Sun on Fire (2 page)

It wouldn’t take long to search the building—though there were four stories and a basement, the floor area was quite small. Each story only comprised a hallway and three or four rooms.
File cabinets were always locked, and the folks who worked there locked their own offices when they left for the day. That meant he’d only have to check the conference room, the kitchenette, the washrooms, and possibly the ambassador’s office. Maybe the basement as well, but he would leave that for last.

On the ground floor were just the reception area, a single washroom, and some locked storage rooms.
There can’t be anybody here
, the counselor thought, and he took the stairs up to the second-floor hallway and switched on the light. To the right were four doors—three of them locked. The fourth was half open and led to a conference room with a large table and ten chairs. The ambassador had obviously held an impromptu dinner party here the evening before. Dirty plates and leftover food in paper wrappers littered the table, as did a number of wineglasses. Two brandy bottles stood in the middle of the table. The lid of a cardboard box that had contained twelve bottles of red wine had been roughly torn off. In the box were eight bottles—six empty and two unopened. Two bottles stood on the table, so that meant two were missing. A powerful odor of spilled wine mixed with the smell of tobacco pervaded the room’s atmosphere. A dirty plate had been used as an ashtray.

“Lovely,” Arngrímur muttered as he surveyed the room. He looked under the table and observed a box that had contained a brandy bottle lying under one of the chairs.

“It doesn’t get much better than this,” he added, returning to the hall.

He peeked into the washroom on the other side of the hall. Someone had thrown up in the toilet and not bothered to flush. The smell was rank.

“Wrong, still more treats to come,” Arngrímur corrected himself. He took a deep breath, leaned over the toilet, and pushed the
lever with one finger. The stench grew stronger still as the jet of water stirred things vigorously around before the bowl emptied.

Up on the third floor, all rooms were locked except for the staff kitchenette. In there the lights had been left on, the cupboards were open, and plates and glasses had been removed. A silverware drawer was also open. Arngrímur closed the cupboards and drawer, and crossed to the window to look out over the plaza. The night was still dark, and nobody was out in the common area. He could see a light in the security guards’ window in the Felleshus. It was the only sign of life. This should have been a quiet night.

He left the kitchenette and crossed the hall to investigate the washroom. Everything was as it should be, or nearly so. The toilet lid was up and a cigarette butt floated in the bowl. Arngrímur flushed and watched as the water vortex sucked the butt away. Then he carefully closed the lid and returned to the hall. He stood still awhile and listened. He had worked in this place for many years and knew all the sounds. Every building has its night sounds, and the silence is never complete. If anybody was around, he would hear it immediately. But he couldn’t detect any unusual noise at all.

He headed upstairs and peered along the top floor’s unlit hallway. He fumbled for the first two doors on the right and found them locked. The washroom on the left was open and deserted.

The only remaining room was the ambassador’s office; its door was half open, and Arngrímur moved closer and looked in. The room was dark except for the flickering light from a large candle in a candlestick standing on a table at the near end of the room. The drapes were closed and all the lights were switched off. Arngrímur stepped inside and examined the candlestick. It was tall, made of fired clay, and more or less cylindrical with a solid base. Beside it was another very similar candlestick, its candle not
lit. The candlesticks were strangely craggy and clearly intended as objets d’art.

Sensing that something was off, Arngrímur felt a chill creep up from his spine to the top of his head. Warily, he turned round and looked into the shadows at the ambassador’s desk. A large man, with head bowed, sat in the chair behind it.

The blood drained from Arngrímur’s face, and he froze for a few moments.

“Hello,” he said as his blood flow recovered, not really expecting a reply.

“Hello,” he repeated, and when the visitor still didn’t move, he fumbled to flick on the light switch by the door.

It took him a while to work out the situation. The man leaned forward in the chair, his hands hanging by his sides. It looked as though he was contemplating his enormous stomach, which had been slit open from the chest down to the groin. The shaft of a large knife protruded from the wound like some lewd symbol. Looking closer, Arngrímur realized that the pool that had formed on the pale wooden floor beneath the man was not merely blood, but also included a substantial part of his intestines and the contents of his stomach. The disgusting stain was incredibly big, but for some reason Arngrímur turned his gaze and fixated on the fat cigar the man held between his fingers, its two centimeters of ash indicating that it had burned in this position until its glow died.

This visitor had the nerve to smoke in here?
was the only thought Arngrímur could manage. He felt that his increasing nausea must be the result of unwelcome tobacco smoke instead of the stench emanating from the filthy pile on the floor and the gaping cleft in the man’s belly.

10:30

“How many times do I have to tell you—I’m not answering any questions from some fucking half-caste,” the prisoner said for the fourth time, grinning across the table at Birkir Li Hinriksson. They were in an interview room at the Reykjavík detective division’s headquarters.

“What were you doing the night before last?” Birkir asked a fifth time, his dark-brown almond eyes unblinking. His work as a detective often exposed him to insults like this, and, though he would have preferred not to have to put up with such remarks, he had long since learned to ignore them. He was unfazed by mere words, especially when there was a lack of intelligence behind them. To him, this was no more than a bark from an untrained dog.

Birkir Li was born in Vietnam toward the end of 1970—his first name at that time was simply Li. In Iceland’s National Register, however, his birth year was recorded as 1972 because people didn’t know any better, and his birth date was recorded as January 10, which was the date in 1979 when he’d arrived in Iceland with a refugee group from Malaysia. By that time, he had lost his whole birth family, and later he was left behind on his own by his Vietnamese adopted family when they disappeared to the United States. After that he was brought up by an old Icelandic couple, and he had taken his patronymic from his foster father, Hinrik.

“What were you doing the night before last?” Birkir asked yet again.

“OK, I’ll tell ya. I was watching your whore of a mom down at the harbor getting fucked by a bunch of Russian trawlermen with the clap.” The prisoner roared with laughter and smirked at Detective Gunnar Maríuson, who sat at the end of the table, cheek in hand, bored out of his mind; his bald patch shone pinkly under the ceiling light, and his thick double chin sagged onto his chest as he tipped his head to one side.

“Is it lunchtime yet?” Gunnar asked when Birkir seemed like he wouldn’t continue talking.

“It’s only ten thirty,” Birkir said.

Gunnar looked at the prisoner. “Shall we get this over with?” he asked, and straightened himself up in his chair, towering his large frame threateningly over the table.

In downtown Reykjavík, an international culture center had been broken into and set on fire, and a cashbox (which was, in fact, empty) removed. A security camera at an embassy right across the street had captured a good shot of a blond guy in a sleeveless leather jacket dropping the box twice before managing to stuff it into the back of an old station wagon of obscure make. In the background, flames could be seen through the building’s windows.

It had taken a day to investigate the scene and negotiate permission to access the security-camera footage, after which the case was cracked—they recognized the blond guy as a well-known psycho, and Gunnar had found him at home at six thirty that morning.

Looking at Birkir, the prisoner made monkey noises and scratched at his sides. Then he hooted with laughter.

Birkir examined the man’s face. Its proportions were odd, with eyes set far apart and the head cone shaped; the nose was thick, upturned, and protuberant with flared nostrils.

“Degeneration,” Birkir said.

The prisoner stopped laughing. “You what?” he screeched. “Does the half-caste know fancy words?”

“Inbreeding,” Birkir explained.

“Whaddya mean?”

“Are your parents brother and sister?” Gunnar asked.

The prisoner’s face contorted with fury, and he threw a punch at Gunnar’s head. But Gunnar had evidently been waiting for this. He dodged the blow, grabbed the arm and twisted it, and slammed the prisoner face down onto the table.

“Aargh!” the prisoner screamed as Gunnar pinned him down with his weight.

“This freak’s hair still smells like smoke,” Gunnar said. “It doesn’t even wash.”

“Let me go, or I’ll smash your face in,” the criminal whimpered.

“You already tried.”

“I’ll sure as hell get you later.”

The door opened and Detective Superintendent Magnús Magnússon, head of the violent crime unit, entered the room.

“Jesus, men,” he said, sizing up the situation. “What’s going on in here?”

Gunnar stood up carefully, maintaining his grip on the prisoner with one hand while taking handcuffs from his pocket with the other. “Assaulting an officer on duty,” he said formally, and cuffed him.

“Ouch!” the prisoner said. “That hurts!”

“We have the arrest warrant for this suspect,” said Magnús, “but it can wait for the time being. When you get back from taking him to lockup, come and see me. Something else has cropped up.”

11:45

“We have a problem,” Magnús said, his customarily sunny demeanor clouded with concern. Though close to sixty years old, he was—aside from a little thickening around the waist—in pretty good shape. The suntan he still had after his August vacation in Italy looked nice against his clean-cut gray hair and thick mustache, but today he was missing his usual crispness and seemed pale and unwell under his tan.

He closed the door to his office and looked gravely at Gunnar and Birkir for a moment before saying, “I need to send you on a quick trip to Berlin. There’s a direct flight early tomorrow morning.”

“To Germany?” Gunnar shook his head. “No way. I never go abroad.”

Magnús was dumbfounded. “What do you mean?”

“I’m not going abroad,” Gunnar repeated.

“You speak German—and you’ve been abroad, surely? You have a passport?”

“Yes and yes and no.”

“What do you mean?” Magnús asked again.

Birkir replied for Gunnar. “You know his mother is German. Of course he speaks German.”

“And he has been abroad?” Magnús looked questioningly at Birkir.

“He went to Majorca once—ate and drank too much and got indigestion. Since then he hasn’t wanted to go abroad. He doesn’t have a passport.”

Gunnar looked angrily at his partner. “I didn’t eat too much. I got salmonella poisoning. I had the runs for six weeks.”

“And you’re always looking at German websites,” Magnús continued.

“He only looks at football news and naked women,” Birkir said.

“And the news,” Gunnar said, bridling. “I got sunstroke, too.”

“Where?” Magnús asked.

“In Majorca.”

Magnús sighed wearily and said, “Berlin is hardly Majorca. You’re in no danger of getting sunstroke at this time of year, and if you eat in moderation you shouldn’t get diarrhea.”

Gunnar replied peevishly, “I also get claustrophobic on airplanes. The seats are so cramped.”

“Right,” said Magnús, “but I’m not
asking
you to go. This is an order.”

Gunnar’s face turned bright red. “I haven’t seen anything in my job description that says I have to do police work in other countries,” he said. “Why the hell do you need to send people to Berlin to do stuff for you?”

Magnús hesitated before replying, “A murder was committed in the Icelandic embassy last night. I got called in to a meeting at the Foreign Ministry this morning.”

Gunnar shook his head and said, “That’s not our problem. Just let the Berlin
Kripo
deal with it.”

Magnús said quietly, “We can’t do that. This is a sensitive matter for the ambassador and for the ministry. We can’t just leave it to the
Kriminalpolizei
.”

Birkir asked, “How the hell are we supposed to solve a murder in Berlin?”

Magnús replied, “Assess the situation, question witnesses, and write a report. After that, we’ll see. Anna will go with you to take charge of CSI—I’ve already spoken to her. I need my most trustworthy people on this job—people who can do the work and keep their mouths shut. Nothing can get out to the media except through the ministry.”

“I’m not going,” Gunnar said.

“That’s what you think.” Magnús was angry. He threw open a desk drawer and grabbed the sheet of paper that lay on top. He thumped it onto the table and said, “If you want to discuss job descriptions and such formalities, let’s not leave anything out. I received this complaint from a law office in Kópavogur last Friday. They say you made a nuisance of yourself, poking your nose into a deceased person’s estate they’d been hired to settle.”

“Is this about that lawyer that was shot out west? The goose hunter?” Gunnar asked.

“Yes. Anything else I should know about?”

“It was about the farm. I promised the folks there that I’d arrange for them to buy back the buildings and the farmland. They’ve been treated really badly in this situation.”

Magnús banged the table with his hand. “The attorneys tell me you made a threatening phone call to people who were about to make an offer for the farm.”

Gunnar screwed up his nose and said quietly, “I just told those vultures that the place was haunted by evil spirits.”