“How much time will it take?” asked Marco, pointing down at his clothes. The elderly man in the dry cleaners threw up his hands and shook his head. What was the boy thinking? he seemed to say.
“How long to get this clean?” Marco repeated, and began to take off his sweater.
“Now hang on a minute, lad.” The man threw his head back as though he’d just caught a whiff of smelling salts. “We don’t clean clothes while you wait. You can’t sit here in the shop in the buff, you can understand that, surely?”
“But I haven’t got any other clothes.”
There was a rustle from behind the racks of clothes packed in plastic, and a row of coats was pushed aside.
The man now peering out at him wasn’t quite as effeminate as the first, but nearly. Marco could spot old gay couples at a glance. On the streets they went about with their little handbags strapped to their wrists and tucked tight under their arms. Always genuine leather clutched in soft, well-manicured hands and often with contents of considerable interest for an experienced pickpocket. But these gays tended to be more careful than most, which was the downside with this kind of prey. Perhaps years of hostile looks had taught them to be wary and take care. Perhaps they were just more fussy about their belongings than most. Marco had never really sussed them out.
“He’s probably quite lovely, otherwise, Kaj,” said the man behind the racks to his partner. “Shouldn’t we give it a go? Look, he’s even got a book with him, so he can’t be that bad.” He flashed a friendly smile at Marco, revealing a pair of rather protruding canines. “But what about paying? Have you any money at all, young man?”
Marco produced his hundred-kroner note. He had no idea if it was enough.
“A hundred kroner?” The man smiled. “Well, let’s see if we can find something else for you back here for the meantime. People these days are so busy that they systematically forget to collect their things. Or maybe they just can’t be bothered. That’s why we always want payment up front. Pretty slipshod, if you ask me.”
Marco was given clean clothes from the back room and allowed to keep his money. If he came back in a couple of days, his gear would be ready, even if, as the men said, it was the dirtiest pile of laundry they’d ever had to deal with. And he could keep the clothes they gave him since they’d been hanging in the back room for over a year.
He saw the two men nudge each other and giggle as he went out the door. Perhaps he had made their day.
They had certainly made his.
–
Living on the streets was hard, especially to begin with. Marco was hungry round the clock. But he learned to maneuver without breaking the law, taking every little job that came his way. He started the first one at five in the morning when he offered to clean the windows of a bakery. In return they gave him an enormous bag of bread rolls. He wandered over to a coffee bar and traded the rolls for a cheese sandwich, a warm drink, and the chance to wash all the floors. And all of a sudden he was fifty kroner better off.
Soon his hustling between shops became a network of employers who would give him odd jobs to do. He ran errands, carried heavy shopping bags for people from the supermarket to waiting cars, split cardboard boxes apart and threw them in the trash, even though his lips turned blue and his hands trembled from the bitter cold that gripped the country like a vise that winter.
For weeks he slogged away in the snow and slush. From shop to shop and up one stairway after another. Often the jobs were difficult and laborious, and the customers demanding, like the madwoman whose week’s supply of groceries had to be lugged up to the fourth floor in a cardboard box. She never opened the door but shoved the money out through a malodorous letter slot. One time he lingered farther up the stairs until she opened the door to take in her groceries, half-naked, her skin pitted with filth.
“What are you staring at, you little freak?” she yelled, jabbing a crooked black fingernail at him.
It was a side of Denmark he had never seen before.
Marco balked at nothing and did his work well enough that the majority of those he helped out didn’t trick him. After a while he was raking it in, as Miryam would have said.
And all the money was his and his alone.
Work from eight in the morning until ten at night except on Sundays. Sixty kroner an hour for errands from the shops, seventy for putting up posters on the streets. It all added up. More than fifteen thousand a month, and he had neither rent to pay nor expenses for food and clothing. For the time being he wore what he’d been given by a woman who ran a pizzeria and thought he needed something less ill-fitting.
“You’re a proper Latino, sweetie,” she told him. “Don’t hide it. Put this on, it belonged to Mario. We sent him packing back to Naples last month.” And everyone behind the counter burst out laughing. As if any of them had ever been near Italy.
At night he bedded down on the street. This was nothing new to him. And yet he knew it couldn’t last long, for it wasn’t only the cold that was dangerous. Though most of his money was stashed elsewhere, there were still lunatics aplenty on the streets who would work him over for a lot less. His family, for example.
It was the gay couple from the dry cleaners who helped him away from such perilous sleeping arrangements. Perhaps they had seen him huddled in a corner of Nordhavn station, or maybe they had heard of his plight through others they knew. In any case, their faces were full of concern when they stopped him on the street one day in late January.
“You can do deliveries for us,” one of them said. “And in return you can stay with us until we find you something else.”
Marco recoiled instinctively, almost stumbling into a pile of snow. What they had in mind was definitely not on his agenda.
“Listen, young man. If we trust you not to do things to us that we don’t like, then you can trust us in the same way, don’t you think? You can’t stay out here in the cold at night, it’s asking for trouble.”
The one who did the talking was called Eivind. It was he who would later come to regret their arrangement the most.
–
Out here on the upmarket side of the City Lakes that curved through the western margin of Copenhagen’s center, Marco learned to view street life with new eyes. Whereas he had previously observed only objects ripe for theft, he now saw people of flesh and blood with jobs to do, errands to run and families to provide for, as well as plenty of people in whose lives all this was absent. Here he saw all facets of the city and its citizenry and realized that in most respects these people were no different from those he had seen walking the streets of other large cities. It was the empty, expressionless faces he noticed most. Unless their attention happened to be diverted by the display in a shop window, most people’s eyes were fixed far enough ahead to avoid dealing with anything close at hand. Positive distractions, however, like the sudden appearance of a friend or acquaintance, prompted folk to stop abruptly and immediately flash smiles at each other that neither the situation nor their frame of mind a moment before would have inspired.
When this happened, Marco stopped, too, and started his inner stopwatch. As a rule it took less than half a minute for him to predict when they would say their good-byes and part company with convincing excuses about how busy they happened to be just now. And when his predictions proved accurate to the second, he would laugh and shake his head, rather impressed with himself. But if these people with their distant gaze were distracted by something less positive, their reaction was often less than amiable. The homeless who sold their own newspaper made people automatically veer away, just as they did from the junkies, the winos, the crazies, the confused, unkempt, or outrageously dressed, or the man with the accordion outside the Netto supermarket whose music could make the paving stones sing and gave the street scene a splash of color.