Gudbrand reacted instinctively to Edvard’s
scream and curled into a ball, but as he lay there he
caught sight of the pin which was spinning round
and round a metre away from him. A lump of metal
was attached to one end. He felt his body freezing
into the ice as he realised what was about to
happen.
‘Move away!’ Edvard screamed behind him.
It was true, the Russian pilots really were
throwing hand-grenades from aeroplanes.
Gudbrand was on his back and tried to move away,
but his arms and legs slipped on the wet ice.
‘Gudbrand!’
The peculiar sound had been the hand-grenade
bouncing across the ice into the bottom of the
trench. It must have hit Dale right on the helmet!
‘Gudbrand!’
The grenade spun round and round, bounced and
danced again, and Gudbrand couldn’t take his eyes
off it. Four seconds from defusing to detonation,
wasn’t that what they had learned at Sennheim?
The Russians’ grenades might be different. Perhaps
it was six? Or eight? Round and round the grenade
whirled, like one of the big red spinning-tops his
father had made him in Brooklyn. Gudbrand would
spin it, and Sonny and his little brother stood
watching and counting how long it kept going.
‘Twenty-one, twenty-two . . .’ Mummy called from
the window on the second floor to say dinner was
ready. He was to go in; Daddy would be coming
home any minute. ‘Just a minute,’ he shouted up to
her, ‘the top’s spinning!’ But she didn’t hear; she
had already closed the window. Edvard wasn’t
shrieking any more, and all of a sudden it was
quiet.
22
Doctor Buer’s Surgery. 22 December
1999.
THE OLD MAN LOOKED AT HIS WATCH. HE HAD BEEN
SITTING in the waiting room for a quarter of an hour
now. He’d never had to wait in Konrad Buer’s
day. Konrad hadn’t taken on more patients than he
could manage in his schedule.
A man was sitting at the other end of the room.
Dark-skinned, African. He was flicking through a
weekly magazine, and the old man established that
even at this distance he could read every letter on
the front page. Something about the royal family.
Was that what this African was sitting reading? An
article about the Norwegian royal family? The idea
was absurd.
The African turned the page. He had the type of
moustache that went down at the ends, just like the
courier the old man had met the previous night. It
had been a brief meeting. The courier had arrived
at the container port in a Volvo, probably a rented
car. He had pulled up, the window had gone down
with a hum and he had said the password: Voice of
an Angel. He had had exactly the same kind of
moustache. And sorrowful eyes. He had
immediately said he didn’t have the gun with him
in the car for security reasons, but that they would
drive to a place to get it. The old man had
hesitated. Then he thought that if they had wanted
to rob him, they would have done so at the
container port. So he had got in and they had
driven to the Radisson SAS hotel, of all places, in
Holbergs plass. He had seen Betty Andresen
behind the counter as they went through reception,
but she had not looked in their direction.
The courier had counted the money in the suitcase
while mumbling numbers in German. Then the old
man had asked him. The courier had said that his
parents came from some place in Elsass, to which
the old man said, on a whim, that he had been
there, to Sennheim. An impulse.
After he had read so much about the Märklin rifle
on the Internet at the University Library, the
weapon itself had been something of an anticlimax.
It looked like a standard hunting rifle, only a little
bigger. The courier had shown him how to
assemble it and strip it; he called him ‘Herr
Uriah’. Then the old man put the dismantled rifle
into a large shoulder-bag and took the lift down to
reception. For a brief moment he had considered
going over to Betty Andresen and asking her to
order a taxi for him. Another impulse.
‘Hello!’
The old man looked up. ‘I think we’ll have to
give you a hearing test as well.’
Dr Buer stood in the doorway and made an
attempt at a jovial smile. He led him into the
surgery. The bags under the doctor’s eyes had
become even bigger.
‘I called your name three times.’
I forget my name, the old man reflected. I forget all my names.
The old man deduced from the doctor’s helping
hand that he had bad news.
‘Well, I’ve got the results of the samples we
took,’ he said, quickly, before he had settled into
his chair. To get the bad news over and done with
as fast as possible. ‘And I’m afraid it has spread.’