“Yes, of course. He gave me the pills to take. I don’t even know what they were. He said I’d be uncomfortable for a while, but there was no real risk; I guess he was not aware of the possibility of a quinine reaction.” She shrugged. “Or perhaps he did not care. He is really a very ruthless person, is he not?”
“And you’ve been telling me what a nice man he was!”
“Yes, I have told you many things.” Her voice was subdued and her eyes wouldn’t meet mine. “You should not believe anything I tell you, ever.”
“I’ll keep it in mind, Countess.”
She laughed shortly. “I am no more a countess than you are a baron, Matt. Alan was naturalized well before I married him. They just like to hang on to the old traditions around here, and I admit it is rather nice and being a countess would be fun; but actually we are both just good democratic American citizens visiting a foreign land.”
I said, “Whether or not you acquired a title by marriage, you’ve got a pretty classy family of your own, don’t you? No titles, but aristocratic enough to rate the book, here.” I reached for the Adelskalender on the nearby table. “Landhammar, Landhammar… I checked on your husband last night and learned that was the original form of your maiden name. Yes, here it is. Apparently an old Swedish-Finnish family, one branch of which returned to Sweden… But you’re not in here.”
“No. That was our name, certainly, but my parents shortened it to Land when they came to America, just as your parents changed Stjernhjelm to Helm. But we would not be in the Swedish book, since we came from the Finnish Landhammars. Does it matter?”
“No, I’m just being nosy.” I went on quickly: “Tell me about Karin Segerby. How well do you know her, really?”
“Well, it was just a social acquaintanceship at first,” Astrid said. “Alan started spending much time in Washington trying to get money for the Institute; he turned out to be very good at it. Usually, I went with him to help him entertain the important people. We heard of the Segerbys and looked them up, since they were relations. We started seeing them fairly often when we were in Washington. He was assigned there by his company, of course.”
“What company?”
She looked surprised. “You do not know the name Segerby? Segerby Vapenfabriks Aktiebolag?”
I said, “My God, you mean SVAB? I always thought that stood for Svenska Vapenfabriks AB.”
“No, it is a Segerby family concern. The Segerby Weapons Factory Company, if you wish a literal translation. Frederik was their Washington representative. When he was murdered, of course, the popular theory was that some pacifists killed him because he was a merchant of death, so-called.”
“But you think she did it. Karin?”
“The two theories are not mutually exclusive, Matt. Karin was engaged in many pacifist and antinuclear activities. I think she was protesting Frederik’s work; they had arguments about it, I know. I think she was madly, blindly in love with him when she married him—such a handsome and considerate and sexy man, somewhat older, with a great deal of money. What girl could resist? But after a while I think she found his business more and more intolerable.”
“So you think she just hauled off and clobbered him because she couldn’t stand his warlike activities.” I shrugged. “Well, it’s a motive, I suppose. How and where did it happen?”
Astrid said, “I do not really know much more about the crime than what was in the Washington newspapers. Apparently Frederik was shot to death in the parking garage in which they kept their two cars. Karin had come home an hour earlier in her little Saab. The attendant remembered seeing her drive in. She is a type that is noticed by young male parking-lot attendants.” Astrid’s voice was dry. “He did not see her leave the garage on foot. The walking exit she would normally have employed was not visible from his station. So she could have hidden among the parked automobiles until Frederik arrived in his Mercedes. She could have shot him and run home to wait for someone to bring her the tragic news. The shooting was done by a woman.”
“How did they figure that?”
“The pistol was found on the garage floor near the body. They said it showed signs of having been carried in a woman’s purse. Among other things, there were traces of face powder in the checkering of the handle.”
“Grips, please. Except for the old broom-handle Mauser, you hold a handgun by the butt or the grips, not the handle.”
“It must be nice to be an expert,” Astrid said.
“What was the police reaction?”
“Karin was investigated very thoroughly. However, while nobody had seen her returning to the apartment when she said she did—they lived two blocks from the garage—nobody had seen her sneaking home after her husband was killed, either. The face powder on the gun turned out to be a shade only a brunette would normally wear; and Karin is quite blonde, you will remember. But apparently the deciding factor was that the police ran some kind of tests that showed she had not discharged a firearm recently, if that makes sense.”
I nodded. “The test is for nitrates produced by the burning of gunpowder. They’re very persistent on the skin; if you’ve done any recent shooting, they won’t wash off.” I grimaced. “I suppose it’s possible to wear long rubber gloves; but if she’d made that kind of preparations for committing murder, wouldn’t she also have arranged an alibi? And I’m not sold on that motive. How many people shoot their spouses for ideological reasons? If she didn’t like his work, if it really turned her off him, she could just move out, couldn’t she?”
“Perhaps not.” Astrid smiled thinly. “Suppose she shot Frederik, or had him shot, because he had discovered evidence of her involvement in certain sinister plans. Maybe one of those protest organizations she joined, apparently a very noble and worthy cause, was actually a cover, if that is what you call it, for something more dangerous. Frederik’s suspicions, and the necessity for silencing him, delayed the scheduled incident, whatever it might be. Karin was forced to behave very properly until the murder investigation was over—which could be the reason she reacted so strongly when I gave her the idea that you might be reopening it. But now that Frederik Segerby is safely buried and forgotten, the plans for violence have been revived, and she is returning to Sweden to help execute them.”
I grinned. “You’re bound to make a real she-devil of this cute little bouncing blonde.”
“I am apparently not the only one. From what you have told me of the conference you just attended, certain important members of your family—my family by marriage—consider her a serious menace, also.” Astrid laughed. “Someone must keep all the possibilities in mind, darling. Someone who is not too impressed by a pair of wide blue eyes.”
“Nevertheless, you don’t seem to have crossed her off your social list.”
“Of course not. There was no proof; and the family sticks together. As a matter of fact we were very kind to the poor young widow, if only to demonstrate that we took no stock in those nasty official suspicions. It was rather a strain, and I was happy when Alan was no longer needed at the current hearings and we could go home; although Karin acted as if we were very cruel to desert her. However, when we came again, this year, she had pulled herself together, I was glad to see; but she was still not a relaxing person with whom to associate, under the circumstances. We tried to avoid her without giving offense; but when Alan vanished like that, Karin decided that it was her turn to comfort me. She got on my nerves quite badly. I suppose that is why I lost my temper with her at our last luncheon in Washington.”
“But in spite of your fight she turned up in Hagerstown to see you in the hospital.”
“Because of our fight, actually,” Astrid said. “She had been brooding about the quarrel, she told me; she wanted to fix things up between us. So she called my parents to ask them to have me telephone her as soon as I arrived; but she found them much distressed. The hospital, unable to reach Alan, listed as next of kin on the cards I carry, had somehow managed to get hold of them instead. I guess I must have
been in a truly critical condition for a few hours; they felt obliged to notify someone. My parents were desperate. They are too old to travel; they did not know what to do. Karin told them she would take care of everything, and drove to Hagerstown, which was really very nice of her.”
There was a little silence. We had pretty well taken care of Karin Segerby as a subject of conversation.
I asked casually, “How did a Finnish girl from Indiana manage to meet a Swedish count working as oceanographer in Gloucester, Mass? Was it your Scandinavian backgrounds that drew you together, or do you know something about oceanography?”
Astrid laughed. “My dear man, I have one degree in the subject and I am working towards another, although I may be an old lady before I get it, at the rate I seem to be progressing these days.” She moved her shoulders resignedly. “Education and matrimony don’t seem to mix very well.”
“I see. Is that how you met, professionally?”
Astrid nodded. “I was Alan’s laboratory assistant, one of his laboratory assistants. It was a considerable honor, I will have you know, to work with Dr. Watrous. I was very proud of it. After a while I lost my student awe of him and we became good friends. The fact that we came from similar backgrounds, as you said, didn’t hurt. Finally we decided to… No!” She shook her head quickly. “Why not the truth for a change? That is what we let people believe, but it is not the way it really was. We were certainly friends, Alan and I, as well as professional associates; but for me there was someone else. Someone I considered even more wonderful than the eminent Dr. Watrous; and I was careless; I became pregnant. A tawdry and common little story. Learning that he had… had knocked me up, to use that revolting phrase, my great love—my great lover—disappeared over the horizon very rapidly.” She glanced at me quickly as I stirred. “Are the true confessions boring you?”
“No, but I think we can use a small refill apiece.”
“I will do it.” Before I could rise, Astrid was on her feet, taking my glass. “I only want a very little. You would be too generous, so I had better do it.”
“Go easy on mine, too,” I said; and when she had returned with my drink, I said, “Carry on, Scheherazade.”
She settled down beside me and took a sip from her glass. “Well, if you wish. Alan soon realized that there was something wrong. My work was suddenly very bad and my temper was atrocious. Finally, as a friend, he got the sordid truth from the shamed tearful lady. He helped her make arrangements for terminating her embarrassing condition… It was the logical escape from my predicament; but I found to my surprise that I could not be so logical. When the time came, I found that I simply could not do it. I was incapable of… of having it killed. Stupid sentimentalism!”
I shrugged. “We all have things we can’t do.”
“But not many things, in your case.” Her voice was sharp. Then she said quickly, “Sorry, I am just being nasty because I hate to confess that I am such an irrational person. But I said I would rather struggle along comically as a supposedly intelligent professional woman who had made a ridiculous mistake and become a mother, although it was hard to imagine anyone less fitted for motherhood. However, nowadays there are many unwed mothers, and I could hope that my life would not be totally ruined; that I would not become the complete social outcast I would have been a generation or two ago. But it would certainly be no help towards the academic career I had hoped to attain.”
There was a little pause. At last I said, “I gather that your good friend came up with another helpful idea. Since abortion was unacceptable, he generously married the pregnant lady to save her reputation and her career, right?”
Astrid turned on me sharply. “You must not sneer! It was a very fine thing; do not be sarcastic! Yes, Alan suggested that if I could not bear to terminate the situation, perhaps I would be willing to legitimize it. He was very stiff and funny, and very… beautiful. He said, we were not madly in love, but we did get along well together, and since he had at the moment no other candidate for this great honor… Making a joke of it to put me at ease and save my pride. A very nice man. I should have refused to let him do such a generous thing; but I was feeling so cheap and ill and humiliated! I told myself that divorces were readily available; and it would be such a great relief to have my problem solved so… so respectably. I told myself I would make it up to him in every way possible.”
“What about the child?”
She drew a long breath. “After all that, after all the misery and generosity, I had a miscarriage six weeks after we were married! But it makes no difference to what I owe Alan. It was still a very wonderful thing for him to do.”
I spoke without expression: “For a lady who got married merely to give a name to her unborn child, and then lost the child, you seem to have stuck with matrimony much longer than one would have expected.”
She gave me a crooked smile. “Please, do not be so tactful, my dear. I think you have guessed that I would continue to stick with it, if the decision were mine. Forever, if Alan were willing; in which case I would not have let us behave as we did last night.”
“Misbehave, you mean.” I grinned briefly. “So propinquity did its dirty work?”
“Yes, I would happily have settled down to be Mrs. Watrous for the rest of my life. But I had made my bargain. It had always been understood between us that our marriage was only a temporary expedient to insure that the lady’s good name would remain untarnished. Even though we had stayed together longer than originally planned, I could not possibly object when he asked for his freedom at last. So as soon as all this is settled, there will be a divorce, and the eminent Dr. Alan Watrous will discard that dull blonde wife of his, and marry the lovely dark girl of his dreams. If we can rescue them in time.”
“Yes,” I said. “Rescue them. In Lysaniemi?” I was watching her carefully.
Astrid hesitated. “I do not really know what we will find in Lysaniemi, Matt.”
I said, “As a matter of fact, that’s just a name you were supposed to feed me, isn’t it? As part of the deal you made with my chief that made my services available to the family.” I took another pull of the fresh drink in my hand, a short one as I’d requested. “He gave you that name, didn’t he? With instructions to whisper it to me at the earliest plausible opportunity. Did he tell you anything about it?”
She shook her head. “No, Matt.”
“Lysaniemi, Lysaniemi?” I frowned at my glass. “That’s all? No hint of what it means or what I’m supposed to do about… Oh, hell, there’s Awful Olaf now!”
Somebody was knocking at the front door. I drained the last of the Scotch and set the glass aside. I rose and started for the front hall, and bumped into an antique chair that seemed to have moved into my path of its own accord. The whole room had suddenly become shifty and unstable.
I was aware that Astrid was watching me with the wary but slightly pitying look that always means the same thing. Then her eyes widened and she pushed herself out of her chair in an attempt to flee, staring at me with shock and fear; but what did the stupid broad expect? She knew what I did for a living, and whom I did it for; did she think we wouldn’t have an answer for the tired old knockout-drops routine? It was too damn’ bad; she was an attractive wench and good company, in or out of bed—well, sofa—but you don’t go around feeding Mickeys to people like me if longevity is your ambition. The standing orders are very specific on that point.
The little .22 High Standard automatic was comfortable in my hand. It was the only thing in the world, in my shut marksman’s world; and the fact that my knees were weak and I was beginning to have trouble with my breathing didn’t matter a bit. When I squeezed off the first round I found that the agency silencer was really very good these days, with that low-powered target ammo. The early ones weren’t so hot, and sometimes you’d blow some kind of sound-absorbent packing out of them and have all kinds of trouble. But this one worked fine; and I’d have made more noise pulling a wine cork.
Well, three wine co
rks. I quit shooting when the pistol started becoming oddly unsteady in my hand, or maybe it was my hand that was becoming unsteady. There was no sense in just making stray holes in the premises.
Three should be enough to get the job done.
14
I awoke folded into a small dark space that jiggled uncomfortably and smelled of exhaust fumes and rubber, or whatever passes for rubber these synthetic days. Analyzing the received data, slowly and painfully, the sluggish mental computer arrived at the conclusion that I was sharing the trunk of a moving automobile with the spare tire. My wrists and ankles were bound, tightly enough to induce considerable discomfort and some numbness. My position was very cramped since few cars these days, particularly European cars, have trunks large enough for convenient transportation of gents my height. I had a throbbing headache, and my stomach didn’t like something that had been put into it. I had to fight to control a panicky attack of claustrophobia. I felt fine, just fine.
I mean, as they say, halitosis is better than no breath at all. Whatever it was that Astrid had slipped into my last drink, the one she’d insisted on making for me, it hadn’t proved fatal yet, so it wasn’t likely to. To be sure, I was a prisoner, in not too great physical condition, but what the hell, somebody besides Bennett had made a real move at last. Sooner or later the assignment might actually take some kind of comprehensible shape, and I’d know what was expected of me. Assuming that I survived, of course.
There was a gradual change in the motion of the vehicle. We’d apparently been cruising at a fairly good clip on an open road—their normal highway speed limits range from ninety to a hundred and ten kilometers per hour, very roughly fifty-five to sixty-five MPH; but they’ve been known to bend the law a bit just like at home. Now there was braking and gear-shifting and lane-changing as the traffic became heavier. I decided that we were coming into a city, maybe Uppsala, maybe Stockholm. But that was guesswork. I could have been unconscious for hours. It didn’t seem likely that we’d crossed any international borders, but we could be entering any one of a number of other Swedish towns. However, those two were the largest, closest, and most likely.
The Vanishers Page 14