Farewell to Freedom Read Online Free PDF Page A

she was. Or who she works for.”
    â€œAnd you’re positive she’s a prostitute?” Lars asked.
    Mikkelsen reclined in his high-backed office chair, pausing for a moment with his hands clasped over his round belly.
    â€œWe’ll never get that fact confirmed a hundred percent,” he said, fixing his gaze on the wall behind them. “But I think we can proceed based on that theory.”
    â€œA colleague claimed he could tell by looking at her teeth that she was from Eastern Europe. Does that sound right?” Louise asked, noticing at once how Mikkelsen’s face tensed up and his expression darkened.
    He leaned forward again, placed his hands on the desk, and said, “It’s always nice to have colleagues who are smart enough to observe everything in a single glance, and who are ready to lump all the girls together. But it’s not that simple. We’re not dealing with brand-name goods here. We can’t just assume that if they look a certain way, they must come from a specific region. These are human beings we’re talking about, not some cultivar of a flower that you can look up.”
    His tone was acerbic. This was obviously a pet peeve of his that came up a lot.
    â€œSo what’s your best guess?” Louise asked.
    â€œShe could very well be from Eastern Europe,” Mikkelsen admitted, but then he smiled. “I’m not basing that just on her appearance. That’s based on what happened to her and where she was found. Plus, I’d be more likely to know her a little if she were one of the Danish prostitutes. And lately I’ve also been getting the impression that things have been getting difficult in Eastern Europe for these girls, so more and more of them have been showing up in Denmark. Some of them work for pimps, others work for themselves, but ultimately they all have to pay to use the street.”
    â€œUse the street?” Louise interrupted with a puzzled look. “What exactly does that mean?”
    â€œSome of the nastier pimps think they’re in charge of the street, and they make the girls pay between 300 and 500 kroner a day for permission to use it.”
    â€œHow the hell can they do that? If anyone ‘owns’ Istedgade, surely it’s not a bunch of foreign pimps,” Lars exclaimed indignantly.
    â€œDo the women get anything in return after they pay?” Louise asked, staring at a large city map, hanging next to Mikkelsen’s desk, that showed the Vesterbro District. There were also some photos on the wall, of Istedgade and its side streets from an era when the shop fronts looked completely different, Louise guessed from the fifties. In one of the pictures, a police officer was riding a bicycle, and another showed three men holding bottles of beer, raising them at the photographer in a toast. All of the photos were black and white.
    Mikkelsen shrugged. “Sure, they promise them protection,” he said with a nod as he scratched his unshaven cheeks.
    Louise understood this to imply that the prostitutes couldn’t really count on this protection.
    â€œThey believe it because they have no other choice. They’re told that the pimps are in cahoots with the police, and that they have to pay if they don’t want to be thrown out of the country.”
    â€œBut don’t the girls find the truth when they talk to each other?” Louise asked.
    Mikkelsen shook his head and pushed his black-framed glasses up onto his forehead. There was something retro about their styling, but she was sure that he hadn’t chosen them for fashion but because he’d actually owned them since the sixties.
    â€œKeep in mind that many of the girls who end up here don’t necessarily have the world’s best education. Where they come from, bribes aren’t uncommon to get the authorities to leave you alone. At the same time, these girls aren’t used to having much of a say about anything. So when