The Draining Lake

37

When winter had descended, bringing piercing northerly winds and swirling snow, Erlendur drove out to the lake where Emil’s skeleton had been found that spring. It was morning and there was little traffic around the lake. Erlendur parked the Ford Falcon by the side of the road and walked down to the water’s edge. He had read in the newspapers that the lake had stopped draining and was beginning to fill again. Experts from the Energy Authority predicted that it would eventually reach its former size. Erlendur looked over to the nearby pool of Lambhagatjorn, which had dried up to reveal a red muddy bed. He looked at Sydri-Stapi, a bluff protruding into the lake, and at the encircling range of mountains, and felt astonished that this peaceful lake could have been the setting for espionage in Iceland.

He watched the lake rippling in the northerly wind and thought to himself that everything would return to normal here. Maybe providence had determined it all. Maybe the draining lake’s sole purpose had been to reveal this old crime. Soon it would be deep and cold again at the spot where a skeleton had once lain, preserving a story of love and betrayal in a distant country.

He had read and reread the account written and left by Tomas before he took his life. He read about Lothar and Emil and the Icelandic students, and the system that they encountered — inhumane and incomprehensible and doomed to crumble and vanish. He read Tomas’s reflections on Ilona and their short time together, on his love for her and on the child they were expecting but he would never see. He felt a profound sympathy for this man whom he had never met, just found lying in his own blood with an old pistol beside him. Perhaps that had been the only way out for Tomas.

It turned out that no one missed Emil except for the woman who knew him as Leopold. Emil was an only child with few relatives. He had corresponded very sporadically from Leipzig with a cousin until the mid-1960s. The cousin had almost forgotten that Emil existed when Erlendur began inquiring about him.

The American embassy supplied a photograph of Lothar from the time he had served as an attache in Norway. Emil’s girlfriend did not recall having seen the man on the photograph. The German embassy in Reykjavik also provided old photographs of him and it was revealed that he was a suspected double agent who had probably died in a prison outside Dresden some time before 1978.

“It’s coming back,” Erlendur heard a voice say behind him, and he turned round. A woman he vaguely recognised was smiling at him. She was wearing a thick anorak and a cap.

“Excuse me…?”

“Sunna,” she said. “The hydrologist. I found the skeleton in the spring — maybe you don’t remember me.”

“Oh yes, I remember you.”

“Where’s the other guy who was with you?” she asked, looking all around.

“Sigurdur Oli, you mean. I think he’s at work.”

“Have you found out who it was?”

“More or less,” Erlendur said.

“I haven’t seen it in the news.”

“No, we haven’t made the announcement yet,” Erlendur said. “How are you keeping?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“Is he with you?” Erlendur asked, looking along the shore at a man skimming stones along the surface of the lake.

“Yes,” Sunna said. “I met him in the summer. So who was it? In the lake?”

“It’s a long story,” Erlendur said.

“Maybe I’ll read about it in the papers.”

“Maybe.”

“Well, see you round.”

“Goodbye,” Erlendur said, with a smile.

He watched Sunna as she went over to the man; they walked hand in hand to a car parked by the roadside and drove off in the direction of Reykjavik.

Erlendur wrapped his coat tightly around him and looked across the lake. His thoughts turned to Tomas’s namesake in the Gospel of St John. When the other apostles told him that they had seen Jesus risen from the dead, Thomas replied: “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

Tomas had seen the print of the nails and had thrust his hand into the wounds, but, unlike his biblical namesake, he had lost his faith in the act of discovery.

“Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed,” Erlendur whispered, and his words were taken by the northerly wind across the lake.