Copenhagen Noir

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.