‘Dad? No,’ Karl says with a shake of his head. ‘He was never found. May he rest in peace.’
‘Cheers, pal!’ says the bartender, lifting his glass. ‘Here’s to your dad!’
‘Yeah. Cheers!’ says Karl with a weak smile then they touch glasses and toss back the contents. Karl licks his lips and hopes the bartender won’t ask him any more about that famous accident, which Karl only knows about from stories his brother-in-law Jónas has told him several times, during their numerous drinking sessions over the past years.
‘So you’re a seaman yourself?’ says the bartender, taking a drag of his cigarette.
‘Yeah, I am,’ mutters Karl. ‘Against the will of my old man, who didn’t intend ever to go back to sea himself.’
‘That’s how it goes,’ murmurs the bartender, signalling to an impatient customer to wait. ‘Listen, pal. I’ll just keep your bill. You can just pay me next time you’re ashore. Okay?’
‘Thanks,’ says Karl, smiling crookedly as he sticks the Camels in an inside pocket of his jacket. ‘Could you maybe phone me a cab?’
‘That I’ll do!’ The bartender waves his callused seaman’s hand at Karl before turning to the last customer of the evening.
Karl walks to the exit, buttons up his duffel coat and turns up the collar before he walks out into the cold night.
‘Last call before closing!’ shouts the bartender and rings the old brass bell three times, so it resounds through the smoke-filled bar. Then the door closes behind Karl and the noisy hubbub immediately changes to a low rumble.
The taxi arrives and Karl asks the driver to take him to Mosfellsbær.
‘The street was Hjarðarland, didn’t you say?’ the driver asks after a while.
‘Huh? Yes,’ says Karl, opening his eyes. He had fallen asleep in the softness of the back seat, with his head to the side. The cab is warm and Karl feels a bit sick waking up like that.
‘Number what?’ says the driver, slowing down.
‘This is fine. I’ll get out here,’ says Karl after looking out the window and seeing his brother-in-law’s house across the street.
‘All right,’ says the driver as he parks the car and turns on the inside light. ‘That’ll be fourteen-hundred crowns.’
‘Keep the change,’ says Karl, handing the man everything he’s got.
‘Thanks.’ The driver takes the wrinkled bills. ‘And goodnight.’
‘Goodnight.’ Karl closes the car door behind him.
His sister María’s house is dark and no-one answers the bell. Not even María. The garage is also dark, and Jónas’s Jeep doesn’t seem to be there.
‘Damn,’ says Karl under his breath, stepping down off the wheelbarrow he overturned by the garage to see in the window.
In front of the garage door is a white bag of rubbish that Karl picks up and shoves into the family garbage bin before strolling down to Highway One.
There aren’t many cars on the road and drops of freezing rain are falling from the pitch-black heavens. Karl just misses a couple of transport trucks, and during the two minutes he’s been huddled on the verge two saloon cars have shot past without even slowing down. The rain is getting denser and the cold drops slide in under the collar of his denim jacket, which is slowly getting soaked. Karl sets off walking east and turns around to stick his thumb in the air whenever he sees lights coming or hears an engine.
A seven-passenger taxi speeds past and then seems to slow down. Karl walks faster and waves at the taxi that lights up the dark of the Thingvellir turn-off with its bright red brakelights. He had seen a man’s face through the passenger window. A face that seemed familiar. And he thought the passenger also recognised him. Karl has no idea where they might have met and it doesn’t really matter. He runs after the taxi, which suddenly speeds up again and sails away into the rain-dark night.
Karl comes to a halt and catches his breath, freezing, wet and with a painful stitch in his chest from running.
The bar. That man had been in the bar earlier this evening. That guy in the taxi. The face in the car window.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ he mutters. He stands by the road sign for Thingvellir, hunched over with his hands on his wet knees, the taste of blood in his mouth.
That’s it, he thinks. I’ll never get to Grundartangi in time. The ship’s going to sail without me.
But then a cone of light appears on the bitumen, the deep roar of an engine approaches and wide radial tyres spurt water from under a silver Range Rover Vogue.
Karl straightens up, takes two steps onto the road, turns around, holds out his arm and points his blue-white thumb towards the sky.
The high-tech xenon lights blind him momentarily, then the big car kisses him on the cheek. Gives him a cold kiss. Breaks bones, tears flesh and mangles organs. All in a fraction of a second. It throws him onto the verge and rolls him face down into the ditch, where he jerks convulsively, half submerged in the mud of a brown puddle. Paralysed with shock. Unconscious.
The growling Range Rover hurtles on into the night with a broken headlight, a cracked windscreen and a streak of blood running from its front fender up to the roof.
No light but the creamy yellow of the streetlights. No noise but the pounding of the rain.
Nothing to see but a human form in a ditch.
Shoes on the side of the road.
And drops of blood on the wet bitumen.
VI
In a windowless basement, a naked man lies on a leather-covered bench, his hands gripping a bar that rests in the notches of steel uprights half a metre above his face. He tenses his chest and back, pushes the soles of his feet against the floor, keeps his buttocks just touching the bench and lifts the bar up out of its notches. He stares with concentration at the middle of the bar, fills his lungs with air and holds his breath as he allows the bar to sink to his chest. When the cold steel touches his straining muscles he lifts the bar off his chest and breathes out as the weight rises past the most difficult point. This he repeats four more times, slowly and deliberately but with increasing effort, higher blood pressure and shorter breaths. Eventually the bar slams back into the steel notches, so that both floor and walls shudder from the weight.
The heat in the room increases with every passing minute and the stagnant air smells of sour sweat and acrid testosterone.
The man sits up on the bench, closes his blue eyes and rolls his head clockwise and counterclockwise while he catches his breath. Apart from a Gothic ‘S’ on his right pectoral muscle, his tanned body is without tattoos. The scars, on the other hand, are of every length and depth, and so numerous that no-one has ever tried to count them. The same is true of his abrasions, old burns and pits from healed boils. Most of these are from motorcycle and car accidents, but unconventional sports, countless fist fights and several knife- and gun-fights have also marked his flesh. Besides these surface blemishes there are adhesions, scars and knobs on his skeleton, which is held together with a dozen steel pins, steel wires and two joint replacements. All his body hair has been removed with creams and wax, except for the hair around his genitals, which has been trimmed to three millimetres with clippers. On his head the hair is of even length and hangs down his back, dyed raven black with decorative red and blue highlights. The man wears no jewellery on his hands, nor round his neck, but in his earlobes he wears thick rings of engraved silver. They are snakes that have been folded together with pliers so their tails disappear into their open mouths, and these handmade ear decorations give his healthy-looking and otherwise confidence-inspiring face a sinister look.