The Quiet Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

way through the white labyrinth of bed units, found
the right room, and opened the door.
    Out in the hall there had been fluorescent lighting and smoking was prohibited. In the room he now entered, antique English Bestlites lamps swam in a cloud of tobacco smoke. On a low bed set in a wide cherrywood frame a man sat cross-legged, surrounded by silk pillows, smoking a cigarette. Unfiltered, but monogrammed in gold.
    "I have to be in court in half an hour," he said. "Come in and say hello to Vivian the Terrible."
    The woman was in her mid-sixties and wore a doctor's white coat. Her skin was pale, almost transparent, and quite thin; he could hear her blood through it, blood and life. She held out her hand; it was warm, dry, and firm. She was in A-flat major. Under other circumstances he could have listened to her for hours.
    "It's only five months since you were here last," said the sick man.
    "I hope this isn't inconvenient for you."
    "I've been performing down south."
    "You haven't been advertised since Monte Carlo. You haven't been out of the country."
    Kasper sat down in an easy chair. There were Karzamra carpets on the floor, shelves filled with books, a pianette, Richard Mortensen's circus paintings on the walls, a television large enough to be the box for the trick where the woman gets sawed in half.
    "I look better than you expected, don't I?"
    Kasper looked at his father. Maximillian Krone had lost at least thirty pounds. His glasses looked too big for him. The pillows weren't for the sake of comfort--they were to hold him upright.
    "I've had a nice visitor. From the Ministry of Justice. Looked like an undertaker. Wanted your address. I told him to go to hell. He insisted they've got a tax case against you. And something worse in Spain. He said WVVF has blacklisted you. Is that true?"
    The sick man gave him a questioning look.
    "You were never very reliable. But you're not the suicidal type either."
    He had some papers in his hand.
    "Rigshospital has laboratories and annexes in the inner city," his father went on. "I'm a consultant on their insurance matters. That's why I can vegetate in this pantomime of A Thousand and One Nights. While Vivian's patients bleed to death in the hallways. I filched a list of the experts the state and county have summoned."
    There were five sheets of paper, perhaps two hundred names, Danish and foreign, companies and individuals. One was underlined.
    Kasper read it, handed back the paper. He stood up, and let his hands glide over the room's props. The Brazilian rosewood bookcases, the lamps' chrome plating. The white-lacquered frames around the large canvases.
    "It must be her," said Maximillian.
    New curtains had been hung, like stage curtains. Kasper gathered the heavy brocade between his fingers.
    "What is Department H?" he asked.
    A delicate tone of anxiety began to sing somewhere in the room, as if a tuning fork had been struck.
    "It doesn't exist--it's a rumor. Where did you hear about it? It was supposedly established in the nineties. Grew out of collaboration among the Serious Economic Crime office, the police's mobile patrol unit, the Financial Supervision Authority, the Customs and Tax Administration. The local tax authorities and the Danish Competition Authority. Along with the board of supervisors at the Copenhagen Stock Exchange. After major companies were drained. The goal was to counteract new ways of making illegal profits. People say they discovered something. Something big. Which they didn't make public. Something that made them set up a special office. I don't believe a damn word of it. And in any case, they wouldn't be mixed up in a small-time con man's boring tax case. Where did you hear about it?"
    Serious illness begins outside the physical. Kasper had noticed this before, sometimes months before the illness broke through. The same was true of Maximillian. There was a change; an unfamiliar element had been added to his tonal picture.
    "What about child abuse? How hard