The Woman from Bratislava

by Leif Davidsen

  Karl Henrik glared at me:

  ‘I may be only an amateur historian, but it so happens that there are well-respected researchers, also at your sister’s university, who see the matter in a different light. A certain revision of history is, after all, taking place these days. Giving a more nuanced picture of the occupation. The views of the resistance movement no longer predominate. The fact that in their lust for revenge they too committed atrocities is, I believe, now being accepted in certain historical circles.’

  ‘I know. You’re right, I’m sorry to say. Everyone in Denmark suffered. Some simply suffered more than others. I only hope,’ I continued, declaiming like a second-rate actor, ‘that our version of history doesn’t end up like that presented to Russian high school students. Do you know what they say: Russian history is too difficult to learn – because they keep changing it.’

  They did not find this funny. They hardly turned a hair, merely smiled politely. I was a guest, after all, and this was the country, where people are more prone to observe the proprieties. The old man poured a brandy for me anyway, and this time I was stupid enough not to say no. It went down well too. Fritz had got his cigar going again. Suddenly he blurted out:

  ‘You don’t know what it was like growing up as Dad’s son. Or Dad’s daughter. The amount of stick we had to take. How we were called Nazi brats until we moved and people gradually forgot as times got better. You were kept in the dark. You were the baby. You had to be shielded. Poul forbade Mum to talk to you about the past. Poul betrayed Dad’s memory …’

  Now I was really riled. How dare he insult my good, kind, loving step-father.

  ‘Leave Poul out of this, brother mine. He was my father, so you and Irma can keep your rotten Nazi, Eastern Front volunteer of a Dad!’

  I could see from Fritz’s face that his temper was up and I suddenly remembered that he had actually given me a hiding once or twice when I was a little boy. He had a violent, or at any rate an aggressive, streak. Maybe he had brought that to bear in the business world from which he had made his money, or maybe he was just good at baking and selling bread.

  ‘You had no right to say that,’ Fritz said at length.

  ‘No, you’re right, I didn’t,’ I said mildly. ‘I didn’t know him, my real father. Well, how the hell could I? So Poul was my Dad, okay?’

  ‘Dad was a good man,’ he said.

  ‘If you say so, Fritz. I didn’t know him. And you’re right, I may have gone too far.’

  ‘That’s alright,’ he said, but I could tell by looking at him that it was not. We sat for a while in silence, probably less than a minute, but it felt longer. At last the old man said:

  ‘You met a woman in Bratislava …’

  ‘How in hell’s name do you know that?’

  ‘She is Andreas’s daughter. I told you, we support one another, we stick together. Our work also transcends national boundaries. Not in order to gain power or to bring back Nazism, simply to help one another … you met Maria, didn’t you?’

  ‘I received a visit from a woman who called herself Maria and told me some crazy story about her being my half-sister. And how my real father had not died ages ago in a bar in Hamburg, but lived happily ever after in Croatia. Is that the one you mean?’

  ‘That’s the one I mean,’ he said clasping his hands on the table in front of the blue-fluted coffee cup. ‘That’s the story I’m thinking of and I was wondering whether she showed you anything to substantiate her story?’

  ‘Yes, she did. Both words and pictures. Most convincing,’ I said.

  ‘And I presume that you have this material at home?’

  ‘I do not have this material at home.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you brought it with you?’ he said, sounding surprised and pleased.

  ‘No. I no longer have it.’

  There was silence around the table, then Karl Viggo and Karl Henrik both spoke at once, their questions overlapping: had I thrown it away, destroyed it? I told them the honest truth – that I had packed the letters and photographs into a suitcase which had disappeared, as so many suitcases have a way of doing on their way from one place to another. That my suitcase, according to the information I had received from SAS, had decided, more or less of its own free will, to see as much as it could of our wonderful world and in the course of its new globetrotting life had then chosen to vanish into thin air.

  They did not find my presentation of the facts particularly amusing, but I honestly did not give a shit. They might well have been hoping to add those letters and photos to their little SS shrine, but that I would never have allowed, lost suitcase or no lost suitcase. Not that I said that to them. Instead I asked to be driven back to my car. They looked at one another, then got to their feet.

  I stood for a moment with Fritz in the yard. It was extremely peaceful out there. A couple of chickens strutted about, and the birds had started singing again. The unmistakable scent of spring was in the air, it seemed to send a double dose of light and ozone shooting straight to the brain.

  ‘I don’t want to be in your gang, Fritz,’ I said. ‘And I think you would do well to let sleeping dogs lie.’

  ‘That’s funny, coming from a historian,’ he said with a sigh.

  ‘This isn’t history, it’s fetishism,’ I retorted and gave him my hand. ‘I’ll talk to you later.’

  ‘I’ve spoken to my lawyer, it’s all arranged,’ he said, releasing my hand. ‘He’ll take on Irma’s case, but he says that there’s very little we can do for the next two or three weeks. Not until she comes up before the judge again.’

  ‘Fair enough. And thanks.’

  ‘It’s the least I could do,’ he said. ‘I mean, I have the money, and she is my sister …’

  ‘Even so.’

  I do not know how much Karl Henrik had had to drink, but he took it nice and easy on the drive back to Knudshoved where my car was waiting. The young driver had evidently taken himself off. We did not say a word to one another the whole way. I was tired and I had a headache. My back was playing up too, although even that I was getting used to, pain and all. I fleetingly considered driving into Nyborg and taking the train. Let Janne pick up the fucking car. But that was just plain stupid – I hadn’t had that much to drink, and it had been with a meal. So most of the alcohol had to be out of my system by now, surely?

  I drove onto the low bridge, across the high bridge and through the toll barrier. That must have been where they spotted me. Nobody gets through there without being caught on video and it is also a good place for checking number plates, especially on weekdays when the traffic is not so heavy.

  The squad car flagged me down just outside of Slagelse. A uniformed policeman came up to the car and I rolled the window down. How much had I had to drink? He tipped his cap politely and asked to see my driving licence.

  ‘Have you had anything to drink today, sir?’

  ‘A beer and a schnapps with lunch,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, at least, I’d say,’ he commented, sniffing inside the car.

  Cars zoomed past and I saw people sending me sympathetic or smug looks. The policeman held onto my licence and said:

  ‘There’s a lay-by a few kilometres up the road. Drive on up to it, nice and easy and pull in.’

  ‘Why should I do that?’ I said.

  ‘Because I say so,’ he replied and returned to his partner in the squad car, still clutching my licence. There was really nothing else for it, so off Teddy tootled at the regulation 110 kph with the squad car in his rear-view mirror, until he reached the small lay-by in which stood a block of toilets, a truck and a blue Ford Escort. The squad car drove past me and stopped behind the blue Ford. I stayed in my car, trying to do a quick calculation: how much schnapps and beer had I had and how long ago had that been? It did not look too promising. Not an outrageously high blood-alcohol level, but it had to be more than the limit of 0.5 per cent. One of the uniforms got out of the squad car, walked up to the blue Escort and handed my licence to a man in a d
ark, well-worn leather jacket. This done, the policeman saluted and, much to my surprise, returned to the squad car, climbed in beside his partner and they drove away.

  There was a woman in the Escort’s front passenger seat. The man in the dark leather jacket stepped out and walked up to my car. I recognised him now. It was the younger of the two CID officers who had interviewed me at my flat. What was his name again?

  ‘Hello, Teddy,’ he said.

  ‘Hello, er … what was your name again?’

  ‘Per Toftlund. Police Intelligence.’

  ‘Oh, that’s right. Hello to you, Per Toftlund. And what can I do for PET? I’m assuming this has to do with my sister?’

  ‘It might. For the moment could I ask you to get into my car and my colleague will drive yours back to Copenhagen. We have a lot to talk about.’

  ‘And if I refuse?’

  ‘You’ll have to blow into a plastic bag and then I think you can wave bye-bye to your licence, Teddy. You smell like a brewery.’

  ‘It’s just one of those days,’ I said as I climbed out of the car. I had to take a second to steady myself. Per Toftlund may have thought it was because I was drunk. And I’m sure I must have smelled somewhat of alcohol, but the real reason was my back, which had seized up, as it always did when I had been sitting in the car for any length of time. I had to stand for a moment with a steadying hand on the roof until I could straighten up and regain my balance. I could have drunk nothing but milk and I would still have been tottering about as if I were pissed.

  Teddy Arrested In Bleak Danish Lay-by With Toilets And Truck might have been the title of this picture, but my usual attempt to put a self-ironic distance between myself and the situation did not help much. Teddy Out Of His Depth was probably more like it.

  Part 2

  PER’S HAPPY LIFE

  ‘All warfare is based on deception.’

  Sun Tzu, 500 BC

  8

  THESE DAYS when Per Toftlund woke, for a brief, almost imperceptible moment he was always afraid that he was alone in bed. Only once he had reached out an arm and touched Lise’s warm, bare thigh under her short nightie and felt her, still half asleep, take his hand, did he feel that daily, almost unreasonably satisfying feeling of happiness. Unreasonable, because, he thought to himself in the seconds between sleep and consciousness, there had to be a price to pay for such happiness. This northern-European sense of guilt evaporated, however, as soon as he was fully awake. And that did not take long. He had never lost the old habit from his army days of wakening early and being instantly and fully alert.

  But these days he would lie for a while, running his hand over Lise’s swollen belly, hearing and feeling her sigh voluptuously – and, if he was lucky, discerning a kick of life from the baby inside her. Her skin was soft and warm and moist, over her drum-tight stomach it felt smooth as velvet under his hand. The bare breasts inside her nightie were taut and ready for breastfeeding. Again he felt that dangerous surge of happiness.

  ‘Sleep well, you two?’

  ‘Uhmmmm …’ she grunted. ‘She takes up so much space, she’s turning somersaults in there and I’m as big as a cow,’ she mumbled.

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ he said. ‘You’re both beautiful.’ He propped himself up on his elbow and brushed a strand of hair back from her brow.

  ‘I’m huge,’ she said. ‘And I’m sleepy and I’ve got the day off.’

  ‘You’re so sweet and lovely,’ he said, as if quoting a line from a pop song. ‘And it’s only four weeks to go.’

  ‘Have you any idea what the thought of another four weeks feels like in my condition. It feels like a hundred years,’ she said. ‘And I’m so sleepy, and now I’m on maternity leave.’

  He kissed her on the forehead and the lips and she smiled, still with her eyes shut. He got up, closed the bedroom window, pulled on shorts, a T-shirt, track-suit top and bottoms, drank a glass of tap water then ran out of the house in Ganløse and up towards the woods north of the town. The wind was from the south-west and there was rain in it. The temperature was only a few degrees above freezing and the ground felt hard under his running shoes, even when he reached the woods and turned onto the paths winding through the mix of hardwoods and conifers. He soon settled into his stride, breathing rhythmically, and his mind turned to the day ahead and the meeting which his old boss had asked him to attend. He was looking forward to it, although he had no idea what she wanted with him. He was hoping, although he did not dare to admit it, not even to himself, that she might be going to ask him to come back. There was a chance, though he doubted it was very great. She probably just wanted to clear up a few points regarding yet another of their interminable investigations. He knew that he had got off relatively lightly with a transfer to Customs and Immigration after his failure to protect Sara Santander, but he missed PET and the work with counter-espionage, missed being out there operating on the fringes of the law, in that shadow world where different rules applied. Running there in the light of early March his mind also went to the new war that had broken out in Europe. NATO had commenced bombing raids on Yugoslavia and for the first time Denmark was officially party to a war of aggression against a sovereign nation. He imagined that this would mean a tightening up of domestic security and cherished a faint hope that he might be involved in this. Even if he had fucked up and Vuk the Serbian Dane had got away, that whole business had given him one gift: he had met Lise Carlsen and, wonder of wonders, she had also fallen in love with him. They had married and were expecting a baby. She had even agreed to move from the Copenhagen flat which she had owned with her murdered husband to a new house in Ganløse. The inveterate city-dweller was now a suburbanite. For the baby’s sake.

  He ran smoothly and easily, aware of how alive his body felt as he rounded his personal five-kilometre mark and started back down the trail. His mind gradually emptied of all thought and on the run home he simply felt light and clear and exhilarated by the lovely morning light flickering through the bare trees. April was just around the corner and you could feel it in the air. He would never see forty again, but he still felt in control of his body. And that was important to him. Per Toftlund was a very physical person. All his life he had sought physical challenges, from his days as a volunteer in the Royal Navy’s special forces unit until the stringent demands made on a frogman on active service became too much even for a man in his physical condition and, with the prospect of a desk job and an instructor’s post looming on the horizon, he had left to join the police. He turned the corner into the new housing estate which they would learn to call home and did his warming-down exercises by the carport. They had chosen the house because it was affordable and brand-new, so they could move straight in. The gardens had not yet been laid out. Piles of damp black soil were dotted around the little red houses. But it would be nice when it was finished. And the estate agent had told them that several families with small children had already put their names down. This had suddenly become an important factor for Per and Lise: coming to parenthood late they were looking forward to it and at the same time dreading it. The financial side was not really a problem. Lise had got a tidy sum from Ole’s life insurance and the sale of his psychology practice, but the way Per saw it this was Lise’s money. He had been persuaded to let the proceeds from the sale of the flat go towards the purchase of the house and other future family outgoings. But he refused to touch the rest of it, even though she would not hear of them keeping their finances separate. Some of it, at least, they would put in trust for the baby. Per preferred not to think about that money. You had to manage on what you earned. That had always been his policy. Things that came too easily had a way of going just as easily.

  Per showered then had a slice of toast with cheese. He kissed a still drowsy Lise as she lay there with her big belly, smelling of bed and sleep, and drove into town, to the low dun-coloured concrete building on Borups Allé which was home to the Danish Security Intelligence Service. The traffic on the road into town was heav
y and sluggish. The travelling time was Lise’s biggest bugbear about suburban life. She had been used to cycling everywhere, but now if she had to be at work in the morning she was liable to end up stuck in traffic along with everyone else. Fortunately, though, that did not happen often. She would soon get used to it. The morning light was struggling to break through the dull haze and grimy drizzle that blanketed the city, making it look drab and dirty and damp. Glistening, as if someone had coated the road and the buildings with sump oil.

  Seeing that ugly grey concrete block with the red windows sitting alongside the busy road, just before the big old Telephone Exchange building was like coming home, he felt. For the best part of his police career this had been his workplace. It might not possess the same sense of history as the old Police HQ, or its unique air of authority, but it probably harboured more secrets than all the other police stations put together. He knew it like the back of his hand and felt comfortable in its functional, rectilinear corridors. He went upstairs and greeted Jytte Vuldom’s secretary with easy familiarity. Vuldom was the second female head of Police Security Intelligence. Her predecessor, Commissioner Jansen, had been the world’s first female spy chief and in most parts of the world it was still a rare thing for a woman to be the head of a national secret service. Toftlund had always got on well with Vuldom. He felt she was good at her job and he had nothing against female bosses as long as they were professional – and Vuldom was. Not only that, but she was adept at walking the diplomatic tightrope between openness and reticence when dealing with the press and politicians; practising the transparency necessary within a democratic society while at the same time, in the looking-glass world of the secret service, hushing up those things which had to be hushed up. In order to safeguard democracy one sometimes had to break democracy’s rules, as Vuldom had said at one of her rare, but popular seminars at the National Police Training Centre at Avnø.