The Steel Mirror

by Donald Hamilton

  “Both.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Her eyes found him again. She did not speak.

  He said, “Your memory’s kind of tricky in spots, Nicholson.”

  “Please,” she whispered. “Please don’t call me Nicholson. It sounds as if…” She choked down a laugh that had come dangerously close to hysteria. “Besides, it isn’t even right! I’m Mrs. Emmett. Mrs. John Emmett. Remember?”

  He was silent, waiting.

  She shook her head impatiently. “We’ve been through all that before. I know I didn’t kill anybody, or telephone anybody.”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  She said, “I thought Miss Bethke gave me a… an alibi.”

  “She was lying to cover the fact that she’d let you get away from her. The Chicago police know it. They think your dad bribed her, and consider it another point against you. Then your dad had your suit cleaned in Boyne; they think that was to get rid of bloodstains. Between you and your old man, Ann, you might as well take an electric cord between your teeth and turn on the juice.”

  “But you married me.” He saw her eyes studying him in the moonlight. “Why, if it’s that bad?”

  “I told you,” he said. “I was stuck with you anyway. I want to make sure you’re stuck with me, and your dad with both of us.” He waited for her to make a comment, or ask a question. When she did not speak, he went on, “What about that Saturday afternoon, the afternoon Stevens was killed? You beat it from the cocktail party after talking to him. Some time later you cashed a check in a department store.”

  She stirred beside him. “How did you find out all this?”

  He said impatiently, “I don’t have to find out. I just stand around and people come and tell me things. The amount of information, probably phony, that people have given me, I need a secretary to keep track of it all. Now, you cashed a check at this store. The manager says you were almost incoherent; he thought you were either stinking drunk or had been in an accident.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t.”

  “Tell me what happened in between.”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I… just left the party and drove down to the lake front. I had to—to think.”

  “Think?”

  “Well,” she said, a little defiantly. “I cried. Then it took me about twenty minutes to get my hair up and my hat back on and my makeup presentable again. It had been quite a deluge. Then… I knew I had to see Dr. Kissel, and I knew they’d stop me if I went home… at least I’d have had to explain why I wanted to go to Denver, so I just cashed the check and drove off.”

  “You had that clipping that said Kissel was at Fairmount U.?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “How long had you had it?”

  She hesitated. “Months,” she whispered at last, avoiding his eyes.

  “And still, it wasn’t until last Saturday that you felt impelled to head for Fairmount to discover what Kissel had to say about you?”

  “Oh, please!” she gasped. “Don’t be sarcastic about it, John. Can’t you understand? I didn’t dare. I didn’t want to know. Until Stevens—”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “—made it impossible for me to go on deceiving myself that I could just forget…”

  “Yes,” he said. “Tell me, what about that clipping? How did you get it?”

  She looked up abruptly. “That was a funny thing,” she said, quite slowly. “We get Time, but that copy just vanished from the house. I wondered if maybe they hadn’t hidden it from me for some—some medical reason.”

  “I see.”

  “I just happened to notice the cover on a newsstand and picked it up because I hadn’t seen it around home. And suddenly the name jumped out at me… Why?” she asked. “Why did you ask that?”

  He said, “Miss Bethke claims to have made a point of leaving the magazine where you could find it.”

  She stared at him; even in the dark he could see the sudden hunted look in her eyes. “But that isn’t true. It simply isn’t true!” she gasped. “Damn it, John Emmett, I’m not crazy! I don’t care if it does sound as if I were trying to claim that everybody is lying except me. And you don’t think so or you wouldn’t have married me, so don’t look at me like that.”

  “Take it easy,” he said.

  “What are you trying to prove?” she demanded. “Why do you keep pointing out how—how everything seems to…?”

  He waited while she fought back the tears. At last he said. “Let’s go back to Saturday again. You left Stevens and had yourself a cry and decided to see Dr. Kissel, is that right?”

  “Yes,” she breathed.

  “What made you think Stevens might be lying?”

  She said, shocked, “Oh, not lying! Mistaken. I’m sure he believed what he was saying.”

  “But you think he might have been wrong? What makes you think Dr. Kissel is going to say anything different?”

  She did not look at him. After a long pause, she whispered, “I have to say that, don’t I? I have to think that.”

  “Do you know that your father claims to have proof you betrayed them?”

  He heard the sharp hissing intake of her breath. Then she had struck him across the face with what must have been just about all the strength she could muster; he felt the blow drive tears into his eyes.

  “… always…!” she gasped “… to shock me, hurt me…!”

  He rubbed his stinging cheek without answering. He found that he was glad of the pain; it was as if it paid off a debt he had owed her since that afternoon when he had struck her. The thought was irrelevant and he put it aside. He saw her eyes waver, and the anger go out of them. “Proof?” she whispered.

  He nodded.

  “I thought… they didn’t even guess…”

  Emmett did not say anything. The girl beside him put both hands to her mouth in a curious abrupt gesture; she was staring at him with an expression he did not try to understand. Then he saw that her shoulders were shaking. She was laughing. She bent over, hiding her face from him, shaken by the silent, frightening laughter. He heard the coyote howling far away. The distant sound of life seemed to make the place where they were more deserted and lonely. When he spoke, telling her to snap out of it, his voice sounded helpless and scared. He kneeled beside her and lifted her and held her. After a long time he felt her bring herself under control with an effort that left her exhausted.

  “… sorry…!” she breathed weakly, “… couldn’t help…”

  “What was so damn funny?” His mouth was dry.

  “… just seemed… trying so hard… years… to keep it secret… and they’ve known all the time… She swallowed with difficulty. “… handkerchief?”

  He pressed his into her hand, and found himself, without thinking, stroking the disheveled light hair back from her temple; and suddenly she had raised her head to look at him.

  “Don’t do that.”

  “Sorry.”

  He let his hand fall. He would have released her, had there been any way of doing it without making a point of it. He could feel himself flushing.

  She whispered, “If… you want to leave g-guns around to see if I’m going to shoot you, and spring information on me like that to see… to study my reactions…” She drew a long ragged breath. “I mean, until you make up your mind about me, you haven’t any right to kiss me as you did this morning, or touch me as you did just now. As if you liked me. That’s dirty.”

  He did not say anything. He looked past her at the moon setting toward the distant low black rim of the mountains to the west. He thought it must be well past midnight. The buttes looked cold and bleak and hostile in the shimmering semidarkness. He had the sudden thought that probably things would have looked pretty much the same had they been on the moon watching the earth set. Then he recalled that the same side of the moon always faced the earth, so that, from the moon, the earth should never set. He tried to visualize the problem, to see if this were correct, but it got all mixed up insi
de his head.

  “I’m sorry,” Ann’s voice said. “I didn’t mean to be nasty.”

  He could see the pattern of her shirt in the moonlight, and the shape of her face, but he could not make out her expression. There was no resistance when he kissed her, nor was there at first any response, and he saw her eyes open, studying him gravely; then she made a small sound like a sob and came to him, her mouth to his mouth, her body to his body, her hands holding him. Then she had turned sharply away.

  “You mustn’t ever hit me again,” she breathed. “It was like dying.”

  He could feel his heart beating. He heard the coyote’s voice in the distance, answered closer. It occurred to him that this was a strange place to be making love; then he thought that probably one place was as good as another. He watched her averted face, waiting for her to look at him again.

  chapter TWENTY-TWO

  He shaved from a cup of water, crouching a little to use his reflection in the side window of the convertible as a guide. It was still just barely morning. There was a heavy dawn mist that looked as if it might very well become rain later on; you could not feel the sun behind it. The plains were flat and gray, the buttes colorless in the weak directionless light. He knew when she came around the car and when she stopped behind him. He found himself thinking that if she were to come quite silently into a perfectly dark room where he was waiting, he would know when she was near him. Then he thought that this was really getting pretty corny.

  “I thought you were going to change into your suit,” he said, glancing at her to find her still in the checkered wool shirt and the brown gabardine slacks that somehow, although creased and dusty, managed to retain a hint of the stiff sized look of newness.

  “It had got too wrinkled in the suitcase,” she said. “And I don’t seem to have a whole stocking to my name.”

  He turned back to his shaving. He could see her in the window, but she would not meet his eyes, even in the glass. “We’ll stop at the first town we come to,” he said.

  She said without expression, “It doesn’t really matter, unless you think I look too disreputable. After all, I looked worse than this the last time he saw me. He might not recognize me all dressed up.”

  He was startled to realize that he had almost forgotten that within a few hours she would be meeting the man she had started out to see almost a week ago.

  The rain caught them on the road, but lasted less than ten minutes. Half an hour later there was no indication that it had rained at all. By the time they reached the town of Numa, a little early, the sun was as hot as it had been the previous day. Emmett drove slowly through the town until he saw the sign: NUMA BIDS YOU GOOD-BYE—COME AGAIN, and beyond it the graded gravel highways leading out across the plain.

  A Chevrolet sedan painted olive-green with army numbers in black was waiting by the sign. The front door was open and a corporal sat behind the wheel. A sergeant and a lieutenant squatted in the shade of the car. They looked as if they had been talking some time earlier, but had run out of conversation and were merely waiting to finish their cigarettes before rising. When Emmett stopped the convertible they both pitched their butts away and stood up, the sergeant taking a hitch to the belt that held his service automatic. The officer came back along his car to the convertible. His silver bars were bright in the sunlight. He had sweated through his shirt under the armpits.

  He glanced at the license number of the Mercury as he passed it, came to the door, introduced himself, and got in beside Ann when she moved over to make room for him. He told Emmett to keep straight on the way he was heading. As they gathered speed again, Emmett could see the army sedan in the rear-view mirror, following. After some miles, he was told to turn left on a narrow but well-paved asphalt road. There was a mesa purple in the distance, but no sign of anything living and no markers along the road until they came to a neat placard: U.S. ARMY—NO THOROUGHFARE.

  They could see the village of steel huts for a long time before they reached it. At the gate a sentry stopped them, and a big man came out to meet them. The lieutenant got out and Kirkpatrick got in. The difference in the amount of room occupied by the two men was noticeable. The federal man had the hot rumpled look of any large man in a palm beach suit after the first hour of a warm day; his brown face was shiny. He told Emmett to drive ahead; obeying, Emmett saw in the mirror the army car pick up the officer and fall in behind.

  “Your father’s already here, Miss Nicholson,” Kirkpatrick said.

  “Yes?” Ann did not look at him, or correct him as to her name or title. She was watching the huts, like great halfsections of corrugated drainpipe laid in geometrical patterns in the dust, slide past the windows. Squeezed between the two men, she had to lean forward a little to look to the sides.

  Kirkpatrick said, a little pointedly, “The secret work is handled in another area. This section is just for routine clerical and filing, and quarters for the army personnel.”

  “I see.” Ann smiled and sat back. “I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to look.”

  “It’s perfectly all right, Miss Nicholson. I was just explaining why there was nothing to see.” The big man cleared his throat. “My name is Kirkpatrick. Mr. Emmett has probably told you about me.” Ann turned the green lenses of her sunglasses toward him, but did not speak. Kirkpatrick went on, “I’m with the FBI. We’ve got the job of protecting Dr. Reinhard Kissel, the man you want to see; cooperating with the army, of course. I don’t know if Emmett has explained, but Dr. Kissel saw some things in a Nazi laboratory during the war that our scientists are very interested in having him reconstruct for them. Certain other parties seem to be just as interested in keeping him from finishing the job…”

  Ann hesitated. “I shouldn’t think they’d have much chance, in here,” she said.

  “Dr. Kissel is a rather independent old man. He says that he spent enough of his life behind barbed wire already that he sees no reason for living behind it now. He refuses to take up quarters on the project, it reminds him of a concentration camp, he says.”

  Ann said softly, “I can sympathize with his point of view.”

  “Turn right at the next corner, Mr. Emmett,” the big man said. “Miss Nicholson, I’m just telling you all this to warn you; if anything happens, get down on the floor and crawl behind some furniture. We’ve taken all the precautions we can, and I don’t expect any trouble. Nevertheless, this interview wasn’t my idea; and with all due respect to you and your father—” He glanced past her. “—and to Mr. Emmett, whom I understand to be the moving spirit behind the occasion, I still don’t like it. I’ve been forced into it against my better judgment, Miss Nicholson, and I want to make my position very clear: Beside Dr. Kissel’s safety, your life, or that of your father or doctor or nurse, or of Mr. Emmett here, doesn’t mean a damn thing to me.” He paused, and went on, “If it’s necessary to start shooting, I’ll shoot. It’s up to you to get out of the way… That goes for you, too,” he said curtly to Emmett. “This building here. Number twenty-seven.”

  Between the metal buildings the sunlight seemed to be focused as if by mirrors, and the heat gave an air of shimmering unreality to the semicircular fronts of the quonset huts lining the street. Emmett got out of the car on his side, and Ann slid behind the wheel to stand beside him. He glanced at her; she was tugging down her halter. He could not see her expression for the dark glasses. He wished he would not be so acutely aware, every time he looked at her, of being in love with her. He hoped it did not show. Kirkpatrick came around the car and led them inside.

  Some of the girls typing in the outer office looked up as they passed through, but most of them paid no attention; nevertheless Emmett was suddenly aware that his sports shirt was soiled and his slacks needed pressing, and that Ann, in slacks and halter, looked no more respectable. It had not seemed to matter, driving, but now it made him uneasy and uncomfortable.

  Kirkpatrick ushered them through a brief corridor and an open door into a conference room mainly occupied b
y a large wooden table surrounded by chairs. Six evenly spaced microphones, hanging from the ceiling, formed a straight line down the center of the long table, about two feet above it. There was a portable blackboard, on castors, pushed back against the far wall, and more chairs lined the long walls of the room. Dr. Kaufman, Helene Bethke, and Ann’s father were waiting to the right of the door. They looked dwarfed and unimportant occupying only three chairs out of thirty in the room. The older man rose at once as his daughter came in with Emmett. Kirkpatrick pressed a catch and let the door sigh closed behind them, taking up his station against it, as if to keep them from escaping.

  As her father came forward, Ann took off her sunglasses, folded them carefully, and then seemed baffled by the fact that there was no pocket in her scanty halter. She faced Mr. Nicholson with the glasses in her hand.

  “Hello, Sister,” Mr. Nicholson said. He looked her over and smiled. “Where did you get those pants?”

  She explained her appearance carefully. “We’ve been camping out. On the desert.”

  Emmett felt the older man’s glance touch him, and he felt himself flush a little. It seemed like a stupid and immature reaction, but he could not help it. Mr. Nicholson did not seem to have noticed it.

  “We were worried about you, Sister,” he said gravely to Ann. “What made you run off like that? You don’t really think any of us would hurt you, do you?”

  Ann was not looking at him any longer. She hesitated, watching Dr. Kaufman come forward, and Emmett, beside her, could sense her sudden panic.

  “No,” she whispered. “No, of course I don’t.”

  Dr. Kaufman’s stocky figure was neat in tan gabardine; his thick dark hair was brushed back, smooth and glossy, from his forehead. He was the only person in the room who did not seem to be perspiring. Ann watched him approach, and the glasses in her hand seemed to bother her. She shifted them from one hand to the other, unable to find a natural way to hold them. Emmett wanted to reach out and take them from her, but he could not bring himself to call attention to her nervousness. It reminded him startlingly, however, that she was facing a man she knew to have tried to kill her.