The Seventh Child (45 page)

Once again I contacted the woman at the Australian embassy, and with renewed insistence, I managed to get her to give it another go. And then the miracle happened. Using the data I provided about the woman’s date of arrival, age, and region, she was able to locate a Danish woman
who’d
become a citizen in 1975—and who had entered the country fourteen years earlier. Her name hadn’t been Bjergstrand, but that was no surprise. Her powerful helpers would have no problem issuing her a new identity.

The age fit, however, and her first name too—Eva—and then came the shocker.

The embassy clerk sat staring at her screen for a while, and nearly blushed when she told me what I hadn’t believed possible. The woman
she’d
just tracked down had reentered Denmark only two days earlier. It wasn’t a piece of information she ought to have shared, but my Australian friend had been as surprised as I.

Susanne and I became almost hysterical in our triumph. The mystery would surely be solved in days. Good fortune had smiled upon us, and set what seemed like an absurd coincidence at our feet.

Naturally, I wish
we’d
never pushed forward.

In a way, the next move was simple: a patient campaign walking from one hotel to the other in Copenhagen’s inner city, which we began the very next day. I had contrived a touching but entirely false story about an Australian businesswoman whose hotel address I’d forgotten.

Our first day of wandering produced no results, but already the next morning I could report a miraculous discovery to Susanne: at the fifth hotel counter of the day, the receptionist had nodded to me right away and told me they’d had a woman by that name staying there.
She’d
shown them an Australian passport when
she’d
arrived a few days earlier—but unfortunately had checked out the day before without leaving any information.

“She went back,” I told Susanne.

Susanne agreed, but nonetheless thought we should go to the library on Krystalgade to study their newspapers and investigate whether the woman had been reported missing or been involved in an accident of some sort. It seemed as though
she’d
had a terrible premonition about this woman’s fate.

The next day we sat at the reading room in the main library, and after only half an hour Susanne found the notice in a Copenhagen morning paper.

It is said that shock can paralyze one’s motor functions and large parts of both the left and right brains all at once.

That was the effect on Susanne Ingemann.

To this day I remember how she sat bent over her paper, white in the face, and read the notice aloud. It was like thrusting open a door only to find something behind it that surpassed your wildest imagination.

Our investigation had come to an end with the scant but unsettling information in the newspaper.

During the following days, we spoke about the case only in panicked whispers.

I understood that Magna must’ve had the same information about Eva Bjergstrand that I had. Eva wouldn’t have come to Denmark for any other reason than to contact her old ally, the woman
who’d
placed her child up for adoption telling her everything would be all right.

Instinctively, I knew why Eva was convinced that she needed to return to her homeland, breaking the promise
she’d
made. She had sent a letter, but
she’d
never received a response. She had no way of knowing that Magna hadn’t received her beseeching plea.

Seen in that light, I, more than anyone else, was responsible for things developing as they did: I had created the prerequisites for a meeting between the two women—and I was certain that Magna, shortly afterward, had discovered that the woman
who’d
visited her in September of 2001 had disappeared.

No wonder my foster mother had seemed so uncharacteristically nervous when the contents of the anonymous letter were published in
Independent Weekend
seven years later. She was one of the few who understood what demons could be unleashed when you opened up the past. She must have been entirely unprepared to see the hidden and long-since forgotten information about the mysterious boy. Eva was gone forever—the notice left no doubt about that—and yet her past slipped from the shadows and threatened those who tried to forget.

When the reporters contacted Magna to get answers to their prying questions, she finally decided to rid herself of the Kongslund Protocol.

This was the only possible explanation for her package to Australia.

Naturally, I only told Knud Taasing what was most necessary—and I made sure he retained the mistaken belief that Eva’s letter had only just arrived at Kongslund a few weeks earlier.

He read the letter three times without noticing the obvious illogic that could have directed him onto the right track, both in terms of Eva Bjergstrand and my role in the matter. He studied the date without suspecting that something was wrong, and he was galloping full speed ahead down the wrong path. If he hadn’t been so farsighted—as so many older reporters are—he would have discovered my clumsy alteration of the number 1 to an 8. Of course I changed the year. No one could know that Eva Bjergstrand was dead.

I smiled at him, without revealing even the tiniest crack through which to glimpse the Darkness inside me. It was an art form all of Magna’s little elephants mastered long before they were driven to their new homes by their hopeful new parents.

“What about the letter to the child that she mentions?” he said at long last.

“There was no letter enclosed,” I said. “She must have changed her mind at the last minute.”

The lie came to me so easily that even the country’s most skeptical reporter believed it. But then I’d had a lot of time to practice. Knud Taasing was closed off from all the leads I had followed in my investigation, because I’d told him nothing, not about Dorah and Helgenæs, not about my contact with the embassy or Eva’s visit to Denmark—and certainly not about the terrifying discovery that Susanne and I had made in the Krystalgade library seven years earlier.

Then, as expected, he stated the obvious: “The package was for Eva. The package Magna sent before she died?”

I didn’t answer.

The next thought clicked into its logical place in his mind. “Maybe in her letter Magna told Eva everything that we don’t know. The police should be able to find the woman in Australia—if they have her name.”

I had feared this very revelation in my risky decision to involve him. But here again he overlooked the most obvious thing, and my silence only confirmed to him that I accepted his theory.

“Yes, that should be possible,” I said. “But it would be unwise to involve the authorities in any of this as long as Malle is in charge of the investigation.”

I could tell I’d hit the bull’s eye.

After Magna’s death, Susanne and I were the only ones who possessed the dangerous knowledge about Eva Bjergstrand’s fate.
We’d
held on to it, too scared to dig into the mystery of her missing child. It simply existed between us, this silent, terrible secret.

In my thoughts, of course, I could never let it go. I’d never been able to forget how
she’d
judged the child’s father. I remembered it all with a rage I couldn’t tell was hers or mine. For seven years that anger had lain dormant until I could no longer stand the silence.

I’d made my decision when Magna’s anniversary was approaching, and I’d made the decision on my own—in the only way that made sense to me—and sent the scant information I had found to the children involved.

I hadn’t told Susanne Ingemann of my decision, because she would have no doubt talked me out of it. I’d sensed the fear that had never loosened its grasp on her. Of course she had to know that I was the most likely sender of the anonymous letters, and I hadn’t done anything to make her think otherwise.

But she hadn’t said a word.

“This letter”—again Taasing put his hand on Eva’s single, handwritten sheet—“this could open up the case again. It connects Magna’s death and the mysterious John Bjergstrand with one common denominator: Australia.”

“Where the police haven’t been able to discover anything,” I said.

“As far as we know,” he said. “But it ought to be possible to find a woman with such a Danish name in Australia—especially since the search could be limited to Adelaide, the city she mentions.” Taasing shrugged. “Certainly I can do that.” He was his usual confident self.

A week and a half later, he no doubt realized how overconfident
he’d
been that day in the King’s Room. There was no Eva Bjergstrand anywhere in Australia. He called me one Sunday evening, sounding unusually despondent. If there’d ever been an Eva Bjergstrand in that vast country, she had completely disappeared. She was nowhere to be found, not in the directories, not via the postal service, and not on the Internet. Perhaps
she’d
taken a name that only Magna knew, he suggested—and I could tell how his failure to locate her disoriented him.

I expressed regret. Luckily, he couldn’t see my facial expression.

Even though I’d like to have made use of his talent, I couldn’t help but feel relieved. From my and Kongslund’s point of view, Eva Bjergstrand was a closed chapter. There were other far more important things that the living should focus on. First and foremost, the father. To me, he was the very embodiment of the arrogance of men, and, day by day, I had become ever more determined to put a name to him—and reveal it. A man who had lived a carefree life after his little “extramarital affair” had been concluded, never gave a thought to either Eva or the child he abandoned. I could never discover my own past—that door was effectively closed—but I swore I’d find John Bjergstrand’s. And with that, his father.

That’s why I played the final card that Knud Taasing would see. “According to one of the old assistants, the child who was called John could be
…
Nils Jensen. His father was a night watchman in Nørrebro, right? That was the detail she remembered,” I told him.

I could almost hear his mind wrestling with the new information.

“But you’re not sure?” he finally said, a peculiar hopefulness in his voice.

“No. I’m not sure. I don’t know if Nils really
is
the child that Eva Bjergstrand gave up at birth. Magna and whoever else were involved in Mother’s Aid Society made everything more complicated than we can even imagine—to confuse pursuers.” It was a strange choice of words.

A few days later, he returned to Kongslund and for a long time sat motionless in the Chippendale chair.

Finally he said, “But when it comes down to it, it’s not really John that matters, is it? It isn’t John that you really care about, right? It’s the boy’s father that you’re looking for with such zeal? The man
who’d
abandoned his child and let the mother vanish forever?”

I sat back in the wheelchair without responding.

“Only Magna knew who the father really was—and now she’s dead—and maybe she was killed for that very reason.”

I said nothing.

Then he said what I’d been waiting to hear for many years: “Maybe we should bring all the children from the Elephant Room together again.”

I could have sworn that he blushed at that moment. He repeated, “I mean, bring them together to see if they—
we
—can solve the mystery.”

It was the opportunity I’d longed for, and it took every effort to hide my excitement. “We’ll never get Orla to show up,” I said with painstaking calm. I didn’t know why I mentioned him first.

“Maybe so. But Peter Trøst is going to Aarhus on Friday, and I can ask him to bring Asger Christoffersen with him back to Copenhagen.” He hadn’t mentioned Nils Jensen, and I understood why. In Knud Taasing’s universe, the photographer didn’t need to know the truth, and I thought that was a strange double standard coming from a reporter
who’d
always insisted that things be made public.

He had assumed I shared his view.

When
he’d
left, I studied Hven under the bright sky, and I felt hopeful. That very afternoon, the staff at Søllerød post office had assured me that all letters and packages for Magna would be redirected to me—in my name—at Kongslund, and that was all I needed to know.

Since Eva had been dead for a while, I knew that in due course Magna’s package would be returned to its sender, ending up in my hands.

In only a few days, the voice from the past would tell me what everyone wanted to know. And it was vital that I learned it first.

22

THE KONGSLUND PROTOCOL

June 20, 2008

I have always considered fear to be the twin sister of anger. In my case, one rarely appears without the other. But the fear that paralyzed us in the days following the discovery of Eva Bjergstrand’s terrible fate could not be overcome by any other feeling.

Susanne Ingemann would never involve herself in the case again. And even I had my reasons to let the years pass.

The June sky was darkening when the sea-green Bedford Caravan with the royal blue Channel DK logo on the side doors rolled through Aarhus and reached the harbor. It was the last car to board the express ferry to Odden in West Zealand.

The two men had been listening to the ten o’clock news in the van; there was nothing about the Kongslund Affair, but they had expected as much. There
was
a segment on the deportation of the Tamil boy, whom the media had seemed to lose interest in as soon as Søren Severin Nielsen managed to delay the deportation process with myriad legalistic quibbles. His last complaint had, however, been rejected, and the ministry had reacted swiftly: as soon as possible, according to the news, the boy would be driven to Copenhagen Airport and put on a plane to Calcutta. From there,
he’d
take a regular routine flight to Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital, accompanied by four Danish police officers.

The national minister had done it again, the approving political commentator cooed. The Almighty One had once more demonstrated his patriotism—so convincingly forged when he helped rescue the Danish Jews during the war—by daring to expel foreigners who had no right to remain in Denmark, regardless of their age; and who, according to a confidential source in the ministry, were part of an extensive network that schemed to bring Tamils into the country. Thousands of them.

In Channel DK’s coverage, the boy’s fate could be easily (and briefly) slipped between the broadcasts of the weekend’s episodes of
Roadshow
, which were set in Denmark’s two largest cities, shows that had been arranged by the station itself. Through a series of revivalist town-hall meetings, the TV station would reclaim its leading position on the ever-changing horizon of options, launching a gigantic show in Aarhus University’s student union. On Sunday, they would follow up with an even bigger program at Forum Copenhagen.

In Aarhus, Peter Trøst had given the thousands in the audience a taste of what was to come; the seven Concept Lions in attendance had sat in the back row to observe the crowd’s reaction. The most controversial concept had been presented when the atmosphere was at its climax, and the lions smiled as a trailer for a show advocating the reinstitution of the death penalty in Denmark streamed across the big screen. The segment was garnished with illustrations of child molestation, terror, and mass murder as irrefutable arguments for capital punishment. Outside, the broadcasting vans, parked one next to the other, captured every single word. At the show’s premiere, the audience would sentence real, preselected criminals; everyone expected these sentences to be harsher and more unyielding than the ones currently meted out in Danish courtrooms. Dramatic images of the firebombing of Danish embassies in Syria and Saudi Arabia that followed the publication of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed were part of the program, with Peter Trøst shouting: “The future isn’t free! We have to fight for it—together!”

The floundering TV station was hopeful it had found a winning strategy for its ratings battle. And so afterward, in the makeup room, they’d toasted their victory with vintage wine. It was then that Peter experienced a moment of unease about what had occurred—and his own role in it.

His bad mood hadn’t lifted until
he’d
found Asger Christoffersen in between transmission vans in the parking lot as arranged, tall and lanky and a little confused, with bristly tufts of hair and round glasses. They shook hands, and he hoisted the astronomer’s tattered red suitcase into the Bedford.

An awkward silence descended on them as they made their way to the harbor. “We can go to the moon and back for all I care,” the tall man said, adjusting his glasses in the manner of an absentminded professor.

“To the moon?” Peter was taken aback by the strange comment.

“Yes. Don’t you see the symbolism?”

He shook his head.

“You’re Tintin, and I’m”—the strange astronomer suddenly giggled—“I’m Professor Calculus!”

He did actually resemble the distracted professor, albeit a much taller version, and in the midst of his surprise Peter felt a kind of relief—as though his encounter with Asger Christoffersen had been preordained for many, many years.

On the ferry they stayed in their seats while the rest of the crew went in search of beer and food.

If the distracted comic-book professor had really been reborn in the body of Asger Christoffersen, his puzzled expression was maintained in Asger’s long face. He wore thick glasses with slim black frames on his pointy nose, and from this somewhat wild appearance, a surprisingly deep voice emerged. Now he leaned back in the soft leather chair and said, “When I was young, I was very small and skinny, but then I grew and grew and grew
…
toward the stars
…
I wanted to get there before anyone else!”

Peter smiled but didn’t respond.

“I began my studies at Aarhus University the year the American physicist Alan Guth discovered the mechanics of the creation in the universe—the inflationary epoch when all matter was shot into space with incredible force—and wrote in his journal: ‘Startling realization!’ ”

The astronomer laughed so suddenly that Peter started. Then Asger changed topic again: “Isn’t it peculiar that we used to share a room when we were little—as babies!” Christoffersen pronounced the last word with obvious delight. Then he made yet another quantum leap in his inner universe: “I was married, like you, Peter—and divorced again—and I left behind a child, just as I was left behind. Even those of us who start our lives at Kongslund make the same mistakes that we ourselves were the victims of. Isn’t it strange?”

The noise from the ferry engines rose, and the van rocked rhythmically in its luxurious suspension. Peter didn’t feel like discussing children—or himself—with anyone.

“My daughter is fifteen now,” Asger said. “It’s strange. I would have expected that kind of longing to be unchanged throughout life. A father’s longing for his only child
…
you wouldn’t think it could decrease or disappear. But that’s what has happened. After a while it just shrank, as though love demands more than simply flesh and blood
…
and then one day I understood: like the smallest particle of earth,
longing
is influenced by other particles with other composites, and this influence of course depends on the three pillars of life—distance, movement, and time. These are the only three. So if we wait long enough without establishing contact, if we move far enough from one another, those forces are at work. Then the longing disappears, and love becomes nothing. That’s what happened to me. The less I saw of her, the less I actually missed her. Don’t you think that was the case for our biological fathers?”

Peter felt a little dizzy, as though the pitching ferry were making him seasick.

“I was there at her birth,” Christoffersen said, shaking his head in wonder. “You have to be now and back in the nineties as well. I really took it seriously—as though I was chasing after a new planet. I felt every pain that my wife felt, the very same pricking, stabbing, cutting jabs in my stomach and abdomen—like telepathy—and in the end, they had to give me a tranquilizer and place me on a beanbag in a corner of the delivery room to calm me down. They thought I was nuts.”

Peter couldn’t tell whether Christoffersen was pulling his leg.

“A while later, after my little girl had been born, I started hiccupping and was sick to my stomach. When she became colicky, I began to have pains in my abdomen again. I thought I was going to die.” Asger leaned to the left, nearly touching Peter’s shoulder. “If this had been in Steinbeck’s novel, the one that ends with a giant flood and characters who take refuge in a barn, I would have started nursing her. But of course I had no milk.”

Christoffersen’s smile was neither ironic nor challenging. Like Asger, Peter had abandoned his own children. Exiting the ferry, they drove south of Roskilde and into Copenhagen’s ocean of light, and Asger resumed his monologue. “Did you know that millions of televisions emit light into the universe and contribute to us being unable to see the night sky—making us blind to all the planets, stars, and galaxies? It’s almost symbolic, don’t you think?”

Again Peter glanced at the man with whom
he’d
once shared a room in a famous orphanage. Was he joking? It didn’t seem so. On the contrary, he seemed utterly solemn.

Peter’s own innocence was irretrievably lost during his second year as an apprentice, when he seduced a female secretary in his pursuit of information on her boss’s abuse of public funds—for travels, hotels, restaurants, even mistresses—and this heartless method had become part of the Peter Trøst Jørgensen legend. He had met her, a seeming coincidence, in a public swimming pool in Gentofte, and after three weeks of lovemaking, she told him everything he wanted to know about the minister. After that, she didn’t see him again until he appeared on television breaking the big exposé. It had been his debut; he was only twenty years old. He hadn’t thought much about it; the editor’s expectations had been all that mattered to him. She, on the other hand, left her job and colleagues and friends—in shame—and five months later they found her drowned, not in the warm pool at Kildeskov Sports Center, but in a bathtub filled with ice-cold water. To be on the safe side, she had swallowed three packs of sleeping pills and sliced both her ulnar and radial arteries.

The legendary episode continued to evoke the admiration of young reporters, who thought that such methods were part of the game—and that such unfortunate outcomes shouldn’t affect a real reporter. He himself had pushed the experience aside—during his waking hours—because of late
she’d
returned to haunt his dreams: she sat in the night sky staring down at him, her wet hair dripping on his duvet. She might as well have been holding the hand of Principal Nordal—and he would awaken, in sweat-soaked sheets, to the sound of water gushing from a sluice in a dam somewhere close by.

They parked in front of the SAS Hotel on Hammerichgade, where Peter had booked Christoffersen a small but luxurious room on the top floor, far from all earthly interruption and with a view of the sound and the Swedish coast.

Here Asger Christoffersen stood by the window for a long time, trying to make out Hven in the distance—but his famous predecessor’s island was hidden in the darkness.

It was the third Friday in June, and
we’d
followed Channel DK’s broadcast of
Roadshow
in the Aarhus student union all night. The program had just ended with the playing of the national hymn, when a sixth sense compelled me to stand and look out the window. A dark-blue Audi drove down the gravel road from Strandvejen, and I recognized it right away.