Stranger in the Dark

by Nielsen, Helen

But Maren was the only one who seemed to have a tongue.

  “Will you promise me one thing?” she asked.

  “Anything,” Larry said.

  “Tomorrow, when the plane has gone and this is all over, you must notify Tante Gerda so she can have Valdemar brought home. I couldn’t even give her name to the police this morning. She would have come at once, of course.”

  Larry stared hard at the harbor. A few large ships were lying at anchor a little distance out, and closer in the bright white flags of the tiny sailing boats chased one another across the blue waters like happy children playing tag. There was so little time….

  “And stopped you from running off with McDonald,” Larry said. “Maren, are you sure this is what you really want?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I have to ask,” Larry said. “There’s more to consider than just what you’re running from. There’s what you may be running into.”

  “But that’s a chance we have to take. There’s no choice—”

  She didn’t understand. He couldn’t hint about a thing like this. It had to come out in the open.

  “I wasn’t thinking of reprisals or any kind of enemy with death in his hands,” he insisted. “I was thinking of your life, Maren. Your life with McDonald.”

  She must know what he meant. That confession last night had to make some difference. There was quite a span between gay, charming company and a gay, charming con man.

  “I told you—there’s no choice!” she said.

  “But why not?” Larry demanded. “Because he’s fast talked both of us into thinking you’re in deadly danger if you don’t go with him now, or because he’s in danger and you’re obsessed with loyalty?”

  “Obsessed!”

  “I don’t know any other word for it. Loyalty to McDonald, loyalty to Valdemar, loyalty to your dead father and brother and the cause they died for—”

  “It’s a good cause!”

  “It certainly is, Maren. It’s the cause of the individual, the cause of a choice! It’s the cause that says no man is born to be used, and driven, and stampeded with fear … not even the fear he creates himself. I’ve been thinking about that since I left you last night. Sometimes a man can live out his life doing things without ever knowing why … without even asking why. The intercom buzzes and a voice from the front office says, ‘Do this,’ and you do it without ever wondering if it’s right or wrong. It must be right because the voice came from the front office, and what would it be doing there it it wasn’t right? What’s more important than the front office?”

  A tinge of bitterness came into Larry’s voice. This was a personal matter, but it seemed important that Maren should know about it, too.

  “Do you know what I was doing the night Holger Hansen ran into me on that corner?” he added. “I was thinking. For the first time since I started to compete with Horatio Alger I had nothing to do but think, and it was the most frightening experience of my life! I was alone, the way I usually am, but it wasn’t the same. Always before I was a part of a big, roaring machine, one of the little wheels trying to grow up to be a big wheel, and then, suddenly, the machine was quiet, and I was alone on a nameless street corner of a strange town, in a strange country, on a strange planet, and scared to death of my own loneliness.”

  “You have been thinking,” Maren murmured.

  “Late in the day, Maren. Very late in the day.”

  “I’m sorry, Larry.”

  “For me? Don’t be sorry for me! Another man would have saved himself all this trouble. He’d have taken that envelope straight to the police, told his story, and that would have been the end of it—that’s what I would have done in my home town. Nothing to it, nothing at all unless you’re already scared when the running starts…. But I’m glad that I wasn’t that other man. If I had been, I would have missed knowing Maren Lund.”

  “Larry, please—”

  “And Larry Willis, too. Do you know, he’s not such a hayseed after all? Before I met Ira McDonald I was green with envy. He sounded like the man I wanted to be—carefree, adventurous, fearless. Now that we’ve met, well, I may be on the dull side, but I do have a few scruples.”

  He expected a big reaction to such blunt words, but Maren didn’t fight back. Her voice was tired and full of trouble.

  “Please, Larry,” she begged, “no lectures today. This is no time—”

  “This is the only time I’ll ever have!” he insisted. “That’s why I had to ask the question and why I have to have an answer. Maren, look at me! Is this what you really want?”

  Once more she said it. “There’s no choice—”

  “There has to be!”

  Larry didn’t mean to shout. He didn’t mean to take her in his arms and make like the great lover and the greater fool. This wasn’t the time, the place, or the girl. This was Ira McDonald’s girl on the eve of her honeymoon, but she didn’t seem that when he kissed her. She didn’t seem that at all. She didn’t even try to say there was no choice.

  Because there was always a choice. Late in the day you remembered. Late in the very last day when the running was over and there was nothing to fear but emptiness. Two people were still two people, and an army of ugly men in black sedans couldn’t change that.

  “… I have to get back,” Maren said, drawing away. “There’s so much to do and so little time.”

  “Yes,” Larry agreed, “that’s true.”

  “And you will remember to call Tante Gerda, won’t you?”

  “I’ll remember,” Larry said.

  “Because I couldn’t bear to think of Valdemar being deserted. He was always so proud. That’s why I couldn’t give you his address last night. He didn’t want me to know how he lived. The police said there were only a few kroner in his pocket when they found him….”

  Larry let her go on talking. She could look at the white sails in the harbor, look at the white clouds in the sky, and go on talking as if nothing had happened … but it had. Larry had his answer, and there was always a choice.

  17.

  AFTER MAREN HAD GONE BACK TO HER APARTMENT TO PACK her bags, Larry went back to his hotel to finish unpacking his mind. All of the items sorted over so carefully seemed to be falling into place, but the one new item he’d discovered this morning needed clarification. Sheldon Garth was good at asking questions; maybe it was time to see how good he was at answering a few. Anxious as he’d been this morning, Larry expected to see those broad shoulders looming in the lobby. They weren’t. They weren’t at the bar, either, and a check at the desk disclosed the surprising information that no one had inquired for Herre Willis all day. Puzzled, Larry lingered in the lobby trying to understand. Garth might have had a change of heart and turned in that knife to the police after all—he could always say that he’d found it on the grounds of the garden. But in that case the lobby should be swarming with Sorensen’s men, and no one had inquired for Herre Willis all day…. “Is something wrong, Herre Willis?”

  The voice at Larry’s shoulder spun him about. Viggo should know better than to speak up that way from behind. Anybody four and a half feet high could easily be trampled by a nervous man. But Viggo was a sharp-eyed youngster. He might have seen what a nearsighted desk clerk missed. Did he remember the man Herre Willis was in conversation with this morning? But of course! The American! … No, he had not left immediately after Herre Willis drove away. He remained to ask questions. Of whom? Of Viggo, of course! Hadn’t Herre Willis seen Viggo’s name in the newspapers? Hadn’t he read of Viggo’s statement to the police about that black sedan that had swung around the corner to strike down a man running across the street? Larry couldn’t have read the story even if Viggo showed him the clippings, but apparently Sheldon Garth had. It was a knack he picked up from association with Otto Carlsberg, no doubt. As for the clippings, Viggo probably had them tucked somewhere under that silver-buttoned jacket, and Larry was in a hurry.

  “Sure, I remember,” he said quickly. “Hit and run, just like in A
merica…. Listen, Viggo, if that American returns, tell him to wait right here. Tell him Herre Willis is interested in that deal we discussed this morning. Very interested.”

  Larry tossed the boy a krone and headed back for that little sedan at the curb.

  … The princess. That was the only definite lead. He’d told Garth about the princess nine hours ago and the man hadn’t been heard of since. Maybe he’d made something out of the muddle after all. Now Larry was really interested. He thought about it as he drove the two long blocks to the teeming square, then he turned left and made his way slowly along the narrow, twisting sequence of streets the natives called the Stroget. Four nights ago a fisherman with a pocketful of trouble had come this way, but Larry wasn’t going to the fishing docks. He was going to the only other place he might find Sheldon Garth if it wasn’t too late.

  Larry didn’t ask for Carlsberg’s suite at the desk in the lobby. With or without Valdemar’s phony accent, he wouldn’t be welcome. But there is something about being thrown out of a place that engraves its location on the mind, and he was in for some unexpected luck when he reached the door. It was standing open. Just inside, a couple of grunting porters were hoisting an oversized steamer trunk onto an undersized dolly, and the little woman with blue-gray hair was exhorting them to be careful of the porcelain. At the sound of her voice, Otto Carlsberg came out of the bedroom looking quite natty in his yachting attire.

  “Birds!” he thundered. “Six hundred birds! What we’re to do with them I don’t know!”

  “Six hundred?” cried the woman. “Six dozen would be an exaggeration and they’re not all birds!”

  “What’s the difference! They collect dust whatever they are! … Here, you’ll never get that trunk out the door that way! Let me show you …”

  Carlsberg was going to get his nice white trousers dirty if he wasn’t more careful, but the commotion did create one advantage. Larry drifted into the room and stood quietly all through the trouble with the trunk. He looked about for Sheldon Garth, but there was no sign of him. He smiled at the woman with the blue-gray hair, and she smiled back. Either her eyesight or her memory was bad, because there was no recognition in the smile.

  “You must be from the police,” she said.

  “I must?” Larry echoed.

  “Such a lot of foolishness!” she said. “I told my husband—”

  Larry was only half listening. Whatever Mrs. Carlsberg had told her husband wasn’t half so important as what he was about to tell an uninvited guest now that the trunk was gone.

  “You!” Carlsberg gasped, at the sight of Larry chatting so calmly under his chandelier. “What are you doing here? What have you done with my secretary?”

  All the way to the hotel Larry had rehearsed what he would say if his search for Sheldon Garth brought him in conflict with Carlsberg again, but he hadn’t bargained for a situation like this. Moving day was always a bit hectic, and the Carlsbergs were very obviously moving. That much of Garth’s story checked out.

  “So you really are sailing at midnight,” he murmured.

  “What’s that?” Carlsberg cried. “How do you know that?”

  This was no place for a man to talk to himself. A straight answer would probably cost Garth his job, and it might be difficult for the old man to find another secretary with so much initiative.

  “It’s obvious,” Larry said. “The trunks—”

  “Never mind the trunks,” Carlsberg snapped. “At midnight, you said. Who told you that?”

  “I got it from a folding ouija board I always carry in my pocket,” Larry muttered. “Everything happens at midnight, don’t you know that? It’s the witching hour.”

  “You’re lying! You got it from Sheldon. You’ve kidnaped my secretary.”

  “I’ve what?”

  Kidnaped, the man said. It was a word that conjured up the image of ransom notes and death threats, of an ugly man in a black sedan and a fat man who must do something between meals. It was a word that made Larry’s scalp tingle until an old man with an even larger imagination took the edge off the fear.

  “He’s been missing all day,” he said. “He went out this morning and hasn’t come back.”

  “But he did come back, Papa,” the woman insisted. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I heard him in his room when you were out.”

  “He’s not there now!”

  “He’s probably gone out to dinner. He’s probably saying good-by to some girl.”

  “On a night like this? He knows the instructions are that we sail at twelve sharp.”

  There was nothing like a heated argument to get a man into trouble. Carlsberg fell into a red-faced silence, and Larry, who’d been following the verbal exchange like a referee at an amateur bout, pounced on the slip of the tongue.

  “Instructions?” he echoed. “Whose instructions?”

  Silence was his answer. The light glinting off his bifocals gave Otto Carlsberg the appearance of a highly flustered owl, and his hands worked nervously at his sides. Somebody had gotten to the old man. Somebody had filled him so full of fear that every stranger was an enemy, particularly a stranger who knew things no outsider was supposed to know.

  “So that’s what you’ve come for,” he said warily. “Sheldon couldn’t tell you and so you’ve come to me. Well, it won’t do you any good. I don’t care what you’ve done with Sheldon; I won’t be bullied!”

  “Don’t get so excited, Papa,” the woman scolded.

  She might as well have been talking to her porcelain birds.

  “What I’ve done with Sheldon!” Larry protested. “How could I do anything with him? I haven’t laid eyes on your secretary since about nine o’clock this morning!”

  “There, you see!” Carlsberg cried. “He admits it! He has seen Sheldon!”

  “This morning!” Larry repeated.

  “He should be under arrest! Where’s that policeman I called for?”

  “I admit nothing! And if you want to call in the law, Mr. Carlsberg, that’s fine with me. I’ll tell them everything I told you yesterday if you’ll tell them everything you didn’t tell me. Maybe then they’ll be able to find your secretary for you … if it isn’t already too late!”

  Larry was bluffing, of course, just like the old man. Calling in the police to look for his missing secretary would jeopardize that precious secret, and no dedicated termite exterminator would violate scout’s honor. A policeman wouldn’t come within a block of this suite tonight.

  But the threat was genuine. It didn’t make sense that a man would risk his neck snatching a knife from a dead man’s body and then so lose interest in the motive that he never followed through on his own threat. This time the old man might have a good reason for being suspicious, but arguing with him was a waste of breath and time. It was time to make tracks. It was time to get back to that unsolved riddle.

  But not just yet. Larry turned toward the door nobody had remembered to close and suffered a severe attack of self-consciousness. The doorway was filled by the ample figure of Martinus Sorensen.

  A policeman wouldn’t come within a block of this suite tonight…. The thought echoed foolishly in Larry’s mind. He couldn’t even remember his own name until the man in the doorway reminded him.

  “Ah, Herre Willis, we meet again,” Sorensen said.

  The hat with the rolled brim was in his hand, the cigar case was in his vest pocket, the smile was on his face. Everything about the man was just the same … and yet it was different. How long had he been standing in that doorway? How much had he heard? Two men were guessing, but one man was going to work.

  “And Herre Carlsberg, I believe,” Sorensen added. “You have requested the police to locate your secretary, is that right? Here, my credentials.”

  Carlsberg barely glanced at Sorensen’s hand.

  “Do you know this man?” he demanded, glaring at Larry.

  “Herre Willis?” Sorensen’s smile broadened. “But of course! He lost someone, too, a few days a
go. I trust we’ll be as prompt in finding your secretary as Herre Willis was in finding his friend.”

  “Maybe with Mr. Willis’s help you will be,” Carlsberg muttered.

  “So? Do you think Herre Willis is a—what is the term?—a private eye?”

  What Otto Carlsberg thought of Herre Willis could only give him a black eye, and this was no time to start explaining what was too complicated to explain two days ago. It was beginning to sound as if Carlsberg intended to take him up on the proposition he’d suggested and didn’t mean. Larry edged toward the door.

  “Don’t let him get away!” Carlsberg cried. “He was with my secretary this morning. He just told me so!”

  “Only for a few minutes,” Larry protested. “I saw him, that’s all. I bumped into him in the—” He stopped just in time. If he said that Garth had gone to his hotel the old man would really get curious. “—in the street,” he finished.

  “Then you know the missing man,” Sorensen murmured. “You have many friends in Copenhagen, Herre Willis.”

  Larry felt as if he didn’t have a friend in the world. Martinus Sorensen might be thinking in Danish, but his face needed no translation. Three days ago this American had dropped the name of a man whose abandoned wreck had put him on the wanted list, and here he was mixed up in another police affair. Even a good-natured patron of the arts would be getting curious after that.

  Larry kept on working his way toward the doorway. “I hate to run this way,” he said, “but I don’t like to keep a man from his work.”

  “But this is his work,” Carlsberg insisted. “Ask him, inspector. Ask him what he discussed with my secretary.”

  “Nothing,” Larry said.

  “You had to say something.”

  “All right, we talked about a woman.” Mrs. Carlsberg would buy that. Maybe she could sell it to her husband. “A living doll, a real princess,” Larry said. “Sheldon wanted her phone number.”

  “And that’s why you came here tonight, I suppose, to give it to him!”

  Poor old Carlsberg. He was going to have a stroke if he didn’t stop getting excited about the wrong things, but now that Larry had reached the door, he didn’t much care what secrets were spilled after he was out of sight.