The Seventh Child (79 page)

The two clearly considered the Kongslund Affair to be a closed chapter, and after Peter’s shocking death, they announced that they were planning to start a legal practice together under the name
Nielsen & Berntsen
. It sounded immensely respectable, and we toasted them with a glass of champagne. The only cases the company wouldn’t touch, they said, not with a ten-foot pole, were those dealing with immigration and asylum (neither man smiled as they told us this). The irony of it all made me smile.

“The Kongslund Protocol is at the heart of everything,” Asger said later that evening, when the two lawyers had said their farewells and departed.

“It’s the missing Protocol that keeps this case alive—regardless of what Malle and Almind-Enevold want us to think. And regardless of whether or not Severin and Orla run away with their tails between their legs, the way lawyers do when push comes to shove.”

Nils had also gone home after telling us of his decision not to share with his parents his real origins. They’d lied to him for half a century, so now they’d have to live without the truth in their remaining years. In a strange way, it satisfied him to possess this unspoken knowledge—perhaps it was a form of revenge.

Susanne, serving green tea in the sunroom, agreed with Asger. Taasing, who had both legs propped up on an antique footstool of African antelope leather, nodded as well.

“Maybe there’s nothing to it but what we already know,” I said. “And then it isn’t that interesting anymore
…
” Lisping only slightly, I could feel my left shoulder sink toward the floor.

It wasn’t a topic I wanted to make more of than I had to.

“That kind of personal log detailing secret events would be extremely dangerous to many
…
” Taasing seemed to almost swoon at the thought of all the scandals
he’d
be able to unleash with that kind of weapon in his hands. “I imagine it contains the names of the most respected dignitaries, many of whom are probably still alive and holding very fancy titles, extremely upstanding citizens in Danish society—just imagine, there might be people from the royal family on that list!” His eyes gleamed at the thought. I understood Taasing’s interest in a story he hadn’t promised the Almighty One he would suppress—if it could be substantiated, that is.

I chose to say good-night and walked alone to my room—leaving only Asger and Susanne in the sunroom. And to my surprise, I didn’t feel a thing at leaving them in each other’s company—nothing like jealousy.

36

EVIL

November 2, 2008

The fable of Kongslund and the seven children from the Elephant Room could have ended right there—with the brightest star among them extinguished in the sky. But as Magdalene said the very last time she visited me, rolling her old wheelchair to my bed, there’s always some rustling about upstairs, which people only hear when they think they’ve come to the end.
Dear Marie, for seven years, you’ve been looking for the truth—and you’ve challenged three kings: the earthly king, the heavenly king, and—most dangerous of all—the king of all life’s coincidences
…

Then, cackling from equal parts satisfaction and effort, she leaned toward me, and I could hear the deep rattle in her throat when she lisped her very last message to me.
No one does that without being punished.

Knud Taasing rang at the old woman’s door, pressing the doorbell again when he got no response. For a long time he listened for a sound, the scraping of a chair or a cough that might reveal the presence of someone inside. He waited. He had time.

In a way,
he’d
returned to the starting point—to the very source of the mystery, even though that might not be an entirely logical way of looking at it—because at a subconscious level, he still connected the thousands of blue elephants that Gerda Jensen had painted on the infant room’s walls with the seven people
he’d
followed ever since the anonymous letter arrived.

For months
he’d
analyzed the seven children involved in the Kongslund Affair, and
he’d
connected the seven pieces that seemed to form a clear and logical picture, which most would accept if they knew it—seven small children who were now adults, one of whom had had a strange prehistory: Nils Jensen. From beginning to end it looked plausible.

And yet there was something that didn’t fit.

In spite of his strong faith that
he’d
found the answer in Nils, he could feel that something was amiss. Strange things had happened—such as when the firemen from Roskilde had finally broken down the steel-plated doors in the basement under Channel DK and found the dead Professor hanging from a rope (you wouldn’t think a man that old had the energy for such a difficult undertaking).

He rang the doorbell again and heard a sound this time. Now he knew she would open the door.

Right away he saw the fear in her eyes. All the strength
she’d
once mustered when the Gestapo confronted her at Kongslund had vanished.

“I have only one question,” he said.

Nothing else. It wasn’t necessary.

She didn’t respond. But she did finally invite him into her apartment, simply by leaving the door ajar when she turned and walked back to her high-ceilinged living room. It was furnished with a large mahogany dining table, four upholstered mahogany dining chairs, and a blue sofa. There were no bookcases, no books, and Taasing thought that was strange;
he’d
pictured her as a knowledgeable, well-read woman.

In the windowsill were three small porcelain figurines, a giraffe, a hedgehog, and a blue elephant. The three animals had a panoramic view of the sound and Hven. She sat on the sofa.

Taasing pulled one of her four dining chairs nearer the sofa and sat down. Without further ado, he asked the one question that had kept him awake for many nights since the old night watchman opened the bureau drawer that held the secret form. “Is Nils Jensen
…
is he John Bjergstrand?”

For a long time she didn’t reply, and he began to think she hadn’t heard his question, until she suddenly said, “It doesn’t matter.”

Her voice was muted, practically a whisper, but those three words were crystal clear.

“He isn’t the one, then? Not the
real
John Bjergstrand?” A slight reformulation of the critical question.

Her long, triangular face with its pointy nose had taken on a grayish tint, as though the blood had slowly drained from the upper part of her body. He recalled Marie telling him that this woman couldn’t lie, even when she most wanted to.

“Who
is
John Bjergstrand?” he said bluntly. “The
real
John
…
who is he?” His eagerness caused him to lean so close that there remained less than a foot or two between them.

Her skin was now the same color as the porcelain hedgehog on the windowsill.

“Answer me, Gerda.
Who
is he?”

She began to slide off the sofa; he reached for her, startled, and clutched at her thin white arm. At that moment he heard a whisper that seemed to arise out of the depths of her chest. “There is no John Bjergstrand.” She stared at the ceiling and fainted.

Afraid that she would die in his arms, he didn’t dare ask the final, crucial question again.

As he lifted her from the floor and placed her upon the sofa cushions, she babbled incoherently. “Magna
…
she never helped anyone but herself
…
and me
…
and the children
…
She was here for the sake of the children
alone
…
She never helped others
…
never helped wealthy people that way
…
covering things up
…
like they’re saying.”

Taasing nodded, but mostly to reassure the old woman, because he couldn’t quite tell what she was blathering on about.

“I was the one who took him
…
it wasn’t Magna, it was
me
…
I took him, for Magna’s sake
…
but she couldn’t know about it
…
She’d
done everything for me.”

The old woman wasn’t making any sense. Taasing nodded again, reassuringly, and waited for the incoherent stream of words to cease. Then he heard a name that surprised him—the name of the person whose role they’d never understood.

“
Dorah
…
she promised
…
she promised
…
if we delivered
…
if we
…
oh, my God, what have I done?” Her small body trembled, and to Knud’s surprise she began to cry.

She was still crying when he left the apartment. Her tears appeared to originate from somewhere deep within her, from an inexhaustible source you wouldn’t think could be contained in such a diminutive frame.

He wondered about that name for hours afterward.

Dorah Laursen.

What was her role in all of this?

She’d
adopted a child who couldn’t possibly be John Bjergstrand—and now she was dead. As so often before, he gave up trying to find the connection. There didn’t appear to be one.

But
he’d
gotten the most important answer he could from the woman who couldn’t lie—and he understood what it meant. Something was completely wrong with the Kongslund Affair. Some invisible hand had shuffled the deck so ingeniously that everyone had come to think they saw patterns where there were none. The electron had never been located at the point in the atom where everyone thought it was. When you touched what seemed to be real and established, it disappeared. He decided not to share this knowledge with any of the others. And, in this, Taasing committed his third mistake in the investigation of the Kongslund Affair. Naturally, it wouldn’t go unnoticed by Fate.

“Yes,
I killed him
,” Orla Berntsen told Søren Severin Nielsen.

The two men were seated in a couple of patio chairs at Glee Court, and the former top official’s admission came abruptly, halfway through their evening meal together after their departure from Kongslund.

During the day, movers had gradually emptied the living room, basement, and the bedrooms on the second floor of his mother’s home; most of the furniture had been driven to a storage facility until Orla could decide what to do with it. He was planning to move back in with Lucilla and his daughters in Gentofte—as
he’d
told Severin—but didn’t know if he wanted to stay with his family very long. His guardian angel hadn’t commented on these plans because she understood the dangers that lurked; she had merely said he was welcome to come back and stay for as long as he wished.

By midafternoon, the movers had removed the last piece of furniture from the small living room, and without comment, had eased the remains of the blue lounge chair onto a dolly and wheeled it out to the moving truck. Now it was gone—and with it all the old images of the woman who kept an eye, from the shadows, on Orla the Lonely. The picture of the boy and the man with the orange beach ball still hung in the second floor bedroom, because Orla had asked the movers to leave it—and he didn’t know why. That evening he noticed another change: the tones of the Brahms sonata emanating from the pianist’s living room were gone, as though all the reports of urban uprisings and international skirmishes on the evening news broadcasts had to be endured without his calming accompaniment. A few days later, he learned that the pianist had actually died in the middle of a bass chord on the most beautiful summer day anyone could remember.

“You’re saying you killed Benny the Fool,” Søren summarized in lawyerly fashion, nodding to his friend.

“Yes, I killed him.” It was a pure confession.

“But the
hand
you saw
…
”

There was a moment’s pause. Then Orla said in almost the same voice:
“My hand
…
”

“Yes. But Orla, if you tore out a human eye that brutally—with bloody sinews and veins and nerves and all the rest—
you’d
have had blood everywhere
…
at the very least on the hand that threw the eye into the creek.”

Orla closed his eyes and tried to recall the night that changed his life.

“Did you?”

“I could have just washed it off.”

“Did you do that?”

“I don’t remember
…
” He hesitated as he recognized this, as though under cross-examination in a courtroom where the accused has not yet understood the ulterior motives of the prosecutor.

“But was there blood on your hands—or on your clothes—later on?”

“Not as far as
…
” Orla stopped.

“The police would have seen it if you had.”

“Yes.”

“And then you would have ended up in the slammer—regardless of Malle’s intervention.”

“Yes.”

“But there was someone else who went and washed up that day, wasn’t there
…
? Someone who went and washed in the creek?”

“Yes,” he said for the third time. Orla sat with his eyes closed. “I thought he was going to help him
…
the Fool, that is
…
but he just stood there
…
his hands motionless in the water.”

“Poul.”

“Yes.”

“Orla, I saw the whole thing, from the bushes under the elm trees.”

“You did what?” The voice came out practically as a whisper, the confidence detonating like a bomb on the small patio.

Severin blushed in a way grown men rarely do, and certainly not a lawyer in the middle of a cross-examination. “Yes. I was hiding in the bushes that night. I’d heard the shots, and I followed you. I tried to shout, but he was much too fast, and afterward I was terrified. I was scared stiff that
he’d
see me, and that I’d end up in the creek along with the Fool. That boy
…
Poul
…
he was crazy.”

“But why haven’t you told me before?” It was a logical question.

“Because
…
” Severin fell silent, blushing even more.

Orla opened his mouth—presumably to repeat his question in a more demanding tone, as lawyers tend to do. In just a few seconds they’d swapped roles. Now Orla was the accuser, and Severin was the guilty one.

But at that moment it was as though an angel passed through Glee Court—perhaps not a guardian angel, but nonetheless some creature with the power to ward off evil—and let the God of Friendship drown out the answer, if there even was one. If friendships are to last, you ought never to demand answers to certain questions.