The Damagers

by Donald Hamilton

  “He’s also quite competent,” Mac said. “The Russians used to do a good job of training them, in their unimaginative way.”

  I said, “That’s right, Papa Caselius worked for the Russians. So they kind of inherited the son?”

  “They supervised his upbringing after the death of the mother. However, the boy, unlike his father, was not used for espionage; he operated out of one of the departments specializing in wet operations. But after gaining a certain amount of experience he went into private practice, shall we say, presumably with official permission, and maybe even official help, at the dawn of the present era of Muscovite sweetness and light. I think it is likely that we’ll find that many land mines like Roland Caselius were left lying around for us to step on by the old guard in Moscow when they saw their power waning.”

  These undercover services do have their jargon. “Wet,” for God’s sake. I don’t know why everybody’s so finicky about avoiding the simple word “kill.”

  I said, “So what wet operation has he got going now, besides his personal vendetta with me, that’s got Washington worried enough to call us in? I gather this is something apart from Mrs. Bell’s problem. Who’s the target whose life I’m supposed to be saving by defanging this DAMAG snake?”

  Mac laughed shortly. “You are being very naive, Eric. You know Washington.”

  I grimaced. “I see. We don’t need to know that, so we haven’t been told. So I may be risking my life for an anonymous janitor in the State Office Building? Well, he’s probably a worthy soul deserving of my protection. Do I gather that somebody feels I’ll protect him better by going for DAMAG than by playing bodyguard directly?”

  “The city is full of qualified bodyguards,” Mac said, “and I suspect some will be employed to cover the potential target, whoever he, or she, may be. However, you have the unique qualification of, more than any other American, being the focus of Roland Caselius’s hatred. All you really have to do is put yourself in his path and he’ll come after you.” He paused, and went on. “The identity of the dead girl confirms what I suspected from the start, that the Arab terrorist conspirators with whom Mrs. Bell is concerned have hired DAMAG to help them. It’s your lead to Caselius; use it.”

  I said, “Arab conspirators? The only opposition I’ve met so far was blond and blue-eyed; I’ve met no Arabs yet.”

  “As a matter of fact, you have spoken with one. Mrs. Bell’s maiden name was Othman, and she is fluent in the language, which is why she was assigned by her so-far unnamed agency to set up a task force to investigate this gang and keep it from attaining its terrorist goal.”

  “What terrorist goal?”

  Mac shrugged. “Does it matter? They are always blowing up something. You should stop them if you can, I suppose, but we are more interested in Caselius. Don’t let yourself be distracted by the Middle Eastern cutthroats and their glorious plans of anti-American sabotage or whatever. They are Mrs. Bell’s concern: DAMAG is yours. I feel your best approach is simple frustration. If DAMAG tries to kill somebody, you keep him, or her, alive. If DAMAG attempts to sink a boat, you keep it afloat. If DAMAG wants it painted green, you paint it red. You want to make Roland Caselius realize that his father’s executioner is standing directly in his, Roland’s, way; and that there are now business reasons, in addition to personal ones, why you must be removed. We can hope that the personal reasons will lead him to attend to the matter personally… Excuse me.” He paused to answer the phone that had started to ring.

  Well, it wasn’t the first time I’d been asked to poke an angry bear with a short stick, and it wouldn’t be the last—assuming that I survived this encounter, of course.

  “Yes, Mrs. Bell,” Mac was saying. “Yes, he is here… Very well, I will tell him.” He put the instrument down and looked at me across the desk. “Mrs. Bell thought you’d be interested in knowing that their missing agent, the real Siegelinda Kronquist, has been located.”

  “Alive?”

  Mac nodded. “Yes, but not in very good shape. She was found this morning, unconscious and in rather battered condition, beside a railroad track in Connecticut. She was at first thought to have wandered drunkenly onto the tracks and received a glancing blow from a train that knocked her into the ditch, where she remained in an alcoholic stupor. However, medical examination showed that she was heavily drugged, and that her injuries were, let us say, more systematic than those that would be inflicted by a locomotive. She is now in a New Haven hospital under observation. She has not yet been debriefed. Well, we can guess what she has to say.”

  I nodded. “It figures that they grabbed her when she was on her way to join me, probably by rail considering where she was found—there’s regular train service all along that shore. They got her seabag and stuff for the other girl to use and took her out behind the tracks somewhere and beat the necessary information out of her—particularly that identification nonsense the other girl worked on me.”

  Mac said, “At any rate, that girl is out of action for the moment, at least. Mrs. Bell said that she is looking for another agent with the proper qualifications. In the meantime you are to take the boat on south by yourself; they will send you a crew member as soon as they can.”

  “I don’t look forward to it; this one will probably be a real Captain Bligh,” I said ruefully. “Well, it’s their boat; if they want to take a chance on my getting it through alone until they can get me some knowledgeable help, it’s their gamble.”

  Mac gestured toward the stuff on the desk. “You will have to memorize the dossiers here; I don’t want those yapping mongrels from security snapping at my heels on account of their precious files.”

  After doing my homework on the files, I caught a flight back to Islip and drove out to Montauk in heavy afternoon traffic. I checked in the rental car, and the man who’d done the paperwork got behind the wheel and drove me to the marina. It had been a long day and I was yawning as I fumbled out the deckhouse key, not hard to locate in my pocket since, along with the ignition key—if the word can be applied to a diesel, which has no ignition—it was attached to a miniature plastic channel buoy designed to keep it afloat if I was clumsy enough to drop it overboard.

  Then I stopped yawning abruptly, realizing that the deckhouse door was already open. After a moment, a small dark-haired girl stuck her head out.

  “Don’t shoot, I’m Lori,” she said.

  6

  She was one of the long-john girls. At least that’s how they always look to me, as if they’d forgotten to pull on their pants of a sleepy morning and wandered out of the house in their long winter-underwear bottoms, in this case dull black tights ending two inches above the ankles. Below, white leather boat moccasins with white nonslip rubber soles. Above, a big black sweatshirt that reached well down her hips but still didn’t succeed in making her look fully dressed. At least as far as I was concerned, she was still a lady making a public appearance in her BVDs; not particularly sexy—it was not a very stimulating garment—but slightly embarrassing.

  The sweatshirt had a hood to keep her head warm, and she might very well need it later in the evening, since she wore her hair too short to provide much topside insulation against the night chill. I was a little surprised, in retrospect, that I’d realized so quickly that she was a girl, since her haircut was strictly boy—or what boy used to be before they all went in for flowing locks. Well, she had a nicely shaped head and pretty ears and if she liked the severe, shorn look, it was her business—as, I suppose, was her underwear. She watched me make my way aboard, taking the standard precautions, which amused her.

  “Careful, aren’t you?” she said.

  I slid the deckhouse door shut behind me, and drew the curtains. It had been a long day, but it was getting toward that time of evening at last. I took a look into the aft stateroom and head, and went forward and checked all the way to the bow. In the forward stateroom, the gear Ziggy Kronquist, aka Greta Larsson, aka DAMAG004, had brought aboard, which had been removed by the disposal
crew, had now been replaced by a well-worn seabag, red with rather grubby white straps and handles. So the girl wasn’t just a casual visitor; she was moving in as crew. The efficient Mrs. Bell must really have scrambled to get her here so fast—assuming, of course, that the kid wasn’t another phony. Returning to the main cabin, I got a bottle of Scotch out of the rack and poured myself a drink.

  “One for you?” I asked, seeing her looking down at me from the deckhouse. When she nodded, I said, “Name it.”

  “Vodka and tonic?”

  “It can be done. It shall be done.”

  Emerging from the cabin with the drinks, I put them on the little corner table. I sat down and gestured toward the settee beside me, but the girl preferred to pick up her glass and perch on the tall stool—the helmsman’s stool— that I’d set to one side, out of the traffic pattern, upon reaching port. She sipped her drink and waited for me to start the conversation. I noted that she had big gray eyes, a small straight nose, and even white teeth in a big-enough mouth, all neatly arranged in a rather small, symmetrical face. Actually, she was quite a handsome little girl despite the cropped hair. Her skin was very smooth, and nicely tanned, which these days may be medically negative, but I’m old-fashioned enough to find it visually positive.

  I asked, “How did you get in here?”

  She reached into a pocket of her sweatshirt and brought out a pair of keys like mine, chained to what looked like an identical plastic float. I frowned at it, got up, and checked in the small locker near the helm. The spare keys were there. I knew I’d returned mine to my pocket, but I reached down and felt for them anyway, finding them right where I’d put them.

  “How many keys are there to this bucket?” I asked. “Are they passing them out by the double handful?”

  “They didn’t pass out this set. It’s mine.”

  She was making me work for it, teasing me, watching me from the high stool. I sat back down and tasted my whiskey, finding myself aware of the length of slim leg being generously displayed in the very snug, mat-black tights. Apparently the garment wasn’t totally unstimulating, after all.

  “What’s a Lori?” I asked. “Who’s a Lori?”

  She grinned at me a bit maliciously. “You’re bright, you figure it out. The keys are really mine; I’ve had them for years. That should give you a clue.”

  “Lori?” I frowned again. “Lorelei?”

  “Ha, I said the man was bright.”

  I studied her for a moment and said, “You’re too young.”

  “Too young for what?”

  I spoke carefully: “Maybe I was wrong. I figured that Truman Fancher had named the boat—his last three boats—after his wife. Lorelei I, II, and III. And I was told he was no chicken. And this boat alone is eight years old; he’d have to have married you in the cradle if you’ve had your name on three of them.”

  She said, “Keep plugging. You’ll get there.”

  I said, “So, no wife. You were in the cradle, or practically so, when he named the first Lorelei for you, his baby daughter. Right?”

  She said, “Bravo, I knew you’d make it!”

  “Lorelei Fancher?”

  She laughed. “Ridiculous, isn’t it? Lorelei! I look about as much like a Rhine maiden as Aunt Jemima.” She sipped her vodka and tonic. “And my mother died when I was four; and the idea of my stepmother—whose name is Dorothy, incidentally—having a boat named for her is fucking ludicrous. Hell, she hates boats. She was even seasick on the Intracoastal Waterway, for God’s sake; they’d done a little bouncing around on one of those wide-open North Carolina sounds inside Cape Hatteras. That’s why she was flaked out below when Daddy… when Daddy died.”

  Lori Fancher was watching me a little too closely as she talked. I wondered why. It wasn’t as if she were telling me anything new and startling; what she’d said only corroborated what I’d heard before.

  She went on: “Well, it isn’t fair to sneer at her for being seasick, I suppose, it can happen to anybody; but she’d only condescended to help Daddy bring the boat up from Florida because they’d had an awful fight and he’d scared her shitless by showing her the reports of a private investigator he’d hired. He told her he’d kick her out on her ear if she didn’t straighten up and fly right, and no court in the world would give her a dime of his money.” Lori shook her head. “Poor Daddy, he really loved the sultry bitch, and he was usually so easygoing that I guess she thought she could get away with anything, but she pushed him too far, playing around with that gorgeous greasy-gigolo-type. Roger Hassim, all he needed was a camel and some flowing robes, Valentino would spin in his grave! But of course Dorothy did get away with it in the end, begged Daddy’s forgiveness, promised she’d never look at another man—ha!—and showed how she’d turned over a new leaf by insisting on making the spring cruise with him up the waterway—he’d planned to take me—so she could learn, at last, to share with him the sport he loved so much. She even sweetly allowed him to keep his big aft cabin, and condescended to suffer nobly in the cramped stateroom forward—lately they’d had separate bedrooms; old men have to get up at night and of course she couldn’t stand being disturbed like that.”

  I said, “Your stepmother sounds like quite a lady.”

  “That is not the word I would choose!” Lori Fancher snapped. “Where she belongs is in harem pants all drenched with musky perfume popping grapes into the fat sheik’s mouth. She’s got a figure that won’t quit— she makes skinny little girls like me cry in their beer— and black hair almost as long as Crystal Gayle’s; that’s a country singer in case you don’t…”

  I said, “I know who Crystal Gayle is; what do you think I am, ignorant?” I looked at her for a moment. “Where are the fuel tanks?”

  She frowned, surprised; then she grinned. “Checking up, huh? They’re in the engine room right below us, an eighty-gallon tank of diesel on each side of the big mill. That’ll take you damn near a thousand miles if you keep the revs down to fifteen, sixteen hundred.”

  “And the water tank?”

  “Tanks, plural. You’ve got sixty-five gallons under the main cabin sole. Then there’s a twenty-five gallon tank under the bunk in the forward cabin. The valve that switches between them is right under that step over there, going down.”

  “Where’s the registration number?” I asked.

  She considered getting annoyed at my persistence, but decided against it and spoke like a child reciting its lessons: “Lorelei III hasn’t got any state registration. She’s U.S. documented, like a ship, and the document number is carved on the main beam at the forward end of the engine room. Six five oh nine three one, if I remember right.”

  It was the correct number in the right place, but I tried one more check: “Where’s the switch for the electric windlass?”

  She laughed. “Cute, aren’t you? The windlass isn’t electric; it’s a big old manual brute that Daddy… that Daddy was always going to replace but never got around to.”

  I said, “Well, it’s replaced now, I had it replaced, and the main switch and circuit breaker are on the side of the steering console. Of course it’s rigged so once the power’s on you can work it from up forward.”

  She glared at me. “Damn you, there’s no way I could have known that!”

  “I know,” I said. “If you had known it, I’d have known you were a phony, just parroting information somebody’d given you this morning. But okay, I guess you’re you.”

  “Well, goody, it makes me feel warm all over, being me.” The little girl drew a long breath. “I think I’m supposed to feed you.”

  “If that’s an offer, I accept.”

  She said, “I’m supposed to help you run the boat, and keep you well fed; and I’m supposed to duck when the shooting starts and let you handle it. You’d damn well better; I’m not much of a marksman… markswoman? Marksperson? Helmsperson? Seaperson? I’m all for women’s lib, but I don’t know about lousing up the language the way they do. And when they tell me it’s insulting to
the female sex to call a boat ‘she,’ I’m with the male chauvinist pigs. Lorelei’s a lady, not an ‘it,’ aren’t you, baby?” She patted the steering wheel fondly. “Matt?”

  “Yes?”

  “What the hell’s it all about?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  She shook her head. “I wasn’t told a damned thing except would I please dash out to Montauk and help a transplanted cowboy-type take Daddy’s boat south, at least as far as Cape May, and make sure he didn’t sink her in some stupid, lubberly way.”

  I grinned. “Gee, thanks lots.”

  “Come on down and talk to me while I heat up some delicious canned chili, or whatever you’ve got in the locker. Don’t expect any gourmet meals on this Florida clipper, skipper.”

  I sat at the big table in the main saloon while she started exploring the galley across the way. She knew the boat, all right; she knew about the safety switch for the propane, and she knew where all the storage spaces were, including the sneaky silverware drawer that hid below the stove. She selected several cans from the shelves above the stove, found a skillet and a couple of saucepans, and started assembling something that looked as if it would turn out to be fried Spam with boiled potatoes and canned peas, and canned peaches for dessert. Well, it wasn’t as if I hadn’t eaten quick-and-dirty meals before and survived. At least I didn’t have to cook this one.

  I said, “You didn’t sign on for a very long voyage, did you? With luck, we should be in Cape May the day after tomorrow, right?”

  Lori spoke without turning her head. “I think they’d like me to stay on board longer, at least until they find you somebody else, but the two-hundred-mile open-water jump just ahead of us is the one they thought you really should have help with, and that’s all I’m committed to. The rest you can probably manage by yourself if I have to take off. Well, we’ll see how it goes.” After a moment, she said, “Please understand, it’s strictly a job for me. It’s what I do, deliver boats. I have my six-pack and I’m working for my hundred-ton license.”