The Seventh Child (80 page)

“So you’re
not
a murderer,” Severin said finally. “You might even be the only one of the seven of us who isn’t. You’re neither an adopted child, nor a murderer.” He tried to smile.

For the first time in many years, sitting alone in his mother’s empty living room, Orla cried.

37

THE ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT

February 5, 2009

When I contacted Dorah’s son it wasn’t to comfort him or to teach him the art of reconciliation, but to tell him a story I had no doubt would have a certain effect on him.

Naturally he would believe me, as he had before, and he would gather courage and confront the person I’d identified as responsible. That’s what I had in mind.

To this day, I don’t know if, deep down, I truly realized what was going to happen. I could easily claim that I thought
he’d
move in the only possible direction—by peaceful means—and that no one could have known
he’d
change course at the last minute. How was I to know the violent temper I’d provoked?

It happened early in the evening on February 5, 2009.

Quite a few pedestrians heard the faint sound of a gunshot—though some thought it was just a midsize firecracker exploding—and for that reason they could help the police determine the time.

The guard at the National Ministry raised his head from a crossword puzzle and listened more attentively. It sounded as though the noise came from somewhere underneath his feet; he instinctively shuffled his shoes and stared at the wooden floor, as though his eyes were able to penetrate the floorboards and uncover a secret hidden in the very core of the earth. Leaning forward, he glanced up at the windows. Behind one of them, the former minister of national affairs was in the process of sorting through old files, a good many of which he believed were better off destroyed. The guard had let him in earlier that evening.

The guard’s feet settled down, and he dozed off. In any other country, there would have been a team with dogs and walkie-talkies and machine guns at the entrance to such an important ministry, but here people still had faith that others wouldn’t resort to violence even if they had obvious reasons to do so. The minister’s chauffeur was the one who rapped on the guard’s office window, calling his attention to the fact that something was amiss.

At 6:32 p.m., the chauffeur from Helgenæs, who had gotten the job about a year earlier, had been watching the first evening news on the little dashboard TV in the minister’s car. A tag on his breast pocket read “Lars Laursen,” a solid Jut name; his job was to be ready around the clock, in full uniform, and he accomplished that with the inherited discipline of his forebears. His mother’s name was Dorah, and it had been almost eight years since she told him the shocking truth. Seven months had passed since
he’d
buried her at Helgenæs Church, right outside the little town of Stødov, where farms and small holdings were scattered across the hills.

Together, the chauffeur and the guard ascended the wide stairs to the ministerial floor and stepped into the section known as the Palace. It was faintly illuminated by the numerous electronic lights from the clerical desks. As he was accustomed to doing, the Almighty One had asked his secret service detail to wait at a discreet distance—in a car outside the entrance—because he absolutely didn’t want to risk the impression that the hero from the resistance movement was afraid to move about his kingdom alone.

The two knocked on the minister’s heavy office door. A new minister of national affairs had not been named, and there were rumors the ministry would be shut down, the Ministry of State would swallow up all its functions, and state and nation would become one. They knocked a second time, then opened the door. For a moment they stood indecisively in the empty office. Finally they tapped on the door to the adjacent suite, the minister’s lounge area, where their lord and master often napped when the day grew too long.

This room too was empty. The bed, with a beautiful embroidered blanket atop a wine-red silk duvet, was untouched.

Then they came to the third door, which was held in place by solid steel hinges. The few people who knew of the existence of this door referred to it, half-jokingly, as the Escape Route—and that was its intent in the olden days. In case of war or attacks or other threats to the nation’s safety or administration, the ministry could be evacuated discreetly through this exit. It led to a staircase that wound down under Slotsholmen, to an extensive cellar system networked underground like a series of giant mole tunnels. From here, the most important ministers could cross beneath the square and up through another staircase—to safety.

After hesitating for about ten seconds, the two men opened the door; they noticed the light was off, and that the ceiling lamp wasn’t working. They fetched flashlights from the storage room.

They descended into the depths, which hadn’t been properly ventilated for centuries. The tunnel sloped downward and came to a bend before resuming its incline. The chauffeur aimed his flashlight at the ceiling, as though inspecting for stalactites or clusters of bats, and therefore nearly stumbled over the nation’s premier, who lay in the middle of the corridor, his legs pulled to his chest, as though he were asleep. Like a small child.

Leaning closer, the guard caught sight of the prime minister’s face, and then proceeded to shower the chauffeur’s shoes with the contents of his stomach. Blood oozed from the premier’s mouth, glowing purple-red in the beam of the flashlight.

Lars Laursen stood like a stone pillar, intransigent just like his stalwart ancestors
who’d
once found a mysterious ticking pocket watch on an East Jutland main road and considered it the work of the Devil. Quickly he flipped the unconscious prime minister onto his back, revealing the bullet’s entry point. Blood seeped from the hole and down the white dress shirt and breast pocket, with its gold-leaf cigar clipper, and onto the chauffeur’s large hands. To his surprise, the prime minister was still alive, cursing under his breath.

The guard sat up, pulled out his gun, and called 911 on his cell phone.

During the following hours, it was believed the perpetrator had been identified—a Tamil refugee who worked for the company that cleaned the ministry. Considering the fate of the deported Tamil boy, it seemed a plausible motive to the police. The assassination could have been an act of revenge.

What clued them in was the fact that the janitorial staff, which consisted entirely of underpaid foreigners, had their locker room and break room in the same part of the basement where the minister was found. They had—quite literally as some of the officials liked to joke—created their very own subculture in the ministerial cellars.

But a couple of days later, further investigation revealed that the suspect had been on his way home, sitting in bus number 6 in Vanløse, when the prime minister was shot.

No new theory about the assassination attempt was formed. Investigators scrutinized the backgrounds and family relations of bellhops, security guards, secretaries—even department heads and administrative bosses. Alibi upon alibi was established and together formed an almost impenetrable wall around the man
who’d
been shot. For all intents and purposes, it should never have happened.

Miraculously, he had been revived twice in the ambulance to Rigshospital, and the entire nation celebrated the old resistance fighter’s resurrection as though it were yet another heroic feat.

“It was a bull’s eye shot,” the chauffeur from Helgenæs had told the TV cameras as he ascended from the dark, adding, “but he’s alive.” No one had taken notice of the slight change of tone, when the man uttered the word
but
—even though it was transmitted and replayed over and over again across the entire nation. Everyone called the chauffeur a hero and attributed his peculiarly gloomy expression to shock. Not even the police thought of checking this man’s past; to suspect him of anything shady would have seemed to the public absurd and insulting.

I could have told them about Lars Laursen. And about his mother, Dorah, who sat in her low-ceilinged home in Helgenæs and who, after many years, finally told her son the gruesome truth about his life. I could have told them about the feeling of not knowing your roots, and about the angst you suffer when you discover you will be forever denied access to it. It’s a feeling we know better than anyone else.

Lars Laursen and I.

I studied his expressionless face on the TV screen and thought of the piece of information I’d given him, which had released the blind, merciless rage I knew only too well. He had reacted even more violently than I’d thought possible. But they wouldn’t catch him, I was sure.

The king was still alive, however, and in a few months he would resume his wrongful place on the throne—now an even bigger hero in the eyes of the people.

38

RESURRECTION

September 11, 2009

In a way, they are still there—the proud governesses who brought us light and who taught us to walk and curtsy and bow, as they observed the other children romping about on the grass a stone’s throw from the beach.

Smiling, they followed us with their eyes, lifting their teacups and controlling life in the beautiful garden down to the last detail.

On this particular day, there is a storm brewing from the northeast, and the wind cuts, as it always has, at the cornices and gables of Kongslund, and I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the seven white chimneys pulled loose and slid down the roof, into the depths.

I am sitting by the window, a little hunched over; my left shoulder hangs a tad lower than the rest of my body, as it always has. I am living proof that Kongslund’s symmetry has always been an illusion.

The Protocol lies in my lap.

It’s bigger than I remembered.

Perhaps in my child eyes, it seemed smaller than it actually was, cradled in my foster mother’s immense arms.

There are brown spots on the green leather binding, maybe remnants of her fingerprints, or just the usual signs of age.

It contains outlines of the lives Magna found particularly interesting. Patient descriptions of the children she invited into the Elephant Room, because they had a very special need for care. There are details about harrowing fates and developments, which she would never have divulged in official journals and psychological reports for fear that these failures and weaknesses would one day return from their archival hiding spots and be used against the people she protected.

I hide it in the cabinet, next to my own binders filled with notes about the children in the Elephant Room in 1961: the carefully recorded observations of my visits and the newspaper clippings from their adult lives.

Now I open it to find the sections I need to destroy a king.

From the beginning, it was obvious to me that there was more than enough evidence. Magna was a methodical woman, after all.

When the following lines are read, it will be too late to undo my last and biggest decision.

It’s already too late for the Almighty One on his glorious throne, too late for the ascended monarch who built Kongslund dreaming of perfect symmetry, and too late for the Master himself, who never in His mocking hubris would discover the obstacle that was intended to trigger the last fatal fall
…

And, of course, it was too late for me.

On the morning the prime minister rose from the dead, I received my very last, almost inaudible message from Magdalene. The whisper was so muted that if I hadn’t known her for as long as I had, I would have mistaken it for the wind sweeping around the gable.

I realized that there was one thing left to do.

Ole Almind-Enevold had finally risen from his hospital bed and was driven the short distance to Slotsholmen in a cortege whose length dwarfed even that of an American presidential inaugural motorcade along Pennsylvania Avenue. It had taken a left turn down Blegdamsvej, then a right onto Østerbrogade; had driven down St. Kongensgade to Kongens Nytorv, over the bridge at the stock exchange, and through the gate to his rightful domicile.

He assumed the Ministry of State, while seated in a silk-upholstered wheelchair that had been provided free of charge by the country’s biggest manufacturer of medical equipment (and whose logo was strategically imprinted on both silver-plated wheel hubs). The wheelchair featured a small, red handle that allowed him to maneuver it majestically to and from his desk. It goes without saying that the chair bore no resemblance whatsoever to the ramshackle vehicle I’d inherited from Magdalene.

Cameras from at least twenty TV stations followed the process (absent of course was the bankrupt Channel DK), and the joy in his recovery reached across the nation; it leaped from house to house, from street to street, and from town to town—just like in a fairy tale.

I turned off the television in the sunroom and walked angrily up to the King’s Room.

I won’t pretend that it didn’t give me personal satisfaction that I, a mere amateur, had outmaneuvered the journalist and the security advisor, as well as the police, who had searched so hard for Magna’s last package.

Of course I succeeded in figuring out my foster mother’s last move. I had lived in her house, as her chosen one, for three decades before she retired. In contrast to the professional hunters, Taasing and Malle, I knew what she was thinking when she decided to send the precious book out of the country, beyond the reach of her pursuers. Given all her experience with the reparation of abandoned children, she would take pains to consider what her own death might mean. And that was the understanding that my two competitors could not quite grasp.

My foster mother would have planned for even the most improbable and undesirable turn of events.

The ministry and the police had no doubt kept the relevant post offices under surveillance as they searched for the package that everyone was sure would eventually return from the other side of the planet. But, all these months, they’d looked at the wrong address of the foreign packages they examined; and even more crucially, they’d focused on the wrong name. I was the only one who understood who Magna would have listed as a sender as she shipped it out of the country. It was her only chance, the only person in the world she could trust.

Gerda Jensen.

The rest of my investigation was simple. After exactly three months, I sought out Gerda. That would definitely be enough time for the Australian postal authorities to determine that the address didn’t exist and to return the package to the sender.

She opened the door only after I’d waited outside for a while, and I felt her nervousness just like I had the last time I’d visited her.

“You received a package containing the Kongslund Protocol,” I said, still standing on her doormat.

The thin woman nodded, a quicker admission than I would have expected, even from the most honest human being alive.

“It’s legally mine,” I said. “I am Magna’s heir.” I stepped into the hallway, and she began shaking even before I mentioned my foster mother’s name. At first it was just a little tremble, then more and more—until finally she was quaking uncontrollably.

I helped her into the living room and to the blue sofa where
we’d
sat the last time I visited her. “It means everything to me,” I said, and though my tone was meant to be reassuring, it had the exact opposite effect. In her renewed trembling, I felt the peculiar fear spreading from her body to mine.

I didn’t quite understand it.
How could the prospect of handing over the book with descriptions of Magna’s impressive life be that frightening? What did it contain?

But I was stubborn. “I have a right to know what’s in that book,” I said.

That message didn’t produce anything but renewed shaking. I stood up and left her alone in the living room.

The Protocol was on her nightstand. I brought it into the living room and asked the only question on my mind in that moment, “Did you read it?”

“Yes.”

The most loyal and upstanding person, who struggled to lie even when her life was at stake, had—for the oldest reason in the world—broken Magna’s trust. I almost laughed, but that would have probably frightened her even more, and I didn’t want her to faint on me again. Gerda had simply been too curious not to read it.

“I knew it would arrive
…
but I’d decided to burn it,” she whispered. “But
…
I didn’t dare
…
Magna
…
”

“That’s what Magna would have wanted,” I said mercilessly. Brutally.

Without forewarning, Gerda Jensen fainted, but I knew she would regain consciousness the minute I left. She was both tougher and wiser than she let on.

Later that night, Knud Taasing called Kongslund. It was almost a ritual.
He’d
called every other day for months to ask if there had been any “new developments” in the case.

What he meant, of course, was:
Has the Protocol surfaced?

I had had a feeling that he no longer unconditionally believed in his own prediction that the Protocol would end up in my hands—and then with him. He had begun to think that his theory about Magna’s cunning plan might be wrong after all, and that she had never sent the secret book to a deceased woman on a distant continent, in the hope that it would be returned when the storm had cleared.

Or maybe he thought that somehow Malle and Almind-Enevold had succeeded in intercepting the package when it returned to Denmark, even though Taasing with his experience and extensive network of sources couldn’t tell how or when that could have happened.

On the telephone he told me that Orla and Severin had received several death threats at their new office—and paradoxically, they came from both ends of the heated debate about refugees and immigrants. Their new partnership had opened them up to accusations of ideological treachery by their own. A threatening letter had arrived in which Orla’s round face had been glued onto the body of the executed Che Guevara lying on a cot in a Bolivian cabin. The juxtaposition was a bit confusing, but much to Knud’s amusement, the police had provided Orla with a bodyguard from the secret service. The former chief of staff once again resided with his wife, Lucilla, in Gentofte, while Severin lived in Søborg—in Hasse’s old room.

For a long time, nobody had seen Nils Jensen, not even Taasing.
He’d
gone on a work trip to “another continent” as his father put it, without offering further details.

Taasing, for his part, had no doubts. “He went to Australia,” he said. “He’s trying to find a trace of his mother—of Eva Bjergstrand. He wants to find a nicer story than the one Almind-Enevold offered him.”

I could tell it rankled Taasing that
he’d
been unable to topple a prime minister—deep down, that’s what all reporters wish to do—when
he’d
had such a unique opportunity. And no doubt this regret grew as the days passed. I knew that the possible retrieval of the Protocol had been his backup plan when he let the Almighty One off the hook the first time around. The contents of those notes were not necessarily covered by the promise
he’d
made so honorably to his old enemy—and to Nils Jensen. Over the past months, no media outlets had offered the former top journalist a job. An exposé of the scandal at Kongslund, supported by the notes in the Protocol, was presumably his last chance at redemption.

He asked how Asger was doing, and I chose to lie so as not to reveal the grief I’d felt when I talked to him for the last time. After all,
he’d
been my secret love for most of my childhood and youth.

But I’ll admit that he visits Susanne once a week, from Saturday to Sunday, and that from time to time, he visits me in the King’s Room.

He comes not as a suitor but as a consoler—always during the daytime—and he always leaves before darkness falls.

I still feel the caution that arose during the first days after my lies were revealed—both my lies about the letter’s real date and about my meeting with Dorah Laursen at Helgenæs. Asger never believed a word of what I said—I sensed that very clearly—but I also knew that he would never reveal his suspicion to the others. But I think it was this unpleasant knowledge about my deceit that finally drove him out of my room, despite our shared fascination for God and Fate and the stars.

From the beginning, he must have thought that all these shared interests had arisen in happy parallel tracks that aligned almost miraculously, and that
he’d
found a soul mate of rare caliber. But my deceits suggested another possibility. They suggested a pattern that would make any scientific observer uncomfortable, because it was
too
perfect; and the way I see it, he chose beauty and safety instead of the asymmetrical and the uncertain—the queen of Kongslund instead of the girl in the tower—and what man wouldn’t have?

When he visits me, we don’t talk about Susanne Ingemann—or about what happened between them as children. Nor has he said a single word about our meeting at the Coastal Sanatorium when I played the blind girl, and I sense that he thinks of that as another deceit. My first. He no longer sits in my wheelchair or uses my telescope, and he takes care not to look out the window where his gaze might be sucked in by the light over the sound and Hven.