The Quiet Mother

17

As Konrád looked around the old nightclub, memories quickly began lining up, one after another. He remembered cold, damp nights outside the place behind the Free Church, endless lines in crazy weather, and puddles on the lot by the entrance. Teased hair like candyfloss and terribly short skirts that came straight from the streets of London. White high-heeled boots that reached up to the knees. He remembered unruly hair that reached down to shoulders and beards of all shapes and sizes; as if free love started with the beard. He remembered the drunkenness. A flask was passed down the line and songs were sung, sometimes on beautiful summer evenings, sometimes in the harsh frosts of winter when the lot transformed into a skating rink and snow collected on people’s clothes. That suited the place, which was an old ice house on a street running up from the Pond, from which the blocks of ice were taken. Finally, it was turned into the most popular nightclub in the country, called Glaumbær.

The goal was to drink as much as possible before going into the club, where alcoholic drinks were sold at exorbitant prices. The best buy at the bar before closing, though, was a Chartreuse Green, which guaranteed the highest alcohol content for the least money. Konrád recalled the almost unbearable heat inside the place, and how it never took long to run into a familiar face. People were in constant motion, with music thumping in their ears, from floor to floor, room to room, and bar to bar. The place was on three floors and divided into bars and rooms, with endless little corridors in between. There was a disco on the top floor, and it was there that the fire started that burned Glaumbær to the ground shortly before Christmas 1971. The place never reopened, and just like that, in the blink of an eye, the entertainment headquarters for the hippie generation in the country disappeared. The party was over.

Konrád tried to imagine the old layout of Glaumbær as he stood there in the middle of one of the galleries — the old ice house had recently been given a new role when it came into the possession of the Icelandic Museum of Art. A retrospective was currently being held of the works of the old masters, Þórarinn B. Þorláksson and Jón Stefánsson. A smattering of people drifted around the gallery like a herd of ghosts, stopping in front of the works and regarding them. Now there was a solemn silence where once you could barely hear the person next to you through the noise.

‘So you think you know something about art?’ Konrád heard a voice say behind him.

Konrád turned, saw the man he’d come to meet, smiled and shook his hand.

‘You don’t come here often enough,’ he said.

‘That’s true,’ said the man. ‘This probably isn’t the first place that comes to mind when I’m on holiday.’

They strolled over to the cafe and sat down and chatted, recalling their years on the police force. The man’s name was Eyþór, and before he worked with the force, he’d been a waiter in the city’s restaurants, and Konrád recalled how he sometimes talked about his years at Glaumbær and how fun it had been working there. He’d quit a year before the fire and taken a job at the Naustið restaurant, then applied to the police, where he worked for about a decade before becoming an estate agent. He’d earned a lot and looked good, in an expensive suit and with a tan from Florida. Konrád hadn’t heard from Eyþór in a long time, but it occurred to him to call and see if he could do him a favour.

‘What’s bugging you?’ asked Eyþór. ‘I hear you’ve been sticking your nose into all sorts of cases since leaving the police.’

‘I’m bored,’ said Konrád.

‘And what is it now? Anything interesting?’

‘I don’t know,’ Konrád said.

‘But not... have you got involved in that incident at the block of flats? What was her name? Valborg, wasn’t it?’

‘Do you remember her at all?’

‘Me?’

‘She was working at Glaumbær when the place burned down.’

Eyþór looked around.

‘Is that why you wanted us to meet here? Because of Glaumbær?’

‘Do you remember a woman by that name? Valborg?’

‘Does it have something to do with Glaumbær? What happened to her?’

‘No, I’m just poking around. She came to me a while ago and asked for help with something and... I’m trying to gather information. Just thought a bit of art might do you good. Looks like I was right.’

Eyþór smiled.

‘I must have missed her,’ he said. ‘I can’t remember anyone by that name. I’d quit by then. Was working at Naustið.’

‘Are you in contact with anyone who worked at Glaumbær?’

‘Yeah, a few of them,’ said Eyþór. ‘Would you like me to talk to them? Ask about this Valborg?’

‘Would you mind?’

‘I’ll try to dig something up.’

‘It was unbelievable, hearing about the fire,’ Konrád said, taking in the thick walls of the old ice house.

‘Yeah, wasn’t there some talk about it being cigarette embers here on the top floor? In a sofa? Wasn’t that the determination? It was all so sad, somehow. It was shortly after they refurbished the place and it had never been livelier. I saw the musical Hair onstage here that December, just before it caught on fire and... you know, it was just awful.’

‘And they were good people who worked here?’

‘Cream of the crop,’ said Eyþór. ‘I still have good friends from that time. I’ll talk to them. Find out if they remember that woman.’

‘There was one other thing,’ said Konrád, as if thinking out loud. ‘I don’t know if it has anything to do with it or not, but Valborg had a child that she gave up at birth.’

‘Oh?’

‘You shouldn’t mention it to anyone because I don’t know if it matters, and it’s probably just a coincidence, but...’

‘Yeah?’

‘The child was born in September 1972, meaning it was conceived in December of the previous year.’

‘In 1971?’

‘Around the same time she worked in this building.’

‘Do you mean... when Glaumbær burned down?’

‘Yes.’

Two days after the search for Glóey’s husband began, he was found. One of his chums informed the Narcotics Unit, in return for some goodwill after being arrested while on probation for drug use, that the man had a half-Danish cousin whom he held in considerable regard. The half-Dane also turned out to have run up against the law, for his involvement in drugs. In that cousin’s home, a shabby rental flat in the Efri-Breiðholt suburb, the suspect was found stoned out of his mind along with two handguns, a wheel wrench that he was holding, three baseball bats, and a considerable quantity of drugs that turned out to belong to his cousin. On one wall was a large but rather well-worn poster of the Danish football team that made an unexpected splash at the World Cup in Mexico in 1986.

‘We are red, we are white...’