The Chill Factor

by Richard Falkirk

  ‘So what do we do, wise guy?’

  ‘There you have me,’ I said. ‘But we must keep tabs on them. I will try and get closer to Magnusson. And we can go through the records that Hafstein was in charge of with a fine-tooth comb. And we can try and figure out what Hafstein meant by German church.’

  ‘You’ll have to figure it out pretty darn quickly,’ Martz said.

  ‘The records might produce a clue. That’s why the agent the policeman shot had Hafstein’s name in his pocket. Somewhere there’s a list of all the agents and sympathisers in Iceland. We might get on to something tomorrow.’

  Martz sighed, finished his Scotch and went to the window. On the cindery grass outside some boys were playing primitive baseball. He said: ‘Forget Magnusson and Laxdal for a moment. I’ve got bad news for you.’

  ‘You’re handing Shirey over?’

  ‘Right. At midnight tonight. There’s no use kicking up a fuss. It’s all fixed. We can’t risk trouble on their National day.’

  ‘But you said …’

  ‘I know what I said, Bill old buddy. I only just got the call. The deadline for Shirey’s release is midnight and that’s all there is to it.’

  The plane was late. I hung around in the lounge for fifteen minutes examining the souvenirs; paintings, carvings, lava ornaments, woollens, all expensive.

  I read the newspapers which were full of reports about the demand to the Americans for access to Shirey, so far unnamed, and the celebrations planned for tomorrow.

  I reached over the counter to examine the postcards of Surtsey and Hekla and the Great Geyser which, as long ago as 1907, had needed a dose of soap to make it spout for the King of Denmark. At the same time a corpulent man standing beside me also reached across and shouldered me to one side.

  Instead of apologising he stayed in the same position flicking through Iceland in a Nutshell with thumb and forefinger. My leg was still hurting and I turned casually, catching him in the belly with my elbow; the belly was surprisingly hard.

  We both turned and looked at each other. At last I had made contact with Olav Magnusson.

  Instinct and training reacted. To show recognition was tantamount to confessing suspicion. I maintained icy English displeasure. ‘Excuse me,’ I said, and grabbed at some postcards, still gouging his stomach with my elbow.

  He stood back. ‘I am very sorry.’ Good English, slight American accent.

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said, treading firmly on his foot.

  ‘Mr William Conran, is it not?’

  Now what, I thought, is your game? ‘Yes,’ I said, in the voice English people use for discouraging vendors of pornography.

  ‘I thought so. I have seen your photograph.’

  ‘I doubt it very much.’

  ‘But I assure you I have. You have come to Iceland to help us treat the sheep and cattle poisoned by Hekla, have you not?’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said guardedly.

  ‘I have read all about you.’ He produced a folded newspaper from the inside pocket of his expensive, charcoal-grey suit. ‘Look.’

  I looked at myself leering stupidly from an inside page. Where the hell had the picture come from? From Whitehall, I presumed, to authenticate my cover. And inserted by whom? Jefferey, probably, with a sneer and a giggle as he remembered other photographs of me.

  ‘That’s certainly me,’ I said.

  ‘Are you waiting for the London plane?’

  ‘I am as it happens.’

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I have just dropped by to buy some periodicals because I happened to be in Keflavik. But I am extremely interested in the problems arising from the eruption and I should be most honoured if you would have a coffee or a drink perhaps with me.’

  ‘The plane will be here any minute,’ I said. ‘So if you don’t mind …’

  ‘Please, Mr Conran. Be my guest. We get very hurt in Iceland if our hospitality is rejected.’

  I gave him my aristocratic damn foreigners look. Why was he chancing his luck? On the other hand it didn’t really matter to him whether we talked or not. And the conversation might indicate whether or not I suspected him. ‘Very well,’ I said. ‘It’s very kind of you.’ If you must, my tone implied.

  We had the usual jugs of coffee and milk and examined each other. He was as I had imagined him from the photograph and description supplied by Sigurdson. Muscle relaxing into fat, cheeks tinged with the pink sheen of good living, greying pomaded hair, clothes made in London, hair snipped inside his ears and tweezered out of his nostrils.

  If he were a Communist then he modelled himself on the elite of the Kremlin, those with the town apartments, the country dachas and the big black Chaika limousines.

  The mutual examination continued interrupted by coffee-table pleasantries. I knew him: he knew me: neither could reveal our knowledge. We both had to be very careful.

  He stirred his coffee and said: ‘I understand that the amount of lava from Hekla has surpassed already the amount of lava from the Askja eruption in 1961.’

  ‘It surpassed it almost a month ago,’ I said. I didn’t think Olav Magnusson knew too much about volcanic fall-outs.

  He sensed that I had the advantage and feinted from another direction. ‘I have always had a very soft spot for the British.’

  A total lie. And one calculated to make me react immediately because, if I had been studying him, then I would have known about his part in the Cod War. He watched me closely through the steam from his coffee.

  ‘I’m very glad to hear it. I, too, am very fond of the Icelandic people.’

  ‘Really. You have been here before, Mr Conran?’

  ‘I was born here,’ I said. ‘It’s all in that newspaper report.’

  ‘Ah, so it is.’ He popped a sweetening tablet into his second cup of coffee. ‘So you have travelled all over our country?’

  ‘Not all over it.’

  ‘Have you perhaps been to the Westman Islands?’

  Again the tricky question. If my only concern were volcanoes there would be no point in denying my visit. Obviously he knew that I had been there. ‘It’s funny you should say that,’ I said. ‘I’ve only just returned. I’m something of an ornithologist as that newspaper report says.’

  ‘Ah yes, we have some wonderful birds there.’

  ‘We?’ Full marks, Conran.

  ‘Yes, I forgot to tell you – I have a house on the Westman Islands. Did you have any luck? Bird watching that is?’

  ‘I saw plenty of puffins.’

  He stroked his polished jowls. ‘But they surely are of no interest to an experienced ornithologist such as yourself?’

  At least he couldn’t fault me where birds were concerned. ‘I was, of course, more interested in migratory species.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘And how long do you propose to stay in Iceland, Mr Conran?’

  Outside I saw the serpent face of a 727 nosing across the tarmac.

  ‘About a month,’ I said. ‘Maybe longer. I want to help you people solve this problem once and for all.’

  ‘If I can be of any assistance at all, Mr Conran, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.’ He produced a thin crocodile-skin wallet and gave me a card made of wafer-thin wood – the sort they made in Hong Kong.

  ‘That’s very good of you Mr Magnusson.’ I read his name aloud from the card.

  ‘You are meeting a friend off the London plane?’

  ‘An acquaintance.’

  ‘Ah.’ He lit a small thin cigar. ‘A lady?’

  ‘A lady.’

  He made one last attempt to see if I knew anything about him. ‘You must come and visit me on my farm. You might be able to study the effects of the fall-out on my animals at your leisure.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you. What do you have – sheep or cattle?’

  The wariness relaxed a little. ‘Very little animals, Mr Conran. But very valuable. I own a mink farm. At the moment all my mink come from Scandinavia. But soon I hope to breed Icelandic mink.
They have been regarded here as vermin for too long. Soon I will have Icelandic mink that will be on show in the best salons of Paris and London. Do you know,’ he added irrelevantly, ‘that it took 5,000 skins to find the seventy to make a coat for Gina Lollobrigida?’

  I said I didn’t know. Passengers were pouring out of the aircraft and walking across the tarmac.

  Magnusson, the mink-breeding, cigar-smoking, trawler-owning Communist, smiled glossily. ‘Do you see your friend?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘I am very interested in the study of volcanic activity.’

  ‘Are you,’ I said, flattening my voice with total disinterest.

  ‘Did you know that there is volcanic activity under the American base? Right here, in fact.’

  I said I had heard about it.

  ‘You can imagine what the Russians in Reykjavik think and dream about.’ He finished his coffee with a couple of kitten sips. ‘All these Americans here and all that activity underneath them.’

  I smiled thinly, drumming my fingers on the table. ‘I can imagine,’ I said.

  The last passenger had disembarked. Two stewardesses in scarlet walked prettily towards us. Neither possessed the unmistakeable contours of Gudrun.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ Magnusson said, ‘those three men over there are Russians. I meet them a lot in the fishing business.’

  There were two of them, trying very hard to live up to the Western cartoonist conception of Russians. Square shoulders, wide trousers, hats perched rather than worn, faces waiting for winter. I wondered who they were meeting.

  Then I saw Gudrun striding across the tarmac. The breeze was teasing her wings of hair and her chest swung slightly with the energy of her stride.

  Magnusson stood up. ‘Your friend will be joining you soon,’ he said. ‘I will leave you now. I hope that we will meet again very soon. Please remember that my home is yours.’

  Which was overdoing it a bit, I thought, even for an Icelander.

  We shook hands and I felt the dormant power of the man. From an inside pocket he took a small box – the sort that they sell cufflinks in. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘a present for your … acquaintance.’ He pressed the box into my hand and walked swiftly away.

  I opened the box. It contained two mink earrings. Icelandic mink presumably. Or Russian.

  ‘I am looking very much forward to making the love,’ Gudrun said.

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘You do not sound wery enthusiastic,’ she said in a pouting voice.

  I squeezed her thigh reassuringly and took another look at the Mercedes that was following us. There wasn’t much you could do about a tail on the long straight road across the lava field from the airport. The driver wore a peaked cap and there was someone sitting behind him – I couldn’t see who. Magnusson perhaps? I accelerated but the distance between the two cars remained the same.

  ‘I have bought you a present,’ Gudrun said. She rustled around in her shoulder-bag.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It is a telescope for you to watch your birds with.’

  ‘That was very sweet of you. Did it cost a lot of money?’

  ‘Yesh,’ she said. ‘It cost much money.’

  ‘I’ll make it up to you,’ I said, ‘when we get back to your apartment.’

  She brightened up. ‘All the time we were flying I was thinking about making the love.’

  I wondered what sort of service the passengers had received. ‘Is that telescope very powerful?’

  ‘Yesh,’ she said. ‘It is very powerful. It was the most powerful one in the shop.’

  ‘Have you looked through it?’

  ‘I looked through it in the plane.’

  Which must have been rather disconcerting for the passengers. As if the captain had deputed her to try and find Iceland.

  ‘I’d like to have a look,’ I said.

  ‘Then let us stop the car.’

  ‘No, I want to get back to your apartment as soon as possible.’

  She sighed contentedly. ‘Then have a quick little look while you are driving. But do not have an accident.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Focus it for me. Try it out on that car behind otherwise you will only be looking at lava.’

  ‘Wery vell.’ She untelescoped the telescope, swivelled round in the seat and peered at the Mercedes.

  And, because it would look very much to the chauffeur as if Gudrun were aiming a rifle right between his eyes, I waited expectantly.

  The Mercedes swung across the path of an oncoming lorry and stopped at the roadside. The lorry also stopped abruptly, tyres screeching on the road. The driver climbed out and addressed himself to the chauffeur with vigour.

  I stopped the Chevrolet and took the telescope from Gudrun.

  ‘What is happening?’ she asked. ‘Why did that car behave like that when I tried to look at the driver?’

  ‘He must have been shy,’ I said.

  I focused the telescope on the passenger in the back of the Mercedes. It was Jefferey. His face looked pained as he listened to the comments of the lorry driver.

  I gave the telescope back to Gudrun and accelerated towards Reykjavik to make the love.

  The love was made, the cigarettes were alight and we were playing word games. But not for long because there wasn’t much time and there was a lot to do although I wasn’t sure what.

  Gudrun said: ‘Do you know what the longest word in our language is?’ She was lying naked on her stomach on the bed.

  ‘No,’ I said, with minimal interest. ‘Then I will show you.’

  She fetched pencil and paper, bouncing considerably as she walked, and wrote: Haestarjettarmalaflutunesmanskifstofust ulkonutidyralykill. That’s using your letters,’ she said. ‘There are fifty-seven of them.’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘It means the latchkey belonging to a girl working in the office of a barrister.’

  ‘A phrase which you use frequently?’

  ‘Not so frequently.’

  ‘What about the latchkey ring belonging to a girl working in the office of a barrister?’

  She considered this with displeasure. Then said: ‘Yes, that is also possible.’

  ‘Then it must be an even longer word.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ She brightened. ‘You see what a wonderful language it is.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, stroking her buttocks, moving up her spine and back again. Her hair smelled of lemon and her body of Johnson’s baby powder.

  She turned on her back and said: ‘I think I love you, Bill.’

  ‘Only think?’

  ‘It is very difficult. Soon you will be gone. It is bad perhaps for me to love you.’

  ‘I shall only go back to London. You fly into London a lot.’

  ‘That would be worse than being in love with a pilot.’

  ‘You sound something of an authority on it.’

  She shrugged. ‘I have flown with our pilots to foreign countries. I know how they behave. I would not like to be married to one.’

  ‘Would you like me to stay in Iceland?’

  ‘Yesh,’ she said. ‘Absolutely I would like it.’

  You could never accuse Gudrun of being devious. And maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea at that. A job as interpreter, William Conransson, life close to the fire and the ice …

  I pulled my trousers on and walked to the window. Metallic sea, clean air, black, sugared mountains and the wild stirring land beyond. Maybe it was a good idea. If I could first help to protect it from the infections of power politics.

  ‘Bill,’ she said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Something is bothering you. I don’t understand what it is. Is it because that American scientist you were meeting didn’t arrive? Or is it that you are upset that I said I love you?’

  I had forgotten the fictitious scientist I was supposed to have been meeting the day I arrived. ‘Neither,’ I said. ‘The scientist is coming later and you only said you thought you loved me.
’

  ‘Now you play word games when they are not games any more.’

  ‘Nothing is bothering me.’ I waited for her to ask if I loved her; but she didn’t.

  ‘Come here,’ she said. ‘Forget whatever it is that is bothering you.’

  I was half way through forgetting when there was a knock at the door.

  I raised myself on one elbow and shouted: ‘You’ll have to wait, Jefferey. I’m busy.’

  14

  Jefferey

  The club was one block from Gudrun’s apartment. Downstairs consisted of a cloakroom and a large dark bar in which seamen in soap-pressed suits drank themselves into lurching stupidity with sombre dedication. They drank vodka and brandy and whisky as long drinks; and no one drank or even mentioned the pale beer.

  The dancing and the girls were upstairs. Girls of all ages and sizes; dances of every vintage from something that looked like The Lancers, through to the Black Bottom and on to the Frug. The girls were very patient with their drunken, lecherous, homesick men and allowed themselves to be hugged, propelled and wept upon with equanimity. Some of the men were in their sixties and seventies, resurrecting the frolics of their youth with surprising agility.

  There were a couple of youths on electric guitars, a drummer, someone on trumpet or sax, and a girl who looked as if she might be English singing Daughter of Darkness as we walked in.

  ‘Why in God’s name did we have to come to a place like this?’ Jefferey asked.

  ‘We didn’t. We didn’t have to come anywhere. I didn’t have to drink with you at all – it was you who wanted this urgent chat.’

  We sat at a table overlooking the dance floor. The other occupants were a kittenish girl with short, bleached hair and a mature lady with hairy legs.

  Jefferey said: ‘This is supposed to be confidential.’

  ‘They won’t understand what you’re jabbering about.’ I addressed the girl. ‘Do you speak English?’

  ‘Just a little,’ she said; which meant a dozen or so words for bargaining with clients.

  ‘And you?’

  The older woman beamed horribly and moved closer to Jefferey.

  I said to Jefferey: ‘Fire away, old boy. And buy mama here a drink.’

  Jefferey looked as if he might vomit; but he often looked like that. A waiter asked in English what we wanted to drink – he didn’t seem to have any trouble in establishing Jefferey’s nationality.