He was at his wits” end when he rushed off home. It was such a short time since they’d been lying snuggled up against each other and she had told him that what she had suspected for some time had been confirmed. She whispered in his ear. It had probably happened at the end of the summer.
He lay paralysed, staring up at the ceiling, uncertain how to take the news. Then he hugged her and said he wanted to live with her for his whole life.
“Both of us,” she whispered.
“Yes, both of you,” he said, and laid his head on her stomach.
He was brought back to his senses by the pain in his hand. Often when he thought back to what had happened in East Germany he would clench his fists until his hands ached. He relaxed his muscles, wondering as usual whether he could have prevented it all. Whether he could have done something else. Something that would have changed the course of events. He never reached a conclusion.
He stood up stiffly from his chair and walked to the door down to the basement. Opening it, he switched on the light and carefully descended the stone steps. They were worn after decades of use and could be slippery. He entered the roomy basement and turned on the lights. Various oddments had accumulated there over the years. If he could avoid it, he never threw anything away. It was not untidy, however, because he kept it all in order — everything had its place.
Along one wall stood a workbench. Sometimes he made carvings. Produced small objects from wood and painted them. That was his only hobby. Taking a square block of wood and creating from it something living and beautiful. He kept some of the animals upstairs in his flat. The ones he was most satisfied with. The smaller he succeeded in making them, the more rewarding they were to carve. He had even carved an Icelandic sheepdog with a curly tail and cocked ears, scarcely larger than a thumbnail.
He reached under the workbench and opened the box he kept there. He felt the butt, then removed the pistol from its place. The metal was cold to the touch. Sometimes his memories would draw him down to the basement to fondle the weapon or just to reassure himself that it was where it belonged.
He did not regret what had happened all those years later. Long after he returned from East Germany.
Long after Ilona disappeared.
He would never regret that.
23
The German ambassador in Reykjavik, Frau Doktor Elsa Muller, received them personally in her office at noon. She was an imposing woman, past sixty, and immediately started eyeing up Sigurdur Oli. Erlendur in his brown woollen cardigan under his tatty jacket attracted less attention from her. She said she was a historian by profession, hence the doctorate. She had German biscuits and coffee waiting for them. They sat down and Sigurdur Oli accepted the offer of coffee. He did not want to be impolite. Erlendur declined. He would have liked to smoke, but could not bring himself to ask permission.
They exchanged pleasantries, the detectives about the efforts that the German embassy had gone to, Dr Muller about how natural it was to try to assist the Icelandic authorities.
The Icelandic CID’s enquiry about Lothar Weiser had gone through all the proper channels, she told them — or rather she told Sigurdur Oli, because she directed her words almost entirely towards him. They spoke English. She confirmed that a German by that name had worked as an attache to the East German trade delegation in the 1960s. It had proved particularly difficult to acquire information about him, because he had been an agent for the East German secret service at the time and had connections with the KGB in Moscow. She told them that a large number of Stasi files had been destroyed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the scant information that survived was largely obtained from West German intelligence sources.
“He vanished without a trace in Iceland in 1968,” Frau Muller said. “No one knew what happened to him. At the time it was thought most likely that he had done something wrong and…”
Frau Muller stopped and shrugged.
“Was bumped off,” Erlendur completed the sentence for her.
“That may be one possibility, but we have no confirmation of it yet. He may also have committed suicide and been sent home in a diplomatic bag.”
She smiled at Sigurdur Oli as if to signal that this was a humorous remark.
“I know you’ll find it amusingly absurd,” she said, “but in terms of the diplomatic service, Iceland is the back end of the world. The weather’s dreadful. The incessant storms, the darkness and cold. There was hardly a worse punishment imaginable than to post people here.”
“So was he being punished for something when he was sent here?” Sigurdur Oli asked.
“As far as we can find out, he worked for the security police in Leipzig. When he was younger.” She flicked through some papers on the table in front of her. “During the period 1953 to 1957 or 1958 he had the task of getting the foreign students at the university in the city, who were mostly if not all communists, to work for him or to become informers. This wasn’t proper espionage. It was more keeping watch on what the students were doing.”
“Informers?” Sigurdur Oli said.
“Yes, I don’t know what you would call it,” Frau Muller said. “Spying on people around you. Lothar Weiser was said to be very good at getting young people to work for him. He could offer money and even good exam results. The situation was volatile then because of Hungary and all that. Young people kept a close eye on what was going on there. The security police kept a close eye on the youngsters. Weiser infiltrated their ranks. And not just him. There were people like Lothar Weiser in every university in East Germany and in all the communist countries, as a rule. They wanted to monitor their own people, know what they were thinking. Foreign students could have a dangerous influence, although most were conscientious both as students and socialists.”
Erlendur recalled having heard about Lothar’s command of Icelandic.
“Were there Icelandic students in Leipzig then?” he asked.
“I really don’t know,” Frau Muller said. “You must be able to find that out.”
“What about Lothar?” Sigurdur Oli asked. “After he was in Leipzig?”
“This must all sound rather strange to you, I imagine,” Frau Muller said. “Secret service and espionage. You only know about this from hearsay out here in the middle of the ocean, don’t you?”
“Probably,” Erlendur smiled. “I don’t remember us having a single decent spy.”
“Weiser became a spy for the East German secret service. He’d stopped working for the security police by then. He did a lot of travelling and worked at embassies around the world. Among other postings he was sent here. He had a special interest in this country, as proven by the fact that he learned Icelandic when he was young. Lothar Weiser was a highly talented linguist. Like everywhere else, his role here was to get local people to work for him, so he had the same sort of function as in Leipzig. If their ideals were shaky, he could offer money.”
“Did he have any Icelanders in his charge?” Sigurdur Oli asked.
“He didn’t necessarily make any headway here,” Frau Muller said.
“What about the embassy officials who worked with him in Reykjavik?” Erlendur said. “Are any of them still alive?”
“We have a list of the staff from that time but haven’t managed to identify anyone who is still alive and would have known Weiser or what happened to him. All we know at the moment is that his story seems to end here in Iceland. How, we don’t know. It’s as if he simply vanished into thin air. Admittedly, the old secret service files aren’t very reliable. There are a lot of gaps, just as in the Stasi files. When they were made public after unification, or most of the personal records anyway, a lot were missing. To tell the truth, our information about what happened to Lothar Weiser is unsatisfactory, but we’ll keep searching.”