Forty Days Without Shadow: An Arctic Thriller

by Olivier Truc

  “He may have worked for them,” said Klemet. “The Nazis came to power in 1933, well before the expedition.”

  “I doubt that,” Nina cut in, still reading her e-mail. “Flüger didn’t complete his training. He was expelled at the end of his first year. He was Jewish.”

  The news left a cold silence. No one was sure how to react.

  “Perhaps his fatal fall in Lapland was a lucky escape,” said Klemet after a moment.

  It occurred to Nina that she might put in a call to France. She did so and came back after a few minutes.

  “Henri Mons thought he remembered Flüger’s name,” she said. “Flüger and his guide headed north when they set out together. And according to Niils on his return, they walked for about two or three days before setting up camp, where they stayed for two days, until Flüger suffered the fall.”

  Eva went back to the main map. “Two possibilities, then. Here…and here. If we take it that the gold seam is somewhere here, that still leaves a huge area to explore. If only we knew whether the geologist had drawn a map.”

  “He did,” said Nina. “Henri Mons saw it. But it has disappeared.”

  “Well, that changes everything,” said Eva. “Our man Flüger must have kept a field book. Every field geologist keeps field books. They use them to draw their maps afterward.”

  She marched back to her computer screen with a decisive air, seated herself, tapped something in and waited, drawing nervously on her cigarette.

  35

  Friday, January 21

  12:30 p.m., Central Sápmi

  Racagnal had trudged two-thirds of a mile upstream along the frozen river, followed by the Sami herder. As he had hoped, the snow was thinner on the ground in this part of the vidda. He could see numerous rocky outcrops. His initial observations confirmed the information recorded on his most recent map. Determining whether or not this coincided with the old geological map would be a more difficult task. Even if he had the unlikely good fortune to hit on the right place first time, it would take a lot of imagination to single out the area he was in now from the drawings on Olsen’s sheet.

  A pale blue light lay over the river and the bare hills all around. With his hammer Racagnal struck an interestingly shaped rock rising through the ice. He picked up the clean-cut fragment but resisted the urge to lick its icy surface. In these temperatures, he risked losing a piece of his tongue. He examined the rock in the bright light of his headlamp, then discarded it.

  He continued up to the bend in the river. A rocky bluff rose from the river to a height of about seven feet, giving him a chance to read the local geography. Old rocks. No surprise there. A layer of granite, unaltered garnets, some gneiss—mesocratic or thereabouts—a layer of clay about two inches thick, sloping up and away at an angle of fifteen degrees. Further down, he could see a matrix of sand and clay. Hurriedly, he noted his observations in his field book, but time was running out. The jottings lacked his usual precision.

  He called Aslak and asked him to fetch a small device he had wrapped in a wool blanket, then aimed the pistol-shaped attachment towards the rock. The device emitted a faint whine. He directed the pistol at various points on the bluff. The changes in tone were scarcely noticeable, barely a hundred shocks per minute. He closed the device and held it out to Aslak, who wrapped it inside the blanket.

  They continued up the thick ice sheet covering the river. Racagnal spotted a rock on one bank that had a fine, rounded form with multicolored spots of lichen, from dark green to yellow. He raised his hammer again and took a fragment, observing its texture and striations, then cast it aside and moved on.

  A small shoal of pebbles had accumulated in a bend of the riverbank. He kneeled down, turning them over one by one, examining them through a magnifying glass, taking his time studying every detail. The light was good now, clear and strong with the glare from the snow. It wouldn’t last, although the hours of sunlight were lengthening day by day. A brighter gleam caught his attention. He passed his magnifying glass over the glint in the stone. It was a fleck of gold. An amateur would have jumped for joy, but he knew it meant nothing, except that there was gold here, which came as no surprise. Everyone knew that. Dozens of companies were looking for gold in the region. The Canadians were a particularly strong presence, because the local geology resembled their own, back home.

  Racagnal stood up, climbed the riverbank, and looked slowly all around. The bare hilltops extended as far as the eye could see. He glanced at his map and walked on. There was still a lot to do. A lot to see. And very little chance of success.

  * * *

  2:20 p.m., Malå

  Eva Nilsdotter led Klemet and Nina to a large, dimly lit side room. Two of its walls were fitted with floor-to-ceiling shelves loaded with files and archive boxes.

  “Right, let’s start here,” she announced, pointing to a small series of folders high up on the longer wall.

  She pulled down a file with a yellow cover.

  “If I’ve understood correctly,” she continued, summing up, “your man Flüger’s map disappeared with him. But I imagine it hasn’t been lost to all mankind. As a student I often heard stories about curses, as well as in my own research, meeting elderly Sami. People talked about a fabulous seam that had brought bad luck. No one was ever able to identify it. Your dear uncle, Klemet, knew nothing more about it, either, it seems. And yet, in his way, he does. Unsettling, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?” asked Nina.

  “I spent part of my career abroad, like all geologists, in fact. Did quite a lot of time in Asia. Mining stories tend to have similar endings, you know. The local population carries no weight faced with the might of the government, determined to exploit its resources.”

  Eva pulled out an archive box from a high shelf and climbed back down the library steps. “Here, catch this,” she ordered the two police officers.

  The box was full of brown envelopes. Eva pulled one out, read the references, and put it back. She reviewed the contents of the entire box and found what she was looking for.

  “Sit down,” she said, opening the envelope and removing a field book, which she placed carefully in front of her but didn’t open straightaway.

  “This is Ernst Flüger’s notebook. There’s only one, which is quite unusual. Geologists generally keep whole series of field books. Veritable works of art, in many cases. That’s how I see them, at any rate. How did this field book come to be here? I have no idea. You should ask your elderly French friend about that, my dear. But I’m sure it’s no exaggeration to say that it hasn’t been opened since Flüger’s death. His body must have been brought back with his personal effects. Someone at the time must have decided to bring the field book here. And it was forgotten. The same is true of many of the archives we hold. Most bits of land and rock have been explored at one time or another, but, for reasons best known at the time, the analyses may not have been considered interesting or valuable. They can become so, of course, a century later, when needs and technologies have evolved. And so we dig down into our old treasure trove.”

  Klemet and Nina were having a hard time concealing their impatience. Eva shot them a small smile and lifted the battered leather cover. The notebook’s pages were covered in a small, dense hand recording precise data on every observation carried out in the field, great or small. The officers peered in fascination at the diagrams and geological cross-sections, the detailed drawings of relief, all to scale, filled with differently textured motifs indicating the types of rock. The notebook was in German. Eva translated a few passages, selected at random.

  “Flüger was a conscientious, meticulous man. He may have had just one year of training, but he had an excellent grasp of the techniques needed to draw up his reports.”

  Eva skimmed through the book to the end. The last page was dated August 1, 1939. She sat for a long time, saying nothing.

  “I have to say, this field book is highly unusual. For someone with an eye for these things, at any rate. In some wa
ys, it describes the presence of mineral ores just as you’d expect: geological cross-sections, the age of the rocks, the way they overlap, the probable geological history of the area of land observed, suggestions for subsequent searches.”

  “But…?” Klemet made no effort to hide his impatience now.

  “But Flüger annotates some of the diagrams and readings in just a few, scattered places, in an utterly fascinating and really rather…mysterious way. He had already made one visit to the region before this. Most of the field book relates to that first trip. What’s very strange, for a document of this type, is the complete absence of precise coordinates. Surprising. Given Flüger’s painstaking approach to every other aspect of geological cartography, I can only think that it was an oversight, or a mistake. Perhaps he noted all that down on the geological map he drew up, based on the information in the field book. Very likely. But let us continue.”

  “What about the mysterious annotations, Eva? What are they? Can you give us an example?” Nina was losing patience, too.

  “As a rule, a geologist’s field book is a very dry thing. Highly technical. Only another geologist would appreciate the poetry in it. Some aesthetes will add decorative touches, little sketches, some of which are genuine works of art. But the text tends to be very succinct. Technical, as I said, using abbreviations and incomprehensible jargon—to the uninitiated, at least. But here, Flüger provides short commentaries that have apparently nothing to do with geology. You have to look carefully, but they’re there, slipped in among the multitude of observations. I didn’t notice them at first. They’re quite incongruous. So Flüger had indeed made a first visit here, and he knew he would have to come back in order to complete his research. Which explains his presence on the French expedition in the summer of 1939. He had a precise objective. The seam. There can be no doubt about it, as far as I’m concerned.”

  Eva went back to reading the book in silence, then took a piece of paper and covered it with notes of her own.

  “When you know what a geology field book ought to contain, the things it shouldn’t normally contain jump out at you,” she explained. “Rather as if you came across quotes in Russian in a Swedish text. There, you see, Flüger spent just a few days on this section. His observations fill a few pages, no more. Five at the very most. And what he wants to say is contained in two phrases, here, two pages apart: ‘The gateway is on the drum.’ And ‘Niils has the key.’”

  “Niils’s drum!” Klemet spoke under his breath.

  “The location of the mine must be indicated on Niils’s drum,” exclaimed Nina. “That’s why he was so insistent it should be taken to a place of safety. And whoever stole it knew what it meant. They knew! It’s obvious! Klemet, we’ve been on the wrong track since the beginning. The drum is no ordinary drum—it points to the location of the gold mine!”

  Nina was gripped with excitement. Klemet saw the plain fact of the matter, too. The drum was the key.

  “Wait,” said Eva suddenly. “I didn’t say anything about any gold mine.”

  “What then? I don’t understand.” There was just a hint of annoyance in Nina’s voice.

  “Flüger makes no direct mention of gold, anywhere. He does everything to give that impression—little touches here and there. Perhaps it is gold. But he never mentions the word gold. He talks about yellow ore and altered black blocks. He says he thinks he’s close to something huge, something unimaginable. But I’m not sure he knew himself what he was on the point of discovering. And, don’t forget, he never completed his training. He’s a technically excellent cartographer—I imagine that was the beginning of his course in Vienna—but he was not qualified to identify rocks. Logically, that would have come at the next, more specialist stage in his training. Theory often comes before practice, you won’t change that. Solid experience is gained only after years and years of reconnaissance work in the field, in a variety of terrains, and poor Herr Flüger here was only half trained in the mid-1930s. He had had no time to develop those skills. He may have been mistaken, or unsure of himself, when he identified the ores.”

  Klemet turned to Nina. “Remember, Niils didn’t want the seam to be discovered. What if he accompanied Flüger just to keep an eye on him, to make sure he didn’t find it?”

  “Then you’re suggesting that Niils may have killed Flüger and made up his story afterward?” said Nina. “Flüger knew about the drum. He talked about it. He must have heard about it from Niils himself. So why would Niils have killed him?”

  “Eva, can you give us a moment? I need to talk things over with my colleague.”

  “Take your time, constables. I’ll go and pop a bottle of white in the fridge, and you can join me in my office when you’re ready. Don’t sit on the uranium samples for too long, they’ll give you piles,” she added, leaving the hangar.

  Klemet and Nina stared after her, unsure whether she was joking or not.

  “What an extraordinary woman,” said Nina after Eva had gone. “She must have ruffled a few feathers in her time. I think she’s great.”

  Klemet made no comment on the character of the director of the NGI. “The problem is,” he said, “we still don’t know what the damned drum looks like. My feeling is it must look like a traditional drum, or it would have attracted attention. We still haven’t followed up that Oslo antiques dealer, the one you were going to try to find. The one who wanted to buy the drum.”

  In the small office area in the corner of the hangar, Nina put in some calls to Oslo, while Klemet left its warmth to walk up and down on the beaten-earth floor between the rows of piled-up chests. The tallest stacks were twenty or so feet high. He stopped in front of one, pulled open a drawer, and lifted a core sample.

  “Don’t touch!” a voice rang out.

  Eva was back with a bottle of white and three glasses in a basket, this time wearing a thick chapka, slightly askew, giving her a rather impish look.

  “The samples absolutely must stay where they are, in the chests. The slightest mix-up is like changing your ancestors’ birth dates on your family tree—the whole thing becomes meaningless and useless. Here, I didn’t want to wait back there by myself. Have something to drink.”

  “Well, just a finger. We have to drive back to Kiruna.”

  “Skål!” Eva stood the bottle on a nearby chest and toasted Patrol P9 with a glass filled to the brim. “Gold in these here boxes.” She smiled, patting one set of chests.

  Klemet took a drink of wine, slooshing it around his mouth to warm it before swallowing it down. The alcohol, even in such small doses, delivered a feeling of mild well-being in the icy depot.

  “Hard to know what you’re looking at, really,” he said, peering at the core samples.

  “Most rocks keep their secrets close. Like a woman of a certain age.” Eva smiled. “Can you possibly imagine the unbelievable quantity of ore, and labor, and smelting, and transforming, and energy it takes to extract one kilo of gold?”

  “But this gold mine, so unbelievably rich that it’s become a legend in the vidda. It seems strange that no one has ever found it, surely?” said Klemet.

  “Strange? No, not really. For one thing, people look for different ores at different periods in history. Our archives are full of unsuspected, hence undiscovered, treasure. Renewed interest in a particular ore, and technical progress, changes in the extraction costs, are all factors that will bring someone back to our archives today, to read them afresh, with new insight. And some ores are better at concealing themselves than others.”

  “You were talking about radium earlier.”

  “For example. A sneaky customer, that one. Highly radioactive. Lurking in uranium ores, talk about underhand. In big demand a while back for its luminescence. Watch hands and instrument dials, as I said. Right up to the 1950s. Very important for fighter pilots in the war. Radium is white, but if you expose it to the air, it camouflages itself, turns black. Clever, no? Like its cousin uranium. And just as cunning. In the form of uraninite, uranium is black. Bu
t when it’s altered, it changes color. Ever heard of yellowcake? I’m simplifying here, of course. But it’s quite the chameleon.”

  “You’ve been a fantastic help already, Eva, thank you,” said Klemet. “But we really must find the mine quickly. We have every reason to believe the French geologist is headed there. And we believe that if we find the mine, we’ll find the answers to the theft and the murder. I shouldn’t be saying this to you, really, but it’s a case of intuition over hard facts.”

  “Have no fear, my dear boy. Officer. I’m no stranger to intuition. It’s 80 percent intuition and luck in my business. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar. But intuition is fed by things seen and lived, you might say. The product of hard work and experience. You still need a nose for it, though.” Eva savored the bouquet of the Chablis before swallowing another mouthful.

  Klemet smiled. “If your intuition ever brings you over to Kautokeino, you must come and visit me in my lavvu, Eva. I’ll keep a bottle of white chilled just for you.”

  “A Sami tent with a supply of chilled white wine? Now there’s an offer I can’t refuse,” she replied, raising her glass in his direction. “Well, to get back to the matter in hand. The only way to find the place, in my view, is to find the geological map that accompanied Flüger’s field book. We clearly don’t have it here. Does it still exist? I have no idea. The presence of this one field book here is a mystery to me.”

  “Find the geological map… But surely that’s Mission Impossible if it isn’t here already?” said Klemet.

  “You said it, not me. Your only possible lead, as far as I can see, is to contact all the surviving members of the 1939 expedition.”

  “You’re right, up to a point,” Klemet admitted after a moment’s thought. “It’s the only logical lead. Most of the explorers are dead. We might be able to trace their families, ask to see their archives. But, well, frankly––”