The Wrecking Crew

Chapter Seven

I SIGHED, hung up the phone, turned, took another deep breath, and pushed the door open. Sara Lundgren was standing there. You couldn't make out the unorthodox color of her hair in the dim light. It just looked soft and bright under her little tweed hat. She looked rather pretty and feminine to me now, after an evening in the company of the taut, shorn, dark leanness of Lou Taylor. I suppose the fact that I hadn't been quite sure I wasn't opening the door to violence, or even death, also tended to operate in her favor.

"All clear?" I asked. My voice was steady enough, I was glad to hear.

She nodded. "As far as I can tell. My car is parked on the other side of the trees. We can sit there and talk."

I don't like parked cars any more than I like phone booths. All it takes is a small amount of explosive, properly activated, or a single burst from an automatic weapon. There's no place you can go that can't be predicted and covered beforehand. But I was just a hick photographer, or, on a different level, a superannuated retread reluctantly put back into service; I wasn't supposed to be thinking of such things.

"You took your time with dinner," Sara said, guiding me into a path I hadn't seen in the dark. Her heels made small clicking sounds against the invisible pavement. "Did you have to let the woman tell you the whole story of her life? Or tell her the whole of yours? At least you could have refrained from spending an hour over the brandy! You might have realized, if you'd bothered to think, that I haven't had my clothes off since I started for Gothenburg at midnight last night!"

It was kind of like being married again, although Beth had never been the nagging type. I found myself wondering how Beth and the kids were getting on in Reno. It wasn't much of a place for kids. I said, "You didn't have to follow us. You knew we'd be coming back to the hotel."

Sara said irritably, "How do you know what I have to do? Any more than I know what you have to do. All I know is that I'm supposed to watch out for you while you're here, at the request of your superiors, confirmed by mine. When I get an order, I obey it!"

I listened to her sharp voice, and the rapping of her smart, slim, pointed little heels, and subtracted these sounds from the total sounds of the night. I subtracted the distant traffic murmurs and the soft whisper of a vagrant breeze. That still left a little more sound than there should have been. It wasn't anything as definite as a cracking branch or even a rustling leaf. It was just the old hunter's instinct warning me that we shared this park with someone, or something.

Sara stopped abruptly. "Did you hear something? I thought I did."

"No," I said. "I didn't hear anything."

She laughed uneasily. "When I'm tired, I get nervous. I've just got the wind up a bit, I guess. Heavens, I've been overseas so long I'm beginning to talk like a Britisher! Come on."

The car was a little Kharmann-Ghia, a Volkswagen with sex appeal. It was the only vehicle in the parking area, which was located just off a wide street carrying considerable traffic, even at this hour of the night. I hadn't realized civilization was so close. As I watched, a motor scooter went past. A boy was driving, and a girl, nicely dressed, her skirt rippling in the wind of their motion, was perched gracefully sideways on the rear cushion: two kids on a date. I could imagine the scornful reaction of an American girl offered this breezy transportation after dolling herself up in high heels, nylons, and little white gloves. Behind me, the park was silent. Whoever was there was no longer moving around. Well, neither were we.

"Come on, get in!" Sara said impatiently. She had already seated herself behind the wheel.

I got into the vacant bucket seat, and closed the car door. It closed smoothly and heavily, like a trap springing shut. She was lighting a cigarette. The flame of the match brought her face out of the darkness, ghostly and surprisingly beautiful. It was hard to listen to her, when you couldn't see her, and remember that she was really a very handsome woman. It was too bad she had to sound like a shrew.

"Have one?" she asked, offering me the package, perhaps as a gesture of peace.

I shook my head. "I quit. It was too much of a nuisance around the darkroom. You can't make a really sharp projection print in a room full of smoke."

She said, with a short laugh, "Don't waste that photographic line on me, my friend."

I said, "It just happens to be the truth. I've actually taken a few pictures in my life; that's why I was picked for this job, remember?"

She asked, "Well, what did you learn tonight?"

"She's coming to Kiruna with me. She wants to watch the genius at work and make sure he remembers to put film in the camera, or something. We didn't go into her motives in detail." After a moment I asked, "Who's Wellington?"

"Jim Wellington. A visitor to her room, apparently not for the first time. He seemed quite at home. A big man with curly hair. Just an acquaintance, she says. She also says he's kind of nice."

"American?"

"Or a reasonable facsimile. He mentioned the Baltimore Camera Club, giving the impression he'd once been a star member."

"I'll put through a query," Sara said. She took out a notebook, turned it to face the street lights, and wrote. "Wellington… Description?"

I gave it to her. "He's supposed to represent some U.S. plastics firm," I said.

"Anything else to add about him?"

I shook my head. "No."

That Jim Wellington had been a member of one of our undercover units during the war, and had made a ifight across the Channel from a certain field in England on a certain date, was information I was keeping to myself for a while. Not that it labeled him, necessarily, as an honest and upright citizen; a lot of men who'd risked their necks for democracy back in those days had turned their reckless courage and their wartime training into less creditable and more lucrative channels since. But it was something I had on the man that, probably, nobody else around here had; and I wasn't going to toss it into the common pool of knowledge until I was quite sure I had no use for it myself. Anyway, he'd kept his mouth shut about me. I could do the same for him until I saw a good reason not to.

"Anything else about the woman?" Sara asked.

I shook my head again. "Not much. She's very good as the grieving widow, bitter but helpless to exact vengeance, now striking out bravely to build a literary career of her own. What do you people have on her?"

Sara said: "What we've got is this: their Peugeot sedan was thoroughly riddled with bullets. We were shown the car afterwards. There were lots of holes. They were real holes; you could see daylight through them. There was lots of blood. It was human blood; that was checked. An urn of ashes was buried later. It was inconvenient to analyze them, and it wouldn't have proved anything, anyway. The people we're dealing with can procure a human body to burn if they want one, and I suppose one body has about the same inorganic composition as another. The widow attended the ceremony with a bandage around her neck and tears in her eyes. The bandage was real and covered a real wound; our witness didn't vouch for the tears. And the fact remains that Harold Taylor disappeared at a time when a lot of our people were looking for him to ask him a lot of questions-disappeared from a place he wasn't supposed to be, a place he could only have reached with a lot of cooperation from the other side."

I asked, "How much of the stuff in his article checks out?"

The woman beside me laughed shortly and blew smoke against the windshield. I have nothing, in principle, against women smoking, but since I've quit myself I must say I find the odor of perfume more attractive than that of tobacco.

She said, "What is there to check against, Helm? He describes Caselius as a big man with a beard; a Cossack type with a great rumbling laugh. It sounds unlikely on the face of it-it's a much too conspicuous appearance for a man engaged in secret work-but it could be a disguise Caselius affects on occasion. Anyway, it's the only description we have, so we can't argue with it. Taylor describes the organization. It's their standard organizational setup, so he's probably fairly close there. He describes several typical operations. Some are on record. He could have learned about them at our end. The information's supposed to be confidential, of course, but he had the reputation of being very persuasive; Other operations, there's no way of checking. If somebody photographed a certain secret document, returned it to its proper place in the files, and sent the negative to Caselius, how can we know until the stuff is used against us?"

I asked, "Is there any possibility that Taylor himself is Caselius, and took this way of getting out from under?"

Sara glanced at me sharply. "Where did you get that idea? Did the woman say anything-"

I kicked myself, mentally. I should have remembered that I was dealing with the intelligence mind, and kept my trap shut. To an intelligence agent, there's no such thing as somebody figuring something out for himself. The information must have been leaked to him by somebody else- preferably somebody who wasn't supposed to have talked and must be identified and punished. In this respect, the intelligence mind is indistinguishable from the security mind. When dealing with either intelligence or security peopie, there's only one motto to follow: don't be bright, they don't recognize the existence of brains.

"She didn't have to say anything," I said. "It's a fairly obvious gimmick, isn't it?"

Sara said, rather stiffly, "I don't know how obvious it is. We have considered the theory, of course, and it's very interesting that you should mention it right after having a long conversation with… You're sure Mrs. Taylor didn't suggest it to you in some way, maybe quite indirectly?"

"Quite sure," I said. "I dreamed it up all by myself."

"Well," she said, still dissatisfied, "well, we don't take it too seriously, but we are checking his movements over the past several years and seeing if there's any correlation with what we know of Caselius' operations. Taylor did move around a great deal, doing articles for various publications, and as a prominent American journalist he had contacts everywhere. There's a lot of hate-America propaganda these days, you know; but there are also a lot of government officials in a lot of countries who'll tell an American things they wouldn't tell anybody else. Generally they've got an ax of some kind to grind, and hope Uncle Sam will supply the whetstone, given the right kind of publicity. Taylor was a genius at sniffing out these people, apparently. And he was also, I gather, the kind of flamboyant character who'd get a big kick out of writing himself up as a master spy, complete with Cossack beard and rumbling laugh, and collecting money for the piece, just before he pretended to be killed and took refuge on the other side of the iron curtain. He had that kind of a sense of humor, they say."

Her voice was disapproving. Obviously she didn't like flamboyant humorists.

I said, "Of course, he doesn't have to be Caselius. He could just have been working for the man and decided that things were getting too hot for him and it was time to run to the boss for shelter. But could he have carried it off for years without his wife's knowing about it?"

Sara said, "It seems unlikely, doesn't it? However, she was shot, apparently. We don't really know how well the Taylor family got along. Men have been known to get tired of their wives, particularly if the wives happened to learn too much about them."

"She's under the impression he saved her life," I said. "Or says she is, which may only mean that one of them is a hell of a good actor. Well, let's sum it up. We can take the Taylor article two ways. One, it's the straight dope, and Taylor just learned too much for his own good, somehow, and made the mistake of publishing it. So he was lured into a deadfall and killed to keep him from spilling whatever else he might have found out that he hadn't put in this article and might put in the next. His wife happened to survive, and was released after they'd observed her long enough to be pretty sure she didn't know enough to do any damage."

"Yes," Sara said. "It could be that way. In which case you're wasting your time with her."

I said, "She's a bright girl; I've wasted more time in worse company." The woman beside me stirred; perhaps she took the remark personally. I went on crisply: "The other possibility is that Taylor is either Caselius or is working for him, and the article was just a kind of smokescreen he threw out when it was decided that the time had come for the character of Harold Taylor, American journalist, to be dramatically withdrawn from circulation. In this case, of course, the article isn't worth the paper it's written on. What about the wife? Did he try to kill her to shut her up, or was there perhaps a lot of shooting to make his socalled death look plausible to her, in the midst of which she took a bullet accidentally? In that case, she's still innocent, and we're still wasting time playing with her. Or is she in cahoots with him, an accomplice sent back to serve some sinister purpose, now that he no longer dares show himself in his old haunts? In that case, explain her wound."

"Plastic surgery," Sara said.

"She'd have to love the guy a lot to let herself in for spending the rest of her life with a scarred neck and a baritone voice."

"Maybe the surgeons promised to make her as good as new when the job is done, whatever it is," Sara said. "Anyway, women do strange things for men."

"And men for women," I said, "and so endeth our philosophy lesson for the day, inconclusively. Are there any final remarks you'd care to add before we adjourn the meeting?"

She shook her head. "No," she said, and hesitated. "No, but… Helm?"

"Yes?"

"If you find Caselius…" Her voice trailed off.

"Yes?"

She drew a deep breath and turned to face me. "Before you… before I help you any further, I must know what you intend to do. Are you going to try to smuggle him back to the States as a prisoner, or will you just turn him over to the Swedish authorities?"

I glanced at her, a little surprised. "Honey," I said, "that's none of your damn business. I have my orders. Let it go at that." Then I frowned. "What do you care? Do you have a yen for this mystery man?"

She drew herself up haughtily. "Don't be vulgar! But-"

"Quite apart from his value to the other side," I said, "which I've heard estimated at a couple of armored di-visions or the equivalent in fully equipped missile bases, you said yourself he's responsible for several deaths among your colleagues, in addition to what may or may not have happened to Harold Taylor."

She said coldly, "I'm not responsible for Caselius' conscience, Helm. I am responsible for my own."

I said, "Okay, honey. Spell it out."

"You've been sent to kill him, haven't you? That's your job, to hunt down a human being like an animal and destroy him! And I'm supposed to… to assist you in accomplishing your mission!"

"Go on," I said, as she hesitated.

She said, "I'm in intelligence, Mr. Helm. I'm a spy, if you like, and it's not a very respectable profession, I'll admit, but my job is to collect and evaluate information. It is not to act as a hound dog for a hunter of men! Not that you look to me like a very efficient hunter, but that's neither here nor there. The fact is…" The ash from her cigarette dropped into her lap, and she brushed at it quickly, annoyed by the distraction, and returned her attention to me. "There's a man called Mac, isn't there? And there's an organization that hasn't got a name, but they call it the wrecking crew, or sometimes the M-group. The M stands for murder, Helm!"

I hadn't heard that one. Some smart-alec must have come up with it since my time. "You're telling it, honey," I said. "Keep it coming."

Her head came up sharply. "Damn you, don't call me honey! Do you know where I got this information? Not from our side, from theirs! For years we've been hearing sly propaganda about an American Mordgruppe-hearing it and laughing at it and combating it as best we could, thinking it was nothing but their clumsy effort to justify their own dirty assassination teams. I can remember, when I was stationed in Paris, laughing myself silly when somebody asked me in all seriousness about this fellow called Mac, in Washington, who points a finger and someone dies. 'My dear man,' I said, giggling, 'you can't really believe we operate like that!' But we do, don't we?"

I said, "Finish the story, Sara. Let's pass the rhetorical questions."

She said, "I knew there was something odd when we were notified you were coming… Helm, don't we stand for anything? Have they actually succeeded in dragging us down to their level? Is the world simply divided into two hostile camps, with no moral distinction between them? I had to have a look at you; that's why I went to Gothenburg this morning, even though it was terribly bad technique. I had to see what kind of a man… I'm not going to do it, Helm! I've given you all the help you're going to get. As a matter of fact-"

"As a matter of fact, what?"

"Never mind," she said. "You can protest through channels, of course. You can try to have me removed from my post."

"Don't worry," I said. I reached for the door handle. "Don't worry abOut a thing, Sara. Just go back to collecting and evaluating important information… Well, I'd better be getting back to the hotel, and I guess I'd better arrive on foot, since I left that way."

She said, "Helm, I-"

"What?"

"Don't sneer just because I-"

"No sneer was intended, honey. I respect all your finer feelings, every last little one of them."

"Can't you understand how I feel? Can't I make you see how wrong it is?"

My wife had asked me that, too. She'd wanted me to understand how she felt, and I'd understood perfectly. She'd wanted me to see how wrong it was, and I'd seen. They all see what's wrong with the world, and tell you all about it

– as if you'd never noticed it before-but none of them has any practical suggestions about how to fix it. One day we'll all live on chemicals and never kill a living thing. Meanwhile, we eat meat and take the world as it is. At least some of us do.

"Good night, Sara," I said, getting out of the car.

Walking away, I was aware of a quick, glowing arc at the corner of my vision as she ificked her cigarette away into the dark. The car door slammed shut behind me. The little Volkswagen motor in the tail of the Ghia started to turn over, and stopped abruptly. I heard her muffled cry. Then they were on top of me.

Lead with your right and take your licking like a man, Mac had said, but it was a good thing I'd taken the precaution of leaving the knife behind. It was a wonderful, tempting spot for it. There's nothing like a knife when you're outnumbered three to one and fighting in the dark. But I didn't have it, and I wasn't supposed to know judo or karate, and as far as I'm concerned fist fighting is for kids. I did get one of them lightly with my knee, hoping it would seem accidental, and I bruised my knuckles on the other two, swinging wildly.

Then they had me by the arms, and a couple more were shoving Sara Lundgren along the walk toward me.