Copenhagen Noir by Bo Tao Michaelis

Author:Bo Tao Michaelis
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: 9781617750151
Publisher: Akashic Books
Published: 2010-01-02T06:00:00+00:00

DEBT OF HONOR

BY KLAUS RIFBJERG

Amager

The wind drove the rain in over the market’s flat roof in gusts, and the sidewalk from Elbagade to Parmagade floated. The streetlights still retained some of their half-blind poverty from during the war, though by now it had been several years since the last Prussian had dragged his boots and himself southward. But maybe it was just his imagination, maybe it was just his inner light, turned down so low that it resembled a pilot light. Maybe that was it, that he, Aage Baldersen, was on pilot light.

He pulled up his coat collar and felt its clammy chill against his neck hair. Despite the blackouts and everything else, there had been more action during what some called the evil years, but what he thought of as the good years. There had been lots to do, and while most felt something was left missing when the police were nabbed on September 19, 1944, and sent to Germany, others—he included—felt a certain relief. Not because he was a German sympathizer, but no one would deny that it had taken a certain amount of pressure off the underworld when the law had been removed in one fell swoop and later replaced by the so-called Vagtværn, the private guard whose effectiveness in relation to the police was on the scale of a teaspoon to an excavation crane.

Someone had thrown a few snipped-up Christmas trees on the bare ground by the depot. Their limbs shook hysterically in the wind gusts and were mirrored in the large puddles formed by the rain. Disgruntled, Aage Baldersen blew out through his nose. Right now there was only mud and slush, but occasionally during the summer a circus slapped its tents up on the lot, and once, having nothing to do that day, he’d been stupid enough to buy a ticket for a show that should have had to pay its audience, that’s how bad it was. One of the clowns was an obese former half of a comedy duo who’d had some success in film. Now he looked like a worn-out punching bag and was just as funny as one.

Parmagade stretched out before him into the horizon. The blocks towered up on both sides of the street, and the vanishing point was anybody’s guess in the drizzly mist. But Baldersen knew very well what was hidden out east; back when the five-room apartment had a porcelain washbasin (women painted on it) and real booze and wasn’t a dump like now, he had bicycled the route many times, past the hospital and along Italiensvej and down to the beach and public baths that had proven to be a convenient meeting place when the bosses decided how the work should be divided. Nobody was going to frisk someone in their birthday suit!

Those days had been great in a lot of ways, and he didn’t even have to close his eyes to picture them. There had been a shortage of everything, but if you could get hold of a product in short supply it could be sold at a high price.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.