The Last Pilgrim

by Gard Sveen

“I spent the evening with Gustav Lande,” she whispered, as if the whole building might hear them. There was a sudden thudding in the water pipes, followed by the sound of a man urinating upstairs, audible through the open bathroom door.

  The Pilgrim wiped away his tears. Agnes took the cigarette out of his hand and went into the bedroom. Still naked, she got under the covers and took two final drags. As he stood in the doorway, running his hand through his hair, he looked like a child compared to Lande.

  “I spent the evening with Gustav Lande,” she repeated. “Do you understand what that means?”

  The Pilgrim walked slowly across the room and sat down on the bed beside her. After stroking her hair for what seemed like an eternity, he lay down on top of her and clung to her body like a child, as if he wanted nothing more than to disappear into her and never come back to this world again. Agnes lit another cigarette from the pack on the nightstand, then stroked his back. The smoke rose to the ceiling in the faint light coming from the living room.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  She waited for him to merely sigh in that dramatic way of his, but nothing happened. He almost seemed to be deliberately holding his breath. Finally she felt him breathe again.

  “Did you forget about Gustav Lande?” he whispered. “If they catch you, and you know my name . . .”

  “Tell me.”

  “Carl,” he said. “Spelled with a C.”

  Agnes started laughing, first quietly, then louder. She couldn’t help herself. Of all the names she’d imagined for him, Carl was the last one that would ever have occurred to her.

  “What’s so funny?” he said, pressing his face against the hollow of her throat. “It’s actually Carl Oscar,” he told her, getting up.

  Agnes laughed so hard that she finally had to hide her head under the covers. The Pilgrim said something that she didn’t catch. Suddenly he pulled the warm covers off her.

  “Carl Oscar Krogh,” he said, staring at her, his face expressionless. “Carl Oscar Krogh.”

  Agnes stopped laughing. He seemed to be trying to convince himself the name was really his.

  He sat on the bed, staring at her for a long time. Finally he pulled the covers back over her naked body.

  “I’m not laughing at you,” she said, reaching out her hand toward him. “I love you, Carl Oscar.”

  Before she could touch his unshaven cheek, he turned away.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked, sitting up now, without covering her breasts.

  The rain was coming down harder, pounding against the windowpane.

  Carl Oscar Krogh lit a cigarette and went over to the window. The blackout curtain hadn’t been closed, but he didn’t seem to notice. He stood there with the cigarette hanging from his lips for several minutes as he stared out at the rain.

  Agnes got out of bed, went over to him, and put her arms around him. His body felt cold from standing at the window.

  “Don’t stand here like this. Someone might see you,” she whispered in his ear. He shook her off. She sighed in resignation and drew the blackout curtains. Krogh opened them again.

  “Why were you gone so long?” asked Agnes, crossing her arms.

  He sighed, then shook his head.

  “Number 1,” he said, taking a drag on his cigarette and letting the smoke out through his nose, then his mouth. “He thought I should lay low for a few weeks.”

  “Eight weeks,” said Agnes. She was about to say his name again, but it suddenly didn’t seem right. She thought of him as the Pilgrim.

  “I killed a man,” he said. His voice was flat, lifeless, as if he were reading a statement that he himself didn’t understand. “That’s why I had to . . . leave you.” He opened the window and tossed out his cigarette.

  Agnes didn’t speak, merely pressed herself closer to his back.

  “Didn’t you hear what I said? I killed a man.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” she said, running her hand over his chest, which was bare as a child’s. We’re both children, she thought. And now Number 1 has made this child kill another human being. It was necessary, she knew, but she didn’t want to know anything more about it. She didn’t want to think about how Number 1 might destroy the Pilgrim—Carl Oscar! Her own Carl Oscar—if things continued this way.

  “One of our own,” he murmured to himself. “He had two children, two small children. I lured him into a trap, Agnes. Now he’s lying out there in Østmarka, buried, gone forever.”

  “I don’t want to know,” she said. She knew full well that they lost people. Far too many. And that there was no mercy for traitors. But she didn’t want him to tell her anything more.

  “Number 1 gave me an assignment. I carried it out. I buried him myself.” He was talking to himself now.

  “Come here,” she said, turning him around. He avoided looking at her, staring instead at the strip of light coming in the door from the living room. Moving like a sleepwalker, he went back to bed with her.

  Agnes lay close to him until dawn, when a grayish light began filling the room. Neither of them had slept, nor had they said a single word all night.

  “Carl Oscar,” she said, propping herself up on her elbow to get her first good look at him in daylight since March. She ran her finger along his straight nose, then over his strong chin. “Will you marry me? When all this is over?”

  “This war is never going to end,” he whispered, keeping his eyes closed.

  CHAPTER 29

  Wednesday, June 11, 2003

  Police Headquarters

  Oslo, Norway

  The large conference room in the restricted area on the seventh floor of police headquarters was filled with investigators who didn’t have the faintest idea why real-estate entrepreneur and former trade minister Carl Oscar Krogh had been murdered with exactly sixty-two stab wounds. This was something the whole country now knew after the police chief had held a quickly organized press conference the night before. No doubt he’d consulted with or received orders from the police commissioner, who for his part had probably sought advice from Norway’s minister of justice.

  “As I’m sure you realize,” said Fredrik Reuter, standing, his shoulders stooped, in front of the screen, “there is now a certain amount of pressure to solve this case.” He gave them a wan smile. Tommy Bergmann would have bet big money that Reuter hadn’t slept more than two or three hours. And judging by the wrinkled state of his uniform, he may have slept on a cot in his office.

  “The only thing most people don’t know yet is what the murder weapon looked like.” Reuter stifled a yawn and pressed a button to display a close-up of the Hitler Youth knife lying in a pool of blood. “If we make this public, I fear that the tips we’ve gotten so far will seem moderate in comparison.” That prompted a few laughs, not because it was funny but because people under tremendous pressure often laugh in the hope of drawing attention away from the fact that they’re on their knees.

  Bergmann tuned out when Abrahamsen began reviewing the autopsy results. The details were of no interest. Old Krogh had been murdered, and there had to be a reason why. It was as simple as that. Nothing in the house had been stolen. They’d been able to determine that much. Not a single thing had been touched. The killer hadn’t been in search of secret documents, nor was he a junkie looking for money or drugs. No, thought Bergmann. The needle in the haystack had something to do with the three old skeletons in Nordmarka and an old man who was dying in Ullevål Hospital. He wouldn’t have more than that to share when it’d be his turn to speak.

  As Abrahamsen talked, Bergmann stared at the papers in front of him. Two sentences in particular jumped out: “Holt died under mysterious circumstances in Stockholm in May 1945.” and “Kaj Holt was Krogh’s superior in Oslo.” The article listed the same source that he’d seen previously: Professor Torgeir Moberg. But it also gave another source—Finn Nystrøm, a name that Bergmann hadn’t seen before. He drew a big circle around both names. He needed to talk to these two i
ndividuals, and the sooner the better. Maybe Moberg knew something about why Krogh had been prevented from investigating Kaj Holt’s mysterious death. Then Bergmann turned the page and found himself looking at Cecilia Lande’s skull. He knew that somewhere in these fifteen or twenty pages lay the answer to who had killed the three of them, and maybe also who had murdered Krogh.

  As if from far away, Bergmann heard somebody saying his name. He looked up and found Reuter looking at him. Bergmann’s brief report contained little more than what everyone in the room already knew. Krogh had been a key figure in the Resistance, but he’d never talked much about the role he’d played in Oslo and Stockholm, nor about his part in the liquidations of a number of Nazis and traitors. After the war he became a prominent member of the Labour Party, even though he came from a solidly bourgeois family. He later was appointed undersecretary in the Ministry of Trade and eventually minister. For close to forty years after stepping down from government service, he ran his own business. In the late 1980s he sold the company to a Finnish conglomerate, apparently for such a large sum that Krogh still had more than enough money at the time of his death.

  “What did Marius Kolstad say?” asked Reuter.

  Bergmann paged through his notes.

  “Not much,” he replied. That was a lie, but he wanted as few people as possible chasing after his leads. He’d have a word with Reuter about it in private later.

  Reuter sighed heavily.

  “What interests me most is the claim that Krogh liquidated the traitor Gudbrand Svendstuen in March 1943,” Bergmann said.

  “So one of Svendstuen’s descendants butchers Krogh with a Hitler Youth knife sixty years later?” said Reuter.

  Bergmann shrugged.

  “Halgeir, I want you to check it out,” said Reuter. “Find out whether Svendstuen has any descendants, but for God’s sake, be discreet.”

  Halgeir Sørvaag dutifully wrote himself a note, looking as if the expectations of an entire nation rested on his shoulders.

  “What about the three skeletons found in Nordmarka? That was pretty much our last hope, wasn’t it?”

  It was Bergmann’s turn to sigh.

  “Agnes Gerner, Cecilia Lande, and Johanne Caspersen. I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know. Kolstad says neither he nor Krogh knew anything about them.” He decided to keep the matter of Kaj Holt to himself.

  Reuter looked as if he were cursing under his breath. He rubbed his hands over his face and then gave his team a resigned look. Bergmann was again grateful he didn’t have his job. Reuter had to deal with the stress of knowing that it was in jeopardy several times a year.

  “What about the phone records, Halgeir?” said Reuter. “Are they equally dismal reading?”

  Sørvaag leaned forward. For further emphasis, he spoke in that phony, self-important voice of his, which he did whenever he took the floor in front of more than two people.

  “Krogh was clearly a man who didn’t like talking on the phone. In the last seven weeks only ten calls were posted to his landline and five to his cell, two of which were from telemarketers. Not even his children saw fit to call him.”

  “So not much to go on,” said Reuter.

  Bergmann had to agree. All they had left was Kripo’s preliminary profile of the killer, which stated that they might be dealing with an individual who was, in plain English, a madman. Or, as Reuter said impassively, “The murder could have been committed by a person experiencing an episode of acute psychosis.”

  Bergmann paged through his papers until he came to the profile that Reuter had quoted from. He reminded himself of his basic premise: it couldn’t be mere coincidence that Krogh was murdered only a few weeks after they’d dug those bodies out of the ground in Nordmarka.

  If an individual experiences a temporary acute psychosis, it is often the result of having suffered a psychological trauma of some kind in the previous week or two. For this reason, the illness was previously called reactive psychosis, i.e., a psychosis that is a reaction to psychological trauma. An episode of temporary psychosis is most often caused by an event that resulted in psychological trauma. For instance, the individual may have lost someone close to him, gone bankrupt, lost his job, or just gone through a stressful divorce; or he may have experienced a dangerous situation such as a fire or a serious car accident.

  What was it Reuter had said yesterday? That the person who had killed those three females in Nordmarka may have murdered Krogh so that Krogh wouldn’t take the matter further? But that was no real lead. Bergmann closed his eyes.

  Reactive psychosis, he thought. Marius Kolstad had given him the idea that Kaj Holt’s death had something to do with Krogh’s murder. Did Holt kill those three females? Why had he died under so-called mysterious circumstances? That the author would put it that way could only mean that he thought Holt had been murdered.

  Bergmann found a blank page in his notebook. He drew a triangle and in one corner wrote “Nordmarka.” In the second corner he wrote “Krogh,” and in the third, at the top, “Kaj Holt.” He was reasonably certain that Krogh had been killed because of something to do with Holt or the three people buried in Nordmarka. Or maybe all four of them. But he wasn’t getting anywhere with the skeletons. He needed to shift his focus. Kaj Holt. What was it Kolstad hadn’t wanted to tell him? He’d be damned if Kolstad and Krogh had talked only about the war when they met at the nursing home on May 20.

  Bergmann ran his pen over the triangle he’d sketched, retracing the line between Holt and Krogh several times. This is what Krogh and Kolstad talked about, he thought as he studied the thin line between Holt and Krogh and Nordmarka.

  When he glanced up, he saw that Reuter was the only one left in the room. He was sitting quietly at the head of the table, looking at Bergmann.

  “So?” Reuter said. He downed the last of his coffee and wiped his mouth with his hand. “What have you got for me? Because you do have something, right?”

  “I need to go see Marius Kolstad again,” said Bergmann.

  “Okay,” said Reuter. “But I thought he didn’t have much to tell you.”

  “Have you ever heard of Kaj Holt?” he asked.

  “Don’t think so.”

  Bergmann told him what little he knew about Holt.

  “So why the interest in him?” asked Reuter. “A dead man can’t kill anybody.” A small smile appeared on his face.

  “I don’t know what Holt has to do with it. But Krogh and Kolstad were prevented from investigating his death right after the war. The Swedes in particular weren’t very forthcoming.”

  Reuter nodded.

  “Let’s keep this between you and me for the time being,” he said. “Understood?”

  Like a child, Bergmann couldn’t help asking, “Why?”

  “Because I suspect that the Holt case is a real wasps’ nest. If a man like Krogh was stopped from looking into a colleague’s death, how do you think they’ll react to us investigating it? Think about the position Krogh held after the war. By comparison, you and I seem about as important as a Somali scrubbing toilets in the city jail.”

  “Don’t you know someone at the National Police in Stockholm?” asked Bergmann.

  Reuter took in a deep breath. Then he shook his head.

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  I’m not, Bergmann muttered to himself when he got back to his office. For the umpteenth time that day he took out his cell phone to look at the text message from Hadja. It had kept him awake almost until dawn. When he had gotten out of the shower, he had sent a reply: Dinner would be great. See you tonight. Tommy. Looking at his message, he thought he could have written something better.

  Or maybe not. He didn’t know. He didn’t know anything anymore. It’ll just have to wait until tonight, he thought as he looked for his car keys. Marius Kolstad might die at any moment, and Bergmann needed to try and coax a few more secrets out of the old man. Otherwise, he’d end up taking them to his grave.

  CHAPTER 30

&nbs
p; Friday, May 21, 1942

  Helge K. Moen’s Beauty Salon

  Majorstua

  Oslo, Norway

  Helge Moen glanced at Agnes Gerner in the mirror and gave her a nearly imperceptible wink, as if he were her father and she were a little girl, and they were sharing a secret.

  You’re crazy, she thought.

  Moen smiled to himself and whistled a tune between his teeth as he headed back to the counter.

  Agnes leaned back in the leather chair and closed her eyes as the assistant put her hair up in curlers. Maybe she was the one who was going mad. It seemed that nobody she knew had been able to hold on to their sanity during these years of war. Her sister was not only an ardent NS member, but she’d even gone so far as to get engaged to a German sergeant and then train as a frontline nurse. At the moment she was somewhere on the endless Russian steppes. Agnes had almost thrown up when she’d heard and felt sick about it all weekend.

  At least that gave her a nearly perfect alibi. Her own mother and sister were the most fanatical Nazis imaginable. Agnes had to smile at the thought that her family’s lunacy could prove so useful.

  When the assistant was done, Agnes opened her eyes and stared for a moment in the mirror at the steady stream of people outside the window, heading through the passageway and going either out to Majorstutorget or down to the Holmenkollen tram line. What were they thinking about on this first steamy, hot summer day, when the whole town seemed to be aflutter with foliage and life? Were they thinking the same thing as Agnes? That things had never looked so dark as they did today? Presumably it was only a question of time before the Germans took Sevastopol. And with the fiendish U-boats sinking American ships before they’d even gotten past Long Island, it looked like the thousand-year Reich would soon stretch from North Cape to the Sahara, from Brest to the Crimea. It would never end, thought Agnes. She forced herself to dismiss these thoughts and take a more positive view of the situation. It was summer, after all; Schreiner had allowed her to keep her job; and even though he’d disappeared into the shadows, the Pilgrim was back. And she herself was on the threshold of a breakthrough so major that she could hardly believe her good fortune.