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.”