The Last Pilgrim (10 page)

He stood out on the loading dock as the sack was loaded into the back of the van. The double doors of the van slammed. Persson watched until it disappeared around the corner.

CHAPTER 14

Monday, May 19, 2003

National Archives

Oslo, Norway

The parking lot at Sognsvann was barely half-full. Tommy Bergmann parked his brand-new service vehicle as close to the footpath as possible. He briefly studied the building through the trees before he took the printout from the passenger seat, rolled down the window, and lit a smoke. Somebody had to be the first to break the no-smoking rule in this damned car.

A mild breeze blew in from the Nordmarka woods, and the pale-green leaves on the nearby birch trees rustled. Then the wind died out and the leaves stopped moving, drooping as if summer were over before it had even started.

Gustav Lande,
Bergmann said to himself, looking down at the piece of paper in his lap. All four hits on the Internet had been more or less similar and originated from a website called the Norwegian War Encyclopedia. All the articles referred to the same author, a well-known figure by the name of Professor Torgeir Moberg. He read the text several times as he puffed on his cigarette, trying to put together what little he knew. In September 1942 someone killed the wife and child of the Nazi Gustav Lande, along with another woman. Almost two years later Gustav Lande took his own life.

All right,
Bergmann thought.
Not much to go on.
But he couldn’t stop thinking about that little girl. It seemed clear that she’d been buried alive. Why were the two women shot in the head, but not the girl? Had the person who killed them simply tossed the child into the grave, clinging to her mother?

He shook off the thought and looked at the printout from the missing-persons list again.

Cecilia Lande, born March 16, 1934.

Agnes Gerner, born June 19, 1918.

Johanne Caspersen, born November 5, 1915.

Yes,
he thought,
Caspersen was probably the mother.
She must have been. He had decided not to speculate as to which of the two women was the mother until he had proof, but he couldn’t help himself.

The man behind the counter looked as if he didn’t appreciate people showing up unannounced at the National Archives.

“You need to make an appointment,” he said. “We get a lot of requests, and we can’t just . . .”

The man, whose name was Rolf according to his nametag, let the sentence die out.

“Look, Rolf,” said Bergmann. “I’m sure the two of us can agree on an appointment time . . . say, right about now.”

Rolf merely sighed when Bergmann held up his police badge and laid the printout on the counter along with a copy of a newspaper article about the three skeletons found in Nordmarka. Rolf pursed his lips several times as he studied the names before him.

“September 1942,” said Bergmann.

Rolf sighed again, scratching the sparse beard he’d managed to grow. Bergmann tried to stay calm by looking out the big picture windows off the lobby.

“Well,” said Rolf, “the old case files are probably in the records for the Oslo and Aker Police Department, because the city and Aker County’s departments were combined during the Occupation.” Then he muttered something that Bergmann didn’t catch and began pounding away at the keyboard. He stared at the screen with an annoyed expression on his face. “Let’s see . . . maybe you’ll get lucky,” he said, smiling in a way that Bergmann chose not to interpret. “They could have been shredded.”

You’re the one who’d be lucky
if they haven’t been shredded,
thought Bergmann.

“Come with me,” Rolf said at last. “Looks like this is your lucky day.”

Bergmann didn’t say a word as he followed him over to the elevators. Down in the basement Rolf led him to a seating area and disappeared into a vast sea of rolling stacks. Yesterday’s
Dagbladet
dated Sunday, May 18, lay on the low table in front of him. Bergmann recognized the scene in the right column of the front page. The photo had been taken late in the evening on May 16. The white tent illuminated the dark forest, and two figures in white tech overalls stood outside. Bergmann glanced at the caption and “mystery in the woods” caught his eye. He put down the paper without turning to the story inside.

The archivist came back ten minutes later, more sullen than before, if that were possible.

“You have to read them here,” he said, placing an old beige file folder on the table.

For a few minutes Bergmann simply sat there with his hand on top of the old folder. Then he removed the white string holding it together. Inside were three separate files, which he spread out on the table. The top one was from the combined Oslo and Aker Police Department, the second from the National Police, and the last one from the Oslo Police Presidium. The stamp on the cover page revealed that the case had been closed on April 15, 1944, three months before Gustav Lande committed suicide.

He put all the folders back in their original order and opened the top one. The first document was the missing-persons report. It gave him a few answers, but unfortunately raised even more questions.

Police Officer Ragnar Dahl, Vinderen Police Station.

Cecilia Lande, Johanne Caspersen, and Agnes Margaretha Gerner were reported missing at 11:55 p.m. on September 28, 1942. All three individuals live at Tuengen Allé 10C. Reported by Gustav Lande of Knaben Molybdenum Mines, Inc., born: March 8, 1905, status: widower, residence: as above. Engaged to Agnes M. Gerner. Ms. Gerner has special permission from the Higher SS and Police Leader North to be on the street from 8:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. The housekeeper, Johanne Caspersen, does not and is therefore subject to the curfew.

So Gustav Lande was a widower, and neither of the women was Cecilia Lande’s mother. And he was engaged to Agnes Gerner, not Johanne Caspersen. Bergmann felt relieved at having overcome the first hurdle on a path he knew would present many more. Gustav Lande’s first wife, Cecilia’s mother, was dead, and Agnes was his new fiancée. It was no more complicated than that. But it did nothing to change the fact that the child was dead.

The next document was a brief report from the following day, September 29, 1942.

A search was instigated around Lande’s summer house at Rødtangen on the Hurum peninsula. According to Lande, who was on a business trip to Berlin and returned to Oslo late in the evening on September 28, Agnes G. was supposed to help Johanne C. (Lande’s housekeeper) close up the summer house at Rødtangen for the winter on Sunday, September 27. According to witnesses nobody was in the house that weekend. Canvassing on September 29 at Rødtangen and interviews with Lande’s neighbors at Vinderen produced no further information. Lande’s car, a 1939 black Mercedes-Benz 170V, was not found. List of witnesses questioned is attached.

Bergmann skimmed over the witness list, which consisted of the names of only those who had been questioned during the canvassing out in Rødtangen and about ten people who resided on Lande’s street.

At the bottom of the file was a sheet of paper that had obviously served as the basis for the investigation that took place the next day, Wednesday, September 30, 1942. Bergmann carefully read through the descriptions of the two women and child. Only one thing caught his attention. Cecilia Lande, born: March 16, 1934, height: 4’1”, blue eyes and dark-blonde hair, had a congenital hip defect that “gave her a characteristic limping gait.” Bergmann pictured the girl up in Nordmarka. Maybe whoever had killed her knew that she wouldn’t be able to run away. Maybe she’d been forced to watch as Agnes and the housekeeper were shot.

Next, he opened a worn light-blue folder containing paper of better quality. From the documents inside, he learned that the National Police had investigated the case under orders from Sipo, the German Security Police, dated September 30, 1942. The introductory report stated that the National Police could not rule out the likelihood that Lande’s collaboration with Norway’s pro-Nazi Reichskommissariat Norwegen made his family a target for the Resistance movement’s terrorist actions. On the previous Friday the Resistance had liquidated one of Gustav Lande’s most trusted men. The National Police also mentioned that both his fiancée, Agnes Gerner, and the housekeeper, Johanne Caspersen, were active members of Vidkun Quisling’s Nasjonal Samling, or NS, Norway’s fascist National Unity Party. The next report stated that a number of presumed Resistance men had been brought in to the Nazis’ provisional HQ at Møllergata 19 on October first and second. Two of them were later transferred to the Gestapo’s HQ at Victoria Terrasse for interrogation by Sipo.

As Bergmann continued leafing through the folder, he came upon transcripts of the interrogations from Møllergata 19, but none from Victoria Terrasse. The transcripts seemed to be of no interest, apart from the fact that one of the alleged Resistance men had committed suicide by jumping from the fourth floor of the Møllergata police station. Gustav Lande’s car had been found on Madserud Allé, nowhere near Nordmarka, on Thursday, October 1, 1942, but an examination of the car, the testimony of witnesses living on that street, and a search of the area all proved fruitless. The final document in the file indicated that the National Police had closed its own preliminary investigation into the case, citing the parallel investigation being conducted by the Oslo and Aker Police Department.

Bergmann said a silent prayer before he opened the third and final folder. It didn’t help much. There was only a single sheet of paper indicating that the case was closed on April 15, 1944. It was signed by Detective Inspector G. Lid and stamped by the Oslo Police Presidium.

There were no photos in any of the folders.
I need to know what they looked like,
he thought. Why had Gustav Lande’s car shown up on Madserud Allé? The three of them were killed an hour north in Nordmarka when they were thought to be on their way south to Hurum, and the car they had supposedly used had been found halfway between the two places in the neighborhood of Skøyen. Bergmann was probably as baffled as the detectives investigating during the war must have been.

He sat for half an hour copying information from the sections of the reports he thought were most relevant. He decided to drive to Rødtangen on the Hurum peninsula as soon as possible to get a sense for the summer house’s surroundings. And photos. He had to find photos of them.

“Newspapers,” he said when he returned the folder. “Have you got any?”

Rolf pointed at several evening papers lying on the counter.

Bergmann tapped his finger lightly on the file folder in front of him to indicate he meant archived newspapers.

“The National Library,” Rolf said. “They close at seven.”

Bergmann looked up at the white clock on the wall and decided to leave the National Library till the next day. He’d rather make it to handball warm-up on time, which started in half an hour.

Although the tempo of the warm-up run had been leisurely, Bergmann had to lie down on the floor of the gym when they were done. This gave the entire Girls 12 team a chance to tease him. He stared up at the ceiling and cursed his old childhood friend Erlend Dybdahl, who had talked him into signing up as assistant coach three years ago.

A year later Erlend got a plum manager’s job with the Asian subsidiary of the IT firm he worked for, and moved to Singapore with his talented daughter and the rest of his family. The coaching situation at the club had deteriorated as a result, and Bergmann had had no choice but to promote himself to head coach. He had appointed the top man at the time, Arne Drabløs—whom Dybdahl had secretly nicknamed Hopeless—as assistant coach. But Hopeless did have one strong point. He was in damned great shape. So even though he could hardly tell a handball from a medicine ball, he played handball admirably. Over the years Bergmann and Erlend had played on teams together and finally ended up on junior varsity for Oppsal. Although Erlend was the big star, Tommy Bergmann was close behind.

Bergmann was big and tall, a rough-cut block of granite when he was in his prime, and well suited to clearing the field for the backs. He was so big that the goalies of the younger opposing teams would creep inside the goal net and shut their eyes whenever he was about to take a shot. Then he tore a ligament in his left knee during his military service, which was enough to make him give up handball, even after a successful operation. In any case he lacked Erlend’s talent and would never have been more than a reserve on the A-team’s bench. By that time he was so fed up with handball that he doubted he would ever pick up a ball again.

But as he lay on the floor of the Klemetsrud gym almost twenty years after he’d given up playing, he thanked his lucky stars for this unpaid job that filled his free time. It cleared his head three or four times a week and kept his body more or less in shape. Plus the sight of these girls, no matter whether they won or lost, made him believe the world was a good place in spite of everything.