Per knocked on Vuldom’s door. The lady herself was sitting at her desk with a cigarette in her hand and a cup of coffee in front of her. The desk was clear apart from a couple of green files lying next to the telephone and intercom. Per wrinkled his nose at the acrid cigarette smoke. He had not managed to persuade Lise to stop smoking altogether, even though she was pregnant, but at least she had cut down drastically, to the point where she was now not much more than a social smoker, and only the other day she had announced that she was giving it up completely. Vuldom, in her realm, smoked as and when she liked. She was in her early fifties, a woman with sharp, shrewd eyes and attractive, fine-drawn features. Her short hair was swept back from a level brow. Her make-up was subtle, matching her sensible skirt, shirt and rather masculine jacket, the overall image that of an independent woman exuding both femininity and efficiency. Lise had called her a role model for other women. Because she succeeded in remaining womanly while at the same time forging a career for herself in a world where, by and large, the men were still the bosses and the women made the coffee. Lise admired her for that. Lise saw injustice everywhere. Per seldom thought about life in abstract terms. He was better at tackling concrete tasks head-on and accomplishing them. But he could tell that Lise did have an influence on him, although she was very discreet about it, recognising, as she did, his Jutlander’s stubborn streak. Nobody could tell him anything! But he did read other books now. And he was no longer so quick to come out with dogmatic statements or opinions on matters about which he in fact knew nothing.
‘Hi, Per,’ said Jytte Vuldom in her deep, husky smoker’s voice. ‘Sit down, have a cup of coffee. Long time no see.’
Per sat down in the chair on the other side of the desk. Vuldom poured coffee for him.
‘I hear you’re going to be a father,’ she said as she filled his cup. ‘Well, I never.’
‘You could congratulate me, you know,’ Per said.
Vuldom smiled:
‘Congratulations. I just never expected it of you.’
‘Why not?’
She shrugged, took a dainty sip of her coffee.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Lone wolf and all that? How are things at HQ?’ She nodded in the vague general direction of Copenhagen, as if they could see all the way into the city centre and, down near the harbour, Police HQ where Toftlund had been stationed for the past couple of years, working mainly with the Customs and Immigration department at Kastrup Airport, known to most people as the passport police. It was a tedious and often heartbreaking job, having to turn away refugees, seeing them huddled like forlorn rag dolls outside of passport control. Or to be right out at the plane, denying them entry. Or to have to sit for hours checking tipsy, sun-tanned package tourists back into the country, listening again and again to the same few standard remarks about the weather there and here.
‘It’s a job,’ Toftlund said.
‘An important job. Very important, no doubt about it. But do I detect a note of dissatisfaction?’
‘Drop the act, Vuldom,’ he said, raising his voice slightly. ‘I was dumped there. I could have done worse, all things considered. But it’s not like I applied for the bloody job, is it?’
‘Temper, temper!’ she said, with a smile in her voice. ‘You had to carry the can, Per. That’s all there was to it. And you did make a mess of things, so to some extent it was fair enough …’
‘What about the politicians? What about them?’
‘Ah, now that’s a different matter. And one which we public servants need not worry our loyal little heads about,’ Vuldom said, leaning across the desk slightly: ‘That’s history, so we leave that to the historians. Our job is to take care of all the everyday crap. Which can turn out to be history in the making. Or a mixture of both. In which current events suddenly take on a whole new meaning. And the past, which everyone thought had been buried, forgotten, destroyed, rears its head again and – due to the sort of coincidences which lie at the heart of all intelligence work – acquires new significance.’
Toftlund grinned and said:
‘Now, now, Vuldom. Are you trying to seduce me?’
Vuldom grinned too, but her eyes were cool and calculating, exactly as he remembered them:
‘Would you like that?’
‘Oh, I think I could be persuaded.’
‘That’s what I thought.’
‘But my boss out at the airport won’t take kindly to me leaving him in the lurch. You should see the piles of paper on my desk. Duty rosters that never seem to work out. An enormous backlog of lieu time still to be taken. And what with all the talk on the one hand about us letting too many people in and on the other about us being too restrictive, we’ve really got our hands full.’
‘I had a word with Larsen.’
‘Oh? You were pretty sure of yourself.’
‘You were made for this job, Toftlund.’
Per sat back, leaned forward again, took a sip of his coffee and wafted away the smoke from her cigarette.
‘What about … that other business? Are the politicians going to accept me being back here? I was the scapegoat, after all.’
‘You’ve been on the sidelines long enough. Besides, people have short memories in this country. No one can remember anything that happened more than a week ago, the media are always coming up with some new story. They’re like children. Totally focused on one thing at one minute, throwing themselves heart and soul into something else the next. You won’t be doing surveillance work anyway. And besides, no one outside our little family will ever know.’
‘When will my transfer come through?’
Vuldom picked up one of the green folders, removed a single sheet of paper from it and pushed it across the desk to him. It was a standard transfer form, used when police personnel were being moved from one department to another. It had been completed right down to the date. If he signed it he would actually have started two days ago.
‘Now,’ she said. ‘We have a case which we would like you to take on right away. It is what one could call urgent.’
‘And Larsen?’
‘He kicked up a fuss, but he had to face the facts.’
‘Which are?’ Per asked, as he took his pen from his inside pocket and signed the form.
‘That the Police Commissioner and his political superiors felt it was a good idea. Possibly even vital to national security. You will be accorded a new rank and your old merit allowance.’
‘I’m impressed, Vuldom,’ Toftlund said and meant it. ‘The Minister for Justice and me. Well what do you know.’
Vuldom picked up the form, slipped it back into the folder.
‘None of your sarcasm,’ she said briskly. ‘You’re one of the best men PET has ever had and I want the best. For the first time since 1864, Denmark is involved in a war of aggression. The politicians may call it a humanitarian exercise, but it still has an effect on national security and hence on our workload. We need more resources. The minister understands this. In addition, a whole lot of old cases, including some of yours, have acquired fresh relevance. The papers will be full of it in a couple of days and at that point the minister will demand a definite answer from us, the gist of which will be that we – which is to say he – are pulling out all the stops in our efforts to solve the strange mysteries of the past.’
‘I stand corrected,’ Toftlund remarked wryly, feeling nonetheless childishly pleased and proud. Like a fourteen-year-old who has just scored a goal in football. ‘Who have I got?’
‘You’ve got Bjerregaard, and a new girl. You don’t know her – Charlotte Bastrup. They’ll be your core team. Bastrup is in her early thirties, still fairly new to this field, but good. You’ve been allocated an operations room downstairs, number 28. You can, of course, draw on all the usual departments. If you need more resources, you’ll need to come to me.’
‘Right,’ he said and waited. Vuldom stubbed out her cigarette, picked up the other, somewhat thicker folder which was, he could see, bulging with surve
illance reports, pictures and notes. She proceeded to read aloud in the dry, but invariably precise and fascinating manner which she adopted whether giving evidence in court or presenting a case. He listened intently, conscious of a tingling inside which he had not felt in a long time. It was that sixth sense which tells the hunter: here is a quarry which can be brought down, but which can be bested only by dint of all one’s skills and ingenuity.
Vuldom handed him a picture:
‘Irma Pedersen, born 1940. Her father was a baker from Fünen, he died years ago. Her mother’s in a nursing home on the island. Today Irma is a professor of women’s history at Roskilde University. Extremely – and I mean extremely – radical left-winger in her youth. Way out where there was certainly talk, if nothing else, of bombs and the need for violence, as those delightful people used to say in the seventies. Hence the reason we had her on file. But for her, as for the majority of them, it never amounted to more than talk and a few articles in the Political Review. Divorced. Childless.’
Vuldom lit another cigarette while Per studied the colour photograph. Irma Pedersen had clean-cut features in a surprisingly wrinkle-free face. Her hair was short and cut in a rather dated, pudding-bowl style. She had narrow, nicely shaped lips, a straight nose and clear green eyes. Her brow, though high, did not dominate her face. She had fair skin which looked as though it would freckle when exposed to sunlight. Per laid the photograph on the desk.
‘A terrorist sympathiser, then a university professor with responsibility for future generations. What a liberal society we live in,’ he said.
‘It certainly is. And here’s the family …’ She passed him another two pictures. One of an elderly man, the other of a younger man whom Toftlund would, nonetheless, have described as middle-aged.
‘He’s not that old,’ Vuldom said, as if reading his mind, but Per was not surprised. Within the service, Vuldom’s intuition was famous. ‘That is one of her younger brothers. Fritz, who followed in his father’s footsteps. Born in 1943, a baker on Fünen. Although I suppose these days manufacturer is more like it. He produces all that so-called ‘artisan’ bread that’s sold as organic in the supermarkets. We have absolutely nothing on him. A solid citizen, married to the same woman all his life, two children both doing well for themselves, member of the Rotary Club. Did a stint as chairman of the parish council. A good Danish man. My guess is that he has some sympathy with the Danish People’s Party but has always voted Conservative. Long-standing member of the party. Because that’s what respectable people do.’
Fritz was a heavily built man who looked older than his years. He was rather coarse in appearance, his face notable for its high, bald pate, bushy eyebrows, big nose and puffy cheeks.
The other photograph was of a middle-aged man clad in a slightly crumpled shirt with a loosely knotted tie. He had blue eyes, light-brown hair with a dusting of salt-and-pepper and a big smile that lit up his face. He looked a bit of a rogue. Or a disarming charmer. Per felt he had seen him before.
‘That’s the baby of the family. Theodor Nikolaj Pedersen, Teddy to his friends. We have nothing on him either. We ran a check on him a couple of years back when he gave a talk on the aims of the new Russia to a group of our staff over in Jutland. Teddy was born in 1948. Today he’s a lecturer at Copenhagen University. Currently on a tour of Central Europe with the Foreign Policy Society. Married to a woman quite a bit younger than himself, whom he scored at the univ …’
Per could not help smiling at Vuldom’s use of the imported English slang. Score! In Denmark, when he was a kid, that had still only been something you did in football. She carried on undaunted: ‘… but she’s a bit of a gadabout and now she’s seeing someone else, which makes Teddy a bit of a cuckold. She has in fact moved in with her lover while Teddy is studying the post-communist morass of Central Europe. I don’t know how bad that will make him feel. Our Teddy is something of a womaniser; he may not look like a movie star, but he must have something because he’s seldom short of female company.’
‘He doesn’t look like a ladykiller.’
‘Well he is, Toftlund.’
She placed three documents in front of him:
‘And here you have the surveillance warrants. We’ve been tapping the phones of all three. But no luck there, so far. In this file you’ll also find profiles of each of them – their habits, vices, virtues. You know the routine – or have you forgotten your craft?’
‘I’ll try to remember all you’ve taught me.’
‘You were a good pupil, so I’m sure you will.’
This last was said with a trace of sarcasm, but in an oddly childish fashion Toftlund was gratified by the compliment. Vuldom slipped all of the papers back into the green folder, slid it across the desk to him and sat back in her chair.
‘Their biographies are by no means complete so might I suggest that you put Bastrup onto bringing them up to date,’ she said and proceeded to fill him in on the background to his first new case in his new, old job:
‘You know something of this from before, of course, but just to bring you up to speed on the events of the past few months: as you know, our old pal Markus Wolf and his henchmen managed to destroy a lot of the records held by HVA, East Germany’s international intelligence network, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. We were, however, able to get hold of the SIRA tapes, which contain the names of hundreds of agents. Only their cover names, though. The GDR was in total chaos after the collapse of the Soviet system, and in all the confusion our dear allies in the CIA contrived to swipe the so-called Rosenholz Tape, which holds the key to the cover names. Now, more than ten years later, it has finally been possible to collate some of the data from these two records and this has paid off, Toftlund. Having the key to the secret lock really paid off. The first cover names were deciphered only a fortnight since. The last of them a few days ago.’
Vuldom lit yet another cigarette and pointed to the coffee pot. Toftlund filled both their cups and let her continue without interrupting:
‘The politicians have at long last given us the green light, and the resources to enable us to check which good Danish men and women joined the Stasi payroll, whether out of idealism, financial greed, ignorance, ideological conviction, naivety or a combination of all of these. It only took ten years. But what the hell. By then the statute of limitations on most of them had expired. Isn’t that just the most convenient thing about this comfortable little country of ours, where we never have any desire to look the past squarely in the eye. Better late than never. I dislike unpaid bills and old debts. I have had people working in Berlin, good moles who have burrowed into Stasi’s massive archives and dug up a lot of dirt as well as pure gold. I won’t bore you with all the details. But we have about fifty cover names which we have investigated more closely. That is partly why you have been brought back into the fold. These informants are named and the dates of their reports to Stasi are given on the SIRA tapes. Once the code was finally broken it became possible to find the actual reports in the archives. But only the cover names. It was, and is, a mammoth task. The matter has attracted the interest of the press and hence of the politicians. So we’re working to a tight deadline. But … one of the informants we came across was a busy little bee by the name of Edelweiss.’
Toftlund grinned broadly at Vuldom’s mixed metaphor.
‘What a pretty codename.’
‘When you think of all the agents and informants Stasi employed, they must have had a whole department doing nothing but dreaming up cover names. Anyway, let’s read on. You’ll find copies in the folder.’ She opened it again, handed him a list of topics. ‘These are just the titles of over eighty reports in which, from 1971 until the fall of the Wall, the little flower betrayed her country. If our information is correct there is no statute of limitations on this case. Which means that once we’ve completed our investigation we can ask the Public Prosecutor to throw the book at this one. Take a look at that.’
Vuldom leaned back in her office chair, c
offee cup in hand, and watched as Toftlund quickly scanned the long list of reports passed, over a twenty-year period, by a Danish agent codenamed Edelweiss to the Ministry for State Security in the sprawling Stasi complex on Normannenstrasse in East Berlin, in the days when the city was split into East and West, thus forming the front line in the continual, clandestine war between two systems. A brutal conflict fought on an invisible front; one in which lives were at stake and to which there was only one possible outcome: for one of the systems to collapse because in character, style and structure they were irreconcilable. In the long run a communist dictatorship and a democracy could not exist side by side, since the ultimate goal of the dictatorship was to do away with democracy.
Edelweiss’s first reports had issued from the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They appeared to be copies of top secret memos from Danish embassies in such diverse locations as Oslo, Moscow and Beirut. There were some relatively harmless reports on Danish oil policy – which would, however, have been of interest to such a large oil producer as the Soviet Union. Denmark’s views on the deployment of new American mid-range missiles in Europe – the so-called ‘Double-Track Decision’ whereby NATO proposed setting up a shield of Pershing and Cruise nuclear missiles to counteract the Soviet Union’s huge arsenal of SS-20 rockets – were, on the other hand, highly confidential. There had been a tremendous political battle. The decision had given the slumbering peace movement a shot in the arm.
The Danish evaluation of the independent trade union organisation Solidarity was also perused in East Berlin and in Moscow, which would naturally also have had access to the Danish agent’s material. Then the nature of the reports changed. They began to deal more with the state of play in the Common Market. Financial and political assessments. Edelweiss grew more ambitious. Also started reporting on the intentions and policy considerations of the major powers of France and Britain. Then came more reports from the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A lot about the economy, but also political appraisals of Denmark’s new conservative government. As well as a report on how attempts to persuade the Danish Social Democrats to change their line on security matters and adhere to the so-called ‘footnote policy’ had borne fruit. Suggestions for further action to be taken. A note on the need to infiltrate the peace movement, so that those elements which voiced criticism of socialism would be brought into miscredit or excluded. Then the scene changed yet again. Once more Edelweiss was reporting on NATO business. Again her communications were concerned with matters of policy, but there were also some which seemed to indicate that Edelweiss had now attained a very high level of security clearance. These reports contained information on NATO strategy so hush-hush that even today certain passages would have to be blanked out.
The Woman from Bratislava Page 13
