The Last Pilgrim

by Gard Sveen

  After he’d stood there long enough to get soaked, someone behind him said that a cab was coming. All he could manage was a grunt in reply. A pair of headlights appeared down the street.

  “To Gärdet,” he said softly to himself. His mind was starting to clear, but he still couldn’t remember anything about the night before. It was as if his short-term memory had been wiped clean.

  “What address?”

  “Rindögatan.”

  Holt took the sleeping pills out of his pocket, counted them, then counted them again.

  He wondered whether there were enough.

  “Quiet,” Holt whispered. His hands were shaking as he counted the sleeping pills in his hand one more time. Seven. That wasn’t enough.

  “Quiet . . .” he said again, surprised at how loud it sounded.

  The next thing he remembered was kneeling in front of the fountain in the middle of Karlaplan, drinking water out of his hand. He swallowed one, two, three sleeping pills. He stood up, swaying, as if he expected to fall asleep and tumble into the water, drown, disappear forever.

  But nothing happened. He reached for his hip flask in his inside pocket, but it was gone. He swore to himself a couple of times, soaked by the rain falling quietly from the black sky.

  The fountain was turned off, and there were no sounds apart from the faint hiss of the occasional car. Holt didn’t know how he had found the right street, but it didn’t matter. He was now staggering up Rindögatan, he was sure of it. He wandered past his building and headed across the street, spinning around as a taxi came out of nowhere and almost ran him down. He thought he had a girlfriend on the next block with whom he’d spent a few nights the year before. He wished that summer had never come to an end. That he could have stayed and slept with her every single night. That the war could have lasted forever, but that he would no longer have had to be part of it.

  He found the doorbell automatically. The fourth button from the bottom felt like the right one.

  “I want you,” he said when she answered. He didn’t even know if he meant it. In fact, he didn’t mean it. But he repeated the words anyway: “I want you.” He was almost incomprehensible.

  “Come back when you’re sober, Kaj. You’re waking up the whole street.”

  “Well, shit,” he said. He didn’t even remember her name. He laughed at himself. Seconds later, he felt tears welling up in his eyes. He leaned down and felt the contours of the pistol under his pants leg. My little friend, he thought. My little friend.

  “Do you know what time it is? I’m going to call the cops, Kaj. Go home and sleep it off, all right?”

  She hung up.

  Holt leaned against the glass door. A moment later, his shoes were covered with vomit.

  “This can’t be happening,” he said quietly to himself. He sat down on the granite steps, getting the seat of his pants all wet. “Tell me it isn’t true . . . dear God . . .”

  Back at his own building, he looked down at the vomit on his shoes through his tears. “I don’t even know why I’m crying,” he muttered to himself. “It just feels so damn good. Better than it’s ever felt before.” Moving like a sleepwalker, he went up the stairs without even turning on the light in the stairwell.

  The tiny strip of paper he had fastened to the bottom of the front door and the threshold had fallen to the floor in the hall.

  He tripped over his own feet.

  He crawled over to the bed and flopped down on top of the bedspread.

  Nothing was real anymore. Not even the face of the man who stood looking down at him with that indescribably calm expression.

  Finally, Holt thought. Finally you’re here. He couldn’t even manage to say the words to the face hovering above him. What are you doing here? He thought he should have screamed the words, just to scare him off. What are you doing here? His legs felt like they’d been sawed off. He knew the little pistol was down around his ankle somewhere, he could just barely feel it, but he couldn’t get up. The man—the same man with the childish face and the soft features, almost like a girl’s—took the pistol out of his garter. He gave a wry smile as he looked down at Holt.

  “Oh Kaj, oh Kaj,” he said, running his finger over the threading on the muzzle. His accent was hardly noticeable. Holt knew that he had seen this man before. It was the childish face of the civilian from Jørstadmoen. In the pocket of the coat draped over the back of the chair the man found the silencer. As if Holt had planned it all himself.

  All right, Holt thought. So I guess I wasn’t meant to survive. What was it he’d said to Waldhorst? “Don’t we all have a little daughter?” Holt tried fleetingly to remember his own little daughter’s smell, but he couldn’t do it. He started crying again despite himself. He didn’t want the man leaning over him to think that he, Captain Kaj Holt, was afraid of taking a bullet to the head.

  If he hadn’t been so drunk, so overwhelmed by sleep, so sad, then . . . he didn’t know . . . then he would have used his bare hands to kill the man hovering over him.

  The man had a faint smile on his lips. It may have been that smile that made Holt get up as though he’d never had a drop of alcohol in his life.

  “If I’m going to die, I’ll die by my own hand,” he whispered. The childish face must have been surprised at that, because he seemed caught off guard when Holt slugged him in the kidneys with his left hand. He doubled over silently and then took a step back, tipping over the chair next to the wall. Holt waited just a second, a single second too long. The floor seemed sloped, the wall was slanted, the ceiling was caving in—wasn’t it? That fucking guy would be pissing blood for the rest of the summer, and Holt laughed at the thought. I’m laughing, you hear me, baby face?

  A second too long, he realized when it was already too late.

  Baby Face’s head-butt must have punctured a lung. His sternum felt like it gave way, but no sound came out of Holt’s mouth. When he lay back down on the bed, it was like he’d never gotten up.

  Holt closed his eyes and thought, It’s going to be like coming home.

  CHAPTER 6

  Early Saturday Morning, May 17, 2003

  Nordmarka

  Oslo, Norway

  A heavy fog had settled over the forest in the last half hour, clinging to the black spruce trees like dust. An owl screeched somewhere over Tommy Bergmann’s head as he stood looking at the white vapor rising up from the piss drenching the cold moss. He buttoned up his fly and listened to the silence all around him. For a moment there wasn’t a sound; everyone—including the newly arrived officers from the Kripo crime-scene team, Georg Abrahamsen, and the two uniformed cops from the Majorstua police station who had arrived late that night—had fallen silent.

  A crackle from the uniforms’ portable radio broke the silence. For a moment Bergmann caught himself missing the camaraderie and cooperation of life on patrol. As investigators, they worked as a team, but deep down they all knew it was every man for himself.

  They hadn’t made much progress in the past few hours, and none of them were even close to being able to answer the question they were all asking themselves: Who was Gustav? The only thing they knew for sure was that the first skeleton they had uncovered was a woman who had been married or at least engaged to this Gustav. One of the Kripo guys thought he could tell at a glance that there were definitely more bodies in the grave. Bergmann didn’t go for that sort of overconfidence, but if that were the case, it might give them a better idea what had become of Gustav.

  He went back down the path and studied the scene before him. The white tent was now up. It was illuminated by one battery-powered light on the outside and three on the inside. The two uniforms stood outside, each with a headlamp. The glaring beams cut through the treetops like air defense searchlights before they turned their heads, and then the light swept over the tree trunks. Bergmann was blinded for a few seconds. When his sight returned, he noticed a pair of deer eyes deep in the forest. Caught in the headlamp’s light beam, the animal froze as if petrified.<
br />
  “Tommy!” Abrahamsen’s voice cut through the night. The eyes in the forest vanished, and Bergmann could hear the frightened flight of the deer through the heath.

  The light fanned over the ground in front of him, and he began walking slowly toward the tent. Abrahamsen stood in the opening, peering out into the darkness as though unable to see anything at all in the abrupt transition from the light.

  “You have to see this,” he said.

  “See what?” Bergmann asked, stepping past Abrahamsen, who held the tent flap open for him. It felt as though all the oxygen inside the tent had been used up. Five men were standing or squatting around the excavated area, which was now about six square feet. Bergmann looked first at the remains of the woman, his gaze moving from the skull with the hole in it to the rib cage, hips, femurs, and tibias. The feet appeared to be crushed.

  Then he looked to the right.

  Abrahamsen nodded somberly. He was dressed all in white, and a big digital camera hung over his stomach.

  “So, that must be Gustav,” said Bergmann, pointing to the preliminary excavation they’d done next to the woman. Another skull had come into view, but this one lay more deeply buried in the dirt. The skeleton was positioned on its left side. The rib cage was almost intact. The rest of the body had not yet been exposed.

  “Yes, but that’s not all,” said one of the Kripo men. Bergmann gazed at the man, a white-haired, self-appointed senior investigator whose name he could never remember. He carefully removed his heavy steel-framed glasses and wiped them with his shirtsleeve. Then he put them back on just as carefully.

  “Come here,” he said, waving over Bergmann and Abrahamsen. Bergmann approached reluctantly. The older man squatted down, and Bergmann did the same. The Kripo man held a ruler. Abrahamsen leaned so far over them that he almost fell into the grave. For the first time that night, Bergmann felt an intense desire to throw up. Maybe it was only the rotten smell of damp earth and gnawed human bones. Or maybe the sight had dredged up the memory of the first time he’d seen a corpse: a battered young woman he had found in a garbage bag in the woods fifteen years before.

  The Kripo man poked tentatively at the rib cage, which looked like it was filled with dark soil.

  “There,” he said, pointing. “Between those two ribs there.”

  There was a flash above Bergmann’s head, and the beam of a flashlight lit the end of the yellow ruler. He still didn’t see anything noteworthy, apart from the ribs.

  The Kripo man rapped lightly with the ruler again. Bergmann felt the hairs on his arms rise and the oxygen leave his lungs. For a moment he felt like he was tipping over the edge.

  “What the hell?” said Abrahamsen, standing next to Bergmann. Then he said what both of them were thinking: “There aren’t two bodies down there. There are three.”

  Bergmann stared, his eyes wide. A fifth hand was visible in the dirt inside the rib cage. Slowly he counted the fingers on the little hand, which looked as though it was clenched into a fist. A little fist with tiny fingers.

  “So,” he whispered to himself, “there’s a child on the bottom.”

  Abrahamsen said something that Bergmann didn’t catch. He felt his colleague’s hand on his back.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” said Abrahamsen.

  Bergmann was filled with an emotion he’d never felt before, a kind of déjà vu. As though he knew that the child who lay at the bottom of this grave had stood exactly where he himself had stood when he’d seen the deer’s eyes through the trees.

  “A child,” he said into thin air. “Somebody killed a child.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Wednesday, May 30, 1945

  Rindögatan 42

  Gärdet

  Stockholm, Sweden

  Detective Inspector Gösta Persson’s stomach growled as he stood straddle-legged on the sidewalk in front of Rindögatan 42. He gazed up at the pale-yellow brick facade. A face disappeared behind the curtain in the tall window on the second floor. A light drizzle fell from the steel-gray sky, and it soon covered the lenses of his glasses. He searched his pocket for a clean cloth to wipe them off.

  If only he could stop this growling in his stomach. Persson was a man who made few demands on life as long as he got three square meals a day at regular hours. But that was essential. So if he didn’t get lunch soon, he was going to explode. He nodded curtly to the officer who was standing guard at the entrance. Ruin his lunch? For what? A dead Norwegian? He almost chuckled to himself as he scanned the mailboxes inside the vestibule. There were still plenty of Norwegians in the world, even after this damned war. But lunch? Lunch was what made the world go round, and he’d been on his way to lunch when the damn phone rang.

  Persson had just grabbed his hat from the coat rack and reached for the door handle when the phone on his massive teak desk began ringing. For a few seconds he had deliberated over whether to pick up, but being a man of ambition, he lifted the receiver to his ear instead of sneaking off to lunch. The watch commander had informed him that one of Stockholm’s ten radio cruisers had reported a suspicious death at Rindögatan 42 in Gärdet. The whole thing could have waited until after lunch, had the zealous watch commander not clarified that the apartment was owned by the Norwegian legation in Stockholm. And something like that couldn’t very well be ignored, could it? Persson could still hear the watch commander’s voice ringing in his ears. He had big plans for his career—maybe he would even make station chief one day—so this lamentable fatality definitely couldn’t be ignored.

  What are these Norwegians supposed to be good for? Persson wondered as he paused on the third-floor landing. Sweat had soaked into the brim of his hat. No lunch and now he was drenched with sweat. And on top of all that, these goddamned Norwegians. Nothing but trouble from them for five long years, hassles and more hassles. If it wasn’t the Finns drinking and fighting and stabbing each other, then it was the Norwegians. No, he damned sure missed the good old days when law and order had reigned in Scandinavia. Persson summoned what motivation he could find and hauled his bulk up the last thirteen steps.

  A uniformed officer, a young kid Persson had never seen before, stood outside the open door of the fourth-floor apartment. He was about to say something, but Persson motioned dismissively and stepped over the threshold. He didn’t want anyone spoiling his first impression of the deceased. He’d stopped trusting anything else years ago. In the kitchen another officer sat talking in a low voice to a trembling woman who was weeping softly, her face buried in her hands. Persson nodded to the officer, an old acquaintance, and put his finger to his lips. Then he stepped past the kitchen doorway and went down the hall toward the living room.

  The body lay on the bed in the bedroom, and even Persson had to admit it was a sad sight. In his stiff right hand the deceased held a pistol that Persson recognized as a Colt Llama. The barrel was pointing at the ceiling. He had an appalling hole in the middle of his forehead. Black blood had congealed over half his face and left huge stains on the white pillow. The Norwegian’s eyes stared in the same direction as the pistol that had blown him into history. A faint odor of old vomit filled the room. Persson stood for a moment observing the man before him. He sighed a couple of times, as he always did when some unpleasant thought tickled the back of his mind. Then he took a couple of steps and began rummaging through the pockets of the coat hanging over the back of the chair by the door. The only thing of interest—aside from Kaj Holt’s ID card, which had been issued two weeks before—was a rather fat wallet. Persson quickly counted the bills, then studied the photo of the deceased on the ID card. The inspector scratched his head. He recalled what it was he’d reacted to and walked over toward the bed. He gave the man in the bed a quick look. The frozen expression on Holt’s face made him shudder. Persson had witnessed similar scenes many times before, but that didn’t make it any easier.

  Quite right, he thought, taking a ballpoint pen out of his pocket. The thought that had festered ever since he first glimpsed the Spani
sh-made miniature Colt pistol was now scintillatingly clear. Persson poked at the muzzle with the cap of the ballpoint. It had obviously been tapped so a silencer could be screwed on. But where in the world was the silencer? And it was highly unlikely that anyone would use one to commit suicide.

  Persson inspected Holt’s skull. Besides, the distance between the gun and the bullet hole simply seemed too great for him to have been certain to hit the right spot. People who took their own lives with firearms most often put the weapon in their mouth because then there was no way out, no room for remorse. Those who put the gun to their temple were most likely to change their minds while pulling the trigger, with the result that they ended up with a less accurate wound than the one poor Holt had in his forehead. Not to mention that it would be much more effective to hold the pistol to the temple at an angle, pointing toward the back of the head. A man like Kaj Holt should have known that.

  As if that weren’t enough, Detective Inspector Persson knew that the neighbors would most likely have woken up when a nine-millimeter projectile that broke the sound barrier made its way into Holt’s skull. But with a silencer those same people would have probably just turned over in bed and continued sleeping.

  Persson went around to the other side of the bed to study Holt from the other side. He looked blue and ashen gray in the cold light coming in the bedroom window. Persson set his hat cautiously on the nightstand and pulled out his handkerchief to wipe his bald pate. Then he lay down on the floor and looked underneath the bed. He got back up with some effort and put his hand on the right side of Holt’s skull. He tried to lift his head carefully, but the rigid neck resisted. Finally he managed to produce a gap between the hair and the pillow. And quite right, there was no exit hole. The bullet was still inside Holt’s head. A silencer would have reduced the bullet’s velocity so that it wouldn’t have penetrated all the way through the skull.