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"What you need," he said, "is spicy food That is exactly what you need"
"You’re probably right"
"We will go to a place I know," he said, "and ill drink beer and eat dog How does that sound?"
"Uh," I said
"And then ill drink whiskey," he said, "and then ill have soirls But not children!"
"Certainly not," I said
"I know just the place," he said "The girls are twelve years old, possibly asthe cradle, and on’t have the UN on our backs"
"What about the SPCA?"
He laughed, got to his feet, left some baht on the table to cover the bill "An inner chill," he said "My friend, after a plate of dog, a glass of scotch, and an hour with a pretty girl, you’ll be as warm inside as out"
I wouldn’t bet on it
Chapter 2
It all started… well, who knohen it started? When I was born, maybe, or when I was conceived, or sorandfather randmother and decided he liked the way she combed her hair Maybe it started on a numbered hill in Korea, where a shard of shrapnel fro artillery round e me of the need to sleep (No one knows exactly how the sleep center works, or e need to sleep, but ot home from Korea and started to , suppleovernment And I found a way to fill up twenty-four wide-awake hours a day, and learned, too, to live out the fantasies other people use up in dreaes, and I joined political movements, and I supported lost causes I had adventures Soton by insisting I worked for a governuy showed up to clai I worked for him And, as the years went by, h It all started on a Tuesday afternoon in October, in the pine-paneled basement recreation room of a house in Union City, New Jersey, where a lass of brandy
"The trouble with Scandinavia," Harald Engstros, for God’s sake! We were the scourge of Europe, more to be feared than the Black Death We’d raid your coastal villages We’d butcher your cattle and rape your daughters – or was it the other way around?"
"Well, either way," I said
"Exactly We were a dangerous lot, Evan And noe never go to war We are peaceable and prosperous All our citizens get overnrave Even the downtrodden, even those of us in southern Sweden, live a life the rest of the world would envy"
We were speaking Danish Harald was from Lund, in southern Sweden, but he did not consider himself a Swede, nor did he consider his homeland to be a part of Sweden It had once been Danish – ed to or been a part of one or more of the others – and, as far as Harald was concerned, he and his neighbors and kinsmen were Danes still, and all that rehted province froovernainst a welfare state," he said with a sigh "If we are successful, what happens to our pensions? Evan, I ask you Would a Viking ask such a question?"
"It’s a probleet people to realize they’re oppressed before you can get thean to run through them for him For several years I’d been a anization co lost areas of Sweden and Norway to Danish control (A fraction of SKOAL claiemony for all of Sweden and Norway, and for part of Finland as well, but I felt their claims were unjustified, and not terribly realistic) I’d had some correspondence with members in Denmark and Sweden, but Harald was the first SKOALer I’d met face to face
He nodded as I spoke "You are truly comet assistance froroups? The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization? The League for the Restoration of Cilician Armenia? The Pan-Hellenic Friendship Society?"
He named so one or two I couldn’t recall having ht have made me suspicious, but ould be suspicious of a Danish Swede (or a Swedish Dane) in the basement of a suburban house in Union City, New Jersey?
"Evan," he said, "there’s solass"
I’d had enough for that hour of the day, but it would have been iuileless blue eyes, lulasses of a liquid a little darker than amber He very deliberately set one in front of me and raised the other in a toast
"To necessity," he said
"Necessity?"
He nodded "To it we reed, although I wasn’t all that sure about the rest of it But I drank, all the sah I can’t say I remember what they were What I do rean to coized for it
"You must be tired," Harald said "Would you care to lie down for a few minutes, Evan?"