The Last Pilgrim (40 page)

He thought his second search in the National Registry would be more complicated. But there was only one person in Norway named Vera Holt, and she lived just a few blocks from police headquarters. He read through the information on the screen slowly, to confirm that it was a match. Vera Holt was born on January 6, 1945, in Stockholm, Sweden. Father: Kaj Holt, captain. Mother: Signe Holt, housewife. Marital status: Single. Address: Kolstadgata 7, 0652 Oslo. He did a quick search on Holt’s wife, Signe, but she died in 1997. So Vera Holt was most likely the one who had in her possession the piece of evidence from the Stockholm police—if Kaj Holt’s supposed suicide note still existed at all.

Bergmann closed his eyes for a couple of seconds and noticed how tired he was. Maybe this was all his imagination, nothing but the wishful thinking of a police detective. He turned the desk lamp away from the screen and perched on the edge of his chair.

“Vera Holt,” he said out loud. “You’ve been here all along, right before my eyes.”

But Kolstadgata 7? Kaj Holt’s daughter must not be doing very well if that was her address. There wasn’t a worse place to live in this whole crazy city. The communal housing project just a stone’s throw from police headquarters was no better than a slum.

He looked her up by her birthday, using the search engine that linked all information the government had on everyone who’d had contact with any official agencies for one reason or another.

What’s this?
thought Bergmann, studying the screen.

There were no remarks pertaining to Vera Holt. She had never filed a complaint, been a witness, or received any sort of court judgment. However, there was an asterisk in the comments field to the right of her name. Bergmann knew that the search engine contained only links to court files and investigations from the last ten years or so. So there was apparently some older case involving Vera Holt that must have been filed and taken out of the system long ago. Either someone had forgotten to remove the asterisk, or it was a serious matter.
A very serious matter,
Bergmann thought.

His cell rang, interrupting his thoughts.

“Are you back?” he heard Hadja say.

Bergmann suddenly felt wide awake.

“Yes,” he said, printing out the screenshot. It would take him only five minutes to go over to Vera Holt’s place on Kolstadgata. But it was too late for that, and his reason for paying her a visit was flimsy at best. Besides, he was more interested in seeing Hadja than Vera Holt.

“Where are you?”

“At the office.”

“Oh.” She sounded a little disappointed. “Martine is spending the night with Sara. I have the evening free, if you have some time.”

“Couldn’t you come over here?”

“To police headquarters?”

He had to laugh. Hadja laughed too.

“Take a cab,” he said, switching off his computer. “I miss you.” It wasn’t like him to say that, but he meant it.

As he walked over to Café Oliven on Nordbygata, he could hardly wait to see her again. He couldn’t help it if this wasn’t the most sensible thing he’d ever done.

Half an hour later they were sitting across from each other. After a few minutes of empty chatter during which they both seemed a little nervous, they settled back to where they’d been less than a week ago. Bergmann once again had the feeling that she could really be the right woman for him. He held her hand for a moment, just to show her how glad he was to be with her. The smile she gave him before exchanging a few words in Arabic with the waiter made him deeply happy, as if a ray of light had pierced the darkness he sometimes felt that he carried inside. He studied her profile. She was wearing more makeup than usual, and he noticed that other men in the café were openly staring at her. Strangely enough, it didn’t bother him that other men found her attractive. Instead, he was proud to be the one sitting there with her. Much better than being filled with a rage whose source he couldn’t identify, much less control.

“You’re a lucky man to have such a beautiful girlfriend,” the waiter told Bergmann. “She says she’s not Palestinian, but I think she is. Only Palestinian girls are so beautiful, my friend.” He laughed as he took the menus from them. They looked at each other, both of them smiling shyly, a bit embarrassed.

“Tell me about your trip to Sweden,” she said.

He told her what little he could, and then she gave him an update on handball practice, most of which she’d heard from Sara. He laughed several times as Hadja mimicked Drabløs’s gestures and drawling Sunnmøre dialect.

“You have a talent for that,” he said.

She frowned.

“Tell that to the theater school. After applying twice, I gave up trying to get in. Maybe I’m good enough for community theater. Some sort of romantic comedy, with the nurses and patients. What do you think?”

They shared a large selection of meze and a bottle of red wine.

“This has been the longest week of my life,” she said quietly, stroking his arm.

He couldn’t remember how long it had been since he’d made out with someone in a taxi, but it made him feel years younger. The Pakistani cabbie drove slowly, turning up the bhangra music, as though wanting to give them as much time as possible. Bergmann would have preferred it if the guy had driven like the wind.

Within minutes, they had shed their clothes and tumbled into bed.

When he came and she whispered “I love you” in his ear, he thought of repeating those same words back to her. She had him locked between her legs, arching up toward him, almost through him.

Afterward they lay in bed and fantasized about things they could do together, starting with a trip to Stockholm and continuing south through Europe, to Spain, and from there across the Strait of Gibraltar to Tangier.

“Morocco,” said Hadja. “Someday I want to show you Morocco.”

Then neither of them spoke for a while. She lay on top of him until they were breathing as one.

After she’d left, two hours later—when the thudding of the taxi’s diesel engine had been swallowed up by the roar of traffic on the E6 and he was leaning against the windowsill, looking at a spot on the street corner where the red taillights had disappeared—he thought to himself that this wasn’t going to work. He went back to bed, breathing in the smell of her, her perfume and sweat, red wine and spices. Hadja’s voice filled his head as he closed his eyes, but he was determined to try to sleep away the guilt he felt over having hidden his true self from her.

He got up and stretched out on the living room sofa instead, chain-smoking until dawn rose over the neighborhood.

CHAPTER 45

Wednesday, June 18, 2003

Police Headquarters

Oslo, Norway

It was only a little past eight, but Tommy Bergmann had already given the secretary two tasks before seeing Fredrik Reuter at the morning meeting. The first was to find Vera Holt’s file in the archives and find out what the asterisk in the agency records meant; the second was to book him a plane ticket to Berlin and a room at a medium-priced hotel. He was sitting with his phone in his hand, about to call Information.

He carefully wrote down the twelve digits of the phone number in Berlin. Then he opened the window and lit a cigarette. He reread the e-mail that Finn Nystrøm had sent at 1:30 that morning.

Tommy,

Here’s the photo as promised. BTW, this might interest you: Peter Waldhorst lives in Berlin as an American citizen under the name Peter Ward. Address: Gustav Freytag Strasse 5. According to my colleague it’s the Waldhorst family’s old house, and it’s an open secret that Waldhorst moved back to Berlin about ten or fifteen years ago. Iver Faalund doesn’t seem to have done much besides drink in recent decades, unfortunately. I’m a bit suspicious of all this guesswork on his part. (By the way, the Waldhorst/Ward house in Berlin is not exactly in the city’s worst neighborhood . . . Take your tennis racket if you have one.)

Best, Finn

PS Keep me posted . . .

Keep me posted,
Bergmann thought. I’ll keep you posted all right. He had to admit that he might be leaning toward Nystrøm’s skepticism about Faalund. The e-mail attachment was the photo from Midsummer Eve 1942. The first file showed the back of the photo, on which someone had written the initials of Peter Waldhorst, Gustav Lande, Agnes Gerner, and the others in the shot. Bergmann then opened the scan of the photo. Lande wore a tux and stood with his face turned away from the camera. Waldhorst—dark-haired, with eyes set too close together to call him handsome—was staring at Agnes. She made Bergmann feel an odd pang of jealousy, even though she was long dead and buried in Nordmarka. Maybe that was precisely what had happened. Maybe Agnes was a woman that men would kill for, and the other two—Johanne Caspersen and little Cecilia—had just gotten in the way. Maybe it was no more complicated than that. Maybe Krogh was obsessively jealous, and Kaj Holt had nothing at all to do with the case. Because this was what Bergmann couldn’t make add up: If Faalund was right that Krogh had killed them and later got rid of Holt, then why would he go on to make such a fuss about Holt’s death? It would have been pure foolishness. Although it could have made him appear innocent, he could just as easily have ended up a suspect.

Bergmann waved off the secretary when she came in the door. He already had the phone to his ear and was dialing the number for Rune Flatanger in Kripo’s profiling group. The secretary ignored the signal and plopped a stack of papers in front of him. He skimmed through them while he waited for Flatanger to answer. A hotel reservation and an itinerary with a late afternoon flight to Berlin via Copenhagen.

Flatanger picked up the phone just as Bergmann was about to give up. Though he’d been helpful on several occasions when the Oslo police district lacked the necessary expertise, Bergmann almost never felt like talking to him. He was nice enough, but he always made Bergmann feel naked and inadequate, as if he could peel away all the lies he was carrying around and see right through him. Maybe he simply didn’t like talking to psychologists in general. He should be going to a therapist himself. In a flash he could feel Hadja’s skin against his own. He swore to himself. Things couldn’t go on like this.

“Long time no see,” said Flatanger on the other end.

“Must be good news then,” said Bergmann.

He brought his colleague quickly up to speed on the case.

“Our leading theory,” Bergmann said, realizing that he was laying it on a bit thick, “is that Krogh liquidated the three females, but that it may have been a mistake. Or he didn’t have a clear conscience about what he’d done.”

“Oh yeah?” Flatanger said in his accent-free manner of speaking. It was hard to tell what part of the country he was from.

Only a faint hum could be heard from the traffic on the street below. Bergmann thought he knew the answer, but he wanted to have it confirmed by someone who wasn’t up to his neck in the case. Maybe he’d be shocked or say that it was going to cause a scandal. Instead the man merely said “Yes?” the way psychologists do, placing the entire question back in Bergmann’s hands.

“And Kaj Holt interrogated a German Gestapo officer in Lillehammer two days before Holt was found dead.” Bergmann hesitated a moment, suddenly confused by his own interpretation. What was he actually after?

“So he learned something in Lillehammer that turned out to be disastrous, is that what you mean?” Flatanger said.

Bergmann cleared his throat, then jumped right in.

“This has to remain between the two of us for now . . . but I think Krogh had Holt murdered in Stockholm. Probably because Holt had begun talking about the fact that Krogh killed the two women and the little girl we discovered in Nordmarka. Or even worse, that Krogh was working for the Germans. I don’t know when Holt found out that Krogh had done the killing. Normally Holt would have known about it when it happened, even bringing the orders with him from London. But I suspect Holt may have found out about it in Lillehammer, and that it upset him so much that he started talking about it. Krogh had close friends in Säpo.”

The psychologist on the other end of the line said nothing.

“What I just don’t understand is why Krogh took the lead in the Norwegian attempts to find out what happened to Holt—if indeed he was the one who had Holt killed, or killed him himself,” said Bergmann.

Flatanger cleared his throat.

“Who’s the most helpful person at the scene of an arson?” Flatanger asked.

“The pyromaniac,” Bergmann muttered.

Neither of them spoke for a long moment.

Finally Flatanger broke the silence.

“If your theory about Holt’s death is correct, then someone connected to Holt would have a relatively obvious motive, don’t you think?”

Bergmann didn’t even want to consider that possibility.

Yet his eyes fell on two words on his computer screen.

Vera Holt.