‘The German and the Englishman,’ I said.
‘No,’ he said emphatically, and the curtain of hair fell across his forehead. His thick face was tired, his jowls were thick with pale stubble. ‘I am an Icelander. Ever since I was a child I have been one. That is the way I want to stay – with my Icelandic wife and my Icelandic children. The accident of birth is forgotten. I am proud to be an Icelander.’
‘I shouldn’t think they’d be very proud to have you if they knew the truth,’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you give yourself up or get caught like the others?’
He shrugged, resting the gun, a Luger, on his knee. He was flanked by the pulpit; behind him was the altar made of varnished wood, fretted with ornate scrolls and cornices. Sulphury steam wandered around the nave – incense distributed by a phantom priest.
‘All the others ended up in captivity,’ I said. ‘Why not you?’
‘My father was captured. We were landed together by a U-boat. We were supposed to head for a farmhouse where we were expected. But the police and the Americans caught my father in a village. I was down the street but no one took any notice of me because no one expected German children to be landed.’ He reached for cigarettes with one hand and threw me one. ‘Like the Russians, we Germans thought ahead. I could even speak Icelandic – like other children who were being trained could speak Norwegian or French. Or English.’
He leaned over and lit my cigarette with his lighter.
I said: ‘What did you do when your father was captured?’
‘I hid. I had instructions about what to do if he did get caught. You know, Germany was very eager to get a foothold in Iceland. Like the Russians, she knew it was the key to the North Atlantic.’
‘Like the British and the Americans,’ I said.
‘Sure, like the British and Americans. Even before the war we were trying to get Lufthansa installed here.’
‘We?’
‘The Germans.’
‘I thought you said you were Icelandic.’
‘I am now. I think I only stayed German for two years perhaps. My father was captured, my mother died in the air raids on Berlin. I had no brothers or sisters.’
‘Did you go to the farmhouse?’
He inhaled deeply and aimed a jet of smoke at a nomadic curl of steam. ‘I did. Most of the Icelanders who had been persuaded by the Germans to take in spies gave their “guests” up to the police almost immediately. But not my foster parents. Because I was a child, I suppose, and they had none of their own.’
‘It’s very touching,’ I said.
‘They were very good to me. And they didn’t regard themselves as traitors. The British invaders or the American occupiers were just as much enemies as the Germans. They were paid, of course – just like Hafstein.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Tell me about Hafstein.’
Sigurdson picked up the envelope lying on the floor. ‘There’s not much to tell. It was he who planted these papers in 1942 when he was a very junior clerk. For years he kept silent about it. Then he went a little mad and started to blackmail me.’
‘But what about your father’s papers? When the police checked those out they must have found that they were phoney. Why didn’t they find yours as well?’
‘Because the Germans had anticipated that if one of us was caught the documents would give the other one away. So my father was given a different name altogether. Möller, I believe.’
‘So you grew up like a good little Icelander?’
‘Or a bad little Icelander.’ Sigurdson laughed hugely. ‘Always I like the girls and the drink.’
‘Even when you were ten?’
Sigurdson considered his precociousness. ‘Not at ten, perhaps. But at twelve I liked the girls.’
‘The Germans chose well,’ I said. ‘You seem to have been more Icelandic than the Icelanders.’
‘Or perhaps it was my environs.’
‘Environment,’ I said.
‘Yes, perhaps that’s what it was. Perhaps we grow up like our surroundings, not like our parents so much. Certainly all the boys where I was brought up in the north liked the girls very much.’
I measured the distance between Sigurdson and myself. A kick would reach the Luger. But Sigurdson was too astute for that. I wondered where he planned to kill me.
‘Why didn’t you get hold of the forged papers before? After all, you were a policeman.’
‘Why should I? The papers said that I was an Icelander by birth. Why should I want to remove such fine proof of my birth?’ Sigurdson squashed his cigarette stub and fondled the barrel of the Luger with his free hand. ‘Then Hafstein went crazy and started demanding money to publish these absurd books of his. I knew then that I had to kill him because you never bargain with a blackmailer. I gave him some money to shut him up and thought about the best way to dispose of him. It was just about the same time that Martz and I were getting worried about the Russians.’
‘Were you really worried?’
Sigurdson looked hurt. ‘Of course I was worried. This is my country.’ He grinned again. ‘And in any case, even if you dispute my Icelandic nationality, I was born in a Fascist state which did not appreciate Communism very much.’
And you still look like a German, I thought. Given different clothes, a slicker haircut, the relaxed figure that beer and cream cakes gives to Burgomasters. Holidaying in the Tyrol, slapping leather-covered thighs and denouncing the Gestapo past. Certainly Sigurdson had retained some of the characteristics which conception in Nazi Germany had impregnated in his soul. The easy conscience about killing and brutality. A middle-aged Hitler youth.
‘You were so worried,’ I said, ‘that you put your future comfort before the interests of Iceland. You deliberately sabotaged our efforts to break the Soviet ring so that Einar Sigurdson could live happily ever after with his wife and kids.’ Somehow I had to keep Sigurdson talking in the hope that Charlie Martz was on his way.
‘You are wrong, my friend.’
‘I’m not bloody wrong.’
A car passed along the road beneath. The door of the anteroom moved in the breeze blowing in through the open door. The breeze chilled me and accentuated the imminence of death. I shivered and thought of nursery gardens, girls like Alice in Wonderland, of my first car, my first job and all that might have been.
Sigurdson said: ‘You are wrong. In the first place Laxdal is dead and Magnusson is in captivity. I found a list of names and places in Laxdal’s possession. We will round them up later. Unhappily, my friend, you will not be here to see that.’
‘Why didn’t you release the names before?’
‘Because I wanted to clear this mess up once and for all and convince everyone that Hafstein was a spy. You, Mr Conran, kept throwing doubt on that. It was most distressing. So I planted false documents about him in Laxdal’s apartment.’
‘Just as you planted Hafstein’s name in the Russian spy’s pocket in the forest?’
‘So you knew that?’
‘I guessed it,’ I said. ‘Too late. Once suspicion was directed against Hafstein it was easy for you to prepare a false dossier on him. Then rig a chase and kill him. How did you make him run for it?’
‘As you said, it was easy. Too bloody easy.’ He tasted the phrase. ‘You know I like your word bloody. The Americans do not use it too much.’
‘It’s a good word,’ I said.
‘Too bloody easy. Yes, that’s what it was. I just told him that the Americans and British – Martz and you – suspected him of being a Russian spy. I said that if you questioned him it would only be a matter of time before he told the truth – no one can stand up to expert interrogation.’
‘Some innocent old men seem to manage it,’ I said.
He ignored me; perhaps because the Nazi in him saw no harm in beating up old men. He went on: ‘I advised him that if he told the truth I would be blown – is that how you say it? Blown?’
‘Some of us do,’ I said.
‘And if I was blown, he wou
ld not get any more money. I advised him to get out of the way. Fly to the Westman Islands where I knew he sometimes used to escape from life in a cave up the cliffs. I even gave him a gun.’
‘Then you planned to follow him and kill him in the pursuit of your duty?’
‘That’s right,’ Sigurdson said. He beamed. The breeze was becoming colder; or perhaps death was approaching closer.
‘But things weren’t quite so easy then, were they Sigurdson? You didn’t know – or had forgotten – that Hafstein had one friend in the Westman Islands. She heard that you were flying across officially to capture Hafstein and warned him. It was then that Hafstein realised he had been double-crossed. That you were coming to kill him. That was it, wasn’t it, Sigurdson?’
‘That was it.’ He stretched, relaxed; muscular and lethal. ‘But as you know I found out from the cave where he was running to. So I followed and got the first shot in, just in case Hafstein decided to give himself up to any scientists who might have been around. But then I found that Hafstein had double-crossed me. He had taken my documents from the Thjodskrain but he hadn’t brought them with him as I had instructed him. Of course to me “German … church” meant only one thing. He was trying to tell the scientist that I was a German and that the documents were in a church. This church.’ He sighed. ‘But I couldn’t find the bloody things.’
‘Bloody bad luck,’ I said.
‘It has all come all right in the end.’ He gave me another cigarette and lit it. ‘Your last I’m afraid.’
‘How are you going to explain my disappearance?’
‘I shan’t,’ he said. ‘Why should I? People disappear in Iceland on the glaciers, in the mountains, down the volcanoes, in the mud pools …’ His tongue played with the last two words and I knew my intended destination. ‘I am above suspicion. I shall organise search parties for you. Co-operate with my good friend Commander Martz. Soothe the distraught air-stewardess. Then after a few days I shall find the list of agents and addresses and we shall round them up.’
‘And what of Thorarinsson and his wife?’
‘I shall have to kill them. But they are old. They wouldn’t know how to spend the money that you have given them.’
‘How will you explain their deaths?’
‘It doesn’t really matter. A fire, perhaps. An accident, natural causes, call it what you will. They will be dead and that’s all there will be to it.’ He stamped on his cigarette. ‘And now we must go. Even the son of a Nazi does not like to kill in a church.’ His grip tightened on the butt of the Luger. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I shall always regret that we did not go out together and find some girls.’
I crashed my first car, forgave my wife, forgave the Russian girl, loved Gudrun, remembered parents long-since dead, winked over Sigurdson’s shoulder and kicked at the Luger with my right foot.
Sigurdson leaped back knocking the pew over. My foot missed and he fired. The bullet hit me in the thigh – the same leg that I had injured on the cliffs. It slammed me back against the pew and I thought for a moment that the femur had been shattered. But it was only a flesh wound. There was no pain: only shock and blood trickling off the shiny seat and splashing on the floor. A curl of blue smoke from the Luger joined an inquisitive cloud of steam from the doorway.
Sigurdson said: ‘Not quite fast enough, my friend.’
I agreed that it wasn’t.
‘Now we have spilled blood in a church,’ he said.
‘I don’t recall such niceties ever bothering the Nazis.’
‘I am not a Nazi. I am not even a German – I am an Icelander.’ He looked at my leg solicitously. ‘This is very messy. I wanted you to die cleanly. It was the least I could do for you.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. The pain was beginning, an aching protest from butchered tissue. I was glad the femur wasn’t broken: I didn’t want to die with a broken femur.
Sigurdson stepped back on to the altar steps. ‘I shall have to clean the blood up,’ he said.
‘I wish I could help you,’ I said. Death approached even closer, stepped precisely over the splashes of blood and sat beside me on the pew. The cold filled my body and soul: there was nothing more to do – I had said my last farewells.
‘I am glad you tried to outwit me,’ Sigurdson said. ‘I expected it of you.’
‘I’m glad I didn’t let you down.’
The grin reappeared: he was his old self again. ‘Now we will go to the entrance of the church. Then we will have to say goodbye.’
I stood up and tried my accident-prone leg. It felt sick, as if it wanted to faint all on its own. But it took my weight with help from the pews. I felt as if life were leaving my body before Sigurdson fired the executioner’s shot.
We were about half way down the aisle when I felt the thudding underground. As if we were standing on a drum and someone was thumping the skin from the inside. I knew what was happening; I wasn’t sure whether Sigurdson did; although he was an Icelander.
He jammed the Luger in my spine. ‘Faster,’ he said. There was urgency in his voice, possibly fear. He knew what the thuds meant: they were the classic prelude to a geyser sprouting. It bad probably been imminent – but aggravated by the shot.
I did my best not to hurry and waited for Sigurdson’s last shot. It came as we reached the font. But the bullet smashed into the roof, its impact and the detonation from the Luger lost in primeval noise.
As Sigurdson pulled the trigger the floor tilted and the earth roared. The altar crashed forward, one wall swung outwards as if it were on hinges, the floor split open. Through the gaping wound in the boards I glimpsed water, steam, smoke.
The building tipped forward towards the cliffs. Sigurdson was coming at me, trying to keep his balance, waving the gun high in the air. I tried to steady myself and chopped at his throat with the side of my hand. It hit him below the ear. But it seemed irrelevant … the chasm split wider as if giant sutures had been removed and the earth roared again in pain.
The pews slid across the floor, one slamming into Sigurdson’s back. He fell towards me, dropping the Luger. I picked it up and ran outside, the weakness in my leg forgotten.
The church was on the edge of the activity. A hundred yards away a dome of water rose slowly, a great shining bubble inflated from the centre of the earth. I scrambled for the cliff, taking my leg with me. Behind me the church tipped sideways as the wound in the earth widened. Sigurdson tumbled out of the porch and started after me.
The dome of water lingered as if there were subterranean observers inside. Then sighed and subsided. I took a shot at Sigurdson with his own gun – a pygmy weapon in these surroundings. The bullet missed and sang around the lava rocks. Sigurdson didn’t bother to take cover. He just came on, attacking, Germanic, inexorable.
The ground was shuddering and there was thunder beneath us. Another bell of water rose, lingered and subsided. Vaguely I remembered the text-book description of the birth of a geyser. It would happen now …
The second dome of water was followed by a roar of escaping steam. Fifty, sixty, a hundred feet high. As if it had been imprisoned since the beginning of time. High above the jet an umbrella of cloud – like man’s imitative penumbra. The heat intensified, the ground moved.
I stumbled down to the rocks beside the pool of boiling mud and waited for Sigurdson behind a crag of moss-covered lava. But I had forgotten that he had my Smith & Wesson. The bullet buried itself in the soft rock beside my head with a thick impact.
I shot back. He was crouching behind another rock. Another bullet embedded itself in the lava beside me. Steam from the springs and steam from the geyser floated in between us. The new jet roared and the earth moved again.
Blood flowed from my thigh, the sick weakness returned. I was aware of my puniness, crouched there on the wafer crust of the world. I felt as if I could poke a hole in it with my finger. Weakness, dizziness, outlines of mountains and the fallen church wavering, the gun heavy in my hand. Icy sweat slid into my mouth.
&nb
sp; The earth moved again, settling itself for the last time. Fifty yards away where Sigurdson was crouching the ground cracked open. Sigurdson leapt for his life and met death.
As he leapt I fired. The bullet hit him in mid-air and punched him sideways. He screamed briefly. Landed on the edge of the mud pool, staggered, grabbed at nothing, and fell in.
I dragged myself towards the pool. Just his head, shoulders and chest. The fringe across his forehead, his mouth wide open. His eyes seemed to be looking at me but I couldn’t be sure. I hoped he was dead. Now just his head and shoulders. Then the final swallow.
The grey mud belched and I passed out.
20
Black Death
I rather hoped the limp endowed me with a new romanticism. Like the old theory of the man at a party with a black patch over his eye. Didn’t the girls ever realise that it only covered a sty?
Charlie Martz didn’t think the limp looked romantic. ‘Bill, you old son of a gun,’ he said, ‘you look as if you’ve got gout.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘Coffee?’ he asked.
‘On you?’
‘Sure.’
I bought a copy of Morganbladid. Hekla was still erupting; there was also a paragraph about the new geyser near Hveragardi.
There was ten minutes till my London-bound Boeing took off.
Martz toasted me in coffee. ‘Look at those guys over there,’ he said.
The two Russian diplomats stood stiff and dour beside the gift counter as if they were wearing cement jackets under their raincoats.
Martz said: ‘They’re either going to London to be executed or they’re waiting to meet the next batch of spies. They sure need some replacements.’ The gold tooth glinted in the back of his big laughing mouth.
‘Are you sure you got them all?’
He shrugged. ‘As sure as I can be of anything. Sigurdson had the list all right. And, as you know, Magnusson confirmed it.’ He poured more coffee. ‘I wonder what the Soviets make of Communism Icelandic style.’
‘They’ll carry on trying to change it,’ I said. ‘They won’t give up. One of these days I’ll be back to get you out of a mess again.’
The Chill Factor Page 20
