Amelia looked from her to me.
“Why don’t you go over to the Alemana while I get the children in, then you can speak in Danish?”
Clever move. Get it over with, and then I could go home for supper. It’s always easier to get rid of someone once you’ve bought them a drink. But Amelia was also being friendly. It was natural for her to think that maybe we would like to speak Danish together. Amelia got terribly tired if she had to speak English, even for a very short time. She was a homebody who was reluctant to leave Madrid, unless it was to go to our holiday cottage in the green mountains of the Basque Country.
“OK,” I said, and kissed my wife again. She looked a bit taken aback. She didn’t like that kind of show of affection in front of a woman she didn’t know, but at the same time she was probably glad that I displayed my love openly. Amelia took my holdall. It wasn’t very heavy. She knew that I never let go of my camera bag.
“This way,” I said in Danish, and led Clara Hoffmann towards the Cervezeria Alemana on the other side of the plaza. She was wearing sensible shoes and only reached my shoulder. She smelled of a gentle, but classy perfume or lotion.
“It’s lovely here,” she said.
“Yes,” I answered, walking towards the brown entrance to the café. It was nearly full, but miraculously three young people got up from a window table and I led Clara Hoffmann over, guiding her lightly by the arm. The tables were white marble. As in all old Spanish cafés, the noise level was high. Serrano hams hung from the ceiling over the bar, where two bartenders were preparing coffee, tapas and drinks for the waiters in their short white jackets and black trousers, who bellowed out their orders. The walls were covered with black and white photographs of old bullfighters such as Manolete and film and stage actors from the 1940s and 50s. A huge bull’s head dominated one of the walls. The clientele was mixed, although mostly young people. The lighting was white and glaring, but the people and the smells of oil and garlic swathed the premises in a pleasantly mellow atmosphere.
“It’s lovely here,” Clara Hoffmann said again. “Well-lit and clean.”
I laughed.
“That’s nearly the title of a short story written by one of its very famous patrons.”
“Who?”
“Hemingway. ‘A Clean Well-lighted Place’,” I answered.
“Well, where hasn’t he been?” she said, taking a cigarette from her bag, which was one of those flat practical ones, the size of a sheet of A4.
“You’re not a fan?” I said.
“I don’t think I’ve read anything by him. Not since my senior school days at least. He’s sort of a bit passé, isn’t he?”
I lit her cigarette.
“Perhaps you don’t agree?” she said. Her eyes were almost grey. They held mine, you couldn’t look away. She seemed confident, slightly cool and remote.
“I’m a big fan,” I said, pointing down at our table and out of the window where throngs of pedestrians were on their way out for drinks and tapas before their late evening meal, which many didn’t eat until 11 p.m. “It’s even said that this was his regular table. He sat and wrote here while the fascists bombed Madrid during the Civil War. He usually stayed at your hotel when he was in town, along with the famous bullfighters of the time. Until some years ago, quite a few of the waiters here had known him and remembered him and had carried him home when he’d got too drunk to walk under his own steam.”
She looked around.
“It’s nice here,” she said.
“But it’s not Hemingway you want to talk about, Ms Hoffmann,” I said.
“Please, let’s not be formal.”
“May I get you a drink? A glass of wine?”
“Yes, thank you,” she said, exhaling her cigarette smoke.
Felipe came over and we chatted about this and that. He had been a waiter at the Alemana since my young days. He had been a promising young bullfighter when he was gored and had lost his balls, as the Spanish say. The injury was superficial, but the injury to his soul was fatal. He lost his nerve and didn’t dare go in the arena again. The Alemana’s owner, who was an aficionado, gave him a job as a waiter out of respect for the great courage he had displayed before that fateful day on which a bull had taken it from him. Now he was a small, thickset man with mournful eyes and a red nose, but he didn’t wear his bleeding heart on his sleeve. He lived alone in a little boarding house and every year he went to Ronda, where he came from, to stand all alone in the arena where he had made his debut. I have no idea what he did there. Maybe he cursed God. Maybe he just remembered his shattered dreams.
He stood with a cloth over his arm and took my order, a glass of red wine for the Danish woman, a lemonade for me and a plate of prawns in garlic and one of serrano ham. He bellowed out the order on his way back to the bar.
“I have a couple of questions,” Clara Hoffmann said.
I looked straight at her.
“Just so everything’s by the book,” I said, “could I see some identification?”
“Of course,” she answered, and handed me her identity card. The Danish police obviously didn’t use the old badges any more. The photograph was a good likeness. So she was 43. I would actually have guessed her to be a bit younger, but it’s hard to tell with women these days.
“Assistant Commissioner. Impressive,” I said.
“My boss is only a few years older than me. She’s a woman too. The Prime Minister’s new permanent undersecretary is only 32. There’s nothing impressive about it.”
She didn’t sound bitter, just a bit resigned, as if she knew that perhaps she had gone as far as she could, that her qualifications had given her so much, but the really big posts were beyond her reach. Or maybe she didn’t feel like that at all. I gave back her card. Felipe slammed the glasses, bottles and tapas onto the table, along with the little white receipt. The prawns sputtered vigorously in the oil and garlic. The cured, wind-dried ham was arranged beautifully on the plate, cut in paper-thin slices, which could have been mistaken for flower petals.
“It looks delicious,” she said. “What is it exactly?”
“Haven’t you ever been to Spain before?”
“Majorca. Ages ago. I’ve been more – how can I put it – my attention has been directed more to the east.”
“Catching Russian spies?”
“Something like that.”
She smiled. Her face changed when she smiled. Some of the primness disappeared and her eyes lit up.
“Prawns in garlic. That goes without saying. This one is serrano ham. It’s from a particular kind of pig which spends a pleasant life wandering in the mountains eating a special kind of root. The hams are cured and then hang in the bar for years just getting better and better.”
She took a cautious bite and then ate the whole piece.
“I’ll have to take some home,” she said.
“Yes. It’s good.”
We sipped our drinks and picked at the food. Then she became businesslike. She leant across the table. I sat with my back to the wall so I could keep an eye on the door. There was a constant flow in and out of the café. I knew quite a few of the regulars, but they didn’t come across and bother me.
“I won’t keep you away from your wife for long. But if I might ask you a couple of questions?”
“Go ahead.”
“You seemed quite dismissive on the phone.”
“The timing was bad,” I said.
“Laila Petrova,” said Clara Hoffmann, watching my face carefully. After a moment or two I shook my head.
“Means nothing to you?”
“Absolutely nothing. Who is she?”
“She’s 48 now. Chestnut hair, very likely dyed. Slim, 175 centimetres tall, average build. Often very tastefully dressed. An oval face, smooth after a little surgery. Sometimes blue eyes, sometimes brown, thanks to contact lenses. Photogenic. An art historian. Twice married. We don’t know the name of her first husband. Most recently married to a Russian painter, they divorced
ten years ago. Born Nielsen, or so we believe. The painter was, of course, called Petrov.”
“Means absolutely nothing to me.”
“Do you read the Danish papers?” she asked, eating ham and prawns in a very feminine and well-mannered fashion. She was hungry. Her stomach hadn’t adjusted to Spanish mealtimes. She broke the bread into small pieces and used it to soak up the oil and garlic. She had slender, strong hands. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but a narrow gold ring studded with blue sapphires on her right hand.
“No,” I answered. “Only if I come across cuttings.”
“Cuttings?”
“I’m a professional photographer. You know that. My firm supplies photographs to the media all over the world, and so we employ an agency to make sure that we know who is using our photographs. In case they happen to forget all about copyright.”
“I’m sorry. Of course,” she said, and scooped the last piece of ham off the plate. She chewed carefully and sipped her wine before continuing.
“Then you don’t know the story. Laila Petrova has disappeared. She was – is – director of one of Denmark’s big, international museums of modern art. The cultural capital of Europe and all that. She’s disappeared, and she’s taken what was left of the exhibition budget with her. About four and a half million kroner.”
“Not bad going, but why have you come to Spain to tell me about a clever little madam who runs off with the kitty? I’ve never heard of her. I could have told you that on the phone. You could have saved the taxpayer the cost of the trip.”
“Yes, but I couldn’t have shown you this,” she said, and pulled a folder out of her bag. From the folder, which looked like it contained a number of other documents, she drew out a black and white photograph. She held it up in front of me, again watching my face carefully. It was a standard agency photograph, 25x36 cm. It was well defined, but obviously a copy from a photograph, not a print straight off the negative. The photograph was of a young, fair-haired woman who was looking a little to the right of the photographer, her eyes scrunched up. She had long, sleek, shoulder-length hair with a straight fringe down to her eyebrows. The photograph must have been taken around 1970. It was a Marianne Faithfull hairstyle which many young women had back then. She was wearing a floral shirt, the top few buttons undone. There was a narrow belt in her jeans and she was smiling. One of her front teeth was crooked, but that just gave her smile extra charm. The outline of a couple of fishing boats could be seen in the background. She was holding a guitar, the position of her fingers suggesting she was playing a chord. It was summer. It was a charming, happy photograph. To the far left, a bearded man was smiling admiringly at the woman. The direction of his gaze, coupled with a pennant on one of the fishing boats, divided the composition into a Golden Section, so that the observer was instinctively drawn to the woman’s eyes and smile. I had a feeling that I had seen both her and the photograph before, but I couldn’t place either.
I looked up at Clara Hoffmann.
“It’s a lovely picture,” I said.
Clara Hoffmann turned the photograph over. I could see from the copyright stamp that it was from POLFOTO. But that wasn’t why she had turned it over. At the bottom, in sloping handwriting, were the words Lime’s photograph? I looked up and Clara Hoffmann stared straight at me.
“Exactly” she said. “Lime’s photograph. Question mark. And Lime, that must be you.”
The photograph rang bells in my memory. I looked for the caption, but there was just a typewritten note: Caption missing, but believed to be Denmark, 15 June 1970.
“I’ve taken thousands and thousands of photographs in my life,” I said, and took the photograph out of her hand. I looked at the handwritten words and the date: 15 June 1970. I knew the young woman in the photograph, but I kept my thoughts to myself. It’s part of my nature to withhold information, at least until I know what the person seeking it wants it for. And it had been years ago after all.
“You just happen to have this photograph with you out on a walk in town,” I said.
She smiled again, still watching me intently.
“If you’re a single woman who wants to dine in peace at a restaurant in a city you don’t know, experience has taught me that pulling official-looking papers from your briefcase and putting on reading glasses keeps the worst at bay.”
“OK,” I said. “Is it her?”
“Laila Petrova, yes. When she was young.”
“She’s not called Laila,” I said, remembering. “She’s called Lola. Nielsen. Jensen. Petersen. Something ordinary like that.”
“Then it is your photograph?”
“I think so, yes. I think so.”
I drank the last of my lemonade.
“But why is it a matter for the NSS? Isn’t it more of a case for the Fraud Squad?”
“Who’s the man in the photograph?” she asked. I studied him. He was also about 20, maybe younger. But he wasn’t in focus, because that would have spoiled the composition. It wasn’t by accident that he was a bit blurred, putting the principal subject in sharp focus. He had a full, black beard and a longish pageboy haircut. His teeth were even and white. He was wearing a dark, probably blue, anorak.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Is it him the NSS is interested in?”
“Let’s just say we’re interested and therefore also interested in Lime’s photograph.”
I passed it back to her.
“I can’t help you.”
“I wondered if you might have the negative. And if there are any other photographs from that place on the same roll.”
“If it’s my photograph, then I might have the negative. If I’ve got the negative, maybe I can find it. If I can find it, maybe there are other photographs. Who’s the man?”
“He’s been on the wanted list for over 20 years. He’s German. One of his many names is Wolfgang. He was in the Red Army Faction. He’s wanted all over the world for murder, arson, bank robberies and kidnapping. My German colleagues thought they’d got him when the GDR collapsed, but he disappeared. He’d been working as a mechanic in East Germany for 15 years. It’s rather a notorious story, so the German tabloids have written about it. One of my colleagues saw your photograph in Bild Am Sonntag. He recognised our Wolfgang and got in touch with us. We had no idea that Wolfgang had Danish connections. Where was the photograph taken?”
Her voice had hardened, as though it wasn’t a friendly conversation any more, but an interrogation.
“I’ve no idea. I’m not even certain that it is my photograph. It was taken nearly 30 years ago.”
She handed me the photograph again.
“Keep it. I’ve got other copies. Think about it. Search your memory, look in your archives, Lime. Help us.”
“OK. I’ll see what I can do – Felipe!”
Felipe came over and I paid the bill and tipped him well, as usual. I got up.
“I’ll ring you,” I said. “In a couple of days. Enjoy Madrid in the meantime.”
“Courtesy of the taxpayer,” she said.
“I don’t pay tax in Denmark,” I said, hitched up my camera bag and left with a feeling of uneasiness which I couldn’t explain or understand. But the period during which the photograph had been taken began to surface. I began remembering, and not all the memories from that time were worth hanging on to.
I put it out of my mind when I got home. I lived diagonally across from the café, in a top-floor flat I had bought many years ago and had extended several times by adding neighbouring flats. We had over 300 square metres, including my studio and a roof garden. We were constantly asked if we wanted to sell. It was a fantastic flat in the middle of the city, so we always said no. I let myself in and, as always, said hello to Jacqueline Kennedy who hung, life-sized and almost naked, just inside the door.
“I’m home,” I called out to the kitchen, which is where Amelia and Maria Luisa would be at this time of day. I locked the undeveloped films in the safe and threw Hoffmann’s photograph on my desk be
fore washing my hands and sitting down to supper with my family. I was enraptured with my home, by the company of my two girls, which always filled me with a feeling of joy, mixed with a feeling of anxiety – that one day they might leave me. Amelia had made noodle soup, steak with salad and afterwards Amelia and I had manchego cheese and Maria Luisa had ice cream. It sounds banal to list the courses of an enjoyable meal, but it was in such banality that I had found my inner calm. My wa as the Japanese say. It’s in everyday detail that the larger story is to be found. Amelia and I tried to talk, but we let Maria Luisa steer the conversation. We listened to her chattering, and saw in each other’s eyes how happy we were that she was the centre of attention at our table.
Sometimes after I had been away on a trip, Maria Luisa insisted that I read her bedtime story in Danish. I seldom spoke Danish with her. I had planned to when she was born, but it felt artificial, since we spoke only Spanish with friends and family. But I had read to her in Danish since she was tiny. She never answered me in my mother tongue, but it seemed to make her feel secure to hear me speak this foreign language. After supper it was time for her bath and then I read her favourite book about Alfons Åberg and his secret friend. Her eyes were heavy and sleepy by the time we reached the end, and I left her asleep with the bedside lamp on. I had a quick shower and crawled under the sheet where Amelia lay naked in the heat. Sounds of the city drifted in through the half-open window as we made love and became one.
Often I can’t sleep, and I got up when Amelia moved her head off my shoulder and turned onto her side. As I had done so many times before, I went up on our roof terrace and drank a cola and smoked a cigarette in the warm night air. I had picked up the photograph which the Danish woman had given me and I sat looking at it, surrounded by geraniums, roses, eucalyptus, orange and lemon trees, listening to the throb of the city drifting up from the plaza below. The clip-clop of heels, the roar of a motorbike accelerating, a couple laughing, a drunk man grumbling, a taxi door slamming, a metal grille being locked up in front of one of the bars, the strident siren of a patrol car, a curse as a man stumbled, someone breaking into song from sheer joy, the late night symphony. This was my window to the sky with a view over Madrid. It was here that I could think and find peace. When I had first moved to Madrid in the mid-1970s, the night sounds had been different, the sound of flamenco as people clapped their hands rhythmically to call forth the sereno. The sereno was a man, a watchman, who walked around with a big gnarled stick and carried keys to the flats and boarding houses. People called him by clapping. He was often a disabled Civil War veteran. His pension was the small change, five pesetas – the duro – he received for unlocking the door. On mild summer nights the clapping echoed round the neighbourhood as if little gypsies were beating a seductive rhythm in the hours of loving between night and day break. The old serenos were gone now. Progress had swept them away. There were a few left, but they were on a fixed salary, museum pieces like the watchman in Ebeltoft.
Lime's Photograph Page 4
