Sun on Fire

by Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson

“Yes, Hertha is my team.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yeah, ever since 1995, when Sverrisson joined the club.”

  The driver grinned broadly. “Ah, Jolly Sverrisson,” he said. “Everyone remembers him. Sverrisson was a great player. Maybe not the most skillful, but he was hard-hitting and reliable. He did a lot for the team.”

  “Yeah, it was a great team when it finally got into the Bundesliga.”

  “I agree. The team is very strong again now in my opinion.”

  “Yeah, but it’s lame that they didn’t beat a low-ranked team like Bochum,” Gunnar said, grabbing the handle above the door as the driver took a sharp curve.

  “Yeah, that was bad. If you’re still here on Saturday, you can go to the Olympic Stadium. Hertha’s playing at home against Stuttgart. The ambassador sometimes goes to soccer games, and he invites me if there aren’t any visitors. I’ll tell him you’re a fan.”

  “I’ll definitely be back in Iceland by then, but thanks anyway,” Gunnar said. After a short silence, he asked, “What’s he like, the ambassador?”

  The driver hesitated, then said, “He has many good qualities.”

  “Such as?”

  “He’s always very friendly and grateful for everything you do for him. He speaks very good German, and he’s kind.”

  “Any flaws?”

  “It’s hardly worth mentioning. He’s a bit . . .” The driver let go of the steering wheel with his right hand and pretended to drink from a glass. “You understand,” he said.

  “Ah. But he’s always compos mentis, isn’t he?”

  “Um, yes, but he does sometimes fall asleep in the car when I’m driving him home from gatherings. The butler at the residence helps me get him into the house.”

  “What about the ambassador’s wife?”

  The driver pretended not to hear the question. “Here ahead you can see the Tiergarten Park woods. We’re almost at the embassy. Herr Ingason is waiting to meet you.”

  “Counselor Ingason? Not the ambassador?”

  “No, the ambassador is at home. Herr Ingason deals with everything at the embassy on his behalf. He’s a very solid and reliable gentleman. The ambassador would be lost without him.”

  He focused his attention on driving, shortly taking a right to arrive at a building complex on their left. In front of the complex stood a row of flags representing the five Nordic countries.

  15:05

  The driver parked at the curb, briskly got out, and opened the door for Anna. An older man standing nearby approached and greeted the passengers as they climbed out of the car.

  “I am Counselor Arngrímur Ingason,” he said, repeating his name as he shook hands with each of the three police officers in turn. Birkir introduced himself first, and then the others.

  Sigmundur and Arngrímur exchanged perfunctory greetings—they obviously knew one another.

  “Thank you for responding so quickly,” Arngrímur said to the trio as they gathered their luggage. Gunnar handled the tool case for Anna, who used the opportunity to light a cigarette.

  “That’s our job, I guess,” said Birkir, taking in the surroundings. Through a glass wall he could see an open area between the embassy buildings. The encircling copper wall was mostly hidden from this angle, but the complex looked impressive in the sunshine.

  The driver said something in German to the counselor, then climbed into the car and drove off.

  “He’s going to get the ambassador,” Arngrímur said. “We held a press conference in the Felleshus earlier this morning to inform the media about the case, and then Konrad went home for a rest. But he wanted to meet you here as soon as possible. We’ve booked hotel rooms for you, but I assume that you’ll want to see the embassy immediately. Inspect the scene, and everything.”

  “Yes,” Birkir said. “The sooner the better.”

  “Exactly. Please follow me,” Arngrímur said, leading the way toward the entrance to the reception area. Anna was still smoking, so they stopped outside and waited while she finished her cigarette.

  Birkir looked up. Horizontally across the entrance were long glass plates, one above the other, with the inscription “Nordic Embassies” in six languages. The bottom one was in German; the Icelandic one was fourth from the top and the Finnish was on top, but Birkir couldn’t distinguish between the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish ones—the spellings were too similar for his limited knowledge of those languages.

  Sigmundur said, “I need to start by meeting with the embassy staffers. They’re here in the Felleshus, aren’t they?”

  “Yes,” Arngrímur said, and explained to Sigmundur where to find the conference room they were using. Sigmundur excused himself and disappeared into the building.

  “Can you keep him occupied?” Gunnar asked. “To stop him from interfering in our business?”

  “I can try,” Arngrímur said, not batting an eyelid.

  Anna stubbed out her cigarette, and Arngrímur showed them into the building and toward a reception window.

  “Please hand over your passports and exchange them for visitors’ passes,” he said.

  They were given white plastic cards bearing the Icelandic flag to clip on. Then they followed Arngrímur through double doors, which he opened with a pass card. They found themselves in the open plaza that linked the separate buildings.

  Arngrímur said, “The building we came through is shared by all the embassies and is open to the public. We call it the Felleshus. Besides the front desk area, there are rooms designed for conferences and exhibitions. There’s also a restaurant. We booked two conference rooms there today as a temporary working facility for our people. The Danish embassy building is here to the left, and then, working around clockwise, we have the Icelandic building over there in the corner—then the Norwegian, the Swedish, and finally the Finnish one here to the right.”

  In front of the Finnish embassy a small children’s choir stood, singing.

  People had come out of the buildings to listen. It was comfortably warm in the sunshine. The buildings provided shelter from the breeze, and the air outside was refreshing. The Icelanders automatically stopped to listen to the pure sound of the unaccompanied singing. As the song came to an end, the audience applauded and the conductor, a young woman, bowed in acknowledgment. Then she gave the tone for the next song, and the choir started up again. At this point Arngrímur had walked on ahead, but as the first notes reached their ears, he stopped dead in his tracks. Birkir recognized the melody and could hear that the choir was singing in Icelandic. The pronunciation was, forgivably, not perfect, but the children sang beautifully and in tune. It was a well-known Icelandic song set to a poem by Jón Sváfnisson, the poet who’d been one of the ambassador’s visitors on the night of the killing. A strange coincidence, perhaps—though the song was very popular throughout Scandinavia as a choral arrangement.

  As daylight grows longer and dreams multiply

  a delicate breeze dusts your cheek, and you stir.

  I question not whence it came, whereby,

  nor whither its purposes were.

  But you see that the springtime and freedom no slumber confer.

  As mountain brooks babble and moorlands grow green,

  A magic enthralls me, insistent, an ache.

  I fetch you my fairest of verses

  and find this the path I must take.

  But I see that with springtime and freedom I slumber forsake.

  As light casts new warmth upon lowland and hillside,

  over lakes all a-shimmer the cloud-armies go.

  I think about you and give thanks that

  all things in creation are so.

  But you see that the springtime and freedom no slumber bestow.

  The choir sang all three verses and received enthusiastic applause at the end. Birkir looked at his companions; all were smiling and clapping. Not Arngrímur, though. He stood frozen, his face turned away from the others. As the applause died down, he glanced quickly over his shoul
der before continuing toward the Icelandic embassy building. Birkir caught up to him.

  “Is the embassy open today?” he asked.

  Arngrímur cleared his throat twice. Finally he said, “No, we decided to keep the office closed until you’re done with your work. Like I said before, the staff is working in the available Felleshus rooms. They can access our computer system from there, and phone calls are routed there. Consular services are open as usual in the Felleshus, and any visitors are directed there.”

  They reached the entrance to the Icelandic building and stopped to wait for the others. Birkir thought that Arngrímur’s voice had seemed unsteady.

  “Please enter,” Arngrímur said, opening the door and showing them in. “A German police team was here yesterday to carry out the initial investigation on the scene, after which the body was taken away. We requested that they do the autopsy here in Berlin. Other than that, everything here is exactly as it was when I arrived yesterday morning.”

  Arngrímur’s voice had regained its previous strength, and he added, “Commissar Tobias Fischer will arrive momentarily to deliver a preliminary report.”

  Birkir gazed out the window opposite the entrance. It overlooked a small open space between the building and the copper wall, loosely paved with black lava flagstones.

  Seeing that this had caught Birkir’s attention, Arngrímur said, “There’s red lighting under the paving you can switch on so this looks like a fresh lava flow. When we have time, I’ll show you around the whole building and explain the architecture.”

  They left their luggage by the front desk in the entrance hall and climbed the stairs up to the second floor.

  “The ambassador’s party was held here in the conference room,” Arngrímur said, pointing at an open door. “He also had a brief meeting with part of the group in his office on the top floor,” he added.

  “Who attended that meeting?” Birkir asked.

  “The ambassador will have to answer that when he comes,” Arngrímur said. “He was a bit vague about it during our discussions yesterday.”

  “You weren’t here at the embassy Sunday?”

  “No, I was in Stuttgart all weekend and didn’t get back to Berlin until late Sunday evening. There was a serious traffic accident Friday involving an Icelandic family—a couple with two children. The mother was killed, and the others were injured and are in the hospital. It’s a horrible case. I went there to provide support until Icelandic relatives arrived to help.”

  “So you had a difficult weekend?”

  “Yes, and it’s not over yet. But this is all part of the job. Some days are more difficult than others. We don’t complain.”

  “I see,” Birkir said. He looked into the conference room, where the smell from leftover food was beginning to overpower the suggestion of stale alcohol lingering in the air.

  “This is where the visitors had dinner,” Arngrímur said. “I hope you’ll give me permission to have the room cleaned soon.”

  “We’ll do our best,” Birkir replied.

  They walked up to the next floor, and Arngrímur showed them the staff kitchenette.

  Arngrímur said, “They got all the tableware and glasses from here. The liquor, on the other hand, was brought up from a storage room in the basement, and it seems like there wasn’t much other activity on this floor that night.”

  “Where was the body?” Birkir asked.

  “Upstairs, in the ambassador’s office on the top floor. I found it sitting in a chair in there. It was totally shocking, of course.”

  “We won’t go up there just yet,” Birkir said. “First we need to hear from the local polizei about their crime-scene investigation. Anna can proceed with the forensics in light of that.”

  “It all must be done in an organized way, of course—I understand that.” Arngrímur looked at his watch. “The German police officer should be here any minute.”

  Birkir looked around. “We’ll need access to a room that was definitely locked and not used on the night in question. We’ll make that our base.”

  Arngrímur nodded and said, “There’s an office on the floor below. We use it for interns sometimes, but we haven’t any interns at the moment. The ambassador doesn’t have keys to that room, so he couldn’t have let anyone in there Sunday evening.”

  15:45

  As they walked back down to the second floor, Arngrímur’s cell phone rang.

  After a brief conversation, he told Gunnar, “That was the front desk of the Felleshus. The local police officer has arrived.”

  Gunnar said, “I’ll speak to him. Is there a restaurant or something over there? I’m starving.”

  “My apologies—you need to eat, of course.”

  Birkir said, “A sandwich and some seltzer water is plenty for me. It’d be good if it could be sent here.”

  “A sandwich for me, too,” Anna said, “and a Coke. But first I need to go out for a cigarette.”

  Gunnar accompanied Arngrímur across the plaza to the Felleshus, where they met Commissar Fischer from the Berlin Police, a tall man with thick gray hair and a neatly trimmed beard. His brown eyes sparkled with humor. Gunnar greeted him in German, and they immediately seemed to click. They agreed to go talk in the cafeteria on the second floor so that Gunnar could get something to eat.

  “I think better on a full stomach,” he said.

  Gunnar got himself a double portion of Hungarian goulash with bread on the side. Fischer accepted a cup of coffee and a wedge of cake. Arngrímur signed for the bill and left, carrying sandwiches, Coke, and seltzer water for the others.

  “Iceland—I’ve got to visit Iceland to see the mountains, the glaciers, and the hot springs,” Fischer said when they’d settled into a corner table. “Next time we’ll have a meeting in Reykjavík.”

  “For sure,” Gunnar said, grinning.

  From a cardboard box he’d brought, Fischer produced the murder weapon enclosed in clear plastic. He handed it to Gunnar, who examined it through its wrapper. It was a large hunting knife with leather handle, covered in blood.

  “American product,” Fischer said. “Nineteen-centimeter blade, overall length twenty-seven point three centimeters. Known as an SOG Super Bowie. List price two hundred sixty-two US dollars. It wasn’t ever available in stores here in Germany, as far as we can ascertain. Unfortunately, blood spread along the handle after the killer let go of it. We can’t find a clean area to look for finger or palm prints. The blade is completely unworn and very sharp—a knife in top condition. You could rip the thickest cowhide with a weapon like this.”

  He pulled a large envelope from his briefcase and extracted several color photographs. The first one showed a fat, bald man sitting hunched over in a fancy office chair. He was dressed in a dark-gray suit and a white open-necked shirt. A gaping wound split the man’s abdomen, and the knife stuck out from its lower end. The blade had sliced through his clothing, and internal pressure had forced the wound open to fifteen centimeters at its widest.

  Fischer said, “The killer plunged the knife deep into the victim’s abdomen halfway between the sternum and the navel, probably using his right hand, since the incision slants marginally to the left. He then pushed the knife downward with considerable force, slitting the abdomen all the way down to the pubic bone. At that point he would have let go of the weapon, and blood, guts and stomach contents would have gushed from the wound and over the knife handle. Very likely over the killer’s hand and arm, too. The victim would have passed out within a few seconds from shock and blood loss. Death probably occurred soon after.”

  “Wouldn’t he have called for help or screamed as he was attacked?” Gunnar asked.

  “Sure, but the sound wouldn’t have carried two floors down to where the party was apparently being held. We can assist you in experimenting with that if you like. And the killer could have muzzled the victim with his free hand. The autopsy may reveal signs of that.”

  “At what stage is your investigation?” Gunnar asked.

/>   Fischer took out a notebook. “We received a message from our Foreign Ministry at 10:27 yesterday morning. We were asked to come to the embassy and carry out a regular examination of the body at the crime scene prior to arranging for its removal and transportation to the pathology laboratory here in Berlin. Our procedure included marking out and detailed photography of the scene. Also preliminary medical examination, thermometry and taking some tissue samples. Transportation of the body and its detached parts was carried out by specialist removers. Our orders from the ministry were to comply with the senior embassy official’s instructions. Following the body’s removal, we were to do nothing more here, so no further forensic investigation was carried out at the scene. No interrogation took place, either. The Foreign Ministry was adamant that the investigation was the responsibility of the Icelandic state, and that we were only to provide such assistance as Iceland requested. The embassy is out of our jurisdiction.”

  “Goddamned mindless bureautwats. They’ve succeeded in delaying the investigation by twenty-four hours,” Gunnar said. “I hope you didn’t comply?”

  Fischer smiled apologetically. “There wasn’t much else we could do.”

  He pulled a wallet wrapped in plastic from his bag. “Here are the deceased’s personal effects,” he said, handing the packet to Gunnar. “This is what he had with him.”

  “Anything specific?”

  “No. Cash, credit cards, business cards, a key.”

  “A key. You mean a key ring?”

  “No key ring. Just a single key in a wallet compartment. Probably to some kind of safe.”

  “I see,” Gunnar said. “Anything else?”

  “Yes, actually,” Fischer replied. “I did a search for the man’s name in our database. Just to see if he had been involved in anything.”

  “And?”

  “We have for some time been increasing our surveillance of German citizens who frequent Asian countries and are suspected of committing sexual crimes against children. We’re trying to make it easier to implement laws sanctioning prosecution of such individuals here in Germany, as happens in many other European countries. We also inform the relevant Asian authorities of our suspicions so they can take measures against traffickers and child abusers at the source. Some things we do in these countries are slightly dubious according to our procedures and laws, but we take the view that these matters are so serious that the end justifies the means. Herr Eiríksson’s name appeared on a list from one of our informers in Indonesia. Eiríksson is known there by the pseudonym Tenderloin, and he is very active in this field. These guys keep their real names as secret as possible, of course, but our man followed Eiríksson for two days and eventually managed to bribe his way to a copy of a hotel bill. I don’t suppose that Anton Eiríksson is a very common name, so there’s no doubt about this. Unfortunately we haven’t yet established clear working rules on how to deal with information on citizens of other countries, so nothing has been done so far in this individual’s case.”