(Originally written in Norwegian)
Istedgade lay like a painted corpse as I emerged from Central Station late in the afternoon one Friday in November, the year the U.S.A. elected its first black president and the world immediately looked much brighter than it had the previous eight years.
For a long time, Europe has begun for most Norwegians in Copenhagen, and Central Station is the gateway to the rest of the continent. There you can buy an aquavit in the cafe at eight in the morning, even on Sunday, and you realize at once that you have arrived in another world.
Norway’s capital was located in Denmark for four hundred years. The despotic Danish sovereigns ruled from Copenhagen with an iron hand. At the beginning of the 1700s, a young man traveled from Norway to Denmark and became the first modern Nordic writer: Ludvig Holberg. Danes claim him for their own, Norway says he is Norwegian, but we in Bergen don’t take the debate all that seriously. We know exactly where he came from. The Danish encyclopedias also put it quite correctly: Danish writer, born in Bergen.
I had followed in Holberg’s footsteps many times myself, not in the pursuit of happiness, but usually to search for some young person who had run away from home. Copenhagen was also the most natural place for those on the run to hide out. It wasn’t so difficult to get there, but still you felt you were far away from home.
After the regular ferry route between Oslo and Copenhagen had developed into a floating orgy of alcohol and the night train from Oslo had been discontinued, most traveled by air to Kastrup, Copenhagen’s airport. Generally I had taken the train. Now the only train ride was the one from the airport, but Central Station was still the customary place to get off. You took the escalator up from the platform to the main hall, where the big city’s noise and commotion hit you immediately. Arrivals and departures were announced over the speakers at regular intervals. Travelers of all nationalities and age groups passed by, some with backpacks, others with heavy suitcases that rolled on nifty little wheels, everyone on their way somewhere, even when waiting impatiently in groups. A railway station of this caliber is like a monument to the restlessness of the times, partings and farewells, greetings and embraces, teary smiles and sparkling laughter, noisy outbreaks of anger and murmured, intense confessions. All types of figures meet here, from the poorest beggar with outstretched hands to the richest businessman with the world’s fattest cigar clenched between his teeth like a lighthouse.
As for me, I didn’t stand out in any particular way. From the moment I walked into the hall, my gaze wandered from face to face, without much hope of finding the right one. After all, I hadn’t seen her for twenty-three years.
Heidi Davik was her name in 1985, and Heidi Davik was her name still. In the years between she had been married and divorced and changed her name back and forth. But both times it was her father who had given me the assignment.
The first thing he asked when he came to my office on that Thursday in November was if I remembered him. He was short, white-haired, and not too dissimilar from the candidate who had lost the American presidential election. But he was probably a few years younger, in his late sixties, I guessed. He was well-dressed, in a double-breasted suit.
“Faintly,” I answered.
“Thor Davik. You were in Copenhagen and found my daughter Heidi in the spring of 1985.” He opened the briefcase he’d brought with him and pulled out an old photo, yellowed and worn at the edges. “I gave you this shot back then.”
He handed me the photo, and I looked down and nodded. I recognized her. Back then she had been a sweet little girl, sixteen, with long, dark hair, a self-conscious gaze, and a nice smile. I had found her in Christiania, the free state, where she was living in the back room of what resembled a ceramics workshop, with a Dane two years older than her who had even longer hair and a short, scruffy beard, reddish-blond. There had been wailing and gnashing of teeth when I convinced her to accompany me back to Bergen, but it didn’t come to blows when she had to part with her soulmate. He looked rather miserable when I escorted Heidi out to Pusher Street and through the gateway of what had once been an abandoned military area, but which was still Scandinavia’s most popular hippie colony, though it had aged somewhat, just like the hippies.
“She doesn’t look like this now, I assume?”
“No, I just wanted to… Here!” He handed me a much more recent photo of an adult Heidi. I recognized her look and smile, but her hair was cut very short and bleached in blond streaks.
“So what’s the story?”
He gave me the short version. After returning home from Copenhagen, things had gone well for her. She studied to be a physical therapist, got a full-time job, married a colleague, and after seven years of marriage without children, she got a divorce. “Her name was Lorentzen when she was married, but she took her maiden name back after the divorce.”
“And what brings you here today?”
His gaze wavered. “It sounds almost like a bad remake of some film, but… she’s back in Copenhagen. She’s been there for fourteen days, and she doesn’t answer her phone. We don’t know where she’s staying, either. I… her mother is very worried.”
“But she’s an adult now.” I made a quick calculation. “Close to forty, if I’m not mistaken.”
“So what?” He seemed aggravated. “Your children are your children, all their lives.”
“And you won’t go down and try to find her yourself?”
“No. It’s impossible. She blames us for everything that’s gone wrong.”
“Everything that’s gone wrong? You’ve just described a more or less normal life.”
“Yes, well, except that we forced her to come home back then. She has never been able to forgive us for that.”
“The young man she was staying with down there… did she ever hear from him again?”
He scrunched his lips together. “We don’t know. But… we found this, among her papers, after she moved back in with us following her divorce. A small apartment in the basement. We can come and go…”
I realized he was trying to make excuses as best he could, and I held out my hand. He gave me a tourist postcard, conventional, with a photo of Tivoli on the front. I turned it over. There wasn’t much written: I’ll meet you here, as planned. If problems, call this number. Your Christian. Below it he had written a telephone number that began with 45, the country code for Denmark.
I looked at the more recent photo again. “Christian-and a phone number. Have you tried calling him?”
“Yes, but he said I must have the wrong number.”
“I see.”
“And we don’t have the strength for it. I want you to go to Copenhagen and see this man, Veum. We want to know what has happened to our daughter. Why she doesn’t answer us…”
I took the job, got on the Internet, and reserved a plane ticket for the next day. Meanwhile, I searched for the name and number and found what I was after: Christian Mogensen, with an address on Wesselsgade, which according to my well-worn map of Copenhagen lay right next to Sortedams Sø, one of the city’s lakes.
I thought about calling him before I left Bergen but decided that it would probably be more effective to wait until I was a short taxi ride from where he lived.
It worked. The man who answered the phone sounded flustered when I introduced myself as a private investigator from Bergen, but he admitted that he was indeed Christian Mogensen and that he had sent a card to an old girlfriend in Bergen. I said that if he didn’t provide information that would lead me to Heidi Davik, I would be at his door like some crazy Viking faster than he could say “three mackerels.”
He hesitated a few seconds, but when I added “or like a bulldog gone berserk,” he gave me an address on Lille Istedgade and said that’s where I would find her, if she was at home.
“Lille Istedgade?” I said, and he took my tone of voice in such a way that he quickly added, “Yes, but Istedgade isn’t like it used to be.”
“No?”
“Not at all.”
In many ways he was right. True, the street still had a porno shop or two, and a few of the girls strolling the sidewalk in what seemed to be a casual manner wore conspiculously short skirts for November. The long look I got from one of them told me that I could warm myself up with her if I was cold.
Nonetheless, there was a shined-up look to the street that hadn’t been there in 1985, and when I got to the address Christian Mogensen had given me, a side street to Sønder Boulevard, the building proved to be newly renovated, the stairway nice and clean, and the list of tenants in the vestibule indicated that it was an apartment building. The left-hand apartment on the fourth floor-the one Mogensen had told me to go to-was apparently unoccupied. At least there was no name on the list.
On the way up I met a couple descending the stairs. The woman was blond, with hair pulled back severely and gathered in a knot. She wore an elegant dark-blue coat and carried a small black envelope purse in her gloved hand. She stared straight ahead, not looking in my direction. Her companion did, however: a broad-shouldered man with short dark hair, in a black winter coat and dark pants. The look he sent me was angry and hostile, as if he were saying: Try taking her away from me, if you dare…
For a moment or two I considered whether the building might be something other than what it seemed, perhaps a refuge for sadomasochists or some other crazy group. Then they passed by me, leaving behind only the reek of her strong perfume. I assumed it was hers, but you can never be sure. Not nowadays.
No one opened when I rang at the fourth-floor door that had no tenant name. I tried several times, and the doorbell could be heard all the way out in the hall, but there was no reaction from inside. I studied the door. It was made of solid, heavy wood, and the lock seemed secure, not one you could work open with a hairpin and a credit card.
I grabbed my phone, called Mogensen again, and gave him my sob story.
“Well, she’s just out somewhere,” he said.
“Then I’ll pay you a visit instead.”
“No, no. Wait right there, Veum, I’ll come to you.”
“And how long will that take?”
“Less than a half hour. Get a cup of coffee in the meantime.”
I walked back to Istedgade, found a café on a corner, noticed the woman with the encouraging look at one of the tables but didn’t accept the invitation this time, either. I sat at the bar on a stool high enough to keep an eye on the entrance to the building I had just left, and I ordered a cup of black coffee and a Brøndums aquavit, the closest I could come to a Simers Taffel south of the Skagerrak.
After twenty-five minutes a black Mercedes pulled up and a man got out. He was tall and somewhat rangy, with red-blond hair and a beard. He looked around before crossing the street and entering the building.
I emptied my glass, nodded at the waitress, and followed him.
I stood in the hallway and listened. At first I heard nothing. Then a door slammed, followed by hurried footsteps down the stairs.
When he reached bottom he met my gaze. Now I recognized him. His hair was shorter, beard neat and well-trimmed, and he was distinctly better-dressed than the last time we’d met. But it was the same man I had found her with in Christiania twenty-three years earlier.
His voice shook when he said, “Veum?”
“That’s me. What’s going on?”
Before he could answer, his phone rang. He put it to his ear, and as he listened he gradually grew paler. “But… but you can’t…” He glanced up the stairway, as if he expected someone to come after him any second. “Yeah… all right, I’m coming. Track seven.”
Then he lowered the phone and looked at me again. His expression was darker than the night, it was as if someone had poured poison in his ear. “I have to go.”
“I’m going with you.”
He looked like he was going to object, but just shrugged his shoulders. We went out to the sidewalk. He walked past his car without a glance.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Central Station. Track seven.”
“And what’s going to happen?”
“We’re going to meet them.”
“Who?” Impatient, I grabbed his arm. “Heidi?”
He jerked loose from my grip and looked at me, his despair about to flow over. The darkness surrounding us had settled over Copenhagen. At the end of Istedgade rose Central Station, its steep gable like some heathen house of God. The wind that hit us came from frozen outposts. It was no merry evening in the King’s Copenhagen-or was it the Queen’s nowadays?
“No,” he snapped. “Svanhild.”
He rushed toward Central Station, and I did what I could to keep pace.
No more was said. At the street’s end we walked directly in through the nearest entrance and bolted up the steps to the main hall, where Christian Mogensen made a beeline for the stairs to track seven. I followed.
The tracks at Copenhagen’s Central Station lie in an excavated area underneath. On track seven, it was announced that an intercity train to Ǻrhus-Struer was arriving in five minutes. Mogensen ran down the steps as if the train was pulling out right in front of him. Without any hesitation I followed at his heels.
The platform was packed, but Mogensen shoved his way through until it thinned out in the crowd of travelers standing with suitcases and other luggage, ready to board as soon as the train pulled in.
They stood waiting for us at the far end of the platform, the blond woman and the broad-shouldered man I had met in the hallway an hour earlier. Mogensen stopped a few meters from them and stood with arms hanging, gasping for air. I stayed behind but off to one side of him for a clear view.
A few tracks away, an S train was headed out to the suburbs, maybe up to what Copenhageners called the “whiskey belt.” No one here on the platform at track seven was indulging in whiskey. But the looks they exchanged were as cold as ice cubes.
The woman I gathered to be Svanhild twisted her lips into the sourest smile I’d seen since Maggie Thatcher. “What’s wrong, darling?” she said to Mogensen.
“You’re both crazy! Was he the one who did it?”
The broad-shouldered man took a few steps to the side and raised his arm like a gunman before the last shootout. He nodded in my direction. “Who’s this clown?”
Mogensen turned halfway around, as if he’d forgotten that I had followed him. Then he pulled out his cell phone and held it in front of them. “I’m calling the police! I am-right now!”
“Remember to give them your confession,” Svanhild said, with an evil smile. “They’ll find your DNA when they test the sperm in her vagina. You gave me a nice-sized quantity of it this morning, have you forgotten? You didn’t say no, even when the gorgeous love of your life was waiting on Lille Istedgade-”
“You don’t mean-”
“A trip to the bathroom and a quick drain into a little bottle. That’s all it took. But we also grabbed a few hairs from your brush just to be safe and laid them on her pillow.”
I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. “What are we talking about here? You’re not saying that-”
Mogensen turned to me again, his face as white as a sheet. “They killed her. That woman there-that evil woman, my wife-she couldn’t let me live with another woman. The one I’ve wanted so much all these years.” He turned back to Svanhild. “Why didn’t you take me instead?”
I was inclined to believe him. Her smile was more evil than that of the queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
“It wouldn’t have hurt enough, darling. Not long enough.”
“And he helped you! My partner, your lover, Frederik Vesterlund.”
“It was a sheer pleasure. For him too. He raped her while I held her down. But don’t worry. He didn’t come. Only you did.”
I could hardly believe my ears. Christian and Frederik stood staring at each other, two kings on the same platform. Like some fake arbitrator I walked between them. “But you’re forgetting one thing,” I said.
“What the hell is this Norwegian doing here?” Vesterlund bellowed.
“He’s the crown witness for the prosecution,” I said. “I can testify that I saw you two leave the building before Mogensen arrived. And when he came, he wasn’t in there long enough to have done any of these things at the scene of the crime that you’re babbling about.”
The train for Ǻrhus and Struer whistled in the tunnel behind us.
It all happened within a few seconds.
Svanhild pointed at me, and as if she was commanding a dog, said: “Frederik, get him!”
Frederik Vesterlund lunged at me, but Mogensen stepped in before he reached me. Vesterlund swung at him, but Mogensen stepped to the side, grabbed his arm, and pushed him along. They stumbled toward the edge of the platform, and in the moments before the train was about to thunder past, they tottered at the very edge. The people behind us screamed in terror, the brakes screeched, and with a violent shove Christian Mogensen took Frederik Vesterlund with him down onto the track, where a fraction of a second later they disappeared under the massive train. Then it got quiet. Completely quiet.
Svanhild Mogensen stood like a limestone pillar in the middle of the platform. Then she began moving, slowly and studiously. She opened her handbag, found a pack of cigarettes, stuck one between her lips, and lit it with a gold lighter. She gazed at me through the blue smoke with the look of a cobra just before it strikes.
She walked toward me, her hips swinging discretely. As she passed, she blew a lungful of smoke in my direction. “Oh well,” she murmured. “I had no use for either one of them any longer.”
I stood and watched her leave. Several railroad employees passed. One of them stopped in front of me.
“Did you see what happened?”
“I saw the whole thing.”
“We have to call the police.”
“Do it.”
After I had given my statement to the police, they insisted I follow them down to Lille Istedgade.
They broke the lock, and I walked into the apartment. We found Heidi where they had left her. Lying in bed, naked and dead, with a blue and yellow necktie tight around her throat and a dead man’s sperm inside her.
Her face was blue-gray, her eyes empty and lips distorted in a grimace that showed she hadn’t left this world voluntarily. Someone had pushed her over the edge and let her dangle. It wasn’t a pretty sight, even for a hardened detective.
I said to myself: What if I hadn’t found her back in 1985? Would she be lying here now? Or would life have been entirely different for both her and Christian Mogensen?
I told the police the whole story, and I saw their skepticism grow with every word I spoke. “How the hell are we supposed to prove that?” groaned the policeman leading the interrogation.
“You have to bring her in for questioning.”
“We already are. She’s on her way.”
“If you need a witness, I’m more than willing to come back to Copenhagen.”
“You’re not too scared?”
“Not yet.”
The last hours before I left for the airport I spent at Jernbanecafe on Reventlowsgade, close to Central Station, where the service was first-class. I ordered a Tuborg Classic and so many Brøndums that I finally lost count. A small model railroad ran back and forth under the ceiling. I sat and followed it with my eyes to be sure. But no one threw himself in front of it. Not a single person.
It wasn’t pleasant news I brought back home with me to Bergen. No one put their arms around me when I told them what had happened, though I’m not exactly used to having that happen.
Several weeks later I stumbled onto a Danish paper at a kiosk in the park. A teaser on the front page piqued my curiosity. I flipped through to a spread inside the paper. There was a beautiful photo of Svanhild Mogensen, smiling cooly at the photographer. The short article explained that after the tragic death of her husband at Central Station earlier in the month, she reported that she intended to continue their successful Amager business and would lead it forward as its new director. Nothing was mentioned about any regrets she might have had; no doubt she didn’t have any.
It’s said that crime doesn’t pay. And who said this, I’d like to know? More on target was the man who said that hidden behind every great fortune is a crime.
I sent her a card with my name on it. But I never got an answer. She surely had better things to do. And so did I, for that matter.