The Courier

by Kjell Ola Dahl

  She knows he means what he says and is grateful. He says he is sure her parents are happy that she crossed the border to safety.

  Ester thanks him, but says it is hard not to blame herself.

  He asks if she is ready for any more jobs.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You have the best grades for active service.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Besides, you managed the Kjesäter job brilliantly. To have the initiative and wits to pull off jobs like that unaided is an inestimable gift, Ester.’

  She looks down. She has never been good at receiving praise.

  ‘Perhaps some more active service will do you good.’

  She looks up. Anything is better than being weighed down by the heavy office air and thinking about everything you don’t want to hear concerning your loved ones. Active service is action, planning – a real break from demoralising thoughts. She hears herself say: ‘OK. I’d very much like to do active service, as you call it.’

  2

  She extends a hand holding the money. The taxi driver takes it. The next moment he is out, round the car and opening the door for her. She thanks him, though feels awkward as she does so. She waits until the taxi has gone before she starts walking, keeping her eyes peeled. If the police are here it is not panic stations. She is working for the Norwegian legation. It is her job to help refugees. It is none of her business what they are wanted for in their homelands. But she doesn’t see a police car anywhere. Kammargatan is quiet and there is almost no traffic. She goes up the stairs and lets herself in.

  The smell of Gerhard still lingers between the walls.

  And the smell of alcohol. There is a bottle behind a chair. The floor underneath is wet. She searches for a cloth, without any luck. So she picks up his rucksack instead. Empty. Goes into the bathroom. Gathers up his toiletries and shaving stuff. Puts everything into the toiletry bag on the shelf. He uses a cutthroat razor to shave. She can imagine it: him stretching his neck, his head to one side, jaw white with shaving foam, contrasting sharply with his black hair. Him slowly running the razor across his cheek. The rasping sound of the sharp razor slowly moving down to his Adam’s apple.

  She wraps the leather strap around the razor. Puts everything into the bag, along with the toothbrush. Drops the toiletry bag in the rucksack.

  A pair of binoculars hangs from the bedhead. They go into the rucksack. Searches for clothes. Sees a little pile and a shopping net. She throws it all on the bed. It is a pathetic sight. One jumper, underwear, woollen socks.

  She holds the socks in her hand. The heel has been darned. Åse, she thinks, and imagines Åse’s nimble fingers doing the needlework.

  Now she feels very near to her. If I turn around now she will be in the doorway, looking at me, Ester thinks. She turns.

  The door is as before, closed. The moment has passed. She rolls up the socks. Feels something heavy in one. Sticks her hand in and pulls out two wads of notes. Two compact rolls secured with an elastic band. Green and black. American dollars. She weighs the notes in her hand. It must be quite a lot of money, she thinks. She resists the temptation to remove the elastic bands. Puts the heavy wads back and drops the socks in the rucksack. She does the same with a pair of breeches.

  She sits down on the bed and lifts the pillow. Here is his passport. She picks it up. A few negatives fall out. She holds them to the light from the window. Tries to make out the subjects. One is a picture of a middle-aged man. If she tilts the negative, the features become clearer. The man bears some resemblance to Gerhard. His father, she guesses. In another picture there is a woman holding a child in a christening dress over a font – Åse and Turid? A photo of Åse on her own. The last negatives must be of a cemetery. At any rate, it looks like headstones.

  Once again she can feel Åse’s presence, as though her friend is sitting beside her. As soon as the thought strikes her she dismisses it and pulls herself together, slips the negatives back into the passport and lays it in the rucksack. She opens the drawer in the bedside table. Inside there is a gun and a cartridge clip. She jumps back and stares down at the weapon. At length she picks up the gun. It is heavy.

  There is a knock at the door.

  She turns towards it with the gun in her hand. It is a hard, imperious knock, as though whoever it is knows someone is inside. Ester freezes, unsure what to do. There is another knock, like thunder.

  Oslo, November 1967

  1

  Gerhard is taken aback by the sight that meets him in the hotel room. Drawers are open, clothes are scattered everywhere. The newspaper falls to the floor and he looks around. The door bangs. A draught. The balcony door is open. He strides through the room, out onto the balcony. No one there. He spins round. At that moment he hears a door click shut in the room. He goes back in. Through the room. Tears open the door. The corridor outside is empty. He runs. Turns left, then left again, to the lift. There it goes. It is on its way down.

  The staircase. He can catch up with the lift. He races down, two or three steps at a time.

  On the third floor he sees the roof of the lift; it is only a few metres ahead. He runs even faster.

  There. Down in the lobby. He charges over to the lifts. The doors are closed. The sign over the door shows the lift has stopped on the first floor. He runs back to the staircase, races up to the first floor. Looks around. No one. Then he sees a green EXIT sign over a door. He pulls it open. A rear staircase. Now he can hear another door shutting on the floor below. He charges down the stairs. The staircase ends in a door. He opens it and scans Klingenberggata. He sees only strangers rushing past.

  He is panting hard. And watching, but doesn’t see anyone he knows – no sudden, surprising movements. He turns and goes back up the stairs. Has to wait for the lift. Finally the bell pings and the doors open. He steps inside and goes up to the fifth floor. Back to his room, along the corridor.

  Gerhard passes a chambermaid hoovering inside a room. Gerhard stops and goes back. He knocks on the open door.

  The maid turns out to be a woman in her late fifties. She looks up.

  He raises a hand.

  She steps on a button on the vacuum cleaner. The noise stops.

  Gerhard says: ‘Good morning.’

  She sends him a questioning look: ‘Morning?’

  ‘I’m expecting an old friend. You haven’t seen him, have you?’

  She shrugs.

  ‘I arrived late and I’m not sure if he’s been here or not. Have you seen anyone walk by?’

  ‘I just saw you,’ she says. ‘And a gentleman with a stick.’

  Gerhard nods. ‘A stick, OK. That’s him. Between fifty and sixty, right? And a little goatee. Bushy eyebrows?’

  She nods. ‘Yes, he was here and then he left. A few moments ago.’

  2

  In the oval rear-view mirror Ester sees the crossroads on Kjeld Stubs gate. A young man is pushing a sack trolley stacked with cardboard boxes, holding them steady with his chin. He manoeuvres his way from the little lorry to a shop for boat equipment. Ester shifts her gaze and looks through the windscreen, at the traffic alongside the rock under Akershus Fortress and at the path up to Skansen restaurant.

  She has parked at the bottom of Rosenkrantz’ gate, by the Holm Hats shop windows. When she looks in the mirror again, the vehicle belonging to the sack-trolley boy has gone. She sees Sverre come round the corner. He stops to check before limping towards the car. He steps into the road. She rolls down the window and looks up at him without speaking.

  He leans on his stick, smiling like a clever schoolboy over a chessboard. ‘Well?’

  ‘Let me say it,’ Ester says. ‘You got out before he came back?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Was it worth the effort?’

  Sverre shrugs. ‘Gerhard has an alcohol problem. He takes Antabus for it. If that’s combined with alcohol you’re really in a bad way. It means he’s an alcoholic and he struggles to stay sober. I saw it when he was at my pl
ace. He didn’t touch the drink I poured him.’

  ‘Were you willing to turn thief to find that out?’

  ‘I didn’t steal anything and I’m still not a thief. Where did he go?’

  ‘He went to Andresens Bank, down to the vault. I tried to contact you when he was heading back, but I wasn’t put through.’

  Sverre frowns. ‘The vault? He must have rented a bank box. What does an American tourist want with a bank box in Oslo?’

  She opens the door and gets out. Further up the street the lights turn green. A lorry roars past them. She waits until it is quiet again. ‘Sverre, this is no good. I can’t do this.’

  ‘Take it easy. He didn’t notice a thing.’

  Ester looks at him patronisingly. While she had been sitting in the car, waiting, she had been wondering whether to tell Sverre about Gerhard’s nocturnal visits to the Cemetery of Our Saviour. But she changes her mind now. She doesn’t trust Sverre. There is no sense in ransacking Gerhard’s room. But Sverre found some sense in it. So there is something he isn’t telling her.

  ‘The excitement,’ he says, a smile playing on his lips. ‘Think of the excitement.’

  ‘Don’t you lie to me. If you want me in the team you have to tell me what you’re actually after.’

  He looks back at her without answering.

  ‘I mean it. This operation was utterly ridiculous. Pulling strings would be much better. If you’re frightened that Gerhard’s agenda is a threat to someone, there are institutions that can deal with it.’

  ‘The interesting bit is the bank box.’

  ‘What about the bank box?’

  ‘I went through the whole room, all his pockets, and found nothing but coins and fluff. But he left the room with a briefcase, to go to a bank box.’

  Ester opens the door and gets in. Turns the ignition key. Starts up.

  He bends over further. ‘That bank box…’

  ‘I don’t want to hear about the bank box. Why did you have to break into his room? What are you after? What’s the agenda he has that you’re so frightened of? How could this poor man, who has lived in America for years, affect you in any way? A man who gets invited to the Royal Palace?’

  Sverre doesn’t answer. Instead he stands up straight and takes a step back.

  Ester puts the car in gear and pulls away.

  3

  The gate squeals on its hinges as Ester opens it and enters the Cemetery of Our Saviour. She stops. Ruminates, recalls where she was when she was shadowing Gerhard, then walks in that general direction.

  Some workmen are raking leaves from the gravel paths and lawns, putting them into heaps and shovelling them into wheelbarrows.

  Ester thinks back to when she was walking between the headstones. She remembers the terrain sloped upwards. There is in fact only one place where it is that steep. As she walks over to it she passes the grave of Edvard Munch. Stops.

  She walks back to the part where the ground is flat. The incline is the start of a little wooded mound inside the cemetery. On the opposite side the mound ends at an impressive buttress wall. That is not relevant for her. She heads towards the mound and counts her footsteps. Goes to one side. Opens her eyes. She can’t see anything unusual. But she had heard a noise and moved towards it, and if she was standing here and walked on, there is only one way she could have gone. If not, she would have collided with the headstones. She carries on. Moving into the area with the tallest obelisks, where the trees have the thickest trunks. She walks slowly. And notices a footprint in the black earth of a flower bed. The print looks suspiciously like the sole of one of her own casual shoes. She tries to draw a sightline from here. Studies a rock. It could be the one. The rock she crouched behind when Gerhard walked past her.

  So where could he have been?

  She tries to establish the general area, remembering the silhouette that appeared from out of the mist. She walks in that direction. Passes under an immense treetop. Behind the trunk there is a large commemorative grove. She walks across the flagstones into the grove, which is demarcated by a little wall. There is an old grave. On the ground there is a coffin-shaped stone engraved with a name that has faded so much it is practically illegible. She spells out the name of the person resting here. Alvilde Munthe. The name means nothing to her. The barely legible inscriptions on the plate below the name tell her Alvilde Munthe died many years ago. Long before the war. The flower bed on top of the grave is dry and hard and untouched. No one has tended it for many years. One slate tile is uneven because tree roots are demanding their space. No one could have visited Alvilde Munthe’s resting place for a very long time.

  Seeing two scratches on the plate, she kneels down. It appears to be made of some kind of metal. She runs her finger along the scratches. They are recent.

  She closes her eyes and tries to remember the sounds she heard that night.

  Instead she hears a low mumble.

  Ester raises her head and sees two women strolling along the path. They are carrying flowers. They move off the path in the direction of a grave nearby. They stoop down over the bed and start weeding the long grass at the edge.

  Ester stands up. She casts a final look at the grove. Now she has been here. If necessary, she will come back. She nods to the women as she passes them on her way out.

  Stockholm, December 1942

  1

  There is more knocking at the door, now it is more insistent. Does whoever it is know she is inside? Panic-stricken, Ester shoots glances around the flat. Looks at the gun in her hand. The rucksack, she thinks. Puts the weapon and the cartridge clip inside, shoves the rucksack behind a chair and goes to the door. She opens it. And looks straight into the face of a man. She has seen him before. It is one of the two policemen who were standing outside this flat the other evening. But now he is in civvies.

  The woman next door, she thinks, and remembers the voices from when she was sitting on the stairs. The police must have asked her to keep an eye open and tell them if anything happened.

  ‘Tor Jonasson Holmér, Stockholm police,’ he says, and asks who she is.

  Ester tells him the truth. She works for the Norwegian legation. ‘This flat’s ours.’

  He comes up close to her. She doesn’t back away. She looks him in the eye. ‘How can I help you, Tor Jonasson Holmér?’

  She wins. He takes a step back and a flicker of uncertainty crosses his face, but only for a second. ‘Shall we talk inside?’

  Ester holds the door open. He is a thin, medium-height man with vulpine features and intense energy. His eyes sweep over the flat. He walks around, examining his surroundings as he speaks.

  ‘I’m looking for the man who’s staying here. Gerhard Falkum. A Norwegian.’

  ‘There’s no one staying here,’ she says to his back.

  He turns. In his hand he has a half-full bottle of spirits. ‘Is that so?’

  ‘I’m clearing up. Making the flat ready for someone else to move in next week.’

  His gaze takes in the rucksack behind the chair.

  ‘So you’ve no idea where this Gerhard Falkum has gone?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about the people who’ve stayed here or will stay here.’

  He looks at her and angles his head. ‘Haven’t I seen you before?’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe we go to the same synagogue.’

  The flicker of uncertainty crosses his face again. ‘Oh, so the lady’s Jewish?’

  ‘Yes,’ she intones. ‘The lady is Jewish.’

  The atmosphere is less charged now. He has tried to impose his authority on the situation, and she has succeeded in parrying it. He will have to try a fresh angle. She guesses he will go for the rucksack.

  Which he does. He lifts it. ‘This—’

  ‘Is legation property,’ she interrupts coolly. ‘If the police are interested in anything pertaining to this flat, you’ll have to approach the intelligence office at the legation. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. The man you’re looking for isn’t
here. I’m only doing my job. Now, may I ask you to leave?’

  He puts the rucksack down and smiles to himself. He raises his eyes. ‘Have you got any ID?’

  It is her turn to bare her teeth. ‘No, but if you wait downstairs until I’ve finished, we can drive back to the legation office. Then you can get confirmation of what I’ve said and ask more questions. What do you think about that?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Not necessary.’ He goes to the door. ‘We in the police are dependent on cooperation at all levels. So – if Gerhard Falkum should appear I assume you or someone at the legation will inform us.’

  ‘Of course, herr Jonasson Holmér.’

  She closes the door behind him. Leans back against it and breathes out. She is bathed in sweat, but also surprised at herself. She feels relieved and happy with her performance. However, she isn’t very happy that she has had to lie to the police. I will have to take this up with Torgersen, she thinks.

  2

  She decides to walk to her flat in Kungsholmen and trudges down Vasagatan with the rucksack on her back. She thinks about Åse. Still unable to come to terms with what happened. Why wasn’t Åse alone with her child that night? Who was she with? Again she sees Åse on the bench beside her pram in the nursery as Syversen goes out to talk to her. What if she had defied Syversen and gone out to talk to her herself? Would she have found anything out? Ester isn’t sure she would. They hadn’t been particularly open with each other over the last year.

  A freezing cold wind gusts across Skeppsbron Bridge. She speeds up to keep warm. Carries on into Scheelegatan. Goes inside and up the stairs. For a fraction of a second she is surprised when the door opens.

  ‘Fru Larsen,’ he says.

  She smiles back. Thinking he has seen her coming from the window. He has been waiting.

  She takes off the rucksack. ‘Here are your things.’

  He seems surprised, almost impressed. ‘Thank you, fru Larsen.’ He opens the rucksack and looks down. Rummages through the clothes. Takes out the woollen socks and squeezes them. She unbuttons her coat and pretends she isn’t looking. He grabs the gun and winks at her. ‘You think of everything, my dear.’ He puts the gun back.