The Serbian Dane

by Leif Davidsen

  She heard the veranda door being pushed back, and Per put his arms around her. He was naked. He slid his bed-warm hands inside the bathrobe and placed them gently over her breasts. Kissed the nape of her neck.

  ‘Come to bed,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t sleep,’ she said, leaning back against him. He caressed her, and it felt so good.

  ‘Who said anything about sleep?’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘Hmm.’ She felt his lips on her neck. The bristles on his chin prickled slightly.

  ‘I was thinking about something.’

  ‘So was I,’ he said, running his hands over her belly and down to her crotch.

  ‘That’s so nice,’ she said.

  ‘So are you.’

  He turned her round and kissed her while his hands slid down her back under the robe and cupped around her buttocks. His penis brushed against her, she wrapped her fingers around it lightly and felt it grow. It was wonderful to be wanted. Maybe that was the whole secret of love: to be the object of such great desire. He stopped kissing her, picked her up and carried her back to the bedroom. Afterwards she fell asleep without that elusive thought returning.

  It came to her, however, the next morning when they were having breakfast together in Per’s little kitchen. He had been out for a four-mile run in Vestskoven, made coffee and gone down to the baker’s for bread and was now sitting reading Politiken, clad in what she described as his uniform: jeans, button-down shirt and tie – to which, later, would be added the gun at his belt. She still hadn’t got used to that. She had slept an hour longer than him and felt fit and rested.

  ‘Per,’ she said. ‘Why is he so hard to find, this hit man?’

  ‘Because he works alone.’

  He put down the paper and poured himself another cup of his strong black coffee.

  ‘We’re keeping a close eye on all anarchist groups, extreme left-wingers, Nazis, nutcases and diplomats from certain countries. That sort have a tendency to blab, some might be persuaded to turn informer; they operate in groups, within organizations. They find it hard to keep their mouths shut. Most of them, anyway. If he were one of them, we would have him in no time. But he speaks Danish like a native and works alone. It’s going to take luck to track down someone like that.’

  ‘I was thinking…’ she said.

  She could see that he was about to make one of his cheeky remarks, but when he realized that she was serious he buttoned his lip and allowed her to continue:

  ‘If this hit man speaks Danish well, so well that he can pass for a Dane, then he must have lived here a long time, right?’

  Per nodded, and she went on:

  ‘You can’t really learn to speak the language – properly, I mean – unless you’re born and brought up here. You can always tell as soon as someone opens their mouth whether they’re Danish or not. It’s the little things that give it away, right?’

  ‘Go on,’ Per said.

  ‘The Danes are a tribe. We take a person to be a Dane if he or she speaks the language without an accent. If you can’t speak the language you stick out like a sore thumb in this little tribal society of ours. Prince Henrik doesn’t speak Danish well, so we’ve never thought of him as a real Dane. Everybody loved Princess Alexandra because she had hardly been in the country any time before she was speaking Danish beautifully. There are so few of us. We’re afraid of being swallowed up by the big world outside. Our language is our shield. That’s why it matters so much to us.’

  ‘Yes, teacher,’ he chipped in with a grin.

  She tutted impatiently:

  ‘No, listen. Just let me pursue this idea for a minute, will you?’

  ‘Okay, go on.’

  ‘Our killer, right? I think we have to take a gamble. He must have been born in Copenhagen around 1969. That’s the year the Russians mentioned, isn’t it? And he must have attended school for at least nine or ten years. He might even have gone to high school. There can’t be that many Yugoslavian boys in Denmark who’ve managed that. And every school keeps copies of the class pictures for each year. Somewhere in a school in Copenhagen is a picture of the man you’re looking for. Of your killer.’

  Per eyed her appreciatively.

  ‘Muy bien, guappa,’ he said, reaching for his mobile phone. He keyed in a number, beaming at her as he did so and making her feel as proud as a schoolgirl being praised by her teacher.

  ‘John, it’s Per,’ he said. ‘Get a couple of people to start ringing round the churches, get them to check their registries. I want the names of male children born to Yugoslavian immigrant workers here in 1968, ’69 and ’70. Once we’ve got the names, we’ll get on to the National Register Office and double-check whether they’re still resident here and in which school district they grew up. Have you got that?’

  He listened, then broke in:

  ‘I know damn well that 25,000 Yugoslavians came to Denmark to work in the sixties and seventies, but we’re only talking about three particular years here, so it shouldn’t be that hard a job, and the longer you go on blethering to me, the longer it will take. I’ll be there in half an hour…’

  Per drove Lise back to her place. Ole’s car was parked outside, which meant he must be home, unless he had taken a taxi to work because he’d been drinking the night before and didn’t want to drive. Per gave her a quick kiss.

  ‘I’ll call you,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll be at the office later.’

  She watched him drive off, missing him already. She walked through the main door and up the stairs, dragging her heels. She couldn’t stand the thought of another confrontation, so she decided to act huffy and just get changed, then bike in to work. Lise was one of those rare individuals who had never learned to drive. She had never had any notion to do so. She let herself in to the apartment. It had a shuttered unoccupied feel to it. She called out tentatively, but there was no reply. Ole had tidied up the living room and run the dishwasher but hadn’t done any shopping. The light on the answering machine was flashing. It was Ole’s secretary, asking Ole to give her a call please, was he sick or something, and should she cancel his appointments for the next couple of days?

  Lise called the secretary, who didn’t know where Ole could have got to. He had not shown up for work, nor phoned to say that he wouldn’t be in. Lise told her it would probably be best to cancel his appointments for that day and promised to call her back. The secretary sounded worried but also grateful to have someone else make a decision. Lise rang the newspaper office and asked if Ole had called, but he had not.

  She sat down in the kitchen with a glass of juice:

  ‘Where the hell are you, you stupid bugger?’ she sighed. She was worried; it wasn’t like Ole to simply go off without a word to anyone. And it certainly wasn’t like him to let down his clients, whatever problems he himself might have.

  She got changed and went to work, where she got her pieces on Sara Santanda’s visit ready to go to press. She had written a profile of the author and a summary of the Iranian government’s fatwa on her, but as agreed with Tagesen, she had not put it out on Politiken’s online newspaper for everyone to read. She would not do that until the evening before Sara’s arrival on the morning flight from London, so that it would appear in the paper on the day of the press conference itself. It was going to be the most fantastic scoop, and Per had not been able to talk them out of it. He would have preferred to eschew all publicity, but he had no say in this matter. Politiken wanted the story on the front page. For once the newspaper would have the jump on the TV and radio. They would hold the press conference, and afterwards Lise would conduct an exclusive interview with Sara at the safe house. They would be one step ahead of all their rivals.

  Lise tried calling home several times and rang Ole’s secretary twice, but she hadn’t heard from him either.

  Per called, and she expressed her concern to him, but he made light of it. As if he saw nothing unusual in the fact that her husband had simply vanished into thin air. Or at leas
t was not getting in touch. But how was he to know that they had always told one another where they would be? They had always felt it was important to check in with one another at least once a day. Even when out travelling, although it was usually her who was away somewhere, they had made a point of calling one another every day, if it was at all possible. Lately, she had to admit, this had tended to be a pretty one-sided arrangement, but at least she had always known where Ole was. Or had she? Per, on the other hand, was the sort of person who divulged only as much as was absolutely necessary about his activities. It wasn’t like Ole not to get in touch. Again she found herself missing the old day-to-day routine. Just to have the time to read a good book again…

  ‘Wasn’t it you who left him, Lise?’ Per asked rather coolly. Stung by this comment, she told him she was too busy to talk and put down the phone. But she was happy when he called a couple of hours later and asked if he should pick her up at eight. She felt restless. There was nothing else to do now but wait and hope that Per’s and John’s investigation would bear fruit. But that was not her department.

  Per picked her up, and they drove back to his place. She wanted him so badly. They took a shower together and ended up in bed, where she forgot all about Ole and Sara and hired killers and gave herself up to a passion she had not thought she possessed. And afterwards, when she was lying there still, and he brought her a glass of red wine, her cigarettes and an ashtray, she thought her heart would burst.

  ‘It must be love,’ she said.

  ‘Just give me time. I’ll wean you off them eventually,’ he said. ‘Pasta and salad?’

  ‘Sounds divine,’ she said, stretching and feeling warm all over and so happy to be alive at this moment.

  He had set the table in the living room; she sat there, swathed in his big bathrobe and ate, while he filled her in on the investigation. In order to narrow the field, they had chosen to concentrate on sons of Yugoslavian guest workers in state schools who had sat the school-leavers’ examination in either ninth or tenth grade. They had had five people working on this all day. It was a long laborious process. There had been no such thing as databases back then, so the people they called had to look up books and registers, but they had narrowed it down to 109 Yugoslavian boys who had taken their school-leavers’ certificate. The team had now started cross-checking these names with the National Register Office, police records and the Motor Vehicle Registration Department, to find out how many of them were still in the country or if any of them had died. It was basic police work – tedious but necessary. Tomorrow he would be able to go round the schools with a list of perhaps twenty names and try to match them with faces in the class photographs kept by the schools. If they were lucky, they might come up with a name and a face for the police artists to work on. A computer-generated Identikit picture could then be distributed to the security officers involved in the visit. And they would be able to check whether Interpol had any record of the man: fingerprints, police record, whether he was wanted for anything.

  ‘It’s a simple process of elimination,’ he said.

  ‘And what if that doesn’t pay off either?’

  ‘Then we’re back to square one. Our best bet still is that we can manage to keep the schedule a secret. Word leaked out that Simba was coming here, but that was all, no details.’

  ‘This is delicious,’ she said.

  He took a sip of his wine:

  ‘What are you doing tomorrow?’

  ‘Nothing in particular. Waiting. Looking forward to basking in the admiration of my colleagues when they read my articles,’ she said dryly, although she did in fact mean it.

  ‘Why don’t you join me, then?’

  ‘I’d love to,’ she said.

  ‘John will be allocating each of us some schools to visit. We’ll call them in the morning and go round them in the afternoon.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, but then he saw her face fall.

  ‘You’re thinking about Ole, aren’t you?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I don’t understand what can have happened to him.’

  ‘Don’t worry, he’ll turn up tomorrow, you’ll see.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re probably right,’ she said, although she didn’t really believe it. She didn’t know why, but she had the feeling that something was very wrong.

  By lunchtime the next day they had whittled the list down to twenty-one names, all sons of Yugoslavian guest workers who fulfilled both of their two criteria: they had sat their school-leavers’ examination in the mid-eighties, and they were no longer resident in Denmark. Eight people had worked right through the night on this, and Per didn’t dare think about the overtime chits he would be asked to sign later. His boss would nod approvingly if his gamble paid off and give him a bawling-out for lack of judgement if it turned out to be a wild-goose chase. Per could not help feeling a little guilty that he had not been there to help, but it was routine work and he was really going to have to be on the ball over the next forty-eight hours. Besides which, he had to admit that he hated the thought of missing a night with Lise. Not that he didn’t feel pretty sure of her, but that didn’t stop him from being afraid that she might walk out of his life as suddenly as she had entered it. She was worried about her husband. A laudable trait in a human being, perhaps, but it also told him that she still had feelings for Ole, and it wouldn’t be the first time he had seen an errant wife return to the safety of the nest. Which had been fine with him, on those other occasions, but he was not so certain that it would be so this time. This was developing into something more than an affair.

  She seemed agitated when they set out to visit the three schools they had picked out. He knew she had spent the morning calling friends and family, but no one had seen Ole. She did not want to report him missing just yet; she would give it another day. He hadn’t taken anything from the apartment. The car was parked at the kerb, but she couldn’t find the car keys. Only the spare set, which was hanging on a hook in the kitchen. It was like the story of the man who went out to buy cigarettes and never came back. She borrowed Per’s mobile and called home, but every time she tried she got the answering machine.

  At the first school they drew a blank. They looked at the class pictures, and the school had a list of the pupils’ names for them, but there had been only two Yugoslavian boys in the class, and their profiles didn’t fit. One was still living in the area and had a Danish wife. The other had been killed in a car crash only four years previously. None of the other pupils at the school matched up with any of the twenty-one names on the list given to Per by the officers who had done the spadework. The second school lay in Nørrebro, in an old redbrick building. Here, in the late afternoon, it was empty and quiet, with no children or teachers around. An elderly man was standing just inside the door, waiting for them. He looked as though he had been there for some time. He was impeccably turned out in an old-fashioned tweed jacket complete with waistcoat and tie and grey flannels with a knife-edge crease. His hair was snowy white but still thick and bushy. The skin of his face had a pinkish cast to it, as if he had given himself an extra close shave that day. Lise gauged him to be at least seventy, possibly more. He was the very image of a venerable old schoolmaster, the last of a dying breed. He had about him a whiff of schooldays long gone, but the word Lise would have used to describe him was ‘distinguished’. He stepped forward and shook their hands:

  ‘Gustav Hansen, senior teacher, retired.’

  ‘Lise Carlsen, Danish PEN and Politiken.’

  ‘Detective-Inspector Toftlund.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Gustav Hansen. His hand was dry and cool. He spoke slowly and very distinctly in a deep baritone. He pointed down the corridor and up a stairway and walked ahead of them with a firm, if slow stride, talking as he went: ‘I know you are pressed for time, and I have been thoroughly briefed regarding the purpose of your investigation, so I gathered together all the material I believe to be relevant while awaiting your arrival. The headmistress has been of great help
with everything and has even given us the use of her office.’