The Hanging Girl (5 page)

“I wouldn’t mind if he’d zoom out now so we could see what’s happening,” Assad said.

Rose said nothing. She simply sat shaking her head.

Protests could be heard from the man the report stated was the police union representative at the reception, but that didn’t seem to faze Habersaat in the slightest. However, it did inspire Uncle Sam to zoom out so that Habersaat and the wall behind him were in full view.

Rose gave a start when he pulled the pistol out and pointed it at the two superior officers standing right in front of the cameraman. You’d be forgiven for thinking they both had a very dark belt in judo or a similar sport with advanced falling technique because both men flew instantaneously to the side in a roll worthy of the best circus performer. Birkedal’s assertion that he’d checked first to see if it was a dummy was revealed for what it was now.

“This is it,” mumbled Assad as Habersaat without the least hesitation put the pistol up to his temple and fired.

The recording just caught the head being hurled to one side together with the undefined white and red mass that lashed to the left of the room. Then the man collapsed as the camera also fell to the floor.

Carl turned to Rose but she was no longer there.

“Where did she go?” asked Carl.

Assad pointed over his shoulder to the staircase. It was too much for her after all.

“There you have it, then,” said Assad without the least sign of emotion. “Turns out Habersaat was left-handed.”

How could someone get through something that terrible so casually and analytically?

September 2013

By the way the
man’s voice was trembling on the phone, he revealed himself to be not only nervous but totally shaken and unsure of himself. Pirjo noticed it immediately.

He could be worth his weight in gold.

“Your name is Lionel, you say. That’s a nice name,” she said. “What can I do for you?”

“Yes, as I said, my name is Lionel and I’d like to be a singer.”

Pirjo smiled. Another one of those. Great.

“I know my voice is good but the minute I have to prove it to someone else I clam up. That’s why I’m calling.”

There was a short pause. He just needed to collect himself.

She thought it best then not to ask him if he even had the voice to fulfill the dream.

“Have you tried to shut the world out, Lionel? To find nature inside you and let your primeval force direct calm, concentration, and happiness through singing?”

“I don’t really know . . .”

“I’ve heard this so many times before, you see. When you want something so badly, as I understand you do, it’s easy to be thrown off-balance. You swing, so to speak, against your own energy. I think that’s what’s happening to you when your voice clams up. But do you experience the same sort of insecurity when you do other things, Lionel? Because if that isn’t the case, then I have to advise you to seek out one of the bioacoustic treatment methods or maybe even grounding body fission,
which I can refer you to once we’ve ascertained what would be best and safest for you.”

“That sounds complicated, but if it works, then . . .”

“Listen to me, Lionel. Spiritual growth is difficult but there are methods to achieve it and develop a more specific, collective karma. It demands a lot of work, of course, but it’s good to remember the bodhisattva vow ‘We will not rest until each and every being has been saved from suffering,’ and that’s how it will be for you in your case. To put it briefly, I’m sure we can find a passable way for you, too.”

There was a deep sigh, Lionel was caught in the net. Yes, it would be expensive.

Sitting there, as stoic as a vestal before the eternal fire, keeping guard over the lives and lifestyles of weak people, was where Pirjo was at her best. Her insufficient upbringing may have emphasized that you should never take someone for a ride, but why have scruples about that when from time to time you could lift a person’s life up toward higher levels by choosing to have your thumb on the scale?

When people called her asking for a little insight into the road to a better future, why shouldn’t they have it? When they fed her with information about their trivial day-to-day lives, banal dreams, and sad hopes, and she subsequently interpreted it so that they had something to look forward to, what could be wrong with that, if they only made the right effort? Hadn’t she seen several times what it could mean when her clients received something to prop them up? And wasn’t it true that a few people on earth were better skilled to predict things and organize the fates than others? It was certainly a skill she had. Atu had convinced her of that long ago.

Pirjo smiled. These phone advice sessions were, in all their simplicity, ingenious and lucrative, and, what was better, it was her idea and all her own income. On Mondays she was the psychologist on one number and on Wednesdays she took on the role of the therapist on the other line, which she’d suggested they should call when the results of the first conversation needed further attention. A voice generator meant that on Mondays she sounded light and ethereal and on Wednesdays professionally
dark and authoritative. You’d really have to know better to figure out what she was up to. It certainly wasn’t possible to recognize the voice.

These two telephone lines with a call rate of thirty Danish kroner per minute to respectively the Light of the Oracle and the Holistic Chain were Pirjo’s pension savings, and for that reason she was the only person from the nature absorption assembly who Atu allowed to run their own business while being associated with the Nature Absorption Academy.

But Pirjo had altogether secured many privileges for herself, all of which she’d earned because Atu had lots of things to be thankful to her for.

“And one last thing, Lionel: What do you really want to get out of your singing talent?”

He hesitated for a moment and hesitation always made Pirjo frown.

“You want to make music because it’s an important part of you, isn’t that right?”

“Yeah, that too.”

So, that’s the way it was. It was just the usual. “You want to be famous, perhaps?”

“Yes, I think so. Who doesn’t?”

She shook her head. There were nineteen to the dozen of this type of idiot these days.

“And what will you do with this fame? Is it because you want to earn lots of money?”

“Yes, please, that would be great. But it’s more the girl thing, I think. You often hear that it’s easier for singers in that area.”

Okay, it was even one of those as well. He would truly be worth his weight in gold.

“So you don’t find it so easy with the opposite sex,” she attempted to say with some empathy. “You live alone, then, I assume.”

Did he giggle?

“Hell no, I’m married.”

It gave Pirjo a start, as if he’d pressed a button directly linked to the nerve endings in her spine. Equal measures of distaste and chemical
reaction hit her brain. She’d spent years trying to fight that vulnerable side of herself, and at the moment not a day went by without it rebounding.

“You’re married, you say?”

“Yes. We’ve been married for ten years.”

“And your wife is totally aware of the scope of your plans, is she?”

“Scope? No, hell no. She just likes it when I sing.”

Pirjo looked at her arms for a moment. Sometimes there were goose bumps and other times her forearms went bright red as if from an allergic reaction. Just now it was both.

This idiot should just get out of her life here and now.

“Lionel, I’ve become aware that I won’t be able to help you.”

“What! I’ve just spent thirty kroner a minute talking with you, so you’ll have to. It’s on your website.”

“Okay, Lionel, fair enough, you’ll get your money’s worth. Do you know the Beatles song ‘Yesterday’?”

She could almost hear him nod.

“Sing the first verse for me.”

A minute went by and then it was over. She hadn’t listened. Judgment had already fallen.

“Lionel. It’s a shame for your wife that you’re such a pig but you’re lucky that she encourages you to sing, because your talent is completely and utterly insignificant. I have pets that can hit a tone better than you and I know deaf-dumb people who can talk better English. So be glad that I’m sparing you the biggest failure of your life, because no matter what happens, you can only ever manage to scare women off with that pathetic bleating.”

Then she replaced the receiver, calmly and gently, as she breathed openmouthedly. She’d overstepped the mark but it wasn’t anything the idiot would shout about. Pirjo turned around with a start.

The sound of a click behind her made her immediately purse her lips. She closed her eyes and felt the sweat oozing from her armpits and the pulse in her neck begin to thump.

And even though she didn’t want to, that was the way she reacted
when Atu locked the door between her office and the atrium so he wasn’t disturbed with his latest conquest.

Always the way. Several times she’d considered moving her office. She had even tried to encourage him to move his quarters to another part of the academy, but things remained as they always had been.

It’s more practical this way, dear Pirjo, he’d say. Key decisions and actions, key supply lines, all in one building. A few steps from administration to you or to me. Everything just around the corner. Let’s not change that, he’d continue.

She looked again at the door to the atrium, rubbing her arms, and ignored the telephone when it rang again. She ignored the disciples who waved to her through the window from the square in front. And finally she tried to ignore the image of the man who’d obsessed her for years and who right now was fondling another woman in the room next door.

But Pirjo couldn’t ignore the clicking sound from the door because she detested it. It made her short-circuit. The warning that he’d shortly be lying beside another woman than her in full swing, or almost worse, that he was finished with her now and had unlocked the door. From an inner peace she exploded to wild revolt in one second and the discomfort was enormous.

But why couldn’t she just accept it? Through the years the sound had always been there; Atu had never tried to conceal it from her. But did he know what it did to her, that ultimate sound of distance and exclusion and ridicule? The bitter sound of degradation. And if he did know, would he try to spare her it? She doubted it.

That was why she always ended up covering her ears, chanting to find the balance in her body.

“Horus, born of a virgin,” she began. “Guide for the twelve disciples, raised from the dead on the third day, free me from my despondency, let jealousy fade, let the rain of new temptations stop, and I will offer a crystal that refracts the sun in all colors in your honor.”

After that, she stood for a while breathing deeply. And when the stomach cramps let up, she thrust her hand in her pocket and grabbed one of the small stones, went over to the window at the back of the room,
opened it, looked out over the Baltic Sea toward the Swedish island of Gotland in the distance, and threw the glistening crystal as far out to sea as she possibly could.

As the years went by, there must have been many crystals washed up on the white sand.

*   *   *

For almost four years, Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi’s school for the study of nature absorption had had its headquarters on Öland, the elongated island off the southeast coast of Sweden, and that suited Pirjo just fine. Here, in this peaceful landscape, most things were under control, and here nothing happened other than that which Providence and the universe desired. Here, Atu’s soul was undisturbed and that meant everything to Pirjo.

It was different when he recruited new customers from the centers in Barcelona, Venice, and London, meeting all the women who found themselves out there in no-man’s-land. When they gaspingly accepted him as an oracle, a soul healer from the ocean of the northern lights and cosmic energy. When he penetrated their shattered dreams, frustrations, and lack of grounding influences in their lives, and like a cloud as light as a feather, lifted them up to the sun.

In contrast to the island, out there in the world Pirjo couldn’t really do anything other than feel alone, trapped by a deep jealousy and isolated in the feeling of insignificance.

Granted, Atu treated her in a way she’d rightly fought her way to as his extra hand and think tank, diary writer, organizer, and coordinator. But Atu didn’t look at her in the way she wanted him to.

He didn’t look at her as he did the other women.

As the years had passed, Pirjo became the last remaining disciple who’d followed Atu Abanshamash Dumuzi from the beginning when he’d been in a completely different place in life and was called Frank. But despite their long history together, and their cooperation and intimacy, and despite it having always been her innermost desire, he’d never made love to her, body to body.

“We two make love with our souls, my friend,” he always said. “You give me my most important orgasms, sweetest Pirjo. I obtain my most significant energy from your gentleness and the great insight of your soul.”

She hated Atu when he said things like that because she was neither gentle nor chaste. Nevertheless, she understood him. Over time they’d become more like brother and sister in spirit than anything else, and it was infinitely far from what she needed. She wanted to feel him like his other women felt him. To feel soft, moist, and penetrated by his lust and passion. If he’d lain with her just once in all these years and lusted after her as a wild and sexy woman, it would’ve been different. Just one single time and she wouldn’t have to obsess anymore that it was never going to happen.

But for Atu she was nothing more than the vestal, the untouchable. The virgin symbol who guarded over him, his business, and everything. It was the way
he
had decided it should be, not Pirjo.

And virgin she still was in some ways, now, at the age of thirty-nine. At least in her relationship with Atu. If she was going to make love to him, and if there was going to be a baby as a result, for which she had a burning desire, it would have to happen very, very soon.

She clenched her teeth and imagined the woman in the atrium. She’d been picked up by Atu a couple of months ago in Paris. This Malena Michel had stood before him in towering heels and a tight, yet innocent, white dress and explained that her parents were Italian but that she had emigrated to France when she was six, and that she felt that her entire past and origin at that very moment melted together with the words he so generously ladled out. That she could feel that she had come into this world solely for Atu’s sake, and that she would serve him in everything he desired.

Nobody understood how much it hurt when he fell for such a saccharine speech, or how undeserved it not only felt but in reality also was.

The consequence of all this was that Malena was now here with them, never more than a few meters away, and totally caught in the net of his charisma. And it wasn’t the first time either that he had a woman like her
among his disciples. On the contrary, it happened more and more often as the years went by, and Pirjo had just about had her fill.

Just a few weeks ago they’d been in London, recruiting disciples and participants for their fall course, when a beautiful young black woman had fainted.

In an unusually insistent manner, which Atu normally didn’t exhibit, he asked Pirjo to ensure that the woman was taken to his private quarters to rest. What subsequently happened behind the closed door she couldn’t say, but Atu had had a new look in his eyes that neither his Parisian floozy nor Pirjo felt comfortable with as they took the plane back.