Three hours later, when Erlendur was on the verge of giving up and the owner had asked him repeatedly whether he had turned up anything, he found what he was looking for: an invoice for the car. The dealer had sold a black Ford Falcon on 21 October 1979, engine defunct, interior in reasonable condition, good lacquering. No licence plates. Stapled to the sheet of paper describing the sale was a pencilled invoice: Falcon 1967. 35,000 kronur. Buyer: Hermann Albertsson.
11
The First Secretary at the Russian embassy in Reykjavik was the same age as Erlendur but thinner and considerably healthier-looking. When he received them he seemed to make a special effort to be casual. He was wearing khaki trousers and said, with a smile, that he was on his way to the golf course. He showed Erlendur and Elinborg to their seats in his office, then sat down behind a large desk and smiled broadly. He knew the reason for their visit. The meeting had been arranged well in advance so Erlendur was surprised to hear the golfing excuse. He had the impression that they were supposed to rush through the meeting and then disappear. They spoke English and, although the First Secretary was aware of the reason for the enquiry, Elinborg briefly repeated the need for the meeting. A Russian listening device had been found tied to the skeleton of a man probably murdered and thrown into Lake Kleifarvatn some time after 1961. The discovery of the Russian equipment had still not leaked to the press.
“There have been a number of Soviet and Russian ambassadors in Iceland since 1960,” the Secretary said, smiling self-confidently as if none of what they had related was any of his business. “Those who were here in the 1960s and early 1970s are long since dead. I doubt that they knew anything about Russian equipment in that lake. Any more than I do.”
He smiled. Erlendur smiled back.
“But you spied here in Iceland during the Cold War? Or at least tried to.”
“That was before my time,” the Secretary said. “I couldn’t say.”
“Do you mean you don’t spy any more?”
“Why would we spy? We just go on the Internet like everyone else. Besides, your military base isn’t so important any more. If it matters at all. The conflict zones have shifted. America doesn’t need an aircraft carrier like Iceland any more. No one can understand what they’re doing here with that expensive base. If this were Turkey I could understand.”
“It’s not our military base,” Elinborg said.
“We know that some embassy staff were expelled from Iceland on suspicion of spying,” Erlendur said. “When things were very tense in the Cold War.”
“Then you know more than I do,” the Secretary said. “And of course it is your military base,” he added, looking at Elinborg. “If we did have spies in this embassy then there were certainly twice as many CIA agents at the US embassy. Have you asked them? The description of the skeleton you found suggests to me — how should one put it — a mafia killing. Had that occurred to you? Concrete boots and deep water. It’s almost like an American gangster movie.”
“It was Russian equipment,” Erlendur said. “Tied to the body. The skeleton…”
“That tells us nothing,” the Secretary said. “There were embassies or offices from other Warsaw Pact countries that used Soviet equipment. It need not be connected with our embassy.”
“We have a detailed description of the device with us, and photographs,” Elinborg said, handing them to him. “Can you tell us anything about how it was used? Who used it?”
“I am not familiar with this equipment,” the Secretary said as he looked at the photographs. “Sorry. I will enquire, though. But even if we did recognise it, we can’t help you very much.”
“Couldn’t you give it a try?” Erlendur asked.
The Secretary smiled.
“You’ll just have to believe me. The skeleton in the lake has nothing to do with this embassy or its staff. Neither in the present, nor in the past.”
“We believe it’s a listening device,” Elinborg said. “It is tuned to the old wavelength of the American troops in Keflavik.”
“I can’t comment on that,” the Secretary said, looking at his watch. His round of golf was waiting.
“If you had spied in the old days, which you didn’t,” Erlendur said, “what would you have been interested in?”
The Secretary hesitated for an instant.
“If we had been doing anything then obviously we would have wanted to observe the base, the transportation of military hardware, movements of warships, aircraft, submarines. We would have wanted to know about America’s capability at any time. That’s obvious. We would have wanted to know about what was going on at the base and other military installations in Iceland. They were all over the place. Not just in Keflavik. There were activities all over Iceland. We would also have monitored the activities of other embassies, domestic politics, political parties and that sort of thing.”
“A lot of equipment was found in Lake Kleifarvatn in 1973,” Erlendur said. “Transmitters, microwave equipment, tape recorders, even radios. All from Warsaw Pact countries. Mostly from the Soviet Union.”
“I’m not aware of the incident,” the Secretary said.
“No, of course not,” Erlendur said. “But what reason could there have been for throwing that equipment in the lake? Did you use a particular method for getting rid of old stuff?”
“I’m afraid I cannot assist you with that,” the Secretary said, no longer smiling. “I’ve tried to answer you as best I can but there are some things I simply don’t know. And that’s that.”
Erlendur and Elinborg stood up. There was a smugness about the man that Erlendur disliked. Your base! What did he know about military bases in Iceland?
“Was the equipment obsolete, so there was no point in sending it home in a diplomatic bag?” he asked. “Couldn’t you throw it away like any other rubbish? These devices clearly demonstrate that spying went on in Iceland. When the world was much simpler and the lines were clearly drawn.”
“You can say what you like about it,” the Secretary said, standing up. “I have to be somewhere else.”
“The man whose body was found in Kleifarvatn, could he have been at the embassy?”
“I think that’s out of the question.”
“Or from another Eastern bloc embassy?”
“I don’t think there’s the slightest chance. And now I must ask you to—”
“Are there any persons missing from this period?”
“No.”
“You just know that? You don’t need to look it up?”
“I have looked it up. No one is missing.”
“No one who disappeared and you don’t know what became of them?”
“Goodbye,” the Secretary said, with a smile. He had opened the door.
“Definitely no one who disappeared?” Erlendur said as he walked out into the corridor.
“No one,” the Secretary said, and closed the door in their faces.
Sigurdur Oli was refused a meeting with the US ambassador or his staff. Instead he received a message from the embassy marked “confidential” which stated that no US citizen in Iceland had been reported missing during the period in question. Sigurdur Oli wanted to take the matter further and insist on a meeting, but his request was denied by the top CID officials. The police would need something tangible to link the body in the lake to the US embassy, the base or American citizens in Iceland.
Sigurdur Oli telephoned a friend of his, a head of section at the Defence Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to ask whether he could locate any past employee to tell the police about foreign embassy officials in the 1960s and 1970s. He tried to give away as little as possible about the investigation, just enough to arouse his interest, and his friend promised to get back to him.