After standing in the passageway on Turesensgade for almost two hours (freezing with a rumbling stomach), Dmitrij, Maks, and the suntanned man come outside and get in the red car. A Mazda. They take off and turn right at Nansensgade. I realize this is my chance. After a few minutes, and just as before, a mother with a baby on her arm opens the front door and I duck inside. It’s one o’clock. People are at work, the hallway is quiet. The door is not hard to open. I use my pocketknife. I’m inside.
Empty vodka and beer bottles, full ashtrays. A horribly sweet, nauseating smell. Bedroom, living room, a tiny bathroom. An unmade double bed and a few mattresses on the floor. In the kitchen, a pile of dirty dishes, banana flies, pizza boxes, overflowing trash bags. I walk through the hall. I catch sight of myself in the mirror. I look like hell. I notice a kid’s drawing behind me, in a frame. I turn around. Lucille, 9 years old, written in a clumsy child’s hand. The drawing is a house with father, mother, and girl standing in front on the steps. Beside the house, a big lion, mouth wide open. Meticulously drawn flowers and butterflies. A shining sun, a cloud, a bird. In the lower left-hand corner, an odd little troll-like figure with fangs and horns. The drawing hangs crooked on the wall. A lump rises in my throat. Into the living room again. Behind some stacked chairs is the bundle they carried up last night. Packed in black sacks and heavily taped. I take a deep breath and kneel down. I manage to carefully strip off the tape in one spot. I peel the plastic sacks apart from each other, a small opening appears. A dead hand. A woman’s hand, already stiff and blue. A cheap ring with a fake stone of green glass on her ring finger. But it’s not Lucille’s hand. The skin is dark. I try to think quickly and clearly. I hear my teeth chattering. It must be one of the girls from Sydhavnen. Maybe even the one Maks smacked around. The stench is now unbearable. My hands shake as I tape it back up again, glance behind me, and see that I left the pocketknife on the floor beside the sacks; I pick it up and get out of there. My back is wet from a cold sweat. I wrestle with the door. Drop the pocketknife, finally tumble down the stairs. Four black men are waiting in the hallway, one is sitting on the steps. He doesn’t move as I pass by. I feign indifference. Say hello. One of the men standing there nods, but his expression doesn’t change. And when I reach the street and hurry off toward Ørstedsparken, the red Mazda returns. I crouch behind a street workers’ tent. The three Russians jump out of the car and are met by the four black men stepping out onto the street. Before I know it, the suntanned man has been knifed in the gut. He gets stabbed again and again. He slides down to the sidewalk. Dmitrij hammers his fist into the jaw of one of the four, Maks is fighting another one and kicks him in the groin, the man doubles over. No one makes a sound. Blood flows on the sidewalk, down into the gutter, the gray asphalt turns black. The knife is knocked out of the hand of the man who stabbed the Russian. Maks pulls out a gun. But Dmitrij gestures to him: don’t shoot. The knifer and his three partners jump into a black car with tinted windows and drive away. Dmitrij picks the knife up, pockets it, he and Maks carry the suntanned man, possibly dead, to the car and into the backseat, they take off-and they’re gone. Only now I hear myself, my breath, fluty, mournful, raspy. I’m paralyzed from fright and have no idea what to do to get myself up and out of here, away from this crime scene. I think: What would have happened if the four men had barged in on me in the apartment? I swallow. They could just as well have. Why didn’t they?
Later I sit on a doorstep and drink coffee, while doing my best to consume a pitifully dry sandwich, turkey and mayonnaise. All I think about now is the hand in the sack. The body lying by itself back in the apartment, what will they do with that? Why haven’t they gotten rid of it? The relief that it wasn’t Lucille doesn’t hit me until late in the day. At that moment I grieve for the unknown dead girl. And it is clear to me that it must be some sort of mafia war going on here. The Russians versus the Gambian slavers. The Russians are presumably fighting for a share of the market. And now they’ve shown their muscle by killing one of the enemy’s girls. That’s my conclusion. At midnight something finally shows up on Internet news. A paragraph about an unidentified white male, dumped on the ground outside the emergency room at Bispebjerg Hospital, catches my attention. He has suffered multiple stab wounds and is in critical condition. Police are searching for family or others who know him. They are also requesting any information, if anyone has seen or heard anything, that could aid in clearing up this case. A description of the man. I turn the computer off. Lie on the bed. The water pipes sigh. Someone nearby is listening to Lou Reed. And then I think: It wasn’t her. It wasn’t Lucille. I nod off; all night long I’m tormented by troubled dreams and I wake at daybreak with a start, my body tense and stiff. I get up and drink some water. Get dressed and go out in the sleeping, duskgray city. It’s now Friday.
Isabel was no beauty queen, but she had a warmth that was special. Something open, generous, overwhelmingly loving. That’s what I fell for. And that’s what later on I punished her for. She was so easily hurt, she was innocent, she didn’t understand my moodiness. Which in a way came about because I felt I was a worse, less giving person than she was. Which also happens to be true. I confused her, I played funny games, as Joe would say. When I met Isabel, Lucille had just turned three. She was trusting and her speech wasn’t yet fully developed-she could say idiot in Danish, and Salut and Je suis une très très grande fille. In the beginning I left her to Isabel. But that changed. I was the one who took her to school on her first day. Who biked with her across the commons on weekends, who taught her how to drink soda without getting it up her nose. And who told her stories at night when she lay in her bed. About small creatures with horns and fangs. I was also the one who in the end failed her and disappeared. The sense of Isabel’s sleeping body close to mine is sometimes so strong and real that I wake up in the night thinking she is there, though I still don’t believe she was the love of my life. Which has yet to happen for me. But her presence. Her being there and her ability to create-life, a kind of safeness, safe and sound. I wonder if Lucille looks like her. If her laughter is as bright as her mother’s. Not that there is much to laugh about just now, when I’m not even sure that she can laugh. I walk along the lakes toward Vesterbro. Past Hovedbanegården, the main station, where the pushers hang out, and down Istedgade, the porn street. An addict has just shot up in a basement stairwell. He falls forward. The last drunks stagger noisily down the street. In the gray dawn I see a group of young black women. They are huddled together on a corner, they laugh and talk loudly to each other in their native language. They look young and healthy, they don’t look like whores. But they are at the bottom of the pecking order and come out only after the other prostitutes have gone home. They get the worst customers. All the scum. The violent, the drunk, the sick. A car pulls up to the group and stops. Negotiations take place through the front windshield. A fat hand points at the girl it wants. She gets in the backseat. For a moment the group is silent. Then I recognize one of the four men from the fight last night on Turesensgade, he shows up all of a sudden. His jaw is swollen and cut. He speaks harshly to the girls and apparently orders them to spread out, and so they do, immediately. It looks sad: now each one of them is alone on this miserable November morning in a foreign country. I walk on up toward Halmtorvet and shuffle past Tivoli and Rådhuspladsen, the town hall square, cut through Ørstedsparken where there is still some action, then up Gothersgade and Bartholinsgade. I stop at the front lawn of the Kommunehospital, the old district hospital. I’ve bought coffee and warm croissants, I find a bench and rest. Moisture drips from the trees. Windows gradually begin to light up, people awaken; I notice that the rosebuds have been ruined by frost, that a fox sneaks through the bushes, I hear birds chirping and the wind rustling shriveled leaves. I came here often with Lucille, we played ball. I taught her how to catch and she was furious at me every time she missed. She stomped the ground and hid under the snowberry bushes. They’re still here, the bushes, with their perfectly succulent white and pink berries. It’s nine o’clock. I try to take stock of the situation. The body in the sack, the wounded Russian. A possible war over prostitution. And the hash traffic that might be much more than just that. But nothing leads me to Lucille. Nothing. I consider whether I should go to the police with my information. But they weren’t exactly helpful before. Besides, they have enough to keep busy elsewhere in the city; there are gang wars and shootings in Nørrebro again. I don’t know what to do. I fumble around in my pocket for my phone and call Kirsten.