"You took your time with dinner," Sara said, guiding me into a path I hadn't seen in the dark. Her heels made small clicking sounds against the invisible pavement. "Did you have to let the woman tell you the whole story of her life? Or tell her the whole of yours? At least you could have refrained from spending an hour over the brandy! You might have realized, if you'd bothered to think, that I haven't had my clothes off since I started for Gothenburg at midnight last night!"
It was kind of like being married again, although Beth had never been the nagging type. I found myself wondering how Beth and the kids were getting on in Reno. It wasn't much of a place for kids. I said, "You didn't have to follow us. You knew we'd be coming back to the hotel."
Sara said irritably, "How do you know what I have to do? Any more than I know what you have to do. All I know is that I'm supposed to watch out for you while you're here, at the request of your superiors, confirmed by mine. When I get an order, I obey it!"
I listened to her sharp voice, and the rapping of her smart, slim, pointed little heels, and subtracted these sounds from the total sounds of the night. I subtracted the distant traffic murmurs and the soft whisper of a vagrant breeze. That still left a little more sound than there should have been. It wasn't anything as definite as a cracking branch or even a rustling leaf. It was just the old hunter's instinct warning me that we shared this park with someone, or something.
Sara stopped abruptly. "Did you hear something? I thought I did."
"No," I said. "I didn't hear anything."
She laughed uneasily. "When I'm tired, I get nervous. I've just got the wind up a bit, I guess. Heavens, I've been overseas so long I'm beginning to talk like a Britisher! Come on."
The car was a little Kharmann-Ghia, a Volkswagen with sex appeal. It was the only vehicle in the parking area, which was located just off a wide street carrying considerable traffic, even at this hour of the night. I hadn't realized civilization was so close. As I watched, a motor scooter went past. A boy was driving, and a girl, nicely dressed, her skirt rippling in the wind of their motion, was perched gracefully sideways on the rear cushion: two kids on a date. I could imagine the scornful reaction of an American girl offered this breezy transportation after dolling herself up in high heels, nylons, and little white gloves. Behind me, the park was silent. Whoever was there was no longer moving around. Well, neither were we.
"Come on, get in!" Sara said impatiently. She had already seated herself behind the wheel.
I got into the vacant bucket seat, and closed the car door. It closed smoothly and heavily, like a trap springing shut. She was lighting a cigarette. The flame of the match brought her face out of the darkness, ghostly and surprisingly beautiful. It was hard to listen to her, when you couldn't see her, and remember that she was really a very handsome woman. It was too bad she had to sound like a shrew.
"Have one?" she asked, offering me the package, perhaps as a gesture of peace.
I shook my head. "I quit. It was too much of a nuisance around the darkroom. You can't make a really sharp projection print in a room full of smoke."
She said, with a short laugh, "Don't waste that photographic line on me, my friend."
I said, "It just happens to be the truth. I've actually taken a few pictures in my life; that's why I was picked for this job, remember?"
She asked, "Well, what did you learn tonight?"
"She's coming to Kiruna with me. She wants to watch the genius at work and make sure he remembers to put film in the camera, or something. We didn't go into her motives in detail." After a moment I asked, "Who's Wellington?"
"Jim Wellington. A visitor to her room, apparently not for the first time. He seemed quite at home. A big man with curly hair. Just an acquaintance, she says. She also says he's kind of nice."
"American?"
"Or a reasonable facsimile. He mentioned the Baltimore Camera Club, giving the impression he'd once been a star member."
"I'll put through a query," Sara said. She took out a notebook, turned it to face the street lights, and wrote. "Wellington… Description?"
I gave it to her. "He's supposed to represent some U.S. plastics firm," I said.
"Anything else to add about him?"
I shook my head. "No."
That Jim Wellington had been a member of one of our undercover units during the war, and had made a ifight across the Channel from a certain field in England on a certain date, was information I was keeping to myself for a while. Not that it labeled him, necessarily, as an honest and upright citizen; a lot of men who'd risked their necks for democracy back in those days had turned their reckless courage and their wartime training into less creditable and more lucrative channels since. But it was something I had on the man that, probably, nobody else around here had; and I wasn't going to toss it into the common pool of knowledge until I was quite sure I had no use for it myself. Anyway, he'd kept his mouth shut about me. I could do the same for him until I saw a good reason not to.
"Anything else about the woman?" Sara asked.
I shook my head again. "Not much. She's very good as the grieving widow, bitter but helpless to exact vengeance, now striking out bravely to build a literary career of her own. What do you people have on her?"
Sara said: "What we've got is this: their Peugeot sedan was thoroughly riddled with bullets. We were shown the car afterwards. There were lots of holes. They were real holes; you could see daylight through them. There was lots of blood. It was human blood; that was checked. An urn of ashes was buried later. It was inconvenient to analyze them, and it wouldn't have proved anything, anyway. The people we're dealing with can procure a human body to burn if they want one, and I suppose one body has about the same inorganic composition as another. The widow attended the ceremony with a bandage around her neck and tears in her eyes. The bandage was real and covered a real wound; our witness didn't vouch for the tears. And the fact remains that Harold Taylor disappeared at a time when a lot of our people were looking for him to ask him a lot of questions-disappeared from a place he wasn't supposed to be, a place he could only have reached with a lot of cooperation from the other side."
I asked, "How much of the stuff in his article checks out?"
The woman beside me laughed shortly and blew smoke against the windshield. I have nothing, in principle, against women smoking, but since I've quit myself I must say I find the odor of perfume more attractive than that of tobacco.
She said, "What is there to check against, Helm? He describes Caselius as a big man with a beard; a Cossack type with a great rumbling laugh. It sounds unlikely on the face of it-it's a much too conspicuous appearance for a man engaged in secret work-but it could be a disguise Caselius affects on occasion. Anyway, it's the only description we have, so we can't argue with it. Taylor describes the organization. It's their standard organizational setup, so he's probably fairly close there. He describes several typical operations. Some are on record. He could have learned about them at our end. The information's supposed to be confidential, of course, but he had the reputation of being very persuasive; Other operations, there's no way of checking. If somebody photographed a certain secret document, returned it to its proper place in the files, and sent the negative to Caselius, how can we know until the stuff is used against us?"
I asked, "Is there any possibility that Taylor himself is Caselius, and took this way of getting out from under?"