He bought a map of Denmark and of Copenhagen and studied them in the evening, while the television played in the background with the sound turned down. He shut his eyes and called up the memory of those familiar streets. He had no trouble converting the flat lines of the city map into roads, buildings, lanes, railway lines and suburbs. In his mind’s eye he saw houses and blocks of apartments. He populated the Town Hall Square, Nørrebrogade, Valby Langgade and Strøget with Danish faces and tried to call up the sound of the language in his head. He placed a hotdog stall on a street corner and picked up a paper in a newsagent’s where the Pakistani shopkeeper’s Danish was even worse than his father’s. He remembered everything, let the memories come and go as they pleased. Most of them were good. His life could have been very different, had his family not moved back to Bosnia. He might have studied maths or engineering, had a steady girlfriend and lived in a student residence like everyone else. He might have had a wife and kids by now. Told them about the old country and tried to make them understand why it was necessary to fight. And yet. Would he have understood? If he hadn’t gone there but had stayed in that safe little land nestling so snugly in its small corner, sheltered both from stormy weather and from cataclysmic man-made disasters and upheaval. Who could say? In any case, it was a waste of time wondering what might have been. He had been born the person he was, with the nationality he had, on the inside at least, although you wouldn’t have known it to look at him. His features were not the least bit Slavic, but unmistakably Nordic. He didn’t know why this should be, but his mother’s family hailed from Slovenia originally, and there was German blood there too. Maybe that was where he got his blond good looks, his fair hair and his mother’s blue eyes. There wasn’t much of his father about him. He had been a dark, powerfully built man with broad shoulders and big hands. But had he not perhaps inherited his father’s sure hand and cold-blooded nature? Thoughts of his family were not permitted to encroach. It would hurt too much to pursue them.
In a newsagent’s he found a Danish newspaper, no more than a day old. But only the foreign news meant anything to him. He could make nothing of the Danish stories. What he did see, though, was that Denmark was still a country where minor problems were blown up into major issues, simply because there really wasn’t that much to write about. He read aloud to himself, and the words flowed easily. From the newspaper reports he picked up the name of the current prime minister and an idea of what people in Denmark were talking about. The television programmes now took up a whole page. There were two evening news broadcasts, at quite different times from what he remembered. TV2 was showing more, or at least as many, programmes as the old Danmarks Radio channel, which apparently now called itself TV1. There were also lots of foreign channels, which the Danes could seemingly receive, since they were listed on the TV page. People in Denmark could watch the same programmes as he was watching in Berlin. Everybody in Europe could, so it seemed, watch the same programme at the same time, if they so desired.
Each day he called in at the Central Post Office and presented his Per Larsen passport at the poste restante desk. The day after his meeting with Kravtjov he called the bank in the Cayman Islands that guarded his banking secrets more closely than the Swiss. He phoned from a box where he could pay in cash after making his call. He gave the bank his code number, enquired as to whether the money had been paid in, was told that it had and asked them to transfer the full amount, minus a small handling charge, to a bank in Leichtenstein into which Vuk had been paying his salary and bonuses for the past four years. It was a discreet establishment, would never divulge information regarding a customer’s identity or sums held in foreign accounts to the local or national tax authorities. Access to an account might possibly be gained by court order but as far as the bank knew such a thing had never happened. No one in the tiny principality saw any reason to kill the goose that laid such lovely, labour-free golden eggs. Vuk had opened an account there under the name of Peter Nielsen and could make withdrawals from this simply by quoting his code number.
On the fourth day he was presented with a padded envelope, the sole contents of which were a suitcase key and a left-luggage ticket from the Central Station in West Berlin. He found the right U-bahn line on his map of Berlin and took it to the station. Young people from all over the world were milling around the left-luggage office, checking their rucksacks in and out, comparing notes on accommodation, cheap eating places and spots you just had to visit where you could stay for next to nothing. Vuk got the impression that the whole point of backpacking was to spend as little as possible and consort only with other like-minded souls. They travelled in order to learn about themselves and other people, but in their search for security they ended up sticking with kids who spoke, thought and dressed exactly the same as themselves. In his blue jeans, trainers and brown leather jacket he blended in easily with the young backpackers. He mingled with them and scanned his surroundings carefully but discreetly. The railway station exuded an air of bustling normality.
He handed over the left-luggage ticket.
‘Ein Moment,’ said the beefy elderly man who took it from him.
Vuk glanced round about. His unease made itself felt as a tremor in the small of his back. What if he was being watched? What if Kravtjov wasn’t who he said he was? Or – if he had betrayed Vuk – then this was the moment when the German police were liable to pounce. He was in Germany illegally, and on CNN he had seen that they had now started arresting Bosnian Serbs, to hand them over to the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. But Vuk knew that he had always covered his tracks well. He was known only to a very few. On the one occasion when, with the Commandant, he had gone too far, they had left no witnesses. He had been a soldier in a dirty war, but he knew that he had merely done his duty as a soldier. Only the blood-roller told him that he might never forget that afternoon when he had lost his head and they had gone on killing until not a single soul was left alive in the village.
The elderly man reappeared, carrying a small, grey Samsonite suitcase. Vuk took it, paid and walked off quickly. No one took any notice of him. Hundreds of bags, rucksacks and suitcases passed over the left-luggage counter every day.
He took a taxi but asked to be set down at the corner of Knesebechsstrasse and the Ku’damm. He stood for a moment or two with the case at his feet, surveying the crowd on the street, before picking up the suitcase and walking the few hundred yards to his hotel. The case was very light. Back in his room, with the door locked, he opened it with the key he had received in the padded envelope. Inside, as agreed, were the Danish passport, the British passport, the British driving licence and a Eurocard/Mastercard – issued in London – together with bundles of Danish kroner, two thousand in each, all in one hundred-and five hundred-kroner notes. Vuk unwrapped a couple of the bundles. It was all there. Kravtjov was a pro. He could, of course, still draw on his contacts from the old days, when the KGB operated over the whole of Central and Eastern Europe. The rapid growth of the Russian Mafia and its ability to function had much to do with its close links with the old regime’s security system and party apparat. Such were the subtle but influential workings of the old boys’ network.
The passports were relatively new but showed signs of normal wear and tear. He signed them in two different hands. Kravtjov had come up with good sound names: Carsten Petersen in the Danish passport and John Thatcher in the British one. It could be that Kravtjov still had access to forgery departments in Moscow, or perhaps he had been far-sighted enough to pocket a bundle of passports when the system collapsed? Or did the Russian Mafia have such enormous clout that it could in fact ask favours of the new Russian security service? Vuk knew that these two passports would be fine for travelling within the EU. Airport computer systems were always a problem, but he wasn’t planning on flying to Denmark anyway. Kravtjov had promised that they were clean and not reported missing, and Vuk had no choice but to trust him. With all boundaries within the EU now open, he was expecting any checks to be of the mos
t cursory nature. Vuk didn’t like playing with too many blind cards, but he had nothing against taking a well-calculated risk.
Vuk stuffed his old rucksack into Kravtjov’s suitcase and returned to the Central Station. On the way there he threw the suitcase into a rubbish skip on a building site. After long and careful scrutiny of the railway timetable he bought a second-class single on the early morning train to Hamburg, paying with cash. This done, he settled down in his room to watch a football match on TV. Afterwards, he ran his six miles around the Tiergarten, then showered and went out to a restaurant where he ordered his usual steak and baked potato. He drank the lion’s share of a bottle of wine with his steak. He wanted to get a good night’s sleep. Back at the hotel he packed his old clothes, the leather jacket, trainers and most of the money into his new suitcase. Then he sat back in the armchair and watched CNN until the stream of news reports and endlessly repeated advertisements was just a blur and he felt that he could sleep.
He woke rested the next morning. He felt fighting fit, felt nothing could touch him, though he knew that would not make him any the less cautious. He did twenty-five quick push-ups before showering and putting on the pale-blue shirt, the navy suit and the red and purple patterned tie. He slipped his feet into a pair of new, black lace-up shoes and picked up his suitcase. He paid for the hotel room in cash with Deutschmarks and thanked the receptionist in English for a pleasant stay. He had enough marks to cover any last outgoings, so he wouldn’t need to exchange any dollars or Danish kroner.
Vuk hailed a taxi on the Ku’damm and took it to the Central Station where he settled himself in a café with a cup of coffee and the Herald Tribune until it was time for his train.
The rush hour was more or less over when the train pulled slowly out of Berlin, bound for Hamburg. Vuk had a compartment to himself. He gazed out of the window, watched the city give way to suburbs, then open country. There were building sites and construction cranes everywhere, and when the train ran alongside the autobahn he saw dense streams of traffic flowing in both directions. The old GDR was falling apart before his very eyes. In a few years the Wall would be nothing but a memory, and all other traces of a divided Germany would have been erased. Vuk remembered how, back in 1989, they had cried ‘We are one people’. He had been just a kid then, and like other young people he had regarded the collapse of the Eastern Bloc as a just punishment for the old men. Their regimes had fallen like so many houses of cards, and they had not lifted a finger. He still did not understand how the Soviet leaders could have given up without a fight. They had taken power by force, they hung on to it by dint of terror tactics and oppression, then willingly relinquished it. How come? He had no idea. He just didn’t get it. He had believed that the fall of the Wall heralded a new beginning. But that conviction had been short-lived. We are one people, they had cried in the East. So are we, had been the speedy response from the West when the collapse of the old order began to tug at the purse-strings of wealthy Western Europe, which had grown affluent at the other side’s expense. The people had brought about the revolution. But their new leaders had soon taken it for their own.
The German Federal Railway train had departed on the dot and arrived in Hamburg bang on time. Vuk paid cash again for a single to Århus on the new German regional service. He just had time to eat a hotdog and buy a couple of German newspapers before the train left for Denmark at 12.30 pm. It was the middle of the week, so there weren’t very many people on the train: a German businessman and a young Danish couple talking softly to one another; a good-looking woman with her teenage son, who was playing his Walkman so loudly that the hiss of it penetrated the railway carriage. She asked him in Danish to turn it down: it was bad for his ears. He grumbled but did as she asked. Vuk sat behind his newspaper, listening to the lilt of the Danish. The German ticket inspector checked his ticket without looking at him twice. His eyes were on the ticket, not the man. Vuk thanked him with a danke and put down his paper. The flat north-German countryside slipped past the window. The houses looked well kept, the fields had been harvested, and the sky was clear over the woods in the background. He was filled with a sense of expectation, a feeling of being on holiday, of rediscovering a normality that he had left behind long ago. Did he not also feel a kind of inverted homesickness? Because, although the country that lay ahead was not his native land, it was a country which he had once found it natural to called home. Home sweet home: hyggeligt hjemme – the Danish words ran through his mind, strange and yet so familiar.
They were approaching the border. The train stopped at Padborg on the German side, then moved off again. A Danish passport controller passed through the train. He merely glanced at most of the green and red German passports, Vuk noted, watching him work his way through the carriage. But occasionally he opened a passport and took a closer look at it. Then it was Vuk’s turn.
‘Pas, bitte,’ the passport controller said.
‘Hi. Doing a bit of a check today, then, are you?’ Vuk said. His Danish was totally without accent. He handed the passport controller his beetroot-red passport in the name of Carsten Petersen. The controller opened it, then promptly closed it again and handed it back to him.
‘Yes. We do a spot check every now and again,’ the man said. He spoke with a Jutland accent. Then, as he moved on: ‘Enjoy the rest of your day.’
‘Thanks,’ Vuk said, somewhat puzzled by the man’s choice of words. Enjoy the rest of your day: Kan du fortsat ha’ en god dag – they never used to say that. It must be something they had borrowed from English. The Danish language snapped up foreign words and phrases and made them its own like no other language Vuk knew.
They trundled into Denmark and headed north through Jutland. The place hadn’t changed a bit. It looked so neat and trim, so innocent; lying there bathed in sunlight under a clear blue sky, smiling at Vuk, who settled back in his seat. The cars were newer, the houses bigger and the farms better kept than he remembered. But that might be because his own country consisted of nothing but ruins and streams of refugees. The contrast was so great simply because he did not feel there were any contrasts in the Danish countryside, only countless subtle nuances which, to a Dane, seemed like enormous differences but which, to a foreigner were like a piece of music, constantly repeating variations on the same theme. The train stopped at almost every station and he recited their names in the voice inside his head: Vojens, Røde Kro, Fredericia, Kolding, Vejle. The Danes didn’t look any different either. Dressed in jeans, which they called ‘cowboy trousers’, and sensible jackets. The few children he saw were well dressed and well fed. The land was bursting with health and plenty. All the way to Århus he feasted his eyes and ears on the landscape and the steady lilt of the Danish voices around him in the train. He felt as if he had divested himself of his Balkan cloak in order, instead, to garb himself in his Danish identity. He didn’t find it difficult. On the contrary, it came so naturally to him that for a moment he wasn’t sure who he really was and why he had come back here.
When he arrived in Århus at 17.28 pm he was just another face in the crowd.
Chapter 10
More than once Lise Carlsen had to check herself, but it was no use: she couldn’t take her eyes off Per, he was so hard to ignore, blast him: perched there so nonchalantly on the edge of a desk. He didn’t say much, left most of the talking to his boss. He had, however, run through the schedule as it now stood. Explained simply and matter-of-factly where they were thinking of holding the press conference and that they were still trying to find secure overnight accommodation. He seemed so self-assured, in a way that was new to Lise, used as she was to a world where a gift of the gab was the mark of a person’s worth; while Per, with his sparing use of words, showed that he knew he was good at his job and that they would listen to him. Had he nothing to prove? Was he simply perfectly content with his own capabilities? Was that his secret? Per had told them the word on the street was that a contract on the subject had been signed and sealed. This came as a surprise to
Lise: he had never said anything to her about it, even though they spent hours of each day in each other’s company.
Lise had also taken a back seat, letting Tagesen speak for their newspaper, and for the press in general. As chair of Danish PEN, she had every right to speak up and say what she thought. She might be young and relatively new to the post, which she had only held for a year, but she was a well-respected arts journalist and social commentator. And she had done her stint on various committees working for persecuted writers and imprisoned intellectuals around the world. She had been a member of PEN for almost ten years. She had travelled abroad for the organization and had been elected chair because she was good at what she did and because the large majority of members had felt that an injection of younger blood would be no bad thing. But she had to confess that she was feeling slightly unsure of herself. It wasn’t like her, but she was rather thrown by the fact that her marriage was in trouble. She had never been in such a situation before. And she had never had responsibility for such an important matter as this before either. One which could be a matter of life and death. Besides, it was Tagesen who had requested and been granted this meeting. And the powers that be did not want to get on the wrong side of the press: a media storm could rise up as suddenly as a dust storm in Texas, and if everybody was playing the same tune, it could sweep the country and clear a foodstuff off the market in a day, ruin the career of a bureaucrat or a politician in a week. Once the whole orchestra struck up, the facts were of little consequence. From then on, emotions governed events. Ole said folk must be scared to death of the life they were leading, to be so easily influenced. People no longer had any sort of an anchor, no firm belief in anything whatsoever, so it was the easiest thing in the world for the mass media to sway them and scare them. It wasn’t a thought Lise relished, but he was probably right.
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