Copenhagen Noir

used to being hunted, she is prey. She no longer knows what it feels like not to be hunted.

The withdrawal distorts her thoughts. She’s not able to follow a straight line of thinking. There’s no beaten path she can follow along, or leave behind.

Debt.

It’s all about that.

The debt.

That she has to pay and cannot do so. She who has to die has tried in vain to settle her debt by offering herself as mule. She said: “I can fix it, I can take it. You know I can handle the pressure.”

It would be so simple, just a transport through Copenhagen to Hassleholm, but that prospect turned out to be futile as well.

She had been hoping for it, it had been a straw to cling to, that she could put her debt aside by carrying a kilo of amphetamines from the head supplier.

She has offered to transport goods from Poland to Sweden-but that’s just as futile. She has, to put it mildly, no credit left in her “trust account.” Istvan is many things, but generous and forgiving he is not. She’s still short four thousand kroner. A piddling amount, really. But every time she’s managed to save up something, it disappears just as fast. There are always new needs. The big problem is that the money runs right through her fingers, that she needs the drugs to be able to work and save up more money, and to do that she needs to use more and more.

It’s an evil cycle. She’s in the rat race, but unlike the rat, she knows she’s doing it-which of course makes everything worse. She knows there’s neither beginning nor end. She just runs.

She who must die gets dressed. Thinks of her mother who is still asleep, sees her in her mind’s eye as she lies in her bed, breathing. She who must die cannot this morning help thinking about how much she loves her mother, how she wishes she could give her what she dreams of. A daughter. That she would come back, return from this shadow world. Become alive again. Be a human being, at least for a little while. That’s by now the only wish the aging mother has-to get her daughter back.

Traffic is still almost nonexistent, but the city keeps changing. Roadwork is going to detour traffic from Exercisgatan during the early-morning hours. According to a report from the traffic department it has something to do with a minor gas repair job. These things happen all the time, everything changes.

She who must die thinks about yesterday when what she has feared for so long finally happened-a friend from her school years picked her up in the street. She didn’t notice until it was too late.

Rickard is his name. She remembers him. He always sat at the front of the class raising his hand and sucking up to the teacher. Even then he was an ass, a pig. Rickard. He didn’t recognize her, paid up front for a blowjob without a rubber. She’s almost the only one on Exercisgatan who does it.

Everyone knows about it. She doesn’t need to advertise her special products. For her it doesn’t mean anything anymore. It isn’t true that there are levels in hell. Everything is equally black and hopeless. After she threw up Richard’s sperm by the cemetery fence, she thought, for the umpteenth time, that it had to stop now. No more! she’d thought. Her eyes had teared and she still felt sick from the stale taste.

She who must die knows that it’s inescapable, that it must come to an end. Death from her own hand or an accident-it makes no difference, not any longer, she is tired, tired to the core. She looked into the mirror this morning and saw a ghost looking back at her: a skull with a thin film of skin stretched over the bones. She saw the badly healed scars all the way down from her upper arms. She saw the badly healed veins winding across her underarms. She is no longer a human being, she just doesn’t know what she has become. A reptile.

A cockroach.

She assumed that’s what she’d become.

He who this morning will do the work of death is calm and methodical. He doesn’t hurry, his hand never hesitates. He strangles her completely, without effort. He’s not a passionate man, he is calm and calculating. He knows what to do.

However, it takes longer than he’d expected. She resists-a kind of passive, hopeless resistance. It’s unbearably exciting, and he can’t help letting go of his grip a tiny bit, just so she can take a quick breath, just enough so she cannot scream, but enough oxygen to draw it out for a few more seconds. His pulse speeds up a touch, not much, but enough so that he’s irritated by his own weakness. He finishes his job, his assignment. He’s annoyed about his sudden weakness-that he couldn’t resist the impulse. It all takes just a few minutes. He wishes he could have dragged it out longer.

The murderer covers up her body with a blanket, not from caring, not because the exposed body tells of the unspeakable-he throws the blanket over her from mere habit. The dead body is then rolled into the backseat of the car; the blanket has a small checkered pattern. He’s reckless. It’s a preposterous thought that he should ever have to succumb to letting his car undergo a criminal technical examination. Although the woman’s body is covered with an abundance of DNA traces, he knows that there are neither trails nor suspicions anywhere, that he’s a free man. He eats when he’s hungry, drinks when he’s thirsty. Now he’s excited in this undefinable way that makes his body shake from inside out. To be like a god! Freedom is pleasurable. He sits still for a few seconds in the car, breathes deeply, thinks of the dead body in back, thinks that he must stay present now, that he can feel the whole world breathe against him, intensely and burning. He’s beginning to change, growing harder, more like an animal. This is what he’s been striving for, to become true to his instinct.

It takes time before one begins to see the pattern. The various parts do not make a whole, they’re not noticeable, though it’s so obvious-and perhaps it’s for just this reason that the simple becomes the difficult. The solution is so obvious that it becomes banal. We search for more depth, a more complex solution. But it doesn’t exist. Everything has to do with desires, with needs.

It’s like emerging from a dark basement and being surprised by the bright summer light. You know what you’re going to see, maybe you even feel it, but in the moment itself-just when the world is going to appear-you see nothing. You’re blinded, thrown to the ground, covering your eyes with your hand to protect against the sharp light. This is what truth is like.

This is the merciless light biblical texts speak of, a truth so penetrating that it’s almost impossible to survive. You must die in order to take part in eternal life. Therefore: better to squint than be blinded, better to be chosen, to be inside, than to be excluded.

Nils Forsberg wrote in one of his few letters to his former friend Father Pietro, as an answer to why he can no longer believe: I think it has to do with a kind of stinginess, your faith, your feeling of presumptuousness-that there should be an answer, incomprehensible for those of us still living in this world. Yes, you are right, I am a coward. My way is the coward’s way, but this way I only have myself to depend on. He knew he would never send the letter, that it didn’t really matter, and that the most important thing was to put his thoughts down on paper-that writing was a kind of mirror.

That’s how it was. It was in the writing that he was able to see himself. You think you have a mandate on truth, and through your very faith you make everyone else an exception. I spit on that!

Father Pietro had for a short time been Nils Forsberg’s father confessor. The aging priest, who’d been exiled to the edge of the world, had been Forsberg’s path into the church, into what he imagined was the world. And then the real world came along and changed everything. The world where death attacked like a splash of ink on a white sheet of paper. Between the inner and the outer world, boundaries were no longer possible.

Body and spirit.

The city is Malmo.

The year is 2008.

The old year left only senseless tragedies behind, incidents that could just as well have been stopped in time before the wheel of death started rolling.

Now it’s January. The month when everything stands in the balance. When everything is both too late and too early.

A series of deaths occur within a very limited time, and within a very limited geographical area.

Everyone is dumbfounded.

The general public. The police. The media.

The cruelty. The meaningless violence. The ominous sense of aggression. It has become like an itch that can never be stilled.