Last Train to Helsingør Page 2
Since then the Polyphon had passed through five owners, four of whom had supposedly died in accidents after playing it. The sixth, Oscar Persson, had kept it in a locked cabinet and never touched it, or so he had claimed.
No doubt the story was good publicity for the auction house, Verner thought to himself. But whatever anyone said, the Polyphon had not wrenched the chandelier free from the ceiling, nor struck a match and set fire to the house. It was not bad luck that killed people, but lack of care.
When, finally, the Polyphon was wheeled in front of the auctioneer, Verner had to concentrate hard not to leap up and shout with both hands in the air. In the hush that had fallen over the room, his heart was a booming drum.
As tall as a man, the top of the Polyphon was crafted in the style of a fairy-tale castle with columns and turrets and tiny windows and doors. In the centre, behind glass, sat a perforated steel disc, and on the bottom panel an exquisite painting showed a stretch of the Danube with a wooded bank, a white castle and snow-capped mountains just visible in the distance.
There were other bidders, but in the end they must have sensed that Verner would have kept raising his hand until everyone had left and the lights had been switched off, for one by one they folded, shaking their heads.
Finally the auctioneer pointed at Verner and dropped his gavel hard, and there was a gasp around the room.
As he put on his fur hat and left, Verner noticed two people get up and follow him. In the vestibule, he turned around to be blinded by a flash.
‘Are you concerned by the curse, Mr Borg? Will you be playing the music box?’
Verner didn’t normally speak to reporters, but on this occasion he was happy to make an exception.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I shall play it and I shall enjoy it, and you shall see there is no such thing as a curse, only silly stories.’
It wasn’t until he had left the building and sat in his car outside that he permitted himself the tiniest of smiles.
It was a whole twenty-four hours before the Polyphon could be delivered, and the waiting was sheer agony.
Sleepless, he got out of bed and walked through his apartment and stood by the window to look out at the city. Far below him, Sortedamsøen lay like a black mirror, ringed by street lights. Somewhere out there, the Polyphon would be standing in a dark warehouse, with a label with his name on it, and the thought of it made his heart flutter.
Twice he had telephoned the auction house to make sure they had received the money. And three times he had called the delivery people to make sure they had the correct address. So much could go wrong and Verner never left anything to chance.
To calm himself, he inspected his collection room to make sure everything was in place.
He had had a special display case built in solid oak, taking up one entire wall. Each of the more than one hundred compartments held an antique music box, from the tiniest French pocket watch to a large carousel, which had once stood in a child’s bedroom in Geneva.
Verner had spent the whole day climbing up and down a ladder to dust the shelves and polish the music boxes, taking each one down and playing it before putting it back and locking it behind its glass door. Now, standing on the floor, bathed in light from an unusually bright moon, he reached for the first piece he had been given as a boy, a ballerina in a gold enamel case no bigger than a matchbox, twirling in front of a mirror. The mechanism still worked when he turned the key.
As the tiny scroll wound its way through its halting rendition of the theme from Swan Lake, he held the box up in front of his face, imagining that he was a giant looking in through the window, his huge eye framed in the mirror behind the dancing girl.
There was only one space left in the display, a large compartment on a raised podium at the centre. All these years it had stood empty, waiting for him to buy the Polyphon and complete his collection.
The next morning, he was dressed and out of the apartment before eight, stamping his feet on the icy pavement and peering down the road for the van. It was after nine – and he had been back up to the apartment twice to phone the delivery people – by the time it finally arrived.
‘For God’s sake, be careful. That thing is irreplaceable,’ he said to the men as they struggled out of the van with the music box, which was wrapped in padding and plastic and fixed to a pallet.
He saw the men exchange a look as he ran ahead of them and opened the doors, telling them to mind the loose tile in the lobby and keep the music box upright and take care that their fingers didn’t slip on the plastic.
The Polyphon was too big to fit in the lift, so they had to haul it up the stairs on a trolley. Verner felt a churning sensation in his stomach every time they cleared a step, setting off a faint tinkle inside the package. It took the two men almost an hour to reach the fifth floor.
Verner watched as they peeled off the wrapping, anxious for a moment that it should turn out to be a different object altogether, but in the end, there it was, the Schönwald Polyphon, smelling of furniture polish and cigars.
He made the men wear gloves as slowly they lifted the music box into place in its compartment in the display cabinet. It fitted perfectly, Verner was delighted to see, as though it had been there always.
When the men had left, he locked and bolted the front door. In the collection room, he closed the curtains and switched off all the lamps, leaving only the display cabinet brightly lit.
Then he got his best armchair and placed it on the Persian rug in the middle of the room, facing the Polyphon. He put a small side table next to the chair and fetched a decanter of Cognac and a crystal tumbler to place on it.
With a soft cloth, he gently polished the Polyphon, running his hands over the distant mountains and the broad-flowing river, before bending down and looking inside the little windows and doors.
Finally, with trembling hands, he reached into the cabinet and picked up the silver coin, which was still sitting in its little brass box from the last time the Polyphon had been played.
Once, Maria Schönwald had held the same coin in her hand, dropping it into the same slot high up on the side of the Polyphon.
When the coin had fallen with a loud clunk, Verner went and sat in the armchair, too nervous all of a sudden to drink the Cognac he had poured. What if there was something to the story after all?
Too late now. He watched the coin slide slowly down its brass runner, flick the mechanism and begin to turn the perforated steel disc with the words An der schönen blauen Donau written in a tall, looping script.
At the first few notes, Verner felt his heart begin to pound hard. The sound was astonishing. He closed his eyes, imagining the Schönwald’s lounge, tall windows opening on to a lawn sloping down to a lake. The long curtains fluttered in the breeze and sunlight speckled the parquet floor as Maria and Franz swept across it in a waltz, her silk skirts rising and falling like a great pink powder puff.
When the tune had ended, he sat quite still and waited for several minutes. Nothing happened. The apartment was silent. He could hear the traffic in the street, a door slamming in his neighbour’s flat below.
‘Bad luck, my foot,’ he snorted, chuckling a little at how nervous he had been.
It was just a music box after all, just wood and brass. Besides, what harm could he possibly come to, if he were to stay in his apartment from now on and speak to no one and do nothing but listen to it?
He got up, opened the music box and reached in to retrieve the silver coin.
This time he was going to enjoy it more, listen out for the little idiosyncrasies on the disc. He was going to sip his Cognac and listen to the Polyphon and glide down the Danube until it was time to go to bed, and the next day he would do it all again.
He got his fingers on the coin, but it seemed to have got itself wedged fast into a groove. He pulled at it hard, but it wouldn’t come loose. He fetched a can of oil and sprayed it onto the coin to loosen it, but still it wouldn’t budge, and his fingers kept slipping on the grea
se.
Then he fetched a pair of pliers, fixed them around the coin and pulled till sweat began to trickle down his temples, but the coin stubbornly refused to move.
If only I can get purchase, I will be able to pull it free easily, he thought.
He placed his right foot on the bottom of the cabinet, braced against it while pulling on the pliers with all of his remaining strength.
A couple of hard tugs, and Verner fell back on the Persian rug, clutching the coin in relief.
He was still staring at it, wondering what had got it stuck in the first place, when he heard a loud crack and sensed something move and shift and slide above him with a sudden catastrophic noise.
‘Oh,’ he said, looking up in detached surprise, almost admiration.
I should have asked the carpenter to fix the display cabinet to the wall, was his last thought, before the air above him darkened and a mass of glass, oak and music boxes came down towards him in a great tuneful rush of air.
The Chanterelles of Østvig
The morning after the doctor told her she was dying, Gudrun Holm woke early, overwhelmed by despair for the chanterelles. The thought of them growing unnoticed in the forest after her death was unbearable.
She pushed back the covers and sat up in bed, wincing at the pain. It was everywhere now, not just in her chest. Her breaths were wheezy and ineffective, her lungs like perforated bellows.
Through the open window, she could hear the eternal sigh of the North Sea. The dawn air was damp and fragrant with rose hip and wet grass. No wind stirred the net curtains.
She snatched a whining mosquito out of the air and squashed its quivering limbs between her fingers before setting two feet on the cold floor.
Five generations of Holms had picked chanterelles in the great sand-dune plantations. She was the last of the line, the only person living to know where the chanterelles of Østvig grew.
Unless she told someone.
A stench of spoiled fish greeted her in the kitchen, last night’s cod. In the end, she had not had the appetite for it. She emptied the pan outside by the woodpile. Something would eat the fish – foxes, rats, gulls.
Like her body when they finally put her in the ground, the cod would be reclaimed by nature. Nothing was wasted in the end. Even her own flesh would make a feast, if only for maggots.
She looked out over the dunes, followed a V-formation of migrating geese pulling across the flat expanse of lyme grass and heather. The sky was bigger here than elsewhere in Denmark. The deep blue light cast a primeval glow on the landscape, as though it had never been morning there before. She licked her lips and tasted salt.
The vicar picked up on the seventh ring, his voice thick with sleep. ‘Gudrun. You are up early.’
‘Vicar, I’m dying,’ she said, brushing off his noises of sympathy. ‘But that’s not why I’m calling.’
‘No?’
She pictured the vicar squinting beneath his great domed forehead, his hand crabbing across the bedside table as he searched for his glasses. She stemmed her impatience at his dithering. After all, he had known her as a child and would, by long-standing agreement, be the one laying her to rest in a few short weeks. There would be no mourners.
‘I wish to pass something on to you,’ she said. ‘It’s about the chanterelles. I want to tell you where to find them.’ She allowed a pause for the vicar’s reaction. It wasn’t much.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh, I see.’
‘Well?’ she said. ‘Will you come with me today, so I can show you?’
When the vicar cleared his throat, she could tell that he was about to disappoint her.
‘I’m old, Gudrun, and won’t be long after you in Heaven. You don’t want to trust me with something so important,’ he said.
‘But you’re the only person I know,’ she protested.
The vicar did not bother to contradict her. Everyone knew that Gudrun Holm disliked people.
There was a moment’s pause before he spoke again. ‘Then there is only one other option.’
‘What?’ Gudrun asked suspiciously.
‘It’s obvious,’ he said. ‘It has to be someone you are yet to meet.’
She rang off.
‘Easy for you,’ she spat, her voice echoing in the empty house. ‘You forget this isn’t exactly Copenhagen Central Station.’
She sharpened her mushroom knife standing by the sink, soothed by the feel of its pear-shaped wooden handle in the palm of her hand. The kitchen window was greasy with sea fret. No matter how often she washed her windows, the sea always won.
After drying it carefully, she wrapped the knife in a dishcloth and placed it in the faded wicker basket that was older than herself. Then she slipped a worn tracksuit top over her T-shirt, found her battered leather walking boots and tied a multi-coloured scarf over the itchy stubble on her scalp.
The bones in her buttocks grated against the saddle as she cycled slowly up the dirt track. How many more days would she be able to do this before the rest of her strength ebbed away? Two? Three?
When she reached the main road, she looked to the left where the village houses lay like a jumble of Lego bricks on the horizon.
A car passed, a sleek black number with German plates. Østvig was not what it used to be, not since they had knocked up all those new holiday homes. Once there had been fourteen sky-blue boats fishing the North Sea from the village, a grocery shop, even a school. Now all the fishermen had cleared off, and Østvig had become a hollowed-out shell, overrun with tourists from May to October.
Someone had placed a sandwich board close to her drive. Straight on for ice cream. She got off her bike and kicked the sign into a rose bush, then had to hobble for a minute, holding her sore foot.
The road was empty but for a small local boy who stopped and stared at her, mouth agape, fish eyes frowning.
‘What are you looking at?’ she scowled, shaking her fist.
When the boy had gone, she turned right onto the main road and, after about five minutes, headed down the gravel track that cut like a ruler through the pine plantation.
The sound of the ocean was more muted here, like a distant exhalation. A wood pigeon called nearby. The air was sweet and mild and buzzing with insects.
Gudrun allowed herself a moment of self-pity that this place should be lost to her, and so soon.
Sweeping flies away from her face, she rested her bike against a silver birch and concealed it with bracken.
For as long as she could remember, she had been the guardian of the chanterelles, and what was to become of them without her? Who now would bear witness to their beauty?
Her father had shown her the almost invisible deer paths that criss-crossed these woods, pointing to the mould-coloured lichen, oak saplings and thick green moss that the chanterelles favoured. They grew low, partly covered by vegetation, like gold coins scattered on the weedy bottom of a lake.
She came to a sandy hollow, dappled with sunlight. It was one of her most reliable patches, and it took her only a few minutes to find the first chanterelle. The sight of the little golden disc made her heart leap, as though it had revealed itself especially for her.
She knelt down with flies circling her head and slid two fingers around the chanterelle. It was cool under the moss. The knife sliced easily through the stem.
Like an offering to the gods, she held the pale orange trumpet up to the light, closed her eyes and inhaled its scent of wet stone and old, sweet apples.
A noise close by startled her. She dropped the mushroom. Someone was laughing in disbelief, the laughter punctured by little gasps and screams.
‘Nej, nej, nej, nej,’ said a male voice.
Gudrun moved towards the sound, keeping her feet on the thick, slippery moss that silenced her steps, and taking care not to snap any twigs or branches. Her heart beat sickeningly fast.
Something red showed between the trees: an anorak. It bobbed up and down as the stranger darted to and fro, bending and standing.
She must have made a sound after all, because the man suddenly raised his head and swivelled around to look right at her.
He was young enough to have been her son, perhaps in his late thirties. His chubby cheeks were plum-coloured with excitement, his long, greying hair tousled and wild.
‘Hej,’ he said. Just like that, as though they were old friends.
This had a disarming effect on Gudrun. She felt herself softening towards him.
‘This is unbelievable, so many. Come.’ He waved. ‘Come and see.’
She didn’t want to, but something pulled her forward, as if by a rope tied around her waist.
As she pushed through the branches, she wondered if she was dreaming. If maybe the painkillers they had given her yesterday at the hospital were causing her to hallucinate.
Her eyes took in a rucksack, tossed aside in a patch of bare sand and next to it a clipboard with a few crumpled sheets of paper on it.
The man looked at her warmly. ‘I see you have the tools of the trade,’ he said, nodding at her basket. ‘A fellow mushroom hunter.’
She opened and closed her mouth like a cod, silenced by his forward manner.
‘Do you live locally?’ he asked.
She nodded feebly.
‘Then, if you don’t mind,’ he said, picking up the clipboard and taking down a pencil from behind his ear. ‘Could you tell me where else I might find chanterelles in this plantation?’
Gudrun noticed with alarm that the papers attached to the clipboard were photocopies of small-scale maps.
‘No, no, it’s not like that,’ the man said. ‘I won’t be picking them. It’s purely for scientific purposes – Aalborg University.’ He fished an ID card out of his pocket.
Gudrun stared at it, marvelling at the barefaced cheek of this Torben Larsen, Research Scientist, Department of Chemistry and Bioscience. She was still too astounded to speak.