Copenhagen Noir Read online

  This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The translation of this volume is supported by the Danish National Arts Council’s Literature Committee.

  Published by Akashic Books

  © 2011 Akashic Books

  Series concept by Tim McLoughlin and Johnny Temple

  Copenhagen map by Aaron Petrovich

  eISBN-13: 978-1-617-75015-1

  ISBN-13: 978-1-936070-66-4

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2010922712

  All rights reserved

  Akashic Books

  PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  [email protected]

  www.akashicbooks.com

  ALSO IN THE AKASHIC NOIR SERIES:

  Baltimore Noir, edited by Laura Lippman

  Boston Noir, edited by Dennis Lehane

  Bronx Noir, edited by S.J. Rozan

  Brooklyn Noir, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth

  edited by Tim McLoughlin & Thomas Adcock

  Chicago Noir, edited by Neal Pollack

  D.C. Noir, edited by George Pelecanos

  D.C. Noir 2: The Classics, edited by George Pelecanos

  Delhi Noir (India), edited by Hirsh Sawhney

  Detroit Noir, edited by E.J. Olsen & John C. Hocking

  Dublin Noir (Ireland), edited by Ken Bruen

  Haiti Noir, edited by Edwidge Danticat

  Havana Noir (Cuba), edited by Achy Obejas

  Indian Country Noir, edited by Sarah Cortez & Liz Martínez

  Istanbul Noir (Turkey), edited by Mustafa Ziyalan & Amy Spangler

  Las Vegas Noir, edited by Jarret Keene & Todd James Pierce

  London Noir (England), edited by Cathi Unsworth

  Lone Star Noir, edited by Bobby Byrd & Johnny Byrd

  Los Angeles Noir, edited by Denise Hamilton

  Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Denise Hamilton

  Manhattan Noir, edited by Lawrence Block

  Manhattan Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Lawrence Block

  Mexico City Noir (Mexico), edited by Paco I. Taibo II

  Miami Noir, edited by Les Standiford

  Moscow Noir (Russia), edited by Natalia Smirnova & Julia Goumen

  New Orleans Noir, edited by Julie Smith

  Orange County Noir, edited by Gary Phillips

  Paris Noir (France), edited by Aurélien Masson

  Philadelphia Noir, edited by Carlin Romano

  Phoenix Noir, edited by Patrick Millikin

  Portland Noir, edited by Kevin Sampsell

  Queens Noir, edited by Robert Knightly

  Richmond Noir, edited by Andrew Blossom,

  Brian Castleberry & Tom De Haven

  Rome Noir (Italy), edited by Chiara Stangalino & Maxim Jakubowski

  San Francisco Noir, edited by Peter Maravelis

  San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Peter Maravelis

  Seattle Noir, edited by Curt Colbert

  Toronto Noir (Canada), edited by Janine Armin & Nathaniel G. Moore

  Trinidad Noir, edited by Lisa Allen-Agostini & Jeanne Mason

  Twin Cities Noir, edited by Julie Schaper & Steven Horwitz

  Wall Street Noir, edited by Peter Spiegelman

  FORTHCOMING:

  Barcelona Noir (Spain), edited by Adriana Lopez & Carmen Ospina

  Cape Cod Noir, edited by David L. Ulin

  Lagos Noir (Nigeria), edited by Chris Abani

  Mumbai Noir (India), edited by Altaf Tyrewala

  Pittsburgh Noir, edited by Kathleen George

  San Diego Noir, edited by Maryelizabeth Hart

  Venice Noir (Italy), edited by Maxim Jakubowski

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  PART I: (MEN AND) WOMEN

  NAJA MARIE AIDT Ørstedsparken

  Women in Copenhagen

  JONAS T. BENGTSSON Northwest

  One of the Rough Ones

  CHRISTIAN DORPH & SIMON PASTERNAK Vesterbro

  Australia

  SUSANNE STAUN City Center

  All I Want Is My Baby, Woah Woah, Woah Woah Woah Woah

  HELLE HELLE Vanløse

  A Fine Boy

  Part II: MAMON

  LENE KAABERBØL & AGNETE FRIIS Ørestad

  When the Time Came

  GEORG URSIN Frederiksberg

  Sleipner’s Assignment

  KLAUS RIFBJERG Amager

  Debt of Honor

  GRETELISE HOLM Istedgade

  When It’s Tough Out There

  Part III: CORPSES

  KRISTIAN LUNDBERG Malmø

  Savage City, Cruel City

  (Translated from Swedish by LONE THYGESEN BLECHER)

  KRISTINA STOLTZ Nørrebro

  The Elephant’s Tusks

  SEYIT ÖZTÜRK Valby

  The Booster Station

  BENN Q. HOLM Frederiksberg Allé

  The Great Actor

  GUNNAR STAALESEN Central Station

  Last Train from Central Station

  About the Contributors

  Copenhagen demands time.

  —Dan Turèll

  INTRODUCTION

  THE SEAMY SIDE OF MODERNISM

  The French word for black is currently an often (mis) used trendy word for irrational and uncontrollable crime, a melodramatic, spectacular, and thrilling intrigue in an entertaining story that begins well but ends badly. The word gained this interpretation in the postwar world of the 1940s, after the launch of a French series of hard-boiled books, “Série Noire,” written by American, English, and French authors, from Dashiell Hammett to Cornell Woolrich and Raymond Chandler, to Georges Simenon and Léo Malet. Black on black, death never gives credit and life is short and dirty, like a kid’s shirt. Yet, what does noir mean nowadays with regards to concept, style, and genre?

  Noir is the story of the fateful coincidence, the precarious absurdity and bitter nonchalance of life. It speaks of loss of control and lack of insight, of irrationality’s impact on what seems to make sense—the throw of the dice that didn’t win, to put it simply. The style is minimalistic, open, and terse. It attempts to describe an unpredictable calamity rather than any act of clear rationality. Capturing the murderer is neither what’s necessary nor important. Because noir is seldom interested in illuminating a valid truth or forming clarity, it rarely seeks a transparent understanding that it doesn’t believe in anyway. Noir is the crime genre’s bleak nostalgia and, at the same time, its unsentimental vision of modern times; without degenerating into cheap puritanism or bigoted abstinence, it often includes sexuality, and more in the light of being used destructively than as any romantic idealism. A noir story seldom has a happy ending. When it does happen, such as in Chandler’s Philip Marlowe books, it is with a bittersweet taste of compromise or bargaining. Life goes on with a wounded soul, and only that which is lost is eternal. Past, present, and future melt into one synchronous now, which cancels out every hope that times change and things will be better. As a famous title from a noir writer, Horace McCoy, puts it: kiss tomorrow goodbye, because nothing will be there at daybreak.

  Noir is disillusionment and melancholy in relation to the big city, the melting pot of modernism. Some classic noir stories do take place in the country, but the metropolis appears either as modernism’s revenge or as temptations fallen for in the past that now must be paid for; it often involves cold revenge, heated confrontation, old love, or as all three
at the same time and place.

  The most archetypical noir short story is Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers,” originally published in Scribner’s in 1927. Two hit men arrive in a country town to shoot a newcomer with a big-city past. It doesn’t happen, they don’t find him that day, but as the narration progresses, we readers know from reading between the lines that it is only a question of time before the killing takes place. Such is life in noir—you can’t avoid your fate; at the most you can delay it and hope that death comes quickly and relatively painlessly as the long sleep that we all must enter at some given point in our lives.

  Noir loves flight, ill-fated love, the cold avenger. You could say that Alexander Dumas’s classic novel of revenge from 1844, The Count of Monte Cristo, is the first noir novel, with its lengthy and cold-blooded reprisal that can be traced back to the main character’s disadvantaged, unfair, and virtually psychopathic past. Others identify Greek tragedy, with its gruesome destinies and lack of redeeming Providence, as the oldest forerunner of the genre.

  No matter. The important point is that noir only seems to operate within the crime genre. There is noir that merely touches occasionally on an actual crime story; Paul Auster’s novels about New York come to mind, but authors from other genres and other parts of the globe can also be included. Japan’s Haruki Murakami, England’s Ian McEwan, and Sweden’s Karin Alvtegen all can be said to create works resembling noir. The dark style does not require bodies, pathetic sex, or cover-tocover violence. More a clear literary, late-modernist, and existential sense that in the evil streets of the big city and dark suburbs is found the consummate experience of shock—the confrontation with the seamy side of modernism.

  Europe’s End and the Gateway to Scandinavia:

  Copenhagen As Noir

  Copenhagen: the Little Mermaid, H.C. Andersen, Søren Kierkegaard, and Karen Blixen, a big city that perhaps more than any other is the absolute capital, origin, and center of northern European romanticism of the 1800s. Denmark’s Copenhagen, with its ramparts and moats forming the shell of the city and suburbs, has retained a glint of back then, that world of yesterday. To be exact, the city’s archaic Middle Ages center, with the beautiful buildings, squares, and streets that tourists meet from their hotels, a comfortable inner circle with Tivoli as its midpoint and King’s Square its end. At one point our metropolis was presented as an idyllic, modest-sized big city, where police stopped traffic when a mother duck guided her ugly ducklings across the street populated by cars, bicycles, and streetcars. But naturally, and quite unfortunately, such is the case no longer. Copenhagen long ago abandoned its Sleeping Beauty slumber for a cosmopolitan night and day that never sleeps, neither in a good nor bad way. Four-wheel drive vehicles, limos, and expensive sports cars now sail down the boulevards and avenues that were once characterized by girls bicycling on dirt paths and healthy boys briskly walking to work or to girlfriends. Those times are gone forever.

  The main character of Naja Marie Aidt’s noir story, “Women in Copenhagen,” returns to the city after seventeen years and realizes that the place has become more multicultural, turbulent, and global than the Brooklyn where he lives. Everything is in flux, in a variety of colors. Gone is the provincial city appointed as capital; instead, one is confronted with a metropolis where the food is from the Middle East, the wine from California, the women from Africa, and the mafia from Russia. Mafia! A new word at these latitudes, where crime formerly took place among bands identified with city neighborhoods and regions. Beatings were bloody noses from a few punches, not like now with knifings and shotgun blasts in the gut and an unmarked grave out in the sticks or under the deep blue sea. Between the wars, in the 1930s, we in Denmark spoke of “white slavery,” poor women kidnapped to a life of prostitution in foreign brothels—today it’s called trafficking, and now we speak of the vile import of East European women. And moreover, we are indeed the last country in Scandinavia to criminalize the customer of such activity, the buying of a hooker.

  The short stories in Copenhagen Noir deal often with this phenomenon, the introduction of women from the outside—often the third world—to our own little den of capitalist lust, to abuse them. Our northern nation, where Europe ends and Scandinavia begins, and which time and again boasts of its romantic lifestyle and puritanical decency in song, in verses concerning our mellow nature, our hale and hearty men and gentle women. This anthology articulates with skill and resolve the dark side of our romantic identity depicted by our nineteenthcentury golden-age literature and contemporary hits on radio and TV, rhyming on love and pain. Here we see the modernist noir, linked to organized prostitution run by criminals from outside our borders. This is a different Copenhagen from what the still lifes suggest in tourist brochures.

  But Copenhagen is also something other than the mediumsized capital of the Danes. The Øresundsbro was finished June 1, 2000, connecting Denmark with Sweden—or perhaps more significantly, from a historic perspective, with the Swedish province of Skåne, the former Danish province lost in the mid-1600s after a number of catastrophic wars. We also lost the region’s capital city, Malmø, which was largely Danish and which, in the period after the Swedish annexation, still attempted to preserve its Danish character. The bridge to Malmø has not only stirred a renaissance for this “freedom movement”; it has also connected southern Sweden more closely to Copenhagen than to the country’s actual capital, beautiful Stockholm. Nowadays, Swedes/Skånings work in Copenhagen and Danes live in Malmø. The bridge has transformed Malmø into a large suburb of Copenhagen; generally speaking, our capital could be seen as a Manhattan to a Malmø that, via one of Europe’s longest bridges, has become a northern European Brooklyn! Therefore, it is natural that the Swedish author Kristian Lundberg, who lives in Malmø, is included in this anthology, with a story about his hero, the alcoholic Catholic policeman Nils Forsberg. Lundberg sees Copenhagen as the end of the rainbow, on the other side of the bridge, a big city that in many ways has put Malmø in a different perspective, different from its status as a big Swedish city.

  But Copenhagen was once not only the Danish capital. The city was, in fact, the capital of Norway for four hundred years, much longer than Norway’s present one, Oslo. Norway justifiably wrested its independence from Denmark in 1814, but long afterward, even to the present day, Norwegians have held a nostalgic and “metropolitan” love for Copenhagen, Europe’s end and the gateway to Scandinavia. But for Norwegians it must actually be the opposite: for them Copenhagen must still be the gateway to Europe, for the cultural bonds are strong and persistent via history, the royalty, and, in particular, language, culture, and literature. Danes and Norwegians are like close relatives who meet affectionately after a happy divorce, who get along very well. Norway’s greatest crime writer, Gunnar Staalesen from Bergen, naturally sends his hero detective, the sensitive yet hard-boiled Varg Veum, on a mission to Copenhagen. As far back as in one of his first detective novels, Sleeping Beauty from 1980, Varg Veum is at work in the center of Copenhagen, in the district that is more or less red-light, stretching from Central Station toward the “mean streets” where gangsters find their apprentices and hookers their customers. Therefore, it is fitting that this Norwegian author has a place in an anthology about crime and punishment in Norway’s old capital, where Scandinavia begins and ends in a metropolis for the entire region.

  All the short stories in Copenhagen Noir are about meaninglessness, violence, and murder in various districts of the city. Written for the most part by Copenhageners, but also by authors—Helle Helle, Susanne Staun, and Gretelise Holm—who now live in the provinces but have spent a part of their lives in the Queen’s city, having absorbed the city and never completely abandoned it. Denmark’s celebrated author from the island of Amager (where the Øresundsbro begins), Klaus Rifbjerg, is of course included, with a historical noir story from that great island, an assimilated part of the capital. But the collection also includes inhabitants of ethnic backgrounds from outside the shadow of the Danish flag. Com
mon for all the writers is a love for Copenhagen and for the dark story of coincidence and necessity, the good and bad luck of humans. In a metropolis that both has a style of its own yet also resembles the other black pearls of cities across the globe: New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Berlin. Enjoy.

  Bo Tao Michaëlis

  Copenhagen, Denmark

  October 2010

  PART I

  (MEN AND) WOMEN

  WOMEN IN COPENHAGEN

  BY NAJA MARIE AIDT

  Ørstedsparken

  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.