Danger Is My Line

by Stephen Marlowe

“Didn’t I tell you I needed a bodyguard?” Brandvik said. He added in a conspiratorial whisper, “The Counter Espionage Agency for the F.B.I.’s got a tail on me too.”

  He grinned an I-told-you-so grin. I didn’t grin back at him. After a crazy morning like this, who was I to doubt it? But on the other hand Brandvik’s unmotivated grins and unreasonable pride and unexpected statements were beginning to climb all over me like pet monkeys, and I began to think in terms of the little men in white suits.

  The phone rang again. Maja Kolding looked up, then down. Brandvik answered it on the second ring.

  “Hello? Hello there, Mr. Baker. Jesus, no. I couldn’t see you today. I’m strung tight as a fat stripper’s G-string. A dame tried to kill me. No, I’m serious. A dame from Iceland or somewheres named Kolding. Uh-huh, what did you expect? Kolding. Tried to shoot me. If your pal Chester Drum wasn’t here you’d be talking to a corpse. I mean—hah-hah—you wouldn’t be talking to anyone. Or maybe a homicide dick.” Brandvik, as usual, seemed to be masochistically enjoying the idea of his own death. “What? Yeah, okay.” He cupped a big hand over the mouthpiece of the phone,” holding it out. “Wants to talk to you, Drum.”

  I took the receiver and sat down on the edge of the bed near the phone, which was on the night table. Maja Kolding glared at Brandvik. He tried to stare her down, then got busy putting his shirt on.

  “Hiya, Wally,” I said without much enthusiasm.

  “He got you down?” Wally chuckled.

  “I’ve seen worse. But I’ve seen lots better.”

  “Think he’s nuts?”

  “She was here. She had a gun. I had to take it away from her.”

  Wally whistled, then said: “But I mean in general.”

  “Search me. I’m no headshrinker.”

  “I kind of wish you were.” Wally’s voice was bantering, but it held an undertone of seriousness. “Can I see you, Chet?”

  “Any time. And how’s Marianne?”

  “We’re pregnant,” Wally said. “Kid’s due any day.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned. Time does scoot.”

  “Been married almost three years.”

  This time I whistled.

  “How about tonight?” Wally asked. “I’ll be all tied up this afternoon.”

  I said that would be fine, and Wally gave me his home address in Georgetown. The last time I’d seen him we’d both been in India.*

  “By the way,” he asked, “you taking the job?”

  “I don’t think so, but I’ll have to read your deathless prose before I’m sure.”

  “For a guy in your line of work you’ve got a lot of scruples,” Wally said, but he laughed.

  “I have to shave once a day. And stare at you-know-who’s face in the mirror.”

  “Eight o’clock then?”

  I said eight o’clock suited me.

  “What about the girl, Chet?”

  “You tell me about her. The name of the crime is attempted murder. The gun went off harmlessly and without much noise, but if I let her loose she’s liable to come pot-shotting for Brandvik again.”

  “Call the cops!” Brandvik hollered.

  “I heard that,” Wally said. He sighed. “Well, see you later.”

  I hung up. Maja Kolding was smiling. It was the first time I had seen her smile, and she was beautiful. The suggestion of dimples had become twin clefts in her cheeks and the smile, instead of narrowing her lips, seemed to thicken them. “You don’t have to call the police,” she said. “It wouldn’t do anybody any good.”

  “No?” Brandvik sneered. He could sneer, since I had taken Maja’s gun away for him.

  “Of course not,” Maja said coldly, not smiling now. “I could shoot you down like a dog outside police headquarters and the worst they could do is tell me to pack my bags.”

  “She’s nuts,” Brandvik said.

  Maja smiled again, but her eyes were cold. “I have diplomatic immunity,” she said. “My brother is an Assistant Consul at the Icelandic Consulate in New York. He’s here in Washington now and I’m a member of the family living with him, and that gives me diplomatic immunity.”

  Brandvik, who still seemed to be enjoying everything, gave her a patronizing look, his forehead and eyes in a scowl, his lips smiling. “What the hell is she talking about?” he wanted to know.

  “Diplomatic immunity,” Maja repeated.

  “A reciprocal agreement between Iceland and the States,” I explained. “Among all nations. No diplomatic personnel or members of their immediate families can be tried for crime in the countries they’re stationed in.”

  “Jesus,” said Brandvik, beginning to look scared again. “He was a Swede. You know how many Swedes have consular jobs in the States? I told you I needed a bodyguard.”

  Maja’s lips began trembling. She was the most mercurial girl I had ever met, or maybe it was the circumstances, or maybe they grow them that way in Iceland. She said, “He was the finest man I ever knew.”

  “Him?” Brandvik demanded. “Kolding?”

  “He was my father,” Maja said.

  Even Brandvik didn’t have an answer to that.

  I used his phone to call the buttons, asking for a guy I knew who worked in the Bureau of Special Services. If Maja had diplomatic immunity as she claimed, the case would be kicked upstairs to them eventually and this way she got spared the tromping of the prowl car boys, a desk sergeant with or without bunions and an unsatisfactory sex life, and a precinct lieutenant itching to use his blitz cloth on a second silver bar.

  Three Special Services detectives arrived twenty minutes later and spent the better part of two hours with us. They called New York, confirming Maja’s story. She answered their questions in monosyllables. One of them even spoke to her in Icelandic, which made Brandvik suspicious. They each could probably use five or six languages as easily as I could clear my throat, which was one of the reasons they belonged to the Bureau. Brandvik acted like a man enjoying himself at a dress rehearsal of a funeral—his own.

  The dicks left with Maja and her little belly-gun. I left with Brandvik’s copy of View Magazine. “Go on and take it,” he urged. “I got ten, twelve more in my suitcase,” he added, by way of explaining his magnanimity.

  “Do I get a free autograph too?”

  “You want it? Honest? Ah, you’re pulling my leg.” Then his face went pale. “Hey, where you going? Aren’t you gonna take a room here? How else can you protect me?” When I shrugged, Brandvik lunged at the door, flung it open and called after the detectives, “Hey, what about you guys? Aren’t you gonna protect me?”

  The dick I knew, whose name was Margeson, turned around slowly and drawled, “We’ll call you, Mr. Brandvik. Don’t you call us.”

  “You see what I’m up against?” Brandvik asked me with bitter pleasure.

  “I’ll call you,” I told him.

  “You mean you ain’t … you don’t.…”

  “I’ll give you a ring.”

  “This is driving me nuts,” Brandvik said as I got out of there. It may have been the only understatement he had made.

  Margeson stood waiting for me at the elevator door, since the car had gone down already with his partners and Maja. “What happens to the girl?” I asked him.

  “We deliver her to the Icelandic Embassy, the State Department writes us up a persona non grata sheet and she flies home. You working for Brandvik, Chester?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “He asked us for protection a couple of days ago.” Margeson laughed wryly. “But I have a hunch the request got lost.”

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “There’s lots of paper work down at the office. It could happen.” Margeson offered me a cigarette and lit it and one for himself. “The son of a bitch is a murderer,” he said. “A cold-blooded killer. We’re not the D.A.’s office and we’re not the people of the District of Columbia. The D.A. got a true bill on him, the people acquitted him, then he up and confessed for fifty G’s in a magazine with five
million readers. Naturally he can’t be tried twice for the same crime.” Margeson winked, but his face was bleak. “You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to let him blow his own goddamn nose.”

  The elevator door slid open.

  “Down?” Margeson said.

  * See Killers Are My Meat by Stephen Marlowe

  3

  AND, “DOWN, BOY!” Wally Baker said that night as he A came to the door with a buff, big-chested boxer that growled deep in its throat, planted its muscular fore-paws in my path and quivered its slate-colored chops at me in a canine snarl. “Down, Benares! Behave yourself.”

  The house was a red-brick Georgian job on a sycamore-lined red-brick street between Canal Road and the University in Georgetown, a quiet street with the smell of fog from the Potomac and the old-fashioned wrought-iron lamplights haloed softly by the fog making it look like a set from a Sherlock Holmes movie.

  Wally Baker was a big bear of a man in his mid-thirties with thinning sandy hair and smile-wrinkles radiating out from the corners of his wide-spaced eyes. “Down, Benares,” he said again, but the growling boxer wasn’t satisfied until I shook hands with its master, until Wally thumped me on the back, until we went inside together past the big ornate doorknocker and the coach light alongside the door, and until Wally got a big hunk of meat on a bone that must have weighed five pounds and dropped it on the hall floor with a thud like a brand new corpse falling.

  “What does he eat for breakfast,” I asked, “door-to-door salesmen?”

  Wally gave me his wide, lazy smile and the three years since I’d last seen him and his wife slipped away. We had all been present at the Afro-Asian conference at Benares, India. Wally and Marianne were both on the Time-Life staff then.

  “I didn’t even know you were in D.C.,” I said.

  “Been here only two months. View gave me a better deal and with the baby coming I couldn’t resist it.”

  We went into a living room that was furnished the way Wally Baker, a pipe-and-tweeds man, would like it, with big leather chairs and mahogany furniture stained and rubbed so dark it looked almost black in the dim lamplight.

  Wally stuffed a large pipe with tobacco, lit it carefully and began to pace while I sank into one of the leather chairs. Wally wasn’t usually a pacer. I looked up at him.

  “Where’s Marianne?” I said.

  “Maternity Hospital. She started getting labor pains this afternoon, so I drove her down.”

  “Hell, Wally,” I said, getting up. “I hope you didn’t come back here just to see me.”

  He waved me back into the leather chair with a hand the size of a softball glove. “Take it easy,” he urged, pacing again and not taking it easy himself. “Marianne’s had false labor a couple of times before. She made me promise not to stay. Doc’ll call me if it’s the real thing. Drink?”

  I nodded, and Wally got out the Courvoisier VSOP and poured it into a couple of snifter glasses. It is the world’s best brandy at anything under thirty bucks a bottle, and over a couple of refills we got mellow about moonlight on the Ganges and Marianne Wilder, the prettiest foreign correspondent in Benares, India, or anywhere else. It was the dog Benares that got us out of it. The boxer came into the living room, put its big head against Wally’s knee and purred. Shaking his head slowly, Wally put his snifter glass down and asked:

  “You get to read the first installment in View?”

  “This afternoon.”

  “Some story, huh?”

  “Very nice job,” I said.

  “No. I don’t mean that, I mean, a guy commits murder, gets acquitted and sells his confession for fifty thousand bucks. View’s legal eagles gave it a thorough going-over before we took it on. They didn’t want to get involved in any court action.”

  “And they won’t?”

  “You can try a man again in the District if a whole new line of evidence is introduced. Otherwise you can’t. Double jeopardy.”

  “And Brandvik’s confession, in writing and in print, isn’t admissable as new evidence?”

  “Right, it isn’t. All he’d have to do is claim he’s lying for money. A fictionalized account. There’s no law against it and the courts couldn’t touch him.”

  “Fifty thousand bucks,” I said. “That’s why I’m not rich. I have no imagination. Maybe I should have killed someone.”

  That didn’t get the laugh out of Wally it should have. It didn’t even get a smile. He said slowly: “If Brandvik killed him, Chet. If Brandvik really killed Jorgen Kolding.”

  I finished the rest of my brandy in a gulp. “What the hell are you talking about? Why should he say so if he didn’t?” Then I answered my own question. “Oh. I see what you mean. Fifty thousand smackers.”

  Wally shrugged. “There’s that. Maybe something else too. We’ll get to it. That’s why I sent you to see Brandvik. I didn’t really expect you to take the job, not for Brandvik. I’d like you to take it for me, though.”

  “Take it and do what?”

  “Find out if Brandvik really killed Jorgen Kolding. In a hurry.” Wally relit his pipe, glaring at it until it was drawing just right. “They put him through the psychiatric mill before the trial. Legally he’s not insane, but the legal definition of insanity and the medical diagnosis of mental illness don’t necessarily jive. Turns out your friend Brandvik is a borderline paranoid.”

  “Nice,” I said. “And View Magazine prints his story like gospel. He have a motive?”

  “It comes out in the second installment. He had a motive, all right. But.…” Wally’s voice trailed off as he banged his pipe in a copper ashtray the size of a dinner plate. Then he asked abruptly: “Know anything about Iceland?”

  I didn’t say anything. It was a rhetorical question.

  “Big island a thousand miles northwest of Europe,” Wally said. “Looks small’ on a map, but it’s bigger than Ireland—with just a handful of people living on it, a hundred and sixty thousand at the last census.”

  “So?”

  “So Iceland’s the latest balky member of NATO. A hundred and sixty thousand people don’t amount to much on the scale of world power politics, but geographically Iceland is probably the most strategic island in the world today.”

  “Smack-dab on the Great Circle route between northern Europe and the States,” I said. “Go ahead.”

  “Okay. Right now Iceland does more than thirty percent of its trading with Russia, Chet. Fish for grain and machinery mostly. And the figure’s going up. Iceland hasn’t gone into the Red camp yet, but one of the Cabinet Ministers is a Commie and he’s drumming up a lot of resentment for the big American military base at Keflavik up there and—”

  “Where does Brandvik come in?”

  “I’ll get to it. A while ago Iceland had this codfish war with England. Maybe you heard about it—Iceland arbitrarily extended its offshore limit to twelve miles so the British trawling fleet couldn’t fish the cod banks up there. Been a lot of loud talk and some violence too. The Icelandics are a proud, independent people.”

  I grinned. “I know. I met one of them today.”

  Wally gave me a blank look. “Huh?”

  “Maja Kolding. The gal who tried to shoot Brandvik.”

  “Kolding,” Wally said. “Kolding?”

  “Uh-huh. Jorgen Kolding’s daughter. More than likely they’ve declared her persona non grata by now.”

  “Jorgen Kolding,” Wally said, “was a real hotshot of a trouble-shooter for the U.N. Like most Scandinavians, he was scrupulously neutral on the surface but favored the West and freedom deep down underneath. He was one of those independently wealthy diplomats with a hundred friends ready to lay down their lives for him—or at least to listen to what he had to say—in every world capital. His death was a hell of a loss to the free world.”

  I lit a cigarette and for once blew three perfect smoke rings. “You’re getting at something, aren’t you?”

  “And how I am. But I didn’t know Jorgen Kolding had a daughter in Iceland. In
a way you can’t blame her for coming after Brandvik with a gun.” Wally’s smile was bleak. “After his trial the courts couldn’t touch him, but he admitted killing her father.

  “Well, anyhow. England and Iceland were getting nowhere trying to settle the codfish war. But Jorgen Kolding was a man respected on Whitehall Street and respected in Reykjavik. If anybody could bring them to terms, he could, so he’d come to Washington to meet with their Foreign Secretaries on neutral ground. Then, conveniently, a borderline paranoid with an old grudge up and murdered him.”

  “Conveniently for who? The Russians?”

  “Sure. If Iceland falls into their lap we’ll have Red missile bases staring down our throats from the north inside of a year. Mighty convenient, friend Brandvik. If he killed Jorgen Kolding.”

  Wally looked at the brandy bottle, picked it up, set it down again and said, “The day before yesterday, Chet, I stumbled into something—something really big, something that would make the Brandvik story look like a frivolous filler in a Sunday supplement in the silly season.”

  “And something that makes you wonder about Brandvik’s guilt?”

  “Wonder is putting it mildly. I was—”

  Just then the phone rang. Benares growled and stood stiffly erect, all four paws planted solidly. Wally took three long strides to the large mahogany desk, said, “God, maybe that’s the word on Marianne,” picked up the phone, grunted, “Baker here,” and listened.

  After a while he said, “Yes, doctor. Sure. I’ll be down anyway. I’ll be right there.”

  Hanging up, he told me, “Doc’s not sure if it’s false labor now or the real thing. He thought I ought to get down there.” He was already heading for the doorway that led to the hall, Benares stalking eagerly at his heels.

  “Give Marianne a kiss for, me,” I said, following him as he fastened a leash to Benares’ collar and opened the door.

  Wally nodded. The fog had thickened, misting the glass panes of the coach light outside the door. “I’ll call you right after the delivery,” Wally said, going down the outside stairs, “and we’ll get together on this again. Okay?”

  “Sure.”