Only Georg had seen something. Something that might prove Manfred wrong. They weren’t all cowards. There was a new mining shaft on the west side of the mountain. They weren’t allowed to go that way, for “security reasons.” The former director had had signs put up, and a chain, but necessity knows no law. Georg had sneaked off and that’s when he’d seen it. A man had been going into the shaft. And Georg had figured it out. Everyone knew the Norwegian resistance had bases here and Swedes were helping them. Now Georg was only going to have a peek. He was certain he’d find a place where they gathered. Perhaps he could help them, too.
He had reached the point where the path turned, leading downward now, headed for the new galley. How dark it was: not a single star. No moon, either. The skin on his back prickled.
But then, there it was: a hole leading straight into the mountain.
“Hello?” he said.
He cleared his throat. “Hello?” he hissed. “You don’t have to be frightened. I won’t let anyone know you’re here.”
He didn’t see the dark shape approaching. He didn’t see the lifted baton. He only felt himself go down on all fours. I really shouldn’t have drunk so much, he thought, before all went black.
April 1943
1.
Laura
Clicking typewriter keys, muttering voices, shrilling phones . . . the barrage of noise in the office was constant. Whenever Laura left work, the echo in her ears made her feel for a while that she had gone deaf. Jacob Wallenberg, Laura’s boss, mentor, and Sweden’s chief negotiator with Germany, walked through the room and they watched him, to see whose desk he would stop at, so they could try to guess the latest twist.
“For you.” Dagmar, at the desk opposite hers, was holding up a receiver.
Laura was already on another phone waiting for a confirmation of travel plans. She took the second phone from Dagmar.
“Yes?”
“Laura Dahlgren?”
“Yes?”
“It’s Andreas Lundius. Andreas Lappo Lundius . . .”
Who?
“Britta’s friend.”
A face now, remembered from university: quiet, Sami. He and Britta were from the same town in Lapland and had known each other since childhood. At university in Uppsala, Laura and the others had told Britta she only needed them. It’d been said jokingly, warmly, but they’d been serious. To be deemed a friend of the Sami would do Britta no favors. But Britta was loyal. Andreas was studying theology with plans to become a priest, she remembered now. But then, weren’t people like him always studying theology? The priests ensuring the few Sami youths they deemed had potential got a university education. Why was he calling her? How had he even got her number?
“Yes?” she repeated.
“Well, um . . .”
She tapped her foot underneath her desk and rolled her eyes at Dagmar. Couldn’t bear slow talkers.
“Britta has disappeared.”
Laura hung up the other phone, turned away from the noise in her office to face the window and bent forward to create a shield against the sounds with her back. “What do you mean ‘disappeared’?” She sounded angry, even to her own ears.
“We were supposed to meet for dinner last night, but she didn’t come.”
Last night? That wasn’t a disappearance. Laura exhaled, sat up straight.
“She probably went somewhere else,” she said, meaning “with someone else.”
“I walked by her dormitory this morning. She didn’t come home.”
“Britta is not the most reliable person,” Laura said. “You know this. She changed her plans.”
“That’s what I would have thought . . .” Andreas’s voice sounded far away, and the rest of his sentence was garbled.
“What?”
“She made me promise that if something happened to her, I would call you.”
LAURA TOOK THE train to Uppsala. Her carriage was empty apart from a mother holding her sleeping baby. Outside her window: a blur of fields, dark empty roads and dull trees. The sky was an insipid gray.
She imagined Britta before her—the laughing eyes, the uneven teeth, the blond hair neatly rolled at the sides and pinned to the crown of her head.
It wouldn’t have surprised Laura one bit: Britta not coming to a dinner because she had met someone on the walk from her dormitory to the restaurant, and, just like that, decided to spend the night with them. It had happened countless times. Her friends had gotten used to it. But Britta never worried. She thought she was invincible. So why on earth had she told Andreas to contact Laura if something happened to her? She’d even made sure to give him her number.
And then there was their meeting in Stockholm a few months ago. Laura was certain Britta had contacted her for a reason that, in the end, she had not revealed. Her heart clenched. I let her down, she thought. She came to talk to me and, seeing me, she decided to keep quiet.
As the train rolled closer, she could see the black twin spires of Uppsala Cathedral. They pierced the sullen sky and made the world twirl around them, as if the spires held the world in its place. Her heart ached. Laura hadn’t been back in Uppsala since she left university three years ago. Too many memories, she thought. Things you shouldn’t be dwelling on.
There had been five of them, inseparable, until the war brought occupations of Denmark and Norway. They’d always ended up in her apartment in the early morning hours, drunk—the only difference to what degree—Laura, Matti and Karl-Henrik in the red velvet armchairs, Erik and Britta on the settee. They’d crack open one more bottle, lounge and gaze up at the painting on the ceiling, the one Matti swore must be a Julius Kronberg: a light blue sky veined with thin white clouds on which perched small golden-haired cherubs; naked women stretched on the rocks beneath, their hands in the air trying to touch the cupids. Futile Desire, Erik had named the artwork. Books were piled everywhere on the floor, balancing on the window sills, throwing candlelight shadows like a landscape of miniature buildings in the dimmed room.
She remembered one night in particular, a strange one, for it had been a premonition of what was to come. They’d opened a bottle of champagne, but Laura had already had too much. It only tasted bitter. She’d laid her head on the backrest and looked at the painting, which seemed alive in the muted light, the golden locks of the cupids waving in an indiscernible breeze, the hands of the women grasping at thin air.
“Now, this is more like it,” Erik said. “For helvede, Britta, that club was lousy. A real dump.”
“So was the chap,” Matti said.
Matti felt like the youngest of them, always joking, teasing. But sometimes—not ill meant—he’d go too far. Laura glanced at Erik, but he was lighting a cigarette, his face blank.
“Oh, what do you know?” Britta said, but she was laughing. She took Erik’s cigarette, inhaled, let the smoke out slowly and handed it back to him. “Yes,” she agreed then. She swirled around, put her head in Erik’s lap and her legs over the armrest.
“Now this,” she said. “This is nice.”
Erik seemed to relax. There was the notion of a smile on his thin lips as his black eyes rested on her, in his lap. The stubble on his cheeks glittered in the faint light. Oh, why wouldn’t they get together? Laura had thought as she always did. They were perfect for each other. Anyone could see. But so far, Britta had been unwilling and hadn’t gone with Erik, like she might have with someone else.