A jpeg file mounted on the camera's hard drive showed a man whom I sought. His name was Butterfrost. He was ex-CIA. He was Robert Gatlin's old friend. He was why I cruised from chic nightclubs to sawdust-and-spit bars wearing this bemused expression.

"Y-y-you the Yankee taking pictures?" slurred a male voice behind me. "Pictures of my babes?"

I turned to look into the square-jawed leer of a belligerent drunk who had a half-head on me. His wiry red hair looked as if he doused it with barbecue starter fluid and flicked his Bic too near it.

"No-no," I assured him. "Nothing like that."

"You're a liar," he said.

To avoid trouble, I tried a new tack. "What're you drinking, friend?"

Blinking, he held up a tallboy. "Coors Lite," he said. "You writing a book?"

I propelled him by the elbow toward the lacquer black bartop. "You're running on fumes. Let's get you another. On me."

He didn't understand until the new Coors was passed to him free of charge that went on Gatlin's Visa. He grinned. "Gunnar Bjorg," he said. "And you are?"

"Frank Johnson." I shook his huge, soppy hand and pocketed my digital camera. "Just out on a runtur but I better get going. Enjoy your beer."

"Where you staying, Frank?" asked Gunnar.

"Inga's Guesthouse. It's pretty plain fare but plenty good for me."

"Tell Inga that Gunnar said hello."

"Will do, Gunnar."

"And thanks."

I nodded. "Think nothing of it."

After tossing the barkeep some krona banknotes, I threaded a path between bopping bare shoulders of dancing girls and embraced the icy dark air needling my cheeks. Slightly larger than Virginia, my native state, this country was an arctic wasteland. Its stalwart population hugged the coastline cut by fiords and bays and there wasn't a damn tree growing anywhere. That said, Iceland had 100 AIDS fatalities last year and little, if any, crime. My LeHigh construction boots padded over a brick paver sidewalk when a covey of coeds swept up from a skinny alley. They smelled of John Barleycorn and sex.

"Wrong way," a redhead dressed in the gold lame of a rock star informed me. "Follow us."

An effusive girl chorus joined in her cheer: "Follow us and rule the world."

My forearm detached from her gloved fingers. "No time, I'm afraid. I'm too busy catching a killer. By chance, have you smelled any cordite or stumbled over a dead body?"

They laughed. I didn't. We forked our separate ways. Butterfrost, the object of my search, had emailed Gatlin one week ago to the day. It said he was stuck in Reykjavik in a spot of trouble. He didn't go on to elaborate about the nature of his difficulties, only asked Gatlin to send guns and lawyers. I heard all this in Gatlin's law offices back in Middleburg, Virginia, because I carried a .44.

"Your CIA connection is news to me," I said to Gatlin.

He snorted. "No need to know it up until now. Are you hale enough to go abroad?"

My sphincter retracted into my prostate gland, a cancer grenade with its pin pulled out if the doctors had been right in their diagnosis. For what they charged, they ought to have been. I didn't like being quizzed about the cancer or even having to think about it. "My treatments are up," I said. "The outcome is indeterminate until my next checkup."

"When is that?"

"In two weeks," I replied.

Centering chin on the apex of his fused forefingers, he said, "Hell, that should give you enough time."

A recent trend I'd noticed in my Gatlin gigs was the vague scope of what was expected from me. "Not to belabor the point," I said, "but just what the dickens I do upon arrival? Try to hunt up Butterfrost?"

"Good question. I emailed him back that you'd hang loose until he initiated contact. Better plan on a several days for him to pick the best time and place. He's being watched, I suspect. In fact, I'd stake my life on it."

"Which spook agency is tailing him?" I asked.

Until that moment, a mirthful smugness had ruled Gatlin's mood. Now, however, his eyes lost their luster to turn dull as lead. "I haven't no idea," he said. "He didn't specify. Wait. This is not good, Frank. I can't send you to Iceland alone, sick and all. What's up with Gerald?"

Gerald Peyton, a bounty hunter who sometimes collaborated with me, was off hunting caribou in Alaska. I informed Mr. Gatlin of as much. "Well, well," he said. "No help from those quarters, then."

I scowled. "Don't worry. I'll be okay. English is Iceland's second language. The excitement will do me good. I'm tired of puking myself to sleep. God damn chemo."

"Iceland’s natural hot springs have great curative properties," said Gatlin. "Have yourself a couple extended soaks."

"That's okay. I don't relish sitting in someone else's bathtub ring," I said. "Any other instructions?"

"Yeah," said Gatlin. "Wear goose down. Reykjavik gets cold. Very cold."

# # #

Inga of Inga's Guesthouse stood over the white zinc sink in the kitchen when I tripped through the threshold. She worked an old-fashioned potato peeler, flicking her wrist back and forth. Peelings flew off it like wood chips.

"Did you locate your friend?" she asked me over a shoulder.

"No luck. I walked and walked, hitting every pub and disco. Flashed his picture around. All I got for my trouble was blank looks and head shakes."

"That's too bad." Turning, she smiled. Unlike my earlier brushes with girls in the street, Inga was Thai, a mail order bride to a high-ranking officer in the Coast Guard. A rowdy drunk all of sixteen years old at a bar just off from Keflavik Airport had fatally knifed him. Inga had originally been Saki but her husband wanted to make her feel at home, thus for the more provincial Inga.

"I'll hit the rack and try again early tomorrow morning."

Inga came over. "Are you hungry?"

"Sure. I can eat a little something."

She fixed me a dish of smoked lamb and crepes, a strange meal for the stranger midnight hour. Apropos of nothing, I remembered my first days as an MP at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. I'd clocked out from my night watch. Transferring my stuff out of the cruiser to my personal car, I put my service piece on the roof, then forgot it was there and drove off. Of course in a flash, I realized my mistake. Braking and tossing the car into Park, I jumped out. After an exhaustive grid search, I had to call my boss, a tough-as-nails buck sergeant, at home and lay out my predicament. It wasn't a smart career move.

"Is it good?" Inga asked me.

I nodded while chewing. "It is good. Good night." The MP tale lingered like smoke in my mind. Not until I was upstairs in my berth undressing did I make the link between then and now. Again, I lacked for a handgun. I wasn't a lawyer either. Denied both his email requests, Butterfrost lying low right now was toast. I tucked between Inga's sheets but only her ghost waited for me there. The mattress felt firm, how I preferred it. Sleep was a couple breaths away. A half-hour later, I was still noodling around my head the dearth of leads in this case. In the background, cancer played the solemn strains of a cello. I wondered what it was like to die in Iceland. Did graveyards dot its ancient lava fields and jagged glacier islands?

With sleep not in the night's cards, I arose and sat stock still on the edge of the bed. Yep, that same gnawing continued deep down inside me. I didn't like hearing it but the cancer had come with me to this treeless land. I sighed and refocused. Didn't the partygoers here turn out in droves after midnight and rock on until dawn? I wristed my forehead. That being the case, I might stand a better chance of bumping into Butterfrost. He'd sent Gatlin emails. Where from? A cyber-cafe? A wireless gadget? A slow boat to China? Punchy, I snickered at my private joke. With a shiver I climbed into my layers of clothes.

A soft double rap fell on my door. I hearkened my ears. After a little, it encored. "Yes?" I asked ass-planted against the wall to club my visitor if necessary.

"It's me Frank," Inga said. "Are you warm enough?"

The double entendre was too delicious to let slide but I did anyway. "Temperature is the same as it ever was," I said opening the door. She carried a red wool quilt folded over her arm just as I'd imagined it.

"You're still dressed," she observed. "Couldn't you sleep?"

"The dreams were lousy, so I took myself out of them. For real, I'm hoofing it back down to the bars. My friend, you see, may yet show up."

"Care for some company?" asked Inga. "Knowing people, I can introduce you around."

"Great. Give me five minutes and we're out of here."

# # #

The night hubbub was in full tilt boogie. The exuberant cost of alcohol served in the bars caused revelers to put off barhopping until after midnight, Inga explained to me. They started early by getting liquored up from little brown jugs of homemade hooch, however that was brewed in Iceland.

"You don't induce?" said Inga.

"Drink? No-no. Bum liver," I lied.

She took my elbow. "Everybody drinks in Reykjavik."

I nodded without a trace of irony or humor. "That I can easily understand."

"There's a drink that silly tourists order called The Black Death," said Inga. "It's aptly named. You are -- how do you say it? -- on the truck?"

"We call it on the wagon. Yes, five years and counting," I said. "Let's hit that bar, the one at the end of this street."

"Stefan's?"

"Stefan's, sure. Why not?"

We walked two abreast. An uniformed policeman skirted by us on a bright red bicycle. A half-block further, a second one flew by us the opposite way on roller-skates. Noirish blue neon played off fresh nubile faces stitched in growing alcoholic hazes. Cigarettes dangled out of stupefied smiles. Outside Stefan's, Inga greeted a couple both dressed in the Icelandic flag and introduced them to me as old friends from the fish market. They didn't speak English and I didn't dig their lingo.

"He asks if you like our cheese?" Inga translated.

A funky disco tune pumped inside Stefan's and I just didn't give a rat's ass about their damn cheese. "Tell your pal I like the beer better."

Inga frowned. "You don't drink beer."

"I don't eat cheese either. Here, ask him to look into my digital camera."

Her friend did a one-eye squint into the camera's viewfinder. "He doesn't know the man in the picture," Inga said. "Sorry, Frank."

"So, we keep soldiering," I said, entering Stefan's smog and suds. Admission was 1000 krona and a dress code was enforced. No jeans or sneakers allowed. Steam misted up from a floor vent because the entire city's heating system ran off geothermal hot springs bubbling underneath the ground like hell's plumbing. At the heart-shaped bar, I waited for a fat man to give up his chrome stool and occupied it. Inga was off conversing with a curvaceous blonde with red-and-white ribbons fluttering in her lank hair and a gold slave ring in her eyebrow. My scan took in a compact dance floor jampacked with patrons indulging in free form movements to the discordant music.

"Frank, you're with us again."

The broad-shouldered Gunnar crowded me almost to pin against the granite bar. His colorless eyes said he was three breaths away from blacking out. "Lemme get this drink," he muttered.

I palmed Gunnar on the collarbones, pushing him away to a conversational distance. "No need. I'm good. Hey, I need to check my emails. The public library is closed. Is there a computer with Internet around?"

"You're in a sweet spot," said Gunnar. "Stefan has an office." His thick thumb jerked overhead. A flight of steel steps zigzagged up into the blue cigar smog. "Use his computer. Go on up. I'll clear it with Stefan. He won't mind."

"Keep my stool warm," I told him.

"Sure, sure."

Inga waved at my ascending the stairs. She looked exotic. I jinked around the landing and two-stepped it up to a small corridor stinking of raw fish. A dingy lit office lay straight ahead. The Pentium had one of those flat plasma monitors. As I copped a squat in the swivel chair, a hand patted my coat pockets. No digital camera. I'd left it down on the bartop. It was Fort Leavenworth all over again except this time I'd lost a camera, not a handgun. The results proved more disastrous.

The bear prowled on soft-padded claws but his distillery breath warned me. The end of a blur from pivoting on my toes landed on Gunnar's sadistic smirk. An eye flick down took into account the oyster knife he wielded with a practiced efficiency. The smirk widened on me.

"I'm gonna kill you," he said.

My fingers hinged around the nearest object, the flat plasma monitor. It swung up from below the waist and connected with the side of Gunnar's skull face. For high tech hardware, the monitor made for a passable cudgel. Gunnar stacked up, the oyster knife held at an imprecise angle. Following up my slight advantage, I kneed him in the nuts, hard. He roared until my gloved knuckles blossomed in his mouth. Fueled by pain and rage, he raked the oyster knife in a wild swath across my mid-section and sliced fabric, maybe flesh.

"You CIA swine," he bellowed. "I'll flay you open."

"Bring it on, Godzilla."

Framed by the door, he leaned to launch his full weight at me. I had the one still undamaged fist, a left uppercut to clip his exposed glass chin. He folded in half, bent at the waist. I snatched up the computer's mini-tower, wires popping loose, and cracked it over his shaggy crown with all my exhausted might. That polished him off to flop into a heap. I felt wetness. A horizontal crimson streak leached through my coat as a lash of pain seared my torso.

"Frank, you're cut," said Inga standing on the other side of Gunnar.

"Let's get out of here," I said. "But no police." The solemn strains of a cello soundtracked my fast fade to black.

# # #

"Butterfrost has turned up," came Gatlin's voice from across the Atlantic.

"Yeah?" I asked. "How so?"

"Dead. Shot through the head. In Toronto. I'll detail it when you're home again. Will you survive your excitement?"

"Sixteen stitches in the guts," I said. "Man, it feels good."

"What feels good, Frank?" Gatlin wanted to know.

"To bleed like a stuck pig and realize you're still alive." I coughed. Hospital disinfectant blew up my nose.

"Gerald Peyton is back home," said Gatlin. "I'm sending him up to lend you a hand."

"Don't bother," I said. "Our paths will only cross in transit."

Two days later, I was up on my feet and keeping down solid food. Walking with a cane was possible. A taxicab met me at the hospital door. From its warm rear seat, Inga guided me inside to sit at a stiff angle. We pulled away from the curb into the Reykjavik smoky dusk strong in its sulfurous stench.

"Where to?" Inga asked.

"The Blue Lagoon."

We rode past the pipe organ playing in the Hallgrimskirkja cathedral to drown out the dolorous cello music inside me. Forty minutes later the taxicab shuttled into a cinder parking lot. The Blue Lagoon was a large natural hot spring famed for its high concentrations of algae and silica to restore broken health and spirits. I needed that. After dining on laufabrauð (deep-fried bread) and rye pancakes fixed over a charcoal grill, we headed for the cabana.

"Care for some company?" Inga asked me once inside it.

"If you keep pampering me, I’ll never get out of Iceland," I said.