The Wrecking Crew (12 page)

I waited, but she didn’t return. I didn’t even consider trying to follow her. It was a complicated game we were playing, but I still thought the guy who would win was the guy who could act dumbest. To hell with her and her midnight expeditions. It was something I knew that she didn’t know I knew. It was a point for our side. Well, call it half a point. I turned over in bed and closed my eyes.

Nothing happened. Suddenly I had the keyed-up feeling you get from a lot of liquor partially neutralized by a lot of coffee. Sleep was no longer anywhere around. I stood it as long as I could; then I got up and walked around the bed to the window and looked out. The window was a casement type without screens, standard in this country. There was something strange and a little shocking about standing at a second-floor window completely exposed to the great outdoors. You get so used to looking at the world through wire netting that you feel naked and unsafe when it’s taken away.

Although it was midnight, the sky was still lighter than it would have been in Santa Fe, New Mexico: we have black night skies at home, with brilliant stars. This wasn’t much of a display, by comparison. My window faced a lake. I’d forgotten the name, but it would end in
-järvi,
since
järvi
was the Finnish word for lake and, as Lou had pointed out, the Finnish influence was strong here, within a hundred miles of the border. Standing there, I could feel geography crowding me—a feeling you never get at home. But here I was standing in a wedge of one little country, Sweden, thrust up between two others, Norway and Finland. And behind Finland was Russia and the arctic port of Murmansk…

A movement in the bushes drew my attention, and Lou Taylor came into sight some distance away. She’d left her coat in her room, apparently. With her dark hair, in her black dress, she was almost invisible. By the time I saw her, it was too late for me to duck out of sight. She was already looking up toward my window, where my face would be shining like a neon sign against the blackness of the room behind me. She turned quickly to warn the person with her, but he didn’t catch the signal in time. As he straightened up, after ducking a branch, I recognized the big, football-player shape of the man I’d met in her Stockholm hotel room: Jim Wellington.

I stood there watching them. Having already been seen, they took time to finish whatever they’d been talking about.

She asked a question. Whatever she wanted, he wasn’t giving it. He turned and disappeared into the bushes. She made her way into the clear, with due regard for her dress and nylons and fragile shoes. She vanished around the corner of the hotel without looking up at me again.

It was getting cold in the room. I closed the window and drew the shade. The bed didn’t attract me any more strongly than before. I found my dressing gown, put it on, and turned on the light. I stood for a moment looking at the films from the day’s shooting lined up on the bureau: five rolls of color and three of black-and-white. This didn’t actually mean that I’d taken more subjects in Kodachrome; on the contrary, I’d taken less, but color is trickier than black-and-white and therefore I habitually protect each color exposure by bracketing it with two others, one longer and one shorter. It’s cheaper in the long run than going back for retakes.

It was a poor harvest for a whole day’s work, showing that my heart had not been in it. On a job that appeals to me, I can burn up several times that amount of film in a day and never work up a sweat. But circumstances hadn’t been conducive to a fine, free, frenzy of inspiration. I’d been practically told what to shoot; I’d had little incentive to branch out on my own.

The knock on the door didn’t make me jump very high. I’d already heard her footsteps in the hall. I walked over and let her in. When I turned, after closing the door behind her, she was taking advantage of the light to examine her stockings for runs and her dress for dust and woods debris. It was the same smoothly fitting jersey dress she’d worn to dinner in Stockholm, with the big bunch of satin at the hip.

“I thought you were asleep.” Her voice was flat.

“I was heading that way, but you woke me up by going out,” I said. “What’s that Wellington character doing up here in Kiruna, anyway?”

She stalled briefly. “So you recognized him?”

I said, “A man that size is hard to miss.”

It occurred to me suddenly that of all the people involved to date, Jim Wellington was the only one big enough to stick on a phony beard and give a rumbling laugh and bear a reasonable resemblance to Hal Taylor’s description of Caselius.

Lou Taylor had turned away from me. She reached out absently and rearranged the films on the dresser before speaking. “What if I were to tell you it’s none of your damn business what he’s doing here?” she said at last.

I said, “I might not agree with you. But there wouldn’t be much I could do about it, would there?”

She glanced at me over her shoulder. After a moment, she reached out and picked up one of the film cartridges. “Are all these from today? I didn’t know we’d taken so many.”

“That’s not many,” I said. “You should see me go through the stuff when I really get warmed up.”

“What will you do with them now? Are you going to develop them right away?”

“No,” I said. “The color has to go to a lab in Stockholm, anyway. I can’t do that myself. The black-and-white I’ll save until I have a place with reasonable facilities to work in. Maybe I can scare up somebody in Stockholm with a real darkroom I can use. I hate working out of a hotel closet.” After a moment, I asked, “Do you owe this Wellington character anything?”

She put the film down and turned slowly to face me. Everything was sharp and clear. We were two people who’d been around. I’d caught her out, and I could now waste a lot of time asking a bunch of silly questions and forcing her to think up a bunch of equally silly answers. The end would be the same. We’d wind up facing each other like this, neither knowing any more about the other than before. There was really only one thing we needed to know, and only one way of finding it out.

“Why, no,” she said slowly, “I wouldn’t say I owe Jim Wellington a thing.” Then, still watching me carefully, she said, “You’ve been pretending not to like me much, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s right. Pretending. I had some thought of keeping this strictly business.”

“That,” she said, coming forward, “was a very silly idea, wasn’t it?”

This was the land of the Midnight Sun, and while it was past the season for that particular display—it happens only around midsummer—the evenings were still late and the mornings were still early. Presently the long winter night would descend over the land, but not quite yet. It seemed very soon that there was light at the window.

She said, “I’d better get back to my room, darling.”

“No hurry,” I said. “It’s early, and the Swedes are a tolerant people, anyway.”

She said, “I was awfully lonely, darling.” After a while she said, “Matt?”

“Yes?”

“How do you think we ought to run this?”

I thought that over for a moment. “You mean, like strictly for laughs?”

“Yes. Like that, or like some other way. How do you want it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’ll take some thought. I haven’t had too much experience along these lines.”

“I’m glad. I haven’t, either.” After a little, she said, “I suppose we could act cool and sophisticated about the whole thing.”

“That’s it,” I said. “That’s me. Cool. Sophisticated.”

“Matt.”

“Yes.”

“It’s a lousy business, isn’t it?”

She shouldn’t have said that. It admitted everything, about both of us. It gave everything away, and we’d been doing fine. It had been a smooth, polished act on both sides, one move leading to the next without a stumble or a missed cue; and then, like a sentimental amateur, she went and deliberately tossed the whole slick routine overboard. Suddenly we weren’t actors any longer. We weren’t dedicated agents, either, robots operating expertly in that kind of unreal borderland that exists on the edge of violence. We were just two real people without any clothes on lying in the same bed.

I raised my head to look at her. Her face was a pale shape against the whiter pillow. Her dark hair was no longer brushed smoothly back over her small, exposed ears. It was kind of tousled now, and she looked cute that way. She was really a hell of a nice-looking girl, in a slim and economical sort of way. Her bare shoulders looked very naked in the cold room. I pulled up the blanket and tucked it around her.

“Yes,” I said, “but we don’t have to make it any lousier than necessary.”

She said, “Don’t trust me, Matt. And don’t ask me any questions.”

“You took the words right out of my mouth.”

“All right,” she said. “As long as we both understand.”

I said, “You’re green, kid. You’re real smart, but you’re an amateur, aren’t you? A pro wouldn’t have given it all away like you just did. She’d have left me guessing.”

She said, “You gave yourself away, too.”

“Sure,” I said, “but you knew about me. You’ve known about me all along. I still wasn’t quite sure about you.”

“Well, now you know,” she said, “something. But are you sure what?” she laughed softly. “I really have to go. Where’s my dress?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “but there seems to be somebody’s brassiere hanging on the foot of the bed.”

“The hell with my brassiere,” she said. “I’m not going to a formal reception, just across the hall.”

I lay and watched her get up and turn on the light. She found her dress on a chair, shook it out, examined it, pulled it on, fastened it up, and stepped into her shoes. She went to the dresser, looked at herself in the mirror, and pushed helplessly at her hair. She gave that up, and came back to the bed to gather up the rest of her clothes. “Matt.”

“Yes?”

“I’ll double-cross you without blinking an eye, darling. You know that, don’t you?”

“Don’t talk so tough,” I said lazily. “You’ll scare me. Reach in my right pants pocket.”

She glanced at me, picked up my pants, and did as I’d asked. She fumbled around among some change and came out with the knife. I sat up, took it from her, and did the flick-it-open trick. Her eyes widened slightly at sight of the sharp, slender blade.

“Meet Baby,” I said. “Don’t kid yourself, Lou. If you know anything about me at all, you know what I’m here for. It’s in the open now, that’s all. This doesn’t change anything. Don’t get in my way. I’d hate to have to hurt you.”

We’d had a moment of honesty, but it was slipping away from us fast. We were starting to hedge on our bets. We were falling enthusiastically into our new roles as star-crossed lovers, a jet-age Romeo and Juliet, on opposite sides of the fence. Too much frankness can be as much a lie as too little. Her speech about double-crossing had been unnecessary; she’d already warned me not to trust her. If you say “Don’t trust me, darling” often enough, you can make the warning lose its effect.

As for me, I was brandishing a knife and making bloodcurdling speeches: good old bone-headed, fist-fighting Secret Agent Helm flexing his muscles before a lady he’d just laid.

I think we both felt a kind of sadness as we looked at each other, knowing we were losing something we might never find again. I closed the knife abruptly and tossed it on top of my pants on the chair.

She said, “Well, I’ll see you at breakfast, Matt,” and leaned over to kiss me, and I put my arm about her just above the knees, holding her by the bed. “No, let me go, darling,” she said. “It’s getting late.”

“Yes,” I said. “Have you seen yourself like that?”

She frowned. “You mean my, hair? I know it’s a mess, but whose fault—”

“No, I don’t mean your hair,” I said, and she looked down at herself quickly, where I was looking, and seemed a little startled to see the way her unconfined breasts made themselves quite obvious through the clinging wool jersey of her dress. It was the same elsewhere. It was really quite a thing: the simple, discreet black dress with its party touch of satin at the waist and so obviously nothing but Lou inside it. She’d have been much more respectable in a transparent negligee.

She murmured, rather abashed, “I didn’t realize… I look practically indecent, don’t I?”

“Practically?”

She laughed, and shaped the black cloth to her breasts with her hands, a little defiantly. “They’re kind of small,” she said. “I always wondered if any other animal besides man... I mean, do you think bulls, for instance, go for the cows with the biggest udders?”

“Don’t be snide,” I said. “You’re just jealous.”

“Naturally,” she said. “I’d just love to have them out to here… well, I guess I wouldn’t, really. Think of the responsibility. It would be like owning a couple of priceless works of art. This way, I don’t have to spend my life living up to them.”

I said, “If current fashions continue, I suppose we’ll eventually wind up with a whole race of skinny women with giant tits.”

She said, quite primly, “I think the discussion has gone far enough in that direction.”

She was a funny girl. “Do you object to the word?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, and tried to free herself again. “And I don’t really want to go to bed with you again right now, certainly not with my one good dress on, so please let me…
Matt!”

I’d pulled her down on top of me. “You should have thought of that—” I said, rather breathlessly, as, holding her in my arms, I reversed our positions by rolling over with her—“you should have thought of that before you started looking so goddamn sexy.”

“Matt!” she wailed, struggling ineffectually among the bedclothes. “Matt, I really don’t want… Oh, all right darling,” she breathed, “all right, all right, just give me a chance to kick my shoes off, will you, and please be careful of my dress!”

Later, alone in the room, I shaved and dressed and organized my equipment for the day’s shooting. I mean, it would have been nicer to spend a few lazy hours thinking about nothing but love, but it just wasn’t practical. As I was going out the door, I glanced back to see if I’d forgotten anything. Yesterday’s films, still lined up on the dresser, caught my eye.