The Last Pilgrim

by Gard Sveen

  “Forget fucking Waldhorst,” said Sørvaag. He was standing in the front hall with a smile on his face. “Vera Holt wears size forty-one shoes.” He held up a running shoe toward the ceiling light.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” said Reuter. “I think we might actually have her.”

  Bergmann merely nodded. He leaned out the window and looked up toward the crest of Holmenkollen. She can almost see the house from here, he thought to himself.

  “Did you hear me, Tommy?” said Reuter. “I think we’ve got the perp. Motive, insanity, and a matching shoe size.”

  “I think we’ll need a little more than a pair of shoes. They’re not even the right kind.”

  “Are you trying to spoil the party?” said Reuter, walking over to a door and opening it. “Oh fuck,” he said. “Anybody need some dirty clothes?” He went into the bedroom, holding his arm over his mouth.

  Bergmann ignored him and went over to the IVAR bookcase from IKEA by the bedroom door. An indescribable stench emanated from the bedroom. It smelled as if she’d taken a shit in there. Or maybe it was the cat. Or both of them. How can they keep sending her back to this place? Bergmann thought as he studied the spines of the books. An old encyclopedia, a few leather-bound classics, and several books about World War II. Plastic bags had been stuffed between several books along with an old plastic container of milk with green spots floating inside.

  Reuter came out of the bedroom holding a kitten in his hands. Although the only thing to eat in the whole apartment was cat food, it looked like it was starving. It made no attempt to scratch Reuter as it stared vacantly at Bergmann, then raced off to the kitchen as soon as Reuter set it down.

  He looked as if he wanted to say something but just stood there dumbfounded as Bergmann began pulling everything off the top shelf of the bookcase. But there was nothing but dust behind it all.

  The same with the next shelf.

  “Stop,” said Reuter. “At least riffle through the pages.”

  When he got to the third shelf, Bergmann muttered, “Bingo.” After removing all the books—most of which looked like worn psychology books—and a bag of handwritten pages, he found an old shoebox at the back of the shelf.

  “Mephisto brand,” said Reuter, studying the lid of the black box. The absence of any dust indicated the box was often in use.

  Bergmann opened it very carefully.

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” said Reuter as Bergmann opened the folded newspaper pages on top. “We don’t need to look any further,” he said quietly. “We’ve got her now.”

  Bergmann was holding four pages from Dagbladet. All the articles were about the murder of Carl Oscar Krogh.

  He scanned the pages, then gave a start when he saw what had prompted the exclamation from Reuter.

  Sørvaag came over to join them.

  On one of the pages was a picture of Krogh from the war days. The chiseled face was unmistakable. He was smiling, and his hair was thick and blond.

  But somebody had jabbed out the eyes in the picture, leaving only a ragged gash between his nose and hairline.

  “She gouged out the man’s eyes,” said Sørvaag.

  A flood of relief washed over Bergmann. Vera Holt, he thought. So it really was you.

  CHAPTER 57

  Friday, September 25, 1942

  Hammerstads Gate

  Oslo, Norway

  Agnes Gerner lay on the sofa in her dimly lit living room. Her bathrobe was open, and she was slowly caressing her stomach. The sunlight coming through the windows brushed her calves. Faintly, as if from a great distance, came the clamor of children playing down in the nearby courtyards.

  Her eyes were wide open. Through the dirty windowpanes she could see that the sky was a cloudless blue. How can the sky possibly be blue today? she thought. She wondered how long she’d been lying here, staring up at that meaningless blue. She wasn’t sure. The only thing she knew was that she mustn’t close her eyes as she’d done in the shower. Just as she’d shut her eyes and raised her hand to wash her hair with a bar of soap, she felt the secretary’s hand on her back, heard the woman’s gentle voice in her ear. Followed by the soundless scream, the glass of water falling to the floor, and that rigid, lifeless look in her eyes.

  Agnes sat up abruptly at a familiar, yet surprising sound. It began in the middle of a tone, as if the siren had merely paused since the last time it went off. The air-raid siren, she thought. Could it really be the air-raid siren? Yes, without a doubt. Suddenly the whole town filled with the blaring sirens, echoing after another. But it had to be a test. It was still daylight outside. It wouldn’t be dark for hours.

  Agnes decided that if this was the real thing, she would simply stay where she was, lying on the sofa, and wait to be taken up to heaven or down to hell. If the building collapsed on top of her, it would come as a relief.

  Then the strangest thing happened. It felt like a dream. She was still staring up at the blue sky when the sound of the sirens changed. She could hear planes somewhere above the city. Agnes got up on her knees and pressed her face against the windowpane.

  Far below she could hear sharp bangs. Then more, ten or twelve times. Then came the piercing sound of antiaircraft guns. It had to be coming from Victoria Terrasse. She looked at her watch. Four fifteen. That couldn’t be right.

  This was why Number 1 had insisted on pushing forward the assassination. He must have known.

  Up to the left Agnes saw what looked like three Mosquito fighter-bombers chased by a swarm of German aircraft. Then she noticed a black stripe in the sky right above Frogner Park. A Mosquito had been hit in the tail and was slowly losing altitude. As she watched its descent she unconsciously folded her hands in prayer. A second later she began to weep. A German plane followed close behind, pumping a hail of bullets into the English plane. Agnes imagined that the pilot had already been hit, but he could still be alive, since the plane was no longer losing altitude. Finally the English plane veered to the right and disappeared behind the rooftops. A few minutes later a black column of smoke rose up in the distance. The whole city was now a strident cacophony of ambulances, police cars, and air-raid sirens.

  After half an hour the sounds suddenly ceased.

  Agnes lay back down on the sofa, feeling as though she might never leave it. After another half hour it was as though the bombing raid had never happened. The only thing that was real was what she herself had done.

  She lay there until darkness fell.

  A few times she raised her hand to her shoulder, touching the place where the Pilgrim had last put his hand. Each time she touched that spot, she felt her skin burning, as if they were once again together.

  She didn’t want to remember anything else. Not how he had looked away, nor how he had left her and then stood leaning against the car, weeping.

  When she had gone downstairs to join him on the floor of the workshop, he had merely handed her a bottle of dry shampoo and then hurried off toward the steel gate. Without a word he had gone out the door of the gate. Agnes had a strange feeling that it would be the last time she ever saw him.

  Now she lay on the sofa, simply listening to her own breathing. Finally she fell asleep and sank deep into a dream in which the secretary’s face became Bess’s face, which refused to stop bleeding. Then she was standing in the workshop bathroom, and she was the one bleeding and bleeding . . .

  Abruptly she opened her eyes.

  Like a folkloric vardøger—a sort of premonition preceding the actual sounds—a faint, almost inaudible ringing started up in Agnes’s ears. Then the sound of car tires on the asphalt outside mixed with the distant shouts of the children in the apartment upstairs.

  The only thing she could think of was that she needed to get her purse. She’d put the Welrod and the codebook behind the baseboard in the kitchen. It would take a long time to find them.

  She leapt up and dashed across the room. First she searched the living room, growing bewildered when she realized she hadn�
�t left it there. Then she desperately scanned the table and countertop in the kitchen. She went out to the front hall, but it wasn’t there either. Where did I put it? she wondered frantically. Her legs felt unsteady as she went into the bedroom. Although she was barefoot, she felt like she had on high heels and had drunk too much champagne, as she had on that evening in London when the attaché had followed her home . . . That chance little incident—nothing more than a momentary infatuation—had led her to this moment, standing on the pinewood floor, trying to find a capsule in her purse that would allow her to end her own life. Before it had really even begun.

  A moment later she heard a car door slam on the street. How late it was. After curfew.

  She heard footsteps approaching the entrance to her building. She remembered that the door wasn’t locked. There had been something wrong with the lock when she came home.

  Where is my purse? she thought in a panic. Where is it? she silently screamed. On her way back to the bedroom, she saw it out of the corner of her eye. It was lying on the floor, partially hidden under the sheets. She must have set it on the bed and then torn off the covers, though she remembered nothing. She remembered only the face of the secretary and the black hole in Rolborg’s pinstriped suit, and how the kind woman had fallen asleep with her eyes open while her head rested in a pool of black blood.

  The door to the stairwell opened. The footsteps were almost inaudible, balancing on the very edge of each step. Agnes tore open her purse. In the bottom she saw several streaks of Rolberg’s blood that must have rubbed off her identification papers. Her fingers were shaking as she took out the stiff wad of toilet paper. Thank God, there was the glass capsule. The blue-black poison gleamed, as if it were the Redeemer Himself.

  She placed the capsule in her mouth. It was cold and strange, tasting of nothing, yet it still almost made her throw up. Only a thin membrane of glass, one millimeter thick, separated her from death. She grabbed her purse and went toward the front hall, listening to the footsteps outside as they came up the last steps.

  One person, she thought. There’s only one.

  But the Gestapo never came alone.

  CHAPTER 58

  Thursday, June 19, 2003

  Kolstadgata 7

  Oslo, Norway

  “Who knows that Krogh’s eyes were hacked out?” said Halgeir Sørvaag.

  “Nobody,” said Tommy Bergmann, handing the newspaper to Sørvaag. An image of himself standing in Krogh’s living room flashed through his mind. The old man had looked so hideous, like an animal in a slaughterhouse, the left side of his chest completely gone.

  Just plain gone.

  “Good Lord,” said Fredrik Reuter. “I need to call the chief and tell her to get out the champagne.”

  What an idiot, thought Bergmann.

  “Do you see a computer anywhere?” said Sørvaag. “She must have bought the knife on the Internet.”

  “There’s one in the bedroom,” said Reuter.

  Bergmann watched the two men disappear into the bedroom. Again Reuter cursed the stench in the room. After a brief pause, Sørvag shouted—as if he’d won the lottery—that the computer was hooked up to a modem.

  Was it really you, Vera Holt? Bergmann wondered as he riffled through the shoebox. He sat down on the filthy sofa to look through the ten or fifteen newspaper clippings of old interviews with Krogh and articles about him.

  Krogh’s eyes had been scratched out with a ballpoint pen or a knife in every photo. He looked through the rest of the shoebox. Held together with a big old paper clip were nearly fifty small pieces of paper from various notepads. Scribblings, doodles. A few of them were dated, others were not. In the middle of the stack was a piece of paper that looked different. A heavy piece of stationery that had been folded twice.

  Bergmann carefully pulled it out from the others and spread it open on the coffee table. He was no longer aware of the smell of congealed food that Vera had left on the table.

  Inside the heavy, plain piece of paper was another sheet of paper of different quality.

  Bergmann read the words written on it.

  “I’m sorry. Kaj.”

  Bergmann studied Kaj Holt’s missing suicide note. He was no handwriting expert, but the writing on the note was clearly not the same as on the other notes in the shoebox. It had been written quickly, with confidence, in a nearly perfect cursive. The notes and doodles on the loose pages had been written by a hounded person, nervously and with no structure—a person who seemed subject to an unceasing torrent of thoughts.

  Bergmann studied the plain piece of paper that had contained the note. What he saw made him take several deep breaths. The murdered police detective. So the rumors that had circulated at police headquarters in Stockholm were true.

  Stockholm

  May 31, 1945

  Dear Mrs. Holt,

  Please accept my condolences. This whole thing is very painful.

  Yours truly,

  G. Persson

  Kaj Holt’s wife must have realized that the suicide note was not written in her husband’s handwriting. Bergmann looked at it again. Suddenly it all became clear to him. It was so obvious. Inspector Persson had sent the presumed suicide note to Holt’s wife so that she would see it wasn’t his handwriting. But had she done anything with this information? Had she shown it to Krogh? Was that why Krogh had put pressure on the Swedes? Or had she shown it to Krogh, who had then ordered Persson killed? Bergmann put the two pieces of paper down on the coffee table, glancing at the green mold forming on the remains of what must have been stew.

  What if that was what happened? Holt’s wife went to Krogh, told him it wasn’t her husband’s handwriting. Krogh thanked her, and the next day Inspector Persson was shot in broad daylight on a street in Stockholm. That way, no one would ever find out that Carl Oscar Krogh had liquidated three people in Nordmarka.

  Nobody would have believed such a story, thought Bergmann. That was why Krogh could get away with it. No one would ever have believed the truth.

  He turned to look at the shoebox on the sofa next to him. He took out the pile of loose pages, removed the paper clip, and leafed through it. Some were drawings of demonic faces, the same faces on many of the pages. The papers had been tossed together in no logical sequence. In addition to the drawings, there were random sentences, place names, and a few fragments of what looked like attempts at poetry. “On such a day you would never believe summer will come again,” he read. “January 1941. I will reach for heaven even though God has given up.” He studied the almost frenzied handwriting, which he believed belonged to Kaj Holt. He kept going, scanning countless names—what he assumed to be cover names—and combination numbers. Some of the names had a cross next to them, and a teardrop had been drawn on one of the pages. But the names of Agnes, Krogh, and the Pilgrim were nowhere to be seen. In the margin of one of the pages was a note that said, “Vera. Her name will be Vera.”

  Bergmann had just made it to the last page when he heard cursing coming from the bedroom. Sørvaag yelled that he’d hit his head on the desk. Bergmann smiled to himself as he took the last piece of paper out of the shoebox. It seemed to be from the same notepad as many of the other pages, but this one had been crumpled up at some point. He read the few words on the wrinkled page: “We have a rotten apple in the basket.”

  “In the basket?” he murmured.

  Next to this sentence someone seemed to have written something in pencil but then erased it until the paper had almost torn. Bergmann got up and held the paper up to the single rice-paper lamp hanging from the ceiling. The pencil had been pressed into the paper so hard that it was still possible to make out the letters in reverse on the back. Someone with different handwriting than Holt—in almost childlike script—had written a name in big letters.

  KROGH.

  Bergmann practically collapsed on the sofa.

  So Iver Faalund was right. Krogh was the rotten apple. But who had written his name on this old piece of paper and then erased it?
Vera Holt? Bergmann sighed. If that were the case, then the only two people claiming that Krogh was a traitor were an old alcoholic in Uddevalla and a psychotic woman who had previously been convicted of murder. Not exactly ideal, but Bergmann had no choice but to believe this was the case.

  “We’ve got her,” said Reuter as he stood in front of Bergmann. Sørvaag held the computer hard drive up, as if it were the spoils of war from another era.

  These few scribbles change everything, thought Bergmann.

  And yet they changed nothing.

  Peter Waldhorst must have known all along, of course. Because what else could he have told Kaj Holt in Lillehammer except that Krogh was the man who had stabbed the Resistance in the back in the fall of 1942?

  And Vera had figured that out.

  And Bergmann really had overlooked something completely banal: the fact that a drunkard in godforsaken Uddevalla and a crazy woman on Kolstadgata might know the truth. And that only served to strengthen his belief that Krogh had ordered Holt’s death.

  “All right. We’ve got her,” said Bergmann. “But I think you might want to wait to call the boss.”

  He held out the loose page to Reuter.

  Reuter frowned, trying to catch Bergmann’s eye. But Bergmann merely nodded and stood up. Then he practically stuffed the piece of paper into Reuter’s hand.

  They stood there staring at each other for a long moment. Then Reuter smoothed out the page and took his reading glasses out of his breast pocket.