Breathwaite woke to a screaming from the courtyard. He knew who it was. Still groggy, he amused himself in the dark behind his eyelids, assembling the Winchester underlever locked away at the bottom of the antique chest in the hall, screwed on the telescopic sight, braced his elbow on the ledge of the back terrace, and targeted the screamer, a bawling red-faced four-year-old. Pick her off and her coddling self-loving yuppie parents, too. Bing bing bing. One, two, three. Thank you, Charlton Heston.

Assassinations complete, he slipped back down for another half hour of blessed nothing.

He had fallen asleep reading the night before and woke this time in a beam of rare October sunlight through the bedroom window of his Østerbro, East Bridge, apartment, book splayed open on his chest. Beside him in the antique four-poster bed, slight and blond as a Renaissance angel, Kirsten lay curled against his shoulder, delicate fists tucked up beneath her chin. Conscious of his own bulk, he studied the calm repose of her face, still mysterious to him after half a lifetime together. Who knows the mind of a woman? He imagined the silken feel of her skin to his fingertips. But he did not touch her.

Kirsten was a morning lover, even now, in her sixties, but despite the fact that he was younger, he had alas nothing left to offer in that department, morning, noon, or night. When he was a boy, hostage to desire, he used to pray to be free of it; now, it seemed, he was, and he would never have guessed how utterly it changed everything, how quintessential was appetite. Kis was five years older, but her appetite still flamed briskly on.

He slid from beneath the eiderdown and slippered softly across the broad-planked bedroom floor to the bath. Sitting to pee, he looked into the novel he’d been reading, at two lines he had underscored:
Choose carefully who you pretend to be, for that is who you will become.

Shoving the paperback into the wall rack beside the bowl, he spied an advertisement on the back of a magazine there—men in suits seated around a table—and remembered the meeting today. He had a premonition something might be coming.

He rose and washed his hands, crossed twenty meters of gleaming hardwood floor, an archipelago of antique carpets—from Iran, Afghanistan, Tibet—through the library with its ceiling-high shelves and gliding ladder, to the long, dark kitchen. He thrived in large rooms. These rooms. Broad floors, high ceilings, tall windows. Space. Without them he would smother. He brewed coffee and took it on the chilly, sunny fifth-floor balcony in his dark blue robe, a CD playing softly from the player inside: Cannonball Adderley, Miles Davis, “Autumn Leaves.” Moody variations of dead men celebrating death’s prelude.

He tugged the lapels of his robe closer to his throat. He was proud of the robe, an elegant one from Magasin du Nord, a gift from his colleagues at the Tank two years before, on the occasion of his twenty-fifth anniversary on the job. His secretary told him it had cost two thousand crowns, money contributed voluntarily, out of pocket, from the headquarters staff. They had lined the long hallway when he’d come in that day, unsuspecting, and when he’d stepped off the elevator he had proceeded through a gauntlet of them, waving paper Danish flags and cheering him. At the end of the gauntlet stood the new CEO, Martin Kampman, holding aloft between thumb and finger a minuscule paper flag on a toothpick, which he’d flicked back and forth at a twitch of his wrist, smiling—a small, horizontal smile bracketed between tiny verticals.

Coffee cheer lifted his brain. The day was immaculate. Vast, flawless, blue autumn sky above his head, yellow and red sunlit leaves on the treetops below, and golden sunlight warming the green-copper towers of Copenhagen, the adopted city that had become his home, where his sons were born, his grandchildren. This sunlight he recognized as the gift it was, the most beautiful autumn he had seen in his decades here, where sunlight and warmth could never be relied on. The days were already being chewed short to feed the lengthening nights as winter prepared to pipe in the darkness. Even
that
he had grown to love about the country that was now his home, the yearly share of death, later repaid to those who survived by the white nights of summer.

The moody, cozy notes of Miles Davis’s trumpet lulled him into an agreeable melancholy.

Curious, he thought, that there is no religious festival to celebrate autumn, no sacred autumnal ceremony. Harvest, of course, but that was end of summer, that was the feast of plenty, not the first smell of death. Not that the Danes had so very much religion to start with, though they
were
a Christian nation, their whole society built on its secular equivalent. And they had their ritual seasonal touchstones—Easter, Christmas, even Pentecost, Whitsunday, which they celebrated by drinking all night until the sun danced at dawn and them with it. But nothing for autumn. St. Morten’s Eve was a ritual-less feast of roast duck or goose. No. There were only the falling leaves to mark the secret reverence of accepted sorrow, reverent natural metaphor of inevitable death. Rake the leaves and strike a match, witness beauty consumed in flame, rising to the sky in smoke.

From the breast pocket of his robe he lifted a Don Tomás, smelled and wet it before striking a match to roast its nose in a cedar flame and filling his mouth with the fine Honduras smoke. His cheeks hollowed deeply as he drew on the cigar, then puffed out as he released the white smoke through pursed lips. He smiled at the Chinese archer on one knee in the corner of the stone balcony. He had purchased the sculpture for a song at a Bruun Rasmussen auction on the other side of Langelinie Bridge. Why an archer? he wondered. Why an antique kneeling Chinese archer on their balcony? He could find no other reason than that the bid had been so low and easy, the only piece of art they owned that he’d bought because it was cheap. All the other pieces—paintings, masks, sculptures—he had acquired because they would not give him peace until he did. Didn’t matter what they were worth in money. Fortunately, he and Kirsten—Kis—shared the same taste. They liked pieces that unsettled them or made them smile or, in the best case, both: an ironically ferocious Inuit mask; an enormous Gunleif oil of an angel sitting like a hen on a woman’s head; a cast-iron blue-and-red amphibian that looked like a cross between a snail and a pterodactyl, by the Finnish sculptor Heikki Virolainen; a three-foot ebony Senafu bird with a meter-long bill in profile; a ram’s head, tongue jutting downward while a rainbow bird pecked into its brain …

And an antique kneeling Chinese archer for a song? He chuckled at his own evident corruption, even of his taste for art.

“Why didn’t you wake me?” Kis asked softly from behind him, standing between the white-lacquered frames of the double glass doors.

He turned his smile to her. “Because I wanted you to miss me,
skat
.” Treasure. The word was not ironic.

“Don’t you come back to bed?” A tender question, tentative. She knew he had a problem but would not let him think she was not willing to help and reminded him discreetly from time to time that such problems passed, but also that problems should be addressed. Difference between men and women: Women wanted to talk about everything, even if doing so caused pain and confusion.

“Wouldn’t blame you if you took a lover,” he said.

“Such rubbish!” she growled, the way Danish women growl to indicate no-nonsense honesty. “Have you one of those meetings today? They always put you in a sour mood.”

“What a blessing this sun is,” he said, and warmed his eyes on her sweet aging blond face.

2. Harald Jaeger

Forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine … Due north from Breathwaite’s east-side windows, Harald Jaeger did push-ups on the dusty wall-to-wall of his Nørrebro, North Bridge, two-room. He entertained the fact that he was halfway to Friday to avoid thinking about the Wednesday morning management meeting he would soon have to suffer at the Tank. The Mumble Club.

Pleasure burned through his blood with the tensing and flexing of his biceps and triceps as he pressed up from and dipped down again to the dirty beige carpet, enjoying the gathering sweat on his brow, beneath his arms and T-shirt.

Demons lurked around the dim little room. He held them at bay with the steamy images assembling in his brain as he worked his blood and muscle, sculpting his arms, his abs, his pecs, feeling the radiation down to the cherished clockwork at the center of his universe.

Ninety-six, ninety-seven, ninety-eight … Finally, midway on the hundred and first, his arms gave out and he dropped to his belly, panting. He sneezed, nostrils tickled by the dust particles dancing in a beam of smeary light. Then he leapt to his feet, shoved a CD into the stereo, and threw himself into the rhythm of Manu Chao, dancing himself into a lather, stepping, dipping, leaping, twisting, until he collapsed into his armchair, gasping, halfway through “Welcome to Tijuana.”

Other books

The Duchess Hunt by Jennifer Haymore

Mistress of the Storm by M. L. Welsh

Calling Me Home by Louise Bay

The Cat Who Played Post Office by Lilian Jackson Braun

Venus in Pearls by John Maddox Roberts

The Dead Hand by David Hoffman

The Spurs of Iron Eyes (Iron Eyes Western #3) by Rory Black

Zectas Volume I: Enigmatic Village of Nanahuatl by John Nest

The Arrangement by Suzanne Forster

ROMANCE: BAD BOY ROMANCE: Mister Perfect: (Alpha Male Billionaire Football Star and BBW Pregnancy Romance)(A Best Friend's Brother Contemporary New Adult Sports Romantic Secret Baby Romance) by Evanna Stone