On the worn wooden floor, ash and dirt gets ground into the spilled beer; cigarette butts, used chewing gum and peanuts are crushed underfoot. And here and there a crown or five-crown coin may be found. Even a fifty, brass-coloured with a crab on it.
Karl reaches for the fifty that is sliding around in a black puddle. He wipes the dirt off it then puts it in the slot of the payphone at the end of the downstairs bar.
From the pocket of his denim jacket he pulls a wrinkled piece of paper and checks the number that is written on it: 555-7547.
He punches in the number, pressing the receiver hard to his right ear and the palm of his left hand over his left ear.
‘Hello?’ says a suspicious voice at the other end of the line.
‘Jónas, ish ’at you?’ says Karl, pressing the receiver even tighter to his ear.
‘Who is it?’ asks the voice.
‘Ish your brother-in-law, Kalli,’ says Kalli, raising his voice.
‘What do you want?’ asks Jónas quietly.
‘Listen! Gonna gimme a lift later on?’ asks Kalli, who can hardly hear Jónas.
‘No. Can’t you just take a cab?’
‘I don’ have enough money,’ says Kalli, watching his credit growing smaller and smaller on the phone’s screen. ‘Can’t I take a cab to your place an’ then just go along with you, eh?’
‘If I’ve already left, just thumb a lift. Okay?’ says Jónas, coldly.
‘You in some kinda hurry?’ asks Karl, smiling mirthlessly to himself.
‘No,’ says Jónas, clearing his throat in the emptiness inside the telephone. ‘But I have to go now.’
‘Where’s my sister?’ Kalli asks as cheerfully as he can.
‘She… She’s just lying down,’ says Jónas, so quietly that to Karl’s ears it sounds like the scratching of mice.
‘I get you! Listen, I just—’ says Kalli as the phone’s screen starts flashing. There is a click and the silence on the phone becomes somehow more real than it has been.
‘Hello!’ says Karl into the receiver. Then he removes it from his ear and looks at it uncomprehendingly, his eyes shiny with alcohol, before he hangs it up.
Karl stands by the phone and fishes his slim wallet out of his hip pocket, opens it and checks on the scanty contents. One bill of 1000, one of 500. Altogether 1500 crowns.
‘Did you want something else?’ the bartender says when Karl sits back down on the bar stool where he’s spent the evening.
The bartender is big and fat, his shirt unbuttoned and the sleeves rolled up. On his hairy chest hangs a gold cross and chain. His smoothly shaven face is red and damp with sweat, his eyes are sunk into his bulging flesh and what is left of his dark hair is carefully combed over to the wrinkled back of his neck.
‘Yeah, maybe a whiskey,’ says Karl, feeling his crumpled pack of cigarettes before pulling out the third last one. ‘And a pack of Camels.’
‘Coming up,’ says the bartender, filling a heavy shot glass with cheap whiskey.
Karl lights his cigarette and pulls the dirty ashtray nearer.
‘So, could you pay your bill, then?’ says the bartender, peeling cellophane and silver paper off a fresh pack of Camels.
‘How much is it?’ says Karl, calm as can be.
‘That makes…’ The bartender adds the latest purchase to the evening’s total. ‘That makes seven thousand nine hundred crowns altogether.’
‘Couldn’t I just put it on a tab?’ asks Karl, taking a careful sip of whiskey.
‘Until when?’ asks the bartender, slitting his bloodshot eyes.
‘I’m off on a tour tonight, back in two weeks,’ says Karl, inhaling the hot smoke and blowing it out through his nose.
‘It would be better if you paid now,’ says the bartender, putting his burly forearm on the bar in front of Karl – a forearm displaying a deep scar from elbow to wrist along with a mighty anchor, tattooed in blue ink, that long ago started to leak out under the weather-beaten skin.
‘I see,’ mutters Karl, tapping the ash off his cigarette and at the same time running his eyes over three framed photographs that hang, one below the other, under the brass bell.
The bottom photo is of the Steamship Company ship Dettifoss, which came new to Iceland in 1930 but was sunk by a German submarine off Ireland in 1945, with fifteen men lost.
In the middle is another Steamship Company Dettifoss, launched in 1949 and sold abroad twenty years later.
And the third photo is the third Dettifoss, which came to harbour in 1970 and served the Steamship Company for nineteen years, until it too was sold in 1989.
‘Were you on the Dettifoss?’ Karl asks, nodding towards the black-and-white photos.
‘Yeah. Why?’ says the bartender suspiciously.
‘On the third one, was it?’ Karl asks with interest.
‘I was mate on the third one, yes,’ the bartender says, glancing at the top photo. ‘Second mate for a good while, but I was chief mate before they sold it.’
‘And then what?’ Karl sips his whiskey. ‘Did you leave the sea?’
‘What’s with all the questions?’ the bartender asks, looking accusingly at Karl, who shrugs innocently.
‘My old dad was a sailor too,’ says Karl after a short silence. ‘Mate, like you. Mostly on fishing vessels. Then he left the sea in 1970. Bought a stake in a fishing company and started working ashore.’
‘Good for him,’ mutters the bartender, wiping ash of the bar with a wet cloth. ‘But how about just paying your bill, mate, before I close up.’
‘But working ashore didn’t suit him,’ says Karl, his mind elsewhere, taking a short drag on his smoke. ‘And in early 1973 he went back to sea, after the company had virtually gone bankrupt.’
‘Listen, mate!’ says the bartender, putting his fists against the edge of the bar. ‘I don’t have time to listen to your dad’s life story. Not now!’
‘The boat he got a job on,’ says Karl calmly, putting out his cigarette in the ashtray, ‘was the Seventh Star from Keflavík.’
‘The Seventh Star?’ The bartender is all ears now. ‘What year did you say, 1973?’
‘Yep,’ answers Karl coolly, nodding.
‘Was he on board when they…?’ The bartender trails off, leaning closer to Karl.
‘When they left the Faroe Islands for Iceland on February eleventh, 1973?’ says Karl, a faraway look in his eyes as he focuses on nothing behind the bartender’s head. ‘Yeah. He was on board then. The boat had been under repair and they were in a hurry to get home and to the fishing grounds.’
‘I was on Dettifoss at the same time,’ says the bartender, opening wide his world-weary eyes. ‘We were on our way home from Leith in Scotland. I was up in the bridge when Captain Erlendur heard the emergency transmission. The Seventh Star was sunk by then, and the men were in the lifeboats.’
‘Is that true?’ Karl raises his eyebrows at the bartender, who wipes the sweat off his forehead.
‘Yeah. I’ll never forget it,’ says the bartender, lighting a cigarette. ‘After twenty minutes we heard the transmission again, but we couldn’t make out the words. We tried to locate the castaways, but the weather was bad that night. A major storm and ten lives in immediate danger. I’ll never forget that night. Never.’
‘They only found one man,’ says Karl, sighing. ‘One corpse, I mean.’
‘Yeah.’ The bartender pours himself a shot of whiskey and fills Karl’s glass up to the brim. ‘Nineteen days later. After one of the most extensive searches in the history of accidents at sea. Did it turn out to be…?’