Sun on Fire

by Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson

  “Is that so?”

  “Yeah, it’s unpleasant to have to admit it, but I’m ashamed to say that’s what I was like that evening.”

  “How long do you think you were sleeping?”

  “At least an hour.”

  “And nobody else used the restroom in the meantime?”

  “No, I’d locked myself in. There were other restrooms on the upper floors.”

  “Did you know the other guests?”

  “No. I knew Helgi, of course, and I knew of Jón from the past. I didn’t know any of the others personally.”

  “What do you mean by ‘personally’?”

  “Well, they’re well-known guys, of course, but I’d never rubbed shoulders with them.”

  “Did you have any dealings with Anton that evening?”

  “We spoke briefly during the party. I didn’t find him very interesting.”

  “How so?”

  “I thought he was arrogant and aggressive. He seemed to think he was the guest of honor, but Jón the Sun Poet made it clear to him that this wasn’t the case, and after that he mostly stayed upstairs.”

  “Where upstairs?”

  “In the ambassador’s office, making calls—courtesy of the Icelandic state.”

  “Did you go up there at all?”

  “Helgi and I briefly met with the ambassador in his office. We took photographs and shook hands on a deal about a promotional campaign. I also went upstairs at one point later in the evening.”

  “Was Anton there then?”

  “I don’t think so. I went up to use the bathroom because the downstairs one was occupied.”

  “What was your business in Berlin?”

  “I set up exhibitions for artists. Helgi and I have worked together in the past, and he asked me again this time. I installed an exhibition of paintings at the embassy three years ago, so I was familiar with the space, but we needed to go to Berlin to take a look at it together. Ceramics need a different approach than paintings.”

  “Do you arrange shipping for the exhibits?”

  “Yes, usually. I get a specialist carpenter to make the crates—under my supervision.”

  “Did you send the two candlesticks that were in the ambassador’s office?”

  “Yes, I arranged that.”

  “Did you see them there?”

  “Yes, I took a photograph of Helgi and the ambassador with the candlesticks between them.”

  “Were they all right?”

  “Yes, of course. Did something happen to them?”

  “No.”

  “Phew, that’s a relief. Those are priceless objects. Helgi doesn’t do that particular style anymore.”

  “Tell me in detail how you arranged their shipping.”

  “How are the candlesticks relevant to your investigation?”

  “Maybe they’re not, but it may turn up something useful.”

  “OK. In consultation with me, Helgi has been collating a list of artifacts that are to be displayed in his exhibition. He decided to send the candlesticks ahead for use in the promotional materials, and asked me to arrange the shipping, as usual. I went to his studio and measured them. The crate was made in my workshop with waterproofed plywood and lined with foam rubber cut to fit the candlesticks precisely. I transported the crate to Helgi’s studio, packed the candlesticks, and personally screwed the crate closed. It’s my usual procedure, and ensures that the contents are one-hundred percent secure. A shipping company then picked up the case for delivery to Berlin.”

  “Did you have a good look at the candlesticks before you packed them?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “What sort of bases did they have?”

  “The usual kind—the same Helgi always uses for such things. He closes them off with plaster of paris and inscribes his initials, HK.”

  “So there was nothing unusual about them?”

  “No, nothing unusual.”

  Gunnar mulled things over. “OK,” he said, finally. “That’s all for now. I’ll need you to come to police headquarters so we can take your fingerprints and palm prints for comparison.”

  “Fingerprints? Is that necessary?”

  “Yes, please, as soon as possible.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll bear that in mind as soon as I get a chance.”

  20:30

  As promised, Birkir went to visit Fabían. He had no other plans, and anyway, his mind was completely occupied by this murder case. Maybe Fabían had something to say that would throw light on the embassy guests’ circumstances during that fateful night.

  He’d started his evening with a ten-kilometer run around the west part of town, and then, after eating leftover vegetable soup and a slice of homemade bread, he’d sat down with a mug of lemon tea for a half hour to listen to some music. Now, donning suitable clothing to protect against the rapidly cooling evening air, he headed out. He didn’t have far to go, so he decided to take a detour up a street lined with little artisan shops, in whose windows he enjoyed studying the displays of handicrafts and all kinds of artwork. There was a sort of contentment in these little shops. Birkir was friendly with an old man who was a goldsmith and ran a small workshop in a back lot behind one of the main houses. He’d been robbed some time back, and Birkir had been instrumental in solving the case. Since then he would occasionally stop by the shop for a chat and to check that the security system was working. There was a real community feel to the neighborhood.

  When he got to Jónshús, once again Rakel opened the door; she seemed to be expecting him. “Fabían is in the kitchen,” she said, showing him the way.

  “Welcome,” Fabían said. He was alone, standing at the kitchen table and slicing an apple. He was dressed in a thick cotton sweater with a hood that he’d pulled over his head. His pants were made of the same material, thick and somewhat too large for him, and he wore fur-lined leather boots.

  “Please sit down,” he said, nodding toward a chair next to the table. “I’m just preparing breakfast for our birds. Úlfheidur usually does it, but she’s otherwise occupied tonight. She’s a fortune-teller and she knits sweaters. A good combination.”

  “Is she a good fortune-teller?” Birkir asked.

  “It varies, but when she hits the mark, it really works. Two years before the banking crash she told Jón to get rid of all the shares he’d inherited from his parents, and buy euros and dollars instead. That was after she dreamed that they’d moved the Art Academy into the Central Bank building—not a bad idea, actually.”

  He laughed quietly, which turned into a coughing fit.

  “Did Jón follow her advice?” Birkir asked.

  “Yes,” Fabían answered once he’d recovered. “And our household greatly benefited from it. Our annual accounts here usually show a deficit, so it’s great to have access to a reliable reserve fund. Jón is very generous to us.”

  He lined up the apple slices on a wooden board and cut out the centers with a corer. “The holes are so I can hang the rings from the trees,” he said.

  Then he fetched a glass bowl from the refrigerator. “Jörundur cooked meat broth yesterday, and I skimmed off the fat from the leftovers at lunch today. I’ll dip some bread in it, it’s good for the thrushes.” He put the bowl into the microwave, and set it for one minute.

  “Tell me about yourself,” Birkir said.

  “Myself?”

  “Yes, where were you born? Where have you lived?”

  “Why do you want to know about that?”

  “Just curiosity, I guess. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “No, I’m just surprised—folks aren’t usually interested in my life story. But, since you ask, I’m from the Northwest, born in Ísafjördur in the spring of 1961.”

  “Did you grow up in Ísafjördur?”

  “To start with, but after a few years I became homeless.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Fabían paused to think before he started his account. “I lost my father before I was even born. When my m
other was six months pregnant, he decided the relationship wasn’t working for him. I’ve never met him.”

  “Why are you called Fabían? It’s not a common name.”

  “I’m fond of my name. It’s the only thing I’ve got left from my mother. My mom loved music. She named me after Fabian, an American singer she idolized—he was very popular, and his songs were always being played on the radio in the fifties and sixties.”

  “Did something happen to your mother?”

  “Yes. She got sick and died.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  The microwave beeped, and Fabían took out the bowl. “Mom coped really well during her first years as a single mother. She had a job in fish processing, and she always provided for me. She was lucky with day care, because she found me a woman who had three kids of her own and took in five others during the day. I was an easy kid, so it was never a problem for me to stay there into the evening if they had to do overtime at the freezing plant. Sometimes I’d fall asleep in bed with one of the other kids, and then they just left me until morning. Mom would swing by and give me a kiss before going back to our little apartment on her own. So my early childhood was good, but when I was seven, my mom fell ill with a neurological disorder and could no longer work. Of course I was in school by then, but outside of that I just fended for myself. Mom stayed at home for a few months, but after that she couldn’t even look after herself and was sent to a sanatorium here in Reykjavík. A year later she was dead.”

  As he talked, Fabían soaked slices of bread in the hot fat. “When Mom couldn’t live on her own anymore, I was sent to a farm to be looked after by a couple who fostered boys in welfare. It was a small place, isolated in the far corner of the fjord, mostly sheep, but also seven cows. It wasn’t altogether bad, but there was no love at all. There were five of us little guys, all different ages, scared to death of the husband, who ruled with terror and tongue-lashing. I don’t actually remember him beating us, but somehow that was always the hidden threat. I was unusually small for my age and kind of puny. My mother’s death had been a great shock to me, and no one helped me deal with that. My poor little soul was in a bad way.”

  Fabían took his tray of fat-soaked bread and put it in the refrigerator. “We’ll let this harden a moment before we take it outside.” He sat down at the table. “Can I offer you anything?”

  Birkir shook his head. “Go on with your story,” he said.

  “One fall, I got very sick and was sent away to the district hospital. It was partly an infection and partly malnutrition because of the poor appetite I’d always had. I was also psychologically blocked—I never initiated conversation, and personal hygiene was a problem. The folks at the hospital decided that I had some kind of developmental disability, and when the farmer refused to have me back after my hospitalization, I was placed in a home for mentally handicapped people. I was not unhappy there and, since I wasn’t as challenging to deal with as most of the others, I was left in peace. They didn’t do much to develop our abilities. Every day was more or less the same, and I spent most of my time sitting by the window, looking out at the yard. Somebody had the idea to give me paper and pencil, and I began to draw what I could see outside. It was crude stuff to start with, but gradually I developed a pretty good freehand technique. I always destroyed my drawings as soon as I’d finished them, though, because I didn’t want to attract undue attention to myself. I was comfortable being left to my own devices, and I stayed there for the next few years.”

  Fabían stood up and took out two plastic containers, which he filled with grains from two sacks in the adjoining pantry. “This one is a mixture of wheat and grits for the snow buntings,” he said, placing the containers on the table in front of Birkir, “and this one is sunflower seeds for the redpolls.”

  “How did you meet Jón the Sun Poet?” Birkir asked.

  “That’s a story in itself. One spring, a young poetry-writing hippie from Reykjavík took a summer job at the home where I was kept. This was Jón Sváfnisson, who later became known as the Sun Poet. His behavior was sometimes a bit over the top, but he was sensitive to his surroundings and to other people. One time, he caught me reading a magazine when I thought I was unobserved. The other inmates were all illiterate, so this was out of the ordinary, but he didn’t tell the staff, he just started chatting to me about this and that, and didn’t seem to mind that I didn’t respond. Also working there that same summer was Sunna, a girl from a nearby village. Nicknamed “Sun,” she was a kitchen assistant and cleaner, and whenever she had a free moment she sang and played the guitar. I was entranced by the beautiful sounds she made, and one day I abandoned my safe place by the window, moved closer, and started drawing her as she played. The finished sketch was really good, I thought, and I couldn’t bear to destroy it like the others, so I slipped it into her guitar case when no one was looking. There was pandemonium when they discovered it. Nobody figured out that it was the idiot by the window who’d produced this masterpiece—except of course for Jón, but he didn’t say a word. Sunna loved the poems Jón had written, and set some of them to music. She and Jón ended up as an item and went together to Reykjavík at the end of the summer.”

  Fabían fetched the bread pieces from the refrigerator, picked up the board with the apple rings, and signaled for Birkir to pick up the grain and seed containers. “All this needs to go out,” he said. Then, stopping only to put on a thick parka in the hallway, he led the way into the yard.

  Despite the overhanging trees, there was a fair amount of light out there, cast by the streetlamps and spilling out from the living room windows. There was a full moon, too, shining down from a northern sky. The only sound they could hear in the stillness was the trickle of a tiny brook that flowed between two small ornamental ponds.

  Birkir stared at the water in surprise.

  “There’s a neat little device that pumps the water through a pipe back up to the upper pond,” Fabían said. “And some of the outflow from the mains hot water gets added to it, that’s why it’s not frozen. There’s always fresh water for the birds.”

  Birkir took a closer look. The ponds’ edges had been painstakingly constructed with flat stones, and mosses had rooted themselves at water level.

  Fabían nodded toward a folding stepladder lying beneath the trees. “Would you mind putting that up for me? I want to hang up the apples in the rowan.” He pointed at the trees, which had lost most of their leaves in the previous week’s wind. “The thrushes have been eating the rowanberries, and there aren’t many left, so it makes sense to give them apples and fat now. Then they’ll remember where they can find food in the winter when there are no more berries and frosts are harder. I’m convinced that the same birds come here year after year.”

  Birkir set up the stepladder where Fabían pointed. “Can you support it while I climb up, please?” Fabían asked. “And can you hold the board for me? We have to put the food as high as possible, because of all the neighborhood cats. We keep shooing them away, but they always come sneaking back.”

  With Birkir holding on to the stepladder, Fabían climbed unsteadily up. Then he held out his hand for the apple pieces. “We’ve cut back some of the smaller branches here to make hooks to hang the food from,” he said as he threaded the apple rings one by one onto the protruding stumps. He repeated the process with the bread slices.

  “Now it’s ready for them when they come out of their sleeping places in the morning,” Fabían said as he stepped carefully back down to earth. “The thrushes and the starlings will fight over it. Sometimes the odd blackbird, too.”

  He stood awhile, collecting himself. “I just need a moment,” he said. “Climbing makes me dizzy.”

  Birkir waited for him to recover before asking, “What happened to you after Jón finished working in the home?”

  “I got sick again and spent most of that winter in the hospital. They had a lot of interesting books there, and I stopped bothering to hide the fact that I could read. A teacher re
gularly came to the hospital to tutor a girl who was chronically sick. He took an interest in me and had me join in the classes. I learned a lot in a very short time, and people realized I was maybe not so retarded after all. Still, when I’d gotten better, they sent me back to the previous place while they considered other solutions. In the spring, Jón and Sun came to visit in an old Russian jeep. When they heard about the problems finding somewhere for me to live, they offered me the chance to come and do farm work for them, as they were about to move out into the country down south. I was worried about having to do heavy work, as I was physically very feeble, but Jón promised that wouldn’t happen. He stood by his word—I never had to overexert myself while living with them.”

  He turned away from Birkir and moved over to the tallest aspens. He pointed to where horizontal wooden boards were firmly attached to the branches three meters above them.

  “Would you mind scattering the grain for the snow buntings up there for me, please?” he said. “I’ll support the ladder.”

  Birkir repositioned the stepladder and clambered up.

  “The buntings arrived unusually early this fall,” Fabían said. “They came straight after that cold spell at the beginning of the month.”

  Birkir sprinkled the contents of the plastic container onto the boards and climbed back down.

  “This should be enough for our morning visitors,” Fabían said. “Úlfheidur will feed them again at noon tomorrow. It’s easier to do this in daylight.”

  “So you moved south—how was that?” Birkir asked.

  Fabían coughed. “Yes, I left with Jón and Sun, and we went to Fljótshlíd in the Southeast, where they set up a small commune with another couple, Helgi Kárason and Rakel Árnadóttir. Helgi was with Jón and me in Berlin, as you know, and you’ve met Rakel here.”

  “What was the farm?” Birkir asked.

  “Jón’s father had inherited a small plot of land with an old house on it, far up the river valley. A remote place, called Sandgil. Jón was one of those typical anarchist hippies rebelling against their wealthy parents, and he and his friends decided to squat on the land. His father avoided confrontation by pretending he didn’t know Jón had taken over the farm. For me, things were better than they’d ever been since I’d lost my mother and my home. My housemates were extremely kind to me, and we had a great life. Other good people came and lived with us from time to time, but only the five of us lived there permanently the whole time.”