Charles would ask Ivan why he stayed in the KGB. ‘I have a family,’ Ivan would say. ‘And, besides, I am a Russian. Where else would I live, except in Russia? They may have dispossessed our bodies; but they will never dispossess our spirit.’
Charles said to Hans Klarlund, ‘You don’t have any pictures of Nicholas? Anything recent, that I could take home to his mother?’
Hans Klarlund shook his head.
‘Could I possibly take a look at his desk?’
‘Well, I don’t know whether that’s possible, Mr Krogh. You have no credentials, after all, nothing from Mr Reed’s family to substantiate who you are.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of touching anything, or taking anything,’ said Charles. He took out a cigarette, and ostentatiously lit it, to Hans Klarlund’s obvious annoyance. ‘I just want to make sure that he hasn’t left anything here of sentimental value. You know, some little token that would make his grieving old mother a more contented woman.’
Hans Klarlund stood up, anxious to remove Charles and his swirling grey clouds of cigarette-smoke out of his cool, functional, Scandinavian office. ‘Well, I don’t want to seem unsympathetic,’ he said. ‘Follow me, and I will show you where his room is.’
They walked through light and shadow, pastel greys and muted creams, pot plants and office partitions. Charles, shambling along behind Hans Klarlund with his hands in his pockets and his cigarette sticking up out of the side of his mouth at 45 degrees, felt that he was walking through a clinic, rather than an architect’s office. All the architect’s offices that he’d ever seen were a chaos of paper and drawing-pins and curled-up tracing-paper, with maybe a desiccated cactus and a dead bluebottle on the windowsill for decoration. You had to say it about the Danes. Their whole life was like smørrasbord; simple, functional, modern, and yet peculiarly unsatisfying.
‘Here,’ said Hans Klarlund. ‘This was Mr Reed’s office.’
Charles stepped inside, and looked around. It was quite a big office, with grey-painted walls, and black carpet-tiles. There was a grey metal desk, and a large architect’s drawing-board, on which Nicholas Reed’s tracings for the old people’s retirement village at Roskilde lay still half-finished. Charles leafed through them, nodded, and sniffed.
‘“C’est la vie”, said the old folks,’ he quoted. ‘It goes to show you never can tell.’
At that moment a secretary came briskly down the corridor and called Hans Klarlund to the telephone. Hans Klarlund frowned at Charles distrustfully, but Charles flapped up both hands like Walter Matthau, as if to say, ‘You can trust me, buddy. I’m innocent, even if I don’t look like it.’
‘You’ll have to excuse me for a couple of minutes,’ said Hans Klarlund. ‘But, please, I must insist that you do not touch anything.’
‘Do I look like a tea-leaf?’ asked Charles, He revelled in the rhyming slang that John Nelson of Britain’s C16 had once taught him, during his time in London.
‘I beg your pardon?’ asked Hans Klarlund.
‘Thief,’ Charles explained, with a quick, tight grin.
‘Oh,’ said Hans Klarlund, in complete perplexity, and went off to answer his telephone call.
The second that Hans Klarlund was out of sight, Charles’s demeanour completely changed. He propped his cigarette on the windowsill, then quickly checked around the office, so that when he reported back to Jeppe he would be able to tell him exactly where everything was. Desk, drawing-board, wastepaper-bin, and something concealed under a large grey plastic cover. Xerox copier, maybe? He tugged the cover off, and there was a terminal for Klarlund & Christensen’s computer, IBM 2000. Charles looked it over, frowning, and wishing that he had been trained in computers. Maybe then he could have accessed Klarlund & Christensen’s personnel file, and found out where Nicholas Reed had come from, and who he really was; and why the Soviets had considered it worthwhile sending Krov’ iz Nosu to kill him. Still, it was no use regretting the disadvantages of having been born too early for microchips; he replaced the cover, and started on a speedy and systematic search of Reed’s office that would have amazed Hans Klarlund if he had seen it.
He opened the drawers of Reed’s desk with a lock-pick, one after the other, rapidly scanning the packets of tracing-paper, the neat rows of pencils, the Mars-Staedtler drawing-pens, the Winsor & Newton inks, the French curves and plastic erasers. Later, he would be able to note, from memory, every single drawer and every single item that was in it. In the bottom right-hand drawer, under a copy of T.T. Faber’s History of Danish Art, was a copy of Sex Bizarre, nr. 42. In the centre drawer on the left-hand side there was a half-eaten packet of butterscotch-flavour Life Savers.
Charles frowned at the Life Savers. Now, who was it he had once known who had always eaten butterscotch-flavour Life Savers? There wasn’t time to think. He closed all the drawers, and re-locked them, and then quickly checked around the floor of the office for unusual cigarette-ends, fragments of waste-paper, anything that might help him identify Nicholas Reed, and what he had been doing here. By the time Hans Klarlund came back, three and a half minutes later, Charles had gleaned from Nicholas Reed’s room all the information that anybody could possibly have found there: apart, of course, from what the computer might be able to reveal. He stood looking out of the window at the early-evening traffic of Hammrichsgade, whistling softly to himself.
‘I am sorry I kept you waiting,’ said Hans Klarlund.
Charles said, ‘What? Oh, don’t worry.’
‘I don’t really think I can allow you to look at Mr. Reed’s desk,’ said Hans Klarlund. ‘Not unless you bring us a letter from one of his relatives. His mother, perhaps.’
‘Well, sure, I understand that,’ smiled Charles. ‘I’ll probably be phoning her this evening; so I’ll tell her to drop me a note of authorization; you know, in case there’s anything here that she wants. Anything sentimental.’
‘Yes,’ said Hans Klarlund. He was clearly waiting for Charles to leave. Charles nodded, and smiled, and smacked Hans Klarlund on the shoulder, and said, ‘That’s it, then. That’s fine. Thank you very much. You’ve been real patient. Patience is a virtue, coveting your neighbour’s ox is a sin.’
Jesus, he thought, when he was out in the street again, these humourless Danes. It’s all that dairy food they eat. The saturated fats clog up their hypothalamus. Probably their bowels, too.
It wasn’t far for him to walk back home to Larsbjørnstrade. It was a warm evening, with a high clear sky the colour of boysenberry jam. The trees were rustling, the bells were ringing from Vor Frue Kirke, the streets were still busy with people going home, or going out to eat. The Tivoli lights were sparkling through the leaves. He bought a copy of the Ekstra Bladet and glanced at the headlines. Soviet Minister Hints At New Thaw. He folded the newspaper up and tucked it under his arm. He wondered if Jeppe were right, and that everything they were being fed by the media was false. Too normal, Jeppe had said. He found himself silently whistling, ‘I prefer boysenberry… more than any ordinary jam… I’m a citizen for boysenberry jam, Sam.…’ On the corner of Jerbanegade and Hans Christian Andersens Boulevard, he stepped out in front of a Volvo estate, and was nearly knocked over. The car’s tyres squealed, suspension bounced, people looked round.
‘What are you, blind?’ Charles demanded, in Danish. He sometimes missed New York. At least in New York the driver would have given him the finger, or climbed out of his car and started an interminable Jewish argument. ‘Under my wheels you want to commit suicide? I’ve got a family, a business.’ But this driver did nothing more than give him a milk-and-water scowl, and drive on.
‘Ah, well, fuck it,’ thought Charles. He needed a drink. The nearest bar was just across the road, the Club Ambassadeur on Rådhuspladsen. He crossed over, dodging more Volvos, and pushed his way through the door into the darkness of the bar. It wasn’t open yet: it didn’t open until ten, although it stayed open until four, but Anker the manager was already there, with Alfred the barman, and a pianist who sounded as i
f all his fingers were bandaged was practising Night And Day.
‘Mr Krogh, you know we’re not open,’ said Alfred. He was thin and blond, with a black waistcoat that was far too tight for him.
‘Did I say you were open?’ asked Charles. ‘Lend me a Jack Daniel’s, straight-up.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Krogh.’
‘You’re sorry? Why should you be sorry? I nearly got run over out there. Some speed-crazed citizen in a Volvo full of dairy produce.’
‘Lend him the drink, Alfred,’ said the manager, from the far side of the club. He was standing under a red light, and all Charles could see of him was a black silhouette and a red gleam shining from his greasy hair.
‘You’re a pal, Anker. In fact, for a Dane, you’re almost human.’
‘Just drink your drink, Mr Krogh,’ said the manager. ‘We all know how much you love Denmark.’
‘What do you want, three choruses of Kong Christian stod ved højen mast?’
‘Just drink your drink,’ the manager repeated.
Charles took the shot-glass which Alfred had already filled for him, tossed it back in one, and then replaced it on the bar with exaggerated neatness. ‘You saved my life,’ he told Alfred.
He stepped out of the club back on to Rådhuspladsen. It was then that he knew, instantly, that he was being tailed. He couldn’t have described his intuition to an amateur. Nobody who hadn’t lived for years in Copenhagen and who wasn’t used to being followed and watched could have detected the unusual way in which the man across the street in the light grey double-knit suit suddenly stepped out of the entrance of the Burger King on the west side of the square. It was something about the way in which the man didn’t look around him before he started walking; something about the way in which he crossed the pavement diagonally, positioning himself so that he had all the options of following after Charles no matter which direction Charles decided to take.
Charles started walking up Vestergade, staying on the west side of the street, in the shadow, so that he would be more difficult to follow. The man in the double-knit suit came after him, twenty or thirty metres behind, glancing from side to side but patently ignoring the shops and the cafes and the bustle of homegoing Copenhagen.
Charles turned down Larsbjørnstrade, where he lived, and immediately quickened his pace. On the far corner of the street, a man in a brown leather jacket noticeably speeded up, too, and Charles realized now that there were two of them. That meant more than a tail; that meant trouble. He jogged heavily down the crowded pavement, and crossed Studiegade against the lights. A large Volvo truck blared its horn at him, but he was too puffed to answer back.
He didn’t want to lead them back to his flat; that could be fatal, not only for him but for Agneta, too. They obviously didn’t know where he lived or they would have been waiting for him there. They had followed him from Klarlund & Christensen; conceivably on Hans Klarlund’s tip-off. There was nothing to say that Klarlund hadn’t made an outgoing call as well as receiving an incoming call.
Charles glanced into the shop window next to him; the man in the brown leather jacket was reflected clearly in it, directly across the street. Charles didn’t want to turn around, but he could guess that his friend in the double-knit suit was pretty close behind, too. And the problem was that he was simply too old and too unfit to be able to shake them off. He wished he hadn’t drunk that shot of Jack Daniel’s. He was sweating, and that jog along Larsbjørnstrade had shaken the bourbon up with his fishy lunch, with the added flavour of ashtrays from his last cigarette.
On a sudden inspiration, Charles dodged into a narrow entrance, above which a flickering red neon sign announced that this was the way to ‘7th Heaven’. He found to his relief that the battered purple-painted door was unlocked, and he struggled his way up a flight of dusty carpeted stairs until he reached the second-floor landing. Through an arch, there was a gloomy bar, crowded with Formica-topped tables, and a stage with drooping red velour curtains. Sitting on the edge of the stage, smoking a cigarette and reading a newspaper, was what appeared to be a glamorous blonde girl in a black sequinned cocktail-dress, pouting-lipped and Bardotesque, with long sooty eyelashes. At one of the tables, a big-busted black girl with a beehive hairstyle was painting her fingernails green and singing Michael Jackson’s Summer Love.
The blonde on the stage looked up; took out the cigarette; and tapped the ash carefully on to the floor.
‘Charlie,’ enthused the blonde. ‘Darling, we haven’t seen you for centuries.’
‘How are you doing, Roger?’ Charles asked the blonde. ‘Juanita, how are you?’
‘This is a surprise,’ said Roger, jumping down from the edge of the stage, and straightening his dress. ‘But you look so hot. What have you been doing?’
‘Running, as a matter of fact.’
‘Running? That’s very rash of you.’
‘He’s in training for the next Olympics, didn’t you know?’ teased Juanita. ‘The cardiac dash.’
Charles said, ‘There’s two guys.’ He nodded towards the arch. ‘They may try to follow me in here.’
‘Muggers?’
‘Unh-hunh. I don’t know who they are. But they look as if their intentions are slightly less than charitable.’
‘Well, well, what have you been up to?’ asked Roger. He brushed the shoulders of Charles’ jacket with picky, feminine fingers. ‘I thought you’d retired from all that.’
‘So did I,’ said Charles. ‘I was doing a favour for Jeppe.’
‘Oh, Jeppe, how is the dear boy? I haven’t seen him for ages, either. Not since I had my op.’
‘You haven’t—?’ Charles asked him.
‘Oh, no, my dear, not that. I’m not that extreme. It was just a little bit of nip and tuck.’ He leaned close, and whispered, ‘Haemorrhoids.’ From this close, Charles could see the grainy creases under his eyes; the powdered shadow of his beard. He had been a merchant seaman once, before coming to Copenhagen and finding his transvestite niche at 7th Heaven. Charles had seen him naked, in his dressing-room. He had muscles like bunches of knotted rope. And yet he made a very appealing and elegant-looking girl. ‘It’s co-ordination,’ he used to insist. ‘You have to move like a woman, and then people will believe that you really are a woman, even if you’re six foot three and built like a truck.’
‘Would you like a drink?’ Roger asked. ‘There’s some rather nasty wine; or some warm schnapps.’
‘Thanks all the same,’ said Charles, shaking his head. And at that moment they heard the street door bang, and the sound of footsteps clumping up the carpeted stairs. Charles looked meaningfully at Roger and said to Juanita, ‘I’d go lock yourself in your dressing-room if I were you. These boys might be rather unpleasant.’
‘I’ll stay,’ said Juanita, but stood up, fanning her wet fingernails as she did so, so that she was facing the door. She was wearing a turquoise leotard cut high on the hip, and a small pair of high-heeled turquoise boots.
The two men who had been tailing Charles came through the archway and stood side by side. The man with the brown leather jacket had his hands thrust in his pockets, and he was chewing gum. The man in the double-knit suit adjusted his skinny little tie, even though it was knotted up tight already. They were both blond, both Danes by the look of them, although the man in the grey suit had slightly Slavic-looking cheekbones, and could have been a Pole or a Russian.
‘Mr Krogh?’ he asked, in a neutral, Americanized accent. The type of accent you hear behind the counter of jewelry boutiques at Hilton Hotels.
‘What’s it to you?’ Charles asked him.
‘You’ve upset somebody, Mr Krogh.’ The two men moved forward through the crowded tables.
‘Oh, yes? And who’s that?’
‘Friends of Mr Reed, that’s who. People who don’t like you sticking your nose in where it isn’t wanted.’
Charles said, ‘What movie did you get that line out of? Now, get out of here. This is a private club and you’re interrupti
ng a conversation.’
The man in the double-knit suit said, ‘What we’ve got to say is a lot more interesting, Mr Krogh. What we’ve got to say is, back off.’
Charles didn’t answer. The two men came and stood close to him, only four or five feet away, and regarded him with the pale eyes of men who like to think that they’re frightening.
‘We’re going to have to work you over, Mr Krogh. That’s our job. Now you can make it easy for yourself, or you can make it difficult.’
Charles glanced at Roger. A silent message passed between them; after years of drinking together they knew each other’s faces well enough, and similar situations had arisen before, when Charles was still working for the CIA.
‘I think you’d better vamos,’ Charles said, dryly.
The man in the double-knit suit shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Krogh. A job is a job. If we don’t work you over, we don’t get paid; and you wouldn’t like me to go back to my wife and hungry children with no wage-packet, would you? That wouldn’t be nice. Now, do you want to tell these ladies to make themselves scarce?’
Roger said, in a reedy voice, ‘All right, all right. We’re going.’ And he walked around the man in the double-knit suit with that unerringly accurate Brigitte Bardot sway of his; so convincing that the man didn’t even notice that Roger was only an inch shorter than he was, and that his shoulders were even wider.
Just as he passed behind him, Roger bunched up his left arm, and punched the man right in the kidneys; a blow so hard that the man was almost lifted off his feet. He cried out, and rolled over one of the tables, crashing to the plastic-tiled floor. Before the man in the leather jacket could grasp what had happened, Roger had brought his knee slamming up between his legs; and as he jack-knifed in shock, hit him a right-handed uppercut that made his jaw crack like a pistol-shot.
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