Available Dark: A Crime Novel (Cass Neary) (21 page)

“What’s that smoke?”

“That’s the hot springs.” Pétur wore only an Icelandic sweater and jeans and Converse low-tops but seemed impervious to the cold. “It looks farther away than it is. Like the glacier looks closer than it is. In Iceland, everything is an illusion.”

He laughed. Like half of Iceland’s population, he could have been a model, clean-shaven with long, stringy black hair and azure eyes. I thought of the single mattress inside the hut. I wouldn’t kick this kid out of bed, either.

“Do you live here?”

Pétur spat at the frozen ground. “Not in winter. It is possible, barely, to get here with a good truck, so I visit. I’m at university in Reykjavík, but we’re on Christmas vacation now. By the old calendar, this is midwinter night, Jöl, and Galdur wanted me to be here. I come every month or so to make sure he’s still alive, also to play music. He’s one of the greatest guitarists in the world, you know that, right?”

“Sure.”

“That’s why he gets so angry: Sometimes people try to find him, you know? Like a pilgrimage. But that’s in the summer. I’m here then, so I send them away. ‘What, you’re looking for Galdur? You must be crazy! No one could live in this place. Go back and look in Reykjavík. Or Oslo.’”

He laughed again, then cocked his head. “But yeah, you know, it’s bad fucked that you’re here. He really doesn’t like it. A few years ago a guy showed up, he wrote for
Terrorizer
magazine? Galdur beat him so bad he had to be taken out by rescue helicopter.”

“Jesus. Did he go to jail?”

“No, he said it was self-defense. Because the guy came inside to wait while no one was here, and when Galdur came home he found him in the living room. With, you know, a camera and digital recorder—very dangerous weapons! He was unconscious when they took him out. Don’t feel too bad; he wrote a good story out of it, even though Galdur destroyed his equipment.” Pétur tossed his cigarette, a spark against the gray sky. “He had trouble with the law before, in Norway, but here in Iceland, I think they would rather not have to be responsible for him.”

“Yeah, I heard about that shit in Oslo.” I hesitated. “Do you know a guy named Quinn? American, about my age?”

Pétur shook his head. “No, sorry.”

“He has a table at the flea market; he sells old records.”

“Oh, yeah.” Pétur brightened. “Yeah, sure—he works with the albino, right?”

“Yeah, that’s him. Does he ever come out here?”

“No. I tell you, no one comes here. And Galdur, mostly he stays away from all the old music scene. He goes into Reykjavík a few times a year, to get supplies. He records music here—mostly ambient stuff he does on his laptop. We met at the upstairs room at Sirkus a few years ago. A great bar, but they closed it.” He grimaced and spat again. “Fucking bastards. I went there a lot. I heard Galdur sometimes went, too, because no one bothered him, especially after that
Terrorizer
guy got pounded. I could not believe it when I was there one night, and I looked over, and he was drinking a glass of wine. I had a few beers so I wasn’t afraid. My friends thought I was crazy, but I went over and talked to him for a long time. That was how we met. The thing no one understands about Galdur—he wants them to believe he is, you know, the man of stone and ice. Nothing touches him, he is above the world, he is god of all he can see. It’s that mathematician brain: Everything can be explained by cold logic. Maybe some things, but not everything. Not me.”

He grinned, and I huddled into my jacket, shivering. “If he’s so logical, why’d he flip out about the raven?”

“That’s what I mean. Probably it was because of the Odin thing. Ravens are sacred to Odin, and Galdur’s very spiritual; he is a follower of Ásatrú. Then he sees your eye, and of course Odin has only one eye. At first we think you are a man, but you are a woman, and Odin too dressed as a woman and practiced women’s magic.

“So when you show up at the door in the middle of the night and say that a raven brought you—well, Galdur will be very agitated. You know what else is weird? I only got here yesterday, too. I might have seen you hitchhiking, right?” He laughed. “A real traffic jam at Lindvidi.”

“What’s that?”

“The name of Galdur’s house. It means ‘wide land.’ In the sagas, Lindvidi is where Viðar lives—he is the god of silence and vengeance—so of course it’s where Galdur lives.” He turned to kick at the Quonset hut’s wall. “He brought this out from the Keflavik airbase a long time ago, before it closed. It’s sweet, huh?”

“Yeah. Silence and revenge, huh? I just thought it was a good name for a band.”

“It’s a great name. Viðar is more famous now than when Galdur started it. The only band Ihsahn said was as good as Emperor. Some people say better. That guy from
Terrorizer,
when he wrote his story he said that the greatest true Norwegian black metal artist is not Norwegian, but Icelandic.”

“I like their stuff.” I looked past him, to the wall of steam erupting from the horizon. “That song on their first album, where you can hear voices in the background.”

“That would be their only album. That’s the song most people know, but there’s some bootlegged stuff; it’s fucking great. They must have kicked ass live. I wish I could have seen them, but I was, like, five. But that song—every time I talked to Galdur about it, he just says Blot is holy and we don’t talk of these things.”

“‘Bloat’? ”

“
Blot
means ‘sacrifice.’ An old Norse word. In Ásatrú, it means the midwinter feast and ritual. Once upon a time, something else.”

But definitely not a prog-rock band.

“I have to get something out of my car,” Pétur announced. He headed toward the back of the Quonset hut. I caught up with him as he opened the door of a badly dented SUV and pulled out a large cooler. “I bring my own supplies. Galdur can live on wine and salted fish, but not me. Grab that six-pack, will you?”

He set the cooler down in the snow outside the front door, retrieved a plastic quart container and a paper bag, and took the six-pack from me. “I’m ready for breakfast. Are you doing okay?”

I shrugged. “I could be worse.”

He looked at the raw landscape around us, the snow glowing blue and gold as the sun edged above the horizon, and turned back to me. “How the hell
did
you get here?”

“Good drugs,” I said as we went back in.

I was relieved to see no sign of Galdur inside. The bedroom door remained shut. I drew a chair up to the table while Pétur made coffee and put out bowls and plates.

“Skyr.” He set the plastic container in front of me. “Icelandic yogurt.”

It tasted more like sour cream, but I wasn’t going to argue. He’d brought some pastries, too, and bread and cheese and some kind of salami. It was the best food I’d had since leaving New York. Almost the only food. The coffee was decent, too.

“What day is this?” I asked.

“Monday. Why?” Pétur laughed. “You have to be somewhere? Good luck.”

“No. It’s just hard to tell; it’s always so dark. And these windows don’t help.” I pointed at the small panes near the front door, all choked with snow.

“Yeah. I tell him, you’d get more light in an igloo. He doesn’t care. There’s never anyone else here to complain, except me.”

“Doesn’t his brother ever come?”

“What, Einar? He’s not welcome here. Galdur hates him. Everyone hates him. Einar came visiting in October, right after the crash. He needed money and he had a crazy idea that Galdur would help him. He wanted Galdur to release the Viðar album with some new tracks. When Galdur said no, Einar argued with him about doing a concert—you know, a special gig at the Iceland Airwaves festival. They would make a lot of money, and Einar would record the live show and release it on DVD, then he’d make even more money. I thought Galdur would kill him.”

“You were here?”

“No. But from the way Galdur talked about it afterward … he went berserk. So I would not mention Einar’s name to him. I wouldn’t mention Einar to anyone. He’s one of the motherfuckers who screwed this whole country.” Pétur’s face grew red. “He and Galdur, they fell out a long time ago. I don’t know what happened. But if you know Einar, you’ll have a good idea: He’s a fucking arrogant asshole. He’s one of the
útrás
. What we call ‘outvasion’ Vikings, the bankers who stole everyone’s money and used it to buy English football teams and Porsches and build themselves mansions. Everyone in Iceland hates them. You can tell their houses because people throw red paint on the walls. Four years ago we were one of the richest countries in the world. Now it’s horrible: We have lost everything. My mother took investment advice from Einar, and she lost her home. Not Galdur—Galdur wouldn’t give him one krónur. But some people trusted Einar because, you know, he is a fucking banker and he studied in America.”

He laughed bitterly. “They fucked us, and now we are supposed to pay off their gambling debts? Do you know what it would cost to do that? Fifty thousand dollars for every person in Iceland. Einar had a house in Greece, a big new mansion here. His wife went to New York for a boob job, and so did his daughter. Now the house is repossessed, and the place in Greece—who knows? And he owes money to some people in the Russian mafia. So no, Einar is not welcome here.”

He gathered the plates and stacked them in a plastic tub. I finished my coffee and tried to square Pétur’s account of Einar with Quinn’s, and both of those with the aging black metal fan in a Dolce&Gabbana suit, squatting with his wife and daughter in an abandoned construction site. The hardest part was imagining Galdur and Einar as brothers. The two looked alike, but the resemblance seemed to end there, except for their gift with numbers and the ability to scale down their domestic needs to kerosene and alcohol.

Also, the inexplicable fact that they shared a love for tremolo guitar and blast-beat drumming. Maybe there was something in Reykjavík’s sulfurous water supply that contributed to seasonal affective disorder on a mass scale, but the predisposition toward musical anhedonia still didn’t seem to have caught on here the way it had back in Norway.

It all made me miss the sunny optimism of The Smiths.

I stood and paced the room warily, trying not to make any noise that might disturb Galdur. I thought of Quinn, and for the first time in decades, maybe, felt on the verge of tears. I should have forced him to take me with him Sunday morning. I wouldn’t be trapped here, in the middle of an ice desert. Or I’d have talked him out of meeting Baldur; we’d have found a bar and gotten shit-faced and fallen back into bed, or boarded a plane for someplace warm. Baldur would be dead, but we’d be gone to ground in Greece or Turkey or the Costa del Sol. We’d throw the dice and begin again.

I knew that all of these scenarios were impossible. Quinn was wrong: I could see into the future, but all I ever saw was my own dead gaze staring back. I glanced at Pétur, sweet-faced, spooning Skyr from the container as he leaned against the sink. It was difficult to think of him shacking up with a serial killer; almost as tough to imagine as him shacking up with a legendarily brutal musician who’d beaten a man to death with a guitar.

The Quonset hut had only one door: If I fled, I’d die in the wilderness. My only hope would be to steal the key to one of the vehicles—Pétur’s, preferably—let the air out of the Econoline’s tires, and hightail it across the desert. It was a stupid idea, but less stupid than dying. I looked for something that might be Pétur’s—a coat or backpack—someplace he might stow a spare key. I saw nothing except for my own jacket slung across the sofa. I’d wait till Pétur stepped out for another cigarette, then do a more thorough search.

I distracted myself by perusing Galdur’s books, which were impressive for a rock musician. He had hundreds of volumes, in English and Icelandic—abstruse works on applied mathematics, astronomy, navigation; archaeological monographs; tomes on excavations of Viking sites in Norway and Great Britain; Icelandic folklore and the sagas. Unlike Brynja’s New Age bunk, these were nearly all from university presses, or scholarly texts published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I pulled out a book on human sacrifice in northern Europe. The dust-jacket photo reminded me of the one in Ilkka’s living room. A bog burial, different photo, same body, with its flaxen hair and broken spear in the crook of one leathery arm. The Windeby Boy. There were more photos inside: bog bodies with mutilated faces and decapitated heads; skeletons sitting cross-legged, minus their skulls; skulls that had been impaled on metal pikes then buried. Their gaping lower jaws made them appear to be screaming.

But the faces on the bog bodies seemed weirdly peaceful, even those who still bore nooses around their necks or whose throats had been severed to expose blackened vertebrae. They reminded me of Ilkka’s Jólasveinar photographs; their subjects human, but their deaths so far beyond imagining that the images possessed the abstract purity of a funerary stela or ancient paleoglyph.

I replaced the book and stepped over to the indoor cairn. It didn’t seem any more out of place than the electric guitars or drum kit in this weird little world. A carved wooden disk sat atop rocks chosen for their symmetry: black lava, bluish granite, round stones that looked like oversize, freckled eggs. The wooden disk reminded me of the antique
askur
with its gruesome souvenir: It had the same motif of the gripping beast. A few artifacts were carefully arranged on it, along with a cell phone. An iron blade, dimpled with rust, its edge gnawed by the centuries; a bronze band that looked as though it had broken off from something bigger, like a sword or helmet. I picked up another object, too small to be a weapon, the width of my hand and also made of iron, with a pair of tiny tongs at one end and a narrow blade at the other—an ancient surgical tool, maybe, like a scalpel. Heavy for its size, it would have demanded a steady grip and steadier eye.

“That’s mine, sorry.” Pétur crouched beside me, picked up the cell phone, and flipped it open. “That’s the only place I never lose it. You asked what day it is, and I thought I better check. Yes, it’s Monday. It doesn’t work here; some places in the highlands you can get reception, but not here.” He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I think Galdur blocks it with his mighty brain.”