The Last Pilgrim

by Gard Sveen

  Next to it was a photo of Cecilia Lande, Gustav Lande’s daughter. She had a lovely open expression, her smile directed at the professional photographer but probably intended for whoever was standing behind him. She had a heart-shaped face and two dark braids with a big white bow at the end of each one. He could see a dimple in her left cheek, but none on the right. She was missing one of her canine teeth. If Agnes Gerner looked like a woman that men would kill for, Cecilia Lande looked like a child for whom anyone would take a bullet.

  To the right of little Cecilia was the housekeeper, Johanne Caspersen. Bergmann tried to enlarge the page but couldn’t. The picture was of such poor quality that she would have been difficult to recognize in real life. She had a rather plain face, birdlike and so pale as to appear almost transparent. Or maybe it was just the low resolution of the image that was tricking him into thinking that.

  Bergmann read through the text a couple of times, in his characteristic halting way. He studied Cecilia’s features and thought of her skull with the gaping black eye sockets. Who did this to you? he wondered. And were they the ones who parked the car on Madserud Allé?

  He sat there for a while, staring at her picture without focusing. Then he began to skim a few other articles in the paper—ads for rationed soap, announcements from National Police headquarters, tributes to Norwegian soldiers at the front.

  He scrolled farther down to the next page. At first he read the article without understanding what he was reading. But something in the introduction struck him as familiar, reminding him of something he’d recently seen.

  The National Police are conducting an all-out investigation into the assassination on September 25 of Torfinn Rolborg, a research director at Knaben Molybdenum Mines, Inc. Still being sought is a blonde woman in her twenties or thirties, thought to have blue eyes although she was wearing glasses, with a beauty mark on her left upper lip. There is a reward of 25,000 kroner for information leading to the conviction of the perpetrator.

  Twenty-five thousand kroner must have been a huge sum of money during the war, Bergmann thought.

  Then he remembered.

  Knaben Molybdenum Mines, Inc. was owned by Gustav Lande.

  First one of his managers was killed, then a few days later his small family was summarily executed.

  CHAPTER 17

  Friday, May 23, 2003

  Police Headquarters

  Oslo, Norway

  It was an unusually warm Friday morning, and Tommy Bergmann still had no answer to why someone had murdered Gustav Lande’s fiancée, daughter, and maid in September 1942. But he no longer needed to find an answer—not to why or more importantly who had killed them. The minimal knowledge he had acquired about molybdenum was no longer of any use. As he sat in the weekly status meeting of the Violent and Sex Crimes Division, Bergmann felt that all his work in the past week had been wasted. Fredrik Reuter had just told the group what Bergmann had known since early that morning, namely that a decades-old triple homicide could not be given priority, and that Kripo would now be taking over the investigation—which all those present knew was only a euphemism for shelving the case altogether.

  Bergmann felt depressed, but that might just have been because Hadja hadn’t shown up for her daughter’s practice on Wednesday. He’d stood outside the gym for several minutes watching Sara and the other girls heading home, in the hope that she would appear. He had even sat down on the steps to the shopping center and waited for the next subway train. When she wasn’t on that one either, he waited for a couple of buses, and then for the next train. At last he had asked himself what the hell he was doing and gone home. Forget about her, he’d told himself as he stood in the shower. Forget all about Hadja.

  He stared at the second hand on the wall clock. He hated to let things go, and he could swear that there was a connection between the three murders in Nordmarka and the death of the research director at the molybdenum company. But it didn’t matter now. This was 2003, after all, and according to Fredrik Reuter the state had plenty of things to spend its precious time on other than three old skeletons found buried in the forest. And no one could really blame him for thinking that way. The Violent and Sex Crimes Division consisted of about sixty investigators—or at least that was the official figure that appeared in every publication about the division’s manpower. If he subtracted the five or six vacancies the division had to allow for because the police were constantly underfunded, there were probably fifty-five detectives at any one time. Of these about ten were usually out sick. And when he subtracted another fifteen detectives who only worked on sex-crime cases—including rape, incest, sexual abuse of minors, and all the other deviant activities that human sexuality could imagine—that brought the total down to thirty detectives. These select few, no more than in an elementary school class, had to handle all the city’s murders, attempted murders, and incidents that fell under the rather meaningless rubric of “aggravated assault.”

  Reuter paced restlessly back and forth in front of the screen. Words were coming out of his mouth, but Bergmann was unable to grasp what he was talking about. Even the images on the screen showing the murder of an Ethiopian woman in a studio apartment four weeks ago meant nothing to him. He glanced at the faces of those sitting at the table. Sometimes he felt like he had no colleagues at all. It was every man for himself, with nobody to lean on. Maybe that was the way he wanted it. That was the way the job had to be done.

  After a few minutes he picked up yesterday’s Dagbladet, which lay on top of the case folder he’d brought with him. Not much had happened over the Independence Day holiday, apart from the routine drunkenness and violence, and it seemed that everyone who’d been knocked down or beaten up had survived with no serious injuries. So the skeletal remains discovered in the forest of Nordmarka were the big story. “Mystery in the Woods” senior crime reporter Frank Krokhol had dubbed the case, unless some rookie reporter on the crime desk had come up with that headline.

  Krokhol and his colleagues had managed to squeeze four whole pages out of the case. One of the photos showed Abrahamsen and the Kripo techs scratching their heads as they looked down into a hole in the ground. The next two pages were full of pictures of the three missing females: Agnes Gerner, Cecilia Lande, and Johanne Caspersen. Krokhol had clearly been smart enough to think along the same lines as Bergmann, even without phoning him as he usually did. For the umpteenth time Bergmann studied the three faces in the photos that had appeared in the Aftenposten of September 30, 1942. At the bottom of the page was an appeal to anyone who knew anything about the victims or the case in general to call in or send old Krokhol an e-mail.

  Good luck, Bergmann thought, casting a glance at Reuter, who was in the midst of a thunderous oration claiming that they would find the devil who did this while pointing at the image of the woman who had been stabbed. If they weren’t even capable of tracking down a murderer who had struck only four weeks ago, how in the world would they manage to find a perpetrator from more than sixty years back?

  Bergmann knew it would be almost impossible to untangle such an old case. Usually, he would have put it behind him and focused on making inroads on the pile he had waiting in his inbox. But he couldn’t stop thinking about the little girl and wondering how she had died. There was nothing puzzling about how the two grown women had been killed. Agnes Gerner had been shot directly in the forehead at point-blank range, while Johanne Caspersen looked to have been shot from the side, directly in the temple. Agnes had been buried with the projectile inside her head, a 7.65mm Browning, and Johanne had an exit hole on the left side of her skull, at the same height as what was assumed to be the entry wound. The bullet—also a 7.65mm Browning—had been found a few feet behind the grave.

  But that’s all just conjecture, in the best-case scenario, Bergmann thought. He looked up at Reuter, pretending to follow the discussion in the room, but as the meeting continued, he skimmed through the final report he had written to accompany the evidence they were sending to Kripo. H
e perused the text, which was clinical and bureaucratic. Three females murdered more than sixty years ago. Back then they were three human beings; now they were nothing more than names, and almost no one in Norway knew anything about them. Bergmann had managed to get hold of one of the sixty-five people in the country named Gerner, who was able to tell him a little about Agnes. But it hadn’t been much help. He only learned that Agnes Gerner had belonged to his branch of the family, but that her family had moved to England in the late twenties. All of them except the father, who’d died young, had been Nazis. The rest of the family seldom—or rather, never—mentioned them. Agnes and her sister had moved back to Norway before the war, but they had been ostracized, both because they were Nazis and because Agnes’s father had an ongoing dispute with other family members. The old man considered the whole thing a tragedy, but he said that was how things go when you pick the wrong side. Agnes’s sister had married a German and might be living down in Oslo if she was still alive. The mother died in England just after the war.

  Frank Krokhol and his friends in the press had succeeded in digging up a few people from Hadeland province who were said to be related to Johanne Caspersen, but they seemed mainly interested in getting their names in the paper. Krokhol had also found out that Gustav Lande had hanged himself one July day in 1944, leaving a huge inheritance to his brother. The brother died twenty years later, and his children refused to talk to the press. They had referred Bergmann to a lawyer the one time he’d phoned them. No doubt they wanted nothing to do with the subject, he thought.

  The room exploded with the sound of laughter and scraping chairs, and Bergmann looked up in confusion. He couldn’t figure out what was going on, as if he weren’t on the same planet as the thirty other people in the room. Somebody opened a window and a summer breeze blew in. Outside the air was shimmering in a cloudless sky. He thought this was the kind of day everyone dreamed about all winter long. One of those days that Cecilia Lande would never experience again.

  Bergmann looked down at the newspaper and concentrated on the photo from the missing-persons article in the Aftenposten of September 30, 1942. If he ever had a child, he pictured she’d be like Cecilia. With the same braids, the same dimple on her left cheek, the same fine eyebrows.

  That evening, Hadja didn’t show up at practice. Nor did Sara. Bergmann was usually in a good mood at practice, but he was morose and uncommunicative that night. The girls noticed and didn’t play well. It was a warm, summerlike Friday evening, and none of them really wanted to be there. He probably should have sent them down to the beach to go swimming, but instead he decided to wrap up early so Drabløs could take them on a run. As they disappeared around the corner, Bergmann stood outside wondering where Sara and Hadja lived. He dismissed the thought and hurried off to his car.

  Back home at his apartment he turned on the record player and lay down on the floor of the living room. When side one of his old Joni Mitchell record was over, he listened to the sounds coming from outdoors. A cricket bat hit a ball out on the blacktop between the apartment buildings. Shouts in a mixture of Norwegian and Punjabi echoed off the walls.

  Bergmann’s thoughts had turned from Hadja and her curly hair in the wind outside the gym to Hege. He had run into her by chance on the street in late April, and they had acted like they hardly knew each other. Her huge belly made her look like a completely different person, but her skin had burned against his cheek, just as it had the first time she touched him.

  He repeated her words just as she had spoken them, with something he interpreted as warmth in her voice, as if she still liked him and always would.

  “How are you, anyway?”

  CHAPTER 18

  Whitsunday, June 8, 2003

  Sofiemyr Gym

  Oppegård

  Oslo, Norway

  Some bright handball geniuses in Oslo had come up with the idea of holding a local minitournament for the teams that weren’t going to travel south to Tønsberg for the big Whitsun Cup. For Tommy Bergmann the decision had come as a relief. Now he wouldn’t have to wonder what he was going to do over the three-day weekend. There were limits to how many shifts he could take at Kripo without seeming socially dysfunctional.

  The team’s best player, Isabelle, was from an affluent family, and she and her parents would be heading out to their newly built cabin in Kragerø for the weekend. She usually saved the team on their worst days, and today looked like it was going to be one of those days. Without Isabelle the other girls seemed like they’d given up before even getting going. Only ten minutes into their first match against Kolbotn’s second-string team, they’d let in seven goals and only scored one themselves. When Kolbotn scored an eighth goal, Bergmann went to the officials and asked for a timeout.

  He patted the goalie, Aatifa, on the back and said that she was doing well. Then he gathered the girls in a circle on the sideline.

  “Have you decided to go on vacation early, girls?”

  “They’re just so good,” said Sara, squirting water from a sports bottle into her mouth. Privately Bergmann ranked her as the second best on the team. Sara held his gaze for a second and gave him a quick wink, as though she knew what he thought about her mother.

  “They’re not that good. We’re just not playing well. You have to move those legs, girls, and get your arms up. Don’t just stand there watching . . . Aatifa isn’t getting any help at all. And remember, we’ve beaten these girls before.”

  “But without Isabelle—” began one of the girls.

  “That’s life,” said Bergmann. “You can’t count on anyone else to do the job. Today you’ve got to do it yourselves, okay?”

  He decided to attach Sara to Kolbotn’s best player, which worked fine, in a way. Before halftime, Kolbotn scored only two more times, while Martine slammed in four goals and made an assist on the fifth.

  Just before the referee blew his whistle to start the second half, Bergmann saw a familiar figure appear in the end-zone bleachers. Hadja pushed her sunglasses up on top of her head and searched for some parents she knew in the bleachers below. When she waved at him, he realized how much he’d missed the sight of her. He had to restrain himself from breaking into a smile. She found a seat near the bottom of the bleachers behind Kolbotn’s goal next to Martine’s mother, who was one of the parents Bergmann had confided in about his bachelor status during the Easter Cup last spring.

  The Klemetsrud team managed to keep up with Kolbotn—more or less—during the second half. But Bergmann was paying almost more attention to what was going on behind Kolbotn’s goal than the game. The match ended in a respectable loss, and he gave the girls a half-hour break. The parents in the stands were replaced by the parents of two other teams. Bergmann discreetly kept an eye out for Hadja, but she was lost in the crowd somewhere. He went out the side door of the gym to enjoy the sunshine for a few minutes. He considered going over to the main entrance, where a large group of people were likely soaking up the sun between matches, but instead walked the opposite way, around the back of the gym. He sat down on the ground and leaned against the wall, trying to clear his mind.

  When he was halfway through his cigarette, he heard footsteps approaching.

  “So this is where you’re hiding.”

  Hadja came up to him with an almost apologetic smile and removed her sunglasses before sitting down next to him.

  “Can I bum one off of you? I just can’t manage to quit altogether.”

  He studied her fingers as she pulled a cigarette out of the pack. Her hand seemed to be attached a little crooked to her forearm, and her nails looked white against her glowing olive skin. He imagined that she left her hand on his a little longer than necessary when he lit her cigarette.

  “Did you get your hot dogs for lunch already?” she asked, fidgeting with her sunglasses. “At the kiosk?” She nodded toward the entrance to the gym.

  Bergmann couldn’t help but laugh.

  “I only eat lunch at gas stations,” he said.

  �
��Oh, I forgot,” she said, taking a drag.

  “Have you been on vacation? You’re so tan.”

  Hadja smiled. “Yes, I’ve been in Morocco. I got home yesterday. Sara’s been staying with her aunt . . . She probably missed some practices.”

  She smiled again, and Bergmann thought that as long as Hadja kept smiling at him like that, Sara could miss as many sessions as she liked.

  “Visiting family there?”

  “In a way,” she said. Her face took on a serious expression. “Yes, you could probably say that . . . Papa . . .” She stopped and seemed to ponder what to say as she took another drag. “It wasn’t very worthwhile, to tell the truth . . . It’s a long story. I probably shouldn’t have gone at all.”

  “All right—” Bergmann said as his cell phone rang. He stood up slowly and took it out of the pocket of his shorts. He stared at the familiar number of the dispatch switchboard for a few seconds.

  “Bad news?” Hadja asked.

  “Probably,” he said. Their eyes locked for a moment as he raised the phone to his ear.

  “This is Karlsvik, in Dispatch,” said the voice on the other end of the line.

  Something in Karlsvik’s tone made Bergmann look at Hadja.

  “Yes?”

  “Well, Monsen called and asked me . . .” He paused. “A guy apparently got knocked off up on Dr. Holms Vei,” he said. “Among other things. Apparently it’s damned . . .”

  “Damned what?”

  “Damned awful.”

  “So, who was it?”

  “Monsen from Kripo thinks it’s a . . . a Carl Oscar Krogh.”