The Steel Mirror

by Donald Hamilton

  She did not say anything. After a while she pushed the clipping slowly back into place behind the mirror, and put the mirror away in her purse.

  Emmett found his pipe in his pocket and began to fill it mechanically. He said, “I keep wondering who you are and what it is you’ve forgotten, Nicholson. I mean, as an amateur psychologist, when I heard what they had to say about you I took for granted that all this double-talk had to do with whether the Nazis had raped you or not… Well, it’s the thing that comes to mind, isn’t it?” he said defensively as she glanced at him, startled, and shook her head quickly in a movement that was very close to a shudder, rejecting the idea. He said, “But if that were your trouble, I think you’d have had a stronger reaction when that sheriff searched you; and I don’t think you’d be quite so casual about picking up male strangers on the roadside and coming to hotels with them. The situation is getting too complicated for a simple question of virginity, anyway; and I’m just wondering, that’s all.”

  She was looking at him, flushed and uncomfortable and indignant. A knock on the door stopped her retort. The boy came in with a carton of Coca-Cola and a bowl of ice cubes, which he set on the dresser.

  “All right,” Emmett said, “now let’s try you on something hard. Let’s see how many Chicago papers you can find.” When the door had closed again, Ann rose quickly and went past him to the dresser without looking at him. He watched her struggle to get the cap off one of the bottles with the patent opener, succeed, charge a glass with ice cubes, and fill it. Then she caught sight of herself in the mirror. He saw her slowly put the glass aside, startled by her appearance, and push at her untidy hair. “I looked rather nice, this time yesterday,” she said, a little sadly.

  Emmett rose to fix a drink for himself. “You worry about the damnedest things,” he said. “How you look, what people are going to think about you… Why don’t you try worrying about who’s dead?” He filled his glass and looked at her. “Are you sure you’ve got the last couple of days all straight in your head? There aren’t any blank spaces? You can follow through from getting up in the morning to going to bed at night? You haven’t waked up somewhere with a smoking revolver in your hand?”

  “Please,” she protested. “They only said material witness.”

  “That may just mean they aren’t sure,” he said cruelly.

  “I really haven’t any idea who might have been killed, Mr. Emmett,” she said stiffly. “Don’t you think I’ve been wondering, worrying about it? And do you have to act as if you thought I were a fraud?” she demanded, her voice rising a little. “Do you think I like not being able to remember—?”

  “What?” he demanded.

  She stared at him over her glass, suddenly silent.

  “What is it you don’t remember?” he asked. “What is it you want Kissel to tell you didn’t happen to you? Goddamn it, if you’re afraid of it, you must know what it is. Something’s haunting you, Nicholson, something makes you want to crawl into a hospital bed and draw the covers up over your head, something that happened back there has got you scared of living, am I right? Well, you can tell me you don’t know whether it happened or not, and I’ll take a chance of believing you, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let you tell me you don’t know what it is.”

  After a little she picked up her drink and carried it back to the bed, sat down, and looked at him again as if trying to make up her mind about something concerning him.

  “Did Dr. Kaufman—?” She hesitated. “Did Dr. Kaufman tell you to ask me that?” she asked, the words coming, at last, in a rush.

  Emmett shook his head.

  “Did he… want you to try and make me talk?”

  Emmett nodded.

  “And, of course, tell him?”

  Emmett said, “He wanted that. But I didn’t agree to it “

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t make a habit of repeating what people tell me. And I didn’t particularly like him.”

  “He’s a nasty little man,” Ann said. “A man has to be a little peculiar to want to pick people’s brains, don’t you think?”

  “Well, it helps, I guess,” Emmett said with sudden caution, wondering where she was trying to lead him.

  “And she,” her voice went on, “is a vulgar, oversexed bitch, and I think they sleep together. Not that it’s any of my business.”

  The quick viciousness of her voice brought his mind sharply to attention. He was a little shocked. There were girls who could talk about certain things and use certain words and you would think nothing of it; and then there were girls, like her, who could not.

  He glanced at her and was suddenly aware that he did not really know what kind of a girl she was. He had only known her for twenty-four hours, although it seemed much longer. He glanced at her and realized that, in thinking about her, he had actually been thinking about an imaginary person—not even the quiet, well-dressed if slightly hot and rumpled, girl he had met in the garage the previous evening, but the girl he had never seen, who had gone to the cocktail party where something had happened to send her rushing off across country without exchanging her party clothes for something more suitable for traveling. He had been thinking of her as the girl he thought her to have been the day before, not as the girl he was actually seeing, sitting rather carelessly on the bed, shoeless, her expensive skirt and blouse showing clearly that she had not had them off for twenty-four hot breathless hours.

  He had not been thinking of her as the girl who would pick up a strange man by the roadside; who would flee from a sheriff in utter panic and fight him like an alley cat when he caught her; whose voice could hold a sharp vixenish note when referring to another girl whom, a few hours earlier, she had claimed to like very much.

  “This morning you said you liked Miss Bethke,” he reminded her quietly.

  She did not say anything. After a moment she rubbed her eyes painfully with both hands, after putting her glass aside; then suddenly threw herself face down on the bed. He heard her harsh breathing as she fought back the tears. After a long time she turned over on her back, raised herself to arrange her clothes, and lay back again, looking up at him from the pillow. Her face looked almost gaunt in the harsh bright light from the window that faced the afternoon sun, gaunt and fragile, as if the skin had drawn tight over the fragile bones, and as if the bones themselves had no more substance than paper. As she lay on the bed, the thin damp material of her blouse revealed the shape of her small breasts, stirred by her shallow breathing, and the heavier stuff of her skirt outlined the contours of her flat stomach and slender thighs. Emmett looked away and busied himself relighting the dead coals in his pipe.

  “If I… told you something…” She waited, but he did not let himself look at her. “If I told you something… would you promise not to tell anybody?”

  “No,” he said.

  He heard her breath catch, and he turned to face her. “Listen,” he said, “we’ve come some distance from the subject, but the subject is still a murder in Chicago. I don’t especially want to hear any more of the story of your life, and if I did promise not to tell, I’d break the promise in a minute if a policeman asked me to. Or even if nobody asked me to and I thought they ought to know… Christ,” he said wearily, “I started this by picking you up or letting you pick me up, or whatever happened back there, in the innocent hope that I’d get to know you well enough to make a pass at you. And now look at me! Here we are in a hotel room together and I know you so damn well that all I do is stand and talk to you. We might as well be married.” He stared at her with dislike. After a while, he said, “I’ll listen, but I won’t promise a thing.”

  She said, “You’re not being very nice. Or very fair.”

  “I can’t afford to be,” he said. “I don’t have a papa who gives me convertibles for my birthday. I’ve got to earn my own living. And there are always questions on the employment blanks: have you ever been arrested, and for what?”

  “They used a de
ntal drill,” she said. He saw that her fingers had come up to touch the tiny scar on her lip. “This… is where it slipped.”

  He did not say anything. It seemed to him that even when he looked away, he could feel the steady regard of her gray eyes, watching him, unwavering. The words came slowly at first, then, as she lost herself in the memory, in a rush.

  “After a while I fainted. I remember that they took the chair away when they left. I was lying on the floor when I woke up. There was nothing else in the cell except a big mirror on the door. I don’t know whether it concealed a peephole so they could watch me, or whether they just wanted me to see what was happening to me. They never turned out the light in the cell. It was quite bright, all the time… They came back several times. Again and again. I remember that it was morning when I was in the office again, but I don’t remember which morning. When they took me back, a man was just being taken from the cell next to mine. There was something wrong with his foot so they had to half carry him; there was blood on his face and he was dirty and almost naked… I hadn’t realized until then, in spite of the mirror, what I must look like. I looked just like that, except that I could walk. The guards made a big show of introducing us to each other. Frau Monteux, bitte to meet the eminent physicist, Dr. Reinhard Kissel. Dr. Kissel, make the acquaintance of the lovely wife of the eminent resistance leader, Georges Monteux… They made him kiss my hand. You know what men like that think is funny. Then I was back in the cell again. I tried to break the mirror with a bowl they had given me food in, so that I could use the splinters to kill myself, but the mirror was steel and wouldn’t break.” She was silent for a while. Then she went on without a trace of expression in her voice, “That’s the last I remember, Mr. Emmett. Trying to break the mirror. But it wouldn’t break.”

  Emmett stood quite still, not looking at the girl or at anything in the room. He found himself considering the irrelevant fact that she had been married, as if it were important. When he drew on his pipe it made a ridiculous gurgling sound and he took it hastily from his mouth.

  “When I got to England,” the quiet voice went on, “I learned what had happened to the others. They had all been taken the week after I was caught, except Georges and two others who had escaped. Georges had been killed later on, with the Maquis, helping an American flyer who had been shot down. But the Gestapo had got all the rest that week. After a while she said, “Don’t you see? I don’t know. I don’t know that I didn’t betray them. I can’t remember.”

  chapter NINE

  He leaned against the dresser without moving and looked at the girl sitting now childishly cross-legged in the center of the big iron bed. There was bitterness inside him. The war always came back. You had managed to stay out of it while it was going on; and now everywhere you went they threw the war you had not fought in your face and asked you to judge what had been right about it, and what had been wrong.

  A knock on the door made him start. He crossed and pulled at the knob. The freckled boy was outside.

  “I couldn’t get any Chicago papers, sir. I got the St. Louis Post and the Omaha Sun, in case you’d…”

  Emmett took the papers and his change. He gave the boy a dollar and closed the door. The girl on the bed was watching him as he came back across the room. There was something disconcerting about her steady questioning stare. He clapped the papers on the bed beside her and unfolded the top one.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything?” she asked softly.

  “No,” he said without looking at her.

  “That isn’t much better than saying it, is it?”

  “You’re jumping to conclusions,” he said. “I mean, what the hell am I supposed to say about it? I mean, even supposing I was going to get indignant about it, I’d better make sure you’d done it, first, hadn’t I?”

  A small sound made him look at her. He saw that she was crying. She looked at him with the tears running unheeded down her face.

  “I thought it would help, telling somebody else,” she whispered. “My folks don’t even guess. They think I won’t talk about it because… because I had such a bad time in that place… They don’t even suspect…” She tried to brush the tears away. After a little she stopped crying and attempted, by craning her neck, to dry her face on the shoulder and sleeve of her blouse. He opened her purse and pulled two wadded handkerchiefs out of it; the one he had lent her earlier in the day and a smaller one. Something fell out and shattered on the bare boards of the floor. He gave her the handkerchiefs and turned to look down at the broken mirror. There was always something ugly and symbolical about a broken mirror, and particularly now after the story she had just told him.

  “No,” he heard her say as he bent over. “No, I’ll get it.”

  He heard her push herself across the bed and drop to the floor in one quick movement that startled him with its abruptness; a moment before she had been crying. He put himself in her way.

  “Please, give it to me,” she gasped.

  He looked down at her streaked pale face. “I think I’d like to see it first, if you don’t mind,” he said slowly, holding the broken mirror away from her, as she reached for it, as if keeping it away from a playful puppy, or a child. Her face seemed to contract a little; and for a moment he thought she would strike him. Then her shoulders sagged in defeat.

  “There’s just the clipping,” she breathed. “You’ve already read it And—” She watched him draw a small card from behind the shattered glass. “—and a picture,” she said, her voice trailing off in silence.

  He was looking down at a small studio photograph, on fairly stiff paper, of a size to be carried in the compartment of a wallet with the driver’s license and identification cards. The picture had apparently been carried flat for easy visibility for a long time; the face of it had the scuffed, smudged, worn look of paper that had rubbed against celluloid or leather for years. It was flat now, but at some intervening time it had been folded so that the crease broken into the photographic emulsion ran directly across the smiling face of the girl it represented: a younger Ann Nicholson than the girl he knew, with her hair worn longer and a young fullness to her face that she did not now have. The broken surface of the photograph marred the expression of the smiling young face, but he could see that even that long ago she had been lovely. The picture had been inscribed on the back: To Georges, with all my love—Ann.

  “It’s mine,” she murmured. “Please, may I have it now?”

  The momentary panic had left her, he thought; and then he saw her eyes avoid his as he looked at her. He glanced again at the picture in his hand; it seemed quite innocent, although there was something vaguely unpleasant and frightening about the wanton way it had been creased. You might fold a photograph like that before throwing it away, but this photograph had not been thrown away. Someone had carried it for a long time, treasuring it; and then the same person, or another, had broken it ruthlessly, but had not thrown it away.

  Then the answer came to him. This was a picture she had given to the man she had apparently married in France. To Georges, with all my love… Georges had carried it; it was possible that Georges had broken it after the death and capture of his friends. But Georges, she had just told him, had been killed with the Maquis later, helping an American flyer escape. He glanced at her, feeling suddenly cold and rather scared.

  “How did you get this?” he asked.

  “It was… sent to me,” she whispered.

  “By whom?”

  “By Georges. When he was dying.” She hesitated. “He… wanted me to know… to know that he had kept it in spite of…”

  “I see,” Emmett said. “And wounded to death, he sauntered out to the nearest mailbox and—”

  “Do you have to be so cruel?”

  “I have to know how you got this,” he said evenly. “I have to know why you jumped to keep me from seeing it. How was it sent? When did you get it?”

  “I got it—” Her lips were gray in her white face. “I got it… yesterd
ay. That’s why I—”

  He was silent for a long time, and she did not finish. Then he shivered a little, and licked his lips. “That’s why you started off for Denver?”

  She nodded mutely.

  “Who brought it to you?” He remembered what he had been told. “A young fellow at the party sent you off, Dr. Kaufman said. Everything was going fine until you talked to him.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Georges died in 1944 or thereabouts, but you just got the picture yesterday.”

  “Yes.” She caught her breath and said quickly, “He couldn’t reach me before, don’t you see? I was in the sanatorium when he came out of the army last year.”

  “What did he have to say to you?”

  “He said—” She hesitated. “He was the one… the aviator whose life Georges saved. He gave me the picture and said that… that Georges wanted me to know… to know he hadn’t blamed me. That he had forgiven me.”

  He tried to see the expression on her averted face, but she would not turn. At last he said, “Then Georges believed you’d done it.”

  Her head moved in a tiny nod.

  “Then you do know,” he said. “You said you—”

  She whirled to face him. “I said I didn’t remember,” she gasped. “I didn’t lie. I didn’t! Even Georges could have been mistaken, couldn’t…?” Her voice ran out abruptly, leaving the sentence unfinished.

  “And the lad who carried the message?” Emmett asked. “What else did he say?”

  “I’ve told you what he said.”

  Emmett watched her with wary objectivity. It was like catching a mouse in a closed room; you had it, you would get it eventually, but it always found something to hide behind. “No,” he said, “you’ve told me what the message was from Georges. Didn’t—?” He cleared his throat, “—didn’t the guy have anything to say for himself? After all, he’d gone to some trouble to look you up personally, when he could have stuck the picture in the mail with a note, and forgot about it. Did he just hand you the picture and quote Georges’ dying words and walk out?”