The Wrecking Crew

by Donald Hamilton

  She sounded enthusiastic and full of energy, as if she’d just got out of bed. She sounded as if this article really meant something to her. She was a hard kid to figure out.

  “Yes,” I said, “it was fine.” We were outside my door now. I opened up and shoved the stuff I was carrying inside, and relieved her of her burdens. “Well, thanks for the helping hand. How about a drink?”

  She shook her head. “No, thanks, and if you don’t mind a little advice, you’d better not have one, either. We’re due out for dinner in—” she glanced at her watch—“in twenty minutes, and unless you know your capacity and Swedish dinners better than I think you do, you won’t want to get a head start. They won’t serve us much in the way of cocktails, but that’s about the only alcoholic beverage they’ll skimp on in any way. So brace yourself, man, brace yourself.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said meekly, and went in to clean myself up for the ordeal.

  14

  The house was a large one, and looked pleasantly old-fashioned—two stories and a big attic, at a guess; no ranch houses or split levels here, thank you. We shook hands with the host and hostess, with a small son and daughter who bowed and curtsied prettily, and with a visiting fireman with the title of Direktör, a title that was shared by our host, a lean man in his forties. In Sweden, I was catching on, everybody has a title, and if your name is Jones and you’re in charge of the city pound, you’ll be introduced everywhere as Chief Dogcatcher Jones. Women are, on the whole, exempt from this formality, so Lou remained Mrs. Taylor, but I became Journalist Helm.

  “There is someone here who wishes much to meet you,” said our hostess, a slender, gray-haired woman who had a little trouble with her English. “A guest from Stockholm. She was much interested when she heard we were entertaining a gentleman named Helm from America. She thinks you may be distantly related. Ah, here she comes now.”

  I looked around and saw a girl in a shiny blue dress coming down the stairs. My first impression was that she must have borrowed the dress from a very rich old maiden aunt. It had that look of magnificent quality and complete lack of style and suitability... As I say, the first thing I noticed was the frumpy, shiny dress. Then I saw that the kid was beautiful.

  It’s not a word I use lightly. It hasn’t got anything to do with big bosoms and sexy rear ends, in my interpretation, nor even with pretty faces. Hollywood, for instance, is full of women you can bear to look at and wouldn’t mind going to bed with. They even photograph fairly well. But they’re not beautiful, and the very few who are spoil it by working too hard at it.

  This girl wasn’t working at all. She didn’t do anything as she came down the stairs, she just came down the damn stairs. She hadn’t put anything on her face you could notice except some lipstick, and that was the wrong color—that ghastly pale morgue-pink stuff—and it didn’t make a damn bit of difference. She was beautiful, and that was all there was to it. It made you want to cry for all the women in the world who were striving so hard for it and would never achieve it.

  She was in her early twenties, rather tall and by no means fragile: she had a nice, durable, well-put-together look. She wasn’t even the kind of spectacular blonde you often get in that country. She had straight, light-brown hair that she didn’t, apparently, pay much attention to except to brush it hard morning and night. It was long enough to reach her shoulders. She had blue eyes. What difference does it make? You can’t add it up or analyze it. It’s just there. I will admit that I might be slightly prejudiced. I’m a sucker for that heartbreaking young-and-innocent look, particularly in combination with a fair complexion, after all the years I’ve spent in a land of dark and sultry Spanish-American beauties who knew everything before they were born.

  I had a chance to watch her a little longer as she was first introduced to Lou, three or four years older, and then had the visiting Director, a pompous middle-aged man—I never did learn what he was Director of—introduced to her. Then it was my turn.

  “Elin, this is Journalist Helm, from America,” our hostess said. “Herr Helm, Fröken von Hoffman.” Fröken, as Lou would have hastened to explain, merely means “Miss” in Swedish.

  The girl held out her hand. “Yes,” she said, “I have been hoping to meet you, Herr Helm, since I learned in Stockholm you were in this country. We are related, you know. Very, very distant cousins, I think.”

  My parents had often talked about coming back here to visit relatives. I did have some, somewhere. This girl could be one. I wasn’t going to disown her, that was for sure.

  “I didn’t know,” I said, “but I certainly won’t argue the point, Cousin Ellen.”

  “Elin,” she said, smiling. “Ay-linn. I always have that difficulty with Englishmen and Americans. They always want to christen me Ellen or Elaine, but it really is Elin.”

  Then some more people came in, and she was borne away on a new tide of introductions and handshaking. There was none of the pre-food dawdling here that you get at home. Everybody being present at the appointed hour, our hostess barely gave us time to absorb the cocktails, so-called, that had been put into our hands—I think they were supposed to be Manhattans, God help them—then the dining-room doors were thrown open and we were introduced to the main business of the evening. It seemed on the whole like an improvement over spending two hours getting blotto while waiting for latecomers to make dramatic, breathless entrances with phony excuses.

  Any previous liquor shortage was more than made up during the meal, as Lou had warned me it would be. There were beer and two different kinds of wine, and a promise of cognac to come. The table settings were aweinspiring to a simple New Mexico boy, and for a while I was kept busy noticing who was eating what with what. It was quite a layout to have to tackle without a manual of instructions. My conversation therefore consisted of letting my hostess explain to me the Swedish art of toast-drinking: you look firmly into the eyes of the person you wish to honor, both parties drink, and then you look again before putting your glass down.

  You’re not, it seems, supposed to skål your host and hostess, and you’re supposed to wait for an older or more important man to take the initiative, after which you must soon return the courtesy, but any lady at the table except your hostess is fair game. In the old days, I was told, a lady could not propose a skål—it would have been considered very forward of her—nor was it considered proper for her to drink without a social excuse, so an unpopular girl could perish of thirst with a full glass of wine in front of her.

  Having learned all this, I put it to use. I picked up my glass and saluted the kid on the other side of me.

  “Skål, Cousin Elin,” I said.

  She looked me in the eyes, as custom demanded, and smiled. “Skål, Cousin… Matthew? That is the same as our Matthias, is it not? Do you speak any Swedish at all?”

  I shook my head. “I knew a few words when I was a boy, but I’ve forgotten most of them.”

  “That is too bad,” she said. “I speak English very badly.”

  “Uhuh,” I said. “Half the population of America should speak it as badly as you do. How did you happen to hear of me in Stockholm?”

  She said, “It is very simple. You like to hunt, do you not? A man in Stockholm whose business is arranging hunts for foreigners called up old Överste Stjernhjelm at Torsåter—Överste means Colonel, you know. There is an Älg-hunt at Torsäter in a week or two. Torsäter is the family estate near Uppsala, one of our two big University towns, sixty kilometers north of Stockholm, about forty of your English miles. Älg, that is our Swedish moose, not as big as your Canadian variety—”

  She wasn’t getting very far. I said, “Cousin, why don’t you just tell the story? When you throw me a word I don’t know, I’ll stop you.”

  She laughed. “All right, but you said you didn’t know Swedish... There are usually not many strangers at the Torsäter hunt. It is a small neighborhood affair, but the man in Stockholm said he had an American client, a sportsman and journalist who wanted to write abo
ut some typical Swedish hunting, and it would be very nice if Colonel Stjernhjelm would invite him to be a guest. The colonel was not really interested, until he heard that your name was Helm. He remembered that a cousin of his had emigrated to America many years ago and shortened his name. He remembered that there had been a son. The colonel, like many of our old retired people, is very interested in genealogy. Having made certain from his records that you were a member of the family, he tried to reach you in Stockholm, but you had already left. He knew I was planning a visit here, so he called me and asked me to get in touch with you.”

  I grinned. “Just get in touch?”

  She said, with some embarrassment, “Well, he did want me to let him know what kind of a person you were. So you must behave yourself while I have you under observation, Cousin Matthias, so I can write a favorable report to the colonel. Then he will invite you hunting, I am sure.”

  I said, “All right, I’ll be good. Now tell me how we got to be cousins.”

  “Very, very distant cousins,” she said, smiling. “It is rather complicated, but I think it was this way: back in 1652, two brothers von Hoffman came here from Germany. One of them married a Miss Stjernhjelm, whose brother was a direct ancestor of yours. The other married another nice Swedish girl and became an ancestor of mine. I hope this is quite clear. If it is not, I’m sure Colonel Stjernhjelm will be delighted to explain it to you when you return south. He has all kinds of genealogical tables at Torsäter.”

  I glanced at her. “Sixteen fifty-two, you say?”

  She smiled again. “Yes. As I told you, it is not a very close relationship.”

  Then, for some reason, she blushed a little. I hadn’t seen a girl do that in years.

  15

  When it was time to leave, our host was shocked to learn that Lou and I had arrived in a car and now intended to drive back to the hotel. It seems that the Swedish laws against drunken driving are so strict that you don’t ever drive to a party unless one occupant of the car intends not to drink at all. Otherwise you play safe and take a cab. We were, of course, quite sober and capable, our host agreed, but we’d both imbibed detectable quantities of alcohol, and we couldn’t be allowed to run the risk. A taxi would take us to the hotel, and somebody would deliver our car there in the morning.

  At the hotel, we climbed the stairs in silence, and stopped at Lou’s door.

  “I won’t ask you in for a drink,” she said. “It would be a crime to dump whisky on top of all that lovely wine and cognac. Besides, I don’t think I could stay awake. Good night, Matt.”

  “Good night,” I said, and crossed the hall to my own room, let myself in, closed the door behind me, and grinned wryly. Apparently she’d decided to give me some of my own medicine: two could play it cool as well as one. I yawned, undressed, and went to bed.

  Sleep washed over me in a wave, but just as I was losing my last contact with reality, I heard a sound that made me wide awake again. Somewhere an ancient hinge had creaked softly. I listened intently and heard the click of a high heel in the hall; Lou was leaving her room. Well, she could be paying a visit to the communal plumbing. Her room, like mine, boasted only a small curtained cubicle with a lavatory and a neat little locker containing a white enamel receptacle for emergency use.

  I waited, but she didn’t return. I didn’t even consider trying to follow her. It was a complicated game we were playing, but I still thought the guy who would win was the guy who could act dumbest. To hell with her and her midnight expeditions. It was something I knew that she didn’t know I knew. It was a point for our side. Well, call it half a point. I turned over in bed and closed my eyes.

  Nothing happened. Suddenly I had the keyed-up feeling you get from a lot of liquor partially neutralized by a lot of coffee. Sleep was no longer anywhere around. I stood it as long as I could; then I got up and walked around the bed to the window and looked out. The window was a casement type without screens, standard in this country. There was something strange and a little shocking about standing at a second-floor window completely exposed to the great outdoors. You get so used to looking at the world through wire netting that you feel naked and unsafe when it’s taken away.

  Although it was midnight, the sky was still lighter than it would have been in Santa Fe, New Mexico: we have black night skies at home, with brilliant stars. This wasn’t much of a display, by comparison. My window faced a lake. I’d forgotten the name, but it would end in -järvi, since järvi was the Finnish word for lake and, as Lou had pointed out, the Finnish influence was strong here, within a hundred miles of the border. Standing there, I could feel geography crowding me—a feeling you never get at home. But here I was standing in a wedge of one little country, Sweden, thrust up between two others, Norway and Finland. And behind Finland was Russia and the arctic port of Murmansk…

  A movement in the bushes drew my attention, and Lou Taylor came into sight some distance away. She’d left her coat in her room, apparently. With her dark hair, in her black dress, she was almost invisible. By the time I saw her, it was too late for me to duck out of sight. She was already looking up toward my window, where my face would be shining like a neon sign against the blackness of the room behind me. She turned quickly to warn the person with her, but he didn’t catch the signal in time. As he straightened up, after ducking a branch, I recognized the big, football-player shape of the man I’d met in her Stockholm hotel room: Jim Wellington.

  I stood there watching them. Having already been seen, they took time to finish whatever they’d been talking about.

  She asked a question. Whatever she wanted, he wasn’t giving it. He turned and disappeared into the bushes. She made her way into the clear, with due regard for her dress and nylons and fragile shoes. She vanished around the corner of the hotel without looking up at me again.

  It was getting cold in the room. I closed the window and drew the shade. The bed didn’t attract me any more strongly than before. I found my dressing gown, put it on, and turned on the light. I stood for a moment looking at the films from the day’s shooting lined up on the bureau: five rolls of color and three of black-and-white. This didn’t actually mean that I’d taken more subjects in Kodachrome; on the contrary, I’d taken less, but color is trickier than black-and-white and therefore I habitually protect each color exposure by bracketing it with two others, one longer and one shorter. It’s cheaper in the long run than going back for retakes.

  It was a poor harvest for a whole day’s work, showing that my heart had not been in it. On a job that appeals to me, I can burn up several times that amount of film in a day and never work up a sweat. But circumstances hadn’t been conducive to a fine, free, frenzy of inspiration. I’d been practically told what to shoot; I’d had little incentive to branch out on my own.

  The knock on the door didn’t make me jump very high. I’d already heard her footsteps in the hall. I walked over and let her in. When I turned, after closing the door behind her, she was taking advantage of the light to examine her stockings for runs and her dress for dust and woods debris. It was the same smoothly fitting jersey dress she’d worn to dinner in Stockholm, with the big bunch of satin at the hip.

  “I thought you were asleep.” Her voice was flat.

  “I was heading that way, but you woke me up by going out,” I said. “What’s that Wellington character doing up here in Kiruna, anyway?”

  She stalled briefly. “So you recognized him?”

  I said, “A man that size is hard to miss.”

  It occurred to me suddenly that of all the people involved to date, Jim Wellington was the only one big enough to stick on a phony beard and give a rumbling laugh and bear a reasonable resemblance to Hal Taylor’s description of Caselius.

  Lou Taylor had turned away from me. She reached out absently and rearranged the films on the dresser before speaking. “What if I were to tell you it’s none of your damn business what he’s doing here?” she said at last.

  I said, “I might not agree with you. But ther
e wouldn’t be much I could do about it, would there?”

  She glanced at me over her shoulder. After a moment, she reached out and picked up one of the film cartridges. “Are all these from today? I didn’t know we’d taken so many.”

  “That’s not many,” I said. “You should see me go through the stuff when I really get warmed up.”

  “What will you do with them now? Are you going to develop them right away?”

  “No,” I said. “The color has to go to a lab in Stockholm, anyway. I can’t do that myself. The black-and-white I’ll save until I have a place with reasonable facilities to work in. Maybe I can scare up somebody in Stockholm with a real darkroom I can use. I hate working out of a hotel closet.” After a moment, I asked, “Do you owe this Wellington character anything?”

  She put the film down and turned slowly to face me. Everything was sharp and clear. We were two people who’d been around. I’d caught her out, and I could now waste a lot of time asking a bunch of silly questions and forcing her to think up a bunch of equally silly answers. The end would be the same. We’d wind up facing each other like this, neither knowing any more about the other than before. There was really only one thing we needed to know, and only one way of finding it out.

  “Why, no,” she said slowly, “I wouldn’t say I owe Jim Wellington a thing.” Then, still watching me carefully, she said, “You’ve been pretending not to like me much, haven’t you?”