Once down in the cellar he let the flashlight play across the furniture and everything else that stood in an unorganized mess. He realized that it was the combined excess of generations that was down there. Much of it was probably old and useless while some was certainly antique and valuable. He withstood the impulse to start poking around-he had loved to stroll around at the market on Windhoek Platz to search for pearls in a sea of junk and scrap-and instead went immediately to the passage with all the boxes to check whether the keys were there.
He grinned as he picked up the key ring. Then he suddenly became thoughtful. The first time he broke into the cellar could be explained by curiosity, but now he was taking a step over a boundary that could not be explained away as an innocent visit.
“Well, what of it?” he mumbled, in an attempt to reinforce the feeling that he was morally superior to the owner of the house, that a break-in was a trifle in relation to the crimes that had been committed here earlier.
He sat down on an old armchair, turned off the flashlight, and prepared to wait. He had decided to make his way up into the house right after midnight.
It was pitch-black but that did not worry him. While others were afraid of the dark and saw various imagined dangers in the deep shadows, the deep night also constituted a shield for him.
Miss Elly had sometimes called him “the cat” for his capacity to smoothly move in darkness. He understood that it was a compliment. In reality it was one of the reasons that she loved him, that apparently he melted in unimpeded with the African reality.
With his thoughts in Africa he fell asleep and woke up with a start, for a moment unaware of where he was. He turned on the flashlight, looked at his watch, and discovered that he had slept for almost two hours.
The house was silent. The stairs creaked slightly. The tension increased with every step. It struck him that perhaps the door was locked but he exhaled when it opened without difficulty. He turned off the flashlight and peeked out. He had come up into the house under a stairway.
In the pale light from the street the details gradually emerged in what he understood was the hall. As long as he stayed on the ground floor he certainly did not need to be worried. He assumed that the bedrooms were one flight up. With cautious steps he opened the first door, one of four in the hall. A long passage stretched out ahead of him. He realized now that the house was considerably larger than he thought. He did not dare turn on the flashlight for fear that the light could be seen from outside.
After ten minutes he found the Hauptmann safe squeezed into a corner behind the last door in the corridor. In the middle of the room was a billiard table. There was a twinge of excitement when he saw that the safe was the same model as his uncle’s. Karsten remembered the numbers 51 so well, embossed in the middle of the trademark that decorated the sturdy door of the safe.
He took out the keys. He remembered the order, first the middle one, then the small key down to the left and finally the big one in the centrally located lock. It creaked as he turned the last key. Uncle Helmuth never would have tolerated such a racket, he thought.
After very slowly opening the door, careful not to create the slightest commotion, he turned on the flashlight and shone it into the safe. On the top shelf, where Helmuth stored the pictures of young black boys, a half dozen folders were stacked. As he reached out his hand to take out the top one a sound was suddenly heard from the top floor. He froze and instinctively turned off the flashlight.
The sound of steps was transmitted and Karsten Heller got the feeling that the ceiling was vibrating. He peeked upward. The sound decreased. He waited on tenterhooks. Was someone on their way down? Half a minute passed. A minute. He carefully wiped the sweat from his forehead. The odor of the rubber glove nauseated him. He suddenly regretted his outing.
Then came the reassuring explanation: a toilet flushed and there was a roar for several seconds in a pipe invisible to Karsten. He had to suppress a laugh of relief and turned on the flashlight again. He realized that either the professor or the housekeeper had relieved their bladder and now were on their way back to bed.
Close, he thought, but still not. He put the flashlight in his mouth to have both hands free and lifted down all the folders. He put them on the billiard table, retrieved a chair, and sat down.
The topmost folder was of no interest. He quickly browsed through the papers, a number of them yellow with age, and found that they all dealt with an association he had never heard of, the Gregorious Brothers. Probably a fraternal order.
The following folders were equally uninteresting. There were various documents from University Hospital, deeds of conveyance, contracts and so on.
He started to despair of finding anything exciting when from the sixth and final folder he pulled out a will. He quickly browsed through it and as good as immediately saw his mother’s maiden name. “Anna Andersson” it said, clear and obvious. He was forced to set the will aside a moment.
He took the flashlight out of his mouth, looked around and discovered a flower pot with a sadly neglected hibiscus, got up and spit out the saliva that had collected in his mouth.
What was he to believe? Perhaps it was another Anna Andersson? It was not exactly an uncommon name. There was only one way to find out, to read on, regardless of where it might lead.
He found the section again and read: “To Miss Anna Andersson, who was in service in the house for a few years in the nineteen forties, I bequest 100,000 (one hundred thousand) kronor.”
It was immediately clear to him that he would inherit from Professor von Ohler.
His surprise was no less when he read the continuation: “To Miss Greta Andersson I bequeath 200,000 (two hundred thousand) kronor. To Miss Agnes Andersson, number three in the group of sisters and whose time of service now exceeds fifty years, I bequest 300,000 (three hundred thousand) kronor.”
And right after that the parting shot: “Should I survive one or all of the misses Andersson, then the respective amounts return to the estate.”
Now the inheritance was not as obvious, but what surprised him the most was the word “now.” That meant reasonably that the woman he had seen working in the house was this Agnes Anderson, “number three in the group of sisters.” In other words, she was his aunt!
He checked when the will was drawn up and found that it was only two days old.
For a long time he sat staring into space. He could have expected anything at all, but not this. He had been given a family.
He read the will again, determined that the amounts Ohler bequeathed to the Andersson sisters were an insignificant fraction of what he owned in total in properties, securities, and cash bank deposits. This was shown by the appendices that were attached to the will. A major item among the agricultural properties was a farm outside Eslöv, which the Ohlers had apparently rented out since the early 1900s to the same farm family. Bertram von Ohler was determined that this would also apply in the future.
But there were also other farms mentioned, including half a dozen in eastern Småland and two in the areas around Bålsta.
The shares were distributed among some two dozen Swedish companies. The largest individual entry was in Alfa Laval with 180,000 shares, but the holdings in SKF, Handelsbanken, various pharmaceutical manufacturers, and forestry companies were also significant. The strangest information was a fifty-percent ownership of a car garage in Nybro, Johansson Brothers Welding and Forging.
A numbing enumeration of companies and figures. Page up and page down that testified to a financial power that was hard to imagine. This was no chance lottery winning but instead columns of riches that had accumulated over many years, perhaps centuries, Karsten Heller suspected.