The Serbian Dane (15 page)

‘Right. And in the meantime, I’ve got a little plan of my own.’

‘And that is, Per?’

‘To get the Russians to give us a hand – with your permission. Igor could find out a whole lot more. If he wanted to…’

Per regarded his boss intently. He could tell by the look in those shrewd eyes that she knew what he was alluding to, but he wanted the suggestion to come from her, in case there should be complications later. You had to cover your back.

‘Our old friend Igor,’ she said.

‘There’s something he’s not telling us. So I was thinking…’

‘I know what you were thinking, Per. All right. Use your sleazy little file if you must. But this is strictly between the two of us.’

‘Fine,’ Toftlund said, relieved.

She stubbed out her cigarette and sat back in her chair.

‘And there’ll be no reason to put any of this down on paper, will there?’

‘No, let’s play it close to our chests,’ Per said.

He drove in to the
Politiken
offices. That had gone well, he thought. He could get in touch with Kammarasov again, with her Ladyship’s blessing, but without having to file a report. This was not one of those cases on which Vuldom felt bound to brief the parliamentary board of control. If all went well, then that was fine. And if anything did go wrong, then officially the matter did not exist. That was how both Toftlund and Vuldom preferred to work when things looked liable to get dirty.

He spotted Lise. She was standing outside the swing-doors of the
Politiken
building. She looked so good, he thought, with her fair hair and those blue jeans and a brightly coloured shirt under her short jacket. All of a sudden he just couldn’t wait to be with her. He made a snap decision, noting as he did so on his mental balance sheet that he was now crossing a threshold and taking a step further in a relationship. He stretched an arm across the passenger seat and opened the door. Lise got in and gave him a long lingering kiss, oblivious of the cars tooting their horns behind them.

‘
Hola mi amor
,’ she said.

‘
Mi amor
yourself,’ he retorted and put the car into first gear. ‘Dinner’s on me, so we have to do a bit of shopping.’

‘And where are we eating?’

‘My place.’

‘Is this a special occasion, then?’

‘You’ve no idea how special,’ he said and accelerated past a slow-moving bus, so fast that she was pressed back against her seat.

‘Hey, easy does it, cop or no cop,’ she cried.

She thought about him as she wandered around his small apartment. How did she actually feel about him, if she looked at it objectively? She was attracted to him, possibly even in love with him, but with what exactly? Did she like him for his own sake – or because he was Ole’s diametric opposite? Ole was verbal. Per was physical. But that couldn’t be the whole explanation. Maybe there was no explanation. And maybe she should stop looking for one and just go with the flow. The apartment was a clear reflection of Per’s personality. Albertslund wasn’t an area she would have chosen. Although it was nice enough really, for all her
preconceived notions about the place. Four-storey blocks of apartments in yellow brick clustered round a neat landscaped courtyard, the province of mothers, prams and young children. There was a nice view: green fields and, in the distance, Vestskoven. Per only rented the apartment. He didn’t like being tied down by a lot of stuff, he had said. Well that he certainly wasn’t. The walls were white and totally bare, except for two exquisite Samurai swords hung crosswise on one wall and a poster advertising a bullfight at Las Ventas in Madrid on another. At first glance she had taken it for one of those ghastly posters on which tourists could have their own names printed, but it was an original with Paco Camino’s name topping the bill. The swords looked like the genuine article too and had probably been bought in Japan. She understood now that Per spent most of his money on travelling abroad. Or had done. There weren’t many books on his bookshelves: a handful of detective novels and some English books on police work and intelligence matters. She roamed the room with a glass of wine in her hand, taking it all in. She could hear Per in the kitchen. He was whistling. Her eye fell on a CD player and tape deck. To her surprise most of the tapes were of classical music by Mozart, Beethoven, Bartok and Vivaldi, as well as opera and some Spanish guitar music. The furniture looked as if it came from a good, but not outrageously expensive, furniture shop. He had a twenty-inch television set and a video recorder. An oval dining table in pale wood with six chairs. A leather sofa with a blond wood coffee table in front of it and two leather armchairs filled the living room. The parquet floors were bare, apart from one richly hued Persian rug. She thought it a rather cold room, but she had been struck right away by how spick and span the apartment was. He had given her a quick tour: the bedroom contained a standard-size double bed and a desk in front of the window on which sat a laptop computer and a small printer. The bed was made, and everything was neat and tidy and very masculine. ‘Could you give me the name of your cleaner?’ she had asked dryly, but he had taken her seriously and replied that he didn’t have one. ‘And I suppose you iron your own shirts, too,’ she had said. ‘Naturally,’ he had said. ‘I was in the Royal Navy for four years.’As if that explained everything.

The kitchen too was spotlessly clean, and here he appeared to have spent a bit of money on equipment, because above the kitchen worktop hung a battery of gleaming copper pots and pans, which she knew for a fact cost an absolute fortune in Illum’s department store. Suspended from a hook was a string of garlic,
which she could see was being used, and ranged on top of the cupboards were wine racks filled with bottles of red and white wine. Simple and functional, like everything else in his apartment. It wasn’t how she and Ole would furnish a home. Had furnished their home, she corrected herself. They bought only the best and were both concerned that their home should look right, and that they should have the right address. There was no way they could live anywhere but in the city – and even then only in a couple of selected areas – or possibly on the coast north of Copenhagen in some really fantastic, architect-designed house. They would never dream of moving to Albertslund or anywhere else west of the city. It just wasn’t on. They had rebelled against the conservative attitudes of their parents, but somewhere along the way her and Ole’s generation seemed to have created a fresh set of values which were every bit as conservative. There were certain things
one
simply did not do. In a way she rather envied Per. In this apartment lived a man who had exactly what he needed, but no more than that, so that he could, at a moment’s notice, pack his bags and go. She and Ole had accumulated so much in the way of material possessions that the idea of upping sticks was too daunting to even contemplate. Or the idea of divorce, she thought, and promptly dismissed the thought. She walked over to the window and gazed out at the green woods. What the hell was she going to do? She felt a little strange, this wasn’t at all like the hours they had spent together at the safe house. That had been different, and a bit naughty, as befits a secret affair – like checking into a hotel. But this was something else: to be here, in his apartment. He was on home ground; she wasn’t. What would she do once Sara Santanda had been and gone? She couldn’t go on like this. Or could she? Wasn’t that the meaning implicit in the word ‘affair’? That it lasted for a certain length of time, then came to an end? But what if this was more than an affair, for her and for him? What then? Her thoughts kept going round in circles.

Lise walked through to the kitchen. It was filled with the aroma of basil, garlic and tomatoes. Per was wearing a blue apron over his shirt. He chopped salad greens and tomatoes and mixed them in a bowl. A crusty Italian loaf had also been sliced, and in a large pot on the stove the water for the pasta was just coming to the boil. He worked quickly and efficiently. He flashed her a big smile and pointed to the bottle of rioja.

‘Dinner will be ready soon,’ he said.

She walked up to him, took the spoon out of his hand and kissed him long and hard.

‘It can wait,’ she said.

‘But it’s just about there,’ he said.

‘It only takes a couple of minutes to cook up a fresh batch of pasta. Switch off the heat and come here,’ she said.

He looked at her, switched off both the ceramic hotplates and proceeded to unbutton her shirt.

Afterwards they sat at the table and ate the splendid dinner he had made. He was in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and she had borrowed one of his shirts. Lise felt warm and contented, and she could tell just by looking at him that he was very happy. It had been better than ever before. They were getting to know each other’s bodies and how they responded. He ogled her with bedroom eyes.

‘Stop looking at me like that,’ she said.

‘I can’t,’ he said.

He broke off a piece of bread and mopped up the last of his pasta sauce.

‘Are you staying the night, Lise?’

She wasn’t sure. It was dark outside. They sat in the glow from two lamps, and she didn’t have the slightest desire to get up and go.

‘Oh, I’d better go home,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t think I’m ready to leave Ole…not yet.’

He eyed her again and his next words surprised her:

‘I’ve never said this to anyone before, but if you want you can bring your toothbrush next time.’

He looked as if this statement had surprised him as much as it did her. Her heart swelled, and with it her sense of confusion. She thought she might be about to cry.

‘Oh, dammit Per,’ she said. ‘You musn’t say things like that.’

‘I’ve said it.’

‘Take me back to bed,’ she said. Because she couldn’t stand the thought of going home to look Ole in the eye and sit with him in their living room while the silence and the coldness grew between them, as if they were in the process of building their very own Berlin Wall.

V
uk switched hotels to avoid arousing suspicion by paying for a longer stay in cash. He called from the one he was in and booked a room in a similar, modest-sized family hotel a couple of streets further up. There were scores of small hotels in the Vesterbro area. Again he was able to check in without showing any form of identification. After breakfast he walked over, as usual, to the post office in Købmagergade. He wore dark glasses and stepped out smartly in the crisp morning air. Summer was gradually giving way to autumn. He wondered what he would do if he happened to meet anyone he knew from the old days. Would he have to kill them? Or would he be able to talk his way out of trouble? He would have to play it by ear. The odds of him bumping into an old acquaintance were slight. He didn’t venture out more than was absolutely necessary, but he had to admit that he could feel his old love for Copenhagen blossoming again. He had the urge just to stroll, to soak up the city. It had its own easy tempo, as slow and easy as the traffic. It amused him that the Danes thought the traffic here was so bad and so chaotic. Compared to that of any other big city, it flowed smoothly and steadily. Cars were parked within the bays reserved for them and not simply abandoned any old where, up on pavements and in all sorts of odd corners as they were in other cities. There was possibly a bit more litter than he remembered. There were potholes in the roads and a strange air of immutability about this town, which never seemed to grow up the way. It was clean, though, and well cared for, and the old Nørrebro area was teeming with new cafés and restaurants. Other cities had changed very fast, but Copenhagen still had a provincial, small-town feel to it; it didn’t seem like a city at all. In the newspaper he read reports of murders and killings, but he also noted the statistics: in Copenhagen
there were fourteen to fifteen murders a year. Where he came from, that many were killed in a village an hour. In another life he could happily have made his home in Copenhagen. The light falling over the city was clear and opalescent, reflected off the sea, and at night, when it rained, the raindrops glittered like crystal beads on the cobbles and tarmac. It was a strangely hushed town, where all sounds were muffled, especially at nightfall – as if the people and buildings were wrapped in cotton wool. The occasional voices one heard seemed to come from a long way off, and the engines of the few cars on the road purred gently and smoothly.

Vuk took a number at the post office in Købmagergade, waited his turn, then asked for poste restante. He spoke English and showed his British passport. He glanced round about, but no one was paying any attention to the handsome young man waiting patiently at the counter. Kravtjov had at long last delivered the goods: the female assistant handed him a white envelope bearing Danish stamps, but no sender’s address. The letter was correctly addressed to John Thatcher, poste restante, Købmagergade Post Office, Købmagergade 33, 1000 Copenhagen K. The address had been typed.

Vuk stepped out onto the street. The sun peeped from behind high,
light-grey
clouds, a cool wind was blowing from the west. He unsealed the envelope. Inside were two pieces of cardboard between which some Iranian diplomat had sellotaped a suitcase key. There too he found a small laminated keycard for a left-luggage locker at Copenhagen Central Station. From the date on the card, printed under an advert for Gourmet Food, Vuk could tell that the suitcase had been deposited there the day before. Three days’ storage had been paid for. Vuk assumed the Iranians had had his weapons sent by diplomatic bag to the embassy, thus avoiding all border checks. Vuk hoped they had found some nondescript man or woman to deposit the suitcase in the locker. He had great respect for PET, or any other intelligence service for that matter. He knew they kept a close eye on Iranians, Iraqis, Syrians, Sudanese, Libyans and anybody else whom they suspected of supporting terrorists or Muslim fundamentalists. The moment when he went to pick up the goods from that locker would, without doubt, be the riskiest so far, if PET happened to be keeping an eye on it, or if the drugs squad suspected it was being used as a letter box. Or he could be unlucky enough to walk right into
a stakeout – he had no way of knowing. The good thing about the Central Station was that it was so busy, with people coming and going all the time. The downside was that it was often under surveillance by one police unit or another. Vuk had checked out the Central Station and committed its new layout to memory. It had changed a lot. The left-luggage lockers were in the basement now. The area was monitored by closed-circuit TV, but there was also an exit giving onto the platforms, so he wasn’t venturing into a complete dead-end. The problem was that it was so easy to oversee and to seal off.

Vuk headed towards the Central Station. He stayed off Strøget and walked along the canal side instead. He thought about Ole. He had finally made contact with him two days before.

It had happened at the pub across from the couple’s apartment. Vuk was sitting at a table just inside the door when Ole walked in and shouted:

‘Oi, Erna! A beer and a chaser!’

Erna was a stout woman in a blue dress. She had slammed the glasses down in front of Ole as if she were mad at him.

‘You’d be better off going home to that lovely wife of yours,’ the woman he called Erna had remarked.

‘She’s never bloody well home,’ Ole had said.

Vuk had grinned and said he’d have the same. To begin with Ole had eyed him with sullen suspicion, but eventually they had got chatting. Vuk introduced himself as a sales rep from Jylland, and after a while he bought a round. It was always easy to strike up a conversation in a pub, in surroundings that were both anonymous and cosy. Words were not as binding here as elsewhere.

Vuk sauntered along the canal side, thinking of Ole and his own gift for getting to know people. He had always had it. His mother had told him that even when he was just a little boy he could smile and charm his way to all the ice creams and lemonades he wanted, and that he had looked so sweet that folk just couldn’t resist patting him on the head and ruffling his blond curls. She had had him and his little sister late in life and spoiled them both dreadfully, and they had loved her with all their hearts. He saw his mother in his mind’s eye, and had to struggle to erase her image and concentrate on Lise’s husband.

Ole had opened up quite a bit. He was a psychologist but evidently not so hot when it came to self-analysis. Or maybe it was just his nature to confide in
others, to be so frank. Vuk now knew that he and his wife were not getting on, that he was sick of his job and felt that life was passing him by all too fast; that he didn’t really have any friends: all the people he knew, he had met through Lise. Although Ole never said so in so many words, it seemed pretty clear to Vuk that he was terrified of losing Lise, and so he skulked in the pub, even though by doing so he was only causing her to drift further and further away from him He couldn’t stand being in that empty apartment. If he sat there alone, he kept seeing Lise in bed with someone else. He had blurted this out the other evening when they were having a few drinks together. Maybe he just needed to talk about himself after spending the whole day having to listen to other people’s irresolvable problems. Ole had been easy to woo, to prime for recruitment as an agent, Vuk thought to himself. It had been nice to have a drink. It had been quite a while since he’d touched alcohol, and the beer and aquavit had slid down easily, but he had a strong head and a strong body and at no time did he feel drunk, while Ole’s speech had become more and more slurred.

The recruiting of agents had been one part of the training at the Special Forces school at which Vuk had really excelled. People found it so easy to open their hearts to him. He was a good listener, and although he never gave away too much about himself, somehow he always left folk feeling that he had also taken them into his confidence. He could turn the charm on and off, like the sun appearing and disappearing behind a cloud. Once it had been only natural to him to be open and friendly, sweet and funny. That was just how he was. A happy and fairly uncomplicated child who grew into a cheeky, cheerful and charming young man, whom all the girls were wild about and all the boys wanted to be mates with. Until he was seventeen his life had been a pretty unproblematic one. Strolling through lovely timeworn Copenhagen he wondered how it might have turned out if the whole family had not moved back to Bosnia. It was his mother who had been so anxious to go home. She had wanted to spend her twilight years surrounded by their good friends in their old village and be buried in her native soil. His father’s back was no longer up to the work at the shipyard, and his invalidity pension would stretch so much further in the old country, but Vuk actually believed that his father would have preferred to stay in Denmark. Nonetheless, he followed Lea, just as she had followed him when they were young and he brought her to that
far-off capitalist country in the north where they were so wealthy that they had to import foreign hands to do the dirty work. His parents had saved enough to build a little house back home in Bosnia. Vuk could easily have stayed on in Denmark, but he was fed up with high school, couldn’t be bothered staying on to take his diploma; the prospect of running off to Yugoslavia appealed to him, even though he knew this would mean having to do his national service there. But that was okay by him, and his father supported his decision. Yugoslavia’s sons had to serve the fatherland, to ensure that the Russians or the Germans did not try to invade them again. This was the lesson Comrade Tito had preached to them, and as far as his father was concerned, what Tito said was law.

Then came the civil war. And with it the pain, the horrors and the rage.

On Rådhuspladsen Vuk halted and gazed over at the weird, black outsize anti-tank barrier. All of a sudden he felt ice-cold, as if the temperature had fallen drastically. The square and the people and the pigeons on it swam before his eyes, the hotdog stalls pitched and swayed, his head reeled, he felt his heart skip a beat, and he was gripped by panic.

‘Are you okay?’ he heard a voice ask, a long way off. ‘You’d better sit down for a minute. There’s a bench just over there.’

He felt a hand on his elbow. Rådhuspladsen stopped rocking like the deck of a ship. A young woman had him by the arm. She was leading a little boy by the other hand. The child goggled at Vuk, whose face was white as a sheet and covered in a fine layer of perspiration.

‘It’s all right. I’m all right now,’ Vuk said.

‘You looked as if you were about to pass out.’

‘Yeah, I know. I had a bit of a dizzy turn, but I’m fine now. Thanks.’

She let go of his arm and gave him a slightly embarrassed look.

‘It was just…’

‘I’m fine now, really. Maybe it was something I ate. Thanks for your help.’

He smiled.

‘Okay. We’ll be on our way, then,’ and she made to walk off with the little boy, who was staring at Vuk with unabashed curiosity, as only a child can do. The mother also took another look at Vuk.

‘Haven’t we met before?’ she said.

Vuk had the same feeling. He
had
seen her before. She was a couple of years older than him, the older sister of one of the guys in his class. Jytte, her name was.

‘I don’t think so. Unless you’re from Århus,’ he said.

The woman laughed:

‘No, definitely not.’

‘But I am.’

‘Oh, well enjoy your stay… I just thought.’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ Vuk, said more brusquely than he intended to, and saw from her face that it had hit home.

‘Right, well I’ll be getting on,’ she said and led the child away. Vuk watched them go. She turned around once and looked back at him. He raised a hand and waved. He wanted her to forget this meeting. Not to think too much over it, to simply dismiss it as just another ordinary, everyday incident. He did not want to get rid of her, nor could he. He would have to risk it. Maybe if it hadn’t been for the child, he would have gone after her. Maybe Copenhagen was having an effect on him.

Vuk stood for a moment, collecting himself. Everything returned to normal. The advertising signs stood chiselled into the facade of the Trade and Industry building. The
Politiken
house lay where it always had, there were queues at the hotdog stalls, and Hans Christian Andersen sat, as always, staring wistfully into space. Vuk hurried on down the street to the Central Station, struggling, as he went, to ward off the dreaded visions by thinking about Emma and the future he hoped they would have together.

At the Central Station he bought a travel card and a copy of
Ekstra Bladet
and seated himself on a bench from which he could watch the streams of people passing to and fro. The station concourse was bustling with activity, but everything looked pretty normal. He spotted no signs of any sort of surveillance operation. From his bench he had a clear view of the stairs down to the left-luggage lockers, which lay at the far end of the station next to the Reventlowsgade exit. It was only a short step from the station to his hotel. Travellers young and old came and went, leaving or collecting holdalls, rucksacks, shopping bags and suitcases, but Vuk could not see anyone else observing movements in the area the way he was.

He got to his feet and wandered about a bit, but even on this round he had no sense of anything untoward. The new shops and cafés were doing a brisk trade. He drank a cola and ate a hamburger in McDonald’s, then made another little round. A smartly dressed man came out of the florist’s carrying four long-stemmed roses. A party from a kindergarten had found itself a corner where the tots sat dutifully waiting. In another, a class of schoolchildren were gathered round a teacher. Vuk trusted his intuition implicitly: if he had had any sense that something was wrong, if one single detail had been out of place, he would have been out of there on the instant and never gone back. Then they would have had to find some other way of getting the goods to him.

Vuk made one more circuit of the station concourse. A couple of uniformed policemen paced slowly past him, but they didn’t so much as glance at the well-dressed young man. Their eyes did, however, dwell on a young girl in a pair of ripped and faded jeans and a grubby denim jacket. She had something that looked like a spear piercing one earlobe and rings through her nose and lips. Her hair was dyed red and green. Under all the
self-mutilation
she was quite pretty, and Vuk found himself wondering why anyone would willingly inflict pain and suffering on themselves. An extremely fat man with a white Santa Claus beard was sitting on a bench with his legs spread wide the way fat men do, watching the world go by. His great belly rested on his thighs. The place smelled of food and dust, but Vuk caught no whiff of danger.