The Draining Lake

23

The German ambassador in Reykjavik, Frau Doktor Elsa Muller, received them personally in her office at noon. She was an imposing woman, past sixty, and immediately started eyeing up Sigurdur Oli. Erlendur in his brown woollen cardigan under his tatty jacket attracted less attention from her. She said she was a historian by profession, hence the doctorate. She had German biscuits and coffee waiting for them. They sat down and Sigurdur Oli accepted the offer of coffee. He did not want to be impolite. Erlendur declined. He would have liked to smoke, but could not bring himself to ask permission.

They exchanged pleasantries, the detectives about the efforts that the German embassy had gone to, Dr Muller about how natural it was to try to assist the Icelandic authorities.

The Icelandic CID’s enquiry about Lothar Weiser had gone through all the proper channels, she told them — or rather she told Sigurdur Oli, because she directed her words almost entirely towards him. They spoke English. She confirmed that a German by that name had worked as an attache to the East German trade delegation in the 1960s. It had proved particularly difficult to acquire information about him, because he had been an agent for the East German secret service at the time and had connections with the KGB in Moscow. She told them that a large number of Stasi files had been destroyed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the scant information that survived was largely obtained from West German intelligence sources.

“He vanished without a trace in Iceland in 1968,” Frau Muller said. “No one knew what happened to him. At the time it was thought most likely that he had done something wrong and…”

Frau Muller stopped and shrugged.

“Was bumped off,” Erlendur completed the sentence for her.

“That may be one possibility, but we have no confirmation of it yet. He may also have committed suicide and been sent home in a diplomatic bag.”

She smiled at Sigurdur Oli as if to signal that this was a humorous remark.

“I know you’ll find it amusingly absurd,” she said, “but in terms of the diplomatic service, Iceland is the back end of the world. The weather’s dreadful. The incessant storms, the darkness and cold. There was hardly a worse punishment imaginable than to post people here.”

“So was he being punished for something when he was sent here?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

“As far as we can find out, he worked for the security police in Leipzig. When he was younger.” She flicked through some papers on the table in front of her. “During the period 1953 to 1957 or 1958 he had the task of getting the foreign students at the university in the city, who were mostly if not all communists, to work for him or to become informers. This wasn’t proper espionage. It was more keeping watch on what the students were doing.”

“Informers?” Sigurdur Oli said.

“Yes, I don’t know what you would call it,” Frau Muller said. “Spying on people around you. Lothar Weiser was said to be very good at getting young people to work for him. He could offer money and even good exam results. The situation was volatile then because of Hungary and all that. Young people kept a close eye on what was going on there. The security police kept a close eye on the youngsters. Weiser infiltrated their ranks. And not just him. There were people like Lothar Weiser in every university in East Germany and in all the communist countries, as a rule. They wanted to monitor their own people, know what they were thinking. Foreign students could have a dangerous influence, although most were conscientious both as students and socialists.”

Erlendur recalled having heard about Lothar’s command of Icelandic.

“Were there Icelandic students in Leipzig then?” he asked.

“I really don’t know,” Frau Muller said. “You must be able to find that out.”

“What about Lothar?” Sigurdur Oli asked. “After he was in Leipzig?”

“This must all sound rather strange to you, I imagine,” Frau Muller said. “Secret service and espionage. You only know about this from hearsay out here in the middle of the ocean, don’t you?”

“Probably,” Erlendur smiled. “I don’t remember us having a single decent spy.”

“Weiser became a spy for the East German secret service. He’d stopped working for the security police by then. He did a lot of travelling and worked at embassies around the world. Among other postings he was sent here. He had a special interest in this country, as proven by the fact that he learned Icelandic when he was young. Lothar Weiser was a highly talented linguist. Like everywhere else, his role here was to get local people to work for him, so he had the same sort of function as in Leipzig. If their ideals were shaky, he could offer money.”

“Did he have any Icelanders in his charge?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

“He didn’t necessarily make any headway here,” Frau Muller said.

“What about the embassy officials who worked with him in Reykjavik?” Erlendur said. “Are any of them still alive?”

“We have a list of the staff from that time but haven’t managed to identify anyone who is still alive and would have known Weiser or what happened to him. All we know at the moment is that his story seems to end here in Iceland. How, we don’t know. It’s as if he simply vanished into thin air. Admittedly, the old secret service files aren’t very reliable. There are a lot of gaps, just as in the Stasi files. When they were made public after unification, or most of the personal records anyway, a lot were missing. To tell the truth, our information about what happened to Lothar Weiser is unsatisfactory, but we’ll keep searching.”

They fell into silence. Sigurdur Oli nibbled at a biscuit. Erlendur still craved a cigarette. He could not see an ashtray anywhere and it was probably a forlorn hope that he would be able to light up.

“Actually, there’s one interesting point in all this,” Frau Muller said, “considering that it involves Leipzig. The Leipzigers are very proud of starting, in effect, the uprising that brought down Honecker and the Wall. There were massive protests in Leipzig against the communist government. The centre of the uprising was Nikolaikirche near the city centre. People gathered there to protest and to pray, and one night the protesters left the church and broke into the Stasi headquarters, which were nearby. In Leipzig at least, this is regarded as the start of the developments that brought down the Berlin Wall.”

“Indeed,” Erlendur said.

“Strange if a German spy went missing in Iceland,” Sigurdur Oli said. “It’s somehow…”

“Ridiculous?” Frau Muller smiled. “In one way it was convenient for his killer — if he was killed — that Weiser was a secret agent. You can see that from the reaction of the East German trade delegation here; they didn’t have a proper embassy then. They did nothing. It’s a typical response for covering up a diplomatic scandal. Nobody says a thing. It’s as if Weiser had never existed. We have no evidence of any investigation of his disappearance.”

She looked at them in turn.

“He wasn’t reported missing to the police here,” Erlendur said. “We’ve checked that.”

“Doesn’t that suggest it was an internal matter?” Sigurdur Oli asked. “That one of his colleagues killed him?”

“It could,” Frau Muller said. “We still know so little about Weiser and his fate.”

“Don’t you suppose the murderer’s dead by now?” Sigurdur Oli said. “It was such a long time ago. If Lothar Weiser was murdered, that is.”

“Do you think he’s the man in the lake?” Frau Muller asked.

“We don’t have any idea,” Sigurdur Oli said. They had not told the embassy any details regarding the discovery. He looked at Erlendur, who nodded.

“The skeleton we found,” Sigurdur Oli said, “was tied to a Russian listening device dating from the 1960s.”

“I see,” Frau Muller said thoughtfully. “A Russian device? So what? What significance does that have?”

“There are a number of possibilities,” Sigurdur Oli said.

“Could the device have come from the East German embassy or delegation or whatever you call it?” Erlendur asked.

“Of course,” Frau Muller said. “The Warsaw Pact countries cooperated very closely, including in the field of espionage.”

“When Germany was unified,” Erlendur said, “and the embassies here in Reykjavik were merged, did you find any devices like that in the hands of the East Germans?”

“We didn’t merge,” Frau Muller said. “The East German one was dissolved without our knowledge. But I’ll check about the devices.”

“What do you read into finding a Russian listening device with the skeleton?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

“I can’t say,” Frau Muller answered. “It’s not my job to speculate.”

“No, right,” Sigurdur Oli said. “But all we have is speculation, so…”

Erlendur put his hand in his jacket pocket and clutched his cigarette packet. He did not dare take it out of his pocket.

“What did you do wrong?” he asked.

“What do you mean, what did I do wrong?” Frau Muller said.

“Why were you sent to this dreadful country? To the arsehole of the world?”

Frau Muller gave a smile which Erlendur thought was rather ambiguous.

“Do you think that’s an appropriate question?” she asked. “I am the German ambassador to Iceland, remember.”

Erlendur shrugged.

“Sorry,” Erlendur said, “but you described a diplomatic job here as being some kind of punishment. But it’s none of my business, of course.”

An awkward silence descended upon the office until Sigurdur Oli made a move, cleared his throat and thanked her for her assistance. Frau Muller said coldly that she would be in contact if anything came to light about Lothar Weiser that might prove useful. They could tell from the tone of her voice that she would not be running to the nearest telephone.

When they were outside the embassy they discussed whether there might have been Icelandic students in Leipzig who became acquainted with Lothar Weiser. Sigurdur Oli said he would look into it.

“Weren’t you a bit rude to her?” he asked.

“That arsehole-of-the-world stuff gets on my nerves,” Erlendur said and lit a long-awaited cigarette.