was about the hopeless marketing campaign conducted by the Danish Poultry Association with government financing. She was only too familiar with the issues. They had resulted in two long nights of intense work.
She turned to Uffe and ruffled his hair so that the big scar on his scalp became visible. “Come on, lazybones, let’s see about getting ourselves some dinner.” With her free hand she grabbed one of the sofa cushions and slapped it against the back of his neck until he started shrieking with joy and flailing his arms and legs. Then she let go of his hair, leaped like a mountain goat over the sofa, through the living room and out to the stairwell. It never failed. Hooting and chuckling with glee and stifled energy, Uffe followed close on her heels. Like a couple of train carriages connected by spring steel, they raced upstairs, down again, outside to the front of the garage, back to the living room, and finally out to the kitchen. Soon they would sit down in front of the TV to eat the food that the home help had cooked for them. Yesterday they had watched
That was how the evenings and nights unfolded. Because that was how Uffe loved things to be-her sweet, innocent little brother. Sweet, silent Uffe.
6
It was true that a brass plate on the door was engraved with the words “Department Q,” but the door itself had been lifted off its hinges and was now leaning against a bunch of hot-water pipes that stretched all the way down the long basement corridor. Ten buckets, half filled and giving off paint fumes, still stood inside the room that was supposed to be his office. From the ceiling hung four fluorescent lights, the type that after a while would provoke a splitting headache. But the walls were fine-except for the color. It was hard not to make a comparison with hospitals in Eastern Europe.
“Viva, Marcus Jacobsen,” grumbled Carl, trying to get a grip on the situation.
For the last hundred yards along the basement corridor he hadn’t seen a soul. In his end of the basement there were no people, there was no daylight, air, or anything else that might distinguish the place from the Gulag Archipelago. Nothing was more natural than to compare his domain with the fourth circle of hell.
He looked down at his two spanking-new computers and the bundle of wires attached to them. Apparently the information superhighway had been split up so that the intranet was linked to one computer and the rest of the world to the other. He patted computer number two. Here he could sit for hours and surf the Net to his heart’s content. No pesky rules about secure surfing and safeguarding the central servers; at least that was something. He looked around for an ashtray and tapped a cigarette out of the pack. “Smoking is extremely hazardous to you and those around you,” it said on the label. He glanced around. The few termites that might thrive down here could probably handle it. He lit the cigarette and took a deep drag. There was definitely a certain advantage to being head of his own department.
“We’ll send the cases down to you,” Marcus Jacobsen had said, but there wasn’t so much as a single sheet of A5 paper on the desk, and all the shelves were empty. They must have thought he needed time to settle into the place. But Carl didn’t mind; he wasn’t about to work on anything until the spirit happened to move him.
He shoved the chair sideways over to the desk, sat down, and propped his feet up on the corner. That was how he’d sat for most of the time he’d been off on sick leave. During the first few weeks at home he’d simply stared into space, smoking cigarettes and trying not to think about the weight of Hardy’s heavy, paralyzed body or the rattling sound that Anker had made before he died. After that he’d surfed the Internet. Aimlessly, without any sort of plan, just trying to numb his mind. That was exactly what he intended to do now. He looked at his watch. He had just about five hours to kill before he could go home.
Carl lived in Allerod, which had been his wife’s choice. They’d moved there a couple of years before she walked out on him and moved into a cottage in an allotment garden in Islev. She’d looked at a map of Zealand and quickly worked out that if you wanted to have it all, you needed plenty of dough in the bank-or else you could move to Allerod. Nice little town on the S-train line, surrounded by fields, with forested land “within walking distance,” as they say. It had lots of pleasant shops, a cinema, theater, social groups, and, to top it all, the house was located in the Ronneholt Park development. His wife had been ecstatic. For a reasonable price they could buy a semidetached house made from stacked-up breeze blocks with plenty of room for both of them, as well as her son. They would even have access to tennis courts, an indoor swimming pool, and a community center, all in the proximity of fields of grain, a marsh, and a hell of a lot of good neighbors. Because she’d read that in Ronneholt Park everyone cared about each other. Back then that hadn’t been a plus as far as Carl was concerned, because who the hell believed that sort of crap anyway? But later on it had turned out to be important. Without his friends in Ronneholt Park, Carl would have fallen flat on his ass. Both metaphorically and literally. First his wife took off. Then she decided she didn’t want a divorce, but instead took up residence in the allotment garden. Next she went through a whole series of young lovers, and she had the bad habit of ringing Carl to tell him all about them. Then her son refused to keep living with her in the garden cottage, and in the full throes of puberty had moved back in with Carl. And finally there was the shooting out in Amager, which brought to a screeching halt everything that Carl had been clinging to: a solid purpose in life and a couple of good colleagues who didn’t give a damn whether he’d gotten out of bed on the wrong side or not. No, if it hadn’t been for Ronneholt Park and the people who lived there, he would have really been up shit creek.
When Carl got home, he leaned his bicycle against the shed outside the kitchen, noting that the other two occupants of the house were both there. As usual, his lodger, Morten Holland, had turned the volume all the way up as he listened to opera in the basement, while his stepson’s downloaded blowtorch heavy metal was blasting out of a window upstairs. A less compatible collage of sounds was not to be found anywhere else on the planet.
He forced his way inside the inferno and stomped a couple of times on the floor. Down in the basement
“Jesper, for God’s sake! The sound waves have shattered two windows down on Pinjevangen. And you’re the one who’s going to pay for them!” he shouted as loud as he could.
The boy had heard the same story before, so he didn’t move a muscle as he hunched over the computer keyboard.
“Hey!” yelled Carl, right in his ear. “Turn it down or I’ll cut the ADSL cable.”
That got a reaction.
Downstairs in the kitchen, Morten had already set plates on the table. Someone in the neighborhood had once labeled him the surrogate mother at number 73, but that wasn’t right. Morten was not a surrogate; he was a real housewife and the best that Carl had ever encountered. He took care of the grocery shopping and laundry, the cooking and cleaning, while opera arias trilled from his sensitive lips. And to cap it all, he even paid rent.
“Did you go to the university today?” asked Carl, knowing what the answer would be. Morten was thirty-three years old, and he’d spent the past thirteen of those years diligently studying all kinds of subjects other than the ones having any direct bearing on the three degree programs in which he was officially enrolled. The result was an overwhelming knowledge about everything except the subjects for which he was receiving financial support and which in the future would presumably earn him a living.
Morten turned his heavy, corpulent back to Carl and stared down the bubbling mass in the pot on the stove. “I’ve decided to study political science.”
He’d mentioned that before; it was just a matter of time before he tried that subject too. “Jesus, Morten, don’t
