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.
Kris, stop!
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
Frederiksberg Allé
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 Allé.
The old allé 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 Helsingør, 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, Hovedbanegård, 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 Rødovre, 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. Jørgens Lake, I saw him.
Involuntarily I slowed down even more, my curiosity simply overwhelmed me. Was it really him? Erik Rützou 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 Rützou’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.
Knock-knock.
Rützou pounded on the window, chalk-white knuckles, a cuff link blinked, he stared inside the taxi, his clenched fist reminding me of a baby’s skull impatiently banging the glass; his slight overbite, which in some odd way served only to reinforce his beautiful, aristocratic face, and his black overcoat made him look like a drunken Count Dracula. Our eyes met, and time stood still. Erik Rützou’s gaze wandered, but he didn’t seem surprised to see me. In fact, he showed no sign of recognizing me. All he showed was that during the course of the evening he had consumed a considerable amount of alcohol, which in all likelihood he hadn’t been obliged to pay for. Champagne and tall drinks in steady streams, served by stunning, blue-eyed blondes. He had sat there in the enormous warm-hearted movie theater in one of the first rows, together with the other luminaries from the film’s cast and their spouses or “good friends,” clips from the nominees had been shown, the entire theater had applauded, the entire theater had held its collective breath while some highly paid stand-up comic convincingly fumbled with the envelope and finally screamed “ERIK RÜTZOU!!” and an avalanche of enthusiastic applause rang throughout the theater, Scandinavia’s largest, it felt as if the roof lifted like some gigantic manhole cover and he rose in feigned surprise, walked up on stage, gave a brief, incisive thank-you speech with a few jokes and wisecracks worked in, thanked the director and the rest of the crew, thanked his old private tutor who was sitting up in heaven drinking port, walked down off the stage, was cheek-kissed along the way by divine women and hugged by male colleagues, and sat down, beaming. Some people are simply born lucky.