‘What about the mafia?’
Samson shrugged:
‘Who knows. Maybe he paid them off, or bought himself some protection? Money’s what counts these days, after all. Ideals and Utopias have, dare I say it, failed miserably.’
‘And he was able to get his building back, just like that?’
‘As long as he promised to rebuild it. That’s the law. The Czech president and all the world’s blue-eyed boy, Havel, is a very wealthy man. His family estate was restored to him. There are lots of similar cases. And the people who have lived in these houses for the past fifty years have to pack up all their worldly goods and move out. Or pay the going market rate for them, and very few can afford to do that. That’s capitalism for you,’ he said, and Toftlund was reminded of an old, forgotten song from his childhood the lyrics of which had said exactly the same thing.
‘You must also have been living in stolen property then.’
‘Maybe, Chief Inspector. Maybe. Shall we order?’
Their drinks and dishes arrived promptly, the food attractively served. It was alright; nothing special, but it tasted fresh, in much the same way that the restaurant interior was fresh, brassily efficient and strangely foreign. A young man with a crew-cut came in and took a seat at the bar. He wore a black leather jacket and had a little ring in his ear. He ordered a Czech Budweiser and ran an eye around the room. It lingered fleetingly on Samson’s semi-profile and on Toftlund, before passing nonchalantly on. He lit a cigarette and casually pulled a mobile phone from his jacket pocket. Another Czech thug, Toftlund thought to himself as he waited impatiently for the story he was paying for with this meal. But Samson began by telling him about the men at the table with the blonde. They were all well-known denizens of the local underworld: mobsters now on their way to becoming respectable businessmen. They too were a part of the new Czech Republic. Characters like these operated all over the former Soviet bloc. They were in their element in this weird hybrid of plan economy and market economy, in which rules were made to be bent. The new knights of dollars and deals, as Samson put it in the midst of his flow of perfect German.
‘You had another story for me though, didn’t you,’ Toftlund said when they were almost finished their main course. They had both eaten well. Samson had clearly enjoyed his meal. Toftlund was almost always hungry and would eat whatever was put in front of him. As long as it involved meat and potatoes. He had never been much for French haute cuisine. You always seemed to leave the table wanting more.
‘I think I would like a large ice cream and some coffee,’ Samson announced, like a child on a trip to town with his dad. But then he got down to it. Toftlund removed his little notebook and a pen from his jacket pocket and glanced expectantly at Samson, who merely nodded. It was a fascinating story and one which he told so well that Toftlund rarely needed to break in with a question.
‘I’m afraid I will have to bore you with a little history lesson. Hitler’s Germany occupied Yugoslavia early in 1941. A quite spectacular parachute attack. The Serbs put up a fight. Most Croats supported the occupation forces. They were members of the Ustashi, a fascist, nationalist movement which was fiercely anti-Serb. But not all Croats were of the same mind. Tito was a Croat too, remember, and it was Tito who organised the resistance movement. Something which he did both skilfully and brutally. But the German occupation force was every bit as brutal, surpassed only by its Ustashi sidekicks. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, that was their motto. Caught in the middle were the Italian troops, who were involved in the occupation much against their will. But believe you me, Mr Toftlund, the war in the Balkans was a bitter and bloody partisan affair. Seeds of hate were sown which, as you well know, have lain there waiting to send up shoots now in the nineties.’
He paused while the little waitress with the podgy, mini-skirted legs removed their plates and took the order for Samson’s ice cream and coffee for them both. Toftlund had been expecting the worst sort of dishwater, but the coffee placed in front of them was an excellent espresso, hot and strong with the delicious aroma of good beans.
Samson continued:
‘It was hell on earth: killings, executions, incarceration, torture, ambushes, torched villages, traitors, double agents. Into this hell, one day in 1943 came a group of Danes. Soldiers in the Waffen SS.’
‘Danes in Yugolsavia during World War II. I hadn’t heard about that. Or at least – not until recently.’
‘No. The majority of people choose only to hang onto the heroic side of their history. The victors’ version. Most folk prefer legend to truth. There are certain things which most nations would rather suppress, either that or stash them away in the dusty libraries of academia.’
‘Who were these people?’
‘Perfectly ordinary Danes. Who also just happened to be officers, non-coms and common soldiers in Himmler’s storm-trooper regiment. Some had gone from Denmark to basic training in Germany and from there straight to Croatia; others had had their baptism of fire on the Eastern Front. In 1943 the Waffen SS was reorganised and the small national units were absorbed into larger regiments. These Danes had been with the Danish Legion.’ ‘Okay, now I’m with you,’ Toftlund said, although prior to this his only knowledge of the Danish legionnaires had been gleaned from his father’s stories about these bewildered halfwits and social misfits, and from a popular Danish television serial.
‘They were now incorporated into the Danish Regiment, which formed part of the Nordland Division. They had been sent to Yugoslavia for a bit of R&R, to put some meat on their bones and train with the other national units in the Division before being sent back to the Eastern Front to fight the Soviets. To begin with they loved Croatia. Well, no wonder – it was warm and sunny and there was masses of food. They had come from the cold north or from the ice-bound hell of the Eastern Front, and in Croatia they found palm trees, exotic fruit, nuts, wine, the excellent slivovitz and beautiful women. To these front-liners it was paradise!’
Samson paused for a moment. Toftlund considered him. His face had grown even ruddier thanks to the gin and the wine. Toftlund did not want brandy, but waited patiently while the little Slovak ordered a large French cognac. The babble of voices in a variety of tongues drifted up to the white-painted ceiling and coiled itself around the apparently random assortment of advertisements for American cars which adorned the beige walls. The young crew-cut guy in the leather jacket paid for his beer and sauntered out of the door as if time was the one thing he had plenty of. The four mafiosi with the blonde had reached the cigar stage. They sat with their heads together across a table strewn with the leavings from their meal. Engrossed in conversation – but about what. The blonde lit another cigarette and gazed blankly at her surroundings through her thick layer of make-up. Samson went on:
‘The young Danes arrived in August 1943 and were billetted in villages such as Sisak, Glina and Petrinja, south of Zagreb. Some of them right down by the Adriatic Sea, near Dubrovnik. In September the Italian forces capitulated and the Danes’ first assignment was to assist with the disarming of the Italians, to save them going over to Tito’s communist partisans, or the partisans getting hold of their weapons. The Italians didn’t really care, all most of them wanted was to go home. Tito managed to get his hands on a lot of equipment and rapidly stepped up the partisan war. With ambushes and so on, but also with actual offensives against the German troops and their Croatian auxiliaries. They showed no mercy. And took few prisoners.’ Samson took a big slug of his cognac before proceeding:
‘Among the young Danes was one Sturmbannführer Jørgen Pedersen. A fine-looking man with dark-blonde hair and green eyes. A true Aryan and confirmed Nazi and SS man. Volunteered in 1941. Awarded the Iron Cross for the previous year’s Russian Campaign. Proud to be fighting under the Danish flag – the Dannebrog – and the Swastika. In that order …’
‘You’re good at names,’ Toftlund could not help interrupting. ‘Dannebrog, Jørgen. Your pronunciation is almost perfect.’
‘It’s a story that interests me.’
‘Sorry for interrupting.’
‘A cognac. No? The Danish flag on Pedersen’s epaulette meant more to him than the SS insignia on his collar. Like the rest of them he hated Jews and Bolsheviks. They were to blame for the slump of the thirties, for poverty and unemployment. The democratic nations had failed. It was pretty much the same argument that was used for becoming a communist. Communism and Nazism have always been the diabolical mirror-images of one another. Which is why they hated one another so much. They looked in the mirror and really did not like what they saw. Sorry, I’m digressing. But this is part of my heritage. These two grim ideals. Anyway – Hitler wanted to create a new world. Pedersen wanted to help him do it. Croatia changed his life. Two diametrically opposed forces were at work here: evil and love. On the beach where the young soldiers went on their days off he met a young woman, a twenty-year-old with glossy black hair, lovely brown eyes and silky olive skin – his rough hands had never felt anything so beautifully soft and smooth. They met on the beach and then again at a dance, because she lived only ten kilometres from the village further inland at which the Danes were stationed. Her father was the chairman of the local political wing of the Ustashi. They fell head over heels in love. They did their best to be together day and night. They tried to forget the war. To forget that the tide of war was turning on the terrible Eastern Front. One day when Pedersen was on patrol with his squad they came upon another unit which had been caught in an ambush. They found their comrades laid out side by side on a grassy slope. Most of them were Danes, with a couple of Norwegians and their Croatian guide. They were all in the same position, on their backs. Every one of them had had his dick cut off and stuck in his mouths by the partisans. There they lay, neatly ranged up, as if on parade.’
Samson broke off.
‘I think I’ll have that cognac now,’ Toftlund said. He could picture that scene all too clearly.
‘Certainly.’ Samson signalled to the waitress, pointed to his glass and raised two fingers. The restaurant was starting to empty. Only four or five tables were still occupied, among them that occupied by the four men in suits and the listless, jaded blonde. One of the men was talking on his mobile. The other guys were listening in, but the blonde concentrated on the last of her drink and another cigarette. Toftlund took a big and appreciative gulp of his brandy and almost choked when the fiery liquor went down the wrong way.
‘It was not an unusual sight,’ Samson went on unfazed. ‘Revenge was a powerful driving force on both sides. Through their spies, Pedersen and the rest of the regiment learned that the band of partisans responsible for the ambush and the massacre hid out in a village fifteen kilometres away. They sneaked into it at night and left again in the morning. The Danish SS troops set out for this village and were there, ready and waiting at daybreak, but no partisans were seen leaving the village, which lay quiet and peaceful on a bend in the river. So the Danes moved in and searched the houses, but found no weapons. Nonetheless, they then began systematically to hang all the men and boys in the village – one after another. Just as the slaves were crucified after the rebellion in Capua. There they dangled in rows. Each time, the Danish Sturmbannführer asked: Where are the terrorists? The women, who had been herded into the village square, wept and begged and pleaded and denied that they had ever sheltered partisans. Then another man or boy was hung by the neck.’
‘But it was a Croatian village, wasn’t it?’
‘Not all Croats sided with the Germans. As I say, Tito was a Croat. In the Balkans, Chief Inspector, nothing is straightforward.’
‘Then what happened?’
Samson took another sip of his brandy and dabbed his lips almost primly with his crumpled, red-checked napkin, before saying:
‘Once all the men and boys had been hung, they drove the women and children into the church, set fire to it and to the other buildings in the village and burned the whole lot to the ground. One massacre among many, then as now. Afterwards, when the blood-lust had left them the SS soldiers felt sickened by what they had done. They drank to forget, but some could not get those images out of their minds – among them Pedersen. He never got over it. He had lost his faith in the cause. It was one thing to have an image of himself fighting the Bolsheviks and seeing the Jews being taken away, but now the atrocities had struck at the countrymen of the girl he loved. Love and evil fought it out in his heart, and the battle continued when, in the December, they returned to the Eastern Front, far fewer in number than when they first came to Croatia.’
Samson drained his glass. Toftlund left his where it was for a moment, then slid it across to the Slovak, who lifted it and swirled the dark liquid around the glass, as if it was his first cognac and and he wanted to release the full aroma.
‘There’s not much more to tell, really,’ Samson said at length. ‘Obviously there are some gaps in the story. The Nordland Division and with it the Danish Regiment and Sturmbannführer Pedersen, was sent to Oranienburg, not far from Leningrad. That was in December 1943, and it was the beginning of the end. We know that Pedersen took part in the retreat to Narva, that he came home to Denmark once on leave, but that he then deserted. In the early spring he turned up in his sweetheart’s village, where the baker was dead and his daughter had switched her allegiance to Tito. How he managed to get from the front, or Denmark, to Yugoslavia we do not know. He never said. Only that he had walked through Poland, down through Slovakia, from there into Hungary and south to Croatia. He had travelled by night. Occasionally he had been helped by people who thought he was one of the partisans. Or because they realised he was a deserter. Or possibly because there are good people everywhere. In any case, on a spring day in 1945 he walked into the village and sat down in a café. As if he had merely been out for a little stroll. He looked like a toilworn farm labourer. He was nothing but skin and bone and he had lost two teeth. Word of his coming must have reached his sweetheart, because she found him. She was eager to find him, so that he could see his baby daughter. Why wasn’t he shot? Who knows. Maybe she shielded him. Maybe everyone was simply tired of all the killing. Maybe his life was spared for the simple reason that he was a baker: the village lacked a baker and there he was. He stayed for six months, the war came to an end, and then he vanished again, as suddenly as he had appeared. Then, in the early fifties he returned and remained there until his death. Everyone knew him as the baker. Not as anything else. Unless it was as the baker with the beautiful daughter who worked for the nameless ones in Belgrade. No one was interested in the past. Everyone had a past.’
‘What an amazing story,’ Toftlund said. ‘How come you know it in such detail?’
‘Because one of the volunteers in Pedersen’s company was my father. A Sudeten German. My father told me this story six years ago, before he died. He made me promise that I would help Pedersen’s daughter, if she ever needed it. Because the Dane had saved his life more than once on the Eastern Front. Because they had deserted together, although they soon became separated. Because he felt he owed the Dane something. Because they shared the dreadful secret of those Croatian women and children in that burning church.’
‘How did they get in touch again after the war?’
‘These people know one another, Toftlund.’
‘An old Nazi network!’
Samson laughed out loud, almost a little too loudly. Two of the guys in suits turned to stare at their table and the blonde crossed one nylon-clad leg languidly over the other.
‘No, Chief Inspector. Nothing could be farther from the truth. They are not Nazis. Nazism is dead and buried, thank God. And the so-called neo-Nazis are nothing but a bunch of frustrated racists, men with no knowledge of history who, inferior as they are, imagine that they are living by a historic ideal. The others are old comrades who help one another because they have a common history, one which they cannot share with others.’
‘Most of them must be dead by now anyway.’
‘Yes, they ar
e, but their children are alive, and that is why I am asking you to help this woman. You don’t have to do it for nothing. She has something for you, something you could use. She doesn’t come empty-handed.’
‘What does she want?’
‘Asylum, a residence permit, to blank out the past, enjoy peace of mind in her old age.’
Toftlund said nothing for a moment. Then:
‘Such things are not up to me.’
‘Denmark is a liberal, open-minded country.’
‘Not any more, it isn’t,’ Toftlund said. ‘Nonetheless, I think it’s safe to say that something can be arranged. If what she has to offer is of sufficient interest, I should be able to bend the rules. We’ve done it before. More than that I can’t promise right now.’
‘Well, for now that will have to do.’
‘Where is she? And what’s her name?’
‘I don’t know where she is. She’s on the run. I may be able to find out, though. She goes by many names, but her real name is Maria Borija Pedersen. Although naturally she has never used that last name.’
‘And what would she give in payment?’ Toftlund asked, although he already knew the answer. Samson did not reply, but his eyes narrowed. The door had swung open. Toftlund was sitting side on to it, Samson more with his back to it, but he had looked round. Two men in black leather jackets walked in. Their faces were covered by motorbike helmets with smoked visors. Samson and Toftlund both caught sight of them at the same moment: the Russian-made Markarov pistols held straight down alongside their trouser legs, almost merging with the black jeans, but becoming hideously distinct as the arms of the two black-clad men came up in perfect sync, almost as if their strings were being pulled by the puppet master on Charles Bridge. Toftlund and Samson both saw what was happening, but only Toftlund was quick enough to react. He threw himself sideways out of the booth and onto the floor, instinctively reaching, as he did so, for the gun that was normally stuck into his belt. Per rolled over and slid under the neighbouring table as the first shots rang out. He saw half of Samson’s face disappear as the heavy dum-dum bullet hit him at close range. He kept on rolling across the floor, with the screams of the waitresses in his ears; he looked up into the astounded face of the blonde, who was staring at the red blotch now spreading between her breasts. The man sitting next to her clutched at his shoulder and fell on top of her. Toftlund tried to crawl away. One of the visored men took two steps forward and drew a bead on Per, straight-armed with a two-handed grip on his gun. Nothing happened. Toftlund was conscious of the gunman trying again, but again the pistol misfired. It was jamming somehow. Toftlund grabbed the leg of the nearest chair and hurled it with all his might at the knees of the gunman, who staggered back a few paces. He shouted something above the screams, his partner took his eye off the room and brought his pistol round to point at Toftlund, moving, so it seemed to the Dane, in slow motion. He made another effort to scramble away, but he appeared to have no command over his limbs, he lay there as if riveted to the floor. Then he heard more shots. These had a different sound to them. As if they came from a revolver: the short, sharp crack of a Smith & Wesson. One of the visored men spun round and keeled over, hitting the bar where the three Englishmen had been having their peaceable chat about golf. The other whipped his gun arm and his face round to confront two of the men in suits. One of them had a snub-nosed revolver in his hand. His face was contorted with shock and fear. His companion clutched the edge of the table as if it were a lifebelt which could render him immune to the bullets which were bound to be coming his way. His face was white as a sheet and drool ran from the corner of his mouth. The revolver barked again, but a tinkle from the mirror behind the bar told Toftlund that the bullet had missed the assassin. The latter froze for a second, as if he had felt the rush of air from the projectile and was surprised to find himself still alive; then, with a quick glance at the still form of his partner he turned on his heel and ran out. The smell of cordite smothered that of fried food and cigarette smoke. And the only sounds in the restaurant were of sniffling somewhere out back and the steady drip-drip of Pavel Samson’s blood trickling onto the new, nicely polished parquet floor.
The Woman from Bratislava Page 22
