The Serbian Dane (21 page)

‘I was looking for the toilets,’ Vuk said.

The chef pointed to the bottom of the passage.

‘They’re just down there,’ he said.

Vuk gave him a big smile.

‘Thanks.’

‘You’re welcome.’ The chef couldn’t help smiling back. Vuk’s smile was so infectious.

‘You must be the man who’s doing the food for us.’

‘Yep. How does fried eel sound?’

‘Mmm. Great.’

‘Well, you’ve still got time. See ya.’

‘Yeah, bye.’

The chef nipped past him, and Vuk followed him down to the signs to the toilets. He committed the number of the chef’s room to memory. It might come in handy later.

Vuk walked up onto the top of the fort. He looked across to Sweden and then to Denmark. The Swedish coast appeared close and inviting. He gazed back at Saltholm and watched the boats out on the water while he smoked a cigarette and mulled over his plan. He spied a Russian coaster sailing northwards through the Sound. It gave a short blast on its whistle as it passed a flat-bottomed barge heading south. The Russian tricolour flew from the stern of the barge, and an idea began to take shape in Vuk’s mind. Again, it was
very risky, but the odds were not impossible. If his luck held, it would definitely be worth a try.

In the restaurant, Vuk had fried eel washed down with a small draught beer and coffee while he turned things over in his mind. He was alone in the restaurant apart from the three elderly ladies, who were sitting over coffee, pastries and cheroots. The eel tasted odd rather than good, and the boiled potatoes had an unwonted floury texture. They brought back memories of childhood dinners with Mikael’s aunt who had made what she called proper Danish food; he could almost taste the hamburger steaks with fried onions, the pork sausages and red cabbage, meatballs and roast pork with parsley sauce, and recall the scent of her tiny kitchen. She must be dead now, otherwise Mikael would surely have mentioned her. He grew a little sentimental and allowed himself to lapse into nostalgia. A lot of things in his life could have been different if he had made other choices. But maybe the fact was that the choices had been made beforehand.

He was shaken out of his reverie by the sight of the chef emerging from the kitchen. He was puffing on a cigarette, and when he spotted Vuk he came over to his table.

‘Well, how was it?’ he asked.

‘Good. Like you said,’ Vuk replied.

The chef nodded.

‘So I guess you’ll be taking the boat home now too?’

‘God, no. I won’t be going home until Saturday. We’re out here from Tuesday to Saturday.’

‘That must be pretty tough, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, it’s amazing what you can get used to,’ the chef remarked.

‘I suppose so,’ Vuk said and got ready to pay his bill.

He went back to the hotel, changed into his smarter trousers and jacket and put on a tie before packing the guns and the rest of his things. His luggage was still untouched. No one had tampered with it. He bound the sheath containing the doubled-edged blade around his ankle and made a thorough check of the room before calling reception to say that he had to leave, but that he would of course pay for the next night, since he was checking out at such short notice. He would be down in ten minutes and would be paying cash.

Then he called Ole Carlsen, who answered after one ring, as if he had been waiting by the phone.

‘Hi, it’s Carsten,’ Vuk said.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ Ole muttered. He sounded disappointed, as though he had hoped it would be Lise.

‘I just wanted to say thanks for a great evening,’ Vuk said.

‘Aah, it wasn’t the best really,’ Ole said.

‘No, I don’t suppose it was.’

‘I don’t know where the hell she is.’

‘It’s all my fault, Ole. I’m sorry.’

‘No, don’t blame yourself. It wasn’t your fault.’

‘I wanted to ask if you could me a favour.’

‘Sure. I mean, it’s not as if I’ve got anything else to do.’

‘I’ve managed to rent the first floor of a house in Hellerup…’

‘Hey, that sounds great. Are you moving to Copenhagen?’

‘Nah, but I’m back and forth so often these days, I wouldn’t mind having a place of my own. I’m sick of hotels.’

‘Very sensible, if you ask me.’

‘I was thinking…you’ve got a car…and what with my cases and everything, I was wondering whether you…?’

‘But of course. Where are you now?’

‘Could you be at the corner of Istedgade and Reventlowsgade in half an hour?’

‘No problem. It’s the least I can do. I’ll leave a note to let Lise know.’

‘Does she deserve that?’

Ole laughed mirthlessly:

‘No, not really.’

They drove in silence. Ole reeked faintly of booze but seemed steady enough behind the wheel, and his speech was clear and coherent.

Sad though he was, he seemed to have come to terms with things. As if he knew it was over. It would be just like the thing for them to track him down because Ole got arrested for drunk driving. The evening was dark and cold, and the tarmac glistened with moisture. The trees bent in the wind, which had freshened.

Vuk gave directions to the house, and when they got there Ole parked outside the front gate. Vuk had put his luggage in the boot. He let Ole take the one suitcase while he carried the locked Samsonite case and the holdall. An old lady walked past on the other side of the street with her little dog on a leash. She turned in at the gate of the house opposite, looking back at the two men as she did so.

‘What a lovely house,’ Ole said. ‘You’ve struck it lucky here, all right.’

Vuk made no reply, merely went ahead of Ole up the short flight of steps to the front door. He set down the case and the holdall and unlocked the door. He switched on the light, stepped aside and let Ole walk in first.

‘Have you got the whole of the first floor?’

‘Yeah, I’ve got the lot,’ Vuk said. Something in his voice must have warned Ole, because he turned and stared at Vuk in bewilderment, but far too late. Vuk punched him hard in the throat and with a gurgle Ole went flying back, slammed into the jamb of the door behind him and collapsed in a heap. In his eyes shone the unspoken question: why?

‘You know me, you fool!’ Vuk hissed and dealt him another blow: short, sharp and precise. All the light vanished from Ole Carlsen’s eyes.

Vuk dragged Ole’s body through the chaotic kitchen to the basement stairs. He gave it a push that sent it rolling down the stairs with him following behind. He removed the car keys from the dead man’s jacket pocket before lugging him through to the washtubs, folding him into the second tub, next to Mikael’s body, and covering both bodies with the tarpaulin.

Vuk spent the next hour clearing up the kitchen. He emptied the rubbish bins, piled up the old newspapers in a corner, filled the dishwasher and switched it on and when all that was done popped a frozen pizza into the oven. He fetched the bottle of whisky from the sitting room, sat down at the kitchen table and studied the map of Copenhagen Harbour, which showed Flakfortet, Saltholm, the two coastlines and the shipping lanes hugging the land on either side. Between the one, known as Dutchman’s Deep, and the other, King’s Deep, was a marked-off section of the Sound shaped rather like Greenland. This was Middelgrund, the Dirty Sea. Vuk could see that the water here was very shallow.

He picked up the phone in the kitchen and called the mobile number he had been given by Kravtjov in Berlin. He preferred to use telephone boxes,
but the likelihood of the police bugging Mikael’s phone was so slight that he had no hesitation in taking the chance.

The phone was answered immediately. A man’s voice said simply: ‘Yes.’

‘This is Vuk,’ Vuk said in his halting Russian.

‘
Ich verstehe nicht
,’ the man’s voice said. He spoke German with a Slavic accent.

‘Kravtjov,’ Vuk said.

In the silence that followed, the phone hissed in his ear, although the line was perfectly clear.

‘
Haben Sie ein Nummer
?’

‘
Moment
,’ he said. He leafed through the phone book and sure enough, there was Mikael’s father’s name. He read out the number, first in Russian, then in German. The other man hung up.

Vuk had eaten most of his pizza by the time the telephone rang. He hadn’t expected Kravtjov to be carrying that mobile phone himself. It would be in a safe house somewhere, manned by a succession of henchmen. Vuk was the only person to have been given that number. Once the job was done it would be deleted. The mobile phone was a wonderful invention: the phones themselves were easy to carry around and easily concealed, numbers were easily acquired and just as easily cancelled. It had made life a lot simpler.

‘Yes,’ said a new voice in English.

‘Where’s Kravtjov?’ Vuk asked, also in English.

‘I know who you are,’ the voice said.

‘Where’s Kravtjov?’

‘They got to him. He’s dead.’

Vuk was silent for a moment, stunned. His mind was racing. His first instinct was just to drop the phone and run, get out of the country. The man in Berlin had possibly been in the field himself at one time. At any rate he seemed to know what Vuk was thinking.

‘It was his old colleagues. But it doesn’t appear to have had anything to do with that other matter,’ the even voice said.

‘What did he tell them?’

‘According to our sources, not very much. Nothing of importance. His heart was weak. It gave out.’

‘The contract?’

‘It stands,’ the voice said. ‘The same terms. There’s been a reshuffle at our end. The client still intends to honour the agreement.’

‘I’m going to need transport home,’ Vuk said.

‘So the contract will be fulfilled?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell me what you need,’ the voice said.

‘A Russian coaster or one of the barges I’ve seen here. From Volga-Nefti or Volga-Balt.’

‘I know the ones. We have good contact with a number of them.’

‘It has to be at a certain spot on the twentieth.’

‘That doesn’t give us much time.’

‘Can it be done?’

‘For a price.’

‘The price is immaterial.’

‘We’ll arrange to have one in the vicinity from now on.’

‘You’ll get the exact coordinates just before.’

‘Fine,’ the voice said.

Vuk paused for a moment, then said:

‘Have the competition got wind of the contract?’

‘Yes.’

Again Vuk had the feeling that he ought to make himself scarce as fast as possible. All the signs were there: the warning tingle down his spine, the quickening of his heartbeat and the film of moisture on his palms. It was the adrenalin, he knew, but these were also danger signals.

‘Are they ahead of us?’ he asked.

‘No. They’re fumbling in the dark. They’re not as far ahead as us.’

‘Okay,’ Vuk said. ‘We proceed.’

‘Okay,’ said the voice in Berlin.

Vuk poured himself another small whisky and drank it in the kitchen. He had tuned into CNN on the television in the corner. There was still nothing but bad news from Bosnia. CNN switched to a new item. Vuk saw the Tibetan leader, the Dalai Lama, come out of a door and walk towards the waiting press. The Dalai Lama was surrounded by people who were
crowding in on him while his aides did their best to shield him. Vuk saw a couple of uniformed police officers struggling to keep the reporters, press photographers and television cameramen at bay, but they just went on jostling to get close to the monk, who looked so small and defenceless in his orange robes. They jabbed their microphones into his face like long lances. Vuk observed the scene with some interest. He did not understand the reporters and all their pushing and shoving and shouting. But their impatience and their lack of consideration gave him an idea, one which he considered that same night as he drove Ole’s car back and parked it, with the doors locked, outside the apartment in Østerbro. He threw the car keys down a drain and took the train back to the house in Hellerup.

He went upstairs and switched on the computer. He could see from the little envelope in the email icon that there were some messages for Mikael. He went into the programme. There were eight new mails. Vuk read one of them. It was from Australia and had something to do with a programming tool unknown to Vuk. All of the other electronic mail also had to do with computers and programmes. None of them required an immediate answer, but from the list of mails Vuk could tell that Mikael had been corresponding with people all over the world. He exited the email programme, formatted the disk from Lise’s apartment and stuck it into a pile of fresh disks lying on the desk.

He collected the whisky bottle and a glass from the sitting room and went back upstairs. There were numerous rooms on the first floor, among them Mikael’s parents’ bedroom overlooking the Sound, a room that appeared to do duty as a lumber-room, a large bathroom and a guest room with a bed already made up and covered with a patterned bedspread. Vuk drew the curtains and lay down on the bed with the bottle of whisky. He had to down two large ones before he felt sleep stealing over him. He dreaded sleep and the way it robbed his subconscious of all control, but he slept peacefully and dreamlessly. He had two full days in which to make the final preparations. All the pieces of his plan had now fallen into place; he knew exactly what he had to do.

L
ise Carlsen stood on the veranda of Per Toftlund’s apartment, smoking a cigarette. She couldn’t sleep and had gone out onto the veranda to have a ciggie. Not that Per hadn’t told her she was welcome to smoke in his apartment, but she didn’t like to. He was so tidy it was uncanny. She didn’t feel right in these almost stringently masculine surroundings. She thought of Ole. She had stormed out of the apartment in high dudgeon the night before and had more or less told herself that she wasn’t going back until he was out of there, but she supposed that wasn’t really feasible. They had bought the apartment together and they would have to sell it together. She would need to start looking around for something else once Sara’s visit was out of the way. She couldn’t stay at Per’s place. It was too small, too much his own, and they would soon start to get on one another’s nerves, once they stopped spending most of their time in bed. Could she afford to go on living in that big apartment on just one income? Probably not, but she would have to do her sums. There always seemed to be something she had to do. And no matter what, tomorrow she would have to go home for some fresh clothes. Or today, rather. She was wearing Per’s thick bathrobe and nothing else, and the night air was cold. She shivered; her eye was drawn to the dark shadow of Vestskoven and the flashing lights in the distance. Somewhere out there, she thought to herself, an assassin was waiting. If what they had been told was right. The police had been asking around on the street, as Per put it. They had checked out scores of hotels, put their snouts to work and asked the mobile units to make a few inquiries when called out anyway to incidents in the Copenhagen underworld. But no luck. She thought of the hired killer, assassin, hit man, or whatever one was supposed to call the nameless, Danish-speaking foreigner
who might be lying in wait out there, somewhere in the city. She tossed her cigarette over the rail of the veranda, her conscience pricking her, but this place was simply too neat and clean. She tried to concentrate on the thought that had been just about to surface: a sense of something important that had come to her at that point between waking and the beginnings of sleep, when they were snuggled up together, spoonwise, after making love. But she couldn’t remember what it was that had struck her, and now she was thinking of Per and his strong agile body.

She heard the veranda door being pushed back, and Per put his arms around her. He was naked. He slid his bed-warm hands inside the bathrobe and placed them gently over her breasts. Kissed the nape of her neck.

‘Come to bed,’ he said.

‘I can’t sleep,’ she said, leaning back against him. He caressed her, and it felt so good.

‘Who said anything about sleep?’

‘Again?’

‘Hmm.’ She felt his lips on her neck. The bristles on his chin prickled slightly.

‘I was thinking about something.’

‘So was I,’ he said, running his hands over her belly and down to her crotch.

‘That’s so nice,’ she said.

‘So are you.’

He turned her round and kissed her while his hands slid down her back under the robe and cupped around her buttocks. His penis brushed against her, she wrapped her fingers around it lightly and felt it grow. It was wonderful to be wanted. Maybe that was the whole secret of love: to be the object of such great desire. He stopped kissing her, picked her up and carried her back to the bedroom. Afterwards she fell asleep without that elusive thought returning.

It came to her, however, the next morning when they were having breakfast together in Per’s little kitchen. He had been out for a four-mile run in Vestskoven, made coffee and gone down to the baker’s for bread and was now sitting reading
Politiken
, clad in what she described as his uniform: jeans, button-down shirt and tie – to which, later, would be added the gun at his
belt. She still hadn’t got used to that. She had slept an hour longer than him and felt fit and rested.

‘Per,’ she said. ‘Why is he so hard to find, this hit man?’

‘Because he works alone.’

He put down the paper and poured himself another cup of his strong black coffee.

‘We’re keeping a close eye on all anarchist groups, extreme left-wingers, Nazis, nutcases and diplomats from certain countries. That sort have a tendency to blab, some might be persuaded to turn informer; they operate in groups, within organizations. They find it hard to keep their mouths shut. Most of them, anyway. If he were one of them, we would have him in no time. But he speaks Danish like a native and works alone. It’s going to take luck to track down someone like that.’

‘I was thinking…’ she said.

She could see that he was about to make one of his cheeky remarks, but when he realized that she was serious he buttoned his lip and allowed her to continue:

‘If this hit man speaks Danish well, so well that he can pass for a Dane, then he must have lived here a long time, right?’

Per nodded, and she went on:

‘You can’t really learn to speak the language – properly, I mean – unless you’re born and brought up here. You can always tell as soon as someone opens their mouth whether they’re Danish or not. It’s the little things that give it away, right?’

‘Go on,’ Per said.

‘The Danes are a tribe. We take a person to be a Dane if he or she speaks the language without an accent. If you can’t speak the language you stick out like a sore thumb in this little tribal society of ours. Prince Henrik doesn’t speak Danish well, so we’ve never thought of him as a real Dane. Everybody loved Princess Alexandra because she had hardly been in the country any time before she was speaking Danish beautifully. There are so few of us. We’re afraid of being swallowed up by the big world outside. Our language is our shield. That’s why it matters so much to us.’

‘Yes, teacher,’ he chipped in with a grin.

She tutted impatiently:

‘No, listen. Just let me pursue this idea for a minute, will you?’

‘Okay, go on.’

‘Our killer, right? I think we have to take a gamble. He must have been born in Copenhagen around 1969. That’s the year the Russians mentioned, isn’t it? And he must have attended school for at least nine or ten years. He might even have gone to high school. There can’t be that many Yugoslavian boys in Denmark who’ve managed that. And every school keeps copies of the class pictures for each year. Somewhere in a school in Copenhagen is a picture of the man you’re looking for. Of your killer.’

Per eyed her appreciatively.

‘
Muy bien, guappa
,’ he said, reaching for his mobile phone. He keyed in a number, beaming at her as he did so and making her feel as proud as a schoolgirl being praised by her teacher.

‘John, it’s Per,’ he said. ‘Get a couple of people to start ringing round the churches, get them to check their registries. I want the names of male children born to Yugoslavian immigrant workers here in 1968, ’69 and ’70. Once we’ve got the names, we’ll get on to the National Register Office and double-check whether they’re still resident here and in which school district they grew up. Have you got that?’

He listened, then broke in:

‘I know damn well that 25,000 Yugoslavians came to Denmark to work in the sixties and seventies, but we’re only talking about three particular years here, so it shouldn’t be that hard a job, and the longer you go on blethering to me, the longer it will take. I’ll be there in half an hour…’

Per drove Lise back to her place. Ole’s car was parked outside, which meant he must be home, unless he had taken a taxi to work because he’d been drinking the night before and didn’t want to drive. Per gave her a quick kiss.

‘I’ll call you,’ he said.

‘I’ll be at the office later.’

She watched him drive off, missing him already. She walked through the main door and up the stairs, dragging her heels. She couldn’t stand the thought of another confrontation, so she decided to act huffy and just get changed, then bike in to work. Lise was one of those rare individuals who had never learned to drive. She had never had any notion to do so. She let herself
in to the apartment. It had a shuttered unoccupied feel to it. She called out tentatively, but there was no reply. Ole had tidied up the living room and run the dishwasher but hadn’t done any shopping. The light on the answering machine was flashing. It was Ole’s secretary, asking Ole to give her a call please, was he sick or something, and should she cancel his appointments for the next couple of days?

Lise called the secretary, who didn’t know where Ole could have got to. He had not shown up for work, nor phoned to say that he wouldn’t be in. Lise told her it would probably be best to cancel his appointments for that day and promised to call her back. The secretary sounded worried but also grateful to have someone else make a decision. Lise rang the newspaper office and asked if Ole had called, but he had not.

She sat down in the kitchen with a glass of juice:

‘Where the hell are you, you stupid bugger?’ she sighed. She was worried; it wasn’t like Ole to simply go off without a word to anyone. And it certainly wasn’t like him to let down his clients, whatever problems he himself might have.

She got changed and went to work, where she got her pieces on Sara Santanda’s visit ready to go to press. She had written a profile of the author and a summary of the Iranian government’s fatwa on her, but as agreed with Tagesen, she had not put it out on
Politiken
’s online newspaper for everyone to read. She would not do that until the evening before Sara’s arrival on the morning flight from London, so that it would appear in the paper on the day of the press conference itself. It was going to be the most fantastic scoop, and Per had not been able to talk them out of it. He would have preferred to eschew all publicity, but he had no say in this matter.
Politiken
wanted the story on the front page. For once the newspaper would have the jump on the TV and radio. They would hold the press conference, and afterwards Lise would conduct an exclusive interview with Sara at the safe house. They would be one step ahead of all their rivals.

Lise tried calling home several times and rang Ole’s secretary twice, but she hadn’t heard from him either.

Per called, and she expressed her concern to him, but he made light of it. As if he saw nothing unusual in the fact that her husband had simply vanished into thin air. Or at least was not getting in touch. But how was he to know
that they had always told one another where they would be? They had always felt it was important to check in with one another at least once a day. Even when out travelling, although it was usually her who was away somewhere, they had made a point of calling one another every day, if it was at all possible. Lately, she had to admit, this had tended to be a pretty one-sided arrangement, but at least she had always known where Ole was. Or had she? Per, on the other hand, was the sort of person who divulged only as much as was absolutely necessary about his activities. It wasn’t like Ole not to get in touch. Again she found herself missing the old day-to-day routine. Just to have the time to read a good book again…

‘Wasn’t it you who left him, Lise?’ Per asked rather coolly. Stung by this comment, she told him she was too busy to talk and put down the phone. But she was happy when he called a couple of hours later and asked if he should pick her up at eight. She felt restless. There was nothing else to do now but wait and hope that Per’s and John’s investigation would bear fruit. But that was not her department.

Per picked her up, and they drove back to his place. She wanted him so badly. They took a shower together and ended up in bed, where she forgot all about Ole and Sara and hired killers and gave herself up to a passion she had not thought she possessed. And afterwards, when she was lying there still, and he brought her a glass of red wine, her cigarettes and an ashtray, she thought her heart would burst.

‘It must be love,’ she said.

‘Just give me time. I’ll wean you off them eventually,’ he said. ‘Pasta and salad?’

‘Sounds divine,’ she said, stretching and feeling warm all over and so happy to be alive at this moment.

He had set the table in the living room; she sat there, swathed in his big bathrobe and ate, while he filled her in on the investigation. In order to narrow the field, they had chosen to concentrate on sons of Yugoslavian guest workers in state schools who had sat the school-leavers’ examination in either ninth or tenth grade. They had had five people working on this all day. It was a long laborious process. There had been no such thing as databases back then, so the people they called had to look up books and registers, but they had
narrowed it down to 109 Yugoslavian boys who had taken their
school-leavers
’ certificate. The team had now started cross-checking these names with the National Register Office, police records and the Motor Vehicle Registration Department, to find out how many of them were still in the country or if any of them had died. It was basic police work – tedious but necessary. Tomorrow he would be able to go round the schools with a list of perhaps twenty names and try to match them with faces in the class photographs kept by the schools. If they were lucky, they might come up with a name and a face for the police artists to work on. A computer-generated Identikit picture could then be distributed to the security officers involved in the visit. And they would be able to check whether Interpol had any record of the man: fingerprints, police record, whether he was wanted for anything.

‘It’s a simple process of elimination,’ he said.

‘And what if that doesn’t pay off either?’

‘Then we’re back to square one. Our best bet still is that we can manage to keep the schedule a secret. Word leaked out that Simba was coming here, but that was all, no details.’

‘This is delicious,’ she said.

He took a sip of his wine:

‘What are you doing tomorrow?’

‘Nothing in particular. Waiting. Looking forward to basking in the admiration of my colleagues when they read my articles,’ she said dryly, although she did in fact mean it.

‘Why don’t you join me, then?’