The Draining Lake (22 page)

'What do you know about Lothar's disappearance?' Sigurdur Óli asked.

'The last time I saw him was at a reception in the Soviet embassy. That was just before we started hearing reports that he was missing. It was 1968. Those were bad times of course, because of what was happening in Prague. At the reception, Lothar was recalling the Hungarian uprising of 1956. I only heard snatches of it, but I remember it because what he said was so typical of him.'

'What was that?' Sigurdur Óli asked.

'He was talking about Hungarians he knew in Leipzig,' Miroslav said. 'Especially a girl who hung around with the Icelandic students there.'

'Can you remember what he said?' Sigurdur Óli asked.

'He said he knew how to deal with dissidents, the rebels in Czechoslovakia. They ought to arrest the lot of them and send them off to the gulag. He was drunk when he said it and I don't know what exactly he was talking about, but that was the gist of it.'

'And soon afterwards you heard that he'd gone missing?' Sigurdur Óli said.

'He must have done something wrong,' Miroslav said. 'At least that's what everyone thought. There were rumours that they took him out themselves. The East Germans. Sent him home in a diplomatic bag. They could easily do that. Embassy mail was never examined and we could take whatever we wanted in and out of the country. The most incredible things.'

'Or they threw him in the lake,' Sigurdur Óli said.

'All I know is that he disappeared and nothing more was ever heard of him.'

'Do you know what his crime was supposed to have been?'

'We thought he'd gone over.'

'Gone over?'

'Sold himself to the other side. That often happened. Just look at me. But the Germans weren't as merciful as us Czechs.'

'You mean he sold information . . . ?'

'Are you sure there's no money in this?' Miroslav interrupted Sigurdur Óli. The woman's voice in the background had returned, louder than before.

'Unfortunately not,' Sigurdur Óli said.

They heard Miroslav say something, probably in Czech. Then in English: 'I've said enough. Don't call me again.'

Then he hung up. Erlendur reached over to the tape recorder and switched it off.

'What a twat you are,' he said to Sigurdur Óli. 'Couldn't you lie to him? Promise ten thousand krónur. Something. Couldn't you try to keep him on the phone longer?'

'Cool it,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'He didn't want to say any more. He didn't want to talk to us any more. You heard that.'

'Are we any closer to knowing who was at the bottom of the lake?' Elínborg asked.

'I don't know,' Erlendur said. 'An East German trade attaché and a Russian spy device. It could fit the bill.'

'I think it's obvious,' Elínborg said. 'Lothar and Leopold were the same man and they sank him in Kleifarvatn. He fouled up and they had to get rid of him.'

'And the woman in the dairy shop?' Sigurdur Óli asked.

'She doesn't have a clue,' Elínborg said. 'She doesn't know a thing about that man except that he treated her well.'

'Perhaps she was part of his cover in Iceland,' Erlendur said.

'Maybe,' Elínborg said.

'I think it must be significant that the device wasn't functional when it was used to sink the body,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'Like it was obsolete or had been destroyed.'

'I was wondering whether the device necessarily came from one of the embassies,' Elínborg said. 'Whether it couldn't have entered the country by another channel.'

'Who would want to smuggle Russian spying equipment into Iceland?' Sigurdur Óli asked.

They fell silent, all thinking in their separate ways that the case was beyond their understanding. They were more accustomed to dealing with simple, Icelandic crimes without mysterious devices or trade attachés who weren't trade attachés, without foreign embassies or the Cold War, just Icelandic reality: local, uneventful, mundane and infinitely far removed from the battle zones of the world.

'Can't we find an Icelandic angle on this?' Erlendur asked in the end, for the sake of saying something.

'What about the students?' Elínborg said. 'Shouldn't we try to locate them? Find out if any of them remembers this Lothar? We still have that to check.'

By the following day Sigurdur Óli had obtained a list of Icelandic students attending East German universities between the end of the war and 1970. The information was supplied by the ministry of education and the German embassy. They began slowly, starting with students in Leipzig in the 1960s and working back. Since there was no hurry, they handled the case alongside other investigations that came their way, mostly burglaries and thefts. They knew when Lothar had been enrolled at the University of Leipzig in the 1950s, but also that he could have been attached to it for much longer than that, and they were determined to do a proper job. They decided to work backwards from when he disappeared from the embassy.

Instead of calling people and speaking to them over the telephone, they thought it would be more productive to make surprise visits to their homes. Erlendur believed that the first reaction to a police visit often provided vital clues. As in war, a surprise attack could prove crucial. A simple change of expression when they mentioned their business. The first words spoken.

So, one day in September, when their investigation of Icelandic students had reached the mid-1950s, Sigurdur Óli and Elínborg knocked on the door of a woman by the name of Rut Bernhards. According to their information, she had abandoned her studies in Leipzig after a year and a half.

She answered the door and was terrified to hear that it was the police.

Rut Bernhards stood blinking at Sigurdur Óli and then at Elínborg, unable to understand how they could be from the police. Sigurdur Óli had to tell her three times before it sank in and she asked what they wanted. Elínborg explained. This was around ten o'clock in the morning. They were standing on the landing of a block of flats, not unlike Erlendur's but dirtier, the carpet more worn and a stench of rising damp on every floor.

Rut was even more surprised once Elínborg had said her piece.

'Students in Leipzig?' she said. 'What do you want to know about them? Why?'

'Maybe we could come in for a minute,' Elínborg said. 'We won't be long.'

Still very doubtful, Rut thought for a moment before opening the door to them. They entered a small hallway which led to the living room. There were bedrooms on the right-hand side and beside the living room was the kitchen. Rut offered them a seat and asked whether they wanted tea or the like, apologising because she had never spoken to the police before. They saw that she was very confused as she stood in the kitchen doorway. Elínborg thought she would come to her senses if she made some tea, so she accepted the offer, to Sigurdur Óli's chagrin. He wasn't interested in attending a tea party and gave Elínborg an expression to signal that. She just smiled back at him.

The day before, Sigurdur Óli had received yet another telephone call from the man who had lost his wife and daughter in a car crash. He and Bergthóra had just come back from a visit to the doctor who told them that the pregnancy was progressing well, the foetus was flourishing and they had nothing to worry about. But the doctor's words were not so reassuring. They had heard him talk that way before. They were sitting at home in the kitchen, cautiously discussing the future, when the telephone rang.

'I can't talk to you now,' Sigurdur Óli said when he heard who was on the other end.

'I didn't mean to disturb you,' the man said, polite as ever. His mood never changed, nor did the pitch of his voice; he spoke with the same calm tone, which Sigurdur Óli attributed to tranquillisers.

'No,' Sigurdur Óli said, 'don't disturb me again.'

'I just wanted to thank you,' the man said.

'There's no need, I haven't done anything,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'You don't need to thank me at all.'

'I think I'm gradually getting over it,' the man said.

'That's good,' Sigurdur Óli said.

There was silence over the telephone.

'I miss her so terribly,' the man said eventually.

'Of course you do,' Sigurdur Óli said with a glance at Bergthóra.

'I'm not going to give up. For their sake. I'll try to put on a brave face.'

'That's good.'

'Sorry to bother you. I don't know why I'm always calling you. This will be the last time.'

'That's okay.'

'I've got to keep going.'

Sigurdur Óli was about to say goodbye when he suddenly rang off.

'Is he okay?' Bergthóra asked.

'I don't know,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'I hope so.'

Sigurdur Óli and Elínborg heard Rut making the tea in the kitchen, then she came out, holding cups and a sugar bowl, and asked whether they took milk. Elínborg repeated what she had said at the front door about their search for Icelandic students from Leipzig, adding that it was potentially connected – only potentially, she repeated – with a person who went missing in Reykjavík just before 1970.

Rut listened to her without answering until the kettle began to whistle in the kitchen. She left and returned with the tea and a few biscuits on a dish. Elínborg knew that she was past seventy and thought she had aged well. She was thin, of a similar height to her, her hair was dyed brown and her face was quite long with a serious expression underlined by wrinkles, but a pretty smile that she seemed to use sparingly.

'And you think this man studied in Leipzig?' she asked.

'We have no idea,' Sigurdur Óli said.

'What missing person are you talking about?' Rut asked. 'I don't remember anything from the news that . . .' Her expression turned thoughtful. 'Except Kleifarvatn in the spring. Are you talking about the skeleton from Kleifarvatn?'

'It fits.' Elínborg smiled.

'Is it connected with Leipzig?'

'We don't know,' Sigurdur Óli said.

'But you must know something if you came here to talk to an ex-student from Leipzig,' Rut said firmly.

'We have some clues,' Elínborg said. 'They're not convincing enough for us to say much about them, but we were hoping you might be able to assist us.'

'How does this link up with Leipzig?'

'The man doesn't have to link up with Leipzig at all,' Sigurdur Óli said, in a slightly sharper tone than before. 'You left after a year and a half,' he said to change the subject. 'Didn't you finish your course, or what?'

Without answering him, she poured the tea and added milk and sugar to her own. She stirred it with a little spoon, her thoughts elsewhere.

'Was it a man in the lake? You said "the man".'

'Yes,' Sigurdur Óli said.

'I understand that you're a teacher,' Elínborg said.

'I went to teacher training college when I came back to Iceland,' Rut said. 'My husband was a teacher too. Both primary school teachers. We've just got divorced. I've stopped teaching now. Retired. No need for me any more. It's like you stop living when you stop working.'

She sipped her tea, and Sigurdur Óli and Elínborg did the same.

'I kept the flat,' she added.

'It's always sad when . . .' Elínborg began, but Rut interrupted her as if to say that she was not asking for sympathy from a stranger.

'We were all socialists,' she said, looking at Sigurdur Óli. 'All of us in Leipzig.'

She paused while her mind roamed back to the years when she was young with her whole life ahead of her.

'We had ideals,' she said, moving her gaze to Elínborg. 'I don't know if anyone has them any more. Young people, I mean. Genuine ideals for a better and fairer society. I don't believe anyone thinks about that these days. Nowadays, everyone just thinks about getting rich. No one used to think about making money or owning anything. There wasn't this relentless commercialism then. No one had anything, except perhaps beautiful ideals.'

'Built on lies,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'Weren't they? More or less?'

'I don't know,' Rut said. 'Built on lies? What's a lie?'

'No,' Sigurdur Óli said in a peculiarly brash tone. 'I mean that communism has been abandoned all over the world except where gross violations of human rights take place such as China and Cuba. Hardly anyone admits to having been a communist any more. It's almost a term of abuse. So wasn't it like that in the old days, or what?'

Elínborg glared at him, shocked. She could not believe that Sigurdur Óli was being rude to the woman. But she might have expected it. She knew that Sigurdur Óli voted conservative and had sometimes heard him talk about Icelandic communists as if they ought to do penance for defending a system they knew was useless and had ultimately offered nothing but dictatorship and repression. As if communists still had to settle accounts with the past because they should have known the truth all along and were responsible for the lies. Perhaps he found Rut an easier target than most. Perhaps he had run out of patience.

'You had to give up your studies,' Elínborg hurried to say, to steer the conversation into safer waters.

'To our way of thinking, there was nothing more noble,' Rut said, still staring at Sigurdur Óli. 'And that hasn't changed. The socialism we believed in then and believe in now remains the same, and it played a part in establishing the labour movement, ensuring a decent living wage and free hospitals to care for you and your family, educated you to become a police officer, set up the national insurance system, set up the welfare system. But that's nothing compared with the implicit socialist values we all live by, you and me and her, so that society can function. It's socialism that makes us into human beings. So don't go making fun of me!'

'Are you absolutely sure that socialism actually established all this?' Sigurdur Óli said, refusing to budge. 'As far as I recall it was the conservatives who set up the national insurance system.'

'Rubbish,' Rut said.

'And the Soviet system?' Sigurdur Óli said. 'What about
that
lie?'

Rut did not reply.

'Why do you think you have some kind of score to settle with me?' she asked.

'I don't have a score to settle with you,' Sigurdur Óli said.

'People may well have thought they had to be dogmatic,' Rut said. 'It might have been necessary then. You could never understand that. Different times come along and attitudes change and people change. Nothing is permanent. I can't understand this anger. Where does it come from?'

She looked at Sigurdur Óli.

'Where does this anger come from?' she repeated.

'I didn't come here to argue,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'That wasn't the aim.'

'Do you remember anyone from Leipzig by the name of Lothar?' Elínborg asked awkwardly. She was hoping that Sigurdur Óli would invent some excuse to go out to the car, but he sat fast by her side, his eyes fixed on Rut. 'Lothar Weiser,' she added.

'Lothar?' Rut said. 'Yes, but not so well. He spoke Icelandic.'

'I gathered that,' Elínborg said. 'So you remember him?'

'Only vaguely,' Rut said. 'He sometimes came for dinner with us at the dormitory. But I never got to know him especially well. I was always homesick and . . . the conditions weren't that special, bad housing and . . . I . . . it didn't suit me.'

'No, obviously things weren't in very good shape after the war,' Elínborg said.

'It was just awful,' Rut said. 'West Germany was redeveloping ten times as fast, with the west's backing. In East Germany, things happened slowly, or not at all.'

'We understand that his role was to get students to work for him,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'Or monitor them somehow. Were you ever aware of that?'

'They watched us,' Rut said. 'We knew that and everyone else knew that. It was called interactive surveillance, another term for spying. People were supposed to come forward of their own accord and report anything that offended their socialist principles. We didn't, of course. None of us. I never noticed Lothar trying to enlist us. All the foreign students had a liaison they could turn to but who also watched them. Lothar was one of them.'

'Do you still keep in touch with your student friends from Leipzig?' Elínborg asked.

'No,' Rut said. 'It's a long time since I saw any of them. We don't keep in contact, or if they do, I don't know about it. I left the party when I came back. Or maybe I didn't leave, I just lost interest. It's probably called withdrawing.'

'We have the names of some other students from the time you were there: Karl, Hrafnhildur, Emil, Tómas, Hannes . . .'

'Hannes was expelled,' Rut interjected. 'I was told he stopped going to lectures and the Day of the Republic parades and generally didn't fit in. We were supposed to take part in all that. And we did socialist work in the summer. On farms and in the coal mines. As I understand it Hannes didn't like what he saw and heard. He wanted to finish his course but wasn't allowed to. Maybe you should talk to him. If he's still alive, I don't know.'

She looked at them.

'Was it him you found in the lake?' she said.

'No,' Elínborg said. 'It's not him. We understand he lives in Selfoss and runs a guest house there.'

'I remember that he wrote about his Leipzig experiences when he came back to Iceland, and they tore him to shreds for it. The party old guard. Denounced him as a traitor and liar. The conservatives welcomed him like a prodigal son and championed him. I can't imagine he would have cared for that. I think he just wanted to tell the truth as he saw it, but of course there was a price to pay. I met him once a few years later and he looked awfully depressed. Maybe he thought I was still active in the party, but I wasn't. You ought to talk to him. He might have known Lothar better. I was there such a short time.'

Back out in the car, Elínborg scolded Sigurdur Óli for allowing his political opinions to influence a police enquiry. He ought to keep his mouth shut and not attack people, she said, especially elderly women who lived by themselves.

'What's wrong with you, anyway?' she said as they drove away from the block of flats. 'I've never heard such crap. What were you thinking? I agree with what she asked you: where does all this anger come from?'

'Oh, I don't know,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'My dad was a communist like that, never saw the light,' he added eventually. This was the first time that Elínborg had ever heard him mention his father.

Erlendur had just got back home when the telephone rang. It took him a while to realise which Benedikt Jónsson was on the other end, then suddenly he remembered. The one who had given Leopold a job with his company.

'Am I bothering you, phoning home like this?' Benedikt asked politely.

'No,' Erlendur said. 'Is there something that . . . ?'

'It was to do with that man.'

'Which man?'

'From the East German embassy or trade delegation or whatever it was,' Benedikt said. 'The one who told me to hire Leopold and said the company in Germany would take action if I didn't.'

'Yes,' Erlendur said. 'The fat one. What about him?'

'As far as I recall,' Benedikt said, 'he knew Icelandic. Actually, I think he spoke it pretty well.'