Now, Andy, did you hear about this one?
Tell me are you locked in the punch?
Hey, Andy, are you goofing on Elvis?
Hey, baby, are you having fun?
Then the phone rings.
“This is Ásgeir Eyvindarson,” says a grating male voice. “Who am I speaking to?”
“Einar.”
I can tell that he’s struggling to control himself, without much success. “My son, Gudmundur, tells me you called him yesterday, making ridiculous and slanderous allegations against me.”
“Not at all. That’s a misunderstanding.”
“Repeating the ravings of a demented old woman. How dare you treat a grieving family this way?”
“All I did was tell your son what your mother-in-law alleged to me. And she’s grieving too, of course…”
He abruptly abandons the grieving family angle and starts threatening legal action. “Surely you realize the gravity of these allegations. They’re slanderous!”
Now he’s shouting.
I feel my temper rising. “Didn’t you just say that Gunnhildur was senile and nobody could take her allegations seriously?”
“Of course she is. That malevolent old witch has always had a grudge against me, ever since I married Ásdís Björk.”
Gleefully, I ask, “Oh, really? So it’s not a new thing, because she’s senile or demented, or whatever you call it?”
“Now you’re adding insult to injury!”
“I haven’t published anything about this, and I never intended to. And I don’t see what all the fuss is about. I just felt that Gunnhildur had a right to her opinion, even if she is old. I simply wanted to explore the facts a little better. That’s all there is to it.”
“I’m warning you,” says Ásgeir Eyvindarson, his voice like a taut bowstring.
“What are you warning me against?”
“I’m warning you to stop snooping into a family tragedy of people who’ve done nothing wrong. I’m warning you not to go sensationalizing…”
And there it was!
“…about people’s private lives, just so you can sell that pathetic little rag that thinks it’s a newspaper. Don’t—”
“I don’t like being threatened,” I reply. I’m quite calm again.
“—imagine that I don’t have influence. Don’t think you can treat me like any Tom, Dick, or Harry you drag down into the gutter. Your boss, ölver Margrétarson Steinsson, is a piece of shit and a punk who thinks he can use his ill-gotten gains through the media to buy political power and respectability. A gangster who buys up all the competition and then forces the rest to knuckle under. It’s…”
“What has your wife’s death got to do with one of the owners of the Afternoon News? Or political issues?”
With a gulp of rage, Ásgeir Eyvindarson hangs up on me.
It seems a huge leap from the pleasant, polite son to the hysterical, threatening father. Before my delightful phone conversation with the bereaved husband, I’d been wondering how hypochondria, as described to me by Gudmundur Ásgeirsson, could relate to his mother’s death when she fell out of a boat into the Jökulsá River. The poor woman actually died: surely that couldn’t be hypochondria?
I’ve still got my conversation with Gunnhildur at the back of my mind, and it occasionally pops up to the surface when things calm down a bit. Now, for instance.
“Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!”
“You can say that again.”
“Thank you. Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!”
Gunnhildur tosses a gray braid. “I don’t know how they can be bothered with such drivel.”
We’re sitting out in the corridor, but we can’t avoid the sound of an American sitcom that’s enthralling the Guiding Light mafia.
“Maybe they can’t find anything better to do,” I suggest, offering Gunnhildur a chocolate from the box I have brought her as a peace offering.
A gnarled, wizened index finger hovers over the tray like a small helicopter. Then she finds what she’s looking for: a bottle-shaped chocolate, with alcohol-laden filling.
“Old people are getting to be just like the younger ones,” she observes. “They don’t read, they don’t talk. They just sit and watch those stupid American idiots make fools of themselves for a million dollars, or whatever it is they get paid.”
The leathery face dissolves into a smile as the chocolate bottle bursts in her mouth, releasing the boozy contents.
“Delicious, my boy. Even though it’s not from the Yumm candy factory.”
I can’t help envying her. I make do with a caramel that’s so chewy and sticky that I’m afraid I may have no teeth left by the time I leave the Hóll care home.
“So you didn’t write off an old woman,” says Gunnhildur, looking at me out of limpid blue eyes. “Here you are again.”
“Yes, I wanted to meet you again, talk a bit more.”
I tell her about my dealings with her grandson and her son-in-law. I don’t go into details about what they said about her.
“That’s Ásgeir to a T,” she says. “He’s full of…”
“Evil, wickedness, and viciousness?”
“Yes, that’s right. How did you know?”
“Oh, just something I heard. And of course I’ve had the dubious pleasure of speaking to him myself.”
“Evil. Wickedness. Viciousness. That’s Ásgeir.” She picks out another little chocolate bottle. “Maybe you’re not so silly, my boy. There’s enough silliness about.” She jerks her head toward the Guiding Light mafia, with a swing of her braid.
“But I haven’t really made any progress about what you said—that your daughter’s death wasn’t an accident.”
“But why on earth did you go and ask Ásgeir? Surely you didn’t imagine he’d simply fold and confess, then go and turn himself in to the police? If you hadn’t brought me these lovely chocolates, I might think you were a little bit silly.”
“Um, I’m sure you’re right.”
“Haven’t you seen Detective Chief Inspectors Morse and Taggart at work on the TV?”
“Yes, of course I have,” I reply.
“It takes them a whole episode, or sometimes more, to break the murderer’s resistance, gather evidence, get them to confess.”
“But…”
“Of course on television they compress it into an hour. I know that. They edit it, days of work by those conscientious detectives, and make one hour of it. Of course they have to sleep and eat, and go to the bathroom, like the rest of us. But they needn’t show us everything. You know that, my boy, don’t you?”
“Yes, yes.”
“And you spoke to our poor little Gudmundur? He’s not a bad boy, although he’s so desperate to be richer than other people and much richer than his scoundrel of a dad. They’ve got greed in their blood. It’s all in the cells, as they say these days.”
“In the cells…”
“He didn’t get that greed from my Ásdís Björk. That greed came straight from cold blood, as cold as any that flows through human veins.”
“I’m sure.”
Gunnhildur’s eyes have been darting around, but now she fixes me with her gaze. “So you spoke to poor Gudmundur, to find out whether I was a crazy old woman?”
“Well, I couldn’t simply make the assumption that Ásdís Björk was murdered just because you said so.”
She looks at me with a strange light in her eye.
“Would you believe me,” I go on, “if I told you the pope had been murdered by a mad prostitute?”
Gunnhildur shakes her head. “You really are a bit silly, my boy. A prostitute—let alone a mad one—would never be admitted into the Vatican. Ha!” She squeaks with glee. “That was a good one! Hahaha!”
“My point was that we can’t take things for granted.”
“And the poor old pope, pale as the ghost of a ghost! Really!”
“It was just an idea.”
She tries to stifle her giggles. “You can be quite a
musing, even if you are a bit silly.”
“Well, I’m glad you think so.”
“Have you got a cell?” she suddenly asks me, with no trace of a laugh.
“Cell?” I parrot, thinking: What the hell am I doing here?
“Yes. A cell.”
“Well, I certainly hope so.”
“Can I borrow it?”
“Borrow a cell?”
“Yes. I’m going to make a phone call for you, to someone who can answer all your questions. There’s no point calling the murderer up and asking if he did it. That will get you nowhere.”
“You want a cell phone?”
“Yes. What else, my boy?”
I reach into my pocket for my cell phone and hand it to her.
Awkwardly Gunnhildur fiddles with the phone in her gnarled hand. “These new cells are made for spiders to use. The buttons are much too small for ordinary people to see and press the right ones.” She passes it back to me. “Dial for me, would you?”
She recites a phone number, which I punch in before returning the phone to her.
“Hello? Ragna, dear? It’s Gunnhildur.”
She waits.
“Hello? Hello?” Turning the phone back and forth in her hand, she glares at it. “The damn thing’s stone dead.”
I reach out and turn the phone around so she is speaking into the mouthpiece. She tries again.
“Hello? Ragna, dear? It’s Gunnhildur…How are you?…Is it low down or further up?…The small of your back?…Oh, yes… Just the same as I had the other year…The same year as the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Reykjavík…I think it was the only thing that resulted from that summit…Yes, I’m sure I got it sitting in front of the TV hour after hour, waiting for something to happen…”
I stand up and stretch. Have a chocolate. And another.
“Look, Ragna, dear. There’s a young man here with me…No, no, no, nothing’s go on between us…Noooo…Too young and delicate…Ragna, dear, I’m going to send him over to see you…No, no, none of that…None of that, with him…I just want you to answer some questions from him…About my Ásdís Björk…And that goddamned wilderness tour…No, don’t be put off. He’s a bit silly, but he means well…Thank you, my dear…No, Lord, no, don’t go to any trouble for the boy. He brought me a box of chocolates…No, these boys are made far too much fuss of…I’ll tell him to bring you chocolates, or you won’t talk to him…Oh, fair to middling, my dear. Fair to middling…He’s on his way…”
Yep, I’m on my way. On the road again. And now, after my second visit today to the expensive confectioner’s shop, my next destination is a small single-story concrete house with a red roof, not far from the high school campus. I had imagined Ragna Ármannsdóttir being around Gunnhildur’s age, but she turns out to be a young thing of only sixtyish, with long black hair—obviously a dye job—wearing a green floral-patterned dress and a blue-striped apron. She is of average height and weight, but with a stack of chins beneath her broad, smiling face. She’s obviously just put her makeup on, and from the kitchen drifts an aroma of pancakes. I ceremoniously present the chocolate box to her, and shortly afterward Ragna and I sit down to coffee and pancakes at her old varnished dining table. She watches me stuff my face and smokes slender Capri cigarettes, as she recounts to me how fond she is of dear old Gunnhildur.
“I started working at Yumm as a messenger. That was while Gunnhildur’s husband, Gudmundur, was still alive. Gunnhildur treated me like one of the family. I’ve worked there ever since. At first I had a summer job during the school vacations, and then I started fulltime after I graduated from Commercial College. I’ve been the office manager, in practice, but without the job title.”
“And how have you liked working under Ásgeir’s management?”
“I don’t want to speak ill of Ásgeir. He came into this old family business, which had been run with the emphasis on family rather than business. He wanted to introduce new management methods, marketing strategies, and so on. A huge amount was spent on all sorts of evaluations and management analyses and advertising campaigns and strategic plans, but he didn’t manage to turn the business around. And that’s all I’m prepared to say about Ásgeir. He had grand ideas, but his plans didn’t work out.”
“Gunnhildur doesn’t think much of him.”
“When old Gudmundur died, Gunnhildur wanted Ásdís Björk to take over the business, but she refused. She wanted her husband to get the job. She pointed out that he had specialist qualifications in business administration, which is absolutely true. Gunnhildur gave way, but she’s found it hard to forgive Ásgeir for what’s happened to the business. But it’s not fair to put all the blame on Ásgeir. There’s been fierce competition in the Icelandic candy market for years now. Not only between Icelandic companies, but also with imported candy from huge and powerful multinationals. Established products and trademarks drop out of favor, and new ones are launched. That’s just the way it goes.”
“Tell me a bit about this wilderness tour.”
“We’ve gone on trips like that, ending up with our annual dinner, for the past three years. I can’t say I like it. But it’s aw of thing. It’s the latest craze in management and human resources policy. Human resources policy, just think! What’s that supposed to mean? Isn’t it enough to treat your staff like human beings? We’ve been on a glacier trip, snowmobiling, dogsledding, snow games, mountain biking, and kayaking. And, on this occasion, white-water rafting, which ended so horribly. What I think is extraordinary is that the objective is supposed to be to promote solidarity, encourage people to get to know each other, stimulate enterprise, but the way it’s done simply leads to competitiveness and rivalry. This time we were supposed to clamber up a cliff fifteen feet high, then jump off into a deep pool of water. They have safety procedures, of course, but the idea is to prove yourself, show how tough you are. And if you’re not prepared to get into that, you’re humiliated. I’ve seen two excellent members of staff, of the older generation, who gave up after trips like that. They felt they weren’t up to the job anymore.”
I’m now full of pancakes. I light up, to keep Ragna company.
“I assume the trips were Ásgeir’s idea?”
“Oh, yes. The other aspect of the wilderness tours is the question of where, when, and how the drinking will come to an end.”
“So there’s a lot of drinking, is there?”
“Not supposed to be. But people bring some beers along and sneak a drink when the guide isn’t looking. And then, when they get back to town, that’s when they get going. Everybody goes along to a fine dinner, tired out and hyped up on adrenaline, excitement, and frustration, and they really let go. That’s when things go wild.”
“Except this time?”
“Yes, except this time.” Ragna twists her cigarette in the ashtray.
“Gunnhildur said that Ásgeir attended the dinner although his wife was lying unconscious in hospital?”
“He stayed for an hour or two. Everybody was so traumatized after the accident that most of us decided not to go. But Ásgeir wanted the program to go on. He didn’t want to cancel. He felt that was what Ásdís Björk would want. Which is actually quite true. I knew her well enough to know that. And at that point we didn’t know how serious her injuries were.”
“What was their marriage like?”
“I’m not in a position to tell. I can imagine what Gunnhildur must have said about it. But no outsider can know what goes on in a marriage. Only the two people who are in it. I know what I’m talking about. When I got divorced, about ten years ago, nobody understood why. Not even my closest family and friends. Some of them couldn’t grasp how I could let go of such a good man after thirty years together. Others couldn’t fathom how I had put up with such a tedious boor for so long. And then there were those who felt my husband was lucky to be rid of me.” She smiles warmly. “But I will say that over the past five or six years Ásdís Björk has been much less involved in the business. She’s hardly been seen in the o
ffice, let alone in the factory. She stayed home, mostly. Ásgeir never said anything about their private life, but I gathered from Ásdís Björk—from the little we spoke to each other—that she was very ill.”
“What was wrong with her?”
“It seemed to vary. First one thing, then another. She used to be a beautiful woman, but she’d put on a lot of weight in the last few years. Maybe because of her poor health.”
“Did you see her fall into the river?”
“No, I was in the boat ahead of them. I just heard all the shouting and screaming. We’ve talked about it a lot, of course. Especially that evening, at the restaurant. I got the impression that no one actually saw her fall. She was sitting in the stern, and she seemed to have stood up, lost her balance, and fallen overboard. Ásgeir was sitting in front of her, and he immediately jumped in after her. He was quite a hero, really.”
As I take my leave of Ragna, darkness is falling. I remember another question: “Gunnhildur told me that Ásdís Björk and Ásgeir had a disagreement about the running of Yumm. Do you know anything about that?”
She hesitates. “Not exactly. But I’ve noticed over the past few years that Ásgeir has sometimes had meetings in his office with intimidating men carrying briefcases and shown them around the factory. Whatever that may mean.”
“I’ve been told that Ásdís Björk had an addiction problem?”
Ragna looks at me in astonishment. “I’ve never heard any such thing. But, as I say, there’s so much we don’t know about people and their private lives. And even less that we understand.”
As I have said before, two plus two doesn't make twenty-two. Nonetheless, Chief of Police Höskuldur Pétursson in Reydargerdi informs me, off the record: “There are people here, actually quite a few people, who think these arrests are purely political.”
Season of the Witch Page 17
