“Unfortunately not,” Sigurdur Oli said. “We don’t have permission to negotiate that kind of thing. We were told you would be cooperative.”
“Cooperative, right,” Miroslav said. “No monies?” he asked in Icelandic.
“No,” Sigurdur Oli said, also in Icelandic. “No money.”
The telephone went silent and they all looked at each other, crammed into Sigurdur Oli’s office. Some time elapsed until they heard the Czech again. He called out something that they thought was in Czech and heard a woman’s voice in the background answer him. The voices were half-smothered as if he were holding his hand over the mouthpiece. More words were exchanged. They could not tell whether it was an argument.
“Lothar Weiser was one of East Germany’s spies in Iceland,” Miroslav said straightforwardly when he returned to the telephone. The words gushed out as if his exchange with the woman had incited him. “Lothar spoke very good Icelandic that he’d learned in Moscow — did you know that?”
“Yes, we did,” Sigurdur Oli said. “What did he do here?”
“He was called a trade attache. They all were.”
“But was he anything else?” Sigurdur Oli asked.
“Lothar wasn’t employed by the trade delegation, he worked for the East German secret service,” Miroslav said. “His specialism was enlisting people to work for him. And he was brilliant at it. He used all kinds of tricks and had a knack for exploiting weaknesses. He blackmailed. Set up traps. Used prostitutes. They all did. Took incriminating photographs. You know what I mean? He was incredibly imaginative.”
“Did he have, how should I say, collaborators in Iceland?”
“Not that I know of, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t.”
Erlendur found a pen on the desk and started jotting down an idea that had occurred to him.
“Was he friends with any Icelanders that you remember?” Sigurdur Oli asked.
“I don’t know much about his contact with Icelanders. I didn’t get to know him very well.”
“Could you describe Lothar to us in more detail?”
“All that Lothar was interested in was himself,” Miroslav said. “He didn’t care who he betrayed if he could benefit by it. He had a lot of enemies and a lot of people were sure to have wanted him dead. That’s what I heard, at least.”
“Did you know personally about anyone who wanted him dead?”
“No.”
“What about the Russian equipment? Where could it have come from?”
“From any of the communist embassies in Reykjavik. We all used Russian equipment. They manufactured it and all the embassies used it. Transmitters and recorders and bugging devices, radios too and awful Russian television sets. They flooded us with that rubbish and we had to buy it.”
“We think we’ve found a listening device that was used to monitor the US military at the Keflavik base.”
“That was really all we did,” Miroslav said. “We bugged other embassies. And the American forces were stationed all over the country. But I don’t want to talk about that. I understood from Quinn that you only wanted to know about Lothar’s disappearance in Reykjavik.”
Erlendur handed the note to Sigurdur Oli, who read out the question that had crossed his mind.
“Do you know why Lothar was sent to Iceland?” Sigurdur Oli asked.
“Why?” Miroslav said.
“We’re led to believe that being stuck out here in Iceland wasn’t very popular with embassy officials,” Sigurdur Oli said.
“It was fine for us Czechoslovakians,” Miroslav said. “But I’m not aware that Lothar ever did anything to merit being sent to Iceland as a punishment, if that’s what you mean. I know that he was expelled from Norway once. The Norwegians found out he was trying to get a high-ranking official in the foreign ministry to work for him.”
“What do you know about Lothar’s disappearance?” Sigurdur Oli asked.
“The last time I saw him was at a reception in the Soviet embassy. That was just before we started hearing reports that he was missing. It was 1968. Those were bad times of course, because of what was happening in Prague. At the reception, Lothar was recalling the Hungarian uprising of 1956. I only heard snatches of it, but I remember it because what he said was so typical of him.”
“What was that?” Sigurdur Oli asked.
“He was talking about Hungarians he knew in Leipzig,” Miroslav said. “Especially a girl who hung around with the Icelandic students there.”
“Can you remember what he said?” Sigurdur Oli asked.
“He said he knew how to deal with dissidents, the rebels in Czechoslovakia. They ought to arrest the lot of them and send them off to the gulag. He was drunk when he said it and I don’t know what exactly he was talking about, but that was the gist of it.”
“And soon afterwards you heard that he’d gone missing?” Sigurdur Oli said.
“He must have done something wrong,” Miroslav said. “At least that’s what everyone thought. There were rumours that they took him out themselves. The East Germans. Sent him home in a diplomatic bag. They could easily do that. Embassy mail was never examined and we could take whatever we wanted in and out of the country. The most incredible things.”
“Or they threw him in the lake,” Sigurdur Oli said.
“All I know is that he disappeared and nothing more was ever heard of him.”
“Do you know what his crime was supposed to have been?”
“We thought he’d gone over.”
“Gone over?”
“Sold himself to the other side. That often happened. Just look at me. But the Germans weren’t as merciful as us Czechs.”
“You mean he sold information…?”
“Are you sure there’s no money in this?” Miroslav interrupted Sigurdur Oli. The woman’s voice in the background had returned, louder than before.
“Unfortunately not,” Sigurdur Oli said.
They heard Miroslav say something, probably in Czech. Then in English: “I’ve said enough. Don’t call me again.”
Then he hung up. Erlendur reached over to the tape recorder and switched it off.
“What a twat you are,” he said to Sigurdur Oli. “Couldn’t you lie to him? Promise ten thousand kronur. Something. Couldn’t you try to keep him on the phone longer?”
“Cool it,” Sigurdur Oli said. “He didn’t want to say any more. He didn’t want to talk to us any more. You heard that.”
“Are we any closer to knowing who was at the bottom of the lake?” Elinborg asked.
“I don’t know,” Erlendur said. “An East German trade attache and a Russian spy device. It could fit the bill.”
“I think it’s obvious,” Elinborg said. “Lothar and Leopold were the same man and they sank him in Kleifarvatn. He fouled up and they had to get rid of him.”
“And the woman in the dairy shop?” Sigurdur Oli asked.
“She doesn’t have a clue,” Elinborg said. “She doesn’t know a thing about that man except that he treated her well.”
“Perhaps she was part of his cover in Iceland,” Erlendur said.
“Maybe,” Elinborg said.
“I think it must be significant that the device wasn’t functional when it was used to sink the body,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Like it was obsolete or had been destroyed.”
“I was wondering whether the device necessarily came from one of the embassies,” Elinborg said. “Whether it couldn’t have entered the country by another channel.”
“Who would want to smuggle Russian spying equipment into Iceland?” Sigurdur Oli asked.
They fell silent, all thinking in their separate ways that the case was beyond their understanding. They were more accustomed to dealing with simple, Icelandic crimes without mysterious devices or trade attaches who weren’t trade attaches, without foreign embassies or the Cold War, just Icelandic reality: local, uneventful, mundane and infinitely far removed from the battle zones of the world.