The Redbreast

37

First Floor, Continental Hotel. 1 March 2000.

'Nice that we could meet like this,' Bernt Brandhaug said, raising his wineglass.

They toasted and Aud Hilde smiled at the Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs.

'And not only on official business,' he said, holding her gaze until she looked down. Brandhaug studied her. She wasn't exactly attractive, her features were a little too coarse for that and she was certainly plump, but she had a charming, flirty way about her and she was young plump.

She had rung him from the staff office this morning saying they needed his advice on an unusual case, but before she could say any more he had asked her up to his office. And when she was there he had immediately decided he didn't have the time and they could discuss it over a meal after work.

'We civil servants should also have a few perks,' he had said. She presumed he meant the meal.

So far everything had gone well. The head waiter had given them Brandhaug's regular table and, to the best of his knowledge, there was no one he knew in the room.

'Yes, there's this strange case we had yesterday,' she said, letting the waiter unfold the napkin over her lap. 'We had a visit from an elderly man who maintained that we owed him money. The Foreign Office, that is. Almost two million kroner, he said, referring to a letter he had sent in 1970.'

She rolled her eyes. She shouldn't wear so much make-up, Brandhaug thought.

'So what did we owe him money for?'

'He said he was a merchant seaman during the war. It was something to do with Nortraship. They had withheld his pay.'

'Oh, yes, I think I know what it was about. What else did he say?'

'That he couldn't wait any longer. That we had cheated him and all the other merchant seamen. God would punish us for our sins. I don't know if he had been drinking or he was ill, but he looked under the weather. He brought a letter with him, signed by the Norwegian Consul General in Bombay in 1944, who guaranteed, on behalf of the Norwegian state, the back payment of the war-risk bonus for four years' service as an officer in the Norwegian merchant navy. Had it not been for the letter, we would have just given him the heave-ho of course, and we wouldn't have bothered you with this trivial matter.'

'You can come to me any time you wish, Aud Hilde,' he said, with a sudden stab of panic: her name was Aud Hilde, wasn't it?

'Poor man,' Brandhaug said, gesturing to the waiter to bring more wine. 'The sad thing about this case is that he is actually right. Nortraship was established to administer the boats in the merchant fleet that the Germans had not already captured. It was an organisation with partly political and partly commercial interests. The British, for example, paid large sums in risk bonuses to Nortraship to use Norwegian shipping. But the money, instead of being used to pay the crews, went straight into the ship-owners' pockets and the state's coffers. We're talking about several hundred million kroner here. The merchant seamen tried to get their money back through legal proceedings, but they lost their case in the Supreme Court in 1954. The Storting passed an act in 1972, establishing that merchant seamen had a right to this money.'

'This man doesn't seem to have received anything. Because he was in the China Sea and was torpedoed by the Japanese and not by the Germans, he said.'

'Did he say what his name was?'

'Konrad Asnes. Wait a moment and I'll show you the letter. He had worked out how much was owed with compound interest.'

She bent to look in her bag. Her upper arms quivered. She should do a bit more exercise, Brandhaug thought. Four kilos less and Aud Hilde would simply be well-rounded instead of… fat.

'It's alright,' he said. 'I don't need to see it. Nortraship comes under the Ministry of Commerce.'

She looked up at him.

'He insisted we were the ones who owed him the money. He gave us a deadline of two weeks.' Brandhaug laughed.

'Did he? And what's the rush now, after sixty years?'

'He didn't say. He only said that we would have to take the consequences if we didn't pay.'

'My goodness.' Brandhaug waited until the waiter had poured out more wine for them before leaning forward. 'I hate taking the consequences, don't you?' She flashed him a hesitant smile.

Brandhaug raised his glass.

'I was wondering what we should do about this case?' she said. 'Forget it,' he said. 'But I was also wondering one thing, Aud Hilde.'

'What's that?'

'If you've seen the hotel room we have at our disposal here.'

Aud Hilde smiled again and said she hadn't.