Authors: Colin Dunne
Vaulting through windscreens and a rub-down with volcanic rock was obviously his idea of a work-out. Despite the extra belly and chin, he was a real toughie. Cleaned up, his face was puffy and swollen and red with dozens of tiny grazes and scars, and his glowing charm had modified to a brisk bonhomie.
'Switch that trash off, will you?' He waved at the television in a far corner of the room. 'No wonder the Soviets laugh at us we invent the most complete form of communication the world has ever known and all we put on it is cats chasing mice.'
'What happened?' Petursson asked.
'What happened? I tell you, I don't come out of this too well.' There was an apology in his laugh, but the Icelander merely acknowledged it with a sombre nod.
Dempsie began to protest, then abandoned it and turned to a straightforward account of what had happened. He and his colleague- he didn't name him- were driving an open jeep back from town when he saw the motor-bike in the rear-view mirror. From the stance of the rider, he thought it was the desert-bike, but he couldn't be certain. The next few seconds were confusing. There were shots. The windscreen went and one of the rear tyres. In the mirror he fancied he saw the rider holding a big handgun. Then there was the crash. From tyre tracks nearby, he reckoned that the rider, the bike and his colleague had all been spirited away in a van.
'Neither of you fired back?' Petursson sounded stern.
'Come on, Pete. You know we wouldn't dare carry guns out there. Not on your patch.'
'I have to be sure.'
'I know that. And you know I wouldn't do anything like that. There's too much at stake. I wouldn't louse up things with your boys.'
With a solemn nod of his head, Petursson came to the question he'd been edging around. 'All I need to know then is the identity of your colleague who is now missing.'
'Not Oscar Murphy?' I thought a little light banter might
help things along, but Dempsie gave me a warning look.
'You know I can't tell you that, Pete.'
'But he is one of your ... department?'
'I can't even go that far. Hell, you know I can't. You're running up against our own security here. See it from my angle. Come on. We understand each other, don't we?'
He'd turned the full force of his warm sincerity on the Icelander. All Petursson did was to frown and get up and walk to the window. Dempsie shook his head with worry at the unfairness of it all.
'He was a great little actor, I'll say that for him,' I said. 'I thought he was going to take a poke at me when I asked him about Solrun marrying Palli.'
'We figured you'd try that one,' Dempsie said.
From the window, facing outwards, Petursson said: 'He would have learned everything that they had on Murphy. He would have had answers for questions you never thought of. That man would have been so well-briefed that he could pass any test except one. A friend of Oscar Murphy, or Oscar Murphy himself. Or both.'
There was only one question that was bothering me. And, since neither of them had asked it, they must both know the answer.
'Why did Oscar Murphy come back?'
Dempsie shifted his gaze to Petursson who had turned from the window to face me. He's with you, he was telling the fulltrui. Then he looked at me again and the American's blotched and battered face changed.
'Doesn't he know?' he asked.
Petursson had kept his eyes steadily on me all the time. Softly, he replied: 'I am not sure.'
'I'm damned sure ...'
'Coffee, boys,' Dempsie roared. A white-frocked nurse wheeled in a trolley. 'And BLTs. Jesus, am I hungry?'
That was the only answer I was going to get.
As the American ate and appointed me on coffee duty with an impatient movement of the hand, Petursson half-sat on the window-sill. He wasn't picnicking. He was on official business. Patiently, he waited until the food had gone.
'Most make an official request for your full co-operation. I am inquiring into a serious crime. I can appreciate that your security is involved but so also is the security of the state of Iceland.'
Dempsie waved his arms to show how powerless he was.
'Think how they're going to be laughing over this in Garda straeti. You're giving it to them on a plate, Pete. You're letting them get between us.'
Petursson's face was slowly hardening. 'Don't tell me my job.
You had no business to instruct your men to try to conduct some sort of operation off this base ...'
'Operation? What operation?'
'Creating false identities and fabricating evidence to confuse people .. .'
'Only a goddam newsman.' He was too good a PR man to leave that. Out of the side of his mouth he snapped at me: 'No offence, Sam.' Back to Petursson again, he said: 'Have you brought in Palli?'
'No.'
'Why the hell not?'
'Because he has not done anything. And please do not tell me how to conduct an investigation. I want that name.'
'Sorry, sorry, sorry.' The American hauled himself up in the bed. 'Let's remember what this is all about, right? Fundamentally we are talking about a PR exercise. That goddam thing,' he flung his hand towards the television, 'rules the world. That and you news guys. I am telling you, if we're not careful, and I mean very very careful, we're gonna come out of this looking so bad we'll make Herod look like Mary Poppins. My man will have to take his chance. What you've got to do is to get to Murphy and get to him fast. If he reaches the girl ... You know what that means as well as I do. If he gets the girl, a year from now you'll have Soviet Typhoon subs calling in here to pick up ice to put in their vodka.'
He studied his clipboard. Without looking up again, he let one arm flop on the bed and released a small sigh. It was a signal of defeat. 'Okay, give me two hours and I'll get you all you need on the missing American. But I'll have to clear it first. From Washington.'
'Thank you.' Petursson was at his most formal. 'You also see my position. If my political bosses ask for an explanation, I cannot possibly say that I permitted anonymous and unauthorised agents to run amok.'
'Fine.' Frost had entered Dempsie's voice now. He wasn't backing off any more. 'And you take mine on board. It isn't easy sitting on our butts while a crazy man rampages around with a fistful of .45. Great ambassador for his country he's gonna be. And don't forget, if the shit does hit the fan, we told you the minute we knew he was heading this way. Don't forget that. You had your chance to get the girl out. That's down to you.'
'He was already in the country when you told us.' Petursson wasn't being bulldozed either. 'We didn't know how near he was. We had to telephone her to warn her. How were we to know she'd go into hiding? As it was, he attacked Craven only a few hours later at her flat. That's how close it was.'
So that was it. Solrun ran because she'd been tipped off. In my blissful sleep, I hadn't heard the phone. Too much pleasure, not enough duty- story of my life. That explained the
'Bless' and the goodbye kiss. Then I'd walked in on Murphy when he was searching the flat, with Kirillina sitting innocently downstairs waiting for her return.
'As soon as we knew, we passed it on.' Dempsie smoothed out the sheet before him like a symbol of the solution. 'Pull him in, that's all. Then we want him. He's ours.'
'That,' Petursson said, 'depends entirely on what he has done. Leave it to us. This time.'
Slumping down in the bed, Dempsie humped up on to one hip so he could read his clipboard more easily. The audience was coming to an end.
As we moved towards the door, he played his last card.
'While you're looking, it might help you to know that the Soviet destroyer Udaloy has anchored half-an-inch outside territorial waters south of Iceland. They're probably bringing food parcels to those bastards sitting in that trawler down in the harbour.'
He didn't look at us. He looked like a big black rock among all that snowy linen.
Petursson's face went even grimmer. 'Leave it to us,' he said, and marched out.
'Yeah,' we heard Dempsie's final word, 'yeah.'
Outside in the cool bright sunshine, we stood while the wind beat at our faces. Petursson put his hand up but his hair-cream was holding out all right. He was making regretful clicking noises with his tongue.
'What's a Soviet warship doing on your doorstep?'
He shrugged and sighed. 'He was right. They will be laughing in Gardastraeti. They put a wedge between us and we are stupid enough to let them do it.'
We began to walk over to the cars. I'd seen these two men, each strong in his way, collide mightily and each draw back, a little hurt, wounded, but still full of fight and pride. I wasn't absolutely sure why. So, quietly, I asked him if he had to force the issue on the missing American's identity.
As we walked, he held his head down so his words didn't get
lost in the wind. 'Dempsie was right about that too. This is public relations. Not what is the truth but what seems to be the truth. Already an old lady has been brutally killed and a diplomat attacked. If it becomes known we have allowed American agents to treat our country as a playground, how do you think people would like that? How would they like that in Britain? I will tell you what would happen here. Even the most conservative of politicians would find it difficult to defend. Everyone would be shouting, "Go home, Yanks." I'm not sure I would not be among them.'
36
In London we don't have weather. Instead we have days when you can get taxis and days when you can't get taxis, days when you have to hurry to the pub and days when you can stroll. Occasionally you get glimpses of weather in those spaces between the buildings if you look overhead. But for the most part weather is something that happens to you on holiday.
In Iceland they've got weather and to spare. When I got back from the base, I decided to let the day and myself just drift around. I spent four hours wandering round the city, and the weather got me wherever I went. On street corners the wind mugged me, tugging at my hair and pulling my tie. Plump white clouds, like the ones produced by smiling steam engines in kids' books, would without warning be replaced by scowling, sooty-coloured clouds so low they almost touched the roofs. Then the wind and the rain ganged up to scare me and, by the time I'd found a doorway to hide in, the wind scrubbed the sky clean and my face burned to a sun that was unfiltered by city muck and dust. If it had snowed too, it would've been a typical Icelandic day.
I sent Sally a card with a picture of a guillemot reassuring her that conservationists need not worry about its future so long as it retains its flavour. Then I bought her something white and woolly to put in the drawer along with all the other untouched presents from Daddy.
I even went right over to Vesturbrun. Outside Solrun's block of flats, two men sat in a car smoking and waiting for their shifts to end.
I passed the sports hall where, on my first trip to the country, I watched a Russian and an American locked in symbolic battle over a chess-board. They made a great pair. One- handsome, fancy dresser, pleasure-loving, never far from a pretty girl or a gin and tonic, dashing on to the tennis court. That was the Russian. So naturally the American spent all his time bolted up behind doomed moods of wild black genius. Somewhere the casting had gone wrong.
The battle was still being fought but with different champions now.
Later, I sat in the shadows of Hulda's sitting-room and listened to her soft voice, as the wind and the light prowled round outside looking for chinks in the defences.
Quite out of the blue she said that she'd hoped me and Solrun would make some sort of couple. I hardly knew what to say. Weakly, I muttered something about only spending a few days together.
She soon brushed that aside. 'Many people spend half their lives finding that they do not like each other,' she said. 'So why shouldn't you find love in a week?'
It's one thing playing the cynical old seen-it-all sod with young reporters, but it's quite another with someone who's twice your age and seen five times as much, so I shuffled my feet and settled for looking foolish.
I was thinking about an early night when the phone went.
'For you,' she said. 'An American.'
It was Palli. He was in a coin box. He spoke in a hushed, excited voice.
'You wanna meet Oscar Murphy?'
'Again?'
'Don't be stupid, Sam. The real Oscar Murphy. My buddy.' If l didn't, I was the only one. 'Yes, I'd like to talk to him. But why would he want to talk to me?' Finger-tips to the head was all it took to remind me of the pan incident.
'He reckons you can maybe fix him a deal with that Icelandic cop you're friendly with.'
I remembered Petursson's words. 'That depends what he's
done. Anyway, what's wrong with the Americans?'
'He thinks he'll get a better deal off the Icelanders and the
Americans won't dare to change it.'
He could be right. It wouldn't have mattered anyway- I had to go.
I grabbed a jacket and a few thousand pounds in case he wanted a Coke. As I was flying out Hulda stood by the door.
'You are going to see her?'
'Who?'
'Solrun?'
'I wish I was, I can tell you. No, I'm going to see a couple of blokes for a drink and a chat.'
'She is up there in the mountains. That is where she is.' The old lady smiled towards the distant hills.