer to him, did he seem unhappy, did Bluett know of other problems he might have been experiencing?
And Bluett found himself telling the policeman that Sam had told him about a woman he was involved with, a very beautiful Russian woman he was apparently in love with. They stood in the hall as they talked, and Anders, near the door of Sam’s apartment, looked up sharply at those words, and Bluett hated himself for not being more tactful.
He glanced at the boy, tried to express his grief in a look, but Anders turned away. The policeman asked if he knew the woman, knew where she could be contacted.
“I never actually met her,” Bluett said.
He did not mention that he had seen her once or that she and Sam had disappeared behind the door of the Satin Club. He did not know why he hadn’t mentioned it. Instinct. A feeling that if he told, the information could not be taken back. But why should he want to take the information back?
Next day, Saturday, he hears more activity in the apartment, people talking in the hall, descending the stairs. He goes to the window and looks down to the street. A car is parked there and stenciled on the side is the name of the realty firm from which Bluett had bought his apartment. A moment later, two people appear through the gate and stand by the car. The realtor and Sam’s Russian girlfriend. She wears a black raincoat and sunglasses, but there is no mistaking the beauty of her face. The realtor unlocks the door of his car and opens it for her, happens to glance up and sees Bluett there, throws a subdued wave. The woman glances up, lowering her sunglasses onto her sharp cheekbones, and for some reason Bluett does not understand he ducks back from the window, but not before their eyes meet.
In a box of papers at the top of his closet, Bluett finds the card the realtor gave him when he bought his own apartment here. It is eleven in the morning. He waits half an hour and makes the call, identifies himself, mentions he was Sam’s close friend, asks if the family has put the apartment on the market.
“His fiancée did,” the realtor says. “The apartment is in her name.”
“What? What about the kids?”
“They were not especially glad about it. She was in here already yesterday afternoon, and the papers were in order. He sold it to her. For a song. I met the son once, Anders, and felt like I ought to give him a call. Didn’t like to bother him with all that happened, but . . . Apparently Sam’s bank book was empty, too. Even of the song he sold the apartment to her for. Nothing left but a small annuity the kids will share. Maybe forty thousand crowns apiece. They were not glad. But all the paperwork was in order. There was nothing to do about it.”
“What’s the apartment worth?”
“She wants a quick sale. She’s asking one point eight. But she’ll go as low as a million and a half crowns.”
“Are you going to handle it for her?”
“I’m a businessman. That’s what I do.”
There is not much more of the weekend. A long, slow walk around the lake to watch the skaters on Sunday, a cappuccino at the Front Page and a stroll across Peace Bridge, where he buys Politiken, with which he spends the remainder of his afternoon, leafing slowly through the newspaper, a pot of Bewley’s afternoon tea at his side.
He reads the news and the sports and the weather. He glances through the TV listings, reads the Nicoline Werdeline comic strip about a woman who is unfaithful to her husband, the one by Strid. Strid usually makes him smile. This time he is interviewing a penguin in the zoological gardens. The penguin has been sponsored by the Danish National People’s Party and is irate. “They’re racists!” he says to Strid, who shushes the bird. “You’re not allowed to say that, it’s against the law, you could get a fine for defamation of character,” and the bird squawks, “I’m an animal, I don’t have to obey that law. They’re racists! Racists! Racists!”
Bluett chuckles, studies the drawing of the bird, begins to laugh, and the laughter takes hold of him so he cannot stop. Then he is trembling, staring with terror out at the frozen lake, fearing the emotion that wants to grip him. He breathes slowly, deeply.
It passes.
He turns back to the newspaper, reads the classifieds, ads for alcohol clinics, psychotherapy, clairvoyance, organic psychotherapy, spiritual advice, friendship, lovers, exhibitionist clubs, homophile/lesbian clubs, advice for men, the association of single fathers, astrological advice, self-help groups, S and M clubs, a support center against incest, an AIDS support group, a shelter for battered wives, an offer for cheap dental work in Sweden, for the association of transvestites . . .
Family paper. A Danish family paper.
On the last page is an ad for women’s underwear, a black-and-white picture of a very ordinary looking woman in very ordinary looking white panties and bra, her body sitting on a blank background, her ordinary face lit with an ordinary smile, and he sits staring with longing at the picture for many moments.
Then the last edge of sunlight is withering down behind the unlit neon chicken and the tilted monolith, and behind the tall state hospital, and he refolds the paper and carries the cold pot of tea out into the kitchen and sees the gray sheepdog standing at the door across the way, waiting to be let in again.
This time the dog does not look up at him.
He takes a drink after all, Stoli on the rocks, hesitates for a moment, with the neck of the bottle over the rim of the glass, thinking of his father, but feels content his own intake is nothing compared to what his poor dad’s was. Which makes him think of a joke he heard recently, from Sam, in fact: What’s the definition of an alcoholic? Someone who drinks more than his doctor. He pours five fingers for himself, and puts on one of his favorite cuts of his favorite CD: Stan Getz doing Billy Strayhorn’s “Blood Count,” recorded live in Club Montmartre, here in Copenhagen, not long before the C took Getz. Bluett holds vodka on his tongue, smooth Stoli, and listens to Getz’s tenor run the range of sorrow, of sorrow that is inevitable, unbreachable, thinks about the fact that Getz blew those notes in this city ten years earlier, four years before he died, wishes he had been in the club that night to hear it, wishes more, wishes to Christ Sam could be here with him right now, just for the four minutes and two seconds it takes for the melody to run through its last chord, Getz’s voice saying, “Thank you.” Then silence. End of the CD. Last number.
There are several things he regrets. That he did not get a telephone number for Anders and Annette and the other sister, that he did not invite them out to talk a little; even if they declined, he could have just asked them. He wonders whether Sam had many other friends, close friends. They both know a few drinking companions here and there around town. The two of them joined Dave and Per and Frej for pivos every other month at Fru Snorks alongside Enghave Plads. But who was there to give the kids a kind word now? His own situation is similar to Sam’s. All these years living in another country, your own people gone, no more friends left from the home country, not even any colleagues; both he and Sam worked indepe
ndently as translators. Just half a handful of occasional friends. The kids are cheated of half a family.
He realizes in a large sense it is his own situation he grieves over, but he grieves over Sam’s as well, over Sam’s fine-looking kids and the sadness they must face alone now, over the sadness of life in general, the sadness at the heart of things. Keep it comic; don’t feel, think. Fall on your butt and laugh at yourself. Tell a tale about your sad times and laugh twice: Har. Hee.
He finds himself thinking about Sam’s suicide then, about the taboo against it, how formerly Christians were refused burial in hallowed ground, how in medieval times they were buried outside town at a crossroads, how even Buddhists judged that it invoked untoward cosmic consequences: Kill yourself and you come back instantly as a dung beetle.
He wonders.
What cosmic balance could the snuffing of a single flame disturb? Surely Sam had his reasons. Cancer. It is just difficult for Bluett to accept. Sam had said not one word about it, had been full of the light of infatuation for this woman—Svetlana Krylova, the realtor said her name was. Fiancée? Sam had said he didn’t want to marry. When could he have found out he had cancer—the day he had that look in his eyes?—and how could he have known or decided so quickly that it was hopeless and incurable? Some cancers are like that, though, Bluett knows. Dan Turèll found out about his throat cancer and died within months. In great pain.
But there is another question that won’t leave him alone. When exactly did Sam sell her the apartment? He’d never mentioned a word about that, either. When did it happen? And how could she already be in the process of selling it? And given that Sam loved his kids so much, how could he not have left at least a share of the apartment to them? It was a roomy apartment, well located, with at least a partial view of the lakes, and a moody view out the back, and Bluett knew for a fact that it was paid off—worth a good two million crowns on the current inflated market, $350,000. Even a fifth of that to each of the kids would have given them some kind of start in their young lives. How could Sam have neglected that? And the “fiancée” was letting it go for a million and a half. Fast sale.
Part III
Pursuance
Charlie Parker leaning up against the paint shop’s stone stoop
Charlie Parker behind the bar
Charlie there throwing a coin in the juke
look now Charlie’s dancing to “The Great Pretender”
twenty years after his American death—
—Dan Turèll, “Charlie Parker on Isted Street”
11. Bad Religion
Into the dark comes the sound that drags him out. He reaches for the little clock to silence it, dozes, holding it in his hand, thinking, What day is it? Monday? Tuesday. It is not good to let yourself sleep now, even as he slides down into the cozy dark again.
There had been a time some years earlier, just after he finished high school, a period of two or three years when he was on his own, slowly realizing that now he was responsible for his life. He could do what he wanted. No hindrances. No help, either. His father was dead. He went to college at night and had a crummy job in a management trainee program at the Bank of New York at 169 Maiden Lane, near Wall Street. His friends had squeezed many a cheap laugh out of that address: 169 Maiden Lane. He was to start by spending three months in a series of departments, learning the details of the bank’s daily operation.
At the time he is thinking of, he was in the Stock Transfer Department, he was eighteen, and his job each day was to put small white pieces of paper, stock coupons, in number order. This was long before the microchip. The numbers were red, printed in the upper right-hand corner, six digits. The lesson he was to learn was the extreme importance of this small, seemingly insignificant task being performed accurately every single day. There were thousands of stock coupons, each indicating a stock transaction, and if they were not organized so as to be immediately traceable, the entire stock transfer system could break down. This could happen very quickly, and even a one-day breakdown could cost the bank large sums of money.
Bluett’s training director wanted Bluett to understand the experience of this task by living it for a time, morning to evening, day after day.
Bluett often overslept and arrived late for work, and his training director had a way of looking at him when he punched in past nine, a way of very slowly turning his face to gaze at Bluett while raising his wrist to his eyes to show that he was looking at his watch. He said nothing, but the message was clear, and Bluett, when he woke late in the morning, would be gripped by terror and loathing at the thought that he would have to be subjected to this performance once again.
His training director’s name was Hagin—Mr. Hagin, he was supposed to call him. Mr. Hagin had large brown eyes, and his nose ran apparently without his being aware of it, so that there was usually a line of transparent mucus between one or both nostrils and his upper lip. Bluett dreaded having to look at him, dreaded his days, dreaded getting in late.
One morning when he woke late, the dread of being looked at by Mr. Hagin was so great that he decided he would play sick, stay home all day. He lay in bed waiting in agony for nine a.m. so he could phone in and get it over with, but once he had called and told his director’s secretary that he had a terrible toothache and had to go to the dentist, he felt suddenly liberated. The whole day lay before him, free, a bonus, a paid sick day. He wouldn’t even lose money for not being there. He went back to bed and read the newspaper, dozed, masturbated. He ate lunch in bed watching some old film on TV and dozed some more.
Finally, around four in the afternoon, he got out of bed, showered and dressed, went out for a walk, met some friends for a beer. When he went to bed that night he was not tired so he read for a while, but he still could not sleep. An hour passed, two hours, three. At 3:45 a.m. he was still awake, and he knew he would never wake on time in the morning, so he set the clock for nine to wake him just in time to call in sick again. He told Hagin’s secretary that he had had a painful extraction of an impacted wisdom tooth (something one of his brothers had experienced once), and the pain had kept him awake all night, and now he had to go back to the dentist to have the operation completed.
Afterward he sat in his underwear on his threadbare second-hand sofa in his seedy little East Fourth Street apartment and saw doom smudged all over the grimy pane of his one window. What would become of him? What could he do?
Perhaps because the questions were so intensely felt in his heart, answers were produced from somewhere inside him. It was as though a door had flown open in his mind to reveal a slate on which were printed the words: if you do not get up early and work hard, others will look upon you and say he does not get up early and work hard.
And then, the primary truth: you have to get up when the alarm clock rings.
From that day on, he had no trouble in his working life. The knowledge that he had no real choice but to rise when the clock beckoned him saved him from the chaos into which he had slowly been slipping simply because he had no argument against it, simply because the yearning for ease, for the cocoon and womb of sleep, had no counterweight to pull him free. Now he knew what the sound of the clock meant, why it is called an alarm clock: Sound the alarm! Danger! You are sunk over your eyeballs! Rise!
And now all these years later, for perhaps the first time in two decades, he wakes with a start, the alarm clock in his hand. He has gone back to sleep instead of rising. In panic, he checks the time: Only twenty minutes have passed. He is his own boss now, but then it is even more important that he have control over himself. Five pages a day minimum. To pay his bills, remain solvent, he must do five pages a day minimum on average per week.
Yet still he does not rise. He reaches the clock back to the bedside table and stretches, his eyes drooping, picking through the fog of his brain for something that seems to want his attention there. He is thinking about God, about what he ever meant by the word God, but he does feel that he has seen God—even if God or god is utterly be
yond his ken—and he feels that he has seen the ungodly, and tries to sort through these thoughts, which are confusing him.
The word God, then, transforms in his mind into the box. Sam said something about putting a box in his storage room. Had he actually done so? Bluett has no idea. He can scarcely remember anything about it. What had Sam said? He had a box of things he wouldn’t want anyone to see if anything happened to him. Had he already known something then? And what did he mean? Did he mean for Bluett to destroy the box if anything happened to him? Did he actually say that? And if he did, what would Bluett do? Should he just destroy it? Could he? Was it legal? Should he try to contact Sam’s kids, his ex-wife, give the box to them? But that must be precisely what Sam was trying to avoid if he put it in Bluett’s basement room.
He throws off the covers and sits on the edge of the bed, thinking about the storage room, but he rises and crosses to the bathroom, past his little work room, and glimpses the neat stacks of paper on his desk, awaiting him. He is already half an hour late. He thinks of how Hagin would have looked at him for coming even ten minutes late. Half an hour!
Thinking about Hagin, Bluett realizes that was almost twenty-five years earlier. Hagin would be . . . how old? Must’ve been at least forty then. So he would be sixty-five now. Retired. An old dude. Probably with a good retirement plan, too. Which Bluett could not say for himself.
Standing there on the living room carpet, he stares blankly at the masks on the wall, the didgeridoo, thinking about the basement, the storage room.
No.
Five pages.
He shaves, brushes his teeth, dresses, carries a glass of juice to his desk, and looks at the new projects that arrived in Saturday’s post: a series of articles for the personnel newsletter of a Danish drug firm that has gone international. The first article, nearly done, seven pages long, is titled, “The Joys of International Exchange.” Clearly the aim is to loosen people up to the idea that they may be called upon to move to one of the company’s other departments in England, Thailand, or the Philippines.
Beneath the Neon Egg Page 14
