Black Ice (17 page)

'Hey,'  I  said,   breaking   off  mid-swallow   as  I  suddenly 'remembered' something. 'One of your  tips  came  up  nicely, Ivan.'

'Did it?' he replied,  listlessly.

'Yes. Oscar  Murphy.'

'Oscar Murphy.' He ran  his thin fingers around his mouth and  began to pull himself up from his slouched  position.

'You remember. Our  first day here, I think. You said  you'd picked his name  up at the embassy.'

'Oh, yes, I remember.' He looked relieved. He didn't know what  was coming  next.  For all he knew he was in for a nasty shock. He was.

'I've got an appointment with him tomorrow.'

Then  he did drag  himself up and  he couldn't keep the amazement out  of his face. 'Oscar Murphy? You're meeting him? That can't  ... I mean, are you sure, is it the same  man? I'm  sure there's some kind of mix-up.'

'Why?'  I  almost  hated  myself for doing  that.  He  was  in enough  trouble as it was. But it was Ivan who'd fed me the two names  in the first place,  both  the Russian  and  the American, and  it was only fair I should  bounce one of them back at him.

He cast  about  for an answer. 'I had  the impression  that  he was ... abroad somewhere.'

'Not  at  all,'  I went  on,  breezily.  'Chap up at  the base has fixed it all for me. I'm  seeing  him at ten tomorrow.'

'Where?' he asked,  too quickly. Then  he added  lamely: 'You don't want  to have to bother  going all the way out to Keflavik again, do you?'

'No,  they're bringing him down here. That's one thing about the Yanks,  their  PR is terrific. So I see him here and let's hope he can give us a lead on Solrun.'

What he should've done  was to ask if the mysterious Oscar Murphy knew Solrun, because as far as Ivan was concerned, he didn't. But  he was tired and  he was missing a few, and  he let that  one go.

He  sat   back  again   and   rested  his  head  on  the  cushion. Wearily  he closed  his eyes. I felt sorry for him.

'This wretched   business,' he  murmured. 'Do  your  bosses ever  make you do things  you find distasteful?'

'Only every day.'

'Like what?' Above his closed and hooded eyes, his brows furrowed  into a frown.

'Like getting out of bed. Picking up the telephone. Talking to their  readers. All pretty  grisly,  I can  tell you.'

After  a  short  silence,  still  with  his eyes closed,  he asked:

'Have you found  anything for the wondrous Sally yet?'

'I thought maybe  something in sealskin.' I didn't dare  tell him about Bell's gift of the stuffed puffin.

'How  ghastly.' His eyes half-opened. 'I won't  have that,  I'm afraid. Not the skins of those dear little creatures. Why don't we look at some of the knitwear  here? It's  gorgeous.'

'Then we'll  run  into the save-the-sheep mob.'

As I walked through the door at Hulda's the phone was ringing. It was Jack Vale.

'What a busy little bee you are to be sure,' he said. 'This is the third  time  I've  tried  you.'

'How'd it go?'

'I managed   to run  him down  all right.  He's  your  man,  no doubt about  that, Sam.  Hang on while I check my notes. Here we are ... ready? It's Corporal Oscar Murphy and he was with the jar-heads.'

'Jaw-heads?'

'Jar-heads. Marines. They are known by this fine example of muscular American  English  because  their caps fit so tightly on to their  cropped  heads  that  they look as though  they've  been screwed  on.'

'Can  we have the rest in English  English  please?'

'And  who better  than  a Scot  to answer  that  plea ... yes, of course.  On   his  first  tour   of  three-to-four  years   he  was  a crewman  on helicopters out of MCAS Cherry Point,  North Carolina. Okay?'

It was a clear line. I could even hear his notebook  rustle as he turned  the page.

'That's right, Cherry Point.  He was a gunner on CH-46s. Is this what  you want  to know?'

'Couldn't be better.'

'He  made  E4, that's corporal, on his first tour,  and - this is interesting- to do that  you have to be what  they call squared away.'

'English, please?'

'It's a reference to the way they have to do their  beds at boot camp, like hospital  corners  for nurses. A squared-away marine is one who is well trained, highly-disciplined, a good soldier  in other  words.  He was doing  well, your  man.'

'Was  doing?'

'I'll come to that. On  his second  tour he came  up to Iceland and they put him on security  duty at the embassy there. Again, they don't give jobs like that  to the ground-pounders.'

He was enjoying this. Oh,  he really was. I didn't even have to ask.

'A ground-pounder, as  I'm  sure  you're wondering, is also known as a meatball or a shithead. This  refers to the more basic type of marine. Oscar Murphy was an altogether more superior type. At first, anyway.'

'What happened?'

'I don't quite  know. The story is that there was some trouble over a girl out  there and  he was transferred back to the States. He hit the booze-also hit a sergeant apparently-and when he tried  to re-enlist  they wouldn't have him. So from being blue eyed  he sank  to bum  status in no time flat.  Lives with a girl called  Vicky.'

'He is there,  isn't  he, Jack?'

'Here?'

'Yes.  In America.'

'Oh yes, he's  here all right.'

That was what  I wanted  to know. More than anything else.

'So what's his explanation?'

'Ah.  I thought you might  ask that.  You see I picked this up on the old white  man's whispering wires.'

'You  didn't go down  there? You haven't seen him?'

'No,   I  managed  to  raise  his  brother   at  the  muff ... the exhaust centre, and  he filled in all the background. Murphy's off work with 'flu, in common  with about a million other people this week, so I didn't see a lot of point in driving all the way out to Jamaica to see him.'

He  didn't want  to drive  out  to Jamaica like people  in Kensington don't  want  to drive  out  to Hackney. Even  so,  I wanted   to know  what  he had  to say about  the girl, and Jack couldn't get that  from  his boss. I asked  him to go out  there.

'It'll cost.' Jack Vale charged a hundred quid for picking up the  telephone. If you  wanted   him  to speak  into  it  that  was another fifty.

'Charge it to Grimm,' I said.

'I will, I will.'

'I can only leave you with the advice Grimm  himself gave me this afternoon, Jack. His final instruction, in fact.'

'What was that?'

I quoted it exactly as Grimm had said it to me before he rang off:  'Walk   tall.' Then  Jack  actually   replied  what   I'd   only thought.

Anyway you looked at it, that was interesting. Jack was going out to see Oscar Murphy in New York. I was going to meet him in Reykjavik. Oscar Murphy, the model soldier  who fell from grace.  Either   he was  unusually adept  at  international trans-port, or there were two Oscar Murphy’s. At least if ever they all got together  in the same country they could have a reunion. As it was, I'd  be quite  happy  just  to meet one of them.

I started  hanging my  cord  suit  and  spare shirts over  the window,  to keep the northern night at bay in the hope of a good night's  kip,  when   Hulda  tapped   on  the  door.   There  was someone  to see me downstairs.

'I hope you have not been a bad  boy,' she said,  archly.

'I believe I have, but it's so long ago now I'm  no longer sure. Why?'

I got  the  answer  when  I went  downstairs into  the  sitting room.   Petursson  was  standing  there.   He  was  sighing   in patiently and  dabbing at his hat with a hankie.

'Raindrops,' he explained, in some irritation. 'Do  you think they will mark  it?'

30

After a blow like that- raindrops on your hat- it wasn't easy to settle  him down.  But,  with  Hulda's ministrations, he made  a fairly good recovery.

She obviously  knew him well, and  there  was a good deal of affection mingled with her respect. She bore off his precious hat and  coat  to a place,  presumably, beyond  the  reach  of acts  of God.  She  then  placed  him  in her own  rug-wrapped rocking chair,  with a table and  ashtray at  hand.

While she was making  coffee, I told him what had happened in Gardastraeti earlier  that  day. That was why he'd  come. Or so he said. At the end of it, to my surprise, he was happy  with my conclusion that Palli hadn't handed  out the beating himself.

'He's going back,  by the way.'

'Who - Palli?'

'Yes.  Back to the  US.  He's  decided  he's  not  an  Icelander after  all.'

'For  this we should  be very grateful. I am a policeman and to me he only means  trouble. Even so, I look at him and at those Vietnamese children down in the town and I think it is strange that  the human wreckage of a war on the other side of the world years ago should  be washed  up here. Strange, and sad. What do you think  about Palli Olafsson, Hulda?'

She'd just  come  in with a tray  of coffee and  some volcanic biscuits. She placed it on the table and began to pour the coffee. As she did,  she  recited  with  great  emphasis a. couple of short bursts of Icelandic.

To me she said: 'That is an old saying  which means that  we cannot save those who are doomed  to die and we cannot send to hell those who must  live.'

It sounded sinister, delivered by this spry little woman in her darkened room cluttered with  the past. The  twentieth century seemed  a long long way away. With  a small  bow of her head, she left the room. Petursson eased the atmosphere with a gentle laugh.

'You  must  not make the mistake  of thinking we are like you central Europeans,' he explained. 'For  centuries life up  here has  been  ruled   by  storm   and  fire.  People  - the  older  ones especially - do have some strange beliefs.'

'Too many  books and  long dark  nights,' I said.

He looked at the stacked  shelves and the heavy drapes which she'd  drawn against the light and laughed again.  Then, to my surprise, he  asked  me  to  call  him  Pete.  That was  what  his friends  in London had  called  him.

I was  happy  enough   to go along  with  that.  Quite instinctively, I liked him. He had none of the cop bully-boy about  him. With  small  twinkling eyes in his solid face, and  his fastidious patience,  there   was  something elephantine about   him.  He didn't get going  too easily,  but  I bet he took a lot of stopping.

'Of  course,' he said,  sipping from  an  elfin-sized  cup  with some  difficulty, 'you  are  a man  with  no past  yourself,  aren't you? Wasn't it Barnardo's?'

To my own surprise, I went and told him about  it. And that is unusual. There aren't three  people  who've heard  that story.

'Does  this mean  you love the Americans or you hate  them, then?'  It was a shrewd  question. I'd  spent  quite  a few hours with  that  myself.

'Neither. It doesn't matter. Parents don't matter. Where you come from doesn't matter.'

'What? None of it?'

'No.  You go from  birth  to seventy or  whatever, you  try  to avoid pushing old ladies under  buses, you try not to slip under too many  yourself, and  that's it.'

I wasn't quite  sure  whether  he was appalled or fascinated.

He sounded about  half and  half.

'That is a most unusual view. But what  about  collective responsibility? As a member of a family, or your country, or the human race?'

'Baloney. They're just so many clubs people join to light fires against the dark  and  the cold,  but  they don't mean  anything. You're still alone.'

'So when the nuclear  holocaust  .. .'

'And  the whole of mankind is wiped? That proves what  I'm saying. If you die with a million people in a nuclear  war, for the individual it's  exactly  the same  as stepping off Beachy  Head. Your  own  individual death's the  only  one  that  matters. To you.'

'You're not serious, surely. It was an Englishman who wrote that  no man  is an island.'

'Just  because someone  wrote it and everyone  keeps saying  it doesn't make it true.' He really had hit on one of my favourites this time. So I presented him with my slightly  more pragmatic version: 'Send not to inquire for whom the bell tolls, because it's only someone  else.'

He gave a shocked  laugh,  and  they're quite  hard  to extract from policemen.

'You  teach all this to your little girl?'

'Do you have children?'

'A son. He is grown  up now, of course.'

'Seriously, did  you  teach  him  anything at  all?  Did  your advice and example really influence  him in the long term?'

He sat staring into  his coffee cup. Then  he raised  his head.

'I'm not sure,  maybe  not, how can you say .. .'

'There you  are.   No.  I  don't  try  to  teach   my  daughter anything. I love her. I try to help her. I try to make her laugh. But in the end  what  happens to her life is down  to her.'

I sat  back smugly  and looked at him. I was pleased with my plough-a-lonely-furrow philosophy. What  I liked about  it was that   it  didn't accept   any  religion  or  political   philosophy  or social system so far devised  by man. Really, it was incompatible with almost  anything right down  to joining  a bookclub,  but I was prepared to cheat  over things  like that.  One  thing,  it had certainly silenced  old Pete  Petursson.

'Do  you still remember the address?' he asked, after a while.

'What address?'

'The address of the grandmother who wrote to you.'

'Oh, that. Since you ask, I can actually remember it. It was in Chelmsford.'

He rose ponderously and  brought the coffee-pot over to me.

'A refill? Yes, of course,  that explains it. But it is still unusual.'

'Explains what?' I  was  getting a  bit  annoyed   about   this sudden change of tack he'd  pulled  on me.

'Why you should  go to such  lengths  to erect an explanation for the fact that you were afraid  to go to that address. You were afraid  to face your  past. That is why you and  Palli understand each  other. Isn't that  so?'

No, it was  not  bloody so,  I told  him, and  I said so several times  and  at some  length. It didn't do any  good of course. If what  I was saying  had about the same philosophical value as a dustbin full  of old  fishheads (which  was  what  I sometimes privately believed)  then he'd just emptied  the lot over my head. On  the other  hand, if it was all true  (which  was also what I privately believed, and sometimes at the same time), then he'd got  me.