Authors: Colin Dunne
Right now it was nice and quiet. Sun was streaming through the windows and glancing off the copper top of the horse-shoe bar. Behind it, a young woman in a scarlet waistcoat examined her finger-nails. For a gin and two martinis, she'd just taken the equivalent of a small pools win.
I looked at Ivan and Christopher with the sort of warm glow a mother must feel when she brings home a little playmate for her son and it works. Any minute now they'd be nicking their thumbs with a penknife and becoming blood brothers. I was glad. It wasn't often we had a chance to pick up a new recruit for our rich gallery of English eccentrics, but Christopher Bell was a definite candidate.
He was even winding Ivan up. My old chum had brought out some wretched cricket game that I vaguely remember from schooldays. You each picked a team, and then rolled dice to decide the progress of the game. It went on for hours if you were sufficiently masochistic to let it - rather like the real thing, I suppose. Anyway, Christopher had annoyed him by choosing a side that consisted of luminaries through the ages. At the moment, Meryl Streep was 38 not out, although Honore de Balzac had been something of a disappointment earlier. He was vulnerable to the rising ball, apparently.
'Another four,' Christopher chortled.
'It reduces the whole thing to a farce,' Ivan protested. 'Meryl
Streep can't play cricket.'
'She's batting rather well, I thought.' Christopher fired a sly wink in my direction.
Ivan was also a bit miffed that I'd asked him about the Russian ship in the harbour. 'How do I know what a trawler is doing there? Trawling, I assume.'
He didn't like being appointed champion for his country. At least if he was British, he said with a roll of those expressive brown eyes, he could say Queen and Country. Particularly Queen.
'Wouldn't you ever want to live in Moscow?' Christopher asked. I'd heard his answer before, but I still listened with interest.
He pushed back the wings of grey hair with both hands first of all, so that his face looked even leaner and more aristocratic.
'In Moscow,' he said, with a deliberate shudder, 'I would simply dry up and die. It's an awfully grey place full of awfully grey people. I wouldn't wish to embarrass anyone but Russia simply isn't the place for someone with my somewhat colourful tastes. And of course this is greatly to the convenience of my employers. They know I will do anything- absolutely anything - to stay in the West, and they also know that my own preferences do take me to some rather interesting places. You'd be amazed who one bumps into in some of those rather maley clubs.'
'Gosh, you really are a spy then?' Christopher was wide-eyed at this revelation.
'Oh, I shouldn't think so, dear. What would you say, Sam? No, no, my little pieces of tittle-tattle help to keep the computers busy in Moscow but I don't suppose for a moment they tip the balance in the great conflict between right and wrong- whatever they may be. Isn't that so?'
'I wouldn't know,' I said. I didn't either. You couldn't be sure with Ivan. He always seemed to be telling you too much until you thought about it later and realised he'd told you nothing. I was even less sure since my talk with Batty. Perhaps we were both spies. Perhaps that's all there was to espionage: tittle-tattle and words in ears, games of table-cricket in empty cocktail bars. Perhaps spies were ordinary people with ordinary lives.
'By the way,' he said, fishing out his silver-backed notebook again, 'I have some news for you about your chamois-wearing friend.'
Now that did surprise me. I had to be careful what I told Ivan: even as a friend, I was always aware of the fact that he must have other loyalties. I hadn't told him about the badge with the winged AC and I hadn't told him about the second man in the kitchen. On the other hand, I had mentioned the trawler and the man in the photograph because of the possible Russian connections. Even so, I was surprised when he opened his notebook and began reading.
'His name is Kirillina. Nikolai Kirillina. He's one of the naval people at the embassy, although they don't have proper military attaches because Iceland doesn't have any military.' Ivan could only be telling me this because someone wanted me to know. Why? 'You traced him through the sputnik?'
He put his fleshless hand to his forehead. 'Ghastly, isn't it? Apparently he has this wonderful flat with a gorgeous display cabinet bursting with silver and porcelain. Bang in the middle of it he puts one of those horrid little plastic sputniks. Not unlike the sort of artefact you might sell, Christopher.'
Christopher grinned up. Then his grin vanished. 'Oh damn, Meryl's out.'
'Thank God. Well bowled.' Ivan kissed the dice. 'Who's in next?'
'AI Jolson.' He slipped me another wink. 'I've heard he's rather useful with the bat. A lot of these coloured chaps are, you know.'
'You see,' Ivan continued. 'What can you do with these people? They have every opportunity, education, money, everything, and they go and put on display a vulgar memento like that.' He reached over and touched my arm. 'I do hope this isn't hurtful in any way, but I am told he was something of a hand with the ladies.'
'Be a waste if he wasn't. He hasn't disappeared then?'
'Apparently not. Drinkiepoohs, anyone?'
As the waitress got the glasses clinking, I walked over to the window and looked out. Poor Solrun. Even by her reckless
standards, this was quite a mess. For reasons well beyond my imagination, she'd got married to an Icelandic Hell's Angel who already appeared to be the proud possessor of woman and child. And she was also playing around with a Russian diplomat. It was beginning to sound crazier than the casting for Christopher's cricket team. Who'd she run off with now- King Kong?
The girl came round with the booze and Ivan told her to put it on his bill. I was wondering why Batty thought I could do anything about all this - let alone why I'd want to- when I heard Ivan ask Christopher if he was married.
'Oh, yes, Bella and I have got a lovely little place out at Braintree. I've asked her to think about moving up to Iceland but she isn't terribly keen. At the moment, that is.'
'Would you take out Icelandic citizenship?' I'd been wondering about that.
'Hope to, naturally. Course it's not easy. You have to speak the lingo, of course, and take a local name.'
'After your father?'
'That's right. And since my old man was called Christopher too. I'd have one of these names with a built-in echo. A bit much, I think. How about you, Sam? What was your father's name?'
'Oddly enough, I don't know.'
I'm so used to it that I forget it sometimes makes other people uncomfortable. After a second's silence, Christopher decided not to pursue that one, and started talking about his plans for a sales drive in the morning. I was sorry to hear that. I'd been hoping he might come as interpreter when I went to s e Solrun's mother.
'I'll come,' Ivan volunteered. 'It will be just like being a real reporter. I shall wear a Bur berry and look terribly louche.'
20
When I come to think about it, I've never actually known a woman who rushed off home to mummy in moments of emotional crisis. My wife used to rush out and spend. To her, the cheque-book was a weapon of retaliation: it gave her a strike-back capability that was awesome.
All the other women I'd known used to go to the hairdressers.
Some of them- I'll swear it- used to seek out emotional crises if they'd got word of a classy new crimper.
But I liked the home-to-mummy theory, and I was encouraged by the glint of doubt in Hulda's eyes when I suggested it. Shaking her head like a terrier with a mouse, she said Solrun would never go to her mother's. Since Hulda seemed to be the chairman of the Solrun Defence League, that was good enough for me. I went.
Asta Arnadottir lived in a small flat-fronted terraced house, painted black, in what they call the Stone Village- Grjotathorp -in the old centre of the city. We had to park at the top and walk down. I climbed the three stone steps and gave the heavy brass knocker a bang.
'Hardly Knightsbridge, is it?' Ivan said, in his snobbiest voice.
Actually, it's got a lot of character. Two dozen or so houses, mostly old-style with steep-pitched roofs, dotted around a slope where you could still see some of the boulders that gave the place its name.
Across the road, a skinny woman in a floral pinafore came out and pretended to sweep the pavement so she could have a look at us. There's one of those in every street: self-appointed sentries.
I knocked again. 'It's no use,' Ivan said. 'Empty houses have a definite aura about them. This, I have to tell you, is an empty house.'
'So it is,' I said in mock gratitude. As he spoke, there'd been a noise from inside the house.
I called out 'Hello,' and this time used my knuckles on the dark paintwork. In the silence that followed, I put my ear up against it to listen. You couldn't say quite what sort of noise it was- a series of stifled sounds, somewhere between a whimper and a wail.
'Oh, let's go,' Ivan said, moving a step or two up the street.
He'd wanted to come in the afternoon. He kept insisting it was too early, meaning, no doubt, too early for him.
'No, there's someone there.' If there was, they weren't opening any doors. I spent fifteen minutes knocking and calling, while the street-sweeper watched in silence, before I gave up and walked back to the jeep.
'You don't think that could've been a child, do you?' I asked.
Ivan was adamant. 'Definitely not. It was a puppy. She won't open the door because she has a dog in there and you know what they're like about that round here. They mow them down in the streets.'
'I'm surprised at you,' I said, as I picked my leisurely way through the morning traffic. 'You mustn't believe what you read in the papers, Ivan. They don't do anything of the sort.' We were passing the Tjornin and the lake was as calm as a mirror.
I stepped on the brake. Marching alongside the water, in corduroy shorts, baseball cap and boots, was Bottger, the Esperanto-speaker who'd been on the flight out. With his long legs and bony knees, he looked like one of the rarer wading birds.
'Have you found your friends over here?' I asked him.
'No. It is most annoying. They have also gone on holiday.'
'Didn't you write to them to say you were coming?'
'Yes, but I fear there must have been a misunderstanding.' I couldn't resist it. 'I thought that was what you Esperanto chaps were going to wipe out.'
He gave me a look loaded with reproach. 'And how is your friend with the musical lavatory?'
'He hasn't made his first million yet.'
He pointed a long hard arm out towards the mountains. 'I go there.' He banged his chest with his fist. 'Fresh air.'
As he loped off, knees high, Ivan patted the lapels of his blazer. 'I go Saga bar. Fresh g and t.'
With a couple of hours to kill, I nipped back down to the harbour to have a look at the Comrades Afloat.
The Pushkin was still there, though whether that was a good thing or not, I wasn't sure. And I could see what Petursson meant. The aft-deck was strewn with nets: the Russians don't usually go in for that much window-dressing. Fish too, Petursson had said. That was altogether too much innocence.
I stood for a while watching the harbour move to the rhythms of the sea. A high-prowed steel fishing-boat grunted in its chains. The little play-boats chattered like children. An old wooden warrior's engine drummed as it pushed out to sea, to where the light sky met the dark water.
I turned then and was looking down as I stepped through the sea's cast-offs - the scattering of torn tyres and wooden crates and plastic bottles- when I heard another engine drumming. I looked up. It was Palli Olafsson. He had stopped not six feet away from me.
He was still wearing the tee-shirt and shorts, thin rags on the hard pale slabs and ridges of muscle that looked as though they'd been bolted on to his body. The tattoos showed clearly through the thickets of ginger hair on his arms. You couldn't see his eyelashes and eyebrows, so his light blue eyes seemed to be staring out of a strangely naked face.
'Palli?' I said, wondering how the hell I was going to talk to him without Christopher.
He gave one short, pugnacious nod.
Slowly and deliberately, I mouthed: 'Do you understand English?'
He folded his heavy arms across his chest. 'Bet your ass I do,' he said. And a hard grin bent his lips as he viewed my astonishment.
I took him to a chintzy upstairs cafe near the lake. Among the blue-and-white gingham tablecloths and spindle-backed chairs, he looked about as likely as a water-buffalo in a dinner jacket.
He can't have been precisely the sort of customer they were hoping would pop in to encourage mid-morning trade, but they didn't say anything. They didn't even say anything when he spun his chair round and the back creaked under the weight of his arms and shoulders. And they didn't say anything when he flicked the ash off his cigarette on to the floor.
I don't suppose he'd ever had a lot of complaints about his behaviour. Menace hung about him like a low cloud.
I didn't know where to start when I looked at that unnervingly hairless face. 'So ... you're an American?'
'No. Next question.'
I'd no idea what to make of that. 'You're not an American?'
'That's what I just told you,' he said, in an accent that was pure popcorn and Budweiser. 'Anyway, I don't wanna talk about that.'