The Chill Factor

by Richard Falkirk

  ‘Ah yes, Hekla,’ he said. ‘We have the finest volcanoes in the world. Always they are erupting. Now you are going to pretend to investigate Hekla’s poison, yesh?’

  The s slushed into sh and the slight American accent reminded me of Gudrun.

  ‘I might even do some good,’ I said.

  ‘Rid poor little Iceland of two poisons, eh? The Russians and the fluor.’

  I wondered how unpleasant he became in drink. He sat down abruptly and laughed with great vigour until tears of aquavit rolled down his pale cheeks.

  I remembered reading something about the Icelandic love of laughter. ‘Simple humour and witty ditties’ – or something like that. Sigurdson seemed to possess his countryman’s characteristics in abundance: he was hospitable, generous, tough, boastful, neurotic about his country’s size and its appeal to America and Russia. He was probably also appreciative of witty ditties: I didn’t know yet whether he was a good policeman.

  He stopped laughing, wiped his cheeks with a white silk handkerchief and said: ‘The Communists are not so strong here – it is just that they make a lot of noise.’

  ‘Strong and noisy enough to persuade a mob to wreck the American TV equipment at the base. Perhaps strong enough to persuade a mob to do far worse.’

  ‘One or two are strong,’ he admitted. ‘But not the ones the public read about.’

  ‘Do you know who they are?’

  He looked at me with a shrewdness that was startling because laughter-lines still cobwebbed the corners of his eyes. I imagined him laughing hugely as he shot a fugitive in the back. ‘You know I know,’ he said.

  ‘All right, I know you know.’

  ‘One in particular,’ he said. ‘A man named Hafstein.’ He opened a black briefcase and tossed three folders on the table. ‘There are the dossiers on all three of them.’

  I decided that he was probably a very good policeman.

  After that the seriousness evaporated. As if we had concluded the first day of business conference and the night was young.

  He poured me an inch of Black Death and an inch and a half of asni for himself. ‘We will finish these,’ he said, pointing at the two bottles, now half empty – or half full, according to your approach to life. ‘Then perhaps we will go and find some girls. There are many beautiful girls in Reykjavik and there are not so many men. We will go perhaps to the Loftleidir or the Saga.’

  ‘Not tonight,’ I said. ‘Thanks all the shame.’ The Black Death was melting my pronunciation into awful jokes.

  Sigurdson laughed massively, although no flesh shook on his hard body. And I – Noel Coward and Brendan Behan fused into one – laughed with him.

  ‘Thanks all the shame,’ he said, and threw himself back on the bed. Somewhere beneath him there was a crack of protesting woodwork. He sat upright again, put his fingers to his lips. ‘Shush.’

  We winked at each other and I mixed myself an asni with Black Death. I liked Charlie Martz, I liked Einar Sigurdson, I loved Gudrun. ‘Here’s to Anglo-Icelandic friendship.’

  We drank to that. Then to American-Icelandic friendship. Then to Anglo-American friendship. Then we ran out of liquor.

  We squeezed the bottles but not a drop issued forth. We commiserated with each other and would have sung if it hadn’t been for the International Templar upstairs.

  Finally Sigurdson rose to his feet, put one arm round my shoulders, hugged me and announced: ‘I like you.’

  I nodded and we both knew that the nod embraced all that was decent in the relationships of mankind. ‘And I like you, old buddy,’ I said.

  ‘Bles,’ he said.

  I watched him walk down the road in a series of S bends. Then I undressed, picked up the three dossiers and went to bed. When I awoke at 10 a.m. I was still cuddling the dossiers – and a small volcano was erupting inside my skull.

  4

  The Saga

  The description fitted my physical and mental condition. ‘A picture of erratic ruin where the entire district looks as if it had been baked, broiled, burnt and boiled by some devilish hand until its chemical soul had fled and left nought behind save a grim, grey shroud of darkness and despair.’ It was an old description of a lava field.

  I put down the book, rejected my landlady’s offer of bread and apricot jam, swallowed my fifth black coffee and went out into the drizzling morning. I took the car to a garage to get the windscreen replaced, then wandered dazedly around the city centre.

  It hadn’t changed much and darts of memory from childhood opened small wounds of regret for what might have been. Austurvollur Square was still toytown with the little white Lutheran Cathedral and the Althing – the diminutive Parliament building. In the streets around the square the same bookshops, glossy with Icelandic geography and culture from the time of the sagas to the contemporary Nobel Prize winner Halldor Laxness. Chanting newspaper boys, a policeman in white peaked cap and gloves, teenagers in flared trousers and brown and fawn sweaters, no hoardings, no dogs, all in miniature.

  The tour of the middle-aged schoolboy with a hangover continued. Along Laufasvegur, overlooking the artificial lake with its mossy waters and placid ducks, to the American Embassy, white, two-storeyed, with a Plymouth station wagon and a black Chrysler New Yorker R18461 parked outside.

  On to the British Ambassador’s house. No. 33. A seaside boarding house with a long garden in front. Then the British Embassy, white with a turreted roof and a Land Rover with CD plates outside.

  Diplomats. Frightened men acting a charade of manners that encouraged Russians and Chinese in their barbarism. A ‘strongly-worded note’ to deflect an armoured column; an umbrella to answer a rifle; petulant anachronisms pitted against inexorable brutality.

  A face appeared at the window. Smooth hair with a self-conscious curl falling over the forehead. White shirt and striped tie.

  We stared at each other briefly, recognition dawning across the long garden. Jefferey, the one diplomat who personified my views on his profession. Jefferey, the one man who knew every detail about my recall from Moscow.

  Jefferey in Iceland … I turned abruptly and returned to the lake and looked at the occupants. Duck, geese, swans and Arctic tern. Before returning to the Serpentine I hoped to visit Lake Myvatn in the north to have a look at Barrow’s Goldeneye, the harlequin and the scaup.

  After Moscow I had relaxed watching birds. These were the diplomatic birds – coots, whimbrels, pipits, white wagtails, snipe, shoveler and shag. And the Russians – red-throated diver, slavonian grebe, red-breasted merganser, redwing, raven.

  The weather changed as if another slide had been slotted into the projector. Toytown was suddenly warm and stirring in spring sunshine and a breeze crinkled the lake and ruffled the birds’ plumage.

  The Stolichnaya vodka had tasted all right. A little thick from the deep-freeze but that was all. I had split many such a bottle with a Russian suckled on grain spirit and watched his face turn mauve before mine.

  But this one drunk with a Russian playwright in an apartment just off Kutuzovsky Prospect was something special. A Micky Finnovitch.

  The room where I regained consciousness was classically bare with a couple of chairs, a leaning dressing-table, a rush mat, a portrait of Lenin – and a bed on which the girl, wearing only a black suspender belt and stockings, and myself were lying. As I swam through the haze I thought: ‘At least they haven’t planted a man.’

  She was very white, heavy-breasted with a Caesarean scar just above the pubic hair. The cameraman said ‘Just one more’ in Russian; she opened her legs and that was that. She began to dress, looking more attractive as she put on more clothes.

  They handed me my clothes. ‘Is there anything more?’ I asked.

  ‘No, Gaspadeen Conran, you are free to go.’

  ‘When will the prints be ready?’

  ‘Tonight at the latest.’ He smiled. ‘It is a pity you were asleep for most of the time. But we can retouch the pictures.’

  ‘Can you do an extra set
of prints for me?’

  ‘Of course, if you wish. We shall be printing very many sets. Dosividaniya, Gaspadeen Conran.’

  The first print showed me suspended between two men outside the café, apparently drunk. Then a series which would have fetched good money in parts of Soho or 42nd Street.

  ‘These should be the subject of a private member’s bill,’ I said.

  Jefferey, from the British Embassy, didn’t smile. He said: ‘There’s nothing for it but to ship you out on the next plane.’ He examined one of the prints closely.

  ‘Jealous, Jefferey?’

  ‘You always were an offensive sort of man.’

  ‘Only because you didn’t like the work I was doing. Trying to unbotch your botch-ups.’

  ‘I imagine these will finish you,’ he said. ‘You don’t exactly look like an absent-minded professor.’ A tiny smile humanised his petulantly handsome face.

  ‘You want to try these methods some time,’ I said. ‘They work, you see. Simple, brutal, amateurish, effective. The Russians could finish the lot of you if they wanted to. But they don’t want to – you’re too bloody useful to them sending your notes and eating strawberries on the Queen’s birthday. Don’t you see, Jefferey’ – his name should have been Cholmondeley – ‘you’re out of date? All of you.’

  ‘At least we don’t get caught in flagrante delicto, old boy.’ He had a liking for the French or Latin phrase, did Jefferey.

  ‘Not even the Russians could manage that with you,’ I said.

  They also sent a set to my wife. She said she understood and started divorce proceedings one year later.

  After the ‘crack-up’ they took me back into the department in Whitehall. Then sent me to Iceland because I was the only one who knew the country and could speak the language; and because no Icelander would see anything compromising in a compromising photograph.

  A DC-3 dropped slowly on to the runway of the city airfield and a duck took off from the lake.

  I opened my briefcase, took out the dossiers and began to read beside toytown’s looking-glass lake.

  The memoranda had been typed in Icelandic for my personal information with explanatory comments.

  ‘Suspect No. 1. Emil Hafstein. Aged fifty-two, pseudo-intellectual, supports the People’s Union, one-time Communist but not ostensibly a fanatical one. There is no stigma in Communism in Iceland. Bachelor with a room in Reykjavik and a house in Hveragerdi forty-six kilometres from Reykjavik. Hobbies – ornithology and the study of Iceland’s ancient churches. Suspicions about him hardened since discovery of his name on person of Gislason. In key position to introduce forged documents into Iceland’s statistical records. Under observation and has been seen to enter the Russian Chancery building in Gardastraeti on two occasions staying ten minutes and fifteen minutes.’ A photograph accompanied the dossier. A thin, guarded face with a goatee beard and sagging neck muscles. The face of a recluse who had not succeeded in finding an escape from life and had, perhaps, sought an ideology as a substitute.

  I stared across the lake in the direction of the Russian Embassy. There was really no escape anywhere in the world. Moscow, New York, London, Rwanda and Burundi, toytown … the war in which so few were really interested went remorselessly on. Jefferey, the Russians: perhaps it was all being set up again for me.

  ‘Suspect No. 2. Valdimar Laxdal. Aged forty-five. Communist but again not apparently fanatical. Political views possibly motived by mercenary considerations. Owns two Cessnas which he hires on charter. A skilled pilot able to fly to inaccessible areas. (This was underlined, with the implication that he could pick up fugitive spies.) Married with two children but marriage believed to be breaking up because of his womanising ways …’

  Womanising ways, I thought. Come op Einar Sigurdson.

  ‘… Recently visited Warsaw and Moscow on a tour arranged by the Communist Party. High standard of living not quite accounted for by his income from chartering small aircraft. Recent deposits, heavier than usual (cash) in the Landsbanki Islands.’

  No explanation was given for the suspicion that Laxdal had attracted. But when I looked at his photograph I conceded that no explanation was necessary. The handsome face of a mercenary dedicated to one cause – Valdimar Laxdal. Watch your wife, your wine and your wallet.

  ‘Suspect No. 3. Olav Magnusson. Trawler owner. Aged fifty. Home in Heimaey in the Westman Islands. One of the rich Left Wing supporters. In fact there are no poor Communists in Iceland because there are no really poor people. This invalidates the theory that it is poverty that spawns Communism … (I offer no theory for the existence of Communism in a wealthy country except that it is the voice of protest …)’

  Einar Sigurdson getting in his bit about the ‘Army of occupation’.

  ‘… Wealthy, running a Mercedes on the mainland and a Saab in Heimaey. Took active part in the Cod War against Britain. Runs mink farm as a sideline. Married with two children in the early twenties. Physically very strong. Suspicions first aroused when US reconnaissance aircraft noted a rendezvous between a Soviet trawler and one of his ships 100 miles east of Gerpir.’

  Charlie Martz, I thought, you forgot to tell me that. Magnusson’s photograph confirmed his potted biography. Sleek, wealthy, strong.

  Sigurdson had appended a note: ‘It is imperative that we do not arouse the suspicions of any of these men. If we do, then we shall have lost all chance of breaking the network. Suggest your investigations start with the key man, Hafstein. Good hunting.’

  For which I thanked Einar Sigurdson. So far, apart from the dossiers, his only contribution to the investigation had been the presentation of a hangover that made any work impossible.

  I strolled back into the centre of town and sent a cable to London. I didn’t relish the reply. Then I went back to bed.

  5

  The Saga of the Saga

  The wallpaper was gold, the receptionists attractive and healthy-looking, the general impression of the Saga Hotel as tubular and modern as a memorial to Mr Hilton or Mr Sheraton.

  The barmen shook, rattled and stirred with professional detachment. I counted four bars but there could have been more. From upstairs you could see the midnight – or 11.23 p.m. – sun hurry down over the bay. And you could see the geometric patterns of the new Reykjavik.

  I banished the memory of Black Death, ordered a Scotch and waited for Gudrun. Around the ground-floor bar long drinks of vodka, gin, brandy and whisky made their impression on expense accounts and ice cubes jingled like money.

  Soon the women began to arrive. Of all ages, all sizes. Smart, watchful, on the prowl like the men of other countries. A woman of about fifty, wearing her age and her sequins well, stood next to me and ordered three brandies with ginger ale. She smiled at me and I smiled back. Widow, divorcee, spinster, wife? Here you couldn’t tell.

  ‘American?’ she asked.

  ‘No, English.’

  ‘Ah, Brezkur.’ I couldn’t tell whether this was good or bad.

  She nodded pleasantly, took her drinks and went back to her table to tell her friends the good or bad news. When I turned round they all smiled. Flirtatious, maternal, predatory, or just friendly – I still couldn’t tell.

  The girls were very smart, a predominance of blondes, wearing mini-skirts and low-cut trouser suits with flared trousers. They came in twos and threes then drifted into larger groups like leaves on a pond.

  Most of the men were visitors from abroad eyeing the talent with furtive wonderment or, if they were with colleagues, discussing the profusion of riches with dirty-joke laughter. The local men knew the set-up and left it till later. One moustachioed man in his late twenties sat at a table with eight girls. He seemed unconcerned at his good fortune: he might have been attending a union meeting.

  Gudrun’s bosom nuzzled me gently in the chest. ‘Hallo, Mr Conran,’ she said.

  ‘Hallo,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m early,’ she said.

  I shrugged.

  ‘It is wonderfu
l to see you. Now please you will buy me a drink.’

  I bought her an asni.

  She sipped happily and said: ‘I think now you have paid for your vodkas.’

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  ‘I am always hungry. That is one of my troubles.’ She took a sip of her asni and half of it disappeared.

  ‘Shall we have dinner here?’

  ‘If it pleases you. I think you should try one of our national dishes. It is called hakarl.’

  ‘Is it good?’

  ‘We think so. But sometimes foreigners do not agree. It is shark that has been buried under the earth for a while. It is a little rotten and has a sort of rind round the outside.’

  ‘I think perhaps I’ll give it a miss this time,’ I said.

  We headed for the restaurant upstairs. It was big, the ceiling supported by pillars, with a dance floor in the middle, two bars and a small happy orchestra. Women and girls and a few men stood near the bars waiting for a happening.

  Gudrun examined the menu and suggested that I try boiled sheep’s head. I resisted and we both had sweet soup and mutton. I ordered a bottle of wine and a glass of beer for myself.

  Gudrun regarded the beer with scorn. ‘Pilsner,’ she said. ‘Water. The Government does not allow much alcohol in the beer – they think it will encourage drunkenness.’

  ‘So everyone drinks vodka and brandy instead?’

  ‘That’s right,’ she said, brightly.

  ‘I never did understand politics.’

  ‘Shall we dance?’

  ‘Before we’ve eaten?’

  But she was already on her feet, hand outstretched, waiting or commanding. She was wearing a dark blue evening skirt and a white silk blouse cut very low.

  For a girl of her build she was lively on the floor. The music was Beatles or Rolling Stones or something like that, played and sung with vigour. She swung her arms around with abandon, laughed, sang a little and trod on a tourist.