The Quiet Girl (8 page)

Ninety-nine out of a hundred women are afraid of strange men who come in and lock the door behind them. The woman behind the desk was number one hundred. There was not so much as a whisper of concern in her system. He could have unzipped his trousers and exposed himself, and she would not have taken her feet off the desk.

"I work with children," he said. "I have a little ten-year-old student who has talked about you."

She had everything. She couldn't be forty yet. She had the age, the self-confidence, the education, the title, the money, the business, and even though she was wearing loose black wool clothing and was mostly hidden behind the desk, he sensed that with her build she could stroll down a catwalk modeling swimsuits whenever she pleased. And would do it, if she could charge for it.

The only sign of the price we must all pay was two long furrows that had etched themselves along each side of her mouth ten years ago.

"This is a busy workplace," she said. "People usually call first. Or write."

"Her name is KlaraMaria. From the children's home. From Rabia Institute. She's been kidnapped. We don't know by whom. She got a message out. The message was your name. And a drawing of this place."

She took her feet off the desk.

"The name may ring a bell," she said. "Will you repeat it?"

It didn't ring a bell. It rang a fire alarm. He did not reply.

"I think there was a preliminary study for a survey. At the institute. For the Research Council. It was years ago. Perhaps a girl with that name was part of the empirical data. She must have remembered that for some reason or other. There was very little personal contact."

"What survey?"

"It's a long time ago."

"Is it available for one to read?"

Normally she wouldn't have answered, but the shock had made her more open.

"It was never finished."

"Even so."

"It's a stack of pages in rough draft."

He seated himself on the desk. If he had been wearing a dress he would have hiked it up. So she could have seen some of his thigh.

"I'm rolling in money," he said. "Unmarried. Unrestrained. How about inviting me home? For a cup of tea. And sixty pages from the drawer?"

The two furrows turned black. She pushed the swivel chair away from the desk. So he could see her entire figure.

"You're speaking to a woman who is eight months pregnant!"

She had gained weight only around the fetus itself. Her stomach was shaped like a roc's egg.

"That doesn't matter," he said.

Her jaw began to drop. He knelt between her legs and put his ear to her stomach.

"A boy," he said. "A slightly more rapid pulse beat, around a hundred and thirty, D-flat major. With a premonition of D-major. Where Gemini slides over into Cancer. Your due date must be about Midsummer's Eve."

She pushed the chair backward, tried to get away from him. He followed her.

"Why did she give your name?"

Steps were approaching, one woman and two men. Just when a bubble of intimacy is about to be created around a man and a
woman, the outer world has a way of interfering, head nurses, angry men, the collective unconscious. It's tragic.

"There's very little time," he said. "The authorities have no clues. You're probably the last chance."

He placed his hands on the arms of her chair, his face next to hers; he spoke softly.

"What if they kill her. And you know you could have prevented it. Every time you look at your own child, you'll think about that."

She managed to stand up. There was a chink in her armor; she was on the verge of opening up.

"Who is Kain?" he asked.

Someone rattled the office door. Without taking his eyes off her, he tried a glass door; it wasn't locked. It opened onto a balcony. The kind Romeo and Juliet had enjoyed. As long as that lasted.

Someone tried to push in the door, without success. Footsteps moved away to get a key.

In eight hours he would be sitting on an airplane bound for Madrid. He bent down toward her. Her face became transparent. He suddenly realized that she was too frightened to speak. He let her go.

He felt in his pockets, found the lottery ticket, tore off a corner, wrote down the telephone number at the trailer. She did not move. He opened her hand and placed the scrap of paper in her palm.

A key slid into the lock. He opened the terrace door and swung himself over the balustrade.

Romeo had better odds; he hadn't needed to contend with sea fog and acid rain. The copper was coated with verdigris; there was nearly half an inch of green algae on the marble rail. He slid as if in green soap.

He hit the lawn flat; the air was completely knocked out of him. When you're six years old and it happens the first time, you think you are going to die. When you're forty-two you know you don't get off that easily. He focused on the starry sky to keep from losing consciousness. Just over the horizon was Taurus, his own persistent constellation. If he'd had a telescope, and if it had been another time of year, in the sympathetic Pisces he could have seen Uranus, the planet of sudden impulsive behavior.

"The survey," he whispered. "It wasn't just a medical survey. You weren't alone. Someone else was involved."

She looked down at him. Because of the fall his voice was still breathless. Nonetheless she had heard him.

Beside her, three unknown faces came into view; the youngest sprang up on the balustrade. He lost his footing and hit the ground like a BASE jumper whose parachute has failed to open. Three feet to the right of Kasper, where the lawn ended and the natural stone chips began. It's these small differences in people's karma that determine if we get up or remain lying on the ground.

"A female friend," Kasper added. "Blond as the chalk cliffs of Møn. Cold as an icy winter. Sharp as a German razor."

She looked like Ophelia standing there above him. Well into Act IV. Where the process has become irreversible. He had hit home. He got to his feet. Like Bambi on the ice. He wanted to start running. But found the strength only for a fast walk.
 
 

13

He rolled over the garden wall and into one of the narrow passages between Strand Road and Kyst Road, He got up, reached the road. The taxi was gone. He crossed the road, increased his speed. Right now the important thing was to gain the darkness around the racetrack. Headlights blinked far back in a driveway; he ducked into the shadows. The Jaguar was backed up all the way to the house. The car door opened, he toppled into the backseat.

"I have the radio set at seventy-one megahertz," said Franz Fieber. "The police change the signal codes once a month. The taxi drivers break them in less than twenty-four hours. They've called the Gentofte police station; two squad cars are on their way."

A patrol car passed the driveway and stopped in front of the clinic. Three officers ran into the building, one woman and two men. Another vehicle stopped behind the first one.

"Let us pray together," said Kasper.

The yellow eyes stared at him in the rearview mirror. Anxiously. Young people begin to fall apart when confronted with a situation where there seems to be no means of escape.

"The woman. Whom you locked out. She saw me back up into this driveway."

"Just a minute," said Kasper.

He leaned back. Prayed. Silently. In sync with his heartbeat. "Lord have pity on me."

He confronted his exhaustion. His fear for the child. His hunger. The alcohol. The caffeine. The pain from the fall. The tax return. The humiliation. At being wanted by the police and wandering on foot through streets and alleys at the age of forty-two. And he confronted the unnatural consolation of prayer.

A knuckle rapped on the window. The young man stiffened. Kasper pressed the button and the window rolled down.  It was a woman in her sixties with her hair in a French braid. It was too dark to see what she was wearing, but even if it had been sackcloth and ashes she would have looked like an aristocrat.

"I don't think I ordered a taxi."

"The day may come," said Kasper, "when you will wish you had."

She smiled. It was a beautiful mouth. It looked as if it had practiced smiling and kissing for the last sixty years and had reached perfection.

"Will you promise to stay here until then?" she asked.

A flashlight beam flickered over the gateposts. There was no escape.

"I'm trying to save a child," he said. "There's no time to go into details. Due to a mistake, the police are looking for me."

She stared straight at him. Like an eye doctor during an exam. Then suddenly she straightened up. Turned. Walked toward the officers.

She moved like a prima ballerina walking
à la couronne
. She reached the gateposts. Stood so she blocked the sidewalk and their view. Said something. Gave a gracious order. Turned around.  The policemen crossed Strand Road without looking back. Franz Fieber slumped behind the wheel.

Kasper leaned out the window.

"When I've completed my mission," he said, "and served my Spanish prison term, I'll come back. And invite you to dinner."

"What will I say to my husband?"

"Can't we keep it under our hats?"

She shook her head.

"Frankness is crucial. Our silver wedding anniversary was ten years ago. We're going for the gold."

Two policemen stood on the sidewalk. The exit was still blocked. "A generous heart like yours," said Kasper, "knows the neighbors. Including Lona Bohrfeldt across the road."

"Yes, for twenty years," she said. "Since before she became famous. And moved out here."

"She's been there when each of my four boys was born," he said.

"My wife and I have wondered: What drives her? What is it about births? Why would anyone want to share in them two thousand times?"

She bit her lip.

"It could be money," she said. "And the premature babies. She's interested in them."

The officers got into a patrol car, and the vehicles drove away. Franz Fieber started the Jaguar. The way was clear.

"May I have your autograph?" she asked.

He felt in his pockets; he needed to keep the voucher, and it was also wise to hold on to the lottery ticket. He tore out his pocket. His fountain pen wrote just fine on material.

"I'm writing on my silk underwear," he said.

"I'll keep it next to my skin."

The Jaguar leaped forward.

"Stop at the gate," said Rasper. "I have to blow her a kiss."

The car stopped. He leaned out and blew a kiss. And read the nameplate on the gatepost. It had been taken down. And replaced with a for sale sign. He looked up the road. Fifty yards ahead toward the racetrack stood a dark Ford.

"Please park just around the corner," he said.

* * *

The Jaguar rounded the corner and stopped. Kasper got out, walked back, peered cautiously over the wall. The Ford had started up and moved forward. The ballerina came out of the driveway, running like a twenty-year-old, and seated herself beside the driver.

Kasper got into the Jaguar.

"There's somebody after us," he said, "who surpasses your skills."

The Jaguar shot forward as if a huge hand had grabbed it from underneath. Behind them, headlights swept over the houses and out to the promenade. The Jaguar's motor began a crescendo, Franz Fieber whipped the wheel to the right, the world tilted, the car raced up the slope toward Slotspark and broke through the hedge. Kasper found a couple of handles and clung to them; there were trees and bushes everywhere. He looked at the young man ahead of him--he was focused but relaxed. Hands and legs danced over the pedals and keys; this was what it must have been like to sit behind Helmut Walcha at the big grand piano in St. Laurent's Church in Alkmaar during his recording of
Die Kunst der Fuge
. Hundreds of pneumatic hammers pummeled the car from outside. The Jaguar began braking and ended with a crash that sounded as if they'd driven straight into a shredder. Everything grew dark.

In the darkness beyond them were points of light, which condensed into a small circular area. The car had stopped in the middle of a rhododendron bush; the bush was as big as a garage.

The dark Ford drove past the lighted area, searching.

"We could have killed ourselves," said Kasper.

"I pray constantly. Jesus hears me."

Every automobile has an acoustic signature. Kasper heard the Ford coming back; it must have turned around. It passed them slowly.

"An expert like you," said Kasper. "Tell me, if a customer was to be picked up inside the barricaded area, could you find out where and when?"

"Have you got a name?"

He gave Stina's name. Franz Fieber spoke briefly on his mobile phone.

"The unions run taxi clubs. Cafeteria food, slot machines, wild rumors. And information. We'll have her in a couple of minutes."

Kasper listened out across the Strand Road traffic. It was in a different galaxy than Glostrup after all. The sound around him was tasteful and muted. The soft click of the hydraulic pump in a RollsRoyce. The complex and yet gently controlled intensity in eight-cylinder common-rail engines. Cars that were manufactured not to be heard, but to appear, suddenly, out of the silence. And if the silence was ever broken, it was by something personal, a Ferrari's bestial rumble or the nostalgic roar of a veteran Volkswagen four-cylinder air-cooled boxer engine.

And there was room for the sound between the houses; reverberation is proportional to the volume of the space. Kasper closed his eyes. He could have owned automobiles like Chaplin. Like Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. He could have employed people to drive them and repair them. Instead he sat here.

It was time to lay a little golden egg.

"Happiness," he said, "doesn't consist so much of what one has scraped together and gotten off the ground, but of what one has been able to let go of."

He heard a nearly silent diesel motor, a Mercedes, the quietest of all cars. He heard the wind softly flapping a convertible top. A Mercedes coupe. The kind of car he would have bought if he had been Lona Bohrfeldt. It drove slowly and unevenly. As he would have driven if he had met himself. And then the police.