The Chill Factor

by Richard Falkirk

  He welcomed his fourth asni with delight while Martz and myself dawdled along with our second whiskies. Then he grabbed a large, plump woman and, after informing us that this was how he liked them, led her on to the floor. At least you didn’t run the risk of a refusal if you didn’t bother to ask a girl if she wanted to dance.

  Martz suggested we took our drinks to a corner table while Sigurdson jogged around with his speciality.

  ‘It’s not over yet, Charlie,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t I know it,’ he said. He was more relaxed now that his liaison duties were less arduous, and I could occasionally see the gold filling when he grinned.

  ‘How did Shirey take it?’

  ‘He flipped his lid. He said to thank you. That goes for me too, by the way.’ He almost looked embarrassed. ‘I’ve revised my opinions about you a bit.’

  ‘You should thank Gudrun.’

  ‘Okay, lover,’ he said. ‘But you know as well as I do that she’ll be charged. Although she might get off fairly lightly seeing as she did shoot Laxdal. Nevertheless she did take money so it wasn’t all youth and naïvety and all that crap.’

  ‘I suppose not,’ I said. I studied the ice cubes with their white Christmas trees inside. And to divert my own thoughts from Gudrun I said: ‘Where’s Shirey now?’

  Martz said: ‘Back in the United States of America. We flew him out as soon as we knew he was in the clear. It seemed to be the best thing to do.’ He beckoned a waiter. ‘Shirey was real grateful to you.’

  ‘Thanks for passing on the message Charlie, old buddy,’ I said.

  Sigurdson returned from the dance floor. But his partner had multiplied – one for each of us. Sigurdson looked proud of himself.

  ‘How are the wife and kids, Einar?’ I asked.

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Just fine.’

  The woman who was to be mine said: ‘Komid thjer saelir.’ She was a big strong girl with a slight cast in one eye. Martz’s partner was small and sulky. They sat down and awaited our pleasure.

  ‘Einar,’ I said. ‘Not tonight. On the night before I leave, perhaps. But not now.’

  Sigurdson offered clumsy understanding. ‘You are unhappy about the air stewardess. You need not be. One night with the girl I have chosen for you and you will forget her completely.’ The girl he had chosen for me concentrated her gaze on my ear and smiled reassuringly.

  Martz said in his appalling Icelandic: ‘I am a happily married man with two children.’ His girl became sulkier and made up her lips, leaving a smudge of lipstick on her rodent teeth.

  ‘Einar,’ I said, ‘get rid of them.’

  ‘You do not like? Then I find you others.’ He dismissed the two girls like a director auditioning chorus girls.

  Martz said: ‘Business first, pleasure afterwards, Einar. Now let’s try and work out what we do know. We’ve pulled both Hafstein’s places apart, we’ve pulled Magnusson’s home, apartment and farm apart, we’ve been over Laxdal’s apartment and office and interrogated his widow. We’ve got practically nowhere. What now?’

  ‘I think Magnusson will break eventually,’ Sigurdson said.

  ‘Maybe,’ Martz said. ‘But we can’t rely on it.’ He frowned. ‘What gets me is that I know we’re almost there. I can feel it, Goddamnit. It’s the Hafstein angle that’s got me beat. Where the hell does he come into it? Everything seems to lead to him – that piece of paper in the dead Russian’s pocket. His position in the national register. And now we find papers in Laxdal’s safe involving him. Yet he just seemed to be a bird-watching screwball.’

  ‘The implication is noted,’ I said.

  ‘You know what I mean. He just wasn’t the stuff spies are made of. And now he’s dead.’

  Sigurdson said: ‘Perhaps you would have preferred it if he had shot me.’ He laughed into his asni.

  ‘Charlie,’ I said, ‘isn’t it after ten?’

  He looked at his big nautical wristwatch. ‘Yeah, it’s a quarter after. What of it?’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be back at base?’

  Martz grinned. ‘The regulation only says that servicemen have to be off the streets.’

  ‘Then why do the police go round the bars?’

  ‘Just checking up, I guess. After all, if you’re in a bar it stands to reason that you’ll have to go into the street if you’re going to leave.’

  A wiry, sallow-faced Icelander came up to the table and showed Martz a plastic-covered card. Behind him stood a square, balding man with a pitted neck. The Icelander said: ‘Are you American?’

  Sigurdson laughed and sobbed and choked. ‘The patrol,’ he managed to say. ‘The patrol’s come to round up Charlie Martz?’

  The American with the pitted neck said: ‘What’s so funny, wise guy?’

  Martz ascertained that he was new to the job, took him aside and told him what was not so funny.

  The 11.30 p.m. sun went down and rose again. The light penetrated the curtains with contempt. Outside someone smashed a bottle – I gathered you didn’t get your money back on bottles in Iceland.

  I closed my eyes and thought: ‘German church.’ I opened them again and switched on the radio. I picked up the BBC loud and clear. A record programme introduced by a disc jockey with a deep, suave voice. Then a news bulletin including an item about the Soviet naval build-up all over the world’s oceans.

  I switched off and my thoughts roamed across the city to Gudrun’s apartment where she was staying under what amounted to house arrest. I hauled the thoughts back because they had no future.

  German church. The two words held the key. What German church? Like Charlie Martz I felt we were almost there. Like Charlie Martz I knew there was something wrong, a barrier of incongruity between us and the truth.

  One a.m. – Hafstein, resurrect yourself for five minutes. Bare your soul before me and your birds in their glass cases. Or make the birds speak, for they surely know all the answers. Hafstein, you deceiver of women, you hermit, you idealist, you ornithologist, you madman. The Adam’s apple bobbed in the scrawny neck but no words issued forth. Hafstein a spy? Never. And hadn’t Laxdal said the same?

  I sat upright abruptly. On the table beside the bed were the keys which I had been given if I wanted to stay in the national register after office hours. I hadn’t yet checked out the register: that was tomorrow’s job. 1.30 a.m. Unquestionably after office hours. But what was conventional time in the Land of the Midnight Sun?

  I got up, dressed, and let myself out of the guest-house into the chill, light night.

  18

  The Files

  The national register, the Thjodskrain, is a sub-department of the Icelandic Statistical Bureau which is called the Hagstofa Islands. The bureau produces a catalogue of facts compiled by the Economic Institute. Icelanders drank 0.61 litres of milk per person in 1967; there were 185 cars, 160 TV sets and 330 telephones per 1,000 inhabitants at the end of ’68; Iceland has the lowest infant mortality rate in the world.

  The Thjodskrain is situated in a building called the Arnarhvoll which houses various other government departments.

  I walked through the town centre still wondering why papers involving Hafstein had been found in Laxdal’s safe when Laxdal had told me that Hafstein had nothing to do with his organisation. There had been no reason for Laxdal to lie; in fact, he was going to some trouble to find out what I knew about Hafstein when Gudrun shot him.

  A policeman nodded at me with the conspiratorial friendliness of those who are abroad while the majority sleep. A group of teenagers occupied a street corner. They were reading a newspaper which extended an apology to the Americans for the injustice of the suspicions that had been aroused: Laxdal seemed to have achieved a considerable improvement in Icelandic-American relations.

  I unlocked my way through corridors, offices and cabinets. The atmosphere was as impersonal as the figures in the cabinets; muffled and motionless, smelling occasionally of yesterday’s coffee and biscuits and, near the washroom, of sulphur from the water piped fro
m the hot springs.

  I let myself into the department where the births, deaths and marriages of Iceland’s 200,000 or so people are kept. The pain and jubilation of birth, the courtship and consummation of marriage, the end of the journey – they were all here in flourished, fading ink and uncaring typescript. Unwritten sagas signed, sealed and delivered by shiny fingers in between coffee and lunch breaks.

  Conran, I thought, you’re getting sentimental – or cynical. The second was only an acknowledgment of the first.

  I thumbed through the ledgers until I came to Olav Magnusson. Nothing much there. Born in 1920 – ‘muling and puking’ and staring at nothing with blue innocent eyes. Or were they innocent? Was not the scheming and the avarice already there inside the soft, unknitted bones of the skull, waiting to develop with all the other faculties? Sentiment and cynicism.

  Married twenty-five years ago. Celebrating his silver wedding anniversary in prison awaiting probable charges of treason unless he gave us what we wanted. Then the prospect of a far more savage retribution from his masters than anything the Icelandic courts would ever impose.

  No death certificate, Magnusson. Not yet.

  Outside, the rasp of an ailing motorcar disturbed the premature day. Then silence, the light waiting for the people. Light with the same texture that first snow gave to the dawns of childhood. Or the light on a honeymoon morning in Switzerland; long before Moscow, long before Iceland.

  I found Hafstein’s desk and sat down at it. It was as he had left it. A typewriter, a quill pen – there was no escape from his birds – an IN tray and an OUT tray, a blotting pad covered with churches and falcons. Hafstein, what did you know, sitting here bringing statistical order to disordered lives, tugging at that stubborn beard, brooding over the values of your fellows, simplifying justice, exaggerating in justice? What did you know that made you flee to your death?

  I waited for the answers but there was no reply. Yet the answer was here somewhere.

  I took out Laxdal’s documents. Nothing here to indicate a ruthless narcissus. Mother, father, wife. I picked up the documents and imagined I could smell his aftershave; it was the time of day for imaginations to deceive. No death certificate; but that had already been written far away from the pens and typewriters.

  Neither Magnusson’s nor Laxdal’s documents looked like forgeries. You couldn’t tell, I knew: that was the idea. But I felt that their papers were genuine. Neither Magnusson nor Laxdal were Russians: they were merely traitors who had enjoyed the money and the secret, gloating self-satisfaction of the spy.

  Where, then, were the forgeries? I couldn’t sift through a population of sons and dottirs.

  A dog howled in the distance. But there were no dogs in Reykjavik. The dawn deception again. An arrowhead formation of ducks or geese crossed the window, too high up in the grey sky for identification. Hafstein would have had his binoculars out for those.

  I sat at the desk waiting. Gradually the sensation that I was being watched embraced me. The sensation, perhaps, that Hafstein had experienced before his flight. I put my hand on the unsentimental butt of the Smith & Wesson that had written Laxdal’s death certificate and crossed the room to the door.

  With my unarmed hand I pulled the door open and peered at no one. I looked down the corridor but the air and the dust were undisturbed. Just the sound of a tap dripping and the chemistry-set odour of sulphur.

  I closed the door and locked it again. The feeling that I was being watched persisted. Like a soldier senses, too late, that he is in a sniper’s sights.

  From the windows across the way? From binoculars, telescope or telescopic sights? I removed the contents of Hafstein’s desk drawer and moved away from the window.

  3 a.m. The whine of a jet gathering momentum, the crash of a bottle breaking. Rain against the window.

  With the papers from his drawer I once again approached the soul of Hafstein which was, perhaps, resting in peace. Formal letters, bills, catalogues, a sprig of heather that crumbled in my hand, a fragment of lava from Katla perhaps in 1918 or even Hekla in 1947. I knew my lava.

  A battered volume by old Snorri Sturluson, a tobacco pouch with a perished rubber lining to which brown flakes still adhered, a metric ruler bearing Hafstein’s name in childish writing, a very old cigarette from which the tobacco slid like snuff, a birthday card to Hafstein signed by someone called Petur in 1960. No more birthday cards, Emil, no more cigarettes, no more memories of childhood evoked by the ruler …

  At the bottom of the pile was a large envelope. Stained, with the flap sealed by time. I slit it open with the schoolboy Hafstein’s ruler.

  Inside the envelope was an official letter appointing Hafstein to his job in 1942. I sat down among the INs and OUTs, among the typewriters and inkwells, and considered the letters. Instincts, intuitions, memories, promptings, expectations … they stirred and shifted like iron filings attracted to a magnet. Why?

  It had to be the date. 1942. Why did the date put all senses on alert, engender a state of emergency?

  Calm down, Conran. Take it easy, boy. Have a cigarette and contemplate the endless dawn.

  I had a cigarette and I contemplated the dawn. I checked the corridor again to see if anyone was listening to my agitation. No one there. I lit another cigarette and tapped the ash in to a waste-paper basket so that I would not give the cleaners too much trouble.

  1942. Charlie Martz. Lights and rockets of enlightenment, enough to give a man a coronary. Take it easy, let the thoughts approach the magnet in an orderly fashion.

  That was the year the Germans had been infiltrated into Iceland, according to Charlie Martz. But how many of them? Just because some gave themselves up it didn’t follow that others hadn’t been successfully absorbed into the community. Absorbed into the community – what a phrase! Like a lecturer with a textbook instead of a brain. A textbook on spying. German thoroughness and all that. They, too, must have found a way of cooking the books in the Thjodskrain.

  The ash beach of Surtsey. Gunfire and a scientist reaching the body of Emil Hafstein first. ‘German church.’ There was no bloody German church. Never had been. Hafstein had said: ‘German … church.’ The pause between the unrelated words missed out by the scientist.

  I replaced the desiccated past of Emil Hafstein, locked up and ran back to the Chevrolet parked outside the guest-house.

  I drove fast, keeping up with my thoughts. The tyres hissed on the wet road and pools of blue sky showed in the watery sky. A coach and some lorries sped towards Reykjavik, the drivers glaring in the way that early-risers – as opposed to all-nighters – do. Behind me two or three cars kept their distance.

  Everything was assembling in my mind now, if I could control the speed of my thoughts.

  The skies cleared and two Delta Dagger F-102 supersonic interceptors took off from Keflavik. I wondered if there was anything to intercept. “The countryside stretched away in solidified waves and crests, grey-green, black and fawn – apologies for colours.

  5 a.m. The earth was steaming lazily on the outskirts of Hveragerdi and a baker was removing black bread from a natural oven in his garden. Fruit grew like wax imitations in the steam-wreathed hothouses. One of them was called Eden.

  I drove straight to the pool of boiling mud and the steam jets with the Roman Catholic church ‘now disused’ perched above. I parked the car on the road and began to climb. Past the grey intestinal mud, past the Japanese gardens of sulphur in the hot steam.

  The church was small, a chapel almost. The front and rear were made with pine-wood boards; there was a green door and a wooden cross on the roof. The whole building was supported on either side by mounds of turf four feet wide, and the roof was covered with turf and sword moss. The turf had been recently trimmed – by Hafstein probably.

  Fifty feet below the mud bubbled like a stock-pot.

  I took out the Smith & Wesson and approached the wooden door with elaborate stealth. Then I kicked it open. Sacrilege. The church felt empty; but you could
never tell. It smelled of forgotten worship – a dead fragrance of incense, whitewash and Bibles. Hymns were lodged in the rafters beneath the turf, a psalm or two caught in the fretwork above the altar.

  I went in cautiously, still holding the gun, because although the setting was convenient I preferred my own funeral to be Church of England. The silence clothed me like a vestment – as it had someone else recently …

  The small altar had been devastated, two pews overturned. The stone font had been knocked from its wooden pedestal and cracked, a dozen or so prayer books had been ripped apart, the prayers scattered over floorboards polished by decades of obeisance.

  A door leading into a tiny anteroom swung open. But the room was empty.

  I picked up one of the pews and sat on it. German … church. This was the church. But where was the answer to our prayers?

  It didn’t look as if my predecessor had found an answer either. The pews had been overturned in thwarted rage, the prayer books ripped up in the last futile formalities of his search.

  I swore to myself and apologised to the altar.

  There was only one man now who might be able to help – Thorarinsson. Eggert Thorarinsson.

  I made a complete search of the church, but I knew as I searched that it was pointless. I closed the door softly and climbed down the cliff to my car. I thought I heard a car start up round the corner, but with the roar of the steam I couldn’t be sure. When I reached the Chevrolet there was no other traffic on the road.

  I drove into Hveragerdi to see Hafstein’s only confidant – the keeper of his hothouse.

  It was more of a hut than a house. White walls, red tin roof. Very clean – like Iceland. Steam dribbled from a couple of patches of moist soil in the garden. I imagined Thorarinsson trying to tap someone else’s steam like they tapped electricity elsewhere.

  I knocked on the door and waited, surveying the hot-houses around. A paradise for small boys with catapults.