The Draining Lake

26

Benedikt Jonsson, the retired agricultural-machinery importer, greeted Erlendur at the door and invited him in. Erlendur’s visit had been delayed. Benedikt had been to see his daughter who lived outside Copenhagen. He had just returned home and gave the impression he would have liked to stay longer. He said he felt very much at home in Denmark.

Erlendur nodded intermittently while Benedikt rambled on about Denmark. A widower, he appeared to live well. He was fairly short with small, fat fingers and a ruddy, harmless-looking face. He lived alone in a small, neat house. Erlendur noticed a new Mercedes jeep outside the garage. He thought to himself that the old businessman had probably been shrewd and saved up for his old age.

“I knew I’d end up answering questions about that man eventually,” Benedikt said when at last he got to the point.

“Yes, I wanted to talk about Leopold,” Erlendur said.

“It was all very mysterious. Someone was bound to start wondering in the end. I should probably have told you the truth at the time but…”

“The truth?”

“Yes,” Benedikt said. “May I ask why you’re enquiring about this man now? My son said you’d questioned him too and when I spoke to you on the phone you were rather cagey. Why the sudden interest? I thought you investigated the case and cleared it up back then. Actually, I was hoping you had.”

Erlendur told him about the skeleton found in Lake Kleifarvatn and that Leopold was one of several missing persons being investigated in connection with it.

“Did you know him personally?” Erlendur asked.

“Personally? No, I can hardly say that. And he didn’t sell much either, in the short time he worked for us. If I remember correctly he made a lot of trips outside the city. All my salesmen did regional work — we sold agricultural machinery and earth-moving equipment — but none travelled as much as Leopold and none was a worse salesman.”

“So he didn’t make you any money?” Erlendur said.

“I didn’t want to take him on in the first place,” Benedikt said.

“Really?”

“Yes, no, that’s not what I mean. They forced me to, really. I had to sack a damn good man to make room for him. It was never a big company.”

“Wait a minute, say that again. Who forced you to hire him?”

“They told me I mustn’t tell anyone so… I don’t know if I should be blabbing about it. I felt quite bad about all that plotting. I’m not one for doing things behind people’s backs.”

“This was decades ago,” Erlendur said. “It can hardly do any harm now.”

“No, I guess not. They threatened to move their franchise elsewhere. If I didn’t hire that bloke. It was like I’d got caught up in the Mafia.”

“Who forced you to take on Leopold?”

“The manufacturer in East Germany, as it was then. They had good tractors that were much cheaper than the American ones. And bulldozers and diggers. We sold a lot of them although they weren’t considered as classy as Massey Ferguson or Caterpillar.”

“Did they have a say in which staff you recruited?”

“That was what they threatened,” Benedikt said. “What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t do a thing. Of course I hired him.”

“Did they give you an explanation? Why you ought to recruit that specific person?”

“No. None. No explanation. I took him on but never got to know him. They said it was a temporary arrangement and, like I told you, he wasn’t in the city much, just spent his time rushing back and forth around the country.”

“A temporary arrangement?”

“They said he didn’t need to work for me for long. And they set conditions. He wasn’t to go on the payroll. He was to be paid as a contractor, under the table. That was pretty difficult. My accountant was continually querying that. But it wasn’t much money, nowhere near enough to live on, so he must have had another income as well.”

“What do you think their motive was?”

“I don’t have a clue. Then he disappeared and I never heard any more about Leopold, except from you lot in the police.”

“Didn’t you report what you’re now telling me at the time he went missing?”

“I haven’t told anyone. They threatened me. I had my staff to think of. My livelihood depended on that company. Even though it wasn’t big we managed to make a bit of money and then the hydropower projects started up. The Sigalda and Burfell stations. They needed our heavy plant machinery then. We made a fortune out of the hydropower projects. It was around the same time. The company was growing. I had other things to think about.”

“So you just tried to forget it?”

“Correct. I didn’t think it was any skin off my nose, either. I hired him because the manufacturer wanted me to, but he was nothing to do with me as such.”

“Do you have any idea what could have happened to him?”

“None at all. He was supposed to meet those people outside Mosfellsbaer but didn’t turn up, as far as we know. Maybe he just abandoned the idea or postponed it. That’s not inconceivable. Maybe he had some urgent business to attend to.”

“You don’t think that the farmer he was supposed to meet was lying?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

“Who contacted you about hiring Leopold? Did he do it himself?”

“No, it wasn’t him. An official from their embassy on Aegisida came to see me. It was really a trade delegation, not a proper embassy, that they ran in those days. Later it all got so much bigger. Actually he met me in Leipzig.”

“Leipzig?”

“Yes, we used to go to annual trade fairs there. They arranged big exhibitions of industrial goods and machinery and a fairly large contingent of us who did business with the East Germans always went.”

“Who was this man who spoke to you?”

“He never introduced himself.”

“Do you recognise the name Lothar? Lothar Weiser. An East German.”

“Never heard the name. Lothar? Never heard of him.”

“Could you describe this embassy official?”

“It’s such a long time ago. He was quite plump. Perfectly nice bloke, I expect, apart from forcing me to hire that salesman.”

“Don’t you think you should have passed on this information to the police at the time? Don’t you think it could have helped?”

Benedikt hesitated. Then he shrugged.

“I tried to act as if it wasn’t any business of mine or my company. And I genuinely didn’t think it was any of my business. The man wasn’t one of my team. Really he wasn’t anything to do with the company. And they threatened me. What was I supposed to do?”

“Do you remember his girlfriend, Leopold’s girlfriend?”

“No,” Benedikt said after some thought. “No, I can’t say I do. Was she…?”

He stopped short, as if he had no idea of what to say about a woman who had lost the man she loved and never received any answers about his fate.

“Yes,” Erlendur said. “She was heartbroken. And still is.”

Miroslav, the former Czech embassy official, lived in the south of France. He was an elderly man but had a good memory. He spoke French, but also good English, and was prepared to talk to Sigurdur Oli over the telephone. Quinn from the US embassy in Reykjavik, who had put them on to the Czech, acted as a go-between. In the past, Miroslav had been found guilty of spying against his own country and had spent several years in prison. He was not considered a prolific or important spy, having spent most of his diplomatic career in Iceland. Nor did he describe himself as a spy. He said he had succumbed to temptation when he was offered money to inform American diplomats about any unusual developments at his embassy or those of the other Iron Curtain countries. He never had anything to say. Nothing ever happened in Iceland.

It was the middle of summer. The skeleton in Kleifarvatn had fallen completely off the radar in the summer holidays. The media had long since stopped mentioning it. Erlendur’s request for a warrant to search for the Falcon man on the brothers” farmland had not yet been answered because the staff were on holiday.

Sigurdur Oli had taken a fortnight in Spain with Bergthora and returned suntanned and content. Elinborg had travelled around Iceland with Teddi and spent two weeks at her sister’s summer chalet in the north. There was still considerable interest in her cookery book and a glossy magazine had quoted her in its People in the News column as saying that she already had “another one in the oven’.

And one day at the end of July Elinborg whispered to Erlendur that Sigurdur Oli and Bergthora had finally succeeded.

“Why are you whispering?” Erlendur asked.

“At last,” Elinborg sighed with delight. “Bergthora just told me. It’s still a secret.”

“What is?” Erlendur said.

“Bergthora’s pregnant!” Elinborg said. “It’s been so difficult for them. They had to go through IVF and now it’s worked at last.”

“Is Sigurdur Oli going to have a baby?” Erlendur said.

“Yes,” Elinborg said. “But don’t talk about it. No one’s supposed to know.”

“The poor kid,” said Erlendur in a loud voice, and Elinborg walked off muttering curses under her breath.

At first Miroslav turned out to be eager to help them. The conversation took place in Sigurdur Oli’s office with both Erlendur and Elinborg present. A tape recorder was connected to the telephone. On the arranged day at the arranged time, Sigurdur Oli picked up the handset and dialled.

After a number of rings a female voice answered and Sigurdur Oli introduced himself and asked for Miroslav. He was asked to hold the line. Sigurdur Oli looked at Erlendur and Elinborg and shrugged as if not knowing what to expect. Eventually a man came to the telephone and said his name was Miroslav. Sigurdur Oli introduced himself again as a detective from Reykjavik and presented his request. Miroslav said at once that he knew what the matter involved. He even spoke some Icelandic, although he asked for the conversation to be conducted in English.

“Is gooder for me,” he said in Icelandic.

“Yes, quite. It was about that official with the East German trade delegation in Reykjavik in the 1960s,” Sigurdur Oli said in English. “Lothar Weiser.”

“I understand you found a body in a lake and think it’s him,” Miroslav said.

“We haven’t come to any conclusions,” Sigurdur Oli said. “It’s only one of several possibilities,” he added after a short pause.

“Do you often find bodies tied to Russian spy equipment?” Miroslav laughed. Quinn had clearly put him in the picture. “No, I understand. I understand you want to play safe and not say too much, and obviously not over the phone. Do I get any money for my information?”

“Unfortunately not,” Sigurdur Oli said. “We don’t have permission to negotiate that kind of thing. We were told you would be cooperative.”

“Cooperative, right,” Miroslav said. “No monies?” he asked in Icelandic.

“No,” Sigurdur Oli said, also in Icelandic. “No money.”

The telephone went silent and they all looked at each other, crammed into Sigurdur Oli’s office. Some time elapsed until they heard the Czech again. He called out something that they thought was in Czech and heard a woman’s voice in the background answer him. The voices were half-smothered as if he were holding his hand over the mouthpiece. More words were exchanged. They could not tell whether it was an argument.

“Lothar Weiser was one of East Germany’s spies in Iceland,” Miroslav said straightforwardly when he returned to the telephone. The words gushed out as if his exchange with the woman had incited him. “Lothar spoke very good Icelandic that he’d learned in Moscow — did you know that?”

“Yes, we did,” Sigurdur Oli said. “What did he do here?”

“He was called a trade attache. They all were.”

“But was he anything else?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

“Lothar wasn’t employed by the trade delegation, he worked for the East German secret service,” Miroslav said. “His specialism was enlisting people to work for him. And he was brilliant at it. He used all kinds of tricks and had a knack for exploiting weaknesses. He blackmailed. Set up traps. Used prostitutes. They all did. Took incriminating photographs. You know what I mean? He was incredibly imaginative.”

“Did he have, how should I say, collaborators in Iceland?”

“Not that I know of, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t.”

Erlendur found a pen on the desk and started jotting down an idea that had occurred to him.

“Was he friends with any Icelanders that you remember?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

“I don’t know much about his contact with Icelanders. I didn’t get to know him very well.”

“Could you describe Lothar to us in more detail?”

“All that Lothar was interested in was himself,” Miroslav said. “He didn’t care who he betrayed if he could benefit by it. He had a lot of enemies and a lot of people were sure to have wanted him dead. That’s what I heard, at least.”

“Did you know personally about anyone who wanted him dead?”

“No.”

“What about the Russian equipment? Where could it have come from?”

“From any of the communist embassies in Reykjavik. We all used Russian equipment. They manufactured it and all the embassies used it. Transmitters and recorders and bugging devices, radios too and awful Russian television sets. They flooded us with that rubbish and we had to buy it.”

“We think we’ve found a listening device that was used to monitor the US military at the Keflavik base.”

“That was really all we did,” Miroslav said. “We bugged other embassies. And the American forces were stationed all over the country. But I don’t want to talk about that. I understood from Quinn that you only wanted to know about Lothar’s disappearance in Reykjavik.”

Erlendur handed the note to Sigurdur Oli, who read out the question that had crossed his mind.

“Do you know why Lothar was sent to Iceland?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

“Why?” Miroslav said.

“We’re led to believe that being stuck out here in Iceland wasn’t very popular with embassy officials,” Sigurdur Oli said.

“It was fine for us Czechoslovakians,” Miroslav said. “But I’m not aware that Lothar ever did anything to merit being sent to Iceland as a punishment, if that’s what you mean. I know that he was expelled from Norway once. The Norwegians found out he was trying to get a high-ranking official in the foreign ministry to work for him.”

“What do you know about Lothar’s disappearance?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

“The last time I saw him was at a reception in the Soviet embassy. That was just before we started hearing reports that he was missing. It was 1968. Those were bad times of course, because of what was happening in Prague. At the reception, Lothar was recalling the Hungarian uprising of 1956. I only heard snatches of it, but I remember it because what he said was so typical of him.”

“What was that?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

“He was talking about Hungarians he knew in Leipzig,” Miroslav said. “Especially a girl who hung around with the Icelandic students there.”

“Can you remember what he said?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

“He said he knew how to deal with dissidents, the rebels in Czechoslovakia. They ought to arrest the lot of them and send them off to the gulag. He was drunk when he said it and I don’t know what exactly he was talking about, but that was the gist of it.”

“And soon afterwards you heard that he’d gone missing?” Sigurdur Oli said.

“He must have done something wrong,” Miroslav said. “At least that’s what everyone thought. There were rumours that they took him out themselves. The East Germans. Sent him home in a diplomatic bag. They could easily do that. Embassy mail was never examined and we could take whatever we wanted in and out of the country. The most incredible things.”

“Or they threw him in the lake,” Sigurdur Oli said.

“All I know is that he disappeared and nothing more was ever heard of him.”

“Do you know what his crime was supposed to have been?”

“We thought he’d gone over.”

“Gone over?”

“Sold himself to the other side. That often happened. Just look at me. But the Germans weren’t as merciful as us Czechs.”

“You mean he sold information…?”

“Are you sure there’s no money in this?” Miroslav interrupted Sigurdur Oli. The woman’s voice in the background had returned, louder than before.

“Unfortunately not,” Sigurdur Oli said.

They heard Miroslav say something, probably in Czech. Then in English: “I’ve said enough. Don’t call me again.”

Then he hung up. Erlendur reached over to the tape recorder and switched it off.

“What a twat you are,” he said to Sigurdur Oli. “Couldn’t you lie to him? Promise ten thousand kronur. Something. Couldn’t you try to keep him on the phone longer?”

“Cool it,” Sigurdur Oli said. “He didn’t want to say any more. He didn’t want to talk to us any more. You heard that.”

“Are we any closer to knowing who was at the bottom of the lake?” Elinborg asked.

“I don’t know,” Erlendur said. “An East German trade attache and a Russian spy device. It could fit the bill.”

“I think it’s obvious,” Elinborg said. “Lothar and Leopold were the same man and they sank him in Kleifarvatn. He fouled up and they had to get rid of him.”

“And the woman in the dairy shop?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

“She doesn’t have a clue,” Elinborg said. “She doesn’t know a thing about that man except that he treated her well.”

“Perhaps she was part of his cover in Iceland,” Erlendur said.

“Maybe,” Elinborg said.

“I think it must be significant that the device wasn’t functional when it was used to sink the body,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Like it was obsolete or had been destroyed.”

“I was wondering whether the device necessarily came from one of the embassies,” Elinborg said. “Whether it couldn’t have entered the country by another channel.”

“Who would want to smuggle Russian spying equipment into Iceland?” Sigurdur Oli asked.

They fell silent, all thinking in their separate ways that the case was beyond their understanding. They were more accustomed to dealing with simple, Icelandic crimes without mysterious devices or trade attaches who weren’t trade attaches, without foreign embassies or the Cold War, just Icelandic reality: local, uneventful, mundane and infinitely far removed from the battle zones of the world.

“Can’t we find an Icelandic angle on this?” Erlendur asked in the end, for the sake of saying something.

“What about the students?” Elinborg said. “Shouldn’t we try to locate them? Find out if any of them remembers this Lothar? We still have that to check.”

By the following day Sigurdur Oli had obtained a list of Icelandic students attending East German universities between the end of the war and 1970. The information was supplied by the ministry of education and the German embassy. They began slowly, starting with students in Leipzig in the 1960s and working back. Since there was no hurry, they handled the case alongside other investigations that came their way, mostly burglaries and thefts. They knew when Lothar had been enrolled at the University of Leipzig in the 1950s, but also that he could have been attached to it for much longer than that, and they were determined to do a proper job. They decided to work backwards from when he disappeared from the embassy.

Instead of calling people and speaking to them over the telephone, they thought it would be more productive to make surprise visits to their homes. Erlendur believed that the first reaction to a police visit often provided vital clues. As in war, a surprise attack could prove crucial. A simple change of expression when they mentioned their business. The first words spoken.

So, one day in September, when their investigation of Icelandic students had reached the mid-1950s, Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg knocked on the door of a woman by the name of Rut Bernhards. According to their information, she had abandoned her studies in Leipzig after a year and a half.

She answered the door and was terrified to hear that it was the police.