The Susan Effect

by Peter Høeg

  Those days are gone. The courtyard of the Rigsdagsgården, housing the National Archives, is no longer open to motorised vehicles.

  ‘How are we going to do it?’

  ‘We turn left, Susan. You and me.’

  During the last dozen years or more, Laban and the twins have turned left and conned their way in to see the crown jewels at Amalienborg Palace, the city’s sewer system and the headquarters of FET, the Danish military intelligence agency, at the Kastellet. They have, moreover, visited the Panum Institute’s department of pathology and its rather unappetising collection of tumours and sexually transmitted growths preserved in formalin. They’ve been round the Technical University of Denmark’s National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy at Risø and – on what until now I thought would be their final outing – the vaults of the National Bank.

  It was there they were finally collared, their combined powers of persuasion eventually falling short. The police were called, and a phone call made to me. God knows how, but they’d succeeded in getting themselves let in to view the nation’s gold reserves, and that’s where their luck ran out. It was only because I used my police contacts and referred to the rounds of questioning I’d done for them, which at that point had been some ten years previously, that I got them back home at all.

  That evening I subjected them one at a time to interrogation. Harald cracked and spilled the beans about turning left.

  ‘Weren’t there any limits?’ I asked him. ‘No rules?’

  ‘Only one,’ he said. ‘There’s only ever been one rule for what we do with Dad: Don’t tell Mum.’

  Laban and I came close to divorce that night. The only reason we pulled through was because he swore he’d never turn left again. And now here he is, wanting me to go with him.

  ‘There are security checks,’ I tell him. ‘I’ve seen it on TV. At the entrance to the Folketing. Magnetic barriers, like at the airport. Guards round the clock.’

  We look at each other for a moment. Then we get to our feet.

  We walk towards the garage. I’ve got my toolbox with me. I feel oddly nauseous.

  Then I stop at the gap in the hedge leading to Villa Chez Nous, Dorthea and Ingemann’s house.

  ‘Dorthea used to be in charge of Sightseeing Day.’

  Laban stares at me blankly. He grew up in the kind of environment that has traditionally set store by not knowing about Sightseeing Day.

  It was a popular annual festival. The Sightseeing Day catalogue used to be sold in all the newspaper kiosks, and the money went to shoes for the children of the poor, or a stay at some colony for weaklings, or whatever. Moreover, it allowed the general public, on that one day of the year, Sightseeing Day, access to all sorts of places that were normally out of bounds: the Svanemølle power station, the storage depots of the Arsenal Museum, the nuclear laboratory at Risø, the Holmen naval base, the Flakfortet sea fort in the Øresund, the winter quarters of the Benneweis circus.

  And the city’s hidden underground: its sewers, the casemates, the vaults of the Børsen Exchange.

  We squeeze through the gap.

  I ring the bell and Dorthea comes to the door.

  ‘Dorthea,’ I say, ‘we’ve got a problem.’

  Without a word she steps aside. We enter the hallway and she closes the door behind us.

  Neither she nor Ingemann ever went to college. He was a fisherman most of his life, until the night he saw an angel. He was sailing in the North Atlantic. Off the coast of Greenland, on a night of fog, in a small, thirty-foot, copper-bottomed wooden cutter sailing at full speed, he suddenly saw an angel in the bow pointing ahead. Immediately, he stopped the engines, and the very next moment an iceberg the size of the cliffs at Møns Klint loomed up out of the fog, seventy vertical metres of sheer ice. Seconds later and the boat would have smashed into it, the bow would have been matchwood, and they would have sunk and drowned in an instant.

  He told us the story once, in a matter-of-fact sort of way. The twins were with us, and it was obvious he wanted them to listen. He’s never mentioned it since.

  After that he went ashore for good and became a road mender. Dorthea came from seven years of schooling to the Copenhagen city hall, where she worked her way up to departmental manager, back in the days when that sort of thing was still possible and the civil administration looked at what people could actually do rather than just at their exam certificates.

  What unnerves me about them is that they’re a bit like angels themselves. In all the years Laban and I have been tearing each other’s heads off at regular intervals, I’ve never heard a cross word between them. They love Thit and Harald like their own grandchildren. Their garden is an unorganised paradise, with Ingemann’s laid-up cutter in the middle and a sea of flowers all around. Before arthritis got the better of him, all but confining him to his cabin, as he calls his room at the top of the house, Ingemann planted what he refers to as – and what indeed is – a lovers’ walk, with roses arching on high, where one might stroll arm in arm with one’s beloved, and feel oneself transported to a different and better world.

  So, basically, they’re beyond me. Too good to be true by half.

  ‘We got ourselves into trouble,’ I tell them. ‘In India. All four of us, though each in our own way. But then we got this miraculous offer, from the government. They asked us to get them some information. In return, they would make sure all charges against us were dropped and our civil liberties reinstated. We agreed and got them what they wanted. Only now it’s all going wrong. People are getting killed. Someone tried to do away with me and Harald. So we’ve decided to go into hiding.’

  Dorthea glances across at our house.

  ‘At your home address?’

  She’s got a point.

  ‘They think we’ve gone to Italy, on a witness protection programme. Some other people think we’re dead. At least we hope they do. The fact of the matter is we’re in limbo. We think we’ve got two days. We’re trying to figure out what it’s all about before we give any information up. What we’re trying to get hold of is a document. A report. We think it’s kept somewhere in the vaults of the Folketing, in a restricted archive.’

  She tips her head to one side and peers at us.

  ‘That’ll be the National Archives Annexe. It’s the only archive there besides the Folketing’s own, beneath the lower level. A sub-basement, if you like, underneath the information support centre, the postal unit and the printing rooms. It’s a series of tunnels, really, dating back to medieval times. You can cross the entire Slotsholmen. If you’ve got the guts.’

  ‘Dorthea, would there be the slightest chance of getting in there?’

  She tips her head to the other side. From the hall where we’re still standing, a narrow staircase leads up to the first floor and then to the top of the house, to Ingemann’s cabin. On the wall at every third stair is a framed, coloured print of a girl in different regional dress, so by the time you reach Ingemann every outpost of the country has been represented in traditional folk garb. The staircase itself is lined with a red carpet with polished brass stair rods. The doorknobs in the hall are polished too. The windows are polished. Everything in Dorthea’s house is spick and span, meticulously neat and clean.

  ‘It’s all closed off. Has been since the bombing of the prime minister’s office in Oslo, right next door to the Norwegian parliament. And the riots. All the doors are wired. If anything gets activated, the alarm goes off simultaneously at police HQ, the Folketing’s security unit and Securitas.’

  She peers at us again.

  ‘But of course you can get in.’

  29

  THE CURVE DEPICTING our relationships with other people as a function of time is close to being a straight line. Meaning that when it comes to being in a relationship, one day is pretty much the same as the next. We might experience the odd little downturn, but basically it’s all much of a muchness. Those instances in which we might apply differential calculus and discover the tangent line at a given
point x to display a positive slope, thereby indicating that we are approaching each other, are few and far between.

  And even more seldom are the moments in which the function becomes discontinuous and performs a leap.

  By the looks of things, Laban and I are approaching just such a moment with Dorthea Skousen.

  She’s sitting in the passenger seat next to Laban, and in her lap is an unfolded map of the system of underground corridors beneath Christiansborg Palace.

  It’s a photocopy, seemingly from the infancy of the Xerox machine in the 1960s. The paper is yellowed, the image grainy, and since the machine could apparently only handle A4, the map comprises five or six separate sheets glued together. And where the glue has come apart it’s been fixed with Sellotape.

  Each sheet has been rubber-stamped with the word CONFIDENTIAL, originally in red ink, now mostly a faded grey.

  There’s always been a bit of municipal management about Dorthea. Not just her cleaning and the way she keeps house, but also the care and attention to detail by which she and Ingemann, without fail, have always cleared the snow on the pavement outside their house and gritted by the book. And outside ours, too, because we always forget. Not to mention the meticulous manner in which they have driven and continue to drive their old Volvo, a vehicle manufactured in the 1960s and thus formally, one would think, a veteran, yet kept immaculately running by their kind words of encouragement, a heated garage and fifty years of accident-free motoring, not to mention the general atmosphere of kindness and conviviality that comes with its owners.

  It’s a side of Dorthea I understand only too well. I’m municipal myself, the way ninety-five per cent of all science is. A comprehensive set of rules administered by university-educated bookkeepers.

  But the Dorthea we see now is different altogether: completely calm, despite being quite as aware as us of what those smudged stamps of confidentiality actually mean. They mean that she is in the process of doing something she must once have agreed in writing never to do. She is about to violate her obligation of professional secrecy.

  ‘The corridors underneath Christiansborg featured in the Sightseeing Day catalogue eight years on the run. To begin with I acted as tour guide myself. I was office manager, so who else was supposed to do it? It was only the Folketing’s caretakers who even knew they existed and who would have any kind of business there. A lot of it was blocked off due to the danger of collapse. We couldn’t ask the caretakers to show anyone round, so we had to do it ourselves. The system starts underneath the Thorvaldsens Museum and leads through the crypt under the Slotskirken. After that, there are branches leading off under the royal stables in one direction, while another lot run under the casemates, the cellars housing the exhibition of what’s left of Absalons Gård. From there, they carry on under the Folketing, all the way over to the Royal Library. Narrow tunnels, dug out by hand. Full of heating pipes and cables now. In the seventies, a group of youngsters broke into a locker room and some security guards’ uniforms were stolen. After that, the underground passages were mapped and sealed off, but one arm was kept open to be used as an archive – an appendix, if you like – running under the old Landstingssalen. They kept all the treasures there from the Arnamagnæan Manuscript Collection while there was all that fuss going on about their being transferred back to Iceland. Njál’s Saga, and all that. They were afraid they’d be vandalised. The earliest copy of Saxo’s history of the Danes. Codex Holmiensis. The most valuable incunabula. Besides those documents kept under what we in the public administration called permanent protection. Which is to say ninety years. Occasionally longer in the case of documents concerning the security of the nation.’

  Laban drives us along Nørre Voldgade and H. C. Andersens Boulevard before turning down Stormgade. After we pass the National Museum, Dorthea points and we veer onto the square that is Prins Jørgens Gård. She signals for Laban to pull in. In the gloom of December, the Thorvaldsens Museum is a solid slab of grey.

  She gets out, goes away, then appears again, waving us across the street and down onto a narrow ramp. She’s opened the gate, and we pass through into a small underground car park beneath the museum. The lights go on automatically and the gate closes behind us.

  We get out of the car. I take the crowbar with me and a small head lamp. The car park contains some twenty-odd parking spaces, the rest of the area taken up by marble statues in storage. Dorthea keys in a code, deliberately, so I can memorise it.

  ‘I’m still on the committee,’ she says. ‘The friends of the museum.’

  The door opens.

  I’ve always avoided museums. Even the Technical Museum at Elsinore. It’s enough trying to come to terms with my own past, without being lumbered with society’s too.

  Dorthea lets me enter the code and another door opens. We descend to another level, this one clearly older. No one’s found it worthwhile to render the walls here: at first it’s all raw concrete, then medieval brick and stone. I switch on my head lamp. Dorthea has brought a little torch, a splendid thing made of metal, from an age when flashlight electromechanics was still young and innocent. Its power comes from a dynamo she activates by rhythmically squeezing the handle, causing a flywheel to spin inside. The sound it makes is pleasant and soft, like a mechanised erotic moan. We come to a third door and Dorthea stops.

  ‘This is as far as I go. Ingemann will be needing me.’

  I open the door and she points down the tunnel.

  ‘Seventy-five metres further on you’ll come to an exhibition room. Pass through and the tunnel carries on. Another hundred and fifty metres and you’ll see three steps up to a door on your left-hand side. Use the same code. If you get caught, there’s a three-year sentence. Ingemann and I will look after the twins, if worst comes to worst.’

  There’s something I want to say to her. Something like thanks. Something about never truly knowing your neighbours until they’ve helped you commit a break-in carrying three years in the slammer. But I’m mute.

  She peers at me.

  ‘Susan. What’s wrong with you is you never believe people actually like you.’

  And with that, she turns and leaves.

  Laban’s about to speak. I shake my head. There’s no more to be said on the subject.

  We go through the door and come out in the exhibition room a bit further on. I was here once as a child, on Sightseeing Day. I can’t remember if Dorthea was our guide, but what I do recall is the bleakness that resides among the historical remains of the medieval city. The present day might not be that cheerful, but the past was worse. To me, the brick foundations whisper not of romance and adventure in the colourful Middle Ages, but of disease, dungeons and rape, and an average lifespan that would have me long since dead. Not to mention a cuisine that peaked with salted herring and gruel.

  Next to the toilets is another door opened by the same code, and behind that a staircase, at the bottom of which the service corridors begin. From here we must hug the walls as we proceed, the bulk of the space occupied by great air-duct systems, heating pipes and bundles of cables led through the tunnels in open stainless-steel troughs.

  I count our paces. After a hundred and twenty-five we reach the steps and the door on our left.

  Only it’s not a door. It’s a sheet of steel without a handle or lock. They’ve sealed it off.

  We walk another fifty metres, then fifty metres back. There’s only the one entrance.

  Laban thumps his fist against the metal. The sound it makes is dull and solid as a railway sleeper.

  ‘The room on the other side will be equipped with sensors,’ I say. ‘Monitored round the clock. The place will come alive with security.’

  ‘We’ll be hog-tied,’ says Laban.

  ‘They’ll call it terrorism and give us ten years instead of three. By the time we get out, the twins will be twenty-six.’

  ‘We should give up.’

  ‘Turn ourselves in,’ I say.

  But then I insert the chisel end of the cro
wbar between the steel and the brick. Laban lends a hand, and we heave. The sheeting is ripped from its frame and crashes to the ground, a clattering supersonic cacophony.

  Just as we thought, it’s hooked up to an alarm: a red lamp flashes inside the doorway and a siren begins to wail.

  The alarm mechanism – and the siren with it – is housed in a casing that looks like it’s made of hardened steel. I raise the crowbar as if it were an axe, and bring it down with all my strength.

  It gashes open, the red lamp goes out, and everything is at once quiet.

  In that silence we wait. For sirens and guards, a sudden stealth attack in the dark. But nothing happens. The room behind the door is pitch black, and quiet as the grave.

  We step inside.

  In the light from my head lamp we see we’ve entered an enlarged tunnel area, perhaps four by seventeen metres, much of the ceiling raised in the form of an arching vault of rendered brick.

  Seventy-odd square metres isn’t much, but the space is crammed solid with documents. Its walls are lined with shelving, with hardly a centimetre vacant. The air is heavy and catches in the throat. The sheer volume of paper, most likely combined with a climate-control system, has drained the atmosphere of moisture.

  We say nothing, but each of us knows what the other is thinking: we’ve got no plan for how to localise a file in this chaos. We pass along the shelves. Ring binders, magazine files and book spines are numbered using a decimal system unfamiliar to me, presumably unique to the National Archives. Behind me runs a section of shelving housing six-sided metal canisters, each one locked and sealed by means of a fastener. They must be capsules, for the sensitive stuff, they too marked only by a six-digit number.

  I sense a certain desperation. I consider splitting each capsule apart one by one with the crowbar, and try to gauge how many there are: at least three full sections, seventeen times ten metres, seven capsules per running metre, three thousand capsules minimum, impossible.

  We inch further and my head lamp picks out a small desk, on top of which is a monitor. I switch it on and the screen comes to life. A box appears asking for a password.