by Gard Sveen
“So, tell me about Kaj Holt.”
“Have you done much fishing?” said Nystrøm, weighing the two red fishing poles in his hands. He seemed completely uninterested in anything to do with Kaj Holt as he looked out across the water.
“No,” said Bergmann, dropping his knapsack on the ground. He was starting to be annoyed by Nystrøm’s tendency to change the subject.
“Give me a soda,” said Nystrøm, pointing at his bag. “And help yourself to a beer. It’s probably been a long time since you were this far away from your boss while on duty.”
Bergmann didn’t move. It didn’t take a genius to understand what Moberg had meant when he’d mentioned that Nystrøm had had a certain weakness. He opened the green Bergen knapsack Nystrøm had been carrying. Inside he found three half-liter soda bottles as well as a thermos of coffee, three cans of beer, a bottle of water, two cups, and a bottle of Rød Aalborg aquavit. As if that weren’t enough, he’d also brought along an old frying pan, a spatula, and a container of butter.
“We’re not going to drink the red schnapps, if that’s what you’re wondering,” said Nystrøm, holding out his hand.
“I haven’t gone fishing since I was ten or twelve,” said Bergmann. That was when his mother had sent him to summer camp, which had been one long nightmare. But there was no need to tell Nystrøm about that.
“All right. You talk, and I’ll fish,” said Nystrøm, opening his soda. “Since you’re a policeman,” he went on, making a poor attempt to hold back a belch, “you can tell me whether this sounds plausible or not, since you’re so damned interested in what happened to Kaj Holt.”
Nystrøm took a container of bait out of his knapsack. “The official cause of Holt’s death was suicide,” he said, cutting the end of his line with the Sami knife. “But as far as I know, there was never any autopsy, and his file folder is missing from the archives of the Swedish Security Service, otherwise known as Säpo. I went there countless times ages ago. Säpo has files on hundreds of Norwegians, but they’d never heard of Kaj Holt. To top it all off, I was denied access to the regular police report from 1945, which probably still exists. So tell me whether you think this stinks or not: Holt’s file was missing from the Säpo archives, I wasn’t allowed to see the report filed by the regular Stockholm police, and, even more suspicious . . .”
“What’s even more suspicious?” said Bergmann. He was paying close attention, but was momentarily distracted by Nystrøm’s intonation. Was that the trace of an accent, a hint of some other language?
“The police officer who investigated Holt’s death was shot in the middle of the street in Stockholm only a few days after Holt’s body was found.”
“So you think he was murdered?”
“I don’t think anything,” said Nystrøm, raising his fishing pole and reeling in the line. “But it does seem rather unusual that an ordinary suicide should stir up so much turmoil.”
“What did Krogh think? According to Kolstad, he and Krogh were the ones who attempted to find out what had happened to Holt.”
“That’s probably true,” said Nystrøm. He pulled a char out of the water, unhooked it, cut off its head, and then put the fish in a plastic bag. It didn’t look as if he intended to answer the question.
“Did you ever meet Krogh?”
“A few times.” Nystrøm wiped his slimy and bloody hands on his pants. “A couple of times with Torgeir and once in connection with my last project. I don’t know how much Torgeir told you about that.” He shrugged.
“Moberg told me about the project you were working on when you disappeared back in ’81.”
Nystrøm lowered his fishing line back into the water.
“Disappeared? Did he say that?” A smile spread across his face, and Bergmann caught a glimpse of the boy he used to be.
“Are you saying that you didn’t disappear?”
Nystrøm shook his head.
“Torgeir has always had a talent for drama,” he said. “I called him a few days later, told him I didn’t want to continue.”
Bergmann nodded.
“So Torgeir didn’t tell you anything else?”
“Not really.”
Nystrøm smiled and again shook his head.
“I suppose you started out like everyone else, driving a patrol car, right?” he said.
“You have to start somewhere.”
“If I say Storgata 38, entrance on Hausmanns Gate, what would you say?”
Bergmann didn’t reply. He couldn’t even count the number of times he’d dropped off drunks for rehab at the Blue Cross back in the day.
“Torgeir got me admitted there countless times, from my student days onward, until I finally stopped drinking. I’ve been sober since May 1980,” said Nystrøm. “Every morning when I arrived for work, Torgeir would force me to take those fucking Antabus pills. But I thought I worked better when I drank, I taught better and wrote better . . .”
“He said you were the best student he’d ever met, then graduate student, associate professor and . . .”
“I suppose he was right.” Nystrøm finished his soda and gave Bergmann a wry smile. “But I was also a really great alcoholic. When Torgeir wasn’t there every morning with that shitty white pill bottle . . . things didn’t go so well.”
Bergmann felt guilty holding the half-empty can of Hansa beer in his hand. He felt a little tipsy as he looked out at the mountain ridges, and the sun stung his eyes.
Silently he cursed himself.
All this talk of alcoholism reminded him of his mother, and he didn’t want to think about her. She’d always been so neurotic about making sure he didn’t drink, not because alcohol was intrinsically bad, but because she insisted that it was easier to get hooked on booze than on any other kind of drug. She was a nurse and claimed to have a good understanding of such things. He hadn’t wanted to disappoint her, or maybe he simply didn’t dare defy her wishes, so he drank very little up until those last years before she died. Only after he graduated from the police academy did he begin to understand that something in her past must have shaped her attitude toward alcohol. Presumably she had fled from an alcoholic, fled so far away that he couldn’t ever find her again. She was originally from somewhere up north, but they had never once gone up there. In fact, they hardly ever went anywhere. It was as if she had been afraid that that man might find them if they left the impenetrable network of people and streets and buildings in the big city. When Bergmann had directed his own fury at Hege, a rage he’d previously only unleashed upon inanimate objects, he realized that his mother must have fled from a man who drank and nearly killed her. Where else could all the rage inside him have come from? Bergmann had decided that he was a pathological abuser, that it was part of his DNA. But he couldn’t blame how he’d been brought up. The simple and cruel truth was that he was someone who didn’t know where he came from, and deep in his heart, that tormented him more and more as the years passed. One day he would have to deal with it, find out why his mother had come south and what she’d left behind up north, what had made her look over her shoulder for the rest of her life. The key to his own soul lay in what she had abandoned, and he needed to summon the courage to find out what it was, or he would never be able to move on with his own life.
Bergmann set down the beer can on the heath-covered ground. It instantly fell over, and he sat and stared at the foaming contents slowly spill out. Nystrøm said something that yanked him out of his own thoughts, though he didn’t grasp the exact words.
“So you fell apart that summer? In 1981?” he said instead as he smashed the beer can in his right hand.
“Yes,” said Nystrøm quietly. “I was in Stockholm and had just been denied access to the Säpo files yet again, and well . . . That may have been the last straw. It was too much work. I spent a whole week drinking, squandered all the money I’d saved up, every last krone. When I came to in Karolinska Hospital, my first thought was that I was never going back to the University of Oslo, and I was never
going to finish that damned research project.”
“About the liquidations?” said Bergmann.
Nystrøm didn’t reply. He just stared vacantly at the lake.
“Now I’ve got that fucking Antabus implanted.” He held up his left arm, as if that were proof of anything.
“So you did meet Krogh a few times?” said Bergmann, wanting to change the subject.
Nystrøm nodded.
“Did he warn you to drop the project?”
“Krogh wasn’t like that,” Nystrøm said after a moment. “He didn’t say much.”
“I thought he threatened you.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me where I was on Whitsunday?” said Nystrøm, casting his fishing line again. “Krogh could be a cold and cynical bastard, but at heart he was an all-right guy. He just didn’t want anyone poking around in those liquidations. It was a closed chapter, as he said. But he never threatened me.”
“Did you throw out your research materials? All the documents?”
“What do you think?” said Nystrøm, pulling in a trout and slicing off its head with his knife. “I may be an old alcoholic, but I’ve never been a fool.”
Bergmann studied the man standing before him, noting the calm way he was gutting the fish. The two setters whimpered quietly, and Nystrøm tossed the guts over to them.
“All right then. What do you make of the skeletons that were found in Nordmarka?” asked Bergmann. He patted one of the dogs as it sniffed skeptically at the fish guts and then turned away. “Is there anything about those three individuals in your research materials?”
“No, but I didn’t finish the project, you know,” said Nystrøm. “It seems clear that we’re talking about a liquidation, don’t you think? The Resistance buried a woman and her child alive in Østmarka in 1944. So why not a family a couple of years earlier in Nordmarka?”
“It’s not a family. Agnes Gerner was engaged to Gustav Lande. She didn’t live long enough to become his wife.”
“Maybe she had a lover,” said Nystrøm. “The most basic of motives: morbid jealousy. And maybe the child and the maid just happened to be on the scene. But you’re the cop, not me.” He grinned. The cigarette butt hanging from his lips had gone out, but he had his hands full landing another fish.
“And now everyone in Krogh’s circle is dead,” said Bergmann. “Except for five people whose names are on a list that Moberg gave me.” He didn’t mention that he’d already been in contact with most of them as he got out the list and handed it to Nystrøm. He’d already wasted an entire day on these people.
“You’re not going to find out much from any of them, I can tell you that. So what’s your theory?” said Nystrøm. “About Krogh, I mean.”
“I think there’s a connection between Krogh, Holt, and the three who were killed in Nordmarka.”
“Liquidated, you mean.”
“Liquidated,” Bergmann agreed.
“What sort of connection?”
Bergmann didn’t reply. He stroked the back of the setter lying beside him and gazed out at the water, following the ripples on the surface. The sky overhead was a pale blue, almost white.
“What sort of connection?” Nystrøm again asked.
“Both Krogh and Holt knew who liquidated those three women. I mean the two women and . . . the little girl,” said Bergmann.
“Possibly,” murmured Nystrøm as he cast his line into the water. He then looked at his dog, who had clearly taken a liking to Bergmann and didn’t seem to want to budge. “It’s strange,” he said, “how different two dogs from the same litter can be. His brother couldn’t stand strangers and ended up biting the poor mailman who had just taken over the route up to Steinbu. I had to shoot the dog myself.”
He got another bite on his line.
“There’s one more person left,” he said. “If he hasn’t drunk himself to death, that is.”
“What do you mean?”
“One more person in that so-called circle may still be alive. He wouldn’t talk to me, but that was more than thirty years ago. A guy named Iver Faalund. He used to live in Uddevalla, of all places.”
“Iver Faalund?” said Bergmann.
“But you’ll be lucky if he’s still alive. I don’t think you could find a worse drunk than him.”
Bergmann got his notebook out of his windbreaker, an old, worn-out Norheim jacket that Nystrøm had found for him, and wrote down the name. Iver Faalund, he thought. The name meant nothing to him.
“What exactly did Kaj Holt do during the war?” he asked.
“There’re two things you need to know,” said Nystrøm. “Holt was the key person in the Norwegian Resistance during the war. No one above him, no one equal to him. That’s why his cover name, or at least one of them, was Number 1.”
“So Holt was called Number 1?”
“He was Number 1,” said Nystrøm, nodding as he set about making a fire. “But he was also very reserved, someone who held his cards close to his chest. There’s no photograph of him, not a single picture. And he seemed to have a guardian angel looking out for him. The Germans arrested him in the fall of 1943, suspecting him of being Raymond ‘Hvitosten’ Gudbjørnsen. But they released him a week later at Victoria Terrasse, because Hvitosten had just been killed with a limpet mine that exploded by mistake. Kaj Holt had five different identities. All with watertight backstories. And he’d created them all himself.”
“Then why did he end up dead in Stockholm? Moberg thinks he suffered from depression,” Bergmann said. But then he suddenly remembered that Moberg had lied to him in an attempt to keep him away from Finn Nystrøm.
Nystrøm waved his hand dismissively and then scraped some remaining pieces of fish out of the frying pan, which now rested on the embers of the fire he’d made.
“Torgeir had a strong maternal instinct. He’s afraid I’ll fall apart because you’ve found your way up here.” Nystrøm smiled to himself. “Does he really think I’d give up everything I have here just because a policeman wants to talk to me?” He laughed briefly, then turned serious again. “But Torgeir may have a point when it comes to Holt, even though I was the one who wrote the dissertation. The problem is that no one knows for sure what Holt was mixed up in. After several Milorg cells and the British network in Oslo collapsed in the fall of ’42, Holt was the only one left who had contacts in all directions—with the Brits, with Osvald and the Russians, with the Swedish intelligence service. In principle, any of them could have killed him in Stockholm. The Swedes, Russians, Germans, Americans. You name it.”
“And the last thing we know is that he was found dead in Stockholm on May 30, 1945.”
“The last thing we know,” said Nystrøm, licking his thumb, “and this is something that Torgeir knows too, is that Holt was a couple of hours north of Oslo in Lillehammer on Monday, May 28, 1945. But no one knows what exactly he was doing there. Two days later he was found dead in Stockholm. Then later that week, the detective in charge of the case was killed in broad daylight on a street in Stockholm.”
Bergmann poked at the food on his plastic plate. Nystrøm seemed to read his thoughts.
“But if you ask me,” he went on, “Holt wasn’t killed because he found out something in Lillehammer. I think there was some other reason.”
Bergmann nodded, then said, “Those three people in Nordmarka. Holt found out who had liquidated them when he was in Lillehammer.”
“No,” said Nystrøm. “Why would he find that out in Lillehammer? There were only German and Russian prisoners of war up there at the time. I don’t think any of them would have known who killed those three. Unless the Germans did it themselves. But why would they?”
“You’re probably right,” said Bergmann.
“So what do you think happened in Nordmarka?” said Nystrøm, fixing his eyes on Bergmann.
I have seen you somewhere before, Bergmann thought. There’s something about your cheekbones or your eyes. Maybe it was just the beer that was making him feel muddle-headed.
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“Who do you think was capable of killing two women and a child?” Nystrøm stood up and threw a stick up the slope for the dogs, who raced off as if the Devil himself were at their heels.
Bergmann looked at Nystrøm, whose expression had turned serious, as if he’d been pondering this question for years.
“Let me ask you a question,” Nystrøm said. “How much of what happened during the war in Norway is actually known?”
“Hmm. Maybe eighty percent,” said Bergmann. He considered mentioning that Krogh had been killed with a Hitler Youth knife, but then decided not to. God only knew what that might have triggered in Nystrøm.
“Let’s say seventy percent,” said Nystrøm. “But how much death and destruction do you think was in the other thirty percent?”
“A lot,” said Bergmann.
“Those three people who were killed in Nordmarka belong to the unknown percent, and that means their killer belongs there too. But I think you already know who did it. You just don’t dare entertain such a thought,” said Nystrøm.
“And?” said Bergmann.
“Carl Oscar Krogh shot one of his best friends in 1943. One shot to the head and two shots to the chest in a stairwell in Bolteløkka. I’m convinced that he had a dozen lives on his conscience by the time the war was over. He was capable of doing absolutely anything to win the war. When he found out that one of his best friends was a high-ranking deserter, he volunteered to go across the border to Sweden to shoot him. And if the Pilgrim—that was his cover name—were given orders to kill the fiancée of a prominent Nazi, he would do it. And if a little girl and a maid happened to get in his way or were named in his orders, he would kill them too. He would have done whatever it took to drive the Germans out of Norway. Absolutely anything.”
“That can’t be true,” said Bergmann.
“Why not? When were they killed?” said Nystrøm. “When did Krogh flee to Sweden? The same day, or the next day. Originally I thought that he fled because of the crackdown on Milorg, but he had at least one damned good reason to leave. The Germans were working round the clock to find out what happened to Agnes Gerner and Lande’s daughter, Cecilia.”
