Cold Smoked

by K. K. Beck

  As he faded away, Amanda Braithwaite descended on her, pumping her hand in a hearty way. “Super to meet you,” she said enthusiastically. “I love your pieces in Seafood Now. Absolutely brilliant! Smashing stuff! I always look for your byline.”

  She’d have to look pretty hard, seeing as nothing had ever appeared under Jane’s name in the magazine. Jane gave her a smile and said, “Thank you so much. Are there any articles you particularly enjoyed?”

  “It’s all wonderful,” Amanda said without skipping a beat. “I do so hope you’ll be writing about our campaign.”

  “Well, it’s obviously a very important story,” said Jane. Right up there with the second coming of Christ, she thought.

  “We’d actually sort of been hoping to get the cover,” Amanda insinuated coyly.

  Jane checked out her ensemble. The suit was bristling with big pearl-and-gilt buttons. People who wore pink that hot liked attention. “What a great idea!” she said. “I think I’ll suggest to Norm that we put you on the cover.”

  Amanda’s face immediately blossomed and expanded. Fat pink cheeks rose like two hills to flank a wide, satisfied smile. “That would be jolly super,” she breathed.

  “Let me go up to my room and get my tape recorder,” said Jane. Based on Amanda’s wordy presentation and clearly healthy ego, dinner could be spent with Amanda monologizing into the machine while Jane nodded and looked alert and let her mind drift. Maybe Carla could get another story out of it. She could probably use the money.

  “Terrific,” said Amanda, hitching a quilted Chanel purse onto her shoulder. “I’ll bag us a decent table in the restaurant. See you there.” She turned imperiously to Solveig. “Do you think you could possibly arrange for my presentation materials to be taken to my room? That would be most helpful. Thank you so much. Good night!”

  Solveig, who’d evidently thought she would be having dinner with them, looked considerably put out, but she had clearly met her match. At the sight of her Norse taskmistress scuttling away to do Amanda’s bidding, Jane found herself warming to the Englishwoman.

  She checked out the remaining guests, who were streaming away with expressions of relief on their faces, and tried to plan an escape route that would allow her to avoid anyone she had ever met, especially Gunther Kessler and his friend the Viking god.

  Kessler seemed to have disappeared, thank goodness. The Viking god was over by the podium, talking to Solveig, who was gathering up the slides. Jane was disconcerted to see that he was staring at her. Solveig looked over her shoulder and followed his glance, then seemed to reply to some question he had asked.

  In the elevator she fantasized briefly about locking herself in her room with the Do Not Disturb sign on the knob and simply refusing to come out. She had a vision of Solveig hammering on the door and another, more alarming one of Amanda Braithwaite putting a beefy shoulder to it and bursting into the room, brandishing a hockey stick to herd her to dinner.

  She put the plastic key card into the lock and opened the door, then gasped, feeling a stab of prickles all over her body before she understood what had caused the physical rush of alarm.

  Gunther Kessler was standing next to her unmade bed, bending over her suitcase and calmly riffling through the contents.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Kessler looked up at her. She would have found it less frightening if he’d had the grace to look unnerved at being caught.

  She stood there in the doorway, reluctant either to enter the room or to surrender it to him. “What the hell do you think you are doing?” she demanded angrily.

  “I am searching your room,” he said, putting down the lid of her suitcase with the confident air of a customs inspector.

  “You’re going through my things,” she said, letting him hear the note of revulsion in her voice. Horrible visions of him making off with bits of her underwear came to her.

  “It is nothing personal, I assure you,” he said with the same infuriating sangfroid.

  She stepped into the room. She hated the idea that he could just come in and take over and leave her standing in her own doorway. But she made sure to leave the door wide open.

  “I was told you were going to dinner with that Englishwoman,” he explained patiently, as if this unpleasantness were all her fault. “If you hadn’t come up, you would never have known and you wouldn’t be distressed now.”

  “Oh, I see! And that makes it all right?” She wanted to tell him to get out, but the idea of his walking past her was creepy. Besides, she wanted to know just what he was up to. And why had he been stalking her in the first place? The fact that she could now presumably get him arrested might give her some leverage when it came to satisfying her curiosity.

  Kessler was now glancing over at the bedside table. He looked with a frown at the remains of her chocolate and cheese. He was exploiting her indecision to conduct a visual sweep of the room, and it made her furious.

  “Tell me in five seconds what the hell you are doing, or I will call security,” she said.

  “That might work to my advantage,” he pointed out thoughtfully. “If there is an inquiry, perhaps I will find out who you are and what you are doing here in Norway. In Shetland. In Seattle. Pretending to be part of the fish business, then denying it. Stories about lovers in Bergen and singing engagements.” He smirked. “It all sounds very fishy.”

  “At least I haven’t been going around breaking into people’s hotel rooms,” she snapped. “Is that part of being a refrigeration specialist? I suppose you are planting promotional brochures about freezing equipment in my luggage.” She stepped toward the phone.

  He gave her a quirky little half smile. “If you call security,” he said very quietly, “I suppose I’ll tell them you invited me here.”

  “You bastard!” she hissed. “Get the hell out of here right now.” Even as she said it, she realized she had been outmaneuvered. He’d managed, in his cold-blooded, nasty way, to make her angry. And because she was angry, she’d abandoned her attempt to discover just what he was doing.

  As she stood there glaring at him, she heard a doorknob rattle in the corridor behind her. She looked around guiltily.

  The Putnam brother was standing there.

  He took in Jane, Kessler, the open door, her clenched fist.

  “Hi, Jane,” he said quietly but firmly. “Are you all right? I heard your voice.”

  “I found this guy in my room, going through my things,” she said.

  “Want me to throw him out?” Putnam said very calmly. “Or do you want me to hold on to him while we call the cops?” He gave Kessler the eye. “I’ve seen this character around,” he said. “Who is he?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know,” said Jane.

  “Okay.” He strolled into the room. “Watch the door,” he told Jane. “So just what are you doing in her room?” he said to Kessler, striding across the carpet.

  Jane felt herself relax a little.

  “I’m searching her belongings,” Kessler said. “I’m sorry. . . .”

  “You’re sorry!” repeated Jane.

  Kessler shrugged. “It’s part of an investigation.” He began to reach into his inside jacket pocket. “I have a card.”

  Before he had a chance to reach it, Putnam was all over him, wrapping his arms around him in a bearlike embrace. Both men started breathing heavily. Jane suddenly felt the whole thing was ridiculous.

  “Go ahead,” Kessler said, wheezing. “Take my card out yourself.”

  “He might have been going for a gun,” Putnam said to Jane. He was shifting Kessler around, with Gunther’s apparent cooperation, until he was holding him around the chest from behind.

  “A gun? Nonsense,” Kessler said indignantly. “This isn’t America.”

  “Take out his wallet, Jane,” said Putnam.

  She stepped forward, and while Kessler held his hands up and looked down at her with another of his horrible smirks, she lifted his jacket away from his body by the lapel and reached into hi
s inside pocket. She hated doing it. It was too intimate. She could feel the starch in his shirt and the heat of his body coming through the fabric.

  “So who is this?” demanded Kessler. “One of your colleagues? Maybe he plays the piano for you. Or helps you do whatever it is you do in the fish business.”

  “I suppose there’s an explanation for this,” said Putnam in a world-weary way. “But I can’t imagine what the heck it might be.”

  Jane got hold of a wallet and a card case, took them out of the silk pocket and stepped back. She flipped open the case. Inside was a whole set of creamy business cards. She plucked one out, read that Gunther Kessler was a representative of a Swiss security firm based in Zurich and flung the card case on the bed. Then she flipped open the wallet. Kessler hadn’t volunteered that, but if he was going to go through her suitcase, she might as well check out his wallet. It contained Norwegian crowns, Swiss francs and American dollars, a few Scottish pounds and a mass of credit cards as well as a Swiss government ID card in five languages with a picture of Gunther Kessler.

  She felt in the back of the wallet and touched a small square package and the ring of a condom through foil. Just to humiliate him, she flung that out on the bed, too. “Very Swiss,” she said. “Now you’ll be safe if you ever get lucky.”

  Putnam smiled, but she didn’t. Kessler shook off the Alaskan, who let him go and stepped back a pace.

  “Okay,” said Kessler. “There’s not much point in continuing with this, is there?”

  “Sure there is,” said Jane, hoping Putnam was still game to prolong the encounter. He seemed to be. “What are you investigating? And why me? And who is your client?”

  “That is confidential,” said Kessler. “If you don’t know, then you have nothing to fear.”

  “You might have something to fear,” said Putnam. “If you don’t tell the lady what she wants to know.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Kessler said with a sort of a sniff. He was looking into the mirror and adjusting his tie. Jane noticed he was also using the mirror to keep an eye on both of them at the same time. “This is all very unfortunate,” he said as if he were talking about a missing memo or a shipment that went awry. “Let us forget all about it.”

  “Absolutely not,” said Jane. “If you have any direct questions about your investigation, go ahead and ask them. After a damn good apology. And an explanation.”

  “Where I come from,” said Putnam, sliding into the old hot and cold routine, “we’d take care of a guy like you real fast.”

  Kessler turned and looked at Putnam haughtily. “You have seen too many cheap American films. You have begun to believe your own stupid myths. You are a bunch of loutish cowboys.”

  He said it rather elegantly, but right then loutish cowboys seemed to Jane like a pretty good thing.

  “Welcome to the West,” said Putnam, making a fist, pulling it back and preparing to flatten the Swiss.

  He wasn’t fast enough, though. Kessler managed a tricky maneuver in which he turned sideways, used two of his arms to stop one of Putnam’s and twisted it down in a way that Jane thought would pop out the elbow.

  “Stop it!” she shouted.

  Kessler was braced with his feet a few feet apart, keeping up the pressure. To her astonishment, Jane found herself kicking the spot right under Kessler’s right kneecap, something she’d read about somewhere in some article about women’s self-defense.

  “Ai!” he screamed.

  “Get out of here right now,” said Jane, brushing back the hair from her forehead. The last thing she wanted was a full-scale brawl in her hotel room.

  “Fine,” said Kessler, apparently recovered from her kick. “Please do not try to strike me, either of you.” He gathered up his card case and his wallet. “You can keep that,” he said, gesturing to the condom before he sauntered out the door. “You might need it.”

  “Hey, that was pretty exciting,” said Putnam, rubbing his elbow. “Thanks for giving him that kick. The sneaky bastard seems to know some weird martial arts moves.”

  He made it sound as if there were something downright un-American about using anything other than a good, old-fashioned haymaker.

  “Thank you so much!” said Jane. “I didn’t mean for you to have to come in here and struggle with the guy. Is your elbow all right?”

  “It’s okay,” said Putnam. Jane wasn’t completely convinced. “No big deal. I can’t resist a lady in distress. Just who is that guy, anyway?”

  “It looks like he’s some kind of a detective,” said Jane, handing Putnam the business card. “Why he’s interested in me, I can’t imagine.”

  “Well, you’re pretty interesting,” said Putnam, frowning at the German on the card.

  Jane suddenly wished she weren’t standing with this man in her hotel room with an unmade bed and a condom lying in plain view. She ran a hand through her hair. “I have to go,” she said. “Amanda Braithwaite must be wondering what happened to me. I can’t thank you enough.”

  “Call me if you have any more problems,” he said. “I’m right across the hall. Twenty-four-hour service. You sure you don’t want to complain to the management?”

  “Too much hassle. The police might be involved, and I’m planning to fly out of here tomorrow morning.”

  He shrugged. “Whatever. You seem to be a pretty tough lady, but if I were you, I’d keep that door chained tonight. He’s gotta be pretty slick if he can get into a locked hotel room.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Amanda Braithwaite was sitting at a corner table behind the dregs of a large gin and tonic when Jane arrived, slightly breathless.

  “Oh, here you are, finally. Almost gave you up,” Amanda said, scowling.

  “I am sorry,” Jane said, sounding more polite than actually sorry. “An important call from the States came in.”

  “Oh, I know how that goes,” Amanda sympathized, handed her a menu. “Everything always seems to fall apart whenever I leave the office. The little sprogs they hire just can’t seem to handle anything on their own. It’s so pathetic. No initiative. That’s the whole problem with Britain today.”

  For a PR expert who wanted to have an article written about her and her firm, Amanda seemed more than a little tactless. She’d practically said she had a lousy staff.

  “Tell me about it,” Jane said with phony exasperation, sensing a way to shorten her time with Amanda. “In fact, I’ll have to excuse myself fairly early. I’ll be spending the night sending out a lot of faxes.”

  “Same here,” said Amanda, apparently unwilling to let anyone seem to be working harder. “Let’s skip the starter and get on to the main course. I’m up to my ears myself! Now that the presentation is over, I have to make sure that all the bodies are signed up and get the final draft of our agreement okayed by the key players. Talk about problems!”

  “It can’t have been easy getting all those salmon guys together,” said Jane, adding, “Even the wild sector,” with a serious expression. This was apparently a big deal. Earlier in his office, Knutsen hadn’t even smiled when she’d compared the generic salmon marketing campaign to the end of the cold war.

  Amanda nodded earnestly. “Putting together this campaign,” she said, “has been the biggest challenge of my whole career.”

  “A great quote. I should get this on tape,” said Jane. She suddenly wondered whether Kessler was back in her room, poking around. Nothing about that creep would surprise her. How had he got in? Unless she was in the room, with the chain on, he could get back in again. She’d been stupid not to think about that. Maybe she should have called the hotel management.

  Meanwhile Amanda blathered on about the vital need for increased salmon consumption in the entire Western world and hinted that once she’d accomplished that task, it was on to the former Warsaw Pact nations and then Asia. “We’re talking tremendous potential here, simply tremendous. If we could get every single Chinaman to eat just one salmon meal a year . . .”

  First, thought
Jane, she’d have to avoid calling Chinese consumers “Chinamen.”

  A waiter came up, and Amanda broke off impatiently to order before going back into her pitch, this time bringing it all around to her own role.

  “Scads of other agencies wanted the portfolio, of course. The difference is, I had a track record in food. I started out as a food technician. Recipe development, nutritional content of foods, the whole shebang.

  “I broke through professionally during that egg scare we had in Britain. Salmonella. Worst-possible scenario for egg consumption.” She had a gleam in her eye. Probably likes mad cow disease, too, Jane thought.

  “That egg scare was my window of opportunity.” Amanda was the kind of Thatcherite eighties Brit who used American business clichés to sound tough and competent. “I have a flair for consumer education. And for marketing as well,” she went on.

  Marketing yourself, anyway, thought Jane. Amanda’s large pink presence exuded confidence. Jane glanced over at the recorder as the tape went around and around and Amanda started in again.

  “When this campaign gets off the ground, production will increase by leaps and bounds. Ditto the promotion budget, with all the salmon producers chipping in their percentage levy. This is a revolutionary concept. I see salmon as a major commodity, promoted like toothpaste or any other consumer product! The sky is the limit! You can grow tons of this stuff. Tons! Not to mention economies of scale. Producers worldwide are getting more and more efficient, as the little players get squeezed out and the big boys come in and take over. We can feed the world!”

  “With that level of enthusiasm, I can see how you got the account,” said Jane.