The Last Pilgrim

by Gard Sveen

  Next, he opened a worn light-blue folder containing paper of better quality. From the documents inside, he learned that the National Police had investigated the case under orders from Sipo, the German Security Police, dated September 30, 1942. The introductory report stated that the National Police could not rule out the likelihood that Lande’s collaboration with Norway’s pro-Nazi Reichskommissariat Norwegen made his family a target for the Resistance movement’s terrorist actions. On the previous Friday the Resistance had liquidated one of Gustav Lande’s most trusted men. The National Police also mentioned that both his fiancée, Agnes Gerner, and the housekeeper, Johanne Caspersen, were active members of Vidkun Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling, or NS, Norway’s fascist National Unity Party. The next report stated that a number of presumed Resistance men had been brought in to the Nazis’ provisional HQ at Møllergata 19 on October first and second. Two of them were later transferred to the Gestapo’s HQ at Victoria Terrasse for interrogation by Sipo.

  As Bergmann continued leafing through the folder, he came upon transcripts of the interrogations from Møllergata 19, but none from Victoria Terrasse. The transcripts seemed to be of no interest, apart from the fact that one of the alleged Resistance men had committed suicide by jumping from the fourth floor of the Møllergata police station. Gustav Lande’s car had been found on Madserud Allé, nowhere near Nordmarka, on Thursday, October 1, 1942, but an examination of the car, the testimony of witnesses living on that street, and a search of the area all proved fruitless. The final document in the file indicated that the National Police had closed its own preliminary investigation into the case, citing the parallel investigation being conducted by the Oslo and Aker Police Department.

  Bergmann said a silent prayer before he opened the third and final folder. It didn’t help much. There was only a single sheet of paper indicating that the case was closed on April 15, 1944. It was signed by Detective Inspector G. Lid and stamped by the Oslo Police Presidium.

  There were no photos in any of the folders. I need to know what they looked like, he thought. Why had Gustav Lande’s car shown up on Madserud Allé? The three of them were killed an hour north in Nordmarka when they were thought to be on their way south to Hurum, and the car they had supposedly used had been found halfway between the two places in the neighborhood of Skøyen. Bergmann was probably as baffled as the detectives investigating during the war must have been.

  He sat for half an hour copying information from the sections of the reports he thought were most relevant. He decided to drive to Rødtangen on the Hurum peninsula as soon as possible to get a sense for the summer house’s surroundings. And photos. He had to find photos of them.

  “Newspapers,” he said when he returned the folder. “Have you got any?”

  Rolf pointed at several evening papers lying on the counter.

  Bergmann tapped his finger lightly on the file folder in front of him to indicate he meant archived newspapers.

  “The National Library,” Rolf said. “They close at seven.”

  Bergmann looked up at the white clock on the wall and decided to leave the National Library till the next day. He’d rather make it to handball warm-up on time, which started in half an hour.

  Although the tempo of the warm-up run had been leisurely, Bergmann had to lie down on the floor of the gym when they were done. This gave the entire Girls 12 team a chance to tease him. He stared up at the ceiling and cursed his old childhood friend Erlend Dybdahl, who had talked him into signing up as assistant coach three years ago.

  A year later Erlend got a plum manager’s job with the Asian subsidiary of the IT firm he worked for, and moved to Singapore with his talented daughter and the rest of his family. The coaching situation at the club had deteriorated as a result, and Bergmann had had no choice but to promote himself to head coach. He had appointed the top man at the time, Arne Drabløs—whom Dybdahl had secretly nicknamed Hopeless—as assistant coach. But Hopeless did have one strong point. He was in damned great shape. So even though he could hardly tell a handball from a medicine ball, he played handball admirably. Over the years Bergmann and Erlend had played on teams together and finally ended up on junior varsity for Oppsal. Although Erlend was the big star, Tommy Bergmann was close behind.

  Bergmann was big and tall, a rough-cut block of granite when he was in his prime, and well suited to clearing the field for the backs. He was so big that the goalies of the younger opposing teams would creep inside the goal net and shut their eyes whenever he was about to take a shot. Then he tore a ligament in his left knee during his military service, which was enough to make him give up handball, even after a successful operation. In any case he lacked Erlend’s talent and would never have been more than a reserve on the A-team’s bench. By that time he was so fed up with handball that he doubted he would ever pick up a ball again.

  But as he lay on the floor of the Klemetsrud gym almost twenty years after he’d given up playing, he thanked his lucky stars for this unpaid job that filled his free time. It cleared his head three or four times a week and kept his body more or less in shape. Plus the sight of these girls, no matter whether they won or lost, made him believe the world was a good place in spite of everything.

  “Come here,” a girl’s voice said above him. Tommy had put his arm over his face to rub the sweat out of his eyes. He took a couple of deep breaths and his pulse slowed to an acceptable rate. He looked up to see Sara smiling down at him as she held out her hand. The expression in her eyes reminded him of her mother, who was from the Maghreb. Algeria or Morocco, Bergmann guessed.

  He took Sara’s hand, a bit embarrassed that he almost felt like her father whenever she was nearby. When she had joined the team in the fall of last year, she had been one of the worst players, fluttering about like a baby bird. Bergmann had reached a low point last fall and winter, but he’d kept his spirits up by taking Sara under his wing and vowing to turn her into a better player. By now she had improved enough to score a goal once in a while. In addition, the brief conversations he had with her mother, insignificant as they were, had given him a reason to live.

  “I thought you were supposed to be a good player,” said Sara, smiling just the way her mother did.

  “I am good,” said Bergmann. “I’m just terribly out of shape. There’s a difference.”

  “I’m sure,” she said, pulling him up before she ran over to Arne Drabløs. He stood near one of the goals, fumbling with a ball net along with a couple of the girls. Bergmann drank a full bottle of water as he followed Sara with his eyes. Sometimes he thought that he ought to ask her whether her mother was single, just blurt it out in the gym: “I’ve never seen your father. Is your mother single or what?” In a weak moment he’d told some of the parents at the Easter Cup in Larvik that he’d just broken up with his longtime partner and had no plans for the Easter holiday. Only later did he recall that one of the girls’ mothers knew Sara’s mother well.

  He took his whistle out of the bag and blew it to gather the team. He knew Erlend’s training regimen by heart. It was not all that different from the regimen they’d trained under twenty, thirty years before. Shoulder warm-up, ball handling, feints, shooting practice combined with goalkeeper training, and finally position play. Drabløs took care of the last half hour of practice today, a sprint that was supposed to give the girls a competitive edge, something Bergmann was happy to skip.

  As he watched the girls practicing position play, he thought about the three people who had met their maker in Nordmarka during the war. Not even the thought that Sara’s mother might appear at any moment could blot out the images he had conjured of the way Cecilia Lande might have been killed. A shot struck the goal post, and two girls got into an argument. One of them had apparently tackled the other one while Bergmann wasn’t looking. When he finished calming them down, he saw Sara’s mother standing on the sideline with the father of one of the Pakistani girls on the team. Her thick black curls were pulled back with a big dark hair tie. The father said somet
hing that made her laugh, and Bergmann felt a twinge of jealousy. Yet a warmth spread through his body, the rotten feeling associated with his twelve-year relationship with Hege dissipating every time Sara’s mother laughed or looked his way.

  Ignoring the practice altogether, he moved closer to her. They exchanged a glance and a quick smile while the girls gathered up the balls and handed in their numbered jerseys to Drabløs. She continued talking to the Pakistani man and another father who had joined them. Something about school, it sounded like, or summer vacation. Bergmann sat down on the bench next to them and stared quite openly. If he liked her, he liked her, and that was all there was to it. She was wearing a white blouse, tight jeans, and a pair of flat leather sandals. It was a completely ordinary outfit, but one that still made him feel like a middle school kid for several minutes.

  As he told the girls about what had worked well—and not so well—in their position practice today, he imagined Sara’s mother without her feather-light white blouse. He pictured her thin, tan arms, and her fine hands stroking his chest. One of the girls asked him a question, something about an underarm shield, but he wasn’t paying attention anymore, and the girls began to giggle. Finally he started to laugh too.

  “Sorry, I’m kind of exhausted today. See you on Wednesday, girls. Arne will take over now.”

  Arne Drabløs launched into an overly enthusiastic pep talk about the hard work that awaited them. Bergmann checked his cell phone as he cast surreptitious glances at Sara and her mother. She ruffled her daughter’s hair. Sara turned away with a resigned “Mamma . . .” before she changed out of her handball shoes and put on her jogging shoes. Then she took off after the other girls leaving the gym.

  “I’m a little overprotective, right?” her mother said to Bergmann, hitching her large expensive-looking shoulder bag more securely onto her shoulder.

  “I don’t know about that,” he said. “She’s starting to show real confidence on the field.”

  “I’m glad.” She raised her hands to her head and pulled out her hair tie. “You’re very good with them.”

  They walked out of the gym together. A gust of wind swept across the sidewalk, blowing her hair in every direction.

  “Oh my goodness,” she said, laughing to herself. Bergmann looked on as she gathered her unruly curls back into the hair tie. He wished they could just stand there like that all evening. That she would keep smiling at him, her dark eyes flashing like mica, and that his relationship with Hege had never happened.

  “So, time to fix dinner,” she said, heading for the stairs that led up to the shopping center.

  “Oh right, dinner . . .” he said almost to himself as he followed her. He might as well take that way to the parking lot.

  “If you’re stopping at the ICA supermarket, maybe I could get some cooking tips from you,” she said when they reached the top of the stairs.

  Bergmann began to laugh.

  “I don’t think you want to know what I have for dinner. Besides, I’ve already eaten. Two hot dogs at the Exxon station on Lambertseter.”

  “Is it that bad?” she asked, pausing in front of the entrance to the shopping center. She cocked her head to one side.

  “Extra bad today,” he said.

  “My name is Hadja, by the way.” She held out her hand to him. It was soft and warm.

  “Tommy.”

  “I know,” she said, smiling again. “I’ll see you on Wednesday.”

  Don’t go, he thought as she disappeared inside.

  CHAPTER 15

  Friday, June 1, 1945

  The Stable

  Östermalm Police District

  Stockholm, Sweden

  Detective Inspector Gösta Persson had had an intense headache all morning. Only now, after a long lunch, did it seem to be abating, slowly but surely. The only thing he’d been able to think about all day was the envelope containing Kaj Holt’s presumed suicide note. His wife would receive it today or tomorrow, Persson was sure.

  In less than an hour he wouldn’t have to give it any more thought. By then he and his wife would be sitting in the lounge of their boat, sailing out of Blasieholm Quay, on their way to her family’s summer house in the archipelago. Persson could hardly wait; a weekend out there would make everything okay. Absolutely everything. The images of Kaj Holt’s head would be erased from his consciousness. The scent of Karen Eline Fredriksen’s perfume would fade from his memory, along with her ice-blue eyes and deep-red lips. As would the thought of who had sent her over to tell him that Holt couldn’t wait to take his own life. Nor would he have to give any more thought to the baby-faced guy who’d been in his office, the man who had threatened to drop his expensive elephant statue on the floor. All these thoughts would vanish out there on the island with his first cold morning dip, his wife on the pier waving, a cigarette in her hand, smiling at his childish antics in the water. No, he simply couldn’t wait to be reborn out there among the islets and skerries, to be awakened by screeching gulls, the sunlight playing over the old linen curtains.

  He was abruptly jolted out of his daydreams. He stared at the door. Wasn’t that where the sound was coming from? He quickly lowered his feet off the teak desk.

  “Come in,” he said.

  His secretary opened the door and took a step into his office. Then to his surprise she lowered her gaze. Well, Persson thought, that might not be so strange. He had specifically asked her not to disturb him before he was ready to leave for the day, and especially not to route any phone calls to him.

  “Your wife is on the phone,” the secretary said, looking at the floor.

  Persson stifled his irritation. All right. She was a good person, his wife. They had never had children, but he couldn’t blame her for that. And now they were both too old. But they still had each other.

  “Fine,” he said, looking at his secretary, who continued staring at the floor. It seemed odd for her to be standing like that.

  But it didn’t matter. He tried to force himself to stop worrying about the envelope. It wasn’t important. Nordenstam would never find it. If Holt’s wife did anything with it, he’d have to deal with the consequences, but he was man enough to take responsibility for his actions. He had to be.

  “Put the call through,” Persson told her. Her face lit up, as though with relief. “And leave the door open,” he added as she was about to close it. He was feeling magnanimous now that the week was nearly over. It had been a terrible week, to be honest.

  “A bunch of blouses were delivered here . . . Couldn’t you have surprised me for once?” his wife said on the phone. “And pick up something good for dinner, will you? I called the butcher at Östermalm Market. He knows what to give you.”

  “Östermalm Market,” Persson repeated. “All right, dear. So Willy Ohlson knows what to give me?” He laughed with relief into the phone.

  He tore off his overcoat in the middle of the sidewalk and draped it over his arm as he turned the corner onto Östermalmstorg an hour later. Persson felt great, better than he could remember feeling in a long time. The sun even looked like it was breaking through the clouds.

  The market square was swarming with people—old and young and worn-out office workers like himself. A new produce shipment must have just come in. He started to cross the teeming square, hardly noticing when someone bumped into him from behind. Then a violent pain exploded in his back and chest, and he realized that his head was about to slam onto the granite paving stones, that the crowds behind him were inadvertently going to trample him, that the warm wetness in his suit was his own blood, that his life would be over in a few seconds because everything inside him was falling out of a crater on the left side of his back.

  By the time he hit the ground, he was already dead. The people behind him stumbled over his body. Somebody began screaming loudly in the sun-filled square, as if that might bring Detective Inspector Gösta Persson back to life.

  CHAPTER 16

  Tuesday, May 20, 2003

  National Lib
rary

  Oslo, Norway

  As the tram accelerated through the intersection of Drammensveien and Frederiks Gate, Tommy Bergmann lost his balance for a second, deep in thought about Hadja. Hadja, he murmured to himself. He replayed the scene in his mind’s eye, the two of them standing outside the entrance to the Mortensrud Shopping Center. Why hadn’t he taken advantage of the opportunity? What opportunity? he thought. He was imagining things. Assuming she was single and even interested in him. What was he actually after? He needed help. Hadn’t Bent, his old colleague from the uniformed police, told him just that? “You’re going to need help before you can move on, Tommy,” he’d said.

  He pushed it all aside—Hadja, her laughter, her eyes, and her hair, Hege, Bent, and everything else, all that old shit—and turned his thoughts to the case. That was why he was heading to the National Library, not to lose himself in daydreams. He had a job to do: to find out what had happened to that little girl and those two women during the war. Why hadn’t Cecilia been shot in the head like the others? The tram braked abruptly and he lost his balance again, as if he’d never been on a tram in his life.

  He was surprised at the library’s impressive newspaper collection and how easy it was to navigate through the material. Only ten minutes after entering the building, he was sitting at one of the microfilm screens in the reading room, scrolling through all the newspapers published during the war. The September 30, 1942, issue of the Aftenposten provided the faces he was looking for. The front page featured a two-column article about the three missing females.

  The first picture was of Gustav Lande’s fiancée. Agnes was a very beautiful young woman with classic features and her dark hair done like a pinup model’s. Her eyebrows were slightly arched, and her eyelashes looked so full that they hardly needed mascara. “Agnes Gerner, twenty-four years old,” the caption said.