by Colin Dunne
'Yes. Your friend.'
Well, he didn't have a lot of friends and if they wanted to put my name in, they could. He never did get around to going back to America. Now he was in a cool steel drawer in there. At least that was as much American as it was Scandinavian: all stainless steel and controlled temperatures. It never seemed quite right to me in Britain. I always thought our morgues ought to have them dressed in cardigans and sitting up in rocking-chairs holding the Radio Times.
'A violent man, a violent end,' he added.
'Not drowning?'
'No, not drowning.' He paused and moved his head to look around. Mid-morning. The lawns were quiet and peaceful. The sun lit up the white buildings. He seemed to take in some of that tranquillity before he began to explain.
'His fingers were smashed. The finger-ends, I mean.' He rubbed his own together to show what he meant. 'The nails were broken, the flesh was torn and lacerated. They looked like ... stubbed-out cigars.'
'Nasty. But you don't die of biting your finger-nails.'
'No, and he didn't drown. At first we thought he did. People who drown generally go a strange pink colour, but in Palli's case, the pinkness- a sort of dusky discoloration- was limited to the knees, the elbows and the hips. We cannot confirm this until a full post-mortem, but there doesn't seem to be any froth in the air passages and lungs either.'
'Which means?'
'Which means he didn't drown.' He stood up and leaned back so he could still see me. 'Palli was frozen to death .. .'
Then I did remember what Palli had said.
'Hop in,' I said. 'I think you're going to like this.'
45
Like new lovers, the sea and the boats played all afternoon. The sea surged in with sloppy kisses, the boats giggled and wriggled like schoolgirls.
'What are they cooking up? What the hell are they cooking up?'
Dempsie had been asking the same question, in assorted forms, all afternoon.
We were sitting in an unmarked car at the top of the slope that led down to the harbour. Below us, the Pushkin was tucked hard against the wall.
We'd been there for four hours, waiting for Petursson to arrive with the necessary authority to board the vessel. He was clearly having problems. He'd said himself that his government wouldn't like it. No one particularly wanted to go and kick the Soviet Union on the shin if they could avoid it.
It was when he'd said Palli had frozen to death that I remembered what he'd said to me. He pretended that I'd said Solrun was on the Pushkin. He'd done it to save my life, I knew that. Oscar was going to throw me under the waterfall again, and I wouldn't have stood another minute of sub-aqua rope tricks by that time. He'd pretended they'd beaten the answer out of me. But there was more to it than that. He wasn't a stupid man. He wouldn't have suggested it unless he thought it could be true.
And the Pushkin was a freezer trawler.
Dempsie and f had spent four hours sitting in the car, me thinking about the stateless man in the cold steel drawer, and
Dempsie trying to read the minds of the men below decks on the trawler. There was little enough life on board. Two fishermen real sloppy unshaven fishermen, not the clean-cut military types - had come ashore and returned with some shopping. Three of them had been doing some repair work to the gantry
over the aft-deck. Otherwise, it was quiet.
We waited. Dempsie smoked his menthol cigarettes and
opened the windows so the smoke was swept away.
He squeezed his fleshy face between his fingers and pounded at his knee with his fist. 'Come on, what is it they're lining up for us? I know these bastards. Every time we work out one move, they've made three more. Where are they taking us? What are they leading us into? Christ, Sam, here he is.'
It was Petursson. If he could feel the pressure from Dempsie urging him on, he didn't let it show. Stone-faced, he unwound
without haste from the back of the official Volvo and the two uniformed men accompanying him waited while the driver passed out his hat and his raincoat. Again, as though preparing for a stroll through the park, he put on the latter and held the former and marched up to the gangplank of the Pushkin.
'What're they saying, dammit?' Dempsie muttered as he leaned this way and that to try to make sense out of the babble of voices. A tall woman in a straight grey dress appeared to be Petursson's interpreter. She stood between him and a skinny wilting figure, wearing what looked like a soiled vest under a heavy overcoat. Beside him was the wide-bodied man-woman I'd greeted a few days earlier. By the way she pushed in she must be the commissar.
Then Petursson raised one arm and waved me down.
'Don't let him foul it up,' Dempsie said. He knew there wasn't a chance of smuggling an American intelligence agent like himself on board.
'It has been made clear to the captain here,' Petursson said, as I ran up to them, 'that this document here authorises us to board this vessel. Follow me.'
With delicate steps, he picked his way up the gangplank,
with me, the interpreter and the two uniformed men in tow. The captain - in the grubby vest and overcoat- shouted, and the woman grunted at the captain and jabbed him in the back. But they parted.
'Hurry,' Petursson whispered to me, taking me by the arm.
'Once the Soviet Embassy gets here, things will become very difficult.'
I followed him down into the belly of the ship. Steep
companionways let out into dark narrow corridors. On the mess deck a dozen or so men were watching a film. It was either porn or the history of a pink blancmange factory. They hardly gave us a glance as we clattered by. A minute later we heard them cheer: presumably the pink blancmanges had clashed.
We went past the gutting benches and the vertical plate freezers, down through the factory floor until we came to a steel cover in the deck. Petursson had to put on his hat so he could use both hands to move it. I took hold of the iron-ring beneath and heaved out the foot-deep plug which blocked the hatch.
The gasp of cold air that swirled out behind it was like a draught from the grave. We both peered down into the half-lit space around the ladder.
'So,' Petursson said. 'No Oscar.'
That didn't bother me too much, but then I didn't have to justify raiding Soviet ships.
He handed me a pocket torch. 'You first.' I turned and went down the steel-runged ladder.
It was only about a seven-foot drop and when I got to the bottom I turned and swung the torch beam round. I've never seen so many damned eyes in all my life, and they were all looking at me.
I was in a space maybe a yard square. On all sides, stacked from deck to ceiling, were slabs of frozen fish. Wherever the torch beam went, it found glittering silver bodies, caught and crammed and crushed into hundredweight blocks. Tails, gaping mouths, scales and fins all solidified in motionless shoals, shimmering in the torchlight. But mostly it was eyes, bulging, white-framed, glassy, glossy eyes that caught the light. When I breathed in, the air was like broken glass. It was thirty below. The cold bit like a rusty razor and was just as deadly. A weak yellow light in the deckhead hardly took the edge off the dark once I moved the torch away. And the only sound was the soft groan of the generator- to remind you that you were being frozen to death.
Forty-five minutes, the pathologist had said. That's how long a fit man could live in those conditions. I shivered. And it had nothing to do with the temperature.
What had it really been like for Palli down there? There was only one way to find out.
'Drop the bung back in.'
Petursson's face, unusually anxious, appeared above me.
'There is no need for that.'
'Seriously. Put it back in place.'
It dropped in with a heavy sigh. I switched off the torch. The deckhead lamp was no more than a clouded moon of light. In the dark, the generator's hum sounded like the voice of the cold itself, sawing roughly into your bones. Tiny flashes of light darted between the heaped shoals so that I glimpsed a lolling mouth, a fierce e
ye, a sudden sweep of the iron-coloured fish.
I climbed two rungs up the ladder and switched the torch on. Dark stains, black by torchlight, marked the steel rim. Where a ragged lip of metal stuck out, I found a sliver of ripped flesh. Then more, where he'd rammed his fingers into a crack to try to tear his way out.
I banged the underside of the bung. I was ready to come out.
The silence that followed was too long. I flashed the torch around at the banks of gaping fish and the shiver which ran through my body owed nothing to the freezing air: that one was hatched in the imagination. Briefly I knew the fear that Palli must have faced. Then the bung rose and with relief I saw Petursson's friendly face.
'That's where he got his manicure.' I heard him curse at the grisly sight.
'And that,' he said, pointing to ripped wires on the deck, 'is where they disconnected the emergency alarm.'
'Probably spoiling their film-show.'
The bottom of the plug, which was made out of some sort of cork-type insulating material, was rough cast and it had taken tiny chunks of flesh off his fingers where he'd been scraping and pushing at it. And all the time he'd be getting weaker and slower, the warmth of his body draining away until he folded up and died. In the dark, with only his terror for company.
Even for Palli, it was a hell of a way to die.
46
'There's only two ways you can hold a fork,' Dempsie was saying. 'There's the logical way and there's upside down. How do the Brits hold it? Upside down. Perverse? They are the most perverse nation on God's earth.'
He gave one of his deep-belly chuckles.
I was finishing off a light meal that Hulda had knocked up for me when the two of them, Dempsie and Petursson, came round. The first thing I noticed was that the American had eased back into his mood of effortless charm as though it was an old sofa. Petursson didn't attempt to hide his concern.
Ostensibly they'd called to tell me about the Pushlcin.
Between the lines of the Russian protest and their own inquiries, it looked as though Palli and Oscar had raided the fishing-boat looking for Solrun the previous night. There'd been a hell of a set-to, by all accounts, and Oscar had escaped. They'd stuck Palli in the deep-freeze and transferred him to the lake later in the hope it would look like a drowning.
By way of trade, I told them about Solrun's visit the night before. That brought them upright and shoulders-back in their chairs. There was a pause while they restrained themselves from laying me on the floor and jumping up and down on me for letting her go.
They listened quietly while I told them, as well as I could recall it, what she'd said.
'I don't get it,' Dempsie said. 'She said she was scared of Oscar but he was her first choice?'
'That's how I understood it.' In daylight, before witnesses, it did sound ambiguous to say the least.
'Her next choice is the Russian. Don't forget.' Petursson frowned at the American.
I thought of offering some cheerful comment on the fascinating unpredictability of women, but decided against it.
'What advice did you offer?' Dempsie asked. He was leaning forward, his arms resting on his knees, and the hard intelligence shone in his eyes.
'None.'
'None.' He repeated it. What he left unsaid was more interesting: it was a long explosive rant about how I do nothing to restrain the one woman the whole island is looking for, and then decline the chance to advise her.
But he didn't say it, and he didn't say it for the same reason he'd put his charm on full-beam. He needed me.
'Sam,' he said. He stopped there, leaning forward with his hands dangling between his knees and his face turned up towards me for maximum sincerity. 'You know they're going to come for you again?'
'I think so,' said Petursson, anxious to put in his two
penn'orth.
'Why?'
'Let's talk it through,' the American said, although it was obvious he and Pete had done plenty of talking through and that's why they were here. 'The Soviets see you as neutral. No disrespect, you're entitled to your views, but they see you as an uncommitted sort of guy. Is that it?'
'I don't see why that should interest them.'
He looked up at Petursson who was leaning with his elbow on the mantlepiece. I didn't know how he'd found room between the photographs.
'You can influence her, right? She listens to you. That's why she came here last night, which- though don't take this as a knock- you should've reported to us. That's by the way.'
'I think he's right,' Petursson put in. 'They are planning some sort of major coup. They think it's possible she will turn to you for guidance.'
They were probably right. That was why Batty wanted me near her - to use my influence. And I was still left with the question I'd put to Batty.
'What makes them think I'll give her the advice they want?' Petursson gave an embarrassed shrug. 'You say yourself that you're not on anyone's team .. .'
'I'm not. I never have been. If Solrun wants to advertise package holidays in the Lubianka, let her.'
Petursson stood there shaking his head. 'The bell only tolls for someone else, isn't that it?'
I was a bit peeved at being quoted back at myself but I wasn't going to back out of it. 'That's about it, yes.'
From behind the ramparts of his face, his eyes were on me.
'And you meant it when you said you don't go to that address in Chelmsford?' Then added: 'To see your grandmother?'- as if l needed any explanation about an address I'd carried round in my memory since I was a child.
'I don't see the connection, but yes, actually, I did mean it.'
'I don't think I'm too interested in your grandmother .. .'
Dempsie began to say, but he fell silent again as Petursson continued.
'No loyalties, then, Sam?'
'Except the ones I choose. Personal ones.'
'Like?'
I tried to lighten it. 'I could be personal to anyone who could arrange to look like Solrun. Or even someone who could make a good pepper steak.'
'What we want to know,' Dempsie cut in, 'is what advice you give her if she's asked to defect?'
That's a heavy word - 'defect'. When she'd talked about going with Kirillina, somehow I hadn't seen it like that.
'It's not as though she's exactly a nuclear physicist .. .' I began.
'Nuclear physicists rate one paragraph in The Times,'
Dempsie said.
Of course, he was right. In terms of newsprint and television time, outside of Hollywood a top model was the best you could hope for. If anyone should've seen that, it was me- up to my ears in Sexy Eskie stories. But I'd been too close to see Solrun as anything other than a woman.
I sauntered over to the window. In the street, the man in overalls was still under his jacked-up car. It was Hulda who'd noticed him earlier and said that it was just like an American to carry overalls in case he broke down. Didn't he live there? I asked. Oh no, she knew everyone who lived in the street. She'd never seen him before. And you could always tell Americans: they had happy faces.
'No one's going to approach me if you have your sneakies crawling all over the place.'
Dempsie began to deny it but my smile and Petursson's frown were too much for him.
'There's a lot at stake,' he said, flinging his arms wide to show how honest he was.
'Your men have no business on our streets,' the Icelander said. 'We will do whatever is necessary.'
'Look, both of you,' I said, turning round and resting on the back of Hulda's head-teacher's chair. 'Stop playing games. If you're right and they do want me, you'll have to let them come. You're going to have to trust me whether you like it or not.'
I saw Petursson confirm it with a nod, and I watched the American shake his head in doubt as he rose to his feet.
'What's he going to tell her?' he said out loud, as he made for the door. 'We still don't know what he's going to tell her.'
'Neither does he,' Petursson said quietly to me.
'Does he?' Half an hour after they'd gone I went for a stroll around town. It was late afternoon, warm and pleasant now. I got a bag of dried fish from a stall and sat and nibbled at it.
One of the Vietnamese kids came round, the clanging northern words sounding hard and wrong coming from a face you instantly linked with sunshine and suffering. He paused in front of me and held out a newspaper. I shook my head.
'Hallgrimskirkja,' he said. 'Midnight.'
I remembered. It was Palli who said they used to send them with grenades. Nothing changed.
When I got back, the roadside mechanic had gone.
47
As soon as I drove into the square I saw them. A Range Rover so we were equipped for rough country - with three heads showing.
I drove right round the square and pulled up behind them. When I got out I took a quick look around. The square was deserted, but from open yellow windows in the houses I could hear people being young and carefree. It was a thousand years since I'd felt like that.
For the first time in my experience there were no men working on the new church. Its tall elegant grey columns, which look as though they've been dripped down from heaven rather than built up from this end, were black against the light sky.
'In the back,' I heard Ivan call out. I got in.
We'd got one murderer each, which seemed fair enough. They were the two non-fishermen that Petursson had pointed out to me that day on the harbour. The two men who, with a third, had called on Solrun's mother. One was driving, with Ivan beside him, and the other was beside me in the back. When he turned I saw that his right eye was almost closed and he had a fat lip and a missing tooth.
'Ah,' I said, always keen to communicate, 'Oscar or Palli?'
He gave me a look that almost melted my fillings.
'You're keeping classy company these days, Ivan.'
He'd turned so that his arm hung over the seat. He looked dishevelled and distraught and repeatedly kept sweeping back his lank hair in a troubled way. I wasn't quite sure how sorry I felt for him any more.
