I decided I'd get out of the hotel, if I could, and then
stay out. Perhaps find myself another hotel; certainly get away from the immediate area. But first I had to get out. Available alternatives were the lift and the fire escape. If Elliot watched one, presumably he couldn't watch the other. Unless he had help. In any case, I had the gun, though I couldn't quite see myself using it.
I chose the lift. It came up empty and I punched the Garage button, keeping a careful finger on the Doors Closed button as the lift descended. I stepped out into the sharplyshadowed light of the garage with the gun held inside my jacket, and looked round. The place was deserted and a concrete ramp, two cars wide, led upward to the street. I went up the side of it close to the steel guard rail and examined the street outside. There were a few people in sight still, but no obvious sign of Elliot, though he could easily be standing quietly in any of a hundred doorways.
I came out sprinting, racing for the first cover, my bruised knee and hip joints protesting. As I ran, I rounded every corner I came to, every time I came to one. After two hundred yards I'd put three corners between myself and the Scanda Hotel and was standing in a doorway myself, trying hard to breathe without gasping noisily. I waited five seemingly endless minutes, then decided to take a chance, and walked quickly towards a brightly lighted thoroughfare fifty yards away. There I was lucky. A taxi was cruising towards me as I emerged in the street and I flagged it down.
Somehow or other, amidst all the exertion, an idea had come to me and I wanted to investigate it while I had the chance. While the taxi was heading for the cinema I'd visited, I kept a careful watch, through the rear window to see whether anybody was following. Nobody seemed to be, at any rate not obviously, though among the fairly heavy late-night traffic it could have been done discreetly. At the cinema, I paid off the cab and began to walk back towards the hotel.
It was Alsa's word contacts that interested me. No con-tacts — check. That was what Alsa's note had said, and I'd assumed, naturally in the context of articles and pictures, that it meant contact prints. But it could refer to something else. Alsa wore contact lenses. They hadn't been in her handbag, where she would normally keep them. Nor were her ordinary glasses, the heavy ones with the black library frames there either. It could mean nothing, of course; just that she'd left them somewhere else in the room and I hadn'
t noticed. Or it could mean something else entirely.
I remembered the little case in which she kept the contact lenses : a small, plastic tube about two inches long and one in diameter. She'd shown it to me once, a couple of years earlier, when the lenses were new. The case had a lid at each end. The lids were marked L and R for left and right, so the lenses didn't get mixed up, and the tube itself was filled with some protective fluid. There was one further thing about that little plastic case : it had a small transparent window for the owner's name and address in case it got lost. No contacts — check.
It all fitted. She'd phoned me in America. She knew how I felt about her, knew that if anything happened to her, I'd be there come hell or high water. The note itself would mean nothing to anybody unless that person knew that Alsa wore contact lenses and perhaps not even then, because it was a commonplace thing to find written at the top of an article. I walked slowly along, looking at those buildings whose lights were on. There were a few restaurants still open, a cigarette kiosk, a news stand. Then a chemist's and I , hurried across the road, but the lights were display lights and the place was closed. I swore to myself and moved on.
The shop, when I found it, wasn't in the main street and I almost walked past. It was tucked away perhaps fifty yards down a side street and it was the glowing pair of spectacles, neatly executed in red neon, that caught my passing glance. And this shop was open! There was a woman at the counter and a back room which must be the dispensary.
I said to the woman, 'Good evening. My wife thinks she mislaid her contact lenses here the other night.'
Òne moment.' She disappeared through to the room at
the back and a moment later a man in a white coat came out and spoke to me. I said, 'I'm sorry. I don't speak Swedish.'
Ènglish?'
`Yes. My wife thinks she may have left her contact lenses here.'
He smiled. 'Ya. On the counter she leave them. Tell her she not worry.'
I manufactured what I hoped looked like a grin of relief and put out my hand. 'Can I have them please. '
Ì am sorry. I send them away by post. I not know where the lady is. I was most careful. I put them in a box with cotton wool to protect them. You see? Then I copy address from the case.'
I said, 'Oh, that's marvellous! Thank you. Just one thing. Which address was on them?'
His eyebrows rose. 'You have more than one?'
I smiled. 'Two. Plus her office address. She wasn't quite sure which Àh ... mmm . . I think . . . was Norway, I remember.' He looked at me suddenly in surprise. 'Norway? You are English?'
`My wife's Norwegian,' I lied quickly.
`Ya. It was Norway.' He smiled. 'I remember exactly! Jarlshof, Sandnes G.B., Norway, Mr Anderson: You see how well I remember.'
I could hardly ask him to write it down, but I'd got most of it. I thanked him, trying to remember every detail until I got outside.
`Ya. She came to buy Kleenex, I remember. She must have leave it on the counter. I find next morning.'
`Thanks so much,' I said, repeating: Anderson, Sandnes G.B., Norway in my mind. 'It was very kind.'
I took out a few kroner and offered them. 'Postage?'
`No, no. A pleasure. To lose them would be bad, eh?' `Very bad. She'll be very glad to have them back. Thanks
again.' And I was off, walking away from the shop, then
stopping to write it down.
At last I knew something more about what Alsa had done! I tried to think what I did know. One, she'd left the hotel, quite deliberately, to get rid of something. Two, it had to be something small to go into that little lens case. The lens case and the optician's shop made an obvious enough connection: Alsa could have been reasonably sure that an optician of all people would take the trouble to return contact lenses to their owner. But why the cinema? I pondered for a while and decided she might have intended to leave the case in the cinema, for the cleaners to find, but had decided against it in case the cinema people weren't too meticulous about lost property. But what was in the case? It was ludicrous to believe she'd taken all that trouble about the cover transparency for Soviet Industry. If she'd found that, she'd simply have returned it to Marasov. All the same, I was prepared to bet on a transparency. The Russians had detained her in Moscow to search for one. My God, I thought, what had Alsa been carrying? Already two men had died for it, and Alsa herself had been kidnapped once and probably twice and was now either somebody's prisoner or dead.
I went back to the open news stand and bought a Scandinavian guide book, then took myself for a cup of coffee. I found Sandnes, Norway, easily enough near Stavanger, but Jarlshof wasn't big enough to show on the map or be mentioned in the guide,'and I didn't know what G.B. meant in , relation to Norway. Could it be the Norwegian equivalent of '