“Could you put me in touch with someone like that?”
“I don’t think anyone knew him better than our sales director, Niels Bach Nielsen. But I’m afraid he doesn’t wish to speak with you about Mr. Hale’s personal life.”
“And why not? Does he have something to hide?”
She gave him another look as if he were making a serious attempt to provoke her. “Neither Niels nor Daniel had anything to hide. But Niels has never recovered from Daniel’s death.”
He caught the undertone. “You mean they were a couple?”
“Yes. Niels and Daniel were together through thick and thin, both in private and at work.”
For a moment Carl stared into her pale blue eyes. He wouldn’t have been surprised if she suddenly doubled over with laughter. But that didn’t happen. What she had just said was no joke.
“I didn’t know that,” he said.
“I see,” she replied.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a photograph of Daniel Hale, would you? One that you could spare?”
She stretched out her arm a few inches to the right and grabbed a brochure lying on the glass counter next to half a dozen bottles of Ramlösa mineral water.
“Here,” she said. “There ought to be at least ten of them.”
He didn’t get through to Bille Antvorskov on the phone until he’d had a lengthy discussion with the billionaire’s grumpy secretary.
“I’ve scanned a picture that I’d like to e-mail to you. Have you got a couple of minutes to take a look at it?” he said, after identifying himself.
Antvorskov acquiesced and gave Carl his e-mail address. Carl clicked the mouse and looked at the computer screen as he transferred the file.
It was an excellent picture of Daniel Hale that he’d scanned from the brochure the public relations woman had given him. A slender blond man, quite tall, suntanned and well dressed, as everyone had noticed over in the MPs’ restaurant. There was nothing about his appearance to indicate he was gay. Apparently he had other sexual inclinations. About to come out of the closet as a heterosexual, thought Carl, as he pictured the man, crushed and burned to death on the Kappelev highway.
“OK, the e-mail has arrived,” said Bille Antvorskov on the other end of the line. “I’m opening the attachment now.” There was a pause that seemed to go on for a very long time. “What am I supposed to do with this?”
“Can you confirm that it’s a photo of Daniel Hale? Was this the man who took part in the meeting at Christiansborg?”
“This man? I’ve never seen him before in my life.”
When she turned thirty-five, the sea of light from the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling returned, thus causing the faces behind the mirrored panes to vanish.
This time not all of the tubes in the reinforced-glass fixtures went on. One day they’re going to have to come in and change them or the room will end up in eternal darkness, she thought. They’re still standing there, spying on me, and they don’t want to have to stop. One day they’ll come inside and change the tubes. They’ll bleed off the pressure ever so slowly, and then I’ll be waiting for them.
They’d increased the pressure again on her last birthday, but that no longer worried her. If she could handle four atmospheres, she could also handle five. She didn’t know what the limit was, but they hadn’t come anywhere near it yet. Just like the previous year, she had hallucinations for a couple of days. It felt as if the background of the room was spinning around while the rest remained in sharp focus. She had sung and felt lighthearted; reality had become meaningless. This time everything returned to normal after only a couple of days. Then she began noticing a howling sound in her ears. At first it was very faint, so she yawned and tried to equalize the pressure as best she could, but after two weeks the sound became permanent. An utterly clear tone, like the one accompanying the test pattern on TV. Higher in register, purer, and a hundred times more enervating. It’ll go away, Merete, you’ll get used to the pressure. Just wait, one morning it’ll be gone when you wake up. It’ll be gone, it’ll be gone, she promised herself. But promises based on ignorance always prove disappointing. When the high-pitched tone had lasted for three months and she was about to go crazy from lack of sleep and the constant reminder that she was living in a death chamber at the mercy of her executioner, she began working out in her mind how she would take her own life.
She knew now that it would all end with her dying anyway. The woman’s face had not displayed the slightest grounds for hope. Those piercing eyes were a clear indication they would not allow her to escape. Not ever. So it would be better to die by her own hand. To decide for herself how it would happen.
The room was completely empty aside from the toilet bucket and the food bucket, the flashlight, the two plastic stiffeners from her down jacket — one of which she’d made into a toothpick — a couple of rolls of toilet paper, and the clothes she was wearing. The walls were smooth. There was nothing to which she could tie the sleeves of her jacket, nothing from which her body could dangle until it was delivered from this life. The only possibility left to her was to starve herself to death. Refuse to eat the monotonous diet, refuse to drink the small amount of water they allowed her. Maybe that was what they were waiting for. Maybe she was part of some sick wager. Since time immemorial, human beings had always transformed the suffering of fellow humans into entertainment. Each stratum of human history had revealed an infinitely thick layer of callousness. And the sediment forming new layers was constantly piling up; she was finding that out for herself now. That was why she made the decision.
She pushed the food bucket aside, stood in front of one of the portholes, and declared that she would no longer eat any of the food. She’d had enough. Then she lay down on the floor and wrapped herself in her ragged clothes and her dreams. According to her calculations, it had to be October 6. She figured she’d last a week. At that time she would have lived for thirty-five years, three months, and one week. To be more precise: twelve thousand, eight hundred and sixty-four days, although she wasn’t entirely sure. She would have no headstone. There would be no birth date or death date to see anywhere. Not a thing left after her death that might link her to the time she’d spent in this cage, where she’d spent this last long period of her life. Other than her killers, she was the only one who would know the date of her death. And she alone would know it beforehand, with more or less accuracy. On approximately October 13, 2005, she intended to die.
On the second day of her refusal to eat, they shouted to her to trade out the buckets, but she refused. What could they do? Either leave the bucket in the hatch of the airlock door or take it back. It was all the same to her.
So they left the bucket in the hatch and repeated the same ritual over the next couple of days. The old bucket out and a new one in. They yelled at her. Threatened to increase the pressure and then let all the air out. But how could they use death as a threat when it was death she desired? Maybe they would come in, maybe they wouldn’t, she didn’t care. She let her mind run amok with thoughts and images and memories that could push the howling in her ears away, and on the fifth day, everything merged into one. Dreams of happiness, her political work, Uffe standing alone on the ship, love that had been shoved aside, the children she’d never had, Mr. Bean and quiet days in front of the television. And she noticed how her body slowly loosened its grip on its unfulfilled needs. Gradually she lay lighter on the floor; a strange stagnation took over, and time passed as the food in the bucket next to her began to rot.
Everything was as it should be, and then all of sudden she felt a throbbing in her jaw.
In her listless condition, it felt at first like a vibration from outside. Just enough to make her open her eyes slightly, but nothing more. Are they coming in? What’s happening? she thought briefly, and then fell back into a silent torpor until a couple of hours later when she awoke with a pain as sharp as a knife stabbing into her face.
She had no idea what time it was; she had no idea if they were out there; and she screamed as she’d never screamed before in that barren room. Her whole face felt as if it had split in two. The pain in her tooth felt like a jackhammer pounding in her mouth, and there was nothing she could do to fight it. Oh God, was this the punishment for taking her life into her own hands? She’d neglected looking after herself for only five days, and now this torment. Cautiously she stuck her finger inside her mouth and felt the abscess around the back molar. That tooth had always been a weak point, providing a steady income for her dentist. A bad spot, which her homemade toothpick had tried to keep clean every day. She carefully pressed on the abscess and felt the pain explode through bone and marrow. She doubled over, opened her mouth wide, and gasped frantically for air. A short time ago her body had succumbed to lethargy, but now it had awakened to this torturous agony. She felt like an animal that would have to chew off its own paw to slip out of a trap. If pain was a defense against death, then she was more alive now than ever before.
“Ohhh!” she sobbed. It hurt so much. She reached for her toothpick and slowly held it up to her mouth. Cautiously she tried to find out whether something stuck in her gums had caused the infection, but as soon as the tip touched the abscess, her tooth once more exploded in agony.
You have to puncture it, Merete. Come on, she told herself, weeping, and jabbed at it again. The little that was left in her stomach threatened to come up. She had to puncture the abscess, but she couldn’t. She simply couldn’t do it.
Instead she crawled over to the airlock door to see what they’d put in the bucket that day. Maybe there was something that might offer some relief. Or perhaps a little drop of water on the abscess would make it stop throbbing so badly.
She looked down at the bucket and saw temptations she’d never dared dream of before. Two bananas, an apple, a piece of chocolate. It was totally absurd. They were trying to bait her hunger. Force her to eat, and now she couldn’t. Couldn’t and wouldn’t.
She grimaced at the next stabs of pain that nearly knocked her over. Then she took out all the pieces of fruit and placed them on the floor, thrust her hand in the bucket and grabbed the water bottle. She stuck her finger in the water and held it up to the abscess, but the icy-cold water didn’t have the expected effect. There was the pain and there was the water, and they had absolutely nothing to do with each other. The water couldn’t even assuage her thirst.
So she moved away, curled up in a fetal position underneath the mirrored panes, and prayed a silent prayer for God’s forgiveness. At some point her body would give up; she knew that. She would have to live her last days in pain.
Eventually it, too, would give up.
The voices came to her as if she were in a trance. They were calling her name. Entreating her to answer them. She opened her eyes and noticed at once that the abscess had stopped throbbing, and that her limp body was still lying next to the toilet bucket beneath the mirrored panes. She stared up at the ceiling, noticing that one of the fluorescent tubes had started to flicker faintly in the fixture high above her. She’d heard voices, hadn’t she? Were they real?
Then a clear voice that she’d never heard before spoke: “That’s right, she took out the fruit.”
It’s real, she thought, but she was too weak to be startled.
It was a man’s voice. Not a young man, but not an old man either.
She immediately raised her head, but not so much that they’d be able to see her from outside.
“I can see the fruit from where I’m standing,” said a woman’s voice. “It’s over there on the floor.” It was the same woman who had spoken to Merete once a year; the voice was unmistakable. Apparently the people outside had been calling to her and had then forgotten to shut off the intercom.
“She’s crawled over between the windows. I’m sure of it,” the woman went on.
“Do you think she’s dead? It’s been a week, you know,” said the man’s voice. It sounded so natural, but it wasn’t. This was her they were talking about.
“It would be just like her to do something like that, the little slut.”
“Should we equalize the pressure and go in and have a look?”
“What were you planning to do with her then? All of the cells in her body have acclimated to five atmospheres of pressure. It would take weeks to decompress her body. If we open the door now, she’ll not only get the bends, she’ll explode on the spot. You’ve seen her feces and how it expands. And her urine, how it bubbles and boils. Keep in mind that she’s been living in a pressure chamber for three and a half years now.”
“Can’t we just pump up the pressure again after we find out whether she’s still alive?”