Authors: Leif Davidsen
I asked reception for the morning papers, went back to my corner, and tried to understand the strange Danish articles. I was glad that I didn’t have to tell a Spaniard what was going on in Denmark. Not a lot it seemed, although pieces on growing xenophobia and how my old country was being inundated with fanatical immigrants were something new. When I looked up I saw the group of Japanese tourists, and then Clara Hoffmann came in through the door and stopped to look around.
She looked younger than she had seemed in Madrid. I remembered her as being in her early 40s. She was wearing jeans and a beige shirt which revealed the outline of her bra. Her body was youthful and slender, like Amelia’s. She was carrying a large bag on her shoulder, which detracted from her stylish appearance. But of course she was on her way to work. Her hair had been cut since Madrid. Now it was short and curly. It suited her, making her face look younger. She wasn’t wearing much make-up, just eyeliner and a touch of lipstick. Her bluish-grey eyes were alert and her lips shone slightly. But it was the way she walked that attracted me most. She came in with short, confident steps, as if she was dancing. A sensual, energetic saunter. She scanned the lobby with a confident gaze and I noticed a couple of men at the reception desk looking at her.
I was just about to catch her attention when, without thinking, I
picked up my Leica, estimated exposure and distance, and took four quick shots of her. Two of them are lying here next to my computer. They could be used for an advertising campaign about a woman who keeps up with fashion, has well-groomed hair and a balanced, slim body. A beautiful, composed and efficient woman who is confident in herself and presents an open face to the world. I had instinctively framed a classic Golden Section. Clara is in soft focus, the fringes of a plant in front of her, and behind her are the reception desk and a man in a suit who has turned his head to look at her. It’s one of my better photographs of a woman in the enterprising 1990s, mature and yet sexy. Self-sufficient, yet ready to take it easy should the occasion arise and there’s a window in her diary.
I put the Leica on the table and waved to her and her face lit up in a smile as she walked over towards me. I realised that Clara Hoffmann was the first woman I had been attracted to since Amelia’s death. It was the first time that I had looked at someone in terms of gender, not just as a person, but also a sexual being. Until then I hadn’t thought about sex, apart from in grotesque dreams that resembled the paintings Amelia and I had seen in the Salvador Dali Museum at Figueres. Maria Luisa had cried at the sight of his paintings. She was inconsolable, and it wasn’t until we were in a McDonald’s later that we got her to tell us what was wrong.
“He must have been such an unhappy man, that painter,” she had said. “I felt so sorry for him and then I got scared.”
This is not what I felt when I saw Clara Hoffmann. What I felt was elation. That’s how I remember it. I was happy, even though I had nothing on which to base my pleasure. I had a pang of guilt, but it was just so nice to see a summery, Danish woman walk towards me with a big smile, and put out her hand.
“Peter. It’s good to see you,” she said.
“Clara. It’s good to see you again too,” I said.
Her hand was cool and firm, she said yes to a cup of coffee and sat down opposite me; we chatted a bit about Spain and Denmark and, like every Dane, she talked about the lovely weather as if the good Lord had set aside these few days to bestow his favour on Copenhagen.
Then she leant forward.
“What can I do for you?” she asked.
The question surprised me. I had presumed she would ask what I had for her.
“First I have to tell you something, but it’s a long story.” I answered.
“I’ve got plenty of time,” she said.
I gave her a broad outline of what had happened since we had last met, back when my life was utterly different. I had a strange urge to tell her something rather more personal, but it was a long time since I had been 20 years old. So instead, while we drank coffee, I told her about San Sebastián, Don Alfonzo, the suspicions of the Madrid police, the post-mortem and the surveillance report, which I showed her. She listened without comment, and read the report quickly, as if she was used to scanning that kind of document. I was grateful to her for not again expressing her sympathy. I couldn’t have borne to hear it.
She listened attentively as she watched me and drank her coffee. When I mentioned the interrogation in San Sebastián without going into much detail, she reached out her hand and touched the healing wound under my eye.
“You look done in,” she said. “You look older, and worn out. All the pain is in your eyes.”
“That’s a strange thing to say,” I said. “We don’t know one another.”
“I think I know you,” she said.
“I don’t understand.”
“If it makes you feel better, neither do I,” she said.
I looked at her and she looked straight back, but I couldn’t read her
expression, so I carried on telling her about Las Ventas. Finally I took out the two photographs. The one she had brought to Madrid and the one showing Lola with the group of bearded men. She studied them carefully.
“Do you know him?” she asked, pointing at the man to the far left in the second picture.
“Yes. I’m not completely out of touch. He’s a member of parliament today.”
“He is, yes. But do you know the others?”
“Yes and no. I remember the woman,” I said.
“I should think everyone does. It’s a fantastic photograph.”
“Not really. It’s under-exposed and the composition’s not great.”
She laughed in a girlish and yet adult way.
“I don’t mean the quality of your photography, Peter. It’s the people. They’re a big help.”
I wasn’t really interested in the significance of the photograph to the National Security Service, but the sound of her laughter and the expression on her face made me feel sexual desire for the first time in ages.
“OK. If it makes you so happy, you can repay me by saying yes to lunch or dinner while I’m in Copenhagen,” I said, speaking without really thinking about it first.
She looked at me. She had tiny, attractive wrinkles in the corners of her eyes. Her eyebrows were rather more pronounced than was usual in a woman, but they gave character to the fine features below her curls and her even, soft mouth with its distinctive bow. Her skin was quite tanned, but still very fair and glowing, very Nordic. I wanted her in front of the camera in a studio in Madrid, with the afternoon light coming in from the left, a softened overhead lamp bathing her forehead, her soft eyes the focus of the composition, tricking the observer into being sucked into the midpoint of her
face, and ignoring her slightly large ears.
“I’d have said yes please whether there had been a photograph or not,” she said. “But before we discuss that, I’ll need you to tell me more about the commune you lived in.”
“Here?” I said.
“No. I’d prefer if you would come with me to Borups Allé. I’d like to go through the whole thing in more detail, in more official surroundings.”
“Why?”
“Borups Allé, Peter.”
“I’m meeting an old friend at eleven o’clock.”
“May I take the photographs with me?” she said.
“Just as long as you remember who owns them.”
“There’s no risk I’d forget,” she said.
“When can we see each other?” I said like a regular schoolboy.
“This afternoon. If you can.”
“I was thinking about dinner.”
“We can decide then.”
“Borups Allé. Do I just say that to the taxi driver?” I said.
She laughed.
“Peter. It’s Bellahøj Police Station. That’s where the NSS has its offices. This isn’t Spain or Russia. In Denmark the security service is in the phone book. Just ask for me at the desk.”
“How reassuring,” I said, and made her laugh again.
The television news was housed in a low-rise concrete building crouching under the giant tower known as TV-City. Since I’d last been there they had put a big red logo at the top of the tower, but the building still looked like it had been brought over from Karl Marx Allee in East Berlin, more like a place where the secret police were holed up than the headquarters of the television news. Klaus was waiting by the double glass door when I arrived. There was no one at the security desk. The message was clear: visitors were not welcome here. Any that did turn up would look pretty shifty talking into an intercom.
“This must be the only newsroom in the world where people can’t come in off the street with a story,” I said, when he had let me in and we had shaken hands.
“Write to the director general,” said Klaus with an exasperated laugh. “The porter has gone as part of a cost-cutting exercise, so the punters just stand rattling the door. They sure as hell don’t get in. God forbid. But it’s par for the course. Come upstairs.”
The offices were a row of small cages with glass doors. It was quiet on the editorial corridor. I knew the rhythm. The journalists would be either behind their glass doors talking on the phone, or already out recording. Klaus’s office was tiny. He sat down at his desk
that was dominated by a computer, surrounded by the journalist’s organised clutter of newspapers, cuttings, magazines and tapes. CNN was running silently on a television suspended from the ceiling. He chucked a pile of newspapers off a low armchair and asked me to sit down. He fetched black coffee in plastic cups and sat in his revolving office chair. We started by chatting, mostly about old colleagues and what they were doing now and about the general folly of the world. He seemed tense, and I could see that the extra ten kilos had settled on his face and waistline. I told him about Lola and my connection to her. He made notes and asked if I would be willing to give an interview if he pursued the case. I said that would be fine, although I couldn’t really see that it had the makings of a story. He was doubtful as well, he said, because it had gone cold now that political responsibility had been attributed. I asked him to tell me how it had come to light that Lola didn’t have any real qualifications. He laughed, and I heard an echo of the old, reckless Klaus. He rummaged through the piles of papers on his desk and fished out a plastic folder full of cuttings.
“It’s all in here, Peter,” he said. “I can’t take the credit. There was a reporter on
Jyllands-Posten
, Jørgenson, who simply sat on his backside and began ringing round. He was going to interview Laila or Lola or whatever the hell she’s called, and the damned woman got really extremely pissed off when my colleague began digging into her Moscow days. Jørgensen speaks Russian, spouts all that stuff about the Russian soul and the rest of it, and he got suspicious. It seemed as if Laila wasn’t really familiar with the arts world from the inside, as it were. She claimed to have been there during that extraordinary time in the 1980s when Gorbachev came to power – glasnost and all that. But Laila had gaps. There were things she ought to have known, people who ought to have been mutual acquaintances whose names didn’t ring any bells for her. When my colleague read the interview to
her, Laila refused to consent to
Jyllands-Posten
running it. Because the paper implied that Laila’s knowledge of modern Russian art was maybe a little limited. That was her big mistake all right. Refusing to let the interview be published. You know how seriously suspicious that makes us reporters, don’t you?”
“Indeed,” I said, and began reading while Klaus went off to a meeting. Despite the mess in his office, his cuttings were in meticulous order. They were arranged chronologically and told the story right up to the point where Lola disappeared, with or without the money.
She had been hired just before the construction of the new art museum was completed. There had been much bewilderment in Denmark’s art world. Especially in the circles that made a living from art – the administrators, reviewers, pundits, lecturers, professors. The Ministry of Culture had been delighted that someone from the outside had been found, and a woman at that. And Lola’s CV was pretty impressive: studied at the Sorbonne, the Academy of Arts in Moscow and the Royal Academy in London, partner in a prestigious gallery in New York, contacts in every corner of the international art scene. I noticed she had knocked a couple of years off her age, and claimed to be the daughter of a Danish woman and an English lord. There were no children from her marriage to the Russian artist Petrov, from whom she had taken her surname. Petrov had gone to the dogs in St Petersburg, she had told a journalist, having just said that she never talked about her private life. He had found it impossible to exist as an artist in the materialistic atmosphere of the new Russia. Not an eye was dry.
She had got divorced around 1987. The photographs showed her to be attractive and well dressed, in a style that was both classic and modern – she had modelled herself on a certain Grace Kelly-type, appearing just a little dated, but maybe that was why she inspired
such confidence. Lola spoke, according to the first profiles, an elegant, slightly old-fashioned, refined Danish not unlike that of the Queen. This description would undoubtedly have been intended as a compliment. It was obvious from the photographs that she cut a bit of a dash, and the older, male politicians, with their wide, loud ties and jackets a size too small, could be seen gazing at her in admiration. She had good press. They had swallowed her story hook, line and sinker.
Good press for the opening of the museum. Good press for the first exhibition, and then the critical articles began to appear. Staff resigned. Extra funding had to be provided. The travel budget was overspent. A lecture at the Academy of Fine Arts turned into a farce because the professors didn’t think she knew her subject matter. Lola responded by saying that this was a typical case of the Danish tendency to knock success. And then finally the unmasking. A front page news revealed that Laila Petrova was not who she said she was, and that the selection committee had never seen evidence of her qualifications because they had never asked for it. A serious, full-page article, as exciting as a thriller, traced the journalist’s investigation that led to the discovery that Laila Petrova had duped everyone. It was a simple, brilliant piece of investigative journalism. Hours spent on the phone making calls to Paris, where no one at
Le Monde
was aware of the fact that she had been one of their visual arts writers, and then via London to New York and Moscow. The same response everywhere: Laila Petrova had always moved in art circles, and plenty of people had positive things to say about her, but she didn’t have any qualifications. At all. She had relied on the fact that people who know nothing about art, and possibly have no understanding whatsoever of modern art, like to appear to know an awful lot, since they can’t afford to exhibit their ignorance; it’s easy to bluff them if you have the nerve to play your hand ice-cold. She had gambled on the appointing authorities knowing little, but not daring to reveal their ignorance.
They had been easy prey for a skilled operator with the ability to show that she knew everything, even though she perhaps didn’t know very much at all.