Hoch's Ladies

by Edward D. Hoch

  “And Keio discovered what she was doing?” Sergeant Shimane asked. “Of course. That’s why she had to kill him. The group wanted Professor Hiraoka’s webs to be displayed in Tokyo next year because—” Even as she spoke, the whole plot was unfolding in her mind. “—because the prime minister himself had promised to visit them. There would be an assassination attempt, a bomb planted by Yoichi in one of his father’s wooden frames, a signal for an uprising. When the contract was signed and Yoichi knew he had failed, he came here to report to Rumiko. He knew even without his remote=control unit that she’d be waiting in the gallery. She figured his death would be blamed on the stranger who shot Keio, so she used the opportunity to kill him. As Yoichi must have feared, the organization had no further need for him once he’d failed in his mission to win his father’s exhibit for the Sino-Japanese centennial. Rather than a co-conspirator, he had become a danger to them.”

  “She was clever,” Peters agreed. “The kimono and the face paint allowed her to pose as one of the automatons if someone came along while she was waiting for a meeting. When she recovers from her wound I think she’ll be ready to talk about the others involved.”

  Susan felt suddenly tired. She’d run down at last. At that moment she only wanted to be out of there and on her way home. As it turned out, she stayed

  on for Yoichi’s funeral service and helped to comfort his parents. Geoffrey Peters was there too, perhaps to comfort her. Trafficking with Eastern merchants hadn’t been at all what she’d expected.

  A FONDNESS FOR STEAM

  “Hurry up!” Mike Brentnor shouted as soon as he spotted Susan Holt alighting from the cab at Kennedy Airport. “We’re supposed to be checked in by now!”

  Whatever had possessed her to agree to a three-day trip to Iceland with Brentnor, she’d asked herself time and again during the past week. “It’s part of the job,” her boss Saul Marx had told her. “The best way to publicize a new line is to be in at the beginning. I want you to go to Reykjavik with the buyer and get a look at this entire line of Icelandic woolens.” Saul was vice president of promotions for Manhattan’s largest department store, and when Mike Brentnor moved out to become a dry goods buyer Susan had become Marx’s chief assistant. It was a relief not to be working with snide, sexist Brentnor any longer, but the relief was short-lived that day in April when Marx told her she’d be traveling to Reykjavik with him. “He’s the buyer now, Susan. And you’re promotions manager. I want you working as a team on this.”

  So here she was at the airport at seven in the morning, ready for an eight o’clock flight to Reykjavik. The time in Iceland was four hours ahead of New York, so it would be six in the evening by the time they landed after their six-hour flight. She’d had a recent flight to Tokyo more than twice as long, but that didn’t make it any more inviting, especially sharing a seat with Mike Brentnor.

  “I was going to call your apartment,” he said with his sickly grin. “I thought maybe you and the boyfriend overslept.”

  “Russell doesn’t live with me,” she said coldly, “if that’s what you’re implying. Where do I check in?”

  “International departures. Our seats are in business class.”

  “Well, that’s something.” She was traveling light, with only one medium sized suitcase on wheels. It should be enough for a three-day stay. She checked it through quickly and found Brentnor waiting for her at the other side of the metal detector.

  “Had breakfast?”

  “A glass of orange juice. They’ll give us something on the plane.”

  They boarded together and took their seats up front. Susan unzipped her briefcase and removed the color photographs of the items the store would be buying—quality woolen garments with new designs and colors. Brentnor hoped to have them in the store by September, or October at the latest. “They’re offering us an exclusive on their full line of sweaters, jackets, scarves, gloves, leg warmers, socks, and blankets.”

  “I see lots of competition out there, Mike, and at lower prices than these.”

  “Wait till you see the quality and you’ll change your mind. I have a blanket in the office that’s unbelievable. They say Iceland has more sheep than

  people.”

  Breakfast was served soon after their Icelandair flight’s departure. Susan dozed through the movie and lunch that followed, and awoke as they started their descent into Reykjavik. It was a small place by American standards, Brentnor told her, with a population of less than 100,000. “Look at all those brightly colored roofs on the houses!” Susan said, her forehead pressed against the plane’s window as it circled south over the city.

  “That would be the Old Town. See that big modern church with the statue out front? That’s Leifur Eiriksson, the Viking.”

  “What religion are the people?”

  “Mostly Lutheran, a few Catholic, even some pagan believers in Thor.”

  “My! You do read the guidebooks.”

  It was a bit after six when the plane touched down at Keflavik, thirty miles southwest of the city, and taxied to the terminal. “The Leifur Eiriksson Terminal, of course,” he told her with a chuckle. “That’s a big name around here.”

  They were staying at the Hotel Loftleidir and a hotel bus delivered them to the door. “Let’s unpack, have dinner and a good night’s sleep,” he suggested. “We’ll be meeting with Bjorn Arnarson first thing in the morning.”

  “By the time I unpack I think I’ll be ready for bed, Mike. I’m really not too hungry. Maybe I’ll just order a snack from room service.”

  “Sounds good to me. We could order together in your room or mine.” He glanced sideways at her. “This doesn’t have to be all business, you know.”

  His bold proposition startled her and she tried not to show it. Her reactions to Mike Brentnor had been varied but mostly negative. She’d never once imagined him in a romantic context of any kind.

  “Please, Mike,” she replied with a sigh. “I’m tired.”

  He shrugged, as if it were her loss. “See you in the morning, then.”

  They arrived at the Yggdrasill Mills before ten o’clock, following a taxi ride past a huge outdoor swimming pool from which steam seemed to be rising continuously. “The whole city’s heated by steam,” their Irish cabdriver explained. “There are hot springs all over the island. They swim outdoors in the middle of winter. One of the springs, Geysir, is the origin of the English word ‘geyser.’” He turned off the main road. “They just opened a big new geothermal plant here a few weeks ago. Biggest of its kind in the world, I guess. Keeps the downtown sidewalks clear of snow in the winter.”

  Off in the distance, beyond the woolen mill that was their destination, she could see towers of steam gushing from the earth. “Is this place safe?”

  The driver laughed. “The people who live here love it, and I got to admit, on a midwinter night even I can develop a certain fondness for steam. Here’s my card. Name’s Patrick Culhane. Give me a call when you’re ready to go back.”

  Mike Brentnor led the way into the big white building that was their destination. Bjorn Arnarson, the president of Yggdrasill, proved to be a sober-faced man in his fifties who greeted them in an office dominated by a large wooden plaque with a carving of a great tree. “Welcome to Iceland,” he said in passable English. Then, noticing that Susan’s attention was attracted to the plaque, he explained.

  “It is Yggdrasill, the world-tree whose branches stretch out over heaven and earth, a bit of Scandinavian mythology which supplied our company with its name.”

  “Your woolens are fantastic,” Mike Brentnor said, cutting through the small talk to get down to business. “We are prepared to make you an offer for the entire line.”

  Arnarson motioned them to chairs and took out a large cigar, offering one to Brentnor, who declined. “You don’t mind, Miss Holt?”

  “Of course not,” Susan answered bravely, not about to challenge a man’s right to smoke in his own office.

  “What quantities did you have i
n mind?” he asked Brentnor.

  Before he could answer they were interrupted by the ringing telephone. Arnarson answered with a single word Susan didn’t understand. He spoke a few more words of Icelandic before hanging up, his expression grimmer than before. “You must excuse the interruption. This is a sad morning for us. One of our female employees was brutally murdered overnight. It is a great shock to us all. Here in Iceland crimes like that are rare.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Susan told him. “Was it one of the knitting-machine operators?”

  He shook his head, putting down the cigar. “A young woman named Sjofn Kristjan. She worked in the payroll department, a lovely young thing. They found her near one of the city’s swimming pools.”

  “How was she killed?” Brentnor asked.

  “With a hammer. The police believe it was a sex crime.”

  “Terrible!”

  Arnarson nodded. “I’m afraid my mind is on her instead of business today. I’ve always thought of my employees as one big family.”

  “Of course,” Susan said quickly, before Mike could pull out his calculator and get back to business. “We’d planned to be here three days. Would you feel better about talking business some other time—perhaps tomorrow?”

  He seemed relieved by her suggestion. “Actually, I would. There’s a police sergeant on his way to see me about Sjofn’s death, and I fear he’ll arrive before we could complete our business. Suppose I have someone show you around the plant, which you’d want to see in any event, and tomorrow morning we’ll talk business.”

  Mike Brentnor looked unhappy, but he could hardly raise an objection. “Fine. We’ll look the place over and be back at the same time tomorrow.”

  The man chosen to show them the plant was a young vice president named Jon Jonsson. He had longish brown hair that he wore parted in the middle, and Susan found him quite attractive. But it soon became apparent that this was not an ordinary workday at the Yggdrasill Mills. Everywhere they went small groups of employees stood in clusters, talking glumly and sometimes whispering when they noticed Jonsson’s approach. A middle-aged woman was actually crying as they entered the payroll department.

  “I’m terribly sorry, Mrs. Schwartz,” Jonsson told her. He introduced the American visitors and the woman made an effort to recover her composure. “She worked right at the next desk. It’s a terrible thing,” the woman told them. “I moved here to escape the violence back home, and now this happens.”

  Susan gathered that “back home” meant Germany, but she didn’t inquire into the nature of the violence. She could see Jon Jonsson was anxious to move on, and the local murder needn’t concern them, tragic as it might be. Jonsson led them next into the mill itself, explaining that most of their woolen products were now produced by machine, although a few of the finer pieces were still handmade. The plant foreman, a bearded man named Hermann Steingrim, spent a great deal of time with them, pointing out the entire process by which a skein of wool became a fine, stylish sweater. Susan had to admit that their products were superior to anything she’d seen in Manhattan stores, with the world-tree symbol linking items as different as gloves and blankets into a single fashion statement.

  “I think we’ve got a winner if the prices aren’t too steep,” she told Brentnor as they followed Jonsson to the next point on the tour.

  “I told you they were neat. If the cost is a little high that’ll just make them all the more exclusive.”

  At the conclusion of the tour they phoned for the taxi and waited with the vice president until it arrived. Susan couldn’t help noticing the two police cars parked at the plant’s main entrance. The cabdriver, Culhane, noticed them too. “What’s going on with the police cars?” he asked as they climbed in.

  “One of their employees got killed last night,” Brentnor told him. ‘’We’ll be going back to the Loftleidir now.”

  He swung the cab around in the parking lot and headed back toward the city center. “That must be the girl they found by the big Laugardalur swimming pool. I just heard about it.” He was one of those drivers intent on showing off the city, even though it was not his own. They detoured so he could point out the university, then took a drive through the Old Town section while Mike Brentnor grew increasingly impatient.

  Finally, when the driver asked if they wanted to visit the swimming pool where the girl’s body had been found, Brentnor barked out, “No! Take us to the hotel!”

  As he was getting out of the taxi at their destination, Susan decided on a sudden impulse, “I think I’ll see the sights, Mike. I’ll be back in time for dinner.”

  “Suit yourself,” he told her, tossing a few kronurs onto the seat. Patrick Culhane whistled. “He doesn’t like sightseeing.”

  “Well, I do. Drive me around for an hour. Then you can bring me back here.” She peered out at the landscape. “Why aren’t there any trees in this part of town?”

  “The Old Town has trees, and they are planting them elsewhere. It’s a long process. Almost nothing is left of Iceland’s forests.” He turned down a side street. “They say that during World War II the Yank soldiers were told that Iceland had a virgin under every tree, just waiting for them. They got here and there were no trees.”

  “Is that true?”

  “About the trees or the virgins?”

  She laughed in spite of herself. “What’s an Irishman doing in Iceland?”

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time. I’ll probably go back someday. Hey, do you want to look at the murder scene?”

  “Why not?”

  He drove through the busy streets until they came to what appeared to be a modern stadium. “It is a stadium,” the driver said in answer to her question. “They often have swimming meets here. There’s an Olympic-sized pool with lanes marked off, and a slightly smaller free-form pool connected to it. The public can continue swimming even while competitions are in progress.”

  “Isn’t the water too hot with all this steam rising from it?”

  “That’s really caused by the temperature difference between the water and the air. The pool is a perfect temperature for swimming. If it gets too hot the water is cooled. This is a popular place, especially in the summer. There’s a campsite and a youth hostel nearby.”

  As they left the taxi and strolled toward the pool, she saw a figure emerge from the steamy mist, striding toward them like a ghost. At her side Patrick Culhane tensed and then relaxed. “It’s only one of the police,” he told her. “Hello, Sergeant.”

  “What are you doing here, Pat? This is a crime scene.”

  “Just showing an American the sights. This is Sergeant Oxara, Miss—” He glanced at her inquiringly.

  “Susan Holt.” Oxara was a big man whose ruddy complexion went well with his occupation. Maybe police looked somewhat alike all over the world. “You have a lovely country here, Sergeant.”

  “We think so. What happened last night is not typical. The streets are perfectly safe, at least on weekdays. The men like to drink on Friday and Saturday, but mostly they behave themselves.”

  “Who was the victim?” Culhane asked.

  “Her name was Sjofn Kristjan. She worked out at the mill. Someone killed her with a single blow from a hammer.”

  “The hammer of Thor.”

  Sergeant Oxara allowed himself the hint of a smile. “No, just a plain hammer for driving nails. He threw it into the water after he killed her.”

  Susan glanced around. “Where was the body?”

  “Over there by the bridge.”

  There was indeed a gracious curving arc of a footbridge at the spot where the two large pools merged. From the top of it one would have a perfect view of both. “She was killed during the night? I wonder what she was doing here.”

  “Young people like to sneak in for a midnight swim, even though it closes at five-thirty on weeknights. I suppose the steam attracts some folks.”

  “Had she been assaulted?”

  “Her undergarments were ripped, but we don’t
think she was molested. You’ll have to read the papers for anything else you want to know, miss.” He walked away from them, and almost at once he’d vanished from view in the rising mist.

  “A strange place,” Susan commented.

  “Good place for a murder,” the driver said. “No one could see what was happening.”

  “I suppose not.” When they’d returned to the cab she decided, “Let’s go back. I’ve seen enough for one day.”

  “We just began!” he protested. “We began at the wrong place.”

  Susan took pity on Mike Brentnor and joined him for dinner in the hotel dining room. They ordered an Icelandic dish called graflax which sounded something like a camera but proved to be a pickled, salt-cured salmon served with a special sauce. “I guess when you’re in Iceland you eat fish,” Brentnor grumbled.

  “There were meat dishes on the menu. Besides, this isn’t half bad.”

  “Where did the taxi driver take you?” he asked, managing to make it sound like an assignation.

  “To look at the murder scene. We met a policeman.”

  “That must have been exciting.”

  “Apparently it’s an unusual occurrence here. I heard people talking about it when I got back to the hotel.”

  He finished up the last of his salmon. “I sent my wife a postcard. Did you know the stamps say ‘Island’ on them?”

  “It’s Icelandic for ‘Iceland’, Mike.”

  “Oh.” He pushed his plate away. “How about some dessert?”

  She was already sorry she’d agreed to dine with him, and after dinner he suggested a walk around the block. The night was chilly and they hurried to get back inside. “I think I’ll turn in early, Mike. My body’s not adjusted to the time difference yet.”

  “I know how both of our bodies could get adjusted together.”