The Historians

by Cecilia Ekbäck

  “Actually, I do. I remember it well because he says it was the pinnacle of his career when the foreign ministers all stayed there, and everything went well. Harald Lagerheim. He was in charge of guest relations at the hotel.”

  Jens unfolded the note that was on his desk. Harald Lagerheim. Jim Becker. Who on earth had put it there?

  “Would you know of a Jim Becker?” he asked.

  “I do know one Jim Becker, yes.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Former Security Services. He was let go a couple of years back. It’s a sad story . . . He used to be an expert on explosives. Then his daughter died in a car accident, if I remember correctly. He was never the same after that.”

  “And what about the name Rebecka?”

  Artur laughed. “There are many Rebeckas, Jens.”

  “Is Harald Lagerheim still alive?”

  “Yes, he lives here in Stockholm. He moved here after his retirement. We play bridge together.”

  “Could you please introduce me? Send me with your warmest recommendations?”

  “Not a problem at all.”

  “Ask him if I can come tonight.”

  30.

  Blackåsen Mountain

  The foreman sat for a long time after the director’s visit. He’d always been of the view that whatever happened on the mountain stayed on the mountain. There was very little the people in Stockholm needed to know. They got their iron. They didn’t need to get involved. Never needed to know about the conflicts, the technical difficulties, the worker issues . . . He had never ratted on anyone: not even when they had that alcoholic director. It was like a code of honor. His code of honor.

  But he had made a promise.

  He rose to look out the window. Men walking, carrying, lifting, their clothes black and faces sooty. He knew the sound to be deafening but he was so used to it now, he didn’t seem to hear it any longer.

  Blackåsen mine. His mine.

  Sandler wasn’t the worst director Hallberg had seen—many had come and gone. He was young. Young and ambitious. In his mind, the foreman likened the directors to peacocks. He had seen one in the royal park once, parading about, flaunting its tail feathers. These young men were well educated; quickly promoted. They knew all the right words. They could talk about the work as if they knew it firsthand. But they’d never actually worked the mine, didn’t know how she breathed, what she responded to, how to make her give up her riches, when she’d turn on you and defend herself. They had no clue. For them it was all calculations on paper. For him and his men, it was life and death. If you didn’t listen to the mine, made one wrong decision—that was that.

  He walked back to the desk and sat down heavily. He pulled out one of the drawers and rummaged through it until he found what he was looking for at the far back. A once white card with a phone number.

  Of course, he, too, had wondered what those men were up to on the other side of the mountain. Like he’d told the director, it had been going on for over a decade. Finally, a few years back, his curiosity won out. They had built another corridor into the mountain—he’d been to see it from a distance. He’d seen them carry boxes inside. He guessed it had to do with weapons. He thought they were experimenting, trying out something new.

  When they’d found Georg’s body, he’d wondered if, for some reason, the man had gone that way. Gone too far.

  But these people didn’t kill.

  “If anyone ever asks too many questions,” the man from Stockholm had told him, “you call this number and let us know. If anyone persists and won’t let it be . . .”

  He’d taken the card, this very card. He still remembered it looking small and crisp white in his hand—he’d been worried he’d soil it when the man was looking. The man had been dressed in a black suit with a white shirt—so white as if the grime from the mine couldn’t touch him.

  He’d nodded.

  “No matter if it happens twenty or thirty years from now, you call.”

  He had nodded again.

  “It’s vital for Sweden.”

  He had sworn he would.

  And he felt they had paid him back. He had held on to his job all this time. And when his daughter had proven to have a good head, they had offered her a university education. The former director had made out that the money came from him, but the foreman had known—had felt—that it came from this man—or men—in their black suits and white shirts in Stockholm. They were rewarding him for his loyalty.

  He looked at the card again and felt his chest tighten. What happened on the mountain stayed on the mountain. But he had sworn . . .

  He lifted the telephone receiver and dialed the number.

  “My name is Hallberg,” he said. “I am the foreman at the Blackåsen iron mine . . .”

  When he hung up, he felt sick. He had set something in motion. Something that couldn’t be stopped.

  31.

  Laura

  She had agreed to meet Karl-Henrik at his apartment. Laura had not told him the others weren’t coming. Up to the last minute, she had hoped Erik would call and say he had changed his mind, but he didn’t. She couldn’t believe he didn’t want to get involved.

  She knocked on the door. She waited a while and then Karl-Henrik opened it.

  “Welcome,” he said with his new voice and used his crutches to move backward in the small hallway. He moved slowly down the corridor, and she followed him.

  In the living room were a quiet Erik and an equally quiet Matti. She stopped abruptly, hardly believing her eyes.

  Matti rose. “Red or white?” he asked.

  Laura was reeling. They were here! They had come through for Britta. She could feel her eyes prickle.

  “Red,” Erik said. “She was always red.”

  “Actually, to be precise, she was always whiskey,” Matti said.

  Erik’s face tightened. Had he ever said sorry to Matti for what happened? She didn’t think so.

  “Red is fine,” she said quickly. Matti poured her a glass.

  “Our Finnish friend here is in a hurry,” Erik said. “He has to go back to support the German war effort, so we’d better get down to business straight away.”

  If only he could just shut up, Laura thought. There was no need to make things worse. But that was Erik’s default position when he felt uncomfortable: attack.

  Matti raised his chin. “Finland is fighting a separate war. We’re defending ourselves against Russian aggression. We have no political commitments to Germany.”

  “You’re fighting with them!” Erik banged the table in front of him with his fist. “Side by side. You’re collaborating with the fucking Nazis.”

  “I’m not sure the Danes were any better,” Matti said. “How long did you resist the invasion? Oh yes, you didn’t. I saw the film.”

  There had been a newsreel: Danish policemen greeting the Germans, handing over their weapons, smiling, chatting. Laura, too, had seen it, during a lunch break.

  “We’re just taking back what was stolen from us,” Matti said.

  Laura glanced at Karl-Henrik. He was the one who had lost the most. His face was blank, revealing nothing.

  “Matti . . . Erik . . .” Laura’s voice sounded frail to her own ears. “Please, not the war. We won’t agree on anything related to it. Can we not talk about it? For Britta’s sake?”

  “You’re asking the impossible,” Erik said. “The war is omnipresent.”

  Matti nodded. On this, they were of the same mind.

  “Please?” she said.

  There was a pause then Matti asked, “So what do you have?”

  “Her autopsy report.” Laura took out the document Wallenberg had given her. “The table of contents of her thesis, which she sent to a person in Foreign Affairs. A conversation . . .” She told them what Sven Olov Lindholm had said—that the State Institute for Racial Biology was undertaking a project. She told them about asking her questions and about the subsequent bomb in her flat.

  “Who did she send
her thesis to?” Erik asked.

  “The foreign minister’s secretary,” Laura said. “He’d been invited to a nachspiel: that’s how they met.”

  The nachspiele. They fell silent. The best of times, Laura thought.

  “Andreas was with you when you found her?” Matti was flipping through the autopsy report. He made a face, and Laura had to look away at the sight of the photos. She nodded.

  “He was the one who alerted me that she was missing. He disappeared soon afterward. I think he was frightened.”

  Matti held out the autopsy report to Erik. Erik shook his head.

  “And the table of contents of her thesis?”

  Laura took out the paper she had brought with her. “The title of Britta’s thesis was Nordic Relations Through the Ages: Denmark, Norway and Sweden on a New Path. And here are the headings.” She passed the paper to Erik.

  “Bah,” Erik snorted. “Anything can be lurking behind a chapter title. We know that. Why didn’t she send him the whole thing?”

  “She did. Unfortunately, he threw it out.”

  “What a jerk.”

  Laura could feel herself bristling. “It was sent to him cold, without a note. He had no idea why and threw it out. That’s not strange, is it?”

  Was she defending Jens? She surprised herself.

  Laura cleared her throat. “I’m assuming Britta didn’t have time to finish it. There’s no conclusion . . .”

  “Well,” Karl-Henrik said, “the first chapter must have been about the various constellations our countries have lived through throughout the years: the Kalmar Union where Denmark, Norway and Sweden found themselves under one king; Norway’s union with Denmark, then Norway’s with Sweden . . .”

  “Scandinavia only,” Matti said. “Finland is nowhere in her thesis, even though Finland was in a union with Sweden longer than anyone else. And at the meeting in 1939, it wasn’t just the three Scandinavian kings—Finland participated, too, if only to have our request for support against the Soviet Union rejected by the rest of you.”

  Matti’s face looked ugly with bitterness. Laura understood. It was personal. Their project as students, and what happened after, and the refusal of Sweden to help when Finland had been threatened by the Soviet Union. A month later, the Soviet Union bombed Helsinki and began the Winter War.

  “A New Way,” Karl-Henrik continued. “That could be about anything. So much changed during the 1800s.”

  “But mustn’t it be linked to the unions?” Matti said.

  “Perhaps only by its impact on them.” Karl-Henrik shrugged.

  “What if they were planning to reunite?” Laura asked.

  Karl-Henrik shrugged again. “We don’t know this.”

  “A New Threat,” Laura said. “Hitler?”

  “Could be.” Matti shrugged. “Or it could be a threat to this “New Way”—whatever that is—mentioned in the previous chapter.”

  “Why on earth does she have a section on the Reich in there?” Laura asked.

  “Well, Hitler is in charge of two of the three countries currently,” Karl-Henrik said.

  “Some would say all three,” Matti muttered.

  “And why so early in the thesis, ahead of ‘A New Way’? Ahead of ‘A New Threat’?”

  They fell silent, staring at the headings before them.

  “It’s pointless,” Erik said. “We’re just guessing.”

  He was right.

  “I wonder,” said Laura, giving voice to what she had thought when she met Sven Olov Lindholm, “if she came upon this—whatever it was—during her research and then wrote about it? Or whether someone told her something and she started researching after the fact? Jens, the foreign ministry’s secretary, said Britta was a swallow.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Basically, a spy. A young woman who involves herself with foreigners in Sweden—important people—to gather information.”

  The room fell silent.

  “Would she have done that?” Erik asked.

  “She hated the Germans,” Karl-Henrik said. His eyes glistened. “She would have done anything to fight them.”

  She had hated them. Or, rather, what they did.

  “Then it’s likely that this has to do with something she found out through that work,” Erik said.

  “Can we retrace her steps?” Matti asked.

  “Or we could begin with what Lindholm told you,” Karl-Henrik said, “and approach the State Institute for Racial Biology. Perhaps it is all about race.”

  “What project about race would merit killing Britta?” Erik asked. “Racial projects are no secret. They’re approved by the government: just look at the sterilization of the feebleminded.”

  Laura shrugged. “Lindholm said the project was deemed crucial for Sweden’s future, and that rumor had it that the people involved would stop at nothing.”

  They fell silent.

  Karl-Henrik was frowning.

  “What are you thinking?” Laura asked.

  “I can’t see Britta writing a thesis about the unions without including the Sami,” Karl-Henrik said. “She was passionate about their rights.”

  “The Sami . . . Andreas is Sami,” Laura said.

  Karl-Henrik shrugged. They fell silent.

  “What about our project?” Laura said.

  “Oh, don’t go there,” Erik scoffed.

  “But what if it has something to do with Britta’s death? Ultimately, they both dealt with race.”

  “It’s the concern of the times,” Erik said. “It was only natural that we would pick that domain for our project. But you can clearly see that hers is totally different.”

  Matti rose. “I’m pressed for time. We’re leaving tonight, but we’ll be back here in Sweden in two weeks. I can meet you then.”

  Erik’s face was scornful.

  “Who would know about a race project involving the highest levels of society?” Matti asked, as he pulled on his gloves.

  Laura thought of Jens. “I might know someone who could find out.”

  “Who would know more about her work as a swallow?”

  “Perhaps the same person,” Laura said.

  “We should look into what organizations the State Institute for Racial Biology has links with,” Karl-Henrik suggested. “I can do that. I have time.”

  “I’ll help you,” Erik said.

  “I need to leave,” Matti said. “But I’ll be in touch. If it is like Lindholm says, we’re all putting ourselves at risk.”

  His face was serious. He looked old. The war beat it out of you, Laura thought. All that mischief and jokes, all gone.

  Erik rose. “I’m leaving too. Laura?”

  “In a minute,” she said.

  He nodded, and they said goodbye.

  “How did you get them here?” she asked Karl-Henrik, once they were gone.

  Karl-Henrik smiled and even though his face twisted sideways, his eyes were the same gentle eyes. “I thought they might refuse. It’s harder to say no to a victim.”

  She smiled. She wanted to put her hand on his cheek but wasn’t sure he’d let her. She wanted to say something kind.

  “I remember when you used to come at night to the apartment,” she said. “I never told you, but I felt good knowing you were there in the library.”

  Karl-Henrik frowned. “I never came to your apartment at night.”

  Laura felt a rush of fear. “It wasn’t you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then who was it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  She thought of the nightly footsteps, the full ashtrays, the empty whiskey glasses. She felt scared, even though it was a long time ago.

  “Why would you think it was me?” he asked.

  Yes, why would she? What on earth had possessed her to believe she knew what Karl-Henrik needed and then not speak to him about it?

  Someone, perhaps a stranger, had been in her home at night a few times every week and she had no idea who.

&nbs
p; 32.

  Jens

  Harald Lagerheim proved to be Artur’s opposite in many ways. Whereas Artur was a large, jovial man, Harald was bony and hunched over. Artur was friendly and generous. Harald seemed wary, his eyes narrow, his mouth a thin line.

  “I’m Jens Regnell.”

  “Yes, Artur called. He told me you would come.”

  “May I come in?” Jens asked when Harald made no sign of inviting him.

  Harald moved backward, and Jens followed. In the kitchen, Harald pointed to a chair and Jens sat. The apartment was small and painted brown. The kitchen seemed unused; perhaps Harald didn’t cook. Jens would have expected the home of someone in guest relations to look more cared for, with greater attention to detail. The other man remained standing, leaning against the kitchen counter with his arms crossed.

  “I work for Foreign Affairs.” Jens leaned forward, hands open, trying to make a connection.

  “Artur said.”

  “We’re updating our files from the three kings’ meeting that took place at the Hotel Kramer in Malmö in 1914. You were the manager of guest relations then?”

  Harald didn’t respond.

  “Do you remember it?”

  “Of course I remember it.”

  “This is going to sound strange, but do you know if there were any other discussions between the foreign ministers in addition to them drafting the announcement?”

  “How would I know that?” Harald sounded affronted. “Their meeting was held in the utmost secrecy. None of my staff was privy to it or would have tried to guess what was going on. The Hotel Kramer is a respectable institution.”

  Jens hesitated.

  “Sometimes things are just known: people overhear things, notice things . . .”

  Harald scoffed. “Other places, perhaps. Not at the Hotel Kramer.” He pushed off from the kitchen counter. The meeting was over. Jens rose.

  “So how many of you are going to come?” Harald asked in the hallway.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re the second one to ask me these questions. How many of you will there be?”