“A quarter of a million for a whisper of information. Sounds reasonable to me.”
“You’re asking me to give someone away.”
Baddó laughed inside at the thought of this pompous fool trying to bargain with him, but merely nodded sagely. “And your conscience is worth more than that?”
Gussi flushed even redder. “It is,” he snapped, “if you want to put it like that.”
“I find it’s normally best to speak as I find instead of dressing things up. How much are you looking for?”
“Half a million,” Gussi said, surprised when the hard-faced man nodded again.
“And the other thing?”
“An assurance that the person will come to no harm,” he said in a shaky voice, unnerved by the indifferent reception his demand has elicited. “No violence.”
“I’ll pass the message on and see what my clients say.”
“About the half million, or the no violence?”
“Both,” Baddó said with a return of the cold smile that Gussi found both chilling and exciting.
Something didn’t feel right. Hekla cleaned the kitchen more thoroughly than usual, glancing out of the windows at the sporadic snowfall from a grey sky that was filling the footprints at the back of the house, gradually wiping them out as if they’d never existed. The red Toyota outside had grown a white layer a hand’s breadth deep as the snow fell evenly in the still, heavy air; it felt like the lull before a storm.
She tried to assuage her own tension by attacking the burned-on stains at the back of the oven with a scouring pad and increased vigour, hoping the activity would push the unease from her mind. An hour later the kitchen was spotless. The muted whine of Pétur’s lathe could be heard from the workshop as she decided the bathroom was next. She opened the bathroom window to let in a blast of cold, fresh air and used the opportunity to spy on the outside world, all the while telling herself that there was no need.
By the time she had finished, the newly mopped kitchen floor was dry. She made coffee and stood staring out of the window at the greyness beyond as the horizon merged seamlessly into sky. The thickness of the weather that masked Reykjavík across the bay also muffled any sound from outside, rendering the noise of the traffic on the main road little more than a distant mutter.
She took two mugs of coffee with her to the workshop where Pétur stood half perched on a stool on his bad side in front of the lathe. Strips of curled wood shavings lay like a deep carpet around his ankles and Hekla breathed in the sharp aroma of newly turned wood.
She put one mug on the bench where Pétur could reach it and cradled the other in her hands. “How’s it going?” she asked, nodding at the stack of newly turned bowls on the bench.
“Not bad.” He smiled. “A dozen so far and I’ll do a few more before I start polishing them up.”
Hekla picked up a bowl and admired the pattern of grain that swept across its broad base, lost in the twists and whorls.
“They’re lovely, Pétur.”
“I like to think so.”
“It’s just a shame that you can’t get more for them.”
“I know,” he sighed. “But there’s only so much people will pay for these things.”
“I still reckon that wholesaler’s ripping you off.”
Pétur shrugged. “Probably. But he has overheads to pay as well.”
“Come on. He pays you twelve hundred for each of these bowls or cups and he sells them for at least eight thousand. I’ve seen his website. We should be selling these ourselves, not giving them to someone else to make all the money on them.”
“I know. But what can I do? I can either make these things or I can stand behind a counter and wait for someone to buy them. I can’t do both.”
“You could get a stall at the flea market.”
“We could get a stall there, maybe.”
Hekla decided to let it drop. The idea of standing behind a stall at the Kolaport flea market with half of Reykjavík walking past was not an idea that appealed to her, not that any of her former customers would be likely to recognize her without one or other of her wigs. Then the face of the corpulent man from the swimming pool came rushing back to her. He must have recognized her, or else made a mistake and thought she was someone else.
“We could get a stall, I said,” Pétur repeated. “You’re daydreaming again.”
“Sorry. Yeah, I suppose we could try it and see what happens,” she said dubiously. “I’ll see if I can find out how much it costs.”
“Even if we only sell a few ourselves, it would make a difference, I expect. Especially if we can charge gift-shop prices for them.”
Hekla scanned the space under the bench on the far side of the workshop and wondered what was missing.
“Where’s that laptop bag that was over there?”
“What laptop?”
“The one I picked up cheap before Christmas. I left it under the bench.”
“I don’t know,” Pétur shrugged, his mind already on the lathe again as he clamped a section of wood into it. “You’re sure it was there?”
“Gunnhildur,” Ívar Laxdal told her, appearing in the doorway. “A word, if you don’t mind.”
Gunna wanted to laugh at the “if you don’t mind” that was an instruction rather than a suggestion. Not sorry to leave the clutter on her desk, she joined him in the corridor, wondering why the man always liked to walk when he was talking.
“It’s the ministry again,” he said. “It’s about this laptop they’ve managed to lose somewhere.”
“They really think we’re going to find a laptop that someone left in a taxi?” Gunna asked and was rewarded with a scowl.
“There’s more to this than meets the eye, Gunnhildur, and I don’t know what they’re playing at either.”
Gunna wondered if the scowl had been directed at her remark or at the ministry. “What do they expect, then?”
“They expect us to find the damned thing, that’s what. I have the serial numbers and a description.”
“That’s something, I suppose. But who lost this computer, and where?”
Ívar Laxdal grimaced. “That’s just what they don’t want to tell me.”
“This really is a needle in a haystack, in that case?”
“Exactly.”
“Can I ask how this request came to you?”
“You can ask, but I’m not supposed to tell you. Between ourselves, it comes through a ministry official called Már Einarsson. I’ve checked him out as far as I can and he has, naturally, a clean record. He deals with foreign relations, apparently. He’s listed simply as an advisor, whatever that means.”
“And I can speak to him?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Leave it with me for the moment and I’ll have another word. I’ll see if I can get these jokers to agree to a meeting this afternoon. The whole thing sounds fishy to me.”
Gussi’s head whirled. He was trying to work out how he had managed to end up with the hard-faced man who both frightened and fascinated him sitting in the only chair in his flat looking quizzically at him.
He looked around appreciatively. “Nice place.”
“It’ll do. It’s a bolt-hole really.”
“How come?”
Gussi didn’t want to be reminded, but he had to come up with an answer. “I had a larger place. I still own it, actually, but I can’t afford to live there and it’s rented out.”
“Came out of the crash badly, did you?”
“I did.”
Gussi poured a little brandy into a tumbler and handed it across to his guest, the only guest the little apartment had ever seen.
“Sorry to hear that. I missed out on all that stuff.”
“You were abroad?”
He nodded and smiled in a way that set Gussi’s stomach doing somersaults. “Back to business. Four hundred thousand is on the table for the information I’m after. Cash, no comebacks, no questions. No reason to see me ever again as long as your information is accurate.”
Gussi grimaced and started to shake his head as he sat down on the three-legged stool that belonged in the tiny kitchen.