The Wrecking Crew Page 15

  “If that isn’t the damndest story I ever heard!” Wellington snorted. “You know damn well you got wind of what we were up to and fogged the film to protect Caselius from the trap we were setting for him!”

  “Caselius?” I said. “Who’s Caselius?”

  Grankvist said, “If you had suspicion of espionage, it was your duty to report it to the authorities.”

  I said, “Mr. Grankvist, with all due respect to your country, I don’t happen to be a citizen of Sweden. My only duty as a guest here, as I saw it, was to make sure that my cameras and my pix weren’t put to any harmful use. Well, I made sure, didn’t I?”

  The Swede shook his head. “It still does not seem very logical to me, Herr Helm. Why go to all the trouble of taking pictures, if you were going to destroy them the same day?”

  I sighed and looked uncomfortable. “Well, now you embarrass me, son,” I said. “But that was a mighty sweet little girl—I certainly hope she hasn’t got herself in any bad trouble. And as long as she thought I was taking the pictures she wanted, she was real nice to me, if you get what I mean. And my wife left me some months ago, and you know how it is when a man gets used to having… Well, like I said, it’s embarrassing. I guess you’d say I’m no gentleman, Mr. Grankvist. On the other hand, trying to trick me into taking her pictures like that, I don’t think you could call her a real lady, either.”

  Grankvist cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said. “Well, I see.” Obviously he disapproved and thought I was a calculating and immoral character; and the fact that I’d willingly revealed such a reprehensible side of my nature, as always happens, inclined him toward believing in me. If I’d acted pure and virtuous, he’d have thrown me in jail. After a moment, he said: “As you’ve probably gathered, Mr. Wellington and I, as agents of our respective governments, have been trying to capture a certain troublesome foreign espionage agent, a man who sometimes goes by the name of Caselius. We went to considerable lengths to insure that this man would be caught with incriminating evidence upon him. Unfortunately, due to your precaution in exposing your films to light, our evidence is worthless. We’ve had to release the man and his female accomplice with apologies.”

  “I see,” I said. “Well, I sure am sorry, son.” I hesitated. “It’s a silly question, I suppose, but why didn’t you tell me what was going on? As an American citizen, I’d have been happy to cooperate.”

  Grankvist hesitated, and glanced at Wellington without friendliness. “The suggestion was made,” he said coldly. “Mr. Wellington didn’t approve it, for some reason.” He cleared his throat. “I am sorry for having disturbed you, Herr Helm, and I am truly sorry for the violence that occurred, for which I must take responsibility, since I am in charge. Under the circumstances, I can hardly be legalistic about your little gun, can I? However, your possession of it is contrary to law, so I will have to confiscate the weapon temporarily. It will be returned to you when you leave this country. Is that satisfactory to you?”

  We looked at each other for a moment. We understood each other. If I made no trouble about getting pushed around, he’d make no trouble about my illegal weapon… On second thought, I wasn’t quite sure I’d better assume that I understood him completely. He’d gone for my act just a little too quickly, and it hadn’t even been one of my best performances.

  “Quite satisfactory, Herr Grankvist,” I said. “I’m sorry to have spoiled your plans.”

  He gave a shrug that was more Latin than Nordic. “Det händer,” he said. “It happens. Are you coming, Herr Wellington?”

  “I’ll be along,” Wellington said, watching me.

  Grankvist frowned, and looked at me quickly. I said, “It’s all right. As a fellow-citizen, whose taxes presumably pay his salary, I’ve got a few questions to ask Mr. Wellington. I’ll scream for help if he tries to bully me again.”

  Grankvist looked from one to the other of us, gave his shrug again, and walked out. Americans have the reputation of being crazy the world over, I guess.

  24

  After the door had closed behind the Swede, I got up and went to the so-called bathroom and took a couple more aspirins. When I came back, Wellington had got out a long cigar and lighted up. Back in the days when I was smoking myself, I didn’t notice it so much, but now I get kind of annoyed with people who stink up the premises without so much as asking if I mind. Well, there wasn’t much chance of my loving him like a brother anyway.

  I pulled on a dressing gown and stuck my feet into slippers. I had a couple of very sore ribs; and chewing was going to be no pleasure for a couple of days, after that poke in the jaw. He smoked and watched me. I jerked my head toward the door through which Grankvist had gone.

  “You didn’t tell him everything, apparently,” I said. “For one thing, he still seems to think Lou Taylor was Caselius’ loyal accomplice, but she was actually working for you, wasn’t she?”

  He said, “I told Grankvist just what he needed to know.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Like you told me. What outfit do you report to, anyway?”

  He named the organization readily enough. It was the same as Sara Lundgren’s. I hadn’t known they had two full-fledged operatives in this little country. Obviously I hadn’t been supposed to know. Vance had apparently discovered it, however. It was what he’d been trying to tell me when he died.

  I said, “I don’t suppose, I have to identify myself.”

  “No,” he said. “We know you, you sonofabitch.”

  He was a real lovable specimen. I said, “You made a bobble, brother. You goofed. You got security-happy, or something, and couldn’t bring yourself to confide in one of the people necessary to your scheme. You thought you could pull it off, working around me, using me, without coming right out and asking for my cooperation. It’s a mistake you guys often make, not trusting people. But if you don’t tell them, you can’t very well blame them for screwing up your plans, can you?”

  He got up from the chair in which he’d been sprawled. He didn’t have any height on me, but that width and weight made it seem as if he were towering over me. I estimated the position of the nerve center I intended to go for if he started to get funny again. They say you can kill a man by hitting him there hard enough. He was big enough to make it an interesting experiment.

  He said, “Still acting innocent, aren’t you? Well, it doesn’t go, Helm. I know you. I’ve known about you and your hush-hush outfit for a long time. I got curious about you and your mission, that time during the war—oh, I recognized you in Stockholm, just like you recognized me—and I did a little digging around afterward and found out some interesting things. I know what you people do. I know that you generally work pretty much alone. I know you’ve got the reputation of being a bunch of prima donnas, although what the hell you’ve got to be proud of, I couldn’t say!”

  He was really a hell of a big guy, and somehow his conservative Harvard-Yale-Princeton clothes made him look even bigger. When the time came, I’d have to cut him down at once. He was too big to play with, although it would have been fun.

  He said, “I’ve met some miserable, jealous, bureaucratic bastards in my time. But I’ve never before met one who’d deliberately spoil a job other people had worked months on, risked their lives on, just to keep it for himself!”

  I stared at him. Well, these organization men judge everybody by themselves. He was just giving me credit for his own brand of thinking. He’d tried to hog the job for himself without cutting me in, and he assumed I’d acted from the same motive.

  “Look,” I said, “I’ll tell you once more in plain language: I didn’t know I was dumping anybody’s apples, except perhaps Caselius’. You didn’t tell me. What I want to know is, why didn’t you tell me?”

  We kicked it back and forth for a while. I won’t bore you with the exact dialogue. Just figure out what the employees of two different government departments would be likely to say to each other after discovering that they’d been working at cross purposes, and you’ll be close
enough. At the end, he was still firmly convinced that I’d fogged my negatives to spite him; and I still wanted to know why he hadn’t taken me into his confidence about what he was trying to do.

  At last he burst out: “Tell you? You damn butcher, after what you did in Stockholm, do you think I’d ask any help from you?”

  “What did I do in Stockholm?” I asked. “Oh, you mean Sara Lundgren?”

  “Damn right, I mean Sara!” he said. “Okay, so she was crazy about the guy—what the hell do they see in these slick little Continental types anyway?—but as long as she was in contact with him she was a potential gold mine to us. We just kept an eye on her and made sure she didn’t slip him anything important—”

  “Nothing important,” I said, “except about me. She blew my cover the minute I stepped ashore.”

  He said, “Hell, it wouldn’t have hurt you. Caselius needed an American photographer badly, too badly to quibble about whether the guy packed a gun in his camera case. Anyway, he’d have seen through your corny disguise soon enough. This way Sara got the credit for unmasking you.”

  “Swell,” I said. “It did her a lot of good. And I don’t recall anybody’s consulting me.”

  He said impatiently, “I was pretty sure Caselius would go ahead and use you anyway. Well, he did, didn’t he? He’s the kind who’d actually be tickled at the thought of having an American agent do his photographing for him. He’d just take the precaution of running a few simple tests to see what kind of a guy he had to deal with, first having his boys knock you around a bit and then checking you out himself with cold steel. You assayed fairly high on stupidity, I understand. You even let him know you were pretty good with a knife, so he knew what to watch out for, He’s a conceited little guy. It would give him a big kick to use and outsmart a man who’d been, sent to kill him. I counted on that.”

  “I see.”

  Wellington grimaced. “What did you lose? We had to let Lundgren pass on some genuine information, didn’t we? If he’d spotted you on his own, and she’d said nothing about you, he’d have wanted to know why. We wanted her to keep her standing with the little man, so that we could use her to slip him a false lead later, if things broke that way. Afterward, she’d have been quietly shipped back to the States and eased out of the service—nobody wants the publicity of a trial, in a case like that.

  “She wasn’t a bad chick, you know, just a little stuck-up, too good for us crude American boys. It was good for a laugh, if your sense of humor ran that way, when a real smoothie came along and played her for a sucker. It would have been punishment enough for her to be tossed out on her ear and have to spend the rest of her life remembering what a sap the little man had made of her. But you couldn’t leave it at that, could you? You had to be judge, jury, and executioner. You spotted the double-cross and lowered the boom, just like that.”

  I said, startled, “Hell, I didn’t kill her!”

  He shrugged, unimpressed. “She went into the park to meet you. You came out, she didn’t. You’re the big dangerous man, aren’t you? Whether you killed her or just stood back and let them kill her doesn’t much signify, does it? She was with you. You’re the smart, tough bastard, sent out to fix things after all the rest of us poor fumbling dopes have failed. Are you going to tell me you couldn’t have saved her if you’d wanted to, Superman?”

  I started to speak and stopped. He was convinced. Nothing I could say was going to unconvince him. Maybe there had been a little more between him and Sara Lundgren than he’d indicated, to make him feel so strongly—or maybe he’d just have liked there to be. And after all, what he said was quite true. I’d gone to meet a woman in the park and left her there dead. It wasn’t anything I could be proud of. It wasn’t worth an argument. Anyway, we’d talked enough about Sara. There was another woman I was more interested in.

  “Taylor?” he said when I asked. “Yes, sure she was working for me. Hell, you saw us together one night, didn’t you?” I didn’t say anything. I was still trying to rearrange my thinking around all this new information. He went on after a moment, “You made quite an impression on her. I guess you must be hell with women. She kept pleading with me to let her tell you what we were doing. That’s why she insisted on meeting me outside here, to make her pitch again, although it was risky as hell. I told her to keep her mouth shut, but obviously she decided she knew best and went against my orders.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He said scornfully, “Oh, come off it! She must have told you what was going on. Otherwise, how could you have known enough to cut the ground right out from under us with this lousy film trick?”

  I said, “She didn’t tell me anything.”

  He shook his head, dismissing this as not even worth comment. “Let me tell you something, Helm,” he said. “You may think you’re going to hog Caselius and the credit for yourself, now that you’ve run us off the track, but you’re forgetting one thing, aren’t you, a little matter of orders? Sara tied a muzzle on you with that letter she wrote to Washington, didn’t she? Caselius put her up to it, of course, but I didn’t mind a bit. I’d asked for more time to trap him legally, cooperating with the local authorities, who didn’t much like the idea of having a well-known foreign spy taking cover under a Swedish identity and Swedish citizenship. Washington wouldn’t listen, until Sara wrote, as the resident agent on the spot, protesting the barbaric notion of sending a trained assassin into a friendly country, etc., etc. Then they got scared and decided to call you off and give me my chance. I was instructed—get this, Helm—I was instructed to make use of your specialized talents only if, in my considered judgment, it was absolutely necessary for the success of our mission.” He grinned wolfishly. “Guess what my considered judgment is, fella. You’ll grow roots like a tree, waiting for action orders from me. We’ll get Caselius some way, in spite of you and without you.”

  “We?” I said. “You and Lou Taylor?”

  His expression changed slightly. “No, I was speaking editorially, I guess. As far as Taylor’s concerned, I don’t figure her chances are very good. But I couldn’t very well stop her, under the circumstances.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked sharply.

  “You heard Grankvist. She went off with Caselius, when they were released. I tried to talk her out of it, but she felt she had to do it, and you can see why.”

  “You can, maybe,” I said. “Brief me.”

  He hesitated. Then he said, “Well, the whole scheme was pretty much her idea. She contacted our people in Berlin secretly, and they passed her on to me in Stockholm; I’d been assigned there to check up on Lundgren and take over her duties. My cover was good—Lundgren was still carrying the ball for us, as far as the other side knew—so Taylor and I just played it straight: the American businessman paying court to the pretty American widow. As far as Caselius knew, I was just another old friend of Hal’s whose connections might come in handy. Of course, he knows better now. That’s another strike against her, wherever she is. Anyway, whether or not he believes she double-crossed him, he knows she can’t be of any more use to him, and he’s not a little man to burden himself with excess baggage.”

  I said, “You’re just a ray of sunshine, aren’t you? If you can figure that out, so could she. And still she went with him?”

  He shrugged. “Like I say, she felt she had to… She told us the whole thing, of course, starting with that damn gaudy article her husband wrote. It was pretty much a gag, you know. There was hardly a word of truth in it. Mister Taylor had just stumbled across the name somewhere. He’d picked up a lot of stray dope about intelligence and counter-intelligence in his work. When a magazine offered him a nice fat check for a sensational article on the subject, he stuck his tongue in his cheek and started beating on his typewriter. Title: Caselius, the man nobody knows. Text: full of terrific facts that just didn’t happen to be so. He didn’t really consider it cheating, according to his wife. He just thought it was a hell of a good joke on everybody. He was that kind; he
liked fooling people.”

  I said, “If all that’s true, why was he killed?”

  Wellington laughed, and walked back to the big chair and sat down. He waved his stinking cigar at me. “Look at it from Caselius’ standpoint, fella. That little man’s no dope. Dozens of bright operatives on our side have been trying to trap him for years. They haven’t succeeded, true, but gradually they’ve drawn a ring around him, if you know what I mean. They’ve driven him from one cover to the next; now he’s compromised this Swedish disguise that I figure he was more or less keeping as a last resort. And then he reads this crap about himself: Caselius, the great hulking espionage genius with a Cossack beard and a laugh that shakes the Kremlin walls. His organization’s described in detail, all wrong—”

  “Lundgren seemed to think he had that fairly correct.”

  “Sara said what Caselius wanted her to say. When these proud, independent females fall for a guy, they really fall. The article was way off the beam in practically every respect, take it from me. Caselius couldn’t have asked for a more perfect red herring. All he had to do was call attention to the piece somehow, make it seem genuine.

  “He’s a great boy for direct action: he simply lured the author into an ambush and had him shot to pieces. That made it look as if Mister Taylor had really got hold of something, some genuine information, important enough that Caselius had to have him killed because he knew too much to live. So Hal Taylor became a martyr, and his crazy magazine piece became—in some circles, at least—the authoritative reference work on Caselius, the bearded giant, while Caselius himself went happily on his way, laughing up his sleeve, planning his next operation while he sold silly dresses to silly women in silly dress shops all over Europe—a cute little Swedish citizen not much more than five feet tall.”

  Wellington grimaced. “He’s really a cocky little bastard. He even gave us a clue. Did you know that Caselius is simply a latinized version of Carlsson? When a Carlsson comes into money and wants to get fancy, he calls himself Caselius in this country, just like at home a Smith might get notions to call himself Smythe.”