Danger Is My Line

by Stephen Marlowe

  A customs officer at the gate asked for my passport. I showed it to him, counting the precious seconds while he thumbed it open to the right page and checked my visa and the immigration control stamp. He nodded, returning the green book to me. We both smiled.

  Beyond the gate a single ancient Citroën taxi was waiting. A little old man in a windbreaker and O.D. pants opened the rear door for me. I tossed the B-4 bag inside and went in after it.

  “I wasn’t sure I’d get a passenger,” the old man said in English. “One already came and went and according to the manifest there were only two, so I—”

  He made no move to get into the cab. He wanted to chat. I looked back at the gate. The guard was reading a newspaper.

  “Came and went with the stewardess?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir. They said there was an American on the plane too stopping here, but—”

  “Look,” I said. “I’m in a hurry.”

  He got behind the wheel. “You Americans are always in a hurry.” He spoke almost perfect English. “I ought to know. I worked seven years at the big military airbase at Keflavik. They said there was an American on the plane too stopping here,” he repeated, “but I thought—”

  “Who said? The stewardess and the Icelander?”

  “No, of course not. The I.A.L. passenger manifest.” He ground the starter and grinned back over his shoulder. “Well, as I believe they say in the vernacular, where to, Mac?” He chuckled. “How was that?”

  “Beautiful,” I said.

  “I learned it at Keflavik. I—where did you say you wanted to go?”

  “There’s a woman in Reykjavik named Kolding. Know where she lives?”

  He shook his head. “Want me to look it up in the directory inside?”

  “No. Let’s drive into town and we can look it up there.”

  “Right you are, Mac. How was that?”

  “Perfect,” I said. Though the sun was bright, the morning was cool with a fresh wind blowing off the tarmac. But I was sweating.

  He started driving. We turned left and paralleled the airport on a two-lane asphalt road. The guard was still reading his newspaper. I saw the first of Icelandic’s through passengers climbing the boarding ramp.

  I wondered if they’d got the officers out of the hangar yet. Welcome to Iceland, I thought.

  13

  THE CITROËN PULLED UP in front of a bright yellow stucco house with a high gabled roof. There was another yellow house on the street and two red ones and a green and a brilliant turquoise. It was a street of houses as a child might have imagined it.

  The driver, who had looked up Mrs. Kolding’s address in the telephone building a few blocks away, changed a ten dollar travelers’ check for me but pointed out that I should have changed some money at the airport.

  “See you around, Mac,” he said. “How’s that?”

  I said it was delightful.

  “Got to go and ask them to fillerup.”

  I carried my B-4 bag up the walk to Mrs. Kolding’s house and rang the bell. The door opened and a fat middle-aged woman stood in the doorway staring at me pugnaciously.

  “Mrs. Kolding?” I said.

  She said something in Icelandic, shaking her head. She slammed the door. I heard her retreating footsteps. I tried the door. She hadn’t locked it. I went inside and along a dim hallway. Ahead I heard voices. One of them was Freya Fridjonsson’s.

  The hall led to a living room with heavily ornate furniture in dark wood and thick, brocaded cushions. With her broad back to me, the pugnacious woman was bent over a figure on the sofa. It was another woman. She had silver-blonde hair but I couldn’t see her face because the pugnacious woman’s shoulder blocked it. Alongside the reclining woman was a basin of water and the pugnacious woman dipped a cloth into it, wrung it out and went to work on the other’s face. The cloth was stained pink.

  Freya sat on a chair near them. She was smoking a cigarette and she had the shakes. A bruise darkened her left cheek.

  “Chet …” she said. “He … I couldn’t help it.…” She started to cry. All the while the pugnacious woman was jabbering away. The one on the sofa never made a sound. I went to Freya. She started to get up, then swayed forward. I caught her and she clung to me limply. I could feel her heart pounding.

  “He would have killed us,” she said. “He was going to. I know he was. I screamed. I screamed, Chet. This woman came.” She started to cry again.

  “Take it easy,” I said. “It’s going to be all right now. Try to tell me what happened. Just take it easy.”

  “He … he kept hitting her and hitting her. Mrs. Kolding. He’d hit her and she’d fall down and he’d make her get up so he could hit her again. His face never … he … never changed expression. I tried to stop him. He turned and hit me. His eyes were like—like a dead man’s. I screamed. She came. He ran away.”

  The pugnacious woman grunted and stood back. The woman on the sofa sighed a long drawn-out shuddering sigh like a dying man’s final breath. Her face had been beaten, almost literally, to a pulp. The left eye was swollen purple. There was a raw red welt on the forehead. The nose had been smashed flat at the bridge. The lips were swollen and bleeding. Flesh had parted over the high right cheekbone. White bone glinted through. I couldn’t do anything for her except to elevate her feet because I thought she was suffering from shock. There was an animal skin in front of the fireplace. I covered her with it. Anything else a doctor would have to do.

  The lines of the pugnacious woman’s face softened. She said something to Freya in Icelandic, and the girl nodded.

  “You call a doctor?” I asked Freya.

  “Yes. And the police.” She trembled. “Right before you came.”

  “I haven’t much time,” I said. “It’s a long story. I’m in trouble with the cops. I can’t stay here. Tell me what happened, Freya. From the beginning.”

  The urgency in my tone must have got through to her, because after that she told it straight and she told it fast. Laxness had had a gun, a small automatic. Had showed it to her at the airport. “Where are you going with the American?” he had asked her.

  She didn’t want to answer, but when he said—and mostly, the way he said it—“Take me there instead. I will be the American. If you don’t, I will kill you. Right here. Right now.”—when he said that, so completely matter-of-factly and with such conviction, she had told him. They had taken a taxi here, and Mrs. Kolding had let them in.

  Whatever else Laxness was, he wasn’t much of an actor. He lost patience with his role almost immediately. Mrs. Kolding didn’t like him. She’ wouldn’t answer his questions. He wanted to know where Maja was. She refused to tell him. He beat her. Methodically, with both hands, about the face. She fell down. He picked her up and hit her. She fell down again. He sat her on the sofa, leaned over her and kept hitting her. Never hard enough to knock her out.

  “She told him,” Freya said. “She had to. He would have beaten her to death. I … I never knew there were people like that.” She was trembling again as she remembered. “The first thing he did was hit her in the throat, so she couldn’t scream. He hit me too. Like I was something in his way. She told him, Chet. She told him. She had to.”

  I stopped listening. Einar Laxness threw me. I couldn’t make him at all. Say he was a member of the Red apparatus that had killed Jorgen Kolding. Say he’d had a hand in killing Wally too, and Brandvik. That much figured. Tailing me also figured. Gustaf Kolding could have told him to do that, or Ollie Meer, or the Baroness. But then why go against them now? They had Maja, sick or drugged or both, under constant watch. Because she had seen who killed Brandvik? But if Laxness belonged to the apparatus too, why’d he have to come here and beat Maja’s whereabouts out of her mother?

  “… Mrs. Kolding couldn’t help it,” Freya was saying. “You don’t know what that man was like. He—it’s like he isn’t human.”

  “I know she couldn’t help it,” I said, then asked, “Where’s Maja?”

  She fi
ngered the bruise on her cheek. “Akureyri. It’s a town on the north coast of the island, on a fjord.”

  “Roads go there?”

  “Yes. The long way around, north to Reykjaskol, then east. But the police—”

  “Where can I get a car in a hurry?”

  “I have a car at home. It isn’t far.”

  “I can’t make out Laxness,” I said. “Why he’s after Maja.”

  Freya touched the bruise on her cheek again, as if it brought everything back to her. “The police,” she said. “There are police in Akureyri. They can be called. They—”

  “There are police everywhere in the world. That doesn’t stop murder from being committed.”

  “Does he want to kill her?”

  “You tell me what you think he wants.”

  A car stopped out front. Freya touched my hand, held it. Her fingers were cold.

  “There a back way out of here?” I said.

  “Yes. Come on.”

  “I told you I’m in trouble with the cops. Just show me.”

  “You need my car to get to Akureyri. If you’re in trouble you can’t take the plane.” She was already leading me across the living room. The doorbell rang.

  “You can’t stick your neck out like that for me.”

  “Then I’m doing it for Maja. She’s my friend,” Freya said. “I saw Laxness. I know what Laxness is like.”

  We ran out the back door together seconds before the police came in the front.

  14

  THE DISTANCE FROM Reykjavík to Akureyri was four hundred kilometers—almost three hundred miles—a fair day’s drive in a fast car on a first-class road.

  We drove it in an old English Ford on a road that looked as if it had been chewed by tank-treads and swallowed by storms and mangled in earthquakes and smashed by falling mountains. Late in the afternoon we reached the Greenland Sea at a little fishing port called Blonduos. It was cold and the weather had closed in and after that we drove due east through fog and occasional rain squalls. We had had coffee and open sandwiches at Blonduos but still the chill penetrated. We were very close to the Arctic Circle. Freya sat with shoulders hunched and arms crossed over her breasts. She wore a turtle-neck sweater she had picked up at home, a scarf on her hair and the skirt of her stewardess uniform, but as the long gray afternoon gave way to the longer twilight of Arctic night she trembled with the cold.

  The car belonged to her father. He hadn’t been home when we took it, so she left him a note.

  “Father’s a member of the Althing,” she had said.

  “The what?”

  “The Althing. That’s our parliament.”

  Akureyri, she also told me, was a fishing and resort town of eight thousand on the Eyjafjord off the Greenland Sea. It had a sanatorium, the only one in Iceland.

  “Do you think they have taken her there?” she asked.

  “Don’t you know?”

  “No. Only that they took her to Akureyri.”

  I shrugged. The sanatorium sounded like a pretty good bet. We’d find Maja there, I thought, if Einar Laxness didn’t get to her first.

  It took us eleven hours to reach Akureyri. That made it nine-thirty. We had driven out of the rain, and the sun hung low and bright on the horizon in the north. I felt stiff and tired and washed out. Except for the short lunch stop at Blonduos, I had been behind the wheel eleven hours.

  The sanatorium was a large stone building and a cluster of cottages on a hill overlooking the fjord, its water blood-red in the twilight sun. Behind the sanatorium was a bare, cone-shaped mountain with pink and mauve sun-reflecting snow nestled in its higher valleys. Before it and at the base of its hill was Akureyri, the brightly colored stone buildings circling the head of the fjord like gems on a tiara.

  “Lovely, isn’t it?” Freya said softly, and then sighed.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Oh, I was just thinking how nice it would be coming here on a holiday with nothing to worry about but where you are going to hike next day or if it will be warm enough to try a swim in the fjord, or who is going to dance with you at night in one of the hotels.”

  “You’d never have to worry about that,” I said, and meant it. Freya wasn’t a strikingly beautiful girl, but she had a quality of prettiness and sexuality that grew on you. It was all there but subtle and understated.

  Freya grinned wryly. “Dressed like this?”

  “Dressed any way at all. Speaking of those hotels, why don’t we check you into one of them?”

  “No you don’t. I’m going with you. If you think I’m going to stay down there on the fjord watching the sun go down—”

  “And come up again before you can blink an eye.”

  “Stop changing the subject,” Freya said obstinately. “If you think I’m going to wait there while you look for Maja, you don’t know a stubborn Icelander when you see one. Besides, this isn’t Reykjavík. Practically no one in Akureyri speaks anything but Icelandic, so I have to come with you.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Well, don’t I?” She looked very grave, and then suddenly she smiled. Her hand touched my arm, and then both hands. She sat turned toward me and close as we drove up the hill to the sanatorium. “I ought to be scared,” she said. “I ought to be scared out of my wits because I know what Einar Laxness is like. It’s funny, Chet. With you I’m not scared.” She leaned toward me. I felt her breasts warm and firm on my arm.

  “After all this is over,” she said, almost in a whisper, “maybe we can watch the sun go down on the fjord, just the two of us.”

  “And watch it come right up again?”

  “Why do that?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “I guess we wouldn’t have to watch the sun come up again at that.”

  A moment later we parked in front of the mam building of the sanatorium. I got out, went around the car, opened the door for, Freya and watched her get out in that graceful, fluid way she moved. There were about a dozen cars in the small parking area.

  “Why, that’s Maja’s car!” Freya cried, pointing to a green sedan three cars to our left. “Or rather her mother’s. I’ve driven in it.”

  The car was a Russian-built Pobeda. Here in Iceland, which did more and more of its trading with the Reds, Russian-built cars were fairly common.

  “She’s here. She’s here, Chet.”

  “Come on.”

  We went up to the big building and inside.

  The assistant superintendent of the sanatorium shook his head, said something, and shook his head again. Freya asked another question in Icelandic. Again he shook his head negatively.

  “He says people come here to rest,” Freya told me. “He says they don’t receive visitors unless they’re requested. He won’t even tell me if Maja’s here or not.”

  “We know she’s here.”

  “I already told him that.”

  “Tell him you’re her friend.”

  “I already told him that too. It doesn’t matter, he says.”

  “Ask him if anyone else has been here asking for her.”

  Freya asked the question. The assistant superintendent shook his head again. He wasn’t a guy to waste words.

  “Well, at least that’s something,” Freya said.

  “Tell him I’m going to knock on every door in the place until we find out where they’re staying.”

  Freya looked doubtful but translated that into Icelandic. The assistant superintendent said eight or ten words. It was a long speech for him.

  “He says he will call the police.”

  “Yeah, he can do that. But tell him if he’s trying to avoid a disturbance that’s the wrong way to do it.”

  Freya translated, but that didn’t get through to him either. He shook his head once more. Freya said, “Let me try something, all right?”

  I nodded, and she spoke rapidly and angrily for a few moments; The assistant superintendent got interested almost with the first words, then he got angry, then he got sulky and f
inally a resigned look stamped itself on his features. When Freya was finished talking he said a few words.

  “They have cottages eight and nine,” Freya told me triumphantly.

  “How’d you twist his arm?”

  “I told him my father was a member of the Althing. I told him my father would know which way to vote the next time an appropriation came up for the sanatorium. It’s run by the state, you see.”

  We went outside and up the hill on a path paved with seashells past the first few cottages. The hill was treeless, since all Iceland is virtually without timber, but the small single-story cottages were set back behind screens of evergreen bushes. It was very quiet and with the lurid glow of the sun hanging low on the horizon, time seemed suspended.

  Cottages eight and nine were dark. We crunched along the path to eight. I knocked at the door. No answer. We moved over to nine and I tried again. They were very small cottages, each probably containing a single bedroom, a bath and perhaps a kitchen. I heard bedsprings creak.

  A man’s voice on the other side of the door said something in Icelandic, a single word inflected as a question. I thought I recognized the voice.

  Freya answered him. Among other things she said her own name and Maja’s.

  The door opened about three inches. I saw an eye and a nose and pink-blond hair on a level higher than my head. I’m six-one, so I was right about the voice: it belonged to Gustaf Kolding.

  The single eye I saw widened when it got a look at me. “You!” Gustaf Kolding said. “What the hell are you doing here?” Then he slammed the door. I heard the lock tumblers fall. “All right, Kolding,” I said. “Open up in there. I want to talk to you.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Open up,” I said. “It’s about your sister.”

  He still didn’t answer.

  “Open it,” I said. “I didn’t come over two thousand miles to have a door slammed in my face.”