Authors: Erik Valeur
“If there is a dark secret behind this mysterious story, the anonymous letter will likely not be the last. The Ministry of National Affairs does not wish to comment on whether one of the letters was also delivered to Ole Almind-Enevold, as has been indicated to
Independent Weekend
. Several sources confirm that Orla Berntsen stayed at Kongslund for an undisclosed length of time during the first year of his life, officially the result of his mother’s depression. The chief of staff has declined to comment on this information.”
“Can you find out
who
…
?” She had poured the coffee, and now the question hung in the air between them.
“Who has given them this information?” He slid the small sugar bowl toward his cup. “Yes, I can, and I’m already on it.” He fingered six or seven cubes, just as he used to. Magna counted the pieces with the same disapproval she felt whenever children bought lollipops at the corner store.
He glanced up and for a long moment stared at her. Instantly she felt pain in her lower back, the pain that presaged thunder and lightning and early autumn storms. Bile rose so forcefully in her throat that she had to put down her cup and lean back in her seat.
“Could we be in any danger?” Her question sounded childish.
“Of course,” he said. “There’s somebody out there—somebody’s got ahold of something—and our friend certainly is angry. And scared.” He almost looked satisfied—though that was absurd—and then he quietly stirred his coffee with the little silver spoon. He had filled out over the years, and the dark curly hair had gone gray. He laid his coat over the newspaper as if he didn’t want to be reminded of it. For a former assistant chief of police, he was appropriately dressed: dark-blue trousers, light-blue shirt, and a blue checkered tie. Nowadays his business card read
Carl Malle, Senior Consultant, Security and Protection Specialist
.
It was almost funny.
She’d
always felt extremely unsafe in Carl Malle’s presence.
“Given that your anniversary is right around the corner, this is most unfortunate,” he said. “The spotlight will be on you and the orphanage for at least another week. I think the anonymous letter writer has taken that into account. But thankfully, the journalist at
Independent Weekend
was thoroughly discredited a few years ago, so it’s doubtful that anyone will take his information seriously today.” Carl Malle smiled. “And certainly not if he were to somehow discover the utterly improbable truth, don’t you agree?”
“This is hardly the time to be joking.” She sounded curt, even a little fearful.
She’d
always felt that way in his company.
“I mean it quite seriously, my dear Magna. The truth is so bizarre that no one will actually print the story without confirmation from the primary sources. And that includes only three of us. Unless you think of anyone else from that time
…
and in any case, the person you and I are both thinking of can’t even document her own story. That door closed a long time ago, and she hasn’t returned. She wasn’t the one who wrote the damn letter to that asshole Taasing.”
“But did you notice who Taasing referred to?”
“It’s a coincidence, Magna. Nothing more. And I keep a leash on Orla of course.” Carl Malle’s laughter rose from deep within his throat and rattled just like the mechanical clowns banging their drums on the sunroom floor on Christmas Eve. “The minister has asked the head of the department to open the gates of hell to locate the anonymous writer. And hell—that’s me. But I’m sure you recall
…
our shared war?” Malle laughed again.
And she did remember the seventeen-year-old resistance fighter whom
she’d
admired for a few months before she saw his true self.
“We go way back, Magna, but even so, maybe there’s an ugly little secret I don’t know about? We both mastered those, didn’t we? We’ll have to flip the barrel upside down and shake it, hope something turns up. I
have
to find that letter writer before anyone else does.”
He lit his Norwell pipe and, for a long moment, concentrated on the bowl as if he wished to burn the entire problem up with his tobacco. For a man of his ilk, the occupation by Nazi Germany had been a gift: dark, dangerous, threatening, and full of excitement. Magna had always understood this. Along with two of his school chums,
he’d
formed a resistance group in Jutland in 1943. They’d been as reckless as only very young men can be, girded as they were by firm conviction in their own immortality. They stole German guns, hand grenades, and explosives; they obstructed train rails with thick oak trees they’d felled in the woods between Vejle and Horsens. They didn’t know the purpose of the trains—or what they were transporting—but in the shrubbery where they were hiding, they would hoot with excitement whenever the rails exploded and the freight cars capsized.
They sabotaged like dogs of hell, blowing up practically everything in their path: parked cars, clothes, warehouses filled with military underwear, factories, ammunition depots, and bakeries that sold morning rolls to officers in the Danish Hilfspolizei. As the months passed, Carl became more reckless and erratic, and he made other members of the movement nervous. When the cooperation agreement between the Danish government and the occupying power finally broke down in August 1943, and the Danish Jews faced the same Final Solution as other European Jews, a resistance leader managed to persuade Carl and his two henchmen to carry out the greatest possible heroic act. Thousands of Jews were to be hidden and then smuggled to Sweden over the coming months, and the base of operations would be in the nation’s capital. The Devil made a pact with God, and it’s debatable whether Denmark would have saved as many Jews and placed itself on the just side of the war had it not been for Carl Malle’s arrival in the city.
By then Magna had become a trusted assistant at the orphanage in Skodsborg, and when on September 29, 1943, Danes learned that the Germans were making plans to arrest and deport thousands of Jews only two days later, Magna went downtown with Gerda. They took the tram to a small tavern near the Kalkbrænderi Harbor, which they knew to be frequented by resistance fighters, and there they met Carl, newly arrived from Jutland, sitting at a small corner table. The tall man from Horsens explained the problem to Magna: the Jews had to be located, hidden, and smuggled out. While the resistance fighters organized the escape routes to Sweden, they needed safe homes.
That night, Carl and Magna slept together in her little apartment at the orphanage; afterward, they crawled through a trapdoor in her bedroom and inspected the attic: except for a few boxes with extra toys, it was completely empty. A perfect hiding place.
Then they climbed back down and made love again. He was seventeen, she twenty-three. There was never any doubt that it was his hands, and his will, that determined the rhythm of their lovemaking, the pace, and the time of their climax; she let her head drop and screamed, hoping the nursing students asleep in the annex would think it was only a baby crying somewhere in the house.
Carl was her first—and last—man.
He sat there smoking his pipe as if he could read her mind. No doubt he could. “There was a time, Magna, when we weren’t afraid of anything. But that was a long time ago.”
“Yes. The five cursed years
…
” The comment was clearly aimed at him.
The Jews had arrived at Kongslund after dark and in small clusters. Men, women, and children with rucksacks and suitcases, no more than what they could carry across the sound to Sweden. Carl Malle and his pals in the Resistance had coaxed, threatened, and bribed their way to seaworthy vessels of any kind. “As long as it floats,” Carl would say, towering over the nervous fishermen who didn’t dare refuse. There was no boat or coffin ship that he didn’t manage to put to sea during those months, and Carl himself would stand in the sunroom whenever another group was about to set sail. “Carry only what’s important so you can let it go if you need to run,” he instructed them. “If you have to swim, forget your luggage.” She recalled how he would laugh out loud each time—and the refugees would look at him apprehensively, as if they couldn’t quite determine who posed the greater threat.
As the weeks passed, the governesses grew less nervous. No one had shown the least interest in the orphanage—maybe because thousands of Jews were hiding along the coast, from Gilleleje in the north to the island of Falster in the south.
Until one night.
Two black cars from the Gestapo turned into the driveway and parked. In all, there were seven men and an officer—and no way out, it seemed.
Gerda Jensen, the woman who had painted the blue elephants in the infant room, met them on the front steps, and they halted.
She’d
wrapped a green crocheted shawl around her shoulders, and she seemed so small that the house behind her appeared enormous. The German commandant showed her his order to search the premises thoroughly. Gerda curtsied.
“
Bitte, stören sie nicht die Kinder
,” she said in a voice so mild. “Please, do not disturb the children.” She was so convincing that the German automatically averted his gaze, as though
he’d
been caught doing something sinful. Ironically, he could have just asked what he wanted to know, because Gerda Jensen had never been able to lie to any living soul. Not even a German officer. But of course the commandant would never have dreamed of this. As it happened, the Germans never made it past the ground floor, where they stood awkwardly—in their long coats and boots—between the beds in the room that would later become known as the Elephant Room.
Gerda approached the commandant. She came up only to his chest. “These children are very frail,” she said in Danish. “They are all alone in this world”—she glanced into his face and let him meet a gaze that reflected centuries of storms and breakers along Jutland’s rugged west coast—“and they’ll never meet their parents.” The eight men looked suddenly very ill at ease; a sense of peril filled the air, which none of them could later explain. The tiny woman certainly posed no threat.
“Fräulein,”
the major said, careful not to look at the sleeping bundles under the small duvets, “
danke schön
.” He turned on his heels and asked to be shown out. The sound of their tires on the gravel road could be heard again, less than ten minutes from when they first arrived.
Not long afterward, liberation arrived, and the Germans surrendered without a fight. They wandered down Strandvejen into Skodsborg, past Kongslund, across Copenhagen, and through Zealand toward their devastated homeland. During the final months of the war, Carl had been very active in the liquidation of Danish collaborators, a necessary evil that was said to mark the resistance fighters for life.
But had it marked him? She didn’t think so.
“Soon Knud Taasing will zoom in on the five boys from the Elephant Room in 1961,” Carl Malle said to Magna. “After all, he’s not stupid.”
She was silent.
“If they discover the connection—even if it’s unlikely”—he clinked the silver teaspoon against the edge of the sugar bowl—“they will ask about the
father
. They’ll ask about him and demand to know where he is today.”
“And of course I will tell them that we often don’t know the names of the fathers, which is true.”
She’d
regained some of her self-confidence. In contrast to Gerda, she was perfectly capable of lying when it was necessary.
“But why all this secrecy? Why this irregular adoption form? As if
you’d
attempted to hide every trace. What will you say if they ask about that?”
“I don’t remember anymore. There were so many children
…
and thousands of people came to Kongslund
.
They can’t force me, Carl. They’re not
barbarians
, are they?”
He ignored the insult. Their lives were intertwined in ways that couldn’t be unknotted. He pushed his coat off the newspaper, and she knew what was coming.
“I think Marie might’ve sent the letter,” he said.
Magna didn’t react.
“I saw her in Søborg
…
when she was a child
…
creeping about, spying on Orla and Severin. That wasn’t normal. And she’s had access
…
to information.” His last words were strange, ambiguous.
The retired matron remained silent. They’d entered dangerous territory.
“She’s always been strange. It’s no wonder you couldn’t find her a home.”
“I did find her a home. The best one,” she replied bitingly.
He stood, and the teaspoon clattered to the floor. “If only we knew why it’s happening now.”
She looked at him. “Yes, but just about anybody could have found that form and kept it, could have sniffed out some of what happened. A visitor
…
a former governess.”
“Of course, what our friend fears more than anything else is that it’s the boy himself,” Malle broke in. “He might have found that form at his adoptive parents’ home, and now he’s trying to figure out what it means.”
Magna noticed her skin was the same color as the ashes in the little crystal bowl set before her. She fell silent.
“Did you erase
every
trace?” he asked.
“Yes—of course I did.”
“It’s your fault—and
his
—that we’re in this pickle.”
It was a peculiar, old-fashioned expression. But he was right. Carl Malle had merely been an instrument.
“And what happens if our beloved TV star Peter gets involved? Him and his TV station? It’s a distinct possibility, isn’t it?”
It didn’t sound like a question to Magna.
“Maybe he, too, received a similar letter.”
She didn’t need to respond to this terrifying prediction. They had to seal off the past, regardless of who had broken through, before it was too late.
“Is Orla really the son of the single woman he grew up with in Søborg?” The question came out of nowhere.