The Steel Mirror

by Donald Hamilton

  Her father said, “Emmett asked me over the phone to find out where Doc was last Sunday night when you—” He avoided the word “suicide.” “—when you were alone in the hotel in Boyne. I just got a report from the office this morning; Plaice had called in that he checked Doc’s story completely.” Mr. Nicholson looked at Emmett. “You don’t have to take my word for it, young man. He’ll be meeting us in Santa Fe after we’re through here. You can ask him.” He turned back to his daughter. “You see, Sister? Dr. Kaufman didn’t leave Denver that night until well after midnight, long after Emmett had already found you unconscious.”

  Ann’s face was expressionless. She held the sunglasses firmly between both hands. “I see,” she murmured, and faced the doctor. “I’m sorry,” she said stiffly.

  Dr. Kaufman smiled. “That’s quite all right, Ann,” he said cheerfully. “We’re used to it. I’ve had patients accuse me of worse than trying to kill them. It’s readily explained; you felt that my probing and questioning had driven you to the point of taking your own life. You blamed me for your act; it was a simple matter for your mind to clear you of all guilt by transferring it to me.”

  “Yes,” Ann said. “Of course.”

  Dr. Kaufman laughed. “You don’t believe a word of it, naturally. Would you rather I left the room?”

  She hesitated again, then, without speaking, shook her head. Dr. Kaufman reached out and gently disengaged the sunglasses from her fingers. Then he led her to one of the chairs at the side of the room. He gave the glasses to Helene Bethke; and then passed his hand rapidly in front of the eyes of the girl in the chair; then, with his hand on her forehead, drew back first one eyelid and then the other. The nurse passed him a thermometer.

  Kirkpatrick cleared his throat, suddenly drawing the attention of everyone in the room to the presence of the big man they had forgotten, still standing by the door.

  “I’ll be back,” he said. “Dr. Kissel is in his laboratory, over in the restricted area. I’ll bring him around.”

  As he pulled the door open, Dr. Kaufman said, “Just a minute, please,” and turned to the seated girl. “Ann,” he said.

  Ann looked up at him. With the thermometer in her mouth she looked, Emmett thought, like a frightened little girl sucking a lollipop, perhaps in a police station where she had been taken after being found, lost, on the street.

  “Ann, do you want to see Reinhard Kissel?” the psychiatrist asked. “Are you ready to see him? You don’t have to until you’re ready, you know.”

  Emmett saw Ann’s eyes find him briefly and then look away; there was something almost furtive in the quick glances. He was suddenly afraid to hear what her answer was going to be. Then Kirkpatrick laughed, swinging them around to look at him again.

  “Baloney,” the big man said. “I’ve been beat over the head with one senator and three congressmen to make me arrange this; now you’re going to hear what the old man’s got to say whether you like it or not.” The door hissed closed behind him.

  There was a small tinkling sound of breaking glass. Ann stood up, slowly and carefully crushing into powder the stem of the thermometer she had spit out on the floor. She walked to the end of the room, nobody moving, and stood staring at the blackboard. Someone had been playing games with chalk on the board; the crosses had won five straight, Emmett noticed, over the noughts; one game was incomplete. Ann’s shoulders were shaking. After a while, Emmett realized that she was laughing. He watched her apprehensively, remembering her hysterical laughter of the night before. When the doctor and nurse started after her, he said angrily:

  “Goddamn it, leave her alone!”

  They stopped and, after a pause, turned back; Helene Bethke idly kicking the smashed remnants of the thermometer out of sight beneath the chairs. Ann had picked up a piece of chalk and finished the incomplete game, the crosses winning again. Emmett walked slowly down the long room to stand beside her. She drew another grid on the board and marked a nought in the center box. He picked up a piece of chalk and put a cross in the corner.

  “Take it easy,” he said without looking at her.

  “Don’t let him touch me again. Or her either.” She choked on a reminiscent giggle. “But wasn’t he funny when that man said baloney? Did you see his face?” The giggle came back. She could not seem to stop it.

  Emmett put his hand on her wrist and drove his fingers cruelly into her flesh. He felt her fight back the incipient hysteria; then her breath came easily again and she tugged at his hand. He released her.

  “Thanks,” she gasped. “Now go away.”

  He glanced at her. She would not look at him. She had not looked at him directly all day.

  “Go away,” she breathed. Her voice shrilled on the edge of uncontrol. “I don’t want you here. Go away!”

  He wanted to take her in his arms, but he sensed that she would either strike him or burst into tears if he touched her again. He put the chalk back into the trough and walked back to Mr. Nicholson. You could go to heaven with company, he thought, but apparently you had to go to hell alone.

  Mr. Nicholson said, “If I’d known what this would involve, Emmett, I’d have told you to go to hell. What does that G-man think we’re going to do, anyway? Blow the place up and murder his pet scientist?”

  The nurse said, “Mr. Nicholson was carrying a cigarette case that set off some kind of alarm on the door. Some kind of a cell, they said. Really, you never heard such a noise. And then a soldier searched him…”

  “Exactly who is this man Kissel, anyway?” Dr. Kaufman asked. “I understood him to be just another refugee scientist.” Emmett moved his shoulders in a shrug meant to indicate that he did not know, or knew but did not care to tell, however they wanted to interpret it. He was aware that Ann had turned to face the room before he sensed the door opening behind him, and looked around.

  The man who came in was quite tall in spite of his stooped posture; he had thick black hair streaked with white. He wore bifocal glasses without rims set on a rather large nose that had been broken and thickened in the bridge, like the nose of a boxer. He wore a dirty brown laboratory coat that reached below his knees; and he walked with the aid of a heavy cane with a crook handle, resting against it for a moment as he came in, locating the girl at the other end of the room, and considering her and the path he would have to take to reach her; then starting forward again. Something about the way he wielded the cane hinted at swordsmanship.

  Kirkpatrick, who had come in behind him, closed the door and stood free of it. The big man’s eyes had a curiously unfocused look, as if he were watching everything in the room at once. His hands hung clear at his sides, and his feet were a little apart. The old man walked deliberately away from him, limping, the cane punctuating each alternate step. Waiting, Ann slowly tilted her head back as he approached, looking up at him, tall above her, as he stopped in front of her.

  Dr. Kissel said harshly, “I never expected to see you again, Frau Monteux.” The German title and the French name took them back to another place and time.

  Her lips barely moved. “No.”

  “Five years, is it not?”

  She nodded almost imperceptibly.

  “And you do not remember?”

  She shook her head.

  He said, “Some things it is better to forget, eh? Sometimes I wish I, too, could forget.” The harsh voice did not quite slip into sarcasm, but the hint was there.

  Ann was silent. Emmett, watching her, was aware of the sound of typing from the outer office. It seemed loud and insistent. There was another sound, like the whining of an electric clock. He glanced at the corner from which it seemed to come and saw the machine there, half hidden behind the chairs, and understood why this room had been selected for the interview; the microphones above the table were recording.

  “I understand that you remember our meeting in the corridor outside my cell in the Gestapo prison in Paris,” the old man said. “You have remembered my name. But that is all?”

  Ann’s l
ips formed the word, yes.

  “But you have no idea why our guards went through the elaborate formality of introducing two scarecrows whom they never expected to meet each other again, Frau Monteux? You were really not aware at the time that they were throwing your name, and your husband’s record with the resistance, in my face? that they were taunting me with the fact that a woman, a girl, had more courage than I? I had just agreed to work for them.”

  Ann was silent, motionless.

  The old man went on, “I spent a great deal of the remainder of the war, Frau Monteux, recalling the way your eyes had stared at me, I thought with contempt. Perhaps you were the biggest factor in driving me to make the rather stupid attempt at sabotage and flight that led them to send me to Glaubnitz. It is strange how one’s own conscience can… And all the time you did not know and did not remember!”

  He started to turn, using the cane as a pivot.

  “And I?”

  He paused, glancing at her. “There is nothing for you to look back on with anything but pride,” he said bitterly.

  “You’re sure? How can you be sure?”

  “We had adjoining cells, you remember.”

  “But… you’re sure?” she breathed.

  “Quite sure.” He cleared his throat and said reluctantly, “I… took steps to find out. It would have made me, frankly, feel better about my own weakness to know that you had capitulated. But you did not speak in the prison. You did not speak in the hospital to which you were taken, very ill, a few days following our meeting. I could not trace you further, but I understand you were sent to one of the eastern camps. What happened there I do not know; but by that time, by using your name, the Gestapo had already tricked the information out of certain of your associates, so it does not really matter.”

  “They… used my name?”

  “One of their standard practices,” the old man said. “To show one prisoner what purports to be a transcript of another prisoner’s testimony. I have no doubt the American police use it occasionally.”

  “I see,” Ann whispered. “Thank you.”

  Dr. Kissel glanced at her again. After a moment he took a fresh grip on his cane and strode, limping, back to Kirkpatrick, who opened the door for him and let it close again behind him; but they could hear the sound of the cane receding through the corridor and outer office. Then it was gone. Kirkpatrick straightened up, as if he had been listening intently and had heard something reassuring. He walked slowly to the machine in the corner, threw a switch; and the faint whirring stopped. He turned to face Ann.

  “Congratulations, Miss Nicholson,” he said. “I’ll have a copy of Dr. Kissel’s statement sent to the Chicago police. It will at least give them something to think about.”

  Ann reached behind her to steady herself; then her shoulders streaked the chalk marks on the blackboard, as she crumpled to the floor.

  chapter TWENTY-THREE

  Mr. Nicholson walked down the length of the room with his hands deep in the pockets of the jacket of his gray seersucker suit, drawing the garment tight across his buttocks. “I tell you, Emmett, the evidence seemed conclusive. I find it hard to blame myself…” His voice trailed off. He reached the streaked blackboard and swung around and came back toward where Emmett sat on the big table dangling his feet aimlessly, watching. Mr. Nicholson’s face looked redder against the gray of his hair and suit. The room seemed to fit him, Emmett thought; you could tell that he was a man at home in conference rooms. “Of course, I never really believed my daughter could have…”

  Emmett listened with a flat sense of anticlimax. Everything had been much easier than he had anticipated. His fears of the day before seemed in retrospect melodramatic and rather silly; no one had tried to trap them or hurt them. It was hard to remember that a man had been murdered in Chicago. The nightmare quality of the situation had been dissolved, as if by daylight; and it was hard to keep from wondering if the whole thing had not existed only in the tortured imagination of a girl obsessed with the question of an older guilt, now answered.

  No one had made a betraying dash for the nearest window, or been shot down by Kirkpatrick in the act of drawing a gun. It seemed to Emmett that the federal man must also have a flat and foolish taste in his mouth, after all his precautions. The only flaw in the entire performance had been that the girl who had been exonerated, instead of being radiantly happy, had fainted—which was reasonable after the strain she had undergone. Kirkpatrick, the closest, reaching her first, had picked her up and carried her out of the room. Dr. Kaufman and the nurse had followed, leaving Emmett and Mr. Nicholson to wait.

  Mr. Nicholson paused in front of Emmett. “I can’t understand it. I tell you, I checked every possibility. Except this one.”

  Emmett said, “Doesn’t what Kissel said explain what happened, sir? The Nazis arranged for her to seem guilty; maybe they even made a deal with the person who actually squealed to protect him by letting the records read that way. When your investigators got to work, they found the phony records, and there you are. Personally, I’d rather take the word of one eyewitness than any number of old Gestapo dossiers and affidavits.”

  The older man frowned at him, then turned away again and strode nervously down the room. “I was so sure. I thought I had done everything I could. I saw no valid reason for risking having our shame made public by investigating further. I thought I knew exactly what Kissel would say. If I’d only acted when I first heard about him—!”

  He made a helpless gesture with his hand, indicating vain regret. Emmett could not quite reach the source of the older man’s emotion; it seemed to him that he was missing something, but he could not grasp it.

  He asked, “What are your plans for her now, Mr. Nicholson?”

  Ann’s father glanced around, his face hardening, as if anticipating conflict. “I think that after her experiences a rest in a quiet sanatorium still wouldn’t do her any harm. I’ll have to discuss it with Dr. Kaufman, of course.”

  Emmett said, “No.”

  Mr. Nicholson turned to face him. “Just out of curiosity, young man, not that it makes a particle of difference, but why do you say that?”

  Emmett said, “She doesn’t need a sanatorium.”

  “That’s hardly a matter for you or me to decide, Emmett.”

  “Listen,” Emmett said, “that girl’s as healthy as I am. What people seem to forget about her is she was tough enough to live through an experience that killed a majority of people exposed to it. Now you want to wrap her in cottonwool for the rest of her life and encourage her to brood about how sorry she is for herself. Nuts to that.” He grimaced. “Look at the way she’s managed to pull one out of the hat every time she’s needed it, so far. Stevens must have given her a terrific shock, but she recovered and headed west to check on what he’d told her; and when I met her a few hours later she was acting like a nice normal person. That morning in Boyne after she is supposed to have tried to kill herself she was scared stiff, yet she hung on long enough to escape from you and the doctor; she remembered an address I’d only mentioned once, and had enough left to put on a good act for the lady running the place. She didn’t let herself come apart until she was as safe as she could make herself. And when we went out of there she still had the shakes, but you should have seen her pull herself together when she had to. The only trouble with Ann, Mr. Nicholson,” he said, “is that everybody’s been encouraging her to have hysterics at the drop of a hat. Sure she’s forgotten three months of her life; sure she’s been worrying about it, but Kissel’s settled that. She can forget it. Or remember it, if she wants to. She’s all set to go now, and you want to stick her in an asylum and let her go back to being a helpless invalid! Nuts to that, Mr. Nicholson.”

  Mr. Nicholson said dryly, “You rather fancy yourself as an amateur psychologist, don’t you, young man?”

  Emmett ignored him. “As for Kaufman and the blonde menace, she hates them and is scared of them. Whether she’s justified or not,” he said, making a concess
ion to the quick challenge in the older man’s face, “I see no reason why she should have to have a doctor who makes her skin crawl.”

  Mr. Nicholson said, “You seem to have my daughter’s life all arranged for her.”

  Emmett glanced at him, hesitated, and said, “I ought to. I married her yesterday.”

  He watched the older man start, begin to speak, catch himself and turn away. Mr. Nicholson walked to the blackboard before speaking.

  “I see.”

  Emmett did not say anything. Mr. Nicholson turned.

  “I could probably have it annulled.”

  Emmett remained silent.

  “Do you want money?”

  “No,” Emmett said.

  “Then why—?”

  Emmett said, “Mainly because I was afraid you’d try to pull a fast one on this interview, Mr. Nicholson. I figured if I was married to her I had something to deal with.”

  Mr. Nicholson smiled thinly. “You’re a smart young man, Emmett. I did consider something like that. However, I would have had to ask Mr. Kirkpatrick to cooperate, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to confessing that I was so certain my daughter was guilty of treason that I didn’t even think it worth while to let her… He cleared his throat. “Then you’re not in love with her?”

  Emmett said, “That hasn’t got much to do with the situation, has it?” He knew that his voice had changed a little, and was annoyed at himself. “The fact is that I have a legal right to a voice in her affairs; and if I should walk out that door now, for instance, and find that she’d been slipped away and stuck into an institution somewhere, I’d raise a stink from here to the coast. I wouldn’t care who it made trouble for. She’s my wife and she’s not going to be put away for anybody’s convenience.”

  The door opened, letting in the clatter of typewriters from the outer office. Emmett stopped talking abruptly, surprised and somewhat embarrassed by his own vehemence. Helene Bethke waited politely in the doorway, as if apologizing for the interruption and waiting for him to finish.