*
Three hours later, the Countess wished fervently that their roles were reversed. While Pauline Berg was watching a game of handball that by all rights was hers, she was sitting in ?rhus with a colleague from the local police force, groaning inwardly in irritation over a political fossil of a witness who had to be well into her nineties and who, according to her home nurse, could tell some mean stories about Thor Gran in his younger days. And perhaps she could, too—the old bat’s mind was certainly sharp enough—she just didn’t.
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?”