Summary
Copenhagen’s gas-lamp dusk becomes a catacomb of whispers when a portfolio of irreplaceable artillery schematics—ink still breathing gunpowder—slips from the Royal Arsenal into the gloved grasp of a suave dilettante-crook. What follows is less a theft than a contagion: every fingerprint on the vellum rewrites patriotism as profit, duty as ransom. Birger von Cotta-Schønberg’s staff-major—ramrod posture eroded by sleepless surveillances—pursues the phantom through ballrooms rank with lilac and treason, through dockside taverns where sea-salt corrodes honor faster than iron. Else Frölich’s engraver-widow, whose pupils hold the ghosts of copperplates, is coaxed to forge duplicates so exquisite they could re-arm a nation—or doom it. Around her orbit Robert Schyberg’s war-profiteer, eyes flickering like balance-sheets, and Nicolai Johannsen’s police inspector, a man who files his conscience next to cold cases. Carl Lauritzen’s consumptive lithographer coughs blood onto stone slabs, each splatter a cartographic prophecy of bombardment. Fritz Magnussen’s script treats suspense like a mercury thermometer: every revelation hikes the mercury until the glass must splinter. The climax erupts inside the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek after hours: marble gods witness modern mortals bargain over who may wield thunder, while flashlight powder flickers across faces as though antique Denmark itself were photographing its own autopsy. The sketches are finally torched—not out of villainy but surgical patriotism—so that no side may possess them; ash drifts past Bertel Thorvaldsen’s lion, a gray snow of erased futures.
