The Vanishers (29 page)

As she watched me steadily, Karin’s face had a convincingly pale and troubled look; the look of an obedient little girl who’d followed the orders of her associates but couldn’t help feeling guilty about the betrayal to which they’d led her. We’d agreed that some ambivalence was in order here; it wouldn’t do for her to hate me even to impress her UFO colleagues. The character she’d established with them, that we’d revived for this occasion, was not that of a hating girl. However, I couldn’t help thinking, as one does, that this was also the way she’d look at me if she were actually betraying me. A double-double-cross was not of the question here. I was putting my life into the hands of a young woman I didn’t really understand, and had no very good reason to trust except that instinct told me it was a reasonable gamble. But instinct had been wrong before.

Karl poked me in the back again. “
Händema mot väggen…
Hands against the wall, feet out,” he snapped, just as he’d heard it in the movies. I assumed the position in docile fashion. He managed to find the .38 I’d once lent Astrid, which had been returned to me in Stockholm with the rest of my arsenal. He got it out of the belt holster, having some difficulty with the catch. “So. Now you can straighten up… Yes, yes, what is it, Karin?”

“He has another gun, one he took from me. I think it is in his sock.”

Okay so far. This was part of the script we’d sketched out while driving: we’d agreed to use the derringer as a sacrifice piece to make her phony betrayal more convincing—but even if she’d rewritten the script she’d want me disarmed. Well, I told myself firmly, there’s only one thing worse than trusting everybody, and that is trusting nobody. Karl was momentarily disconcerted by his mistake; his voice had lost authority when he spoke again:

“Oh. Do not move, Helm!”

“Move! Don’t move! Make up your cotton-picking mind!”

I was aware of him bending down behind me, checking my ankles, and extracting the little two-barreled monster of a weapon from its place of concealment. He straightened up. I got a sharp rap on the side of the skull that made bright lights flash across my vision.

“So! That is for your tricks! Now you can turn around.” I turned to look at him. He wasn’t a bad-looking boy, I suppose, if you like them lean and soulful; but at the moment he had the overbearing, triumphant look that comes to some people holding guns who don’t know anything about guns. They feel they’ve grabbed hold of the key to the universe, instead of merely an ingenious mechanical device designed to propel a small hunk of metal a certain, rather limited, distance at a certain, rather limited, velocity. His weapon, I noted, was the Browning 9mm automatic with the thirteen-round magazine. Plenty of firepower. He was in the same jeans and sweatshirt he’d worn in Stockholm, and he could have used a shave, but he didn’t grow it very fast.

Normally, I wouldn’t have chosen this moment for conversation. Recriminations are a waste of time, and making threatening speeches at a man with a gun, just to show how mad you are and how brave you are, is stupid. Even if you plan to convert him into dogmeat eventually, why announce your intentions? Let it come as a big surprise when it comes. But we weren’t doing real life here, we were doing a movie; and in the movies they’re always shooting off their big mouths to impress the customers.

“You treacherous bitch!” I snapped at Karin; then I turned and gave Karl the tough-guy speech beloved by every two-bit scriptwriter: “You can’t get away with this!”

“I am doing just that, am I not?” He gestured with the gun. “Sit down in that chair and be quiet!”

Seating myself grudgingly where indicated, I came up with another scintillating line: “When I get my hands on you… You’ll be sorry!”

It made Karl feel fine; it made him feel right at home. This was exactly the blowhard behavior he’d seen in every bang-bang American film he’d watched since he’d been old enough. Not as a youngster, of course, because there in Sweden such movies are all
bamförbjuden
—officially child-forbidden, due to all that violence, all those guns, to which no young Swede must be exposed. They grow up very sheltered in that country. The odd thing is that after being protected since infancy from the slightest hint of movie or TV violence, particularly violence involving firearms, each one is then grabbed as he approaches maturity, handed a gun, and run through a year of tough military service. You’d think, if it’s going to teach them real killing when they grow up, their government wouldn’t make quite such a production of saving them from celluloid homicide while they’re kids. Well, hell, governments aren’t noted for consistency.

“Tie him up while I keep him covered; there is some cord in my hip pocket,” Karl said to Karin. “Make him very secure. I will check your knots.”

She glanced up with some irritation, kneeling before my chair as she fastened my ankles to it with tough white twine, having already lashed my arms behind me. “Check what you please! I have traveled with him as instructed and… and allowed him to make love to me as instructed. I have showed you how to trap him, and helped you. I have even told you about that extra hidden pistol which you overlooked. But check, check, check if you wish. Maybe I tie him with slipping knots so he can free himself and kill me for my trickery, as he undoubtedly wishes. Of course you must check!”

Karl looked slightly embarrassed. “You misunderstand; it is not that I do not trust you. But women often do not tie knots very well. That is all I meant.”

She shrugged at this piece of male arrogance, and rose. “
Se om du kan göra bättre!
”

Having told him to see if he could do better, she marched across the room, picked up her ryggsäck, and started to repack the stuff she’d dumped out on the farther bed. Then she looked up quickly, as somebody knocked on the door in code. Three shorts. One long. Repeated. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. V for Victory, for God’s sake!

Karl said, “It is Greta. Let her in.”

“Yes, of course. I am sorry; I did not mean to be rude, but you made me angry.”

Karin put down the pack and went to the door. The dark-haired girl who came in seemed to have lost weight overnight; she looked more thin and intense then I remembered her. She’d changed from the bloodstained clothes in which I’d last seen her, in the doctor’s office in Stockholm; now she was wearing red wool slacks, a white mannish shirt, and a thick maroon sweater. The right side of her face looked pale and drawn; the left side was pretty well masked by the big dressing. The eyes were sunken in the bandaged face; they looked hot and bloodshot. They acknowledged the presence of Karl, and of Karin, and focused on me.

“So you have him captive. Good!” She continued to stare at me as she spoke to Karl. “I watched him walk into the town. He obtained something in the store, something for the car that does not function, but he telephoned to no one, and no one follows him. I waited outside to make certain. There is no one.”

“Astrid should be told that we have him,” Karl said. “She was concerned that he might interfere tomorrow.”

The bandaged girl made an impatient gesture, dismissing Astrid. “She will be told. She will not leave her command post in Luleå until later this evening; there is time. She will be told after we have finished with him. After he has answered my questions.”

Karl said dubiously, “It is not authorized. Astrid will not like it.”

“All Astrid wants is for him to be immobilized for the next few hours, until it is all over tomorrow morning. Well, he is going nowhere and doing nothing. We are insuring that he makes no trouble, as ordered, are we not? If he suffers a little damage, that is too bad and does not affect the work at Laxfors at all.” She stared at me. “But perhaps he will be cooperative. Perhaps coercion will not be necessary. Perhaps he will tell us where to find the other, the one who… who hurt me.”

Karin stirred. “He cannot tell you that.”

Greta turned to look at the smaller girl. “What do you mean?” she demanded sharply.

“The man you want is dead, killed by this one.”

“That cannot be true! They work together!”

“I was there; I saw it. There, is a conflict in the American spy organization that employed them both. There are two factions. One fights the other. Just like gangsters; just what one would expect of such people!” Karin licked her lips. “But there is no need for you to… to question this one; he can tell you nothing. Actually, you should be grateful to him; he executed the man you wanted; he did your work for you.”

“Grateful!” Greta’s voice was scornful. She didn’t take her eyes from me. “You! You killed your friend?”

“No friend of mine,” I said. “A man I worked with. We had a slight disagreement about which of two gentlemen we were working for.”

“But while he was working with you—actually for you—he did this!”

She made a dramatic gesture towards her bandaged cheek and glared at me, challenging me to deny the accusation, or my responsibility for what had been done to her.

I said casually, “Tough, but what’s your gripe?”

“Gripe?”

Karin said smoothly, “He means, Greta, what complaint have you?”

The dark girl stared at me, shocked. She started to speak angrily, but changed her mind. Instead she turned sharply away and took a couple of steps that brought her to the dresser opposite the twin beds. She bent forward to get closer to the mirror. I couldn’t make out what she was doing; then I heard Karin gasp, as Greta turned with the bandage in her hand and the injured side of her face uncovered. She marched back to stand over me, leaning close for my inspection.

“Look!” she said harshly. “Look at me! Look what your man did to me! You can ask what complaint I have? Look!”

Karl was staring at her, aghast. I guess he hadn’t had an opportunity to view the damage before, or at least not when it wasn’t masked by blood. And I have to admit that I found it disturbing, myself; the world isn’t so full of even moderately attractive girls that you like to see one chopped up. Still, it wasn’t the first knife-slash I’d ever viewed; and it was a nice clean incision that had been neatly closed by someone who knew his business.

Of course it wasn’t very pretty at the moment. There were the sutures, there was some crusty dried stuff, and there was a normal amount of swelling and inflammation; but with a little luck in the healing she wasn’t going to be too badly marked.

She snapped, “Well, what say you to
that
, Herr Helm?”

“I still say, what’s your beef?” I shrugged elaborately. “
Vad har du at beklaga dej om?
If you’ll excuse my bastard Swedish. Hell, you joined a violent organization. You’re planning a violent demonstration of some kind up here in Lapland, in which people may quite possibly get hurt, right? And in the meantime you’ve been accessory to kidnapping a man and burning him with a hot iron. Me. And you’re complaining because somebody sliced you up a bit? As a great American once said, if you can’t stand the heat, baby, stay out of the kitchen.”

It worked almost too well. She seemed to have trouble catching her breath; she tried to speak angrily, but only a wild sound of protest came out; an irate howl. She was clawing for something under her sweater, at the waist; and her hand emerged with one of the souvenir sheath knives they sell in that part of the country—actually in most parts of the country. The blade was about four inches long and probably of pretty good steel, since steel is something they do well over there. The hilt was of figured birch; and there were silver decorations. She held it like an icepick rather than a fighting knife.

“Se hur du tycker om det!”
she gasped, raising her hand into a position from which she could stab downward at my face. “See how you like it!”

There was a momentary pause; there always is. They don’t ever just do it, no matter how angry they are. They’ve got to have their kicks first; they’ve got to see you cringe and, if possible, hear you beg. That’s part of the fun and they never want to miss it.

“Now you’re mad,” I said solicitously. “That’s very bad for you, Greta. You must keep your face calm or it won’t heal properly.”

“Greta!” That was Karl. “Greta, you must not do this ugly thing; you will never forgive yourself!”

“Forgive myself? He is the one I cannot forgive!”

I said, “Well, come on, come on, start carving; I can’t stand the suspense!”

“Why do you taunt her, she is not herself; she has had too much to bear…”

That was Karl again. Everything was fine, everything was great, I had the full attention of both of them as planned; but where the hell was the Seventh Cavalry that was supposed to come riding to the rescue… I could see the girl above me making up her mind, and I watched the knife, very nice and shiny and new and probably not very sharp, since they wouldn’t want a lot of tourists cutting themselves right there in the shop. But plenty sharp enough to rip open my face or, if I managed to lean my head to the side fast enough to avoid it, drive down into my shoulder or chest.

As Greta tensed herself to strike, there was a soft plopping sound behind her, and the gleaming blade wavered oddly. An expression of shocked surprise came to the disfigured face above me. Greta started to turn, to discover what it was that had struck her so painfully. The silenced automatic spoke again, in its quiet way, and her body jerked once more to the impact of a little .22-caliber bullet. She dropped the knife and went to her knees before me.

Karl had whirled, reaching for the Browning he’d tucked away into his waistband. There was total incredulity in his voice:
“Karin! Karin, vad gör du?”

Three bullets drove into him, answering his question as to what Karin was doing. He collapsed on top of his gun. Little Mrs. Segerby came forward, clutching the automatic I’d lent her, in both hands. She took careful aim downwards and put a final forty-grain slug into the back of Karl’s head. Then she moved to Greta, who’d slumped across my knees where I sat tied to my chair. Karin reached out and grasped the other girl by the hair, pulled her off me, and let her sprawl on her back on the rug. Moving like a mechanical doll, Karin then took deliberate two-handed aim once more and gave Greta the coup de grace. The bullet had probably been intended for a spot between the eyes, but it punched out the left one instead; not that it mattered, since Greta was already dead. Karin stood there clutching the automatic, swaying slightly, her face quite white, her throat working.