Lime's Photograph (31 page)

I couldn’t help laughing. Lola had always been an actress and in the snobbish art world, where the definition of what is and what isn’t great art is as ephemeral as a snowflake, she had found her star role, but she hadn’t managed to see the show through to its finale. If the accounts hadn’t been such a shambles, she would undoubtedly have ended up on the Queen’s Honours List. Denmark is a tiny country, and the media always go crazy if a Dane, even a half-Dane, has made waves in the big wide world.

After the story broke, the politicians ran for cover, trying to pass the buck to the selection committee and civil servants. It was a case of trying to sweep the muck under the carpet, but the media storm intensified and then one day she was gone, along with a sum of money which, depending on which newspaper you read, was anything from two to 20 million kroner. Lola had vanished without trace. The pressure on the Prime Minister grew, but with the sacrifice of the Minister of Culture the crisis seemed to blow over.

End of story.

I put the cuttings back neatly in order. Klaus returned from his meeting. He stood in the door wearing his jacket, his tie loosened at the neck.

“I’m sorry, but I’m filming now,” he said.

“I’m on my way too. Thanks for letting me see the cuttings. What about the money? Wasn’t there a police investigation?” I asked as I got up.

“Officially, yes, but my sources in parliament tell me the police have been given to understand that they should use their resources elsewhere. She has, after all, fooled the entire system, so the system closes ranks and buries the issue. Yesterday’s sacking was the ritual slaughter.
The purgative sacrifice. Now the museum must be left in peace. The concept of a new museum still holds good. In the future they should just concentrate on modern Danish art. One must look to the future and not the past. And so on and so forth, ad nauseam.”

“So she’ll get away with it,” I said.

“Come on, I’ll see you out,” he said. “As long as she stays away from Denmark nothing will happen to her.”

“Does anyone know where she is?”

“Some say London. Some say Tokyo. Others Moscow. No one really knows. She’ll be all right. She’ll probably add to her CV that she single-handedly got a new Danish museum off the ground, and then when it was up and running went looking for a new challenge. There’s a sucker born every minute,” he said as he took me down to the door.

We agreed that if he wanted me he would leave a message at the Royal, and we said that it would be nice to have a couple of drinks together one evening and talk about the old days, when the whole world was his playground, but I got the feeling that he didn’t really want to. I didn’t fit in with his life any more, it seemed. Maybe I knew too much about the old him, and he didn’t want his new wife to hear any details. Who knows? We all change. I was probably just envious of his home life, his wanting to spend his free time with his family rather than with me.

I went for a walk in sunny Copenhagen and ate a hot dog while I watched the bike couriers weaving dangerously in and out between cars and pedestrians. A grilled sausage with a bread roll seemed to bring back the taste of childhood and teenage years. Eaten in the sunshine and cool breeze it tasted of the Denmark I wanted to remember, which had a place in my heart. An efficient, unostentatious country which made the best of the few resources the Lord had given it. The newspapers told me that it was a country gripped by a fear that foreigners would overrun the Danes and turn them into
Muslims and heathens, but looking around Copenhagen everything seemed as normal. On such a lovely summer’s day you could almost forget that November and March existed. The city was smiling, and the slow tempo and lack of noise in comparison with Madrid were balm to my soul. I would find it hard to live there permanently, but having eaten the sausage, wiped my mouth with the paper napkin and listened to the hot dog man chatting with his customers, I felt better than I had for a long time. I couldn’t explain why, but it was as if I felt a germ of hope that I would get through the crisis, not just survive it but also live life again.

Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that I looked forward to seeing Clara, her face and her smile, her melodious voice.

She was rather businesslike with me as I sat in a small conference room on the top floor of an ugly concrete building that housed the National Security Service, while downstairs the ordinary police dealt with local, visible crimes. We were in a plain, white-walled, slightly cool room with pale, functional Danish furniture. She had only, apart from my two photographs, a notepad and a tape recorder. There were a couple of pleasant abstract reproductions on the walls. I might just as well have been sitting in any other modern Danish public office of a certain status. There was a younger man sitting at the far end of the table, whom Clara introduced to me as Detective Inspector Karl Jakobsen.

The taxi driver who had taken me out to the meeting was a Kurd from Iraq who spoke rapid Danish with a heavy accent. He was in his 40s, and had the radio tuned to a local station playing old 1960s pop music, putting me in a pleasantly nostalgic mood.

“You going to see the spies?” the Kurd had asked when I gave him the address of Bellahøj Police Station.

“In a manner of speaking,” I said.

“Big trouble, right.”

“Trouble?”

“You Danish, aren’t you?”

“Yes. But I don’t live in Denmark,” I said.

“Oh. Then you don’t know. The National Security Service has listened in on legal political parties on the left and now big trouble.”

“They’ve always done that, haven’t they? Kept an eye on communists and Nazis and terrorists and Russians. That’s what they’re paid to do, isn’t it?” I said.

“Well, now they’ve been caught at it. An agent told about it on television.”

“Right. They’ve been caught with their fingers in the biscuit tin.”

“No. Not biscuits. They’ve listened in and spied on legal Danish party. Listed legal Danish party in register. Spied on Kurds in Denmark. Kurds legal in Denmark, yeah? Big trouble.”

“OK. I understand,” I said, even though I didn’t really.

I had intended to ask Clara about it, but the atmosphere was formal, so I didn’t. Karl Jakobsen was wearing a grey-brown jacket and a muted tie. He stood up and we shook hands and he sat down again, studying me with his small, brown eyes. His eyebrows were in need of a trim.

Clara reached out to the tape recorder and switched it on.

“Peter Lime,” she said. “I would like to begin by saying …”

I reached out, picked up the tape recorder and switched it off.

“Before we start recording or do anything at all, I’d like to know what this is all about,” I said.

“A few questions,” said Jakobsen, clearly annoyed. “That’s all. Clarification.”

“I wasn’t speaking to you,” I said. “Clara …?”

“OK, Peter …”

Karl Jakobsen straightened up in his chair, looking surly, and cut her short.

“Just a few questions,” he said. “No more to it than that.”

I ignored him and turned to Clara.

“Is this your boss?” I said.

“No.”

“Then I think you should tell him where to get off.”

She smiled with her eyes.

“What would you like to know?” she asked, ignoring the fact that Jakobsen was looking rather pissed off. It was a very elegant way to put the jerk in his place. I didn’t like him without really knowing why. He appeared trustworthy, but he had the cockiness of a typical cop who thought that his position gave him the power to do whatever he liked. He seemed to me to be the type who loved beating confessions out of people, not that I had any basis for that kind of misgiving.

I looked at Clara.

“What are you going to use this for?” I asked.

“Well, really all you have to do is tell me what I already know. That you took the photographs. That they are Lime’s photographs, when you took them and if you can identify the individuals in the group photograph.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

She took a deep breath and glanced across at Jakobsen who scratched his bluish stubble, which he undoubtedly thought was macho, but which I found repellent.

“No. It wasn’t. Your replies will be entered into a report, several reports, in fact. Within a relatively short period of time we have to make a summary of the NSS’s activities over the last 20 years. One report will be made available to the public, an expanded version will go to the Security Affairs Committee and an even more detailed report will be made to the Justice Department. Your information will be included in the latter.”

“Why is it so interesting?” I asked.

Again she looked at Jakobsen, and I realised that he was her superior, but that they had some kind of arrangement for dealing with me. I was familiar with the manoeuvre from Don Alfonzo. These people were incapable of saying anything straight out.

“It just is,” said Clara.

“Why?”

“Peter. You don’t have any particular links to Denmark. You obviously don’t keep up with what goes on here. One of our former sources has stated publicly that the NSS has kept legal political parties under surveillance. We want to tell our political masters that there was a reason for it. But it’s of no concern to the public. We’re not being put to the vote. We’re not up for an election.”

“OK. You’ve had a defector?”

She smiled.

“That’s a splendid interpretation, Peter,” she said.

“And now I am to tell you, so you can tell your political watchdogs, that you might well have monitored parties illegally, but there was a reason for it. Because this Lime chap, he’s actually got proof in a photograph that a member of parliament, in his young revolutionary days, had coffee with German terrorists? So it was a good thing you kept tabs, even though nothing came of it. No bombs, at least. Is that how it fits?”

“We ask the questions, Lime,” said Karl Jakobsen.

“I can just leave,” I said. “Is that how it fits, Clara?”

“More or less,” she said.

“OK. Last question.”

“Yes, Peter.”

“Is there a file on me?” I said.

Clara glanced across at Jakobsen before answering.

“No. There was nothing on you.”

“You can switch on your tape recorder,” I said.

“Thank you, Peter.”

It didn’t take long. She asked me straightforward questions: my name, why I had taken the two photographs, and about the identity of the people in the pictures. She was especially interested in the man who later became a left-wing member of parliament. Jakobsen took notes and stared at me. It was clear that he liked neither my ponytail, nor what I represented – which was everything he wasn’t.

It didn’t take long, and when we had finished Jakobsen got up and left with a brief nod. He took the tape recorder with him.

“Nice lad,” I said.

“His manner possibly works against him,” said Clara. “Can you come by tomorrow and give it your signature?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“What do you mean?” She looked worried. “We’re a bit pressed for time.”

“I want you to do something for me,” I said.

“I’d like to go out to dinner with you. That’s got nothing to do with all this.” She placed her hand on top of mine and looked me straight in the eyes, making me feel confused and nervous, as if I was 17 again. I didn’t really know what I was getting into, but I knew I couldn’t control my feelings.

“It’s not that,” I said.

“Then what?”

I told her that I wanted to see my file in Berlin, but that I didn’t know how to go about it and that I hoped she could help.

“I’d be happy to try, Peter. But there’s not much I can do,” she said.

“Surely you could ring your colleagues in Germany and get me in.”

“No. I’d like to, but I can’t do it just like that. But you can get access yourself. The old Stasi archives are open to the public, but the demand is crazy. There’s a huge waiting list. They’ve got 180 kilometres of shelves filled with files. The Stasi employed 280,000 people
and countless numbers of informers. The whole GDR was one big nest of singing canaries. Everyone reported on everyone and a lot of people want to see what’s in their files.”

Clara paused and took her hand from mine.

“I can give you the address, I can help you write the letter. I can ring a couple of contacts and get them to try to speed up your right of access, but I can’t promise to get you in ahead of everyone else. Why do you want to see your file?”

“Maybe there’s an answer there, maybe there isn’t. But I have to look,” I said.

She tore off a sheet of paper from her notepad and smiled at me.

“It’s Germany, right? Do you speak German?”

I nodded.

“OK. The place is called Bundesbeauftragter für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik. It’s in the old Stasi headquarters on Normannenstrasse. The Stasi had the most enormous office complex sprawling over more than just one street. They tried to shred and burn as much as they could at the time the Wall fell, and angry demonstrators destroyed other material. But there are still millions of files open to the public. But – and this is the crucial thing – they’re open to everyone and anyone, and people who are registered have first claim. Do you understand what I’m saying? It’s not as if I can come along and get you in first, even though I work for the intelligence service of a friendly country. It’s democratic but it’s agonising.”

I nodded again.

“That long, German name is colloquially called the Gauck Authority. They’re the ones you have to write to. The whole idea of providing an insight into what went on has been named after Joachim Gauck. He was a priest in the GDR and now he’s in charge of this colossal evidence of the GDR’s paranoia”

“What do I have to do?”

“You write to them and say you think you’re registered. They check to see if you are and if so, you receive a letter giving a date on which you can go along and read your file. It’s as simple as that. But first they screen your case, to ensure that innocent third parties don’t have their private lives exposed. It’s unique. No democratic country or socialist state has ever gone so far in opening up their archives for anyone to look at as
die ehemaligen DDR
, the former GDR. In a way it pleases me. In a way it scares me.”