crawl down to her on all fours. No more falling. If something happens to me, who will save the girl?
I manage to get her through the hole in the fence and carry her down a gravel path, alongside hedges and past garden gates. Which cottage is it? The little green one. I look back at the slope to judge just where we are. A fox stands there staring at us. Fucking shitty animals.
I turn around. The cottage must be right along here on the left. Up a wide garden walk. I grab the doorknob. Locked. Try the potted plants. One after the other. At first I put them back carefully, but it gets to be too difficult with the girl on my shoulder. So I kick the pots over with my foot, one by one. Finally. The key. It’s under the fifth or sixth one. I unlock the door and glance back quickly. No one in sight. Nobody has followed us. No foxes. No sex murderer.
I carry the girl inside and close the door behind us. Lay her on a small sofa, farthest back in the room to the left. I sit on the floor beside her. “I just need to rest a little,” I say, to the air. “I just need to catch my breath, then I’ll go out and call the police. I just need a break.”
I open my eyes and immediately begin to shiver. The cottage is like ice. It’s getting light outside. I must have slept, I feel stiff all over. I stand up slowly and look at the girl on the sofa. She’s lying there like some kind of gift, wrapped up tightly in a much-too-short blanket. The bite marks on her legs stand out. They’ve taken quite a bit of her calves.
I turn and step over to the door. Through the window I see Kris standing up on the slope, looking out over the community gardens. No doubt about it, he’s looking for us. I open the door, but he’s already disappeared again behind the noise barrier. I run down the walk. My legs hurt. Through the hole in the fence and up the slope. I run around the barrier. And smack into Kris.
I fall over. He looks at me for a moment, puzzled, then recognizes me. “She’s gone. He’s been here and took her.” I can see he’s been crying.
“No. She’s down in the community gardens,” I say, getting back to my feet.
“You moved her?”
“Yeah, the foxes-”
“You moved her. How are we going to catch him now?”
“Kris, it’s too late. He’s not coming back anymore.”
He takes a step closer. His fists are clenched, and he nearly snarls at me. “How are we going to catch him now? How are we going to-” He doesn’t finish his sentence. Instead he attacks me. I hit the ground hard, it knocks the breath out of me. He straddles me and shakes me by the collar.
“We were supposed to wait for him!” he screams. “That was the deal we made. Don’t you remember?”
I’m hurting. Really bad. All over my body. My legs. My hands. My head. I can’t take anymore. I moan: “She’s down in the house. She’s safe.” But he can’t hear me. He’s crying, it’s flooding out of him, his words come in short bursts. How I’d promised that the murderer would show up again, that we would be heroes. Tears drip down on my face, and I try to push him away. His hands press down on my throat.
Not a sound gets past my lips. I try to push him off but he’s way too heavy. My hands reach around for something, anything. I get hold of a rock and hit him with it, but it glances off his arm and gets knocked out of my hand.
I can’t breathe.
My fingers close around something long. A handle. The hammer. The one I lost that first day. It’s heavy, but I lift it and swing it at Kris. Hit him in the temple.
Kris loosens his grip. He looks at me through his tears, surprised.
I swing at him once more, hit the same spot, harder this time. He lets go and holds his temple, gapes at me. He crawls away.
“Are you okay?” I gasp. Cough, spit mucus out.
“We just had to wait one more day,” I hear him say as he moves off on his hands and knees. “Just one more day, he’s on his way now, for sure.”
Slowly I get to my feet, the hammer in one hand, rubbing my throat with the other.
“He’s coming,” he murmurs, and sits back against the barrier. “He’s coming. Wait and see. He’s coming.”
“Okay,” I say. “Okay, goddamnit. We’ll wait for him. I’ve had enough of your goddamn shit, but okay. We’ll wait for him. We’ll wait till afternoon, then we call the police. Okay?”
Kris nods. He’s still holding a hand against his temple. “Yeah. He’s coming. Just wait.”
I walk over and sit beside Kris, lean against the barrier. Even though it’s cold, it feels nice to rest. I’ve been on the go for too long. Too tired right now to continue. I lift the hammer and dry the blood and hair off on my pants, and then we start waiting for the man.
THE GREAT ACTOR BY BENN Q. HOLM
I walked down the stairs. It was over. Utterly and completely over. I was tired. The red carpet muffled the sound of my footsteps. He lived on the fourth floor, and I finally made it all the way down and out to the portal, dark and cold as a sepulchre. You could hear the wind whistling outside on Frederiksberg Alle.
The old alle was completely deserted, it was four, four-thirty in the morning. I walked through the ironlike cold under the naked trees, past the cars covered with frost, got in the Mercedes, grabbed the thermos from the glove compartment. Dregs of lukewarm coffee with a few drops of aquavit. What the hell, I could still feel the shots of whiskey. I fished a cigarette out of his pack, only two left, shit. I could smoke a whole tobacco farm, drink an entire barroom. My hands shook, my body. The brief, blazing explosion of fire and light, smoke deep in my lungs. Soon I’ll start the car, disappear.
Normally I wouldn’t dream of taking a shift on that particular Sunday in February, when the film industry holds its big annual awards program. But I was broke, and several of the other drivers were down with the flu. All evening I had avoided the area around Vesterport Station and the Imperial Theater, stayed near the airport. Fortune smiled upon me: I picked up an elderly suntanned couple just in from the Grand Canaries, dropped them off in Helsingor, about as far from the awards gala as I could get. After I’d driven for over nine hours, my back ached, and it was a little past midnight when I dropped two stewed Chinese off at the SAS Hotel. Time to call it a day, at last. The red, castlelike main station, Hovedbanegard, hugged itself behind the sooted moat of railway cutting. It was as if the city was coated with a thin membrane of gray-white frost; a few frozen souls hurried by. The neon ads blinked uselessly. In twenty minutes I would be back home in Rodovre, popping open a beer, smoking a cigarette, watching some TV. I’d go to bed, sleep. I switched the meter off and felt deeply relieved.
Because of some late-night streetwork on Vesterbrogade I spotted too late, I had to turn up Trommesalen. Suddenly I was perilously close to Imperial. Damn. And sure enough: the rest of the city was empty, but here the slick sidewalks looked like a veritable penguin march on inland ice. The big party had just ended. Cars and people shot out. Couples in evening dress waved in the bitter cold; had my taxi been stuffed with customers, with a pink elephant tied to the top, they would have hailed me anyway, that’s how it goes. I ignored the no-left-turn sign, found a nonexistent gap in the traffic, bounded over an island, and swung past the crowded slipstream, away from Imperial, continuing at a snail’s pace past Hotel Scandic, which the old Sheraton was now called, and there in the windswept space between the concrete high-rise and Sct. Jorgens Lake, I saw him.
Involuntarily I slowed down even more, my curiosity simply overwhelmed me. Was it really him? Erik Rutzou himself, the pompous ass? My archenemy. Yes, it was.
He walked slightly stooped, fighting off the gale that tugged open his black overcoat, exposing his tux underneath. It looked as if he was poling his way forward in a boat. The moment he caught sight of my taxi he eagerly began flagging me. A long whitish thingy shimmered at the end of his raised arm; a torch, it looked like, but it had to be a Bodil statuette. It could hardly be less, in Erik Rutzou’s case. I cursed the streetwork, my curiosity, and was about to floor it when a bicycler without lights swung out on the street. Against my will I stomped on the brakes.
