The Draining Lake

19

One day a message appeared on Sigurdur Oli’s desk from the US embassy in Reykjavik stating that it had information that might prove useful to the police in their investigation regarding the skeleton from Kleifarvatn. The message was delivered by the gloved hand of an embassy chauffeur who said he was supposed to wait for a reply. With the help of Omar, the ex-director general of the foreign ministry, Sigurdur Oli had made contact with Robert Christie in Washington, who had promised to assist them after hearing what the request involved. According to Omar, Robert — or Bob, as he called him — had been interested in the case and the embassy would soon be in touch.

Sigurdur Oli looked at the chauffeur and his black leather gloves. He was wearing a black suit and wore a peaked cap with gold braid; he looked a complete fool in such a get-up. After reading the message, Sigurdur Oli nodded. He told the chauffeur that he would be at the embassy at two o’clock the same day and would bring with him a detective called Elinborg. The chauffeur smiled. Sigurdur Oli expected him to salute on departing, but he did not.

Elinborg almost bumped into the chauffeur at the door to Sigurdur Oli’s office. He apologised and she watched him walk off down the corridor.

“What on earth was that?” she said.

“The US embassy,” Sigurdur Oli said.

They arrived at the embassy on the stroke of two. Two Icelandic security guards stood outside the building and eyed them suspiciously as they approached. They stated their business, the door was opened and they were allowed inside. Two more security guards, this time American, received them. Elinborg was braced for a weapons check when a man appeared in the lobby and welcomed them with a handshake. He said his name was Christopher Melville and asked them to follow him. He praised them for being “right on time’. They spoke in English.

Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg followed Melville up to the next floor, along the corridor and to a door which he opened. A sign on the door said: Director of Security. A man of around sixty was waiting for them inside, his head crewcut although he was wearing civilian clothes, and he introduced himself as the said director, Patrick Quinn. Melville left and they sat down with Quinn on a small sofa in his spacious office. He said he had spoken to the Defence Department at Iceland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and that the Americans would gladly help the Icelandic police if they could. They exchanged a few words about the weather and agreed it was a good summer by Reykjavik standards.

Quinn said he had been with the embassy ever since Richard Nixon visited Iceland in 1973 for his summit meeting with French President Georges Pompidou, which was held at Kjarvalsstadir Art Museum. He said he liked Iceland very much in spite of the cold, dark winters. At that time of year he tried to make it to Florida for a vacation. He smiled. “Actually I’m from North Dakota, so I’m used to this kind of winter. But I miss the warmer summers.”

Sigurdur Oli smiled back. He thought they had made enough idle chat, much as he would have liked to tell Quinn that he had studied criminology for three years in the States and loved America and all things American.

“You studied in the US, didn’t you?” Quinn said. “Criminology. Three years, wasn’t it?”

The smile froze on Sigurdur Oli’s face.

“I understand you like the country,” Quinn added. “It’s good for us to have friends in these difficult times.”

“Do you… do you have a file on me here?” Sigurdur Oli asked, dumbfounded.

“A file?” Quinn laughed. “I just phoned Bara from the Fulbright Foundation.”

“Bara, yes, I see,” Sigurdur Oli said. He knew the foundation’s director well.

“You were on a scholarship, right?”

“That’s right,” Sigurdur Oli said awkwardly. “I thought for a moment that…” He shook his head at his own folly.

“No, but I’ve got the CIA file on you here,” Quinn said, reaching over for a folder from the desk.

The smile froze on Sigurdur Oli’s face again. Quinn waved an empty folder at him and started laughing.

“Boy, is he uptight,” he said to Elinborg.

“Who is this colleague of yours?” she asked.

“Robert Christie occupied the post I now hold at the embassy,” Quinn said. “But the job is totally different now. He was the embassy’s director of security during the Cold War. The security issues I handle are those of a changed world where terrorism is the greatest threat to the United States and, as borne out by events, to the rest of the world.”

He looked at Sigurdur Oli, who was still recovering.

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to freak you out.”

“No, it’s fine,” Sigurdur Oli said. “A little joke. Never harmed anyone.”

“Bob and I are good friends,” Quinn continued. “He asked me to help you with this skeleton you found at, what do you call it, Klowffervatten?”

“Kley-varrr-vahtn.” Elinborg pronounced it for him.

“Right,” Quinn said. “You don’t have anyone reported missing who could be the skeleton you found, or what?”

“Nothing seems to fit the man from Kleifarvatn.”

“Only two out of forty-four missing-persons cases over the past fifty years have been investigated as criminal matters,” Sigurdur Oli said. “This one is the sort we want to look into more closely.”

“Yes,” Quinn said, “I also understand that the body was tied to a Russian radio device. We’d be happy to examine it for you. If you have trouble establishing the model and date and its potential applications. That’s easily done.”

“I think forensics is working on it with Iceland Telecom,” Sigurdur Oli said cheerfully. “They might contact you.”

“Anyway, a missing person, not necessarily an Icelander,” Quinn said, putting on his reading glasses. He took a black folder from his desk and browsed through some papers. “As you may know, embassy staffing was under close surveillance in the old days. The Reds watched us and we watched the Reds. That was the way things were and no one thought it was strange.”

“Maybe you still don’t today,” Sigurdur Oli said.

“We had a look in our archives,” Quinn said, no longer smiling. “Bob remembered it well. Everyone thought it was a mystery at the time and what was actually going on was never uncovered. What happened, according to our records — and I’ve talked to Bob in detail about this as well — is that an East German attache entered Iceland at a certain time but we never noticed him leaving again.”

They looked at him blankly.

“Perhaps you’d like me to repeat that,” Quinn said. “An East German diplomat came to Iceland but did not leave. According to our information, which is fairly reliable, either he’s still here — and doing something completely different from embassy work — or he was killed and the body either disposed of or sent out of the country.”

“So you lost him in Iceland?” Elinborg said.

“It’s the only case of this sort that we know about,” Quinn said. “In Iceland, that is,” he added. “The man was an East German spy. He was known to us as such. None of our embassies in other parts of the world picked him up after he came to Iceland. A special alert was sent out about him. He never appeared. We made a special check on whether he had returned to East Germany. It was like the earth had swallowed him. The Icelandic earth.”

Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli mulled over his words.

“Could he have gone over to the enemy — I mean to you, the British or the French?” Sigurdur Oli said, trying to recall films and books about spies that he had seen and read. “And then gone underground?” he added, unsure of exactly what he was talking about. He was not a great fan of spy stories.

“Out of the question,” Quinn said. “We would have known about that.”

“Or used a false identity when he left the country?” Elinborg suggested, groping and as much in the dark as Sigurdur Oli.

“We knew most of them,” Quinn said. “And we kept a fairly good watch on their embassies on that score. We believe that this man never left the country.”

“What about in some other way from what you expected?” Sigurdur Oli said. “By ship?”

“That was one possibility we checked,” Quinn said. “And without going into too much detail about our procedures then and now, I can assure you that this man never emerged in East Germany, which was where he came from originally, nor in the Soviet Union or any other country in Eastern or Western Europe. He vanished.”

“What do you think happened? Or thought at the time?”

“That they killed him and buried him in the embassy garden,” Quinn said without batting an eyelid. “Killed their own spy. Or, as has since transpired, sank him in Lake Kleifarvatn tied to one of their listening devices. I don’t know why. It’s perfectly clear that he didn’t work for us, nor for any NATO country. He wasn’t a counter-espionage agent. If he was, he was working so deep that nobody knew about it, and he would probably have hardly known it himself.”

Quinn flicked through the folder and told them that the man had first come to Iceland in the early 1960s and worked in the diplomatic corps for a few months. Then, in autumn 1962, he left, but returned briefly two years later. After that he had moved between posts in Norway, East Germany and Moscow for one year and ended up at the East German embassy in Argentina, with the title of “trade attache” — “like most of them,” Quinn said, grinning. “Our guys too. He spent a short spell at the embassy in Reykjavik in 1967, then went back to Germany and from there to Moscow. He returned to Iceland in 1968, in the spring. By the fall he had disappeared.”

“Fall 1968?” Elinborg said.

“That was when we noticed that he was no longer at the embassy. We investigated through specific channels and he was nowhere to be found. Admittedly, the East Germans did not operate a proper embassy in Reykjavik, only what was called a trade delegation, but that’s a minor point.”

“What do you know about this man?” Sigurdur Oli asked. “Did he have friends here? Or enemies at home? Did he do anything wrong to your knowledge?”

“No. As I say, we’re not aware of that. And of course we don’t know everything. We suspect that something happened to him here in 1968. We don’t know what. He could just as easily have left the diplomatic service and made himself disappear. He knew how to do that, how to merge into the crowd. It’s up to you how you interpret this information. This is all we know.”

He paused.

“Perhaps he slipped away from us,” he said then. “Maybe there’s a rational explanation for it all. This is all we’ve got. Now you must tell me one thing. Bob asked about it. How was he killed? The man in the lake.”

Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli exchanged glances.

“He was hit over the head and sustained a hole in the skull just by the temple,” Sigurdur Oli said.

“Hit over the head?” Quinn asked.

“He could have fallen, but it would have been from quite a height,” Elinborg said.

“So it’s not a straightforward execution? A bullet in the back of the head?”

“Execution?” Elinborg said. “We’re Icelanders. The last execution in this country was done with an axe almost two hundred years ago.”

“Yes, of course,” Quinn said. “I’m not saying that an Icelander killed him.”

“Does it tell you anything, him dying like that?” Sigurdur Oli asked. “If it is this spy who was found in the lake?”

“No, nothing,” Quinn said. “The man was a spy and his job entailed certain risks.”

He stood up. They could tell that the conversation was coming to an end. Quinn put the folder down on the table. Sigurdur Oli looked at Elinborg.

“What was his name?”

“His name was Lothar,” Quinn said.

“Lothar,” Elinborg parroted.

“Yes,” Quinn said, looking at the papers he was holding. “His name was Lothar Weiser and he was born in Bonn. And, interestingly enough, he spoke Icelandic like a native.”