The Purity of Vengeance (8 page)

“And now you’re telling me you’ve got friends in the Lithuanian intelligence service, and that you can get them to help you by issuing threats and giving up confidential information, and all you’ve got to do is lift the receiver. But you know what, Assad?”

Another shrug, though this time his eyes were more alert.

“This means you can do things not even the head of our own intelligence service can do.”

Yet another shrug. “This may be true, Carl. But what do you want to say by telling me so?”

“What do I want to say?” Carl straightened his back and tossed the folder back onto the desk in front of him. “What I want to say, Assad, is this: How come you’ve got so much fucking clout?
That’s
what I want to know, and this case folder here is telling me nothing.”

“Carl, listen. Are we not happy down here together? Do we not get along? Why should we go into this?”

“Because today you overstepped a mark beyond which ordinary curiosity no longer suffices.”

“Say again?”

“For fuck’s sake, Assad. Why don’t you just tell me you worked for Syrian intelligence and that you got your hands dirty doing all sorts of shit for which they’ll have your head on a plate if you ever go back? Tell me that here in Denmark you’ve been providing services for PET or FET, or some other similar bunch of snoops, so they felt they had to do the decent thing and let you stay on here, farting about in this basement so you could earn a decent wage. Come on, Assad, spill the beans, for Chrissake!”

“This I could do, Carl, if only what you say were true, but I’m afraid it is not quite correct. What is true is that in a way I have done some work for Denmark. That is why I am here, and also why I cannot tell you any more. Perhaps one day, Carl.”

“But you’ve got friends in Lithuania. Where else have you got friends, can you tell me that? They might come in handy one day if we knew who they were.”

“I shall tell you when the time comes, Carl. The whole ship hang.”

Carl’s shoulders drooped. “The whole
shebang
, Assad.” He forced a weary smile in the direction of his flu-ridden helper. “But from now on you don’t do anything like you did today without running it by me first, OK?”

“Running by you first?”

“Running
it
by me first. It means you have to ask before doing it, yeah?”

Assad thrust out his lower lip and nodded.

“There’s another thing, Assad. I think it’s about time you told me what you’re doing here at HQ so early in the mornings. Is it something I’m not supposed to know about, seeing as how you have to steal about in the dark of night? And how come you don’t want me stopping by to see you at home on Kongevejen? How come, while we’re at it, that on more than one occasion I’ve seen you arguing with men who I’d hazard a guess come from the Middle East? And why are you and Samir Ghazi from the Rødovre police always trying to beat the shit out of each other every time your paths cross?”

“These are private matters, Carl.”

He said it in a way that impacted immediately on Carl. It was an affront. Like a friend’s rejection of an extended hand. An unequivocal accentuation to the effect that no matter how much they shared at work, Carl not merely came second, he simply didn’t belong in his assistant’s sphere from the moment Assad clocked out at the gate. Trust was the key concept here, and he didn’t have it. Not by a long chalk.

“I thought as much. Two gorgeous guys having a cozy chat,” came a familiar voice from the corridor.

Lis parked her pearly whites in a seductive smile and winked at them from the doorway. Her timing was miserable.

Carl looked at Assad, who had immediately resaddled and now seemed relaxed, his face beaming with delight.

“Oh, look at you, poor thing,” said Lis, stepping forward and smoothing her hand over Assad’s dusky cheek. “Have you come down with it, too? Your eyes are almost drowning. And you, Carl, forcing him in to work. Can’t you see how helpless he is, the little dear?” She turned to face Carl with reproach in the blue of her eyes. “I’m to say from Ploug they’re waiting for you out in Amager.”

6

August 1987

It wasn’t until she
got to the end of Korsgade and sat down on the bench under the chestnut trees by the front door of the apartment building, her gaze directed toward Peblinge Lake, that she felt release from the city’s disapproval and the prison of her own body.

The figures that graced the city streets of the 1980s were well shaped and comely. This she had noted, and on that point she was no longer able to compete.

She closed her eyes, put a hand to her lower leg, and rubbed it gingerly. As the tips of her fingers massaged the irregular contour of her shin bone, her thoughts wandered back to her old mantra: “I am
good
enough
 . . .
I
am good enough.” But today it sounded hollow, no matter where she placed the emphasis. It had been a long time since she had repeated the words to herself.

She tipped forward, folded her arms around her knees, and pressed her forehead into her lap, her feet tapping out little drum rolls. It often helped against the excruciating jolts that ran through her body.

The walk to Daells Varehus department store and back to Peblinge Dossering was a tall order and led to pain. Pain in her shattered shin bone that forced her gait askew. Pain in the foot that for each step had to accommodate the centimeters by which her leg had been shortened. Pain in the hip that sought to relieve the pressure.

It hurt, but that wasn’t the worst thing. Walking along Nørregade, she stared straight ahead, trying not to limp, knowing full well she would not succeed. It was hard to accept. Two years earlier she had been an attractive, nimble woman, and now she felt like a shadow of her former self.

But shadows live well in the shade, so she had told herself until now. The city was somewhere she could make a fresh start. It was why she had fled to Copenhagen almost two years earlier. Away from the shame and the grief, and the icy stares of the locals back on Lolland.

She had moved from Havngaard in order to forget, and now this.

Nete pressed her lips together as a pair of young women with prams walked by, faces and voices brimming with joy and abandon.

She looked away, first glaring at one of the neighborhood lowlifes who came strutting by with his ugly and unmanageable beast of a mongrel, then gazing out upon the flocks of birds that dotted the surface of the lake.

What an awful life. Twenty seconds in a lift at Daells Varehus forty-five minutes earlier had shaken her very foundation. That was all it took. Twenty seconds.

She closed her eyes and allowed her mind to replay what had happened. Her steps toward the lift on the fourth floor. Pressing the button. The relief at not having to wait more than a few seconds before the door slid open.

But what had been relief was now a malicious virus inside her.

She had taken the wrong lift. If only she had used the one at the other end she could have carried on with her life as before, letting herself be swallowed up among the edifices of Nørrebro, the bulwark of its streets.

She shook her head. Now everything was changed. After those fateful seconds the last remnants of Nete Rosen were no more. She was dead and departed. Deleted from this world. Now she was Nete Hermansen again. The girl from Sprogø was risen.

With all the consequences.

 • • • 

Eight weeks after the accident they had discharged her from the hospital without ceremony, and in the months that followed she lived alone at Havngaard. The lawyers were busy, for her husband had been a man of great means, and from time to time photographers lurked in the ditches and bushes. When one of Denmark’s most prominent businessmen lost his life in a car crash, the newspapers and gossip magazines smelled new sales opportunities, and what could be better than a wealthy widow on crutches with a pained expression on her face? But Nete drew the curtains and let the world race on without her. She knew what people were thinking: the little mite who had wormed her way from the laboratories into the bed of the CEO didn’t deserve to be where she was, and it was only because of her husband and his money that those around her had toadied to her all those years.

That was the way it felt still. Even some of the community nurses who tended her at home had difficulty concealing their disdain, but she soon had them replaced.

During these months the stories of Andreas Rosen’s fatal accident became spiced with rumor and the anecdotes of witnesses. She felt the past squeeze like a python, and when they took her in to the police station in Maribo the people of the village stood at their windows and smiled smugly. It was common knowledge by then that the family who lived in the house opposite the spot where the accident had occurred had seen something that looked like a tussle inside the car immediately before it careered through the windbreak and plunged into the water.

But Nete did not break down and confess her sin, neither to the public nor to the authorities. Only inside.

They failed to knock her off balance, for she had long since learned to stand firm on her own two feet, even when storms were raging.

And then she left it all behind.

 • • • 

She undressed slowly in front of the windows facing the lake and sat down calmly on the stool before the bedroom mirror. The scar above her pubis was more visible now that her pubic hair was less pronounced. A faint lavender-colored line that marked the division between good fortune and bad, life and death. The scar of her sterilization.

She smoothed her hand over the loose skin of her barren abdomen and clenched her teeth. And then she rubbed until it hurt and her legs trembled, her breathing increasingly agitated as her thoughts ran aground.

Only four hours earlier she had been sitting in her kitchen with the department store catalog and had fallen for a pink sweater on page five.

Autumn Catalog 1987
, the cover proclaimed, so full of promise. “Fashion knitwear” above the picture that grabbed her attention.

She had admired the item over her steaming coffee and thought to herself that a pattern-knit sweater like that would go so well with a shoulder-padded Pineta shirt blouse and give her a fresh start. For although her grief was immense, there was a life that remained to be lived, and she would soon feel ready again.

That was why she had stood in the lift almost two hours earlier, with her shopping bag in her hand and her heart full of cheer. Exactly one hour and fifty-nine minutes earlier the lift had stopped at the third floor and a tall man had stepped inside and stood next to her, so close she could smell him.

He hadn’t bothered looking at her, but she had seen him. Had studied him as she held her breath, retreating uncertainly into the corner, her cheeks flaming with rage. Hoping he didn’t turn and catch her face in the mirror.

Here was a person who was clearly pleased with himself and the world around him. In control, as they said. In control of his life and, despite advancing years, of the future, too.

The scum.

An hour and fifty-eight minutes and forty seconds earlier he had stepped out of the lift on the second floor and left Nete gasping for air, hands clenched into fists. During the long minutes that followed she sensed nothing. Rode up and down in the lift without reacting to the concerned inquiries of other customers. It was all she could do to calm her pounding heart and gather her thoughts.

When once again she found herself outside on the street she no longer had the plastic bag in her hand. Who needed a pink sweater and a blouse with shoulder pads where life was taking her now?

And now she sat in her fourth-floor apartment, naked and desecrated in heart and soul, wondering how revenge could be taken, and against whom.

She smiled for a second, musing that perhaps she had not been the unfortunate one after all. Perhaps it was the despicable monster fate had sent into her path in this sublime chance encounter.

That was how she felt during the first hours after Curt Wad had once more entered her life.

 • • • 

When the summer came, her cousin Tage came, too. An unmanageable tyke neither the school nor the streets of Assens could contain. “Too much brawn, too little brain,” said her uncle, but Nete loved it when he came to stay. It meant there was someone to help her while away the daylight hours for a few weeks. Feeding hens was fine for a small girl, but not the other jobs. Tage loved to get his hands dirty, so the pigsty and the little cowshed became his domain. Only when Tage was with them could she go to bed at night without her arms and legs aching from work, and for that she adored him.

Perhaps she adored him rather too much.

“Whoever taught you such foul language?” the schoolmistress barked, after the summer holiday. And it was always after the summer holiday that she was punished the hardest, for Tage’s favorite words, like “fuck” and “shag” and “boner,” were far removed from the lonely world the mistress inhabited.

It was words such as these, and Tage’s freckled abandon, that laid the first stones on the path that led to Curt Wad.

Smooth, slippery stones.

 • • • 

She got up from the stool and put on her clothes as the list took shape in her mind. The list that opened the pores of her skin and smoothed the furrows of her brow.

There were people in the world who deserved not to breathe. People who strove only toward their own selfish goals and never looked back at the destruction they left in their wake. A few came to mind. The question was, what price should they be made to pay in consequence?

She walked down the long hallway and into the room at the end, where the table she had inherited from her father stood. At least a thousand meals had been consumed at that table, her father prodding at his food, silent and bitter, weary of life and all its pain. On rare occasions he had looked up to send her a fatigued smile. It was all he could muster.

Had it not been for her, he would have found himself a length of rope and hanged himself years before he eventually did. Such was the toll of arthritis, loneliness, and barrenness of mind.