Available Dark: A Crime Novel (Cass Neary) (9 page)

Inside, a worn modular sofa was pushed against one wall, its cushions faded to the same dingy gray as the cement exterior. There were stacks of tourist brochures on a battered coffee table, an empty beer bottle, and one wool glove. Everything reeked of disinfectant and cigarette smoke.

“Halló, gott kvöld.”

I turned to see a middle-aged man behind a small counter. “Yeah, I’m looking for a room.”

“Okay.” He set a clipboard on the counter and pointed at a rate sheet in English. “Just one night?”

“For now, anyway.” I pulled a few bills from my wallet. “Euros okay?”

He nodded, handed me a key, and pointed to a stairwell. Upstairs, I found my room, tossed my jacket and boots on the floor, and fell into bed.

I awoke to the sound of a truck idling outside. I checked the time on the bedside clock. A bit after ten, but was that morning or night?

I stood, head pounding, staggered to the bathroom, and forced myself to drink several glasses of sulfurous water, which made me throw up. I felt slightly better after I took a scalding shower that stank of rotten eggs. Then I dressed and went downstairs. The same man was behind the counter, hunched in front of a laptop.

“It’s supposed to snow, maybe,” he said without looking up.

“There a place where I can get coffee and something to eat?”

He pointed at the door, flicked his hand to the right. “That way. Laugavegur.” I traded him some euros for krónur and stepped outside.

The street acted like a wind tunnel for the gale blowing from the harbor. I’d forgotten my watch cap, so did my best to cover my ears and face with my scarf as I hurried uphill. I’d gone only a few steps when a piercing cry rang out behind me. I looked back.

Whirling white shapes filled the black sky above the harbor: a cyclone of seagulls and wild geese, thousands of them rising and falling as though trapped inside a huge snow globe. I watched, mesmerized, until the cold got too much for me, then turned and trudged up the street.

There seemed to be more birds than people in this place. I didn’t see another person. No dogs or cats, either, and not a lot in the way of vegetation, besides some shrubs and depressed-looking birch trees. Apart from the cries of seabirds, the city felt muffled. I started at the sound of horses’ hooves, then saw it was an SUV, its studded tires ringing against the cobblestones.

And the air had no smell. No exhaust. No smoke. No dog shit or rancid grease from fast-food joints, none of the city reek and fume you absorb without knowing.

But also no green smells, trees or grass or wet earth. I couldn’t even smell the ocean, close as it was. The city was a kind of sensory tabula rasa.

I reached Laugavegur, a deserted street lined with shops that offered some protection from the wind. Spindly evergreens were strung with forlorn fairy lights. The blocky buildings looked like cheap toys, their colors slightly off—sallow green, brownish red, baby-shit yellow. I passed a shuttered tattoo parlor, a vacant art gallery, a bar. Dust-covered vitrines filled an abandoned jewelry store. The evergreens turned out to be lampposts, the fairy lights arranged to mimic the shape of Christmas trees. In a darkened boutique, bald mannequins wore artfully distressed clothing. I squinted to read the sale price on a tattered T-shirt.

ÜTSALA 400,000 KR. What a fucking deal.

Nobody was buying. Block after block, SALE and FOR RENT signs flapped in the wind. ÜTSALA! TIL LEIGA. A string of Christmas lights formed a noose around a plastic Viking doll. Shattered glass glittered on the sidewalk, broken beer bottles, broken headlights. It was like a scene from a disaster movie, a city everyone had fled after the plague struck.

After a few minutes I reached a stretch that seemed relatively prosperous, with clubs plastered with gig posters, several jewelers, and a few shops catering to tourists, their windows filled with Lopi sweaters, toy puffins, reindeer-hide mittens. A pizza joint, only open for dinner. Across the street, a metal sidewalk sign rattled in front of a dingy corner diner. A sudden gust sent the sign flying. I dodged it and hurried inside.

The room smelled reassuringly of coffee and fried fish. A few people huddled at the counter; others sat at scuffed tables beside the windows. I found an empty table in the back, a chair repaired with electrical tape. A platinum-haired girl wearing a sweater knit from what looked like green yak fur came over and handed me a menu.

“You got one in English?” I asked.

“Yeah, sure.” She flipped it over. I ordered fried eggs and sausages and coffee, for about what my flight over here had cost. A shot of bourbon would have covered the return ticket, so I decided to hold off for the nonce.

The breakfast reminded me of that line from
Quadrophenia
about fried eggs making you sick first thing in the morning. Still, the coffee was good.

“Nice sweater,” I said when the waitress returned to clear the table.

She stuck the bill under my coffee mug. “My boyfriend gave it to me.”

I wondered if her boyfriend had bought it from Bigfoot. I dropped some cash on top of the check. “I’m supposed to meet a friend here, but he hasn’t shown up. An American.”

“What’s he look like?”

I frowned. What
did
he look like? “About my age,” I said at last. “Guy named Quinn O’Boyle.”

The girl surveyed the room. “I don’t think so. Only a few people have been in here.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.” She tilted her chin toward the counter. “Want me to ask?”

“That’d be great. Quinn O’Boyle.”

She went behind the counter and stuck her head into a pass-through piled with dirty plates, yelled at someone, then turned to wave me over. “Ask Andrés; he’s here more than I am.”

A burly man strode from the kitchen. Grizzled reddish hair topped by a black ski cap, beard flecked with cigarette ash, face weathered to the color of raw meat by sun and wind. His stained apron featured a picture of Jamie Oliver embellished with horns and a Hitler mustache.

“Yeah?” He smelled strongly of fish.

“I’m looking for a guy named Quinn O’Boyle. I was supposed to meet him a little while ago, and…” I shrugged.

“O’Boyle?”

I nodded. Andrés stared at me, his expression impossible to read. After a moment he looked over his shoulder and shouted into the kitchen, then cocked a thumb toward a dim staircase. “Come on.”

Upstairs was a bigger dining room with grimy windows overlooking the street. Andrés kicked open a door behind a karaoke deck and stepped out onto a fire escape. He propped the door with a chair and dug into his apron pocket for a pack of cigarettes. “Can’t even fucking smoke inside a fucking bar anymore.”

He held the pack out to me. I shook my head and he lit up, leaned against a precarious railing, and stared down into a driveway crammed with trash bins and empty liquor cartons.

“Fucking nanny state. You American? Americans all think they’re going to live forever. You’re fucking going to die of something.” He exhaled and turned his back to the wind. “I know Quinn the Eskimo. The Mighty Quinn.”

“Is he American?”

“Canadian, I think. Maybe American.” His breath mingled with the smoke. “Are you his sister?”

“Not if he’s Canadian. Or an Eskimo.” I tried to find a place out of the wind, gave up, and leaned against the door.

“You look like him.” Andrés tossed his cigarette and reached into his apron pocket. He withdrew his hand and opened it to display a mass of something white and glistening. I caught a whiff of putrefying fish as he tossed the lump into the air. A brilliant white gull dove to snatch the fish and soared off before I could draw a breath.

“Arctic tern—it should have migrated months ago. Hungry little bastard,” said Andrés. “They’ll attack if you go near their nests.” He stared admiringly into the empty sky.

“In Helsinki I saw a talking raven.”

“I have never seen that.” Andrés lit another cigarette. “But the Finns—they’re sorcerers. In the old days, that’s what they said. The Finns are sorcerers, like we are Vikings. The men, anyway.” He pinched the match out between his fingers. “Old women are witches. And some young ones I know, too.” He laughed.

“Like Valkyries?”

“Sure. Valkyries talk to ravens, too. In the sagas. ‘We sisters weave our cloth with the entrails of men, their severed heads: corpse carriers, our bounty chosen from the bodies of the slain.’”

He turned, and a spill of light struck one side of his face. Shadows sheared away the rest, save for a scatter of what looked like glitter across his cheek. His cell phone rang, and he stepped away to answer it. When he returned, I saw that the glitter on his face was fish scales.

“Back to work. I haven’t seen Quinn in a while. He moves around, but usually he comes into the bar. He used to be at Sirkus every night, before the motherfuckers tore it down.”

“Is there someplace else he hangs out?”

“Yeah. Every bar in Reykjavík.” He stepped toward the door. “Viva Las Vegas—he’s there a lot.”

I followed him downstairs. Andrés headed for the kitchen and stopped. “What’s your name? In case I see him?”

“Just say an old friend.”

“How good a friend?” I didn’t reply. Andrés stared at me, then lowered his voice. “You should be careful. It’s a small place, Reykjavík. Easy to find someone here. But outside the city, it’s easy to get lost for a long time.”

I nodded, pulled up the collar of my leather jacket, and stepped back into the cold.

11

Viva Las Vegas was an overheated casino bar where the morning gamblers clutched slot machines so avidly it looked like they were having sex with them, an impression bolstered by the groans that erupted every time someone won or lost big. I angled between people waiting for a turn at the slots. Judging from their grim faces and sunken eyes, most of them had been there for a while—years, maybe. I wondered how many people died at the machines and whether they just tossed the bodies into a cold back room and waited till spring to bury them.

I scanned the room for someone who resembled Quinn. I tried running a fast-forward, time-lapse loop in my head. The pale-skinned boy who used to sprawl across his mattress and stare at me with hostile eyes: I could no more imagine that boy than I could imagine my seventeen-year-old self inside the gaunt, scarred creature I’d become.

I gave up and grabbed a seat at the bar. A plasma TV played a music video with the sound turned off, a singer in a dolphin mask backed by blue-faced people in space suits. The bartender sang along in Icelandic.

I ordered a beer and got something called Gull. The whole fucking country was like
The Birds,
if the birds had won. I drank and thought about what Andrés had said: a guy named Quinn, Canadian or maybe American; a guy who looked like me.

It had to be him. Quinn and I used to lie in bed with our hands pressed together, then our arms; chest to breast, groin to groin, aligning ourselves as though we stared into a mirror. His hair red, mine tawny, his eyes fern green and mine gray ice. I flagged down the bartender.

“Another beer?”

“In a minute. A friend’s supposed to meet me, a guy named Quinn. Is he around?”

“Not all week.” The bartender was short, with hennaed hair and a sunburst tattooed on her wrist. “Dagny’s over there, you could ask her.”

She tipped her head toward a very tall woman bent over a slot machine, white-blond braids framing her angular face. She wore a tight red T-shirt and expensive jeans tucked into fur-trimmed boots. Icelandic Casino Barbie. I left some money on the bar and walked over.

“Dagny.”

The woman stared at the icons flickering across the screen as though they measured her vital signs. She cursed and fed more money into the machine without glancing at me.

“I’m looking for Quinn. Is he around?”

“
Farðu i rassgat.
Go fuck yourself.”

I kicked the slot machine. It flickered then flashed
TRY AGAIN
. The blond woman whirled, fist raised to strike. I grabbed her wrist and wrenched her toward me. “I’m looking for Quinn. Is he around? Simple question.”

She pulled away, nearly yanking my arm from its socket, and I let go. She straightened and looked at me dead-on, her face a rictus of fury.

I returned her glare but took a step back. I wasn’t used to meeting women eye to eye. She was older than I first thought but still younger than me, her face seamed with lines, none of them produced by smiling.

“Who the fuck are you?” she spat.

“An old friend.”

She stared at me, then laughed harshly. “Then I can ask you the same thing: Where’s Quinn? Stupid fucking question.” She stooped to pick up a lipstick-red handbag. “I don’t know. He owes me fifty thousand krónur. He sold some stuff for me and now he’s holding out.…”

Instinctively I looked at her arm. Telltale reddened pockmarks, like fleabites, and an abscess near the crook of her elbow. She caught my glance and bared her teeth in disdain.

“Fuck you. I gave him a bunch of old vinyl; he sells it on eBay. If you find him, tell him he still owes me fifty thousand krónur.”

“Where could I find him?”

She pushed a blond strand from her face. “Kolaportið maybe. I checked the last two weeks, but he wasn’t there. And I’m leaving for Uppsala this afternoon, so…” She shook her head. “I’ll find him when I get back. Asshole.”

“Where’s Kolaportið?”

She leaned forward and gave me a shove that sent me reeling, turned, and stalked off. When I caught my balance, she was gone.

I made my way back to the bar and ordered another Gull. The silent flat-screen had switched from Cetacean MTV to BBC World. The bartender poured herself a mug of coffee, yawning.

“What’s Kolaportið?” I asked her.

“Kolaportið? That’s the indoor flea market down by the harbor. It used to be the coal warehouse. Big building.”

“Is it far from here?”

“Nothing is far in Reykjavík. Just walk toward the harbor, that way.” She gestured vaguely at the wall. “But it’s not open today. Only weekends. Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday?”

I drank my beer. I felt trapped in some bizarre time loop where the clock had stopped and the sky never turned to dawn. The background noise was nothing but electronic
ching
s, the nonsense susurrus of a language I didn’t understand, or want to. Even the oldest burnouts here were younger than me. I was wasting my time along with the remaining stash of money Anton had sent me. I had a valid passport and some ready cash: I could have gotten a flight to Greece or Ibiza. Instead I was holed up near the Arctic Circle in the Casino of the Living Dead.