Beneath the Neon Egg (26 page)

The shorter policeman sniggers. Bluett feels around inside his mouth with the tip of his tongue, finds a painful spot, pokes gingerly at it, tastes blood. The doctor steps closer. “Guess you had a rough night of it tonight, huh?”

Danish sympathy. Bluett says, “It wasn’t Sunday afternoon at Tivoli.” The doctor smiles appreciatively, nods with sympathy.

The taller policeman asks, “Do you have anything at all to add to your report now, Mr. Bluett? No identification possible at all? Take your time.” He taps the side of his pen against his pad.

“Would you like me to write you up for crisis counseling?” the doctor asks. “Might be a good idea. Think about it.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Think about it. Sometimes you get a delayed reaction. It helps to talk to someone.”

Bluett hoists himself up to sit on the edge of the table, grunts, wincing at the sharp pull in his chest. A red-headed nurse appears with his shirt—there is dried blood down the front—and helps him slip his arms into it. “Can you do the buttons yourself?” she asks.

He nods. As his fingers work the buttons through the holes, the fuzzy tall policeman is slipping the pad back into his shirt pocket.

Bluett thinks about what has happened to him, the likely meaning of it, whether he can manage to put it together into a coherent whole and what might happen then if he does. Then he thinks about the fact that he has to get himself home. The thought of going out into the dark street again shortens his breath. He says to the policeman, “I can’t see much of anything without my glasses. Could you possibly give me a ride home?”

“We could do that,
ja
.”

The nurse has his jacket and tie. She is looking closely at him, and he realizes that she is observing him, maybe for signs of dizziness, concussion. She stands close enough that he can see her face, that he can smell the soap on her skin, a slender woman with pale eyebrows.

He slides his necktie beneath his collar without tying it, and she helps him down from the table, guides his arms into the jacket and leads him to his shoes. As Bluett considers what he might say to her, she lowers herself to one knee and begins to tie his shoelace, and he says softly, “Thank you. You’re very kind,” hears the huskiness of his own voice.

“Wish I had one like you to come home to at night,” the shorter fuzzy policeman says, and the nurse glances over her shoulder. “Scrub off,” she says quietly and rises while the policemen disappear through the door.

“Think I just lost my ride,” Bluett says.

She smiles, and he wishes
he
had someone like her to come home to, too. Her pale red eyebrows fascinate him. He takes a step, and his ribs pull against the tape. He groans.

“Take it still and peaceful,” she says, touching his arm for moral support, as she hands him a blister pack of pills. “These are very strong. Don’t take more than two every four hours. Got that?”

He nods.

“You want crutches?”

He shakes his head gingerly, sees the policemen are waiting by the outer door for him. He also sees, as the nurse hands him his Burberry, that it will have to be dry-cleaned. He hopes the blood will come out.

In the back of the police car, he watches Blegdamsvej roll past in the dark, a fuzzy blur of wall and light, and considers his options. What does he have to give them? What can he say? What can he prove? He realizes that he doesn’t even know for sure himself whether the attack was a coincidence. He doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t know if there is the least evidence for a case against Svetlana Krylova or the Satin Club, whether some other facts could explain, or be made to explain, his own hasty conclusions. And whatever else, if he tries to go into it, he will have to reveal what was in Sam’s box, just what Sam wanted to keep from being revealed.

He thinks of a poem by Dan Turèll and sniggers grimly. The poem is a parody of Dashiell Hammett’s
Red Harvest
and the Turèll poem ends with someone taking a shot at the narrator, and he thinks,
Now I understood everything! Except what was happening, and why, and who was after me, and for what reason
.

It is a short ride from Rigshospitalet to his apartment on the lakes. The taller policeman gets out and opens the door for him, supports his elbow as he swings his legs out slowly, one at a time, and hoists him to his feet. Bluett grimaces.

“Want help up the stairs?” the policeman asks.

“No. Thanks for your help.”

“Okay, you think of anything else, just call the station.”

“Who should I ask for?”

“Whoever answers will help you. They’ll have our report. We’ll be out now looking for a group of troublemakers. They might still be roaming around drunk. If we find anyone you’ll be contacted for a confrontation.”

Is that a threat?
he wonders.
A warning?
And he realizes that he is halfway worrying that the police are part of a conspiracy, recognizes that for what it is and decides all he needs now is sleep.

“Give you some good advices,” the taller policeman says in English in a not unfriendly manner. “Stay away from those Satin Club places. Find yourself a nice woman your own age. Man your age shouldn’t be running after young whores in places like that. Only bring you to troubles.”

Bluett grunts, smacks the car door shut after him.

He lets himself in and climbs the winding wooden stairs slowly, gets the key into the lock on his door after a few tries, hits the switch for the overhead light and goes immediately for the dresser drawer where he thinks he can remember having stored his old glasses just in case. He finds them in the bottom drawer in a plastic case, an old pair of tortoise-framed plastic lenses. The one earpiece is stained with white streaks of discoloration, and they fit loosely, but his heart floods with gratitude at the ingenuity of opticians as the world around him adjusts into focus.

All the necessary things available in a society, the pool of ingenuity. Eyeglasses, medical care, food, housing . . . That’s what holds us together. Commerce. He pictures living in the woods, in a tree. Never could. Trapped in civilization. Instead of bears in the forest you got the Russian mafia. And police protection instead of a spear. Only hope is to keep clear of it all. Don’t go into the forest at night.

Then he remembers the dream monkey, suddenly wonders at the vividness of the image of the prayer, like a shrill psalm:
Blessed be His name!

He hobbles out to his oak table, lowers himself into a chair, considering his next move. He glances at his wristwatch: The crystal is shattered, the digital display blank. The clock on his stereo says 3:56. Nothing to do now but try to sleep. His ribs and nose are throbbing, first in unison, then in counterpoint, and he begins to notice a number of other sore and tender points on his back, his right, his rump. His right hand hurts and he notices the heel of his left is scraped badly. He feels less anger than bafflement. How odd that such things transpire.

Then, glancing through the open door into the little hall, he spots something white that had apparently been slipped under the door on the carpet, an envelope. He hoists himself to his feet and limps over to it, squats slowly, catches it between thumb and forefinger, rises, muttering, and proceeds to the kitchen, where he fills a glass of water from the tap and pops two of the pills from the blister pack the nurse gave him.

It occurs to him she did not tell him what they were, whether there were side effects, whether it is dangerous to mix them with alcohol; but they would always claim that anyway. She only said they were very strong. Morphine maybe. Ketogan. Would they make him sleepy?

Standing over the kitchen counter, he looks at the envelope. It trembles in his fingers. It is plain, cheap gray paper, nothing written on it. He peels back the self-adhesive flap. There are photos inside. He holds them in the circle of light from the ceiling lamp.

The first shows Sam wearing stockings and a garter belt and bra. He stands facing three seated persons viewed from the back. Sam is the only identifiable person in the picture. His hands are behind him like a soldier at parade rest, and he looks very happy. To one side of him is a person wearing a leather mask and wielding a paddle.

In the next, he is on a table with his ankles tied into gynecological stirrups while a woman, again viewed from behind, holds a black dildo above him. He is smiling like a puppy dog.

The last shows him tied naked to a cross. A woman, viewed from behind, stands in front of him holding a whip alongside her leg. Sam is not smiling. The quality of the photo and composition are poor, making it seem even more seedy.

Bluett tucks the photos back into the envelope. He limps back to the oak table, switching off the lamp on the way, and sits staring out into the dark morning. He finds he is most comfortable sitting straight up, his back even with the back of the chair. He nods there, thinking perhaps the pills are also a soporific, but wakes again a few moments later. It occurs to him that Sam died, that Sam paid out the equivalent of a couple of million crowns to keep these photos from being shown to his ex-wife and children. He can imagine no other explanation for this. Simple. Svetlana Krylova won his trust, extracted information, determined his weak spot, applied the pressure. He paid her, then killed himself both to stop the extortion and in shame for having been caught in a trap fashioned for him of his own hunger.

Still there is the question why, when he knew he was going to kill himself, he hadn’t burned the stuff in the box. Bluett dozes again, wakes, noting that his broken bones have stopped throbbing except in the most distant, almost beneficent manner, his bruises numbed. He realizes he ought to try to sleep while the pain is gone, supports himself on the edge of the table as he straightens his knees, notices again the envelope on the oak table, thinks. Maybe he just wanted to feel that one other person in the world, one friend, might know him, might understand him, might know him and not hate him for what he knew.

You took it all too seriously, Sam. Yet how would I have felt in your place, thinking of those pictures being shown to your kids? Maybe she just asked for it a little bit at a time and you kept thinking you could just give her that much and that much more until you were so deep in, it was all too late.

Undressing is an ordeal, but finally his clothes lie in a pool on the bedroom floor, and he sidles in under the feather blanket. Ugly thoughts come to him as he lies there. An article he read in the
New Yorker
recently about a cult in Nebraska where the leader decreed that wayward members could be declared slaves, that torture was an acceptable means of correction with murder as the extreme necessity. The leader’s name was Ryan and the article included excerpts from the court transcript of some of the things Ryan had done to his followers and to their children, how he had taped the mouth of one to muffle his screams, and, using razor blade and pliers, had literally skinned him alive. Bluett could not believe what he was reading, yet it was quoted directly from a court record, as reported in the
New Yorker
magazine.

Bluett feels feverish there beneath the blanket, feels as though his brain has shaken loose, and he is spinning. His thoughts sink slowly away from him and his brain calms into sleep, but not before he sees again, for a fleeting instant, the monkey:
Blessed be His name!

At some point he rises again to consciousness and opens his eyes to see the snout of a black dog against a blood-red sky staring into his face. He is not frightened. He thinks simply that this must be death, come to take him, and closes his eyes again and sinks into a place of fragments where existence drifts on the water of consciousness through a long channel of blankness that eddies into a patch of images: a street of many people where he walks again in the dusk to some unknown place. There are too many dreams to remember, too strange and wordless, one that is the broken fragment of a rib, a curved jagged bone, an object that knows pain without mercy. He steps off the subway onto a high, narrow, stilted bridge and requests information at the booth but cannot understand the language spoken by the black woman there. The bridge sways on its stilts high above the road. He clutches the railing and then his mother is there, very thin and naked, her nipples, and he offers her his comforter, and is grateful then to breach the surface of sleep and understand he is awake in his own dark bedroom, his nose clogged with dried blood, mouth arid.

He eases out of bed and hobbles to the kitchen for water that he gulps from the tap. He clears his nose, tries to fathom what day it is, remembers what has happened to him. He thinks he needs help to come through this and finds himself at the door, about to go to Sam, but remembers his friend’s eyes staring at him wordlessly, imprinted in him.

In the bedroom, he looks at his watch, which is cracked and blank, sighs, phones the time operator, learns that it is 2:13
a.m.
on Tuesday. Two days have passed. He ought to eat.

On the kitchen counter are two blackened bananas. He gobbles them with a glass of skimmed milk, refills the milk tumbler, stands smacking his lips at the kitchen window, looking across to the dark wall, the dark line of rooftops, a shaved white globe of moon peering down through the window with dusty pale light. The sheepdog is lying outside the door in the courtyard, chin on paws. For some reason he makes Bluett think of the monkey in his dream, but the monkey is no longer vivid. He doesn’t hear the words of its psalm, and the dog does not look up at him.