The Last Pilgrim (18 page)

“What did he mean by that?” Agnes asked Holt when they were back out on the street.

“You probably won’t see Lafton again. Only me and a few others. So don’t worry about it. It’s a sign of trust, you see. Lafton wanted to meet you personally. He invited you to his office because you come with the best references from London. If he says things you don’t like . . . well, you’ll just have to put up with it. In my opinion he takes too many risks and talks a little too much. He shouldn’t have invited us to his office at all. I’ve hardly ever been there myself. I don’t like it, but what can I do? He’s my boss.”

They rounded the corner of the Grand and walked past the window table where they’d dined a short time ago. Agnes paused in the middle of the crowd moving along the sidewalk. Holt continued on a few paces before he noticed that she’d stopped.

He held out his arm to her.

“I’d like you to meet the person you’ll be reporting to directly.”

“I thought you were my boss,” Agnes said, unenthusiastic about the prospect of meeting anyone else that day. But she caught up to Holt anyway and continued walking.

Holt broke into a smile, making his eyes look like a child’s for a moment.

They stopped outside the Horn building, which had been built after she left Oslo and was now Norway’s tallest building. Holt excused himself and went inside the menswear shop while Agnes looked up at the imposing edifice. At the very top she saw a sign with the words Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
It’s too tall for this town,
she thought.

The Floris café on the third floor was almost full. The steady buzz of voices filled the room, the ringing of a cash register competed with the laughter coming from a nearby table, and cigarette smoke hovered like a dim fog below the expensive hardwood ceiling. Holt gripped her shoulder as he led her toward a row of tables near the window.

In the far corner sat a young man with dark-blond hair who appeared to be close to her own age. A notebook lay open in front of him, filled with what looked like lecture notes. He was eating a piece of cake with a silver fork. Next to him on the table was a small stack of worn books.

Holt cleared his throat. The young man looked up at them in bewilderment. Then a disarming smile spread across his face. Agnes felt herself blush.

“Agnes, this is the Pilgrim,” whispered Holt, barely audible above the hum of voices.

At first glance, the Pilgrim looked more like a boy scout than an intelligence agent. His suit looked like something he might have worn for his confirmation. But the blue eyes beneath his finely etched brows left no doubt that he’d been around the block a few times. And when he smiled, all traces of boyish innocence vanished. As Agnes sat down across from him, she barely heard Holt ask her what she’d like to order.

“Just a cup of coffee,” she heard herself say.

The Pilgrim,
she thought as the man packed up his books and notebook with an apologetic but confident smile.
What sort of cover name is that?
She cast a glance outside at the street, not because she was interested in the crowds or the cars driving past, but to restrain a strong urge to find a mirror. She felt that her hair was more wavy than she liked, even though her hat hid most of her hair. She silently cursed Moen and his salon, as well as Lafton’s yellowed horse teeth and his poorly disguised insinuation that she was going to spend her time in Oslo sleeping with men and not sitting across from them, as she was now. As an equal.

“So. What have they told you about the situation here in Oslo?” asked the Pilgrim. He surveyed the room and finally settled his gaze on Holt, who was now standing at the counter.

“Almost nothing,” she told him. What Lafton had said was hardly worth mentioning. Or even remembering.

“He’s a real strange guy, our friend down the street,” said the Pilgrim. He seemed like the sort of person who smiled as often as he could, and his teeth—unlike Lafton’s—were perfect. As perfect as only the teeth of a dentist’s child could be. She tried to find fault with his face, looking for something out of proportion or any tiny flaw, but she couldn’t find a thing.

Agnes merely nodded. She could think of nothing to say. For the umpteenth time, she cursed herself for having allowed herself to be recruited into the service. To be bowled over like this, by a boy like him!

“The Pilgrim studied in Germany,” said Holt when he returned. “An engineer. Wasn’t that what you wanted to be?”

The Pilgrim nodded and ran his hand through his hair.

“You wouldn’t believe what’s going on in that country,” he said. His expression remained neutral as he reached across the table and took a cigarette from Holt’s pack. He stared distractedly out the window, seeming to disappear into himself, to thoughts he would never share with anyone else.

When Holt left half an hour later, Agnes was still none the wiser. Holt and the Pilgrim had mostly talked cryptically about people she didn’t know.

She and the Pilgrim remained seated at the table and watched Holt walk off down the street.

“Tell me one thing. I . . .” she began. But she didn’t know what she was trying to say.

The Pilgrim kept on staring out the window at the reversed letters of the café’s sign.

“Let’s take a walk,” he said.

They walked slowly up Akersgata until they finally came to Vår Frelsers cemetery, which was deserted. The trees surrounding feminist and politician Gina Krog’s tombstone swayed in the wind. “I think we’ll soon be ratcheting up to Operation Charlie level,” said the Pilgrim. “That means you’ll refer to Kaj only as Number 1, and to yourself as Number 13. We can keep on this way. Lafton may have already breached protocol.”

I don’t want to be Number 13,
Agnes thought.

“Only my boss, Number 1, knows who belongs to which cells and how many of us there are,” said the Pilgrim. “In case the worst comes to pass. That’s all you need to know. For the time being, I’m your only contact.”

“How did you . . .” Agnes sat down on the nearest bench. She didn’t want to know.

They sat there for a while, looking at each other. As if they were both thinking,
What are we doing here?

“You’re not the only one here,” said the Pilgrim at last. “But I’m sure you know that.”

She nodded as she studied the bust of Gina Krog. It was a relief to evade his eyes, even though all she really wanted to do was stare at him.

“Try not to kill each other.”

She laughed quietly.

“What’s your real name?” she asked.

The Pilgrim didn’t answer. Instead, he took another cigarette out of the pack that Holt had left behind at the café. After struggling to light it in the wind, he took out a stack of papers from his briefcase and set them on the bench next to her.

She didn’t need to pick them up to know what they said.

On top was a flyer promoting the Nasjonal Samling. The yellow sun cross against a red background was unmistakable. The Pilgrim pointed to the address at the bottom.

Next he pulled out a newspaper clipping. An attorney she’d never heard of was looking for a typist and a secretary. Agnes put both papers in her purse without asking any questions.

“Tomorrow you’ll go and join the Party. Your sister is already a member. After that, you’ll call and apply for one of the two open positions in the office of Supreme Court Advocate Wilhelmsen. Then you’ll start going to the Rainbow Club, preferably every evening. Any questions?”

“What’s your real name?” she merely said.

Their eyes met. She could clearly see the black ring around the dark-blue iris of his eyes. A faint smile played over his face. He took out the pack of Craven A’s and offered her one. Agnes felt her fingers tremble as she raised the cigarette to her lips. For a moment the smoke threatened to choke her.

“The Pilgrim,” he said in a low voice. “Just the Pilgrim.”

CHAPTER 26

Tuesday, June 10, 2003

Oppsal

Oslo, Norway

The traffic light changed to green. Tommy Bergmann heard the car behind him honk, but kept on reading the documents on his lap. When the car honked again, he shifted into first and pulled into the closest bus bay. He had three printouts from the Web and several copies of newspaper articles from the past decade. So far that was all he’d been able to dig up on Krogh. And that might have been intentional. From his research, Bergmann gathered that Krogh had never provided any biographical information about himself, participated in any debates, or written a single article about the war. According to a newspaper interview from 1999, which was linked to one of the Internet articles, Krogh left postwar commentary to others. He described himself as a simple man, first and foremost an engineer who was also interested in business and politics. He was not a historian, nor a man who judged others who had made different choices than he had during the war.

The three articles Bergmann had found all referred to books written by Torgeir Moberg, a well-known historian who was possibly the leading expert on the war. According to Moberg, Krogh had been a member of Milorg, the Norwegian Resistance, from 1941 to 1945, and a British SIS agent in Oslo even before the war broke out, until he was exposed by the Gestapo in the fall of 1942. He managed to flee to Sweden under dramatic circumstances, but in March 1943 was sent back to Norway, where he was presumed to have been behind a number of liquidations, including the death of Gudbrand Svendstuen, whom the Brits claimed had betrayed Krogh and his cell to the Nazis. Krogh later became a leading figure in the Norwegian Resistance community in Stockholm, and he also spent long periods of time in London.

Bergmann’s reading was once again interrupted by honking. The driver of the 69 bus was waving his arms at him, as if they were in the middle of a traffic jam in Karachi and not the outskirts of Oslo.

“Marius Kolstad,” Bergmann muttered. “I need to find Marius Kolstad.”

Standing outside the high-rise building that housed the Oppsal nursing home, Bergmann tried to recall the last time he had been here. It had been years ago—maybe even a decade—when he was still on patrol duty. He turned around to survey the nearby apartment buildings and the shopping center, which he remembered as being old and worn out, but which had been so completely modernized that he felt like a stranger here, in his own part of town.

As he went inside, he silently vowed never to end up in a nursing home, not even if he could have a private room and wine at dinner. The mere smell of the place was enough to make him want to leave. A hospital was different because it held the hope of life, side by side with death. Here the stale smell merely underscored the fact that no one was ever going to get out alive. Few things scared him more than the thought of a lingering death in a place like this. It was better to die the way his mother had, even though she’d died far too early. Three weeks from diagnosis to death was just enough time to put things in order and try for some sort of closure.

He showed his ID to the young woman sitting at the reception desk. An old man passed behind him, and Bergmann turned to look over his shoulder, noting the gnarled, bluish knuckles of the man’s hands, trembling slightly, as he held on to the walker.

“I’d like to speak to Marius Kolstad,” said Bergmann.

“Kolstad? Let’s see now . . .” She gave him a practiced and professional smile that made Bergmann feel a bit better. And her perfume smelled wonderful. “May I ask what it’s about? I mean . . .” She pointed at his ID. Bergmann noticed that her nails were bitten to the quick, and he found himself appreciating this flaw in her otherwise perfect appearance.

“It’s about a homicide case,” he said.

The nurse, whose nametag identified her as Lise, gave him a perplexed look. He nodded to emphasize that he was serious.

“Well . . .” she said. “That’s a little shocking. I . . .”

“It’s important that I speak with him. I can get a warrant, if . . .”

She suddenly looked relieved.

“Oh, that’s right,” she said, her eyes on her computer screen. “Kolstad is at the Ullevål Hospital. He was transferred there yesterday. I forgot all about it. He took a turn for the worse two nights ago.”