Copenhagen Noir

Naturally, Aage Baldersen had understood that things wouldn’t be the same after the Liberation, but the first few years went very well. People still lacked everything that made life a bit more fun; the promised boatloads of bananas arrived a lot later than most had expected. But now he’d hit bottom, and while others saw light ahead, he stared into a growing darkness. And that’s really what surprised him the most: he’d lost his zing. It was as if all the fun had gone out of life. Once he’d been cheerful and energetic, now he was mostly surly, if not depressed.

Deep inside he knew what it was about: a lack of excitement. If he wanted he could get work-honest work-but he didn’t seem to have it in him, his slide had been too severe, and when it was all said and done, he had been the one left holding the bag. They bought him out with cash, and he’d been dumb enough to take it (who says no to a truckload of C-notes?), but when the paper money exchange came after the war, he was sunk-there was no way he could explain where all that money came from. He was so depressed that he couldn’t even enjoy the flames when all the bundles ended up in the furnace.

And this is where he’d ended up. Aage Baldersen opened the door to his apartment-room-that you walked directly into because it had no entryway, with the bathroom out in the hall. His shoes had dried enough from the climb up to the fifth floor that they left only small tracks on the floorboards when he walked in, yet he didn’t know what to do with his coat. He stood undecided for a moment, then he unbuttoned it and let it fall to the floor in a wet heap. He was soaked from the knees down.

He sat on one of the two dining room chairs that were the sum total of the apartment’s furniture and turned his eyes to the window facing the courtyard. One good thing the peace had brought: it wasn’t necessary to lower the blinds, the blackouts were over, the view was open. No longer busy with anything else, Baldersen now permitted himself to enjoy the free entertainment from a distance. Being broke prevented him from enjoying the pleasures to which he’d had such ample access in the good old days, but he took a certain dogged pleasure in seeing how people made fools of themselves in the illuminated rooms above and below, arguing, fighting, or hunching listlessly over dining room tables, and the bitches, yes, there were bitches too, and when he discovered that he had a view of two dykes who weren’t ashamed of performing most of the stunts their kind dreamed up, and in full public view, it both aroused and enraged him. A pair of cows like them should have been shipped south with the other perverts, but anyway he wouldn’t want to have missed them.

He grabbed the half-bottle of schnapps he kept on the shelf beside the kitchen sink. Although he had only cold running water, it didn’t really matter, since he still went to the public baths at Helgoland in the summer, and the water did a fine job of cooling off the liquor if it got too warm. He poured schnapps into a coffee cup and sat down at the table. Maybe it wasn’t just the building that smelled sour, maybe it was him. He took a shot of schnapps and directed his sight to the entertainment on the other side of the street. But not much was going on, and should Aage Baldersen be completely honest he would have to admit that it was a poor show; like the circus, it wasn’t worth shelling out money for.

The schnapps warmed him up, and a bit later he fell asleep. Naturally he was unaware of it, but in that crooked position, his elbow on the table and head in his hands and arm hanging, Aage Baldersen looked like a sculpture that could easily be entitled: “Tired Man.” That was what he was, and when a while later someone knocked on the door and he opened his eyes and felt a shudder race through him, he thought: Uhh, I never want to wake up again! But of course he woke up-after all, he was still alive.

The man he let in was about his own age, wet only on the outside of his black, shiny oilskin coat. A military belt bound it in front. Without being invited, he sat down opposite Baldersen on the other dining room chair.

“Hey, Baldy,” he said after a short pause, “how you doin’?”

Aage Baldersen said nothing, but he straightened up in his chair. The weariness that he had felt before was gone, replaced by a disgust as thick as pudding.

“I’ve got nothing,” he said.

“Excuse me,” the man replied, “I didn’t quite hear what you said. What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

The man laughed tersely. “So, that was what I heard.”

The silence lengthened between them, and only the faint reflection from the windows across the street created any sort of movement in the room.

“You know what you owe.” The man leaned forward. “You don’t walk off with that much money without there being certain… debts. Debts of honor, if you want to put it that way.”

“You want a schnapps?”

“No thanks, I don’t drink on the job.”