Read Online Chasing the Storm by Martin Molsted - Free Book Online Page B

Yuri told him. “To eat and to fuck Turkish woman with big ass.” He had already unwrapped his cutlery and tucked his paper napkin into his collar. He held his spoon in his fist like a child and jabbed at the dishes. “ Aalsuppe . From a long fish, black. Úgor , it call in Russian. It swim like—” He waggled the spoon.
    “Eel. Ål. It’s the same in Norwegian.”
    “Yah, Aal.” He stabbed his spoon into the bowl. “The famous dish of Hamburg. When I am at home I dream of this.”
    “Sounds delicious,” Rygg said. Luckily, Yuri was so absorbed in the aalsuppe that he only had to sample a couple spoonfuls. It actually wasn’t bad, with a dense, meaty flavor. He watched Yuri ladle the stew in under his moustache. He ate so fast and so intently that the meal was over before Rygg had taken five bites.
    Yuri sat back and cleaned off his mustache with downward swipes of the napkin, then sucked at the ragged ends. He belched. “You like?” he asked.
    “Fabulous,” Rygg told him.
    Yuri picked up his vodka glass and motioned Rygg to do likewise. He banged them together and said: “ Prost !” then drank half of it in a single swallow. He belched again. “Okay,” he said. “We begin.”
    Over the next half hour, as Yuri drank vodka and told him his story, Rygg was bemused to remember Yuri’s initial suspicion and precautions. Now, he felt, he was Yuri’s pal for life. He wondered if all Russians were like this: once you’d eaten with them, and clashed your vodka glasses together, you were family.
    On April second, Yuri told him, Captain Tamm of the Alpensturm , who Yuri had worked under for eight years, and who was like a father to him, had come to his house. He told Yuri that he was letting him go – Yuri was too lazy and liked his vodka too much to work on the ship any more. Yuri went crazy, shouting, grabbing at the captain – he demonstrated on Rygg’s shirt – but the captain just walked away.
    For a day and a night Yuri moped, drinking and raging, but then he decided that he’d give it one last shot. He’d go see the captain and tell him that he needed another chance. He’d work for free for one trip, and if the captain still thought he was lazy, he’d quit, no problem.
    He went to the captain’s house, but nobody was around, so he went down to the Kaliningrad docks. It was late in the evening, perhaps ten or eleven. Yuri was, by his own estimation, everybody’s best friend, and he just sauntered in with a wave to the guards. He walked down to the Alpensturm . The ship was dark. There was a car parked in the shadows beyond it. As he stepped toward the ship, two men got out of the car, one tall, one short and square. Yuri drew the figures in the air. They wore ordinary clothes, but didn’t seem like dock workers or even guards.
    “They say what I want? I say I need Captain Tamm. They say to me to leave. I say fuck you, I need Captain Tamm. Then they show to me gun, they say to me to leave or they kill me. Okay. I leave.” Yuri lifted his hands in mock surrender. “These men, they no smile, I think they can kill me. But now I am very interested. What is happening with Alpensturm ? Maybe on Alpensturm is now drugs, I think.”
    Yuri headed out the closest gate. But then he turned right around and came in by the first gate again. He went to a ship berthed on the far side of the wharf, where he had a Filipino friend called Ocho. “I say ‘Ocho, take my clothes, I want to go swim.’ He is very surprise. I take off my clothes. I say ‘Ocho, give me Vaseline.’ You know Vaseline?”
    Rygg nodded.
    “I put Vaseline. I take my camera, always I have my camera. I buy here, in Hamburg. Three hundred Euro. It can go into water, it very small.”
    Slipping into the frigid water, he swam to the Alpensturm , carrying the camera, and squirmed in through the galley porthole, which was always open. Inside it was “black as fuck” and he didn’t dare switch on a light. He heard snoring and peeked into