‘NICE THAT WE COULD MEET LIKE THIS,’ BERNT
BRANDHAUG said, raising his wineglass.
They toasted and Aud Hilde smiled at the Under
Secretary for Foreign Affairs.
‘And not only on official business,’ he said,
holding her gaze until she looked down. Brandhaug
studied her. She wasn’t exactly attractive, her
features were a little too coarse for that and she
was certainly plump, but she had a charming, flirty
way about her and she was young plump.
She had rung him from the staff office this
morning saying they needed his advice on an
unusual case, but before she could say any more he
had asked her up to his office. And when she was
there he had immediately decided he didn’t have
the time and they could discuss it over a meal after
work.
‘We civil servants should also have a few perks,’
he had said. She presumed he meant the meal.
So far everything had gone well. The head waiter
had given them Brandhaug’s regular table and, to
the best of his knowledge, there was no one he
knew in the room.
‘Yes, there’s this strange case we had yesterday,’
she said, letting the waiter unfold the napkin over
her lap. ‘We had a visit from an elderly man who
maintained that we owed him money. The Foreign
Office, that is. Almost two million kroner, he said,
referring to a letter he had sent in 1970.’
She rolled her eyes. She shouldn’t wear so much
make-up, Brandhaug thought.
‘So what did we owe him money for?’
‘He said he was a merchant seaman during the
war. It was something to do with Nortraship. They
had withheld his pay.’
‘Oh, yes, I think I know what it was about. What
else did he say?’
‘That he couldn’t wait any longer. That we had
cheated him and all the other merchant seamen.
God would punish us for our sins. I don’t know if
he had been drinking or he was ill, but he looked
under the weather. He brought a letter with him,
signed by the Norwegian Consul General in
Bombay in 1944, who guaranteed, on behalf of the
Norwegian state, the back payment of the war-risk
bonus for four years’ service as an officer in the
Norwegian merchant navy. Had it not been for the
letter, we would have just given him the heave-ho
of course, and we wouldn’t have bothered you
with this trivial matter.’
‘You can come to me any time you wish, Aud
Hilde,’ he said, with a sudden stab of panic: her
name was Aud Hilde, wasn’t it?
‘Poor man,’ Brandhaug said, gesturing to the
waiter to bring more wine. ‘The sad thing about
this case is that he is actually right. Nortraship was
established to administer the boats in the merchant
fleet that the Germans had not already captured. It
was an organisation with partly political and partly
commercial interests. The British, for example,
paid large sums in risk bonuses to Nortraship to
use Norwegian shipping. But the money, instead of
being used to pay the crews, went straight into the
ship-owners’ pockets and the state’s coffers.
We’re talking about several hundred million
kroner here. The merchant seamen tried to get their
money back through legal proceedings, but they
lost their case in the Supreme Court in 1954. The
Storting passed an act in 1972, establishing that
merchant seamen had a right to this money.’
‘This man doesn’t seem to have received
anything. Because he was in the China Sea and was
torpedoed by the Japanese and not by the Germans,
he said.’
‘Did he say what his name was?’
‘Konrad Åsnes. Wait a moment and I’ll show you
the letter. He had worked out how much was owed
with compound interest.’
She bent to look in her bag. Her upper arms
quivered. She should do a bit more exercise,
Brandhaug thought. Four kilos less and Aud Hilde
would simply be well-rounded instead of . . . fat.
‘It’s alright,’ he said. ‘I don’t need to see it.
Nortraship comes under the Ministry of
Commerce.’
She looked up at him.
‘He insisted we were the ones who owed him the
money. He gave us a deadline of two weeks.’
Brandhaug laughed.
‘Did he? And what’s the rush now, after sixty
years?’
‘He didn’t say. He only said that we would have
to take the consequences if we didn’t pay.’
‘My goodness.’ Brandhaug waited until the
waiter had poured out more wine for them before
leaning forward. ‘I hate taking the consequences,
don’t you?’ She flashed him a hesitant smile.
Brandhaug raised his glass.
‘I was wondering what we should do about this
case?’ she said.