The Last Pilgrim (60 page)

Another pause. Then he said, “She told me that she killed Carl Oscar Krogh for everyone. For herself, for Cecilia, for Kaj Holt, for Vera Holt. For everyone who died because of him.”

“Was she in contact with—”

“Vera Holt? Yes,” said Waldhorst. “A couple of times, in the past few years. God, how Agnes hated that man. I tried to tell her that’s what happens in war, that you have to expect betrayals, but . . . She fooled me. I thought she’d come to terms with what happened.” He rubbed his face, then sighed heavily and gave a resigned laugh. “‘The Pilgrim got me in the end,’ she said when she came home on Sunday evening. And well, you know . . . she won’t last much longer.”

Bergmann lit a cigarette. Fritz sat motionless next to him. Both stared at the horizon. Another plane emerged from the clouds and slowly descended toward the city.

“How . . .” Bergmann began but then stopped. He didn’t know what to ask.

Again all three men lapsed into silence.

“She came to the door,” Waldhorst said finally. He nodded to himself several times, looked down at his cigar, let it burn out.

“She rang the doorbell,” he corrected himself. “It was such a lovely apartment, you know, Mr. Bergmann. Quite lovely. At the top of Bygdøy Allé, right across from Frogner Church . . .” He let the words die away. “I opened the door without saying a word.”

Bergmann waited.

“And there she stood, right before me. Tears were running down her face, and she was holding a gun.”

Waldhorst fixed his eyes on Bergmann and gestured with the burned-out cigar.

“An angel. She was like an angel.”

“Why? Why did she come to you?”

“She knew that I’d had her surrounded long ago. She wanted me to have her arrested. All she wanted was to die,” said Waldhorst. “She had killed a child. A child that she loved.”

“What did you do?” asked Bergmann.

“I convinced her that I could get her out of Norway. That her own death wasn’t going to bring Cecilia back to life. I went over and took the gun out of her hand. A gun made by the Brits. I’d never seen any like it.”

“And?”

“Then I took the engagement ring off her finger and stuck it in my pocket. She told me where the two bodies were. All I had to do was follow the main path until I came to the logging area on the left-hand side. A good flashlight was all that was needed to find the place. I took the keys to Gustav Lande’s car and drove to Torshov, where one of my informants lived. A lonely and embittered little devil of a man from up north somewhere. Someone I knew nobody would miss, at least not until the war was over. It took us an hour to dig a grave in the woods, in utter darkness and a hell of a downpour. First we threw in the poor child. Then the maid. She had been working for me, but I was the only one who knew that. At least she took to her death an engagement ring from Gustav Lande. Then I pulled out Agnes’s Welrod and shot the poor informant in the head. He never even knew what happened. He never saw me point the gun at him. He was leaning on the shovel, staring down at the two bodies. And he was crying. ‘Just a child,’ he said. ‘That poor little girl.’ When he said it again, I pulled the trigger and rolled him down into the grave. I drove the car back to town, parked it on Madserud Allé, and then walked back to my apartment, where she was waiting.”

“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 time 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.”