The Last Pilgrim (23 page)

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 individuals, 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

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.

A middle-aged NS woman was sitting in the chair next to her. As soon as Moen stepped away, she put down the magazine she was reading and turned to Agnes. Nazi women had started frequenting Moen’s beauty salon back in the spring and early summer of 1940 when money in Norway began changing hands. At first Agnes was nauseated by the sight of all these Nazis, but now, two years later, she realized just how valuable they might be.

“So, a special occasion, Ms. Gerner?” The woman’s voice was cold, bordering on arrogant, and her expression was patronizing at best.

“I’ve been invited to Gustav Lande’s tonight.”

The woman’s face fell. Maybe she had been expecting Agnes to say that she didn’t have anything special going on, even though many of the Nazi women knew that Agnes Gerner would go to bed with Helge Schreiner, if need be. But Gustav Lande? That was something else entirely.

Agnes turned to look at the woman and flashed her most enchanting little-girl smile.

The only thing that bothered her was that she’d arranged to meet the Pilgrim in Sten’s Park that evening, but was going to have to miss it. Last week he’d told her that they would have to meet in parks and doorways for the time being, until he could possibly borrow an apartment from friends who were unaware of what he was doing, but those sorts of friends were few and far between. Number 1 thought that their relationship was dangerous and had apparently forbidden him to continue seeing Agnes. The Pilgrim thought he was so determined to end their relationship that he’d put both her apartment and all the safe houses under surveillance. According to Number 1, love had no place in war. It was a danger to them all.

As if anyone has to convince us of that,
Agnes thought as she let the front door close quietly behind her. She took down the invitation from Gustav Lande, which she’d stuck in the frame of the mirror in the entryway, and ran her finger over the heavy card stock. Even at times like this, Gustav could apparently afford to spend money on dazzling white stationery edged with a gold border. “Dear Agnes,”
he’d written. “Thank you for an unforgettable evening.” His signature was confident and verging on stylish. Agnes set the invitation down on the teak bureau under the mirror and cast a quick glance at her watch so she could calculate how much time she had to get ready. Then she opened her purse and took out the envelope from Helge K. Moen. She crumpled up the beauty salon receipt and placed it on the bureau. Then she took out the strip of paper tucked into the bottom of the envelope. She looked at herself in the mirror, then took off her hat and studied her hair, which was stiff with hair spray. The darkness of the entryway made her face look white, almost like a death mask. She unfolded the strip of paper and headed to the kitchen, studying the brief, cryptic message on her way. By the time she had lifted up the loose floorboard at the end of the counter with only a butter knife, then wiggled out the baseboard, she had almost memorized all the letters. Tucked away in the dark among the old junk and dust bunnies was the codebook.