The Prize (87 page)

‘The toothpick man with greased reddish hair—he is in full dress—is Konrad Evang. He is a Norwegian millionaire, the owner of many department stores in Scandinavia. Several years ago, he was in the United Nations. He is an important member of the Stortings Nobelkomite in Oslo—the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. Since there is no peace award this year, he has the time to represent his country at this affair. The one he is speaking to, the bald-headed one in the pin-striped suit, he is Sweden’s wealthiest man today, no doubt a billionaire. Perhaps you have heard of him. He is quite world famous. He is the industrialist, Ragnar Hammarlund. Do you see them?’

Now Craig saw them, and was surprised that he had not identified them before. They were a bizarre pair in a room of figures so alike and monotonous. Suddenly, he remembered Hammarlund’s name from news stories and magazine articles, although he could not recall his face.

‘Yes, I know Hammarlund’s name,’ he told Jacobsson, ‘but I never knew what he looked like.’

‘He does not permit photographs,’ said Jacobsson. ‘He is a fabulous figure, most mysterious. I suppose everyone who has made his first billion inevitably becomes mysterious. He is ageless, but possibly sixty. He was at the Hotel de Paris, in Monte Carlo, negotiating his first international deal with Sir Basil Zaharoff, when the munitions king died there in 1936. Hammarlund became interested in high finance when, in his youth, he was briefly employed by our Ivar Kreuger, whom you admire. In 1928, I think, four years before Kreuger shot himself through the heart in Paris, he hired Hammarlund to set up a holding company, the Union Industrie A.G., in the tiny principality of Liechtenstein, next to Switzerland. This was at a time when Kreuger had loaned seventy-five million dollars to France, had big factories in thirty-four countries, and was making sixty-five per cent of the world’s matches. But I think Hammarlund smelled the rat. He considered Kreuger the world’s first money wizard, but he also guessed that he might be a super-swindler. So he got out in time and went off on his own. He enjoys to speak of Kreuger, and the old days, but I have heard him say many times, with pride, it is not necessary to emulate Kreuger to become wealthy. Shrewdness is better, even easier, than thievery, he likes to say. And I do believe he is honest, ruthless perhaps, but honest, anyway as honest as a man can be who has made so many millions.’

‘Does he manufacture matches?’

‘Nothing so fragile. He is in everything, I am told, in Scandinavia, in America, everywhere in the world. He once owned a part of Bofors with Axel Wenner-Gren and Krupp. He has hydroelectric power plants, a merchant shipping fleet, forests, iron mountains, several airlines, newspapers, oil wells, banks—endless banks. I could not begin to enumerate his holdings. You will learn more of him, when you visit his villa in Djurg
ه
rden—the Animal Park not far from here—on the sixth. It is Hammarlund’s dinner for the Nobel laureates. Surely you will attend?’

‘I wouldn’t miss it.’

‘I think maybe it would be proper to meet him now. However, I must warn you, he is not an easy talker when he is away from the villa. At home, he is engaging and outspoken. Elsewhere, he is reticent and on guard. No, Hammarlund will not offer much tonight. But I do think you will enormously enjoy Konrad Evang. He is a delightful man, but serious. He is a virtual encyclopaedia of information on his Oslo Peace Prizes—perhaps I value this trait in him too highly, since information on the prizes is my own field, too. Would you like to meet them?’

‘Yes, I would,’ said Craig, ‘but first, I’d like another drink.’

A flicker of apprehension showed on Jacobsson’s face, but then he signalled the liveried servant, who came with the tray. Craig placed his empty goblet on the tray, and taking one filled with champagne, began to drink it at once.

‘All right,’ he said finally, ‘let’s find out about peace—and money.’

The four of them had been talking—or rather the three of them talking, with Hammarlund, for the most part, listening—for five minutes, Evang had governed the conversation, graciously discussing and praising Craig’s novels, with occasional interjections of assent from Jacobsson and Hammarlund. Craig, his reactions dulled by a morning and afternoon of whisky and two recent champagnes, pretended attention but remained indifferent.

Concealing his impatience, he found his eyes seeking the servant with the tray, but the man was nowhere in the immediate vicinity. With effort, Craig tried to concentrate on Evang, who was extolling the merits of Oslo. He observed that Evang’s rust hair was touched with bleach, and the pince-nez on his thin nose had a golden chain, and a network of veins showed through his cheeks, and the cords of his throat stood out as he spoke.

Almost stealthily, Craig transferred his scrutiny to Ragnar Hammarlund. He could not help but stare. The abnormally albescent skull and face were entirely devoid of a single bristle. Hammarlund’s head was glabrous and his face hairless. Peering hard, Craig thought that he detected white eyebrows of almost invisible down above the eyes, but he could not be sure. No wrinkle added character to the face, no wart, no scar, and almost, or so it seemed, no human feature. The eyes lay evenly pressed into the head, neither concave nor convex, miniature flat mirrors of watery grey. The broad nose was shapeless, melting into the centre of the face, so that only the nostrils showed. The mouth was a delicate roseate. No more than an inch beneath the lower lip, the pretension of a chin receded, giving the disconcerting effect of no chin at all. In summary, a soft, smooth larva countenance, the consistency of a white slug. The frame beneath the remarkable head was medium in height and width, and garbed impeccably in an old-fashioned, expensive custom-tailored suit.

Craig tried to detect something human about this legendary figure. The feminine hands held a silk handkerchief, and several times, quickly, almost unobtrusively, the handkerchief was touched to the place where Hammarlund’s forehead must be. The forehead perspired, Craig was pleased to note, and then he remembered that on their introduction, he had shaken Hammarlund’s limp hand, and it had been clammy and repellent.

Raised on the traditions of Commodore Vanderbilt and Gould and Fisk, the blustering and savage robber royalty, Craig could not conceive of how this pulpy being had made his first billion. Fleetingly, he wondered what Hammarlund was doing at this affair. What was his connection with Nobel? Or the King? And what was his interest in the laureates, anyway?

He realized that Hammarlund’s head had turned to meet his stare, and quickly he returned his attention to Konrad Evang, apostle of peace.

‘Yes, my friend,’ Evang was saying to Jacobsson, ‘you get all the attention in Stockholm. I suspect most of the world hardly knows that we in Oslo are responsible for possibly the most important of the five prizes.’

‘If you wanted attention, you should have given a prize this year,’ Jacobsson chided him.

‘It is not so easy, not so easy, my friend,’ said Evang. ‘Ours is a perilous task, and infinitely more controversial—political—than any of the four under your guardianship.’

‘Well, why did you skip this year?’ Craig inquired.

‘We were hopelessly deadlocked over three candidates,’ said Evang. ‘Not one could win a majority of the votes. It is just as well, I believe. How could we honestly give a prize for peace in a time like this?’

‘I should think there would be no better time,’ said Craig. ‘There are plenty of men and organizations working to keep the world from being blown apart. Why not recognize and encourage them?’

‘Because,’ said Hammarlund, speaking at last, in a tone so satiny and faint that it automatically forced everyone to lean closer to him, ‘our Norwegian neighbour prefers to keep peace rather than honour peace. An award to any party, no matter how neutral, might be interpreted as an affront to the Soviet Union or the United States.’

‘Come now, Ragnar, that is not so,’ said Evang without anger. ‘We are judicious men, not frightened men, and you know it.’

‘I am not so sure.’ Hammarlund’s handkerchief flicked his forehead. ‘I know your awards very well. You gave your first one to a seventy-three-year-old Swiss, Henri Dunant, because he founded the International Red Cross. I have heard it said that he deserved not the Nobel Peace Prize, but the Nobel Prize in medicine. You could have done better, but you were playing it safe. In 1946, after World War II, you honoured the American Quaker, Emily Greene Balch, who had done her best work in World War I, and John Raleigh Mott, the Protestant, who was in retirement. You would not honour an active worker, because you feared controversy. You reached into the forgotten past. As for you and your colleagues being judicious men—’

‘Now, now, Ragnar,’ protested Evang, ‘do not start in on us again.’

‘I am speaking for the benefit of our guest, Mr. Craig,’ said Hammarlund softly. His glance included Craig, but he continued to address the Norwegian. ‘In 1906, you gave thirty-six thousand dollars and a Peace Prize to Theodore Roosevelt—to the Rough Rider—an obvious warmonger like all the others. Did not this Roosevelt once say, “No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumph of war”?’

‘He mediated the Russo-Japanese War,’ said Evang.

‘Mediators are not good enough for me,’ said Hammarlund. ‘Then go and honour all referees and umpires on earth. They are mediators, too. I know your list of Rough Riders—you honoured Elihu Root, Aristide Briand, Gustav Stresemann, General George Marshall—you call them all genuine pacifists?’

‘You must be fair, Ragnar,’ interrupted Jacobsson. ‘Our Norwegian friends have also honoured Woodrow Wilson, Fridtjof Nansen, Albert Schweitzer, Ralph Bunche, Cordell Hull—’

‘I know about Hull,’ said Hammarlund placidly. ‘Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote to Oslo every year between 1938 and 1945, nominating Hull, before Mr. Evang’s committee saw fit to elect him.’ He turned to Craig. ‘This may interest you, Mr. Craig. In 1937, Cuba nominated Franklin D. Roosevelt for the Peace Prize, and Hull seconded it. That was one election your Roosevelt lost. The Peace Prize went to Viscount Cecil of Chelwood instead, a League of Nations man.’

Evang appealed to Craig. ‘My friend Hammarlund is teasing. He knows of our courage. Take the year 1961. Did we not defy the white supremacy people of South Africa to give our honour to Albert Luthuli, a dark-skinned former Zulu chief who fought apartheid?’

‘Too easy,’ said Hammarlund. ‘You were not afraid of South Africa. You were picking on someone your own size.’

‘All right, then,’ persisted Evang, ‘let us speak of someone bigger. In 1946, the Finns nominated Aleksandra Kollontai, Russia’s first female Ambassador, an advocate of free love, for helping to shorten the war between Finland and Russia. It was outrageous, a Russian propaganda move. We voted her down, despite the threats of
Pravda
. And long before that, we had suffered when the Czar of Russia and Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany were nominated for the Peace Prize, and we had voted them down, too.’

‘How did you ever get saddled with that award?’ asked Craig. ‘Why was that single one taken away from Sweden?’

‘Nobel had intended that Sweden give the Peace Prize, too, with the other four awards,’ said Evang, ‘but at the last moment, he had a change of heart. At the time, Sweden and Norway were under a single ruler, King Oscar II and Nobel wanted to bind the countries more closely together. Also, he felt that we in Norway could be more impartial about a political hot potato than his fellow Swedes. There were other reasons, but those were the principal ones.’

Abruptly, Evang turned away from Craig to face the bland Hammarlund once more. ‘I will tell you this, Ragnar—we have made our blunders, yes, but we have had our moments of truth, too, truth and courage. I will mention one name, and then you judge us as you wish.’ He paused, and then he said slowly, ‘Carl von Ossietzky.’

There was a silence. Hammarlund remained imperturbable. His handkerchief flicked. His hairless head moved ever so slightly up and down.

‘Yes, Konrad,’ he said, ‘Ossietzky was your finest hour. For giving the prize to him, I forgive you all else.’