Available Dark: A Crime Novel (Cass Neary) (15 page)

“Then why’d you let me in?”

“Better to watch the Devil than turn your back on him.”

She glared as though she hoped to set my hair on fire. I ignored her, dropped my bag, and walked to the far side of the shop. Filthy windows tinted the midday sun a sour nicotine yellow. The room smelled of scorched coffee. Brynja’s wares were a mix of Nordic trinkets and New Age cheese: refrigerator magnets featuring puffins and reindeer and trolls; postcards of geysers and improbably beautiful young people riding miniature blue-eyed horses; Viking key chains. Lots of rune jewelry, along with rune stones, rune cards, rune bottle openers, shot glasses, and coffee mugs. A one-stop shop for all your runic needs. I held up a sweatshirt emblazoned with a horned helmet and the words
ROAD TO RUNE.

“Who the hell buys this stuff?”

“Americans.” Brynja looked back at the computer screen. “And Japanese. The same people who go on the elf tours.”

Brynja seemed happy to pretend I didn’t exist, so I returned the favor and spent the next few hours wandering around the shop. There was a cabinet filled with books, including English titles like
Twilight of the Gods, Wisdom of the Runes,
and
Ásatrú for the Solitary Practitioner,
along with translations of various sagas and a bunch of maps showing where the elves lived, shrink-wrapped so I wouldn’t drop in unannounced and without paying for directions. I flipped through a crudely illustrated, well-thumbed guide to sex with the hidden people, then stepped to another cabinet. This one held neat stacks of tea towels, red and white and green, brightly colored calendars, and a basket filled with Christmas ornaments. I picked up a kitschy figurine of a grinning, troll-like figure holding a spoon in each hand. He looked more like the Hamburglar than one of Santa’s helpers, crudely painted and with a price tag that suggested the ornament was made of sterling silver rather than plastic. I dropped it and picked up a bearded troll peeking through a doorway. A hand-lettered sign above the basket read JÓLASVEINAR! YULEBOYS! ICELANDIC SANTA CLAUS!

I stared at the leering troll: Door Slammer. The other one would be Spoon Licker. I dug through the basket and withdrew a troll gnawing a candle as though it were a turkey drumstick. I thought of Suri, her spine severed by a slammed door; Anton with a candle jammed into his eye socket. And Ilkka …

I searched until I found a figurine who wore a bowl on his head, like a hat.

“Shit,” I whispered.

“I know. They’re ridiculous.” Brynja watched me, her expression resigned. “Santa Claus has conquered Iceland.”

“You sell a lot of these?”

“I don’t sell a lot of anything anymore.”

“But these are popular?”

“Oh sure.” She looked away. “Too popular. Two hundred years ago they were a black story for a winter night. Now they are Santa Claus,” she said in disgust. “Everything that belonged to us has been destroyed so that someone else can get rich.”

“I hear you.” I turned the ornament over:
MADE IN CHINA.
“But you’re making money on this crap.”

“Once. Now there is barely any money. I don’t know what will happen to me. To all of us.”

I dropped the ornament into the basket. “What about your brother?”

“He’s young. He’ll move to someplace warm. That’s what all the young people are doing. We have different mothers; Baldur’s mother lives in Madrid. He’ll probably go there and start over.”

“As a record dealer?”

Brynja’s mouth grew tight. “He has a degree in engineering. If he hadn’t met Quinn, my brother would be far away by now.”

“What, did Quinn pull him from a blazing car wreck? Seems like Baldur could leave whenever he wants to. Maybe he likes working with Quinn. Maybe the money’s good.”

“The money is shit.”

She stood and walked to a counter holding a coffeemaker and several mugs. She poured herself a cup and stared at me, her eyes chips of smoky glass.

“Baldur got into trouble with drugs.” She sipped her coffee. “Not using them; selling them.”

“For Quinn?”

“And others. The police didn’t catch him, but … Quinn had to pay off some of my brother’s debts. Now Baldur does favors for him.”

I imagined what kind of favors Quinn might call in. “Does Baldur know a guy named Anton?”

Brynja said nothing. “From Oslo,” I went on. “Norwegian guy.”

“No,” she said. “I know people there. From a long time ago. Quinn does, too. But not Baldur.”

I was starting to wonder how it was that Brynja knew so much about a guy she hated. I casually examined an ID bracelet etched with runes. “Was that before you and Quinn hooked up?”

Silence; then a terse “Yes. A long time ago.”

Bingo. I waited for her to go on. After a moment she asked, somewhat warily, “He told you about us?”

“Not how you broke up.” I shrugged. “Forget it. He’s an asshole.”

“He is worse than an asshole.”

Brynja reached behind the coffeemaker and withdrew a bottle of Brennivín. She poured a slug into her coffee, handed me the bottle. I sloshed a few inches into a mug with a volcano motif. Brynja drank, poured herself another few inches of Brennivín, and fixed me with an icy stare.

“Him and his friends. They are evil men, all those Odinists.”

“What?”

“Odinists.” She looked at me suspiciously. “I thought you knew Anton.”

I downed the rest of my Brennivín. I knew Odin was a Norse god, but his details were fuzzy. “I never really hung out with Anton much. Or those other guys.” I hesitated, then added, “Just Ilkka.”

“Ilkka.” Her tone grew wistful. “I almost forgot about Ilkka. What happened to him, do you know? He disappeared after he stopped doing the magazine work.”

“I think he got married. And had kids. I saw him a little while back.”

“He was so smart. I never understood why he got involved with that scene.” She stared into her mug. “We were all young and stupid.”

Brynja didn’t look stupid now; just drunk. Me, I drink to remember. If the right music’s playing, if it’s dark enough and I’m loaded, I can sometimes catch a flicker of that 3:00
A.M.
feeling I used to live for. Brynja, though, was drinking to forget.

And it looked like she’d get lucky real soon, which meant I’d have a hard time getting anything useful out of her. I poured what remained of the Brennivín into my mug. She didn’t seem to notice. She began to straighten a stack of postcards, folded the
ROAD TO RUNE
sweatshirt, and walked to the next counter, where she paused in front of a display of black leather wristbands, ornamented with spikes and round silver bosses.

“Look at these.” Her voice slurred. “Baldur told me these would sell, but no one wants them. Kids from Oslo and Bergen maybe, but not Reykjavík.”

I walked over and picked up one of the wristbands. It was a nice piece of hardware, thick black leather, steel spikes sharp as thorns. Brynja took it from my hand and undid the clasp, put it around my wrist, and loosely fastened it.

“There.” She raised her hand with the pinkie and thumb extended—devil horns.

I made a fist. “This thing’s heavy.”

“Yes, for heavy metal.” She laughed too hard, steadying herself against the counter. I tightened the wristband a notch, then stopped.

Beside the clasp was an engraved silver disc. I turned to the window, squinting until I made out the design—a triskele formed of three skeletal, grasping hands.

“It cost extra to have them engraved,” said Brynja. “I had to order them special. I should make Baldur pay for them.”

I ran my finger over the silver boss. “What’s this mean, this design with the hands?”

“That is the Gripping Beast. It’s a very old symbol, from the Broa burial on Gotland in Sweden.” She picked up another wristband, spikes bristling. “A Viking symbol.”

I pointed at the sweatshirt she’d just folded. “Like the helmet.”

“Perhaps. Only these are more…” She paused. “Cultic.”

“Right.” I made the devil sign. It looked far more impressive with the wristband on. “You’d make a killing with these at Ozzfest.”

“No. I mean a true cult. A religion. We all used to wear them. It is a symbol of the past’s hold upon the present and the future. This in the middle…”

She touched the spectral face formed by the interlocking hands. “That is Death. Some say it is the face of Odin, who gained power over death by being slain and then reborn; but I do not believe that. Nothing is more powerful than Death. It reaches from the past to destroy us, yet no future world can exist without it. Every step you take is across a bridge that will end in that country. This design…”

She turned the wristband so its spines caught the pallid sunlight. “Now it is very common; you see variants in many places, just like all the spikes and leather. You can buy them online. But fifteen years ago, it was harder to find them. And we didn’t have much money; we had to make them ourselves, from old belts and nails. It was Anton’s idea. He wanted to sell them at Forsvar, his club, and then after Helvete closed, he was going to open his own black metal store. Even then, all Anton wanted was money.”

She dropped the wristband as though it were something foul and looked at me. “I threw mine into the ocean on the ferry crossing back from Kiel. You never had one?”

“No. Like I said, I didn’t hang out that much with them.” Whoever
them
was. I mustered an offhand tone. “And Ilkka wasn’t really into it.”

“Yes he was,” retorted Brynja. “In the beginning, he was the biggest one. He started everything, after he came to Norway: He was so in love with the idea of resurrecting an ancient religion, of making it all new. Creating new rituals, modern rituals … Ilkka was in love with it because it was not his own history as a Finn. The way Americans fall in love with another place or a lost part of their history. Do you understand?

“And he was so brilliant. The others were just boys—kids. I was only seventeen. I left home and followed a boy to Oslo. He was in a band, and I wanted to escape from Iceland. I was so stupid; all I cared about was Halmar. Did you know him? He was very cute then; he had long blond hair and was very sweet, trying to look tough. He’s fat now; you wouldn’t recognize him. He works in social services here in Reykjavík. But he broke my heart. That’s why I started seeing Quinn, to make him jealous.”

“Did it work?”

“No.” She laughed. “Quinn was too old. Everyone thought he was creepy—a cradle robber, because I was so young. But he always had coke, you know? Ecstasy, everything. He was a drug dealer; he’d been in prison. I thought that was so great. He was like a gangster. And we never had gangsters in Reykjavík. Or Oslo. Just a bunch of stupid boys burning down churches. They were all so angry, because they were so bored. They had more time to be bored afterward, in prison.”

She stared out the window. I handed her my mug, still half full; she nodded and drank as we watched the sun dip behind the Legoland rooftops. When she looked at me again, her eyes were red, as though she’d been trying to see an impossible distance.

“Quinn said you were an old friend from New York. Have you been in prison, too?”

“Not yet.”

Darkness overtook the room around us as another hour slowly passed, shadows roosting in corners and ceiling and pooling across the floor. I waited for Brynja to turn on a lamp, but she remained motionless beside me, the mug held tight to her breast. The last light leaked from the sky. A star glimmered into view and faded so quickly I wondered if I had imagined it. After a long time I spoke.

“Do you know a band called Viðar?” Brynja inhaled sharply. “That symbol,” I went on, “I’ve seen it before. On a record by them.”

“I told you, it’s not unusual. Maybe in America, but not in Scandinavia.”

She answered too quickly, set her empty mug on the counter, and turned to me, her face a dark blur, as though it were my own face half glimpsed in a mirror. “Who are you?”

“I told you. Quinn’s friend.”

“You didn’t tell me that. He did. You’re lying. You were not in Oslo then, or you would have known that the name is pronounced
Vithar,
not
Vidar
. Even a stupid American would have remembered that. You come from nowhere, but even Quinn is afraid of you. Tell me who you really are.”

She drew her head close to mine. I smelled raw alcohol on her breath, and a foul scent like an abscessed tooth.

“You’re crazy. Why would Quinn be scared of me?”

“I will tell you,” she whispered. “Because you carry the dead with you. On your skin—I can smell them.”

She dug her nails into my palm. “‘On all sides she gathers hordes of the dead, back bent to bear them homeward to Hell. Shield-maiden, skull-heavy.’ That is you.”

She really was crazy. I kicked her and she fell back, clutching her leg.

I grabbed my bag and ran to the door. The room erupted with light, a blaze that immediately subsided. Headlights. I peered out the window, hoping for Quinn’s Cherokee. Instead I saw a Volvo wagon. A stocky figure stepped around it and hurried toward the door. I yanked it open before he could knock.

“Takk.”
A balding man stepped into the room, gray faced and out of breath. He flicked a light switch, frowning when he saw Brynja doubled over.

“She flipped out,” I explained. “Who are you?”

“I’m Magnus—a friend of Baldur’s.” He looked more puzzled to see me than anything else. “Yes, she has fits sometimes. Mostly when she drinks. Is Baldur here?”

I shook my head. Brynja got to her feet and hobbled across the room. She shot me a hateful look before turning to Magnus. “I spoke to him this morning, he was going to make sure Svana got there to watch my stall. I had to do accounts.”

“Svana was there; I spoke to her,” said Magnus. “She said Baldur never showed up, and she was there very early. I had money for him, that’s why I was starting to worry. It’s not like him to forget about money.”

“What about Quinn?” I broke in.

Magnus shrugged. “No, he wasn’t there either. No one unpacked anything; their tables were empty. Baldur’s car was in the lot; it’s still there, with everything locked inside. I didn’t see Quinn’s Jeep, though. I keep calling Baldur, but he’s not answering his mobile.”