The next morning I meet Kirsten again in the bakery. She looks sweet, a bit puffy in the face from sleep, with clear eyes and an arched red mouth. She holds her daughter’s hand. I ask her if Lucille had a job the last time she saw her. She says that she is in teacher’s college. She looks at me. “Haven’t you found her yet?” I shake my head. “I think I have her phone number, wait just a second.” She pays and hands a pastry to her daughter. And sends Lucille’s number to my phone. “I remember your apartment so well, back when I was a kid,” Kirsten says, and smiles. “That long creepy hallway, the dining room table we built caves under. And Lucille’s mother.” “Isabel,” I say. “Yeah. Isabel.” She grabs her bag. “Call me,” she whispers, and she’s out the door, I watch her lift her daughter up on her bike seat. I’m left with my coffee and my paper and suddenly I feel wide awake.
Across from the building on Turesensgade is a large courtyard passageway-it’s possible to stand hidden in there and still see the second-floor apartment’s windows. I can also keep an eye on the front door. I brace myself for a long lookout. I end up standing there four hours. My legs and lower back are sore. I give up. Nothing happens. I do see Dmitrij drive up in a red car together with a tall, well-tanned man. I also see the longhair run down the stairs and return a few minutes later. With cigarettes. Just a trip to the kiosk. That’s it. I don’t know what I imagined would happen. I call Lucille’s number several times, but there doesn’t seem to be any connection. I send a text, ask her to call. I get no answer. I wander up to Funch’s Wine Bar on Farimagsgade for a sandwich with beer and aquavit. Roast pork and round sausage. The red cabbage melts in my mouth, the pickles are crunchy. It must be over fifteen years since I’ve had a Danish lunch. And whether it is the taste exploding in my mouth, or how I’m haunted by the thought of Kirsten’s red lips, I suddenly start crying. I bawl my eyes out. Over the time that has gone by, the years in Brooklyn, Isabel now dead, Lucille disappeared-Lucille, the closest I ever came to having my own child. All the missed opportunities, everything I’ve run away from. But also this strange pleasure at coming back to Copenhagen, where I was born. I’m sentimental. I blow my nose and order another aquavit. Then my phone rings. Frantically I snatch it out of my pocket, thinking it’s Lucille. But no, it’s Kirsten. She hears me sniffling. “Have you picked up a cold since this morning?” My voice is hoarse: “No, no.” Silence. “What is it? You’re not sitting there crying, are you?” Pause. “No.” “Did you get hold of Lucille?” “Unfortunately no.” “Honestly, is something wrong? I mean, is she… do you think she’s disappeared, seriously, or what?” “I don’t know,” I say, and that is the truth. Kirsten says she will call later, which thoroughly pleases me.
I go to the police in the afternoon, but Lucille has not been reported as missing. They’re visibly annoyed by my request. They’re on coffee break, it looks like. The policeman sighs loudly and stirs his coffee. “And what makes you think she’s disappeared? Have you talked to her boss? Her family?” I stand up and walk out in the middle of this conversation. I call the teacher’s college that, according to Kirsten, she attends. They haven’t seen her in six weeks and have been wondering why she hasn’t called in sick. They wrote to the address on Turesensgade but Lucille hasn’t contacted them. They have also tried her cell phone. “I’m glad you called,” the secretary says, “I didn’t know who to contact. Lucille didn’t specify a contact person on her information card. Are you her father?” I hesitate a moment. “Yes,” I lie, “I’m her father.”
I rest for a while at the hotel. It’s already twilight. Deep-blue late afternoon. I close my eyes and feel a pang of homesickness. See Brooklyn in my head, the corner of Flatbush and Bergen where I live in a small, badly heated apartment. The eternal noise of traffic, howling ambulances, horns, and shouting, the rumble of underground trains. Suddenly I miss Joe, who serves me coffee and asks about my bronchitis every morning when I sit down in my regular window seat at his diner. The subway trip to the West Village, to the modest office where I write my mediocre poems, job applications, and the few ad copy assignments I get that put bread on the table; the sounds, smells, the people I see every day and make polite conversation with, all the strange faces gliding past me on the street for the first and only time. The sea of humanity, the loneliness. But also that sense of being a part of something, of belonging. That’s my life. A beer at the bar when the Giants are on TV. The weekly stroll to the laundromat. Mrs. Rabinowitz, my next-door neighbor, who once tried to get me in the sack when we were both younger, and who has now focused all her love on a small fat dog named Ozzie, whose barking keeps me up half the night. I see her painted face, her blinking, near-sighted eyes: “How are you today, Mr. Thomsen? Going out?” It occurs to me that she must have Russian blood with that name, a thought that makes me sit up with a start because now I see Dmitrij in my mind’s eye, strangling Lucille with his bare hands, the longhair and the suntanned guy in the background; it looks like they’re in a summer house, I glimpse an orchard and a gray sea in the distance. I get up, badly shaken, and reach for the bottle of gin. Shortly after, I hear the telephone ring, but I’m unable to speak. I read the display: Kirsten’s number, lit up in green.
Much later that night, stumbling out of Jagtstuen, a bar on Israels Plads where I’ve been drinking heavily for several hours and playing all the oldies on the jukebox, my first impulse is to wake Kirsten up. I want to kiss her. I want to touch her white, matte skin. Then I tell myself: No, no, don’t do it, don’t you dare do it. I manage to turn around and stagger down the hushed street toward the hotel. A rat scurries under a car. I fish around in my pockets for my cigarettes. It starts to rain, a light drizzle. Suddenly, a car roars up the street at high speed. I’m startled, automatically I step back. Whining brakes as it turns the corner at Turesensgade. The car is red. And slowly, through my foggy head, it dawns on me that it’s Dmitrij’s car. I try to get a grip on myself, to walk straight, I’m swaying from being so drunk. I hold onto a building and edge over to the corner. Back against the wall and carefully turn my head to see what’s going on. What’s going on is that Dmitrij and his dark-skinned helper are lifting something out of the trunk. It looks heavy. My heart skips a beat. Obviously they are in a rush, they act harried and nervous, constantly checking up and down the street. Dmitrij apparently tells his helper to hold the door; he lurches while carrying his heavy load into the hallway. The door slams. But his helper comes out again, they forgot to lock the car. He grabs something from the glove compartment. Holds it up, studies it intently for a moment. Dmitrij half-stifles his cry from an open hallway window: “Maks! Maks!” And then a bunch of Russian I don’t understand.
Maks puts the object in his pocket, and he whistles as he disappears into the building.
Silence. My head is buzzing. The rain is pouring down. I slide to a crouch and feel my stomach turn. Then I throw up and once more splatter myself. It takes me forever to stand up. After I finally find the hotel and my bed, I sleep in my clothes, a heavy, dreamless sleep. And wake up late Thursday morning with a remarkable headache and pain in my stomach. The usual thoughts: Where am I? Who am I?
So his name is Maks, the dark-skinned guy. That’s the first real thought I have after doubting if what I thought happened actually happened, being so wasted, and what did happen? Maksim, that’s what. I know that familial variation of the name from Brooklyn. Maksim. With the gun. I’m sure it was a gun he was staring at. Then I remember everything clearly. I stink of vomit. Oh God, I’d forgotten about that. I get up, take a shower, pick a clean shirt from the closet, find a plastic bag and stuff my dirty clothes inside. On my way out I drop it off at the reception desk to be washed.