The Last Pilgrim
Page 1
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2013 Gard Sveen
Translation copyright © 2016 Steven T. Murray
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Previously published as Den siste pilgrimen by Vigmostad og Bjørke in 2013 in Norway. Translated from Norwegian by Steven T. Murray. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2016.
Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503937116
ISBN-10: 1503937119
Cover design by David Drummond
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
CHAPTER 65
CHAPTER 66
CHAPTER 67
CHAPTER 68
CHAPTER 69
CHAPTER 70
CHAPTER 71
CHAPTER 72
CHAPTER 73
CHAPTER 74
CHAPTER 75
CHAPTER 76
CHAPTER 77
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
PROLOGUE
Whitsunday, June 8, 2003
Carl Oscar Krogh’s Residence
Dr. Holms Vei
Oslo, Norway
Only when she had parked in front of the large timbered house did the young housekeeper realize that the gate up by the road had not been closed. Even so, she remained sitting in her car for almost a minute to finish listening to a song on the radio. As the song faded out she turned off the radio, got out of the car, and looked back up the paved driveway.
The wrought-iron gate stood wide open, and she hadn’t opened it when she drove in.
It’s never left open, she thought.
One thing she’d learned after almost a year of having Carl Oscar Krogh on her client list was that he was a stickler on that point. The first question he’d asked her when she arrived was whether she’d remembered to close the gate behind her. And the same reminder was always repeated as she left for the day: “You must remember to close the gate behind you.”
And the dog, she thought. Where’s the dog?
The frisky English setter, which still scared her a little, hadn’t barked or yanked on its chain in the backyard. The dog always made its presence known, excited to go out for the day’s long walk as soon as she got out of her car.
The housekeeper turned toward the house. She slammed the car door, a little too hard. The metallic thunk rang in her ears before everything went quiet around her, quieter than before. And so much warmer, she thought. The sudden heat wave that had descended upon the city yesterday no longer seemed pleasant, but unbearable.
After she had rung the doorbell twice, there was no longer any doubt.
Something was wrong.
She had a creepy feeling that somebody had quite recently—only a few minutes ago—stood on the stairs just as she was now. Someone who didn’t belong there.
She rang the doorbell again.
“Herr Krogh,” she called out. “Carl Oscar?”
Finally she put her hand on the heavy door handle. Locked. As she turned around, she silently cursed this huge, lonely property and the tall spruce trees forming a windbreak that blocked any view from outside. It was as though she was all alone in the world. Not a soul would hear her if she shouted.
She walked slowly around the side of the house. She stopped at the kitchen window, put her hands on the windowpane, and peered inside. Empty. Then she continued past the library down the flagstone path that led to the terrace in the rear. She moved cautiously, trying to make as little noise as possible. When she was three feet from the corner of the house, she stopped and ran her hand along the corner beam, which was warm from the blazing sun. Normally she would have waved off the bugs buzzing in front of her face, but now she didn’t even notice them. She was concentrating on staring straight ahead, which somehow calmed her. She scarcely noticed the city spread out far below and the zigzag pattern of white boats as they silently sliced across the fjord.
She rounded the corner of the house and noticed the white curtains billowing out of the terrace doorway.
Something flickered at the edge of her field of vision, something on the flagstones by the lawn furniture. A pool of red fanned out beneath the dead body of the dog. The black-and-white spotted throat gaped up at her. The blood looked as though it had hardly begun to congeal.
She considered running back to her car, but her legs propelled her toward the terrace.
As she moved slowly toward the billowing curtains, she silently prayed to God to watch over her.
She sidestepped the dead dog and entered the living room. In the middle of the floor lay what had once been Carl Oscar Krogh. Even his eyes were gone, chopped up like jellyfish.
How could they? she thought. How could anyone do such a thing to another human being?
CHAPTER 1
Monday, May 28, 1945
Jørstadmoen POW Camp
Former Stalag 303
Lillehammer, Norway
Captain Kaj Holt of the Norwegian Resistance movement Milorg stopped at the parade ground. He studied the barracks arranged in front of him for a moment. Then he turned around and looked toward the gate through which he had entered, as though to assure himself that it wasn’t too late to turn back.
Wasn’t it true that you should never ask a question if you didn’t want to know the answer? Maybe it was best not to know and instead resign yourself to the way things were, as normal people did, and get on with your life. The only problem was that he no longer had any life to get on with. The war would not let him go.
“It would’ve been best if they’d caught
you too,” said Kaj Holt quietly to himself. That was what his wife had said.
A few minutes later, he had simply walked out the door, abandoning everything that had kept him alive for the past five years: his wife, his child, all of it. The first night he slept outside had felt like liberation.
He shook off the memories and pulled out the interrogation orders from the side pocket of his uniform jacket. He spread out the paper and read the words he himself had entered into the blanks on the form. Hauptsturmführer Peter Waldhorst. Security Police (SIPO) Division IV. Foreign Service Post Lillehammer. At the bottom of the page was Holt’s own signature. Although a handful of people knew that he was in Lillehammer, no one knew why he was there. That was best for the time being. Not many people knew that a group of German officers had been transferred to this camp, which still housed a large number of Soviet prisoners of war.
Division IV, he thought. The Gestapo’s official name sounded innocent enough. So typically German to create a hell concealed by bureaucracy.
From farther up the valley came a powerful crash of thunder, unusual for late spring in Norway.
Kaj Holt carefully folded up the interrogation orders and put them back in his pocket. The heavy rain had already begun to soak through his uniform. He jogged toward the building in front of him, but instead of going inside he stopped on the steps under the eaves, wanting to postpone everything for a few more minutes. He fished out a Swedish cigarette from his breast pocket; soon almost everything he owned would be Swedish. The nicotine calmed him down, slowing his pulse, which had been pumping hard since he came through the gate.
Like a deluge, Kaj Holt thought as he watched the torrents of water striking the hill and ricocheting back into the air, frothing and foaming. The sight reminded him that the Creator Himself had once wanted to drown them all for their sins, because no one, absolutely no one, was free of sin. Holt himself had killed people who still, even after it was all over, haunted him every night: young people, old people, parents, even a young mother who was only nineteen years old. Her baby had begun to scream as soon as Holt started down the stairs. He could still hear the crying through the flimsy door and down the stairwell; he could still see the baby lying alone in its crib, while the mother, still a child herself, lay in a pool of blood in the hall.
No one is free of guilt.
Isn’t that the truth? he thought. He ought to jot it down on a scrap of paper and save it with all the other scraps he’d scribbled on over the last five years, saving them for what he imagined would become his memoirs, assuming anyone cared. If he even made it out alive—wasn’t that what he’d been thinking? And had he really left without taking all those notes with him? The thought hadn’t occurred to him until now. He had to get hold of those notes. He hadn’t planned that far ahead when he’d simply walked out on his wife and child and vanished out of their lives ten days ago, on the seventeenth of May too, the first Independence Day celebrated in freedom since 1939. He’d hidden the notes in a shoe box and put the box in an old “America trunk” full of discarded clothes in the attic of what had once been his home. And that was where all that stuff would remain if he never returned home.
Holt gave a start at the sudden sound of a jeep rounding the corner at terrific speed. It ground to a halt right in front of the stairs where he was standing. The young American driver leaned his head back, lost in his own world, as he chewed his gum.
When Kaj Holt had almost finished his cigarette, the door next to him opened. Two men stepped out and stopped short; they obviously hadn’t noticed the sudden change in the weather. One was American, a captain like Holt himself, and the other was in civvies. The civilian bumped into Holt as they passed and muttered “sorry” in Swedish. The American captain gave Holt a brusque nod before they went down the steps. The captain said “Get back in” when the driver jumped out to open the door on the passenger side. The civilian, who had a remarkably childish face, turned to give Holt a long look before he got in the car. A smile seemed to tug at his lips beneath the wet brim of his hat.
Holt watched the car as it vanished among the trees; he had a feeling he’d seen that childish face somewhere before. No, he thought. He must be imagining things. Usually he would have reacted to the fact that a Swedish civilian was here with an American officer, but today he thought no more about it. The liberation of Norway had created such chaos that almost nothing surprised him anymore.
He dropped the cigarette on the ground and turned around. The German imperial eagle above the wheel with the swastika inside was still imprinted on the wired glass of the entry door. The sight gave him a momentary jolt, and he stopped with his hand on the door handle.
The hair of the British lieutenant seated behind the improvised counter was thick, black, and shiny. He looked as if he’d sat behind a desk for the duration of the war and now had emerged to take over the country from the Germans. Beside him stood an armed British MP with a supercilious look on his face. The Englishmen had been here less than a month, but they acted like they owned the country, as did the Americans. He didn’t especially like the Yanks, but it was the English for whom he’d developed an odd distaste. They didn’t feel a need to proclaim to all the world that they were the victors—they just assumed everybody knew it. If anyone had told this to Kaj Holt just a few weeks ago—that he’d end up wishing the damned Brits would go home—well, he would have thought they were out of their minds. As crazy as a person got from lying mutely under the floorboards of a little girl’s room in an apartment on Valkyriegata in Oslo while listening to the Gestapo breathing across the room.
Holt pulled the interrogation orders out of his jacket pocket. A corner of the paper had gotten wet and ripped a bit. The British officer took the paper but kept his eyes fixed on Holt, as if he were some kind of idiot. Then he sighed in resignation and smoothed out the sheet of paper. Holt chewed on the insides of his cheeks, suppressing a stupid remark about the English. The lieutenant signed his initials and handed the orders back to him. A British MP corporal strode ahead of him down the basement stairs. A musty smell hovered over the dark basement corridor, causing Holt to gasp for air.
A young Milorg soldier was standing guard outside the room where Peter Waldhorst was being held. The young man snapped to attention, but Holt waved his hand dismissively, then grunted a few words to the corporal and watched him retreat the same way he had come. Holt turned around. The stairway at that end of the basement had been blocked off with wide, rough planks. He ran his hand through his hair and tried to ignore the fact that he was underground—confined in a dark, damp basement with only one way out—but the slight trembling of his hand gave him away.
He brushed past the Milorg youth and reached for the door handle. The light from the narrow basement window hurt his eyes, the stench assaulting him, and for a moment he couldn’t see what was in the room. After a few seconds he made out the contours of a man lying curled up in the corner by the window.
Holt stopped in the doorway, noting the surprise, even astonishment he felt at seeing a German lying on a rough concrete floor. He’d been beaten severely.
He glanced over at the young Milorg soldier, who was fiddling with the barrel of the Schmeisser MP 40 submachine gun he held in front of his chest. Holt noticed that his eyes had a panicked expression and his face was pale. The boy finally left, closing the door behind him.
When the German heard footsteps coming across the floor and drowning out the sound of the rain outside, he put his hands over his head, slowly. Clearly that was as fast as he could manage. One arm seemed to be painfully stiff. It was dark in the corner and hard to see clearly, but the German seemed to be weeping. Yep, no doubt about it. You devil, he thought. You’re a damned bastard who deserves every single kick you get. A moment later, his anger vanished, and Holt cursed himself for such thoughts.
“Hauptsturmführer Waldhorst?” he said quietly.
The German didn’t reply. He kept his hands over his head. If he covered his chest or groin, they
would kick him in the head. And then he would definitely end up dead.
“Peter Waldhorst?”
A sound. A kind of yes.
“Möchten Sie nach Hause fahren?” Holt asked. Do you want to go home?
Peter Waldhorst gave a low laugh.
“I’m probably not going anywhere.”
“I have enough contacts to get you home,” said Holt. He wasn’t sure whether that was true. But Waldhorst didn’t have to know that. If the situation was bad enough, he would be shot.
Kaj Holt repeated the question that no one in Peter Waldhorst’s condition could resist.
“Do you want to go home?”
There was a long pause. The sound of the rain on the basement window had decreased somewhat, as though the clouds were about to lift.
“I have a little daughter,” said Waldhorst at last.
“Don’t we all have a little daughter?” said Holt.
“I’ve seen her only once.”
The rain began hammering on the little basement window again.
“Who are you?” Waldhorst asked.
Holt didn’t answer. The raw stench of the cellar threatened to overpower him for a few seconds, making him feel as though he were back under the floorboards on Valkyriegata. He dug his nails into his palm.
“Tell me who you are,” said Waldhorst again, this time in perfect Norwegian. Kaj Holt froze. For some reason he couldn’t stand hearing Germans speak Norwegian, especially when they spoke it as well as Waldhorst did. It was as if these Germans wanted to say, “We are like you, and you are like us, so let’s lay down our weapons and live as brothers.”
“Holt. Kaj Holt.”
Waldhorst made a sound.
“The man the angels protected,” he said in a low voice. “So that’s what you look like.”
Holt had heard that the Germans had nicknamed him the Angel. It didn’t matter. He didn’t believe in angels; he didn’t even believe in himself any longer. The Germans had tried to rip him apart for a week before they suddenly tossed him out on the street. Maybe someone was watching over him after all. Maybe he should have believed in something greater than himself. It didn’t matter anymore.
“Are you thirsty, Hauptsturmführer?”