The Last Pilgrim

by Gard Sveen

  “So that’s why the car was found on Madserud Allé,” said Bergmann.

  Waldhorst nodded.

  “I knew where all the checkpoints were in town, so I drove around them. Besides, who looks out the window in a dark city with blackout curtains? No, Mr. Bergmann, the car was the least of my problems.”

  Bergmann lit another cigarette. He tried to think of something to say, but then thought it best not to say anything at all.

  “Do you remember what I said to you the first time you were here?” asked Waldhorst.

  “No,” said Bergmann.

  “I said that in war, only one thing matters.”

  “Survival?” said Bergmann.

  Waldhorst nodded.

  “Agnes survived,” Bergmann said.

  “At that moment I held her life in my hands. I wanted her to survive,” said Waldhorst. “That was the only thing I cared about.” He reached for the matches and relit his cigar.

  Bergmann got up and went over to one of the pillars. He leaned against it and watched yet another plane descending toward Tegel.

  “I think you’re lying,” he said and turned around to face Waldhorst.

  The two men stared at each other.

  “Every word I’ve said is true,” he replied.

  “About the war, yes,” said Bergmann.

  “So?”

  “There were two people at Krogh’s house that day,” said Bergmann. “Two people drove down Dr. Holms Vei in a red rental car. One of them was Agnes Gerner, but who was the other person? Who had she turned to for help?”

  Waldhorst’s lower lip quavered. He opened his mouth to speak, but changed his mind. He stared out at the dark lake, at the falling rain.

  “Carl Oscar Krogh was killed with tremendous force. More than sixty stab wounds. More than a dying, eighty-year-old woman could manage. And why would she kill him with a Hitler Youth knife?”

  Waldhorst made an attempt to answer again. Bergmann had all the time in the world. He let the old man take his time.

  “Have you ever wondered why I never asked?” Waldhorst finally said.

  “Asked what?” said Bergmann.

  “Who you talked to in order to find me?”

  Waldhorst grasped the armrests of his chair and slowly got to his feet. Then he went inside.

  Bergmann lit another cigarette and waited on the terrace without exchanging a single word with Fritz. Waldhorst came back a few minutes later. He paused just inside the terrace door. In one hand he held a photograph. Bergmann motioned to him, but the old man didn’t move. A tear spilled from his left eye. Bergmann went over to him, holding his cigarette in his right hand. He held out his left. Waldhorst handed him the photograph.

  “Without him you would never have found me, and without me you would never have found your way back to him,” said the old man in a low voice. “He turned sixty a few weeks before Whitsunday. We weren’t there, of course, but Gretchen, Agnes . . . She just wanted to see him one last time and tell him the truth about what happened in Nordmarka back then. She gave him all the money she had . . . And I gave him my brother’s knife.”

  Bergmann took a deep breath before he turned over the photo.

  There were three people in the picture, a relatively recent color photograph. It took him two or three seconds to comprehend the connection, to grasp why the landscape looked so familiar and that he had not been mistaken. He really had seen this man standing in the middle before.

  “I thought you said that you hadn’t been to Norway since 1945,” said Bergmann, handing the photograph back to Waldhorst.

  “I said I hadn’t been back to Oslo.” Waldhorst looked past him at the lake.

  “I’ll need to ask you to contact him,” said Bergmann.

  “She said that she’d already killed one child too many.”

  Bergmann nodded.

  “But after a few weeks she gave him away to an orphanage. Ten years ago she found him again.”

  “I understand,” said Bergmann. He placed his hand on Waldhorst’s shoulder.

  “I want you to believe that she was a good person, Mr. Bergmann. A good person.”

  CHAPTER 77

  Wednesday, June 25, 2003

  Steinbu Lodge

  Vågå, Norway

  Tommy Bergmann signaled to turn left and began driving up the final steep incline. The last rays of sunlight that reached down into the valley glittered on the surface of the water on his right. Chet Baker’s trumpet on the car radio competed with the sound of the windshield wipers. Bergmann turned off the radio and glanced in the rearview mirror. The music reminded him of something he didn’t want to remember.

  The photograph that Waldhorst had given him was stuck in the edge of the mirror. As he shifted into second gear, he looked at the three people in the picture. They were standing in this landscape, surrounded by magnificent mountain formations, more peaceful than anywhere else on earth. The big man in the middle and the two old people on either side of him—Peter Waldhorst and Agnes Gerner—were smiling at the photographer. As if the world had never caused them any harm. Bergmann shifted his gaze to the mirror to check on the two patrol cars from the sheriff’s office following close behind. It wouldn’t take much for them to switch on the sirens. The Vestoppland police chief had even given the sheriff—who was one of the drivers—permission to carry a gun. Bergmann had merely shaken his head at their overeagerness, but there was nothing he could do.

  The place looked deserted. Only three cars were parked next to the building where he had stayed two weeks ago. No lights were visible in any of the windows. Only a single light above the carved sign telling visitors that they had arrived at Steinbu Lodge. The two setters scratching at the fence in the dog run on the north side of the main building were the only sign of life.

  Bergmann stood in the middle of the yard, staring at the water, smooth as a mirror, below the main building. Then he tipped his head back and looked up at the evening sky.

  Why the hell did it have to be you? he thought.

  Five uniforms were now standing next to him, all wearing Kevlar vests. The sheriff, an ambitious new hire from Østfold, had already taken out his gun. Bergmann’s only protection was the same GANT shirt he’d been wearing in Berlin over the past few days. The last thing he wanted was a bulletproof vest. He motioned for the sheriff to put his gun back in the holster.

  Finn Nystrøm’s wife was in the lobby. She was just about to bend down behind the counter when Bergmann stepped inside. At first she gave him a welcoming smile of recognition. Then, as the uniformed officers quickly filled the small lobby area, her expression changed to what looked like deep sorrow. The last traces of the young girl she had once been seemed to disappear from her face for good.

  “He’s in the kitchen,” she said quietly.

  Bergmann nodded. The sheriff was following so close he almost stepped on his heels.

  Nystrøm’s wife bowed her head toward the wide pine counter.

  “Do you have to do this?” she asked.

  Bergmann wanted to respond, but he couldn’t think what to say. He chose to remain silent and started down the stairs to the dining room, holding out his hand behind him to keep the sheriff at arm’s length. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw two other officers run along the side of the building to secure the doors to the terrace and the kitchen. As if there were any place to run up here in the mountains, thought Bergmann. He paused on the bottom step. Three people—a middle-aged couple and a young girl—were eating dinner in the spacious dining room on the right. The man noticed the shadow of the police officer who had taken up position outside. One by one the guests put down their forks and knives and turned to look at Bergmann and the two officers behind him.

  Bergmann heard the muted sound of a radio coming from the kitchen on the left. He stepped quietly down onto the terracotta tiles and peered through the round window in the white swing door. Nystrøm was bent over several saucepans on the big stove. He had cut his hair short since the last tim
e Bergmann had seen him. All that was left was a thick mat of gray hair above his weather-beaten face.

  Finn Nystrøm, Bergmann thought, realizing that he’d done a bad job. If only he’d bothered to check—just done a simple search in the National Registry—he might have been suspicious. He would have found out that Nystrøm had emigrated from Sweden at the age of nineteen, and a year later changed the spelling of his last name from Nyström to Nystrøm so he fit in. He also should have realized that faint, barely discernable accent he’d heard was a remnant of the man’s native Swedish. But even so, that might not have done much good. He pushed open the door. Nystrøm hadn’t ever used the last name Gerner either in the Swedish orphanage or with any of his foster families. And Agnes had supposedly been dead for what amounted to two generations. Yet Bergmann nonetheless felt that he’d failed in some way when Nystrøm raised his eyes from the saucepans to look at him.

  “Why did you lead me to Iver Faalund and Peter Waldhorst?” asked Bergmann, taking two steps forward on the white tiled floor. He held his hand behind his back to signal to the sheriff to wait outside the kitchen. “If you hadn’t done that, I never would have found out you . . .” He stopped. It all seemed pointless.

  “Otherwise you never would have found me,” said Nystrøm, turning his gaze back to the pots. “Wasn’t that what you said?” A strong aroma of stewed meat and gravy filled the air.

  Bergmann didn’t know what to say.

  “I knew you would come,” said Nystrøm, reaching up to the shelf to turn off the radio. “You must be hungry after traveling all the way from Berlin and then driving so far.” He took off his blue apron and laid it on the kitchen counter.

  “The footprint,” said Bergmann. “Was it hers?”

  “Agnes—or rather, my mother—went back inside after I came out, covered with his blood.”

  Nystrøm stepped toward Bergmann with his hands raised, as if to show that his intentions were peaceful.

  “But why?” said Bergmann.

  “Why?” Nystrøm snorted. “Because I knew what he’d done during the war. And because he was my father. Because . . . I really never understood it until that Whitsunday. Because I was ashamed of myself. He’d bought me off, you know. More than twenty years ago, when I finally came home from Stockholm, right before I took off from the University of Oslo, the Pilgrim gave me two hundred thousand kroner. By way of consolation, as he put it. And I took the money without saying a word. He wasn’t stupid. He knew from the first time we met that I was his son and that I already knew too much about him. But I was basically a pitiful bastard who needed money. Money to buy booze.” Nystrøm leaned one hand on the stainless-steel counter. He raised his other hand to touch the pots and pans hanging from a metal pipe above the counter. The movement caused a strange clattering sound.

  “If Agnes hadn’t come from Berlin and driven me all the way to Oslo, it never would have happened. Maybe I felt sorry for her. I don’t know. She was so depressed after reading about the discovery of the bodies in Nordmarka. But she didn’t want me to think that it was the Pilgrim . . . Krogh . . . who had killed them.”

  “Agnes told you that she killed Cecilia and the maid?”

  Nystrøm nodded.

  “Yes. She wanted me to know. She said she was pregnant with me at the time. She also said that she had been used, that the assassination of Rolborg had never been cleared by London. It was something that Kaj Holt and the Pilgrim had decided on their own. They took credit for the whole thing, while she ended up paying the price. She should never have made the trip from Berlin earlier this month. She was actually too weak for such a long trip, but she was dying and said she wanted to see her sixty-year-old son. She brought along the knife that had once belonged to Peter’s brother. She knew how obsessed I was with the war. She called me the last pilgrim, you know . . . She wanted me to have the knife, and apparently Peter did too.” A faint smile appeared on his face. “I even went back to Oslo with her. Agnes wanted the three of us to reconcile before she died.”

  Nystrøm rubbed his face.

  “Look at me,” he said. “Look how much I resemble him . . .”

  “Then what?” said Bergmann. “What happened?”

  “I . . . I regretted it as soon as we arrived. We would never . . . It would have been better if she’d never found me again, Tommy. Do you understand? Nothing good ever comes of such things.”

  “Was it something he said? Krogh, I mean?”

  Nystrøm took the last few steps toward Bergmann. He laughed quietly, but Bergmann saw that his eyes filled with tears, as if the child inside him were trying to get out.

  “He didn’t even invite us in, that traitorous old fucker. And the things he said to Agnes . . . to my mother . . . and to me . . . I don’t know. He was afraid someone would see us. ‘Bastard child,’ he called me. He was practically shaking with rage because we’d come to his house. I had the knife in my pocket, and I actually thought of killing him on the spot. But I told my mother we should just leave. So we went back to the car, but when she got in she started crying. She was inconsolable. That was when I realized he had to die. He had locked the front door, so I went around back. First I cut the throat of that damned dog of his. I couldn’t stand the thought that he owned a setter. The terrace door stood open . . . and, well . . .” Nystrøm fell silent.

  “And?” said Bergmann.

  “I should have cut him right down the middle. That was the only thing I could think of. Cut that fucking man apart so nothing was left of him. Do you understand? I’ve always hated him for what he did, and hated myself because he was my father, and because I took his blood money.”

  For a moment neither of them spoke. The swing door behind Bergmann opened slightly, but he signaled that everything was fine.

  “Do you think I’m going to kill you too?” said Nystrøm. He raised his hand, as if to place it on Bergmann’s shoulder.

  “Don’t do that,” said Bergmann. “You’ll get us both killed.”

  Nystrøm nodded and took two steps back, holding his hands up in front of him to show the sheriff on the other side of the door that he had no intention of doing anything other than talking.

  “And Agnes went back inside?”

  Nystrøm nodded.

  “I came out, covered with Carl Oscar’s blood, and after I got in the car, she went around to the back of the house. As we drove back to town, she told me that she—of all people—had forgiven him!”

  Nystrøm laughed, but it quickly turned to sobs.

  The sheriff came in. Bergmann motioned for him to stop.

  “I need to tell you this,” said Bergmann. “I’m sorry it turned out to be you.”

  “Really?” said Nystrøm. He looked down at his big hands, as if he couldn’t understand how they could have hacked his own father into pieces.

  Bergmann nodded.

  “You’re going to have to come along with me, Finn,” said the sheriff quietly.

  But Nystrøm wasn’t listening. He simply walked out the swing door and through the dining room, where the three people were still sitting, seemingly frozen in place. The sheriff went next, keeping his hand on the hilt of his gun in the black holster. Bergmann came last, moving slowly, almost reluctantly. Through the open terrace door he could see Nystrøm heading for the lake. The sheriff went after him, with one of the young police officers a few feet ahead. Nystrøm started to run toward the water but was soon caught by the policeman. He fell to his knees at the edge of the lake, bowed his head, and buried his face in his hands.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2014 Charlotte Hveem

  Gard Sveen is an award-winning crime novelist who divides his time between writing and working as a senior adviser to the Norwegian Ministry of Defense. The Last Pilgrim, his debut novel, was originally published as Den siste pilgrimen in Norway and is the first in the series featuring troubled police detective Tommy Bergmann.

  The novel was an instant hit with critics and readers, and it went on to win the
Riverton Prize in 2013, the prestigious Glass Key in 2014, and the Maurits Hansen Award, also in 2014. Sveen is the only author to date who has received all three honors for a first novel. The only other author who has managed to win both a Riverton and a Glass Key for their debut novel is Jo Nesbø.

  Sveen is currently working on his third book in the Tommy Bergmann Series.

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  Photo © 2010 T. Nunnally

  Steven T. Murray is an American translator from German, Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish. He translated the bestselling Millennium series by Stieg Larsson, three crime novels and two African novels by Henning Mankell, three psychological suspense novels by Karin Alvtegen, four police procedurals by Nele Neuhaus, and works by many other authors. In 2001 he won the Gold Dagger Award in the UK for his translation of Sidetracked by Henning Mankell. He was born in Berkeley and now lives in Albuquerque with his wife, Tiina Nunnally, and their two cats.