The Draining Lake de-6 Read online

  “What did this man do when Joi took the hubcap?” Sigurdur Oli repeated.

  “He seemed very tense.”

  “So what happened?”

  “He attacked my brother,” Haraldur said. “He shouldn’t have done that, because even though Joi was stupid, he was strong. Threw him off like a sack of feathers.”

  “And killed him,” Erlendur said.

  Haraldur raised his head.

  “What did I just tell you?”

  “Why should we believe you now, after you’ve been lying all these years?”

  “I decided to pretend that he never came. That we’d never met him. That was the obvious thing to do. We never touched him, apart from Joi defending himself. He left and he was fine then.”

  “Why should we believe you now?” Sigurdur Oli said.

  “Joi didn’t kill anyone. He never could have. He never hurt a fly, Joi. But you wouldn’t have believed that. I tried to get him to give the hubcap back, but he wouldn’t say where he’d hidden it. Joi was like a raven. He liked pretty things and they were nice, shiny hubcaps. He wanted to own one. As simple as that. The bloke got really worked up and threatened us both, and then he went for Joi. We had a fight and then he left and we never saw him again.”

  “Why should I believe this?” Erlendur asked again.

  Haraldur snorted.

  “I don’t give a monkey’s what you believe,” he said. “Take it or leave it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell the police this touching tale about you and your brother when they were searching for the man?”

  “The police didn’t seem interested in anything much,” Haraldur said. “They didn’t ask for any explanations. They took a statement from me and that was it.”

  “And the man left you after the fight?” Erlendur said, thinking of lazy Niels.

  “Yes.”

  “With one hubcap missing?”

  “Yes. He stormed off without bothering about the hubcap.”

  “What did you do with it? Or did you ever find it?”

  “I buried it. After you started asking about that bloke. Joi told me where he’d put it and I dug a little hole behind the house and buried it in the ground. You’ll find it there.”

  “All right,” Erlendur said. “We’ll poke around behind the house and see if we can’t find it. But I still think you’re lying to us.”

  “I don’t care,” Haraldur said. “You can think what you like.”

  “Anything else?” Erlendur said.

  Haraldur sat without saying a word. Perhaps he felt he had said enough. There wasn’t a sound in his little room. Noises were heard from the canteen and the corridor: old people wandering around, waiting for their next meal. Erlendur stood up.

  “Thank you,” he said. “This will be useful. We should have been told this more than thirty years ago, but…”

  “He dropped his wallet,” Haraldur said.

  “His wallet?”

  “In the fight. The salesman. He dropped his wallet. We didn’t find it until after he’d gone. It was where his car had been parked. Joi saw it and hid it. He wasn’t that stupid.”

  “What did you do with it?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

  “I buried it with the hubcap,” Haraldur said, a sudden vague smile on his face. “You’ll find that there, too.”

  “You didn’t want to return it?”

  “I tried, but I couldn’t find the name in the phone book. Then you lot started asking about that bloke, so I hid it with the hubcap.”

  “You mean Leopold wasn’t in the directory?”

  “No, and nor was the other name.”

  “The other name?” Sigurdur Oli said. “Did he have another name?”

  “I couldn’t figure out why, but some documents in the wallet had the name he introduced himself by, Leopold, and on others there was a different name.”

  “What name?” Erlendur asked.

  “Joi was funny,” Haraldur said. “He was always hanging around the spot I buried the hubcap. Sometimes he’d lie on the ground or sit down where he knew it was. But he never dared dig it up. Never dared touch it again. He knew he’d done something wrong. He cried in my arms after that fight. The poor boy.”

  “What name was it?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

  “I can’t remember,” Haraldur said. “I’ve told you all you need to know, so bugger off. Leave me alone.”

  Erlendur drove to the abandoned farm just outside Mosfellsbaer. A cold northerly wind was getting up and autumn was descending over the land. He felt chilly when he walked behind the house. He pulled his coat tighter around him. At one time there had been a fence around the yard, but it had broken up long before and the yard was now mostly overgrown with grass. Before they left, Haraldur had given Erlendur a fairly detailed description of where he had buried the hubcap.

  He took a shovel from the farmhouse, paced out the distance from the wall and began to dig. The hubcap would not be buried very deep. The digging made him hot, so he took a rest and lit a cigarette. Then he carried on. He dug down about one metre but found no sign of the hubcap. He began widening the hole. He took another break. It was a long time since he had done manual work. He smoked another cigarette.

  About ten minutes later there was a chink when he thrust the shovel’s blade down, and he knew he had found the hubcap from the black Falcon.

  He dug carefully around it, then got down on his knees and scraped the dirt away with his hands. Soon the entire hubcap was visible and he lifted it carefully from the earth. Although rusty, the hubcap was clearly from a Ford Falcon. Erlendur stood up and knocked it against the wall, and the dirt fell away. The hubcap made a ringing sound when it struck the wall.

  Erlendur put it down and peered into the hole. He still had to find the wallet that Haraldur had described. It was not yet visible, so he knelt down again, leaned over the hole and dug away at the earth with his hands.

  Everything that Haraldur had told him was true. Erlendur found the wallet in the ground nearby. After carefully extracting it he stood up. It was a regular, long, black leather wallet. The moisture in the ground meant that the wallet had begun to rot and he had to handle it carefully because it was in tatters. When he opened it he saw a cheque book, a few Icelandic banknotes long since withdrawn from circulation, a few scraps of paper and a driving licence in Leopold’s name. The damp had seeped through and the photograph was ruined. In another compartment he found another card. It looked like a foreign driving licence and the photograph on it was not so badly damaged. He peered at it, but did not recognise the man.

  As far as Erlendur could tell the licence had been issued in Germany, but it was in such a bad condition that only the odd word was legible. He could see the owner’s name clearly, but not his surname. Erlendur stood holding the wallet and looked up.

  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. The
re 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?”

  “I’ll tell them I found him like this and don’t know what the hell happened. But the main thing is to get rid of him. They understand that. Now go away! Get out of here before I change my mind!”

  “Do you know what happened to Ilona?” he asked. “Can you tell me what happened to her?”

  He had gone to the door of the shed when he turned round and asked the question that had long tormented him. As if the answer might help him to accept those irreversible events.

  “I don’t know much,” Lothar said. “I heard that she tried to escape. She was taken to hospital and that’s all I know.”

  “But why was she arrested?”

  “You know that perfectly well,” Lothar said. “She took a risk; she knew the stakes. She was dangerous. She incited revolt. She worked against them. They had experience from the 1953 uprising. They weren’t going to let that repeat itself.”

  “But…”

  “She knew the risks she was taking.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “Stop this and get out!”
/>   “Did she die?”

  “She must have,” Lothar said, looking thoughtfully at the black box with the broken dials. He glanced at the bench and noticed the car keys. A Ford logo was on the ring.

  “We’ll make the police think he drove out of town,” he said, almost to himself. “I have to persuade my men. That could prove difficult. They hardly believe a word I tell them any more.”

  “Why not?” he asked. “Why don’t they believe you?”

  Lothar smiled.

  “I’ve been a bit naughty,” Lothar said. “And I think they know.”

  36

  Erlendur stood in the garage in Kopavogur, looking at the Ford Falcon. Holding the hubcap, he bent down and attached it to one of the front wheels. It fitted perfectly. The woman had been rather surprised to see Erlendur again, but let him into the garage and helped him to pull the heavy canvas sheet off the car. Erlendur stood looking at the streamlining, the shiny black paint, round rear lights, white upholstery, the big, delicate steering wheel and the old hubcap that was back in place after all those years, and suddenly he was seized by a powerful urge. He had not felt such a longing for anything in a very long time.

  “Is that the original hubcap?” the woman asked.

  “Yes,” Erlendur said, “we found it.”

  “That’s quite an achievement,” the woman said.

  “Do you think it’s still roadworthy?” Erlendur asked.

  “It was, the last time I knew,” the woman said. “Why do you ask?”

  “It’s rather a special car,” Erlendur said. “I was wondering… if it’s for sale…”

  “For sale?” the woman said. “I’ve been trying to get rid of it ever since my husband died but no one’s shown any interest. I even tried advertising it but the only calls I got were from old nutters who weren’t prepared to pay. Just wanted me to give it them. I’ll be damned if I’d give them that car!”

  “How much do you want for it?” Erlendur asked.

  “Don’t you need to check whether it starts first and that sort of stuff?” the woman asked. “You’re welcome to have it for a couple of days. I need to talk to my boys. They know more about these matters than I do. I don’t know the first thing about cars. All I know is that I wouldn’t dream of giving that car away. I want a decent price for it.”