The Seventh Child (37 page)

No one laughed at his joke.

“And now we’re getting to the interesting part. To this day, Agnes Olsen remembers that the foundling was a boy. So I asked how the boy had come to be referred to as a girl in all those newspapers and magazines, and she couldn’t tell me.”

Nils glanced at Knud and then to Peter Trøst and back again, formulating the question that was on both their minds: “So what’s the problem?”

Taasing fished a Prince cigarette from the little silver case that he carried only during the summer, when he risked crushing his cigarettes in his pants pocket. Nils was one of few people who knew the date engraved in the bottom of that case. His wedding day: 8.8.88.
He’d
divorced a year after the scandal that buried his career.

Taasing lit his cigarette and said, “What do you mean, ‘what’s the problem’?”

Peter said, “You ask us to meet with you, and you tell us you’ll continue your investigation. You say it’s
possible
that
the foundling they found forty-seven years ago was a boy, not a girl.” He fanned the smoke away from his eyes. “Why the hell is that so important?”

“Because you’re forgetting,” Taasing said, “that John Bjergstrand is a boy.”

19

DEATH

May 15, 2008

On the second floor of the villa, my foster mother, ever dutiful, is bent over her records and balance sheets. From time to time she opens the top drawer in the beautiful rosewood writing bureau with its bronze mountings, retrieves the
Kongslund Protocol
, and makes notes in it. It’s as thick as a wrestler’s arm and bound in dark-green leather; and to the question I once asked in my childish curiosity, she replies without hesitation: “It is my log, Marie. Without it I wouldn’t be able to keep my ship on course!”

Then she laughs so loudly that it sounds like thunder rolling in from the east.

The content of the log was a secret she would take to the grave. The house’s foundation would creak and rumble, but
she’d
bring it with her; not even the greedy curiosity of a foundling could pry open the drawer and reveal its contents. It was solidly constructed, and its lock could not be picked with even the greatest patience—all my attempts were in vain.

Maybe she noticed the fine scratch marks that appeared to have been made by small fingers in the bureau’s panels and had drawn her own conclusions
…
but naturally it hadn’t caused her great concern.

Martha Magnolia Louise Ladegaard died two days after the anniversary celebration.

It was a shock to the entire nation that had just seen her—so vivid and splendid—on their television screens. The festivities had nearly overshadowed the serious accusations that had been levied against the orphanage. Again and again over the intervening days, my foster mother was referred to as the one
who’d
helped thousands of Danish children into the safe homes and thankful arms of tens of thousands of Danish parents.

I remember Magdalene once told me that Magna
“sent all the others into the world, but you she wanted to keep for herself.”
And then she added with a strong lisp that underscored her warning:
“The anger, Marie. Anger. That’s what you have to watch out for!”

Before I could ask her to elaborate,
she’d
turned and had been absorbed by the shadows, leaving me with a faint smell of soil and meerschaum pipe smoke in my earthly quarters. (I think that by now she spent most of her time on the Other Side with her soul mate, the People’s King.)

It was Magna’s sudden and brutal death that caused the police to reconsider the status of the Kongslund Affair. Thus far, behind closed doors, the leading criminal investigators had practically shrugged their shoulders at the amateurish anonymous letter, agreeing that the ministry was overreacting. They’d been satisfied that a man like Carl Malle had, in effect, taken over the investigation. No one had ever cared for him, and now he might finally do himself in with his recent dealings with those in the elevated circles.

But that was before the case’s true main character was found dead in her Skodsborg apartment. Now the homicide investigators came out in full force, and through numerous interviews they examined every detail of her final hours. The Kongslund Affair had been resurrected.

They’d found my foster mother lying on her living-room floor, right beneath the window that faced the funeral home on the opposite side of Strandvejen. They discovered her body several hours after any doctor or miracle from above could have saved her life. She lay in a pool of blood, her head resting on a white scrapbook containing hundreds of newspaper clippings featuring photos of the many cohorts of Kongslund’s children.

Several of the articles had been removed from the scrapbook and strewn around her body.

During the next couple of days, the police tried to conjure a kind of phantom image of the homicide. It had occurred at a time when most of those in the building were still asleep, and no one was expecting a visit from Death or anything that looked remotely like it. As a consequence, they had only one witness to work with. He was the only tenant to awaken when a voice spilled through the ceiling from the apartment above. He was the manager of the Oceka Grocery at the corner of Strandvejen and Skodsborgvej, and just two evenings before he had seen the victim on television.

To all appearances, the poor woman had been reading her scrapbooks when she received an unexpected guest. There were several other books, white, red, and brown with letters, pictures, and clippings stacked on the coffee table as well. Two unused coffee cups stood on the table, and the old woman lay on her back near the bookcase. A snuffed cheroot—a Bellman, her favorite brand apparently—rested on the floor next to her. Although the grocery manager downstairs had gone to bed, he had at one point heard some noise in the upstairs apartment. A fretful person,
he’d
been born—delivered, wrapped in a blanket, and laid in a dresser drawer by his mother—in the very room where he slept, and he hadn’t had the courage to get out of bed.

The police figured that Magna had been attempting to pull the big scrapbook off the bookcase when she fell with such force that she conked her forehead on the second-highest shelf, then spun, losing her balance.
She’d
cried out, and that was another sound the neighbor had heard. This finally forced him out of bed. She appeared to have then dropped sideways into an antique Sheraton chair, which caused a gash in her temple (one of the trademarks of this particular kind of chair were the pointy edges), and when he heard the bang, the neighbor had jumped for a third time.

Her neck snapped the second her head hit the floor. Her right cheek rested on a scrapbook from the years 1961 to 1964 (the dates were written in neat script in the top corner, and it was just about the only spot that wasn’t covered in blood).

Finally, the grocery manager flicked on the light and turned to his sleeping wife. He was, as always, struck by a nameless fear of sharing eternity with a person
he’d
never really known. Maybe it was this fear that, in spite of everything, gave him the courage to get up and call the police. A few minutes later the epicenter of his life was filled with flashing blue lights and sirens and feet stomping up the hallway stairs.

Clearly someone had riffled through the dead matron’s possessions. Several drawers had been pulled out of the dressers in the hallway and in her bedroom, the contents spread on the floor. Theoretically, however, this could have happened before
she’d
died, and she could have been in the process of tidying up, though the police doubted it. The problem was that there was no evidence that her death had been anything but accidental. There were no bruises indicating punches or kicks. All they had to go on was the neighbor’s statement concerning noise.

“What was on TV when you heard the guest arrive?” one of the police investigators asked. The grocer looked at him for a long time, and then said rather nonsensically, “I don’t remember at all. It’s an old Telefunken TV, and I always turn it up loud. My wife snores, you see.”

The policeman nodded, though he hadn’t understood a word the man said. Morning was breaking, and from the window you could see the Swedish coast like a narrow strip of gray pocket fluff on the horizon. The undertaker stood at the grocer’s door staring at the police cars, a blue sheen reflected in his eyes.

Suddenly a light appeared in the grocer’s eyes. “The last time I saw Ms. Ladegaard was when she bought stamps a couple days before, right after the anniversary. She got back early. She
…
well, you may not find it easy to believe, but she came in with a letter, or rather a package, she wanted to send to Australia. I remember that
…
Australia
…
” He uttered the last word with undisguised longing.

Then he sank back in his chair and shrugged, as though he wanted to withdraw into the dresser drawer where
he’d
begun his life.

“To Australia?” the policeman gave his only witness a confused look. He wondered how that could possibly be relevant and decided not to include it in his notes.

But silence had descended on the living room. The cheroot had died out between the old man’s fingers. He stared into the darkness, as though he had the power to make the old lady upstairs walk again, to undo everything that had happened.

The policeman let him cry in peace.

The police drove the few hundred yards from Skodsborg to Kongslund, where I lay sleeping in the King’s Room in the early morning hours.

Susanne Ingemann showed them in.

Immediately following the anniversary festivities,
we’d
tidied up the yard and the house and removed the numerous yellow freesia with their drooping heads, asphyxiated by all the fine guests’ cheroot and cigarette smoke.
We’d
dumped the dead flowers in big garbage bags, and the sweet smell of rot wafted in from the sunroom.

The scent lingered in the hallway outside my room, when Susanne rapped on my door that morning. “It’s the police
…
your mother, she
…
” she stammered—and for a moment she looked like she might cry.

“My foster mother,” I corrected before
she’d
even finished the sentence. I had instantly known what she was going to say. Something ought to have collapsed inside me, or at very least a fissure ought to have opened into some deeper layers within. But nothing happened.

I don’t remember feeling anything at all.

The few routine questions—and my own brief responses—took less than ten minutes. I had spoken briefly with Magna about an hour before the guests arrived and had then gone to bed—putting orange earplugs in, I told them, because my room faced the lawn where the festivities were still going on. I hadn’t heard or seen anything significant.

The policeman gave me his condolences once again and left. I went into the infant room and closed the door. The curtains were drawn. No light whatsoever penetrated the thick folds of cloth. The children were asleep. The song had ceased.

“Hello,”
the Darkness said.
“You’ve never been able to stay away for very long.”
If you’ve known Darkness for a long time, you know that its greetings are not scornful like those of the mirror.

I walked to the window and drew the curtains aside; the blue elephants stepped out of the shadows and threw golden cones of light from their thick trunks, the way they’d always done. I’d once asked Gerda how many blue elephants she had intended to paint in the room, and
she’d
simply said: “I stopped when there were enough.”

I suspected there was a deeper explanation to Gerda’s obsession with the blue elephants; one of the assistants claimed that Gerda had painted one for every child that passed through the room. Once, she studied me for a long time (I was only seven or eight then) and said: “Marie, we’ve had all kinds of children here
…
children of young girls and children of penniless parents who saw no way to keep them
…
children of professors and politicians and managers, and even children of criminals and murderers, and that is the hardest of all, because if no one intervenes, that kind of legacy can follow children through their lives.”

Gerda had never doubted the significance of biological inheritance (this was years before all the clever minds shifted their focus to nurture), and I later discovered that she feared it more than anything. “A criminal’s mind can live on in the mind of the child—even if they share no physical proximity,” she once told me. “Even if the child grows up under the safest conditions you can imagine and with the most loving adoptive parents on Earth, the blood bond will never be torn, Marie. Every single child contains his or her real father and mother deep inside.”

I stood by the window letting my eyes glide with the light toward the blue elephant above the bed where I myself had lain as an infant. The elephant’s plump body was sliced in two where the wallpaper had peeled, but it still floated above me on invisible threads; for the first time I sensed the danger that Gerda had talked about—but without knowing which direction to look. I was sure
she’d
been referring to one of the children
who’d
been with me in the infant room during that Christmas of 1961. If my hunch was correct, this child would prove to be the mysterious John Bjergstrand whom the whole nation had come to see as the symbol of an unwanted, discarded human being. The kind of being that the well-intentioned at Kongslund longed to save.