Season of the Witch (22 page)

“What does—”

“Daddy! Daddy!” a shrill little voice calls. “I’ve gone poo!”

“Excuse me. I’ve got important work to do here,” Gudmundur babbles hurriedly. “But that’s all you need to know about my gran.”

“Do you mean Gunnhildur is a hypochondriac herself?”

“No…Not exactly. I’m not sure…”

“Daddy! Poo on the floor!”

“Sorry, I’ve got to go,” he says. “Did Gran say Dad killed Mom?”

“Well, she implied as much.”

“For goodness’ sake, take no notice of her. She’s a poor old worn-out, bereaved woman.”

“OK…”

“Ooooh,” the little voice resounds. “Poor poo.”

“Good-bye,” says the economist. “Dirty work to do.”

“Look, Daddy! I’m drawing with the poo…”

There’s dirty work, and then there’s dirty work.

In the evening I try to persuade Trausti Löve to stop the front page and redo the layout to make room for a report that a twenty-year-old man has been remanded in custody in connection with the investigation into the death of Skarphédinn Valgardsson in Akureyri. He explains to me, quite gently, that it is Saturday evening. There is no paper tomorrow.

After Friday comes Saturday, followed by Sunday. I learned that once upon a time, even before I went to high school. But it seems to have slipped my mind in the busyness of my new life, exciting personal affairs, and vibrant social life. It’s not so very long ago that weekends and days off were what I most looked forward to. Sometimes they were all I looked forward to. Now they don’t seem to matter anymore.

I start that Sunday by changing the newspaper in the bottom of Polly’s cage and giving her a cracker to peck at as a Sunday treat. Then I stand at the kitchen window for a long, long time, with a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other, contemplating what to do. It still looks wintry outside, and I think I even spot the odd snowflake drifting down, just as a reminder that in these times of prosperity and optimism we’re still living in chilly old Iceland. Times may change, but place remains the same. In the neighboring gardens there are no children playing ball today. I look through the CD collection left behind by the owner—I didn’t think to bring my own music with me. There are a lot of operas and symphonies. Then I come across a CD of
R.E.M. As
Man on the Moon
fills the room, I feel I’m home. On my own private moon:

Now, Andy, did you hear about this one?
Tell me are you locked in the punch?
Hey, Andy, are you goofing on Elvis?
Hey, baby, are you having fun?

Then the phone rings.

“This is Ásgeir Eyvindarson,” says a grating male voice. “Who am I speaking to?”

“Einar.”

I can tell that he’s struggling to control himself, without much success. “My son, Gudmundur, tells me you called him yesterday, making ridiculous and slanderous allegations against me.”

“Not at all. That’s a misunderstanding.”

“Repeating the ravings of a demented old woman. How dare you treat a grieving family this way?”

“All I did was tell your son what your mother-in-law alleged to me. And she’s grieving too, of course…”

He abruptly abandons the grieving family angle and starts threatening legal action. “Surely you realize the gravity of these allegations. They’re slanderous!”

Now he’s shouting.

I feel my temper rising. “Didn’t you just say that Gunnhildur was senile and nobody could take her allegations seriously?”

“Of course she is. That malevolent old witch has always had a grudge against me, ever since I married Ásdís Björk.”

Gleefully, I ask, “Oh, really? So it’s not a new thing, because she’s senile or demented, or whatever you call it?”

“Now you’re adding insult to injury!”

“I haven’t published anything about this, and I never intended to. And I don’t see what all the fuss is about. I just felt that Gunnhildur had a right to her opinion, even if she is old. I simply wanted to explore the facts a little better. That’s all there is to it.”

“I’m warning you,” says Ásgeir Eyvindarson, his voice like a taut bowstring.

“What are you warning me against?”

“I’m warning you to stop snooping into a family tragedy of people who’ve done nothing wrong. I’m warning you not to go sensationalizing…”

And there it was!

“…about people’s private lives, just so you can sell that pathetic little rag that thinks it’s a newspaper. Don’t—”

“I don’t like being threatened,” I reply. I’m quite calm again.

“—imagine that I don’t have influence. Don’t think you can treat me like any Tom, Dick, or Harry you drag down into the gutter. Your boss, ölver Margrétarson Steinsson, is a piece of shit and a punk who thinks he can use his ill-gotten gains through the media to buy political power and respectability. A gangster who buys up all the competition and then forces the rest to knuckle under. It’s…”

“What has your wife’s death got to do with one of the owners of the
Afternoon News
? Or political issues?”

With a gulp of rage, Ásgeir Eyvindarson hangs up on me.

It seems a huge leap from the pleasant, polite son to the hysterical, threatening father. Before my delightful phone conversation with the bereaved husband, I’d been wondering how hypochondria, as described to me by Gudmundur Ásgeirsson, could relate to his mother’s death when she fell out of a boat into the
Jökulsá River. The poor woman actually died: surely that couldn’t be hypochondria?

I’ve still got my conversation with Gunnhildur at the back of my mind, and it occasionally pops up to the surface when things calm down a bit. Now, for instance.

“Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!”

“You can say that again.”

“Thank you. Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!”

Gunnhildur tosses a gray braid. “I don’t know how they can be bothered with such drivel.”

We’re sitting out in the corridor, but we can’t avoid the sound of an American sitcom that’s enthralling the
Guiding Light
mafia.

“Maybe they can’t find anything better to do,” I suggest, offering Gunnhildur a chocolate from the box I have brought her as a peace offering.

A gnarled, wizened index finger hovers over the tray like a small helicopter. Then she finds what she’s looking for: a bottle-shaped chocolate, with alcohol-laden filling.

“Old people are getting to be just like the younger ones,” she observes. “They don’t read, they don’t talk. They just sit and watch those stupid American idiots make fools of themselves for a million dollars, or whatever it is they get paid.”

The leathery face dissolves into a smile as the chocolate bottle bursts in her mouth, releasing the boozy contents.

“Delicious, my boy. Even though it’s not from the Yumm candy factory.”

I can’t help envying her. I make do with a caramel that’s so chewy and sticky that I’m afraid I may have no teeth left by the time I leave the
Hóll
care home.

“So you didn’t write off an old woman,” says Gunnhildur, looking at me out of limpid blue eyes. “Here you are again.”

“Yes, I wanted to meet you again, talk a bit more.”

I tell her about my dealings with her grandson and her son-in-law. I don’t go into details about what they said about her.

“That’s Ásgeir to a T,” she says. “He’s full of…”

“Evil, wickedness, and viciousness?”

“Yes, that’s right. How did you know?”

“Oh, just something I heard. And of course I’ve had the dubious pleasure of speaking to him myself.”

“Evil. Wickedness. Viciousness. That’s Ásgeir.” She picks out another little chocolate bottle. “Maybe you’re not so silly, my boy. There’s enough silliness about.” She jerks her head toward the
Guiding Light
mafia, with a swing of her braid.

“But I haven’t really made any progress about what you said—that your daughter’s death wasn’t an accident.”

“But why on earth did you go and ask Ásgeir? Surely you didn’t imagine he’d simply fold and confess, then go and turn himself in to the police? If you hadn’t brought me these lovely chocolates, I might think you were a little bit silly.”

“Um, I’m sure you’re right.”

“Haven’t you seen Detective Chief Inspectors Morse and Taggart at work on the TV?”

“Yes, of course I have,” I reply.

“It takes them a whole episode, or sometimes more, to break the murderer’s resistance, gather evidence, get them to confess.”

“But…”

“Of course on television they compress it into an hour. I know that. They edit it, days of work by those conscientious detectives, and make one hour of it. Of course they have to sleep and eat, and
go to the bathroom, like the rest of us. But they needn’t show us everything. You know that, my boy, don’t you?”

“Yes, yes.”

“And you spoke to our poor little Gudmundur? He’s not a bad boy, although he’s so desperate to be richer than other people and much richer than his scoundrel of a dad. They’ve got greed in their blood. It’s all in the cells, as they say these days.”

“In the cells…”

“He didn’t get that greed from my Ásdís Björk. That greed came straight from cold blood, as cold as any that flows through human veins.”

“I’m sure.”

Gunnhildur’s eyes have been darting around, but now she fixes me with her gaze. “So you spoke to poor Gudmundur, to find out whether I was a crazy old woman?”

“Well, I couldn’t simply make the assumption that Ásdís Björk was murdered just because you said so.”

She looks at me with a strange light in her eye.

“Would you believe me,” I go on, “if I told you the pope had been murdered by a mad prostitute?”

Gunnhildur shakes her head. “You really are a bit silly, my boy. A prostitute—let alone a mad one—would never be admitted into the Vatican. Ha!” She squeaks with glee. “That was a good one! Hahaha!”

“My point was that we can’t take things for granted.”

“And the poor old pope, pale as the ghost of a ghost! Really!”

“It was just an idea.”

She tries to stifle her giggles. “You can be quite amusing, even if you are a bit silly.”

“Well, I’m glad you think so.”

“Have you got a cell?” she suddenly asks me, with no trace of a laugh.

“Cell?” I parrot, thinking:
What the hell am I doing here?

“Yes. A cell.”

“Well, I certainly hope so.”

“Can I borrow it?”

“Borrow a cell?”

“Yes. I’m going to make a phone call for you, to someone who can answer all your questions. There’s no point calling the murderer up and asking if he did it. That will get you nowhere.”

“You want a cell phone?”

“Yes. What else, my boy?”

I reach into my pocket for my cell phone and hand it to her.

Awkwardly Gunnhildur fiddles with the phone in her gnarled hand. “These new cells are made for spiders to use. The buttons are much too small for ordinary people to see and press the right ones.” She passes it back to me. “Dial for me, would you?”

She recites a phone number, which I punch in before returning the phone to her.

“Hello? Ragna, dear? It’s Gunnhildur.”

She waits.

“Hello? Hello?” Turning the phone back and forth in her hand, she glares at it. “The damn thing’s stone dead.”

I reach out and turn the phone around so she is speaking into the mouthpiece. She tries again.

“Hello? Ragna, dear? It’s Gunnhildur…How are you?…Is it low down or further up?…The small of your back?…Oh, yes… Just the same as I had the other year…The same year as the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Reykjavík…I think it was the only thing that resulted from that summit…Yes, I’m sure I got it
sitting in front of the TV hour after hour, waiting for something to happen…”

I stand up and stretch. Have a chocolate. And another.

“Look, Ragna, dear. There’s a young man here with me…No, no, no, nothing’s go on between us…Noooo…Too young and delicate…Ragna, dear, I’m going to send him over to see you…No, no, none of that…None of that, with him…I just want you to answer some questions from him…About my Ásdís Björk…And that goddamned wilderness tour…No, don’t be put off. He’s a bit silly, but he means well…Thank you, my dear…No, Lord, no, don’t go to any trouble for the boy. He brought me a box of chocolates…No, these boys are made far too much fuss of…I’ll tell him to bring you chocolates, or you won’t talk to him…Oh, fair to middling, my dear. Fair to middling…He’s on his way…”

Yep, I’m on my way. On the road again. And now, after my second visit today to the expensive confectioner’s shop, my next destination is a small single-story concrete house with a red roof, not far from the high school campus. I had imagined Ragna Ármannsdóttir being around Gunnhildur’s age, but she turns out to be a young thing of only sixtyish, with long black hair—obviously a dye job—wearing a green floral-patterned dress and a blue-striped apron. She is of average height and weight, but with a stack of chins beneath her broad, smiling face. She’s obviously just put her makeup on, and from the kitchen drifts an aroma of pancakes. I ceremoniously present the chocolate box to her, and shortly afterward Ragna and I sit down to coffee and pancakes at her old varnished dining table. She watches me stuff my face and smokes slender Capri cigarettes, as she recounts to me how fond she is of dear old Gunnhildur.