Danger Is My Line Read online

  Only, he like hell had had them. They had sold out to Laxness, and Laxness had given narrow-face enough rope to plan his own execution. It was the neatest double cross I had ever seen, and it meant that Laxness, to understate it, didn’t see eye to eye with the Baroness and Gustaf Kolding. It was something to remember when we reached the Archipelago. Laxness might move in on them, a fait accompli, but they wouldn’t like it. Something to remember and something to use if I could. It wasn’t much, but rain-drenched, bare-handed and a prisoner, it was all I had.

  Freya, her hair a wet cap plastered to her head, her face gleaming with rain-water, her wet dress clinging to her body, screamed.

  She wasn’t looking at me, but over her shoulder, behind me, her eyes frantic. I spun around, bringing my arm up. Laxness stood there, driving his automatic butt-first at my head. When I deflected it with my arm he slipped, falling to one knee, and my right fist missed his head by a foot. Then I felt my arms pinned, and Hans’ weight was dragging me down.

  We fell together on the wet floorboards of the cockpit, where I smashed an elbow back into Hans’ face and heard him grunt with pain. All at once I was loose on the slippery floor. I got to my knees and clutched Laxness’ legs as he swung the automatic again. He missed once more because just then Hans slammed his shoulder at me from behind. I skidded forward on my chin, shoved with my palms flat against the slick wood like a weary recruit doing a final push-up for an irate sergeant, in time to see Laxness make another try with his automatic.

  I remembered thinking oddly, crazily, third time lucky. Then lightning and thunder and the sweeping motion of Laxness’ arm all merged and the dark sky split and spun sickeningly a hundred and eighty degrees until it was beneath my feet, and I plunged in.

  23

  THE QUICK AND THE … WHAT? Thought circling, flitting away from me, elusive. I tried to grab it and hold on. Blackness everywhere else.

  The quick and the dead. But this time you weren’t quick enough, Dram. You weren’t quick enough at all.

  Away the thought ran. Then it wasn’t thought any longer: It was an automatic, and it had legs and I wasn’t chasing it now, it was chasing me.

  Someone used my voice to shout. I shouted back, almost loud enough to wake an insomniac if I cupped my hands at his ear.

  I opened my eyes.

  There was light and there was form, but there were colors too, drifting, parting, like gossamer veils.

  I was looking up and I saw the beige wool of Freya’s dress, in two abundantly upward-curving slopes. Freya’s breasts. My head was on her lap. And then, leaning out over the slopes of her breasts, I saw her face, the eyes big, their pupils dilated.

  “… Chet.”

  Someone used my voice again to say a lot of things, among others that I was all right. To prove it, I sat up. My head should have hurt. It didn’t. I felt disembodied. I stood up and even managed to walk a few steps. We were in a small room. Freya sat on the bed. There was a door. I tried it. Locked. There was a window. I looked out. It was dark. Not raining any longer. Far away there was a glow—the sun below the horizon, but not much further below than it had been in Iceland. And much closer, just beneath the window, a single pin-point of orange light. It grew brighter, then waned. The glowing end of a cigarette being smoked. A man stood out there in the night. He probably had a gun to keep him company. We wouldn’t be going anyplace—not through the window, though it didn’t seem more than a ten-foot drop to the ground.

  Dizziness clutched at me, making the walls spin. I sat down on the bed near Freya.

  “Chet,” she said, “what did they do to us? I feel so strange.”

  “Strange how?”

  “I see you, but I also … it’s crazy. I can see right through you and … and I see something else. I’m at the airport in Reykjavik. A plane just landed. Full. Sixty people getting off. I’m standing on the runway. I’m all … undressed. They’re watching me, They’re all … laughing.” She sobbed. “Chet, it’s so real. Am I going crazy?”

  Then I thought I knew, but it took time to say it be cause I couldn’t seem to hold an idea very long. I had that disembodied feeling again. Freya giggled. I felt like laughing too, suddenly. No reason. I just felt like it. I laughed. But I said, “They gave us an injection, didn’t they?”

  “… now I’m dancing,” Freya said. “And … Chet, don’t look!”

  I slapped her face, not hard. Her head swung toward me, her eyes wild.

  “They gave us a shot, didn’t they?”

  “Yes. The big blond man. Hans. After they brought us here … dancing and …”

  “Stop it. Try to concentrate.”

  “On the boat. I thought they were going to kill you. But Hans showed your gun. They said it was Swedish. You know, the one from Inspector Heyst? That worried them. They don’t know if we … please don’t look!”

  “I’m not. I can’t. You’re hallucinating, Freya. They gave us a shot of L.S.D. What you see is in your mind. I can’t see it.” I wanted to say I had my own nightmare to contend with, but didn’t. Beyond Freya and beyond the walls of the room I was falling through veils of color, falling, falling. I said, “It’s the same drug they’ve been giving Maja Kolding. Smaller doses for her, maybe. I don’t know. It produces temporary psychosis.”

  “Wha-what?”

  “It makes you crazy. Schizophrenic. It will wear, off. How do you feel?”

  “Loose. Outside myself. Restless and all mixed up so I can’t concentrate and … stop, stop it, Freya, what’s the matter with you? Freya!”

  I shook her shoulders. She looked straight at me. Her pupils were enormous and not focusing.

  “Listen, Freya. Listen to me. The cops are probably going to come. Heyst knows we were looking for the Baroness.”

  “They hit the policeman. He couldn’t follow us because they hit him,” Freya sing-songed.

  “Sure, but Heyst knew we were looking for the Baroness. When his cop reports back he’ll send someone here. Just like we came here.”

  Freya giggled again. Then she laughed harder. Tears streamed from her eyes. “The things I’m doing!”

  “Freya, when the cops come we’ve got to let them know we’re here.”

  “We can’t. It’s too late. They already came. And left.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “The police. A police boat. We were hidden. With Hans. Some kind of a storeroom. He had a gun. They didn’t find us. The Baroness got very angry. I could hear her shouting. The police went away.”

  Freya stretched out on the bed, her breasts rising and falling rapidly. Too rapidly. She shut her eyes. “I don’t want to talk now,” she said. “Please just leave me alone.”

  My own heart was hammering much too fast, my breath was shallow and rapid. That would be the drug, L.S.D. I felt washed out, but restless too. I got up, paced, sat down again near Freya. I shut my eyes. It was unexpectedly pleasant doing that, because then all the confusing thoughts went away, then you didn’t have to think at all. There was only the image of a man falling, and then I joined the image and was falling too, in great looping swoops, in a rhythm almost sexually pleasant. I drifted and plunged, lifted and fell …

  And outside the window a voice shouted hoarsely.

  Standing at the window, I heard the soft lapping of a gentle surf, then footsteps crunching on gravel and more shouting.

  Freya stood at my side. “It’s Gustaf Kolding,” she said. “They’re calling him.”

  More footsteps, directly below the window. That would be our guard, going after Kolding. It was very dark. I heard Baroness Margaretha’s voice: “Gustaf! Gustaf!”

  “Was he alone?” I asked Freya.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see him. I just heard them calling. Besides,” she added in a little-girl voice, “who cares? I’m going back to bed.”

  The drug was beckoning me again too. It was warm and soft in there with the drug, and I had stopped falling. I climbed the face of a limp-Dali clock. I had to
hurry, because when the clock struck—either midnight or noon, I couldn’t tell which—I had to reach the top. Not ticking, the clock was dripping off the edge of a cliff, the numbers melting behind me as I scaled them. And at the top, where the twelve should have been, was a woman. She was crouching, and her long hair cascaded down to her firm rounded thighs. It tented her. She wasn’t wearing anything else.

  Straining, I reached up toward her. She crouched on her knees, one bare arm extended down toward me, a Circe smile on her red lips.

  “Chet …”

  Freya’s voice, far away.

  Then I was falling, not in the dream-world of the psychosis-drug. I fell through darkness, landing heavily on gravel, rolling over to see the lighted window above me and Freya’s face framed there.

  A man lumbered toward me. He said something I didn’t understand. He also said, “Kolding.”

  I swung from the knees. Dream or real? I almost expected not to feel it. But I felt the bruising contact of bone on bone numbing my arm to the elbow. He went over backwards and lay there, not moving. I squatted near him. It was the big blond man, Hans. In his pocket I found the Beretta. I went with it across gravel toward where the surf was lapping. A door opened and slammed shut behind me.

  Think, I told myself. You’ve got to hold onto your thoughts, got to concentrate. All right, you’re out. You went out through the window. Urged by a psychotic fantasy, sure. But sane, not under the influence of the drug, you’d have done the same thing. A chance to get out. Not to leave, though. Freya was still in there. Unless they checked, they’d think you were too. The man you knocked out thought you were Gustaf Kolding. So what do you do now? Wait for them to find Kolding, or for Kolding to get away?

  Keep hidden.

  I was wading through water, up to my knees. Icy cold, it lapped at rocks encrusted with barnacles. A breakwater. I followed it out until the water reached my armpits, holding the Beretta high and clear of it. Then I put the gun on a ledge of rock and waited. Turning around in the water I could see the Baroness’ beach house, a veranda running the length of it, lit up now, two windows on the second floor showing yellow light. I had come around the side. That’s where Freya was. And Hans, unconscious on the gravel.

  Einar Laxness came running along the veranda. My hand moved, almost of its own accord, toward the Beretta. Then Laxness was gone. But I heard his running footsteps, and splashing in the water on the other side of the breakwater. Pretty soon I heard a motor kick and grunt and start with a roar. The cabin cruiser. Kolding?

  The cabin cruiser nosed around the end of the breakwater behind me. On the roof of the cabin was a spotlight stabbing the black water with a bright yellow circle. It swung and probed as the cruiser came ahead slowly. It caught the breakwater, moved among the rocks. Hung for an instant, spotlighting the Beretta, then flicked over it, then back. I took a breath and ducked my head under. Waited that way, eyes squinched shut, body cold to the bone, for hallucination to return. Almost wanting it to return.

  But there was nothing but the cold and the wet and the darkness. The drug was wearing off.

  That shook me suddenly. They knew when they administered it and would know, because they had been shooting Maja full of it for days, about how long it would last. So pretty soon after they found Kolding, or were convinced they wouldn’t find him, they’d pay a visit to Freya’s room and learn I was missing too. A visit—to administer, L.S.D. again, as they had given it to us before, to keep us rocky until they decided what to do with us, or to kill us now that the cops had come and gone?

  Lungs ready to burst, I went up for air. A hundred yards away now, its white wake faintly luminescent, the cabin cruiser was circling the small island. Abruptly the motor cut off. The light swung back fifty yards in my direction where a narrow headland jutted out into the water.

  Clear, in the night I heard a girl’s high, insane laughter. Then a man’s voice, and shouts, and splashing in the water. The spotlight steadied on them, Kolding and a man I didn’t know fighting in the water, waist-deep, near the headland. And Maja near them, her hands cupped over her ears parodying a child confronted with terror. Maja laughing, then screaming. Drugged, as Freya and I had been drugged.

  A shot rang out and a slug ricocheted from the surface of the water. Einar Laxness’ voice hailed them from the boat, in Icelandic. There was another shot. This one didn’t ricochet. I saw the gout in the water at the edge of the circle of light. Laxness called out again. You didn’t have to be a linguist to know what he was saying. If they didn’t surrender he could shoot them in the water.

  Gustaf Kolding floundered toward shore, holding his sister’s hand. Maja didn’t seem to mind. She came docilely. The spotlight moved with them. When it reached shore at the base of the narrow headland, I saw Hans waiting there for them. He had a rifle now, and with it he herded them back toward the beach house.

  Pretty soon Laxness took the cabin cruiser back to its mooring on the other side of the breakwater. The motor cut to silence. A cricket on the island chirped. I heard footsteps again, and saw Laxness silhouetted for a moment against the light of the veranda. I picked up the Beretta. But sighting I knew it was a long shot for a hand-gun, much too long for accuracy, and if I missed they’d know I was out here. The light on the veranda went out.

  I waited maybe five minutes, then waded out of the water toward the house.

  24

  I WENT AT A CROUCH past the dark veranda and around the left side of the house. Freya was in a room on the second floor on the right side, and I figured Hans or someone would be out there again, watching.

  It was cold enough to see vapor when you exhaled. Dripping wet, I began to get the shakes. It was a little better in the lee of the house, where the cold wind didn’t reach. I saw the bright rectangle of a single lighted window there, on the ground floor. Hoping to get by it and find a way in at the rear of the house, I crouched and kept going.

  But voices arguing—in English—stopped me.

  “You’re a fool, Gustaf,” the woman said. “Now you’re talking like Ollie. I never really knew what a fool you were, until tonight.” It was the Baroness.

  “Ollie loved Maja,” Gustaf Kolding said.

  “Him? Love?” Baroness Margaretha laughed.

  “Never mind him. What are you going to do to Maja now?”

  “I? It’s out of my hands now. You saw to that.”

  Their speaking English, I thought, meant that someone else was in the room with them and they didn’t want him to understand what they were saying.

  “It never was in my hands,” Kolding said bitterly. “I did everything you said, Margaretha. I took Maja to Iceland. I brought her here. But we were running. All the time we were running, weren’t we? Einar Laxness doesn’t take orders from you.”

  “He did, until tonight. Until you tried to make a break for it with Maja.”

  “That’s a lie. It was all over for you when Laxness came here this afternoon. When he brought the detective in. You were scared. You’re still scared. You’re scared right now.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that. What kind of a man are you anyway? You’re as bad as Ollie. I thought you were a man like your father.”

  Kolding laughed. It was a bitter sound torn from his throat, almost like a sob. “You know what I thought of my father. But he knew one tiling anyway. He knew when to get rid of excess baggage. Meaning you.”

  I heard a slapping sound. Footsteps moved across the floor and a voice I didn’t recognize said something in Swedish. “Tell me you’re not a prisoner,” Kolding said after a while. “Tell me you’re not Einar Laxness’ prisoner now.”

  “I’ll tell you how it is with Laxness, you fool,” Margaretha said slowly. “He is an assassin. No more. He had orders to kill your father in Washington, and he carried them out. He—”

  “Whose orders? Yours?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “I just want to know, that’s all.”

  “No, I didn’t give Laxness
any orders to kill your father.”

  “If Laxness killed him.”

  “I just told you—”

  “I know what you told me. But how did Laxness get to him, in his hotel room, in downtown Washington?”

  “Jorgen Kolding didn’t believe in bodyguards.”

  “So Laxness just walked right in on him and shot him?”

  “Laxness is a professional at murder. He would have ways.”

  “Speaking of which, so would you.”

  “Just what is that supposed to mean?”

  “An old girlfriend in town, calling him up, inviting herself to his room—”

  “So now because I no longer can help your precious sister you’re going to make a murderer out of me.”

  The harsh reality of the here and now tore Kolding’s thoughts away from speculation about the past. “Isn’t there anything we can do? We can’t just let him kill her.”

  “I was telling you about Laxness. He has no ideology, Gustaf, but as a paid killer, a paid international killer, he is extremely well paid. Don’t you think he knows his usefulness would be impaired if he had to face a murder charge? Of course, he would never return to the United States to stand trial, but then his territory would be limited. No American assignments. And possibly no assignments in any country that had extradition arrangements with the States. That wouldn’t leave him much, would it?”

  “You don’t leave me much,” Kolding said. “Like a fool I listened to you. Why didn’t you tell me Laxness murdered my father? Why did you let me go on believing Brandvik had done it?”

  “How could I have told you that, Gustaf? If I had there would have been another member of the Kolding family Einar Laxness had to kill.”

  “But not you, Margaretha? He trusts you?”

  “He trusted me about as much as he trusted anyone. Which is what you should have done.”