“I do not care if you are on a mission from heaven. The patient is very weak. The doctor has not permitted visitors.”
Jason sized up Nurse Elga. The woman was immense. If it came to physically ejecting the tubby police commissioner, Harvor was an odds-on second best.
Harvor pulled a cell phone from somewhere in his uniform. “How may I contact this doctor?”
“You may contact him from the hall.”
The policeman outside stuck his head around the doorjamb, assessed the situation, and disappeared.
Elga put hands the size of a catcher’s mitt on thighs that would have credited an NFL running back. “Do you require assistance in leaving?”
Threat, not a question.
Harvor glanced at the form under the sheets and then at Jason. “I think we better take this up with the doctor.”
No shit.
As Jason turned to go, he thought he had somehow snagged his pants on part of the hospital bed. Instead, Boris’s hand was holding on to his sweater’s sleeve as the face on the pillow looked up at him. He was whispering something.
“You are leaving.” A statement, not a question, from Elga.
Jason held up a hand: wait. He leaned over, putting his ear next to the moving lips.
“What?”
“Cravas, Nigel Cravas.” There was a pause as though Boris was summoning the strength to finish. “British Institute … Tell him, tell him …” A pause. “The … eanies …”
Jason was not sure what he was hearing. “‘Cravat’? ‘Meanie’? ‘Beanie’?” he asked.
No good. Elga pulled his shoulders up, inserting herself between Jason and the bed. “You are leaving now.”
15
In the hall, Harvor tried the number the nurse had given him, fuming when he reached the doctor’s voice mail. “These doctors! They think they may come and go as they please! Ever since Iceland’s financial crisis a few years ago when the number of free hospitals was reduced, the doctors have forgotten they work for the state, that they are required to be on call twenty-four hours a day. Shameful!”
If you think Iceland’s MDs are hard to get in touch with, Jason thought, try an American doc on a weekend.
“Exactly where is this place where the man in there was found?” he asked the commissioner.
Harvor was still distracted by the independence of his country’s medical profession. “In an area of the glacier called Geitlandsjökull, the southern part of the glacier. But why? … Surely you are not planning on going there?”
“Why not? We can’t get any information from the man in there.” Jason gestured toward the hospital room.
“But as soon as I can reach the doctor—”
“Which may be after dark.” Jason glanced out of a window at the end of the hall. “If it gets dark.”
Apparently despairing of reaching the doctor, the commissioner returned his cell phone to wherever it had come from. “What do you expect to find there?” he asked suspiciously.
“I don’t know,” Jason replied, “but we sure aren’t finding out by standing around here.”
“How do you plan to get there? It is a two-hour drive and the rental-car agencies are closed. It is almost midnight.”
Jason grinned. “I thought you might want to take a look yourself, possibly before the shooter returns.”
Harvor looked at Jason levelly. “What makes you think he will return?”
“The man in there, Karloff, whatever his real name is, was trying to tell me something.”
“Who shot him, no doubt.”
“Maybe, but I think he was giving me directions.”
“To what?”
“We won’t know if we don’t go there. Besides, who knows how long it will be before you have a chance to investigate another shooting in Iceland?”
Jason’s stomach growled, reminding him that he’d had nothing to eat on the plane. “Is there a place I can get a quick bite around here?”
“Bite?”
“Something to eat.”
“There is a very fine restaurant down the street, serves Icelandic specialties.” Harvor looked at his watch. “May be closed by now.”
It was.
Jason tried to ignore his complaining stomach. Reading the menu posted in the window in English and a number of other languages helped assuage his hunger: fresh herring, salt herring, broiled herring, baked herring, fried herring. And, of course, herring croquettes.
He returned to the hospital, convinced that, in this case, hunger was the better alternative.
The ride in the Range Rover took closer to three hours actually. They were no more than a few kilometers out of Reykjavík when the road went from four lanes to two to gravel. It was getting dark now, a dusklike light that would be as close to night as the summer months permitted. Other than an occasional truck headed into the city, there was no other traffic.
Since Jason found it impossible to sleep on airplanes, even in the Gulfstream’s small but comfortable bedroom, he had been awake for more than twenty-four hours. But cars were not aircraft. There was no irrational fear that something might go wrong at thirty thousand feet. The steady sound of the engine, the monotonous hum of the tires on the road were a lullaby. He dozed off, coming awake with a jolt when the car stopped. At first, he was unaware of what he was seeing. The huge white mass shimmering in the twilight seemed luminescent, almost magical, as though an iceberg had floated out of the North Sea and onto land.
“This is it,” Harvor said, getting out of the car, a flashlight in his hand. “Come, I will show you where the shepherd found him.”
Jason was thankful for the heavy sweater as he pulled it tighter around him. “You know the location?”
The policeman stopped, turning. “We may not be as sophisticated as your American police but we do investigate thoroughly, Mr. Peters. The officer who first responded made a map of the location as well as photographs of the scene. Can you see your way without a light?”
“Not well, but I’d prefer not to turn on the light just yet.”
“Oh?”
“In case someone else is in the neighborhood, I’d just as soon not pinpoint our position.”
Jason could see the gray blur of Harvor’s face as the commissioner stared at him a moment. “As you wish. Mind your step.”
Jason was doing just that: watching where he placed his feet. The scree left by the retreating glacier made the path treacherous, all the more so because it was difficult to see in the half-light. He was so intent on trying to avoid tripping over the rubble that he was almost upon it before he saw it.
Something made him look up. Twilight was beginning to fade into the twenty-hour day. Limned against the dove-gray sky of early dawn towered a form vaguely familiar but just out of the reach of Jason’s memory.
He stopped and the commissioner, hearing no steps behind him, turned around. “What is it?”
“That rock formation.” Jason pointed.
Harvor’s voice bore a tinge of annoyance. “There are many rock formations here. The ice cap carves …”
Jason tuned him out. In daylight, he would have missed it, but in the half dark where sight was not three-dimensional, the silhouette had a square, Romanesque tower above … above … a church!
He had heard Boris correctly.
But what had he meant?
Jason was pointing. “We need to take a look at those rocks.”
Harvor reached into a pocket and produced a sheet of paper. “I can’t be sure in this light, but it looks like from the map the investigating officer found your friend there.”
Both men were silent as they climbed the steep slope. Once at the top, they were surrounded by the formation itself.