Chapter Text
“When I found out who little Robbie was marrying this time, I almost shit myself to death laughing.”
That seemed like a good start.
Normally Glanni wouldn’t have bothered planning things like speeches in advance. He certainly hadn’t last time. But he had so much to say about his little brother’s new husband-to-be that he barely knew where to begin. It had pained him not to blurt the whole sorry tale out over the phone when Robbie dropped the news that afternoon. To many it might have seemed a little premature to already be drafting a best man speech, but who else was Robbie going to ask?
He was currently staying with a guy called Steggi in a lovely tattoo parlour/autoshop/guest-house in Aachen, Germany. Hell if he knew how Robbie got their phone number. Steggi and his girlfriend had been friends of Glanni’s for a long time. They went back to the old days when he’d used to travel around Europe with a low-status biker gang called Mayhemtown. Gang was pushing it, really. At their most subscribed there had barely been twelve of them plus a disappointingly well-behaved Labrador, but this hadn’t stopped them from acquiring logo jackets and a jumped-up sense of self-importance. This coupled with a near psychopathic lack of regard for personal safety had made them, in their time, an outfit of minor infamy.
Steggi had left the life behind now. They all had in one way or another save Glanni, who’d never quite managed to make a proper go of ‘settling down’ the way all his old friends had. Now comfortably past forty, he still made his way from place to place with a dogged combination of petty criminality and bloody-minded confidence. Still, Steggi ran a good house, and was very hospitable to old friends who were looking to lie low for a little while.
Glanni’s most recent scheme to make a bit of money in diet pills had backfired when it was discovered he’d just been selling people blackcurrant skittles with the little ‘s’ rubbed off. This wouldn’t have been a problem were it not the case that one of his most grossly overcharged customers was also the wife of a prominent member of the Bulgarian Mafia. He’d ducked out of the country sharpish, but was now watching his back for the ‘businessmen’ who he’d convinced to plough investment capital into his supposed miracle obesity cure, whose money was partially in a locked Suitcase in Glanni’s car, and partially the car itself. It was an impulse purchase, picked up on his way between Poland and Germany from an obsequious old man who had agreed it was only right that a deposed Eastern European Monarch should drive a Rolls.
He was feeling a little irked by the whole experience, and was sure he’d developed repetitive strain injury from rubbing all the little initials off the pills by hand with the back end of a mechanical pencil. What a time to receive an unexpected call from family to share happy news.
Was that really the way to begin it?
“Hey little brother, I’m pretty sure I fucked your boyfriend’s dad.”
Now he would love to see how that went down as an opening line. He could imagine them, sitting at their tables, merry on champagne among the inevitably purple colour-scheme. His brother’s colleagues and acquaintances (lord knows he’d never had many friends). The kid, too. Sally or Stella or whatever his niece’s name was. Eh, she was probably old enough now to handle a bit of public laundry.
It was a hell of a coincidence, though.
He took a drag and watched the smoke uncurl against the cold night’s sky. As soon as Robbie said his fiance’s name it took him right back. Íþró. He thought at first it was the same guy, but it became clear that it wasn’t the father but the son who had found his way into Glanni’s extended family. He even remembered him vaguely. He’d definitely crossed paths with the son - not much more than a kid at the time - at least once during his short but eventful stay in that small Icelandic town nearly 20 years ago.
It made him think. It made him nostalgic. Or at least as close as he generally came to those sorts of sentimental feelings. It was a personal policy of Glanni’s that he never went back to a place if he could possibly help it. This rule was helped along by the various restraining orders, arrest warrants and potential bastard children that made return to most places physically impossible. But in that moment, lying on the roof of Steggy and Hilda’s Guest house, Glanni couldn’t think of anywhere he would like to be more than back in that pathetic, isolated hole of a fjord town where he’d met Íþró senior.
He gave it one more go.
“Ladies and Gentlemen. I want to thank my little brother, and his lovely new husband, for inviting us all here today. What a beautiful ceremony, huh? Great food. Great wine. Great people...
“And do I have one hell of a story to tell you…”
It started at a ferry port in Denmark 17 years previously. Glanni sped onto the last commercial ferry out just as they were pulling up the ramp. Neither his ID nor car were his own. His brain was a thumping chasm of adrenaline as he tried to untangle the events of the last hour. He’d known that fence was bad. There was a feeling in the air as soon as they entered that parking garage that something large, mean and bloody was going to go down. It wasn’t so much a set-up as a skirmish.
As soon as Raucher started swinging that goddamn pipe he knew Mayhemtown were done for. All exits were blocked; there was nowhere to go. Steggi took down a couple of pigs barehanded before getting tazed in the back and crumpling to the ground in a twitching heap. The only thing Glanni knew for certain was that there was no way he was ever going to another Scandinavian prison. If he wanted people to ask him about his feelings every day for six months he would have gone back to alcoholics anonymous.
It wasn’t until he’d run as far as he could physically go that he realised the alternative was jumping down two storeys onto black ice. Still, the cops that weren’t nursing broken faces here hot on his heels, and he’d never been a fan of the sensation of tazing, so he vaulted the ledge, hung his body at its full extension and let go.
He was expecting to feel a rush of air, followed by a hot snap as one of his ankles gave way. What he got was slightly better and slightly worse. He fell right onto the windshield of a moving car.
Glanni bounced off and slid maybe 10 feet into the curb, taking a great deal of the skin off his right side and making contact with the pavement with a heavy thud.
“Hej!” He heard, as the shock receded. “Er du okay?” There were cold hands on him. “For Pokker.” It was the driver. He must have stopped. Glanni could see the car now, the driver-door wide open where the man had barrelled right out. He blearily became aware of the strangeness of this man’s hat. His immediate thought was ‘airline pilot’, which was the point at which he began to suspect concussion. There was shouting from two floors above and hurried footsteps. No time to be concussed!
The opportunity was just waiting there so, ever-resourceful, Glanni took it. What’s a little more head-trauma among friends? He headbutted the driver who was now leaning over him and made a dash for the open door of the car. Through the pain and the rush, he dimly registered that the engine was still running, and his foot stamped down on the accelerator before any higher functions had a chance to make their voices known. The door bounced shut. The tyres squealed as they found purchase on the icy ground, and Glanni made his escape.
It wasn’t until he was plunging down the motorway at about 90mph that his brain caught up with him enough to appreciate that this was one plush car he’d stolen. There was also a jacket on the passenger seat, same weird uniform as the hat, which yielded a bonanza of a wallet in the inside pocket.
The tired customs officer at the Ferry port barely glanced at the ID card before waving him through. In fact he was more polite to Glanni than anybody had been since his last court date. He just about made it before the vessel disembarked, and sat in the dark parking deck for a good 20 minutes with nothing but static buzzing around in his brain before he was able to re-engage his intellect.
Why? Why would a customs officer wave him through without properly checking his ID? Why would he attentively refer to him as ‘sir’ and make sure to tell him that the ferry was leaving imminently? People only tended to call Glanni ‘sir’ when he paid them for it.
That was when the penny dropped. He grabbed the jacket and examined the gold braid. Not airline pilot, you moron, chauffeur! He opened the glove compartment and removed a bundle of documents, all of which were headed with the Danish coat of arms. There was one more penny left to drop, and when it did it dropped so hard that Glanni almost burst a lung. The laughter came in a silent convulsing wave. He collapsed forward on the steering wheel as tears creased in his eyes.
This wasn’t just any car. This was the private car of the Prime Minister of Denmark.
This just kept getting better.
An unspecified number of hours later he emerged under a frosty night’s sky into a small Icelandic fishing town that had no idea what was about to hit it.
Which is to say, other than a small-time criminal who’d accidentally robbed a head of state, one of the biggest storms they’d seen for years.
The snow was already piling up as Glanni maneuvered the vehicle across the town. The fact that it was dark as hell didn’t mean much, he'd been told, in this part of the world. But he was assured by the clock that it was somewhere around 10:30pm. He didn’t really have a plan. Current ideas centred around driving overnight to Reykjavik, dumping the car on the outskirts and finding out whether there were any strip joints this far north where the dancers weren’t wearing turtlenecks and scarves. Then maybe he could see about finding out what happened to the rest of Mayhemtown.
A jolt in the road made him bite his tongue. Shit.
He spun the car’s wheels a little bit to see if he could free it, but no good. All this bloody snow. He hadn’t been able to make out where road ended and snowbank began, and had now managed to get his car well and truly wedged by the side of the road, right outside city hall. He put on the chauffeur’s jacket and went to see if he could dig it out. The cold hit him like a sharp slap in the face that just kept on slapping. By this point the snowstorm was turning into a blizzard and the way the snow was piling up on top of the vehicle, burying it almost faster than he could dig with frozen hands, was beginning to concern him.
“Hej þú!”
Oh god, not again. He turned and saw a figure bounding out of City Hall and wading towards him through the fast-rising snowfall. Glanni immediately recognised him as a cop. Shit. That was fast.
“Hvað ertu að gera?!”
The cop called out. The winds dragged most of his voice out to sea, not that Glanni could have understood a word of it anyway. He couldn’t see the cop’s face; he had an enormous coat buttoned right the way up and the rest of him seemed to be hood or hat. Glanni could feel his thin jacket soaking with icy water and sticking to him. His hands had gone completely numb. He went back to digging the car out, this time with renewed urgency.
The police officer grabbed his arm. This was very bad. He tried to pull it back but found this guy to be surprisingly strong.
“Hey, get the fuck off me!” He shouted through the freezing air. How much of it made it through that faceless blue coat, he had no way of knowing.
“Are you from the ferry?” The figure said in English. Glanni had only a moment to be surprised, however, as he suddenly found himself being lifted bodily into the air. The cop swung him round like he was made of string and slung him over his shoulder. He then started running back through the rapidly piling snow to City Hall while Glanni wriggled, kicked, cursed and spat entirely in vain.
How had they known to wait for him? He guessed the Danish government probably put the word out about the car, but he couldn’t believe it had even reached this asshole of the world. He wondered if they’d extradite him, or if Icelandic prisons were better or worse than Norwegian ones. At this point he was beginning not to care, so long as they were slightly warmer than he was right now. The cold was filling his head with a blank whiteness, and forming coherent thoughts was becoming impossible
He came back to rationality to find he’d been placed in a plastic chair in a large municipal building. Two male voices argued nearby in words he couldn’t understand. A woman with curlers in her hair pressed a warm cup into his hand. She smiled. Glanni realised he had a blanket round his shoulders as well. Pretty hospitable for an arrest.
The cop reappeared from round the corner. His coat still done up over his face, his shoulders shelved with fresh snow. He was trailed by another police officer, a middle aged man of seemingly lower rank; gangly and, Glanni observed, unintelligent-looking. The second man spoke.
“There is no more room in the hotel. Nobody can leave town so there’s no room anywhere.”
Glanni blinked at the second officer. Something about this seemed strange. The first cop, the one with the superhuman strength, started to unbutton his coat.
“I don’t know what made you think you can park there. This is clearly the town square. And with this blizzard who knows when you’ll be able to move your car. Stupid to be driving in this weather anyway. You could have died out there.”
Glanni was no longer listening to the second officer. The first cop undid all the buttons on his coat, pulled off his thick gloves and then unzipped the front.
Glanni liked to think of himself as a great observer of people; an expert at sussing their weak points quickly and exploiting them. It was the trademark of a good salesman. And he was a great salesman.
“If it were up to me, I’d throw you in the cells overnight on the parking violation. But the heating’s broken and you’d probably freeze. So the chief here… he says you’re going to come stay at my house.”
What did he think when he first saw the chief's face?
“Damn.”
“What was that?” The second cop demanded, clearly disgruntled.
“I mean, thanks.” Glanni corrected, flashing a grin at the skinny subordinate. He stood up, the blanket falling from his shoulders, and turned to the man who’d fireman lifted him out of the freezing cold. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Trying to drive in that storm. I’m late for a meeting with some very important people in Reykjavik. You know, governmental important, I don’t want to say too much.”
The subordinate gaped at him, Glanni ignored him.
“Very generous of you to let me stay at your deputy’s house.” He laughed internally at the indignant spluttering behind him. He stuck a hand out. “To whom do I owe the favour?”
The police officer looked him in the face, properly this time. He was a handsome, sandy-haired man of around 40. He had a well-trimmed moustache and beard and eyes of a steely light blue. He wasn’t tall, but even in the bulky coat, his powerful frame was noticeable, and Glanni had felt the power in those arms already.
The police officer shook his hand, and Glanni was pleased to feel heat in his firm grip.
“Íþró.” He responded. His voice strongly accented, his gaze unwavering. “I’m the chief of police here.”
“Pleasure to meet you.” He responded. It really was.
A couple of days ago, if someone had asked him where he LEAST wanted to be, hiding out in a small town in Iceland after a fence went violently wrong, hemmed in by a blizzard and toting a stolen car would probably have been high on that list. But Glanni was suddenly optimistic that it might not be so bad after all.