The Damagers

by Donald Hamilton

  Looking down at me, she said, “I said I would think about it when I know you better.”

  I cleared my throat. “And you know me well enough now?”

  “Ja, minälskade.” She laughed softly. “That means ‘yes, my darling’ in Swedish.”

  She sank down on the side of the berth; then she was in my arms, her lips warm and eager, her hands… I caught her wrist left-handed and twisted the point of the knife aside. With my right hand I scooped up the little tranquilizer gun from the bedside dresser and fired it at contact range. She grabbed my wrist but too late to deflect my aim. She was very strong, and I had a hard time controlling her knife hand. The blade that she’d tried to slip into my armpit was the big Sabatier from the rack in the galley; it seemed that I’d found the assassin who liked to employ weapons of opportunity.

  There was a testing moment during which we just lay there straining against each other. She was in better condition, but I was bigger and she couldn’t force the knife point any closer to me. I let her expend part of her strength keeping the dart launcher twisted aside. It didn’t matter since the thing was strictly a one-shot proposition. Suddenly she broke free and rolled away and stood up, or tried to, forgetting where she was. Her head hit one of the wooden battens that held the cabin’s elaborate quilted headlining, dazing her for a moment, giving me time to switch on the little bedside light. She crouched there naked, still holding the knife; after a moment, she looked down at the bright little tuft of plastic sprouting from her left breast.

  My orders were to take them alive. Using a gun to crease or disable is something that only works in the movies; in a real-life situation, if you try it, you generally wind up with somebody dead, and occasionally it’s you. Our armorer had therefore adapted a system used by game departments to immobilize unwanted animals for transport elsewhere. The catch was that, while there are some fairly quick poisons if you want to go all the way, the backroom boys haven’t come up with anything reasonably safe that still causes instant unconsciousness in the dosage that can be delivered by a dart. The bear can eat you while you’re waiting for him to fall asleep, and the lady can carve you to bloody ribbons…

  But Ziggy was looking down at the little brush of plastic fibers that made the dart fly straight, colored Day-Glo orange so you could see your shots. She reached down gingerly and drew a deep breath and pulled it out with her left hand and tossed it aside, still holding the knife with her right. A small trickle of blood escaped from the puncture wound.

  She looked at me accusingly. “You knew?” she whispered. “I thought I was very good. You knew?”

  “You were very good, and I didn’t know, not for sure,” I said. “But I’m a pro, sweetheart. I hate to tell you how many times the pretty-lady-in-my-bed routine has been tried on me. I figured, if you stayed in your own bunk tonight, you might be okay; but if you came to me the very first night you just had to be a ringer. I’m not all that irresistible. What happened to the real Siegelinda Kronquist?”

  She licked her lips and didn’t answer the question. She said softly, “So I was right in hesitating to deal with you; I sensed you were danger and bad fortune for me. But the man said the clients were becoming impatient… I feel strange. Am I dead?”

  “No, you’ll just sleep for a while. It was you who got the others?”

  She looked at me bleakly, and I saw it in her eyes, what had really warned me although I hadn’t quite been aware of it: the hunter look, the killer look. I should know it; I’ve seen it in the mirror often enough.

  “Not the old man,” she said. “I do not know about that; I was not there. But that stupid woman tripping over her pretty nightdress as she came rushing out of this cabin with her little gun, and the stupid young man so eager to get us into another harbor where he could again… we could again… His girlfriend must have been very uncooperative; he was really eager for it, I had no trouble at all picking him up on the dock and getting him to invite me aboard. I’d studied him, his dossier, of course; I knew he did not swim so good. He was already panicking back there in the wake, drowning, as the boat sailed away from him after I had tipped him over the side. I swim very good. After arranging to scuttle the boat, I swim to the waiting skiff, but this förbannade big, clumsy vessel, it will not stay on the course I have set. It will not die! I try to blow it up, I try to sink it, but it will not die!” She drew a long, ragged breath, and went on. “Do you really think you can just shoot me with your little arrow and turn me over to the questioners? Me? Ha, I am a professional, too, my friend!”

  She said it proudly, but in her eyes was the gray realization of failure. She’d killed twice, to be sure, but the boat she’d been sent to destroy still floated, and in a moment she would be unconscious, a helpless captive. She was swaying, the drug was taking effect—but it didn’t work fast enough to prevent her from putting the point of the big butcher knife against her breast and driving it home with both hands.

  5

  “Unfortunate,” Mac said.

  Getting from Montauk, N.Y., to Washington, D.C., I’d discovered, is reasonably simple. You just find a car to rent and drive westward half the length of Long Island to the small town of Islip, from which, strangely enough, there are several flights daily to the nation’s capital, roughly two hours away by air.

  The view through the window behind Mac hadn’t changed much since my last visit, and neither had he. I’d just finished giving him the story in more detail than I’d managed over the phone in the middle of the night. He didn’t seem to be particularly distressed about my failure to carry out my mission as specified.

  “Unfortunate,” he said, “but unavoidable.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. “Thanks just the same, but unavoidable is bullshit, sir. Hara-kiri is not a Japanese monopoly. Falling on your sword when defeated is an old Viking custom. I should have been ready for it; I should have known that was not a girl who would accept failure, humiliation, interrogation, imprisonment…”

  “You had no trouble afterward?” Mac asked.

  Okay. He was right. Talking about it accomplished nothing. “That depends on what you mean by trouble,” I said.

  Actually, it hadn’t been too bad. Luckily the bedding hadn’t got splashed, and washing it off the woodwork had been easy enough. Getting it out of the carpet had been the worst problem, but that indoor-outdoor stuff with a rubbery backing doesn’t hold fresh stains too stubbornly.

  I’d gone ashore to call the body snatchers first thing, of course, at the same time as I’d made my preliminary report to Mac. I had the cleanup pretty well under control when they arrived to haul away the tarpaulin-wrapped bundle I’d prepared for them, and the girl’s belongings. There was no reason to think they’d caused any marina comment; bags and bundles of canvas, large and small, are always being hauled off sailboats, and onto them, even in the middle of the night.

  Then I checked out the boat thoroughly to make sure that no items that didn’t belong to me had been missed. I’d remembered to send off the shoes she’d discarded in the deckhouse; she’d left nothing else behind but a memory that wouldn’t be as easy to erase as her bloodstains. I did a bit more scrubbing; by the time I’d finished, there was dawn outside the deckhouse windows. I went ashore to use the marina showers since the facilities on Lorelei III, while nice to have available, were, like everything else on board, a little cramped for a gent six-four. I got into shore-going clothes, grabbed a quick breakfast on the way to the airport, and here I was in front of the familiar desk facing the familiar bright window, telling Mac all about it as usual.

  I said, “It wasn’t too bad. A forensic genius could undoubtedly discover that somebody’d bled on my boat, but I got it pretty well mopped up. The telephone contact was a woman who identified herself very formally as Mrs. Bell, and called me Mr. Helm. Good for her. In the middle of the night, with a stiff on my hands, I don’t want to have to deal with a twittering female dimwit who says, ‘Hi Matt, honey-bunch, I’m Bobby, what’s your everlasting proble
m, sweets?”

  “Terry, actually.”

  “What?”

  Mac said, “The lady’s name is Mrs. Teresa Bell. I suppose somebody calls her Terry. I would not venture to try it myself.”

  “I know what you mean. Not a warm personality.”

  “Did she have anything to say?” Mac asked.

  “Well, yes. She said she preferred to have me send her live specimens, if it was all the same to me. I said I’d prefer to have her send me nonhomicidal crews, if it was all the same to her. I wouldn’t call it love at first sight— well at first hearing, since we’ve never seen each other. What’s her agency?”

  “The name has not been revealed to us.” Mac smiled thinly. “We are hardly in a position to complain.”

  What he meant was that nobody knows the name of our outfit, either, perhaps because it hasn’t got one.

  I said, “The girl indicated that it’s some kind of a security organization dealing with coastal problems, whatever that means—maybe true, maybe not. Since she was a ringer we can’t be sure how much she really knew about the outfit she was supposedly working for, and how much she was just making up to sound authentic.” I shook my head ruefully. “She was quite a girl. It’s too damn bad. I could have enjoyed sailing with her.”

  Mac responded by shoving a stack of file folders across the desk. “See if you can find her in there,” he said.

  The bundle was bound with very strong half-inch plastic tape put on and sealed by machine. It had a covering sheet indicating that anyone compromising the stratospherically secret contents would be dismembered and cooked piecemeal in boiling oil, or words to that effect. Well, you should see the ones that are really sensitive. This was just a routine warning.

  I cut the tape with the smaller, and sharper, blade of my Swiss Army knife. There were eleven folders. Each one had the heading DAMAG on the label, followed by a series of numbers that presumably made sense to somebody’s computer. She was easy enough to find. She was DAMAG004, the fourth one down. A couple of bad snapshots were stapled to the inside of the folder, along with a small color print of a posed glamor portrait that had been taken when she was a few years younger. The photographer had made her look breathtakingly beautiful, not hard to do.

  “This is the girl,” I said, turning the file around and shoving it toward him.

  “You’re certain?”

  “Yes, sir. It isn’t likely there are two like that around.” When he didn’t speak at once, I asked, “What’s this all about? What’s DAMAG?”

  Mac said, “I haven’t been entirely frank with you.” He made it sound as if this were highly unusual, instead of being the normal state of affairs in that office. He went on, “We are, of course, happy to work with our fellow agencies whenever our assistance is requested, but I might not have been so ready to invest several months of a senior agent’s time in Mrs. Bell’s problem if there had not been reason to believe that it could lead us to an organization with which we have been asked to deal…”

  I regarded him rather grimly. Of course I should have known. I once used to hunt with a man who, in a duck blind, specialized in one-shot doubles. He was a superlative shotgunner, and it wasn’t enough for him to pick two birds out of a decoying flock and fire twice to drop them both, bang-bang, splash-splash. Most hunters feel pretty good about pulling off a double like that; but what my friend liked to do, and managed more often than seemed possible, was to wait until two birds’ flight paths were about to cross so he could cover both with the spread of pellets from a single charge of shot: bang, splash-splash.

  No, I’m not that good with a shotgun. Just in case you were wondering.

  Anyway, I should have remembered that any time Mac gets generous and lends me to another agency in the name of interdepartmental cooperation, I should be asking myself just what he’s getting out of it. Almost always, he’s got a double in mind, and there’s another mission on the wing, one of ours, that he hopes to nail with the same shotgun shell: me.

  He was still talking: “But you had better glance through two or three of the files and get a preliminary feeling for the people involved.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I retrieved the folder for DAMAG004, the girl I had known as Siegelinda Kronquist. They had quite a bit of stuff on her. I didn’t take time to read it all; I just leafed through the various papers until I found the condensed dossier prepared for lazy folks like me:

  Larsson, Greta, aka Greta Anderson, Mary Olsen, etc. (for complete list of known aliases consult master file). Uppsala Sweden 59, entered US 64, naturalized through parents. Five-eleven, one-sixty, blonde, blue. Slight accent, often exaggerated for effect. Marginal firearms, excellent unarmed combat, excellent edged weapons, but prefers to operate unarmed employing implements available at scene. W and A, no hosex encounters recorded, sm and sp tendencies suspected. Freelance specializing in B and B. No arrests. Probables: Lionel Hansen, Atlantic City, 83; Margaret Johnson Martinez, Marina del Rey, 83; Laura Pottsweiler, Miami, 85; Carl Gustav Elliston, Bar Harbor, 86…

  Well, she’d told me she was a pro. She hadn’t been kidding. Although she’d apparently been less than expert with guns, it didn’t seem to have handicapped her much, perhaps due to her habit of using whatever was handy—a windlass handle, a good strong shove with her hands, a large kitchen knife, to mention only the cases with which I was acquainted. According to the dossier, she had nine probables to her credit, if credit is the proper word. With the two kills, confirmed by the subject herself, that had not yet been entered into the computer, her total score was eleven, and those were only the ones that had found their way into the record. There could have been others.

  I said, “The jargon gets thicker every year. It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t keep changing it. What the hell is W and A? That’s a new one on me.”

  Mac laughed shortly. “It means that the lady was no nun. Willing and able. Hosex refers to homosexuality, sm you can probably figure out, sp means sociopathic, and B and B indicates that she preferred to operate around beaches and boats, in other words seaside resorts and marinas.”

  I said, “I know I’m old-fashioned, but I thought the English language was kind of nice, back when we used to use it.”

  I picked a couple more of the files at random. DAMAG006 was a little mustached weasel of a man called Elmer (Snipey) Weiss. I’d heard of him before; I like to keep track of the long-range boys since it’s kind of a specialty of mine. DAMAG008, Jerome (Boomer) Blum, was a lean, balding character with glasses who could apparently cook you up anything from a hand grenade to an atom bomb in his girlfriend’s kitchen. DAMAG002 was a stout, gray-haired woman named Carlotta (Lottie) Espenshade who specialized in drugs and poisons.

  I looked up from the files. “Somebody seems to have made a fine collection of homicidal talent here,” I said. “What the hell kind of an outfit is it, sir?”

  Mac said, “DAMAG, Incorporated, is what they call themselves, although it seems unlikely that they are a legal corporation. It is thought that the name was originally Damage, Inc., but it was shortened because the truncated form just sounded or looked impressive to someone.”

  “Damage, Inc.,” I said. “Shades of the old Murder, Inc.” When he did not comment, I said, “Apparently our DAMAG friends aren’t particular what kind of damage they do, anything from killing people to sinking boats, or trying to.”

  Mac nodded. “Particularly a boat with a certain person on board, when they learn of his presence. One Matthew Helm.” He gestured toward the pile of folders. “You did not get to the bottom of the pile, Eric. Examine the final dossier, please.”

  I dug out the file, DAMAG011, and opened it. “Oh, Jesus!” I said.

  “You recognize the name?”

  “Roland Caselius? Sure, but he’s been dead for so long… Hell, I finished him off myself, way up in northern Sweden.”

  “How much do you remember about him?”

  I said, “Well, I remember clearly that I used half a magazine of ni
ne millimeter stuff on him, just to make absolutely sure nobody’d bring him back to life. As I recall, his espionage activities were the basic reason I’d been sent after him; but the little man was very quick to kill anybody who got close to him, and too damn many people had died at his hands, some of whom I’d kind of liked. Who’s using his name?”

  Mac said reprovingly, “You’re not reading, or remembering, carefully enough, Eric. The first name of the man with whom you dealt all those years ago was Raoul. This is Roland.”

  “A son?” I asked rather grimly.

  People in our line of work shouldn’t have families, although I’m in no position to criticize.

  Mac nodded. “A son who has apparently inherited much of his father’s cleverness. A son who has been brought up to hate America, and a certain American, for tracking down and terminating his father.”

  I drew a long breath. “Brought up by whom? If Caselius, Senior, had a son he must have had a wife— well, at least a woman—but there was nothing about a woman in the information I was given at the time.”

  Mac said, “There was a great deal about Raoul Caselius that we did not know; but it appears now that he had been married for some years when he died. The son is in his middle twenties now; he would have been at an impressionable age when his father was killed, receptive to the vengeful message pounded into him by an unbalanced and vindictive mother. She had several years to work on him.”

  “She’s dead?”

  “She finally killed herself, leaving a note to the boy saying that he could consider that she’d been murdered, like his father, by wicked America.”

  I said, “Hell, if the U.S. didn’t exist, they’d have to invent it, wouldn’t they? Otherwise, who could they blame?” After a moment I went on grimly. “So, having grown into long pants, Roland has organized a fancy sabotage/assassination bureau as an instrument of vengeance. He seems to be an enterprising young fellow.”