by Colin Dunne
'So who's the lucky Palli?' It's one of those names where the affectionate diminutive comes out one syllable longer than the formal name, like John and Johnny.
Her mouth pursed in disapproval. 'He is nothing. He 1s nobody.'
'Well, he's her husband, Hulda, let's face it.'
She turned towards me, her brows creased as she tried to make me see sense. 'You know Solrun, you know that she has men ...'
'Endless many men .. .'
'Endless many,' she repeated. 'She would not want this man.
It is not a proper marriage. It is not a serious marriage. You must understand that.'
'I did get the impression the vows were a bit elastic.'
'You will not put it in your newspaper? We must not spoil things for her.'
'Don't worry, we won't,' I said. And that reminded me.
Sooner or later I had to face up to another conversation with my employer. I had to let him know I was still alive.
'Now then,' he said, going straight into it, 'I'm glad you've rung. We'll want pix of this Sexy Eskie lass. Topless. And is there any chance of getting her next to an igloo?'
'An igloo?' His conception of life outside Britain seemed to be
based on the early editions of 'Children of Other Lands'. 'They don't have igloos here.'
'Oh, bloody hell,' he said, in some irritation. 'Not even for show like?'
'No. They never did have igloos.'
'Oh, well, let's have her in the snow then. Topless, making a snowman. That sort of thing.'
Out of the window I could see cool bright sunshine lighting up the coloured houses. 'The only snow here is up the mountains.'
'Thanks for the geography lesson. If our readers wanted educating they wouldn't buy this bloody rubbish would they? So hire a studio, drag the snow down the mountain and let Little Miss Bloody Icicle build an igloo like her granddad used to do. Right? Ciao.'
Compared with that briefing, espionage seemed relatively straightforward - and certainly a lot more honest.
I only had one more job. I stopped off in the town and picked up a postcard of a glacier standing still for the camera. I sat for a while, wondering how best to explain that in Iceland boys take their father's Christian name plus the word 'son' for the surname, and girls do the same with the word 'dottir'. In the end, I simply wrote: 'Do you realise, if you lived here you’d be called Sally Samsdottir? Ask your teacher to explain.'
That was one way of getting my value out of school fees. Then I called at the Saga and picked up Christopher to do a bit of interpreting. Musical too gadgets, he'd confided to me on the phone, were proving surprisingly difficult to sell.
18
Alongside the slums of the civilised western world, Breidholt is gracious living.
They don't have the dead dogs and the heaps of wrecked cars and acres of smashed glass that you find in a well-appointed British slum, or the beggars and the pickpockets that you find in southern cities.
You don't find any of these things because in Iceland poverty is practically illegal. There is almost no unemployment, and what little deprivation there is gets mopped up by a social service system that makes Santa Claus look tight-fisted.
So the worst they can show you is Breidholt. It's stuck up on a boulder-strewn hill overlooking the town, high up where the rain and the snow and the wind don't miss a thing, big bare blocks of flats in the glass-and-plastic period of architecture. As I say, in some parts of Naples they'd call it Snob Hill; even so, with shabby washing flapping on the balconies and hardboard up at the broken windows, you could see why the Icelanders weren't too proud of it.
A boy in an outsize tartan jacket stopped chasing a cardboard box, which was being driven by a hard wind, to have a look at us. He tugged the sleeve of his jacket across his trickling nose as Christopher repeated the name and address, then he pointed into a corner of the car park, at an old Ford Escort that had been given a lime-green spray job. By someone, if the paint on the windows and ground was any indication, in the advanced stages of Parkinson's Disease.
As we walked over I heard the international sound of male cursing and spanners clinking. It sounded quite friendly. It didn't look friendly. Behind the Ford, lying alongside an old Triumph motor-bike, was one of the most frightening men I've ever seen. He was on his back, muttering through a cigarette which bobbed on his lip. When he saw me, both the cigarette and the ring spanner in his hand stopped moving.
His head was towards me so that it had that chimpanzee look of all upside-down faces.
When I moved round he looked a lot worse.
He was short in the same way a cement-mixer is short and he looked just as solid. All he was wearing was a soiled red tee shirt and ragged canvas shorts. His exposed limbs were so bulked up with muscle that they looked foreshortened. Golden hair, sawn off to a ginger bristle on his head, covered his pale hard limbs in a fleece and burst in springy tufts from his exposed belly and over the neck of his shirt. His biceps were blue with tattoos.
Pale blue eyes stared up at us. He didn't move. He didn't speak. He even ignored his cigarette as it flared briefly in the wind.
'I'm looking for Palli Olafsson,' I said, bending down. He gave no reaction.
Christopher said something- presumably the same thing in Icelandic - and although his eyes shifted over to the new speaker, he still didn't reply.
Again Christopher asked, mentioning his name, and then I heard him say the address. The man on the floor grunted and pointed with his spanner at a double-door entrance forty yards away.
As we went he sat up and took a swig from an open bottle of Polar beer. He didn't look like a man with contacts but he must've had some good ones: Polar beer is export only.
'Not the most welcoming of chaps,' Christopher whispered.
'Or places,' I said.
Inside the entrance, the wind, which whirled scraps of litter in a sad dance on the bare concrete, couldn't shift the smell of stale urine and despair. On the metal door of the lift someone had scrawled 'No Nukes'.
The apartment we wanted was on the fourth floor. The door was open. From inside, a gust of wet heat and raw pop music surged out.
That's another old Icelandic trick: when you get your heating cheap- by plugging into all that bubbling just below the earth's crust- all you do is open the door or the window when it gets too hot.
I rapped on the door, rapped again, and then moved slowly down the half-dark corridor. Christopher was a couple of steps behind me. The air was damp and smelt of dead goats. I saw why when the corridor opened out into a large cramped untidy room. The sunset on the carpet had been extinguished by a few hundred spilled dinners and the walls had been used for finger-printing chimney sweeps. Chunks of cheap plastic covered furniture filled the place. Over the backs and arms of chairs, and from a thin wire stand, hung wet baby clothes. That was what gave the room its own highly individual atmosphere. In a blue, white-lined cot balanced on a wooden stand, a baby lay with its fat arms above its head like Marciano at the end of a fight.
The mother was asleep too. Not restful angelic sleep but smashed-out exhaustion, sprawled in the sunken seat of a sagging black armchair.
Perhaps a year ago her hair had been in that squared-off blonde shape, only now most of the blonde had gone and it was dull with dirt. The American eagle on the front of her shirt had lost most of its glitter and she wore baggy trousers. She was yesterday's youth suddenly grown old, and on the left side of her face she had the blue-brown bruise that you always find on women like that in flats like that.
'Excuse me,' I said. I had to repeat it twice before she stirred.
She opened her eyes and lay there.
A burst of Icelandic behind me reminded me that Christopher was there. It struck me then that if Batty had sent him to keep an eye on me he was keeping well out of the firing line.
'English?' the girl said, yawning. 'Why come here?' She rooted down the side of the chair and came up with a packet of Camels. She coughed as she lit one.
>
'Why do you want Palli Olafsson?'
Christopher spoke again, and in bad English she said: 'If it is private you can tell me. I am his girl.'
She rose, smoothing down her clothes and pushing the limp
hair back from her bruised face. A soft wail came from the cot. She was there in one movement, changing the cigarette to her left hand so she could stroke the child.
'This is his home?' I asked.
'Oh, yes. His home.' She glanced at a bottle of vodka on top of the television set. 'You like a drink?'
'No, thanks. Is he around?'
Picking her way among the debris of baby clothes and toy ducks and green and red wooden bricks, she went to the window. She made a fuss of opening it, pretending to wipe the sweat off her brow. 'Better,' she said, as the cold wind punched through the rotten warmth of her home.
Again Christopher started talking and she replied to him in rapid Icelandic.
'Sorry, Sam, she's not terribly helpful. Says he's gone out and she doesn't know when he'll be coming back. She wants to know who you are- naturally enough, I'd say.'
As I'd suggested, he told her I was a London journalist who was writing an article about Iceland. That made her laugh.
'Palli can tell you all about Iceland. No problem he can.' Her sharp laugh halted suddenly. I heard another noise, a cough, a man's cough, coming from the next room. Then it was followed by a deep sleepy groan.
I swopped nervous glances with my friend. Neither of us knew what to do. She resolved it for us then by skipping over to the window and shouting to someone below.
'Damn!' said Christopher. 'That was Palli. With the motor bike. She just told him to run for it.'
We could hear her laughing behind us as we raced for the lift.
When we got down he'd gone. As we went back to the Daihatsu, the little boy in the tartan jacket made his fingers into a gun and shot me. In his other hand he was holding the Polar beer.
19
'What gets me,' I said again, 'is why she'd want to marry someone like that.'
'Oh, I don't know,' Ivan replied, as he shook the dice. 'I think there's quite a lot to be said for a dumb brute. What surprises me is that you haven't tried to claim he's a refugee from the Russian weight-lifting team. Your turn, I think, Christopher.'
Early evening, and the eighth-floor bar of the Saga was still empty. Reykjavik night-life doesn't get into first gear until eleven. By twelve it's a tin-hat job and after that it's every man for himself: or, with a bit of luck, herself.
Right now it was nice and quiet. Sun was streaming through the windows and glancing off the copper top of the horse-shoe bar. Behind it, a young woman in a scarlet waistcoat examined her finger-nails. For a gin and two martinis, she'd just taken the equivalent of a small pools win.
I looked at Ivan and Christopher with the sort of warm glow a mother must feel when she brings home a little playmate for her son and it works. Any minute now they'd be nicking their thumbs with a penknife and becoming blood brothers. I was glad. It wasn't often we had a chance to pick up a new recruit for our rich gallery of English eccentrics, but Christopher Bell was a definite candidate.
He was even winding Ivan up. My old chum had brought out some wretched cricket game that I vaguely remember from schooldays. You each picked a team, and then rolled dice to decide the progress of the game. It went on for hours if you were sufficiently masochistic to let it - rather like the real thing, I suppose. Anyway, Christopher had annoyed him by choosing a side that consisted of luminaries through the ages. At the moment, Meryl Streep was 38 not out, although Honore de Balzac had been something of a disappointment earlier. He was vulnerable to the rising ball, apparently.
'Another four,' Christopher chortled.
'It reduces the whole thing to a farce,' Ivan protested. 'Meryl
Streep can't play cricket.'
'She's batting rather well, I thought.' Christopher fired a sly wink in my direction.
Ivan was also a bit miffed that I'd asked him about the Russian ship in the harbour. 'How do I know what a trawler is doing there? Trawling, I assume.'
He didn't like being appointed champion for his country. At least if he was British, he said with a roll of those expressive brown eyes, he could say Queen and Country. Particularly Queen.
'Wouldn't you ever want to live in Moscow?' Christopher asked. I'd heard his answer before, but I still listened with interest.
He pushed back the wings of grey hair with both hands first of all, so that his face looked even leaner and more aristocratic.
'In Moscow,' he said, with a deliberate shudder, 'I would simply dry up and die. It's an awfully grey place full of awfully grey people. I wouldn't wish to embarrass anyone but Russia simply isn't the place for someone with my somewhat colourful tastes. And of course this is greatly to the convenience of my employers. They know I will do anything- absolutely anything - to stay in the West, and they also know that my own preferences do take me to some rather interesting places. You'd be amazed who one bumps into in some of those rather maley clubs.'
'Gosh, you really are a spy then?' Christopher was wide-eyed at this revelation.
'Oh, I shouldn't think so, dear. What would you say, Sam? No, no, my little pieces of tittle-tattle help to keep the computers busy in Moscow but I don't suppose for a moment they tip the balance in the great conflict between right and wrong- whatever they may be. Isn't that so?'
'I wouldn't know,' I said. I didn't either. You couldn't be sure with Ivan. He always seemed to be telling you too much until you thought about it later and realised he'd told you nothing. I was even less sure since my talk with Batty. Perhaps we were both spies. Perhaps that's all there was to espionage: tittle-tattle and words in ears, games of table-cricket in empty cocktail bars. Perhaps spies were ordinary people with ordinary lives.
'By the way,' he said, fishing out his silver-backed notebook again, 'I have some news for you about your chamois-wearing friend.'
Now that did surprise me. I had to be careful what I told Ivan: even as a friend, I was always aware of the fact that he must have other loyalties. I hadn't told him about the badge with the winged AC and I hadn't told him about the second man in the kitchen. On the other hand, I had mentioned the trawler and the man in the photograph because of the possible Russian connections. Even so, I was surprised when he opened his notebook and began reading.
'His name is Kirillina. Nikolai Kirillina. He's one of the naval people at the embassy, although they don't have proper military attaches because Iceland doesn't have any military.' Ivan could only be telling me this because someone wanted me to know. Why? 'You traced him through the sputnik?'
He put his fleshless hand to his forehead. 'Ghastly, isn't it? Apparently he has this wonderful flat with a gorgeous display cabinet bursting with silver and porcelain. Bang in the middle of it he puts one of those horrid little plastic sputniks. Not unlike the sort of artefact you might sell, Christopher.'
Christopher grinned up. Then his grin vanished. 'Oh damn, Meryl's out.'
'Thank God. Well bowled.' Ivan kissed the dice. 'Who's in next?'
'AI Jolson.' He slipped me another wink. 'I've heard he's rather useful with the bat. A lot of these coloured chaps are, you know.'
'You see,' Ivan continued. 'What can you do with these people? They have every opportunity, education, money, everything, and they go and put on display a vulgar memento like that.' He reached over and touched my arm. 'I do hope this isn't hurtful in any way, but I am told he was something of a hand with the ladies.'
'Be a waste if he wasn't. He hasn't disappeared then?'
'Apparently not. Drinkiepoohs, anyone?'
As the waitress got the glasses clinking, I walked over to the window and looked out. Poor Solrun. Even by her reckless
standards, this was quite a mess. For reasons well beyond my imagination, she'd got married to an Icelandic Hell's Angel who already appeared to be the proud possessor of woman and child. And she was also playing around with
a Russian diplomat. It was beginning to sound crazier than the casting for Christopher's cricket team. Who'd she run off with now- King Kong?
The girl came round with the booze and Ivan told her to put it on his bill. I was wondering why Batty thought I could do anything about all this - let alone why I'd want to- when I heard Ivan ask Christopher if he was married.
'Oh, yes, Bella and I have got a lovely little place out at Braintree. I've asked her to think about moving up to Iceland but she isn't terribly keen. At the moment, that is.'
'Would you take out Icelandic citizenship?' I'd been wondering about that.
'Hope to, naturally. Course it's not easy. You have to speak the lingo, of course, and take a local name.'
'After your father?'
'That's right. And since my old man was called Christopher too. I'd have one of these names with a built-in echo. A bit much, I think. How about you, Sam? What was your father's name?'
'Oddly enough, I don't know.'
I'm so used to it that I forget it sometimes makes other people uncomfortable. After a second's silence, Christopher decided not to pursue that one, and started talking about his plans for a sales drive in the morning. I was sorry to hear that. I'd been hoping he might come as interpreter when I went to s e Solrun's mother.
'I'll come,' Ivan volunteered. 'It will be just like being a real reporter. I shall wear a Bur berry and look terribly louche.'
20
When I come to think about it, I've never actually known a woman who rushed off home to mummy in moments of emotional crisis. My wife used to rush out and spend. To her, the cheque-book was a weapon of retaliation: it gave her a strike-back capability that was awesome.
All the other women I'd known used to go to the hairdressers.
Some of them- I'll swear it- used to seek out emotional crises if they'd got word of a classy new crimper.
But I liked the home-to-mummy theory, and I was encouraged by the glint of doubt in Hulda's eyes when I suggested it. Shaking her head like a terrier with a mouse, she said Solrun would never go to her mother's. Since Hulda seemed to be the chairman of the Solrun Defence League, that was good enough for me. I went.
