“I thought we were safe,” he replied. “The Icelanders. I never suspected…” He stopped in mid-sentence. He was coming back to his senses. The haze was lifting. His thoughts were clearer. “You weren’t any better,” he said. “You weren’t any better yourself. You were exactly the same as him, only worse.”
They looked each other in the eye.
“Do I need to be afraid of you?” he asked.
He had no feeling of fear. Not yet, at least. Lothar posed no threat to him. On the contrary, Lothar already appeared to be wondering what to do about Emil lying on the floor in his own blood. Lothar had not attacked him. He had not even taken the spade from him. For some absurd reason he was still holding the spade.
“No,” Lothar said. “You don’t need to be afraid of me.”
“How can I be sure?”
“I’m telling you.”
“I can’t trust anyone,” he said. “You ought to know that. You taught me that.”
“You must get out of here and try to forget this,” Lothar said as he took hold of the spade’s shaft. “Don’t ask me why. I’ll take care of Emil. Don’t go and do anything stupid like calling the police. Forget it. Like it never happened. Don’t do anything stupid.”
“Why? What are you helping me for? I thought—”
“Don’t think anything,” Lothar interrupted him. “Go away and never mention this to anyone. It’s nothing to do with you.”
They stood facing each other. Lothar gripped the spade tighter.
“Of course it’s something to do with me!”
“No,” Lothar said firmly. “Forget it.”
“What did you mean by what you just said?”
“What was that?” Lothar asked.
“How I knew about him. How I tracked him down. Has he been living here long?”
“Here in Iceland? No.”
“What’s going on? What are you doing together? What’s all this equipment in this shed? What are those photographs on the bench?”
Lothar kept hold of the shovel’s shaft, trying to disarm him, but he held on grimly and did not let go.
“What was Emil doing here?” he asked. “I thought he was living abroad. In East Germany. That he had never come back after university.”
Lothar was still a riddle to him, more so now than ever before. Who was this man? Had he been wrong about Lothar all the time, or was he the same arrogant and treacherous beast he had been in Leipzig?
“Go back home,” Lothar said. “Don’t think about it any more. It’s nothing to do with you. What happened in Leipzig isn’t connected with this.”
He did not believe him.
“What happened there? What happened in Leipzig? Tell me. What did they do to Ilona?”
Lothar cursed.
“We’ve been trying to get you Icelanders to work for us,” he said after a while. “It hasn’t worked. You all inform on us. Two of our men were arrested a few years ago and deported after they tried to get someone from Reykjavik to take photographs.”
“Photographs?”
“Of military installations in Iceland. No one wants to work for us. So we got Emil to.”
“Emil?”
“He didn’t have a problem with it.”
Seeing the look of disbelief on his face, Lothar started to tell him about Emil. It was as if Lothar was trying to convince him that he could trust him, that he had changed.
“We provided him with a job that allowed him to travel around the country without arousing suspicion,” Lothar said. “He was very interested. He felt like a genuine spy.”
Lothar cast a glance down at Emil’s body.
“Maybe he was.”
“And he was supposed to photograph American military installations?”
“Yes, and even work temporarily at places near them, like the base at Heidarfjall on Langanes or Stokksnes near Hofn. And in Hvalfjordur, where the oil depot is. Straumsnesfjall in the west fjords. He worked in Keflavik and took listening devices with him. He sold agricultural machinery so he always had a reason for being somewhere. We had an even bigger role lined up for him in the future,” Lothar said.
“Like what?”
“The possibilities are endless,” Lothar replied.
“What about you? Why are you telling me all this? Aren’t you one of them?”
“Yes,” Lothar said. “I’m one of them. I’ll take care of Emil. Forget all this and never mention it to anyone. Understood?! Never.”
“Wasn’t there a risk that he’d be found out?”
“He set up a cover,” Lothar said. “We told him it was unnecessary, but he wanted to use a fake identity and so on. If anyone recognised him as Emil he was going to say he was on a quick visit home, but otherwise he called himself Leopold. I don’t know where he dreamt up that name. Emil enjoyed deceiving people. He took a perverse pleasure in pretending to be someone else.”
“What are you going to do with him?”
“Sometimes we dispose of rubbish in a little lake south-west of the city. It shouldn’t be a problem.”
“I’ve hated you for years, Lothar. Did you know that?”
“To tell the truth I’d forgotten you, Tomas. Ilona was a problem and she would have been found out sooner or later. What I did is irrelevant. Totally irrelevant.”
“How do you know I won’t go straight to the police?”
“Because you don’t feel guilty about him. That’s why you should forget it. That’s why it never happened. I won’t say what happened and you’ll forget that I ever existed.”
“But…”
“But what? Are you going to confess to committing murder? Don’t be so childish!”
“We were just children, just kids. How did it end up like this?”
“We try to get by,” Lothar said. “That’s all we can do.”
“What are you going to tell them? About Emil? What will you say happened?”
“I’ll tell them I found him like this and don’t know what the hell happened. But the main thing is to get rid of him. They understand that. Now go away! Get out of here before I change my mind!”
“Do you know what happened to Ilona?” he asked. “Can you tell me what happened to her?”
He had gone to the door of the shed when he turned round and asked the question that had long tormented him. As if the answer might help him to accept those irreversible events.
“I don’t know much,” Lothar said. “I heard that she tried to escape. She was taken to hospital and that’s all I know.”
“But why was she arrested?”
“You know that perfectly well,” Lothar said. “She took a risk; she knew the stakes. She was dangerous. She incited revolt. She worked against them. They had experience from the 1953 uprising. They weren’t going to let that repeat itself.”
“But…”
“She knew the risks she was taking.”
“What happened to her?”
“Stop this and get out!”
“Did she die?”
“She must have,” Lothar said, looking thoughtfully at the black box with the broken dials. He glanced at the bench and noticed the car keys. A Ford logo was on the ring.
“We’ll make the police think he drove out of town,” he said, almost to himself. “I have to persuade my men. That could prove difficult. They hardly believe a word I tell them any more.”
“Why not?” he asked. “Why don’t they believe you?”
