“All that injustice in such a tiny country where everyone could so easily be equal,” Emil said. “I want to change that.”
“Would you want a socialist state like this one?” Tomas asked.
“Why not?”
“With all the trappings? The surveillance? The paranoia? Restrictions on freedom of expression? The charade?”
“Is she starting to get through to you?”
“Who?”
“Ilona.”
“What do you mean, get through to me?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you know Ilona?”
“Not at all,” Emil said.
“You’ve had girlfriends too. Hrafnhildur told me about one from the Red Cloister.”
“That’s nothing,” Emil said.
“No, quite.”
“Maybe you’ll tell me more about Ilona sometime,” Emil said.
“She’s not as orthodox as we are. She sees problems with this system and wants to put them right. It’s exactly the same situation here as in Hungary, except that young people there are doing something about it. Fighting the charade.”
“Fighting the charade!” Emil snarled. “Fucking bollocks. Look at the way people live back in Iceland. Shivering in old American Nissen huts. Children are starving. People can hardly clothe themselves. And all the time the bloated elite gets richer and richer. Isn’t that a charade? Who cares if you need to keep people under surveillance and restrict freedom of speech for a while? Eradicating injustice can mean making sacrifices. Who cares?”
They stopped talking. Silence had descended on the camp and it was pitch black.
“I’d do anything for the Icelandic revolution,” Emil said. “Anything to eradicate injustice.”
He stood at the window watching the sunbeams and a distant rainbow and smiled to himself when he remembered the sports club. He could see Ilona laughing at the smoked-lamb feast and thought about the soft kiss that he could still feel on his lips, the star of love and the young man grieving, deep in his dark valley.
14
The Foreign Ministry’s officials were more than willing to assist the police. Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg were having a meeting with the under-secretary, a smooth man Sigurdur Oli’s age. They were acquaintances from their student years in America and reminisced about their time there. The under-secretary said the ministry had been surprised by the police request and he wanted to know why they required information about the former employees of foreign embassies in Reykjavik. They were as silent as the grave. Just a routine investigation, Elinborg said, and smiled.
“And we’re not talking about all the embassies,” Sigurdur Oli said, smiling too. “Just old Warsaw Pact countries.”
The under-secretary looked at them in turn.
“Are you talking about the ex-communist countries?” he asked, his curiosity clearly in no way satisfied. “Why just them? What about them?”
“Just a routine investigation,” Elinborg repeated.
She was in an unusually good mood. The book launch had been a huge success and she was still over the moon about a review that had appeared in the largest-circulation newspaper praising her book, the recipes and photographs, which concluded by saying that hopefully this would not be the last to be heard from Elinborg, the detective-cum-gourmet.
“The communist states,” the under-secretary said thoughtfully. “What was it that you found in the lake?”
“We don’t know yet whether it’s linked to any embassies,” Sigurdur Oli said.
“I suppose you should come with me,” the under-secretary said, standing up. “Let’s talk to the director general if he’s in.”
The director general invited them into his office and listened to their request. He tried to wheedle out the reason for wanting this particular information, but they gave nothing away.
“Do we have a record of these employees?” the director general asked. He was a particularly tall man who wore a worried expression and had large rings under his weary eyes.
“As it happens we do,” the under-secretary said. “It’ll take a while to compile the list, but it’s no problem.”
“Let’s do that, then,” the director general said.
“Was there any espionage to speak of in Iceland during the Cold War?” Sigurdur Oli asked.
“Do you think it’s a spy in the lake?” the under-secretary asked.
“We can’t go into details of the investigation but it would appear that the skeleton has been in the lake since before 1970,” Elinborg said.
“It would be naive to assume that no spying took place,” the director general said. “It was going on all around us, and Iceland was strategically vital then, much more so than it is today. There were several embassies here from Eastern European countries, plus of course the Nordic countries, the UK, US and West Germany.”
“When we say spying,” Sigurdur Oli said, “what exactly is it that we’re talking about?”
“I think it mainly involved keeping an eye on what the others were up to,” the director general said. “In some cases there were attempts to establish contact. To get someone from the other side to work for you, that sort of thing. And of course there was the base, the details of operations there and military exercises. I don’t think this had anything much to do with Icelanders themselves. But there are stories of attempts to get them to collaborate.”
The director general became lost in his thoughts.
“Are you looking for an Icelandic spy?” he asked.
“No,” Sigurdur Oli said, although he had no idea. “Were there any? Icelandic spies? Isn’t that a ridiculous notion?”
“Maybe you should talk to Omar,” the chief of department said.
“Who’s Omar?” Elinborg said.
“He was director general here for most of the Cold War,” the chief of department said. “Very old but clear as a bell,” he added, tapping his head with his index finger. “Still comes to our annual dinner and he’s the life and soul of the party. He knew all those chaps in the embassies. Maybe he could help you somehow.”
Sigurdur Oli wrote down the name.
“Actually it’s a misunderstanding to talk about real embassies,” the director general said. “Some of these countries only had delegations back then, trade delegations or trade offices or whatever you want to call them.”
The three detectives met in Erlendur’s office at noon. Erlendur had spent the morning locating the farmer who had been waiting for the driver of the Falcon and had told the police that he failed to turn up for their meeting. His name was in the files. Erlendur discovered that some of the old farmland had been sold to property developers for the town of Mosfellsbaer. The man had stopped farming around 1980. He was now registered as living at an old people’s home in Reykjavik.
Erlendur called in a forensics expert who brought his equipment to the garage, vacuumed up every speck of dust from the floor of the car and searched it for bloodstains.
“You’re just messing about,” Sigurdur Oli said as he took a large bite from a baguette. He chewed fast and had clearly still not finished speaking. “What are you trying to find?” he said. “What are you going to do with the case? Are you planning to reopen the investigation? Do you think we have nothing better to do than fiddle about with old missing-persons cases? There are a million other things we could be doing.”
Erlendur eyed Sigurdur Oli.
“A young woman,” he said, “stands outside the dairy shop where she works, waiting for her boyfriend. He doesn’t come. They’re going to get married. Nicely settled. The future’s bright, as they say. Nothing to suggest that they won’t live happily ever after.”