The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [47]
"Aye," said Melander softly. "I just didn't recognize Laban as a Russian name."
"Tell us a thing, Braaf, You've earned with your pockets, as they say. What's the grandest thing you ever stole?"
Braaf blinked in Wennberg's direction. "Your nose, from up your ass where you usually keep it."
"Just trying to be civil, you Stockholm whelp. Something to pass the time from squatting on this goddamned sand, I thought."
"The pair of you," Melander conciliated. "Don't make a feather into five hens."
Braaf eyed up into the line of timber, the treetops nodding this way and that in the wind. "Could tell you, though, if I wanted. If I was asked right."
The request for etiquette sank through to Wennberg. "Oh, God's green socks, all right, Braaf, all right. Would you be so kind as to tell us whatever the hell it is you have in mind?"
"A time, I was working slow—"
"Working? I thought this is going to be true."
"Near enough the truth for common purposes, as we say on ship," Melander suggested. "Let Braaf get on with it, aye?"
"Your little finger's between your legs, Wennberg. Working slow is a way we go about it in the streets. Walk as if counting the cobblestones, that's what it means. Do that, and you see what's around. See who's forgot a window, or whose purse is sleeping fat in his coat. So I spied the thimble then. A shopman was sweeping—"
"Thimble? You went round Stockholm stealing thimbles? Christ and the devil, Braaf, some tales I've heard in my time but—"
"The thimble's the chance, ironhead. Means you see a chance for yourself. Haven't you heard anything in this world but a hammer?"
Wennberg muttered this or that. Braaf resumed.
"The shopman was sweeping the steps. Had one of those birch brooms—widow's musket they're called, isn't that so, Wennberg? So he had his back away from me, and the door just open, like so. i slipped in, knew I had to be fast. A shopkeeper likes to be clever. Else he wouldn't be a shopkeeper. Sometimes he'll stash money right there, in some crock like any other. Biscuits here and salt herring there and just maybe riksdaler somewhere around. This time, there're crocks on parade. All along there. So I picked one, lifted the lid. And there they were, riksdaler and more of them. My pockets had mumps when I went out of the place. I slid behind the shopman, he's at the other end of the steps by now, ask him please sir, is the store open? Never to the likes of me, he says. Buns me off. Tells himself, clever man like him he'll not let in some street stray."
"The money, Braaf," prompted Wennberg. "What'd you do with it all?"
Braaf reflected. "It lasted just about as long as it's taken to tell of it."
Their third morning storm-held on the Kaigani shore, a gunshot clapped sleep out of the men under the sailcloth shelter. Then another, even as Melander flung up and out of the tent like an aroused stork and Wennberg and Braaf were untangling from their blankets.
Melander immediately was back to say that Karlsson was absent, along with his hunting rifle and Bilibin's gun. "Bear milking, he must be."
The pairs of shots continued as the three men got breakfast into themselves. Then after a time of no firing, Karlsson appeared with a bag of ducks, a dozen or more as lie emptied the sack.
"Weathered in, like us," was bis report. "There at the river mouth."
"A lazy wind, we call this on Gotland." Now the next morning after the duck plucking. "It goes through you instead of around you."
"Melander, serve you a plate of fly shit and you'd declare it pepper," muttered Wennberg.
"And you'd lend me your soul as salt, aye, Mister Blacksmith? lint we have deciding to do. We've