Danger Is My Line Page 14

  I sloshed slushy ice into the glass, poured the strong colorless aquavit over it and drank. The liquor was almost tasteless but very strong. Along with the broiling, surging steam it was supposed to ease the tension out of my muscles. I felt pent up and restless because I couldn’t leave for Sweden until the morning, because I couldn’t do anything to help Maja Kolding right now, because the self-pitying woman in the hospital had triggered memories of another woman and another hospital, a woman waiting to bear the child who would never see its father.

  I poured another drink, my fourth. I listened to the steam hissing from its pipe, hot-spring steam that heated the homes of Reykjavík. Then the door opened, steam swirled in the cold draft, I saw a figure slip into the small room and the door shut.

  “Chet? I can’t see you.” It was Freya.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “The hall-porter said you were in the steam room.”

  I saw her then, moving through the steam. She wore a dark suit with a jacket that pinched in at the waist and flared out at the hips and a tight skirt that sheathed her legs.

  “There you are! My, it’s hot in here. I can hardly see you.”

  “Be happy. I’m wearing exactly one towel.”

  Freya laughed. “Don’t you think I’ve ever seen a man in a steam room before? We have one at home.”

  “I’m not your father.”

  “I didn’t mean my father. May I sit down?”

  I finished my fourth drink. The heat drew the alcohol right out of my body. I didn’t feel it. I poured another.

  “My turn,” Freya said.

  I gave her the glass and she drank it off quickly.

  “I might as well tell you,” she said. “I came here to find you. And I’ve made up my mind not to leave until you agreed to take me to Sweden with you.”

  “It’s out of the question, Freya.”

  “Ever been there? To Sweden?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “I have. Many times. I know my way around Stockholm. Know where Lidingö is?”

  “No.”

  “That’s where the Baroness Margaretha lives. I asked my father.”

  “I can find it. Any taxi driver can tell me.”

  “Speak Swedish?”

  “No.”

  “I do.”

  “All right, you’re a linguist. That still doesn’t mean you’re coming to Sweden.”

  She gave the empty glass back to me. The slushy ice had melted. “It must be a hundred and thirty degrees in here.”

  “In the shade.”

  She unbuttoned her jacket and slipped out of it. She wore a woolly blouse that clung damply to her breasts. She wasn’t an eight-foot glamazon like the Baroness. She wasn’t even beautiful. But she was pretty, and she had that indescribable quality that is so rare—frank, open, but not overplayed, sexuality.

  “Remember,” she said, “I told you I was a female chip off the old block. I’m going to Sweden with you. You can’t stop me. Let me have another drink, please.”

  “You’re not going anyplace. Why do you want to go, anyway?”

  “I want to be with you.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Did that shock you?” Freya giggled. “You Americans with your double standard for sex. Can’t a woman have any—preferences too?”

  I got up and took one step through the steam. That put me in front of Freya. “Come here,” I said.

  “Wait a minute. I’m all uncomfortable.”

  She stood up, moved both hands to the left side of her skirt and wiggled her hips. The tight sheath moved down her legs. She stepped out of it. The heat and the steam made her slip cling to her long, firm thighs.

  She started to say, “That’s a little better.” At least, that’s what I think she was going to say. She got as far as the middle of “little,” then I was kissing her.

  It jolted me. It always does with sex that isn’t blatant, that isn’t overplayed with the tired, cynically exaggerated gestures and movements that too many women learn from the Hollywood screen. Freya was all underplayed woman, with the fathomless depths surfacing.

  She stepped back, sighing. “Oh my,” she said, “I was afraid it would be like that—with you.”

  “Afraid?”

  “Afraid. Because I told myself, ‘Freya, you are going with that man tomorrow even if you have to seduce him.’” She smiled, shaking her head. “But how can I use my wiles on you, Chester Drum, if you—get through to me like that?”

  It was as if there were two Freyas—the one pleasantly and lightly seductive who did all the talking, the other silent and deeper with an almost astonishing understated desire and need. Alone either one of them would have been a memorable occasion for a man who likes such memorable occasions. Together they could have stirred even an octogenarian.

  “Look,” I said, “let’s not talk about it any more—you’re coming with me. Okay?”

  “But I told myself I would fend off all your advances until you agreed.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So it’s too hot in here to argue.”

  I kissed her again. Our lips came together and our bodies came together. We didn’t move our arms. We swayed a little.

  “It can make you all dizzy like that,” Freya said. “No hands. I think I’d like another drink.”

  I put what little ice water that was left in the bowl into the single glass and filled it with aquavit. When I turned back to Freya, she was criss-crossing her arms in front of her body, her hands down at her waist. With a single fluid movement she removed her blouse. While I had been busy with the drink she’d stepped out of the half-slip. She stood there in bra and panties, the swooping upper edges of the bra-cups tight against the upper slopes of her breasts and as dark with sweat as the plunging valley between them.

  We both looked at the drink in my hand.

  “I don’t think I want it now,” Freya said.

  I set the glass down on one of the benches. Steam swirled between us.

  “I’m not thinking of Sweden now,” Freya whispered. “I want you to know that.”

  “The hell with Sweden,” I said.

  I took Freya’s hand and led her through the steam. Her hip bumped against me. I opened the door at the back of the steam room that led to a smaller room that had three rub-down tables with leather mats on them. After the steam room it was very cold in there, so I left the door open and some of the steam drifted in.

  “What if someone comes?” Freya said.

  “Warm enough?”

  “I’ll get warm,”

  I shut the door. There was a lock. I locked it.

  It was dark, and absolutely silent. I groped my way to the first rub-down table. It was empty. Then I heard Freya’s breathing. My bare foot touched something on the floor. That would be her bra.

  She was waiting for me on the leather mat on the second rub-down table.

  But not both Freyas. The lightly seductive one had gone away. Waiting for me was the silent one with her Nordic reserve breached and the earthy depths making her cry out once, in her need, as I came to her.

  It was swift and explosive and then it built—a slow mounting fusion of lips, arms, legs, bodies—to magic.

  21

  THE SLEEK MERCEDES-BENZ BUS that drove the six miles from the Flygpaviljongen at Bromma Airport to downtown Stockholm was not crowded, but I didn’t have a seat all to myself.

  The road ran straight for a while through forests of Scotch pine and towering northern birch, then hit the outskirts of the city on Drottningholms Vagen. Traffic was on the left, with huge blue and yellow arrows pointing the way at intersections since the rest of Continental Europe keeps to the right. It was mid-afternoon, the air clear, the sun bright. I had the clothes I wore on my back, my B-4 bag in the luggage bay of the bus, returned courtesy of the Reykjavik police on my departure from Iceland, an address for Baroness Margaretha on the island of Lidingö, the name of an Inspector at the Polishuset on Bergs Gatan, given t
o me at Reykjavík Airport before takeoff by Gunnar Fridjonsson, and a traveling companion.

  She wore a beige wool-jersey dress, her arm was tucked under mine and she was smiling.

  “I told you you’d take me along, Chet.”

  “I didn’t take you along. You just came. I couldn’t kick you off the plane, could I?”

  “Or off this bus,” Freya said. “What are you going to do first?”

  “I ought to duck out on you.”

  “But you won’t. Besides, I’d follow you. I’d follow you wherever you went now.”

  I mimicked despair. “What a fate.”

  “Seriously, what are you going to do?”

  “Look up your father’s friend at the Polishuset, Inspector. Heyst. Get us some co-operation. Then stash you away in a hotel maybe.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “All right, I wouldn’t. Don’t ask me why.”

  “I’ll tell you one good reason. When we find Maja, she may need a woman’s shoulder to cry on. Or—Chet, why are you smiling?”

  “I can think of some other mighty pleasant reasons.”

  Freya just kept right on smiling.

  The airport bus left us off at the Central Station, so I had to exchange bur two luggage tickets for my B-4 bag and Freya’s over-nighter, then hail a taxi which we took back across City Hall bridge past the Statshuset’s high gold tower and along Bergs Gatan to police headquarters. It was a long low red-brick building with dark roof-domes supporting spires.

  From the window of Inspector Birger Heyst’s tower office you could see the green islands of Lake Mälaren. Heyst himself was a plump penguin of a man with slumping narrow shoulders and a big belly. Maybe he got the belly from drinking too much beer or maybe he got it from eating criminals alive—but the overall impression he gave, penguin-body, rimless hexagonal glasses, merrily twinkling eyes, was about as deadly as a house-cat’s. Still, I told myself, these things are relative—house-cats are pretty deadly: to rats.

  Whatever else he was or wasn’t, Heyst turned out to be a good listener. I gave him the whole story much as I’d given it in my Icelandic deposition, naturally leaving out the Bureau’s stake in the case. He sucked on a pipe and studied me. He never interrupted once. Then he said, “But then why did you come here, Herr Drum? Assuming the Kolding girl is here in Stockholm, she is with her brother. They have committed no crime. As for this man Laxness, he too has been guilty of no crime in my country.”

  “Yes,” I said. “They’ve been here four days. Maybe we’re too late already. Unless Gustaf Kolding and the Baroness have been able to stall off Laxness with whatever alternative plan they have.”

  “Alternative in regard to the girl Maja, you mean, and alternative to murder?” Heyst asked.

  “That’s the idea.”

  “But what can I do for you?” Heyst refilled and relit his pipe.

  “Put a police tail on us.”

  “Tail?”

  “Sorry. Have an undercover man follow us. We might need him in a hurry.”

  Heyst scowled at his contrary pipe, which had gone out again. “Gunnar Fridjonsson recommends this?”

  “He told me to drop in on you and give you the setup, that’s all.”

  “My father has a great deal of faith in Mr. Drum,” Freya said.

  Heyst swung around toward her in his swivel chair. “You have some means of identification, Fröken Fridjonsson? Var så god? Please?”

  Freya showed him her I.A.L. ID card. It seemed to satisfy Heyst. “I haven’t seen Gunnar Fridjonsson in—let me see—three years. And how is your dear mother?”

  “My mother,” Freya said calmly, “has been dead for eight years.”

  Heyst nodded promptly, “Ja, ja, flicka. Very well, girl. I am sorry, but I had to be sure.” Still the mild face and the merrily twinkling eyes and the frustrated efforts with the pipe, but Birger Heyst shaped up suddenly as a shrewd cop. He leaned forward. “Herr Drum, you shall have—hmm—a tail, as you wish. That is satisfactory?”

  I said it was satisfactory.

  “Naturally, if there is any trouble you are to contact this—hmm—tail immediately. I do not care if you are the king of the private detectives in the United States, here in Sweden you are not to take the law into your own hands. This is understood?”

  I grinned. “You’d be surprised, Inspector. They put it the same way in the States—even to private detectives. Hell, especially to private detectives.”

  “Then we understand each other. Anything else you wish?”

  “Yes. I want a gun.”

  Heyst leaned further forward and stared at me over the tops of the hexagonal glasses. “But I just now said if there is any trouble you will contact the police officer following you. I thought you understood that.”

  “If there isn’t time? If Laxness or someone takes him out of the play?”

  Birger Heyst sighed, thumbing an intercom toggle on his desk. I heard a buzzer faintly in the outer office, and pretty soon a uniformed cop who wore a ceremonial saber at his side came in.

  “Herr Inspector?”

  Heyst said something in Swedish. The cop saluted, turned smartly and went out. He was back in a few moments with a short-barrelled Beretta revolver, a .38. Swinging the gate, he loaded it for me, leaving the chamber under the hammer empty. I took the revolver and said, “Tack.” Freya smiled at me for my use of the Swedish word, but scowled at the trim and deadly-looking Beretta. I unbuttoned my jacket. The revolver was a loose fit in my shoulder holster.

  Heyst rocked with appreciative laughter. “You knew I would give you a gun. You had a holster all ready for it. In Iceland then do I have a reputation as a—” he broke into Swedish suddenly, looking at Freya for help in translation.

  “Soft touch,” she said.

  “I don’t know what kind of reputation you have,” I said. “If you didn’t give me a gun I’d have spent some time finding one illegally.”

  Heyst growled, then he purred, then he laughed again. “Go on—go. And good luck to you.”

  I left with Freya. Outside in the bright sunshine, while waiting for a cab, I looked for our—hmm—tail. Either he was very good at it or it is difficult to make a tail in a strange, foreign city, or maybe both. We got in a black Mercedes taxi and I gave the driver the Schroeder address in Lidingö after he had stowed our luggage in the trunk.

  Outside the Schroeder villa on the island of Lidingö, on a bluff overlooking the blue water of Lilla-Vartan and the Stockholm skyline beyond, stood two tall marble pillars that had no capitals, like relics from a bombed-out world.

  “The sculptor Carl Milles lived here on Lidingö,” Freya said, explaining the pillars. “This is a motif of his, and it has become quite fashionable.”

  The villa was a big, sprawling stone building with a roof of red tiles in the Italian style. It had several wings, and terraced rock gardens descended the bluff to Lilla-Vartan. But most of the windows were boarded up, and only the comparatively small central section looked in use.

  I went past the pillars and up three steps to the front door. I knocked and waited. A thin middle-aged woman in a black dress and a while frilly apron opened it. Freya did the talking for us. “God afton, Herr and Fru.” No, there was no one home. She was the caretaker’s wife. The Baroness? Was the Baroness then in Sweden? But she did not know this, the caretaker’s wife said. She thought the Baroness was in Washington, D.C. That is in the United States.

  “Tell her we know the Baroness was here,” I told Freya.

  “But do we?”

  “Tell her.”

  Freya tried it. The caretaker’s wife shook her head.

  “There someplace else the Baroness might go in Stockholm?” I asked Freya. “A beach house on Lake Mälaren, maybe?”

  Freya asked the question. The Schroeder family had a town house in the Old City, near Riddarholm Church, the caretaker’s wife said, and a beach house in the Archipelago near Vaxholm.

  “What do you think?” I asked Freya.

/>   “She seems to be telling the truth. The Baroness wasn’t here.”

  “Which are we closer to, the town house or their place in the Archipelago?”

  “Stockholm, as you know, is a city built on islands between Lake Mälaren and the Baltic Sea. The Archipelago leads out to the sea, Old City is a small island in the heart of Stockholm.”

  “Then it’s the town house first?”

  “It looks that way, yes.”

  “See if you can get both addresses.”

  Freya got them. We went back to the waiting cab and drove in it along the water to the bridge that would take us back to the heart of Stockholm via Lidingö Vagen. Just before we turned left for the bridge, a maroon Saab pulled away from the curb behind us. That would be Inspector Birger Heyst’s—hmm—tail. I had a hunch, a very strong hunch, we would need him before the day was over.

  The Old City was an island of crooked cobbled streets and ancient stone buildings, their façades weathered, leaning out over the cobbled lanes and scowling at each other like old maids at a school reunion. The streets were narrow, so narrow that jay-walkers preempted cars. We’d driven back along Strandvagen and then across Strom Bridge. I took one look at the narrow streets, crawling with pedestrians, behind the grim buff ramparts of the royal palace, and told the driver to stop because we could make better time on foot.

  That left us with our luggage, which we checked at the cloakroom of a restaurant called Cattelin, where we also had a quick lunch. When we went outside again the maroon Saab, or one just like it, was parked up the street from Cattelin. No one was in it.

  The Schroeder town house, a connected yellow stone three-story building on a narrow street at the top of a hill, looked old and run-down. The windows were of leaded glass, and some of them had been broken. The stone façade needed a sand-blasting. The door, set in a deep shadowy niche, was heavy wood with cast-iron reinforcements. I pulled the bell-cord and heard the bell ringing hollowly inside. I didn’t get any answer.

  “The beach house?” Freya said.

  “Hold it.”

  I tried the door. It wasn’t locked.

  Immediately inside hung a heavy tapestry. I pushed it aside as Freya came in and shut the door behind her. We entered a large dim room, cluttered with heavy furniture and exotic knick-knacks.