The Wrecking Crew Read online

  “She didn’t have to say anything,” I said. “It’s a fairly obvious gimmick, isn’t it?”

  Sara said, rather stiffly, “I don’t know how obvious it is. We have considered the theory, of course, and it’s very interesting that you should mention it right after having a long conversation with… You’re sure Mrs. Taylor didn’t suggest it to you in some way, maybe quite indirectly?”

  “Quite sure,” I said. “I dreamed it up all by myself.”

  “Well,” she said, still dissatisfied, “well, we don’t take it too seriously, but we are checking his movements over the past several years and seeing if there’s any correlation with what we know of Caselius’ operations. Taylor did move around a great deal, doing articles for various publications, and as a prominent American journalist he had contacts everywhere. There’s a lot of hate-America propaganda these days, you know; but there are also a lot of government officials in a lot of countries who’ll tell an American things they wouldn’t tell anybody else. Generally they’ve got an ax of some kind to grind, and hope Uncle Sam will supply the whetstone, given the right kind of publicity. Taylor was a genius at sniffing out these people, apparently. And he was also, I gather, the kind of flamboyant character who’d get a big kick out of writing himself up as a master spy, complete with Cossack beard and rumbling laugh, and collecting money for the piece, just before he pretended to be killed and took refuge on the other side of the iron curtain. He had that kind of a sense of humor, they say.”

  Her voice was disapproving. Obviously she didn’t like flamboyant humorists.

  I said, “Of course, he doesn’t have to be Caselius. He could just have been working for the man and decided that things were getting too hot for him and it was time to run to the boss for shelter. But could he have carried it off for years without his wife’s knowing about it?”

  Sara said, “It seems unlikely, doesn’t it? However, she was shot, apparently. We don’t really know how well the Taylor family got along. Men have been known to get tired of their wives, particularly if the wives happened to learn too much about them.”

  “She’s under the impression he saved her life,” I said. “Or says she is, which may only mean that one of them is a hell of a good actor. Well, let’s sum it up. We can take the Taylor article two ways. One, it’s the straight dope, and Taylor just learned too much for his own good, somehow, and made the mistake of publishing it. So he was lured into a deadfall and killed to keep him from spilling whatever else he might have found out that he hadn’t put in this article and might put in the next. His wife happened to survive, and was released after they’d observed her long enough to be pretty sure she didn’t know enough to do any damage.”

  “Yes,” Sara said. “It could be that way. In which case you’re wasting your time with her.”

  I said, “She’s a bright girl; I’ve wasted more time in worse company.” The woman beside me stirred; perhaps she took the remark personally. I went on crisply: “The other possibility is that Taylor is either Caselius or is working for him, and the article was just a kind of smokescreen he threw out when it was decided that the time had come for the character of Harold Taylor, American journalist, to be dramatically withdrawn from circulation. In this case, of course, the article isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. What about the wife? Did he try to kill her to shut her up, or was there perhaps a lot of shooting to make his so-called death look plausible to her, in the midst of which she took a bullet accidentally? In that case, she’s still innocent, and we’re still wasting time playing with her. Or is she in cahoots with him, an accomplice sent back to serve some sinister purpose, now that he no longer dares show himself in his old haunts? In that case, explain her wound.”

  “Plastic surgery,” Sara said.

  “She’d have to love the guy a lot to let herself in for spending the rest of her life with a scarred neck and a baritone voice.”

  “Maybe the surgeons promised to make her as good as new when the job is done, whatever it is,” Sara said. “Anyway, women do strange things for men.”

  “And men for women,” I said, “and so endeth our philosophy lesson for the day, inconclusively. Are there any final remarks you’d care to add before we adjourn the meeting?”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said, and hesitated. “No, but… Helm?”

  “Yes?”

  “If you find Caselius…” Her voice trailed off.

  “Yes?”

  She drew a deep breath and turned to face me. “Before you… before I help you any further, I must know what you intend to do. Are you going to try to smuggle him back to the States as a prisoner, or will you just turn him over to the Swedish authorities?”

  I glanced at her, a little surprised. “Honey,” I said, “that’s none of your damn business. I have my orders. Let it go at that.” Then I frowned. “What do you care? Do you have a yen for this mystery man?”

  She drew herself up haughtily. “Don’t be vulgar! But—”

  “Quite apart from his value to the other side,” I said, “which I’ve heard estimated at a couple of armored divisions or the equivalent in fully equipped missile bases, you said yourself he’s responsible for several deaths among your colleagues, in addition to what may or may not have happened to Harold Taylor.”

  She said coldly, “I’m not responsible for Caselius’ conscience, Helm. I am responsible for my own.”

  I said, “Okay, honey. Spell it out.”

  “You’ve been sent to kill him, haven’t you? That’s your job, to hunt down a human being like an animal and destroy him! And I’m supposed to… to assist you in accomplishing your mission!”

  “Go on,” I said, as she hesitated.

  She said, “I’m in intelligence, Mr. Helm. I’m a spy, if you like, and it’s not a very respectable profession, I’ll admit, but my job is to collect and evaluate information. It is not to act as a hound dog for a hunter of men! Not that you look to me like a very efficient hunter, but that’s neither here nor there. The fact is…” The ash from her cigarette dropped into her lap, and she brushed at it quickly, annoyed by the distraction, and returned her attention to me. “There’s a man called Mac, isn’t there? And there’s an organization that hasn’t got a name, but they call it the wrecking crew, or sometimes the M-group. The M stands for murder, Helm!”

  I hadn’t heard that one. Some smart-alec must have come up with it since my time. “You’re telling it, honey,” I said. “Keep it coming.”

  Her head came up sharply. “Damn you, don’t call me honey! Do you know where I got this information? Not from our side, from theirs! For years we’ve been hearing sly propaganda about an American Mordgruppe—hearing it and laughing at it and combating it as best we could, thinking it was nothing but their clumsy effort to justify their own dirty assassination teams. I can remember, when I was stationed in Paris, laughing myself silly when somebody asked me in all seriousness about this fellow called Mac, in Washington, who points a finger and someone dies. ‘My dear man,’ I said, giggling, ‘you can’t really believe we operate like that!’ But we do, don’t we?”

  I said, “Finish the story, Sara. Let’s pass the rhetorical questions.”

  She said, “I knew there was something odd when we were notified you were coming… Helm, don’t we stand for anything? Have they actually succeeded in dragging us down to their level? Is the world simply divided into two hostile camps, with no moral distinction between them? I had to have a look at you; that’s why I went to Gothenburg this morning, even though it was terribly bad technique. I had to see what kind of a man... I’m not going to do it, Helm! I’ve given you all the help you’re going to get. As a matter of fact—”

  “As a matter of fact, what?”

  “Never mind,” she said. “You can protest through channels, of course. You can try to have me removed from my post.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. I reached for the door handle. “Don’t worry about a thing, Sara. Just go back to collecting and evaluating imp
ortant information… Well, I’d better be getting back to the hotel, and I guess I’d better arrive on foot, since I left that way.”

  She said, “Helm, I—”

  “What?”

  “Don’t sneer just because I—”

  “No sneer was intended, honey. I respect all your finer feelings, every last little one of them.”

  “Can’t you understand how I feel? Can’t I make you see how wrong it is?”

  My wife had asked me that, too. She’d wanted me to understand how she felt, and I’d understood perfectly. She’d wanted me to see how wrong it was, and I’d seen. They all see what’s wrong with the world, and tell you all about it—as if you’d never noticed it before—but none of them has any practical suggestions about how to fix it. One day we’ll all live on chemicals and never kill a living thing. Meanwhile, we eat meat and take the world as it is. At least some of us do.

  “Good night, Sara,” I said, getting out of the car.

  Walking away, I was aware of a quick, glowing arc at the corner of my vision as she flicked her cigarette away into the dark. The car door slammed shut behind me. The little Volkswagen motor in the tail of the Ghia started to turn over, and stopped abruptly. I heard her muffled cry. Then they were on top of me.

  Lead with your right and take your licking like a man, Mac had said, but it was a good thing I’d taken the precaution of leaving the knife behind. It was a wonderful, tempting spot for it. There’s nothing like a knife when you’re outnumbered three to one and fighting in the dark. But I didn’t have it, and I wasn’t supposed to know judo or karate, and as far as I’m concerned fist fighting is for kids. I did get one of them lightly with my knee, hoping it would seem accidental, and I bruised my knuckles on the other two, swinging wildly.

  Then they had me by the arms, and a couple more were shoving Sara Lundgren along the walk toward me.

  8

  They took us back through the trees into the little clearing where there was some illumination from the gaudy phone booth, from the lights along the sea-wall promenade, and from the open sky that had the faint yellow glow that goes with any big city, anywhere in the world. The stars looked weak and far away. They’d been much closer, I remembered, back home in New Mexico.

  I wasn’t really scared, however. We were over the first hurdle. If killing had been on the program, I figured, I’d have been dead already. That had been the greatest risk, considering the circumstances, and it was past. Now we were playing games. All I had to do was keep the rules clearly in mind, and I’d be all right. Well, relatively all right. I don’t suppose any normal man really enjoys being beat up.

  The three of them went to work on me again. They were quite amateurish about it. I got pummeled here and there, I got a cut lip and that would probably turn into a black eye, and a hole in the knee of my slacks when I went down. I was glad I’d had the forethought to change from my good suit. Each one of my attackers was very careful to offer himself to me, wide open, every time he came in to take his swing. You had to hand it to them. They were brave men. They exposed themselves to kicks that would have maimed them for life, to blows that would have killed them—and every time I managed to break free I’d put my head down and charge in swinging like the hero of a TV saloon brawl, and they’d all pile on top of me, and we’d start all over again.

  I caught glimpses of Sara between her two guards, first struggling and calling my name and pleading with them to stop, then standing breathless and defeated, and finally, woman-like, beginning to tuck herself in and button herself up and smooth herself down mechanically even as she continued to watch the proceedings with fear and horror. It took me a while to locate the sniper. Finally I caught a glimpse of him among the trees beyond the phone booth, a dark shadow holding a weapon that gleamed dully as he watched my performance, no doubt, with a critical eye.

  It’s a foregone conclusion that they’re going to test you out carefully before they accept you as harmless, Mac had said, and now I was undergoing my entrance exams. The surprising, and encouraging, thing was that they’d still bother. Even if they’d had no evidence against me before, which wasn’t likely, just catching me here with Sara, the local undercover representative of Uncle Sam, was enough to tell them all they needed to know about me. As a stupid free-lance photographer, I was totally unmasked. But it seemed as if I might still be able to do business as a stupid intelligence agent, a thing I’d barely dared hope for, although Mac had obviously had it in mind when he arranged my advance publicity. Apparently these people needed me for something. Otherwise, why hadn’t they either killed me or simply ignored me?

  But they checked me out thoroughly. That was, of course, why I’d been hauled out here where there was some light to see by—to shoot by, if necessary. I was to be knocked around, humiliated, goaded beyond endurance, in the hope that if I was putting on an act I could be made to lose my temper and reveal myself as something more dangerous than I seemed. In that case, presumably, my attackers would dive for cover and the man among the trees would take care of things permanently with the chopper he held.

  They were treating me to choice insults in Swedish now, testing my linguistic abilities, as we milled around flailing at each other breathlessly. At least the words I recognized weren’t very nice. However, you have to know a language very well to appreciate its more esoteric blasphemies. These weren’t expressions I’d normally have encountered as a nice little boy in Minnesota, and they hadn’t been on the vocabulary lists I’d had to memorize more recently, either, although you’d think a practical language course would give some attention to such details…

  Suddenly it was over, and they were just hanging onto me. Dead game to the end, as the British would say, I threw myself around some more and tried to jerk my arms free and ignored an invitation to break the shin of the guy to my right with the hard heel of my shoe.

  “You bastards,” I gasped, “you yellow bastards, what the hell do you think you’re doing, anyway? I’m an American citizen—” Well, you can fill in the rest of my angry monologue for yourself. I take no pride in it. At last my breath ran out and we all stood there panting.

  The man among the trees spoke. “Fösök med kvinna,” he said.

  I jerked around to look at him, as if aware of his presence for the first time. What he’d said was, “Try with the woman.” It was time to toss them a bone, and I gasped, “You leave her alone, whoever you are! She’s got nothing to do with—”

  “With what, Mr. Helm? With taking innocent photographs for American publications?” The sniper laughed. “Please, Mr. Helm! Give us credit. We know who she is. And we know who you are, and why you’re here... So you do understand some Swedish, after all?”

  I said angrily, “You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you? So help me, if I get my hands on you—”

  The man to my left hit me across the mouth. The man in the trees said, “Not likely, Mr. Helm. Not even though I understand you’ve come a long way to find me. I assure you, if you did get your clumsy hands on Caselius, it would do you very little good. Quite the contrary, in fact.”

  It was my cue to struggle madly to break free and reach him, although just what I expected to accomplish barehanded against his machine pistol wasn’t quite clear. But it was good TV stuff and it went over big. Actually, I hadn’t the slightest hope of getting near him tonight, and I didn’t even intend to make a serious attempt. For one thing, I had no assurance that the man among the trees was really the man I wanted, and I wasn’t going to get myself killed or badly hurt trying for a decoy.

  “You wait!” I cried, allowing myself to be subdued. “You just wait, Mister Caselius! It’s your trick tonight, but you’d better stop horsing around now and kill me, or some day when you haven’t got that gun and an army to help you—”

  One of them clipped me alongside the head. The sniper in the trees snapped an order in a language I didn’t understand. One man detached himself from the group about me, leaving two holding me. The single man started towa
rd Sara, who drew back apprehensively, but was seized again by the two men flanking her. As the lone man approached, the other two gave her a sudden shove, propelling her toward the third. He stepped quickly aside and thrust out a foot, so that she tripped and hit the grass full length, with a nice display of legs and lingerie. I shouted something incoherent and appropriate and, lunging free—they made it easy for me this time— charged in to protect her from further abuse.

  Two men came to meet me, offering the usual opportunities for scientific mayhem, which I ignored, sticking to my windmill, wild-western attack. I suppose there are people who can accomplish something with their fists—Joe Louis for one—but I’d as soon go into a brawl armed with nothing but a fresh-baked roll and a well-done hamburger. You can’t do any real, disabling damage with a fist—at least I can’t—and when you hit a guy with one, damn it, it hurts. But I was a red-blooded, fist-fighting American boy tonight, and we had a fine slugging match over and around the prostrate form of Sara Lundgren. In the middle of it she scrambled to her feet and tried to run, limping from the loss of one of her high-heeled pumps, only to be caught by a man waiting outside the meleé.

  They got me pinioned again—it took two of them to hold me; I was a real tiger that night—and Sara’s captor sent her stumbling into the arms of the other two, who tossed her right back at him. He missed the catch, and she tripped on the edge of the walk and sat down hard on the unyielding pavement. They were laughing now, jeering at me and challenging me to come to her aid as they picked her up and passed her back and forth some more before dumping her again, sobbing and disheveled, at my feet.