The Vanishers (18 page)

I grinned. “You’re bound to make a real she-devil of this cute little bouncing blonde.”

“I am apparently not the only one. From what you have told me of the conference you just attended, certain important members of your family—my family by marriage—consider her a serious menace, also.” Astrid laughed. “Someone must keep all the possibilities in mind, darling. Someone who is not too impressed by a pair of wide blue eyes.”

“Nevertheless, you don’t seem to have crossed her off your social list.”

“Of course not. There was no proof; and the family sticks together. As a matter of fact we were very kind to the poor young widow, if only to demonstrate that we took no stock in those nasty official suspicions. It was rather a strain, and I was happy when Alan was no longer needed at the current hearings and we could go home; although Karin acted as if we were very cruel to desert her. However, when we came again, this year, she had pulled herself together, I was glad to see; but she was still not a relaxing person with whom to associate, under the circumstances. We tried to avoid her without giving offense; but when Alan vanished like that, Karin decided that it was her turn to comfort me. She got on my nerves quite badly. I suppose that is why I lost my temper with her at our last luncheon in Washington.”

“But in spite of your fight she turned up in Hagerstown to see you in the hospital.”

“Because of our fight, actually,” Astrid said. “She had been brooding about the quarrel, she told me; she wanted to fix things up between us. So she called my parents to ask them to have me telephone her as soon as I arrived; but she found them much distressed. The hospital, unable to reach Alan, listed as next of kin on the cards I carry, had somehow managed to get hold of them instead. I guess I must have been in a truly critical condition for a few hours; they felt obliged to notify someone. My parents were desperate. They are too old to travel; they did not know what to do. Karin told them she would take care of everything, and drove to Hagerstown, which was really very nice of her.”

There was a little silence. We had pretty well taken care of Karin Segerby as a subject of conversation.

I asked casually, “How did a Finnish girl from Indiana manage to meet a Swedish count working as oceanographer in Gloucester, Mass? Was it your Scandinavian backgrounds that drew you together, or do you know something about oceanography?”

Astrid laughed. “My dear man, I have one degree in the subject and I am working towards another, although I may be an old lady before I get it, at the rate I seem to be progressing these days.” She moved her shoulders resignedly. “Education and matrimony don’t seem to mix very well.”

“I see. Is that how you met, professionally?”

Astrid nodded. “I was Alan’s laboratory assistant, one of his laboratory assistants. It was a considerable honor, I will have you know, to work with Dr. Watrous. I was very proud of it. After a while I lost my student awe of him and we became good friends. The fact that we came from similar backgrounds, as you said, didn’t hurt. Finally we decided to… No!” She shook her head quickly. “Why not the truth for a change? That is what we let people believe, but it is not the way it really was. We were certainly friends, Alan and I, as well as professional associates; but for me there was someone else. Someone I considered even more wonderful than the eminent Dr. Watrous; and I was careless; I became pregnant. A tawdry and common little story. Learning that he had… had knocked me up, to use that revolting phrase, my great love—my great lover—disappeared over the horizon very rapidly.” She glanced at me quickly as I stirred. “Are the true confessions boring you?”

“No, but I think we can use a small refill apiece.”

“I will do it.” Before I could rise, Astrid was on her feet, taking my glass. “I only want a very little. You would be too generous, so I had better do it.”

“Go easy on mine, too,” I said; and when she had returned with my drink, I said, “Carry on, Scheherazade.”

She settled down beside me and took a sip from her glass. “Well, if you wish. Alan soon realized that there was something wrong. My work was suddenly very bad and my temper was atrocious. Finally, as a friend, he got the sordid truth from the shamed tearful lady. He helped her make arrangements for terminating her embarrassing condition… It was the logical escape from my predicament; but I found to my surprise that I could not be so logical. When the time came, I found that I simply could not do it. I was incapable of… of having it killed. Stupid sentimentalism!”

I shrugged. “We all have things we can’t do.”

“But not many things, in your case.” Her voice was sharp. Then she said quickly, “Sorry, I am just being nasty because I hate to confess that I am such an irrational person. But I said I would rather struggle along comically as a supposedly intelligent professional woman who had made a ridiculous mistake and become a mother, although it was hard to imagine anyone less fitted for motherhood. However, nowadays there are many unwed mothers, and I could hope that my life would not be totally ruined; that I would not become the complete social outcast I would have been a generation or two ago. But it would certainly be no help towards the academic career I had hoped to attain.”

There was a little pause. At last I said, “I gather that your good friend came up with another helpful idea. Since abortion was unacceptable, he generously married the pregnant lady to save her reputation and her career, right?”

Astrid turned on me sharply. “You must not sneer! It was a very fine thing; do not be sarcastic! Yes, Alan suggested that if I could not bear to terminate the situation, perhaps I would be willing to legitimize it. He was very stiff and funny, and very… beautiful. He said, we were not madly in love, but we did get along well together, and since he had at the moment no other candidate for this great honor… Making a joke of it to put me at ease and save my pride. A very nice man. I should have refused to let him do such a generous thing; but I was feeling so cheap and ill and humiliated! I told myself that divorces were readily available; and it would be such a great relief to have my problem solved so… so respectably. I told myself I would make it up to him in every way possible.”

“What about the child?”

She drew a long breath. “After all that, after all the misery and generosity, I had a miscarriage six weeks after we were married! But it makes no difference to what I owe Alan. It was still a very wonderful thing for him to do.”

I spoke without expression: “For a lady who got married merely to give a name to her unborn child, and then lost the child, you seem to have stuck with matrimony much longer than one would have expected.”

She gave me a crooked smile. “Please, do not be so tactful, my dear. I think you have guessed that I would continue to stick with it, if the decision were mine. Forever, if Alan were willing; in which case I would not have let us behave as we did last night.”

“Misbehave, you mean.” I grinned briefly. “So propinquity did its dirty work?”

“Yes, I would happily have settled down to be Mrs. Watrous for the rest of my life. But I had made my bargain. It had always been understood between us that our marriage was only a temporary expedient to insure that the lady’s good name would remain untarnished. Even though we had stayed together longer than originally planned, I could not possibly object when he asked for his freedom at last. So as soon as all this is settled, there will be a divorce, and the eminent Dr. Alan Watrous will discard that dull blonde wife of his, and marry the lovely dark girl of his dreams. If we can rescue them in time.”

“Yes,” I said. “Rescue them. In Lysaniemi?” I was watching her carefully.

Astrid hesitated. “I do not really know what we will find in Lysaniemi, Matt.”

I said, “As a matter of fact, that’s just a name you were supposed to feed me, isn’t it? As part of the deal you made with my chief that made my services available to the family.” I took another pull of the fresh drink in my hand, a short one as I’d requested. “He gave you that name, didn’t he? With instructions to whisper it to me at the earliest plausible opportunity. Did he tell you anything about it?”

She shook her head. “No, Matt.”

“Lysaniemi, Lysaniemi?” I frowned at my glass. “That’s all? No hint of what it means or what I’m supposed to do about… Oh, hell, there’s Awful Olaf now!”

Somebody was knocking at the front door. I drained the last of the Scotch and set the glass aside. I rose and started for the front hall, and bumped into an antique chair that seemed to have moved into my path of its own accord. The whole room had suddenly become shifty and unstable.

I was aware that Astrid was watching me with the wary but slightly pitying look that always means the same thing. Then her eyes widened and she pushed herself out of her chair in an attempt to flee, staring at me with shock and fear; but what did the stupid broad expect? She knew what I did for a living, and whom I did it for; did she think we wouldn’t have an answer for the tired old knockout-drops routine? It was too damn’ bad; she was an attractive wench and good company, in or out of bed—well, sofa—but you don’t go around feeding Mickeys to people like me if longevity is your ambition. The standing orders are very specific on that point.

The little .22 High Standard automatic was comfortable in my hand. It was the only thing in the world, in my shut marksman’s world; and the fact that my knees were weak and I was beginning to have trouble with my breathing didn’t matter a bit. When I squeezed off the first round I found that the agency silencer was really very good these days, with that low-powered target ammo. The early ones weren’t so hot, and sometimes you’d blow some kind of sound-absorbent packing out of them and have all kinds of trouble. But this one worked fine; and I’d have made more noise pulling a wine cork.

Well, three wine corks. I quit shooting when the pistol started becoming oddly unsteady in my hand, or maybe it was my hand that was becoming unsteady. There was no sense in just making stray holes in the premises.

Three should be enough to get the job done.

I awoke folded into a small dark space that jiggled uncomfortably and smelled of exhaust fumes and rubber, or whatever passes for rubber these synthetic days. Analyzing the received data, slowly and painfully, the sluggish mental computer arrived at the conclusion that I was sharing the trunk of a moving automobile with the spare tire. My wrists and ankles were bound, tightly enough to induce considerable discomfort and some numbness. My position was very cramped since few cars these days, particularly European cars, have trunks large enough for convenient transportation of gents my height. I had a throbbing headache, and my stomach didn’t like something that had been put into it. I had to fight to control a panicky attack of claustrophobia. I felt fine, just fine.

I mean, as they say, halitosis is better than no breath at all. Whatever it was that Astrid had slipped into my last drink, the one she’d insisted on making for me, it hadn’t proved fatal yet, so it wasn’t likely to. To be sure, I was a prisoner, in not too great physical condition, but what the hell, somebody besides Bennett had made a real move at last. Sooner or later the assignment might actually take some kind of comprehensible shape, and I’d know what was expected of me. Assuming that I survived, of course.

There was a gradual change in the motion of the vehicle. We’d apparently been cruising at a fairly good clip on an open road—their normal highway speed limits range from ninety to a hundred and ten kilometers per hour, very roughly fifty-five to sixty-five MPH; but they’ve been known to bend the law a bit just like at home. Now there was braking and gear-shifting and lane-changing as the traffic became heavier. I decided that we were coming into a city, maybe Uppsala, maybe Stockholm. But that was guesswork. I could have been unconscious for hours. It didn’t seem likely that we’d crossed any international borders, but we could be entering any one of a number of other Swedish towns. However, those two were the largest, closest, and most likely.

There was a considerable amount of stop-and-go business; and finally a complete halt, motor off. I heard the doors open and footsteps come along both sides of the car towards the rear where I lay. Two people, or maybe three, I wasn’t certain. Call it three. One made shorter, crisper sounds with the heels than the others. A woman? The key went into the lock, and the trunk lid went up, admitting some light, but not glaring sunshine. I saw no reason to try to roll myself over so I could face my kidnappers and greet them with cries of joy. While I wasn’t exactly comfortable jammed into that car trunk, I had a hunch the situation wouldn’t improve much wherever they were taking me.

“Kanske han kvävats.”

A youthful male voice I didn’t recognize was suggesting that maybe I’d smothered in there. The owner of the voice wasn’t gloating about it, but he wasn’t greatly concerned about it, either.

“Nej, han är för elak att dö.”

This was an older male voice saying that, no, I was too mean to die. It was a voice I’d heard before. Well, I’d been anticipating a discussion with Baron Olaf Stjernhjelm, but I hadn’t expected it to take quite this form. He gave an order, sending somebody named Greta off to watch an alley, lane, or driveway. The word was
gränd
, pronounced “grend.” I wasn’t certain of the exact translation. The female footsteps moved away at a crisp trot.

Olaf s voice spoke in English: “Helm, it is of no use for you to play o’possum, if I have the correct slang phrase. I am instructing Karl to cut you free. Please do not try to take advantage. I have a pistol, your very convenient silenced pistol, with a cartridge in the chamber; and I have refilled the magazine from one of the boxes of ammunition found in your luggage. You have no chance whatever of disarming or overpowering me… All right, Karl.”

Something, presumably a knife, tugged at the ropes that bound my ankles first, and then the ones about my wrists.

I said without moving, “Okay to sit up?”

“What? Yes, it is okay. If you are careful… Stand back, Karl; allow him room. Do not get between us.” The last two sentences were in Swedish.