The Darkness Knows

39

It had been a while since Konrád had last walked down Lindargata. Once, he had been a frequent visitor, not only because it had been his childhood home but because there used to be a Ríki — one of the very few state off-licences in Reykjavík — on the street, and he had regularly shopped there. In those days, self-service had been unheard of; instead the alcohol had been kept behind the counter and the place used to be packed with a heaving throng on Friday afternoons, before it closed for the weekend. An orderly queuing culture was something that Icelanders knew only from pictures taken abroad. The crowd used to spill out onto the pavement, and people would push and shove until the crush at the counter was almost unbearable. The assistants would be flat out, taking orders from the harried customers and dashing back and forth with their bottles. In those days the sale of beer was illegal, and the idea of fine wine for the discerning palate was virtually unknown. Even if a wine culture had existed, the melee wouldn’t have allowed for any pretentiousness of that kind as closing time approached. The only demand was for quick service. ‘Two vodkas!’ would come a cry, and notes would be passed across the counter. ‘Icelandic brennivín!’ ‘Two bottles of gin!’ Notes would be waved in the air. ‘What kind?’ ‘Any kind! And one of brennivín!’ In comparison, the clamour of the New York Stock Exchange would have seemed positively restrained.

Konrád’s first memories were of the Shadow District. The house he was born in had been torn down, like so many others from those days, as the area hadn’t been spared the treacherous economic upswing of the boom years. The world of his childhood had been concreted over with high-rise apartment blocks — symbols of the financial crisis, which had been standing empty ever since, exposed to the chill northerly blasts. At the height of the bubble, these derelict blocks had been the most expensive real estate per square metre in the entire city. And now things were threatening to go the same way again.

Konrád halted by the spot where Villi had been run over, and looked down the street at the sheltered housing for senior citizens that now towered over the site where the abattoir had once stood. The area between Lindargata and the sea used to be his playground. When it snowed in winter, the kids would sledge on the mound at Arnarhóll. In summer, they would play hide-and-seek by Broadcasting House on Skúlagata, or sneak into the Völundur timber yard to climb the vertiginous stacks of wood. To him, these childhood haunts seemed no less remarkable than any idyllic valley or mountainside, just because they happened to be in the city. Whenever he walked down Lindargata he was filled with the sense of coming home from some infinitely long journey.

A stone’s throw from where Villi used to live, ranks of tower blocks loomed against the sky like a forbidding wall of cliffs. The young man had only been a few metres away from his front door when the car hit him. Lindargata was a one-way street, and the vehicle had approached from the west. If the driver had been the man Villi was talking to in the sports bar, he must have lain in wait for him and seen him leaving the bar and heading home on foot through the snowstorm. He could have shadowed Villi from the city centre, his car crawling after him, probably up Hverfisgata first, then down one of the side streets — Ingólfsstræti perhaps — as Villi turned off towards Lindargata. Once he reached these quieter backstreets, Villi’s pursuer must have seized his chance to stamp on the accelerator and run the young man down.

In spite of the poor visibility and the size and power of the vehicle, it was hard to credit the notion that the driver could have failed to notice the impact. No, it was much easier to believe that Villi had been deliberately knocked down. Yet the alternative possibility remained, niggling at the back of Konrád’s mind: that Villi hadn’t in fact been followed from the bar. That the driver, whether drunk or sober, had simply been speeding down Lindargata and, failing to spot Villi in the thickly falling snow, had collided with him, then fled the scene.

The police had knocked on the doors of the neighbouring houses in search of witnesses, but none of the occupants had been able to shed any light on the incident. It had happened in the early hours of the morning and the residents of the street had been sound asleep. No one had seen or heard a thing.

Konrád noticed a man coming along the road towards him and recognised him at once. It was one of his old playmates from the area. He hadn’t seen him for years, perhaps not since they’d both been caught up in the Friday-afternoon rush hour at the long-vanished Ríki. His name was Magnús and they used to call him Maggi Pefsi in the old days because of his inability to pronounce ‘Pepsi’. Konrád didn’t know if this nickname had survived and hadn’t liked to ask on the few occasions when they had crossed paths as adults. Magnús had always been amazingly stubborn. Konrád had once seen him force down a whole raw onion that the kids had stolen from the Lúllabúd corner shop, simply to win a bet of a paltry ten aurar. The clearest memory he had of Maggi Pefsi was of the tears pouring down the boy’s cheeks as he chomped his way through the onion out of sheer pig-headedness.

‘If it isn’t Konrád,’ Maggi said, holding out his hand. ‘Wh... what are you doing in this neck of the woods?’

Konrád shook his hand. They were around the same age, Maggi perhaps a couple of years older, though he had been rather a timid, introverted character as a boy, perhaps because of his stammer. He had lived with his mother in a pretty, well-kept house on Lindargata, and still lived there now. His mother was long dead and Maggi had never married, never moved out of the area or found the right person to spend his life with. At one time he had at least made an effort to change this, but his mother had been very critical of potential girlfriends and extremely disapproving of any attempt on his part to make her share him. Despite his obstinacy in other matters, Maggi had never had the guts to stand up to his mother and so he had been left alone in the world when she died.

‘You never moved,’ Konrád observed.

‘No, and I’m not likely to now,’ Maggi said. ‘Just having a look around for old times’ sake, are you?’

‘Yes, I suppose so,’ Konrád said. ‘It’s a while since I’ve been down this way.’

‘I don’t know what I’m still doing here,’ Maggi said, wiping a drip from his nose with the back of his hand. ‘Everything else has gone, G... God knows. Everything except me.’

‘The area’s almost unrecognisable.’

‘Life’s pretty unb... unbearable here nowadays, what with the racket from the student flats they’ve built where the Ríki used to be, and those m... monstrosities they’ve built all the way down to the sea. You remember what the view used to be like, over the sound and the islands, all the way to Mount Esja? Well, that’s all been taken away and those p... p... piles have been p... plonked down right in our faces. Who would dream of p... putting up walls like that to b... block the view for everyone else? Building high-rises at the bottom of the slope and overshadowing the entire existing area?’

‘They saw it as ripe for development,’ Konrád said drily.

‘Well, they can get st... stuffed. Arseholes.’

‘You’re telling me.’

‘It’s all gone: the abattoir, the timber yard, the Kveldúlfsskáli fish-processing building, B... Broadcasting House, Lúllabúd and all the rest of the shops. Everything except the National Theatre, and I never go there.’

‘Tell me something — do you by any chance remember an accident in this street some years ago?’

‘Accident?’

‘A pedestrian was hit by a car...’

‘You m... mean, when Villi died?’

‘Yes, did you know him?’ Konrád asked, surprised.

‘Not really, he hadn’t lived here long. I spoke to him m... maybe twice. A nice lad, if that’s what you’re asking. The police never found the driver, did they?’

Konrád shook his head. ‘You didn’t see anything yourself?’ he asked.

‘N... no,’ Maggi said. ‘Vigga said she f... found him. You remember her.’

‘Yes, I remember Vigga,’ Konrád said, recalling the woman who used to live in a dilapidated house on the street and who had scared the living daylights out of him as a child. She used to look like a tramp with her layers of ragged jumpers, her wild mop of grey hair and the grim lines of her face that never softened. He had a feeling she’d even done a spell in the dreaded Kleppur Asylum. As kids, they had taken care never to lose a ball in her garden. At times she used to shriek curses at them if they so much as dared to walk past her house. She had even been known to stop and scold children on the pavement outside for no good reason. If a child wandered into the area selling stamps and unwittingly knocked on her door, he risked a slap and an earful of abuse. Sometimes she dragged kids inside her house to read them the riot act. All this did was turn the children in the area against her. They used to play pranks on her and torment her by breaking her windows or banging on her door and running away. Once someone had even set fire to her lean-to.

‘As a matter of fact, I went to see her about something not that long ago,’ Konrád said, thinking back to when he’d turned to Vigga for help over the complicated wartime case in which his father had been involved. But he couldn’t remember coming across any mention of her in the police reports on Villi’s accident.

‘Yes, she died back in the summer, p... poor thing. Spent several years in a nursing home, c... crazier than ever.’

‘She’s dead is she?’ It was the first Konrád had heard of it.

‘It was all very low-key,’ Maggi said. ‘I told them at the home to get in touch with me when she kicked the b... bucket, because she didn’t have any family of her own. So I took c... care of the rest, as they say. She wanted to be cremated. Her ashes are in the cremation plot in Fossvogur. Imagine living that long and still telling the world to go f... fuck itself. She made it to a hundred, you know.’

‘Her name isn’t mentioned in the police file on the accident.’

‘They wouldn’t have known. She didn’t tell anyone. She only told me about it a c... couple of years ago, when I looked in on her at the nursing home and the accident happened to c... come up in conversation.’

‘What did she say?’

‘It was all very vague. I just happened to m... mention Villi because he used to rent the place next door to her. She seemed to remember him. Said she’d found him on the p... pavement. Something like that. I d... didn’t know whether to take her seriously.’

‘Then what?’

‘That was it.’

‘She said she’d found him on the pavement?’

‘I don’t remember exactly what she said but it was something like that.’

‘Did she help him? Did she talk to him?’

‘I couldn’t get any more out of her. She was pretty confused, poor thing. Out of it, you know. She thought she was b... being attacked by all kinds of weird creatures that only she could see.’

‘What did you and Villi talk about the couple of times you met him?’ Konrád asked. ‘Do you remember at all?’

‘He was a Valur supporter like me. It was something about football. Nothing imp... important. He was a good lad. It was tragic what happened to him.’

The two old playmates stood there for a while without speaking.

‘You never got to the b... bottom of that b... business with your dad, did you?’ Maggi asked eventually.

Konrád looked at him. ‘No.’

‘Strangest thing.’

‘Yes, the strangest thing,’ Konrád agreed, hoping Maggi wouldn’t pursue the subject.

‘Did you hear about Polli?’ Maggi said suddenly, a new thought occurring to him. ‘He’s d... dead. Heart attack. Mind you, he’d got bloody fat. I used to work with him at the shipyard in the old days.’

‘Polli?’

‘Yes, you remember him? Lost all his t... teeth. Claimed he’d fallen downstairs. Weren’t you in the same class?’

‘Yes, for one winter. Then he left. So he’s dead, is he? When did that happen?’

‘Ab... about two weeks ago. You two didn’t g... get on, did you?’

‘No.’ Konrád remembered Polli all right. He’d been a thug. ‘I suppose she’d have been by far the oldest resident left in the area?’ he said, bringing the conversation back to Vigga.

‘Yes, no d... doubt.’

‘Vigga and I didn’t exactly get on either,’ Konrád remarked.

‘No, she was a difficult woman,’ Maggi said, sniffing loudly, and Konrád had a flashback to him as a boy, standing in a back garden on Lindargata, eating that stolen onion for a ten-aurar bet while the tears streamed down his cheeks.

Come to think of it, Konrád was pretty sure Maggi had never actually got his ten aurar.

Finally, unable to restrain himself any longer, he asked: ‘Do you still drink Pepsi, Maggi?’

‘What, Pefsi?’ Maggi said. ‘Ah, you can’t b... beat it.’