The Seventh Child (6 page)

“Yes, your secretary told me. But I have to tell you, if you don’t give me any details about this house—at the very least an address—then I’ll be forced to publish the photo and the letter, as well as a transcript of our conversation. And if we don’t post a reward for information on the matter, we certainly will ask the public to help us play detective. We
will
get to the bottom of this.”

Orla Berntsen wasn’t sure a reporter in Taasing’s reduced position could really follow through on this threat. Air whooshed behind him, and he felt, more than heard, his mother whisper from the Other Side:
What harm could it do, Orla? Let the truth come out.

“The house is at Skodsborg Strandvej. It’s an orphanage. And now I’ve got to run.” He hung up.

He stood and walked to the window. The snake continued to spray water on the rainbow it had created. He sneezed.

Goddamnit.

Closing his eyes, he sank into the mustard-yellow couch where he sometimes catnapped, never more than five or six minutes and always with his legs dangling over the edge.

Half-asleep on this couch
he’d
been able to probe the contours of the biggest problems in his career, lay out new paths, and find ways to escape the sticky situations he sometimes landed in. Here
he’d
earned his reputation as a problem solver, the very quality that had made him a sought-after advisor whenever the administration faced a crisis. At the end of the day, he always found a way. He was a ruthless strategist and a hardened adversary.

During the first fifteen years of his life,
he’d
weathered the bullying of the other boys, whose impenetrable circle
he’d
orbited like a tireless insect, persisting solely through his alertness and an uncanny ability to rebuff humiliations. Grinning like an idiot, his square, freckled nose sniffling as if in spite, his light-blue eyes anticipating where the fists would land. That well-honed façade and a flair for lightning quick evasion had remained in the man, long after his expression ceased to reveal his thoughts and the goofy grin of childhood had disappeared.

If any of the boys from the street saw him today, they would only recognize the watchful eyes, the frequent sniffle, and the subtle shift of his eyes behind his glasses.

For once, Orla Berntsen didn’t know what to do. He stood. The letter rested on his desk. Had the minister seen it? He didn’t think so, because the Fly surely would have mentioned it to him. Triumphantly.

He sank into the chair once again. His large glasses were slightly steamed, his half-closed eyelids thick and taut, his lashes short and blond. Should he inform his boss? There was good reason to. Still he hesitated.

There is no goal that can’t be achieved
, the minister had told him long ago.
Except by those who hesitate
. (The words had offended Severin, a friend from his youth, but of course Severin hadn’t amounted to much.)

Orla had loved the aphorisms Ole Almind-Enevold had impressed upon him during their first meetings following his appointment; they were all about making the right call in any situation—about the determination each extolled, about the will to find the most efficient solution for any given situation.

He who wants to rule the world must react when it changes.

Orla Berntsen had smiled at the obviousness of that one.

He who prioritizes compassion before resolve loses his ability to make decisions
.

The minister had never lost his resolve.

He who acts with leniency rather than consequence will be left behind.

This was perhaps the most advanced insight—the very secret: the ability to unleash one’s anger without remorse.

He who dares not kill when called upon to do so will perish
, Orla Berntsen’s boss had said about his efforts during the Resistance—and the entire nation had applauded.

The chief of staff put down his mug. The knitted white socks lay on the desk before him. For a moment he sat in silence, and then he dialed a number on his private line. After a moment, a woman answered in a soft voice: “Attorneys’ office.”

“I’d like to speak to Søren Severin Nielsen,” he said.

It had been more than ten years since they’d last spoken. The rift had been caused by Orla’s refusal to extend humanitarian asylum to a Syrian refugee; the media had blown it out of proportion. As the legal representative of the female defendant, Severin had been furious, but Orla had upheld his decision despite their former friendship. A few days later the woman was taken to Kastrup Airport, and no one had heard from her since.

Now his old friend was defending the eleven-year-old Tamil boy who was facing deportation—and, of course, that was a problem, but that wasn’t the reason for his call.

“Søren Nielsen is at court,” the woman replied.

He left his private number with the secretary and a short, clear message: “Severin, call me. It’s urgent.”

A few miles away, the reporter made a ninety-degree turn in his battered swivel chair and tossed his cell phone on the desk.

“Skodsborg,” he said triumphantly. “There’s only one orphanage in Skodsborg, and that’s a very singular one—
Kongslund
—the pride of the entire nation!”

The excitement in Knud Taasing’s voice was unmistakable. He pulled his laptop closer. “For many years the administration has given preferential treatment to Kongslund—with special appropriations—and who do you think has been its protector and benefactor since the war?”

He didn’t have to say the name, and his companion didn’t have to respond. Nils Jensen was a taciturn man.

“And who do you think took part in the Resistance alongside the young Kongslund governesses who were working in total secrecy with the most famous saboteur group in the nation?” Knud Taasing turned on his computer and said the name out loud. “Ole Almind-Enevold, minister of national affairs and soon-to-be prime minister—if death does its duty, that is, and puts our leader out of his misery soon.”

Still the photographer didn’t reply.

The reporter typed nine letters into the search engine. The stuffing in his rickety chair’s cushion flaked off as he shifted his weight, leaving small particles of orange foam on his pant leg. “Kongslund,” he said again, almost absentmindedly, to the thin figure in the office’s only other chair. “The Infant Orphanage Kongslund. There must be a reason we’ve received these letters.”

“Or maybe there isn’t,” the photographer finally replied, breaking his silence.

Knud Taasing looked mildly at the man who in some sense had become his friend—the only one who remained after eight long years in the humiliating twilight of his journalistic career.

Nils Jensen put four batteries into a flash nearly as big as the camera in his lap. “An
infant
orphanage
?” he said, making the innocent words sound strangely suspicious.

“Yes. And not just any orphanage
…
Kongslund.” The reporter waved the blue envelope so vigorously an onlooker might expect the colored letters in the address to come loose and scatter to the floor. “The story is pretty clear as far as I can see. In 1961, a boy by the name of John Bjergstrand was given up for adoption by unknown parents. This boy was one of those who for God’s sake—or rather, for the sake of a particular family—had to be fast-tracked
…
his whole existence erased. Presumably because his parents were either very famous or very powerful, or perhaps both.”

“Sounds like nonsense to me,” Nils Jensen said, spinning the flash in his hands disapprovingly.

Knud Taasing didn’t respond. As
he’d
often noted, it was one of the last remaining privileges of the working class: the right to be contrarian. And Nils had been born to the bottom rung of society. Though, for some inscrutable reason, his parents had given him a camera as a confirmation gift. A fact that was particularly odd to Knud, since the father, a night watchman, was practically never awake during daylight hours. In the late 1970s, Nils Jensen had photographed the massive demonstrations against the Black Square tenement demolition, and
he’d
sold the pictures to the city’s grassroots newspapers.
He’d
made a name for himself with a close-up of a plainclothes officer beating a demonstrator in a back alley on Blaagaardsgade. The photo was distributed across the country. Three days later, the police officer hanged himself with a short rope attached to a hook
he’d
drilled into the ceiling of his living room. His wife and colleagues had lowered his dead body themselves. The young photographer never blamed himself, not for a second. As
he’d
told others in the media quite openly,
he’d
merely done his duty in the service of documentation.

That statement, and that photograph, had made him a public figure. When, in the late 1990s, the small opposition paper merged with the last remaining organ of the government and became
Independent Weekend
, Knud Taasing had persuaded his editor to hire Nils Jensen as a freelance photographer. They had worked together ever since. Mostly in silence, because the photographer was a man of few if any words.

“There are no John Bjergstrands listed in Krak’s Directory or in the white pages,” the reporter said.

Taasing typed another twelve letters into the computer database. A few seconds passed before the electronic archive supplied him with the titles of twenty-four articles. “Only four profiles. That’s not much,” he said.

As expected, the profiles contained no personal information—except that the chief of staff had once lived in Gentofte but had moved from that address, and that he had two daughters—one twenty-three, the other seven.

“They’d had quite a surprise baby. And now they’re getting divorced. The wife’s alone in the house. But where the hell does he live?”

Nils Jensen was predictably silent.

Taasing found no information about Berntsen’s current residence. There were unsubstantiated rumors swirling about his childhood. An anonymous source claimed the chief of staff had been raised by a single mother who, according to another (or possibly the same) anonymous source, had locked him up and beaten him with a coat hanger (this always seemed to be the preferred instrument of punishment in those days, when the indulgence bred by a wave of prosperity collided with the petty bourgeoisie’s penchant for old-fashioned discipline). According to these rumors, his upbringing had tortured his mind and soul and made him the person he was: a snarling dog. A national gatekeeper no one passed by in one piece.

Very few people knew the man behind the façade.

According to a tabloid article,
he’d
earned several pejorative nicknames among the ministry’s case officers—the most noteworthy being the Sociopath.

This was what officials called him on those rare occasions when they felt they were at a safe distance in the ministry’s narrow hallways. It was a brutal assessment, even for a brutal ministry.
What was the origin of such stories?
Taasing wondered.

Knud Taasing looked quizzically at the photographer, who only shook his head in silence. As usual.

3

KONGSLUND

May 6, 2008

She looked like Cinderella in the fairy tale my adoptive mother read to me when I was a child. She arrived in a dress as green as the beeches on the hill, and none of the governesses ever said a peep about her peculiar background.

“This is my daughter Marie,” my adoptive mother told her in a tone of voice that, more than anything, sounded like a warning to the sensitive concerning my oddness. But the woman in green didn’t notice. She curtsied to me like a little girl—at once polite and spiteful—and now that
she’d
become a part of Kongslund’s identity (and had been for almost twenty years), I couldn’t imagine my life without her.

The business with the anonymous letters would affect her, of course—as it would everyone—but it couldn’t be helped. I heard the clatter of the cups in the sunroom and knew guests had arrived at Kongslund, just as Fate had long ago intended.

What looked like a coincidence had never been a coincidence.

Nils found Knud Taasing wedged between three moving boxes in the corner of his office at the Press Building near the harbor front. He was just waking from what seemed a fitful slumber.

Always a loner, Knud Taasing was born in 1961 to a full-blown hippie, flowing robes and all (before most even knew the hippie age was dawning). His mother had joined the first protest march against nuclear power—from Holbæk to Copenhagen—shortly after giving birth and still somewhat swollen from the difficult labor. Despite the after pains she was suffering, she abandoned her son as easily as a tumbleweed blowing in the wind and had wandered south with a handsome Spaniard (as women did back then). She traveled more than 1,200 miles south through Europe to a large commune in Andalusia, leaving Knud to his factory-worker father who lived in a small row house in a Copenhagen suburb.

Later father and son returned to the island from which the family derived its name, Taasinge, and where relatives had settled more than a century earlier. Knud, Nils had noticed, never spoke of his time there. Not that he asked about it—he didn’t.

Knud had evidently spent the night scanning old articles until
he’d
finally slouched onto an overturned green plastic wastebasket, where he had fallen asleep. When the first and only guest of the day edged his way through the labyrinthine stacks of paper, books, and ring binders to his uncomfortable bed, his eyes were still half-shut.

With some difficulty, Knud got to his feet, mumbling a greeting to the effect of “Is it morning already?” He smelled vaguely of alcohol and oil—strangely enough—as though he, in the middle of his nighttime reading, had gone for a refreshing dip in the slick black water of the harbor basin. A single weekly magazine rested on the table. Stapled to it was a receipt from the Green Messengers.

Nils Jensen stepped closer. The magazine was a forty-seven-year-old issue of
Billed Bladet
, and had cost just seventy-five øre a copy back then. The cover text was set in the same blocky red letters the magazine employed today, nearly a half a century later. It was dated December 27, 1961.

Nils leaned in. The black-and-white cover showed a boy with big, frightened eyes and tightly closed lips. Across the child’s striped shirt, the graphic designer had chosen a cursive font characteristic of the time for the four simple but strongly appealing words:
Who will adopt me?

“I found a reference to this article on the Association for Adopted Children’s website,” Knud said, one eye half-open. “And voilà, look what I discovered
…
” He lifted the magazine and then let it fall dramatically on the table.

The two photos the anonymous sender had copied and mailed to the Ministry of National Affairs and
Independent Weekend
appeared in the centerfold of the magazine. The beautiful brown villa in the golden circle filled the entire left page. On the right—under the words “The Seven Dwarves”—the magazine had printed the photo that had fascinated Knud for hours the day before.

In the black-and-white reproduction, the seven small babies were assembled on duvets and blankets under a towering Christmas tree. The caption was the same as the one they’d read in the anonymous letter:
The seven dwarves—five boys and two girls—live in the Elephant Room and are all ready to find a good home in the new year!

This was followed by the statement Knud considered so intriguing:
Because the biological parents’ identity can be protected, they choose adoption rather than illegal abortion. It is rumored that famous Danes, whose names and reputations would be damaged beyond repair by prying eyes, have benefitted from the discretion of Mother’s Aid Society. In these cases, it is essential that the identities of the biological parents are kept secret
.

No names were provided for the children in the photograph, nor was any other information given about them. The allusion to Walt Disney’s beloved dwarves was due, of course, to the fact that the children were all wearing elf hats.

Knud was surprisingly alert despite the fact
he’d
spent a long night in an uncomfortable position and hadn’t even had his first cigarette yet. “If you knew how many children were put up for adoption in this country during those
…
thousands and thousands
…
whole battalions of healthy Danish babies given away. And it wasn’t even that long ago,” he scoffed and then snatched the magazine from the table.

Including the centerfold, the article was six pages long. The italicized headline on the first page of the feature was nearly identical to the one on the cover: “
Who Will Adopt Us?”

An explanatory caption accompanied every single photo in the spread. Under the image of a sad, crying child:
Per (in checkered overalls) is a willful little man of 17 months.

Under the image of a chubby, melancholy girl sitting on a polar bear rug:
What do you think of Dorthe in her pretty white blouse?

The next showed a cheerless girl in a floral dress:
Lise looks quite down. She is only 18 months and cross-eyed, but that can be fixed
.

The largest photo showed a dark-haired boy in a white bed. Behind him the wallpaper was decorated with odd little round elephants drawn in a childlike fashion. The graininess of the spread made it hard to decipher the elephants’ curved tusks and tails, and their raised trunks.

Under this photo was the caption:
One elephant marched along
…
but where is it going? When you’re only 9 days old, you don’t know much about the future
.

“This is the original article—the mother article if you will—of the excerpt that was included in the anonymous package,” Knud said, though it was obvious to Nils.

“It’s from the same year as the form,” he continued. “Whoever sent it to us has this magazine—and something he wants to share—and he’s telling us where to start looking. At the Kongslund orphanage. In 1961.”

Again he slumped onto the battered wastebasket.

“That’s the year I was born.” It was the first time Nils had spoken.

“Yeah—me too. In fact, it was one of the biggest baby-boom years in Danish history.”

Knud closed the magazine and tossed it aside. “Next week the orphanage will celebrate the retired matron’s anniversary—the famous Ms. Ladegaard, who back in the day was simply called Magna—and on that occasion, they’ll bring all the old experts on early childhood education to Skodsborg. Plenty of politicians and famous people will be there, as you might expect given all the talk lately about childrearing, stress, and institutionalization.”

The two men headed outside through the empty editorial office and climbed into Nils’s beige Mercedes.

“In 1989, Magna was succeeded by an equally formidable woman,” Knud said. “Susanne Ingemann.”

Nils silently noted the journalist’s strange tone of voice as they drove along the harbor toward Kongens Nytorv.

“While everyone else was celebrating Liberation Day last night, a crisis meeting was held at the Ministry of National Affairs,” Knud said after a long pause. “I know this from my source in the ministry. Do you know why?”

As usual, Nils said nothing—there was no reason to—the reporter would answer his own question as he always did.

“Because of the anonymous letter that Orla Berntsen received. My source wasn’t at the meeting, but they discussed the mysterious letter for at least an hour—and then decided to seek the assistance of an expert
…
a former assistant chief of police in Copenhagen.”

Nils sped up through the soft curve near Sølyst and Emiliekilde. It was a gray but mild spring day. The morning’s first sailboats were already making their way across Øresund, dozens of them.

“He’s one of the minister’s old acquaintances, and he runs his own company, does security consulting, that sort of thing. He’s been hired by the ministry to serve as security advisor. They want him to find whoever sent this package, and they are giving him free rein to do so. You might remember him from that time you snapped pictures on the barricades in Nørrebro. His name is Carl Malle. He’s become a big dog since leaving the force, someone you
only
hire when the shit’s burning so close to you that your ass is on fire.”

Nils made no comment on this peculiar analogy.

“And it’s a very fitting name, Malle,” said Knud, who still smelled like oil. “He’s malevolent as all hell. But of course, it’s terrible timing for them. In a week everyone who knows what’s what will be at Kongslund to honor the famous matron. In addition, the minister of national affairs, who has been the spiritual and material protector of the orphanage, is about to make the biggest leap in his career—to the nation’s highest office. Ever since the Great War, the party has supported and financed Kongslund, deemed it the shining example of the Danes’ compassionate attitude toward the weakest members of society, and party bosses will resist any attempt to shatter this piece of Danish history. Naturally, they can’t stand an article surfacing all these years later that suggests that Kongslund’s past—and therefore also its present—is in any way unseemly; that the orphanage, in return for the party’s support, helped powerful citizens avoid scandals and erased the identities of its little charges so completely that they could never be reconstructed.”

The blue envelope that was the root of Knud’s confidence rested in his lap; it represented, possibly,
Independent Weekend
’s final chance to secure a prize-winning story. At a crisis meeting held just a month earlier, the marketing team had informed the last band of reporters that only 7 percent of the country was even aware of their newspaper’s existence, and that only a sensational scoop could save the paper from the disease that was slowly but surely killing it.

Nils cast a sidelong glance at the neatly cut red, white, and black letters on the envelope, before turning his gaze toward Sweden. The water in Øresund was steel gray, and he briefly recalled his father, who during school holidays had brought him along on his rounds as a night watchman in Nørrebro—perhaps in the hope that he would end up in the same occupation.

They passed Bellevue, with its white sand and small tufts of grass, Copenhageners’ preferred beach for more than 150 years. “The name itself
…
John Bjergstrand,” Knud said, breaking the silence. “That, of course, is the key piece of information. A boy born in all discretion and adopted out in secrecy—with a new name that we don’t know. A bastard child who could completely destroy an otherwise glorious career. And that’s exactly what happened, I think
…
a very powerful person had an extramarital affair, but he pulled some strings and covered up every trace of his exploits.”

With satisfaction he leaned back in his seat. “Except for one. Which our letter sender found,” he said, before adding, “Our anonymous sender doesn’t know the parents’ identities. But he thinks we’ll be able to find out who they are and believes
Independent Weekend
has the guts to go public with the story.”

Nils remained silent as they passed Strandmølle Inn and the Jægersborg forest.

“We know it made Berntsen nervous, and we know he’s aware of the orphanage. And we know that a silly little piece of paper startled the entire Ministry of National Affairs to the point where it held crisis meetings rather than attending the administration’s Liberation Day celebration.”

The one meeting, Nils noted, had now grown to many.

“I think the party is involved in some way or another, and the letter writer knows it. In the fifties and sixties tens of thousands of illegitimate children were given up for adoption. That figure didn’t drop until abortion was legalized in 1973.” He clucked his tongue at the unfortunate if necessary national triumph.

“Yesterday I spoke with a retired social worker from Mother’s Aid Society. She visited Kongslund frequently back in the day. She told me that the children were often given nicknames of famous people whom the nurses thought they resembled, such as the actor Ebbe Rode or the writer Poul Henningsen
…
at one point there was actually a black-haired girl they called
Jackie
…
after Jacqueline Kennedy!” Knud chuckled briefly, as though the name of the former president’s widow was a particularly interesting detail. “There was also a bald baby called Khrushchev. Anyway, the naming was quite innocent, though once in a while it was rumored that this practice was more significant than simple likeness. And those rumors persisted during all the years she visited Kongslund.”