Sun on Fire

by Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson

  “I’d tell you to head east to Selfoss, or nearly. Turn left before you get there.”

  “Isn’t the road numbered? A numeral?”

  “Yes, Route 1, going south.”

  Emil looked at the paper. “Isn’t that the ring road?”

  “Yes.”

  “One in a circle.”

  Gunnar glanced at the paper. “Right. What next?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe kilometers.”

  10:30

  In the yard of Jónshús, a man stood at an easel. He was painting a picture of a snow-covered red currant bush surrounded by a scattering of little multicolored birds.

  The artist noticed that Birkir was looking at him. “Sorry, I can’t stop for a chat, buddy,” he said. “The light will be changing soon, and I’ve got to get this.”

  “Sorry to disturb you,” said Birkir, and turned to approach the house.

  As before, it was Rakel who responded to his knock. “Jón hasn’t been in touch at all,” she said.

  “This time it’s not Jón I’m after, I’m afraid I have to speak to Fabían. It’s important.”

  “Fabían is tired. He’s asleep. But do come in. I might be able to help you.”

  Rakel showed Birkir into the kitchen and offered him a seat. “I’ve just made some tea. Why don’t you have a cup with me?”

  “Thanks.”

  Neither spoke as Rakel poured tea into two cups and placed them on the table, and then stretched up to a shelf and retrieved something from among a stack of papers. Sitting down across the table from Birkir, she handed him a plain, unaddressed envelope. Birkir opened it and extracted a cassette tape and a small piece of paper. He read:

  I, the undersigned, Fabían Sigrídarson, confess to the murder of

  Anton Eiríksson at the Icelandic embassy in Berlin in the early

  hours of today, the twelfth of October.

  Signed: Fabían Sigrídarson

  Witnesses: Helgi Kárason, Rakel Árnadóttir

  It was dated the evening of October twelfth, this year.

  “This is why you came, right?” Rakel asked.

  Birkir nodded.

  “Fabían said it wouldn’t take you long to reach this conclusion.”

  “Did he?”

  “But he asked me to give you this envelope. How did you know it was him?”

  “We found traces of a skin lotion at the scene. I saw packaging from it in his room. Am I supposed to listen to this tape recording?”

  “Yes. He wants you to hear this.”

  Birkir looked at the cassette. It was old, reused. Someone had written “Bob Dylan” on one side and then crossed it out. Birkir asked, “Why didn’t you bring it this morning? With the other envelope?”

  “I was hoping we’d get more time. A few days, at least.”

  “Can I listen to it here?”

  “We have a cassette player in the living room. There’s nobody in there, so you can listen in peace. Take your cup with you.”

  Rakel led the way into the living room and switched on an ancient stereo. Birkir inserted the cassette and pressed the “Start” button. The recording was clear, but the voice on it sounded weak. Sometimes there was a pause in the account and you could hear Fabían sipping a drink, and at other times there were fits of coughing, from which he took a while to recover. But the tape kept running, and little by little the whole story emerged.

  “My name is Fabían. My mother died when I was eight years old and in foster care on a remote farm in the Northwest. I’d been sent there when she became too ill to take care of me. There were five of us foster children. When I had been there for a few months, a new farmhand joined the household—Anton Eiríksson. Eighteen years old, he was the cowman, and drove the tractor during haymaking season. In him I found a friend, something I hadn’t had since I was taken from my mother. Anton always found time to talk to me, and sometimes he brought me candy when he came back from the village. He whispered in my ear not to tell anybody—he didn’t want to give the other boys candy because they were bad boys. But I was a good boy, and I was his friend. Of course I felt proud of this, being the cowman’s chosen friend—he was a guy all the other boys looked up to. I dreamed of being like him, driving a tractor and combing back my hair with brilliantine.

  “Then, late that fall, the farmer and his wife were going to take us boys to Reykjavík. We’d visit the National Museum and go to the theatre and the movies. A two-week trip including the journey on the coastal steamer, and Anton was assigned to look after the farm in the meantime. I wanted to go, too, of course—to go on the steamer and see the National Museum—but Anton said that I should ask permission to stay behind and help him with the animals. He said he didn’t want to be left all alone. I was supposed to say that I didn’t want to go to Reykjavík. He asked me so nicely and said I wasn’t his friend if I refused. I tried to promise that I’d stay behind next time, but then he became very sad and said he’d expected more from me. So I went to the farmer and said I didn’t feel well and that I would prefer to remain with Anton rather than go on the steamer, and they agreed to it. Anton and I watched as the others headed off in the jeep to catch the boat.

  “Anton raped me every single day for two weeks. When the family returned, I was seriously ill—but that didn’t arouse suspicion, as I’d complained of not feeling well before they left. I couldn’t keep anything down, and I became severely dehydrated. Anton had told me in graphic terms what would happen to me if I revealed to anybody what he’d done. It was so upsetting that I lost the power of speech. I was admitted to the local hospital in Ísafjördur, where they tried to get some food and liquid into me. They succeeded, gradually, but then we found that I’d become incontinent. They said it was intestinal cramps and would get better, and they sent me home. But the truth was that Anton’s repeated assaults had severely damaged my anal sphincters. The outer muscle, the musculus sphincter ani externus, operates voluntarily, while the action of the inner muscle, the internus, is entirely involuntary. Together they normally perform the important task of controlling bowel movements and keeping the anal canal clear, but mine were so ruptured and bruised that they retained only very limited function. I’d soil my pants at the slightest exertion. I was so ashamed and did everything I could to conceal my condition. I learned to make a diaper from toilet paper, and that caught most of the fecal leakage—but my bowel functions were an ongoing problem, and the resulting contamination caused sores around my anus. I soothed them with constant applications of udder ointment, of which there was, fortunately, a plentiful supply in the cowshed. Anton had resigned his job and disappeared while I was in the hospital, so I didn’t have to be scared of him anymore, but the other boys started bullying me, saying I stank of shit. I stopped eating, hoping that would keep my pants clean, but I ended up back in the hospital suffering from malnutrition.

  “My foster parents could no longer cope with my problems, and—because I hadn’t shown any mental or physical progress over a period of two years—the authorities put me into a home for retarded people. As it happened, I fit in pretty well there, since some of the inmates’ toilet habits were, you could say, unconventional. At least I wasn’t the only one who smelled of excrement. I stayed there for three years and did my best to fit in with the others. I just sat by the window all day, looking out and waiting for my next bathroom visit.

  “One fall I had to go into the hospital again when the sores I was getting around my anus became infected, causing a high temperature. Antibiotics took care of that, but the doctor realized that my plumbing was not as it should be, and with some simple tests diagnosed that my sphincter muscles were defective. They couldn’t treat that in Ísafjördur, but until I could see a specialist in Reykjavík the doctor suggested that I plug the leak with tampons. He gave me some to try, and told me to insert one up my rear end between trips to the bathroom. That worked reasonably well, and my sores healed. But nothing came of my seeing a specialist at that time. The doctor was a busy man, and I gues
s he forgot about me. I just didn’t have the initiative to follow things up, and it wasn’t clear who was responsible for my physical health.

  “For a while, I lived with some good people down in Fljótshlíd, but, following a tragic event there, I ended up in a mental hospital. I had been there twelve years when I became seriously ill, and they diagnosed malignant colon cancer, a long-term consequence of my rectal damage. Because the muscles weren’t functioning properly, there were always fecal remains in the anal canal, a condition that eventually causes cell changes leading to cancer. I had surgery to remove part of the bowel, followed by radiotherapy, chemo, the whole package.

  “I had a colostomy, and for the first time since I was nine years old, I didn’t have to worry about whether I’d soiled my pants. This was a huge improvement to my life, but—unfortunately—the cancer has now recurred and will soon finish me off.

  “So now we come back around to Anton Eiríksson. I recognized him immediately when he joined the ambassador’s party after the reading in Berlin. He had been plump as a young man but had gotten considerably fatter since then. He didn’t appear to recognize me. I kept to myself, and we hardly said a word to each other until I told him that his face looked like a pig’s ass. That was when he first took notice of me, and seemed to be trying to place me. I was in turmoil and wanted to banish all thoughts of him from my mind—it made me nauseous to look at him. I had absolutely no intention of revealing to the other guests what he’d done to me. It would have been interesting to to see how he would have reacted, had I spoken up and told them about our encounter back then, had I described how he’d mauled the little wisp of a child that I was, night after night, ripping my insides apart. But I said nothing. I’m not used to people taking me seriously or believing what I say. I am, after all, a chronic mental patient.

  “But later, while looking for a bathroom on the fourth floor, I ran into Anton alone. He remembered me then, though our conversation was brief. I never managed to tell him about my condition, since he was too busy babbling on about how kind he always was to the children he abused. That was the final straw for me. Everybody sees me as an invalid, someone incapable of any great exertion. Anton, certainly, exhibited no signs that he feared me, so I seized the opportunity when he was preoccupied with making a telephone call. I extracted the knife that I knew was concealed in my friend Helgi’s candlestick—and I plunged it into Anton’s stomach. The blade was razor-sharp, and it took very little effort for me to slice a big gash in his belly before losing my grip on the handle. At first Anton screamed and tried to stand up, but I easily pushed him back into the chair. He was quiet after that.

  “I noticed that my arm was covered in blood and innards, so I took off my jacket and turned the sleeve inside out. I went to the bathroom, rinsed my shirt, and turned up the sleeve. The shirt was black, so the staining wasn’t as conspicuous as it would have been otherwise. Then I went back downstairs. There was some commotion having to do with the ambassador’s wife, and nobody paid any attention to me. We all left the embassy shortly afterward.

  “I know that a confession like this may seem far-fetched. People may even suspect me of taking the blame for someone else. But that’s not the case. The jacket and the shirt I was wearing that evening will prove this—I lied when I claimed I’d left the jacket in Berlin.

  “Why didn’t I confess at once? Maybe I thought I could get away with not saying anything. That might have been an easier option. But I don’t want anybody else to be accused of what I did, which is why I made a written confession as soon as I got back to Iceland. There are witnesses to my signature. If the police charge somebody else with the murder, or if the case still continues after I’m gone, my friends will present my confession, and this recording is to accompany that document.

  “I am fully aware that when the police receive this, they will charge me with the murder. But I received my sentence a long time ago—I’m hardly going to worry about the judgment of any court. My health is not up to incarceration, and it’s in no one’s interest to hospitalize me. I think that a fair sentence would be house arrest here in my home until the mortician comes to collect me. It won’t be long now.

  “And that is the end of this account.”

  The recording was over, and Birkir rewound the cassette. He looked at Rakel. “You know Fabían well, don’t you?” he said.

  “Yeah, I guess. Better than most, I think.”

  “As witness to his confession, do you think he is physically capable of doing what he describes in this statement?”

  Rakel replied, “Fabían has never been capable of any kind of physical exertion. He’s very skinny, the dear boy. But in my profession, working with addicts and mentally ill folks, I have seen the most improbable of wretches take violent action when pushed to the limit. I think that Fabían could have wielded a knife if the occasion really demanded it.”

  “Would you feel able to testify to this?”

  “Well, of course I didn’t actually witness the deed, but I have confirmed with my signature that Fabían himself wrote this confession of his own free will and of clear mind. He did it the moment he returned from Berlin because he is always so afraid that he might not last the day. He taped this statement after your first visit, and I wrapped up his bloody jacket and shirt and put them in the freezer to preserve the evidence that will prove his story. He couldn’t bear the thought of someone else taking the blame for this.”

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to disturb him for a bit,” Birkir said.

  “Go ahead, then. Actions have consequences, of course. Fabían will have to deal with that.”

  Birkir hesitated, and said, “We’re investigating another murder that’s linked to this one. Do you know anything about that?”

  “Another murder? No, God forbid. Fabían hasn’t left the house since he came back. He can’t possibly be guilty of that.”

  Do you remember me?”

  The voice came from the restroom doorway. Inside, the fat guy rinsed his hands at a shiny steel sink.

  “Yeah, we talked earlier this evening,” he replied without looking up.

  “Yes, but I mean . . . do you recognize me from the past?”

  “Should I?”

  “Maybe you can’t, Anton. It was a long time ago—I was only nine years old.”

  Anton picked up a clean towel and carefully dried his hands. Then, lifting the towel to his puffy face, he wiped the sweat from his brow.

  “Nine, huh,” he said, pausing to check his reflection in the mirror. “That’s a good age.”

  After a prolonged silence, the other man said, “That was the last good year of my life.”

  Anton studied the man in the doorway. Then his small, deep-set eyes came to life as a hint of a smile twitched at the corners of his mouth.

  “Yeah, I remember,” he said. “I kept an eye on you for a few years after our encounter. You were the first one.”

  “The first one?” the other man said, almost whispering.

  “I remember being kind of clumsy. I might have hurt you a little.”

  “You did.”

  Anton threw away the towel and walked toward the door. The other man moved aside as Anton stepped into the hallway. At first he headed for the stairs leading to the lower floors, but then he turned back and entered a room directly across from the restroom. The other man followed.

  It was an impressive office with a large desk at one end. Anton flicked on the light switch by the door and said, without looking around, “It was impatience and inexperience. I was only eighteen—and much too impetuous the first few times.”

  “Yes,” the other said. “I guess you were.”

  Anton drew a cigar from his jacket pocket and lit it with an elegant lighter. His jowly cheeks rippled as he puffed a few times to get the glow going.

  With his lighter still in hand, he lit two tall candles on a low table nearby and continued: “But it didn’t take me long to figure out how to do it right. Once I did, I never hurt anybody aga
in. Now I know how to make the boys feel good. I even teach them about themselves.”

  The men scrutinized each other. Finally the other one broke the silence. “So you are still abusing children?”

  Anton shook his head in disdain. “I have never abused anybody. That’s the truth. To say otherwise is just spreading the ignorance and lies of those who have no concept of sincere friendship and tenderness. I merely guide my boys toward maturity. I open them up to new and wonderful dimensions. I allow them to experience their bodies completely for the first time. If I get my hands on them before they’re spoiled by adolescence, I always succeed. They cry with pleasure when we’re done.”

  The other man gasped. “Who are these boys? How do you get away with this?” His voice trembled.

  “You just need to be careful. People are so prejudiced. I mostly go to Indonesia. The boys there are beautiful.”

  “Doesn’t anyone ever press charges?”

  “Charges? No, of course not. I pay well, and everything is taken care of. I only do business with the safest houses.”

  “Jesus! People are selling these children to you?”

  Anton moved across the room and sat down in a large, comfortable chair behind the desk. “The hosts know me. They know how gentle I am. They save the new boys for me because nobody else is as tender with them. Many of the other customers are monsters. Unfeeling trash. They can ruin a boy in ten minutes, frighten them so badly that they shut down forever.”

  “You need to be stopped,” the other man said.

  Anton went on as if he hadn’t heard. “I have a gentle touch—the kind the boys find soothing. You have to be patient with them.”

  After a short silence, the other man firmly said, “Someone has to put a stop to this.”

  Digging some change from his jacket pocket, he stacked the coins in a small pile and slid them across the table next to the candlesticks. “Someone has to put a stop to this,” he repeated.