Copenhagen Noir

If you ever come to Copenhagen and ride into town from the airport on a rainy, dark November evening, the taxi driver will doubtless take the harbor road and you will travel through residential neighborhoods and abandoned areas with old factories where the wind rattles the windows, and you will see the lights from across the sound in Sweden and be puzzled at how quiet and deserted it is here. You have arrived in Scandinavia. You have just entered a long, bitter winter. Here there are no free rides. Here you are left to your own fate. The taxi driver listens to Arabian pop music and talks on the phone. The taxi meter ticks. You get a glimpse of a young woman with blond hair down her back, standing alone on a street corner, apparently wondering which way to go. You see black water sloshing in the canals and lights from bars and pubs. Noisy groups of drunk kids popping out of the dark with beer in plastic bags; their glowing cigarettes. And suddenly you’ve arrived. The driver runs your credit card through the machine and sends you out in the rain. You’re here.

That’s how it was for me when I arrived in Copenhagen to clear up a painful situation. November. Rain. Wind. The low sky. A sense of desolation. I had lived in Brooklyn so long that I felt like a stranger. My Danish was rusty. My parents long dead and gone. But Lucille was there. Or was she? That was the question.

The night clerk glances at me and hands me a heavy key. I say that I don’t know how long I’m staying; he doesn’t raise an eyebrow but sends me up to the third floor, and I walk through a hallway that has seen better days and let myself into room 304. A bed, a desk, a chair. A bathroom with a leaky faucet. The raw, damp cold that characterizes Denmark in the winter. I push the curtain open and look down at the back courtyard. Trash cans, overturned bicycles. A glimpse of night sky, a full, misty moon. But no stars. I hang my shirts in the closet. Wash my hands and take a drink of cold water from the faucet. I need a shave. I lie down on the bed, float around a moment in the confused but weightless condition just before sleep-and then darkness; it’s been a long time since I’ve had any sleep and I desperately need it. I see Lucille clearly in my dreams. Her narrow, freckled face, her sparkling blue eyes. The birthmark on her forehead. The smooth, light-colored hair, lying like a helmet on her head. She smiles. She is missing one of her front teeth. I see Lucille as the child she was a long time ago. And I wake up bathed in sweat and grope around for the clock. It’s three a.m. A feeling of guilt, and something vague, unpleasant. I turn over. But I can’t sleep. I switch on the bedside lamp and sit up. Light a cigarette. And then it sweeps through me, as it so often has. The memories from this city. Isabel, Lucille’s mother, her warm breath in my ear. Her breasts and silky, meaty thighs. The unmistakable French accent that enhanced whatever she said, turned it into something special. The image of her, there in the doorway with Lucille standing behind like a shadow, that day I left her. That day I left them. We’d had soup and drunk some wine. Isabel grabbed my hand under the table. But I had already made up my mind. Now it’s hard for me to understand why. Because that little bit of happiness we truly did find now and then, I never captured again; there’s been nothing but quick stopovers in sleazy rooms with burned-out, sad women, the brief physical satisfaction that kind of sex provides, a bad taste in my mouth. I wanted to be free and see the world, instead I prowled around like a caged animal; the world isn’t big enough for someone so restless that he searches relentlessly, without a clue to what he is looking for.

I see Lucille, like a shadow behind her mother. I hear the front door slam behind me. I haven’t seen her since. At one point I heard in a roundabout way that Isabel had died, but I didn’t write Lucille, didn’t even send a funeral wreath. Suddenly I got an e-mail from her in September, and that’s when I knew I had to find her. If she’s still alive. I listen to the wind, a few cats hissing and howling in the courtyard, the faint sound of groaning intercourse from somewhere in the building. If she’s still alive.