Free Beneath the Neon Egg by Thomas E. Kennedy

dark road
    For the straight way was no longer in view  . . .
     
    The remainder of the afternoon he spends walking, to earn an appetite for dinner. Copenhagen is a city to walk in, one of the reasons he settled here. He is a walker. And he loves the serving houses, of which there are many. And the light, even in winter, when the city is a perfect noir setting, dark—in the depth of winter—from before four in the afternoon until nearly ten in the morning.
    By seven o’clock, he finds himself wandering through darkness across Knippels Bridge toward Christianshavn, and he realizes that all along he has had a plan. Down from the bridge and along Torvegade, over the canal, past Christianshavn Square, he follows the plan to the Spicy Kitchen for a dinner of curried lamb and a pint of Carlsberg Classic.
    By nine, after a beer and a shooter of Havana Club at the Eiffel Bar on Wilders Street, he is strolling past Our Savior’s Church and along Prinsessegade toward Christiania, an abandoned military installation taken over by squatters in 1971, just barely tolerated now as a social experiment in conflict with the police and the conservative citizenry. Through the front gate, he walks the unstreetlighted, frozen, rutted mud of the path to Pusher Street, sparsely populated this freezing night, toward the JazzKlub. The shutters are open at the entrance, and he steps in.
    The girl at the door says, “Nothing really happening yet.”
    “If I can just get a beer while I wait.”
    “Just holler into the kitchen for the bartender.”
    Bluett pays his forty- kroner entry and holds out his hand for her to scribble on it with a marker so he can return to the club if he steps out for a joint, but she says, “Forgot the marker today. I’ll remember you. I know your face. I’ve seen you before.”
    “Did I behave in an orderly manner?”
    “I don’t remember what you did, but I don’t have bad memories of you.”
    The bartender, a dark-haired man who speaks Danish with a Spanish accent, is already at the bar. He recognizes Bluett from previous visits. It’s nice to be recognized. Bluett passes him a twenty- kroner coin for a bottle of red-label beer. The first patron in the place, he has his pick of tables, each different, some metal, some wood. He picks one that has an overview of the whole club and all of its black walls and pipes. There are also long benches against the long back wall of the little room, beneath a row of oil paintings of jazz artists, only one of whom he recognizes: the great tenor sax player Dexter Gordon, wearing a long coat on his tall frame, a leopard-skin hat perched on his head.
    Over the sound system come Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker blowing “Night in Tunisia,” written by Diz in 1942. He remembers one day the previous July during the Jazz Festival, sitting in the sun all day drinking golden pints of draft on the canal at Gammel Strand, listening to the Esben Malø Quartet, young musicians—trumpet, tenor, contrabass, el guitar—play cool jazz in the hot afternoon while kayaks and yachts with half-naked people sunning on the foredecks and flat canal boats of waving tourists floated past—right across from Thorvaldsens Museum, yellow sun high in the arch of the blue sky, points of light glittering on the green tower of the parliament and the black tile roofs of the pastel-colored canal houses—and the red-headed young trumpeter blew an approximation of Cannonball Adderley’s version of “Autumn Leaves,” a cool subject for a hot day, and the breeze ruffled the edges of the broad white umbrellas over their stage area. He had watched a two-man kayak lance past in the water, the back space empty, while the sunlight tingled his flesh.
    Life is gorgeous sometimes.
    Bluett had asked the cool young quartet if they would play “Night in Tunisia,” but the trumpeter had confided he was too hungover to take on that number. Now it’s playing on the JazzKlub’s sound system, and those two simple