The Redbreast

36

Irisveien. 1 March 2000

The door opened and Harry peered into a pair of piercing blue eyes in a lined face.

'Harry Hole, police,' he said. 'I rang this morning.'

'Right'

The old man's grey-white hair was brushed smoothly across his high forehead, and he was wearing a tie under a knitted cardigan. It had said even amp; signe juul on the postbox outside the entrance to this red duplex house in the quietly affluent suburb in north Oslo.

'Please, come in, Inspector Hole.'

His voice was calm and firm, and there was something about his bearing that made Professor Even Juul look younger than, by rights, he had to be. Harry had done his research and knew that the history professor had been in the Resistance movement. Although Even Juul was retired, he was still considered to be Norway's foremost expert on the history of the German Occupation and the Nasjonal Samling.

Harry bent down to take off his shoes. On the wall directly in front of him hung old, slightly faded black and white photographs in small frames. One of them showed a young lady in nurse's uniform. Another, a young man in a white coat.

They went into the sitting room where a greying Airedale stopped barking and instead dutifully sniffed Harry's crotch before walking over and lying down beside Juul's armchair.

'I've been reading some of your articles about Fascism and National Socialism in Dagsavisen,' Harry said after they had sat down.

'My goodness, so Dagsavisen readers do exist then?' Juul smiled.

'You seem keen to warn us against today's neo-Nazism?'

'Not to warn, I am merely pointing out some historical parallels. It's an historian's duty to uncover, not to judge.' He lit his pipe. 'Many people believe that right and wrong are fixed absolutes. That is incorrect, they change over time. The job of the historian is primarily to find the historical truth, to look at what the sources say and present them, objectively and dispassionately. If historians were to stand in judgment on human folly, our work would seem to posterity like fossils-the remnants of the orthodoxy of their time.'

A blue column of smoke rose into the air. 'But this isn't what you came here to ask, I imagine?'

'We're wondering if you can help us to find a man.'

'You mentioned that on the telephone. Who is this man?'

'We don't know. But we have deduced that he has blue eyes, he's Norwegian and is seventy years old. And he speaks German.'

And?'

'That's it.'

Juul laughed. 'Well, there are a few to choose from then.'

'Right. There are 158,000 men in this country over seventy, and I would guess around 100,000 of them have blue eyes and can speak German.'

Juul raised an eyebrow. Harry gave a sheepish smile. 'Office for National Statistics. I checked, for fun.’

‘So how do you think I can help?'

'I'm coming to that. This person reportedly said that he hasn't handled a weapon in over fifty years. I thought, that is, my colleague thought, that over fifty is more than fifty, but less than sixty.'

'Logical.'

Yes, she's very… er, logical. So, let's assume it was fifty-five years ago. Then we'd be smack in the middle of the Second World War. He's around twenty and uses a weapon. All Norwegians privately owning a gun had to hand them over to the Germans. So where is he?'

Harry counted on three fingers: 'Either he's in the Resistance, or he's fled to England, or he's at the Eastern Front fighting alongside the Germans. He speaks better German than English. Accordingly…'

'So this colleague of yours came to the conclusion that he must have been fighting at the front, did she?' Juul asked.

'She did.'

Juul sucked on his pipe.

'Many of the Resistance people had to learn German,' he said, 'in order to infiltrate, monitor and so on. And you're forgetting the Norwegians in the Swedish police force.'

'So the conclusion doesn't stand up?'

'Well, let me think aloud a bit,' Juul said. 'Roughly fifteen thousand Norwegians volunteered for service at the front, of whom seven thousand were called up and were thus allowed to use a weapon. That's a lot more than those who escaped to England and joined up there. And even though there were more men in the Resistance at the end of the war, very few of them ever held a weapon.'

Juul smiled.

'For the time being, let's assume you're right. Now obviously these men fighting at the front are not listed in the telephone directory as ex-Waffen SS, but I imagine you have found out where to search?'

Harry nodded.

'The Traitors' Archives. Filed according to name, along with all the data from the court cases. I've been through it in the course of the last few days. I was hoping that enough of them would be dead to make it a manageable total, but I was wrong.'

'Yes, they're tough old birds,' Juul laughed.

'And so I come to why we called you. You know the background of these soldiers better than anyone. I would like you to help me to understand how men like that think, to understand what makes them tick.'

'Thank you for your confidence, Inspector, but I'm a historian and know no more than anyone else about individual motivation. As you perhaps know, I was in the Resistance, in Milorg, and that doesn't exactly qualify me to get into the head of someone who volunteers for the Eastern Front.'

'I think you know a great deal, anyway, herr Juul.'

'Is that right?'

I think you know what I mean. My research has been very thorough.'

Juul sucked on his pipe and looked at Harry. In the silence that followed Harry became aware that someone was standing in the sitting-room doorway. He turned and saw an elderly woman. Her gentle, calm eyes were looking at Harry.

'We're just having a chat, Signe,' Even Juul said.

She gave Harry a cheery nod, opened her mouth as if to say something, but stopped when her eyes met Even Juul's. She nodded again, quietly closed the door and was gone.

'So you know?' Juul asked.

'Yes. She was a nurse on the Eastern Front, wasn't she?'

'By Leningrad. From 1942 to the retreat in March of 1944.' He put down his pipe. 'Why are you hunting this man?'

'To be honest, we don't know that, either. But there might be an assassination brewing.'

'Hm.'

'So what should we look for? An oddball? A man who's still a committed Nazi? A criminal?' Juul shook his head.

'Most of the men at the front served their sentence and then slipped back into society. Many of them made out surprisingly well, even after being branded traitors. Not so surprising maybe. It often turns out that the gifted ones are those who make decisions in critical situations like war.'

'So the person we're looking for may well be one of those who did alright for himself.' Absolutely.'

'A pillar of society?'

'The door to positions of national importance in finance and politics would probably have been closed to him.'

'But he could have been an independent businessman, an entrepreneur. Definitely someone who has earned enough money to buy a weapon for half a million. Who could he possibly be after?'

'Does this necessarily have anything to do with his having fought at the front?'

'I have a sneaking feeling it might.'

A motive for revenge then?'

'Is that so unreasonable?'

'No, not at all. Many men from the front see themselves as the real patriots in the war. They think that, given the way the world looked in 1940, they acted in the best interests of the nation. They consider the fact that we sentenced them as traitors to be a total travesty of justice.'

'So?'

Juul scratched behind his ear.

'Well. The judges involved in bringing them to justice are by and large dead now. And the same is true of the politicians who laid the basis for the trials. The revenge theory seems thin.'

Harry sighed. 'You're right. I'm only trying to form a picture with the few pieces of the puzzle I have.'

Juul glanced quickly at his watch. 'I promise I'll give it some thought, but I really don't know if I can help you.'

'Thanks anyway,' Harry said, getting up. Then he remembered something and pulled out a pile of folded sheets of paper from his jacket pocket.

'By the way, I took a copy of my report of the interview with a witness in Johannesburg. If you could have a look to see whether there's anything of significance in it?'

Juul said yes, but shook his head as if meaning no.

As Harry was putting on his shoes in the hall, he pointed to the photograph of the man in the white coat.

'Is that you?'

'In the first half of the previous century, yes,' Juul laughed. 'It was taken in Germany before the war. I was supposed to follow in my father's and grandfather's footsteps and study medicine there. When the war broke out I made my way home and in fact got my hands on my first history books on the boat. After that it was too late: I was hooked.'

'So you gave up medicine?'

'Depends on how you look at it. I wanted to try to find an explanation of how one man and one ideology could bewitch so many people. And perhaps find an antidote, too.' He laughed. I was very, very young.'