Jorgen pointed at the Japanese panels again and walked around them, disappeared on the other side. Apollo looked at the knife, then at the rendering of those three people—Nils, Petra, and Anna Sofie. The heaters clattered and snapped, the heat so strong by now it felt as if they were trying to chase him away.
Then, on the other side of the panels, Jorgen raised a hand and waved to Apollo, a big goofy gesture like when you’re meeting a relative at the airport and you want them to see you at Arrivals. Apollo walked around the Japanese panels and joined Jorgen.
The old Viking stood before the long wall where well over one hundred framed photos hung. This side of the den felt significantly cooler. No heaters on the ground. Jorgen tapped at a picture frame when Apollo joined him. Hardly more than an outline, really. A child. Its eyes were closed and its mouth tight, as if it was whistling, wisps of hair splayed out over both ears.
“Agnes,” he said. “My father drew this likeness much later, from memory.”
Jorgen took his hand away from the sketch, then brushed at the edges of the frame.
That baby had been abandoned in the woods—in a cave—by her own father? It was too much to contemplate. Apollo looked away from the sketch to the walls, the mystery of the windowless den. Now he could see there had been windows once but the walls had been altered. The windows hadn’t been covered. They’d been removed. This wall had been reframed, but the job still showed. The places where the new framing had been set stood out slightly from the rest of the wall so there was a faint up-and-down effect, like the difference between the black keys and white keys on a piano. This variation in the wall made the framed photos seem to undulate, some pitching forward and others rolling back, an effect like watching waves. From here he had an easier time identifying the subjects. Children. All of them were portraits of kids. A sea of small faces.
“Why did Nils bring the monster over?”
“He had to leave Norway, and he needed to bring his wife with him. He loved her, I expect, and didn’t want to start his new life without her. But when he saw the ship those na?ve Quakers planned to sail, he immediately held doubts. The sloop was too small. He had to think of his family. So he brought insurance. But it came at a price. The Sloopers made it to New York and scurried away upstate. But Nils and Anna Sofie and Petra Mikkelsdatter stayed here in Queens. There was no park here, it was farmland. Thousands of acres of forest and greens. In our homeland these things are creatures of the natural world. Forests and mountains are where they make their lairs. Queens was a perfect place for it to settle. By 1898 the land for the park, as you see it now, was bought, and they began to design it. Golf courses, hiking paths, on and on. But it’s hilly country, still lots of pockets. Lots of caves. Lots of places for something large to hide. Jotunn. Trolde. That’s how we say it in Norwegian.”
Apollo’s eyes met Jorgen’s now.
“Nils would be its caretaker. That was part of the deal he struck in Norway. Making sure it was appeased. It demanded only one thing. A child. That had been the bargain. So one night, when he couldn’t put it off any longer, Nils Knudsen took his daughter Agnes out into the woods, and to the cave of the beast he delivered her.”
THE PICTURE FRAMES ran left to right like a time line, one that began at the upper left end of this long wall and ran to the right. When the limit of the wall was reached, it started again, one row lower. Sketches and charcoal renderings, then the almost shocking leap into clarity that was the daguerreotype, then black-and-white photos led to the early, grainy color stock. All of them infants. None older than a year. The magnitude of this collected horror made Apollo feel as if the skin had been peeled back from his face.
“All these kids,” Apollo finally said. “You fed them to it?”
“No,” Jorgen said firmly. “That’s not accurate. It tries to raise them. You see? It tries to be a good—”
“Father,” Apollo said, but the word sounded spoiled in his mouth.
Jorgen raised his arms and shrugged faintly. “It tries, but it fails. When it fails, it feeds. Then we must try again. That was our pact.”
“Our,” Apollo repeated.
“The men of the Knudsen line,” Jorgen said.
“What about its own babies? Couldn’t it raise those?”
“Those things?” Jorgen cleared his throat as if he was about to spit. “They’re too ugly to love.”
Apollo might just have fallen backward, paralyzed by this tableau, this horror history. What was this? An education of a kind. Jorgen Knudsen had taken Apollo Kagwa to school.
“Nils learned it was difficult to ask a mother to hand over her own child, you see. Anna Sofie cracked. She disappeared into the woods to look for her daughter and never came out.”
“Then maybe she found Agnes,” Apollo said. “Found Agnes and ran like hell because her husband couldn’t be trusted.”
Jorgen gave Apollo a thin smile. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
Apollo nearly sank at the words.
“Nils married Petra quickly and had seven children with her. But he never took them into the woods. He’d learned his lesson. And I like to believe it was too hard for him to make such a sacrifice again. He wasn’t evil, no matter what you might think. All seven of his children told stories of his kindness.”
Apollo switched the utility knife from his left hand to his right as he moved toward Jorgen. His hands wanted to use the blade again. But he stopped and looked at the pictures of those victims once more. These other boys and girls—black and brown, yellow, white, and red—a roster as varied as the general assembly of the United Nations.
“If he didn’t sacrifice his own kids,” Apollo said, “whose children did he use?”
“Queens has many immigrants,” Jorgen said. “Immigrants have many children. It was a different time. You can’t judge him by the standards of today. Men like him, men with the temperament to make tough choices and see them through, made this country thrive.”
“You really believe that?” Apollo asked.
“No one wants to learn their history,” Jorgen said firmly. “Not all of it. We want our parents to provide but don’t want to know what they had to sacrifice to do it. No nation was ever built with kindness.”
From the other side of the Japanese panels, the three heaters squawked and rattled. It sounded like tinny laughter just then.
“How do you find them?” Apollo asked. “How do you choose?”
Jorgen ran a hand over his nose and down to his chin.
“When I was in service, I could be searching for hours. Days. In the eighties I drove everywhere in my white van. It was really too much. But eventually I would find a candidate. A boy or girl without protection. A baby that no one is watching. The castoffs. They have a look to them. I learned to recognize it instantly.”
He shook his head at Apollo as if Apollo might offer sympathy.
“But now you hardly have to leave the house,” Jorgen said. “All a man needs these days is an Internet connection.”