Danger Is My Line

by Stephen Marlowe

  He gave me the silent treatment once again.

  I took one step back away from the door. Then I raised my right foot and kicked hard with the flat of my shoe against the door, right alongside the handle. If you do that, and if you weigh a hundred ninety pounds, as I do, and if you’re in reasonably good shape, only one thing can happen. There was a loud splintering sound as the lock-bolt tore away part of the door jamb. The door flew in, swiveling all the way and slamming against the wall.

  It was a small bedroom. Baroness Margaretha was sitting up in bed with a startled look on her insolent-eyed, thick-lipped, beautiful face. From the waist up she wore only the lurid light that streamed in through the windows. Her bare breasts were like firm, ripe melons.

  She was nice to look at, if you like your sex thrown at you. There are times when I like it that way or any way at all, but this wasn’t one of those times.

  Gustaf Kolding came away from the bed and jumped me. He bellowed and swung wildly. That one blow would have taken the head off a rhinoceros, had it landed. It didn’t even come close.

  I slid under it and Kolding almost went out the door. As he started to turn I hit him with my left below the ribs on his right side. All he wore was pajama bottoms, and my fist made a wet smacking sound against his flesh. He countered with his own right, but again it was wild and high and only grazed my forehead. That set him up for the left again, and he got it. If he was mad, I was madder. But I was cold-mad, not crazy with it. All I wanted to do was save his sister’s life. I drove the left twice into his belly. He started to sag.

  Then I heard a movement behind me, and the next thing I knew Baroness Margaretha’s strong bare arms were wrapped around my arms. I felt her breasts pressing against my back.

  “Hit him!” she cried. “Hit him, Gustaf!”

  I saw Freya’s frightened face in the doorway behind Kolding. The Baroness clung to me. I felt her hot breath on my neck. And, obediently, Kolding hit me. In the belly, as I had hit him, twice. Then he crossed his right and I went back fast, taking the Baroness with me. Kolding’s knuckles barely scraped my jaw. The Baroness and I fell down on the bed. I shoved her away from me and she lay there panting, her long fair hair loose and down to her waist, her pink breasts peeking out, her eyes wild in the lurid twilight.

  I got up in tune to pick off a Kolding left in mid-air. He threw a right and I started under it but it caught me high on the cheek. He was a pretty good boxer, probably as good as I was, and he out-weighed me by thirty pounds or more. Now that he had settled down out of his first rage and was fighting scientifically—and especially if the Baroness decided to help him again—I’d have a fight on my hands. If I fought it his way. His way was the way they teach you in college or even in the gyms if you’re big enough and tough enough and dumb enough to want to earn a living with your fists. But I’m a pro in a different school—where you fight not for a championship purse but for your life.

  We circled each other. He feinted with a left, missed with a right and moved back in a hurry. I opened my fists, extending my fingers together and stiffly with my thumbs at right angles to them. Do that and you will feel the muscle along the edge of your palm go tense and hard. With a little practice, you can smash wood planks with it. With even less practice you can kill a man.

  “Cut it out,” I said. “I don’t want to fight with you. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  He laughed and swung the right. I bobbed my head. His fist felt like sandpaper rasped across my ear. Then I used the edge of my palm, once, not too hard, in the opening he had given me. I drove it against his torso in front of the kidney. An inch further back might have injured him permanently. An inch higher up would have cracked his floating rib. As it was, he let out a single hoarse cry of pain, fell to the floor and rolled over clutching his side.

  The Baroness Margaretha went to him quickly, crouching near him, sobbing, forgetting her nakedness. I forgot it too.

  Freya came into the room. Even in the strange twilight of the midnight sun her face was very pale.

  “Shut the door,” I told her.

  She shut it.

  Gustaf Kolding groaned. The Baroness looked up at me. If looks could kill, Freya would have had to make the long drive back to Reykjavik herself.

  I asked the Baroness, “Where’s Maja?”

  15

  IT WAS FIVE MINUTES LATER. The Baroness had cussed me out, a long string of hissed obscenities in English and Swedish, in combinations that would have made a stevedore blush.

  “Finished?” I said.

  Kolding was sitting up now, but huddled awkwardly over the pain in his side. Freya was smoking nervously, her back to the door.

  “Go put something on,” I told the Baroness. “The next time I see a naked girl I don’t want to think of all the beautiful things you said.”

  She glared at me but padded barefoot into the bathroom. She came out wearing a shorty robe that ended at mid-thigh. Both her hands were thrust into the big front pockets. She removed her right hand as she came across the room. In it she held a small gun with a surprisingly long barrel as thin as a pencil. It was a .22 target pistol. Freya cried out. Kolding looked up and laughed.

  The Baroness came close to me, pointing the target pistol about six inches below my belt line. “They are small bullets,” she said. “Very small, you understand? They won’t kill you.” She smiled. “I’m going to ruin you with them. I’m going to ruin you, Mr. Detective.”

  But she came too close. She didn’t want to miss.

  I slapped the target pistol out of her hand. Kolding rolled over for it. Freya dove for it and got there first. She stood up and backed off holding the target pistol. I looked at Kolding and the Baroness.

  “Here comes a speech,” I said. I got the Magnum out of its holster. “I’ve got a gun too. It’s a big one. It can blow holes in people. It’s done so before. I came in here not wanting to use it. Crazy, huh? With people like you.”

  “What do you want to say, Drum?” Kolding demanded.

  “Hold your horses, mister. You bought yourself a speech. I came to Iceland because one of you, or maybe both of you, killed Wally Baker.”

  “He’s out of his mind,” Baroness Margaretha said.

  I ignored her. “Or if you didn’t, you know who did. But I picked up trouble in Reykjavík right away. Guy named Laxness who came over from the States in the same plane with me. You told him to follow me, right?”

  Kolding and Baroness Margaretha exchanged meaningful glances. They were happy to learn friend Laxness had arrived. But I had news for them.

  “Only it seems Einar Laxness was more interested in finding Maja than in tailing me. He got me tangled in red tape at the airport, Kolding, and went to visit your mother. We got there after he did. He had asked your mother where Maja was. Because she didn’t like the way he asked, or for whatever reason, she wouldn’t tell him. He made her.”

  “What are you saying?” Kolding’s eyes had narrowed to slits in his handsome, rugged face. He looked like a badly frightened man. “What are you talking about?”

  “He beat her. Laxness gave your mother a beating, Kolding. She’s probably in the hospital right now.”

  “He’s lying, Gustaf!” Baroness Margaretha cried. “Can’t you see he’s lying?”

  Gustaf said, “Shut up. Shut up, damn you.”

  “Freya and I drove here to help you. Or to help Maja anyway. I guess I could have saved myself some grief and called the cops, but who the hell knows if you can trust the cops around here with a third of Iceland voting Red and the other two thirds dickering? Maybe Laxness had the cops in his pocket, I thought, so I came here. To find you two rolling in the hay.” I grinned, felt it freeze there on my face. “A roll in the hay with the Baroness isn’t a bad idea, Kolding. Ordinarily I could go for it myself—if she didn’t take a target pistol to bed with her. But I thought Maja was sick. I thought you were watching her.”

  “She is suffering from hysterical shock,” Margaretha said. “She has ret
rograde amnesia. The doctor said she needed rest and relaxation in a familiar environment. That’s why we brought her here to Akureyri. She grew up here.”

  “Pretty convenient for you, huh?” I said. “Retrograde amnesia. She doesn’t remember what happened that night in Brandvik’s room at the Central Arms, that night Brandvik was killed.”

  “She is going to get her memory back here,” Margaretha insisted. “This place is good for her. She will get well. She will remember.”

  “Remember who really murdered her father?” I said.

  Gustaf Kolding got up for the first time since I had ended the fight. He came close to me, ignoring the gun in my hand but not trying to go for it either, and said, “What do you know about that, Drum? What do you know about how Jorgen Kolding died?”

  “Don’t be a fool, Gustaf,” file Baroness said coldly. “He knows nothing.”

  Kolding took a deep breath and then let it out. I could see the hard pectoral muscles on his bare chest relax. “George Brandvik killed my father,” he said. “He confessed.” Kolding sat down on the bed, slumped forward and massaged the back of his neck with a big hand.

  “Gustaf had a problem, you see,” the Baroness said. “He hated his father. And he had the usual guilt feelings. His father deserted the family when he was very young, making his mother’s life miserable because she still loved him. So—”

  “Save the lay analysis for some other time,” I snapped. “Let’s get back to Maja. She was in Brandvik’s room the night he died, looking for something.”

  “We know she was there,” Margaretha said. “I called for you, remember? She had phoned me.”

  “Like hell she phoned you. She couldn’t have, not in the condition she was in.”

  “You called for him?” Kolding asked the Baroness. “What are you talking about?”

  She said quickly, “You know Maja was in trouble. I thought Drum might help her. I certainly couldn’t.” She went to the bed and stroked Kolding’s shoulder, kneaded the back of his neck with her long, strong fingers. “Maja tried to kill Brandvik once before, Gustaf,” she said with gentle patience. “What else could I think but that this time she had murdered him? And though she couldn’t be touched for it by the law courts, still the police could have made it unpleasant. Drum had prevented it once. I thought—I hoped—he would do that again.”

  “Maja didn’t kill anyone,” Kolding said. “She couldn’t have.”

  The Baroness shook her head sadly, and shrugged. I asked her, “What are you doing to Maja to make sure she keeps on forgetting?”

  “You’re a fool, Drum. She is with friends. She will get well. Right now she’s with Ollie Meer. Don’t you think he wants to help her? He isn’t very much of a man, but he loves her.”

  “Because whatever you’re doing,” I said, “it doesn’t seem to be enough for Einar Laxness. He came here after Maja. To kill her?”

  “Came here before you did?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then where is he now? Where is he now, Drum?”

  “Where’s Maja?”

  “With Ollie on the mountain,” Kolding said. “Taking a hike. She loves to hike in this country.”

  “It’s good for her,” the Baroness said.

  I said, “Laxness wouldn’t be so good for her.”

  “Laxness was told to keep an eye on you in the States,” Kolding admitted. “Not to come here.”

  “He’s here,” Freya said.

  “Ask your mother,” I said.

  Kolding looked at me, as if for the first time realizing what I had told him about his mother. “I—I thought you were lying,” he said. “If that son of a bitch dared lay a finger on her—”

  “He hurt her, Mr. Kolding,” Freya said. “He hurt her.”

  Kolding stood up. He looked at the Baroness. Suppressed rage flattened his voice, and fear shook it. “I’m getting dressed. We’re going after Maja.”

  The Baroness started to say, “Why should we believe what Drum—” But she saw Kolding’s face and said, “Very well. I’m coming too.”

  Five minutes later the three of us started out. We left Freya in the cottage, locked in with the Baroness’ target pistol. If Maja and Ollie Meer returned, she was to let them in. If Laxness came …

  But Laxness wouldn’t come there. He had reached Akureyri before we did. By now he knew where Maja was.

  16

  MOSQUITOES SWARMED IN THE LONG TWILIGHT of the sub-Arctic summer night. We started up the hill slapping at the exposed skin of our necks and faces. We left the grounds of the sanatorium behind us and climbed up a rocky path at the foot of the mountain that dominated Akureyri, and there the wind blew stronger and the mosquitoes weren’t so bad.

  After fifteen minutes we met the first hikers. They were coming down the mountain. Despite the cold wind they wore only shorts and short-sleeved shirts. They had big metal-framed canvas rucksacks strapped to their backs. The skin of their bare, sturdy arms and legs glistened with mosquito-oil and sweat.

  Margaretha spoke to them in Icelandic, probably describing Ollie Meer and Maja and asking if they had seen them. The man shook his head. The woman said something. We kept climbing.

  The hiking path went up steeply, switching back from ledge to ledge. Pretty soon the drop below us was steep and awesome. There were no guard rails. You could see miles out into the fjord. Diesel-driven fishing trawlers skimmed its surface like water bugs, their hanging, drying nets the wings. A bright yellow seaplane, bobbing on the tide, was moored at a pier at the head of the fjord.

  An old man wearing a wool sweater and leather shorts came down the path toward us. When the Baroness spoke to him, he nodded. Kolding asked a question too, and again the old man nodded.

  “He’s seen them?” I asked.

  “Yes,” the Baroness said. “Up ahead. Not far. Coming down.”

  “What about Laxness?”

  Kolding put it to the old man in Icelandic. This time he shook his head negatively. He stood in the path watching us climb where he had come down from.

  “If he so much as touches her,” Kolding vowed, “I’m going to kill him.”

  “Be quiet,” the Baroness said. “We’ll find Maja.”

  Ahead of us the ledge widened. It opened on a narrow valley, a gash in the mountainside where wind-stunted bushes clung to the slope. Rocks thrust up out of the earth skeletally, some of them covered with moss or lichen. Among them narrow dry stream beds traced tortuous paths, like the scratchings of a berserk Jotunheim giant from the Icelandic sagas.

  The gnarled fingers of the bushes caught at our legs. The wind shrieked, rattling their tight branches. Margaretha said something.

  “I can’t hear you,” Kolding shouted.

  “I see them.” The Baroness pointed.

  At the head of the valley, twilight-pink snow lay in the deep hollows among the rocks. Two figures were silhouetted against it. A man and a girl, both small and slender. Had Einar Laxness set the stage himself, he could not have picked a better spot for an ambush. He could be anywhere among the rocks, waiting. They would not see him until it was too late. Or, perhaps they would not see him at all. Gunning for Maja, Laxness would have waited for a spot like this, a moment like this. It was late. Most of Akureyri’s hikers had left the mountain. The midnight sun was finally dipping into the fjord, but its light clung to the snow. Their figures were etched sharply against it.

  “Maja!” Kolding called. He waved both arms over his head. But the wind lifted his voice, merged with it, carried it away.

  “Maja!” he roared.

  The wind answered him.

  I started running.

  Distances were deceptively short in the strange twilight. I ran hard, pumping my knees high, without seeming to cut the distance between us. For a few moments I heard Kolding’s voice behind me, then only the wind. Einar Laxness was a real pro, I thought. I had seen the way he could operate at the Reykjavík airport. Figure he had arrived here in Akureyri hours before Freya and I. Still, he wou
ld have been in no hurry. Kill Maja down at the sanatorium and chances were he’d be caught. Follow her on the mountain, lie in wait for her earlier, and other hikers might witness the murder.

  Now, I thought. Here and now. This was his chance, and he would know it. I felt blood roaring in my ears, pounding in my temples. They hung there in silhouette against the pink snow, Ollie Meer and Maja. Maja—sitting duck for a killer who had come two thousand miles to get her.

  I got the Magnum loose from its holster and fired twice into the air. The shots echoed from the higher slopes of the mountain.

  Ollie Meer and Maja kept walking.

  I saw the silhouette that was Meer point toward me. Probably he had seen the muzzle-flash. But they didn’t dive for cover. Why should they? No one had told them Einar Laxness was in Iceland. I could have been a hiker pot-shooting at the rocks with a target gun. I could have been plinking at sea-gulls with an air-rifle. I could have been just about anything but a killer gunning for them.

  I shouted against the wind futilely, waving my arms as Kolding had done.

  Ollie Meer waved at me casually. I’m big, almost Kolding’s size. Maybe he thought I was Kolding.

  Then I saw his silhouette stiffen in a sudden pose of alertness exaggerated by the bright field of sun-reflecting snow behind him. He must have seen Kolding and the Baroness running up behind me, and three of us didn’t make any sense to him.

  I fired again, this time aiming for a rock a couple of dozen yards to Ollie Meer’s left. I heard the quick answering whang of the slug ricocheting.

  Meer grabbed Maja’s arm then. They started to go down. And a gunshot roared, echoing. Not mine.

  Unseen marionette wires jerked Meer away from Maja. He flung his arms skyward, parodying a benediction, and fell. Maja went down on her knees after him.

  Another shot slammed across the narrow valley. The top of a rock exploded a half dozen feet ahead of me. He would guess, now, we had come after Maja. And he had committed himself.

  He had a new target. Me.