The Last Pilgrim (5 page)

“Well,” replied Abrahamsen. “I’m not going to risk having that skull fall apart in my hands.” He took his cell phone out of his pocket.

“Well,” said Monsen in an attempt to imitate Abrahamsen. “If these bones and that skull have been lying there for over twenty-five years, all we have to do is transfer this case ASAP, and then
they
’ll have to figure out what to do about them.”

Five minutes later Monsen was gone.

An hour and a half later, the students had left and another couple of uniforms had arrived. Getting a statement from them hadn’t taken much time. They’d just been hammering in the last tent peg when they struck something in the dirt and pulled up a bone. A human bone, probably a leg bone. Since they were probably more familiar with human leg bones than anyone else at the scene, there was little cause to doubt that they were right.

Bergmann had put on a pair of gloves and was following Abrahamsen’s instructions. He shivered as he ran his hand over the forearm bones, which now lay exposed. An apparently complete skeleton lay buried here among the earth and stones. The chest cavity had collapsed, but apart from that the remains were fairly intact. With the exception of the hole in the forehead, that is.

“The permafrost pressed the skeleton up to the surface,” said Abrahamsen. “The bones have been here for years.”

Bergmann shook his head and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

“That’s why we bury people six feet under, you know. Just imagine what a hell of a mess it would be if you managed to outlive your mother-in-law, only to have her rise up from the damned ground a year later.”

Bergmann was hardly listening any longer. He felt dizzy as he got up off his knees and stood staring down at the two forearm bones, which lay across what was left of the rib cage. The odor of the forest floor made him feel sick. He tore off his plastic gloves and stuck a cigarette in his mouth. How long had they been out here working on this? An hour? He cocked his head to one side as he always did when lighting a smoke, but stopped just before the lighter flame reached the cigarette.

The angle of the battery-powered light cast a sharp glow on the end of the forearm, or maybe it was the hand. Bergmann saw something flash down in the dirt.

He took the unlit cigarette from his mouth and held it almost listlessly between his fingers.

“Georg,” he said in a low voice, dropping the cigarette to the ground. Putting his gloves back on, he knelt down and began to dig carefully around what must have been the left hand. He removed the last bits of dirt from around the brown, porous finger bones.

Hanging on the half-rotten ring finger was a dull ring.

A gold ring.

A wedding ring.

Tommy Bergmann felt another chill run through his body as he picked up the remnants of the hand.

“Don’t do that,” said Abrahamsen behind him.

Bergmann ignored him. It was too late anyway. Besides, the bones didn’t break. He slipped the ring on his own finger and held it up to the sky. After three tries he managed to make out the letters on the engraving.

Y
OURS FOREVER
. G
USTAV
.

CHAPTER 5

Early Wednesday Morning, May 30, 1945

Berns Restaurant, Large Salon

Stockholm, Sweden

Kaj Holt had no idea where he was when he was rudely awakened by a hand shaking him lightly by the shoulder. All the lights were on in the large, long room, and there was no music coming from the stage. He was reclining rather than sitting, and a thundering headache was the only sign that he was still alive. For a moment it seemed like the huge, gleaming chandeliers on the ceiling were falling toward him. But there was no sound, absolutely none. And nothing could penetrate his headache, not even the thought of lying beneath the floorboards on Valkyriegata, or the fear of not having identification papers on him.

“The gentleman will have to leave,” said a voice above him.

Holt automatically straightened up, tipping the chair over backward. The hand gripped his shoulder again. He had a sudden desire to lash out around him, but reason prevailed. Maybe it was the clinking of glasses somewhere in the room, or the sound of laughter—friendly, not jeering—coming from somewhere else.

Images from the night before flashed across his mind’s eye. The faces, the laughter, a woman on his lap, her fragrance, the taste of her. Nordenstam’s suntanned face and white teeth, the pats on his back. The words “It’s over now, it’s all over.”

But where am I?
Holt thought, glancing around the room.
Where is everybody?

“Sorry,” he heard himself say. Then he was suddenly standing out on the street with his suit coat over his arm, holding his hat between his thumb and index finger. Carefully, as if to ensure that his head wouldn’t fall off, he looked up at the sky, relieved to see that an almost invisible rain was falling from the darkness above him. He checked his watch several times, but was unable to make sense of its hands.

After he’d stood there long enough to get soaked, someone behind him said that a cab was coming. All he could manage was a grunt in reply. A pair of headlights appeared down the street.

“To Gärdet,” he said softly to himself. His mind was starting to clear, but he still couldn’t remember anything about the night before. It was as if his short-term memory had been wiped clean.

“What address?”

“Rindögatan.”

Holt took the sleeping pills out of his pocket, counted them, then counted them again.

He wondered whether there were enough.

“Quiet,” Holt whispered. His hands were shaking as he counted the sleeping pills in his hand one more time. Seven. That wasn’t enough.

“Quiet . . .” he said again, surprised at how loud it sounded.

The next thing he remembered was kneeling in front of the fountain in the middle of Karlaplan, drinking water out of his hand. He swallowed one, two, three sleeping pills. He stood up, swaying, as if he expected to fall asleep and tumble into the water, drown, disappear forever.

But nothing happened. He reached for his hip flask in his inside pocket, but it was gone. He swore to himself a couple of times, soaked by the rain falling quietly from the black sky.

The fountain was turned off, and there were no sounds apart from the faint hiss of the occasional car. Holt didn’t know how he had found the right street, but it didn’t matter. He was now staggering up Rindögatan, he was sure of it. He wandered past his building and headed across the street, spinning around as a taxi came out of nowhere and almost ran him down. He thought he had a girlfriend on the next block with whom he’d spent a few nights the year before. He wished that summer had never come to an end. That he could have stayed and slept with her every single night. That the war could have lasted forever, but that he would no longer have had to be part of it.

He found the doorbell automatically. The fourth button from the bottom felt like the right one.

“I want you,” he said when she answered. He didn’t even know if he meant it. In fact, he didn’t mean it. But he repeated the words anyway: “I want you.” He was almost incomprehensible.

“Come back when you’re sober, Kaj. You’re waking up the whole street.”

“Well, shit,” he said. He didn’t even remember her name. He laughed at himself. Seconds later, he felt tears welling up in his eyes. He leaned down and felt the contours of the pistol under his pants leg.
My little friend,
he thought.
My little friend.

“Do you know what time it is? I’m going to call the cops, Kaj. Go home and sleep it off, all right?”

She hung up.

Holt leaned against the glass door. A moment later, his shoes were covered with vomit.

“This can’t be happening,” he said quietly to himself. He sat down on the granite steps, getting the seat of his pants all wet. “Tell me it isn’t true . . . dear God . . .”

Back at his own building, he looked down at the vomit on his shoes through his tears. “I don’t even know why I’m crying,” he muttered to himself. “It just feels so damn good. Better than it’s ever felt before.” Moving like a sleepwalker, he went up the stairs without even turning on the light in the stairwell.

The tiny strip of paper he had fastened to the bottom of the front door and the threshold had fallen to the floor in the hall.

He tripped over his own feet.

He crawled over to the bed and flopped down on top of the bedspread.

Nothing was real anymore. Not even the face of the man who stood looking down at him with that indescribably calm expression.

Finally,
Holt thought.
Finally you’re here.
He couldn’t even manage to say the words to the face hovering above him.
What are you doing here?
He thought he should have screamed the words, just to scare him off.
What are you doing here?
His legs felt like they’d been sawed off. He knew the little pistol was down around his ankle somewhere, he could just barely feel it, but he couldn’t get up. The man—the same man with the childish face and the soft features, almost like a girl’s—took the pistol out of his garter. He gave a wry smile as he looked down at Holt.

“Oh Kaj, oh Kaj,” he said, running his finger over the threading on the muzzle. His accent was hardly noticeable. Holt knew that he had seen this man before. It was the childish face of the civilian from Jørstadmoen. In the pocket of the coat draped over the back of the chair the man found the silencer. As if Holt had planned it all himself.

All right,
Holt thought.
So I guess I wasn’t meant to survive.
What was it he’d said to Waldhorst? “Don’t we all have a little daughter?” Holt tried fleetingly to remember his own little daughter’s smell, but he couldn’t do it. He started crying again despite himself. He didn’t want the man leaning over him to think that he, Captain Kaj Holt, was afraid of taking a bullet to the head.

If he hadn’t been so drunk, so overwhelmed by sleep, so sad, then . . . he didn’t know . . . then he would have used his bare hands to kill the man hovering over him.

The man had a faint smile on his lips. It may have been that smile that made Holt get up as though he’d never had a drop of alcohol in his life.

“If I’m going to die, I’ll die by my own hand,” he whispered. The childish face must have been surprised at that, because he seemed caught off guard when Holt slugged him in the kidneys with his left hand. He doubled over silently and then took a step back, tipping over the chair next to the wall. Holt waited just a second, a single second too long. The floor seemed sloped, the wall was slanted, the ceiling was caving in—wasn’t it? That fucking guy would be pissing blood for the rest of the summer, and Holt laughed at the thought.
I’m laughing, you hear me, baby face?

A second too long, he realized when it was already too late.

Baby Face’s head-butt must have punctured a lung. His sternum felt like it gave way, but no sound came out of Holt’s mouth. When he lay back down on the bed, it was like he’d never gotten up.

Holt closed his eyes and thought,
It’s going to be like coming home.

CHAPTER 6

Early Saturday Morning, May 17, 2003

Nordmarka

Oslo, Norway

A heavy fog had settled over the forest in the last half hour, clinging to the black spruce trees like dust. An owl screeched somewhere over Tommy Bergmann’s head as he stood looking at the white vapor rising up from the piss drenching the cold moss. He buttoned up his fly and listened to the silence all around him. For a moment there wasn’t a sound; everyone—including the newly arrived officers from the Kripo crime-scene team, Georg Abrahamsen, and the two uniformed cops from the Majorstua police station who had arrived late that night—had fallen silent.

A crackle from the uniforms’ portable radio broke the silence. For a moment Bergmann caught himself missing the camaraderie and cooperation of life on patrol. As investigators, they worked as a team, but deep down they all knew it was every man for himself.

They hadn’t made much progress in the past few hours, and none of them were even close to being able to answer the question they were all asking themselves: Who was Gustav? The only thing they knew for sure was that the first skeleton they had uncovered was a woman who had been married or at least engaged to this Gustav. One of the Kripo guys thought he could tell at a glance that there were definitely more bodies in the grave. Bergmann didn’t go for that sort of overconfidence, but if that were the case, it might give them a better idea what had become of Gustav.

He went back down the path and studied the scene before him. The white tent was now up. It was illuminated by one battery-powered light on the outside and three on the inside. The two uniforms stood outside, each with a headlamp. The glaring beams cut through the treetops like air defense searchlights before they turned their heads, and then the light swept over the tree trunks. Bergmann was blinded for a few seconds. When his sight returned, he noticed a pair of deer eyes deep in the forest. Caught in the headlamp’s light beam, the animal froze as if petrified.

“Tommy!” Abrahamsen’s voice cut through the night. The eyes in the forest vanished, and Bergmann could hear the frightened flight of the deer through the heath.

The light fanned over the ground in front of him, and he began walking slowly toward the tent. Abrahamsen stood in the opening, peering out into the darkness as though unable to see anything at all in the abrupt transition from the light.

“You have to see this,” he said.

“See what?” Bergmann asked, stepping past Abrahamsen, who held the tent flap open for him. It felt as though all the oxygen inside the tent had been used up. Five men were standing or squatting around the excavated area, which was now about six square feet. Bergmann looked first at the remains of the woman, his gaze moving from the skull with the hole in it to the rib cage, hips, femurs, and tibias. The feet appeared to be crushed.