Where the Shadows Lie (Fire and Ice)

but dangerous, even his occasional bad moods seemed to attract her. Until she started to view him not as a lover but as a potential husband.
    Who did she want him to be? Who did he want to be? For that matter, who was he? It was a question Magnus often asked himself.
    He pulled out his electric-blue Icelandic passport. The photograph was similar to the one in his US passport, except the Icelander was allowed to smile, whereas the American was not. Red hair, square jaw, blue eyes, traces of freckles on his nose. But the name was different. His real name, Magnús Ragnarsson. His name was Magnús, his father’s name was Ragnar, and his grandfather’s name was Jón. So his father was Ragnar Jónsson and he was Magnús Ragnarsson. Simple.
    But of course the US bureaucracy could not cope with this logic. A son could not have a different last name to his father and his mother, whose name was Margrét Hallgrímsdóttir, and still have the government computers accept him as part of the same family. Obviously it couldn’t cope with the accents on the vowels, and it didn’t really like the non-standard spelling of Jonsson either. Ragnar had fought this for a few months after his son arrived in the country and then thrown in the towel. The twelve-year-old Icelandic boy Magnús Ragnarsson became the American kid Magnus Jonson.
    He turned back to the book on his lap. Njáls Saga , one of his favourites.
    Although Magnus had spoken very little Icelandic over the past thirteen years, he had read a lot. His father had read the sagas to him when Magnus had moved to Boston, and for Magnus they had become a source of comfort in the new confusing world of America. They still were. The word saga meant literally what is said in Icelandic. The sagas were the archetypal family histories, most of them dealing with the three or four generations of Vikings who had settled Iceland around 900 AD until the coming of Christianity to that country in 1000. Their heroes were complex men with many weaknesses as well as strengths, but they had a clear moral code, a sense of honour and a respect for the laws. They were brave adventurers. For a lone Icelander in a huge Junior High School in the United States, they were a source of inspiration. If one of their kinsmen was killed, they knew what to do: they demanded money in compensation and if that was not forth-coming they demanded blood, all strictly according to the law.
    So when his father was murdered when Magnus was twenty, he knew what to do. Search for justice.
    The police never found his father’s killer, and despite Magnus’s efforts, neither did he, but he decided after leaving college to become a policeman. He was still searching for justice, and despite all the murderers he had arrested over the last decade, he still hadn’t found it. Every murderer was his father’s murderer, until they were caught. Then the quest for just retribution went on, unsatisfied.
    The plane descended. Another gap in the clouds; this time he could see the waves breaking against the brown lava field of the Reykjanes Peninsula. Two black stripes bisected the barren stone and dust: the highway from Reykjavík to the airport at Keflavík. Wisps of cloud, like smoke from a volcano, drifted over an isolated white house in a puddle of bright green grass, and then Magnus was over the ocean again. The clouds closed in beneath the airplane as it began its turn for the final approach.
    He had the feeling, as Iceland came nearer and nearer, that he was moving towards solving his father’s murder, or at least re solving it. Perhaps in Iceland he could finally place it in some kind of perspective.
    But the airplane was also bringing him closer to his childhood, closer to pain and confusion.
    There was a golden period in Magnus’s life before the age of eight, when his family all lived together in a little house with white corrugated-metal walls and a bright blue corrugated-metal roof, close to the centre of Reykjavík. It had a tiny garden with a white-painted picket fence and a stunted tree, an old whitebeam, on which to clamber. His father went off to the university every morning, and his mother, who was beautiful and always smiling then, taught at the local secondary school. He remembered playing soccer with his friends during the long summer nights, and the excitement of the arrival of the thirteen mischievous Yuletide elves during the dark cosy winters, each dropping a small present in the shoe Magnus left beneath