The Woman from Bratislava (44 page)

‘Why did you come to see me in Bratislava?’

She puffed placidly on her cigarette. A faraway look had stolen over her face. She must have been remarkably beautiful as a young woman, Teddy thought to himself. Irma looked good, she always had done, but Mira’s Croatian blood had endowed her with a
loveliness
and a sweetness underneath the tough exterior which Irma lacked.

She looked at him:

‘A fox always has two exits. You were to take something out for me.’

‘The codes to bank accounts.’

‘Something along those lines, but it was more than that.’

‘The suitcase is gone,’ Teddy said, feeling disappointed that it had not been personal.

‘I realise that. I also sent them
poste restante
to myself.’

‘But you don’t know whether the money has been touched?’

‘No, I’ve no way of knowing.’

She paused as if not entirely sure whether to tell him, but then she went on:

‘I gave you notes and things, hidden within our family history. It’s a very old method. Written in invisible ink underneath the visible words: details of cash transfers made over the years, the names of agents, of people who now think themselves safe, but whom I know to be what one would term traitors. All sorts of information which I thought might come in handy if I had to make a deal.’

‘You crossed borders. Why was I suddenly supposed to be given your life insurance policy?’

‘That’s a very good name for it, Teddy. An insurance policy. They were after me. A lot of different people, but I wasn’t worried about my former colleagues. I was worried about what you call the mafia.’

‘What do you call it?’

‘The mafia.’

They both giggled. Teddy liked that about her. She had the ability to laugh – at herself too.

‘I followed you, but I had the feeling that someone was
following
me. I don’t trust customs officers in this part of the world. They can be bought for a ten-dollar bill, so it occurred to me that it would be better if I could deliver my little hoard of secrets 
concerning
other people and their pasts to a man whom no one has anything on. Namely, you. Had things gone differently I would probably have paid you a visit in Copenhagen. I felt the net closing in on me. I had to get rid of my heaviest piece of baggage.’

‘So old Teddy was to be your mule. Like a sort of drug courier.’

She laid a hand on his arm:

‘I also wanted to meet my brother. My emotions have been in turmoil for years, after all that has happened. To be perfectly honest I was at my wit’s end. I was terrified, Teddy. You don’t play games with the Russian mafia. It’s active everywhere these days and here in the East or in the Balkans it has a pretty free hand. I was scared, Teddy. I could feel them breathing down my neck and I didn’t dare risk carrying that information across yet another
border and having some underpaid customs guy give me funny, knowing looks. I watched you for a while first. Not least to see whether anyone else was watching you. I liked what I saw. Maybe I just had a stupid dream that in the family I might find an anchor to cling to amid all the chaos. That as well as everything else.’

‘Sounds awfully sentimental.’

‘Well, I could never afford to be sentimental, but perhaps that’s what I dream of when I dream of a normal life.’

Teddy took her hand:

‘Crazy as it may sound, I’m actually happy to have met you.’

‘It’s nice of you to say so.’

‘No doubting the title of this picture:
Teddy Gets All Sloppy in Albania after Reunion with Lost Sister
.’

‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘We’ve plenty of time. I’ll explain it to you some day.’

Teddy let go of her hand and stood up, stretched his back and massaged his aching lumbar region.’

‘Does your back hurt?’

‘Ah, it’s not too bad.’

‘Bend over a little, that’s it, now place your hands on the wall,’ she instructed and he did as she said, stood with his legs slightly apart and his palms pressed against the rough plaster as if he was about to be searched. Her hands felt good as she massaged his back, first through his jacket, then working their way underneath it.

‘You’re good at this, Mira,’ he said, then asked: ‘Why didn’t you come to see me again?’

‘I had to protect you.’

‘From whom?’

‘Let’s just call them the bad guys. Some of those whom I
double
-crossed. I had an old friend in Prague and in Bratislava. He created a smokescreen for me, in honour of a youthful love affair and the other bond between us, but they got to him. I think they were afraid he would tell your Danish policeman too much. They didn’t know the nature of the relationship which Pavel and I had.’

‘You’re surrounded by death, Mira.’

She stopped massaging him for a moment, then resumed her gentle stroking of his spine and the small of his back.

‘That’s why I want to get out. It’s over.’

‘Is Irma going with you?’

‘No, why would she?’

‘Because Irma’s a spy. Irma is Edelweiss. I realise that now.’

‘Yes and no. Irma was a courier. Edelweiss is more than one person. Edelweiss is the best operation we ever ran. Without Irma there would have been no Edelweiss. Without Edelweiss, no Irma. But Edelweiss is also the biggest Danish operation we ever mounted. Several different controllers, several agents. More in Denmark than anywhere else, and Irma was responsible for
coordinating
their efforts. It wasn’t hard to infiltrate Denmark. There were so many like Irma there.’

‘So who is he? The mystery man? Irma’s secret lover?’

Mira gave another soft laugh and he felt her gentle hands kneading his back.

‘I don’t know. Maybe he is more than one man. Maybe I know, but don’t want to say if Irma is not prepared to say. And she is not. He is Edelweiss, but he is also a dream. Our sister’s dream of
lifelong
love, perhaps. Or her dream that it is possible to realise a just society, to create a Utopia. Maybe he’s just an illusion. Take your pick. You’ll have to finish this story yourself, Teddy. Choose your own ending.’

‘It’s like Keyser Soze,’ Teddy said.

‘Who?’

‘A guy everyone is terrified of. He crops up everywhere, but nobody has ever seen him. He’s a mysterious character in a film called
The Usual Suspects
.’

‘Not one I’ve seen.’

‘D’you know what? You will. It’s a great film. You’ll see it at home with Teddy, with wine in your glass and rain on the window. I’ve got it on tape. You’ll love it. It’s a fantastic film.’ He paused,
then without altering his tone he said: ‘The police believe you’ve met Irma’s secret friend.’

Her hands stopped moving. He straightened up and turned to face her smile and her cool eyes.

‘Is that what they’re saying?’

‘They say they can as good as prove it.’

‘And perhaps they’re right.’

‘Why perhaps, Mira?’

She smiled at him again in a way which made him think how lovely she was and what a pity they had not met before. He felt instinctively attracted to her. It was hard to regard her as a
half-sister
when she was so new to him and so much of a woman.

‘Oh, to hell with it,’ she said. ‘I met him once. Just before I met you. I met him in Denmark along with Irma. She insisted.’

‘One last piece of business?’

‘No, Teddy. E– has cancer. I don’t think he has that long to go. Irma wanted the two people who have meant the most to her to meet before it was too late. We complied with her wishes, each for our own reasons.’

‘That was both sentimental and dangerous.’

Unexpectedly she took his hand and held it:

‘Teddy, Irma started out as business, but later we became sisters. Very dear sisters. It’s many years since we’ve had any
professional
dealings with one another, but we exchanged letters, met a couple of times a year in Zurich. It’s such a wonderfully
anonymous
, neutral place. We went walking in the mountains, talked, dreamed, told each other the things sisters tell one another. Irma knows nothing of my links with the underworld. When the Wall collapsed there was no longer anyone to spy for, but that didn’t mean that we stopped caring about one another, you know. Quite the opposite.’

‘It all sounds so bloody complicated. I don’t understand a blind thing.’

‘No, and you don’t really need to either, Teddy.’

‘You make it sound so complex and yet so awfully banal. Like some pop song: I love you and I forgive you and I’ll miss you and all that jazz.’

She laughed out loud:

‘Well, maybe that’s how it is. Love is banal, brother mine. Which is why it’s also so grand and unpredictable.’

Still holding her hand he eased himself down onto his stool and drew her down beside him.

‘Did you see who E– is?’

‘I know what he looks like.’

‘I’m sure the Danes would like to hear more about that.’

‘Forget it. It won’t get you anywhere.’

‘I’m not so sure the Danes will forget about it.’

‘Ah, the Danes,’ she sighed. ‘They’re a little naive. Up in arms one minute, mild as milk the next. All the Danes really want is to have a nice, comfortable life free from too much trouble or conflict. As a nation you’re adept at weaving your way through a dangerous world. The Danes would prefer to get off as lightly as possible. That’s how it was when our father was a soldier and that’s how it is today. No one in Denmark really wants anyone digging up recent history. There was no revolution. No violent action. All those young men and women became worthy pillars of society. That’s very Danish. They really didn’t mean anything by it. Or at least that’s what they say today. So why don’t we all just move on.’

‘Edelweiss is in the files.’

She laughed again. He liked to hear her laugh and it occurred to him that if she found it so easy to laugh in her current
situation
then she must be great fun to be with under normal
circumstances
. Neither Irma nor Fritz had that gift. They both had about as much humour as a doorpost. It would be just like the thing for him finally to meet a relative with a sense of humour only for her to emigrate to Australia or somewhere in Asia, maybe, far from Europe. Well, at any rate, it was good to hear her laugh, feel the warmth of her wrinkled, blue-veined hands in his, hear the mirth
in her voice and see it reflected in her eyes, those eyes which he suddenly remembered having likened to a glacial mountain tarn that evening when she visited him in Bratislava.

‘Oh, the files! Teddy, you’re a historian. You have to believe in the truth of the files. Otherwise what would you have to research? But what will you find in the files of the secret services except the conceited hopes of vain individuals, their attempts to make themselves seem important, their longing to be loved and taken seriously. Intelligence reports consist of ninety per cent bullshit or glaringly obvious facts, ten per cent lies, five per cent truth and possibly the occasional little secret.’

‘That’s more than a hundred per cent.’

‘Deduct as you see fit.’

Teddy beamed happily at her. He was sure the two of them were going to have a lot of fun. She was a sister after his own heart.

She let go of his hand, smiled up at the almost clear blue sky, stretched her arms over her head and tossed her short curls. Teddy was gazing at her with almost lovestruck eyes, so he saw the little red hole appear, heard the dull thud of the bullet driving into her right breast and saw the blood spatter over the wall behind from the much bigger exit wound in her back before he heard the actual shot. It was followed by another and yet another – the last one splintering the plaster only half a metre from his stunned, stricken face – and then, with staring eyes and a gurgling sound in her throat, Mira slid off the stool into the black mud, from which only a few green blades of grass protruded.

Per Toftlund had got there that crucial second too late.

Like Teddy he had roamed around the grim disused factory grounds, doing his best to block out the misery, the hopelessness and the stench as he searched for a woman of whose appearance he had only the vaguest idea. Eventually, down by a building at the very back, he had been stopped by two men in white trousers and jackets with the Red Cross emblem on them. On their left breast pockets they wore a little Norwegian flag.

They had asked him straight out in Norwegian if he was one of the Danes who had come with the convoy from Dürres. They were an odd-looking couple. One was a tall, lanky character with small, fishy, blue eyes and a great bush of hair spilling over his face. The other was a stocky guy with brown hair and eyes to match, little glasses and a smile so dazzlingly white that it seemed the snow of the Norwegian mountains had settled permanently on his teeth. He introduced himself as Dr Per Samuelsen and asked if Toftlund knew the three men who had presented themselves to the Norwegian doctors as members of the Danish health delegation, but had looked blankly at Samuelson when he smiled, and in the spirit of Scandinavian brotherhood, switched to the lovely, lilting
Norwegian
language.

‘It’s odd, though,’ Samuelsen had said. ‘I’ve never met a Dane who didn’t understand at least some Norwegian. They didn’t seem like doctors
or
Danes to me so I called the French soldiers.’ He patted the neat, new little satellite phone in his hand lovingly, as if it were a precious doctor’s bag. Toftlund had simply pointed, and then they had pointed and in their Bergen accent said ‘Down at the bread store,’ and then Per had started to run, with the mud
spurting
up over his trouser legs and his heart like a galloping lump in the left side of his chest. Children and women stared at him with horror in their eyes as he whipped his gun out of its
shoulder
holster, cocked it and hurtled onwards, careless of whether he knocked down any of the startled people in his way. They backed away from him, clutching their loaves of bread or tins of food, because in his face they recognised the violence from which they had fled.

Toftlund rounded the corner of the last building before the bread store, which was housed in the old factory building closest to the fence. Ahead of him was one of the two young men from the restaurant in Dürres, standing like a competition marksman with his legs slightly apart and a two-hand grip on his pistol; at the very second that Toftlund caught sight of him and shouted he
fired. Out of the corner of his eye Per saw that he had hit his target, then he instinctively raised his own gun, wrapped both hands round the butt and fired three times in rapid succession. The first bullet embedded itself in the shoulder of the black-haired young man, staining his jacket red. The second hit him above the left eye, causing his head to explode in a cloud of blood and brain matter and the third flew across the fence and burned out somewhere on the way to the suburbs of Shkodra.