The Historians

by Cecilia Ekbäck

“I’m glad you like it.”

  She bent her head as she ate and her ponytail fell over one shoulder, dipping beneath her collarbone.

  “You know what?” he said. “The other day, when I forgot my notebook and I came back for it, I saw Karl Schnurre leaving the building. Was he with you?”

  “No.” She frowned. “Of course not.” Then her face lit up. “Oh, I know what that must be,” she said eagerly. “I’m not allowed to tell you, but I will anyway. I bet you Schnurre paid a visit to the gentleman in the flat opposite you.”

  “To Mr. Enander? But he’s never here.”

  “Well, he must be here every now and then. Apparently, he travels back and forth to Germany. Sometimes, he brings things for Schnurre.”

  “Wow,” Jens said.

  “I know, right?”

  “How on earth do you know this?”

  “Ah. Here comes what you’re not supposed to know: Barbro has more than one boss, if you see what I mean. She said that we might notice a surveillance team, and if we do, it has to do with Mr. Enander.”

  So he had guessed correctly about Barbro.

  “I’m really surprised you know this. About her double role, I mean.”

  “I’m sure she wouldn’t have told me if I hadn’t figured it out. We’ve known each other for a long time. After a while, it became obvious. I asked her.”

  Kristina stood up to gather their plates from the table. She turned on the tap to let water pour into the sink, ponytail swaying down her back. She pulled the apron over her head and tied it around her narrow waist. “What was the business that came to a close today?” she asked, as she put the plates in the water and started to wash them. “If you can tell me, I mean.”

  He didn’t see why not. It wasn’t classified, after all. “A woman was killed last week in Uppsala and then, a few days later, there was a bomb in her friend’s flat here in Stockholm. Before she was murdered, she had sent me her thesis and I was worried that it had to do with me or the ministry in some way. But apparently it was a personal matter. A jilted lover.”

  “How did you find out?” she asked.

  “Sven came to tell me.”

  Kristina turned to face him. There was a wrinkle between her eyebrows. She wiped her hands on the apron. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Jens, but why do you think Sven is telling you things?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know you’re friends, but do you really trust him?”

  Jens couldn’t believe his ears. “I’ve known him for years. Yes, I trust him.”

  She nodded. “Okay. It’s just that I find him a little bit too keen to give you information. I wonder if he’s doing it to make sure you see things the same way he does.”

  She walked up beside him, put her hand on his shoulder and kissed the top of his head. “I’m only trying to look after you.”

  “I know,” he said and put his arm around her waist.

  He didn’t want to admit it, but there was something about the way Sven had come to find him tonight, to tell him not only about the ex-lover, but also about the missing phone calls and about the archivist’s illness, that jarred him. Why stand outside his door until he came home? Why not wait until tomorrow? It hadn’t been that urgent, had it? And why had he gone so far as to find out what had happened to Daniel Jonsson? It did seem over the top.

  But his friend was thorough. Sven would have felt awful about telling Jens something that wasn’t a hundred percent correct. He would have wanted to ensure he made it up to him.

  As he lay with Kristina in his arms that night, he found it hard to sleep. Daniel Jonsson had suffered from delusions, and he wished he had known, though he wasn’t sure what he could have done about it. The archivist had seemed a lonely figure—odd—but never delusional.

  He yawned. His arm was falling asleep and, carefully, he pulled it out from underneath Kristina’s neck. She stirred and twisted away from him onto her side. He turned to lie on his back and closed his eyes. There was something else he was supposed to remember, but he didn’t know what it was.

  24.

  Blackåsen Mountain

  The boys had agreed to meet with Notholm by the large river. Gunnar told his mother that he would stay at school and do his homework. Now, he regretted it. It would have been better if he had lied and said his mother needed him at home. But he had been scared Mr. Notholm would just come and find him. He shrugged to himself: Mr. Notholm was just a man—a respectable man, too. Owner of the town’s hotel. That thought didn’t make him feel any calmer, though. But Abraham’s cheeks were red. He really wanted this. And he was the oldest.

  There was the clop of hooves and Notholm entered the glade on a black horse.

  “There you are,” he said and smiled, but he didn’t get off his horse. “I have a mission for you.”

  Abraham raised his chin higher. His eyes gleamed.

  “I want you to catch me a hare,” Notholm said.

  “Bah!” Abraham answered. “Catching a hare isn’t hard.”

  “That’s true,” Notholm said. “All you need is the right bait.”

  Catching a hare was actually quite difficult, Gunnar thought. Hares could run as fast as a horse. But there were tricks. Though he was certain Mr. Notholm knew them himself.

  “I’ll come by this evening,” Notholm said. “Catch me a hare and you’ll get paid.” He turned his horse, as if to take off, then changed his mind and reined it in. “Oh, and I want it alive.”

  Alive. That was more problematic.

  The two boys discussed it after Notholm had left. They needed a trap that wouldn’t kill the animal.

  “A snare,” Gunnar said.

  “But we need to be able to set it off,” Abraham said. “To try to catch it by the legs, rather than the neck.”

  Abraham had some wire. Hares had habits; they knew this. There was still enough snow to find tracks. It took them a good hour before Abraham shouted that he’d found some.

  They followed the animal’s trail until they came to a kind of tunnel in the undergrowth. A couple of sticks and a few rocks created a channel that the animal had already passed through several times. That was where they set their snare, using buds and berries for bait.

  Then they waited. They took turns lying near the snare. The other stayed in the glade, so as not to disturb the process. Waiting grew tiresome, but they tried to stay vigilant. To hear it come. To pull the wire just at the right time.

  “We’ll never make it,” Abraham said in the late afternoon as they swapped places yet again.

  Gunnar shrugged. You couldn’t force these things; you had to be patient.

  “What if we try to find its den?” Abraham suggested.

  “Won’t work,” Gunnar said. “It’ll hear us long before we find it.”

  Abraham kicked a stone.

  Gunnar went to lie down. It was warm. The sun was still standing high and he could see the remaining snow melting, becoming a translucent blue. Sometimes larger pieces fell from the overhead branches with a faint scrunching.

  He could feel himself doze off and shook his head to stay awake.

  Then he saw it. The hare. It came jumping on the path, just as they had imagined. A wiry white animal with long legs and long ears. A meter away it stopped, its nose quivering. Perhaps it had sensed him. Come on, he willed it. Come on.

  The hare hesitated but then continued forward, leisurely jumping. Gunnar held his breath. One jump. Two. Three . . .

  He pulled the snare.

  “Yes! I got it!”

  Abraham came running. The hare was on the ground, its hind legs caught in the metal snare. It was struggling to get free. Gunnar put a foot on its neck to hold it down. The wire had cut through its skin and there was blood on the white fur, but its legs were unbroken.

  “Good job,” Abraham said.

  Gunnar felt himself beam.

  They relaxed. Having tied up the hare, they sat down in the glade again, chatting and mucking about as usual.

 
It was early evening when the clop of a horse’s hooves approached again. They rose and got ready.

  When Notholm entered the glade, Abraham held the hare up—like an offering, Gunnar thought. He held its front legs in his left hand, back legs in his right. The animal was bouncing its body, trying to get loose.

  “You did it,” Notholm said. “Well done. Alive, too. Now, can you kill it?”

  “Of course.” In one swift movement, Abraham laid the animal down, grabbed the stick he had prepared and placed it over the hare’s neck. He stepped on one side of the stick, and then the other, pulling the hare’s body upward by the hind legs.

  There would be a small pop, Gunnar knew. You would be able to feel the neck bones give in your hand. But it was quick, relatively pain-free for the animal and didn’t damage the fur. Their parents had taught them.

  The animal was shuddering. It was already dead; this was just the body moving.

  They looked up and found Notholm frowning.

  “Now, where was the fun in that?” he said.

  Beside Gunnar, Abraham’s mouth was half-open.

  “No,” Notholm said. “This is how it’s done.”

  He turned on his horse and opened his satchel. Inside it was another hare, its legs also bound—but alive. Still alive.

  Gunnar held his breath. His stomach clenched.

  Notholm took out his knife. He held the animal up and slit its side. A small cut, the ripping of tearing cloth. The animal began to bleed. Notholm held it up in the air. Blood was leaching down his bare arm, dripping onto the ground. The hare was writhing in pain. Thrashing. Notholm laughed. Then he brought the animal back down and, holding its face with one hand, he cut off the hare’s nose.

  Gunnar’s knees softened. He was going to faint.

  And the animal screamed. Its shriek was piercing; as loud and as human as that of a baby. Gunnar wanted to cover his ears. He couldn’t stand it. He’d never known hares could scream.

  25.

  Laura

  There were three addresses on the paper Wallenberg had given Laura. She had them and the police report in her hand.

  “I’ll do the most difficult one first,” she promised herself. But they were all difficult. “I’ll do the most revolting one first,” she decided.

  Sven Olov Lindholm, the head of the SSS, could, at the moment, be found in an apartment on Fleminggatan in Stockholm, Wallenberg had said.

  Since Jens’s visit, she’d been trying to puzzle it together. If Britta had been a swallow, seeing Sven Olov Lindholm could have been part of the work she did for the C-Bureau. Laura liked the idea that Britta had been spying on him. Perhaps trying to find out more about their plans for the Easter meetup. Perhaps Sven Olov had found out. Perhaps he was the one who’d killed her.

  The thought went through her head that she ought to leave this to those who knew how to investigate. But then she thought about the visit from the Security Services and about commitment.

  She found the house, an older apartment building, and rang the doorbell.

  “Yes?” A woman’s voice.

  “I’d like to speak with Sven Olov Lindholm,” Laura said.

  “Who’s asking?”

  “Britta Hallberg,” Laura said.

  The door clicked open. Laura’s heart sank. She would far rather they had asked, “Who?” She walked up the stairs and an apartment door opened on a floor above her.

  “Up here,” a man said.

  She turned the corner. Sven Olov; blond hair, blue eyes. Very Aryan. She scoffed. He could have been good-looking if it weren’t for his nose leaning slightly one way and his mouth slightly the other. And if it wasn’t for the arrogance, which was all over his lifted chin, the curved eyebrows and in the way he leaned with one arm raised against the doorframe. He did not seem like a person who’d just heard an acquaintance had come back from the dead.

  “You’re not Britta,” he said.

  “No. Britta is dead.”

  He stirred. “Dead?”

  She nodded.

  “How?”

  “She was murdered.”

  Sven Olov stood tall. He looked behind her as if he thought she might be followed. “I have nothing to say to you,” he muttered and turned away.

  “I’m Laura Dahlgren. I work with Wallenberg.” She raised her voice. “I negotiate with Germany. I have good connections with the same people you do.”

  He had stopped. “How did you find me?”

  “Wallenberg himself gave me the address.”

  Sven Olov pursed his lips.

  “Nobody else knows. And anything you tell me stays with me,” she said.

  THEY SAT DOWN in the kitchen. The room looked tired; the laminated cupboard doors had once been a bright green, but bumps and dents had made the paint crack. The walls were brown stone. The lampshade hanging from the ceiling was knitted with tassels. It must have been white in the beginning, but now it was a light gray. He put out an ashtray and they both lit cigarettes. She could hear low voices from inside the apartment. The woman. Other people, too.

  “Why are you here?” he asked.

  “She was my best friend. Someone said you had coffee together not long before she died.”

  “Who?”

  “Britta had told another good friend of hers she was meeting you.” She tried smiling, thought of Andreas and how he had gone missing.

  He was frowning. “How did she die?”

  Did he already know? She didn’t think so. His reaction in the stairwell had seemed genuine.

  “She was shot,” Laura said.

  He exhaled; a slow long breath.

  “Communists,” he said then. In contrast to his first reaction, this one didn’t sound genuine. He was looking past her as he spoke.

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Uppsala is totally infested with them. Them, Jews and Norwegian criminals.”

  His lips curled, and even though she tried not to react, her stomach clenched.

  “Why did you two meet up?”

  He turned to look at her. He was weighing up whether to tell her or not, she guessed. But the Wallenberg name had opened doors. “It was quite an interesting conversation,” he said. “This is why I remember her. Otherwise, it’s hard, as I meet a lot of young women.”

  She forced another smile.

  “She wanted to know what our links were with the State Institute for Racial Biology in Uppsala. If we ever did any work together.”

  This was the last thing Laura would have expected.

  “Work?” she asked. “What kind of work?”

  “That’s what I asked. I know, of course, about the racial studies they do—you know, the skull measurements and so on. She asked if we took an active involvement in that, or any similar project, and I said no. Our battle is the political one. The science is already clear.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She insisted. She said that there was an organization that was working with the State Institute and how could I not be aware of it if I was the head of the Nazi party?” He scoffed at the memory.

  “And then what?”

  “Nothing.” He shrugged, but his eyes wavered.

  “You set her off on a trail, didn’t you?”

  He remained silent.

  “She was tortured before she died,” Laura said. “Whatever you know, you need to tell me.”

  He leaned forward. “You have no idea what you are getting yourself into,” he said quietly.

  “Tell me,” she insisted. “No one will ever know it came from you.”

  “I want you to leave now.” He rose.

  “But . . .”

  “Leave!” he yelled. There were footsteps from the bedroom and another man showed up.

  “Please show her the door,” Sven Olov said.

  “My name is Laura Dahlgren,” she shouted as she was pushed out of the apartment. “You can find me. When you’re ready to talk!”

  SHE NEEDED TO think. She walked down Fleminggatan and
sat down at the first café she found and ordered a tea. Another woman sat alone at a table, too, and their eyes met briefly; a small sensation of recognition. Not many women went to cafés on their own.

  The State Institute for Racial Biology. Why would Britta have asked about that? And what kind of “work” was she asking about? This did not sound like spying on Germany—this was a Swedish institution.

  She thought more about Sven Olov Lindholm. Once, the Nazi parties had been taken seriously. Racial biology was the way forward. A strong people, a powerful nation, eugenic experiments . . . Freud, Nietzsche, Darwin, their own Carl von Linné had all had thoughts on the matter.

  Her group of friends had been seduced, too. She remembered a nachspiel discussing “the elite.” At the time, they had all agreed that it was the right and responsibility of better placed people to lead; most people were ignorant, and ability was not distributed equably. Though they had disagreed on what “better placed” meant. It had gotten heated. She remembered both Erik and Matti shouting; Erik completely refusing the notion that ancestry had any bearing on it and Matti screaming that a lineage ensured high intellect and special skills.

  “Better people, better ideas,” Professor Lindahl had said. “What about nations?”

  And they’d been right back at the subject of race, Laura thought.

  “Why would it matter where you were born?” Britta asked.

  “Isn’t that what you’re arguing, though; that it does matter where and to whom you’re born? That everyone is not equal?”

  Yes, they had been seduced.

  Then stories began to emerge from Germany about what was going on with the Jews. Svenska Dagbladet had published several reports about missing Jews, thousands of them: Emil Persson himself had authored a few. The Swedish government had kept quiet, but the right-wing upswing had stopped in its tracks. The Swedish Nazi parties were shown in their true colors: a bunch of petty lawbreakers who bullied and tried to provoke fights.

  Sven Olov Lindholm had told Britta something. Britta would have charmed him. She would have managed to get answers out of him. Now he was scared.

  Their kind only understood one language, she thought. Like most groups. The Germans with whom they negotiated, for one. They understood the language of power. If you were weak, you were trampled over, but if you were strong, you had a chance. Early on, one of the Germans in their negotiating committee had been interested in her on a personal level. He had tried to get her to have dinner with him and grew more and more annoyed with her refusals. He’d begun to wait for her outside the meeting rooms, Wallenberg raising a warning eyebrow. Then, one night, the German had been outside her hotel room. He’d grabbed her, tried to have his way with her.