‘I’d like to hire one of your aircraft,’ I said.
‘Are you a pilot?’
‘No. I want you to fly me as close as possible to Hekla.’
‘Are you a photographer?’
‘No.’ I told him what I was supposed to be.
‘It is very dangerous to get too close.’
‘I’m not asking you to get too close.’ I lit a cigarette and offered him one. He shook his head: smoking contributed to ageing. ‘Just close enough. There is a lot of controversy about the eruptions. One school of thought says they are not genuine Hekla eruptions because the Hekla eruptive rift runs from north-northeast to south-southwest and these craters run north to south.’
‘And the other school of thought?’ He leaned back in his chair, fingertips pressed together.
‘The other school of thought derives from lava analysis. You have probably heard of the geo-chemist Gudmunder Sigvaldson?’
‘I have heard of him.’
‘According to him the samples had a very high acid content at the beginning of the eruption. This decreased later. This is typical of Hekla eruptions.’
Even if you don’t believe me, I thought, you’ve got to admit that I’ve done my homework.
‘And what will flying near the craters achieve?’
A good question, Valdimar Laxdal. ‘Their pattern is important,’ I said. ‘I believe that the initial strength of the eruptions prevented accurate assessment. I believe that those craters do lie north-northeast to south-southwest.’
But Laxdal had also done his homework. ‘You could be right,’ he said. ‘Observation was difficult at the beginning. As you know, the height of the first eruptions was phenomenal according to radar at Keflavik.’
I nodded profoundly.
‘It was very difficult and highly dangerous to get anywhere near them,’ he said.
‘That’s my point,’ I said. I threw in a bit about the first earthquake measuring strength four on the Richter Scale.
He countered with a few statistics about the craters. A total of thirteen on the first day. Then he probed a bit more. ‘What areas do you intend to concentrate upon when you’re on the ground?’
‘Certainly around the Burfell power plant where they evacuated all the women and children. And, of course, some of the ash has fallen as far north as Hornbjarg.’
We regarded each other quietly. He said: ‘It will still be dangerous to fly very close to the craters.’
‘I’m aware of that,’ I said.
‘And it will therefore cost you more.’
‘I’m willing to pay more. At least your government is.’
‘Very well. When do you wish to fly?’
‘The day after tomorrow – weather permitting.’
‘Very well. Perhaps you would oblige me with a payment now. Half perhaps?’ He gave me a conspiratorial smile – let you and I cheat the government together. ‘We can perhaps reach an agreement together?’
‘I don’t quite know what you mean,’ I said primly, and wondered if he was the man who had tried to kill me on the road from Keflavik.
The messenger arrived just in time – a breathless girl from the terminal building. ‘There’s a phone call for you, Mr Laxdal,’ she said. ‘They say it’s very urgent Something about some money.’
‘In the terminal building?’
She nodded breathlessly.
‘I’ll try and take it here.’ He picked up the receiver but it was dead: Sigurdson had done his job well.
Laxdal swore tersely in Icelandic. But money was money, an important commodity in his life. ‘Please excuse me,’ he said. ‘I shan’t be long.’
I watched him across the hangar floor with the girl. Then I unscrewed the base of the telephone and inserted Martz ‘s bug, his insect, his nasty little eavesdropper, inside. I screwed the base on again and looked out across the hangar. No sign of Laxdal.
I went to his side of the desk and opened the drawer. Maps, bills, aerial photographs of Reykjavik. A razor, a pencil sharpener, a grease pencil, a copy of Playboy. Nothing incriminating, nothing surprising.
I flipped through the Playboy and a photograph of Gudrun fell on to the floor.
When he returned he was taut with suppressed anger. Monosyllabic, the knife half out of the sheath of cultivated behaviour.
‘A profitable trip?’
‘It was a mistake.’ He glared at me as if it were my fault, which it was. He picked up the receiver: it was working. He swore again and I hoped that Sigurdson’s monitor was not a man of delicate sensibilities.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘So it is fixed – we fly the day after tomorrow?’
‘It is fixed.’
I got up to go.
‘Mr Conran – or is it Professor Conran?’
‘Just plain mister.’
‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’
‘Ah, the money.’ I handed him a thin wad of kronur. He took it and began to count it. It was too much – but it was money well spent.
Hveragerdi is a small wandering place with 768 inhabitants, many hot springs, a geyser which erupts frequently and a profusion of hothouses. The hothouses are heated by natural steam, and tomatoes, bananas and grapes prosper in its warmth.
When you walk around the village you come across patches of soft, smoking earth. Elsewhere steam jets savagely from bore-holes.
I parked the Chevrolet outside the Hotel Hveragerdi and tried to look like a tourist with my camera and guidebook. In most other places in the world you would choose the hours of darkness if you were contemplating a break-in; in Iceland in the summer this is impossible. Luckily Hafstein’s house was on the outskirts of the village and was partially screened by a jet of steam.
It was neat and white like the rest of Hveragerdi, with a green corrugated iron roof and a hothouse full of tomatoes. A pipe led away from the hothouse towards the crumpled hills where Hafstein presumably had a private source of steam.
I picked the lock of the back door, let myself into the kitchen and stood for a moment listening to the house. A creak of wood, an electrical click in the refrigerator, a clock ticking, a tap dripping. Outside steam rolled past the window and the smell of sulphur was strong in the air.
I went into the living room. A bachelor place with a television set as a substitute for – friend or enemy. Modern furniture, multiple-store carpet, a seascape and a green Chinese face print on the walls – the essentials, unloved, bought during one excursion into town.
But I had not reached the shy soul of Emil Hafstein. Beside the television there was a door, locked; but not with intent to discourage burglars because I opened it in less than a minute.
From the walls of the study birds stared at and through me with disdain. Glassy, dusty, frozen savagery. From inland a white-tailed eagle, a gyrfalcon, old Nyctea scandiaca the snowy owl; from the cliffs and waves a petrel, a fulmar, a kittiwake and the sad parrot-clown puffin; from Lake Myvatn, a Barrow’s goldeneye, a harlequin and a scaup.
Now I was close to Hafstein. Knowing him better than I would if I had met him. And ashamed of it because it was like reading someone’s diary. If man had any right to anything then surely it was a sanctuary – beneath the sea, in the skies, in attic, study, studio or cobwebbed potting shed – the private confessional for braggart, pervert, introvert. And I had intruded, as brutally as a drunk in a convent.
On an easel in the corner stood a half-finished painting of a church and beside it a book with a photograph of the same church. The caption said: ‘Old Roman Catholic Church situate adjacent mud pools and hot spring, one km from Hveragerdi. Now disused.’ The author did not seem to have much feeling for old disused Roman Catholic churches. The painting was being executed with loving, amateurish strokes.
The desk was covered with peeling, moss-green leather scrolled with gold-leaf. The mess of papers was weighted here and there with chunks of ancient lava. I ducked the gaze of the birds and opened the drawer of the desk. There was a photograp
h of a girl inside; she was wearing a picture hat and a summer frock of immediate post-war length; she was smiling self-consciously at the camera and at the bottom she had written ‘To Emil with Love’, which I imagined was tantamount to an avowal of lifelong devotion from such a girl. Dead? Discarded? The answer, perhaps, to Hafstein’s lonely ways.
Under the photograph was a file bound with pink ribbon. The network, the contacts, the pick-up points … I opened the file and began to read a thesis on the migratory habits of Calidris canutus, called the bjartmafur in Icelandic and the knot in English. Hafstein had been observing it in the Westman Isles. If the stuffed puffin had been alive to sense my suspicions he would have died laughing or laid an egg.
I slipped one bugging device behind the snowy owl and another under the telephone in the living room.
The quiet was brooding and heavy. Just the small sounds of a house breathing. And then the crunch of a foot on the black ash outside. Or was it my imagination? The cumulus of steam thinned briefly and I fancied I saw a face.
I withdrew to the study and waited there with the birds and my Smith & Wesson. Five minutes, no further sound. I read the thesis, exhaustive and accomplished. I read the other papers, searched his books and middle-aged bachelor clothes, looked for wall-safes or hidden spring drawers. Nothing. A man of austere, listless habits away from his birds and churches; his only indulgence seemed to be sweets, an indulgence shared by many Icelanders.
Hafstein’s loneliness settled around me; it seemed inconceivable that he could be a spy, a traitor, a Marxist or even a shop-steward of the local stuffed-bird society.
I closed the drawer, smoothed the owl’s ruffled feathers, avoided the glare of the gyrfalcon and let myself out of Emil Hafstein’s sanctuary of innocent pleasure.
I was across the lounge and three steps into the kitchen when the barrel of the pistol was rammed in my spine.
I swung and ducked in one movement, chopping upwards with the side of my left hand. But I wasn’t playing games with an amateur. He clipped me quite gently on the mastoid and I lost consciousness.
7
Hekla
Half an hour later I blessed the professionalism. The swelling was small, the pain sharp but curable. I lay on the kitchen floor for a while, then lumbered around the house checking to see if my little insects were still alive and safe: they were.
I let myself out and walked through the mushrooms of steam to the hotel and phoned Gudrun. She was due to pick me up at 6 p.m. in Reykjavik; I told her to come on out to Hveragerdi, which is on the way to Hekla, and to bring some painkillers and my sheepskin coat with her. Then I went into the hotel and ordered a brandy.
‘What happened?’ Gudrun asked. Her concern warmed me as much as the brandy.
‘I fell climbing one of those bloody hills.’
She frowned. ‘What were you doing here and why were you climbing hills?’
‘I’m writing a paper on the knot,’ I said. ‘That’s the sort of terrain you would find them in.’ I hoped she knew nothing whatsoever about ornithology.
‘What’s a knot?’
‘The bjartmafur.’
She nodded vaguely. ‘Are you fit enough to go to Hekla?’
‘I’m all right,’ I said.
She drove the Land Rover well, talking a lot and pointing out rivers, mountains and farmhouses wedged into the flanks of senile volcanoes.
‘It was in farms like those that they wrote the sagas,’ she said. ‘Vonderful men like our own Snorri Sturluson.’
‘A sleepy sort of name.’
She ignored me. ‘You see we have no trees hardly to speak of?’
I nodded and a jab of pain passed from one ear to the other.
‘Ari the Learned said that Iceland once had the trees but they were all cut down to make fires. But there are still a few birch in the east.’
It was to be a guided tour and nothing would deter her. I made the occasional contribution. I pointed at the lava field on either side of us – frozen waves covered with verdigris. ‘Do you know the names of the moss beginning to grow on the lava?’
She shook her head irritably.
‘Rhacomitrium lanuginosum and rhacomitrium canescens.’ I had practised the pronunciation on the underground taking me home to Kensington and I was rather proud of it. ‘You can tell the age of the lava from the vegetation. When it gets a bit older you get small shrubs and later on birch.’
Ari the Learned apparently had nothing to contribute to this.
We passed some more patches of smoking earth and a fine wide river combed by boulders into white tresses. Then we began to climb and I saw the first far-flung black ashes of Hekla. She stopped the Land Rover and I filled a bag with the ash which was like coke. The land had been pasture; now it was a black wilderness.
‘Katla is also a wonderful volcano,’ Gudrun said. ‘It is covered by a glacier which melts when it erupts causing huge floods and explosions, and storms of ash that turn day into night.’
I recalled the description from a guide book. ‘Very soon you’ll be telling me that Iceland is Greenland and Greenland is Iceland.’
‘That is right,’ she said. ‘We have the good climate here. Especially in the south. You should have come last week for the sunshine.
‘Or later in the year?’
‘Or later in the year.’
‘That’s what they all say,’ I said.
‘Your head is hurting you,’ she said.
‘How was Johann?’ I asked.
‘Ah, Johann. He did not come. He must still be looking for the fish.’ She let out the clutch and we continued climbing. ‘Perhaps he has found another girl.’
‘Would you mind if he had?’
‘No.’ She paused and added: ‘Not now.’
She wore a pale blue headscarf, corduroy jeans, sealskin boots and a dark blue anorak unzipped at the front to reveal a powder-blue jersey that was far too small for her.
‘Are things so different now?’ I asked.
‘Yesh,’ she said.
‘I saw a photograph of you today.’
‘It is good, is it not?’
‘I didn’t look too carefully.’
‘It took all day that photograph. He took many, many pictures.’
‘It didn’t look all that good,’ I said.
‘You mean the picture for Icelandair?’
‘No, not that one.’ I lit a cigarette carefully, surprised at my reluctance to ask the positive question.
‘Which is this photograph then?’
‘I went to Valdimar Laxdal’s office today. I wanted to charter one of his aircraft to fly over Hekla. When he opened his desk there was a photograph of you in the drawer.’ I made a production of inhaling, exhaling, examining the tip of the cigarette. ‘Did you know him well?’
She seemed nonplussed for the first time since I met her. She took my cigarette and drew on it. We passed an extinct volcano crater filled with milky blue water; ahead the skyline of peaks was wrapped in scarves of mist. The track was muddy and deeply-rutted and some of the scoria tossed fifteen miles distance from Hekla was as big as rocks.
‘Well, did you?’
‘I knew him.’ Her mittened hands held the wheel very firmly.
‘Intimately but not well.’
‘I think that is some sort of joke. I do not like those sort of jokes.’ The tyres crunched on the ash as she swung off the track to avoid a mire of wheel-tracks. ‘Very well, we were lovers.’
‘Does that mean you loved him?’
‘Yes, I think perhaps I did then.’ She turned to the defence of her country’s morals. ‘But that is not why I slept with him. I would have slept with him anyway if he had asked. He is an attractive man and we were attracted to each other. Therefore it is natural that we make love. That is the way it is in Iceland.’ She brightened a little. ‘We eat we drink, we make the jokes, we make love. That is how it was intended. We think that you in England and America are the ones without morals. Why is it wrong to make love?�
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‘I didn’t say it was.’
‘Already we are getting too serious.’
‘I agree,’ I said.
This seemed to annoy her. ‘You make me serious because I know how you English and Americans are about these things. If I were with an Iceland man I would not have to explain.’
‘Do you still go with him?’
‘We are no longer lovers.’
‘Did he go back to his wife?’
‘He never left his wife.’
The situation sounded more international than exclusively Icelandic. ‘Is he the father of your child?’ Jesus, I thought, get me another script writer.
‘Yes,’ she said. The tyres spat lava as we accelerated round a hairpin bend.
I heard Hekla about four miles before we reached it. A continuous grumble of distant thunder becoming louder and sharper as we got nearer. We parked the Land Rover on a ledge overlooking a plain. It was midnight, and the white peaks of the mountains on the far side of the plain floated on mauve mist in the uncertain light. Immediately below flowed a wide river of lava, dark and embedded with red jewels: to the right, around a jutting crag, stood the craters.
Smoke was suspended high above, being pushed around by the jets of hot air as docilely as jellyfish in strong currents. I took Gudrun’s hand because we were children in the presence of all this and we climbed down the hill to the plain. Half way down we saw the great mouth of Hekla spewing molten earth into the sky. The red lava, the burning earth, sprayed up like storm waves hitting a jetty; with a regular rhythm – the pulse of the world. The noise was a continuous artillery barrage, the crust of the earth felt very fragile under our feet.
On the plain we stood within a couple of feet of the lava. A wall of grey coke ten feet high, half a mile wide, carrying red caves and chasms with it on its inexorable journey. Every second or so a segment fell from the top in front of the base: that was how it advanced. All the time it grumbled and muttered as it flexed its clinker muscles.
We skirted its path and walked towards the craters. There was hardly any ash now and the dark tough ground was embroidered with mauve flowers.
Sightseers heading for the craters were scattered across the plain. The daring got to within about three quarters of a mile of them with their cameras and binoculars and sandwiches.
The Chill Factor Page 6
