by Andrew Gross
Under the staircase, Nordstrum noticed a door that clearly led to a basement. As he watched, a burly sergeant stepped out from it, rolled down his sleeves as if he had been doing some grimy work, and headed upstairs.
He realized the man had come from the cells that contained his father.
He cased the room and quickly calculated that it wouldn’t take that much to pull it off. Most things didn’t take much more than the will and the daring to do it. At night, there would likely be only a few guards. He only needed a partner to help him take out whoever was in the lobby, silently if they could, and make their way downstairs. How many guards could there be? He’d need one more man in the car outside, waiting. He knew Ox would be happy to volunteer. He noticed a rear entrance down a hall, a single guard manning it, that led onto Kveg Street.
Still, he was building his network for the good of the Allied cause, not for personal vendettas.
And, as Einar said, his father was infirm. Even if he could get him out of the cell and away, where could he take him? On the vidda? His father would never be able to make the climb. Out of the region? After such a brazen act, the two roads in and out of town would be shut down within five minutes. Put him up in a friendly basement somewhere? For the duration of the war? That would be the same as jail to him. Cooping him up. Besides, they wouldn’t get halfway to Vigne.
And then there would be reprisals, of course. Even if they did get away, many innocent people would surely pay. How many other Anna-Lisettes would there be on his conscience? Because of his will to free his father. And his hatred for those who had taken him.
Like Einar said, Don’t do something stupid, Kurt. There was still work to do. And you are needed. His father was always his own man. He probably wouldn’t even come along, knowing he would be a burden. Nordstrum could see him stubbornly remaining in his cell, refusing to leave. An ox to the end.
Best to just get out of here. You’d be mad to risk it.
As he turned to leave, Nordstrum’s attention was grabbed by the sound of heavy footsteps coming down the stairs.
* * *
Dieter Lund headed from his office down to the lobby, set to inspect the new security procedures for the dam at Mosvatn, which, after the raid at Norsk Hydro, he and Gestapo chief Muggenthaler had mapped out personally. With him was his aide, Lieutenant Norberg of the NS, and, a step behind, the chief security engineer, Oren Karsten, an asthmatic sycophant pushed on him by Muggenthaler, who was always pratting around with his papers and charts. Lund’s staff car was waiting outside.
While over the past weeks they had been unable to apprehend a single one of the saboteurs directly involved in the Norsk Hydro bombing, they had rounded up dozens of potential troublemakers in town. Their jail was overflowing with them. Also, there was word from the Gestapo of recent observed activity on the vidda. New signs of radio signals transmitted. Single tracks spotted, to and from certain huts. If someone was up there, sooner or later he’d make a mistake. They’d catch him. There were troop increases all over. It was only a matter of time before they ran into him.
Even if it was Kurt Nordstrum, who everyone claimed was so crafty, as Lund was certain it was.
“Captain, this diagram shows the new mine pattern at the dam…” Karsten, the engineer, said, following Lund as they went down the stairs. “Perhaps we can review it on the way?”
“Yes, yes.” Lund waved the engineer off, coming down the last flight into the crowded lobby. The man had the breath of someone who had downed a tin of cat food for lunch, and was always so overbearingly obsequious with his pages of charts and diagrams.
The lobby was unusually crowded this morning. It would be pleasing to take a drive in the country to inspect the dam just to get away from this nest of influence seekers, even for just a few hours.
“Please, make way, coming through.” Lieutenant Norberg pushed through the crowd to create some space. Lund’s eyes fell over those waiting in long lines to have their grievances heard, or who had been called here to act as a witness or make a deposition. Or those clamoring uselessly on and on about the disappearance of a loved one.
“Captain, please, I beg you…,” someone said, spotting someone in command.
“Sorry. No time. Please put in your request.” Lund brushed by them. The woman in an eiderdown coat. The tall man in a gray wool cap. Just cattle. He went past them toward the entrance where his car was waiting for him and—
He stopped.
He’d nearly gotten to the front door when the face he had just passed suddenly came clear in his mind. An image, like a frame spinning into focus in a film, a film from years ago. Spinning, then coming perfectly clear.
Lund spun around.
The man was gone.
“Norberg, that man in the hat,” he said. “Did you see him?”
“What man, Captain?”
Lund looked back across the lobby. “In a navy seaman’s jacket. Gray wool cap.” He headed back through the crowd. “He was just there. A moment ago.”
It had been many years, of course. Six, seven? But there was something. Something in the eyes he just saw. Something that transported Lund back through those years. He was here? Impossible, Lund thought. It would be an act of complete audacity. Only a fool would dare.
A fool, or someone plotting something.
He must have learned that his father was in the cells below.
“Lieutenant, there was a man with a navy coat and gray hat standing there just a moment ago. He must have gone out the back. Find him!”
“Yes, Captain.” Norberg took out his gun and blew his whistle. Three sharp shrills.
The crowd in the lobby quickly parted. Lund and Norberg pushed their way through, elbowing by a woman in a long coat who was in the way. “Let us through.”
Down a narrow hall there was a short set of stairs leading to the back entrance, which he had to have gone down.
They ran out into the street and scanned both directions. Norberg had his gun out and the whistle in his mouth, prepared to call the alarm.
The street was empty.
A German guard stood at the door. “Hauptman, a man in a navy coat just left through here a moment ago. Did you see him?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the guard said. “I saw no such man.”
“No such man…?” Lund looked both ways. “Impossible, he only just came out a second—”
Before he could utter the word “ago,” Lund bolted back inside the building. Down the narrow hall they had come through, there was a door just off the lobby. A janitorial closet. Lund stopped at it, removed his pistol, and wrapped his hand around the doorknob.
He stood aside, his gun readied against his chest, and yanked the door open.
Hanging on the handle of a mop in a pail was a navy seaman’s coat and a gray wool hat.
Lund’s eyes lit up and he smiled almost triumphantly. “Nordstrum.”
“He’s here!” he said, and sprinted to the end of the hallway, searching for a tall man with short light hair, exactly how he remembered him.
Nothing. Again.
“Lieutenant, come with me!” Lund pushed his way to the front entrance, hurrying past the guards, outside.
He raised his gun and spun, his finger tensed on the trigger, in both directions.
No one.
Still, it didn’t stop his blood from racing like a swollen stream spilling over a dam in long, held-in validation.
From his first impulse, months ago, about who had killed the Hirden on the ferry. And now, who was behind the sabotage at the Norsk Hydro. And he could be here, at Gestapo headquarters, where his father was being held, for no other reason than to try and free him, fool that he was.
“Captain, who was it?” Norberg finally caught up to him out on the street.
“An old friend.”
“Old friend…?” The lieutenant looked at him, puzzled.
“Kurt Nordstrum, Lieutenant. Sound the alarm. And circulate the photos we have of him through town. He can’
t be far.”
53
Hurrying past the guards, pretending to recognize a woman on the street and running to catch up with her, Nordstrum turned at the corner and ducked through the stalls on Market Street, fishmongers and meat suppliers hawking their catches, until he wove his way to a cousin’s bicycle warehouse on King Olaf Street, which had been shut down since the war. He ducked into the loading dock as the tramp of boots on pavement and the shrill of whistles could be heard piercing the streets nearby. Soldiers hurried by.
“Look down there!” a man’s voice ordered in Norwegian. “You three, check these buildings.”
He kept his gun close to his side and held his breath, waiting to see if he’d have to use it.
The footsteps passed.
After an hour or so, the sounds of pursuit diminished. Nordstrum found a yellow fisherman’s slicker in the entrance and slipped away, taking the back streets past the cemetery out of the town.
It was three kilometers to his father’s farm. Every once in a while he saw an NS police car speeding by, its siren wailing. He waited for darkness and hid in the shadows of the church, down from his father’s home. He was in need of a warm jacket and skis. He noticed a car parked on the street not far away, two darkened shapes inside. Too risky, he decided. NS or Gestapo, they were watching.
Now they knew who he was and that he was nearby.
Deciding where he would go, he tramped through a field knee-deep with snow and then hooked back onto the main road a mile west of town. He flagged down the public bus to Vigne and Mosvatn, which was about twenty kilometers away. The old driver, a man he recognized, merely nodded at Nordstrum as if he had seen him daily for the past three years. He went to the back and put himself across from the rear exit, near a bundled old woman doing her knitting and a girl of maybe sixteen or so, perhaps on the way home from work. At each stop he prepared to bolt out the back if the wrong people stepped on.
They didn’t.
In Vigne, he ducked off the bus and, pulling up the collar of his jacket, walked about a mile to the Nils road. It began to snow. He found the pleasant stone house with an Opel in front at the end of a large field. He waited behind a tree until he made absolutely certain no one had followed him. When he was satisfied, he went up to the porch and knocked on the front door.
Einar Skinnarland answered, his eyes wide with surprise. “Kurt?” He looked past him to be sure no one was watching. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Sorry to bother you, friend. But I need a jacket and some skis and I’ll be out of your hair.”
“Of course. Come in.” Einar knew if Nordstrum had showed up at his door it was not an ordinary situation. “What the hell’s going on? You really shouldn’t be here, Kurt. Jesus, you look frozen.”
“I’m sorry, but there was no other choice. I had to ditch my gear in Rjukan.” He greeted Einar’s wife, who he hadn’t set eyes on since the war. “Marte.” He took off his boots so as not to wet the rug. “Sorry to intrude.”
“Kurt.” He couldn’t tell if she was angry that he had shown up like this or merely concerned at his condition. She took a look at him dripping with snow. “Go and stand near the fire. Let me get you a blanket and some tea.”
“That would be great. If you don’t mind, I will.”
When she left, Einar said to him, “It’s too dangerous for all of us for you to be here, Kurt. My little one’s upstairs. What possibly brought you into Rjukan?”
“I won’t be here long. I promise.” Then he looked at him. “I couldn’t just let him rot there, Einar, without seeing it for myself.”
“Your father?” Einar lowered his voice. “And seeing if you could what, Kurt, break him out? I told you not to do something stupid. So what did you find?”
“That it could be done.” Nordstrum warmed his hands over the flames. “It would take three of us maybe. At night. Depending on what we encountered downstairs. A car could be pulled around back.”
“And then what? Even if you pulled off another miracle, your father’s in no shape to be on the run. You’d get yourselves both killed. One thing you learn, Kurt, it just takes one stupid act to undo all the good you do in this war.”
“I hear you.” Nordstrum wiggled his fingers as the warmth slowly came back into them. “I saw him though, Einar.”
“Your father…? How?”
“Not him. Our old school mate. He walked right past me in his Hirden grays.”
“Lund?”
“Yes. And he saw me as well.”
“So that’s what all the commotion was about. Now it’s starting to make sense. Still, it was damn foolish, Kurt. People are counting on you. You’re far too valuable to be caught up in a game of personal vengeance. Next time—”
“Next time I’ll put a bullet in him, that’s my promise.” Marte came back in with a tray of biscuits and a mug of hot tea. “Marte, you’re too kind. I didn’t mean to trouble you.”
“It’s no trouble at all, Kurt.” She hesitated. “But our son is upstairs. You can’t stay long.”
“I won’t. Just let me drink my tea. It’s been a long time since a woman made some for me.”
* * *
They outfitted him in boots, skis, and a hunter’s coat Einar found among some old things. Once warmed, Nordstrum left through the field at the back, and headed into the hills. Over the next few days he made his way to the Skinnarland family farm, where there was an unused meat-curing hut in the woods only the family knew about. Emma, Einar’s sister-in-law, brought him food and a blanket. The days were lonely and cold with only a woodstove there, but he filled his heart and warmed his bones with the belief that what he was doing was right and necessary. He slept with his gun on his pillow and kept his eye on the fields in case the Germans tracked him to the farm. After four days, when he was sure the coast was clear, he made his way back up onto the vidda.
In Uvdal he found a stone in Ox’s mailbox.
There were messages back and forth now between Ox and Sassy (Hella’s code name, a word Nordstrum had learned in England that well described her) and SOE in England. A cache of supplies was being dropped on the vidda, which he and Ox went out and retrieved, including a new radio. They reported the new troop intensification on the vidda and heard back that there might be a few more agents dropped in the area soon. The exchanges of information were working perfectly now; both Ox and Hella were well suited to the job. Though he had to admit he found his thoughts drifting far more to her than to the broad-shouldered slaughterhouse hand in his heavy oilskin coats.
SOE appeared to be pleased.
The best news he received was that Gunnerside had successfully made it to Sweden. All but one, they said. They had separated from the Yank. They feared him lost.
Gutterson. He was a good lad who had earned his place with them, and Nordstrum felt genuinely sorry to learn that.
“What’s Gunnerside?” Hella asked in her father’s cabin after handing him the decoded message.
Nordstrum shrugged. “Just some friends of mine.”
“Well, they must be good friends. I’ve never seen you smile so widely as a moment before. Or now so sad.”
“You know there are things I have to keep from you. And I do smile every now and then. I just haven’t had much to smile about in the past few years. So is there anything to drink in the house? We should have a toast.”
“My father kept something somewhere.” Hella found some whisky and an old bottle of aquavit in a cabinet and poured out two glasses and they toasted to his friends’ safe return, and to the Yank, whose fate was unknown.
“It would be good to go to Sweden.” Hella sat down at the table. “It would be good for one week to pretend this war wasn’t happening. I was in Stockholm a couple of times. With Anders.”
“Maybe one day I’ll take you,” Nordstrum said.
“You and me?” She tilted her glass toward him. “So you actually do have a heart in there. Anyway, I must be ten years older than you. I’m sure you can fi
nd some pretty young thing who doesn’t have two marks against her.”
“One thing I’ve learned: In war, there’s no such thing as age. Or one’s past. We’re all the same. Anyway, if your husband doesn’t return, consider it a date.”
“I’ll mark my calendar.” She laughed. “But I won’t buy an outfit just yet.”
“I’m a man of my word.” Nordstrum put down his glass. “Don’t be so sure we won’t.”
* * *
Einar knew of someone in Miland who might be interested in some work, so Nordstrum traveled there by ferry and bus with a bag of tools, posing as a carpenter. The man was a beer salesman, which was perfect, as he was always on the road, so he could transmit from anywhere. His name was Reinar.
If a man was smart and careful, he would always say no, of course, to Nordstrum’s initial entreaty for this kind of “work.” And with good reason to be wary of the Gestapo’s reach and infiltration into the general population.
Which Reinar did, of course. Even with Einar’s recommendation.
Nordstrum would then give them a small radio where they could pick up the BBC.
“That’s illegal, isn’t it?”
“Tell me your mother’s name,” Nordstrum said. “Then listen to the news Friday.”
“Her name?” Reinar said, cautious. “Her name’s Regina.”
“Remember.” Nordstrum got up. “Friday.”
Three days later, the lead-in: “A special greeting to Regina,” was played just before the News of the Night, convincing Reinar that Nordstrum indeed had a genuine connection to England.
“So what’s your favorite beer?” he asked Nordstrum on their second time together, showing him his catalogue, which these days included Lowenbrau and Hofbrau from Germany.
“Guinness, these days,” Nordstrum replied.
Reinar closed his catalogue. “Mine too.”
