The Prize

by Irving Wallace

  ‘It takes one to know one,’ said Krantz grumpily. ‘How has this niece behaved in Stockholm?’

  ‘Exactly as I told you when I discussed Mr. Craig. She has been seen in his company. Apparently, they do have interest in one another. She has seen no one else alone, to the best of my knowledge. I do not think Professor Stratman would permit it. As I have indicated, he is over protective. In the case of Mr. Craig, I should imagine that Professor Stratman would trust a fellow laureate. This is her record here. I have been thorough, Dr. Krantz. I know of her movements up until a quarter to five this very afternoon. That was when she left the hotel on foot, by herself, and walked across Kungsträdgården, and crossed Hamngatan, and went into Nordiska Kompaniet, along with all the other late shoppers…’

  Emily Stratman had been sitting at the table beside the window, in the fourth-floor grill-room of the Nordiska Kompaniet department store, for five minutes, waiting.

  Suddenly, now, she had an impulse to run.

  She could not go through with the embarrassment of this meeting, she told herself. She should not have agreed to it. Her mind was a turmoil. She had cried herself to sleep last night, and her eyes were a fright. And worst of all, she felt inadequate for the encounter.

  Why had she consented?

  Nervously, her hand kneaded the handbag on the table, almost knocking off the menu, as she recalled the telephone call.

  Only a few hours ago, she had lain listlessly on the sofa of the hotel sitting-room, trying to read, when the telephone behind her rang. She had taken up the receiver, still reclining and still morose.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Miss Emily Stratman, please.’ The voice on the other end was young, female, possibly Swedish, and unfamiliar to Emily.

  ‘This is she.’

  ‘I am Lilly Hedqvist,’ said the voice.

  The name had already been branded distinctly in Emily’s mind since Andrew Craig’s confession, but the reality of hearing the name spoken aloud by its possessor was paralysing.

  So disconcerted that she was at a loss for words, Emily could not reply. Her knuckles whitened on the receiver, but her vocal chords were mute.

  Apparently, her silence had disconcerted Lilly Hedqvist, too. ‘You know of me, I believe?’ asked Lilly.

  Emily’s response was automatic, unsteered by thought. ‘Yes, I know about you.’

  ‘Mr. Craig came to me last night to speak of you, and to tell me what happened between you. You may believe it is none of my business, but it has been on my mind today, and I believe it is some of my business. This call is not easy for me to make, Miss Stratman, but my conscience tells me I must make it. I do not know you, but I do know Mr. Craig, and if he thinks highly of someone, then I tell myself that someone must be a good person. I would like to meet you for a few minutes today, Miss Stratman.’

  Emily did not know what to say. The voice sounded younger and cleaner and more simple than she had imagined it in her fantasies. After Craig’s revelation, the name Lilly Hedqvist had become the name of all on earth who were abandoned and wanton and experienced. But this was not Lili Marlene or Cora Pearl or Märta Norberg. This was a girl.

  ‘I-I don’t know-I don’t know if it’s possible,’ said Emily. ‘I wouldn’t know what to say to you.’

  ‘You do not have to say a thing,’ said Lilly. ‘I want you to see me. I want you to hear me. For a few minutes. And that is all.’

  At once, Emily was recklessly tempted. She did wish to set eyes on a girl who could give Andrew Craig kindness and love with nothing in return. She did want to see this girl and to hear her. But it was less these desires than another that was now influencing Emily. Above all, she wanted to find out about herself, why she still was as she was, and why yesterday had happened, and Lilly might be her fluoroscope. And then one more faint thought. If she said no to Lilly, that was the end of it forever. On the other hand, the Swedish girl was a part of Craig now, and to see her would be to see Craig one bitter time more.

  ‘All right,’ she said suddenly, and it was as if another person had uttered the sentence on herself. ‘All right, I’ll see you. Where and when?’

  ‘I work in the Nordiska Kompaniet, the biggest department store, only a few blocks from your hotel. You turn to your right when you leave the hotel, and follow the pavement, and go across the park diagonally, and it is the seven-storey store on the other side of the street. It is only a few blocks. If you are lost, ask someone for En Ko-that’s how Swedes pronounce NK-and they will direct you. Inside, there is an escalator in the centre. It will take you to the eating grill-lunchrummet. You pick a table if you are there first, and I will come. Can you be there at ten minutes to five?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I will sneak off from my work at ten minutes to five, and we will have coffee and talk a little.’

  Emily began to panic. ‘I still don’t know what we can possibly say-’

  ‘Then we will say nothing,’ said Lilly. ‘But the meeting will be good. Good-bye, Miss-oh, wait-one thing I almost forgot. How do you look?’

  ‘How do I look?’

  ‘So I can find you.’

  ‘I-I’m a brunette-bobbed hair-and-I don’t know-I’ll be wearing a jacket, a suede jacket.’

  ‘If I am first, you will see me with blonde hair, also a white sweater and blue skirt. We will find each other.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good-bye then, until ten minutes to five.’

  All the interminable time after that, Emily had meant to call the store pronounced En Ko and ask for Miss Hedqvist and cancel the meeting, but in the end, she had not. And now here she was in the half-filled grill-room, at the table beside the window, with her red eyes and suede jacket, and her desire to run from here, quickly and far away.

  It was four minutes to five, and she told herself: I will give her one more minute and that is all.

  ‘You are Miss Stratman?’

  Emily’s head tilted upward with genuine alarm, and there was a child of a girl, with golden hair, long and caught by a blue ribbon, and alive blue eyes, and a young mouth and attractive beauty mark above it. She wore a thin white sweater that hung straight down from her breast tips, and a pleated dark blue skirt, and low-heeled shoes, and she extended her hand and said, ‘I am Lilly Hedqvist.’

  Emily accepted the firm grip, but briefly, for this was the hand that had caressed Craig, and then watched with wonder as the Swedish girl, so fresh and flaxen and blue like the Swedish flag, matter-of-factly took the place opposite her.

  ‘You have ordered?’ inquired Lilly.

  ‘No-’

  ‘I will order. Is there anything with the coffee?’

  ‘No.’

  Lilly waved to a passing waitress, who appeared to know her, and called ‘Kaffe,’ holding up two fingers.

  Now she returned her attention to Emily, leaning elbows on the table, cupping her chin with her hands. She considered Emily frankly. ‘You are very beautiful,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I-well, thank you.’

  ‘It does not surprise me. I knew you would be beautiful, but I did not think in this way.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Like the lovely fawns I have seen in Värmland. They are delicate and withdrawn. And besides, you look like you are nice. I thought you would be more bold and sure.’

  Had she not been so tense, Emily might have been amused, remembering as she did, after the phone call, her first imagined image of Lilly as the one who might be bold and sure.

  ‘Now it is easier to understand,’ Lilly went on, ‘because you are beautiful.’

  The irony of it came to Emily’s mind-we are always, she thought, not what we are through our eyes, but only as we are to other eyes-for she felt anything but beautiful. In fact, she felt more inhibited than ever by Lilly’s peach-coloured natural freshness, and it seemed incredible that Craig could have been so attentive to her after spending time with this bursting, outdoor child, and suddenly she was glad that Craig could not see them together
like this.

  ‘Mr. Craig is beautiful, too,’ Lilly was saying, ‘in the same way. He is secretly shy. It is appealing. I do not know how you could send him away yesterday, when he loves you from the heart so much.’

  ‘What makes you think he loves me?’

  ‘My eyes and ears and woman’s sense.’

  The waitress had arrived with coffee, silver, and napkins, which she dispensed from a tray. Neither paid attention to her, and when she left, Lilly resumed.

  ‘When Mr. Craig went away from you last night, he became very drunk, which is natural. Then he visited me and offered to marry me because that was like committing suicide.’ She had said the last with a twinkle, and then with tiny laughter. ‘He was not serious, and I knew he was not serious. I made him confess the truth, and he admitted how much he loved you, and he told me everything about that.’

  ‘I-I cannot believe he means it.’

  ‘Why, Miss Stratman? You cannot believe a man loves one woman from the heart, when he is also in another woman’s bed?’

  The naked question seemed to carry with it some implication of a personal failure in Emily, and she was less appalled by its asking than by this implication. ‘I wish I knew the right answer. I only know my answer. I was-yes, it upset me.’

  ‘You are now an American woman,’ said Lilly, ‘and I am a Swedish woman, and we are different. I must explain to you how I behave as I behave. On the outside, the Swedish girl is like the Swedish man-she is stiff, formal, with traditional manners. But with sex, she is open and free, because she is raised up with no prudishness. Education is honest about sex. In the country, we swim naked in summer. In the magazines, there is no censorship. And because there are so many women for so few men, it is a necessity not to make sex so difficult and rare-if you hold back the sex love, the man will find it easy in the next woman he meets. But that is not the main thing.’

  She paused and sipped her hot coffee, and Emily waited.

  ‘In America, the heart love comes first, and if that is good, then you go until you have the sex love, which is last and made most important, and which the American woman saves for the final precious gift. In Sweden, it is the opposite way around. In Sweden, the sex love comes first, and if that is good, you wait to see if it grows to heart love, which is forever and to us the most important. Do I explain myself, Miss Stratman?’

  ‘Yes, you explain yourself well,’ said Emily, envying her.

  ‘I could so easy give Mr. Craig my sex love,’ said Lilly earnestly, ‘because it is not the important thing, and I think less of it, like kissing. The important thing, for me, was to see if our sleeping in bed would become more to us, would become heart love, so it would be a part of a greater love that would last always. But it did not grow and become more for Mr. Craig or for me, because he did not love me. He loved you.’

  For the first time, fully, Emily had grave doubts about her standards in relation to Craig.

  ‘I tell you the truth, Miss Stratman,’ said Lilly. ‘If I had known that Mr. Craig loved me above the sleeping together, and if I had known my own love for him was more than that, we would not be here having coffee together, because he would be my husband forever. But I have told you, it did not happen and could not happen, because his real love was for you. I am telling you of myself, and I am telling you of Mr. Craig and myself, and now I will tell you of Mr. Craig and yourself.’

  Emily waited outside Lilly, as if waiting outside the Oracle of Venus at ancient Paphos.

  ‘Mr. Craig showed his heart love for you immediately, Miss Stratman. If you had welcomed this, and loved him back from the beginning, he would never have come to my bed to be warm with someone, because he would not have needed another woman. He would have had, for his heart and his manhood, all he wanted in the world. It is you who sent him to me. It is you who have had the power to send him or keep him.’

  ‘But I couldn’t,’ said Emily wretchedly.

  ‘You could not-what? Keep him with love?’

  Emily was helpless. ‘That’s right, Lilly.’

  ‘Why not? Is it because you are a virgin, or afraid to give your heart and life to someone’s hands?’

  ‘Neither and both. It is something more.’

  ‘Then I do not understand you.’

  Emily tried to smile gratefully. ‘How can you? I don’t understand myself.’

  ‘You must change, or there will be no hope for you.’

  ‘I cannot change,’ said Emily simply.

  She had gone beyond Lilly’s depth, she knew, because she had guarded what was within her and had chosen to hide behind enigma, and now, watching the wholesome Swedish girl finish her coffee and prepare to return to work, she felt the blackness of despair. For the conversation, so one-sided, open on Lilly’s side, closed on her own, made it clear to her at last, the extent to which the fault was her own and not the fault of Andrew Craig. To have turned him away, when she had known that she loved him, and now, to keep him away, when she knew that he loved her, was the stark revelation of the illness within that had not been healed.

  She had never believed that she would hear the final dooming toll of the death of the heart, but she heard it now. She listened. It was against her eardrums, heavy as the beat of her heart, and she surrendered to the knowledge that she was incurable, and she would not have Craig or any man, because the disease had eaten away her ability to love, and there was nothing more to give, because there was nothing left.

  In Carl Adolf Krantz’s apartment, it was now a few minutes before eight o’clock in the evening.

  Daranyi had pretended to be finished with Emily Stratman, and then he had reported a few bits of scattered gossip on this one and that one, and then suddenly, as he folded his sheaf of papers, ‘Oh, there is one more thing.’

  Deliberately, he returned the sheets to his right-hand jacket pocket, and as deliberately, he tugged two large photocopies and six smaller ones, folded and held together by a brass paper-clip, from his left-hand pocket.

  He held the photocopies a moment, disliking this part of it and sorry for himself, and aware of Krantz’s wondering face behind the fern.

  ‘About Miss Stratman,’ said Daranyi. ‘I had almost forgotten. Your short biography of her interested me, the fact that she had been interned in Ravensbruck concentration camp during her adolescence. It occurred to me that it might be useful, on a long chance, to learn something of the people Miss Stratman had known in those years, and if any of her old associations had carried over, for her or Professor Stratman, to the present day. It occurred to me, also, that among the millions of old SS documents that had not been destroyed, that had been confiscated after the war, there might still exist one on Miss Stratman’s history. Since I had a friend who has the proper connections in West Berlin, I suggested that he do what he could. His success was remarkable. Photocopies of Miss Stratman’s SS file came to my hands late this afternoon. The dossier may have no real value to you, but still, one never knows, and I thought it might be of certain interest.’

  ‘Let me have a look,’ said Krantz.

  Daranyi half rose and handed the two large photocopies and the six smaller ones across the top of the plant to his employer.

  ‘You will note,’ explained Daranyi, ‘that there are two sets of photocopies. The larger set is the copy of a summary of the report of Miss Stratman’s military psychoanalyst. You may find something useful in several unfamiliar names referred to-Frau Hencke, Dr. Voegler, Colonel Schneider. I am sorry I had no time to trace their histories. The smaller sheaf of photocopies represents a copy of an exchange of formal correspondence between departments of the Red Army and the American Army. Since the correspondence concerns Miss Stratman, it was also found in her file. Only one new name springs up in that correspondence-Dr. Kurt Lipski-not identified, but presumably a physician. I made a cursory check of my German library and found mention of three K. Lipskis of some importance in science today-one a naturalist, one a dermatologist, and one a bacteriologist. Nothing significant
.’

  Now Daranyi sat back, fingertips touching, eyes never leaving Krantz, as the other read the documents to himself. Krantz’s upper lip wriggled beneath his moustache, but his face betrayed no other reaction. At last, he looked up.

  ‘Where did you get these?’ he asked, and Daranyi detected that his tone was over casual.

  ‘You know, Dr. Krantz, I try to keep my sources-’

  ‘It does not matter. Merely personal curiosity as to how authentic-’

  Yes, Daranyi decided, over casual, and therefore, it has value. ‘It is completely authentic,’ he said. ‘I will say this much. I have an English friend, a newspaperman now in Stockholm, who is down at the heels. He is underpaid and forever in debt. He, in turn, has a friend who works in British Intelligence in West Berlin-a Scotch girl-a filing clerk. My newspaper friend offered to telephone her, and I supported this. When he advised me what was available, I agreed to give him-he must give half to her-nine hundred kronor of the expense money you gave me. That is steep for something that may have no value, but I thought I would risk the investment. I hoped you would find it illuminating in some way.’

  Krantz shrugged. ‘I cannot tell.’ And then-over casual, over casual-‘By the way, has anyone else seen this?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Well, no matter. It really gives us nothing, but I will retain it as a curiosity.’

  ‘As you wish.’

  Krantz stood up, to indicate that the interview was terminated and the business of the evening was concluded. ‘For your part, Daranyi, you are to be congratulated, as ever, a thorough job well done. For our part, and I hate to say this, you have uncovered nothing of real value, nothing that can solve our little problem. Still, you have done what you could in a limited time, and for that, we on the committee concerned with this are grateful. I told you, the other day, your recompense would be generous. I believe you will be more than satisfied. I have discussed payment with my colleagues, and they have agreed with me that your services-considering the small amount of your time we have taken-are worth ten thousand kronor. I have the envelope-’