Danger Is My Line Read online

  “Talkative this morning, aren’t you?”

  “I’m sorry, Jack. And thanks for the address.”

  “Just don’t let out where you got it.”

  “Anybody else looking for her?”

  “Such as who?”

  “Such as anybody.”

  “Not yet that I know of. Who do you want me to steer wrong?”

  “You couldn’t, Jack, but thanks. It ought to be one of the F.B.I. agencies.”

  Jack groaned. “Why do you always go around looking for trouble?”

  “It,” I said, “comes looking for me.”

  They would pick me up outside the apartment and have the office on F Street staked out too. They would be very unobtrusive and very good at it: that was their line of work. But I had the same kind of training they did, and if I wanted to visit Maja Kolding this morning I had to be better.

  I drove through late rush-hour traffic along Whitehurst Freeway to Washington Circle and halfway around the circle to Pennsylvania Avenue. They were back there in the heavy traffic somewhere, tailing me. They had to be, of course.

  Putting the car in the lot across the street from the Treasury Building, I lit a cigarette casually, jawed with the white-coated parking attendant and went down F Street to the Farrell Building. Elevator to the seventh floor, and past the black-lettered sign on pebbled glass that said: CHESTER DRUM, Confidential Investigations. How confidential I could be with the F.B.I. staking me out I didn’t know as yet.

  Ten minutes with the mail and the waste basket. Ten more to stare at the pale green walls, the desk top, the rack of pipes I never smoked, the Treasury Building outside the window at the head of F Street.

  Then I made my move. I took a cab from the hack stand out front to Union Station. That one they would follow: I expected them to.

  At the station I stood on the longest line I could find and bought a ticket to Mount Vernon. They would check that one out, would board the suburban train to Mount Vernon with me.

  Fifteen minutes later it pulled out. I got a seat in the middle car of five and shoved my head in a newspaper. They wouldn’t be aboard this car, not if they had to stick to me all day. One car to the rear, or one forward. It’s the way I would have done it, and we all went to the same school.

  The train stopped at the Maryland Avenue Station before crossing the narrow neck of water between the Tidal Basin and Washington Channel. I waited for the conductor to say, “Board!” then scooted out in a hurry.

  Downstairs and outside without looking back. Chances were they were still en route to Mount Vernon, but I had to be sure. I hopped a cab, told the driver, “Greyhound Bus Terminal,” and settled back against the leather cushions. Just before we turned out of sight of it, another cab swung out of the taxi line.

  “Would you recognize that cab from a distance?” I said.

  “What cab?” the driver asked.

  “The one that pulled out behind us.”

  “Veterans’ Cab, Harry Brink driving. So?”

  “Lose it and you get a five-spot.”

  “Mac,” the driver said, “consider it lost.”

  He was as good as his word. He ran a yellow light on 14th Street near the Department of Agriculture and another one on Vermont south of Thomas Circle. Tires protesting, he swung halfway around Thomas and all the way around Logan Circle, heading south again on 13th Street.

  “He’s gone, Mac. Been gone for ten minutes.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “They could use you at Indianapolis.”

  I gave him the five at the Greyhound Bus Terminal, where he pulled into the taxi line and waited for another fare. I went inside to the ticket windows, figuring that if he knew Harry Brink then Brink might be able to identify him. But I didn’t buy a ticket. Instead I walked out the main entrance of the terminal, strolled two blocks and caught a cruising cab.

  “Up the Anacostia River past the park,” I told the driver. “I’ll let you know the address.”

  That left the Federal boys on their way to Mount Vernon, or stuck in downtown traffic, or getting no answers at the Greyhound Terminal. I was in the clear.

  “You want me to wait?”

  “No. Be a while.”

  I watched the cab swing in a wide U-turn and head back toward downtown Washington. The house, a flat-roofed cedar-shingle bungalow on a low bluff overlooking the river, stood about a hundred yards from its nearest neighbor. It was very quiet and seemed deserted except for a middle-aged colored man in a yellow T-shirt and faded jeans who was polishing up a maroon Volvo with diplomatic plates in the shade of the carport.

  When I went up the gravel driveway to him, he stopped whistling the march from The Bridge on the River Kwai, set the can of polish down on the fender of the Volvo and looked at me.

  “Pretty good picture,” I said.

  “Well, it didn’t deserve any eight Academy Awards, mister,” he said in a soft, polite voice, almost a whisper. “If you ask me, the motivation was all shot to hell and back. Mainly the colonel. Know what I mean?”

  “Maybe you have a point there,” I said.

  “Me, I was a PW in Luzon. Same war, mister. Same Japs. The colonel, he was a big joke. He was all Hollywood. All Hollywood, mister.”

  I didn’t belabor the point. “Anybody home?” I said.

  He dropped his critical acumen disappointedly, picked up the can and said wearily, “Out back, mister. They’re out back.”

  I went around the side of the house. Before I could see anything but the projecting corner of the house, I heard voices. I stopped to listen.

  “You’re sore,” a whining young man’s voice said. “So all right, you’re sore. I still can’t tell you.”

  “Her brother will, you little fool,” a woman answered him. She had a rich, throaty voice, she spoke with a slight Scandinavian accent, and she was sore all right.

  “Her brother ain’t home. Who says he knows?”

  “For the last time, I want you to tell me.”

  “I don’t want to,” the whining voice said. Then it took on an edge of fright and added hastily: “I can’t. I promised.”

  “You little fool, you know she wasn’t supposed to have gone anywhere.”

  “Yeah? Who was I to stop her?”

  “She wasn’t home last night. Where did she go?”

  “I don’t know,” the whining voice said.

  “You’re lying.”

  “I said I don’t know.”

  “You’re a fool and a liar, Ollie.”

  “That ain’t news, what you think of me,” Ollie whined.

  I heard a sharp cracking sound. The woman had slapped him—from the sound of it, hard enough to hurt.

  “Keep your rotten hands off me!” the whining voice shouted.

  “Or you’ll do what, little man?”

  “I—I’ll tell Gustaf.”

  The throaty voice purred laughter. “I’m shaking. I’m trembling all over.”

  “Nuts to you,” Ollie whined. Then: “Don’t hit me! Don’t hit me again, Baroness.”

  “Get out of here. Get out of my sight. You make me sick.”

  Footsteps crunched on gravel. I started moving forward again as he came around the side of the house. He was a skinny little guy, barefoot, wearing bathing trunks, maybe twenty-three or twenty-four years old, with a hollow, hairless chest, scrawny limbs and the red imprint of a hand on his pale left cheek.

  “What the hell do you want?” he whined up at me. He was only five-three or -four and would tip the scales at a hundred and twenty pounds, dressed to the ears.

  “I’m looking for Maja Kolding,” I said.

  He blinked and rubbed his left cheek, then scowled, then laughed. He went around me without another word and toward the front of the house, still laughing.

  There was a gray and terra-cotta slate patio in back. Beyond it a lawn sloped down to a terraced rock garden and that descended the bluff to a small sandy beach and the Anacostia River.

  At the edge of the patio, where the
shade didn’t reach, was a chaise longue with a terry cloth robe draped across it. Seated on the edge of the lounge and wearing a white Bikini bathing suit that made her tanned skin look even darker than it was, a woman watched me approach.

  She was not quite twice the size of Anita Ekberg, and all of it in splendid proportion. She had fair hair tied up in back, and untied it would be long, down almost to her supple waist. She had time to stand up in a fluid, languid motion and count my teeth before I said anything. She was that kind of woman. Her eyes were green, her large high breasts fought against the white wisp of the Bikini top, her hips, bare for a couple of devastating inches above the Bikini bottom, were broad and firm-fleshed, her long legs were as tanned as a beach-boy’s and as shapely as a Grecian statue’s. She was an insolent-eyed, thick-lipped sex-bomb of a woman, to end all insolent-eyed, thick-lipped sex-bombs. She was probably a Swede.

  “It is all mine,” she said with the kind of man-devouring look that Circe must have had, “as you are so obviously observing and cataloguing. Now will you kindly stop staring at me?”

  I went over to the chaise longue and picked up the terry-cloth robe, holding it out for her at shoulder height. That bought me a widening of the green eyes over one bare bronzed shoulder. Her eyes were not quite on a level with mine, but I’m six-one without my cordovan bluchers. I dropped the robe like a cape on her shoulders and she swung lazily to face me. She was lazy—like a rattler dozing in the sun.

  “Who are you?” she said. “If you’re selling something, we’re not in the market. Whatever it is.”

  “I’m buying,” I said. “Not selling.”

  “Yes? Buying what?”

  “Information.” I took out my billfold, found my F.B.I. Association card and showed it to her with my thumb over the fine print that said I had paid my dues for the current year. I put it away in a hurry, telling myself I was not really impersonating a Federal Agent, and asked:

  “Who else lives here?”

  Now the green eyes narrowed. “Well, to start with, I don’t.”

  “No?”

  “No. I am just a house-guest.”

  “And your name is?” I snapped at her.

  “I am the Baroness Margaretha Schroeder. Swedish,” she said, beginning to smile lazily. “Six feet tall and—”

  “Save the vital statistics for the Miss Universe contest, Baroness. I asked who lives here.”

  “Then you are not interested in such—statistics? What a shame,” she said teasingly.

  “I’m on duty,” I said.

  “What a shame,” she repeated, with those insolent eyes six inches from mine. That put the terry cloth that covered her breasts a millimeter or so from the Italian raw silk of my suit jacket.

  “Who lives here?” I tried again.

  “Gustaf Kolding.”

  “The Consul. Who else?”

  “His personal secretary, an American boy named Meer. Ollie Meer.”

  “And Kolding’s sister? Until she leaves the country?”

  “I am only a house-guest here,” the Baroness Margaretha said.

  “Kolding’s sister flew the coop, didn’t she?”

  “Why don’t you wait and ask the Consul? We expect him shortly.”

  She was too lazily, insolently cool to get anywhere with, too breath-takingly big in all the right places, too sure of herself, too certain of the natural male response to all that equipment. I wondered if I could jar that cool patrician poise out from under her and decided it was worth a try.

  “That why you’re surrounding me with the merchandise?” I said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “A stall until the Consul gets here?”

  “I ought to slap your face.”

  “Like you did Ollie’s?”

  “Ollie. I do not like Ollie.”

  “Because he doesn’t roll over on his back, and purr, and let you scratch his throat? Maybe we ought to have Ollie out here with us. Maybe he can tell both of us where Maja Kolding went.”

  “I still ought to slap your face.”

  “It’s been tried, Baroness.”

  “And?”

  I just leered at her.

  She raised one hand. Then she raised both of them. The terry-cloth robe slipped off her smooth bronzed shoulders. When it lay in a heap at her feet she took a tiny half-step forward. The white Bikini top was terry-cloth too. It got comfortable against my raw silk jacket. Her arms slid around behind my neck. My hands felt the smooth, sun-warmed flesh of her back under them. We both squeezed. And then kissed the kind of kiss the censors scissor out of Hollywood’s love scenes and sell to the stag-party movie-makers.

  “Has that—ever—been tried before?” the Baroness Margaretha whispered against my lips. She chuckled softly, tickling my lips with hers. “All of a sudden you are off duty—yes?”

  “All of a sudden I’m on duty,” I said, and kissed her again.

  After a moment the Baroness said huskily, “I think I could learn to like you.”

  Far away down the river a dog barked. I thought of Benares, and of Wally Baker. “Let’s ask Ollie where Maja Kolding went,” I said.

  The Baroness’ breath hissed out between her parted lips. She disengaged her arms and I could breathe again, some. “Idiot,” she purred softly, lazily.

  Just then a car stopped out front and I heard footsteps crunching on gravel.

  He took long strides out across the patio, flicking a cigarette off on the grass between thumb and forefinger. He was a guy to match, at least quantitatively, the Baroness’ outsized charms. He was six feet three or four inches tall in white ducks and a double-breasted blue yachting jacket. Hatless, he had pink-blond hair thinning on top and meticulously combed over his bald spot. He had a rugged outdoor man’s face and eyes as cold as Maja Kolding’s. He looked as hard as a teakwood plank and as easy to bluff as ENIAC.

  “Who’s the company, Baroness?” he asked, neither politely nor arrogantly. All he wanted was an answer, but his attitude as he came to stand beside the Baroness was faintly, self-consciously possesssive.

  The Baroness wasn’t wearing lipstick. I had none to scrub off my mouth. I just waited.

  “A Federal Agent,” Baroness Margaretha said. “Mr.—”

  “Drum,” I supplied.

  “Mr. Drum, I would like you to meet Consul Gustaf Kolding.”

  “Prove it,” Consul Gustaf Kolding said.

  I looked at the Baroness. The Baroness looked at me. We both looked at Gustaf Kolding.

  “If you’re a Federal Agent, show me something to prove it.”

  I took out the Association card and waved it casually between us. He caught it in his fingers and plucked it away from me.

  “This says,” he told me coldly after he had read the card, “you belong to something called the F.B.I. Association. If that’s the Federal Bureau of Investigation, it’s news to me.”

  “I showed it to the Baroness,” I said. “She drew her own conclusions.”

  The Baroness gave me the kind of look she must have given Ollie before she slapped him. “He wanted what?” Gustaf Kolding asked her.

  “Maja.”

  Kolding dropped my card. It fluttered to the patio. “Pick it up and clear out of here,” he said. “Or shall I make a phone call to tell the F.B.I. just how you’ve broken the law?”

  He had me. We both knew it. I stooped for the card. When I was on my way up he hit me. His fist couldn’t have traveled very far or I’d have seen it coming. He didn’t telegraph it, but he could hit like an ox could kick. I sank to my knees and remained that way a while. They were talking. I couldn’t make out the words. When I climbed unsteadily to my feet my knees felt like under-inflated rubber.

  The first words I heard clearly were Kolding’s. He said: “You can take a punch.”

  “You can throw one.”

  “Want more?”

  I stared at him. I felt my hands tensing into fists.

  “You’ll have a fight on your hands, Gustaf,” the Baron
ess observed coolly.

  “I guess I would at that. But he’d have the F.B.I. on his.”

  Neither the Baroness nor I could think of an answer to that.

  “What do you want with my sister?” Kolding asked.

  “I’ll tell her,” I said, “when I see her.”

  “She’s not here.”

  “Where is she?” I said.

  “He wants more,” Kolding told the Baroness.

  “I still say you’ll have a fight on your hands,” the. Baroness said. They were like two people watching a play and trying to guess what would happen in the next scene.

  “Go inside and call the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Kolding said. “Tell them what we’ve got out here.”

  “While you’re at it tell them Maja Kolding got herself lost,” I said. I caught Kolding’s eyes and held them. “That would look swell on your record, Consul. You’d be persona non grata because you couldn’t keep your sister where she belonged.”

  “Touché!” Baroness Margaretha cried huskily.

  Kolding glared at her. “I’ll take my chances. Call them.”

  I had one last card between me and losing my license for impersonating a Federal Agent. It wasn’t a card I enjoyed playing but I played it all the same. “Tell them Maja Kolding was seen last night leaving the block in Georgetown where a guy named Wallace Baker lived—right after the bomb went off. Tell them that, Baroness. With the compliments of an eye witness. Tell them she’s the girl the F.B.I. is looking for.”

  Kolding’s right shoulder, dropped a couple of inches. This time I was ready for him, up on the balls of my feet. But all he did was say, “That the truth?”

  I nodded.

  “Why didn’t you tell them yourself?”

  “I’m in no hurry. I wanted to see your sister first.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Wally Baker was my friend,” I said.

  “I don’t know where Maja is,” Kolding said bitterly. “That’s the truth. And she didn’t kill Baker!”

  “Would she have had a reason to?”

  “Get out of here,” Kolding said. “Get out, you bum.”

  I gave him one of my business cards. “When you see Maja tell her, to call me.”

  Kolding read the card, his cold blue eyes blank. The Baroness took it from him. She looked interested.