She returned to the hotel and placed the call.
As the operator was putting her through, she wished she had taken more time to plan what to say. Should she ask for Arne? If anyone happened to be listening in, that would give away his whereabouts. No, she would have to speak in riddles, as she had when calling from Stockholm. Jens would probably answer the phone. He would recognize her voice, she thought. If not, she would say,
Before she had time to think it through, the phone was picked up, and a man’s voice said, “Hello?”
It certainly was not Arne. It might have been Jens, but she had not heard his voice for more than a year.
She said, “Hello.”
“Who is that speaking?” The voice was that of an older man. Jens was twenty-nine.
She said, “Let me speak to Jens Toksvig, please.”
“Who is calling?”
Who the hell was she speaking to? Jens lived alone. Maybe his father had come to stay. But she was not going to give her real name. “It’s Hilde.”
“Hilde who?”
“He’ll know.”
“May I have your second name, please?”
This was ominous. She decided to try to bully him. “Look, I don’t know who the hell you are, but I didn’t call to play stupid games, so just put Jens on the damn phone, will you?”
It did not work. “I must have your surname.”
This was not someone playing games, she decided. “Who are you?”
There was a long pause, then he replied. “I am Sergeant Egill of the Copenhagen police.”
“Is Jens in trouble?”
“What is your full name, please?”
Hermia hung up.
She was shocked and frightened. This was as bad as it could be. Arne had taken refuge in Jens’s house, and now the house was under police guard. It could only mean that they had found out that Arne was hiding there. They must have arrested Jens and perhaps Arne, too. Hermia fought back tears. Would she ever see her lover again?
She walked out of the hotel and looked across the harbor toward Copenhagen, a hundred miles away in the direction of the setting sun. Arne was probably in jail there.
There was no way she was going to meet up with her fisherman and return to Sweden empty-handed. She would be letting down Digby Hoare and Winston Churchill and thousands of British airmen.
The ferry’s horn sounded the all-aboard with a noise like a bereaved giant. Hermia jumped on her bicycle and cycled furiously to the dock. She had a complete set of forged papers, including identity card and ration book, so she could pass any checkpoint. She bought a ticket and hurried on board. She had to go to Copenhagen. She had to find out what had happened to Arne. She had to get his film, if he had taken any pictures. When she had done that, she would worry about how to escape from Denmark and get the film to England.
The ferry hooted mournfully again and moved slowly away from the dock.
19
Harald drove along the Copenhagen quayside at sundown. The dirty water of the harbor was an oily gray in daytime, but now it glowed with the reflection of the sunset, a red and yellow sky broken up, by the wavelets, into dabs of color like strokes of a paintbrush.
He stopped the motorcycle near a line of Daimler-Benz trucks partly loaded with timber from a Norwegian freighter. Then he saw two German soldiers guarding the cargo. The roll of film in his pocket suddenly felt burning hot against his leg. He put his hand in his pocket and told himself not to be panicky. No one suspected him of any wrongdoing-and the bike would be safe near the soldiers. He parked next to the trucks.
The last time he was here he had been drunk, and now he struggled to remember exactly where the jazz club was. He walked along the row of warehouses and taverns. The grimy buildings were transformed, like the dirty water of the harbor, by the romantic glow of the setting sun. Eventually he spotted the sign that read, “DANISH INSTITUTE OF FOLK SONG AND COUNTRY DANCING.” He went down the steps to the cellar and pushed the door. It was open.
The time was ten o’clock, early for nightclubs, and the place was half-empty. No one was playing the beer- stained piano on the little stage. Harald crossed the room to the bar, scanning the faces. To his disappointment, he did not recognize anyone.
The barman wore a rag tied around his head like a gypsy. He nodded warily to Harald, who did not look like the usual type of customer.
“Have you seen Betsy today?” Harald asked.
The barman relaxed, apparently reassured that Harald was just another young man looking for a prostitute. “She’s around,” he said.
Harald sat on a stool. “I’ll wait.”
“Trude’s over there,” the barman said helpfully.
Harald glanced in the direction he pointed and saw a blond woman drinking from a lipstick-stained glass. He shook his head. “I want Betsy.”
“These things are very personal,” said the barman sagely.
Harald suppressed a smile at the obviousness of this remark. What could be more personal than sexual intercourse? “That’s very true,” he said. Were tavern conversations always stupid?
“A drink while you’re waiting for her?”
“Beer, please.”
“Chaser?”
“No, thanks.” The thought of aquavit still made Harald feel nauseated.
He sipped his beer thoughtfully. He had spent the day brooding over his plight. The presence of police at Arne’s hideout almost certainly meant that Arne had been found out. If by some miracle he had evaded arrest, the only place he might be hiding was the ruined monastery at Kirstenslot; so Harald had driven there and checked. He found the place empty.
He had sat on the floor of the church for several hours, alternately grieving at his brother’s fate and trying to figure out what he should do next.
If he were to finish the job Arne had started, he had to get the film to London in the next eleven days. Arne must have had a plan for this, but Harald did not know what it was, and could not think of any way to find out. So he had to devise his own.
He considered simply putting the negatives in an envelope and mailing them to the British Legation in Stockholm. However, he felt sure all mail for that address was routinely opened by the censors.
He did not have the luck to be acquainted with any of the small group of people who traveled legitimately between Denmark and Sweden. He could simply go to the ferry dock in Copenhagen, or the boat train station at Elsinore, and ask a passenger to take the envelope; but that seemed almost as risky as mailing it.
He had concluded, after a day of racking his brains, that he had to go himself.
He could not do so openly. He would not be given a permit to travel, now that his brother was known to be a spy. He would have to find a clandestine route. Danish ships went to and from Sweden every day. There had to be a way to get on board one and slip off unnoticed on the other side. He could not get a job on a boat-sailors had special identity papers. But there was always underworld activity around docks: smuggling, theft, prostitution, drugs. So he needed to make contact with criminals and find someone willing to smuggle him to Sweden.
When the afternoon began to cool, and the tiled floor of the monastery became chilly, he had got back on his motorcycle and returned to the jazz club, in the hope of seeing the only criminal he had ever met.
