The House That Jack Built (21 page)

Chapter 45

“I
'm just going
to buy some cigarettes.” Lars got out, handed her the keys. “It will only take a minute.”

Sanne nodded, locked the car. Lars ran into the corner store at number 4. It was the young guy behind the counter again.

“Two twenty packs of King's Blue?” he asked. The pimples quivered on his chin.

Lars nodded. Then he thought about the empty cupboards upstairs. “Hey, do you sell wine?”

“Sure, but don't you think you should go to Føtex instead? If she's the one you're taking upstairs, I don't think our booze is good enough.” He laughed.

Lars's gaze wandered. Sanne stood on the sidewalk, waved at him.

“That's not — oh, to hell with it. Give me the best bottle you've got.”

“Sure. This one, I guess.” The guy placed a bottle on the counter next to the two packs of cigarettes. Lars paid without looking at the label.

Sanne raised an eyebrow when he came out of the store. “Are we having wine?”

“If you feel like it. I can take your car in tomorrow.” His cheeks warmed. “I didn't mean —”

She laughed. He liked it when she laughed.

“Just one glass,” she said.

They walked up the stairs. Lars put the key in the lock, said a little prayer that Maria hadn't left the apartment in a state of disaster, and then turned around.

“I have literally just moved in,” he apologized, but it didn't look like Maria had left behind a big mess. Both the bathroom and the kitchen looked presentable.

Sanne sat down on the sofa, while Lars fetched two glasses from the kitchen and opened the bottle of wine. Sanne looked around the living room.

“How's it going?” she asked. “With the divorce, I mean?”

“Well, we speak as little as possible. It's best like that.”

“And Ulrik?”

“I avoid him.” He poured them both a glass. He considered for a moment whether he should tell her about the problems selling the house. But there were only a few subjects more boring than property sales and equity. Instead, he raised his glass.

“Cheers.”

“Cheers.” Sanne grimaced as she took a sip. “Well, it's not exactly a Chateau L'Évangile.”

“A what?”

“Chateau l'Évangile. A wine from Pomerol, Bordeaux. It's close to Pétrus. Do you know it?”

Lars shook his head. Sanne took another sip.

“It's not that bad,” she said. Then she burst out laughing.

“Are you some kind of wine expert?”

“Martin would certainly like to be. He's always reading about it on the Internet. But I haven't tried that one. The name just stuck.” She dried her eyes, put the glass down, and looked at him. “Just let me know if you don't want to talk about it. About the complaint.”

Lars shrugged. “Ask away.”

“Well, I don't understand . . . you and Ulrik . . .” She hesitated. “You're — adversaries. But what's the deal with this complaint? Kim A doesn't have anything to do with you and Ulrik, does he?”

Lars was biting his cheek, thinking. The alcohol burned in his mouth.

“It's a long story. It goes back nearly twenty years.”

Sanne looked at him, waited. He sighed.

“In 1993, both Ulrik and I had graduated from the police academy and started probationer duty at Station One.
On May 18,
after the referendum on the Maastricht Treaty for the European Community, we were on our usual patrol downtown. This was early in the evening, mind you, before our colleagues fired into the demonstration. As the evening wore on we realized it was getting
more and more violent on Nørrebro, but we were told to keep to this side of the lakes, by the intersection at Frederiksborggade and Nørre Farimagsgade. Just when the fighting was at its worst, a riot police officer, Kim A, comes running toward us with someone in handcuffs. He opens the door, practically throws the young guy into the back, and starts searching him and swearing at him, saying all sorts of nasty things. The other guy is pretty wound up too and starts shouting back. Ulrik tries to calm them down. Kim A starts pushing the guy and he pushes back. All of a sudden, Kim A punches him in the stomach. He doubles up right there in the back seat, gasping for air. I looked at Kim A in the rear-view mirror and told him that if he laid another hand on him, I'd drive us straight to the station and report him for assault. You should have seen his face. Then Ulrik asked what the guy was being arrested for. Kim A mumbled something, but kept staring at me in the rearview mirror.”

“Then what happened?”

“He let the guy go. And then he just sat there. For two minutes, staring me down. After that he got out of the car and left, out toward Nørrebro.” Lars shrugged. “For a few months, he tried to get the better of me. But Ulrik had seen everything, so he risked being reported for assault. There's been bad blood ever since. This is the first time Kim A's worked on an investigation that I'm leading. It was bound to go wrong. On the other hand, you would think that after nearly twenty years . . .”

Sanne was looking out the window. “In Kolding, some of the usual suspects occasionally get a once-over in a patrol car. Not everyone does it — I have never taken part. But I know it happens. And generally, they deserve it.”

“Maybe I see it from a different perspective.”

“What do you mean?”

Lars hesitated. Sooner or later she would find out. She might as well hear it from him. “Before I joined the force, when I was in high school, I was a punk. This was just at the beginning of the squatter's movement. I helped occupy a few houses.”

The glass rattled as Sanne set it down on the table.

“Easy.” He put his hands up, tried laughing. “I haven't thrown stones or dropped toilets out of windows or anything.”

She looked him in the eyes, held his gaze for a long time. “Tell me.”

It was in the 1980s. The nuclear threat, the economical ruptures following the oil crisis in the 1970s, youth unemployment. There was nothing to do if you couldn't quite bring yourself to conform. Years earlier, the first punks had proven that it was possible to start a movement, create your own scene. It started out on Nørrebro, before Lars was old enough to participate. First an abandoned bread factory, then a derelict, empty factory that in happier days had produced bicycle tires — he'd read about the movement in the papers, heard it on the radio. His mom encouraged him to participate, to rebel. But he had no ideology, no political conscience, only a vague need for something to happen, though he did not know what. It was more out of defiance that he was attracted to the activity and vibe around the young punks and squatters. Something was happening here; people were trying to get an alternative scene going, something untainted by the adults' eternal ideological trench warfare. There was colour, life, parties. There was no violence back then either, nobody threw stones or Molotov cocktails. It was just a group of rootless kids who wanted something different. And then there was the music: wild and intense; hard, fast, and frenetic. Beautiful as a rock slide and filled with the poetry of destruction. It tore away the dust and the haze that numbed the senses, liberated the mind and exposed the bleeding flesh. He had heard the punk band Sods on the radio, and another that called themselves Bollocks. And then there was Ballet Mécanique. And Kliché.

At the end of October 1981, he read about a demonstration for a youth house. It was a dark day. Heavy grey clouds were suspended above the flatbed truck that was being used as a makeshift stage. It looked so small in front of the enormous City Hall. A trio with short hair and leather jackets was playing hardcore punk. The wind hurled the sounds back and forth across the large open square. A number 6 bus pulled into the square from Vesterbrogade, and the passengers were staring thunderstruck at the motley crowd shuddering in front of City Hall. It had been announced that the demonstrators would walk to Nørrebro, but when the punk band finished their set, instructions were shouted into megaphones for people to follow those in the front. The crowd started moving, picking up speed, and suddenly everyone sprinted down Vesterbrogade. The police officers assigned to monitor the demonstration were caught completely off guard; they couldn't keep up. Several hundred people tore down one of the widest and busiest streets in Copenhagen.

Lars found himself more or less in the middle of the crowd, his legs pumping. He was filled with a total sense of freedom. Everything inside him was bursting with the knowledge that he was doing something, that he was a part of something. The leaders of the demonstration had secretly planned for the demonstration to occupy the old shelter for the homeless, Abel Cathrines Stiftelse, on Abel Cathrines Gade. They'd even arranged to have ladders there so people could climb in through the second-storey windows. That night was a party, an intoxicating collective of colours, music, and people. Lars blissfully jumped from group to group, had a few drinks here, took a drag on a joint there. Suddenly he found himself in the corner of a small room with a pretty redhead. The music and the voices faded into dull blasts from a distant world. They kissed hard and awkwardly, their hands wandering over each other's clothes. But the restless energy tore him away, kept him moving aimlessly around the building, then out into the neon-illuminated night. Whatever happened to the girl, he never found out; he never saw her again. But he frequently returned to the occupied house to see concerts by ADS and Under For.

Lars stubbed out his King's in the ashtray, followed the smoke that rose up toward the ceiling in lazy billows. Outside the twilight was about to lapse into night.

Sanne was silent, her face was hidden in the shadows.

“The point,” he said, trying to catch her eyes, “is that during the entire occupation there was not a single confrontation with the police and everyone left the building voluntarily several months later. But to this day there's still bad blood between the police and the squatters.”

Sanne blinked, drank a little of her wine. It was clear that she had difficulty understanding him, but she tried.

“Does Kim A know about all of this?”

“I don't know.” Lars shook his head. “But it wouldn't surprise me if he had ploughed through all the records to find something on me.”

Sanne nodded, rubbing her temples. “But if you didn't do anything then surely you're not in the police records?”

He smiled indulgently.

Sanne tried to laugh. “A police officer with a past as an anarchist? There's a first for everything.”

“Anarchist? I was a punk and a bit on the fringes when it all began,” he said. “At night, I went home to my mom and did my homework. That's not very rebellious, is it? But I'm glad you can laugh at it.” He took his glass, emptied it, and grabbed the bottle.

“More Chateau l'Évangile?”

“You're out of your mind.” She laughed, held out her glass. “How did you end up joining the police then?”

Lars poured more wine for both of them, took his glass, and swirled it around.

“Yes, why did I? After the occupation of the building called Allotria — you've heard about that, right?”

Sanne nodded. “I was born that year, but of course I've heard about it. Squatters digging a tunnel under the street and leaving the house under the very boots of our colleagues.”

Lars shook his head, smiled. “Well, everything started getting more violent, then. You've heard about toilets being thrown at the police from the windows of occupied buildings, Molotov cocktails . . . When that started, I pulled out. I'd started playing music and spent a lot of time on that.” Lars took an almost imperceptible pause. He'd revealed enough already; better to slam the door shut now. “I moved to New York, lived with my dad for a year — went to eleventh grade in a high school over there. I came home, was called to the conscription board when I finished high school and hoped I'd get out of the army. But there was really no way of getting around it.”

“You could have been a conscientious objector?”

“That's what my mom said too. She was furious. But I was tired of the alternative scene. I was way too stoned all the time. So the military became an easy way out, a clean break. And when I'd completed my service, a job with the police didn't seem like such a big leap.”

Sanne nodded, pulled her feet up under her, and looked at him above her glass. “Have you got a spare cigarette?”

Lars lit her cigarette. The ember pulsated in the darkness between them, lit up her eyes. Her pupils were large, burning into his.

Outside, an S-train zipped into the station. Farther away, the cars roared down Nørrebrogade. The Ring Café was open now; they could hear shouting and bottles clattering. They sat close on the low sofa.

“What was that about work? In the car . . .”

Sanne shook her head, put a finger to her lip. “Shh. Not now.”

He looked at her, almost as if in a trance. Her face drew closer. The cigarette smoke rose from her hand. The front door opened in the hallway below, and they heard steps shuffling on the staircase. Dark eyes with a little too much makeup burned into his; her tongue carefully slipped out and wet her lip. He was just about to say something, when her lips touched his. A flash of skin and light.

His head began dancing in triple time. He opened his mouth, kissed her back, and closed his eyes.

Then the door slammed in the hall, and a sobbing filled the apartment. Sanne shot back on the sofa, dropping the cigarette. They both dove to the floor, searching for it. Maria stepped into the living room, her face grimy from smudged makeup. She was shaking.

“Maria, what happened?” He was up, his arms around her before the sentence was finished. Sanne had found the cigarette and got back on the sofa, pushing her hair back. Maria snuggled up to him.

“What happened?” he asked again.