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 important 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 ificked 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.
Chapter Eight
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. "Fцrsфk 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?"