She smiled as she handed him a couple of beers. Then she followed him out of the store and pointed, smiling, at the house where the man lived.
Shortly thereafter he stepped into old Severinsen’s backyard, where he heard someone chopping firewood. Severinsen was a weather-beaten and sinewy old man. He was dressed in worn, dirty green work clothes and his thin white hair fluttered in the wind around a beautifully furrowed face. He laid his ax down when he saw that he had a visitor. A dog of uncertain extraction raised its head and stared at Simonsen before it lay back down to sleep. After having shaken hands, the old man led him to a moldy bench along the side of the house. Simonsen sat down and hoped for the best. The bench held up, and he opened the beers.
“They say you’ve lived here a long time.”
“My whole life.”
“I’ve come from Copenhagen to hear something about the brothers Allan and Frank Ditlevsen. Can you remember them?”
The old man drank some of his beer and Simonsen followed suit. Then the man spit contemptuously. Simonsen copied him. The beer tasted like a disaster.
“You didn’t like them?”
“No, they were pieces of shit. They spent more time at the pub than on honest work and if there was anything they could get away with, they did.” A peculiar expression came into his face. “They are both dead. Someone hung them in the capital city. It’s nothing less than they deserved.”
The information was not completely accurate but Simonsen did not correct him.
“I beat up their dad one time when we were young. He is of course also dead and has been for a long time, but no one around here misses them. They were rotten bastards, all three of them, if you ask me.”
“I have some names that I wonder if they mean anything to you.”
“Let’s hear them.”
He started with the first name on his short list: “Andreas Linke?”
The old man reflected on this. Then he said, “Andreas. Well, I don’t know exactly … I can remember dates and see faces, but I forget names.”
“So you don’t know him?”
“Maybe. Andreas—it could be the son, that is, the grandson, but Linke I know of course. That’s the German. Yes, we never called him anything but the German even though Linke was his name. He lived here for many years, right next to the brothers for that matter.”
Simonsen felt triumph rush through him, the beginning of an intense relief in his body, swelling to a boastful pride and culminating in an inner roar of victory that felt as if it separated everything around him into a before and after. He had found Climber!
What he wanted most of all was to take a little walk around the garden and savor the moment but, of course, that wouldn’t help anything. He continued the conversation.
“They were neighbors?”
“Yes, they were, but the addresses are different. The German lived on the side of the road down by the church, and the road there stretches into a curve so the last two houses toward the forest lie directly behind the brothers, who lived on the main road. A Copenhager lives there now but he’s never there.”
“Do you want to tell me about the German?”
The old man nodded. For a while he just sat and thought himself back in time, then he started to tell.
“The German, well that’s a long story. After the war, in the summer of 1945, he moved in together with his wife. They wanted to get off the main road a bit because the missus had been through a little of everything—had her hair cropped, that kind of thing—and back then there weren’t many who wanted anything to do with that kind of folk. Later they came and took him away. He wasn’t a real German, he was from T?nder, part of a minority population, but he had fought for Hitler so he had to sit on the inside for a couple of years while the wife had a baby and everything. Well, she was hardly a tender mother and there were all manner of things that people said that he had done even though most of it was just idle rumor. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been let out after three years.”
“And the wife had a child?”
“Yes, it was a girl, and then she had another while he was still in prison but that one disappeared. Well, she brought shame on herself, but on the other hand … things weren’t completely easy for her, to manage the everyday and such. And they reconciled when he got out in 1949 and then there were two of them to get things to work. He hired himself out locally as a farmhand. He was strong and as time passed people thought less often of the war so in the end he was an appreciated commodity. But then the girl grew up. She was quite pretty. She went to study in Nyk?bing, that must have been in 1960 or 1961, but it wasn’t long before she moved back home again knocked up, as it were. Well, well—she was a chip off the old block, and then they had to start over, the old couple.”