The Historians
Page 12
Gunnar didn’t want to work in the mine, either. But it paid the most. And there was always work. Abraham was a year older; he had already turned thirteen with only one year left to graduation. And now, with his father dead, he’d have to make his mind up very soon as to what to do. Gunnar felt guilty. His father was the mine foreman. Not that his father decided anything or had it much easier than the others. But he knew from experience that his father was a hard man.
It was recess. Gunnar and Abraham were behind the school building by the creek. Gunnar’s father had told him about Abraham’s father yesterday morning. Gunnar had already known something had happened as the mine was quiet. Without the normal racket, he’d heard birdsong, the whistle of the wind. And then anxiety wrapped around him like ropes. He’d been relieved when he saw his father; it wasn’t him. Only for it to prove to be Abraham’s.
Gunnar was sitting on the grass. Abraham still stood watching the water. Behind them, the grinder was chugging. Every now and then there was a screeching.
“No, as soon as I’ve finished school, I’m leaving,” Abraham said. His voice sounded choked.
“Where will you go?” Gunnar asked.
“Anywhere.” Abraham spat again. “South.”
South. Closer to the war, Gunnar thought. Not that Sweden was really involved, but still. He would go too, he decided. But his sister had gone to Uppsala to get away, and she had died anyway. He’d been proud of her: she’d managed, he’d thought. She had done it. Found a way out. All the fights with their father. She’d proven him wrong. University. Not that Gunnar had doubted. His sister had been smart. And then, in the end, it had all been for nothing.
There was the crack of a stick breaking and the boys turned.
It was Mr. Notholm, the owner of the hotel, the Winter Palace. His blond hair was greasy, and he had combed it back.
Gunnar didn’t like him. His father had told him how Mr. Notholm had arrived once the hotel was already built and forced Mr. Olsson, the original owner, to sell to him.
“Forced?” Gunnar had asked his father.
His father frowned, as if he felt he had said too much. “Rumor has it he knew something about Mr. Olsson,” he said, “That Mr. Olsson didn’t want widely known.”
Most people here had something in their background, Gunnar was certain. Otherwise why come in the first place? He had looked at his father; wondered why he was here and who knew what things about him.
“What are you boys doing?” Notholm said.
“Nothing,” Abraham said.
“I would have thought you weren’t allowed to leave the schoolyard during recess.”
Abraham shrugged. “A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do,” he said pluckily.
Gunnar looked at him. “A man?”
Notholm laughed. “I like that,” he said. “I could use the help of a few young . . . men. Young men who aren’t afraid of doing things that might be breaking a few rules. I need help in tracking something down. I’ll pay you.”
Abraham straightened. “We’re not afraid.”
The skin on Gunnar’s back tingled, and he shivered. As if someone had just walked over his grave, his mother always said. He wanted to say that he didn’t want to work—not for Notholm. But then it would sound as if he were afraid.
“Good,” Notholm said. “I’ll call on you soon.”
“Abraham? Gunnar?” It was their teacher. She was young, on her first assignment. They all had a crush on her.
“We should go,” Abraham said uncertainly. “Otherwise, they’ll wonder.”
Notholm smiled. Mocking? “Of course,” he said then, exaggeratedly serious. “We don’t want them to wonder.”
16.
Laura
Laura met Erik at the Grand Hotel again in the late afternoon. As she saw him at the bar, she felt a jolt, reminding her what it felt like to be in love.
She shook her head at herself, smiling at her thoughts. Erik was not her type, nor was she his. Seeing him promised an evening full of drinking and laughter, that’s all. Since the war had begun, she hadn’t gone out and had fun. She and her friends had been at university and overnight, they’d had to grow up. A part of her must have decided that side of life was gone for ever; she was an adult now, with responsibilities. But with Erik, she felt young; how pathetic was that?
Beside him at the bar, a group of German soldiers were drinking. They were wearing the black uniforms of the SS. The audacity. It had happened more often at the beginning of the war—German soldiers passing through Sweden on a break. Nowadays, you rarely saw them in uniform. They knew public opinion had changed. She was amazed these ones dared.
Erik had already ordered her a drink and she sat on the leather barstool beside him.
“It’s good to see you.” He looked into her eyes over the rim of his glass, his brown eyes seeming black in his pale face, and she felt the same jolt again. Not her type, she repeated to herself.
“You too,” she said and lifted her glass. Thank you.
The soldiers behind him laughed loudly and she felt a stab of worry. Erik had been known to pick a fight. But it only seemed to amuse him. Pigs, he mimed. He leaned into her. “There was no other free space,” he explained. “Now, I’m thinking perhaps we would have been better off standing.”
Laura smiled.
“So, did you go to Uppsala?”
She nodded.
He shook his head, at the idea of her going, or of Britta’s fate, or both.
“I saw the policeman,” she said. “Has he been in contact with you?”
“No. Will he be?”
“He says he wants to speak with all of us.”
Erik took a sip from his drink.
She turned her glass around, looked at the drops of condensation making their way down toward the liquid. “He told me all of us are in Stockholm now.”
“What do you mean, ‘all of us’?”
“Matti, Karl-Henrik, you, me . . .” She shrugged. “Did you know they were here?”
“Not at all.”
“I can’t believe they haven’t gotten in touch.”
“We did leave one another rather abruptly.” He avoided her gaze, perhaps remembering his own role.
They had.
“You said something back then,” she said.
“When?”
“Back at university. You said we were being watched.”
“Did I?”
“Yes. You said Loki was following us.”
Loki, the sly trickster god, scheming, caring only for himself. The flaw in the otherwise perfect world of the Norse gods.
He scoffed. “Was I drunk?”
“Probably,” she admitted. But, as she said it, she thought about Inspector Ackerman. Someone knew things about their group and their interest in the Norse legends. She had a vision of this shadow following them, a shape-shifter: Loki.
“The war breaking out.” Erik cleared his throat. “We all felt it, didn’t we? Things spinning out of control. Ties being made and unmade. People you knew, advocating a different side. Not knowing who to trust. It was easy to feel paranoid.”
“The policeman knew we had fallen out. Someone had told him”
“Well then, it was most likely Matti or Karl-Henrik, as they’re both here.”
“What if there was a Loki? What if he’s the one who killed Britta?”
Erik shook his head. “Nobody got that close to us, Laura. We kept to ourselves.”
“A secret society.” The words rang in her ears.
“So,” he said, “were there any German connections? Links to your secret project?”
He was making fun of her.
“She’d changed,” she said.
“Who?”
“Britta.”
“In what way?”
“She kept apart.”
He took a sip of his drink. “We’ve all changed.”
“It’s like she no longer had any friends. I couldn’t find out anything. Apart from one th
ing—a student said Britta had been in love. A relationship that went wrong and left her heartbroken.”
Erik bent his head.
“Were you in love with her?” she asked him.
“With Britta?” He smiled.
She nodded and remembered his face whenever he looked at Britta. The only time his eyes softened.
“Weren’t we all?”
In her mind’s eye, she saw Britta’s face again. Laughing, raising her glass in a toast. Laura sighed.
“But just a bit.” Erik had leaned closer to her, his arm warm against hers. There was a glint in his eyes. “A teeny tiny bit.”
Before she could react, the bartender was in front of them.
“Mr. Anker?”
Erik scowled.
“There’s a phone call for you. In the lobby.”
Erik walked through the bar and out into the adjacent lobby, the lean frame, the focused gait. A policeman on the hunt, Laura thought to herself again. Her drink was making her mind fuzzy. When Erik came back, she’d suggest they have dinner.
She saw Erik in the lobby, speaking on the wall-mounted phone close to the reception desk. He was gesticulating as if angry. Tense times.
They were playing American jazz; Billie Holiday’s I Cried for You. The bar was full. Stockholm was a small town in many ways. There weren’t that many restaurants or hotels. People ended up in the same places. The hotel was home to the international press headquarters, and it was always buzzing with news and with rumors. In the bar, there were people she recognized, people who she knew by reputation, or who had been pointed out to her: representatives of the British intelligence services, of the Gestapo; Finns and Norwegians in exile; Swedes from the Security Services; Italian fascists; Eastern-European “travellers”; “businessmen”; everybody spying on everybody else. She had been warned about them, shown photos, told they would try to befriend her, get her to talk, and then use her to get to Wallenberg and the negotiations . . . She avoided meeting anyone’s gaze, as many of them would know who she was and have been shown photos, too.
“A neutral, green island in an otherwise dark, German Europe,” one of the British diplomats had described Sweden.
She was done. She’d tell Wallenberg she had found no proof of any German links, or links to them. She’d listen to the policeman who had told her not to ask questions, let him do his job.
Through the crowd, she spotted Erik again, hanging up the receiver with such a force it was as if he were trying to hammer the phone itself down from the wall. He leaned his forehead against it, then spun around and headed back to her. She felt that same jolt again. She didn’t want to like him. She didn’t like him—not in that way. It was just that right now, he represented before.
“Dinner?” he asked.
“LET’S ENJOY THE spring night,” he’d said as they left the restaurant, though Stockholm was in total darkness apart from the occasional dimmed lights of a cab or a tram rattling past. It wasn’t that late, but there was a chill in the air, and they were both shivering by the time they reached her house.
Then he was adamant that they should have one more drink at the small bar in the building opposite hers.
“A nightcap,” he said.
She could have invited him up to hers, but she was worried about what that would entail. She wasn’t stupid; Britta’s death had rendered her fragile. Him, too, most likely.
“You haven’t told me yet what you’re working on now,” she said as they sat down at a small table by the window. The bar was warm. It smelled of cooked food. She lifted the edge of the blackout curtain stretched over the window and peeked out. On his side, Erik did the same. She half expected the waiter to scold them. Outside, it had begun to rain. Spring weather, unpredictable.
Across the street, the door to her apartment building opened, a brief square of light. A man, hands in pockets, head down, walked out into the rain without looking around. Laura let go of the curtain at the same time as Erik.
“This and that,” Erik said. “I write articles about the occupation in Denmark, try to get people engaged.”
“How is your family doing?”
He shrugged. “Last I heard, alright. We don’t speak often. Dad’s a policeman. Sabotage has been increasing—small acts of resistance—and the Germans want those caught to be severely punished. He struggles with that. The Germans are bloody brutes.”
In the beginning, the Danish government had been trying to predict German directives, implementing them before they were issued. But rumor had it that the resistance was finally getting itself organized.
They sat, quiet, both lost in thought.
“It was as if Professor Lindahl didn’t care that she was dead,” she said.
“What?”
“When I saw him. It was as if he didn’t care that Britta had died.”
“He has a lot of students, Laura.”
“But didn’t you think we were . . . special to him?”
“No, I can’t say I did. I mean, I enjoyed studying under him, but he was just a teacher.”
She couldn’t believe her ears: Erik had been infatuated with Professor Lindahl. They all had been—but he, the most.
“You always want these guarantees, Laura. That we’ll all be together forever. That we’re the best ones ever. The most loved ones, the most brilliant. Life isn’t like that. Things change. People turn out to be just average.”
She bent her head. His words stung. But it was true: things did change. And people moved on more quickly than she did.
Erik fingered his glass, then yawned.
It made her yawn, too.
“Time to leave,” she said, although it wasn’t yet nine according to the clock behind the bar.
“Let’s have one more,” he said, even though his glass was half-full.
“We should go.”
“We could go dancing. Or to the China variety show?”
She hesitated. It was tempting, but she was exhausted, so she shook her head.
“Come on, Miss Dahlgren. For old time’s sake.”
“Another time. I’m tired.”
She stood up.
As they stepped out, rain, driving in vertical bands, hit her on the top of the head and began running under her hair. Erik raised the collar of his jacket and grabbed her hand, and they ran across the street. At her door, she dawdled, couldn’t find her keys. Erik pushed the door. It was open.
The hallway was lit, but it felt different.
Erik walked in behind her, as if he felt her hesitation.
“I don’t know . . .” she said and began walking up the stairs to her apartment on the second floor.
Nothing had changed, and yet . . .
The door to her flat stood wide open, the dark room behind it resembling a gaping hole.
She inhaled sharply.
Erik put out his arm to hold her back. “They might still be in there. Let’s leave, Laura. Come on!”
She ducked under his arm, walked to her door, reached her hand inside and flicked the switch. The hallway light was bright yellow. Her chair lay overturned. Its seat had been slashed. Her father had given her that chair. It used to stand in their hallway at home. “You can sit on it and remember your old father and grandfather and all that they’ve given you,” he’d joked.
The drawers in her dresser had all been emptied onto the floor, her clothes pulled out from the entryway closet. Who would do such a thing? She continued walking into the flat and each room was the same. All her belongings. All her things were scattered on the floor: photos, books, jewelry, clothes . . . She tried not to step on them, watching where she put her feet. There was a smell. A bitter smell. Plastic burning?
She needed to call the police, but in the living room, her phone had been ripped out from the wall, the contact hanging loose.
The smell was getting stronger. Sulfur?
Rapid footsteps behind her. Erik, eyes wide.
“Get out of here! Now!”
He grabbed her arm a
nd pulled her through the hallway. She stumbled as she followed. They ran down the stairs, jumped the last steps. At the bottom, he threw himself against her and they fell as her apartment exploded, shaking the building, and sending a white puff of dust down the stairs.
A moment of silence. Then panic. Doors opened as her neighbors fled, running down the stairs, screaming as they passed the damage on the second floor.
Sirens. The police were on their way.
LAURA WAS STANDING with a blanket over her shoulders that a policeman had put there. The rain had stopped. The street was a stretch of blank wetness. The sky was dark blue. On the other side of the road, the windows of her apartment had been blown out, gaping holes in the night. There had been a brief, violent fire that the firemen had extinguished, but the sides of her windows were charred black, flames reaching out to grab at the bricks outside. There wouldn’t be much left inside. It all felt unreal. If Erik hadn’t pulled her out . . .
“The man,” she said to Erik.
“What?”
“While we were having a drink, a man came out of my apartment building.”
“I didn’t see.” He touched her cheek with a finger. “You’re bleeding.”
She shook her head. “How did you know? How did you know we had to leave?”
“I walked into your kitchen. The bomb was there, on the floor by the stove.”
“A bomb?” A policeman had come up to them.
“Yes,” Erik said. “At least I think so.”
“What did it look like?”
“A piece of pipe. There were wires going to an alarm clock. I thought . . .” He shrugged. “It looked like an explosive device to me.”
“There was a smell, too,” Laura said. “Sulfur.”
“A pipe bomb, perhaps,” the policeman said.
“My apartment had been burgled.”
“Anything missing?”
Laura thought about the jewelry on the floor, the television in the corner. All her belongings pulled out of drawers and cupboards.