KEFLAVÍK AIR BASE,
SATURDAY 30 JANUARY, 0500 GMT
Arnold’s directions
proved accurate. Before he left them at the administration block,
he had told Steve how to get out of the base without using a gate
or climbing over the wire. Kristín could not begin to imagine what
sort of favour he owed Steve, but it must have been considerable.
She preferred not to think about it.
After leaving
Thompson, they headed west, away from the airport and Leifur
Eiríksson terminal. The military traffic in the area had
intensified; police roadblocks had been set up at intervals around
the base and soldiers now patrolled the perimeter fence on the
Keflavík side. To the south and west the base was bracketed by sea.
Avoiding the more frequented ways, they darted from building to
building, shielded by the darkness, until the built-up area petered
out, giving way to lava and snowfields which ran down to the
shore.
The sky was cloudless
and full of stars, and with the moon lighting their way they
covered the distance quickly. Arnold’s detailed description of the
landmarks soon led them to the Zodiac. All they needed now was to
follow the shore south past Hvalsnes and into Kirkjuvogur bay, to
the hamlet of Hafnir, where they could abandon the boat and hitch a
lift into Reykjavík. The Zodiac had a quiet outboard motor, a
twenty-horsepower engine that chugged into life at the first
attempt. As Steve steered away from shore, Kristín had the
impression that this was not the first time he had navigated along
this stretch of coast. An icy wind buffeted her face and although
the boat did not achieve much of a speed, it smacked into the waves
at regular intervals, forcing her to cling with all her strength to
the rope fastened at the bows. Her anorak was soon drenched by the
spray.
A quarter of an hour
later they abandoned the boat at Hafnir. They had not spoken at all
during the journey.
‘Is this how they
smuggle the drugs?’ Kristín asked at last, once Steve had made the
rubber dinghy fast.
‘I wouldn’t know,’ he
said. They left it at that.
As they made their
way north from Hafnir towards the Reykjanes dual carriageway, they
saw the distant reddish-brown glow illuminating the sky above
Keflavík and Njardvík. After about forty-five minutes’ walk in
complete silence they noticed headlights approaching out of the
darkness behind them. The car slowed down as it drew near, finally
stopping a little way ahead of them. It was a baker on his way to
Keflavík; he offered them a lift up to the main road. From there it
should not take them long to hitch a lift to
Reykjavík.
Michael Thompson had
given them the Reykjavík address of Leo Stiller’s widow, Sarah
Steinkamp, in case she could shed any more light on Stiller’s
theories. Apart from that, he claimed to know little about her
situation and was unwilling to discuss her; he looked in on her
every few years for the sake of his old commanding officer, he
said, but she was a difficult person – angry, bitter and depressive
– so he never stayed long.
She lived in the old
Thingholt district, on the ground floor of a small, dilapidated
two-storey wooden house. The corrugated-iron cladding had rusted
away where it met the ground and the small windows were only
single-glazed. Long ago, the front door had been painted green but
most of the paint had now flaked off. A large fir tree stood in the
middle of the small garden that had once been enclosed by a wooden
fence, the palings of which were now rotten and had largely
collapsed.
Kristín and Steve
approached the house with caution; they had seen no sign of their
pursuers but still peered nervously into the darkness that
surrounded them. Despite being confident that they had escaped
unseen from the base, they were taking no chances. They stepped
into the circle of weak light shed by the tiny lamp above Sarah
Steinkamp’s door, an icy wind chapping their faces. It was about
seven in the morning.
Steve pressed the
doorbell. There was a small copper plate on the door with a name
engraved on it in faint lettering. It was almost illegible but
Kristín thought she could make out ‘Sarah Steinkamp’. There were no
other names; the upstairs apartment must be unoccupied. Its dark
windows stared down at them like empty eye-sockets. Steve pushed
the bell again. Even when he put his ear to the door he could hear
no sign of life inside.
He rang the bell yet
again, more forcefully this time but still nothing happened. They
took a few steps backwards from the doorstep and out into the glow
of the streetlamps, straining their eyes towards the windows on the
raised ground floor but could not see any lights inside. Steve rang
the bell a fourth time to be sure and they heard it jangling deep
inside the house. They had just turned away, on the point of
abandoning hope, when a ground floor window opened. The unexpected
noise in the still morning made them both jump. A tremulous woman’s
voice asked what was going on.
‘Are you Sarah
Steinkamp?’ Steve asked. There was no answer. ‘I’m sorry to call so
early in the morning but it’s urgent.’
‘What do you want
with her? Who are you?’
‘It’s
about . . .’ Steve began. ‘Could you let us in,
please? My name’s Steve; this is my friend Kristín. She’s
Icelandic.’
‘Icelandic?’ said the
quavering voice. They could not make out her face in the darkness,
just a faint, disembodied silhouette at the window.
‘And you? You don’t
sound Icelandic.’
‘I’m American. We
need your help. Could you let us in? You’re Leo Stiller’s widow,
aren’t you?’
‘Leo? What do you
want with Leo? Leo’s dead.’
‘We know that. We
want to talk to you about Leo,’ Steve said, doing his best to sound
agreeable.
They stood motionless
for a long time in front of the house, unable to see even whether
the figure in the gloom was still at the window. Just as they had
given up all hope, the door opened a crack, revealing a woman of
tiny, almost dwarflike, stature. The security chain
rattled.
‘What do you want
with my Leo?’ she asked, her eyes fixed on Kristín. She spoke
English with a thick European accent that Kristín could not place
exactly but suspected might be Eastern European.
‘It’s because he was
a pilot,’ Steve said. ‘We need some information about
him.’
‘What kind of
information? What are you talking about?’
‘Could we come in and
talk to you?’ Steve asked.
‘No,’ the woman said
irritably. ‘You can’t.’
‘It’s terribly urgent
that we talk to you,’ Kristín said, taking two steps towards the
door. ‘You are Sarah, aren’t you? Sarah Steinkamp?’
‘Who are you?’ the
woman asked. ‘How do you know my name?’
‘My name’s Kristín.
My brother’s in danger. A retired pilot, Michael Thompson,
suggested we talk to you. You know him, don’t you? He lives on the
base.’
‘I know Thompson,’
the woman said. ‘He was a friend of Leo’s. Why’s your brother in
danger?’
‘Because of a plane,’
Kristín said. ‘Your husband was a pilot at the base, wasn’t
he?’
‘Yes, Leo was a
pilot.’
‘That’s why we want
to talk to you,’ said Kristín, who had inched her way forwards to a
spot beside the front door. She had a better view of the woman now:
long grey hair, a wrinkled face, her body painfully thin and a
little hunched, clad in a worn, brown dressing gown. Admittedly,
they had disturbed her at the crack of dawn but Kristín sensed that
their sudden appearance had also disturbed her on some more
profound level. She hesitated. It was an uneasy stand-off, the
woman half-hidden by the door as if she felt a physical
threat.
‘What plane?’ the
woman repeated.
‘A plane on the
Vatnajökull glacier,’ Kristín replied.
‘On Vatnajökull?’ the
little woman said in surprise.
‘Yes, my brother saw
a plane on the glacier and then I lost contact with him. He saw
soldiers too.’
The old woman pulled
her dressing gown more tightly around her.
‘Come in,’ she said
in a low voice, undoing the chain and opening the door wider.
Kristín hesitated, then stepped inside the house, Steve at her
heels, entering a hall that served both flats. A staircase led up
to the floor above but directly opposite them the door to the old
woman’s flat stood open. Inside it was dark and stiflingly hot; she
must have left the radiators on full blast all night. Kristín lost
sight of the little woman as she vanished into the gloom. She stood
stock still, not daring to move forward, screwing her eyes up
towards where she thought she saw a movement. Then a match hissed
and she saw the woman’s face briefly illuminated in the flame. She
was lighting candles; the house appeared to be full of them and the
old woman walked around lighting one after another until Kristín
lost count. They cast a soft, flickering glow over the sitting
room. Kristín noticed a piano and a violin, family photographs
crowding the walls and tables, a threadbare sofa and armchairs, and
thick rugs on the floors. The woman invited them to sit down but
she herself remained standing by the piano.
‘I feel like Gretel,’
Kristín whispered to Steve.
‘Then I’m Hansel,’
Steve breathed back. ‘As long as she doesn’t put us in her
oven.’
‘Please excuse the
intrusion, Mrs Steinkamp,’ Kristín said, once her eyes had adjusted
to the candlelight. ‘We had no alternative. We won’t keep you
long.’
‘I don’t understand
how Leo could have anything to do with you,’ the woman
said.
‘It’s a long,
complicated story,’ Steve replied.
‘But it’s more than
thirty years since he died,’ the woman pointed out.
‘Yes, how did he
die?’
‘He was killed in a
helicopter crash. An error, they said, but I never received any
explanation. They never conducted an inquiry but I have my
suspicions. I moved away from the base and came to Reykjavík. They
send me his pension every month.’
‘What happened?’
Kristín asked.
‘Leo was an
outstanding pilot,’ the woman said, the dim glow of the candles
playing over her features. She had clearly once been an elegant,
even beautiful, young woman but Kristín suspected that life had not
been kind to her; age had set its stamp on her hard and there was a
glittering determination in her eyes that hinted at past troubles.
She must have been in her late seventies. Kristín examined the
family pictures on the walls and piano; they were old, taken in the
first half of the century, all photos of adults or elderly people,
encased in thick, black frames. She could not see any children in
the pictures, nor any recent photos or colour pictures. Only old,
black-and-white images of men and women, posing for the
photographer in their best clothes. The woman caught her looking at
them.
‘All long dead,’ she
said. ‘Every single one of them. That’s why there aren’t any new
pictures. Those are mourning frames. Is that enough of an answer
for you?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Kristín
said. ‘I didn’t mean to pry.’
‘Leo told me to keep
my maiden name, Steinkamp. That was Leo all over. He was a Jew like
me. We met in Hungary after the war and he took me in. My family
were all dead. All I had left were photographs. Everything else had
gone. Our neighbour in Budapest had saved them. Leo tracked him
down and I’ve kept the pictures with me ever since.’
‘They’re beautiful
photographs,’ Kristín said.
‘Are you
investigating Leo?’
‘Investigating?’
Steve said. ‘No, of course not. We just need
information.’
‘They never
investigated anything. They said it was an accident. Said he’d made
a mistake. My Leo didn’t make mistakes. He was a perfectionist, you
know? Always checking. He saved my life. I don’t know what would
have happened to me if he hadn’t found me . . .’ She
was silent for a moment, then asked: ‘What sort of
information?’
‘About the plane on
Vatnajökull. Did Leo ever tell you anything about it?’
‘Leo knew all about
the plane on the glacier. He said it belonged to the
Nazis.’
They stared at the
woman in astonishment.
‘And then he died,’
she added.
‘The Nazis?’ Kristín
repeated. ‘What do you mean? What did he mean?’
‘There was a Nazi
plane on the glacier. That’s what Leo said. Then he died. In a
helicopter crash. But Leo was a very good pilot. How peculiar that
you should come knocking on my door after all these years, asking
questions. No one has mentioned the plane since those
days.’
‘But it crashed after
the war was over,’ Kristín said, confused.
‘No, it did not,’
Sarah corrected, her small eyes meeting Kristín’s steadily. ‘It
crashed before the end of the war. The Nazis were trying to escape,
scattering in all directions to save their wretched
skins.’
‘Thompson said it was
carrying American soldiers who had stolen some gold,’ Kristín
said.
‘Of course he
did.’
‘Did Leo tell you the
same story?’
‘No, he knew what was
really happening and he did not keep secrets from his
wife.’
‘What exactly did he
tell you?’ Steve asked.
The woman still
appeared suspicious and uncertain, as if in two minds about whether
to answer them, but then she seemed to come to a
decision.
‘Leo made a fuss
about it at the base. About the plane. They wanted to cover it up
but my Leo wanted to know what was going on. He wouldn’t shut up.
He couldn’t stand all the secrecy.’
‘And what happened
then? Did he get any answers?’ Steve asked.
‘No, nothing,’ Sarah
Steinkamp replied. ‘The plane appeared out of the ice, then
vanished again.’
‘What do you mean?’
Kristín asked.
‘Leo said that the
glacier was like that. He said the plane had been buried in the
glacier but then reappeared. End of story.’
‘Was this in
1967?’
‘Yes, 1967,
exactly.’
‘So why did Leo
believe it was a Nazi plane? What did he mean by
Nazi?’
‘Surely even you know
who the Nazis were, young man!’ the old woman snapped, her
expression hardening. ‘Or has everyone forgotten them, as if they
never existed?’
Kristín had stood up.
She shuddered as the full implication of this woman’s history
dawned on her: the photographs, Budapest, Steinkamp.
‘Murderers!’ the old
woman exclaimed, and Kristín heard the frozen agony in her voice.
‘Bloody murderers! Never forget what they did,’ she cried, her eyes
blazing as she stood there surrounded by the family pictures in
their thick black frames. ‘They murdered my entire family. Burnt
them in the ovens. Murdered our children. That’s what the Nazis
were like, and never you forget it.’
Kristín looked at
Steve rather than meet Sarah Steinkamp’s gaze. She felt guilty and
ashamed for rousing this pensioner from her warm bed and stirring
up a lifetime’s horrors. To her amazement, Steve ploughed on, lost
in the complexities of the riddle they were struggling to
solve.
‘But why did Leo
believe the plane belonged to the Nazis? What made him think that?’
he persisted.
‘Who are you?’ the
old woman asked, suddenly sounding brusque, as if she had regained
her senses. ‘Who are you? I don’t know you at all. I am tired and
you are upsetting me. Please leave now. Please go away and leave me
alone.’
Kristín signalled to
Steve that enough was enough. They took their leave of her without
more ado. She stood by the piano, watching as they turned and
walked back out to the front door. They closed it carefully behind
them and felt a mingled sense of relief and sadness on emerging
once more into the icy winter air.