There is the Leviathan.He moves in the deep,in the playground of God. He waits for his foodin its season. God asks,Can you draw him out with a fishhook?Put a cord through his nose?Make a covenant with him? The Zippo. He ran his thumb across the worn edges. Took it out of his pocket. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Act I. The Affair Copenhagen, spring 1945, three weeks after the Germans left. You could still smell it. Smoke, petrol, something sour underneath. The city was learning how to breathe again. Nobody knew what to do with their hands. She was twenty-three. Blonde. Thin in a way that made people look away. She’d spent four years learning to be invisible. How to walk past soldiers without being seen. To keep her face empty. Make herself small enough to survive. He was American. A sergeant from Kansas. People thought all of Kansas was flat, but not where he was from. Huge houses on the river bluffs, oak trees. Nearly every year, someone drowned. They jumped off the bridge, knowing they could swim out of the great river. They could not. He had a wide smile and big hands and he talked too loud for any room he was in. They met in “Glasshall in Tivoli.” A Danish jazz club. Defiant of German rule to the end. Jazz was Allied music. The Nazis despised it. She was drinking alone. She knew she shouldn’t, but the Germans were gone, and she didn’t feel afraid. He sat down across from her without asking. “You speak English?” “A little.” “More than a little, I think.” She didn’t smile. But she didn’t leave. She touched her hair. By June, the city remembered what it was. The canals turned silver in the long light. Sun sat on the water like a thin sheet of metal. The sun only pretended to set, hovering just below the horizon, turning the sky the color of bruised peaches over slate roofs and church spires. People sat outside again. Chairs scraped on cobblestone. Glasses clinked. Bicycles hummed past in steady lines. They drank beer in Nyhavn. Watched the boats. She laughed too loud. Heard herself. Didn’t stop. She showed him the city. The parts the Germans hadn’t touched and the parts they had. Street corners, the paint still new. Shop windows. Fresh glass that didn’t quite match the old panes. The gardens, gates open again, lights coming on one by one. The fountains, running with joy. Shopkeepers repainting their signs with careful strokes, making the letters bold again. They walked along the lakes at dusk. The air cooled and smelled of water and grass. Swans drifted in the half-dark, white shapes sliding over black glass. He threw bread. She told him not to, said it made them aggressive. He did it anyway, and she didn’t mind. A couple passed, arms linked, moving slow like they had nowhere they had to be. One night, he put his arm around her. She let him. It happened the way those things happened. He had cigarettes. Real ones. American tobacco. She had a room with a window that faced the harbor. The city was broken. They were alive. Enough reason for anything. He talked a lot. She learned this about him early. He talked like he didn’t know the precious silence. It was something to be filled, like the world would forget him if he stopped making noise. He talked about the war. His unit. The things they’d seen. Friends he’d lost. Kansas. The bluffs. The river. The fields. The sky that stretched out forever. He talked about what he was going to do when he got home. Big plans, big dreams. Like he had a key to the future. She listened. He was kind. Happy. Funny. She didn’t talk about the occupation. Didn’t talk about her father, who’d been taken in ‘43 and never came back. Her father had believed in things. Agreements. Treaties. A league of nations. He’d been wrong. She didn’t talk about what she’d done to survive. The humiliations. Decisions no one should have to make at nineteen. Some things you don’t say. Not even to the man in your bed. One night, she showed him the emerald. She kept it in a box beneath a loose floorboard. Her grandmother had given it to her before the war. Before everything. It was small, cloudy, the color of ice under green water. She had hidden it from the German searches. Always worried she would lose it. “Family?” he asked, holding it up to the light. “My great-great-grandmother’s.” He turned it over in his palm. Squinted at it like estimating its value. Then he handed it back. “Nice,” he said. Reached for a cigarette, a Lucky Strike. Lit it with his Zippo. Black crackle metal. Rounded on the edges, where the color of the rubbed metal shown through. She watched him light it. He glanced towards the window. Still talking. He had already forgotten the stone in her hand. She put it back in the box. Back under the floor. Didn’t say anything. He had a pocket full of stones. She’d seen them. Sapphires, rubies, a diamond. He was twenty-four years old, and he’d already had someone’s lifetime. Her emerald was cloudy. Sentimental. Not worth much. He didn’t want it. He shipped out in September. They stood at the dock. He held her hands, looked into her eyes, said what he thought were the right things men say. I’ll write, I’ll come back, this isn’t the end. She nodded. She didn’t believe him. But it cost her nothing to let him say it, and it seemed to cost him something, so she let him. “Keep that emerald safe,” he said, smiling like it was a joke. “I will.” He kissed her. Walked up the gangway. Didn’t look back. The letters came for a while. November. December. A long one in January that talked about home. Snow. Missing her. Then February. Nothing. Nothing again in March. She didn’t write to ask why. She already knew. She wasn’t the kind of woman he’d marry. She’d known it that first night in the club and every night in the room with the window. She was what happened during the war. She had loved him anyway. She went to the floorboard. The emerald was there, where it had always been. Where it hadn’t always been. A flashback. The stone, in her palm. Cloudy green. Cold. Her grandmother’s hands had held it. Her mother’s. Hers. Not only hers. She remembered the day they came. Spring, 1941. Germans had searched her room. They knew about the emerald. They just came in. Moved her aside. Later that week, two Americans on the stairs. Their uniforms didn’t fit the narrow turn. They were polite. Professional. They spoke English to each other, slow Danish to her. For safekeeping, ma’am. Just until things settle down. She was nineteen. The occupation was a year old. Her father was still alive then. He still believed in agreements. He told her to cooperate. He said the Americans were friends. She handed it over. They wrapped it in cloth. Carried her grandmother’s stone down the stairs and out into a street full of German soldiers. The Germans didn’t stop them. Americans were still neutral then. She said thank you. Standing in the doorway. Thank you to the men taking her inheritance because she could not keep it. Four years. The emerald spent the war in a vault in Washington. Safe. Dry. Far from the Germans. Far from the Danes, who couldn’t stop them. She spent the war in Copenhagen. Learning to be invisible. Learning where to look and where not to look. Her father was taken in ’43. She didn’t think about the emerald that night. Or the night after. Later, she did. A small green stone. What it might have bought. Passage. A bribe to the right man at the right time. She told herself there was no chance. The stone couldn’t have saved her father. She would never know. They gave it back in the summer of ’45. A note on American paper about Danish American friendship. They handed her the cloth like a gift. We kept it safe for you. She knew they were right to take it. That was the part she couldn’t forgive. She said thank you again. Smiled. That night she put it under the floorboard. Didn’t look at it for months. Until she showed it to him. The man in her bed. Once, he was not vast.Once, he was small. He swam among other creatures.He learned hunger.He learned taking. Act II. The Vault Copenhagen, April 1949, in a palace room full of signatures and glassware. Four years since the war ended. The city had rebuilt itself. Stone by stone, street by street. Pretended the scars weren’t there. He came back with a delegation. American money rebuilding Europe. He was one of the men who decided where it went. Defense contracts. Airfields. Ports. The stones from his pocket had bought his first contract. The contracts bought everything else. He wasn’t a sergeant anymore. He wore a suit now. Good wool. Italian shoes. He’d learned to shake hands like a man who expected his calls returned. They met at Christiansborg Palace. Twelve of them sent someone. They would build a museum, they called it. A vault. Somewhere to protect what mattered. A symbol that civilization still meant something. He didn’t expect to see her. She was standing by the window when he walked in. Blonde. Older. The softness of girlhood gone. She was talking to a Belgian, something about transit routes. She held herself like a woman who belonged in the room. He stopped. She turned, mid-sentence, as if she felt it. Their eyes met. Four years. No letters. No explanation. Just silence, and now. Her face in a window across a room full of diplomats. She excused herself from the Belgian. Walked toward him. Unhurried. Like she’d known he would come, sooner or later. “You came back,” she said. He tried to smile. The old smile. “I told you I would.” She looked at him. Just looked. “Yes,” she said. “You did.” They talked. Small talk. He asked about her work. She was part of the Danish delegation. Her family had influence, old connections. A name that opened doors even after an occupation. She asked about his. Defense. Contracts. Building things. “You’ve done well,” she said. “I got lucky.” “You got
