He recognised the name on the driving licence.
He recognised the name Emil.
35
Lothar Weiser shook him, shouted at him and slapped him repeatedly around the face. Gradually he came to his senses and saw how the pool of blood under Emil’s head had spread across the dirty concrete floor. He looked into Lothar’s face.
“I killed Emil,” he said.
“What the hell happened?” Lothar hissed. “Why did you attack him? How much did you know about him? How did you track him down? What are you doing here, Tomas?”
“I followed you,” he said. “I saw you and followed you. And now I’ve killed him. He said something about Ilona.”
“Are you still thinking about her? Aren’t you ever going to forget that?”
Lothar went over to the door and closed it carefully. He looked around the shed as if searching for something. Tomas stood riveted to the spot, watching Lothar as if in a trance. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness and he could now see better inside the shed. It was full of piles of old rubbish: chairs and gardening tools, furniture and mattresses. Scattered across the bench he noticed various pieces of equipment, some of which he did not recognise. There were telescopes, cameras of different sizes and a large tape recorder that seemed to be connected to something resembling a radio transmitter. He also noticed photographs lying around, but could not see clearly what they showed. On the floor by the bench was a large black box with dials and buttons whose function eluded him. Beside it was a brown suitcase that the black box could fit inside. It appeared to be damaged — the dials were smashed and the back had dropped open onto the floor.
He was still mesmerised. In a strange, dreamlike state. What he had done was so unreal and remote that he could not begin to face it. He looked at the body on the floor and at Lothar tending to it.
“I thought I recognised him…”
“Emil could be a real bastard,” Lothar said.
“Was it him? Who told you about Ilona?”
“Yes, he drew our attention to her meetings. He worked for us in Leipzig. At the university. He didn’t care who he betrayed or what secrets he spilled. Even his best friends weren’t safe. Like you,” Lothar said and stood up again.
“I thought we were safe,” he replied. “The Icelanders. I never suspected…” He stopped in mid-sentence. He was coming back to his senses. The haze was lifting. His thoughts were clearer. “You weren’t any better,” he said. “You weren’t any better yourself. You were exactly the same as him, only worse.”
They looked each other in the eye.
“Do I need to be afraid of you?” he asked.
He had no feeling of fear. Not yet, at least. Lothar posed no threat to him. On the contrary, Lothar already appeared to be wondering what to do about Emil lying on the floor in his own blood. Lothar had not attacked him. He had not even taken the spade from him. For some absurd reason he was still holding the spade.
“No,” Lothar said. “You don’t need to be afraid of me.”
“How can I be sure?”
“I’m telling you.”
“I can’t trust anyone,” he said. “You ought to know that. You taught me that.”
“You must get out of here and try to forget this,” Lothar said as he took hold of the spade’s shaft. “Don’t ask me why. I’ll take care of Emil. Don’t go and do anything stupid like calling the police. Forget it. Like it never happened. Don’t do anything stupid.”
“Why? What are you helping me for? I thought—”
“Don’t think anything,” Lothar interrupted him. “Go away and never mention this to anyone. It’s nothing to do with you.”
They stood facing each other. Lothar gripped the spade tighter.
“Of course it’s something to do with me!”
“No,” Lothar said firmly. “Forget it.”
“What did you mean by what you just said?”
“What was that?” Lothar asked.
“How I knew about him. How I tracked him down. Has he been living here long?”
“Here in Iceland? No.”
“What’s going on? What are you doing together? What’s all this equipment in this shed? What are those photographs on the bench?”
Lothar kept hold of the shovel’s shaft, trying to disarm him, but he held on grimly and did not let go.
“What was Emil doing here?” he asked. “I thought he was living abroad. In East Germany. That he had never come back after university.”
Lothar was still a riddle to him, more so now than ever before. Who was this man? Had he been wrong about Lothar all the time, or was he the same arrogant and treacherous beast he had been in Leipzig?
“Go back home,” Lothar said. “Don’t think about it any more. It’s nothing to do with you. What happened in Leipzig isn’t connected with this.”
He did not believe him.
“What happened there? What happened in Leipzig? Tell me. What did they do to Ilona?”
Lothar cursed.
“We’ve been trying to get you Icelanders to work for us,” he said after a while. “It hasn’t worked. You all inform on us. Two of our men were arrested a few years ago and deported after they tried to get someone from Reykjavik to take photographs.”
“Photographs?”
“Of military installations in Iceland. No one wants to work for us. So we got Emil to.”
“Emil?”
“He didn’t have a problem with it.”
Seeing the look of disbelief on his face, Lothar started to tell him about Emil. It was as if Lothar was trying to convince him that he could trust him, that he had changed.
“We provided him with a job that allowed him to travel around the country without arousing suspicion,” Lothar said. “He was very interested. He felt like a genuine spy.”
Lothar cast a glance down at Emil’s body.
“Maybe he was.”
“And he was supposed to photograph American military installations?”
“Yes, and even work temporarily at places near them, like the base at Heidarfjall on Langanes or Stokksnes near Hofn. And in Hvalfjordur, where the oil depot is. Straumsnesfjall in the west fjords. He worked in Keflavik and took listening devices with him. He sold agricultural machinery so he always had a reason for being somewhere. We had an even bigger role lined up for him in the future,” Lothar said.
“Like what?”
“The possibilities are endless,” Lothar replied.
“What about you? Why are you telling me all this? Aren’t you one of them?”
“Yes,” Lothar said. “I’m one of them. I’ll take care of Emil. Forget all this and never mention it to anyone. Understood?! Never.”
“Wasn’t there a risk that he’d be found out?”
“He set up a cover,” Lothar said. “We told him it was unnecessary, but he wanted to use a fake identity and so on. If anyone recognised him as Emil he was going to say he was on a quick visit home, but otherwise he called himself Leopold. I don’t know where he dreamt up that name. Emil enjoyed deceiving people. He took a perverse pleasure in pretending to be someone else.”
“What are you going to do with him?”
“Sometimes we dispose of rubbish in a little lake south-west of the city. It shouldn’t be a problem.”
“I’ve hated you for years, Lothar. Did you know that?”
“To tell the truth I’d forgotten you, Tomas. Ilona was a problem and she would have been found out sooner or later. What I did is irrelevant. Totally irrelevant.”
“How do you know I won’t go straight to the police?”
“Because you don’t feel guilty about him. That’s why you should forget it. That’s why it never happened. I won’t say what happened and you’ll forget that I ever existed.”
“But…”
“But what? Are you going to confess to committing murder? Don’t be so childish!”
“We were just children, just kids. How did it end up like this?”
“We try to get by,” Lothar said. “That’s all we can do.”
“What are you going to tell them? About Emil? What will you say happened?”