The Woman from Bratislava

by Leif Davidsen

  Then, all unprompted, she said: ‘He loves the kids.’

  ‘And is that more important than whether he loves you?’ I retorted bitterly.

  ‘He loves me too.’

  ‘Oh, God, how banal can you be?’ I sighed.

  ‘You and I – we’ve nothing in common now,’ she said. ‘You’re always in a bad mood. Or you’re in a world of your own. Or both.’

  ‘And Peter’s not?’

  ‘Peter is always there when I need him.’

  ‘And I’m not.’

  She placed a hand over mine and looked deep into my eyes. They were a little moist.

  ‘Teddy, you’re as charming as ever, and you’re still a dear, sweet man, but you’re also in danger of turning into an old grouch. Don’t let that happen. There’s so much good in you. I just don’t seem to be able to bring it out any more. If I ever could. Peter makes me feel alive. And the children are happy when we’re with him. They say we’re like a real family. “Why is Teddy always so cross?” – I don’t know how many times they’ve asked me that in the past year. Listen to me. It’s for the best. For all of us. One day you’ll understand that.’

  First my tooth, then my back, and now I had a pain in my gut too – the coffee had upset my stomach. I felt a powerful surge of nausea. Being sick helped, but when I bent over the toilet bowl my torturers set to again with their whole battery of instruments. That she was leaving me was bad enough. Almost worse, though, was the pity in her eyes when she looked at me. She regarded me as a poor old soul, and maybe she was right.

  I returned to the kitchen. She said nothing, thankfully. I poured myself a glass of milk, stood there holding it. Why are we always so bloody civilised? Why don’t we chuck plates at one another? Maybe that was what she had really been saying. That I was always so thick-skinned. That nothing could penetrate the armoured shell I had built up around myself. That deep down I was a selfish son-of-a-bitch who employed sarcasm as a deadly weapon to conceal the fact that I was a total failure – as a scholar and as a human being.

  I thought about this as I stood by the kitchen bench, listening to her footsteps fading off down the hall, then I heard the bang of the front door as Nora left the doll’s house and a rejected Helmer. Thank God for literature. The unfailing resort of we ageing academics. There is nothing like a good, veiled quotation to put one’s demons to flight, or at least render them comprehensible in abstract terms. The situation was, however, pretty clear. Teddy was, in all ways, down for the count.

  I kept the storm of emotions at bay by doing something practical. I picked up the phone, made an appointment with the doctor, and with the dentist, both of whom could manage to squeeze me in, then I called my lawyer – Janne had asked me to do this, she had already hired Peter’s – and, lastly, SAS. My suitcase had obviously decided to go globetrotting. It now appeared to be winging its way to Timbuktu or some other godforsaken place. At any rate the nice lady at the airport was able to inform me that it was not on its way to Denmark. Not at the moment, as she said. Smart suitcase. I looked out of the window. It was coming down in buckets, and so windy that the rain was hitting people head-on. Cars splashed through the puddles, splattering those sorry wretches who had dared to brave the early Danish spring with cascades of brown sludge. Finally I called my sister. She was the one to whom everyone in the family took their troubles. She was not at home. I called Roskilde University only to be told that she was attending a symposium at Lund, in Sweden. She would be back the next day. I left a message on her answering machine at home and on her mobile, then I went to see the doctor and the dentist. I should possibly have booked an appointment with a psychologist as well, but that might have been overdoing things on the treatment side for one day. No matter how hard I tried to block out the image, it kept coming back to me: Peter and Janne in bed together, slim and naked, locked in a passionate embrace. Janne’s face was the worst bit. She looked so damn happy. The same happiness that she had been unable to hide as she sat across from me at the kitchen table, feeling sorry for Teddy, I’m sure, but actually glad that the cat was now out of the bag, that she had confessed her four-month-old secret.

  The doctor poked me in the back and I almost hit the roof. He said he doubted it was a slipped disc, it was probably nothing more than a strained muscle. Good old-fashioned lumbago. It would get better by itself. If it did not, I should come back and have it X-rayed. In the meantime I could take some paracetamol. And take it easy. The dentist told me it was my gums that were the problem, that I ought to floss more regularly for a while; if that didn’t work he would have to cut away some of the infected tissue, but he did not have time to do that today. He had to help me out of the chair. Once I got myself stretched out in it I could not get up again. I have a feeling he thought I was a bit of a joke. A wimp, as my sun-bronzed, golf-playing dentist, a man of my own age, was wont to say whenever I asked for an injection.

  I beat my way through the rain, did a bit of shopping, went back to my empty flat, buttered a couple of slices of bread and fried an egg. Janne had taken the car. Well, she had the kids. I didn’t mind. I had never owned a car until I met Janne. In the city they were more trouble than they were worth. As far as I was concerned she could keep it, although it was me who had paid for it. The flat smelled empty, but I would just have to get used to that. At the sight of the children’s toys and books lying here and there I found myself missing the little brats and the endless mess they made. Janne’s side of the wardrobe was still full of her clothes. I sniffed her blouses, they smelled so strongly of her that I promptly shut the wardrobe door and shuffled back through to the living room. The flat was mine. I had learned one thing, at least, from my previous two divorces. The first had not cost me much because we did not have much. The second had been an expensive business. She walked away with half my personal pension and the house. This time everything was in my name. I might have been in love, but I had not been a complete idiot.

  I could not settle. Why the hell had Irma not called me back? I needed to talk to my wise, mature older sister. About life in general, but also about the mysterious woman in Bratislava. I could not bring myself to read. Not even a newspaper. It was nine in the evening before I really began to relax; I made a pot of coffee and took it through to the living room to watch the evening news. The petty issues that pass for news in Denmark had a soothing effect on me. But there was also a good piece on the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, and heartbreaking pictures of Kosovo Albanians fleeing to the poorest country in Europe – Albania. Our own worries tend to pale into insignificance when we are confronted with the misfortunes of others. But I also remembered a line from a Dylan song from the mid-seventies, one which I still had on one of my venerable old LPs: ‘Didn’t seem like much was happenin’, so I turned it off and went and grabbed another beer.’ I kept my TV switched on, though, and in the middle of the weather forecast the doorbell rang.

  Outside stood two men, one in his late thirties, the other in his fifties. The younger of them showed me his ID card and said:

  ‘Police. We have a Theodor Nikolaj Pedersen registered as living at this address.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Do you know where he is?’

  ‘You’re looking at him.’

  ‘Are you telling me that you are Theodor Nikolaj Pedersen?’ Again it was the younger of the two who spoke.

  ‘Are the forces of law and order always so slow on the uptake,’ I said. ‘I just said so, didn’t I? Teddy to my friends. At your service.’

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to be in Budapest?’

  ‘How the hell do you know that?’

  ‘Might we come in for a moment?’ the older man asked.

  ‘Why? Has something happened?’

  ‘We’ve received a message from the police in Budapest. This evening. Earlier today the Danish Embassy down there got in touch with us. They reported that a Danish citizen by the name of Theodor Nikolaj Pedersen had been found murdered. But now our Hungarian colleagues are
saying that it is, in fact, another Danish citizen. A Niels Lassen. May we come in?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, more shaken than I let on. This was definitely not the most ordinary day in Teddy’s normally so straightforward academic life.

  5

  THEY SEATED THEMSELVES on the edge of the sofa. I remained standing. I asked if they would like coffee. They said they would, so I fetched two more cups, poured coffee for them and told them just to call me Teddy. Everyone else does. They introduced themselves. The middle-aged man gave only his surname: Bjerregaard. He was wearing the sort of jacket I wear myself, along with shirt, tie and grey flannels. Very conservative, but dapper. The younger man’s name was Per Toftlund. He was the athletic type, with the look of a boxer, or a soldier: hair close-cropped, clad in a dark leather jacket, light-coloured shirt, tie and faded jeans. He could even have been taken for an undercover cop. I had the feeling that I had seen him before. In the news, in connection with that bloody business involving the writer Sara Santanda, the one with the fatwa on her head. I could not recall all the details, but I was sure Toftlund was the name of the officer who had been hung out in the media for failing to prevent the attempt on her life at Flakfortet. If I remembered rightly the would-be assassin had got away too. Toftlund was clearly still with the police, though, so maybe he had not been left to carry the can. Or maybe he had been transferred from PET to the CID or Interpol?

  ‘Won’t you take a seat?’ Bjerregaard asked, as if he were the host.

  ‘No thanks,’ I said, putting a demonstrative hand to the base of my spine. ‘I have a bad back.’

  ‘Have you tried doing some stretching exercises?’ Toftlund asked. ‘Lie down and I’ll loosen it up for you.’

  ‘No, that’s okay. Thanks anyway,’ I said, sounding more startled by this offer than I intended. But I could just imagine what those strong hands and muscular upper arms could do to my back. They would make the torturers from Bratislava seem like amateurs.

  ‘It does help, you know,’ he said.

  ‘Why don’t we just get down to the matter in hand,’ I said. ‘What’s all this about Niels?’

  ‘Was he a good friend of yours?’ Toftlund asked.

  ‘Not really. An acquaintance. In this Lilliputian land of ours the academic world is not all that big. Everybody knows everybody else. But what about his daughter? Charlotte?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, she was with him,’ I snapped – this whole situation was starting to get to me.

  Gently, Toftlund put down his coffee cup. His movements were smooth, almost graceful, those powerful hands notwithstanding.

  ‘We don’t actually know that much. We’ve received a couple of faxes from Budapest. We’re only here now because your name cropped up. Maybe you can help us. When did you get home?’

  ‘No. No, dammit. I want to know what happened!’

  ‘Sometime last night a person or persons unknown broke into Niels Lassen’s hotel room in Budapest. The room was registered in your name. He was killed, either by strangulation or by a blow to the back of head. The details are still a bit vague, but according to our Hungarian colleagues it was a very professional job. The intruders then ransacked the room before making their getaway. No one saw them come or go. As far as we know.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ I muttered vacantly. ‘Poor Charlotte.’

  ‘Yeah, poor Charlotte,’ Toftlund said with something approaching sarcasm. I did not like his arrogance or his coolness, but I told them the story. About my back and how I had come home, how the room had been paid for in advance and Charlotte had asked if she could make use of it, since it was going to be lying empty anyway. They had obviously done it the other way round, though. Either that or Brandt had mucked things up and given them the wrong keys. He always checked people in. I deliberately kept quiet about the woman who had come to my room in Bratislava. That had nothing to do with the police. Only as I finished telling my story did it dawn on me how lucky I had been. Incredibly lucky, to have hurt my back and have had to come home. Toftlund could obviously tell from my face what I was thinking.

  ‘Yes, Teddy Pedersen. Fate’s been kind to you.’

  ‘A fat lot of good it does to know that. You make it sound as if it was my fault.’

  ‘Not at all, but I can’t help wondering whether the killers simply picked that room at random, or whether there was more to it?’

  He let those last words hang in the air. Bjerregaard merely sat there, hunched over the table with his coffee cup in his hand, suspended, like a little painting almost: Still Life of Plain-clothes Policeman with Coffee Cup on Teddy’s Sofa.

  I put my hand to the small of my back, which was throbbing like mad, and said:

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Oh, of course you do,’ Toftlund replied. ‘What could they have been looking for?’

  ‘How should I know? I don’t smuggle alcohol or drugs. I’m sure I look guilty as sin if I’m carrying as much as four cigarettes over the allowance.’

  ‘It’s an odd coincidence, though,’ Toftlund said.

  ‘Yes, exactly. A coincidence. Have you any idea how crime has exploded in that corner of the world since the collapse of communism. It’s part of the way of life in the old Soviet bloc. Capitalism brought them freedom, poverty and the mafia.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ Toftlund persisted. ‘But you could have enemies down there. You’ve done a lot of travelling in Eastern Europe.’

  How the hell did he know that, I wondered. They must have run a check on me before making their little surprise visit. My name was bound to crop up in various PET files, what with all the trips I had made behind the Iron Curtain over the years. Not that I had anything to hide, but I read the papers. Something akin to a witch-hunt had been under way to unmask old Stasi spies ever since the Americans had handed over the magnetic tapes which held the key to the identities of the people behind the aliases used by Stasi’s thousands of agents and informers. There was something farcical about the whole thing. Ten years after the fall of the Wall some of my fellow academics were shaking in their shoes at the thought of what might be on those tapes. Had some of their pronouncements been a little too pro-Soviet? Had they accepted a couple of gifts too many? Made some remark which was now preserved on yellowing papers along with other nuggets of intelligence information? The problem was, however, that it had been in the interests of controllers and other agents to exaggerate the importance of the information they received; that, and the fact that there was in effect no court of appeal. You were guilty until you could prove otherwise. Just as well I had kept my nose clean. A few trips to the East in the old days didn’t make you a flaming communist.

  ‘I’ve enough enemies here in Denmark,’ I said.

  ‘And who might they be?’ Bjerregaard asked, only now putting down his coffee cup.

  ‘My academic colleagues and rivals. All the people whom I’ve pipped at the post for research grants, as well as those to whom, as a member of various boards and committees, I’ve denied funding, because I questioned the validity of their projects. We smile at one another, congratulate one another, but what each of us really wishes for all the rest is failure, disgrace and a job teaching high school in some far corner of Jutland. But we fight with words, not knives. Or at least only the symbolic sort used for stabbing people in the back,’ I said.

  Toftlund laughed. He had a deep, very pleasant laugh; even the more straitlaced Bjerregaard smiled and I, too, gave a little chuckle, to relieve some of the awkwardness and indeed the unpleasantness of the situation.

  ‘Right, then,’ Toftlund said, standing up. ‘We may have to get back to you.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘But can you tell me … the rest of the group, are they being kept down there? Or are they coming home?’

  ‘As far as I know they’re coming home. I would assume that they’ve all been interviewed – it’s standard procedure. But it sounds as though the Budapest police think, as I do, that it was a robbe
ry that went wrong. We’ll be speaking to the daughter when she gets back to Denmark with the … deceased.’

  It was a grim word, and with that and a handshake they were gone. I wandered around the flat with my hand pressed to my back as if I was nine months gone, reflecting on how lucky I had been and what a really awful story it was. I called Irma again, but still only got her answering machine. So I had a whisky, took a sleeping pill, flossed my teeth as prescribed by my dentist, so vigorously that I all but sawed through to my jawbone, and went out like a light. For the next couple of days, over the weekend, I took good care of myself. I stayed indoors. Partly because rest seemed to be the best thing for my back and partly because the rain and wind were battering off my windowpanes. I read the old newspapers, a new book on Stalingrad which a British colleague had sent me, watched films on TV, drank some red wine and went to bed early. I missed Janne and the kids more than I would have thought possible, even picked up the phone a couple of times to call her at his, ‘the other man’s’, place – talk about a cliché – but thought better of it and instead gave myself up to wallowing in self-pity. I have always been good at that. What hurt most was the fridge door. More than once I found myself standing gazing at it, bleary-eyed. It was plastered with all the usual little notes. Copies of school timetables. Reminders about swimming lessons and handball practice. Pictures of the children. A postcard or two. An invitation to a birthday party. Affixed with little magnets: hearts, dogs, a cow and a cat and a shiny red apple. Little magnets holding the secure pattern of everyday life firmly in place on a white refrigerator door. This picture could have been entitled: Teddy Forsaken By All.

  On Monday morning, wonder of wonders, the late March sun was shining and Copenhagen was once again my beloved city with its roofs and spires, girl cyclists, little doggies and big yellow corporation buses bowling almost soundlessly along. People everywhere were tilting their heads back and gazing up at that blue sky, as if trying to drink in the light. Sunlight streamed through my kitchen window as I made coffee, and I deemed it a victory that I had managed to get out of bed unaided, without having to do it in three stages as on the previous days: first sitting up, then easing my legs over the side of the bed and finally pushing myself onto my feet. It was rather like being a three-year-old again, so pleased and proud of being able to put on one’s own socks. It still hurt like hell, but in many ways I had forgiven my back, seeing that it had, in fact, saved my life. When Janne called I surprised both her and myself by being pleasant and urbane and agreeing to find a day on which to discuss the practicalities. We were civilised people, after all. Nonetheless, our conversation left a dent in my good mood.