thousand from your newspaper . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘A few of them would do a bit of good, that’s for
sure.’
‘How many?’
‘Well, how many have you got?’
The old man sighed, looked around once more to
ensure there were no witnesses. Then he
unbuttoned his coat and reached inside.
Sverre Olsen crossed Youngstorget with large
strides, swinging a green plastic bag. Twenty
minutes ago he had been sitting flat broke, with
holes in his boots, at Herbert’s and now he was
walking in a shiny new pair of combat boots, high-
laced, twelve eyelets on each side, bought from
Top Secret in Henrik Ibsens gate. Plus he had an
envelope which still contained eight shiny new big
ones. And ten more in the offing. It was strange
how things could change from one minute to the
next. This autumn he had been on his way to three
years in the clink when his lawyer had realised that
the fat lady associate judge had taken her oath in
the wrong place.
Sverre was in such a good mood that he reckoned
he ought to invite Halle, Gregersen and Kvinset
over to his table. Buy them a round. See how they
reacted. Yes, he bloody would!
He crossed Pløens gate in front of a Paki woman
with a pram and smiled at her out of pure devilry.
On his way to the door of Herbert’s he thought to
himself that there wasn’t much point in carrying
around a plastic bag containing discarded boots.
He went through the archway, flicked up the lid of
one of the wheelie bins and threw in the plastic
bag. On his way out again his attention was caught
by two legs sticking out between two of the bins
further to the back. He looked around. No one in
the street. No one in the alley. What was it? A
dipso? A junkie? He went closer. Where the legs
protruded the bins had been shoved together. He
could feel his pulse racing. Junkies became very
upset if you disturbed them. Sverre stepped back
and kicked one of the containers to the side.
‘Ooh, fuck.’
It was odd that Sverre Olsen, who had almost
killed a man himself, should never have seen a
dead person before. And equally odd that it almost
made his legs give way. The man sitting against the
wall with one eye staring in each direction was as
dead as it was possible to be. The cause of death
was obvious. The smiling red wound in the neck
showed where his throat had been cut. Even though
the blood was only trickling now, it had clearly
pumped out at first because the man’s red Icelandic
sweater was soaked and sticky. The stench of
refuse and urine was overwhelming, and Sverre
caught the taste of bile before two beers and a
pizza came up. Afterwards, he stood leaning
against the bins, spitting on to the tarmac. The toes
of his new boots were yellow with vomit, but he
didn’t notice. He only had eyes for the little red
stream glistening in the dark as it sought the lowest
point in the back alley.
21
Leningrad. 17 January 1944.
A RUSSIAN YAK 1 FIGHTER PLANE THUNDERED
OVER Edvard Mosken’s head as he ran along the
trench, bent double.
Generally speaking, the fighter planes didn’t do a
lot of damage. The Russians seemed to have run
out of bombs. The latest thing he had heard was
that they had equipped pilots with hand-grenades,
which they were trying to lob into the trenches as
they flew over.
Edvard had been in the Northern Sector to collect
letters for the men and to catch up on the news. The
whole autumn had been one long series of
depressing reports of losses and retreats all along
the Eastern Front. The Russians had recaptured
Kiev in November, and in October the German
army had narrowly avoided becoming surrounded
north of the Black Sea. The situation was not made
any easier by Hitler redirecting forces to the
Western Front, but the most worrying thing was
what Edvard had heard today. Two days ago
Lieutenant General Gusev had launched a fierce
offensive from Oranienbaum on the southern side
of the Finnish Bay. Edvard remembered
Oranienbaum because it was a small bridgehead
they had passed on the march to Leningrad. They
had let the Russians keep it because it had no
strategic importance. Now the Ivans had managed
to assemble a whole army around the Kronstadt
fort in secret, and according to reports Katusha
cannons were tirelessly bombarding German
positions. The once dense spruce forests had been
reduced to firewood. It was true they had heard the
music from Stalin’s artillery in the distance for
several nights now, but no one had guessed that
things were so bad.
Edvard had taken the opportunity during the trip
to go to the field hospital to visit one of his men
who had lost a foot on a landmine in no man’s
land, but the nurse, a tiny Estonian woman with