The Serbian Dane

by Leif Davidsen

  Vuk filled Ole’s glass and raised his own.

  ‘Cheers, mate. Let me get this, will you? It’s been a really nice evening. You get tired of always eating alone.’

  Ole also raised his full glass.

  ‘No, it’s me who should thank you. I needed the company too.’

  They put the glasses to their lips. Vuk sipped his wine, Ole gulped down half a glassful. He couldn’t really taste it anymore. Vuk noticed that his speech was also becoming a bit slurred. Not much. He carried it well, but he hissed his ‘s’s.

  ‘So…what does your wife say to you being on the road so much with your plastic bags?’ Ole asked.

  ‘I’m not married, Ole, remember?’

  ‘Oh, that’s right. You’re not. Lucky man, eh?’

  ‘Well, I’m not that old, you know. I hope some day I’ll find the right girl for me. Have kids. Settle down. Right now, though, I’m happy playing the field. This way of life suits me fine right now.’

  ‘But selling plastic bags for a living.’ Ole said. ‘What kind of a life is that?’

  ‘Solving other people’s problems day in, day out – what kind of a life is that?’

  ‘Well, it’s easier than solving one’s own,’ Ole said.

  Vuk flashed him a warm smile. He knew he had a nice sympathetic smile, that he inspired confidence, that he was a good listener. He could play that part to perfection. So Vuk bided his time. Ole drained his glass and allowed Vuk to refill it before saying:

  ‘The thing is that you invest everything you’ve got in a marriage… And somewhere along the way you lose touch with your mates. The guys who were such an important part of your life when you were younger. And you get scared. Of suddenly finding yourself all alone in the world.’

  ‘You can always make new friends.’

  ‘It’s not so easy. As you get older you become more distanced from other people. It creeps up on you like the dark of winter.’

  Ole Carlsen smiled wryly at his own metaphor. Vuk smiled too and said:

  ‘I’m still young.’

  ‘Well, I feel very lucky and very happy to have met you, young man.’

  Vuk lifted his glass and watched Ole drink.

  ‘Same here,’ he said. He wondered briefly whether the time had come to make his play. Ole’s eyes were moist, his vision as blurred as his speech, and he was getting maudlin, so Vuk continued:

  ‘I’d really like to invite you back for a drink, but I don’t think my hotel room is the ideal place for entertaining…’

  ‘Why don’t you come back to my place?’

  ‘What’s your wife going to say to that?’

  ‘Lise? She’s never bloody there.’

  ‘It’s up to you, you know, if you want to talk about it…’

  Ole tipped the last of the bottle into his glass.

  ‘Oh, what the hell, let’s have a brandy with our coffee. On me. You’ll let me do that, at least.’

  He beckoned to the waitress. Like the staff of most Copenhagen restaurants she was young and, hence, cheap labour. Ole ordered coffee and two brandies.

  ‘I don’t think there’s much chance of saving our marriage,’ he said once the waitress had gone off with their order. She hadn’t asked which make of brandy they wanted, which was typical. She probably didn’t drink anything but Coke anyway, but Ole really couldn’t have cared one way or the other. He went on: ‘But we’d like to have a go at it. I mean, we are grownups, right?’

  Vuk nodded. Ole had said more or less the same thing earlier in the evening, but he was starting to repeat himself. Which was good. Vuk let him ramble on:

  ‘We’ll have more time together in a week or so. Then we’ll have to talk things through. It might even be easier then. Now that I’ve discussed it with you, Carsten. You’re such a good listener. I feel I’ve managed to get things straight in my head.’

  ‘Thanks. But why should it be easier in a week’s time?’

  Carlsen regarded him. For a moment Vuk was afraid he had been too direct. The waitress appeared and placed two glasses of brandy, cups and a pot of coffee on their table. Vuk poured coffee for them both and avoided looking at Ole as the latter resumed.

  ‘Why should it be easier? Well, I shouldn’t really be telling you this…but honestly, all this secrecy’s a bit much. Does the name Sara Santanda mean anything to you?’

  Vuk shook his head.

  ‘No, of course not,’ Ole corrected himself. ‘You’re in plastic bags, right? She’s this writer whom the Iranians want dead. She’s coming to Denmark in a week’s time, Lise’s in charge of organizing the visit. She’s collaborating with PET on the security arrangements and is probably being screwed rigid by some brainless cop as we speak.’

  Ole lifted his brandy glass and drained it. His voice had been close to breaking by the end of the sentence.

  ‘That’s not necessarily the case,’ Vuk said.

  Ole steadied himself.

  ‘I’m rather afraid that that is exactly the case.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it.’

  ‘Thanks, Carsten. You’re a good man, so you are, but if it hadn’t been this one, it would probably have been someone else. In any case, she’s not at home, and to tell the truth I don’t really feel like sitting there all alone or going on to a pub, so if you would like…’

  ‘I’d love to,’ Vuk said, smiling. But Ole did not see the triumph in that smile.

  They took a taxi to the Carlsens’ apartment. Ole had some trouble with his balance as he unlocked the door. Vuk made a round of the apartment when Ole took himself off to the toilet. The open-plan kitchen was neat and tidy. The living room was furnished with modern pieces in pale soft colours. Books covered the whole of one wall and in a corner a cream-coloured leather sofa and two leather chairs, all nicely worn-in, were arranged round a coffee table. You could sit there and drink coffee or swivel the chairs round to watch TV. On a sideboard which looked as though it might be an antique, stood framed photographs of Ole and Lise: happy snaps in which they had their arms around one another. And pictures of each of them on their own, taken on holidays abroad. A hallway led to the bathroom and toilet, from which Vuk could hear the sound of running water, and beyond them three rooms: the bedroom with its double bed, a room containing a computer and books on psychology, and another room with yet another computer, Vuk noted, when he quickly switched on the light and popped his head round the door, still listening out for the splash of water. The larger of the two rooms was obviously Lise’s. There were newspapers, magazines, books and floppy disks scattered all over the place. A telephone and an answering machine stood on a modern desk. Apart from these and a pile of papers, the desk was completely clear. On the wall hung a poster from Expo ’92 in Seville and a beautiful picture of a flamenco dancer. Vuk returned to the living room and gazed down at the street below. There was no traffic on the road, only an elderly man walking past with his dog. The glow from the sign on the pub opposite fell softly on a rain puddle.

  Ole came in and urged him to take a seat. He fetched a bottle of whisky, two glasses and a bowl of ice and poured two generous measures. It was almost as if he had made up his mind to drink himself out of, or into, oblivion, because in no time flat he had finished his drink and was refilling his glass. Vuk was full of compliments for the apartment, the furniture and all the laden bookshelves. He could see that Ole was very drunk now, so he wasn’t surprised by the sudden change of mood when Ole peered at him and said:

  ‘Christ, you’re a strange one, Carsten. In some ways, I mean. You know just about everything there is to know about me. I don’t know the first thing about you. Who are you, really?’

  ‘A dumb Jutlander,’ said Vuk, on his guard now. He didn’t want to have to resort to violence unless absolutely necessary. He lit a cigarette and held the pack of Prince out to Ole, but instead the other man took one of his own Kings, from a yellow pack that was new to Vuk.

  ‘Nah! There’s a lot more to you than meets the eye,’ Ole drawled.
/>   ‘I suppose the same could be said of anybody.’

  ‘No, I mean…you’re Danish, but somehow you’re different.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Vuk asked warily.

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t quite put my finger on it. But take Carl Ohmann, for instance. Most people would have made some comment about him sitting in that corner having dinner. But anyone would have thought you didn’t know who he was.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It’s just odd, that’s all, when you live in this country. And you do live here, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I do!’

  ‘Maybe you just don’t watch much television?’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose I do.’

  Vuk rose and walked across to the sideboard. He picked up one of the photographs – of Lise, somewhere down south. She was dressed in a little top and shorts, smiling and squinting at the camera. Her skin was tanned, and just visible in the background were some mountains and a patch of blue sea.

  ‘You’ve got a lovely wife, you know,’ Vuk said, but Ole was not about to be sidetracked:

  ‘Where did you go to school? Did you graduate from high school? Do you have a girlfriend?’

  Vuk turned to face Ole. The menace crept into his eyes, and the smile on his lips was, he felt, stiff and false. They were venturing onto dangerous ground.

  ‘Father-fixation, unhappy childhood, rotten sex life,’ he laughed.

  ‘Exactly.’

  Ole was very, very drunk now, Vuk saw. The whisky had gone straight to his head, and he wasn’t even pretending to savour it now. It just had to be gulped down. It just had to black everything out.

  Ole was still wittering on:

  ‘Exactly. We all have our baggage. There’s something inside you that wants out. Something mysterious. And frightening. You’re walking along a road, and there are a whole lot of signposts, but you’ve lost your bearings, can’t decide which sign to follow. Or maybe it’s actually me who feels like that.’

  Vuk put the photograph back in its place.

  ‘Very lovely wife. You shouldn’t let her go gallivanting all over the place.’

  Ole Carlsen laughed again, an affected, drink-sodden hoot. He lifted up the bottle and sloshed more whisky into his own empty glass and into Vuk’s, although this was still half-full. He did not add ice this time, just knocked it back again and underwent another abrupt mood shift, as the seriously inebriated are wont to do. He became tearful and sentimental.

  ‘Oh, she’s lovely all right. Christ, yeah. C’mere, Carsten. Fuck’s sake man, sit down and have another little drink. C’mon, mystery man. Lovely wife! God Almighty. Lovely! I’ll say she is. But what bloody good does that do?’

  Vuk sat down. He took a drink, and after twenty minutes Ole’s head began to nod and his utterances grew more and more incoherent. He had been talking about Lise and his life with her. About how happy they had been, the holidays they had gone on together. About how much he loved her, and how fuckin’ wonderful she was, and what a damn shame it was that they couldn’t have children, and about that bloody bitch Santanda, who should just stay the hell away from here, and a dumb cop who might have something between his legs but nothing between his ears, and about what a rotten fucking mess his life was in. And how he couldn’t take it any longer. At last Vuk was able to ease the lit cigarette from between his fingers and lift his feet up onto the sofa.

  Vuk sat for five minutes smoking a cigarette and considering the sleeping man. Ole was breathing deeply and heavily. His cigarette finished, Vuk got to his feet and gave Ole a gentle nudge. He didn’t stir. He was miles away.

  Vuk walked down the hallway and into Lise’s office. Her computer was an IBM model with which he was familiar; he switched it on. Alongside it was a disk case. It was locked. There were three drawers on either side of the desk next to the computer table. While the computer was loading he checked each one in turn. The top drawer on the right-hand side was locked. Vuk took out his pocket-knife and slid it into the crack, located the bolt and unlocked the drawer. Inside were some bank statements and a small key The computer finished loading, and he found himself looking at the well-known layout of Windows 5.1.

  Vuk clicked on the icon for Wordperfect, and the bright blues and reds of the word processing programme flashed up onto the screen. It surprised him slightly that a large newspaper concern such as Politiken should still be using the 5.1 version, but that wasn’t his problem. He sat down on Lise’s office chair and systematically set to work.

  By pressing ‘F5’ he gained access to a list of files. He ran an eye over it: Articles, Report, Pen, Pol, Personal, Letters, Notes. Vuk’s hands were steady as he proceeded to go into the various files, folders and documents. Not a thing. He hadn’t expected Lise to leave a printout of the schedule for Sara Santanda’s visit lying about, but nor would she be experienced enough not to have it written down somewhere. What would she do? Plainly she worked at home as much as she did at her office in the Politiken building.

  He took the small key from the drawer that had been locked. Not surprisingly, it fitted the disk case. In his experience, most people were pretty careless about computer safety or security in general. They never thought that they would be the victims of a break-in.

  Inside the disk case were a number of floppy disks with dividers in between. Lise was well organized; behind the divider marked ‘Danish PEN’ were four floppy disks, each clearly labelled: ‘Work in Progress’, ‘Meetings’, ‘Minutes’, ‘Simba’. ‘Simba’ sounded like a code word. The sort of thing an amateur would write on a disk. Vuk guessed that Lise was not the sort of person to muddy her trail any more than was absolutely necessary. You had to be trained always to remember to cover your tracks. And by writing down an unintelligible codename she had actually only made things easier for him.

  He slid the disk into the A-drive, and a document entitled ‘Simba’ appeared on the screen, the only document on the disk. He pressed ‘Enter’ to open the document, but instead, at the bottom of the screen, up came the message: ‘Error… Access denied’. She had clearly protected the document with a password. She assumed this meant that it could not be opened or copied. And she was quite right, but just because a document is password-protected doesn’t mean the whole disk can’t be copied.

  Vuk helped himself to a disk from behind the divider marked ‘Formatted’.

  ‘Right, Lise. Disk copying time,’ he murmured to himself.

  It took only a moment for him to copy the disk and slip the copy into his pocket. That done, he placed the original back in the case exactly where he had found it and locked the case with the key. He put the key back in the drawer. Then he duly exited Windows and closed down the computer. There would be no sign of his break-in whatsoever, apart from one missing blank disk, and nobody kept an exact count of those.

  Vuk switched off the light and went back to the living room.

  Ole was still flat out on the sofa. He gave a little grunt, moaned softly in his sleep but seemed to be completely out of it. The ashtray was full; the living room stank of cigarette smoke and whisky. Vuk scanned the room. He knew he had not left anything behind him. It was past one o’clock, all was quiet in the apartment and out on the street, so he had no trouble hearing the sound of a key being inserted in the lock and, seconds later, the front door closing.

  For a moment he stood as if turned to stone.