THE CHILL FACTOR
Suspense and Espionage in Cold War Iceland
DEREK LAMBERT
writing as
RICHARD FALKIRK

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

50th Anniversary edition 2021

First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph Ltd in association with Arlington Books 1971

Copyright © Estate of Derek Lambert 1971

Introduction © Ragnar Jónasson 2021

Cover design by Stephen Mulcahey © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021

Cover images © Shutterstock.com

Richard Falkirk asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008433871

Ebook Edition © January 2021 ISBN: 9780008433888

Version: 2020-12-03

First Epigraph

Iceland. In the winter it gets light at 10 a.m. and dark at 2 p.m. There is a daily announcement of the Chill Factor, by which the mathematically minded can calculate how quickly they could die from exposure …

INTRODUCTION

Glöggt er gests augað.

This Icelandic saying came to mind while reading Richard Falkirk’s espionage thriller The Chill Factor. It means simply that an outside visitor often sees things more clearly than the locals, and is certainly true – more or less – in Falkirk’s book.

The Chill Factor was first published in 1971, when crime and thriller fiction was almost unheard of in Iceland. The first Icelandic detective novel is generally considered to have been written in 1926, actually during what is now considered to be the Golden Age of crime fiction. However, there was no such Golden Age in Iceland. Only a handful of other books followed, and there are then no records on any lists of a single crime novel written in Icelandic from 1950 until the early 1970s. From then on books were few and far between, with the proper ‘golden age’ of the Icelandic crime novel not commencing until 1997, when Arnaldur Indridason published his first book. The reason for the lack of Icelandic thrillers for most of the twentieth century was simple: readers (and indeed writers) felt that Iceland was too small a place in which to set believable murder mysteries.

And so, in 1971, Richard Falkirk was entering largely uncharted territory, writing a contemporary thriller set in Iceland. Interestingly, Desmond Bagley had beaten him to it by a matter of months with his espionage thriller Running Blind, published at the end of 1970, and its instant popularity should have been a clue to Falkirk’s publishers that they had another potential success on their hands. Falkirk – whose real name was Derek Lambert (1929–2001) – worked as a foreign correspondent for the British press, and he had spent time in Iceland prior to writing the book, as was his modus operandi for many of his novels. His descriptions of people, places and customs are accordingly quite vivid. As one might expect in the heightened world of adventure fiction, some of the statements about the local people are overly exaggerated, and occasionally incorrect, but many would have been instantly recognizable to an Icelandic reader at that time.

Now, fifty years later, much of Falkirk’s book evokes an Iceland that few writers were capturing at that time, such as this charming description of Reykjavik in the early 1970s:

‘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 Reykjavik that forms the backdrop to this novel, with the US naval air station at nearby Keflavik, is somewhat unknown to me, as the story takes place in the early 1970s before I was born. Keflavik was closed and the Americans left in 2006. But even though these Cold War icons have passed into history, Richard Falkirk’s story transports the reader to this faraway time and place; a Reykjavik smaller and more quiet than the one we know now. This is the Reykjavik my parents knew as a young couple, and funnily enough the Icelandic Gudrun drives a ‘baby Fiat’, just as they did at the time. And when they got engaged, they went for dinner at the Naust restaurant, which also features in the book.

Even though the Icelandic crime novel hadn’t really made an appearance in the 1970s, readers there were still enjoying mysteries and thrillers in translation, with authors such as Alistair MacLean and Agatha Christie proving highly popular. The Chill Factor rapidly found its way to Icelandic readers, as it was published in translation within a year, in time for 1972’s traditional Icelandic Christmas book flood. In fact, the book made headlines in Iceland, with one of the leading newspapers of the time, Vísir, running a prominent piece on the novel in November 1972 with the headline: An Icelandic stewardess the leading character of a foreign novel. The publisher also took advantage of the Icelandic connection, advertising the book with the strapline: A foreign author chooses Iceland as a setting. The ad goes on to say: ‘The leading characters are a British man and an Icelandic stewardess at Icelandair. The novel also features the Russian embassy, the Iceland Defence Force, the Icelandic police, the National Registry, clubs and coffee shops in Reykjavik, and various locations outside of Reykjavik.’

The translator, Bárður Halldórsson, was perhaps more sceptical than his publisher, as his introduction to the Icelandic edition carried a word of warning to Icelandic readers:

‘The author of this book … travelled around Iceland and acquainted himself well with the situation here, as is clear from the reading of the book. However, some of his statements about Iceland and Icelandairs may be disputable and some readers may take offence, as the story is often quite satirical, even ironic. The author sometimes also gets his facts wrong and makes a few mistakes here and there. I decided not to change that in the translation, as such errors give the novel an air of freshness and foreignness. The author is not writing a work of historical accuracy and he has hardly expected the novel become an immortal work of literature, but in spite of all of that, the author’s reflections on Icelanders – their nature and disposition – makes it superior to most thrillers.’

The novel is indeed filled with interesting details about life in Iceland, but as the translator notes, some of the statements need to be taken with a grain of salt, delivered as they are with the characteristic flippancy of a fictional secret agent! He remarks, for example, that the second names in Iceland are so alike that phone numbers are listed under Christian names. The second part is quite true, but the reason is perhaps more complicated. He also mentions that in Iceland the weather can change by the minute, which unfortunately is very true. ‘You should have come last week for the sunshine,’ says Gudrun – a wonderful line, capturing in a subtle way the fact that Icelanders love to talk about the weather, especially the elusive sun.

It is also never too late to do anything in Iceland: ‘To drink or make the love. At least not in the summer when we have no night. In the winter it is different – then we sleep.’ And following this statement, the character of course offers the protagonist aquavit and a bottle of Black Death – Iceland’s signature drink. Falkirk was also aware that beer was not allowed in Iceland (not until 1989, in fact): ‘The Government does not allow much alcohol in the beer – they think it will encourage drunkenness.’

One of the appeals of spy thrillers from this era – and of Falkirk in particular – is the presence of dry humour to move the story along, and he spices things up with some very broad generalisations: ‘You’ll like him. A great drinker, a great joker – like most Icelanders,’ is one example. Another is that Icelanders are ‘Very friendly, very inquisitive, very tough. They also like to tell you about their dreams.’ And yet another is the assertion that sweets are apparently an indulgence shared by many Icelanders.

You can tell the author was a journalist, as he never wastes an opportunity to extract humour from something he has observed. During his visit to Iceland he obviously noticed the tendency of some English-speaking Icelanders to use ‘v’ instead of ‘w’ and vice versa:

‘But you are alive and that is vonderful.’

‘Wery,’ I said.

And I think it’s safe to say that reading Richard Falkirk’s previously forgotten book is truly a wery vonderful wisit into the past, all the way back to the toytown of Reykjavik in 1971.

RAGNAR JÓNASSON

Ragnar Jónasson is the award-winning author of the bestselling Dark Iceland series and the Hulda Trilogy, called ‘a landmark in modern crime fiction’ by The Times. His books are published in 27 languages, and his first standalone novel, The Girl Who Died, is published in 2021. Ragnar lives in Reykjavik.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

First Epigraph

Introduction

Second Epigraph

1. The Stewardess

2. Charlie Martz

3. The Welcome

4. The Saga

5. The Saga of the Saga

6. Ruffled Feathers

7. Hekla

8. Two Devious Policemen

9. Airman First Class Fred Shirey

10. The Fugitive

11. The Grenadiers

12. The Fire-Bringing Giant

13. The Latchkey belonging to a Girl working in the office of a Barrister

14. Jefferey

15. The London End

16. National Day

17. Gudrun

18. The Files

19. Confessional

20. Black Death

Keep Reading …

About the Author

By the same author

About the Publisher

Second Epigraph

In a book called Letters from Iceland first published in 1937, W. H. Auden replied to a question from Christopher Isherwood. Question: ‘What about the sex life?’ Answer: ‘Uninhibited.’

1
The Stewardess

At least they warned you. The first club listed for Reykjavik in the guide book was Alcoholics Anonymous – open daily 1800-1900, tel. 16373. I didn’t recall the need for such an establishment, but I was only twelve when I was last in Iceland.

I asked the stewardess the price of a miniature vodka. ‘Too cheap,’ she said, discarding cosmetic charm as if her boyfriend were invariably incapacitated by Stolichnaya. That was the second warning.

‘I’ll have one,’ I said.

The smile reappeared, as sincere as a TV advertisement. ‘Very well, sir.’ Slight American accent, hair blonde and slithery, body slender in red skirt and blue blouse representing the fire and ice of Iceland.

I looked out of the window of the Icelandair Saga Jet, a Boeing 727. Pastures of grey cloud were far below; it never seemed to be proper to inspect clouds from above – it made Nature appear vulnerable.

I returned to Iceland in a Nutshell. On the cover Hekla was erupting in the snow in a great convoluted brain of smoke. Inside the covers were the desolate grandeurs of the Iceland I remembered. Waterfalls, glaciers, red tongues of lava tasting the cold; clean skies, geysers and towns with green and red roofs like playing cards. Civilisation in the Ice Age melted a little by the Gulf Stream.

I travelled through the pages. Tobacco and alcoholic drinks. ‘Icelanders generally say “Good Health” (Skal) each time they raise their glasses when drinking alcohol, at the same time looking into one another’s eyes.’

I looked into the eyes of the stewardess and said, ‘Skal.’

She smiled back and I detected warmth behind this smile. But it was a different stewardess.

‘Do you know what it means?’ she asked.

I shook my head, still warming myself with her smile.

‘It means skull. It’s different from the Scandinavian. In the old days the Vikings used to cut a skull in half and drink from it.’ Her tone implied: Those were the days.

‘You seem to approve of drinking more than your colleague.’

‘She has had many bad times because of drink.’

‘And you have had many good times?’

‘Always I have the good times. With or without the drinking.’ She, too, spoke with a slight American accent; but her v’s became w’s and vice versa and some of her s’s became sh’s. She sat on the arm of the empty gangway seat next to me: there were few passengers on board and she had time to waste. She pointed at my papers. ‘You know much about volcanoes?’

‘Quite a bit.’ I listened to my voice to hear if I could detect its lying quality: I could and hoped she couldn’t.

‘They are a hobby of yours, these volcanoes?’

I swallowed the vodka neatly and quickly as the Russians had taught me in Moscow. Fire and ice. Perhaps it would oil the lying squeak in my voice. ‘It’s a little more than a hobby. It’s part of my job.’

She said: ‘You have come to observe Hekla?’

‘That’s the general idea.’ I held up the empty glass. ‘Could I have another, please?’

‘Of course. It is wery good wodka, is it not?’

I nodded. ‘Wery, wery good. Vonderful, in fact.’

I put away the papers because I didn’t want to tax my knowledge of eruptions. The girl returned and sat down again: she seemed to be a rather unorthodox stewardess by BOAC or Pan-Am standards. And the absence of the papers deflected her not one degree. ‘You are very lucky that Hekla has erupted again after twenty-three years;’ she said.

Press on with the lies, then. Make this a dress rehearsal. But first another dose of fire water – the volcano in the glass. ‘I’m going to Iceland at the request of your Government. The ash has poisoned cattle and pastureland. I’m something of an expert on these matters.’

‘You must be a very clever man.’ The light blue eyes appraised me and I glimpsed formidable singleness of purpose. ‘In Iceland girls say, “Brains first, then looks”.’

The compliment seem dubious. It was also unanswerable. I examined the cube of ice in my vodka; it had a tiny white Christmas tree imprisoned inside.

She went on: ‘If you are lucky you may see Hekla from the aircraft just before we land. You know that in the Middle Ages people thought it was the Gates of Hell?’

At least I knew my Hekla after two days of application in London’s museums and libraries. I took out a notebook and read aloud: ‘The wailing and gnashing of teeth of the damned can be heard from the mountains and shepherds have seen great vultures driving the fallen souls in the form of black ravens into the opening to hell.’

‘Vonderful,’ she said.

It didn’t seem exactly wonderful. I finished the vodka, Christmas tree and all.

‘You would like another?’

‘I might as well. Vodka seems to go with volcanoes.’

‘It is good that you like vodka. We like it very much in Iceland.’

‘So I gather. I don’t remember people drinking a lot last time I was there.’

‘You have been to Iceland before?’

‘During the war.’ I didn’t mention my recent visit to the NATO base.

She paused – to calculate my age, I suspected. She confirmed the suspicion. ‘How old were you then?’ It seemed doubtful if Icelandic conversation was ever hampered by reticence.

‘I was only a child. My father was in the British Embassy. But I learned to speak Icelandic.’

She exclaimed enthusiastically in Icelandic, which is Old Norse. ‘Say something,’ she said.

‘Djoffullin sjalfur,’ I said. Which means roughly: ‘Bloody Hell’. I added: ‘But I prefer to speak English.’

‘Vonderful,’ she said, and went to fetch some more vodka.

The aircraft was lowering itself on to the grey pastures of cloud as if it wanted to touch down on them. It was the time to stop aeronautical speculation; the time to banish all speculation about the altimeter which would bring us down on the razored peaks of the mountains just below the clouds if …

The other passengers were queuing for the toilets. Prematurely fastening their seat belts, extinguishing cigarettes or yawning and scratching with exaggerated nonchalance.

I accepted my third vodka with a buoyant disregard for landing formalities inspired by the two previous vodkas. And – with a familiarity that owed something to the same source – asked the stewardess what her name was.

It was, she said, Gudrun.

We were told to strap ourselves in and stop smoking. We submerged in the cloud, then surfaced underneath. And there was Iceland – all lichen, moss and black ash from the air. Uncompromising, fighting with the sea in a front-line of breakers. Mountains veined with snow on one side of us, on the other a shower of rain bowling along like a bundle of gnats.

Gudrun sat down and peered towards the mountains. ‘It is wery disappointing,’ she said. ‘I cannot see Hekla.’

She pointed downwards. ‘Perhaps you can see Surtsey down there? Iceland, you see, is still forming. It is wery vonderful.’

I looked for the island that had suddenly sprung from the sea in a fountain of fire and smoke. But I couldn’t see it.

We sank lower and went into circuit. I mentally recited some of my homework: ‘The centre of Iceland consists of a rift from SW to NE. This is part of a vast rift running the length of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge south from Iceland to the Azores, Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha … thought to represent a line of fracture along which the Atlantic Ocean may first have opened … from which basalts have been pouring out for millions of years.’

The runway was a few feet below, wet and fast. ‘Of the volcanic rocks the tertiary plateau basalts are the oldest dating from Eocene to Pliocene …’

We bumped once, then settled and the first sign I saw said: ‘US Navy Ops Field Elevation 169 ft’.

I considered asking Gudrun, now in scarlet jacket and hat, out to dinner. But reluctance to invoke a clause of the tired businessman’s travel manual prevented me; just such reluctance could make a man an octogenarian celibate.

I said goodbye to her breezily and squeezed past her on to the landing steps. She looked hurt, I thought; but it was too late now. I was on the tarmac and the runway accelerating across the airfield like buckshot.

At the duty-free counters I debated prices with a morose sales assistant so that I could be last through formalities and customs and proceed unnoticed to my own nearby destination.

I was still deep in low finance when Gudrun rounded the corner, a galleon in full sail. She dropped anchor in front of me and said: ‘You did not pay for your vodkas.’

Interest animated the face of the sales assistant.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, searching my pockets for the kronur I bought at London Airport.

She considered the coins in my hand. ‘Why are you staying around like this? Reykjavik is thirty-five kilometres from here and you will miss the bus.’

‘I prefer to go by cab.’

‘That will cost you much money. You are very rich?’

‘Not rich at all.’

‘Where are you staying?’

‘In a guest-house in Baragata.’

‘Then you are certainly not so rich.’

‘A lot of scientists stay there. It’s very peaceful, I’m told.’ I held out the coins. ‘Take whatever I owe you.’

‘I do not want your money,’ she said.

Which was perplexing. My body, perhaps? I put the coins back in my pocket and waited optimistically.

She said: ‘Tomorrow I will introduce you to a man who knows all about volcanoes.’

Which was what I needed like a crater in the head.

‘Do you know the Saga Hotel?’

I shook my head. ‘It wasn’t here in my day.’

‘You will find it very easily.’ Her face challenged me not to find it. ‘I shall be there at eight o’clock tomorrow evening. Perhaps the three of us may dine and dance.’

‘The three-step?’

‘You are not anxious to meet my friend?’

‘Not if he’s your boyfriend. Perhaps’ – consulted the tired businessman’s manual – ‘perhaps you and I could have dinner tomorrow at the Saga and meet your friend some other time.’

She smiled as the conversation degenerated into a cliché of her profession. ‘Very well.’ She paused. ‘But what about all those poor cattle dying?’

I looked concerned. Which I supposed I was because I like cattle. And birds, and human beings sometimes. ‘There’s nothing I can do for them. I can only try and stop it happening again.’

She looked relieved. ‘Very well. Eight o’clock in the downstairs bar. We have many things to discuss. And now – can I give you a lift into Reykjavik? I have a little car.’

A single lie spawns with great fertility. I pointed at an Orion P3 anti-submarine surveillance aircraft brushing up wings of spray on the runway. ‘I have to meet someone off that plane.’

‘Who is he?’

‘An American scientist. He’s been rushed in. We’ll be working together on this project.’

She looked at the unorthodox passenger aircraft with surprise. But the surprise was prevented from being inflated into suspicion by sudden emotion. ‘Britain and America helping little Iceland,’ she said. ‘It is vonderful.’

‘Wonderful,’ I said.

And so it was.

2
Charlie Martz

The NATO base at Keflavik, which also serves as one of the capital’s two airfields, once belonged to the British. They occupied it when they occupied Iceland on May 10, 1940, to prevent the Germans doing the same thing. Later in the war the Americans took over the job because Britain had other commitments.

But after the war the Americans were reluctant to leave Iceland vacant for new post-war enemies to occupy and in 1951 Keflavik became a NATO base staffed predominantly by Americans. There are some 2,000 Naval personnel, 1,000 Air Force and two Army men.

The welfare authorities do their best. Cinema, theatre, sport, domestic television and radio. But it is difficult to make a site on a lava field homely. In the winter it gets light at 10 a.m. and dark at 2 p.m.; there is a daily announcement of the Chill Factor (temperature multiplied by wind velocity) by which the mathematically-minded can calculate how quickly they could die from exposure; even tourist literature, which can normally transplant a palm tree almost anywhere, admits that Keflavik ‘is rather bleak and barren’.

In high summer it never gets dark, which is not such a relief from winter gloom because you can get bored with looking at military buildings, unaffected by the influence of Le Corbusier, and hangars and lava. There is also a possibility of volcanic activity under the base. Many servicemen consider Keflavik to be the worst foreign posting after Vietnam.

Strenuous efforts are also made by the Military to foster goodwill between Americans and Icelanders. These efforts succeed to an extent but there is still some opposition to the ‘Army of Occupation’ which declined to depart after the war. The United States then argued that the war was not over until an actual peace treaty had been concluded with Germany; In 1946 a new agreement was drawn up permitting the Americans to stay at Keflavik. Opposition to this was fierce and partly responsible for a change in Government. Five years later the tenancy was extended under the auspices of NATO.

The hostility emanates mostly from Communists within the divided People’s Union which holds nine of the sixty seats in Parliament. It manifests itself in demonstrations which were recently concentrated against the Americans’ own television. They were asked to adjust the transmitter so that Icelanders’ artistic appreciation was not debased. Thus the islanders were deprived in one political move of Rawhide, Captain Kangaroo, The Flying Nun and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. Demonstrators further emphasised their views on American entertainment by entering the base and pouring paint over the TV equipment.

I walked from the civilian air terminal to the entrance to the base. Past raw blocks housing Service families – each apartment a microcosm of Los Angeles or New York City or Seattle, with Chevrolet, Ford or Volkswagen parked outside on concrete or black volcanic ash.

The reception room was a small hothouse occupied by an American military policeman, scrubbed and stroppy and gingery, and an Icelandic policeman in black uniform playing patience. An invisible barrier preventing communication stood between them and on the wall hung a Pam-Am calendar displaying a coloured photograph of Novodevichy Monastery in Moscow.

I spoke to the American guard, as resentful as a dog with bitten ears. ‘I think I’m expected …’

He interrupted me with a jerk of his thumb towards the young Icelandic policeman, picked up the phone and embarked on a wearily obscene conversation with someone called Irwin.

‘My name’s Conran,’ I said. ‘I believe Commander Martz is expecting me.’

The military policeman stopped talking on the phone and accused me headily through his spectacles. Why hadn’t I told him who it was I wanted? He said: ‘I’ll call you back, Irwin.’ But by that time the Icelandic policeman had spoken to Charlie Martz and put an eight of hearts under a nine of clubs.

We drove to Martz’s Nissen hut offices in a Land Rover. British hut, British truck.

He called for coffee, offered cigarettes, put one foot on his desk, flashed a gold tooth somewhere at the back of his mouth, called me ‘an old son of a gun’ a couple of times, massaged the chopped stalks of his harvested hair and inquired with totally spurious concern about the flight, the weather in London and my health.

On his desk were several files, a photograph of his wife and kids and, unaccountably, a toilet roll. On the walls of the office, built austerely for war, were pictures of Charlie Martz with John Kennedy, Charlie Martz with various admirals, Charlie Martz with the boys. Charlie Martz ostensibly in the carefree days before they shore-based him and lumbered him with security and liaison – and British agents.

But he was a nice man, was Charlie. Fortyish, intensively off-duty in windcheater and concertina slacks, with a broad, frank face that was his greatest asset – I was never quite sure how devious he was behind his props. Or at what stage in the pictorial history of Charlie Martz boyishly displayed on the walls his training in counter-espionage, and perhaps espionage, had begun. Anyway he still looked as if there should have been a compass or a periscope instead of a desk in front of him.

Currently Charlie was trying to equate liaison with counterespionage. As liaison officer he spent much time trying to convince a phlegmatic world that great camaraderie was burgeoning between American and Icelander: as a counter-espionage expert he had called in a British agent to help him stamp out subversion. The equation didn’t equate and now he gave up.

‘Bill, old buddy,’ he said, ‘it’s gotten worse.’

‘How much worse?’

‘Lots worse.’

‘You mean they’ve painted your TV cameras again?’

‘Nothing like that.’

The painting had occurred just after my last visit. I had been flown in by the United States Air Force for a briefing and returned to London to await developments without even seeing Reykjavik.

Martz walked to the window and stared in the direction of the herring-filled sea. Momentarily back at the helm. He said: ‘We calculate that there are now thirty-five Russians in Reykjavik. Thirty-five, Bill, for a population of 200,000.’

‘You mean diplomats?’

‘Diplomats and their families and staff.’ He lit a cigarette with a gun-metal, wind-shielded lighter. ‘And as if that were not enough, Goddamnit, the news agency Novisti is starting operations here. At the moment the Soviets are occupying seven buildings in Reykjavik, not to mention some rooms let to them by the Poles.’

‘At least you know where they all are.’ So far the only difference to the situation on my previous visit three months earlier was numerical.

Martz sat down again and replaced his foot on the desk. ‘That’s just the Goddamn trouble, Billy boy, we don’t.’

‘But diplomats can’t take off and strike camp on Vatna Jökull.’

‘Diplomats can’t. Spies can.’ He paused. ‘You remember all the stories about the Germans landing agents here during the last war to start a Fifth Column?’

‘They weren’t just stories. The British found transmitters in caves in the north-east on the Langanes Peninsula. They also landed some Icelanders who had been living in Berlin. They thought they’d got them brainwashed, but they hadn’t – the agents went straight to the local police. We reckon the Soviets are trying something similar right now.’

‘To little old Iceland?’

‘Little old Iceland nothin’. The key to the North Atlantic more like. And as you know, Bill’ – he dropped the old buddy when things were getting really serious – ‘the Soviets think a long way ahead. They’re seeing another war five, ten, twenty years ahead. Or maybe next year. And they want to have a great big foot in Iceland if and when that war comes.’

‘What evidence have you that the Russians are landing agents?’

‘Nothing hard until the other day. A lot of indications though. As you know there’s been a lot of Soviet Naval activity around these shores. Not to mention the fishing fleets. They call it Red Square now up on the East Coast.’

Still nothing that we hadn’t covered on my previous visit. ‘So?’

‘Every now and again a Soviet trawler puts into a fiord claiming a breakdown or something. By the time our guys or the Icelanders get there the engine has been put right and more than likely a passenger is missing somewhere in Iceland. And there’s another funny thing …’ He waited to give the funny thing more effect.

‘What funny thing is that?’

‘According to the guys who reach the Soviet trawlers none of the crews ever smelt of fish.’

Silently we ruminated on the olfactory evidence. Rain machine-gunned the corrugated-iron roof. A 727 came in low from the sea looking for the glistening canal that was the runway.

Finally I said: ‘Perhaps they use deodorant.’

Charlie Martz said: ‘Perhaps.’ The way you humour a facetious child. Then he said: ‘There’s one anchored somewhere near Vopnafjorthur right now if you’d like to go and have a looksee.’

‘Okay. But surely you’ve got a little more to go on than Russian fishermen who don’t smell of fish.’

We eyed each other across the toilet roll. Allies playing poker. A common cause but different methods, different personalities, miserly with our secrets, lavish with suspicion.

‘There is a bit more,’ he said reluctantly.

‘This is killing you, isn’t it?’

The bonhomie had departed for a while, an unwanted guest. He eyed me with resignation because I wasn’t his sort of agent; maybe he didn’t even like me; maybe my dossier – perhaps it was in one of the files on the table – didn’t appeal to him. Something like: ‘First assignment since crack-up, fondness for drink and women increased since this breakdown, flippant in manner, invaluable to this project because of his knowledge of Iceland and Icelandic. Hobbies – ornithology.’ For Christ’s sake – a bird watcher!

I said: ‘Look, Charlie, if we’re going to do this job we’ve got to do it together. If you don’t want me to share your secrets why in God’s name did you send for me?’

‘You know why I asked for you. Not you in particular. But a limey.’

‘Because there are a lot of Icelanders around who wouldn’t take too kindly to an American nosing among their affairs?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Well, you got me and you’d better come clean or I might as well catch the next plane home.’

‘Okay,’ he said, reaching for straws of friendliness. ‘Five days ago a Russian agent was picked up at Egilsstathir. How’s that for openers?’

‘Not bad,’ I said. ‘Not bad at all.’

‘At least we think he was a Russian agent.’

‘Ah.’

‘But we can’t be sure.’

‘Why can’t you be sure?’

‘Because he’s dead,’ Martz said.

The difficult part was over now and Martz began to talk with something like his usual loquacity.

‘As you probably know,’ Martz said, ‘Egilsstathir is one of the few places in Iceland with any trees. Or the forest at Hallormsstathur rather. A local cop was out rambling or something when he came across signs of human habitation. The ashes of a fire, a gnawed bone, that sort of thing.’

‘Wasn’t there snow up there?’

‘Not in the Lagarfljot valley. Anyway the lawman got angry because it seems he reckons that part of the forest belongs to him. So he waited around. After about an hour this guy comes up carrying a sleeping bag and a radio transmitter. The cop came out of hiding and challenged him but he ran for it. The cop called on him to stop but he just kept on running. Then a shooting match started.’

‘You see, we nature-lovers can be quite tough when we feel like it.’

‘Yeah.’ He explored the stubble on his scalp with the tips of his fingers. ‘Yeah, I guess so. Anyway this cop must have been quite a marksman because he holed our spy right between the eyes with a pistol from seventy-five yards.’

‘That wasn’t very clever,’ I said.

‘I didn’t say it was very clever.’ Martz did a reconnaissance patrol of his study and sat down again.

‘Any identification papers?’

Martz nodded. ‘All Icelandic. Ingolfur Gislason. Forgeries – but good ones. Someone by that name was expected to rent a room in Egilsstathir the day after he was killed. The landlord still had the letter signed Gislason.’

‘Where was it posted?’

‘In Reykjavik.’

‘And the transmitter and sleeping bag?’

‘Swedish and Danish respectively. But that doesn’t mean a damn thing. You can buy both in Iceland.’

‘Then why the hell do you think he was Russian?’

‘There had been a Soviet trawler anchored off the coast the day before. About forty miles away. The crew of a C-130 reckoned they saw a man heading across the snow from the trawler in the direction of Egilsstathir.’

‘I thought you said there wasn’t any snow up there?’

‘There’s plenty of it outside the valley. The roads are still impassable up north.’

‘And that’s the only evidence you have that the dead man was a Russian?’

‘As I told you we’ve suspected for some time that they’ve been landing agents like the Germans did. This is the nearest we’ve got to proof. I reckon Mr Gislason spoke fluent Icelandic, had a prepared Icelandic background and contacts to back up his stories just like a British agent parachuted in to France in 1941 would have contacts in the Resistance.’

‘Do you have any ideas?’

‘Our Mr Sigurdson does.’

‘Who the devil is he?’

‘My opposite number in the Icelandic police. Liaison with the Americans and counter-subversion. The trouble is he gets a little confused as to who the enemy is. He wants the Russians out but he’s not crazy about having the Americans in.’

‘What are Mr Sigurdson’s ideas?’

‘He had two suspects. He was keeping them under surveillance. Waiting for an agent to contact them. He had nothing definite on them – just Icelandic intuition.’ Martz’s voice implied that this was a formidable quality. ‘They’re both Communists, both highly mobile. They’ve both had dealings with the Russians and the Czechs.’

‘What do you mean had two suspects?’ Martz issued his information in cliff-hangers.

‘He’s now got three.’

‘Ah.’

‘Sigurdson flew up to Egilsstathir immediately after the shooting. On a slip of paper among Gislason’s forged documents he found a name – Hafstein.’

Which was a relief in a country where the second names are so alike that phone numbers are listed under Christian names. ‘And who is Hafstein?’

‘It seems he’s a guy working in the national register – the Thjodskrain. It figures. That way the Soviets could plant forged birth certificates and other documents confirming their agents’ identities if they ever came under suspicion.’

In the adjoining office someone battered on Martz’s door and a voice bawled: ‘You in there, Charlie?’

The other Charlie Martz bawled back: ‘Sure am, Harry. What can I do for you?’

The door opened and a basketball player’s head about 6 ft 4 ins from the ground looked around. Appraised me, dismissed me and concentrated on Martz. ‘You working late or something?’

‘Something like that, Harry. This is Bill Conran, an old buddy of mine from London, England.’

Harry smiled at me because I was Martz’s buddy and swivelled back towards Martz. ‘Well, when you’ve finished get your fat ass out of that chair and buy me a beer. Bring Mr Conran along too.’

‘Not tonight, Harry, you old sonofabitch. You buy me one tomorrow, eh?’

Harry grimaced, shrugged, shut the door; we heard his retreating voice decrying Martz’s unsocial behaviour in fundamental terms.

Martz stretched in his swivel chair. ‘Great guy, Harry. We were on a destroyer together once.’ He finished stretching and became the wary raconteur again. ‘Anything else you want to know?’

‘I suppose I’d better make contact with Mr Sigurdson.’

‘He’s expecting you. He’s not the most forthcoming of guys because he reckons Icelandic security should be left to Icelanders. He has a point, I guess – if there were enough Icelanders to do the job. And if they had an Army …’

‘What’s he like apart from that?’

‘You’ll like him. A great drinker, a great joker – like most Icelanders. But cunning beneath it all.’

‘Not unlike Charlie Martz.’

‘That’s not kind,’ Martz said. The sun came out and discovered his gold tooth.

‘Was there nothing else at all to confirm that Gislason was a Russian?’

‘As a matter of fact there was. He had a steel tooth. You should know those teeth’ – Martz was telling me that he knew I’d worked in Moscow – ‘like a mouthful of bullets.’

I did know those teeth because it had once cost me £100 to go to Helsinki to avoid Russian dentistry. ‘How the hell did the Russians overlook that?’

Martz shrugged. ‘God knows. But there it was, at the back of his lower jaw.’

But it didn’t really surprise me. The KGB was both the most efficient and inefficient network in the world. Machiavellian intrigue hampered by strokes of wondrous incompetence.

Martz stood up and replaced the mask that faced the world. ‘Come on, Billy boy, let’s go take a look at that spy ship.’

In Iceland the weather can change by the minute. Now the sky was ice-blue and clear of cloud. We walked across the tarmac to the waiting C-130.

Beneath me Iceland. Twice in one day. It was 10 p.m. and the heavens were as blue-bright as if it were 10 a.m. Behind us the playing cards of Reykjavik, below the black and khaki moss, ahead the mountains finding the snow as they grew taller.

Then I saw Hekla – and heard her above the drilling of the Hercules’ engines. An umbrella of smoke and a turbulence of clouds: and beneath all this the red mouths spewing lava into the sky. It was difficult to see the craters in detail because of the smoke, but from the aircraft the earth’s crust looked very frail.

Martz had similar feelings. ‘Makes you feel pretty puny, doesn’t it?’ he shouted.

‘It makes what we’re doing seem even more puny,’ I shouted back. ‘Can’t we get any nearer? Get under that smoke?’

‘Are you crazy?’

We left Hekla behind and took up the northern boundaries of Vatna Jökull, the largest glacier in Europe. In 1783 the Laki fissure had erupted west of this glacier poisoning sheep, horses and cattle and killing twenty per cent of Iceland’s population through famine. The peaks and caverns of the Ice Age, discarded by time, accepted a bluish glow from the sky. Then we were over its last white fingers, groping as ponderously as evolution itself.

The Hercules dipped towards the coast and we sat back in the old leather seats. The aircraft banked and we looked down at a fiord, the water motionless inside its mountain barricades. In the middle, just getting up steam, was the Russian trawler looking as innocent as a pleasure boat on Lake Lucerne, a red flag flying pertly from her mast.

Martz made an extravagant gesture towards her; the gesture could have been triumphant in the face of my scepticism, or defeatist because they were getting away.

We went as low as the mountains would allow and the little men on the deck waved at us.

‘Will she get intercepted?’ I yelled at Martz.

‘She might’ His voice implied that the interception would be pretty futile.

We did another circuit, then headed back across the primeval countryside. It was 11.25 p.m. and as we settled down over the capital the sun was just going down, ready to bounce up again without letting dusk make night. The sea was bronze, wheeling with seagulls. And Reykjavik, which means Smoky Bay – so named because of the steam from the hot springs noticed by the Norse settlers in 874 – looked very innocent from the air with its churches and clean houses and small waves losing themselves on its shores.

‘So now I’d better find Sigurdson,’ I shouted at Martz on the tarmac, forgetting that there was no longer any need to raise my voice.

‘Don ‘t worry about that Billy boy – he’ll find you.’

The prospect pleased him because he clapped me on the back with one large hand.

‘Does he know all about me? My cover and everything?’

‘He sure does. And I hope you know your subject because Icelanders are very inquisitive. Very friendly, very inquisitive, very tough. They also like to tell you about their dreams. But then you know all that.’

‘I was only a kid,’ I said.

‘You’ll have to go up and take a look at Hekla, seeing as that’s supposed to be the reason you’re here.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And do some bird watching at the same time.’ Just to re-activate his doubts.

We stopped outside his Nissen hut. It wasn’t the most august building on the base. Perhaps he had been relegated to it when the mob of students subverted the barbed-wire fences and painted the TV cameras.

The weather did a quick-change and the rain returned.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Now the car and the gun and the little bugging devices they seem to think you’re so clever with.’

The car was a pale green Chevrolet, the gun a Smith & Wesson.

‘Anything more?’ he asked.

‘I wouldn’t say no to some ammunition.’

The old-buddy smile once again erased the doubts. ‘Jesus, I nearly forgot.’ He gave me a box of bullets. ‘Nothing intentional.’ He shook my hand. ‘Good luck, Billy boy. See you tomorrow. Be good.’

I released my hand and smiled because I liked Charlie Martz. ‘And you,’ I said.

I started the Chevrolet and headed across the lava field in the direction of Smoky Bay.

3
The Welcome

The initial greetings to a country affect your whole stay. They lodge in your brain and stay there until you leave. At least there was no doubt about the spirit of the greeting on the way to Reykjavik from Keflavik. And it nearly did lodge in my brain – permanently.

It happened somewhere near the hill called Stapi which is reputed to be haunted – Icelanders are much affected by wights and ghosts and the toughest put away their muscles when the Huldufolk are mentioned.

There was nothing ghostly about the bullet. The sea was on my left, the lava field stretching away to my right, more desolate than any desert. The rain bounced on the bonnet, the wipers moved like metronomes. Then, crack, the metronomes were wiping glass cracked into a million sugar cubes and there was a hole the size of a new potato just above my head.

I braked, skidded slightly, stopped and crouched on the floor. The bullet, which had ricocheted around inside the car, lay on the passenger seat, warm and bright and hardly scratched. I crawled to the passenger side, opened the door and lay on the ground.

Then I reached up, took the Smith & Wesson from the glove compartment and peered round the fender. There was a lava mound ahead, greeny-brown and cracking at the top, scaled with lichen and cushioned with moss round the base. I guessed that the sniper was behind it; but there wasn’t much I could do about it unless he showed himself; if I showed myself in the all-night light or tried to drive away then I was dead.

I glanced at my watch. Midnight, June 30th.

I took aim from behind the wheel and potted one of the cubes of pumice on top of the mound. Fairground stuff. I thought I detected a movement behind the mound but I couldn’t be sure. The rain bowled down the long empty road plastered my clothes to my body. It was going to be a question of whose patience became exhausted first.

Then a pair of headlights showed in the uncertain light about a mile down the road. There was a movement behind the lava mound and I potted another chunk of lava; the marksman must have seen the headlights and realised that the driver would stop. He was probably backing away into the bleak cover behind.

The headlights stopped, rain lancing their beams. It was a red Broncho truck. I stood up and prayed; nothing happened. I explained to the driver – an old seaman by the look of him – that a pebble had struck the windscreen. And before he noticed the bullet-hole I punched out the frosted glass.

Then I drove on to Reykjavik past lines of dried fish hanging out like laundry, past the new Swiss aluminium plant at Straumsvik. With the windscreen gone it was like driving underwater. The houses and apartment blocks of the capital looked very welcome and I congratulated Ingolfur Arnarson, the first settler, on his choice.

The house in Baragata, near the city centre, was white and old, surrounded by an uncertain lawn of new grass. The landlady was still up; so, it seemed, was half of Reykjavik. She welcomed me and in a series of shambling little sentences assured me that the weather had been fine until my arrival, described the eruption of Hekla and deplored the consumption of strong drink.

She showed me my ground-floor room, whisked me upstairs for the inevitable coffee, treated me to flurry of comment on young people’s morals – it was their parents’ fault – and then allowed me to return to my room because I must be tired.

When I opened the door there was a crate of ginger ale and soda water on the floor and two bottles on the table dividing the single beds. And a man sitting in the wickerwork chair.

He grinned and began to stand up.

‘Don’t get up,’ I said. ‘You’re Mr Sigurdson, I believe.’

The grin faltered a little.

Einar Sigurdson looked as tough as a trawlerman. About forty with a broad face, smiling creases from nose to mouth, a round scar on his neck, faded eyes and longish pale hair cut at an awkward length around the sides so that it stuck out. But Sigurdson was not a man who needed to bother with the fripperies of fashion: his strengths were deep in his searching eyes, rasping in his voice, sheathed in his ordinary suit. He was a man’s man and a lady’s man.

He was also an exuberant man. He proceeded with the grin, grasping my fingers with one hand, my bicep with the other. ‘It is good to see you,’ he said; his bluff sincerity was more convincing than Charlie Martz’s. ‘Welcome to Iceland.’

‘I’ve already been welcomed.’ I showed him the bullet, snug in my hand.

‘You were shot at?’ Incredulity, mirth and concern contended for dominance.

‘I was.’

He disposed of the incredulity, briefly proffered the concern, then indulged the mirth. ‘You seem to be very accident prone,’ he said.

How much did he know of Moscow? I wondered. ‘I don’t call a bullet through the windscreen an accident.’

‘But you are alive and that is vonderful.’

‘Wery,’ I said.

‘We must drink to that.’

‘Isn’t it a little late?’

‘It is never too late to do anything in Iceland. To drink or make the love. At least not in the summer when we have no night. In the winter it is different – then we sleep. I have here a bottle of aquavit and a bottle of Black Death.’

‘That sounds interesting.’

‘It’s like schnapps. Once upon the time it was forbidden to stick a gay label on a bottle of liquor so they stuck this black one on – that is how it got its name. You like to try?’

‘All right,’ I said. I didn’t recall Black Death in my childhood.

He poured half an inch of colourless liquid in a thick glass for me and an inch of aquavit for himself. He topped up the aquavit with ginger ale. ‘We call that asni – it means mule. We Icelanders like a long drink. You would like some ginger ale?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll take it neat.’ Like I had once taken a Stolichnaya, oily from a deep freeze, and woken up much later far from home. You didn’t necessarily learn from your mistakes: but then I didn’t really care any more.

‘Skal,’ he said.

‘Skal,’ I said. It was like vodka, only faintly aromatic.

He swallowed half his mule and examined the little whitewashed room. ‘I have been here some time,’ he said. ‘The front door is open always. When you came down just now I took myself to the toilet.’

‘Couldn’t you have asked the landlady if you could wait?’

He shook his head violently so that the pale hair swung across his forehead. ‘She is the enemy. A member of the International Order of Good Templars. They are teetotallers and they are very influential in this country of ours. It is,’ he added unnecessarily, ‘a country of extremes. Your lady would have smelled the drink on my breath and banished me from her house.’ He finished his drink and poured us both another. ‘We must be very quiet.’ He raised his glass and stared into my eyes guide-book style.

I sipped at death and said: ‘Okay, Einar, let’s be quiet and get down to business. I’ve got a lot of questions I want to ask you.’

‘And I have a lot to ask you. First of all, why do you wish to help the Bandarizkur?’ He put a pillow against the wall and lay down on one of the beds, asni beside him, hands behind his sturdy neck.

‘You speak as if I were helping a Nazi in the last war. Are they so unpopular, the Americans?’

He shook his head, fringing his forehead again. ‘No. We like them. They are wonderful people. But not all Icelanders want them here. It is, after all, our country. Although it is a little country and we realise that we cannot make the rules.’

‘They are here to protect you.’

‘Would they be here to protect us if we were not in such a – how do you say it? – strategic position?’

I applied myself to my Black Death without answering.

He went on: ‘And would Britain have been so keen to protect us in 1940 if we hadn’t been in such a position of strategy?’

‘It doesn’t alter the fact that you’re a member of NATO and the military presence of the Americans is desirable to shield a fellow member.’ I poured myself another drink to dispel the diplomatic clichés – if there was one thing I disliked more than diplomats it was their clichés. ‘Would you rather have the Russians here?’

‘We would rather just have Icelanders here.’

‘If you don’t have the Americans then as sure as night is day in Iceland you’ll have the Soviets.’

‘You are right, of course.’ He considered the gloomy truth. ‘That is why I have agreed to help you.’

He passed me a copy of the morning newspaper, Morgunbladid, with four sentences underlined—

Despite progress in military technology the Atlantic Ocean is still very important militarily. Icelanders must keep this in mind when they think about their own security. They must also keep an open eye on those that now seek a position on the Atlantic, i.e. the Soviet Union. Isn’t its increased interest in Iceland a clear witness to that?

Sigurdson mixed himself another asni and said: ‘You see, my friend, we realise the truth. But that doesn’t stop us wishing that we were not a prawn in the Big Power Game.’

‘Pawn,’ I said. ‘But in any case that’s a pro-Government newspaper.’

‘I am trying to give you a complete picture,’ he said, and handed me a copy of the Opposition paper Timinn. It described a protest march which halted predictably outside the American Embassy. There a student ‘challenged all imperialists and preached world revolution’.

He also handed me the Communist paper Thjodviljinn which described the protest march and added for good measure: ‘It is now the task of the young to join the occupation opponents and relieve the nation of the yoke of the occupation.’

‘You see?’ Sigurdson said.

‘I see.’

‘We are very democratic.’

I read a bit more of Morgunbladid because it contained a report on the Hekla fall-out. ‘Tests of samples taken of ash from the Hekla eruption indicate that the fluor contents are much higher than in the eruption of 1947. Sheep on a number of farms in the vicinity of Hekla have become sick, and it is suspected that they suffer from acute fluor poisoning.’

Perhaps I would be helping Iceland more by applying myself to my spurious rather than my true profession.

The bed creaked as Sigurdson, curious to see what had caught my interest, came up behind me. I could feel his gun inside his heavy grey jacket pressed against my back.

‘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 wonderful 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.

Then we returned to our sweet soup. She drank this quickly, panting a little from her exertions. Her face was flushed and pretty and her soft blonde hair was brushed into wings in front of her ears so that it looked like a helmet.

I drank my beer which was not dissimilar from water and said: ‘Skal.’

‘Skal,’ she said. We looked into each other’s eyes in search of messages.

‘I’m enjoying myself,’ I said.

‘That is good. In Iceland we know how to enjoy ourselves.’ She then embarked on the cross-examination which swiftly follows any meeting between man and woman in any country; although in most other countries it is often conducted with subtlety.

Gudrun said: ‘Are you married?’ Elsewhere they favour an exploratory, ‘I suppose you had to leave your wife in England?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Are you divorced?’

‘Yes.’

‘It is best.’

‘What do you mean – it is best?’

‘If two people do not get on then they should part.’

‘And if there are children?’ Not that I had any.

‘Then they should still part because they will only make the children unhappy.’ She drank some wine and attacked the mutton. ‘In Iceland we love children but we do not let them rule our lives. In any case many are born before marriage – thirty-three per cent I believe.’

‘And then the couples marry?’

‘Very often.’ She warmed to her subject. ‘I am travelling a lot and I do not understand your ways in other countries. There is so much talk about this permitting society.’

‘Permissive,’ I said.

‘We have always been like that in Iceland – but we do not talk about it all the time. If a man and a woman are attracted to each other then they should make the love. But why make big fusses about it all the time?’

I imagined that her Icelandic philosophy was immensely popular in the Skyways Hotel at London airport – or wherever Icelandair overnighted.

‘Do you have any children?’

‘Only one,’ she said, and popped the last piece of mutton into her mouth.

‘Does the child live with you?’

‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘He is away.’ She patted her lips with a napkin. ‘You will perhaps see him.’

Beside our table a girl of about sixteen was dancing with a partner two or three years older. Her face was very pale and she did not look well. Her hair was long and honey-coloured, parted in the centre, and her eyes were dark and staring. In London she would have been part of Chelsea, on the brink of debbiness, embarking on a few years of hunt balls and pot before marrying into stockbroking. Her partner wore a dark flared jacket, light grey trousers and a flowered blue shirt; his hair was blond, almost yellow, and his eyes very blue.

Gudrun said. ‘What are you staring at?’

‘Just that couple. They’re rather striking.’

‘Just two young Icelanders enjoying themselves.’ She pointed towards the bar at the entrance to the restaurant. ‘See those two men there?’

‘Which two?’ Icelandic men had now begun to appear and were standing around, drinks in their hands, apparently waiting to be chosen, like the girls in the dance halls of my youth.

‘Those two in the front looking around the restaurant.’

One was middle-aged, balding, wearing a brown gaberdine suit, square-toed shoes and a button-down collar. The other was slighter, fair, sharp.

‘Who are they?’

‘Police,’ she said. ‘American and Icelandic. It has gone ten and all Americans must be back at their base. That is the agreement that the Americans have with our Government except on Wednesdays when there is no drink sold in Reykjavik. Those two policemen are looking for Americans breaking the rules. If they catch any they will be in the big trouble.’

The Icelandic plain-clothes man stared at me and spoke to the American in the brown suit. The American appraised me, shook his head and continued examining the dancers. I followed his gaze. The girl with the pale face and dark eyes was still dancing, staring across the heads of the diners. But of her partner there was no sign.

We danced and drank till midnight. Then Gudrun said we should leave. I went to the toilet and found several Icelandic men gathered there with their drinks – escaping briefly from a predominantly female gathering. They were talking about politics, fishing and their expectations for the night.

Outside the hotel a crowd was still clamouring to get in. Gudrun led me to her baby Fiat and we drove to her apartment on the east side of the city.

The apartment was smart and untidy, adorned and littered with the paraphernalia of a stewardess. Ornaments from foreign parts, duty-free packets of cigarettes, an airline bag, half-consumed bottles of whisky and gin, a framed photograph of Gudrun with some air-crew grinning muzzily over champagne glasses.

‘I hope that was after a flight,’ I said.

‘Of course,’ she said. She looked at them fondly. ‘Vonderful men.’ She poured me a large Scotch and retired to the bathroom where she made a lot of noise with water.

I stood at the window of the apartment and gazed across the sea to the mountains. The 1 a.m. light was mauvish and the crumpled peaks were sugared with new snow even though it was June.

The apartment was on the fifth floor of a skyscraper block in an area known as ‘Snob Hill’ because of the expensive villas there. From the bathroom there came the faint smell of Hydrogen Sulphide as Gudrun washed herself in the hot water piped from natural springs.

I was wondering whether to start undressing when she reappeared – naked. She stood in front of me and said: ‘You like me?’

I pulled the curtains and said: ‘Yes.’

‘Then you must get undressed.’ She took off my jacket and tie with deft movements. ‘And now I will wait for you in bed.’ She paused on the way to light a cigarette; her alpine breasts swung slightly; her buttocks jogged jauntily. Someone once said that the spectacle of a half-dressed woman was more erotic than the sight of a nude one: he was wrong.

We made love with enthusiasm, pleasure and – certainly in her case – expertise that might have aroused jealousies in my conformist soul if I had been more involved.

Then we smoked cigarettes and looked at the ceiling through the lacework of smoke.

She touched my face and said: ‘You have very sensitive eyes.’

‘I’m a very sensitive person.’

‘Why did you divorce your wife?’

‘I didn’t – she divorced me.’

‘Why?’

‘She found someone else.’

‘Then she was wery stupid,’ Gudrun said.

‘So was I.’

She raised herself on one elbow and examined me. ‘You are a very interesting man.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Brains first, then looks.’

She ignored me. ‘You have a wery sensitive face and yet your ways and your body are hard.’ She nibbled at her lower lip. ‘What are your hobbies, Mr Conran?’

‘Bill,’ I said.

‘What are your hobbies, Bill?’

‘Bird watching.’ I waited for the amusement that usually greeted the confession.

‘Vonderful,’ Gudrun said. ‘We have the most vonderful birds in Iceland.’

‘You can say that again.’

She looked puzzled and said: ‘We have the most vonderful birds in Iceland.’

‘I hope to see some of them before I leave.’

‘When will you leave, Bill?’

‘As soon as I’ve sorted out this eruption of yours.’

‘When will you go and see Hekla?’

I would have to go soon, I thought, to maintain the cover. ‘Tomorrow, maybe.’

‘Then I shall take you.’

‘Aren’t you flying?’

‘Not for two days. So, it is arranged. I have a friend who will lend me a Land Rover. I will pick you up at your guest-house. Or,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘you can stay here.’

‘It might be better if you picked me up,’ I said.

She lit another cigarette with a gold Dunhill lighter. ‘Yesh,’ she said, ‘it might be better. Johann might come back in the morning.’

I digested this enigmatic information. ‘Who is Johann and where might he be coming back from?’

‘Johann is my boyfriend. He is out fishing at this moment. He is on a trawler.’

I imagined him at the door, enormous in a blue sweater and thigh-boots, delivering me a stunning blow as if I were an errant cod. ‘Is he the father of your child?’ It sounded unbelievably pompous.

She looked surprised. ‘Gud minn almattugur’ – which means Good Lord – ‘he is not. He is just a boyfriend but he likes me very much and he comes round here straight from his ship.’

I glanced at my watch; it was 2.30 a.m. ‘What time does his ship get back?’

‘I do not know. When they have enough fish.’ She shrugged and dismissed the ardent, salty Johann from the conversation. ‘So, it is fixed – I will pick you up tomorrow at six in the evening. It is best to see Hekla at night when at least there is a little dusk.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘There’s just one thing.’

‘And that is?’

‘Don’t bring Johann.’

She smiled and shifted her body so that her nipples touched my face. ‘Elskan min,’ she said, which means darling. I noted that with familiarity she lapsed more into Icelandic. The breasts lowered fractionally and my powers of observation faded for a while.

Later she said: ‘This eruption – is that your only reason for visiting Iceland?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

I washed in the sulphurous water and dressed. Outside the sky was icy bright. I kissed her and said: ‘See you today – blessadur.’

She stood at the door, still naked, and said: ‘Bles.’

I walked back through the shopping centre of Laugavegur and down the hill to Laekjargata, the home of many Government offices, on the perimeter of the old city centre. At first there were a few teenagers around, a few drunks, a lot of broken glass – Icelanders are dedicated breakers of bottles.

Gradually I became aware of more activity. Police cars, policemen, an American military patrol.

I was stopped by a black-uniformed policeman. ‘Your identification papers, please,’ he said.

‘What the hell’s going on?’

‘A girl has been found dead,’ he said. ‘We think she may have been murdered.’

Intuitively I knew that the dead girl was the girl with the long hair and dark wide eyes that I had seen dancing at the Saga.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.