“Now then,” Jóa cheerfully observes. “I think we’ve had enough of the party games, haven’t we?”
Agnar groans his agreement.
“Einar, shouldn’t we be calling the guests of honor?”
“The police?” I ask, brandishing my phone.
“No! No! Please, man, don’t call the cops. Please, fucking please!” Agnar whines.
“Listen, lamebrain,” Jóa counters, “do you think you can break into innocent people’s home in the middle of the night, make violent threats, take one of the family hostage, and then just walk away?”
“Please, ma’am,” whimpers Agnar. “We’re sorry. Please.”
“I know you losers are involved in collecting drug debts,” I say. “I’m sure you’re proud of yourselves. But if you think you can treat us the way you treat those poor fuckers who owe you money for drugs, then you’ve got another think coming.”
“Nobody owes us any money,” says Gardar, still standing motionless at the window. Polly has taken up a position directly above him on the curtain rail. “We don’t sell drugs.”
“No. I’m sure idiots like you three are users rather than pushers. Am I right?”
Gardar makes no reply, but Agnar mumbles something that sounds like agreement.
“So you collect drug debts for other people now and then?”
Agnar is silent.
“Mostly to work off your own debts?”
Another mumble from Agnar.
“Ugh! Fucking fuck!” exclaims Gardar. A small dropping has landed on his nose. He looks up. On the curtain rail sits Polly, tail feathers gracefully raised.
Swearing, Gardar wipes Polly’s little gift away with the back of his hand. Jóa chortles, bumping up and down on Agnar’s head. He gags, and black slime seeps from his mouth onto the sofa cushion.
“Jóa, honey,” I observe with a smile. “I think you’ve squashed Agnar’s skull so much that the drug-addled mush of his brain is leaking out his mouth.”
“Stop it! Stop it!” howls Agnar in between coughing and gagging.
“Who are you collecting drug debts for?”
Ivo’s head moves. Just as a precaution, I lightly tap the cut on his head with the ashtray. He stops moving.
Nobody seems to want to answer the question.
“Agnar, you said just now that you owned all that crowd at the party. Why is that?”
Agnar says nothing.
“Jóa, do you know, I think Agnar’s falling asleep over there. Don’t let him get too comfortable.”
Jóa bounces up and down again.
“Ow, ow. Don’t…,” groans Agnar, and dribbles more black slime.
“What’s this?” says Jóa. “I thought you said you’d always wanted to get intimate with a bull dyke?”
“Come on, I want answers,” I say.
“All that crowd. They owe money for shit,” mutters Agnar. “But they don’t owe us. We’ve only collected from them now and then.”
“So you were just talking big?”
“Yes,” he whispers.
“Who do they owe? And who do you owe?”
Agnar says nothing.
“If I tell you, I’m a dead man,” he finally says. “Go ahead, finish me off, here and now.”
Not really an option. Unfortunately.
“Who were you looking for tonight? Who is it that you think ratted you out to the cops?”
Jóa bumps up and down on his head.
“Rúnar!” screams Agnar Hansen. “Motherfucking Rúnar!”
“What? Skarphédinn’s brother?”
He nods, as far as he is capable.
“Why him?”
“Like you said, it must have been someone from the party. He’s the only one who doesn’t use. So he’s the only one who’d dare…”
“Was Rúnar at the party? Are you sure?”
“Yes, of course. He was around.”
“So you know him, do you?”
“Never spoken to him.”
“What about his brother?”
“I’ll tell you what I told the cops: he got in our face and threw us out.”
“How very inconsiderate of him.”
Silence.
“You were giving him a hard time about that costume he was wearing, weren’t you?”
More silence.
“Well?” I ask.
“He got in our face before that,” says Gardar Jónsson. “He was hassling me about my shirt.” He indicates the words White Power! “He said Ivo was lucky not to be black—although he’s dark-skinned. Or something like that.”
“And what did you have planned for Rúnar?”
“Just a bit of fun,” says Gardar. “Teach him not to get involved with what’s none of his business.”
“His brother’s death—that’s none of his business, is it?”
“That’s not what I meant. I meant he had no right to drag us into it. We weren’t there.”
“Did Skarphédinn use drugs?”
Agnar says nothing.
“If you wouldn’t mind, Jóa, a little persuasion.”
She bumps up and down on his head.
“Oooww. Don’t! All I know is he was acting completely crazy.”
“The police theory is that you were collecting a drug debt from Skarphédinn and finished up killing him. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“No! No! No way! We had nothing to do with it. We don’t know anything.”
“Where have you been looking for Rúnar tonight?”
“Around town. And we went to his place.”
“And?”
“He wasn’t there. His mom told us to get the hell out of there, or she’d call the cops.”
I ponder this. “I’m with her there. Get the hell out of here. If you so much as look at Jóa or me sideways, we’ll be reporting you to the police for burglary and assault.”
“We’re the ones who got assaulted,” grumbles Gardar. “Not you.”
“So we invited you here to a party and then beat you up, did we?” says Jóa. “If you think the police will believe a word of that, you’re even stupider than you look.”
“If that’s even possible,” I add.
“No, no, fuck it,” gabbles Agnar. “We’ll leave you alone. It was all a mistake. Sorry! Sorry!”
“You’d better keep your word and leave us alone,” I say. “You know you’re at our mercy now. Just like a little bird in the palm of our hand.”
In a little while they’re gone. Jóa and I sit in silence, mentally and physically exhausted. Polly swoops down from her curtain rail and settles on my shirt collar. Now and then she pecks gently at my neck. Then, without a word, Jóa and I simultaneously nod, stand up, and set to work to eradicate all traces of the three wingdings from the east, who came bearing their gifts of vomit, violence, and fear.
I press the doorbell for 3rd floor and attic, Skarphédinn. On this occasion I’m buzzed in. I open the door and enter.
After driving Jóa over to Heida’s place, I tried to get some sleep. But every nerve in my body was humming, my muscles so tense that I couldn’t relax. Polly had refused to return to her cage. She fluttered wildly around, crashing into the bars. So I decided to allow her to snuggle on my shoulder as I lay in bed. She fell fast asleep there with her head beneath her wing, but my shoulder didn’t get a lot of rest. Polly didn’t stir when the shoulder slipped out of bed, made coffee, switched the radio on, and read the Sunday papers until lunchtime.
Then I found my note of Rúnar Valgardsson’s phone number and dialed. He answered. As I suspected, he’d been staying at his brother’s apartment. I told him about our nighttime visitors. He said his mother had also called him about them during the night. So he’d decided not to go home but to take refuge at his brother’s place.
He is waiting for me at the door, wearing jeans and a long white shirt, untucked. He looks more like his brother than ever.
“Hi,” I say as I enter the parquet-floored entrance hall. “I heard you were plannin
g to move in here. Take over your brother’s apartment.”
“Who told you that?” he asks in surprise.
“A young lady here in the building. Her name is ösp, and she hates it.”
He smiles halfheartedly.
“It sounded as if she was really looking forward to you moving in. She thinks you’re much hotter than Skarphédinn.”
“She’s a nice girl,” says Rúnar gloomily.
“And talking of nice girls,” I jump in, “I didn’t realize you knew Sólrún Bjarkadóttir.”
He doesn’t answer. And it wasn’t really a question, anyway.
I try to put it better. “You must have been close. Your obituary was a beautiful tribute to her.”
He glances up at me. “How did you know it was me?”
I shrug. I didn’t know, until now.
“We were pretty good friends,” he says.
Rúnar leads the way into a spacious, bright living room, with tall windows, white-painted walls, and parquet flooring. The furniture is modern, tasteful, in pale colors. On the walls are old photographs of various places around northern Iceland. One shows Hólar.
“Wow,” I observe.
“Yes,” agrees Rúnar. “It’s a good apartment.”
I have to ask: “Are your parents wealthy?”
He shakes his head. “Not at all.”
“So how could Skarphédinn afford to rent a place like this?”
Now he shrugs. “It belongs to a friend of his.”
“You mean Mördur Njálsson?”
“Yes, he moved to Reydargerdi and offered the place to Skarpi while he was away.”
“Skarpi, you say. You’re the only person I’ve heard use that nickname. Was he called Skarpi as a rule?”
“Only by me and our parents.”
“And now Mördur’s lending the apartment to you?”
He nods. “Yeah, until he comes back here.”
“So the move to Reydargerdi isn’t permanent?”
“I don’t know how long he plans to stay there.”
“He must be well-off?”
“I suppose,” replies Rúnar.
Not a chatterbox, Rúnar.
“Does everything here belong to Mördur?” I ask him.
“Everything but the pictures,” he says. “They’re…They were Skarpi’s. Mördur used to have contemporary art on the walls.”
I take a walk around. There are no bookshelves anywhere, only a gigantic flat screen. Beyond the living room is an equally spacious dining room, furnished with a blond wooden dining table and eight chairs and a massive matching liquor cabinet. Off the dining room is a big kitchen with state-of-the-art fittings. Between the kitchen and dining room are two doors. One leads to the bathroom, the other to the attic.
“Can I take a look upstairs?”
After a momentary hesitation, Rúnar goes up the stairs ahead of me.
It’s as if he does so not because he wants to, but because it’s what I want. Passive, not active. But it would probably be unwise to draw too many conclusions from the limited signs of life Rúnar’s displaying.
A light is on in the attic. It’s a long room, the sloping roof wood-paneled like the loft of an old farmhouse. At one end is a roomy sleeping area with a four-poster bed, and at the other a workspace, with a desk placed under a dormer window. On it stand a computer and a printer, along with piles of papers. Books fill the bookshelves and overflow into stacks on the floor. I see an audio system with CD racks, and atop the CD player an old-fashioned turntable. Vinyl LPs are arranged in an old wooden crate that once contained soda bottles.
This is quite a different world from the glossy rooms downstairs. The lighting is muted, the ambience somehow older, denser.
“I imagine that Skarphédinn made his mark up here?”
“Yes. This is more his style.”
“You don’t need to stay up here with me. I just want to have a quick look around.”
He dithers, but then seems relieved. “All right,” he says and sets off down the stairs.
I wait a moment before going over to the desk and starting to examine the papers there. They seem to consist of all sorts of notes for essays or articles. One printout reads:
Children who are constantly bombarded with stimuli from movies, TV, computer games—and, perhaps not least, news of real-life violence in all its forms such as murder, mutilation, rape—will, sooner or later, feel the impact of those stimuli. The form that it takes is a function of genetics and nurture: will the child reject the reality presented in those media or identify with it? Most Icelanders are resistant to the idea of killing another person, and that reflects cultural and educational influences. Here in Iceland, we have no military tradition, no glorification of weapons, such as exists in various forms in many other societies and systematically undermines that instinctive resistance. But even in such societies, only a minority, a tiny minority, lose that resistance. They tend to be the children of uncaring parents, who have grown up without boundaries, discipline, or love. A yet smaller minority, a fraction of a percent, make the conscious decision to do exactly what they want, regardless of their environment, family, or society—regardless of anything but their own desires. Parents and other environmental factors have no influence: only the individual’s reasoning.
There’s no context. Just some ideas. They could be part of an article for the press, like the ones written by Skarphédinn that I found in the Morning News archive. The style is similar, at any rate.
I move the mouse that’s lying on the desk by the computer. The screen comes to life:
The Adoption of the Christian Religion in Early Iceland
An essay by Rúnar Valgardsson.
The title is followed by details of Rúnar’s class and of his teacher: Kjartan Arnarson. Then the essay begins. I see no reason to read it all, but the style is nothing like the printout I’ve just read.
The CD rack contains an eclectic range of music, new and old. The vinyl LPs are classic rock of the fifties and sixties. Curious, I push the play button on the CD player and turn down the volume. From the first notes, I instantly recognize the song:
Please allow me to introduce myself,
I’m a man of wealth and taste,
sings Mick Jagger smarmily.
I’ve been around for a long, long year,
Stole many a man’s soul and faith.
And I was ’round when Jesus Christ
Had his moment of doubt and pain.
Made damn sure that Pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his fate.
I glance over the bookshelves. The selection is as catholic as the music. Literary classics, Icelandic and foreign: Jón Trausti, Thorgils Gjallandi, Grímur Thomsen, Jónas Hallgrímsson, Jóhann Sigurjónsson, Halldór Laxness. I notice a number of books about witchcraft, witch hunts, and the occult, including works by an English mystic, Aleister Crowley, who I’ve read about, and Malleus Maleficarum by Heinrich Kramer.
Pleased to meet you,
Hope you guess my name.
But what’s puzzling you
Is the nature of the game…
I’ve never really liked the Stones’ Sympathy For The Devil. Not until now. I’ve no idea whether it’s been there since Skarphédinn last pushed Play, or whether his brother picked it.
Does it mean anything?
“Good song, Sympathy For the Devil,” I remark, back in the kitchen with Rúnar, who’s taking a Coke from the fridge.
“Sympathy…?” he repeats, bewildered.
“Oh, I just happened to touch the Play button on the CD player. And it was that old Stones song.”
He shrugs. “Skarpi must have been listening to it.”
In a half-open drawer I notice a cell phone in a tooled brown leather pouch. I’ve seen it before. Or another one just like it.
“Would you like a Coke?” he asks as he drinks from his bottle and closes the drawer.
“No thanks,” I answer. “I’d better be going.”
I go into the living room. He follows.
“Is it all right if I smoke?”
“I don’t care,” says Rúnar.
I stop in front of the TV, which stands on top of a shelf unit holding a digital decoder, a DVD player, and a video recorder. Below them is a row of videocassettes. I light up and bend down to look at the videos. I pick out one I recognize.
“Street Rider. I remember this. Your brother played the lead role.”
“Yes. He did.”
“Skarphédinn seems to have wanted to be the star of the show.” I stand up, holding the cassette in my hand. “In all situations?”
For a few seconds Rúnar says nothing. “It wasn’t a question of wanting. He simply was. Everyone wanted him to be.”
“Yes. A born leader.”
“Yes. That’s what he was.”
“And I suppose he meant to make his mark on public life?”
No reply.
“I gather that your brother’s cell phone hasn’t turned up. I wonder what can have happened to it?” I ask as I kneel by the TV.
“Skarphédinn didn’t have a cell phone.”
“Oh, that’s right. I heard that somewhere. Hey, can I borrow Street Rider? I’d like to take another look at it.”
“I don’t mind.”
“I won’t keep it for long.”
I head for the door, smoking. “Thanks for letting me drop by.”
“I thought you wanted to talk about Skarpi,” says Rúnar.
“Yes, I do. Absolutely,” I reply. “But I had such a rough night I don’t think I can manage it now.”
“And it was my fault that they came after you…”
“Not really. They’re such a bunch of idiots. Better that they inconvenienced me than you. You must be very busy. Finishing essays, studying for exams?”
“Yes…,” replies Rúnar remotely. “But it’s hard to focus at present, as things are. At least I’ve got peace and quiet here.”
“Are you interested in social issues and history, like your brother?”
“Yes.”
“Following in his footsteps?”
No reply.
“Yes, it was very sad. A tragedy.” Kjartan Arnarson is happy to speak to me when I call him that evening. But he speaks gravely.
“After that business of the Question of the Day, you told me that Sólrún was upset. But did she seem to be in such a bad way?”
Season of the Witch Page 26
