‘It was probably you, Harry.’ Her laughter was
husky and heartfelt. ‘Being on the wagon suits you,
by the way.’ She said this under her breath, made a
note of his order and was off.
The other newspapers were full of the
millennium, so Harry tackled Dagsavisen. On page
six his eyes fell on a large photograph of a wooden
road sign with a sun cross painted on. Oslo 2,611
km, it said on one arm, Leningrad 5 km on the other.
The article beneath was credited to Even Juul,
Professor of History. The subheading was concise:
The conditions for fascism seen in the light of
increasing unemployment in Western Europe.
Harry had seen Juul’s name in newspapers
before; he was a kind of éminence grise as far as
the occupation of Norway and the Nasjonal
Samling were concerned. He leafed through the
rest of the paper but didn’t find anything of interest.
Then he flicked back to Juul’s article. It was a
commentary on an earlier report about the strong
position held by neo-Nazism in Sweden. Juul
described how neo-Nazism, which had seen a
dramatic decline in the years of the economic
upturn in the nineties, was now coming back with
renewed vigour. He also wrote that a hallmark of
the new wave was its firm ideological base. While
neo-Nazism in the eighties had mostly been about
fashion and group identification, a uniform code of
dress, shaven heads and archaic slogans such as
‘ Sieg Heil’, the new wave was better organised.
There was a financial support network and it was
not based to the same degree on wealthy leaders
and sponsors. In addition, Juul wrote, the new
movement was not merely a reaction to factors in
the current social situation, such as unemployment
and immigration; it wanted to set up an alternative
to social democracy. The catchword was re-
armament – moral, military and racial. The decline
of Christianity was used as an example of moral
decay, as well as HIV and the increase in drug
abuse. And the image of the enemy was also to
some extent new: champions of the EU who broke
down national and racial boundaries; NATO
people who held out a hand to Russian and Slav
Untermenschen; and the new Asian capital barons
who had taken on the Jews’ role as world bankers.
Maja arrived with the lunch.
‘Dumplings?’ Harry asked, staring down at the
grey lumps on a bed of Chinese cabbage sprinkled
with thousand island dressing.
‘Schrøder style,’ Maja said.‘Leftovers from
yesterday. Happy New Year.’ Harry held up the
newspaper so that he could eat, and he had just
taken the first bite of the cellulose dumpling when
he heard a voice from behind the paper.
‘It’s dreadful, I say.’
Harry peeked beyond the newspaper. The
Mohican was sitting at the neighbouring table,
looking straight at him. Perhaps he had been sitting
there the whole time, but Harry certainly hadn’t
noticed him come in. Presumably they called him
the Mohican because he was the last of his kind.
He had been a seaman during the war, was
torpedoed twice, and all his pals were long since
dead. Maja had told Harry that. His long, unkempt
beard hung into his beer glass and he sat there with
his coat on, as he always did, summer and winter
alike. His face, so gaunt that it showed the contours
of his skull, had a network of veins like crimson
lightning on a background of bleached white. The
red, watery eyes stared at Harry from behind a
layer of limp skin folds.
‘Dreadful!’
Harry had heard enough drunken babblings in his
life not to take any particular notice of what
regulars at Schrøder’s had to say, but this was
different. In all the years he had been going there,
these were the first comprehensible words he had
heard the Mohican speak. Even after the night last
winter, when Harry had found the Mohican
sleeping against a house wall in Dovregata and had
most probably saved the old boy from freezing to
death, the Mohican had not even offered him so
much as a nod on the occasions they met. And now
it seemed that the Mohican had said his piece for
the time being, as his lips were tightly pressed
together and he was concentrating on his glass
again. Harry looked around him before leaning
over to the Mohican’s table.
‘Do you remember me, Konrad Åsnes?’
The old man grunted and stared into space
without answering.
‘I found you asleep in a snowdrift in the street
last year. The temperature was minus eighteen.’
The Mohican rolled his eyes.
‘There were no street lights, so I could easily
have missed you. You could have croaked, Åsnes.’
The Mohican screwed up one red eye and gave
Harry a furious look before raising his glass.