Danger Is My Line

by Stephen Marlowe

  The nurse came to unwrap the helmet of bandages on my head. The two doctors gave me a thorough examination, jabbering away in Icelandic.

  “How soon can I get out of here?”

  Dr. Ericsson scowled. “I would like to see you ambulatory in three or four days. In a week, perhaps, you may be well enough to leave.”

  “That’s too long.”

  “You’re too sick.”

  The nurse wrapped a fresh helmet of white gauze for me. “I would like you to meet Dr. Kvaran,” Ericsson said, indicating the younger medic. Kvaran nodded curtly. He had a baby-face and lidded, sleepy-looking eyes.

  The nurse was preparing a hypo. I shook my head. “No more needles, doc. When I’m sleepy, I’ll sleep.”

  Shrugging, Dr. Ericsson said, “As you wish.” He yawned. “Time I went off duty, I think, Mr. Drum. If you need anything, Dr. Kvaran—”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Dr. Ericsson left with the nurse. “I couldn’t dun you for a smoke?” I asked Dr. Kvaran.

  “No. Sorry.”

  “Doctor, there’s something I’d like to ask you. About Maja Kolding.”

  “Yes?” The baby-face was guileless. The sleepy eyes couldn’t have looked less interested.

  “I know how doctors hate to diagnose on the basis of hearsay, but can you give it a try? It may be important.”

  “I will do what I can to help you.”

  “Well, she looked kind of drowsy when I saw her, but she was agitated too. She couldn’t keep her thinking straight from one minute to the next. First she said she knew me. She even called me by name. Then a minute later she didn’t know who I was, even became afraid I might hurt her. She was confused. Her eyes were too big. I don’t mean the pupils—the eyes themselves. You know, showing white all around the irises?”

  “And you wish to know …?”

  “If she was being drugged. If there’s any kind of drug that could produce those symptoms.”

  Kvaran lit a cigarette. “You mind?”

  “Not at all. Hell, blow some in my direction while you’re at it.”

  He inhaled, let the smoke out thoughtfully. “The condition you describe,” he said, “could be brought about simply by emotional shock. But then again, there are drugs that can duplicate in the human organism almost any known traumatic state. I am frankly at a loss, Mr. Drum. If I could see’ the patient …” He showed me his palms in a wordless but eloquent gesture. Like most educated Icelanders, he spoke English with an Oxford accent.

  “If it wasn’t a drug,” I said, “would you care to take a crack at diagnosing it?”

  “If your description was accurate, there are several possibilities. One of the most likely is what we call traumatic amnesia. The patient undergoes a great shock, and there is a consequent lapse of memory for a variable period of time before—and possibly after—the occurrence.”

  “What’s the prognosis on that one?”

  “It depends on the individual. But with rest, with a familiar environment, with loving care, memory should return eventually and the state of agitation and drowsiness cease.”

  “Well, let’s say someone didn’t want it to end. Let’s say they wanted to keep the patient sick. Could they keep her that way?”

  “Well, I would say it could be done for a time but not indefinitely. Were the patient kept on stimulants, and if she were not permitted to rest—but even then the situation would eventually reverse itself.”

  “There’s nothing more extreme?”

  “There is L.S.D.,” he said. “That is d-lysergic acid, an experimental psychosis-inducing drug. Given in limited doses it could produce the state you describe. Given in greater doses it would produce the symptoms of a severe psychosis. But I hardly think Einar Laxness would have access to d-lysergic acid.”

  “Not Laxness. He showed up too late for that. I mean Gustaf Kolding or Baroness Margaretha.”

  “The same applies. Where would they get L.S.D.? I’m afraid, in this hypothetical case of yours, you’ll have to settle for ordinary stimulants.”

  We batted it around a while longer, then Dr. Kvaran left. Blame it on concussion or fatigue or both, but the alarm bells which should have started going off in my head were silent.

  They gave me broth and dry toast for supper, and then Freya’s father came to see me. Gunnar Fridjonsson was a Viking in twentieth-century dress. He wore his blond hair long, and he had a beard that would have put Dr. Ericsson’s to shame. He had an enormous pair of shoulders and a torso like a tree trunk. His face was craggy, the pale blue eyes deep-set.

  “That daughter I have,” he said in a booming voice. His English was not as good as Freya’s. “She used to bring home stray dogs when she was a little girl. To this inclination I believe we owe this meeting.”

  He didn’t offer to shake hands. “You have been in Iceland how long?” he boomed. “Not counting the time in the hospital here? A day? Are you trying perhaps to turn our little country upside down? The customs and immigration officials were looking for you, the police are holding a suitcase belonging to you—found in the house of the Kolding woman in Reykjavík—and a man died on Akureyri Mountain because you came here.”

  “Not exactly because I came here,” I said.

  “No?” he challenged me.

  “Unless you’d just as soon he got away—after shooting Maja Kolding. That’s what he went up there for.”

  “Mr. Drum, so you make no mistakes, I am not here to vilify you. I have—how do you say?—squared your accounts with the police. For that you may thank my little Freya. But the last three nights I have had very little time to sleep, and I cannot say it would not have been better for Iceland had you stayed in America.”

  “Maja Kolding’s still alive.”

  “Would they have tried to kill her, Mr. Drum, had you remained in America?”

  I couldn’t answer that question with a straight yes or no. If I hadn’t flown to Iceland, would Einar Laxness have come? Only Laxness himself could answer that question, and Laxness had disappeared.

  “She’s a sick girl,” I said. “They’re trying to keep her sick.”

  “You say.”

  “Ask Freya.”

  He shrugged that suggestion aside with his massive shoulders. “She is very impressionable, my little Freya.”

  “Tell me about Laxness,” I said, changing the subject.

  Gunnar Fridjonsson paced to the window, stalked back to the door. Then he came and stood near my bed. “Einar Laxness is an opportunist. But to know what that means in Iceland, you have to understand our little country. In the 1930’s, Mr. Drum, we Icelanders did most of our trading with Spain. A great many of us still can speak Spanish.

  “Laxness then was a very young man, barely twenty. He was caught up in the Spanish war for two years. He had the look of an innocent child, then, until he was disfigured in a bombing. There is talk that he did intelligence work for both sides. But things grew—how do you say?—too hot for Laxness in Spain, and his activities there came to an end.

  “When next he appeared, it was after World War II. Laxness was in Sweden trying to arrange for the escape of several top Nazi war criminals who had been in hiding. He was found by the authorities in Malmö with a fortune in Swedish kronor on him. Ironically, the money turned out to be counterfeit. Laxness was able to prove that he. had received it in good faith. He was not prosecuted.

  “He turned up next in England. But again time had passed. Iceland had turned from the Mediterranean trade to trading with Great Britain, and Laxness worked for an import-export firm. But once again there was a lapse in time. He did not appear in England until 1950. There were rumors that he had been in East Prussia, and though these rumors could not be proved, the fact is that three missing war criminals were turned over to the Russians. Two others were murdered. It would seem,” Fridjonsson said dryly, “that Einar Laxness had his revenge for the counterfeit money.”

  “He gets around.”

  “All opportunists do. Laxness left Eng
land in 1952. He disappeared for four years. Some say he went to South America. Some say he went East to work for the Russians. An East German refugee, now living in Sweden, claimed that Laxness became a paid assassin for the Russians. This may be. There is no proof beyond hearsay. But the fact is, Laxness could have been very valuable to the Reds. He spoke German like a native and, during his war years, had gathered information on many second-string Nazis.

  “At any rate, in 1956 he returned here. By then our trade with England was going sour, Mr. Drum. Why should they trade machinery for our codfish when they could trawl our fishing banks themselves? Laxness was aware of this, had been out of import-export for years. Besides, he seemed to be independently wealthy. Whether he earned the money in South America or from the Russians, I cannot say. But every few months he would leave the country for a while. For example, he left in 1957, when the Central European Premier, Novotny, was murdered. There is a report, again unsubstantiated, that Laxness was there when it happened. I cannot say for sure. No one can.”

  “In other words, Laxness may be a paid political assassin for the Reds?”

  “It may be as you say.” Fridjonsson glowered. “As a case in point, Premier Novotny had been out of favor with the Russian bosses. He was killed, and—”

  “And if a local talent did it, there might be recriminations. But Laxness, the outside expert in murder, could come and go like a shot, so no one would ever be sure who killed Novotny or why.”

  “Precisely, Mr. Drum. And there have been others.”

  It made damn good sense. I thought of gangland slayings in the States. The talent is usually imported. If the Syndicate wants someone iced in. L.A., they fly in a hatchetman from, say, Chicago. The victim is fingered, the talent performs, and flies back to the Midwest on the next plane. No time for a dragnet, no sweat, all the local hands are clean. The same would apply on an international level. Substitute international Communism for the Syndicate, substitute. Laxness for the out-of-town talent, and you get the picture.

  I said, “Could Jorgen Kolding have been one of those others? Jorgen Kolding, in Washington, trying to cement the differences between Iceland and England?”

  “Those differences cannot be cemented. Great Britain—”

  “You’re getting off the track. Could Laxness have been ordered by the Reds to take out Jorgen Kolding?”

  My reference to Kolding’s mission had upset him. “Don’t snap at me, young man. I still say you’re responsible for the trouble we’re having. If you hadn’t come here, or if you had to come and had gone to the police—”

  “I’m a private detective, Mr. Fridjonsson. I work with the police when I can. I work without them if I have to. I don’t have to tell you what my license is worth in a foreign country. As for the Icelandic police, you tell me. I don’t know your politics, Mr. Fridjonsson, but you’re a government official and you start climbing on your high horse as soon as the subject gets around to Great Britain. As for the cops,” I said again, “hell, a third of Iceland votes Red, your government does more and more of its trading with the Iron Curtain countries—you tell me where I would have got with the cops. Or what might have happened to Maja Kolding if I’d gone to them.”

  “Maja Kolding,” he said stubbornly, “is being taken care of by a member of her family.”

  “Would that have satisfied you if it was Freya we were talking about?”

  “Maja Kolding went to Sweden, willingly, with her brother.” We tried staring each other down. I remembered what Freya had said about her father, how stubborn he was.

  “Climb down off your goddamn high horse,” I said, “long enough to listen to me.”

  “I don’t have to stand here listening to you talk like that!”

  “No, you don’t. Remember you came to see me.”

  He went stalking to the door and stood there a moment. I saw his shoulders slump. He turned around abruptly and came back to me.

  “Young man, no one’s talked to me like that in years.” He was not quite smiling. “Perhaps it is good for. the ego. I’m ready to listen to whatever you want to say.”

  But our yelling brought Dr. Kvaran into the room. “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” he said. “I could hear you down at the other end of the hall. This is exactly the sort of thing our patient must not be subjected to. He’s still a sick man.” His guileless baby-face looked apologetically in Fridjonsson’s direction. “I’m afraid I must ask you to leave now, sir. The patient needs sleep.”

  “I’m at a hotel in Akureyri. The Greenland Sea. I’ll see you in the morning, Drum. And I’ll listen.”

  “See you in the morning,” I said, offering my hand. This time he shook it. Then he left.

  Dr. Kvaran called for a nurse, who propped my pillows and refilled my water carafe. “This patient is not to be disturbed under any circumstances,” he said in English for my benefit, then in Icelandic for the nurse’s. “He needs sleep.”

  They went out together. The twilight dimmed slowly. After, a while the patient slept.

  And almost died in his sleep.

  Not, as they write it on the death certificates, of natural causes.

  18

  I FLOATED UP OUT OF SLEEP SLOWLY, aware all at once of danger.

  “Who’s there?”

  Silence first. Then a soothing, apologetic voice: “I’m sorry if I’ve awakened you, Mr. Drum.”

  “Doctor?”

  “Yes. Dr. Kvaran. This will only take a moment.”

  “What will?” I strained against the darkness to see him.

  “I have a shot for you.” His voice still soft, still soothing.

  My facial muscles struggled with a smile. It was like the hoariest of hospital jokes, with the young graduate nurse waking a patient for his forgotten sleeping pill in the middle of the night. But I didn’t smile. I dredged memory, almost had it, then lost it. Something Dr. Kvaran had said.

  “It will only take a moment,” he repeated.

  I felt his hand on my shoulder. He was strong. I wasn’t. I’d had only a couple of cups of broth and some toast between me and starvation the past three days. He pushed with gentle firmness, and I settled down on my back.

  “Shall we have light?” he said. “I didn’t wish to wake you, but now you’re up—”

  “Yeah. Let’s have some light.”

  He touched the switch on the night stand. Light gleamed on the water carafe and on his face. He was sweating. Outside, a tubercular patient coughed rackingly in his sleep. Dr. Kvaran didn’t quite jump a foot.

  In his right hand he gripped a hypo.

  “The left arm,” he said. “Roll the sleeve, please.”

  I shook my head. “No more needles, doc. I want out in a couple of days.”

  White shone dully in the lidded eyes. “You need this.”

  The guileless baby-face hovering. The needle waiting.

  “I think you better get out of here, Dr. Kvaran.”

  “No needle?” He tried to smile re-assuringly, as if I was behaving like a child. But his lips were trembling.

  “No needle.”

  The seconds hung in the dim light, in the silence. Outside there was another racking cough. A man, probably the same one, moaned in his sleep.

  Kvaran leaned toward me. His left hand shot out and gripped my throat. It was like a steel band. I lacked the strength to fight it, lacked the breath to yell. His right hand moved with the hypo toward my left arm.

  I flailed at his side with my own right hand. All it got from him was a grunt. I flailed out again, weakly but wildly. Felt my fingers touch something hard and cold. It was the heavy water carafe on the night stand.

  I gripped the glass neck, lifted, felt water slosh on my hand. I smashed the carafe against the side of Dr. Kvaran’s head.

  It struck with a thud, and glass shattered. Water geysered all over me. Shards of glass stung my face. The needle stung too, once, lightly, barely pricking my skin. Then Dr. Kvaran stumbled back, tripped, fell. The hypo dropped on the bed as he stumbled
away from me. He sat there clutching the side of his face. Blood trickled through his fingers.

  And then something, I don’t know what, triggered memory. He had said something about Laxness. He had said Laxness couldn’t have had access to the experimental psychotic drug, to L.S.D. But I hadn’t mentioned Laxness to him. He had brought the name up out of his own awareness, his own memory.

  I stood over him with the hypo in my hand. He looked up at me. His brow, cheek and jaw were bleeding. Fragments of glass glinted in the deeper cuts. I was weak from the after-effects of concussion, from lack of food. But he was now very much weaker—the carafe had dropped him to the floor, had almost knocked him out.

  Bending down and grabbing the front of his white hospital tunic, I said, “Maybe you’d like some of your own medicine, doc?”

  His lidded eyes got big for the first time. He stared, fascinated, at the needle. I brought it close to his face.

  “Don’t,” he begged. “Don’t.”

  “What’s the matter, doc? Afraid of a little needle? You must give five, six of them a day. A little needle won’t hurt you. Will it?”

  He watched the slender silver point. His eyes crossed watching it as I brought it close to his face. He reached out with his bloody hand to push it away. I slapped the hand aside.

  “Morphine,” he said. “Enough to kill.”

  He giggled then as if he’d taken the morphine—enough to give him a jag. Then he began to cry.

  I felt his body go slack, a hospital tunic, blood-splattered, with weight but no strength. I let go of him.

  “Einar Laxness’ orders?” I said.

  “… yes, Laxness.”

  “You work for him?”

  “No.”

  “But he paid you?”

  “No.”

  “Got something over you?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “Then what the hell?”

  Kvaran sat on the floor, staring down at his lap. He jerked his head up, spraying blood. And he said, “The end justifies the means. Any means.” Like something he had learned as a child, and remembered, and was reciting by rote. “We are a small country. England is robbing what wealth we have. We’ve found help. A giant.”