A Conspiracy of Faith

by Jussi Adler-Olsen

  Thomasen gave a shrug. “Not if you ask me. My guess would be an hour.”

  Carl took a deep breath. “In which case, we just have to hope our theory about that local paper is sound. Otherwise, this is going to be a tall order indeed.”

  He sat down on the bench next to the suffering Assad, who was by now a grayish shade of green and trembling. His double chin was in constant motion due to his involuntary regurgitation, and yet he still had the binoculars pressed against the sockets of his eyes.

  “Give him some tea, Carl. The wife’ll be upset if he throws up on her covers.”

  Carl pulled the basket toward him and poured a cup without asking.

  “Get this down you, Assad.”

  Assad lowered his binoculars slightly, took one look at the tea, and shook his head. “I will not throw up, Carl. What comes up, I swallow again.”

  Carl stared at him, wide-eyed.

  “This is how it is when riding camels in the desert. A person can become so weary in his stomach. But throwing up in the desert is to lose too much liquid. It is a very silly thing to do in a desert. That is why!”

  Carl gave him a pat on the shoulder. “Well done, Assad. Just keep your eyes peeled for that boathouse, eh? I’ll not bother you anymore.”

  “I am not looking for the boathouse, because then we will not find it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I think it is very well concealed. Perhaps not between trees at all. It may be in a heap of earth or sand, or under a house, or in some thicket. It was not very tall, remember this.”

  Carl picked up the other pair of binoculars. His assistant was obviously not all there. He’d better do the job himself.

  “If you’re not looking for a boathouse, Assad, what are you looking for?”

  “For the thing that rumbles. A wind turbine or some similar thing. Something that can rumble this rumbling sound.”

  “I’m afraid that’s going to be difficult, Assad.”

  Assad looked at him for a moment as though he had tired of his company. Then he convulsed so violently that Carl drew back to be on the safe side. And when he had finished, he said in what was almost a whisper: “Did you know that the record for sitting against a wall as though in a chair is twelve hours and something, Carl?”

  “You don’t say?” He sensed that he probably looked all question mark.

  “And did you know that the record for standing up is seventeen years and two months?”

  “Get out!”

  “Oh, but it is, Carl. An Indian guru. He slept standing up in the night.”

  “Really? I didn’t know that, Assad. What are you trying to tell me?”

  “Just that some things look more difficult than they are, and some things look easier.”

  “I see. And?”

  “Let us find that rumbling sound, then we shall speak no more of this.”

  What kind of logic was that?

  “All right. But I still don’t believe that story about standing up for seventeen years,” Carl rejoined.

  “OK, but do you know what, Carl?” Assad looked at him intensely, then convulsed again.

  “No, tell me.”

  Assad raised his binoculars. “That is up to you.”

  They listened and heard the hum of motorboats, the chugging of fishing vessels, motorbikes on the roads, single-engine planes photographing houses and farms so the tax authorities could make new appraisals on which basis to fleece the country’s citizens of their savings. But no constant sound, nothing that might provoke the rage of the National Association of the Enemies of Infrasound.

  Klaes Thomasen’s wife picked them up at Hundested, and Thomasen promised to ask around if anyone knew of a boathouse like the one they were looking for. The forest officer at Nordskoven would be a good place to start, he said. The sailing clubs likewise. He assured Carl he would resume the search the following day. The forecast said dry and sunny.

  Assad was still looking queasy after they were dropped off and continued south in their own car.

  Carl felt a sudden affinity with Thomasen’s wife. He didn’t want Assad to puke on his covers, either.

  “Give us a nudge if you’re going to be sick, Assad, yeah?” he said.

  His assistant nodded absently. Most likely it wouldn’t be a matter of choice.

  Carl repeated the appeal as they came into Ballerup.

  “Perhaps we should have a little stop,” said Assad after a pause.

  “OK, can you wait two minutes? I’ve something to do first, it won’t take long. It’s on the way to Holte. I’ll drive you home after.”

  Assad said nothing.

  Carl gazed ahead. It was dark now. The question was, would they even let him in?

  “I need to drop in on Vigga’s mother, you see. Something I promised Vigga I’d do. You OK with that? She lives at a care center just around here.”

  Assad nodded. “I did not know Vigga had a mother. What is she like? Is she nice?”

  It was a question that for all its simplicity was so hard to answer that Carl almost drove through a red light on Bagsværd Hovedgade.

  “When you have been there, can you then drop me off at the station, Carl? You are going north, and there is a bus right to my door from there.”

  Assad certainly knew how to preserve his anonymity. His family’s, too, for that matter.

  “No, I’m afraid you can’t visit Mrs. Alsing now. It’s much too late for her. Come back tomorrow before two o’clock, preferably about elevenish. That’s when she’s most lucid,” said one of the caregivers on evening duty.

  Carl produced his police ID. “It’s not a private matter. This is my assistant, Hafez el-Assad. It won’t take a moment.”

  The woman stared in astonishment at the badge and then at the odd individual who stood rocking on the balls of his feet at Carl’s side. This was not an everyday occurrence for the staff of Bakkegården.

  “Well, I think she’s asleep. She hasn’t been doing too well of late.”

  Carl glanced at the clock on the wall. Ten past nine. What the hell was this woman on about? Normally, the day was only just starting for Vigga’s mother about now. She hadn’t been a waitress in Copenhagen’s nightspots for more than fifty years for nothing. She couldn’t be that senile, surely?

  They were led, politely but reluctantly, to the area set aside for the center’s dementia sufferers, coming to a halt outside the door of Karla Margrethe Alsing.

  “Give us a shout when you want to get out again,” said the caregiver, pointing farther down the corridor. “There’s a staff room just down there.”

  They found Karla amid a clutter of chocolate boxes and hair clips. With her long, tousled gray hair and carelessly tied kimono she looked like a former Hollywood actress yet to come to terms with her career’s demise. She recognized Carl immediately and leaned back in a pose, chirping his name and telling him how adorable he was standing there like that. It was plain to see how much Vigga took after her mother.

  She didn’t so much as glance at Assad.

  “Coffee?” she asked, pouring a cup from a thermos without a lid. The cup looked like it had been used all day. Carl signaled that he was fine without but realized the futility of it. He turned instead to Assad and handed him the cup. If anyone needed a shot of cold coffee left over from this morning, it was Assad.

  “Nice place,” said Carl, glancing around at the furnished landscape. Gilded frames, ornate mahogany, brocade. Karla Margrethe Alsing had always taken pride in appearances.

  “What keeps you busy, then?” he asked, expecting some lament about how hard it was to read and how bad the television programs had become.

  “Busy?” A distant look appeared in her eyes. “Well, apart from this…”

  She paused mid-sentence, reached behind the cushion at her back, and produced a luminous-orange dildo resplendent with all manner of nodulations and projections.

  “…there’s bugger all to do.”

  Assad’s coffee cup trembled
on its saucer.

  29

  With each hour that passed, her strength diminished. She had screamed at the top of her voice when the sound of the car died away, but each time she emptied her lungs, it became more difficult to fill them again. The weight of the boxes was simply too great. Gradually her breathing became more shallow.

  She wriggled her right hand forward and scratched at the box in front of her face. The sound of her fingernails against the cardboard was enough to raise her spirits. She was not entirely helpless.

  After some hours, the strength to scream was unequivocally gone. Now all she could do was try to stay alive.

  Perhaps he would show mercy.

  She recalled the feeling of suffocation all too vividly. The sense of panic and impotence, and in a way also relief. The experience was familiar to her—she had been through it a dozen times at least. The times her thoughtless giant of a father had pinned her to the floor when she was small and squeezed the air from her lungs.

  “Try getting away now!” he used to say, laughing. To him it was just a game, yet she was always so frightened.

  But she loved her father, and so she said nothing.

  Then one day, he was gone. The game was over, though she felt no sense of relief. “He’s run off with some cow,” her mother told her. Her wonderful father had found another woman. Now he would cavort and frolic with other children.

  When she first met her husband, she told everyone he reminded her of her father.

  “That’s the last thing you want, Mia,” her mother had replied.

  That was what she had said.

  Now she had been trapped under the packing cases for some twenty-four hours, and she knew she was going to die.

  She had heard his footsteps outside the door. He had stood listening and then gone away again.

  You should have groaned, she thought to herself. Perhaps he would have come in and put an end to her misery.

  Her left shoulder had stopped hurting. All feeling had gone from it, her arm, too. But her hip, which absorbed much of the weight, pained her dreadfully. She had sweated profusely during the first hours in this claustrophobic embrace, but even that had stopped. The only secretion of which she was now aware was the occasional seep of urine against her thigh.

  And there she lay, in her own pee, trying to turn her body just an inch or so in order that the pressure against her right knee, on which the weight of the boxes had settled, could be shared by her thigh. In this she failed, and the sensation remained, like the time she broke her arm and could only scratch against the outside of her cast when it itched.

  She thought of the days and the weeks when she and her husband had been happy together. In the beginning, when he had fallen at her feet and treated her just the way she wanted.

  And now he was killing her, without feeling or hesitation.

  How many times had he done this before? She didn’t know.

  She knew nothing.

  She was nothing.

  Who will remember me when I am dead? she thought, and extended her fingers against her right arm, as though caressing her child. Benjamin won’t. He’s so small. My mother, of course. But in ten years, when she’s no longer with us? Who will remember me then? Besides the man who took my life? No one but him and perhaps Kenneth.

  That was the worst thing, apart from having to die. It was what made her try to swallow in spite of the dryness inside her mouth. And it was what made her abdomen convulse with grief, though no tears came to her eyes.

  In a few years she would be forgotten.

  Her mobile rang a few times. Its vibrations in her back pocket gave her hope.

  After the ringtone died away, she would lie for an hour or two listening for sounds outside the house. What if Kenneth was there? Had he sensed something was wrong? He must have done, surely? He had seen with his own eyes the state she had been in the last time they saw each other.

  She slept for a short while, only to wake with a start, unable to feel her body. Her face was all that remained. She was reduced to a face. Dry nostrils, a recurring itch around the eyes blinking in the dim light. This was all that was left.

  Then she realized that something had woken her. Was it Kenneth or something in a dream? She closed her eyes and listened intently. There was someone there.

  She held her breath and listened again. It was Kenneth. She opened her mouth in a gasp. He was standing below the window at the front door, calling her name so the whole neighborhood could hear it. She felt a smile spread across her face and mustered all her strength for the final cry that would now save her. The cry for help that would prompt the soldier at her door into action.

  She opened her mouth and screamed as loud as she could.

  So silently that not even she could hear it.

  30

  The soldiers came in a battered jeep late in the afternoon, one of them yelling that local Doe supporters had stashed away arms in the village school and that she was going to show them where.

  Their skin glistened, and they were as cold as ice when she tried to tell them she had nothing to do with Samuel Doe’s Krahn regime and that she knew nothing about any stash of arms.

  Rachel—Lisa, as she was then—and her boyfriend had heard the shots ringing out all day. Rumor had it that Taylor’s guerrillas were ruthless, and so they had been preparing to flee. Who wanted to hang around and see if the future regime’s bloodlust could be held in check by the color of a person’s skin?

  Her boyfriend had gone upstairs to fetch the hunting rifle, and the soldiers had surprised her as she busied herself hiding the school’s books away in the various outbuildings. So many houses had been razed to the ground that day that she wanted to spread the risk.

  And there they were. The men who had been killing all through the day and who now needed to discharge the electricity crackling inside their bodies.

  They exchanged words, words she did not understand, though their eyes spoke a language she knew. She was in the wrong place. Too young and all too available in the empty schoolroom.

  She darted to one side and sprang up to the window opening, only for them to grab hold of her ankles. They pulled her to the ground and kicked her until she lay completely still.

  Three faces blurred for a moment in front of her eyes, and then two bodies were upon her.

  Superior strength and overconfidence prompted the third soldier to lean his Kalashnikov against the wall and help his comrades spread her legs apart. They covered her mouth and entered her one by one, whooping hysterically. She drew in air feverishly through sticky nostrils, then heard her boyfriend groan in the room next door. She was frightened for him. Frightened that the soldiers would hear him, too, and make short work of him.

  But that groan was all that transpired. His only reaction.

  Five minutes later, as she lay in the dust staring up at the blackboard on which only two hours before she had meticulously written the words “I can hop, I can run,” her boyfriend had made his escape, taking his rifle with him. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to shoot and kill the perspiring soldiers who now lay spent at her side with their trousers around their ankles.

  But he had not been there for her. And neither was he there when she jumped to her feet and grabbed the Kalashnikov to discharge a round of bullets that tore open the bodies of the three black men and turned the room into an echo of screams steeped in the smell of burned gunpowder and warm blood.

  Her boyfriend had been there for her only for as long as everything had been all right. When life was easy and the day ahead bright. But he was absent when she dragged the carcasses onto the dung heap and covered them with palm leaves. And he was absent when she scoured the walls of the schoolroom, washing away the human flesh and the blood.

  That was part of the reason why she had to get away.

  It was the day before she gave herself up to God and repented her sins so fervently. But the vow she made that evening when she pulled off her dress and burned it, the
n washed and scrubbed her crotch until it hurt, was something she would never forget.

  If the Devil should ever cross her path again, she would take matters into her own hands.

  And if in so doing she broke the command of God, it would have to be a matter between her and Him.

  As Isabel sped along the motorway, her gaze flitting between the road ahead, the GPS, and the rearview mirror, Rachel stopped sweating. Her lips ceased to quiver, from one second to the next. Her heart rate returned to normal. In an instant, she recalled how fear can be turned into anger.

  The dreadful recollection of the NPFL soldiers, their satanic breath and the yellow eyes that showed no mercy, surged through her body, making her clench her jaw.

  She had taken action before, and she could do so again.

  She turned to her driver. “Once we’ve given Joshua what he needs, I’ll do the driving, OK?”

  Isabel shook her head. “You don’t know the car, Rachel. It’s temperamental. It oversteers, for one thing. The lights are dodgy, and the hand brake’s loose.”

  She listed other things that were wrong with it, too, but Rachel didn’t care. Maybe Isabel didn’t believe that this pious woman in the passenger seat could match her behind the wheel. But she would soon know better.

  They met Joshua on the platform at Odense. His face was like ash, and he was clearly ill at ease.

  “I don’t like what you’re saying!”

  “I know, Joshua, but Isabel’s right. This is how we’re going to do it. We have to make him know we’re breathing down his neck. Did you bring the GPS like we said?”

  He nodded and looked at her with red-rimmed eyes. “I don’t give a damn about the money,” he said.