by Colin Dunne
Which meant, if the coughing man wasn't there, that the flat was empty. Me, I'm like nature, I abhor a vacuum.
Since my last visit, the only improvement to the environment was a fresh vomit stain in the lift. The corridor was empty. From the flat next door came the sound of American voices from the base radio and a small child's monotonous pleading. Happy-family time.
On the door of Palli's flat, swinging from a central drawing pin, was a note. It was scrawled in thick blurred pencil lines on the back of a computerised bill. I read it, and read it again -
'Lykillinn era sinum stad.'
It didn't mean a lot to me. In fact, it didn't mean a thing to me. Not many Icelandic words do.
I took a closer look at the door. It wasn't much more than a thin board on a frame with a key-turn opening, which meant it only had one fastening. Under pressure from my hand, it gave a little before springing back. One bash would do it. One heel kick would rip out the screws that held it to the jamb.
It would also rip all the neighbours out of their flats to see what was going on. And what would I find inside? Maybe Palli lying on his bed reading comics and smoking while a friend borrowed his bike. No: whatever real spies may do, kicking doors down wasn't the answer.
I examined the note again in the hope that my Icelandic had improved. It hadn't. Next door the woman was singing and the child was crying - which was cause and which was effect was anyone's guess. Two doors down, I heard a man's voice getting louder as he got nearer to the corridor. His door opened and his voice, echoing in the tiled corridor, stopped when he saw me. He was a weathered-looking man, heavily built, in an old leather jerkin. He stood there, scratching his belly, then went back inside.
Then I remembered the credit card trick beloved of private eyes. The latch didn't take Amex, but thought seriously about Diners before rejecting that too.
I stared at the door again, hoping it would talk to me. In a way it did. Woman, child and Palli resident, plus one more man who may be resident or guest. Keys. How did they all come and go? Did people like that have a selection of keys ready cut for house guests? No, they did not. So what did they do?
Bruce Willmott, who was at school with me, had five brothers and two sisters. They didn't all have keys that was for sure. So what ... I remembered.
I reached up and ran my fingers along the shelf above the door. The key was there. They did what most people did who weren't too worried about burglars because they'd nothing worth nicking. They stuck the key in the nearest hiding place and left a note saying, 'Key in Usual Place'.
The door opened easily. I stepped inside and closed it behind me.
The coughing man suddenly became an eight-foot Viking in my imagination. Every creak became a footfall, every shadow an ambush. Even my breathing was deafening. I leaned back against the door and calmed down my fears. I was inside. I couldn't go back.
'Hello,' I called out in a breezy voice. 'Anyone at home?
Palli? You there, Palli?'
With thumping, confident steps, I strode into the living room. Some of the steamy smell had lifted, otherwise it was the same. If I abhorred a vacuum then she abhorred a vacuum cleaner.
The first bedroom was hers and the baby's. His too, lucky feller. Her clothes were heaped in a jumble on a chair, spilling down to the floor. She'd propped a chipped mirror against the window. That, with a few flattened tubes and topless pots, took care of her glamour requirements. Over the duvet cover, Snow White and the dwarfs scampered, presumably looking for somewhere to have a wash. Both pillows were badly bruised.
The second bedroom was unfurnished: no bed, no chairs, no carpet, nothing. But someone was camping out there just the same.
It was the tidiest corner of the whole flat. One olive-green sleeping-bag had been rolled up and stacked against the wall. Beside that stood a nylon tote-bag. A few items of clothing had been folded and put into a neat pile: roll-neck sweater, patch pocket canvas trousers, a camo-shirt. A green woollen stocking hat held the pocket debris: a handful of American coins, an airline boarding pass, a pair of nail dippers, a book of matches from a bar in New Jersey inscribed 'No Faggots Allowed', two ballpoint pens. Next to that lay a duty-free carton of tipped Camels, ripped open with several packs missing, and a bottle of Jack Daniels Black Label, either half-empty or half-full, depending on whether you're a pessimist or an optimist.
Whoever he was, he liked things neat and tidy. The map of Iceland might have unfolded itself if he hadn't been careful to pin it down with a good solid weight.
But that's the thing about a Colt .45 automatic - they do weigh a lot. Now I don't know a lot about guns- when I first read James Bond I wondered why he shot people with the Pope's hat - but I do know that this one was very big, very wicked, and very dangerous.
If you could manage to lift it, that is. I could, with an effort. I held it in my handkerchief while I inspected it. Full magazine, one up the spout, safety on, which is how a working pistol should be if you're thinking of putting it to some use. And if you're not, why not carry a willing smile instead?
It wasn't new, but it was well cared-for. Which was more than you could say for me.
Then I thought of the ID tag which marines have on their shirts, inside and just below the collar where they have their name, rank and number. Someone else had thought of it too. Name rank and number had been snipped off. All that remained was the assurance that this shirt met USMC specifications. It was when I was trying to fold the shirt as neatly as I’d found it that I felt the photograph in the pocket. I say photograph, but it was only one of those instant snaps, so the focusing wasn't too good and there was a lot of glare from the snow.
Even so, it couldn't have been anyone but Solrun. She was standing on a wooden verandah outside what looked like a sumarhus- the country cabins the Icelanders race to for their summer weekends. You could see the snow in the background and Solrun was wrapped in hood and gloves. So was the baby she was holding up for the camera.
If that's what it was. It was baby-shaped. It wore baby clothes. But that was all you could see. It looked like one of the in-arms models- much the same as the one I'd seen here earlier -rather than the running-around ones. That was about as far as my infant recognition took me.
I wasn't expecting to find that. I wasn't expecting the knock on the door either.
The first knock was hesitant. The second was more forceful. The third rattled the door on its hinges, and there were raised voices behind it too.
By then I'd shoved the photo back in the shirt and put it back on the pile. As I raced through to the bathroom I was taking off my jacket and tie, and I prayed that the shaky-looking shower fitting worked as I stuck my head under and turned it on. It did. Then all I needed was a towel- I found one that had apparently been used for mucking out elephants- before I answered the door.
What I saw was the man in the leather jerkin I'd encountered earlier, and a watery-eyed woman he'd pulled in as a witness. What they saw was a half-dressed man who was in the middle of washing his hair.
'Ja?' I asked, giving my head another scrub.
The man, who'd been poised for action but had now dropped
back a step in puzzlement, aimed some hesitant Icelandic at me. I retaliated with a minute and a half of rapid German along the lines of my being Palli's best friend from Hamburg. I mentioned Palli 's name four times just to make sure.
'Ah, Palli?' he said, eventually.
'Ja,' I said, congratulating him as though he'd just won the pools. 'Friend,' I said in English, tapping myself on the chest.
'Friend,' the woman said, treating me to a brown-toothed smile. Still trying to smile at me, she shot a volley out of the side of her mouth at her husband. What it said, at a guess, was what the hell was he playing at, dragging her out of her flat with a lot of nutty talk about burglars and then disturbing innocent tourists in the middle of their toilet preparations. After all, whoever heard of a burglar hanging about to wash his hair?
'Guten morgen,' she sai
d to me, in a moment of inspiration. She led him off by the arm and the moment their door closed she was at him like an angry monkey.
Five minutes later I left. It may not have been a very profitable morning, but at least I'd got my hair washed. I wanted to look my best for the US Navy top brass, didn't I?
26
Forget East meets West. Forget about those places like Berlin and Korea where they've scratched a line in the dust across the road so they can stand eyeball to eyeball. These are quaint rituals, as formalised and lifeless as the quadrille.
Instead, turn the globe on its side. Up on top of the world, that's the place. Without walls or barbed wire, without salutes or ceremony, no check-points, no stiff courtesies, no furtive soldiers' button-swapping, the two sides are already engaged. Battle is joined. Warfare has commenced. Only so far this is an exhibition fight: like karate killers demonstrating their skills, they stop always a fraction short of death.
Between Canada and Scotland there is a 1600-mile stretch of water that has been called the most strategic highway in the world. From their naval base at Kola, the Russian submarines slip unseen down this highway and out into the Atlantic. There, if they felt like it, they could s and between America and Europe, or simply sit on America's front doorstep slotting rockets in at short range.
Anyone who enjoys a symbol might like to think about this: the name which the Russians give to the base from which all this wickedness is unleashed, in America- phonetically at any rate- is the name of a fizzy drink. Kola. Cola. The sinister, the frivolous.
It's not quite so charmingly simple, of course. The Americans don’t just sit around with their Cokes. Slap-bang in the middle of this route south is Iceland. As long ago as 1920, a man who later earned something of a reputation as a tactician was talking about the strategic importance of the country; his name was Lenin. Early in World War II, the Brits and the Americans grabbed it before Hitler could, and after the war the Americans left, then moved back in.
The Russian submarines-some twice the size of jumbo jets- may be unseen but they are not undetected. Like cuddly black nosed pandas, Orion P-3C's and AWACS with the giant mushrooms on their backs, trudge backwards and forwards, to and fro, over the cold sea. Beneath it electronic eavesdroppers called sonar buoys pass back details of all the passing traffic. So finely, so accurately can they do this, that the Americans can recognise individual vessels. 'I see old Igor still hasn't got that bearing fixed,' they say. They sit there counting the ships as easily as little boys collecting train numbers.
It is a game of blind man's bluff. Both are blind. Both, we hope, are bluffing.
That would be an acceptable way of preserving the status quo if it wasn't for one thing- the chance Russians have of changing it. They can't invade, of course. This isn't Afghanistan: it is a part of Europe. They can't nurture revolution: it's one of the few countries in the world that is prosperous and classless.
No, they have one chance. And that is to make the Americans so hated that they have to pack up and go home.
27
'That's what I'd do,' said Andy Dempsie, sawing off a chunk of steak no bigger than a standard house brick. He held it in midair as he finished his statement. 'Make 'em hate us. That's what I'd do if l was sitting down in Gardastraeti. You bet.'
The steak brick vanished.
He wasn't in Gardastraeti where the Russians had their embassy. He was facing me across a bare-topped table in the Navy Exchange snack bar on the NATO base at Keflavik. It was one of those places you couldn't hope to describe without a hatful of hyphens - it was a no-frills, fast-food, stand-in-line, serve-yourself place. All the phrases that in Britain guaranteed you a hamburger you could heel your shoes with, but here it meant a pizza as deep as his steak and just as delicious. And the Milwaukee beer was sweeping up the remains of the hangover from my long night with Palli.
'So,' he went on, 'when you phoned so early this morning- a London newspaperman, would you believe - and said you wanted to talk about one of our guys, I thought, here we go, it's happened. What's he done, this Murphy? Murdered a coupla dozen Iceland kids and every damn one of them as cute as hell? It's got to happen. One of these days. But it's not like that, you say?'
I told him again that it wasn't like that. I'd told him before when I arrived at the Public Affairs office, and he'd left one of his clerks to pull out the records on Oscar Murphy while we ate. It wasn't hard to see why he was their Public Affairs man. With his wide-open face and non-stop chatter, plus a hair trigger laugh, he was one of those blessed men who made you smile the minute you saw him. I've met a few with that gift, but not many. It's the sort of talent that opens doors and minds and mouths and if I could choose any talent, that's the one I'd go for.
He was a big-framed man and, although time and good times had added another chin and stomach, he still looked fit. He was wearing loose, colourful golf-course clothes.
'Another beer? Sure you want another beer. Now, where was I .. .' He'd kept up three lines of conversation since we met, and still managed to keep eating. 'Oh yeah, the doc. So I says to him, sure I smoke, forty-a-day, sometimes fifty. Do you drink? he asks, and I says, you bet I do, a few beers, a jugful of martinis before dinner, wine, a few big brandies later. I thought, dam mitt, I'm not going to lie to these medics, they rule our lives. He writes it all down then he looks up and says, "Mr Dempsie, you're in great shape. Whatever you're doing don't stop." Not bad, huh?'
Rich laughter rolled from him at the thought of how he'd cheated the medical profession. He finished off the steak, and speared the last dozen chips before pushing the plate away.
As he sat back, rocking the chair up on its rear legs, he lit a menthol cigarette and said: 'Nothing personal, Sam, but I truly am sorry to see you here.'
'Me? Why?'
'Because you're the guys who win and lose wars. Most of the time you win 'em for someone else and lose 'em for us.'
'But you're the country that invented advertising and public relations.'
'I know. And we keep getting whipped at it. Stay there.' He got up and came back a minute later with two more beers. 'One of the political boys was up from Washington doing a report and he said,' Dempsie puffed out his chest and lowered his voice, ' "The greatest threat to the American presence in the North Atlantic is the interface between the American male and the Icelandic female." That's what he said and it's true. But you wouldn't believe what we do to stay out of trouble.'
He recited it. They vetted servicemen to make sure they were suitable. They brought as many married couples as possible. Single men only stayed a year. They gave them everything they could to keep them on base: food at a quarter of Reykjavík prices, shops, clubs, sport, country lodges for fishing and skiing and night-classes in everything short of nuclear physics.
They were so low-profile, he said, they were almost under ground. No men were permitted off base in uniform. Even out of uniform they had to be back on base before the Reykjavik night-life had begun to move. They even piped their three television channels around the camp so that it wouldn't get into the Iceland homes and corrupt them.
'You ever seen a US serviceman walking around in uniform in this country?'
I thought about that. 'I've not seen a US serviceman at all, as far as I know.'
He slapped the table with his non-smoking hand. 'There you are. Five thousand here, including dependents, and you wouldn’t even know it. We are so careful, Sam, I'm telling you so very very careful.'
'You're winning, then.'
With a sigh and a shake of the head, he murmured: 'We don't stand a chance.' He waved his cigarette hand at a man in aviator glasses who was feeding the juke-box. 'That's the man who's getting the computer to cough up on Oscar Murphy.'
'Why don't you stand a chance?' I didn't want that to get lost.
He assumed an expression of candid philosophical despair.
'Have you seen these Icelandic women?' He ground his cigarette out in an ashtray. 'And we have to persuade our fellers to stay
in and study basic home economics? That's the interface he meant. Oh boy. Now you're going to tell me that Murphy's mixed up in some girl trouble?'
'Well .. .'
That was enough. He came bolt upright and rested his arms on the table and stared at me, waiting for the rest. I couldn't have lied to him. He seemed to have half-guessed anyway.
'Not necessarily trouble, but I'm writing a piece about an Icelandic girl and he's been ...'
I pulled an apologetic face. He nodded and chewed his top lip.
'To be absolutely honest,' I added, 'I don't think he's here any more. But I thought you might have something on your records. Now I suppose I don't get any help?'
He scrubbed that out of the air with his hand. 'We can help, we will. That's where we're so stupid. Free press, open society.
Christ! No wonder we don't have any control.' Somehow he dredged that big laugh up from somewhere. 'Don't look so grim, Sam, we'll sort it out.'
He lit another cigarette and the hospital smell of menthol drifted over.
'What I was saying before, I have a lot of sympathy for the Icelanders who don't want us here. They'd only just got their full independence from Denmark when we moved in during the war.'
I thought it was time I showed that I'd done some homework too. 'But don't all the polls show that two-thirds want you here?'
'They do, sure they do. Politically, rationally they know that. But I think that emotionally they'd like to be neutral. All those hundreds of years when they had the shit knocked out of them day after day by good old Mother Nature - I mean, if you weren't suffocated in a ten-foot snow drift then you had your ass burned off by a volcano- no one was interested then. Now it's strategically important, and they're pulling in the bucks too as it happens, and suddenly everyone wants to be their best friend. I can see they wouldn't like that. I can see they'd feel mightily inclined to tell us all to get the hell out. I'd feel like that too. It wouldn't take too much to turn that two-thirds one-third round.'
