The Draining Lake de-6 Read online

  Erlendur’s thoughts turned to his old Japanese banger, crumbling from rust. He had never cared for possessions, did not see the point in accumulating lifeless objects, but there was something about the Falcon that kindled his interest. Perhaps it was the car’s history and its connection with a mysterious, decades-old case of a missing person. For some reason, Erlendur felt he had to own that car.

  Sigurdur Oli had trouble concealing his astonishment when Erlendur collected him at lunchtime the following day. The Ford was entirely roadworthy. The woman said that her sons came to Kopavogur regularly to make sure it was still running smoothly. Erlendur had gone straight to a Ford garage where the car was checked, lubricated and rustproofed and the electrics were fixed. He was told that the car was as good as new, the seats showed little sign of wear, all the instruments were working and the engine was in reasonable condition despite hardly having been used.

  “Where’s your head at?” Sigurdur Oli asked as he got into the passenger seat.

  “Where’s my head at?”

  “What are you planning to do with this car?”

  “Drive it,” Erlendur said.

  “Are you allowed to? Isn’t it evidence?”

  “We’ll find out.”

  They were going to see one of the students from Leipzig, Tomas, whom Hannes had told them about. Erlendur had visited Marion that morning. The patient was back on form, asking about the Kleifarvatn case and Eva Lind.

  “Have you found your daughter yet?” his old boss asked him.

  “No,” Erlendur said. “I don’t know anything about her.”

  Sigurdur Oli told Erlendur that he had been looking into the Stasi’s activities on the Internet. East Germany had come the closest of any country to almost total surveillance of its citizens. The security police had headquarters in 41 buildings, the use of 1,181 houses for its agents, 305 summer holiday houses, 98 sports halls, 18,000 flats for spy meetings and 97,000 employees, of whom 2,171 worked on reading mail, 1,486 on bugging telephones and 8,426 on listening to telephone calls and radio broadcasts. The Stasi had more than 100,000 active but unofficial collaborators; 1,000,000 people provided the police with occasional information; reports had been compiled on 6,000,000 persons and one department of the Stasi had the sole function of watching over other security police members.

  Sigurdur Oli finished spouting his figures just as he and Erlendur reached the door of Tomas’s house. It was a small bungalow with a basement, in need of repair. There were blotches in the paint on the corrugatediron roof, which was rusted down to the gutters. There were cracks in the walls, which had not been painted for a long time, and the garden was overgrown. The house was well located, overlooking the shore in the westernmost part of Reykjavik, and Erlendur admired the view out to sea. Sigurdur Oli rang the doorbell for the third time. No one appeared to be at home.

  Erlendur saw a ship on the horizon. A man and a woman walked quickly along the pavement outside the house. The man took wide strides and was slightly ahead of the woman, who did her best to keep up with him. They were talking, the man over his shoulder and the woman in a raised voice so that he could hear her. Neither noticed the two police officers at the house.

  “So does this mean that Emil and Leopold were the same person?” Sigurdur Oli said as he rang the bell again. Erlendur had told him about his discovery at the brothers” farm near Mosfellsbaer.

  “It looks that way,” Erlendur said.

  “Is he the man in the lake?”

  “Conceivably.”

  Tomas was in the basement when he heard the bell. He knew it was the police. Through the basement window he had seen two men get out of an old black car. It was purely by chance that they happened to call at precisely that moment. He had been waiting for them since the spring, all summer long, and by now autumn had arrived. He knew they would come in the end. He knew that if they had any talent at all they would eventually be standing at his front door, waiting for him to answer.

  He looked out of the basement window and thought about Ilona. They had once stood beneath Bach’s statue next to Thomaskirche. It was a beautiful summer’s day and they had their arms around each other. All around them were pedestrians, trams and cars, yet they were alone in the world.

  He held the pistol. It was British, from the Second World War. His father had owned it, a gift from a British soldier, and he had given it to his son, along with some ammunition. He had lubricated, polished and cleaned it, and a few days earlier he had gone to Heidmork nature reserve to test whether it still worked. There was one bullet left in it. He raised his arm and put the muzzle to his temple.

  Ilona looked up the facade of the church to the steeple.

  “You’re my Tomas,” she said, and kissed him.

  Bach was above them, silent as the grave, and he felt that a smile played across the statue’s lips.

  “For ever,” he said. “I’ll always be your Tomas.”

  “Who is this man?” Sigurdur Oli asked, standing with Erlendur on the doorstep. “Does he matter?”

  “I only know what Hannes told us,” Erlendur replied. “He was in Leipzig and had a girlfriend there.”

  He rang the bell again. They stood and waited.

  It was hardly the sound of a shot that reached their ears. More like a slight thud from inside the house. Like a hammer tapping on a wall. Erlendur looked at Sigurdur Oli.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “There’s someone inside,” Sigurdur Oli said.

  Erlendur knocked on the door and turned the handle. It was not locked. They stepped inside and called out but received no reply. They noticed the door and the steps down to the basement. Erlendur walked cautiously down the steps and saw a man lying on the floor with an antiquated pistol by his side.

  “There’s an envelope here addressed to us,” Sigurdur Oli said as he came down the steps. He was holding a thick yellow envelope marked “Police’.

  “Oh,” he said when he saw the man on the floor.

  “Why did you do this?” Erlendur said, as if to himself.

  He walked over to the body and stared down at Tomas.

  “Why?” he whispered.

  Erlendur visited the girlfriend of the man who called himself Leopold but whose name was Emil. He told her that the skeleton from Kleifarvatn was indeed the earthly remains of the person she had once loved and who then vanished without a trace from her life. He spent a long time sitting in the living room telling her about the account that Tomas had written and left behind before he went down to the basement, and he answered her questions as best he could. She took the news calmly. Her expression remained unchanged when Erlendur told her that Emil had conceivably been working undercover for the East Germans.

  Although his story surprised her, Erlendur knew that it was not the question of what Emil did, or who he was, that she would mull over when towards evening he finally took his leave. He could not answer the question that he knew gnawed at her more than any other. Did he love her? Or had he simply used her as an alibi?

  She tried to put the question into words before he left. He could tell how difficult she found it and halfway through he put his arm around her. She was fighting back the tears.

  “You know that,” he said. “You know that yourself, don’t you?”

  One day shortly afterwards, Sigurdur Oli returned home from work to find Bergthora standing confused and helpless in the living room, looking at him through broken eyes. He realised at once what had happened. He ran over to her and tried to console her, but she burst into an uncontrollable fit of tears that made her whole body shake and tremble. The signature tune for the evening news was playing on the radio. The police had reported a middle-aged man missing. The announcement was followed by a brief description of him. In his mind’s eye Sigurdur Oli suddenly saw a woman in a shop, holding a punnet of fresh strawberries.

  37

  When winter had descended, bringing piercing northerly winds and swirling snow, Erlendur drove out to the lake where Emil�
�s skeleton had been found that spring. It was morning and there was little traffic around the lake. Erlendur parked the Ford Falcon by the side of the road and walked down to the water’s edge. He had read in the newspapers that the lake had stopped draining and was beginning to fill again. Experts from the Energy Authority predicted that it would eventually reach its former size. Erlendur looked over to the nearby pool of Lambhagatjorn, which had dried up to reveal a red muddy bed. He looked at Sydri-Stapi, a bluff protruding into the lake, and at the encircling range of mountains, and felt astonished that this peaceful lake could have been the setting for espionage in Iceland.

  He watched the lake rippling in the northerly wind and thought to himself that everything would return to normal here. Maybe providence had determined it all. Maybe the draining lake’s sole purpose had been to reveal this old crime. Soon it would be deep and cold again at the spot where a skeleton had once lain, preserving a story of love and betrayal in a distant country.

  He had read and reread the account written and left by Tomas before he took his life. He read about Lothar and Emil and the Icelandic students, and the system that they encountered — inhumane and incomprehensible and doomed to crumble and vanish. He read Tomas’s reflections on Ilona and their short time together, on his love for her and on the child they were expecting but he would never see. He felt a profound sympathy for this man whom he had never met, just found lying in his own blood with an old pistol beside him. Perhaps that had been the only way out for Tomas.

  It turned out that no one missed Emil except for the woman who knew him as Leopold. Emil was an only child with few relatives. He had corresponded very sporadically from Leipzig with a cousin until the mid-1960s. The cousin had almost forgotten that Emil existed when Erlendur began inquiring about him.

  The American embassy supplied a photograph of Lothar from the time he had served as an attache in Norway. Emil’s girlfriend did not recall having seen the man on the photograph. The German embassy in Reykjavik also provided old photographs of him and it was revealed that he was a suspected double agent who had probably died in a prison outside Dresden some time before 1978.

  “It’s coming back,” Erlendur heard a voice say behind him, and he turned round. A woman he vaguely recognised was smiling at him. She was wearing a thick anorak and a cap.

  “Excuse me…?”

  “Sunna,” she said. “The hydrologist. I found the skeleton in the spring — maybe you don’t remember me.”

  “Oh yes, I remember you.”

  “Where’s the other guy who was with you?” she asked, looking all around.

  “Sigurdur Oli, you mean. I think he’s at work.”

  “Have you found out who it was?”

  “More or less,” Erlendur said.

  “I haven’t seen it in the news.”

  “No, we haven’t made the announcement yet,” Erlendur said. “How are you keeping?”

  “Fine, thanks.”

  “Is he with you?” Erlendur asked, looking along the shore at a man skimming stones along the surface of the lake.

  “Yes,” Sunna said. “I met him in the summer. So who was it? In the lake?”

  “It’s a long story,” Erlendur said.

  “Maybe I’ll read about it in the papers.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, see you round.”

  “Goodbye,” Erlendur said, with a smile.

  He watched Sunna as she went over to the man; they walked hand in hand to a car parked by the roadside and drove off in the direction of Reykjavik.

  Erlendur wrapped his coat tightly around him and looked across the lake. His thoughts turned to Tomas’s namesake in the Gospel of St John. When the other apostles told him that they had seen Jesus risen from the dead, Thomas replied: “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

  Tomas had seen the print of the nails and had thrust his hand into the wounds, but, unlike his biblical namesake, he had lost his faith in the act of discovery.

  “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed,” Erlendur whispered, and his words were taken by the northerly wind across the lake.

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