The Draining Lake

31

He put the pen down on the desk. In his account of the events in Leipzig and later in Iceland, he had tried to be as clear and succinct as possible. It ran to more than seventy carefully written pages which had taken him several days to produce, and he had still not finished the conclusion. He had made up his mind. He was reconciled to what he was going to do.

He had reached the point in his narrative where he was walking along Aegisida and saw Lothar Weiser approach one of the houses. Although he had not seen Lothar for years, he recognised him at once. With age Lothar had put on weight and now walked with more of a plod; he did not notice the onlooker. Tomas had stopped dead and stared at Lothar in astonishment. Once the surprise wore off, his first reaction was to keep out of sight, so he half-turned away and very slowly retraced his steps. He watched Lothar go through the gate, shut it carefully behind him and disappear behind the house. He presumed that the German had gone in through the back door. He noticed a sign saying “The Trade Delegation of the German Democratic Republic’.

Standing outside on the pavement, he stared at the house, transfixed. It was lunchtime and he had gone out for a stroll in the good weather. Normally he would use his lunch break for an hour at home. He worked for an insurance company in the town centre. He had been there for two years and enjoyed his job insuring families against setbacks. With a glance at his watch he realised he was due back.

Early that evening he went for another walk, as he sometimes did. As a man of routine he generally followed the same streets in the western quarter and alongside the seashore on Aegisida. He walked slowly and stared in through the windows of the house, expecting to catch a glimpse of Lothar, but saw nothing. Only two windows were lit and he could not discern anyone inside. He was about to go back home when a black Volga suddenly backed out of the drive beside the house and drove down Aegisida away from him.

He did not know what he was doing. He did not know what he expected to see or what would happen next. Even if he saw Lothar leave the house he would not have known whether to call out or simply follow him. What was he supposed to say to him?

For the next few evenings he would walk along Aegisida and past the house, and one evening he saw three people leaving it. Two got into a black Volga and drove away while the third, who was Lothar, said goodbye to them and walked up Hofsvallagata towards the city centre. It was about eight o’clock and he followed him. Lothar walked slowly up to Tungata, along Gardastraeti all the way to Vesturgata, where he entered the Naustid restaurant.

He spent two hours waiting outside the restaurant while Lothar dined. It was autumn and the evenings were beginning to turn noticeably colder, but he was dressed warmly in a winter coat with a scarf and a cap with ear flaps. Playing this childish game of spies made him feel rather silly. He mainly stayed on Fischersund, trying not to let the restaurant door out of his sight. When Lothar finally reemerged, he went down Vesturgata and along Austurstraeti towards the Thingholt district. On Bergstadastraeti, he stopped outside a small shed in the back garden of a house not far from Hotel Holt. The door opened and someone let Lothar in. He did not see who it was.

He could not imagine what was going on and, driven by curiosity, he hesitantly approached the shed. The street lighting did not reach that far and he inched his way carefully forward in the near-dark. There was a padlock on the door. He crept up to a small window on the side of the shed and peered inside. A lamp was switched on over a workbench and in its light he could see the two men.

One of them reached out for something under the light. Suddenly he saw who it was and darted back from the window. It was as if he had been hit in the face.

It was his old student friend from Leipzig, whom he had not seen for all those years.

Emil.

He crept away from the shed and back onto the street, where he waited for a long time until Lothar emerged. Emil was with him. Emil vanished into the darkness beside the shed, but Lothar set off again for the west of town. He had no idea what kind of contact Emil and Lothar maintained. As far as he knew, Emil lived abroad.

He turned all this over in his mind without reaching a conclusion. In the end he decided to visit Hannes. He had done that once before, as soon as he returned from East Germany, to tell him about Ilona. Hannes might know something about Emil and Lothar.

Lothar went into the house on Aegisida. Tomas waited for a while a reasonable distance away before setting off home, and suddenly the German’s strange and incomprehensible sentence at their last encounter entered his mind:

Take a closer look.