The Damagers

by Donald Hamilton

I said, “Let’s move over there, under the trees.” I led her to a picnic table, and she sank down on one of the built-in benches. It was obvious from the way she moved that her attempt to flee had done her damaged foot no good at all. There was less light here, some distance from the dock and the buildings. I asked, “Did Mrs. Bell send you?”

  Ziggy Kronquist gave a bitter little laugh. “Mrs. Bell thinks I’m a terrible sissy, a total loss to the organization. After all, I only let them cripple one hand and one foot, and slash my face a couple of times. I’m just a hopeless sniveling weakling; I… I gave in and talked before they could b-blind me… Oh, Jesus!” She put her elbows on the table and buried her bandaged face in her hands. When she spoke again, her voice was muffled. “Why the hell did I want to be a glamorous girl field operative, anyway? Glamorous? God, look at me! Why didn’t I just stick with my research and my computers? And now I probably can’t even go back to punching a computer keyboard, the way they’ve mangled my fingers!”

  A power yacht even larger than the big one at the dock glided slowly past. It looked like a miniature cruise ship, blazing with lights. Well, it undoubtedly had a professional captain who’d come through here a hundred times and could run the canal blindfolded. The girl had found a handkerchief with her unbandaged hand and was mopping her eyes.

  She sniffed, put the hanky away, and said more calmly, “In answer to your question, no, Mrs. Bell didn’t send me. She’s still looking for somebody else, somebody brave and strong, to help you. But in the meantime… I knew you’d got to Cape May, which meant you’d probably stop here next, and I told her I was coming here to see you whether she liked it or not.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  She hesitated. “Well, I owe you an apology, don’t I? I really held out as long as… I’d really had all I could take. But I did… did talk, and Mrs. Bell said I almost got you killed. I’m sorry.”

  I said, “I’m still here; don’t sweat it.”

  “Mrs. Bell said you’d asked for me in spite of everything. She thought it was pretty dumb of you, and she wasn’t about to be a party to any such foolishness. But I hoped if I came here, even without orders from her… I don’t really want to go back to those lousy computers. At least not until…” She stopped.

  I looked at her for a moment, and said, “Revenge, Miss Kronquist… I mean, Ziggy? You don’t want to retire from the fray, or be retired from the fray, until you’ve settled with the people who damaged you so badly?” She didn’t answer, but the answer was in her silence. I said, “Well, just hold everything for a little, vengeance-wise, please. I need that woman alive—I hope she still is in spite of you—until I can learn what she and her friends are up to. I presume that, since you shot her, she’s the one responsible for your injuries.”

  Siegelinda Kronquist said, “I’d recognize her voice anywhere!”

  “Voice?”

  “Well, it was the man who… who tortured me; and he had a couple of dark-faced gofers who helped him tie me down on that old iron bed. We were in a kind of rundown shack near the railroad where they’d grabbed me. But gradually I became aware of somebody watching from the doorway beyond my head, and then she… she started making suggestions. You could just feel her licking her chops, enjoying every minute of it, the sadistic bitch. I never saw her face, but I’d know her voice anywhere, with that hint of an accent.”

  I said, “So you’d have a hard time identifying her in court. A good defense lawyer would throw so many accents at you, you’d have a hard time spotting a Tayxas caowboy.” I regarded her critically. “Well, let’s skip that for the moment. I didn’t realize they’d left you in such bad shape, when I asked Mrs. Bell to send you to me. Aren’t you being optimistic to even think of working on a boat yet?”

  She said, “Mister, I’ve seen a little of your record, and I’m willing to bet that with just one hand and foot I’m a better sailor than you with two of each. How far am I going, to have to hike on my busted toes, anyway, going down the waterway on a thirty-eight-foot motor sailer? I can certainly manage a steering wheel—I just drove my car from Washington, D.C.—and throw a line; maybe I can’t do any heavy, two-handed hauling, but you look pretty strong in a skinny, rawhide sort of way, and we’re not going to be setting any racing sails, so how much beef do we really need on board?”

  I said, “Okay, say you’ve convinced me; but as you pointed out, yourself, the position you’re plugging for is filled at the moment.”

  “That female rattlesnake!”

  I glanced at the gun I was still holding, the one I’d taken from her. It was the old assassination weapon that was once standard in a lot of undercover services and still keeps turning up regularly: the beautiful, now obsolete, .22 Colt Woodsman with the usual silencer—nowadays we’re supposed to call it a sound suppressor for reasons that escape me, but it was still a silencer back when this gun was made.

  I said, looking at the handsome old weapon, “You seem to have come prepared to deal with her.”

  She licked her lips. “I… I just knew that if I managed to talk you into taking me along, sooner or later I’d come across one of them, either her or that lovely torture-happy Arab Apollo of hers, Roger Hassim. So before I left Washington I managed to sneak a gun out of the historical section of the Armory without anybody seeing me, and buy a box of .22s. The hard part was finding the lowspeed stuff that would work with the silencer; everybody seems to stock nothing but high-velocity .22s nowadays. But I didn’t expect to find the woman so soon. It… it took my breath away, literally, when I walked out the dock hoping just to get a chance to talk with you, and heard her voice in the deckhouse, talking with you. I knew it instantly, of course; and I stood there with my silly mouth open… And then it was as if a computer program had taken over and I found myself running—well, hobbling—back to the car and getting the gun out of the trunk and checking the magazine and jacking a cartridge into the chamber and sneaking back to see her standing there in the doorway, a lovely target… But as I told you, it wasn’t a good shot. I didn’t take my time the way I should have; I rushed it; I didn’t wait to catch my breath. The whole thing had taken me by surprise and I wasn’t… wasn’t ready, psychologically.”

  “Maybe you never will be ready, psychologically,” I said. “Some people are never ready to kill.”

  The girl shook her head with sudden violence. “No, I’ll be ready next time. She’s got to die!” Ziggy Kronquist drew a long breath, looking up at me. “You don’t understand! That’s not a woman, it’s an animal. They all are; at least they’re not really human the way we understand human. They don’t laugh at funny jokes, they laugh at pain; and if it’s pain that cripples and disfigures, so much the better! She and that beautiful Hassim freak! He was like a kid tormenting a small animal for fun, and she was egging him on: she’d tell him what joint to crunch with his ugly pliers, or where to slice next with his pretty little knife, and he’d do it very carefully and stand back so she could appreciate the marvelous effect he’d achieved. They thought it was hilarious when I moaned and sobbed and shrieked in agony. They thought it was delightfully comical when I… when the pain got so bad that I… I wet and d-dirtied myself; oh, look at the ridiculous infidel girl making such a disgusting mess of her expensive slacks, ha ha, try the other finger, now the face, now the other cheek, now the eye…” She stopped and drew a deep, ragged breath. “That’s when I screamed that I’d tell them what they wanted. That silly ID business about the weather in Maine and Connecticut. I’m sorry, sorry, sorry if it made you a lot of trouble, but I just couldn’t let them… I just couldn’t help myself!”

  I said, “You understand that even if I wanted to, I couldn’t take you aboard right now.”

  She drew a long breath and said, “Thanks for listening. I didn’t really mean to use you as a father confessor.”

  I said, “Welcome to the club, Ziggy. I can tell you one thing, it won’t be any better next time; it’s not something that improves with practice.”

  After
a moment, she smiled faintly. “Gee, thanks lots, Matt. That’s really a great big help!”

  “Here,” I said, “you may need this for protection. Just don’t use it for anything else until I give you the all clear.”

  She looked at the pistol I put into her hand. She started to ask a question, but changed her mind and, sitting there, slipped the magazine out of the butt of the gun. Then she jacked the cartridge out of the chamber, fed it into the top of the magazine, and reinserted the magazine into its slot, working quite efficiently in spite of the splinted fingers. She lifted her jersey and wedged the gun inside her snug waistband. The demonstration, indicating that she knew firearms and was careful with them, helped to confirm the decision I’d made.

  I said, “Assuming you’re right and the woman isn’t too badly hurt, I’ll try to keep to the schedule I’ve been given. That means we’ll be in Annapolis, Maryland, tomorrow night, Port Annapolis Marina. Then, continuing south, Solomon’s Island on the Patuxent River the following night, Zahniser’s Marina. Then a night at anchor in Fishing Bay, off the Piankatank River; then Tidewater Marina in Norfolk, the official beginning of the Intracoastal Waterway. I don’t know what’s going to happen, I just hope something is. There’s not much you can do while we’re under way—don’t try to trail us in another boat, there’s no way of doing it without being spotted, and I want her to think she’s got me all to herself—but if you can manage to keep up with us in your car and stay handy in the evenings to make sure nobody sabotages the boat when we go ashore, and see who else is interested in us, if anybody, it could be useful.”

  She studied my face for a moment. “Thanks, Matt,” she said quietly. “Thanks for taking a chance on me in spite of the way I… I’ll try to do a good job for you.”

  “Not too good,” I said.

  She frowned. “What do you mean?”

  I said, “You’ve got nothing to prove. If it gets dangerous, back off. A dead girl is no damn good to me.”

  She grinned. It was a pretty good grin despite the bandages. “Mister, don’t you know you’ve got yourself a certified coward here? If you don’t know, ask Mrs. Bell, she’ll be happy to tell you. Well, you’d better get aboard and hold the female monster’s head. Just watch out she doesn’t bite you, they say those rabies shots are rough…”

  15

  When I came aboard Lorelei III, Mrs. Fancher wasn’t lying where I’d left her and had half expected to find her, possibly dead even though Ziggy had called it a grazing shot. Predicting what bullets are going to do to people is not an exact science. However, the woman was very much alive, sitting at the top of the steps leading down into the galley, where she could reach the paper-towel dispenser mounted on the nearby bulkhead. She had a strip of the toweling draped over her shoulder and tucked into the collar of her shirt to protect it, and a bloodstained wad pressed to her head.

  “I think the bleeding has stopped,” she said without looking around. “Bandage it for me, please, but be careful. Considering how few clothes you’ve left me, I can’t afford to get blood on them; it’s very hard to get out.”

  I squeezed by her—I seemed to be spending a lot of time climbing over her, but she still did nothing for my libido—and got the first-aid kit and a clean washcloth out of the galley. I wet the washcloth under the tap. Turning back to her, I found her watching me. The pupils of her lovely, unreadable, brown eyes were exactly the same size, which is supposed to be a good medical sign.

  “No dizziness, no double vision?” I asked.

  “Only a headache,” she said. “I was just stunned for a moment; I was never really unconscious. I presume you caught the girl with the gun, since at present she is incapable of running very fast.”

  “You saw her?”

  “At the last moment, yes. The one who calls herself by that ridiculous name. Ziggy.”

  I said, “You’re not as bright as I thought. You help to maim a girl and scar her for life—and then you tell me you can’t imagine anybody wanting to shoot you!”

  “So she recognized me? I thought I had kept well out of her sight.”

  “She recognized your voice.”

  Mrs. Fancher shrugged. “I suppose I underestimated her. It’s hard to take them seriously, these modern American children. They are all taught from infancy that they are supposed to be safe, that they have a God-given right to be safe, as if any deity, yours or mine or theirs, could be bothered with such a minor thing as their physical safety—their spiritual salvation is, of course, quite a different matter. But what kind of training for life is that, particularly for our kind of life? When they make the dreadful discovery that this is not really a very safe world, the shock is more than they can bear. The young woman was so very noisy and messy under interrogation that I did not think she could possibly find the courage to retaliate even if she did manage to identify me. It seems that I was wrong. What did you do with her?”

  I said, “What do you think I did? I gave her back her weapon, of course, and told her to try to shoot straighter next time.”

  Mrs. Fancher gave a short bark of laughter. “And undoubtedly, after hearing what she had to tell you, you think I am a very terrible person.”

  I said, “Hell, I knew you were a very terrible person the minute I saw you. Hold still now.”

  Standing down in the galley, I was in a good position to work on her as she sat on the steps above me, when she leaned forward a little. It was a brief furrow in the smooth, dark skin at the side of her forehead, an inch below the hairline. As she’d said, it had already stopped bleeding. I left the groove itself alone, I just washed around it cautiously and taped a small dressing over it; then I used the damp washcloth to clean the rest of the drying blood off her face. I picked up all the bloody paper and stuffed it into the garbage can under the galley sink, rinsed out the washcloth and hung it up to dry, and put away the first-aid kit.

  “I don’t suppose you feel up to hiking over to the restaurant for dinner after all that,” I said. “I’ll take a rain check on your invitation and see what I can cook up for us here.”

  She shook her head cautiously. “No, just find me a couple of aspirins or Tylenols and I’ll be all right. It’s really just a scratch.”

  I grinned. “It’s hell what some folks will do to avoid having to eat my cooking.”

  One good thing about getting rid of her belongings was that I didn’t have to wait for her to dress for dinner. After washing down the pain pills I brought her, with water from the galley, she let me help her up to the dock, and over the crosswalk to shore. I saw her look around a bit warily.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I told the kid not to shoot you again until I was finished with you.”

  She laughed and took my arm to cross the big parking lot. When we entered the restaurant, we found that it was by no means full; but in spite of her modestly loose-fitting costume Dorothy managed to get the attention of what male customers there were. I doubt that any of them even noticed her bandaged forehead as she walked past; they weren’t looking at her face.

  We were given a pleasant window table with a good view along the canal, which seemed to be lighted almost as well as a city street; but the desolate, marshy land across from the canal house dock, that we’d seen coming in, was now hidden in darkness. Two pilot boats were tied up below us, painted orange for identification. Even as we were being seated, one of them cast off its lines and pulled out. I’d been told that they guide the ships through in two stages, and that Schaefer’s is where the Maryland pilots take over from the Delaware pilots and vice versa. I ordered another martini to back up the one I’d been served so graciously on the boat that I’d never got to finish.

  When the waiter had delivered our drinks and departed, I said, “I hate going out with dames who don’t drink. They always look so damned smug and disapproving as they sip their lousy Perrier water.”

  She laughed. “I’m sorry. It was not my intention to look disapproving, although, of course, my religion does disapprove of al
coholic beverages.”

  I said, “I’m not much for religion. Particularly a religion that says drinking a glass of wine is a terrible sin but spoiling a pretty girl’s face is perfectly all right.”

  Mrs. Fancher said calmly, “They were clean incisions with a very sharp blade; Roger keeps his weapons well. A plastic surgeon can probably erase the scars with very little difficulty. And not that it matters, but the girl was not really very pretty.”

  I said, “Maybe your pretty isn’t my pretty. Talking about pretty, tell me about Roger Hassim. The kid said he’s a very beautiful man, for a practicing sadist.”

  Dorothy said, “You are trying hard to make me angry, aren’t you?”

  I said, “I’m trying to give you the impression that I don’t really like you much, and that I doubt that I’m going to be very fond of any of your friends.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  I said, “Well, that way I can maybe kid you that I’m an honest man; if I pretended to adore you and love your religion and admire your beautiful boyfriend, you’d know me for the bar I really am. Tell me about this lovely, toe-crushing, finger-cracking, face-slashing Hassim bastard. Does he make a full-time career of mutilating women, or does he have some interesting sidelines like murder or arson or robbery—or sabotage?”

  She didn’t rise to that bait. She just said, rather stiffly, “I do not think you are really in a position to disapprove of the interrogation we conducted. I know you must also have questioned people rather drastically when it was necessary.”

  She was, of course, perfectly right; and the fact that I don’t laugh and giggle when I have to work somebody over for information doesn’t really make me a better person. But the attitude of moral outrage was, I felt, useful at the moment; if I could needle her enough, perhaps she’d get angry enough to let slip something that would prove helpful.

  I said, “You still haven’t told me anything about this Roger character. All I really know about him, aside from the fact that he loves hurting people, is that he screws other men’s wives.”