The Last Pilgrim (4 page)

Holt didn’t reply. He just stared at Nordenstam’s classic features, noting the hint of boyish optimism in his eyes, a look that suggested he was utterly unaffected by the innate evil in people. He had a sudden impulse to smash his handsome face with a sledgehammer, just to watch it dissolve into a mess of bone, blood, and brain matter, and then to dump the pulverized man on his wife’s doorstep, so that she would understand what had taken place on the other side of the border.

Holt shook off the grotesque thought as a wave of nausea rose up in his throat. One of these days, he was going to lose his grip on reality for good.

“Isn’t the food coming soon?” he said absently, as if they had never started this conversation.

“I thought you were going to ask me questions, Kaj.” Nordenstam fixed his gaze on him. The piano player finished a number to muted applause from one of the tables, and a lively group yelled something in Swedish, which was followed by laughter.

“Have you been to Spain?” Holt asked. “To Galicia?”

Nordenstam shook his head, then smiled. “What’s this about, Kaj?”

“I went to Lillehammer to get an answer to a question. I didn’t get it. But I was asked whether I knew the name of a town in Galicia, a town with a famous cathedral.”

Nordenstam frowned. Either he was bored with this conversation or he was worried about what might come of it. Holt no longer cared.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.

Holt pulled a pen out of his suit pocket. From the piano came the first notes of “The Jazz Boy,” a song that the Nazis back home had hated intensely. A smile formed almost imperceptibly on his lips as he wrote the words on a napkin. He carefully folded it up and pushed it slowly over to Nordenstam.

“So,” said Holt. “I’d like to get an answer from Waldhorst about the thing with Gudbrand. I think he was the wrong man.”

Nordenstam’s expression turned somber. It took him several seconds to gather his thoughts. Then he unfolded the napkin.

“That may be some sort of answer,” said Holt. “Who goes to places like that?” He nodded toward the napkin that Nordenstam held in his hand.

Nordenstam folded it up and stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette. He tried to meet Holt’s gaze, but Holt looked away. In the reflection of the windowpane, he saw Nordenstam put the napkin in the inside pocket of his suit coat.

“What is this, Kaj?” he asked, a sympathetic look on his face. “What has got into you, my friend? Where is the Kaj I used to know? Are you letting a Gestapo officer pull your leg?”

Holt didn’t reply, but instead let his gaze sweep the premises, only stopping when he noticed that one of the men in the lively party a couple of tables over looked familiar. Very familiar, in fact.

No,
he thought to himself.
I can’t keep doing this.
In his mind he could still hear Peter Waldhorst’s voice and see his brown eyes under those thick black eyebrows. Maybe it was just his imagination, a final dastardly trick from that condemned, conniving German. Holt felt like he could no longer tell what was true or false, as though he were on a carousel going round and round, surrounded by dead people. Agnes, Hvitosten, the young mother he had killed, Gudbrand—all spun in his head, almost driving him mad.

“Let me get you a girl tonight, Kaj. What do you say? You need to relax a little.”

He shook his head. For a second he wanted to grab Nordenstam by his lapels and shout, “Don’t you have any idea what Waldhorst was talking about?”

“Where are you staying tonight?” Nordenstam asked.

“At the apartment. On Rindögatan.”

Nordenstam nodded as his eyes followed a young girl across the room.

“You’ve got to unwind a little,” he repeated and smiled, exposing his perfect white teeth.

A plate was set down in front of Holt with a thud. Finally.

“Later,” said Nordenstam, “you and I are going to
have some fun
, aren’t we?” He began to laugh. Holt couldn’t help joining in. He knew exactly what Nordenstam meant by
have some fun
.

“I’m going to take you to a hell of a place that’ll make you forget all about these interrogation games, all right?”

Holt had already forgotten, at least he thought he had. He cut into his meat almost brutally, knowing that he hadn’t had a decent meal in days, not to mention enough sleep.

“Tonight we’re going to live a little!” said Nordenstam.

Holt nodded and thought,
Yes, tonight I’m going to live it up.
If only to disprove what his own wife had told him just a few days before: “It would’ve been best if they’d caught you too.” Just as she had the first time she’d told him she’d lost him.

He had said yes again. That it was probably for the best. She had stood there holding the girl in her arms, a child he hadn’t managed to develop any feelings for. He wasn’t even glad that he’d survived and could be a father to her.

“The only thing that will make you happy,” she’d said, clutching their daughter even tighter as if the child belonged to her alone, “is to follow the others, the dead, all the way home.”

He had walked away without a word. There was nothing left to say.

Kaj Holt put down the silverware on the damask tablecloth and surveyed the room as though for the first time: the crowd, the smiling faces, the cigarette smoke beneath the ceiling, the singer’s white tuxedo, the behind of a young woman on her way across the restaurant to the ladies’ room, the gazes that followed her, the ripple of the magenta fabric over her buttocks.

“Håkan . . . I don’t want to live any longer,” he said bluntly.

In a daze, he saw himself at Jørstadmoen. When he’d stood out on the steps after the interrogation and filled his lungs with fresh air, he was no longer sure whether it had even happened. Whether he had really held Peter Waldhorst’s head in his hands and screamed at him. Screamed that it couldn’t be true. That it was all lies.

“Don’t say that,” said Nordenstam.

Then, a split second later, a familiar face popped up at the periphery of Holt’s vision. He turned around.
Yes,
he thought,
it’s definitely him.
Across the restaurant, at a corner table by the band, sat the civilian from Jørstadmoen. He sat there alone with that childish face of his, looking as if he’d been waiting all afternoon for Holt to look his way.

What was he doing here?

Who was he?

Their eyes met. A couple crossing the room broke their contact for a moment. When they had passed, the civilian gave him a friendly smile and a curt nod, and raised his glass in a toast.

“Kaj, what is it?” said Nordenstam, gripping Holt’s arm once more.

“Nothing,” he whispered.

“Something’s wrong,” said Nordenstam.

“Do you know who that is?” Holt asked. A group of people walking past them momentarily cut off the view of the table where the civilian sat. They stopped and talked to one of the waiters, then continued on their way.

Nordenstam turned in the direction Holt had indicated.

“I’ve seen that man before,” said Holt. “Yesterday at Jørstadmoen. But . . . before that too.”

Nordenstam turned back to Holt and frowned.

“What man, Kaj? I don’t understand.”

Holt glanced back at the table over in the corner. He blinked. His pulse seemed to stop.

The table was empty.

It was obvious that no one had been sitting there. The tablecloth was fresh and the utensils hadn’t been moved. A waiter was showing a party of four to that table.

“But—” Holt sprang up from his chair, knocking over his glass, which rolled off the table and smashed on the floor.

The restaurant fell silent. The band paused for a few seconds, staring in Holt’s direction, and the waiters froze.

Holt felt the room spinning; only the table in the corner stood still. Round and round, tablecloths, glasses, laughter, clinking, “The Jazz Boy,” glamorous women, matches being lit, crystals in the chandeliers. The man was sitting there again. Holt was sure that their eyes met, that the man was looking straight through him, right at everything he knew.

A second later he was gone.

“He’s sitting over there!” Holt was shouting now, oblivious to the oppressive silence in the large room. And again: “He’s sitting right there!”

“It’s okay,” Holt heard from somewhere far away. “It’s okay.”

The next thing he knew, hands were gripping his shoulders, he was waving his arms, and the floor vanished beneath him.

Nordenstam’s face hovering above him turned into the childish face of the man from Lillehammer. Although Nordenstam’s lips were moving, Holt heard nothing. Overhead it was pitch dark, and to the left he felt a long, thin stream of air. He shut his eyes and took a few weak breaths. Each time he inhaled his chest touched the floorboards above him. He ran as quietly as he could down the stairs, the child screaming behind him.

Once they were out on the street, he turned to Nordenstam and whispered, “How can anyone live in a world like this?”

CHAPTER 4

Friday, May 16, 2003

Nordmarka

Oslo, Norway

Tommy Bergmann stopped on the path and looked up. Above him all was green and blue. He closed his eyes for a few seconds and felt his pulse hammering through his body. No matter how absurd it might seem, it had been good to get out of the city, if only for a while. If only to look at some old bones.

He snorted to himself and fished a cigarette out of his breast pocket. Then he turned around slowly, studying the interplay of the trees with the evening light, or maybe it was the other way around. Voices.
Yes,
he thought. Beyond the soughing of the treetops, he could hear voices off to the left. He looked up and saw red-and-white crime-scene tape fluttering about thirty or forty yards farther up the path.

He started walking again but was more worn out than he felt he ought to be. Soon he would hardly be able to keep up with the laziest girls on the handball team. This spring he’d noticed that he could no longer hold his own with the top athletes when they took their warm-up runs, and he’d long since given up on the 15-15 intervals.

A strip of crime-scene tape had been wrapped around a tree trunk to the left of the wide path. Bergmann turned onto a much narrower, slightly overgrown path. A piece of tape had been tied every ten yards to mark the way to the location of the bones.

Georg Abrahamsen and a colleague were already there. He was trying to put up a white tent over an area Bergmann first thought looked like nothing more than ferns and moss. A heavy battery-powered light lay on the ground, illuminating the work of the crime-scene techs. A few feet away, two uniformed men stood talking in low voices with one of the students. The boy kept running his hand through his hair as he spoke. Another tent had been put up a little ways behind them. Two girls and a boy sat on the ground, staring into space.

“Damn,” said Abrahamsen, “how many times have we run past this very spot?” He motioned toward the wide path where Bergmann had just been walking.

“Speak for yourself,” said Bergmann as he stuck another cigarette between his lips. He should have stopped smoking long ago if he wanted to keep up with the girls, but he kept putting it off. And tonight wasn’t a great time to start a new and better life.

“Shit. Don’t go starting a forest fire up here,” he heard someone say behind him.

Leif Monsen, the watch commander of Kripo, the Criminal Police, came huffing and puffing through the lingonberry bushes not far from where Bergmann himself had entered the clearing. His red face was a good match for the setting sun shining through the spruce trees.

“This is the
shits
,” said Monsen, and “shit” was about the strongest swearword Monsen ever used. Although he smoked like a chimney and was an almost pathological racist, he was a God-fearing man who seldom saw a need to pepper his comments with curses. Bergmann had once thought Monsen smoked so much because he wanted to meet his maker sooner than he would have done otherwise.

“So, no pool winnings for any of us,” he said to Bergmann with a nod toward Abrahamsen.

Bergmann didn’t reply, but instead studied Abrahamsen as he and his colleague gave up on their attempt to set up the tent. Abrahamsen squatted down and began carefully removing the top layer of peat from a patch of ground in front of him. Bergmann thought he could see the outline of a brownish skull under Abrahamsen’s latex gloves. He took two steps forward, and Monsen followed suit.

“Look like some pretty old bones, don’t they?” said Monsen as he pulled out his pouch of tobacco.

“Yep,” said Bergmann.

“You know,” said Monsen, reaching for the lighter that Bergmann handed him, “this miserable excuse for a criminal division investigates an average of one point three dead bodies every blessed day . . .” He looked at Abrahamsen, who was now down on his knees, digging deeper into the heath with his bare hands. “And I’ll be darned if we don’t end up having to deal with a bunch of old soup bones too.”

“You’ve got your students over there,” Bergmann said, nodding in greeting toward Abrahamsen. One of the girls was gesticulating as she talked to the uniforms. It would probably be a long time before those four students went camping again.

“No, we ought to leave this sort of insanity to the rich folks on Brynsallé.” Monsen hawked and shot a clot of phlegm onto the heath before taking a deep drag on his hand-rolled smoke.

It didn’t take much for Monsen’s bitterness to surface. Bergmann had thought many a time that he had a point. People had a habit of getting killed outside office hours, and then it always turned out the way Monsen said it did. The Kripo officers were the ones who had to work all through the night for no extra pay, wading through blood and tending to abused women and half-dead children, until the station opened for business again at eight the next morning.

“Well,” said Abrahamsen. “No matter what you think of the rich folks who live on Brynsallé, I’m not going to dig anymore until I get s
ome support from them.”

“Oh?” Monsen seemed surprised for once.