The Vanishers (10 page)

“It did come to mind, sir.”

“Let’s clarify the situation,” I said. “I’m a reasonably normal male, and you’re a good-looking female, and it looks as if we’ll be sharing accommodations for a while, for reasons of security. At the moment, our main concern is to get your strength back. Once we’ve got you reasonably healthy, well, let’s just say that I’ll take anything that’s offered. I won’t take anything that isn’t offered. Satisfactory?”

She regarded me for a moment longer. “I’m beginning to think you may be a very nice man,” she said at last.

I said dryly, “You think too many men are nice men. My boss. Me. No discrimination whatever. Here, grab your drink and sit down and let’s talk things over. Unless you’d really rather rest.”

“No, I am fine.” She seated herself and took a sip of her Scotch, setting it aside on the small table between our chairs. “What do we talk about?”

“First, this.”

Reaching down for the revolver in my open suitcase, I tossed it in the general direction of her lap. Throwing firearms around is not recommended practice; but I’d discovered that you can learn a lot about somebody by their reaction to a flying pistol. Astrid’s eyes widened with shock; but she managed to field the weapon at the last possible moment. Instinctively, she switched it around so the muzzle was pointing in a safe direction, and hit the latch to let the cylinder swing out.

“Oh, it’s empty.” Then she looked at me angrily. “That was a foolish thing to do. You almost frightened me to death.”

“Yes, I noticed,” I said dryly. “You’ve handled one before.”

She shrugged. “I had a college friend who became a policewoman. We thought it a very strange profession for an intelligent and educated person to choose.” She gave me a sharp glance. “Almost as strange as your vocation.”

“It takes all kinds,” I said.

She made a face at the cliche and went on: “Mary Alice—that was her name, Mary Alice Linderman—kept saying that she never could understand how women could be against guns, particularly women who were for equality. She said that it seemed obvious that the only thing that could make the average woman equal to the average man, physically speaking, was a good big revolver or automatic pistol. Or even a little one. That was what guns were for, to give a small, weak person a chance against a big, strong one. She insisted on showing me how her service revolver worked, although I wasn’t really enthusiastic. She even made me go out with her and shoot it a little, enough so I’d know what it was like. She said that someday it might save my life, just knowing that much about it.”

I said, “Swell, that saves me a lot of talking. Please snap it a few times to get the feel of it… Good. Here are the cartridges. Load it and keep it handy. We’ll be staying here until tomorrow morning; but I’d like to slip out after it gets dark, to see who’s hanging around. While I’m gone, don’t open the door for anybody, and if somebody tries to force his way in here, shoot him dead.”

She licked her lips. “That could create… difficulties, couldn’t it?”

I said, “Sweetheart, what would you rather have, some Norwegian officials hassling you alive, or the same Norwegian officials saying what a nice, law-abiding, humanitarian person you were, as they bury your cold, dead body? Keep your eye on the ball. Survival is first on the priority list, always. As your friend Mary Alice indicated, that gun can keep you safe if you use it properly.”

She frowned, watching me. “You told me in Hagerstown you do not trust me even well enough to tum your back on me.” She glanced down at the gun she was still holding, after filling the chambers expertly and snapping the cylinder into place. “Now you trust me with a loaded pistol. That does not seem very consistent.”

“Maybe I’ve decided to take a chance on you. Or maybe I’m just testing you, all set to blow you away if you try to use that weapon against me.” I grinned. “You can have a lot of fun deciding which. Meanwhile, do you have people keeping an eye on us? Two men in a small black Mercedes, for instance?”

“No.”

I stared at her hard. “If you’re lying, you’re apt to lose some friends, Mrs. Watrous. One slim, dark, intense-looking, one of the long-haired pretty-boys, clean-shaven. The other huskier and whiskerier and not so dark. You’re sure they’re not yours? It wouldn’t bother you if I dealt with them a bit, let us say, drastically?”

She swallowed. “I do not understand what you suspect me of, Matt. If there is somebody following us, it is none of my doing, nobody I know; I swear it. But if you really mean to
kill
… Of course it would bother me if you killed them. It would bother me if you killed anybody. What do you think I am?”

I watched the hand that held the pistol. I said, “I’m very glad you asked that question, Astrid. And I’m happy to answer it. That’s why I organized this discussion session, to let a little honesty into our relationship. If you really want to know, I think you’re a lady who’s leading me on a wild-goose chase into darkest Scandinavia, for reasons yet undetermined. A lady who, in order to con my chief into assigning me to protect her, fed herself some pulse-accelerator pills to put herself into the hospital. That’s who I think you are, sweetheart. Since you asked.”

There was a lengthy silence. Astrid’s face was shocked and white. She whispered at last, “You must be joking!”

“Sure, sure,” I said. “Just a great big kidder, that’s Helm.”

She licked her lips. “But… but you can’t believe I deliberately brought on that attack of… Why, I almost died!”

“Yes, that must have been a nasty surprise,” I said. “And things had been going so well, too! There you were in the hospital with everything under control, ready to smile at me courageously from your sickbed, pale but lovely. Of course it was easy for you to be brave then. You knew your tachycardia was phony, induced by a careful dose of stimulant, self-administered; probably one of the compounds on the list the heart specialist gave me. You knew that even without treatment you’d soon be back to normal. It wasn’t hard to play the poor martyred lady bearing her cross heroically. But you were unlucky; they picked quinine to treat you with. Nobody knew you were sensitive to the stuff, including you. Suddenly that night it went all grim and real on you, didn’t it? It wasn’t a charade any longer. The gent with the skull face was right there by your bed rattling his bones and breathing his graveyard breath on you…”

She shook her head impatiently. “Please spare me the picturesque imagery!”

I said, “Sweetie, I’ve been there. I know that guy very well. One of my best friends, or enemies. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. Anyway, you hadn’t expected anything like that; you weren’t prepared for it at all.”

She started to say something, and stopped. We listened to a man and woman entering a room across the hall. The woman was laughing at something the man had said as if he was the sweetest, funniest man in the world, and maybe he was.

I went on: “So when I arrived, there you were, still not quite sure you were even going to live, and not knowing, if you did live, if you’d be permanently damaged in some way. And the thing you couldn’t bear to think about was that you’d done it to yourself: the clever, clever girl who’d outsmarted herself so ridiculously, and wound up lying there helpless, hooked up to a lot of medical plumbing, looking like something that had been pulled through a knothole backwards. Instead of the brave, bright, charming, convalescent glamour girl I’d been supposed to find there, and fall for, hard.”

Astrid regarded me for a long moment. At last she took a deep swallow from her glass that left it empty, and gave a defiant little shrug that admitted everything.

“You can’t prove it!”

I rose and refilled her glass, and replenished my own drink. Standing there, I studied her thoughtfully, until she looked down in a flustered way and did something feminine to the lacy ruffles at her breast. I grinned and raised my glass to her, seating myself again.

“For a beautiful lady, you’re a damn’ good man, Watrous,” I said. “But you have some very corny reactions. Why the hell should I want to prove anything? You know the gag you tried to pull. I know. I can’t see that it’s anybody else’s business, can you?”

She frowned quickly. “I don’t understand.” When I didn’t say anything, she asked, “How did you guess?”

“Well, you were much too bitter about that quinine reaction, as if you’d been double-crossed by somebody you trusted; and I guess you had been. By yourself, your own body. And you were working so hard.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Bible covers it very neatly:
The guilty flee where none pursue.
If I’ve got it right, and it is the Bible. Anyway, you were like a dame with an inconspicuous little run in her stocking, horribly self-conscious, feeling that everybody must be staring at her. Pulling at her skirt, crossing her legs awkwardly, anything to keep the dreadful blemish out of sight, actually calling attention to what she’s trying to hide. Only you were trying to cover up the fact, which seemed guiltily obvious to you now that everything had gone wrong, that you’d put yourself into that hospital deliberately.”

Astrid licked her lips. “For an undercover operator, you are a very great mind reader.”

“Thanks, but it didn’t take telepathy. You’re a lousy actress, or maybe just a lousy criminal. At least what you’d done to yourself seemed like a crime to you, didn’t it? And of course you were in bad shape and not thinking very clearly, so you let yourself go off in all directions at once. Practically charging the medical staff with malpractice at the same time as you accused Karin Segerby of attempted murder, to her face as well as to me. You even threw me the name, Lysaniemi, just to keep my mind occupied, so I wouldn’t think too hard about you and your medical situation and how you might have got that way. Of course, the following morning you realized that you’d overreacted, and backed off from a lot of the wild stuff you’d said.”

Astrid grimaced. “It still seems very clairvoyant to me.”

I said, “There were other inconsistencies. The way you’d been beating at the gates of bureaucracy to help you find the missing husband you were supposedly mad about; but then it turned out you really weren’t too crazy about him after all, or too jealous of the lady he’d run off with. You even asked me to give the lovebirds a helping hand. And finally, so weak you could hardly stand, you let me carry you off to Europe without any significant protests. Ordinarily, a lady as ill as you were would have screamed rape and murder at being asked to travel even across the street; you accompanied me stoically across an ocean, and didn’t even complain about leaving behind your good suitcase and all your nice clothes except those you’d worn to the hospital. Why? Could it be that the original plan had been to decoy me over here, using the name Lysaniemi; and since I was being so beautifully cooperative, you felt you had no choice but to play along, regardless of the risks and sacrifices involved? Very admirable, ma’am, very brave considering your condition, but just a little suspicious under the circumstances.”

She smiled slowly. “It is a very good thing you are not married. What woman would want a husband who could see through all her little deceits and subterfuges?”

“As a matter of fact I had a wife once; but that wasn’t why she left me.” I looked at the handsome lady in the elaborate, inexpensive negligee. “It’s motive time,” I said. “What’s this all about, Astrid?”

She shook her head minutely. “I cannot tell you that, yet. Soon, perhaps, but not yet.”

I said, “Your husband disappears, with feminine company. A lady named Beilstein disappears, with masculine company. Various other people disappear in equally plausible ways, at least so I’m told. You come to us for help in finding your missing hubby. Not satisfied with what’s being done for you, you stage a phony heart episode—never mind that it backfired—to hint at a possible murder attempt and get a private bodyguard assigned to you by my chief, who then up and vanishes in his turn. Meanwhile, courageously overcoming your own weakness, you’re leading the tame agent you’ve acquired, me, out of the U.S. and up into the Scandinavian Arctic to find a village with a funny name where the greatest excitement ever is probably the arrival of the reindeer with the weekly mail. Tell me something that makes sense of all this, sweetheart.” I stared at her grimly; but she shook her head and remained silent. At last I shrugged. “Well, okay, for the time being. Let’s see how it breaks. But please remember that the resemblance between me and a nice guy is fairly superficial. Next time I ask, I’ll get an answer. One way or another.”

She studied my face for a moment; then she smiled slowly. “You are very tough, are you not? Will you please show me what you hold in your right hand?”

I brought the hand into sight with the palm-sized .25 automatic I’d released from its clip earlier in the conversation. I said, “I don’t like to be the only character in a room not holding a gun.”

She glanced down quickly at the Smith and Wesson that still reposed in her lap, and seemed surprised to see it. “Oh.”

“I was trying to learn something,” I said. “I thought it would be useful to see your reaction when I threw some nasty accusations at you, and you had a firearm handy.”

“Did I pass the test?”

“Your hand never twitched,” I said. “Your knuckles never even whitened. Obviously Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson were wasting their time inventing that thing, as far as you’re concerned. Even when pushed into a corner you don’t think in gunpowder terms.”

She smiled. “Maybe it was not so much of a corner you pushed me into, my dear. Or maybe I just knew I could not win doing battle on your terms. An amateur against a professional.”

“And maybe you’re just a nice lady playing a crazy game of some kind that you don’t feel is worth killing for… No, keep the piece. You’ve earned it and you may need it before we’re through, or I may. In the street gangs, I understand, the moll always carries the heater so if her man is frisked he comes up clean. I don’t think my terminology is up to date, but who can keep track of the jargon nowadays?” I looked at her. “Tired?”

She nodded. “I think I could sleep for a week.”