Hans Lahlum - The Human Flies

A hard expression slipped over Deerfoot’s face. His story was dramatic and it struck me that it was possibly the first time he had told it to anyone. His eyes were fixed on me – and the gun was still alarmingly pointed at me.

‘Do you remember the young German soldier I mentioned to you, the one who had tried to comfort me when they came to get my father? He was one of the three who had pursued us now – the second one to be shot. He was still alive when I went over to him. He tried to say something to me. “ En …” He started twice without managing to say the word. I have later thought that he was perhaps trying to say “ Entschuldigung ” – that he was trying to apologize to me, who had shot him. It was an awful situation; he was not much more than a boy himself. I put my gun to his head and looked away while I pulled the trigger. He still comes back to haunt me – only last night I was woken by the sight of his face.’

Once again Deerfoot’s eyes became glazed, but they were still looking straight at me, and I was in no doubt that he would shoot me immediately if I so much as took a step towards him. I nodded as calmly as I could in the hope that he would continue the story.

‘The worst shock was still to come, though. After I had fired my final shot, I looked up and saw that Harald Olesen had raised his gun and was aiming at me. He said something vague about me having seen him kill a refugee so I had to die. I expected him to pull the trigger and kill me at any moment. God knows what I said. My guess is that it was probably that he had seen me kill her and that it was our shared secret. And that he would never find his way back on his own and that the baby would freeze to death in the cold without me. I think it was the latter that made him finally lower his gun and hand me the child. In which case it was the baby who saved me, and I then saved her in turn. You apparently know the rest of what happened. He stayed behind to bury the dead in a nearby cave. I skied for my life all the way to Sälen, first to get out of Harald Olesen’s firing range and then to save the baby’s life. It became an obsession: having killed her mother, I at least had to do something to save her life.’

Deerfoot was back in the present and reacted immediately when I carefully raised my hands.

‘Stay still! Both I and the gun have killed before!’

His voice was controlled, but had a dangerous undercurrent of desperation. I nodded as soothingly as I could. It was hard to see how we would get out of this alive. The only hope was to keep the dialogue going. Suddenly, Sara’s soft voice came to my aid.

‘Thank you for saving my life. I forgive you for killing my mother – you were young and you were in a situation in which you feared for your own life. Finally knowing what happened will help to ease the burden of grief. Do you remember where the cave is?’

Deerfoot cast half a glance in her direction. A tear twinkled in her eye as she spoke. But he continued to keep his focus on me – and his finger itching on the trigger.

‘I know exactly where the cave is. But you will only find remnants of the clothes and bones of the five people who were fated to die there together one winter day in 1944. I have never been back, but have never managed to move on from there all the same. I was a wreck in 1946 and 1947, when the papers were writing about the two border guides who killed the Feldmann couple. And in later years I have lived with the memories, every hour and every day – and with the fear of being discovered one day and ending up as a new Feldmann murderer on the front of every newspaper.’

He fell silent. His finger started to tremble on the trigger.

I carried on talking, out of sheer desperation.

‘Why did you not leave the pistol behind when you killed Harald Olesen?’

A painful expression flooded Deerfoot’s face.

‘That was my initial plan: the perfect murder camouflaged as suicide. The problem was that I then began to wonder how easy it would be to trace the army pistol back to my father’s time in the army. If it could be traced back to him, I was finished. I thought about procuring an unregistered weapon, but Harald Olesen was at death’s door and was under considerable pressure from the young Miss Sara here. He wanted to ease his conscience and tell her the truth before he died. So in the end, I did not dare wait any longer. It had to be the perfect murder without a murder weapon at the scene of the crime, instead of the perfect murder with the weapon at the scene of the crime. As for Jensen, buying an unregistered weapon would not have been easy, as I could not go out. The solution was to buy a more recent model from a half-witted childhood friend, who both before and after the murder accepted my explanation that I needed it to feel safe in Oslo. I had to go to Gjøvik to arrange it, hence my trip home last weekend.

‘When you have already killed several people at a young age and then used the rest of your adult life trying to live with the memories and hide the truth, you become a bit of a lone wolf. It is all about survival and protecting yourself from possible dangers. Harald Olesen’s death does not upset me so much now. After all, he did not have long to live. And it was largely his betrayal that made me the monster I am. But in the end, it was my fear of being exposed that made me pull the trigger; I shot him when he told me that he had finally decided to tell Sara the whole story. So in a way, I shot him in self-defence, having tried every other means. But I admit that there was also a latent need to avenge my broken life.’

He stopped and let his finger play with the trigger. His story was finished. I immediately tried to extend it.

‘Then you committed another murder, to avoid the risk of being arrested for the first?’

He nodded brusquely, twice, and then blinked his eyes furiously.

‘That has plagued me far more than the murder of Harald Olesen. No matter how repulsive Konrad Jensen was, and no matter how dismal his future prospects, he should have been able to live out the last years of his life here in peace, with all his bitterness and complexities. But your investigation seemed to be making dangerous progress. A scapegoat was needed, and as a former Nazi, he was clearly the best candidate. I made the plan even before I murdered Harald Olesen, and wrote the suicide note for Konrad Jensen when I was in Gjøvik last weekend. He was terrified of everyone and everything after the murder, but also desperately lonely. And he could not imagine, like other greater men, that a friendly and sophisticated cripple could be a murderer. So while the caretaker’s wife was out doing the shopping, I knocked on his door. He was wary at first, but then opened up when he saw that it was me and all I wanted was a cup of coffee and a chat in these uncertain times. He signed the suicide note with the gun to his forehead, without having any idea of what he was signing, and died without pain only seconds later, without ever knowing. It was a sad end to a tragic life. But Konrad Jensen became the necessary sacrifice for a greater and more important cause – that is, my life, my freedom and my honour.’

He stopped talking; a deathly silence fell in the flat. I made a final attempt to stop him from shooting.

‘I have four armed policemen standing guard on the street outside. You will be caught without much trouble – and your punishment will be worse for every murder you commit.’

He nodded, but did not smile – nor did he show any sign of desperation or weakness.

‘I guessed that that would be the case. So I really am back in that snowdrift in 1944 that I have revisited in my dreams so many times since. I have to try to shoot my way out, against all odds, and I have nothing to lose in trying. There are too many corpses in my wake for me to turn back now. Four policemen in a town does not feel that hopeless when you have survived against three soldiers in the mountains at the age of sixteen.’