The Serbian Dane

by Leif Davidsen

  Again Vuk checked his compass. His fingers and toes were chilled, but nothing serious, not badly enough to hinder him in his task. The wetsuit protected him against the water that occasionally slopped in over the dinghy when it hit a rogue wave. He set course for Flakfortet, all the while keeping an eye on other vessels in the Sound. He knew they could not see him. Just before he reached the fort he switched off the outboard motor. Giving the harbour entrance a wide berth, he rowed round the island, following the breakwater that encircled it, and brought the raft to rest on the seaward side of the breakwater.

  He clambered up onto the stones of the breakwater, hauled the watertight bag up after him. Had there been anyone out in the rain and the dark, it’s unlikely they would have seen him, even if they had been standing only six feet away inside Flakfortet itself. Nonetheless, he hunkered down and listened intently. All he could hear was the rain on the stones, and the sea. The Swedish and Danish coastlines were lost in the drizzle. Flakfortet was deserted. Vuk climbed back into the raft, hoicked up the outboard and pricked a tiny hole in the rubber with his knife under the water level, before pushing the dinghy out into the current. In less than thirty minutes it would have sunk to the bottom.

  He bound the shoulder straps of the waterproof bag around his waist and with his right hand holding the satchel out of the water slipped into the strip of water that separated the fort from the breakwater and shielded it from the sea’s constant assaults. Three kicks of his legs took him to the other side, and he crawled ashore.

  Vuk peeled off the wetsuit, feeling exposed, naked and white in the darkness, but he did not want to leave a trail of water when making his way through the fort’s passageways. He opened the bag, took out the towel and rubbed himself dry before slipping into the black jeans, the undershirt and the black polo-neck, socks and shoes. He tossed the wet deck shoes into the water and watched them drift away. He rolled the wetsuit up in the big towel and tucked it into the top of the bag, which he drew shut again before shouldering his gear and entering the fort’s benighted maze. His night vision was perfect, but the darkness of the passageways was absolute. He switched on his torch, after first straining his ears for any sound in the night. He located the concrete steps and climbed deep down into the bowels of the fort. The temperature in the casemates was only ten degrees Celsius, and he began to shiver slightly with cold.

  He found the padlocked door to the old ammunition store. He pulled out his pick and set to work on the lock. It was a very basic one, and he sprang it without any trouble. The other, more sophisticated lock-pick he would need tomorrow. He removed the chain and opened the door into the cold dark room, to be met by a wave of rank musty air. He stood quite still and listened, could hear nothing but his own breathing. He laid the bag, the satchel and the lighted torch inside the room and closed the door. No light showed. He retrieved the torch, returned to the main entrance, got down on his knees and swept the dust on the cement floor carefully with the palm of his hand, erasing his footprints. He worked his way back to the ammunition store and obliterated all tracks outside it before pulling the heavy steel door closed and padlocking it on the inside.

  He switched on the camping lamp, which gave him enough light to make out the dry livid walls of the low-ceilinged room. There was a sudden movement in a corner where the concrete was crumbling away around what might have been an air vent or sewage outlet. The rat eyed him, as if wondering who could have penetrated its domain after all these years. Vuk’s hand slid down to his shin and curled around the knife, then it shot out. The tip of the knife caught the rat in the side as it tried to scuttle off down the side of the room. It emitted a short squeal as it was run through. Vuk pricked it in the throat and stomach, opened the steel door and chucked it out. It looked like a victim of one of the fierce territorial battles in which rats engaged. Its blood trickled slowly out.

  He unrolled the sleeping mat and laid the sleeping bag on top. He spread the wetsuit out to dry and sat with the sleeping bag wrapped around him, massaging his cold feet. He was exhausted from all his physical exertions and the mental strain. He was dying for a cigarette, but smoke could be smelled a long way off, and he didn’t know what sort of ventilation there was from the casemates. So instead he poured tea into the thermos cup and ate his sandwich, while he waited for morning.

  Chapter 21

  Per Toftlund whirled around as he heard Lise scream. He had dragged the tarpaulin off the two tubs and was staring down at the bodies of Ole and Mikael. Her first shrill shrieks subsided into gasping grating sobs. Rigor mortis had set in and passed. The corpses were a ghastly white, with livid patches where the blood had drained down and coagulated, the eyes sunken and blank.

  Per held Lise and let her weep onto his shoulder. He stroked her hair, caressed her cheek, which felt cold and clammy. The uniformed policeman stood riveted to the spot, his eyes flicking back and forth between them and the bodies. He had seen dead people before. You didn’t have to have been a policeman in Copenhagen for very long before you saw your first body. Usually, though, they were suicides or old folk who had died alone and neglected. He had never seen a corpse lying doubled-up in an old-fashioned washtub with its throat gouged by steel wire.

  ‘Get onto the murder squad, man!’Per snapped, his arms still wrapped tightly around Lise, who seemed to be teetering on the brink of shock. ‘Use the phone. Not the radio,’ he added. He knew the tabloid crime desks listened in on the police wavelength. Their scanners were as good, if not better than the police’s own. He wanted to keep the lid on this for the next twenty-four hours at least.

  ‘It’s Ole. It’s my husband,’ Lise cried for the third time. ‘What’s he doing here? Why didn’t I take care of him?’

  ‘Lise, Lise, Lise. It’s not your fault,’ Per said as her sobs increased again.

  He took her upstairs, sat her down in the kitchen and poured her a glass of water, which she gulped down. Her eyes were red and swollen, but her tears had abated. She had hiccups from drinking the water so fast, but she emptied the glass, and he filled it again from the tap.

  She looked up at Per.

  ‘I remember him,’ she whispered.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The boy in the school photograph. The one they call Janos.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He was at our apartment. He said his name was Carsten.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘The other day. He was this new friend of Ole’s.’

  Her voice broke again at the mention of Ole’s name, but then she seemed to Per to get a grip on herself. Or was she stronger than he thought?

  ‘All of a sudden, when I saw Ole there, I made the connection between the photograph and the man who was at our place. Why didn’t I think of it before? Why Per? If I had, none of this would have happened.’

  ‘The memory can play tricks on us. Sometimes it needs to be jogged,’ he essayed.

  ‘It wouldn’t have happened!’ she cried, dissolving into tears once more.

  Per left her to sit for a while. The patrol cars would be here any minute, closely followed by the murder squad and the forensic team with all its equipment. This was no longer his case. This was murder, and there were others with far greater expertise in that field than him. They would take over, start their investigation, issue a description of the man they wished to interview, the usual stuff. His eye fell on the rifle in the open suitcase on the floor. Janos had gone off without his gun. He must be long gone by now. Something must have scared him off. Sara Santanda was actually safer now. Not that that was any comfort to Lise, but it did take some of the pressure off him. Nevertheless, he asked:

  ‘How much did your husband know?’

  She looked at him. Her eyes swam with tears, and his heart went out to her. Why hadn’t she stayed in the car? Blasted reporters, they never could resist poking their bloody noses in.

  ‘He was my husband. Obviously I told him things…’

  He considered her.

  ‘
Oh, what the hell. Janos is miles away by now. Something must have gone wrong with his plans.’

  ‘I want to go home,’ she said softly.

  ‘Is there someone who could keep you company? I have to…’

  ‘I have a good friend. She can probably come over.’

  ‘Good.’

  He could tell by looking at her that the full force of what had happened had not quite hit her yet. She could still break down completely.

  ‘I want to go home,’ she said.

  ‘What could Ole have told him?’ Per asked. He couldn’t stop himself, even though he saw the pain return to her face.

  ‘Nothing. Ole knew none of the details. I want to go home, Per.’

  But Per went on, talking more to himself than to her:

  ‘He’s no kamikaze, this guy. He’s a pro. Simba will be safer now. He didn’t take his rifle. Did Ole know about Flakfortet?’

  ‘Per, didn’t you hear what I said? I want to go home.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘No, he did not.’

  ‘I’ll get one of the patrol cars to run you home.’ He handed her his mobile. ‘Here, call your friend and take a sleeping pill when you get home.’

  ‘No thanks. I’ve got a long day ahead of me tomorrow. I mean today.’

  ‘You’re surely not thinking of going through with this tomorrow, Lise? No one would ask or expect you to go ahead as planned, not after what’s happened.’

  ‘If I don’t work, I’ll crack up,’ she said, keying in the number.

  She was sick of people telling her to go to bed. Her friend had kept urging her to, when they were sitting in Lise’s kitchen, drinking wine and smoking cigarettes; Tagesen had called early this morning to say the same thing and had said it again while they were standing together in the outermost finger at Copenhagen Airport. Didn’t they understand that the only way to stop herself from falling apart, the only way to keep her feelings of guilt and grief at bay, was by concentrating on her work? She knew she was going to feel awful when the visit was over and the police – after due examination and a postmortem – released Ole’s body; when she would have to think about a funeral, lawyers, her future. When that time came she would want to be alone with her grief and her guilt, but she would be the one to say when she was ready to go off and hide from the world for a while.

  She was standing with Per, John and Tagesen, waiting for the arrival of the plane from London. She had put on a skirt and a smart blouse, with a jacket on top. She was very carefully and somewhat more heavily made-up than usual, but even this could not disguise her pallor or the strain in her face. She had slept for a couple of hours, curled up next to her friend and clutching her hand. In a deviation from standard procedure, the police were keeping the whole business completely under wraps for the time being. Not to shield her from the attentions of her fellow reporters but solely to save Janos from learning that they had found his hideout – just in case he hadn’t, as they believed, done a runner. Per was in his usual jeans and windbreaker, but Tagesen had donned a suit for the occasion. Per had been informed that Sara’s British Airways flight had landed. She would be allowed to leave the plane first.

  Tagesen laid a paternal arm briefly around Lise’s shoulders.

  ‘You don’t need to do this, you know, Lise. There’s nothing to stop you going home,’ he told her yet again.

  She shrugged his arm away.

  ‘I’d rather be at work. I’d go spare with nothing to do.’

  ‘You’re not to blame, you know.’

  ‘I’d just rather be doing something, okay?’

  ‘Here comes Simba,’ Per said and sent a quick message over his walkie-talkie to the two cars waiting on the tarmac at the foot of the finger.

  Sara Santanda looked exactly like her photograph, except that she was not clad in the traditional Iranian women’s costume, as she was in one of the most renowned pictures of her. Instead she wore a long skirt with a jacket and a shirt underneath. And those now famous gold earrings. Over her arm she carried a small handbag, which, in some absurd way, made her look a little like a young Margaret Thatcher. But Lise recognized her soft smile as she advanced to meet Tagesen, who greeted her effusively while Per muttered into his walkie-talkie. All of this Lise saw through a sort of a fog; somehow, though, she managed to collect herself enough to shake hands with the author, to wish her welcome and tell her what a brave woman she was. And Sara very sweetly said how nice it was to see her again.

  Per shepherded them out of the finger, through the emergency exit and into the Volvo saloon with smoked-glass windows that was waiting outside. Tagesen got into the back along with Sara Santanda, and Lise and Per climbed into the front alongside the driver. At the wheel of the other car was John, with the female member of the team, Bente, in the passenger seat. Within a matter of seconds both cars were on the move. If she hadn’t felt that she was viewing the whole thing through cotton wool, Lise would have been impressed by the efficiency of the exercise.

  Tagesen chatted to Sara in the elegant Queen’s English he had picked up when doing his PhD at Cambridge, while Lise gazed out of the window at the disaster area from which, at some point, a bridge to Sweden would rise. At the moment the area looked as though it had been hit by a minor earthquake.

  ‘You have had a war here?’ Sara Santanda asked in her light, dry Iranian English.

  ‘They’re building a bridge to Sweden. Just as you are building a bridge between cultures with your courage,’ Tagesen explained with that characteristic intensity which normally made Lise feel proud to be working for him but which today made her toes curl. For the first time she felt happy with the programme for the day. Tagesen would be taking Sara to a brunch with her publisher and a select gathering of writers and intellectuals at his apartment in Copenhagen, while Lise got everything ready for the press conference at Flakfortet. She was sailing out to the island with the members of the press. John was going straight to Flakfortet with the six officers allocated to Per. He had asked for twice that, but Vuldom had cut back on the numbers when he reported that the hit man appeared to have fled. He had, however, kept the dog teams, which he would get to comb Flakfortet one more time. Himself, he would come out on the White Whale with Sara and Tagesen. He had a helicopter standing by at Værløse Air Force Base, only ten minutes’ flight time from Flakfortet. Lise could tell that he hadn’t slept a wink the night before. His face was pale, but his eyes burned in it. He looked as though he was running solely on his last reserves of adrenalin.

  Lise heard Tagesen apologizing for the fact that no government minister or prominent member of the opposition had so far agreed to meet Ms Santanda. The politicians were, unfortunately, staying well away, for fear of damaging relations with Iran. It was realpolitik at its very worst.

  Sara gazed out of the window:

  ‘It doesn’t surprise me,’ she said. ‘Follow the money, and you’ll never be surprised by what people will do, especially people in power. And the Danes are no different, I’m sure.’

  ‘I know, but still…’ Tagesen said, fiddling with his tie.

  ‘Anyway, it’s nice to be out and about,’ Sara Santanda said with a smile, as the cars sped through Copenhagen. Lise felt a faint flutter of excitement at the thought of interviewing this woman later, even if she did still feel in constant danger of sinking into that fog where all she could see was Ole’s dead, empty eyes. Under normal circumstances she would have been exulting over this day and the fact that her articles dominated that morning’s paper, but instead she merely felt empty inside, as if her body were consumed by darkness.

  The darkness was still there a couple of hours later when she stood on the quay outside the Hotel Nyhavn. It was a lovely day, and a few people were sitting outside with their beers at the restaurants along the harbourside. Everything seemed so normal that it made her want to scream. How could they sit there like that, quite normally, as if nothing had happened? Didn’t they realize that the world was full of horror and guilt? Sailboats lay
quietly alongside the quay. The scents of tar and salt water mingled with cooking smells from the restaurants. A young couple with glasses of beer in their hands sat with their legs dangling lazily over the edge of the quay. The drone of traffic filtered down from Kongens Nytorv, and passers-by gawped at the thirty-odd strong press contingent milling around the foot of the gangplank. Lise gave herself a shake. She had put on some more make-up in an attempt to conceal the ravages of the night, but as she watched the last of her press colleagues arrive on foot or by taxi, she felt naked and transparent and did not trust her own smile. The M/S Langø was moored at the quayside, the skipper peering out of the wheelhouse at the members of the press. Among them were reporters from five television stations, including one from Germany and a Reuters crew who, along with a few others, had soon put two and two together and realized that they were here not for Scheer but for Sara Santanda. She recognized cameramen from TV2 and Danmarks Radio, as well as the new guy from TV3 and most of the newspaper crowd, but there were also some faces that were new to her. She could see from her list that quite a few foreign journalists had also been accredited. Scheer’s name had, as expected, proved a big draw, and a number of journalists whom she knew personally had called her, having twigged what this was really about, and had their names added to the list at the last minute. She nodded and smiled mechanically to those she knew. Two plain-clothes policemen were standing by the gangplank, checking people’s press cards against the names on her list before allowing them on board. Everyone took it in good part. They all knew the routine.