Available Dark: A Crime Novel (Cass Neary) (16 page)

“Quinn dropped me off this morning,” I said. “He told me he was going to the market. He was supposed to come back and get me by two. He said he’d call if he was late, but he never did.”

“He didn’t answer his cell phone, either.” Magnus opened the door to an adjoining room and peered in, as though he suspected someone of hiding there. “Huh.”

“I told you, he’s not here.” Brynja limped over and angrily shut the door. “Have you called Astridur?”

“Yes. She hadn’t heard from him either. She was upset because they were supposed to meet for lunch. He never showed up.” Magnus’s brow furrowed. “That’s just not like Baldur, especially with Astridur. You’re sure he didn’t call you?”

“No one called. No one has been here. Except for her.” Brynja glared at me. “Please take her with you when you go.”

“I can’t.” Magnus headed for the door. “I’m bringing the children to my mother’s for dinner. If you hear from Baldur, tell him to call me.”

“Hey!” I chased him outside. “I’m not staying here. She’s a fucking nutjob. And she’s tanked. I have to talk to Quinn. Take me with you, I’ll help you find him.”

“I can’t do that. I’m sorry.” Magnus hopped into the Volvo. “Make her drink some coffee. If Baldur shows up, tell him to call me.”

I shouted after him, but he just gunned the motor and drove off. It had started to snow, fine flakes that glowed crimson in the Volvo’s taillights. I stood in the cold and watched until it was out of sight, then returned inside.

18

Brynja was bowed over the sink with the water running. After a minute she turned the water off and looked at me, her face flushed and wet.

“I feel better now.” She picked up a Yuleboy dish towel and dried her face on it, then bent to inspect her leg. “You attacked me. I should call the police.”

“Be my guest. It was self-defense. Look, do you have any idea where Quinn could be? He said he’d be back by two and that was, what? Three hours ago?”

Brynja looked at me with contempt. “You think Quinn is reliable?”

“No, but…”

She walked back to a closet and removed her coat and several bags. “I’m going home.”

“So, what—I wait here? Can’t you even call him? Can I?”

“I should never have let you in here. You or Quinn. Here—” She thrust a cell phone at me angrily.

“Do you know his number?”

“I do not.”

“Neither do I. Forget it.”

She started to pull on her coat. “You can walk from here; maybe he will find you in the dark. I’m leaving.”

“Look,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound as desperate as I felt. “I was always jealous of you and Quinn, that’s all. I wanted to know what was going on with you guys back then, and he would never tell me. He asked me to come here to Reykjavík. Now I’m here and I find out you’re here, too. I didn’t know whether you guys were still involved.”

It sounded half plausible, even to me. But I could see by Brynja’s sour face that she wasn’t easily placated. I pointed at the volumes of New Age wackery, hoping to distract her. “So what was that before? Some kind of Icelandic curse?”

“A curse?” she sneered. “No. That is from the
Völuspá,
one of the Eddic poems. In Iceland we grow up reading them.”

I grew up reading
Hägar the Horrible,
but didn’t mention that.

“It’s the prophecy of the Völva,” Brynja went on. “A wisewoman—a seer. But all she sees is ruin and the end of things. Fimbulwinter. Ragnarök.”

She stopped and stared at me, brooding. “You see things, too. Terrible things. Dead things.”

My skin went cold, and I looked away. “A prophecy. Is that what the cult was based on? With your friends in Oslo?”

“Ilkka’s friends were all involved in a revival of the old Norse religions. The boys in the black metal scene came from the suburbs, nice families, but they hated all that. They hated many things, but most of all Christianity. They believed the priests had destroyed the heathen religion—the true religion for the people of the north. And of course that is true. So they loved anything anti-Christian. Some played at being Satanists, like Emperor and Fenriz. Now most of them see it is ridiculous. They have become adults.

“But some, once they outgrew the Devil, they became devoted heathens. In Iceland that tradition remains close to us through our literature. That’s what Ilkka studied at university. He was a Finn, but he was obsessed with the sagas, Norse folklore and archaeology and anthropology. He was in love with old things. Dead things, like the Danish bog people who were strangled and thrown into the mire a thousand years ago. He was obsessed with finding connections between all the old northern European beliefs; he thought they could be revived. And even though he was a Finn living in Norway, he believed that the purest form of these beliefs would be found in Iceland. Because we are so isolated. Our language is the closest to Old Norse. We practiced our pagan religion longer than in Europe. And Ásatrú, modern heathenism, began here in the 1970s.”

“Those churches that burned down—did Ilkka do that? Was that your friends?”

She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I don’t know. I was gone by then. All those black metal guys hanging out at the Elm Street Café? None of them ever laughed, except for Quinn. I finally couldn’t stand it, so I came back here. In Iceland, no one cares if you are anti-Christian. Live and let live. But in Norway and Sweden, more groups formed. Ásatrú, Odinism. They read the sagas and Eddas, like Christians read the Bible. They follow the old gods. Many of them practice in secret, but they are real.”

“What do you mean, ‘real’? This is, like, a religion inspired by ‘Immigrant Song.’” I gestured at the posters for elf tours, the piles of plastic trolls and rune stones. “I know you sell all this to tourists. But you can’t believe in this Viking stuff.”

Brynja scowled. “Americans—all you ever want to talk about is elves and Vikings. And Björk. You don’t even know what
Viking
means. They are only the men who went to sea, the raiders. The heathen religions are much older than that. It is in our blood, whether or not you believe in it. And it doesn’t matter what I believe. Christ is real for Christians, yes? And what is not real, some believers will try to make it real. There may be no Satan, but the people who burned those churches and murdered were doing his work all the same.

“Scandinavia is not like America, and Iceland is the safest place in the world. We still have few murders. But the Internet has changed everything. And immigration, and now the bank crash—people have become angry. But in those days, violence was like a drug we weren’t used to. People fell in love with it—with hatred and death, darkness. Because there is a beauty there, too, in the darkness. The northern sky—the total emptiness. You cannot imagine it. You stand on top of a glacier like Vatnajökull at midnight in the winter—you will see how your life is worth nothing, compared to that. And some people, they see that emptiness and need to fill it up with even greater darkness.”

“Is that what you wanted?”

“For a little while. Until I saw what was inside that darkness.”

I recalled what Suri had told me about Anton Bredahl.
He had a bouncer at that club, a really scary guy.… He was with his girlfriend one night, and she was carrying a bag, and there was a head in it
.

“What did Quinn do when he was in Oslo?” Brynja didn’t reply. “When you met him—did he have a job?”

“He worked at Forsvar,” she said at last. “Anton’s club. He was the bouncer there.”

“What do you mean?” I grabbed her but she shook me off. “What do you mean, he—”

She walked to the register to retrieve her coat. “I’m going to Baldur’s. We’ll see if Quinn is there. You can ask him all these questions. Ask him about Jens Ramstad. And Ellisabet Anders, and all the other ‘work’ he did for Anton. Ask him why he cannot leave Iceland.”

“But—”

“I need you to go now.”

In the Opel, Brynja refused to speak; she just stared straight ahead as we drove across town. I clutched my bag and tried to stay calm, tugging at my sleeve: The wristband’s spikes had torn the jacket’s lining. I fought the urge to grab the wheel and drive blindly away from here, to—

Where? Toy city that it was, Reykjavík was unreadable to me. The grid of crosshatched streets seemed at once small yet infinitely complex, like a computer chip. Those distant, ominous mountains faded in and out of view as though some giant hand continually adjusted a vast gray monitor. I’d always assumed agoraphobics simply felt unnaturally attached to their cramped rooms, but now I realized what it must be like to sense the sky waiting outside the door, ready to crush you like a monstrous fist.

Fine snow flowed like smoke around the steady traffic. I couldn’t see much besides the ghostly lights of apartment buildings. Black-clad figures straggled along the sidewalk, heads bowed as though the approaching headlights would burn them. My head thrummed from the Brennivín. The Focalin buzz had long faded, replaced by dread that burned into my veins like quicklime and the same atavistic horror that fueled my night terrors.

But I was awake now. The poison inside me came from the world outside: people who wouldn’t meet my eyes; withered trees; that cancerous, enveloping darkness. I fumbled in my bag for a bottle that wasn’t there; fought a wave of nausea I knew was the precursor to blacking out. I cracked my window to let in a rush of cold air and forced myself to breathe deeply. Then I pushed up my sleeves and jabbed the spiked wristband against the inside of my arm until my eyes watered and I dropped my hand with a gasp.

“Close the window,” said Brynja. She reached to turn up the heat. “We’ll be there soon.”

The traffic had slowed; a line of crimson taillights crept ahead of us. It wasn’t snowing that hard; I would have thought that drivers here wouldn’t be put off by the weather. Brynja muttered to herself, then turned on the radio to a news station.

After a few minutes the bottleneck eased and we could see what had caused the slowdown. Several vehicles had pulled to the side of the road, including a police car. Two cops stood in the snow, talking to a small group of people.

Brynja frowned. The Opel slowed almost to a halt; the car behind us honked. Brynja tapped the accelerator and drove another fifty feet before turning down a road that led to a small apartment complex. A single streetlamp threw sulfur-colored light across drifted snow and a row of parked vehicles. Brynja’s mouth tightened as a police cruiser raced down the drive past us.

People were clustered beneath the apartment’s concrete awning, faces glowing blue as they held up cell phones to take pictures. Brynja slammed on the brakes. The Opel came to a stop. She jumped out and ran to where the cruiser had parked, its high beams spotlighting the ground beneath a straggly evergreen. I leaned over to turn off the engine, pocketed the keys, and followed her. A moment later she began to scream.

19

I started after Brynja, thought better of it, and instead walked up the embankment that led back to the main road, where I had a better view of the parking lot. A figure sprawled beneath the evergreen, his hair a blaze of silver in the cruiser’s headlights. A shadow seemed to obscure his face. Then I realized that
was
his face, collapsed like a rotting jack-o’-lantern. I quickly retraced my steps.

More cruisers pulled into the lot. Brynja’s screams were swallowed by the blast of a police bullhorn. A cop restrained her as she fought to get to Baldur’s corpse; she pummeled the cop, and a policewoman hurried to pull her away. Lights appeared in apartment windows, and more people began to emerge from the building’s back door. Several cars had pulled onto the side of the main road to rubberneck. A tall man stood beside an older Range Rover, staring at the scene below, the collar of his overcoat turned up against the snow and something cradled against his chest. He seemed to be breathing heavily. When he turned to get into his vehicle, I saw it was the guy who’d chased me—Einar Broddursson.

I glanced back but couldn’t find Brynja in the crowd of cops and onlookers. I hurried to the Opel, started it, and drove back up to the main road. An ambulance wailed past, racing toward the apartment complex, and another police car.

In all the confusion, no one stopped me or the Range Rover a few car-lengths ahead. I remembered that repeated refrain: There are few murders in Iceland. I could only assume that nobody on the Reykjavík police force wanted to miss this one.

Traffic moved slow and tight, which made it easier to keep track of Einar. Sleet crackled like sugar glass beneath the Opel’s studded tires; more than once the car began to slide. I don’t spend a lot of time behind the wheel, and stealing a car belonging to someone whose brother had just been murdered probably wasn’t the best way to ease myself back into crosstown traffic, especially on ice-covered roads in a place where the sun only shines for fifteen minutes a day.

Not to mention the onset of alcohol- and light-deprived psychosis that made me feel as though ants were tunneling into my skull. I knew the signs and I knew the cure. When the going gets tough, the tough get fucked up. I kept hold of the wheel with one hand and dug inside the slit in my jacket until I found the Baggie I’d hidden back in New York.

The Range Rover was a block ahead of me. We were somewhere near the water. From the corner of my eye I saw black sky unrolling above thickets of steel masts. There were fewer cars here, so when the Range Rover slowed, I did the same, letting a truck pull between us in case Einar had noticed me tailing him. I cupped the little glassine envelope in my palm, opened it, and tipped a tiny blast onto the back of my hand; snorted it, then shoved the envelope into my jeans pocket. By now the Opel had drifted into the other lane. I yanked the wheel and hit the wipers, smearing slush and grit across the windshield until I picked out the Range Rover’s taillights through the sleet.

The crystal engulfed my brain like sunrise over an ice floe. Phil was right: This was the stuff. My exhaustion vanished; my eyes could pierce the dark like lasers. The first rush of crank is like a miracle from God: You can’t believe you can feel this great and still be alive. Of course, a lot of times you’re not alive for very long. You have to pace yourself, which is hard to remember when your neurons are moving so fast you can see them dancing in front of your eyes. The trick is to have a goal, something to think about besides doing another line. The difficulty is finding a potentially useful goal. I once spent two days playing Crazy Eights with a bassist and another twelve hours fucking him. Neither of us ever got off, and we might still be doing it if the lead singer hadn’t broken the door down and sucker punched his bandmate.