The Wrecking Crew (22 page)

As we left Kiruna behind, she said, “These big American cars are terrible. So soft, like perambulators swaying on their springs. And these automatic gears— you Americans must not like to drive, or you would not invent such intricate machinery to do the driving for you.”

If she was trying to pick an argument, she’d come to the wrong man. You couldn’t give me an automatic transmission if you threw a Cadillac in with the deal. I’ve done some racing and I enjoy shifting gears. But it was hardly the time to discuss the shortcomings of Detroit iron.

“That’s right,” I said. “I remember. You’re the Jaguar-and-Lambretta kid.” I watched the wilderness going past the window. “Where are we going?”

She gave me a secretive smile. “I will tell you only this much: it is a cabin on a lake upon which a small airplane with floats will land when the proper signal is sent.” She glanced at me, and added slyly, “I am afraid you are going to have to walk a considerable distance, but I will try to pick the easiest way.”

Proudly masculine, I started to tell this cocky girl that I could damn well go anywhere she could, but I shut up quickly. If she wanted to consider me helpless in the woods, why should I disillusion her? Upon reflection, it seemed like a notion that deserved encouragement...

We drove eastward at a fast clip. The highway was gravel, but wide and well-graded, the nice, friendly, informal kind of road we used to have out west before they went crazy and started pouring asphalt on every little track across the desert. Around us, the arctic foliage still retained its bright fall colors. There was a low bush with small red leaves that grew everywhere, so that the ground seemed to be on fire. Presently Elin turned into a small logging road heading off in a northerly direction. It turned into a couple of ruts, and then into a trail full of mud holes. She stopped the car and got out.

“From here we must walk,” she said.

“How far is it?” I asked, showing no enthusiasm for the prospect.

“About one Swedish mile: ten kilometers. That is about six of your English miles.”

I said, “Six and a quarter, to be more precise, one English mile being equal to one and six-tenths kilometers.”

She flushed slightly. “I am sorry. I do keep trying to educate you, don’t I?”

I looked at her for a moment. The trouble with people is that they’re practically all human. It would be much easier if they weren’t. This kid had shoved a gun in my back, and threatened Lou with torture and death, but I couldn’t seem to hate her very hard. As a matter of fact, I still kind of liked her, I discovered. I won’t say her being lovely didn’t influence me a little.

“Let’s go,” I said shortly. “The damn trail won’t get any shorter from our standing here looking at it.”

She said abruptly, “They will kill you, Matt.”

“It’s been tried,” I said. “So far, unsuccessfully.”

“But—” She checked herself, hesitated, swung around, and started into the forest with that businesslike foot-traveler’s stride I’d seen before. Following behind, I said, “Caselius must value his privacy highly, to hike six miles every time he wants to reach his headquarters.”

“It is only a rendezvous,” she said without looking around. “It was only intended as a place to meet once. A place to leave from. A place for the airplane to come, where it could not be seen or heard.”

“So he’s leaving the country.”

“Yes.” Still without turning her head, Elin said, “You must love her very much, to deliberately walk into danger for her.”

“It’s not that,” I said. “I just feel kind of responsible for putting her on the spot. If it hadn’t been for my trick with the films, Caselius would be in jail and she’d be safe.” After a moment I added, “Lou’s all right. I won’t say I’m not fond of her, but I don’t make a habit of wasting undying passion on married women. She’s still got a husband around somewhere.”

The girl ahead of me didn’t actually break step, but her foot kind of hesitated in midair before she put it down. “Has she?”

“What do you mean?” I asked innocently. “Isn’t that how Caselius has been keeping her in line, by holding her husband prisoner?”

“She is a fool,” Elin said scornfully. “Her husband died of his injuries six months ago. Caselius has been fooling her ever since. One heavily bandaged man in a hospital bed looks very much like another, if the photograph is bad enough…” She threw a quick, suspicious glance over her shoulder. “You knew?”

“I guessed, when I saw the pix,” I said. “After all, I really am a photographer of sorts, you know. I couldn’t help wondering why he’d have such lousy shots taken when he’d be bound to have somebody around who could take good ones.”

I heard her laugh, striding ahead of me briskly. “You are quite clever... Am I walking too fast for you?”

I said, breathing heavily, “Well, we’re not standing still, that’s for sure.”

“I will go slower,” she said. “It is too bad we cannot drive you in that fine American car with its soft springs and its wonderful automatic transmission.” She laughed again. “How can you believe America is going to win, Cousin? How can one conquer the world sitting down?”

After that, we didn’t have much breath for conversation. The kid was a walking fool, and despite her promise to slow down she continued to set a killing pace. The country was the wettest I’d ever hiked through. Although I hadn’t noticed an abnormal amount of rain during the week I’d been there, the ground seemed to be saturated almost everywhere. We jumped little creeks, splashed through puddles, and waded through boggy hollows. Our shoes were soaked after the first quarter mile. I suppose the solid granite of the earth’s core is so close to the surface up here—the soil is so thin—that any rain that falls has no place to go.

Finally I called a rest and sat down on a boulder, panting. She didn’t deign to admit weariness; kids never do. She just stood there waiting. Aside from wet feet, the only sign of distress she showed—if you could call it that—was the fact that her soft, light-brown hair, loosened by her exertions and snagged by branches along the way, was falling untidily out of its neat, pulled-back arrangement. Presently she reached up, removed a few pins and a contraption that seemed to be made of horsehair, and shook it all lose about her shoulders.

“Elin,” I said. “Tell me. What are you getting out of all this?”

She threw me a quick glance. Her voice was stiff when she spoke. “I am not ashamed.”

“Fine,” I said. “You’re not ashamed. I’ll make a note for the record: Elin von Hoffman is not ashamed.”

She said, “You would not understand. You are an American, not a Swede. America must be a wonderful country in which to live. At least for the moment, you are both free and powerful. And you have no history to remember and regret.”

“Now, listen—”

She made an impatient gesture. “American history is a joke! Why, Columbus did not discover the New World until almost the year fifteen hundred. We have churches still in use here in Sweden dating from twelve hundred, and all they indicate is the time of the arrival of Christianity. Much Swedish history, as you must recall, was made earlier by men who worshiped Odin and Thor. By the time your American history was fairly begun, Swedish history was almost ended.”

“I’m slow,” I said. “You’re leading up to something, but I haven’t got it yet.”

“Now America is a great power,” she said, “and Sweden is a little neutral country, cowering between two giants she must not antagonize on any account. We must be careful, we are told, we must be prudent... Bah! Can we forget that there was a time when the dragon ships would put to sea each spring, and the crews would cast lots to see whether they would take their tribute, this year, from east or from west? And all along the coast of Europe, people trembled awaiting their coming!”

“What are you suggesting,” I asked, “that we gather together a bunch of congenial Vikings and go a-raiding?”

She gave me an indignant look. “You joke,” she said, “but it is no joke! Once Norway was ours, and Finland and Denmark; the Baltic was a Swedish lake. When Swedish armies moved, the world held its breath, waiting to see where they would strike. We had real kings in those days, not just a family of handsome figureheads imported from France, whose function is to make palatable these little socialists and their comfortable welfare state!” She drew a long breath. “If we are to have royalty, let’s have royalty that rules—and fights! Or let us get rid of the whole cowardly pack of princes and politicians and get a government that will recognize that these are days of decision for the whole world. Sweden cannot hide from what is to come under a word called neutrality, like a cur dog biding under a broken basket. We must take a stand. We must make our choice!”

I said, “It’s pretty clear what choice you’ve made.”

“Somebody will rule the world, Matthew Helm! Will it be the country that spends its time and ingenuity saving its people from the dreadful effort of shifting gears? You Americans have almost forgotten how to walk; how can you fight? I do not like these Slavs with their silly political theories, but they have the strength and they have the will, and one cannot be sentimental in these matters. And when it is all over, what country will they select to form the nucleus of the great Scandinavian state that must come? Will it be Finland, that fought them savagely and hates them bitterly? Will it be Norway, that joined your North Atlantic pact against them? Will it be Denmark, geographically and politically aligned with the continent, rather than with us here in the north?” She moved her shoulders abruptly. “It is not what one would choose for one’s country, perhaps, but who is free to choose? And who knows, if the giants kill or weaken each other, maybe the time of the pygmies will come!”

I said, “Elin, I’m no world strategist, but I know that for years—centuries—the Russians have been trying to break through to a warm-water port on the Atlantic. It’s even more important these days, when the nuclear submarine may become one of the deciding factors of world power. They’ve got access to the Pacific, but they’re still hemmed in on this side of the world. The Black Sea can be blocked at the Dardanelles. The Baltic can be closed almost as easily. Murmansk, way up there on the Arctic Ocean, is a hell of a place to get into and out of, as our boys learned during the war.

“Narvik, in Norway, could be the answer. But you can’t reach Narvik by land except through north Sweden, not from the direction of Russia, anyway. I don’t say it will happen this year, or the next, but they’re considering it, or they wouldn’t go to all this trouble to get pictures of the area.” I gestured toward the two paper-wrapped packages she carried. “And you’re helping them.”

She shrugged her shoulders again, under the gray ski sweater. “Nothing is free,” she said. “If one wants powerful allies, one must pay a price. What we lose now we may be able to take back later, when they are weakened by war.” She was a real little old Machiavelli, in her fouled-up way. I couldn’t tell how much of this she really believed, and how much was a rationalization of the fact that the world was going to hell in a basket and she simply had to do
something
about it, even if what she did was the wrong thing. Some people just aren’t built to sit around on their butts being carefully neutral.

She broke off the argument by turning away and starting off again fast. I set off after her. She was half running. I contented myself with following at a jog trot. Gradually, as she slowed after the first spurt, I gained on her. When she heard me coming, she increased her pace again, keeping well ahead of me. I’d catch glimpses of her through the trees, moving rapidly. I’d lose her for several minutes and then see her far ahead, waiting for me, and her laughter would come back to me, mocking me, as she set off again.

When she let me catch her at last, she was sitting on a log at the edge of a great open space that looked at first glance like a wilderness meadow. She looked at me as I slumped down beside her, gasping for breath; and she laughed.

“You do not keep up very well, Cousin Matthias.”

“I’m here,” I panted.

She waved her hand at the meadow before us. “It looks harmless, does it not, like a pasture for cows. It is a
myr.
The word is the same, I think, as the English ‘moor’, or maybe ‘mire’. In spring it is a bottomless bog and quite impassable; reindeer that venture out upon it disappear from sight and are never seen again. Now in the autumn the ground is not quite so wet, and it can be crossed if one knows how. But one must be careful.” She glanced at me again, and said, “Listen.”

I frowned. “Listen to what?”

She shook her head sharply. “Be quiet. Just listen!”

I listened. After a moment, I got what she meant. There wasn’t anything to hear. In all that flaming country, red and gold to the horizon, not an insect buzzed, not a bird sang. The sky was blue and clear. A breath of air rustled a few dry leaves nearby. Otherwise not a sound broke the great northern silence.

Elin glanced at me. “In our Swedish schools we have a course called ‘orientation’. Every Swedish child must learn how to find his way across unknown country without getting lost. Do you have such classes in America?”

“No,” I said.

She asked gently, “Do you know where we are, Cousin Matthias?”

“No,” I said, honestly enough. I knew which direction the highway was, which is as much as you generally knew, hiking through the bush. But that wasn’t the question she’d asked.

She rose and stood looking down at me for a moment. “Go back,” she said. “Walk due south. You will strike the road after a while. Go that way.” She pointed. It was the right direction. She said, “If you come with me, they will kill you. They are waiting for you, armed. I am supposed to lead you up to their guns. But I cannot do it. After all, we are related, even if very distantly. Go back.”

I hesitated, and shook my head. She looked at me for a moment longer and started to say something else; then she laughed instead.

“You are stubborn,” she said. “I will not argue with you. The
myr
has better arguments than I have. Just remember the direction to the highway. This is a nice country in which to be lost.”