Danger Is My Line

by Stephen Marlowe

  “Russia,” I said.

  His stare was defiant.

  “The Czechs thought they found a giant,” I said. “So did the Hungarians. They got stepped on.”

  “That’s irrelevant.”

  “Yeah. Isn’t it always?”

  “You don’t understand. You’re not trying to understand. With Iceland it’s different.” He spoke with an almost pedantic stubbornness now, as if he had forgotten he’d tried to kill me.

  “I’ll bet a dead man wouldn’t think much of the difference,” I said, wanting to keep him talking because his defenses were down and he might run off at the mouth about Laxness. “Like Jorgen Kolding.”

  His eyes remained defiant, and I didn’t think he knew anything about Kolding. There was no reason why he should have.

  “The difference wouldn’t matter to a paid professional killer like Einar Laxness,” I said.

  “All great movements have had their men like Laxness. They are needed. They can be weathered.”

  “Did Laxness tell you that?”

  “Him?” Dr. Kvaran smiled bitterly. “He wouldn’t understand. He is a means to an end.”

  “What end?”

  “You are talking in specifics. I am talking in generalities.”

  “Why’d they take Maja to Sweden? Did Laxness buy the idea?”

  “Laxness will kill her. He has to.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you gave that drug—L.S.D.—to Gustaf Kolding. Didn’t you?”

  “Please. I gave it to the Baroness. I need help. My face …”

  “Why’d you give it to them?”

  “You think I am a killer? L.S.D. doesn’t kill. It was my suggestion. Mine. The Baroness was frantic. They had to do something. Maja knew something which frightened them. But there was a shock … traumatic amnesia … she had forgotten. If she remembered, when she remembered, they would have to kill her.”

  “What was it she knew?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “No. I swear it. I don’t know.”

  “About Kolding’s father? In the States?”

  “I don’t know. I suggested L.S.D. To keep the girl in a state of confusion. Then Laxness came. It didn’t satisfy Laxness.” His voice dropped so low I could barely hear it.

  “You knew Laxness wanted her killed?”

  The dogma of his ideology and the creed of his profession fought a battle on his face. He sobbed, “I didn’t want to believe it. I tried not to believe it. Even when he told me to order her, as her doctor, to take a hike—to climb that mountain where I guessed he’d be waiting for her.” The words came in hoarse gasps from his throat, like a death rattle. “He will kill her. He must.”

  “Why?”

  But I didn’t get any more answers out of him. He wiped his fingers on his white ducks and left a bloody handprint. He stood up unsteadily. “I need help. I have lost too much blood.”

  “Why must Laxness kill her?”

  He made a lunge for the hypodermic needle. I stepped aside and shoved him toward the bed. He fell across it face down.

  Then he got to his feet holding a shard of glass in his hand. It came to a jagged point. He looked at it and at me, and beyond me at the door.

  “Don’t try it,” I said. “It’s not your line, doctor. You’re all finished.”

  With a slow weary smile he aped my words. “I’m all finished.”

  He brought the shard of glass swiftly, deftly across his own left wrist, slashing it back and forth. The bright arterial blood pumped. Staring at it, hypnotised by it, he dropped the shard of glass. Striking the floor, it splintered.

  He stood watching me, absolutely unconcerned, while I ripped the pillowcase. I bound a strip around his arm for a tourniquet, winding it tight with the hypodermic syringe. The bleeding slowed to a trickle.

  With him in tow I went to the door and shouted. He came obediently. He didn’t try to fight me.

  Two nurses, their eyes puffy with sleep, found us that way. In a few minutes Dr. Ericsson came.

  That was when Kvaran began to cry like a child. He could, and would, get back the blood he had lost. But he had lost far more than his blood.

  19

  FREYA SAT ON THE EDGE OF THE BED, which had been stripped down to the bare mattress, smoking and watching me shave.

  I’d already had a shower and they’d replaced the helmet of bandage on my head with a square of adhesive which almost covered the bald spot that had been shaved so twelve stitches could be taken in my scalp. I was a little weak in the legs but felt reasonably functional again.

  I heard the mattress creak as Freya got up. “I like to watch a man shave,” she said. I heard her footsteps, and then saw her face in the small mirror over my shoulder. Her hands touched my shoulders. They were cool.

  “I never did thank you for how you saved Maja,” Freya told me.

  “She hasn’t been saved yet.”

  “That’s not your fault. You are going to Sweden, aren’t you?”

  “I’m going. Alone.”

  Her fingers tensed on my shoulders.

  “Hey, I’ll cut myself.”

  “You are definitely not going alone. I’ve already put in for time off. I’d had it coming.”

  I finished shaving and turned around. Freya stood where she was but raised her hands and laced the fingers behind my neck. Her eyes came very close, then too close to see them clearly. I kissed her. She stood on tiptoe, her breasts softly firm against my chest.

  Gunnar Fridjonsson cleared his throat in the doorway. We broke it up, but Freya stood at my side with one arm around the back of my waist. “Chet and I are going to Sweden,” she said.

  “I’m going anyway,” I told her father. “The cops decide what they want to do with me yet?”

  It was the afternoon after Dr. Kvaran had tried to kill me. I hadn’t seen much of Dr. Ericsson, which was one reason I’d got out of bed without a fight on my hands. In the morning I’d had a long session with Fridjonsson and the police. They had been thorough but friendly and I’d given them the whole setup as I knew it, leaving out only my relationship with the Bureau.

  “I have here,” Fridjonsson said, “your deposition. You merely have to sign it, and you are a free man.”

  Freya said, “Please read it, Father. Chet won’t tell me anything.”

  Fridjonsson looked his question at me. I shrugged, and he read: “My name is Chester Drum. I’m an American citizen. I live in Washington, D.C., which is how I came to get involved in the Jorgen Kolding affair. My first contact with it was through a friend named Wally Baker, a member of the editorial staff of View Magazine. Baker had been assigned to write the story of Brandvik’s confession to killing Jorgen Kolding. This was after Brandvik had been legally acquitted of the crime. Baker began to doubt Brandvik’s self-confessed guilt. He commissioned me to look into it.

  “The first time I saw Brandvik, Maja Kolding tried to kill him—or pretended she tried to kill him. The second alternative is only a guess, but it could be that Miss Kolding had reason to believe, as Wally Baker had, that Brandvik hadn’t really killed her father, and that she hoped to frighten Brandvik into admitting that and possibly shedding light on the identity of the real murderer. The second time I saw Brandvik, he was dead and Miss Kolding was with him again. She was suffering from shocks and instead of improving, her condition deteriorated—to be diagnosed here in Iceland by Dr. Kvaran as retrograde amnesia.

  “Brandvik wasn’t the only one murdered as a direct result of the Jorgen Kolding affair. Baker, too, had apparently come upon some dangerous information in regard to Brandvik’s guilt or lack of guilt, because he was killed outside his own home in Washington. I was an eye witness to his murder. This happened before Brandvik was killed, and once again Miss Kolding appeared in the picture. I tried to follow her but lost her in the fog.

  “It was the Baroness Margaretha Schroeder, a Swedish friend of the Kolding family
, who told me Miss Kolding was in trouble at the Central Arms, Brandvik’s hotel. And though the Kolding girl had diplomatic immunity, the police could still have made things unpleasant for her. The Baroness wanted me to intervene, later giving this as her reason. But if she had any criminal knowledge of Brandvik’s murder she might actually have been trying to protect herself by offering Miss Kolding as a scapegoat.

  “At this point, Gustaf Kolding took charge of his sister and he and the Baroness flew with her to Iceland. Wally Baker and I were friends, and I promised his widow I would find her husband’s killer. I came to Iceland, learning from personnel aboard the I.A.L. plane that Maja Kolding, flying home three days earlier, had been a sick girl.

  “I had trouble at the Reykjavík airport because I’d. smuggled in a gun without an Icelandic license. This was brought to the authorities’ attention by an Icelandic national named Einar Laxness, who had left Washington with me and who is probably a paid political assassin of the Soviets. Laxness got to the Kolding house before I did. He was looking for Miss Kolding and beat her whereabouts out of her mother. I followed him here to Akureyri, where an attempt was made on the girl’s life. Laxness got away but his cohort, an Icelander whose name was Munthe, was killed. I shot him in self-defense.

  “Before fleeing, Laxness asked Kolding, the Baroness, and the American boy with them, whose name is Meer, to deliver Miss Kolding into his hands. They were frightened but they refused. They either work for Laxness or have reason to be afraid of him or both. It was finally decided there was another way the affair could be handled. What it is I don’t know yet, but it obviously entails taking the Kolding girl to Sweden.

  “I was knocked unconscious to prevent me from shooting Laxness, and spent three days here in the Akureyri Sanatorium. I learned that in all probability Maja Kolding was being kept in a state of extreme confusion by means of an experimental drug called L.S.D. As for myself, I apparently knew too much, or it was feared I would follow the Koldings to Sweden. So Dr. Kvaran, who allied himself with Laxness purely for ideological reasons, tried to kill me with an overdose of morphine. From this I gather that Laxness, at Soviet direction, murdered Jorgen Kolding in Washington to keep the British and the Icelanders from reaching an agreement.”

  When her father finished reading, Freya’s eyes were big. “When do you sit still in one place?” she said.

  “When someone conks me with a rifle, I guess.”

  Fridjonsson said, “I see you have managed to leave Freya’s name out of your deposition. I wish to thank you for that.”

  I got into my shirt and tied a knot in my tie. “We’re a hell of a lot more than halfway toward proving the Reds murdered Kolding in Washington,” I told Fridjonsson. “What happens if we go all the way?”

  “You mean politically?”

  “Sure. Politically.”

  “We Icelanders,” Fridjonsson said crisply, “are not in the habit of allying ourselves with murderers. I, for one, would do all in my power for a new rapprochement with Great Britain.”

  Freya smiled. “And for a stubborn old mule, Father has a lot of influence.”

  “Freya.” Fridjonsson’s mouth formed an angry line, but his eyes were twinkling.

  About an hour later we started on the long drive back to Reykjavik in the Fridjonsson car. Freya and her father shared the driving. They said I was an invalid. We stopped in Blonduos for the night and reached Reykjavík early the next afternoon. Einar Laxness had not turned up anywhere. Either he was in hiding or had followed the Kolding party to Sweden. I checked with the airport and learned there was an I.A.L. flight to Stockholm in the morning. I booked passage, checked into the Bay of Smokes Hotel for the night and walked on my still-wobbly legs to the Reykjavik Hospital.

  Mrs. Kolding had a large private room on the ground floor. They had propped up her bed and she was sucking coffee through a glass straw. Her silver-blonde hair was made up with pathetic care over the swath of bandages that hid her face.

  “Mr. Drum?” she said. “Then you must be the American who Freya said wanted to see me that day. I—but you know all about that, of course. I learned later you were there.” She had an unexpectedly deep contralto voice. “That man … I … I tried not to tell him where they went. I said to myself I would not tell him, no matter what he did. But I am a woman, Mr. Drum, and I …”

  “They gave me five minutes, Mrs. Kolding,” I said. “They didn’t think you ought to have visitors. Can I ask you some questions?”

  “Why?”

  “I want to find Maja.”

  Again she asked, “Why?”

  “Among other things, she’s in trouble.”

  “And you want to help her? Who are you?”

  “Back home I’m a private detective. Here I’m just a tourist.”

  “On the phone that day, Freya Fridjonsson told me she thought we could trust you, Mr. Drum. What do you wish to know?”

  “You know that Gustaf took his sister to Sweden?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He was here. He told me.”

  “When?”

  “Three days ago. I was on the critical list. All serious accident cases are, for at least twenty-four hours. So of course relatives can visit. Gustaf was here.”

  “Alone or with the Baroness?”

  Her voice grew harsh. “No, he was alone. I would have refused to see Margaretha Schroeder at any rate.”

  “Refused to see her why?”

  The battered, swollen lips smiled a little. “Please understand, Mr. Drum. This is not jealousy, for while it is true that my late husband had a protracted affair with the Baroness, we had been separated twenty years—and twenty years ago the Baroness was only a child. But,” she added with faint feline satisfaction, “of course Margaretha Schroeder is nowhere as young as she tries to act. She must be in her thirties anyway, and.…”

  “Sure, I know. You were saying?”

  At first she seemed to be changing the subject, but she was approaching it in a flanking movement. She said, “Jorgen Kolding and I were married ten years. For a man like Kolding, that was more than any woman could expect. He had life, vitality, a compulsive urge to explore, to keep moving, to do anything but settle down. Why, in his early forties,” she said proudly, wistfully, “Jorgen won a gold medal for cross-country skiing. I—I guess I followed his career from a distance, for you see, ten years with him was more than any woman could hope for.

  “Well, several years ago, he had this protracted affair with the Baroness. It was in all the Scandinavian papers. For a time it threatened to eclipse his diplomatic career, but finally he left her. You will notice,” Mrs. Kolding observed dryly, “that she did not last ten years with Jorgen. Nor did he take the trouble to legalize their relationship. Then, not long ago, she—but how would you say it in English?—made an attempt for Gustaf.”

  “Made a play?”

  “Yes. Of course, made a play. Gustaf was susceptible, Mr. Drum, for many reasons—not the least of which is that Gustaf knows he is not the man his father was and would obviously be flattered by the attentions of his former mistress.” Mrs. Kolding sighed. “Strange, isn’t it, that when your life is not all you have hoped—as mine wasn’t from the day Jorgen left me—you transfer your hopes to your children, only to see them fall still further short of the dreams you once cherished?”

  I looked at my watch. My five minutes were up. I heard footsteps in the hall, but the nurse didn’t come in.

  “But forgive me, please, for running on like this. Alone in bed, with nothing but your thoughts.…”

  “What did Gustaf tell you he’d do about Maja?”

  “They were going to Sweden. To Stockholm.”

  “What for?”

  “Maja would be safe there, he said. But I know my son, Mr. Drum. He was badly frightened.”

  “How could he be sure Maja’d be safe in Sweden?”

  “But don’t you see, he wasn’t sure. He was trying to convince himself. He even b
lustered that he would know how to deal with this man Laxness when they met. But that was just whistling in the dark, because they flew to Sweden to get away from him. Didn’t they?”

  I did not tell her Laxness had followed them to Sweden, and she didn’t ask me. Maybe unconsciously she preferred not to know.

  “Where in Stockholm could I find them?”

  “I don’t know. But Margaretha Schroeder has a home there. In Lidingö. You are going after them, Mr. Drum?”

  I said I was going after them.

  She sat up straight and said: “Why does Einar Laxness want to kill my daughter, Mr. Drum? Why? What has she done to him? What does she know that he wants to kill her? She is just a child. She never.…”

  On her bed of pain, the grief on her face hidden by the swath of bandages, Mrs. Kolding began to sob. I waited in an awkward silence. I had run out of questions to ask and hadn’t received many answers. Pretty soon the nurse came in, looked at Mrs. Kolding, bit her lower lip and shook her head to show her disapproval of me. Then she cranked the injured woman’s bed into a horizontal position and tucked the counterpane down tidily.

  The head on the pillow twisted from side to side as if it was trapped by its bandages, and the husky voice cried, “Why did Jorgen Kolding have to die? A man like him. Such a great man. Why did he have to die?” The stiff fingers clutched convulsively at the counterpane. “I had his name. They couldn’t take that away from me. Twenty years I kept his name, and the memories he left. Why did he have to die?”

  The nurse glared at me.

  Put that way, it wasn’t a question I could answer. It wasn’t a question anyone could answer. I thought of Marianne Baker, in Washington, who had asked it almost in the identical words of her own dead husband. I thought of men like Einar Laxness and ideologies like Dr. Kvaran’s that made such questions necessary. I left in a hurry.

  20

  I SAT ON A BENCH and soaked up heat and steam. I wore a towel about my waist and had a tray with a bottle of colorless aquavit, a glass and a bowl of ice that would melt in a hurry in the tremendous heat. This was in the Bay of Smokes Hotel steam room, which I had all to myself since the masseur had gone off duty.