Meltwater (Fire and Ice)

it something to do with the US?’ Magnus asked.
    Franz didn’t respond. But his eyes locked on to Magnus’s. Encouraging him perhaps?
    ‘France?’
    No movement.
    ‘Switzerland?’ After all, Franz was Swiss. After Icelandic banks and German banks, the Swiss made sense next.
    Nothing. But Franz’s eyes were steady.
    Magnus ran through the other volunteers in his mind. Then it came to him. The Israeli student Zivah Malach did not seem like your average computer hacker. What the hell was she doing with these
people?
    ‘Israel?’
    Franz’s eyes dipped downwards in a kind of ocular nod. ‘Actually, I can’t help you any more,’ he said.
    ‘That’s no problem.’ Magnus smiled. ‘You have been very cooperative.’

CHAPTER TEN
    J ÓHANNES PULLED UP outside the Hotel Búdir and switched off his engine. It was mid-afternoon; it had taken
him two hours to drive up here from Reykjavík. The hotel was situated on the south side of the Snaefells Peninsula, a long, slightly crooked finger that stretched eighty kilometres out into
the Atlantic from the west coast of Iceland. It was named after Snaefellsjökull, a smooth round glacier, fifteen hundred metres high at the western tip.
    The glacier was free of clouds, its ice cap gleaming in the low afternoon sun. Beneath it slept a volcano that hadn’t erupted for eighteen hundred years, but the glacier retained an aura
that had inspired Icelanders and others for generations. Jules Verne had chosen Snaefellsjökull as his entrance to the centre of the earth. There were tales about a half-man, half-troll named
Bárdur, who had been one of the first settlers in the area and given the glacier its name, ‘Snow Fell’, before disappearing into the glacier himself. More recently, New Age types
had designated it one of the seven energy centres in the world and a frequent landing site for aliens.
    Jóhannes preferred his tales medieval, but he couldn’t deny the power of the glacier on the imagination. He had been transfixed by it when he had stayed at the Hotel Búdir on
family holidays as a boy, as, of course, had his father, who had frequently taken two-week trips up here alone to write.
    The hotel was all that was left of what once had been a thriving trading post, apart from the isolated black church a couple of hundred metres away. The hotel was perched at the mouth of a small
river, with the glacier on one side and a broad sweeping beach on the other. A group of half a dozen horses and their riders were gliding across the sands in a tölt : the rapid smooth
trot known only to the Icelandic horse. To the north, stretching eastwards from the glacier, was a ridge of forbidding mountains, and on the other side of those was Hraun, Jóhannes’s
father’s childhood home.
    The air was fresh and crisp and the sea sparkled blue, tossing gentle waves on to the sand. There were clouds dashing about the sky, but for the moment they were not obscuring sun or
mountain.
    Jóhannes entered the quiet hotel lobby and asked for the manager, to whom he had spoken after he had received the letter from his former pupil. Hermann, the head groom, was out with some
guests on the sands, but would be back soon.
    Jóhannes strolled outside to wait for the horses. After ten minutes they were back at the stables and Jóhannes waited another ten minutes until the guests were dismounted and the
horses returned to their stalls.
    A broad-shouldered man in his forties with a thick dark beard seemed to be in charge. Jóhannes approached him.
    ‘Hermann?’
    ‘Yes?’ The voice was gruff, but the blue eyes were friendly.
    ‘My name is Jóhannes Benediktsson. My father Benedikt Jóhannesson used to be a regular visitor here.’
    ‘Yes, yes, I remember him,’ said the groom. ‘Although that was a long time ago.’
    ‘And you remember Halldór Laxness, no doubt?’
    ‘Yes.’ Hermann lifted up a saddle and took it into a tack room. Jóhannes followed him. He avoided Jóhannes’s glance.
    ‘A letter has just come to my attention from Halldór to a friend of his. Apparently Halldór was staying here in 1985 when he saw my father and a man with a shotgun having an
argument. He says you broke it up. He mentions you by name.’
    ‘Does he now?’ said Hermann. He dumped the saddle and turned towards Jóhannes, his eyes wary.
    ‘I wonder if you could tell me a bit more about it.’
    Hermann hesitated. Then he nodded. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Although there is not much to tell. I