Black Ice

by Colin Dunne

  36

  In London we don't have weather. Instead we have days when you can get taxis and days when you can't get taxis, days when you have to hurry to the pub and days when you can stroll. Occasionally you get glimpses of weather in those spaces between the buildings if you look overhead. But for the most part weather is something that happens to you on holiday.

  In Iceland they've got weather and to spare. When I got back from the base, I decided to let the day and myself just drift around. I spent four hours wandering round the city, and the weather got me wherever I went. On street corners the wind mugged me, tugging at my hair and pulling my tie. Plump white clouds, like the ones produced by smiling steam engines in kids' books, would without warning be replaced by scowling, sooty-coloured clouds so low they almost touched the roofs. Then the wind and the rain ganged up to scare me and, by the time I'd found a doorway to hide in, the wind scrubbed the sky clean and my face burned to a sun that was unfiltered by city muck and dust. If it had snowed too, it would've been a typical Icelandic day.

  I sent Sally a card with a picture of a guillemot reassuring her that conservationists need not worry about its future so long as it retains its flavour. Then I bought her something white and woolly to put in the drawer along with all the other untouched presents from Daddy.

  I even went right over to Vesturbrun. Outside Solrun's block of flats, two men sat in a car smoking and waiting for their shifts to end.

  I passed the sports hall where, on my first trip to the country, I watched a Russian and an American locked in symbolic battle over a chess-board. They made a great pair. One- handsome, fancy dresser, pleasure-loving, never far from a pretty girl or a gin and tonic, dashing on to the tennis court. That was the Russian. So naturally the American spent all his time bolted up behind doomed moods of wild black genius. Somewhere the casting had gone wrong.

  The battle was still being fought but with different champions now.

  Later, I sat in the shadows of Hulda's sitting-room and listened to her soft voice, as the wind and the light prowled round outside looking for chinks in the defences.

  Quite out of the blue she said that she'd hoped me and Solrun would make some sort of couple. I hardly knew what to say. Weakly, I muttered something about only spending a few days together.

  She soon brushed that aside. 'Many people spend half their lives finding that they do not like each other,' she said. 'So why shouldn't you find love in a week?'

  It's one thing playing the cynical old seen-it-all sod with young reporters, but it's quite another with someone who's twice your age and seen five times as much, so I shuffled my feet and settled for looking foolish.

  I was thinking about an early night when the phone went.

  'For you,' she said. 'An American.'

  It was Palli. He was in a coin box. He spoke in a hushed, excited voice.

  'You wanna meet Oscar Murphy?'

  'Again?'

  'Don't be stupid, Sam. The real Oscar Murphy. My buddy.' If l didn't, I was the only one. 'Yes, I'd like to talk to him. But why would he want to talk to me?' Finger-tips to the head was all it took to remind me of the pan incident.

  'He reckons you can maybe fix him a deal with that Icelandic cop you're friendly with.'

  I remembered Petursson's words. 'That depends what he's

  done. Anyway, what's wrong with the Americans?'

  'He thinks he'll get a better deal off the Icelanders and the

  Americans won't dare to change it.'

  He could be right. It wouldn't have mattered anyway- I had to go.

  I grabbed a jacket and a few thousand pounds in case he wanted a Coke. As I was flying out Hulda stood by the door.

  'You are going to see her?'

  'Who?'

  'Solrun?'

  'I wish I was, I can tell you. No, I'm going to see a couple of blokes for a drink and a chat.'

  'She is up there in the mountains. That is where she is.' The old lady smiled towards the distant hills.

  The lime-green Ford was in the square outside the Hotel Borg and Palli was at the wheel.

  'Where do we meet him?' I said, as I pulled the door shut. He didn't answer. He didn't need to. My answer was a forearm like warm steel that slid across my throat and then thumbs searching for the carotid arteries.

  If I'd wanted to show off my classical education, I could've told them they get their name from the Greek word for sleep because the Ancients supposed that it sent you to sleep if someone blocked them.

  My last vision was a stocking-masked head in the mirror. I did a few karate chops and judo throws all by myself in the front seat. They caused about as much pain as a fly's final spasm does to sticky-paper.

  I sank into darkness. Those Ancients knew a thing or two.

  37

  When I woke up, I was sealed inside my own body. Blind. Deaf. Dumb. And paralysed. Yet I was thinking so I must be alive buried alive inside myself.

  It was a nightmare so instantly terrifying that I made a convulsive effort to throw it off, and then the nightmare doubled. This was no mad dream. This was real.

  Panic rocked my mind and shook my soul. I was being buried alive in a black coffin which was pitching from side to side as it swung down into the earth. Fear ran like flames through veins shaking sanity out of my finger-ends and putting reason to flight. It was true. I was locked up in my own body and my soundless screams rang only in my own head. I was the last man on earth. Me and Johnny Cash.

  Johnny Cash.

  Somewhere, far far away, Johnny Cash was singing.

  Now I know that the end of the world isn't going to be a lot of laughs for the likes of me, but even a vengeful God wouldn't hit me with Johnny Cash in my last moments.

  Intently, I listened again. It was one of those prison dirges ...

  I could hear. Not much. Indistinctly. But I could hear.

  At that moment the pitching to and fro stopped and the floor beneath me rose up, smashed me in the back and on the back of my head, so that I bounced upwards, and then fell back again. On cold metal. It hurt but it was worth it. I wasn't cut off from the rest of the world after all. For that relief, they could bounce me all day.

  Consciously, I set about finding out what bits of me were still working and what they could find out about my surroundings. The cold metal was against my fingers. My arms were tied behind me, my fingers free. And I really could hear. All around me was a dull roar, partly vibration and partly sound. I could smell. Oil, petrol. Then I knew. I was trussed up in the boot of a car.

  Right then we hit what must've been a pothole and I was thrown around again.

  At least I could do something about that now. Hope surged through me, washing away the panic. I was lying on my side. All I had to do was to wriggle until my shoulders were against the wall of the boot, then stretch out my legs to the other side so that I was firmly wedged. Better, much better. No more bouncing.

  And my legs were free. Free and working, what's more. Fingers, legs, at least ten per cent of my hearing - I could always be a disc jockey.

  I started to work on that. It wasn't my hearing that was on the blink. My head was bound too. I stretched the muscles of my face to feel it. Eyes, ears and mouth were all tightly covered by some stretchy, sticky binding- probably that bandage they use to hold pulled muscles. My nose was flattened but I could still breathe.

  Then I remembered meeting Palli and the stocking mask in the rear-view mirror. They'd trussed me up and hi-jacked me, and were now ferrying me over rough Icelandic roads, with accompaniment by Johnny Cash on the radio. Which meant it was the base radio because the Icelandic government would not risk corrupting their citizens with that rubbish, and for once I was right with them.

  Where? Where were they taking me? And why? Was this how they'd hi-jacked the fake Oscar? Perhaps they wanted me for a fourth for bridge. Ouch. We hit a pothole four-foot deep and my head rang bells on the back of the boot.

  That focused my attention on where I was. It doesn't matter
where you live, one of our old Barnardo's aunties used to say, so long as it's home. For now, this was home. I braced myself again to get more comfortable. I tried again to work my hands and my jaw against the bindings, but always they slackened, then resumed their tight grip. Arm fastenings. Same there. I was tied so tightly at the wrists that I couldn't even work my fingers back to feel what they'd used. I tried to push my hands down to get my legs through. I couldn't get anywhere near, and every time I tried I got another bouncing round the boot. One thing was for sure- I'd never make a television cop.

  Television. On television, bound victims back up against a saw-edged strip of metal and free themselves that way. All the time. Grunting and sweating, I manoeuvred myself around my metal tomb, feeling with my fingers for anything like a saw edge. I couldn't find any edge at all, saw or otherwise. I banged my head a few more times and that made me conscious of the pain in my arms and shoulders with being trussed so tightly.

  I sagged back. Lie back and think of Iceland.

  I ran through the who and why questions again. It had to be Sol run. They must still think that I knew where she was. 'They' being one enraged Oscar Murphy with a Colt .45. And my pal Palli had set me up for it beautifully.

  Braced on my side again, my fingers were doubled up in the dirt in the bottom of the boot. Dirt and paper. Slowly I realised that my half-numb fingers were resting on a small sheet of paper- as far as I could tell, about the size of a pound note. A garage bill perhaps. A petrol receipt. A love letter. Who cared so long as it bore a name or an address. It took me about five minutes to force my arms up my back so that I could push it down the back of my trousers. But I did it. That made me feel useful. It wasn't an emotion I'd experienced for some time.

  I must have faded away then. The next thing I knew was silence. After the bouncing and the drumming, it was quite eerie. Before I could begin to evaluate that, I felt a big hand lock around my upper arm and heave me to my knees. Another grabbed the front of my cord suit and I was hauled over the car boot. When they stood me on the ground, I was shaking so much I had to lean back against the car.

  'He can't hear you.'

  'Sure he can hear me. You can hear me okay, can't you?'

  'There. I told you he couldn't.'

  Powerful fingers tugged at the bandages round my head. He prised an opening over one ear and another so that part of my mouth was free.

  'This is the guy, Palli. See where I got him on the head with the pan?'

  All the time he was pulling at the bandages, I was trying to assess my new surroundings. The first thing I realised was that almost immediately I was covered in a fine drizzle, and the drumming of the car was now replaced by a great whooshing roar of sound that seemed to fill the background. Together they meant something but, with my head still echoing from the journey, I couldn't quite piece it together.

  'Evening, Oscar,' I said, as I managed to free my top lip from

  another layer of bandage. 'Nice to meet you after all this time.'

  'Manners. All these Brits got such cute manners, Palli.'

  'He's cute all right. I told you he was.'

  'Is that why Solrun wanted him? I mean, Jesus, he don't look much.'

  'It's because I'm nervous,' I said. 'It always upsets my complexion.'

  Suddenly I could smell his gut breath as he came close to me, and feel the warmth of it on my lips.

  'You gonna be nervous, don't you worry about that. You are gonna be very fucking nervous. Nervous and cute, eh? I never knew she went for nervous cute guys like you. To me you’re just a man who played around with my wife and that means you don't have no future.'

  'She wasn't your wife.' I said that because I wanted to give the conversation a push from my end. I had to try to work out what sort of man he was and what his reactions were likely to be and I only had my hearing to go on. Reaction was what I wanted- reaction was what I got. I felt myself jolted forward as he grabbed my clothes again and I could sense his face an inch or two from my own.

  'She was my wife,' he screamed, 'Palli was standing in for me. I asked him to. That was me she was marrying, not him. Tell him, Palli.'

  'Like he says.'

  He was still shaking me. 'She was going to get the money and come over and join me in the States. Then, Mister Goddam Smart-Ass, we were going to get properly married. With choirs and things like that. It was all fixed up. You understand that now, you cute little bastard?'

  I did understand it. I understood a few more things, too.

  'Then she upped and ran off with her Russian fancy-man, did she, Oscar?'

  I was halfway into a flinch, waiting for the blow that would bring. Or at least another gale of stomach-stench and rage. I got neither. He even let go of my clothes. When he did speak, his voice was easy and pleasantly conversational.

  'Maybe she did. Or maybe that's what she's planning to do. I

  asked her little Russian boyfriend about it and he wasn't too helpful. I coulda made him more helpful but Palli here said we didn't want to start no Third World War or nothing. Me, I don't mind.'

  As he spoke, chuckling gently from time to time, he spun me round, holding my collar with one hand and sawing through the binding around my wrists with the other. Then he spun me back again, one-handed. In the jumble of new sounds and voices, I'd at last managed to work out where I was. The spray and the whooshing sound- we must be close, very close, to one of the tumultuous waterfalls that you find in Iceland where the rivers, swollen with the melting snows, crash over the rocks. I rocked around for a minute, partly at the novelty of having my arms free and feeling the blood rush in them, and partly at the proximity of tons of cascading water.

  'So now I'm gonna ask you. I'm gonna ask you where Solrun's hiding and you're gonna tell me and we'll all be friends. Palli here says you're a good guy and I believe him, so naturally I don't wanna hurt someone who's a friend of Palli’s. It's reasonable, you gotta admit. She's my wife. I'm looking for my fucking wife. Nothing funny about that, is there? It's not crazy or anything, is it? So you tell us. Okay?'

  That did worry me. The careful control in his voice, the way

  he had to rationalise what he was doing, the insistence that Solrun was his wife, the way he tried to hold a line of logic ... he'd gone. He was mad.

  'By the way, Palli,' I whispered, when I reckoned Oscar was out of earshot, 'just in case I don't get out of this alive, I'd like you to know I do appreciate your efforts on my behalf.'

  'I had to get you out of the house,' he hissed back at me. 'He was going to come in and carve up the old lady, too.'

  By this time we were actually doing that shouting-whispering up against each other's ears to be heard over the crash of the water. When I'd thought I was next to the water before, I was wrong. Oscar had walked me about thirty yards- I counted the steps-over rough rocks to what I now knew must be the edge of the waterfall. Here the spray streamed down my face and my clothes were drenched. He'd gone back to the car for some thing, which gave me my only chance to try to lay claim on the friendship I'd built with Palli.

  'Anyway, you said you were going back to the States.'

  'I was. I am. I just gotta get Oscar out of this_ hole.'

  'He's in a hole? Oh that's great .. .'

  'He's gone nuts, Sam, can't you see? They were working on him back home, phone calls and letters, drip, drip, drip, until his nerve went.' He held my arms hard to drive home the urgency of what he was saying. 'Do what he says .. .'

  'Do I have a lot of options?'

  'Listen. Do what he says, play along, I'll try to get you out from under ... you'd better tell him, that's all. Hey Oscar, what's the rope for- we're not having a lynching are we?'

  His laugh was too sharp and too quick to be anything other

  than apprehensive. I didn't like the sound of that. Palli wasn't a man who apprehended easily.

  'Your friend here's gonna tell me and we'll go straight up and see my wife. No problem. It's make-your-mind-up time, cutie. Where is she?'
<
br />   'I don't know. I really don't.'

  He was chuckling. Anywhere else you'd have taken it for good humour.

  'Look, I didn't come up here for the air, you know. Solrun's got a summer-house up here. Hell, I've been there, man. But they all look the same to me, all this fucking country looks the same to me. I was gonna ask her but someone got to her first and did some asking. But you know. You've gotta know. Which one, cutie? Tell me which one.'

  So that's why we were out here. He was right. She did have a cabin, somewhere near Thrastarskogur, which was near a lake on the road out to Gullfoss - if I remembered correctly. It wouldn't have mattered anyway. There were dozens and dozens of the bright little cabins. I'd no idea which was hers.

  I thought perhaps Oscar wasn't paying rewards for information like that.

  'Why did you come back?' I asked, by way of an alternative.

  'I told you.' He sounded stubborn and peevish, for some reason. 'I come back for my wife.'

  'That didn't bother you when you left her.'

  'I didn't know the truth then. They told me she was a tramp, even said she was some sort of spy and that she'd been twisting secrets out of me and making me into a traitor. That's a thing I'd never be, a traitor. Palli'll tell you that.'

  'That's right,' Palli said.

  'Sent me back and got me kicked out of the marines. Yessir, that's what they did to me.'

  At least I'd got him talking, and while he was talking he wasn't doing any of the alternatives. 'So why did you come back then?'

  'I got friends, see. Good friends. They told me what was

  really going on. Soon as I found out, I came out here right away.'

  I was so soaked that my clothes were sticking to me and the