The Wrecking Crew (13 page)

I regarded them for a moment, a little grimly. Then I set my gear down, closed the door, and went over there. What I was thinking now seemed terribly suspicious and disloyal. She was a nice kid and she’d been, as sweet as she could be—but she’d also displayed some curiosity last night, maybe casual, maybe not, about just how and where I planned to get the stuff processed and printed.

Much as I hated to spoil what had happened between us with cynical afterthoughts, I couldn’t help remembering that I’d been playing it cool deliberately to see just what she’d do in the way of insuring my cooperation and lulling my suspicions. Well, she’d gone and done it, there was no denying that. Maybe she’d done it because she liked me, but one thing you learn very quickly in this business is not to take for granted that you’re just naturally irresistible to lonely women. Whatever her reasons, whatever her motives, she’d certainly allowed the businesslike relationship between us to be changed into something considerably more intimate.

I couldn’t afford to ignore the warning, or her display of curiosity about the films. It might mean nothing, of course, but I had to consider the possibility, at least, that these pix and the others I’d be taking in her company might have more significance than appeared on the surface. A few simple precautions seemed in order.

I sighed for my lost faith and innocence, went to the closet, and got out one of the metal .50-caliber cartridge boxes I use for preserving my main film supply. I dug out five unexposed rolls of Kodachrome and three unexposed rolls of black-and-white, still in the factory cartons. I sat down on the bed and opened the virgin film cartons carefully, breaking loose the adhesive with my knife without tearing the cardboard flaps.

Then I removed the unexposed films inside and carefully substituted the exposed films from the dresser. I glued the cartons shut again with patent stickum from my repair kit, and made a tiny identifying mark on each of the doctored cartons—a dot in the loop of the “a” in Kodak, if you must know—and buried all eight of them at the bottom of the box of fresh film, hoping I wouldn’t grab one by mistake some day when I was in a hurry.

I turned to the new films, and drew each five-foot film strip completely out of its metal cartridge, exposing it to light so that, if developed, it would turn totally black. No one would ever be able to determine whether or not it had ever held a real photographic image. There’s nothing as permanent and irrevocable as fogging a film, except killing a man.

I rolled all the films back into the cartridges by hand, got an empty camera, and one by one loaded them into the instrument, wound them a little way, and rewound them again. This gave the proper reverse curl to the leaders, as if they’d actually been used. I was getting pretty tricky now, but there’s no sense pulling a gag like that unless you make it good. I marked each fogged roll with an authentic-looking number to correspond with the data in my notebook. Finally I put the film cartridges in a neat row on the dresser, where they looked exactly like the films that had stood there before.

Probably I was just wasting my time. However, I had plenty of film to spare, and if I was wrong there was little harm done. It seemed about time to start taking a few obvious precautions, anyway. I had to remember that the opposition had tested me carefully at least once and maybe twice—if little Mr. Carlsson wasn’t exactly what he’d claimed to be. They’d found me stupid and harmless enough to let live, while Sara Lundgren had been killed. The difference was, presumably, that they had no further use for her, while they needed me for something.

I still didn’t know with certainty what that something was. However, if yesterday was a reliable indication, I was going to be taking a lot of pictures in this northern country—and I was going to be taking them under the very close supervision of a young lady whose motives weren’t exactly clear, to put the matter with the greatest charity possible. It seemed just as well to make reasonably sure of retaining control of my pix until I could determine that everything I’d been told to photograph was completely innocuous. Not that it had much bearing on my primary job—Mac wouldn’t give a damn what happened to my films—but I do take a certain pride in my photography, and I wasn’t going to let it be used, unnecessarily, for purposes of which I didn’t approve.

Finished, I crossed the hall and knocked on Lou’s door. “I’m going downstairs,” I called. “See you in the dining room.”

“All right, darling.”

The endearment made me feel like a calculating and suspicious beast, but one of the things you have to keep in mind in this work is that what happens in bed, no matter how pleasant it may be, has no bearing on what happens anywhere else. A woman may be sweet and wonderful under those circumstances, and still be dangerous as a rattlesnake with her clothes on. Cemeteries are full of men who forgot this basic principle.

When I crossed the small lobby, there was a girl speaking to the clerk at the desk. My interest in stray females was at a low ebb that morning, for reasons both emotional and glandular, and this one was wearing pants—bright plaid pants at that—so I didn’t even bother to examine her rear view closely as I headed for the dining-room door. Her voice caught me by surprise.

“Good morning, Cousin Matthias.”

I swung around to face Elin von Hoffman. That kid could do the damndest things to herself and still be beautiful. This morning, in the loud pants and a heavy gray ski sweater, without a trace of makeup besides that lousy lipstick she’d worn the night before, she was still something to make you weep for your wasted life. She held out a small key by its tag and chain.

“I brought your car,” she said. “Those old Volvos are not much good, are they?”

“It runs,” I said. “What do you expect for thirty crowns a day, a Mercedes 300SL?”

“Oh, you know sports cars?” she asked. “In Stockholm I have a Jaguar, from Britain. It is very handsome and exciting. I also have a little Lambretta which is much fun. That is a motor scooter, you know.”

I said, “Yes. I know.”

She laughed. “I am still trying to educate you, aren’t I? Well, I must go.”

“I’ll drive you,” I said.

“Oh, no. That is why I came, for the walk back. I love walking, and it is such a fine day.”

“It looks kind of gray and windy to me.”

“Yes,” she said. “Those are the best.”

So she was one of the rain-in-the-face kids. Well, she’d outgrow it; she had plenty of time. I said, “That’s a matter of taste. Like walking.”

“You say you like hunting. If you hunt, you must walk.”

“I’ll walk if I can’t get a horse or a jeep,” I said. “I don’t mind a little hike, if there’s a chance of a shot at the end of it. But not just for the sake of hiking.”

She laughed again. “You Americans! Everything must show a profit, even walking… Good morning, Mrs. Taylor.”

Lou had come down the stairs, in her working uniform of skirt and sweater and trench coat. Beside the taller, younger Swedish girl in her outdoor clothes, she looked surprisingly slight, almost fragile, although I had good reason to know that she didn’t break easily. The thought, for some reason, was a little embarrassing at the moment. I saw the kid look from Lou to me and back again. She was young, but not that young; she saw something and understood it. I guess it usually shows, except on the really hardened sinners, which we were not. When Elin spoke again, there was noticeable stiffness in her voice.

“I was just leaving, Mrs. Taylor,” she said. “Good-bye, Herr Helm. Your car is in the parking space across the street.”

We watched her go out the door into the gray fall morning. The wind caught her hair as she came outside, and she brushed it out of her face, and tossed it back with a shake of her head, and went out of sight with the efficient, no nonsense stride of the practiced foot traveler, that you hardly ever see in America nowadays. Come to that, America never was much of a country for walkers and runners, at least after the frontier hit the Great Plains. There was just too damn much ground to cover efficiently on foot. Most of the old-timers sensibly preferred to ride. There are some real fancy foot pilgrimages on record, but if you check closely you’ll find that in almost every case they start with a horse getting killed or stolen. Walking for fun is strictly a European custom.

“Who
is
that overgrown child?” Lou asked as we went on into the dining room. “I never got her name straight last night.”

“Child yourself, honey bunch,” I said. “From my advanced age, twenty-two doesn’t look much younger than twenty-six.”

“Well, you ought to know, grandpa,” she said, smiling. “You were right in there looking, at dinner last night.”

I seated her at a table by a window. “My interest was purely aesthetic,” I said firmly. “I was admiring her as a photographer. You must admit she’s so beautiful it hurts.”

“Beautiful!” Lou was shocked. “That gawky—” She stopped abruptly. “Yes, I see what you mean. Although I don’t go for the nature-girl type myself.” She grimaced. “You hear about Sweden being such an immoral country; how do they manage to grow up with that damn dewy look? I never looked like that, and I can tell you, I was innocent as hell practically to the day I married.”

“Practically?” I said.

She smiled at me across the table. “Don’t be nosy. If you must know, Hal and I anticipated the ceremony slightly. As he put it, you wouldn’t buy a car without driving it around the block, would you?”

“Nice, diplomatic Hal,” I murmured.

She said, “Oh, I didn’t mind. I… learned a lot from Hal. He was pretty conceited, sometimes, and he couldn’t always be bothered with being kind, but we both knew he needed me. He was a strange person, very brilliant, but temperamental and erratic. Sometimes I wondered if... you know, I wasn’t quite sure that I really meant anything to him except, well, a convenience. But you can forgive a man a great many things, Matt, when the last thing he does, with a machine gun spitting in his face, is to turn and do his best to protect you with his body. He saved my life, remember that.”

She was very intent, very serious, and I knew she was trying to tell me something important. “I’ll remember it,” I said. “And I’ll make no more derogatory remarks about Mr. Taylor. Okay?”

Lou smiled quickly. “I didn’t mean to sound as if… Well, maybe I did.” She brought out her long cigarette holder, loaded it, and applied a match before I could act like a gentleman. “Now,” she said, “you tell me about your wife, and we’ll have all that out of the way.”

I glanced at her. “I never told you I had a wife.”

“I know you didn’t, darling. It was very deceitful of you, but I already had the information. You have a wife and three children, two boys and a girl. Your wife is getting a divorce in Reno on the grounds of mental cruelty, after fifteen years of marriage. It certainly took her a long time to discover that you’re a brute.”

I said, “Beth is a nice, sweet, bright, somewhat inhibited New England girl. She thinks wars are fought by brave men in handsome uniforms, engaging each other in open combat according to the rules of civilized warfare and good sportsmanship. Even so, she thinks it’s dreadful. She was very glad that I’d spent the war behind a desk in a public information office and hadn’t killed anybody. That was the story I told around, under orders. When she learned it wasn’t the truth, she couldn’t make the adjustment. I wasn’t the same person; I wasn’t the man she’d married. I wasn’t even anybody she’d want to marry. There was nothing left but to call it a day.” I glanced out the window, and saw with relief that our transportation was outside. The conversation had been getting slightly personal. “Finish up your coffee quick,” I said. “Our escort is waiting.”

I used more color on the job today because of the bad light. Black-and-white depends largely on highlights and shadows, not only for effects, but even for sharp details. On a cloudy day, it’s hard to get useful black-and-white shots of intricate industrial subjects, particularly with a small camera that, necessarily, doesn’t yield the ultimate in sharpness. Color, on the other hand, is almost easier to handle on a cloudy day than otherwise, since it doesn’t tolerate or require strong contrasts of light and shade. With color, the colors themselves provide the necessary contrasts. If you don’t insist on gaudiness, you can get some wonderful color stuff under lousy weather conditions.

We had a little rain, but not enough to drive us to cover; and we finished up around two o’clock without having stopped to eat. I spent the ride back to town worrying about the tipping problem, and settled by shaking hands with Lindström, our young guide, and thanking him for all his trouble. Then I slipped the middle-aged driver five crowns, the equivalent of a buck, which didn’t seem to excite him tremendously, but he didn’t throw it away, either.

“Let’s get something to eat uptown,” I said to Lou after we’d hauled my stuff up the stairs. “I’m getting kind of tired of the hotel food.”

“All right,” she said, “just give me a couple of minutes to change my socks and scrape the mud off my shoes.”

I went into my room to wash up—also to perform my little switch routine with the day’s films. Then I went out to the car. I never like to drive a car that’s been standing around, while I’m on a job, without first giving it a quick inspection, and this one had spent the night far from home.

The Volvo was standing in the hotel parking space with nothing but somebody’s Triumph motorcycle for company. I walked around the little sedan once and looked inside; it was empty except for a rug or blanket provided by the management, which had slid off the rear seat onto the floor. I decided to take a chance on the doors; generally, if they have the vehicle booby-trapped, they prefer to let you get inside before they blow you up, since the explosion has a better crack at you in a confined space.

Nothing happened when I opened the door. I got the hood open. The little four-cylinder mill looked all right to me. There didn’t seem to be any unnecessary wiring around the starter or its switch. I crouched to look underneath for signs that the brakes had been tampered with. There weren’t any, but something was dripping out of the differential housing.