The woman was a communist and had been so for more than seventy-five years. “Stalin-Sally” or “Russian-Sally,” as she was called back in the day, were nicknames she wore proudly. She was even more proud of the fact that she had once heard Beria speak. Her voice was thin but clear: “Lavrentiy Beria himself. It was in Tbilisi in 1937 at a special party conference. I sat in the second row and listened to this famous man speak, how he revealed a whole serpent’s nest of traitorous activities spread over the entire Transcaucasus and even in the Central Committee for Armenia. He could definitely get people to listen, that handsome Migrel. Everyone was cheering in the streets and demanding justice against the fascist criminals and Trotsky dissenters, so they made short work of it-if you understand.”
She drew a wrinkled hand across her throat.
The Countess shook her head a little and asked for at least the fifth time, “But what about Thor Gran? You promised to tell us about Thor Gran. That is why we’re here.”
“I’m getting to him but these things hang together. Rest assured, I have a couple of juicy things to say about him, a few things I believe you can make use of.”
Then she continued in the same irrelevant vein. A little later, when she was done praising Beria, she went on to Kollontai. The remarkable Alexandra Kollontai herself, whom she had met in Stockholm during the war. Later yet, it was Richard Jensen. The boiler man himself who had denounced the party president as a renegade, long before he displayed any signs of it.
After an hour of idle chatter and a review of the highlights of communism, the male detective tossed in the towel. He left with a muttered comment that he had been at the health insurance office with Vivi Bak, the famous Vivi Bak herself. Also he had once defecated in the same restroom as Prince Joachim, the very same restroom. He showed himself out.
The Countess stayed. She intended to trick the old woman, who was plainly a snob in her own red way. As it happened, the Countess had some ammunition up her sleeve. Especially if she-in good communist tradition-altered the truth a little. She interrupted loudly, “My grandfather knew Dimitrov.”
The woman stopped her monologue and squinted suspiciously at her. “Dimitrov himself? The leader of the Comintern?”
“The one and the same. The Georgi Mikhaylov Dimitrov.”
The Countess had heard the name ad nauseum. The apartment below hers was inhabited by refugees from Bulgaria, an older married couple who gave little girls sweets and lemonade and told stories from the other side of the world in a funny, broken kind of Danish. They had cursed Georgi Mikhaylov Dimitrov so often that his name stayed with her even forty years later. The old woman’s interest was kindled.
“Well, then, out with it,” she said.
“Not so fast. Something for something. You have to talk first. About Thor Gran, and only about Thor Gran, if you actually ever knew him. When you’re done, I’ll tell you all about the committee chairman.”
The woman seemed to be turning this over in her mind, with evident mistrust.
“The Comintern’s chairman. He was chairman of the Comintern.”
“Yes, of course he was. Everyone knows that.”
Finally, the woman started to tell her story.
“Well, I was a skilled needlewoman and in the early sixties I worked for Thor Gran’s father, the shoe manufacturer and financial speculator. There I was a head seamstress and there must have been over a hundred employees, so that was something. His home was next to the factory and we watched his son grow up. A bad and arrogant child who had trouble keeping his fingers to himself when the time came. But that was neither here nor there. We knew how to deal with a puppy like him. It was worse for the gardener’s little girls. That’s the kind of thing you want to hear about, isn’t it?”
The Countess confirmed this. She wasn’t sure if the woman was making this up or wanted to assure herself that her story was living up to the expectations.
“It went on for a period of time until one day he was literally caught with his pants down, and then all hell broke loose. The gardener, who was very attached to his children, threatened to go to the police but the old man talked him out of it and they came to a financial arrangement. What was done was done and the girls were better off with a little sum of money, even if the perverted young man should have been put behind bars. I handled negotiations on behalf of the gardener. Do you follow?”
“Completely. Please go on.”
“Well, the factory owner was an ugly capitalist of course, but he was also an honest enough person and he dug deep in his pockets. Eighty thousand kroner to each child and another twenty thousand for a new family home in Bornholm. It was a lot of money in those days but neither of the girls ever fully recovered from the events so I really don’t know how much it helped. After a solid dose of fatherly caning the son was sent to boarding school in England. This punishment was part of the agreement but it was also the easiest path to take.”
The Countess was far from impressed. In part because the incident lay over forty years in the past, in part because the trustworthiness of the old woman lay in a village in Russia, or rather the Soviet Union, and it would not be easy to have the story confirmed from other sources. At the same time, she perceived that the old woman was holding something back. She took a chance.
“But you spread this story in the Party. And when Thor Gran came back from England…” She let the sentence hang in the air.
The woman answered willingly, “Yes, he did some favors for us occasionally. That’s true.”
“And when the Party dissolved he continued to do favors for you?”
The old woman sputtered, “The Party lives. The Party will always live. And anyway, he had enough money, he owned an entire studio.”
“How much?”
A little time went by before she answered, “It varied. Sometimes a few hundred or so when he was here.”
The Countess concealed her astonishment.
“He came and visited you?”
The woman pointed to a vase that stood on a teak bookcase behind them. “Take that down.”
The Countess fetched the vase. It was cheap, with a Grecian motif of three dancing women. She shook it and heard a metallic clanging noise.
“And what are your three graces guarding?”
The old woman snorted. “Graces! Do you think I care about graces? Turn it upside down.”
The Countess obeyed this command and something fell out. “What now?” she asked.
“Under the bed. The large wooden chest with the latches. I can’t get it out myself.”
The Countess followed these instructions and eagerly opened the box. At the very top was an amateurly constructed brochure advertising a three-week vacation to Chiang Mai, Thailand. Two of the pages featured pictures of Asian children.
They had numbers.
The Countess’s gaze lingered on the boy in the upper row on the right. He was hard to resist, although there was nothing really special about him compared to the others. A normal, smiling boy with white teeth and all-too-childish features.
The old lady turned her back to it and said, “I’m not the one who is responsible if he kept up his disgusting habits. Tell me about Dimitrov. How did your grandfather know him?”
“I can start by telling you about the treatment of prisoners in a Bulgarian prison in 1946. I’ve heard something about that, and later we’ll talk more about this, but first I have to call someone.”
Her hostess snarled, the Countess made her call, and Simonsen got his final checkmark.
Chapter 46
Pauline Berg was watching her first handball game ever. She had arrived in good time and had watched with some curiosity as the room gradually filled with excited hometown fans. Sports talk filled the air around her but even the videos of the day were discussed and snippets of disgust and anger swirled in the mix: “That kind has no pity; they got what they deserved; finally a solution for them; great to see the animals strung up; they should crush their balls next.”