The Draining Lake (9 page)

'No, it's nothing. Come on.'

Instead of living on campus, Ilona rented a room in the city, and they went there. He tried to be sure whether the man from Thomaskirche was tracking them, but could not see him anywhere.

The room was in a little flat belonging to a widow who worked in a printshop. Ilona said she was very kindly and allowed her to waltz around the flat as she pleased. The woman had lost her husband and two sons in the war. He saw photographs of them on the walls. The two sons wore German army uniforms.

In Ilona's room were stacks of books and German and Hungarian newspapers and magazines, a dilapidated portable typewriter on the desk and a futon. While she went into the kitchen he browsed through her books and struck a few keys on the typewriter. On the wall above the futon were photographs of people he presumed were her relatives.

Ilona returned with two cups of tea and kicked the door to with her heel. She set the cups down carefully beside the typewriter. The tea was piping hot.

'It'll be just right by the time we've finished,' she said.

Then she walked over to him and gave him a long, deep kiss. Overcoming his surprise, he hugged her and kissed her passionately until they fell onto the futon and she began hitching up his sweater and undoing his belt. He was very inexperienced. He had had sex before, the first time after the school's farewell dance and once after that at the party paper's annual get-together, but those had been fairly clumsy efforts. He was not particularly skilled, but she seemed to be and he gladly let her take control.

She was right. When he slumped down beside her and she smothered a long groan the tea was just the right temperature.

Two days later in the
Auerbachkeller
they talked politics and argued for the first and only time. She began by describing how the Russian revolution had spawned a dictatorship, and that dictatorships were always dangerous no matter what form they took.

He did not want to argue with her although he knew perfectly well that she was wrong.

'It was thanks to Stalin's programme of industrialisation that the Nazis were defeated,' he said.

'He also made a pact with Hitler,' she said. 'Dictatorship fosters fear and servility. We're bearing the brunt of that in Hungary now. We're not a free nation. They've systematically established a communist state under Soviet control. No one asked us, the nation, what we wanted. We want to govern our own affairs but can't. Young people are thrown in prison. Some disappear. It's said that they're sent to the Soviet Union. You have an American army in your country. How would you feel if it ran everything by its military might?'

He shook his head.

'Look at the elections here,' she said. 'They call them free, but there's only one real party standing. What's free about that? If you think differently you're thrown in prison. What's that? Is that socialism? What else are people supposed to vote for in these free elections? Has everyone forgotten the uprising here the year before last that the Soviets crushed by shooting civilians on the streets, people who wanted change!'

'Ilona . . .'

'And interactive surveillance,' Ilona continued, seriously agitated. 'They say it's to help us. We're supposed to spy on our friends and family and inform on antisocialist attitudes. If you know that one of your fellow students listens to western radio you're supposed to report him, and he's dragged from one lecture to the next to confess his crime. Children are encouraged to inform on their parents.'

'The party needs time to adapt,' he said.

When the novelty of being in Leipzig had worn off and reality confronted them, the Icelanders had discussed the situation. He had reached a firm conclusion on the surveillance society, about what was called 'interactive surveillance', whereby every citizen kept an eye on everyone else. Also on the dictatorship of the communist party, prohibition of freedom of speech and the press, and compulsory attendance at meetings and marches. He felt that instead of being secretive about the methods it employed, the party should admit that certain methods were needed during this phase of the transformation to a socialist state. They were justifiable if they were only temporary. In the course of time such methods would cease to be necessary. People would realise that socialism was the most appropriate system.

'People are scared,' Ilona said.

He shook his head and they started arguing. He had not heard much about events in Hungary and she was hurt when he doubted her word. He tried to employ arguments from the party meetings in Reykjavík, from the party leadership and youth movement and from the works of Marx and Engels, all to no avail. She just looked at him and said over and again: 'You mustn't close your eyes to this.'

'You let western imperialist propaganda turn you against the Soviet Union,' he said. 'They want to break the solidarity of the communist countries because they fear them.'

'That's wrong,' she said.

They fell silent. They had finished their glasses of beer. He was angry with her. He had never heard or seen anyone describe the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries in such terms, apart from the conservative press in Iceland. He knew about the strength of the western powers' propaganda machine, which worked well in Iceland, and he admitted that it was one reason for needing to restrict freedom of speech and press freedom too in Eastern Europe. This he could understand while socialist states were being constructed in the aftermath of the war. He did not regard it as repression.

'Let's not argue,' she said.

'No,' he said, putting some money on the table. 'Let's get going.'

On the way out, Ilona tugged lightly at his arm and he looked at her. She was trying to communicate something by her expression. Then she nodded furtively towards the bar.

'There he is,' she said.

He looked over and saw the man Ilona had said she thought was pursuing her. Dressed in an overcoat, he sipped his beer and acted as if they were not there. It was the same man from outside Thomaskirche.

'I'll have a word with him,' he said.

'No,' Ilona said. 'Don't. Let's go.'

A few days later he saw Hannes sitting at his table in the library, and sat down beside him. Hannes went on writing in pencil in his exercise book without looking up.

'Is she winding you up?' Hannes asked, still writing in the book.

'Who?'

'Ilona.'

'Do you know Ilona?'

'I know who she is,' Hannes said, and looked up. He was wearing a thick scarf and fingerless gloves.

'Do you know about us?' he asked.

'Everything gets around,' Hannes said. 'Ilona's from Hungary so she's not as green as us.'

'As green as us?'

'Forget it,' Hannes said, burying his head back in his exercise book.

He reached across the table and snatched the book away. Hannes looked up in surprise and tried to grab the book back, but it was out of his reach.

'What's going on?' he said. 'Why are you behaving like this?'

Hannes looked at the book that Tómas was holding, then stared at him.

'I don't want to get involved in what's going on here, I just want to go home and forget it,' he said. 'It's completely absurd. I hadn't been here as long as you when I got sick of it.'

'But you're still here.'

'It's a good university. And it took me a while to understand all the lies and lose my patience with them.'

'What is it that I can't see?' he asked, fearing the answer. 'What have you discovered? What am I missing?'

Hannes stared him in the eye, looked around the library and then at the book that Tómas was still holding, then back into his eyes.

'Just carry on,' he said. 'Stick to your convictions. Don't go off the tracks. Believe me, you won't gain anything by it. If you're comfortable with it, then it's all right. Don't delve any deeper. You can't imagine what you might find.'

Hannes held out his hand for his exercise book.

'Believe me,' he said. 'Forget it.'

'And Ilona?' he said.

'Forget her too,' Hannes said.

'What do you mean?'

'Nothing.'

'Why do you talk in riddles?'

'Leave me alone,' Hannes said. 'Just leave me alone.'

Three days later he was in a forest outside the city. He and Emil had enrolled in the Gesellschaft für Sport und Technik. It advertised itself as an all-round sports club that offered horse riding, rally driving and much more. Students were encouraged to take part in club activities, just like the volunteer work organised by the FDJ. It involved a week's harvesting in the autumn, one day a term or in the vacations clearing air-raid rubble, factory work, coal production or the like. Attendance was voluntary, but anyone who did not enrol was liable to be punished.

He was pondering this arrangement while standing in the forest with Emil and his other comrades, a week's camp in front of them which, as it turned out, largely involved military training.

Such was life in Leipzig. Very little was exactly what it seemed. Foreign students were under surveillance and took care not to say anything in public that might offend their hosts. They were taught socialist values at compulsory meetings and voluntary work was voluntary in name only.

As time went by they grew accustomed to all this and referred to it as 'the charade'. He believed the present situation would be temporary. Others were not so optimistic. He laughed to himself when he found out that the sports and technology club was merely a thinly veiled military unit. Emil was not so amused. He saw nothing funny in it and, unlike the others, never called it 'the charade'. Nothing about Leipzig struck him as funny. They were lying stretched out in their tent on their first night with their new companions. All evening Emil had talked with fervour about a socialist state in Iceland.

'All that injustice in such a tiny country where everyone could so easily be equal,' Emil said. 'I want to change that.'

'Would you want a socialist state like this one?' Tómas asked.

'Why not?'

'With all the trappings? The surveillance? The paranoia? Restrictions on freedom of expression? The charade?'

'Is she starting to get through to you?'

'Who?'

'Ilona.'

'What do you mean, get through to me?'

'Nothing.'

'Do you know Ilona?'

'Not at all,' Emil said.

'You've had girlfriends too. Hrafnhildur told me about one from the Red Cloister.'

'That's nothing,' Emil said.

'No, quite.'

'Maybe you'll tell me more about Ilona sometime,' Emil said.

'She's not as orthodox as we are. She sees problems with this system and wants to put them right. It's exactly the same situation here as in Hungary, except that young people there are doing something about it. Fighting the charade.'

'Fighting the charade!' Emil snarled. 'Fucking bollocks. Look at the way people live back in Iceland. Shivering in old American Nissen huts. Children are starving. People can hardly clothe themselves. And all the time the bloated elite gets richer and richer. Isn't that a charade? Who cares if you need to keep people under surveillance and restrict freedom of speech for a while? Eradicating injustice can mean making sacrifices. Who cares?'

They stopped talking. Silence had descended on the camp and it was pitch black.

'I'd do anything for the Icelandic revolution,' Emil said. 'Anything to eradicate injustice.'

He stood at the window watching the sunbeams and a distant rainbow and smiled to himself when he remembered the sports club. He could see Ilona laughing at the smoked-lamb feast and thought about the soft kiss that he could still feel on his lips, the star of love and the young man grieving, deep in his dark valley.

The Foreign Ministry's officials were more than willing to assist the police. Sigurdur Óli and Elínborg were having a meeting with the under-secretary, a smooth man Sigurdur Óli's age. They were acquaintances from their student years in America and reminisced about their time there. The under-secretary said the ministry had been surprised by the police request and he wanted to know why they required information about the former employees of foreign embassies in Reykjavík. They were as silent as the grave. Just a routine investigation, Elínborg said, and smiled.

'And we're not talking about all the embassies,' Sigurdur Óli said, smiling too. 'Just old Warsaw Pact countries.'

The under-secretary looked at them in turn.

'Are you talking about the ex-communist countries?' he asked, his curiosity clearly in no way satisfied. 'Why just them? What about them?'

'Just a routine investigation,' Elínborg repeated.

She was in an unusually good mood. The book launch had been a huge success and she was still over the moon about a review that had appeared in the largest-circulation newspaper praising her book, the recipes and photographs, which concluded by saying that hopefully this would not be the last to be heard from Elínborg, the detective-cum-gourmet.

'The communist states,' the under-secretary said thoughtfully. 'What was it that you found in the lake?'

'We don't know yet whether it's linked to any embassies,' Sigurdur Óli said.

'I suppose you should come with me,' the under-secretary said, standing up. 'Let's talk to the director general if he's in.'

The director general invited them into his office and listened to their request. He tried to wheedle out the reason for wanting this particular information, but they gave nothing away.

'Do we have a record of these employees?' the director general asked. He was a particularly tall man who wore a worried expression and had large rings under his weary eyes.

'As it happens we do,' the under-secretary said. 'It'll take a while to compile the list, but it's no problem.'

'Let's do that, then,' the director general said.

'Was there any espionage to speak of in Iceland during the Cold War?' Sigurdur Óli asked.

'Do you think it's a spy in the lake?' the under-secretary asked.

'We can't go into details of the investigation but it would appear that the skeleton has been in the lake since before 1970,' Elínborg said.

'It would be naive to assume that no spying took place,' the director general said. 'It was going on all around us, and Iceland was strategically vital then, much more so than it is today. There were several embassies here from Eastern European countries, plus of course the Nordic countries, the UK, US and West Germany.'

'When we say spying,' Sigurdur Óli said, 'what exactly is it that we're talking about?'

'I think it mainly involved keeping an eye on what the others were up to,' the director general said. 'In some cases there were attempts to establish contact. To get someone from the other side to work for you, that sort of thing. And of course there was the base, the details of operations there and military exercises. I don't think this had anything much to do with Icelanders themselves. But there are stories of attempts to get them to collaborate.'

The director general became lost in his thoughts.

'Are you looking for an Icelandic spy?' he asked.

'No,' Sigurdur Óli said, although he had no idea. 'Were there any? Icelandic spies? Isn't that a ridiculous notion?'

'Maybe you should talk to Ómar,' the chief of department said.

'Who's Ómar?' Elínborg said.

'He was director general here for most of the Cold War,' the chief of department said. 'Very old but clear as a bell,' he added, tapping his head with his index finger. 'Still comes to our annual dinner and he's the life and soul of the party. He knew all those chaps in the embassies. Maybe he could help you somehow.'

Sigurdur Óli wrote down the name.

'Actually it's a misunderstanding to talk about real embassies,' the director general said. 'Some of these countries only had delegations back then, trade delegations or trade offices or whatever you want to call them.'

The three detectives met in Erlendur's office at noon. Erlendur had spent the morning locating the farmer who had been waiting for the driver of the Falcon and had told the police that he failed to turn up for their meeting. His name was in the files. Erlendur discovered that some of the old farmland had been sold to property developers for the town of Mosfellsbaer. The man had stopped farming around 1980. He was now registered as living at an old people's home in Reykjavík.

Erlendur called in a forensics expert who brought his equipment to the garage, vacuumed up every speck of dust from the floor of the car and searched it for bloodstains.

'You're just messing about,' Sigurdur Óli said as he took a large bite from a baguette. He chewed fast and had clearly still not finished speaking. 'What are you trying to find?' he said. 'What are you going to do with the case? Are you planning to reopen the investigation? Do you think we have nothing better to do than fiddle about with old missing-persons cases? There are a million other things we could be doing.'

Erlendur eyed Sigurdur Óli.

'A young woman,' he said, 'stands outside the dairy shop where she works, waiting for her boyfriend. He doesn't come. They're going to get married. Nicely settled. The future's bright, as they say. Nothing to suggest that they won't live happily ever after.'

Sigurdur Óli and Elínborg said nothing.

'Nothing in their lives suggests anything is wrong,' Erlendur went on. 'Nothing suggests that he's depressed. He's going to fetch her after work. Then he doesn't arrive. He leaves work to meet someone but doesn't show up and disappears for ever. There are hints that he may have caught a coach out of the city. There are other signs that he committed suicide. That would be the most obvious explanation for his disappearance. Many Icelanders suffer serious depression, although most keep it well concealed. And there's always the possibility that someone did him in.'

'Isn't it just a suicide?' Elínborg asked.

'We have no official record of a man by the name of Leopold who went missing at that time,' Erlendur said. 'It seems he was lying to his girlfriend. Níels, who was in charge of the case, thought nothing of his disappearance. He even believed that the man lived somewhere else but had been having an affair in Reykjavík. If it wasn't just a straightforward suicide.'

'So he had a family out in the countryside and the woman in Reykjavík was his mistress?' Elínborg said. 'Isn't that reading a bit too much into his car being found outside the coach station?'

'You mean he might have got himself back home to the other end of the country and stopped shagging in Reykjavík?' Sigurdur Óli said.

'Shagging in Reykjavík!' Elínborg fumed. 'How can poor Bergthóra stand you?'

'That theory needn't be any more daft than any of the others,' Erlendur said.

'Can you get away with bigamy in Iceland?' Sigurdur Óli asked.

'No,' Elínborg said firmly. 'There are too few of us.'

'In America they make public announcements about guys like that,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'They have special programmes about that type of missing person, criminals and bigamists. Some murder their family, disappear, then start a new one.'

'Naturally, it's easier to hide in America,' Elínborg said.

'That may well be,' Erlendur said. 'But isn't it simple enough to lead a double life even for a while in a small community? He spent a lot of time in rural places, this man, weeks on end sometimes. He met a woman in Reykjavík and maybe he fell in love or maybe she was just a fling. When the relationship became serious he decided to break it off.'

'A sweet little urban love story,' Sigurdur Óli said.

'I wonder if the woman from the dairy shop had considered that possibility,' Erlendur said thoughtfully.

'Didn't they announce that this Leopold had gone missing?' Sigurdur Óli asked.

Erlendur had already checked and found a brief announcement in the newspapers describing the man's disappearance, along with a request for anyone who had seen him to contact the police. It gave a description of what he was wearing, his height and the colour of his hair.

'It led nowhere,' Erlendur said. 'He'd never been photographed. Níels said to me that they never told the woman they couldn't find any record of him.'

'They didn't tell her that?' Elínborg said.

'You know what Níels is like,' Erlendur said. 'If he can avoid trouble, he does. He had the feeling that the woman had been duped and I'm sure he felt she'd been through enough. I don't know. He's not particularly . . .'

Erlendur did not finish the sentence.

'Maybe he'd found a new girlfriend,' Elínborg suggested, 'and didn't dare tell her. There's no greater coward than a cheating male.'

'Here we go,' Sigurdur Óli said.

'Didn't he travel around the country selling, what, agricultural machinery?' Elínborg said. 'Wasn't he always roaming the farms and villages? Perhaps we can't rule out that he met someone and started a new life. Didn't dare tell his girlfriend in Reykjavík.'

'And has been in hiding ever since?' Sigurdur Óli interjected.

'Of course things were completely different in 1970,' Erlendur said. 'It took a whole day to drive to Akureyri

– the main road around Iceland hadn't been finished. Transportation was much worse and regional communities were much more isolated.'

'You mean there were all kinds of nowhere places that nobody ever visited,' Sigurdur Óli said.

'I once heard a story about a woman,' Elínborg said, 'who had this terrific boyfriend and everything was just fine until one day when he phoned her and said he was breaking it off, and after beating about the bush a bit he admitted he was going to marry someone else the next week. His girlfriend never heard any more of him. Like I say: there's no limit to what creeps men can be.'

'So why was Leopold in Reykjavík under false pretences?' Erlendur asked. 'If he didn't dare tell his girlfriend that he'd met someone outside the city and started a new life? Why this game of hide-and-seek?'

'What does anyone know about these characters?' Elínborg said in a resigned tone.

They all fell silent.

'What about the body in the lake?' Erlendur finally asked.

'I think we're looking for a foreigner,' Elínborg said. 'It's ridiculous to think it's an Icelander with Russian spy equipment tied around him. I just can't imagine it.'

'The Cold War,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'Weird times.'

'Yes, weird times,' Erlendur said.

'To me, the Cold War was always the fear of the end of the world,' Elínborg said. 'I always remember thinking that. Somehow you could never escape it. Doomsday constantly looming over you. That's the only Cold War I knew.'

'One little fuse blows and ka-boom!' Sigurdur Óli said.

'That fear has to come out somewhere,' Erlendur said. 'In what we do. In what we are.'

'You mean in suicides, like the man who drove the Falcon?' Elínborg said.

'Unless he's alive and well and happily married in Sheepsville,' Sigurdur Óli said. He rolled up his baguette wrapping and threw it on the floor beside a nearby rubbish bin.

When Sigurdur Óli and Elínborg had left, Erlendur's phone rang. On the other end was a man he did not recognise.

'Is that Erlendur?' the voice said, deep and angry.

'Yes – who is this?' Erlendur said.

'I want to ask you to leave my wife alone,' the voice said.

'Your wife?'

The words caught Erlendur completely off guard. It did not occur to him that the voice was talking about Valgerdur.

'Understand?' the voice said. 'I know what you're up to and I want you to stop.'

'It's up to her what she does,' Erlendur said when it finally registered that this was Valgerdur's husband. He remembered what Valgerdur had said about his affair and how meeting Erlendur had initially been an attempt on her part to get even with him.

'You leave her alone,' the voice said, more menacingly.

'Get lost,' Erlendur said and slammed down the phone.