Karl was only halfway through his account when Tómas ran off. They had been so cautious. Ilona had passed on a message to her companions and they had made arrangements to leave Leipzig. She wanted to go back to Hungary to stay with her family; he was going back to Iceland and would meet her in Budapest. His studies no longer mattered. Only Ilona mattered.
When he reached their house, his lungs were bursting. The door was open and he ran inside and into their room. Everything was in disarray, books and magazines and bedclothes on the floor, the desk overturned, the bed on its side. They had spared nothing. Some objects were broken. He stepped on the typewriter that lay on the floor.
He ran straight to the Stasi headquarters. Only when he was there did he realise that he did not know the name of the man with the moustache; the people at reception did not understand what he meant. He asked to go down the corridor and find him for himself, but the receptionist just shook his head. He barged against the door to the corridor, but it was locked. He shouted for Lothar. The receptionist had come from behind his desk and called for assistance. Three men appeared and dragged him away from the door. At that moment it opened and the man with the moustache entered.
'What did you do with her?!' he roared. 'Let me see her!' He shouted down the corridor: 'Ilona! Ilona!'
The man with the moustache slammed the door behind him and barked orders at the others, who seized him and led him outside. He pounded on the front door and cried out to Ilona, but to no avail. He was out of his mind with anxiety. They had arrested Ilona and he was convinced they were keeping her in that building. He had to see her, had to help her, get her released. He would do anything.
He remembered noticing Lothar on campus that morning and left in haste. A tram had stopped by the campus and he jumped aboard. He leaped out by the university while the tram was still moving and found Lothar sitting alone at a table in the cafeteria. There were few people inside. He sat down facing Lothar, panting and wheezing, his face red from running, worry and fear.
'Is everything all right?' Lothar said.
'I'll do anything for you if you let her go,' he said immediately.
Lothar took a long look at him, observing his sufferings almost philosophically.
'Who?' he said.
'Ilona – you know who I'm talking about. I'll do anything if you let her go.'
'I don't know what you're on about,' Lothar said.
'You arrested Ilona this lunchtime.'
'We?' Lothar said. 'Who's "we"?'
'The security police,' he said. 'Ilona was arrested this morning. Karl was with her when they came. Won't you talk to them? Won't you tell them I'll do whatever it takes for them to release her?'
'I don't think you matter any more,' Lothar said.
'Can you help me?' he said. 'Can you intervene?'
'If she's been arrested, there's nothing I can do. It's too late. Unfortunately.'
'What can I do?' he said, almost bursting into tears. 'Tell me what I can do.'
Lothar took a long look at him.
'Go back to Poechestrasse,' he said in the end. 'Go home and hope for the best.'
'What kind of a person are you?' he said, feeling the anger coursing through him. 'What kind of bastard are you? What makes you act like . . . like a monster? What is it? Where does this incredible urge to dominate come from, this arrogance? This inhumanity!'
Lothar looked around at the few souls sitting in the cafeteria. Then he smiled.
'People who play with fire get burned, but they're always surprised when they are. Always fucking innocent and surprised when it happens.'
Lothar stood up and bent over him.
'Go home,' he said. 'Hope for the best. I'll talk to them but I can't promise anything.'
Then Lothar walked away, taking slow steps, calmly, as if none of this was any concern of his. He stayed in the cafeteria and buried his face in his hands. He thought about Ilona and tried to persuade himself that they had only called her in for interrogation and she would soon be released. Maybe they were intimidating her, as they had done to him a few days before. They exploited fear. Fed off it. Maybe she was already back home. He stood up and left the cafeteria.
When he left the university building he found everything strangely unaltered wherever he looked. People were acting as if nothing had happened. They hurried along the pavements or stood talking. His world had collapsed, yet everything seemed unchanged. As if everything were still in order. He would return to their room and wait for her. Maybe she was already back home. Maybe she would be back later. She had to come. What were they detaining her for? For meeting people and talking to them?
He was at his wits' end when he rushed off home. It was such a short time since they'd been lying snuggled up against each other and she had told him that what she had suspected for some time had been confirmed. She whispered in his ear. It had probably happened at the end of the summer.
He lay paralysed, staring up at the ceiling, uncertain how to take the news. Then he hugged her and said he wanted to live with her for his whole life.
'Both of us,' she whispered.
'Yes, both of you,' he said, and laid his head on her stomach.
He was brought back to his senses by the pain in his hand. Often when he thought back to what had happened in East Germany he would clench his fists until his hands ached. He relaxed his muscles, wondering as usual whether he could have prevented it all. Whether he could have done something else. Something that would have changed the course of events. He never reached a conclusion.
He stood up stiffly from his chair and walked to the door down to the basement. Opening it, he switched on the light and carefully descended the stone steps. They were worn after decades of use and could be slippery. He entered the roomy basement and turned on the lights. Various oddments had accumulated there over the years. If he could avoid it, he never threw anything away. It was not untidy, however, because he kept it all in order – everything had its place.
Along one wall stood a workbench. Sometimes he made carvings. Produced small objects from wood and painted them. That was his only hobby. Taking a square block of wood and creating from it something living and beautiful. He kept some of the animals upstairs in his flat. The ones he was most satisfied with. The smaller he succeeded in making them, the more rewarding they were to carve. He had even carved an Icelandic sheepdog with a curly tail and cocked ears, scarcely larger than a thumbnail.
He reached under the workbench and opened the box he kept there. He felt the butt, then removed the pistol from its place. The metal was cold to the touch. Sometimes his memories would draw him down to the basement to fondle the weapon or just to reassure himself that it was where it belonged.
He did not regret what had happened all those years later. Long after he returned from East Germany.
Long after Ilona disappeared.
He would never regret that.
23
The German ambassador in Reykjavík, Frau Doktor Elsa Müller, received them personally in her office at noon. She was an imposing woman, past sixty, and immediately started eyeing up Sigurdur Óli. Erlendur in his brown woollen cardigan under his tatty jacket attracted less attention from her. She said she was a historian by profession, hence the doctorate. She had German biscuits and coffee waiting for them. They sat down and Sigurdur Óli accepted the offer of coffee. He did not want to be impolite. Erlendur declined. He would have liked to smoke, but could not bring himself to ask permission.
They exchanged pleasantries, the detectives about the efforts that the German embassy had gone to, Dr Müller about how natural it was to try to assist the Icelandic authorities.
The Icelandic CID's enquiry about Lothar Weiser had gone through all the proper channels, she told them – or rather she told Sigurdur Óli, because she directed her words almost entirely towards him. They spoke English. She confirmed that a German by that name had worked as an attaché to the East German trade delegation in the 1960s. It had proved particularly difficu
lt to acquire information about him, because he had been an agent for the East German secret service at the time and had connections with the KGB in Moscow. She told them that a large number of Stasi files had been destroyed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the scant information that survived was largely obtained from West German intelligence sources.
'He vanished without a trace in Iceland in 1968,' Frau Müller said. 'No one knew what happened to him. At the time it was thought most likely that he had done something wrong and . . .'
Frau Müller stopped and shrugged.
'Was bumped off,' Erlendur completed the sentence for her.
'That may be one possibility, but we have no confirmation of it yet. He may also have committed suicide and been sent home in a diplomatic bag.'
She smiled at Sigurdur Óli as if to signal that this was a humorous remark.
'I know you'll find it amusingly absurd,' she said, 'but in terms of the diplomatic service, Iceland is the back end of the world. The weather's dreadful. The incessant storms, the darkness and cold. There was hardly a worse punishment imaginable than to post people here.'
'So was he being punished for something when he was sent here?' Sigurdur Óli asked.
'As far as we can find out, he worked for the security police in Leipzig. When he was younger.' She flicked through some papers on the table in front of her. 'During the period 1953 to 1957 or 1958 he had the task of getting the foreign students at the university in the city, who were mostly if not all communists, to work for him or to become informers. This wasn't proper espionage. It was more keeping watch on what the students were doing.'
'Informers?' Sigurdur Óli said.
'Yes, I don't know what you would call it,' Frau Müller said. 'Spying on people around you. Lothar Weiser was said to be very good at getting young people to work for him. He could offer money and even good exam results. The situation was volatile then because of Hungary and all that. Young people kept a close eye on what was going on there. The security police kept a close eye on the youngsters. Weiser infiltrated their ranks. And not just him. There were people like Lothar Weiser in every university in East Germany and in all the communist countries, as a rule. They wanted to monitor their own people, know what they were thinking. Foreign students could have a dangerous influence, although most were conscientious both as students and socialists.'
Erlendur recalled having heard about Lothar's command of Icelandic.
'Were there Icelandic students in Leipzig then?' he asked.
'I really don't know,' Frau Müller said. 'You must be able to find that out.'
'What about Lothar?' Sigurdur Óli asked. 'After he was in Leipzig?'
'This must all sound rather strange to you, I imagine,' Frau Müller said. 'Secret service and espionage. You only know about this from hearsay out here in the middle of the ocean, don't you?'
'Probably,' Erlendur smiled. 'I don't remember us having a single decent spy.'
'Weiser became a spy for the East German secret service. He'd stopped working for the security police by then. He did a lot of travelling and worked at embassies around the world. Among other postings he was sent here. He had a special interest in this country, as proven by the fact that he learned Icelandic when he was young. Lothar Weiser was a highly talented linguist. Like everywhere else, his role here was to get local people to work for him, so he had the same sort of function as in Leipzig. If their ideals were shaky, he could offer money.'
'Did he have any Icelanders in his charge?' Sigurdur Óli asked.
'He didn't necessarily make any headway here,' Frau Müller said.
'What about the embassy officials who worked with him in Reykjavík?' Erlendur said. 'Are any of them still alive?'
'We have a list of the staff from that time but haven't managed to identify anyone who is still alive and would have known Weiser or what happened to him. All we know at the moment is that his story seems to end here in Iceland. How, we don't know. It's as if he simply vanished into thin air. Admittedly, the old secret service files aren't very reliable. There are a lot of gaps, just as in the Stasi files. When they were made public after unification, or most of the personal records anyway, a lot were missing. To tell the truth, our information about what happened to Lothar Weiser is unsatisfactory, but we'll keep searching.'
They fell into silence. Sigurdur Óli nibbled at a biscuit. Erlendur still craved a cigarette. He could not see an ashtray anywhere and it was probably a forlorn hope that he would be able to light up.
'Actually, there's one interesting point in all this,' Frau Müller said, 'considering that it involves Leipzig. The Leipzigers are very proud of starting, in effect, the uprising that brought down Honecker and the Wall. There were massive protests in Leipzig against the communist government. The centre of the uprising was Nikolaikirche near the city centre. People gathered there to protest and to pray, and one night the protesters left the church and broke into the Stasi headquarters, which were nearby. In Leipzig at least, this is regarded as the start of the developments that brought down the Berlin Wall.'
'Indeed,' Erlendur said.
'Strange if a German spy went missing in Iceland,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'It's somehow . . .'
'Ridiculous?' Frau Müller smiled. 'In one way it was convenient for his killer – if he was killed – that Weiser was a secret agent. You can see that from the reaction of the East German trade delegation here; they didn't have a proper embassy then. They did nothing. It's a typical response for covering up a diplomatic scandal. Nobody says a thing. It's as if Weiser had never existed. We have no evidence of any investigation of his disappearance.'
She looked at them in turn.
'He wasn't reported missing to the police here,' Erlendur said. 'We've checked that.'
'Doesn't that suggest it was an internal matter?' Sigurdur Óli asked. 'That one of his colleagues killed him?'
'It could,' Frau Müller said. 'We still know so little about Weiser and his fate.'
'Don't you suppose the murderer's dead by now?' Sigurdur Óli said. 'It was such a long time ago. If Lothar Weiser was murdered, that is.'
'Do you think he's the man in the lake?' Frau Müller asked.
'We don't have any idea,' Sigurdur Óli said. They had not told the embassy any details regarding the discovery. He looked at Erlendur, who nodded.
'The skeleton we found,' Sigurdur Óli said, 'was tied to a Russian listening device dating from the 1960s.'
'I see,' Frau Müller said thoughtfully. 'A Russian device? So what? What significance does that have?'
'There are a number of possibilities,' Sigurdur Óli said.
'Could the device have come from the East German embassy or delegation or whatever you call it?' Erlendur asked.
'Of course,' Frau Müller said. 'The Warsaw Pact countries cooperated very closely, including in the field of espionage.'
'When Germany was unified,' Erlendur said, 'and the embassies here in Reykjavík were merged, did you find any devices like that in the hands of the East Germans?'
'We didn't merge,' Frau Müller said. 'The East German one was dissolved without our knowledge. But I'll check about the devices.'
'What do you read into finding a Russian listening device with the skeleton?' Sigurdur Óli asked.
'I can't say,' Frau Müller answered. 'It's not my job to speculate.'
'No, right,' Sigurdur Óli said. 'But all we have is speculation, so . . .'
Erlendur put his hand in his jacket pocket and clutched his cigarette packet. He did not dare take it out of his pocket.
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