The Wrecking Crew

Chapter Nine

As THE GUN went off, I threw myself flat, tearing myself loose from the men who held me. There was nothing I could do for her. He wouldn't miss at that range. I fully expected to be the next target. I rolled toward one of the park benches for such shelter as it could give. No bullets came near me. Presently I sat up, foolish and alone except for the still figure on the grass. Everyone else had departed the scene.

There had been no gaudy farewell speeches, no threats or promises, no blood-curdling ultimatums, just that single, short, accurate burst of automatic fire and some quick footsteps among the trees. I heard a car start up somewhere and drive away. I got up and walked forward. She was quite dead, of course. It was time for me to get out of there before the shooting brought the police, but I stood looking down at her for a moment. It wasn't a very nice moment.

Not that her death changed my opinion about her part in the night's events. I still thought she'd betrayed me. She'd merely been double-crossed in her turn. But that didn't matter now. What mattered was that I'd stood by, gleefully watching her being mauled and humiliated, taking satisfaction in the sight. I'd let her get my goat with her high-flown talk of murder and moral distinctions..

The Stockholm police carry sabers three feet long. So help me, I saw one. They are courageous men. They'll charge into a dark wood toward the sound of submachine-gun fire, armed with nothing but a yard of cold steel. Well, the world is full of brave men, My experience has been that the cowards are in the minority. I've been brave myself upon occasion, but that night wasn't one of the occasions. There wasn't anything left to be brave about. I'd have loved to find something.

After the sword-bearing officer had run by, I slipped out of my hiding place in the bushes and made my way back to the hotel. Various official vehicles were converging on the park. They didn't use sirens. Instead they made a kind of braying, hee-haw noise, like musical donkeys. I recalled reading somewhere that over here sirens were reserved for air raid warnings and such. It's not a bad idea, come to think of it. Back home, hearing a wailing in the distance, you never know whether you're dealing with a brush fire in a vacant lot, a kid snatching a purse, or an intercontinental missile with a hydrogen warhead zeroed in on your home town.

I made it to my room without encountering anybody who might have noticed my torn pants, my battered face, and my grim and fearsome expression-at least it felt grim and fearsome. I didn't take a drink. I didn't have anything to celebrate. I just took a hot bath and two sleeping pills, and went to bed. I was just a retread, too old to be much use. If someone wanted to kill me in my sleep, he was welcome.

I didn't sleep very well, in spite of the pills. I kept seeing a slender, disheveled woman with bright hair that looked blonde in the dusk, stretching out her hands toward a shape in the woods, pleading for mercy. Then the dream changed. I was being attacked from all sides. I was overwhelmed, pinned to the ground; they were all over me and I was being slowly smothered by the weight of them… I opened my eyes abruptly to see light in the room. A man was bending over me. His hand was across my mouth.

We stared at each other in silence, our faces less than a foot apart. He was quite a handsome and distinguished-looking man, with thick, black, well-combed hair, grayed at the temples. He had a little black moustache. He hadn't been wearing a moustache when I'd seen him last, there'd been no gray in his hair, and his arm had been in a cast up to the shoulder.

"You are careless, Eric," he murmured, taking his hand away. "You sleep too heavy. And you still have bad dreams."

"I don't know why they bother with a key for this room, the way people wander in and out at will," I said. "Roll up your left sleeve."

He laughed. "Ah, we play tricks. It was the right one, don't you recall?" He started to take off his coat.

"Hi, Vance," I said. "Never mind stripping. I remember you."

I got up, shook my head to clear it, went into the bathroom and started the hot water running. I got a jar of instant coffee and a plastic cup out of my suitcase. I loaded the cup with the powder and went back to the bathroom to fill it. The water was almost hot enough. I sat down on the bed to drink, without offering any to Vance. I hadn't invited him. If he was thirsty, he could supply is own coffee, or at least his own cup.

"Don't smoke," I said to him as he produced cigarettes. "I don't, and somebody might wonder who stunk up the curtains."

He chuckled and lit the cigarette. "They will think it was just your lady friend. The one with the strange hair."

I rose and knocked the cigarette from his fingers and stepped on it. "I said don't do it!"

He looked up at me. "Careful, Eric!"

I said, "I could take you, Vance. I could always take you.,'

He said calmly, "It was never proved. Some time we must try. But not here and now."

I sat down on the bed again, and polished off my almost-warm-enough coffee. "Sorry, amigo," I said. "I've had a rough night, and nembutal makes me irritable. Furthermore, I'm not in a mood for jocular references to the lady in question. She happens to be dead."

"Dead?" He frowned quickly. "The commotion in the park?" I nodded, and he said: "At whose hands? Yours?"

"Why do you say that?"

"One of my reasons for coming was to warn you against trusting her too far. It wasn't a message we could send through her apparatus, naturally. It appears that her department is secretly investigating some derogatory reports, which they only recently got around to mentioning to us."

"I'd say the reports were probably correct," I said. "But it was our man who got her. At least he announced himself by name, and now I'm inclined to think it actually was Caselius. Unfortunately, he gave me no opportunity to look at him in the light, and I think he was disguising his voice… It was a cat-and-mouse act, Vance. Kind of lousy. They let her assist at her own funeral; they let her co-operate with them in making a holy spectacle of herself; they let her think until the last moment that she was just helping them to kid me along. Then they killed her. He killed her.

"It was a great joke, and whoever set it up would have wanted to be there to laugh. That's why I think it was Caselius himself. He wouldn't have bothered to arrange all that specialized fun for another guy. He'd have wanted to be there to finish her off himself, and see the horror in her eyes as she realized how cruelly she'd been tricked." After a moment, I said, "I figure he killed her because she'd served her purpose and he couldn't leave her alive to talk. That means she had something to talk about. I've got to go on to Kiruna in the morning with the Taylor woman. Can you check on two men for me?"

"I can try."

I said, "One man I don't know. But she said she was going to be married as soon as she finished her tour of duty here; and I think the bereaved fiancй deserves a little of our attention. Somebody filled her full of fine ideals and used them to make a sucker of her. The other is a man who currently calls himself Jim Wellington. I have no evidence of a connection between him and Lundgren-he does know Taylor-but maybe you can find one. Watch out for him; he's been through the mill.

"He wasn't one of ours, but he made a flight with me into France from our usual field, some time in late '44 or early '45. Some of those people went bad later, and some even changed sides. He might be one of them. I don't know his outfit, but I'll give you a description and Mac can find the date I made that flight and check the official records for my companion. Tell him it was that prison-break operation at St. Alice. My job was to take the commandant out of action with a scoped-up rifle five minutes before they blew the gates. I got the damn commandant, all right, but nobody else showed up, as in most of those lousy cooperative jobs, and I had a hell of a time getting clear..

"Hell, I'm talking too much. I guess I've got a bit of a jag on. She wasn't much, Vance. Just a pretty clothes horse with intellectual and moral pretensions that she didn't have the brains to live up to-just the kind who'd be a patsy for a clever character with a humanitarian spiel. But I don't like the way she died, amigo. I just don't like the lousy way she died!" He said, "Take it easy, friend Eric. In our business, one does not work well if one lets oneself become emotionally involved."

I said, "I'll get over it. I'm just a little shook-up tonight. Somebody held up a mirror, and I didn't like the looks of the fellow inside the frame. As for that guy Caselius-"

He said, "You had better get over it. You are going to have to restrain your vengeful impulses."

"What do you mean?"

He was reaching in his coat pocket. He said, "This is ironical, Eric. It is really very ironical."

"Maybe," I said. "I can see that it's a lot of things, but I haven't spotted much irony yet."

He said, "I had another reason for coming, a direct cornmunication from the master of ceremonies himself."

"The master of-"

He laughed. "MC," he said. "Mac. It is a joke."

"I'm not up on all the jokes yet," I said.

"This is no joke, however," he said. He gave me a folded sheet of paper. "Read it and you will see the irony, too. I could tell you the gist of it, but I will let you decipher it yourself so as not to miss the full flavor of Mac's prose."

I looked at him, and at the paper; and I took the paper to the little writing table by the wall and went to work on it. Presently I had it lying before me in plain language. It had my code number and the usual transmission signals. The station of origin was Washington, D.C. The text read:

Representations from female agent Stockholm have led to serious case of cold feet locally. Temporarily, we hope, your orders are changed as follows: you are to make firm identification of subject if possible but do not, repeat do not, carry out remainder of original instructions. Find him, keep him in sight, but don't hurt a hair of his cute little head. Realize difficulty of assignment, sympathize. Working hard to stiffen local backbones. Be ready for go-ahead signal, but under no circumstances take action unless you receive. Repeat, under no circumstances. This is an order. This is an order. Don't get independent, damn you, or we're all cooked. Love, Mac.