Donald Hamilton - The Wrecking Crew

She murmured, rather abashed, "I didn't realize… I look practically indecent, don't I?"

"Practically?"

She laughed, and shaped the black cloth to her breasts with her hands, a little defiantly. "They're kind of small," she said. "I always wondered if any other animal besides hian… I mean, do you think bulls, for instance, go for the cows with the biggest udders?"

"Don't be snide," I said. "You're just jealous."

"Naturally," she said. "I'd just love to have them out to here… well, I guess I wouldn't, really. Think of the responsibility. It would be like owning a couple of priceless works of art. This way, I don't have to spend my life living up to them."

I said, "If current fashions continue, I suppose we'll eventually wind up with a whole race of skinny women with giant tits."

She said, quite primly, "I think the discussion has gone far enough in that direction."

She was a funny girl. "Do you object to the word?" I asked.

"Yes," she said, and tried to free herself again. "And I don't really want to go to bed with you again right now, certainly not with my one good dress on, so please let me •.. Matti"

I'd pulled her down on top of me. "You should have thought of that-" I said, rather breathlessly, as, holding her in my arms, I reversed our positions by rolling over with her-"you should have thought of that before you started looking so goddamn sexy."

"Matt!" she wailed, struggling ineffectually among the bedclothes. "Matt, I really don't want… Oh, all right darling," she breathed, "all right, all right, just give me a chance to kick my shoes off, will you, and please be careful of my dress!"

LATER, alone in the room, I shaved and dressed and organized my equipment for the day's shooting. I mean, it would have been nicer to spend a few lazy hours thinking about nothing but love, but it just wasn't practical. As I was going out the door, I glanced back to see if I'd forgotten anything. Yesterday's films, still lined up on the dresser, caught my eye.

I regarded them for a moment, a little grimly. Then I set my gear down, closed the door, and went over there. What I was thinking now seemed terribly suspicious and disloyal. She was a nice kid and she'd been as sweet as she could be- but she'd also displayed some curiosity last night, maybe casual, maybe not, about just how and where I planned to get the stuff processed and printed.

Much as I hated to spoil what had happened between us with cynical afterthoughts, I couldn't help remembering that I'd been playing it cool deliberately to see just what she'd do in the way of insuring my co-operation and lulling my suspicions. Well, she'd gone and done it, there was no denying that. Maybe she'd done it because she liked me, but one thing you learn very quickly in this business is not to take for granted that you're just naturally irresistible to lonely women. Whatever her reasons, whatever her motives, she'd certainly allowed the businesslike relationship between us to be changed into something considerably more intimate.

I couldn't afford to ignore the warning, or her display of curiosity about the films. It might mean nothing, of course, but I had to consider the possibility, at least, that these pix and the others I'd be taking in her company might have more significance than appeared on the surface. A few simple precautions seemed in order.

I sighed for my lost faith and innocence, went to the closet, and got out one of the metal.50-caliber cartridge boxes I use for preserving my main film supply. I dug out five unexposed rolls of Kodachrome and three unexposed rolls of black-and-white, still in the factory cartons. I sat down on the bed and opened the virgin film cartons carefully, breaking loose the adhesive with my knife without tearing the cardboard flaps.

Then I removed the unexposed films inside and carefully substituted the exposed films from the dresser. I glued the cartons shut again with patent stickum from my repair kit, and made a tiny identifying mark on each of the doctored cartons-a dot in the loop of the "a" in Kodak, if you must know-and buried all eight of them at the bottom of the box of fresh film, hoping I wouldn't grab one by mistake some day when I was in a hurry.

I turned to the new films, and drew each five-foot film strip completely out of its metal cartridge, exposing it to light so that, if developed, it would turn totally black. No one would ever be able to determine whether or not it had ever held a real photographic image. There's nothing as permanent and irrevocable as fogging a film, except killing a man.

I rolled all the films back into the cartridges by hand, got an empty camera, and one by one loaded them into the instrument, wound them a little way, and rewound them again. This gave the proper reverse curl to the leaders, as if they'd actually been used. I was getting pretty tricky now, but there's no sense pulling a gag like that unless you make it good. I marked each fogged roll with an authentic-looking number to correspond with the data~ in my notebook. Finally I put the film cartridges in a neat row on the dresser, where they looked exactly like the films that had stood there before.

Probably I was just wasting my time. However, I had plenty of film to spare, and if I was wrong there was little harm done. It seemed about time to start taking a few obvious precautions, anyway. I had to remember that the opposition had tested me carefully at least once and maybe twice-if little Mr. Carlsson wasn't exactly what he'd claimed to be. They'd found me stupid and harmless enough to let live, while Sara Lundgren had been killed. The difference was, presumably, that they had no further use for her, while they needed me for something.

I still didn't know with certainty what that something was. However, if yesterday was a reliable indication, I was going to be taking a lot of pictures in this northern country

– and I was going to be taking them under the very close supervision of a young lady whose motives weren't exactly clear, to put the matter with the greatest charity possible. It seemed just as well to make reasonably sure of retaining control of my pix until I could determine that everything I'd been told to photograph was completely innocuous. Not that it had much bearing on my primary job-Mac wouldn't give a damn what happened to my films-but I do take a certain pride in my photography, and I wasn't going to let it be used, unnecessarily, for purposes of which I didn't approve.

Finished, I crossed the ball and knocked on Lou's door. "I'm going downstairs," I called. "See you in the dining room."

"All right, darling."

The endearment made me feel like a calculating and suspicious beast, but one of the things you have to keep in mind in this work is that what happens in bed, no matter how pleasant it may be, has no bearing on what happens anywhere else. A woman may be sweet and wonderful under thbse circumstances, and still be dangerous as a rattlesnake with her clothes on. Cemeteries are full of men who forgot this basic principle.

When I crossed the small lobby, there was a girl speaking to the clerk at the desk. My interest in stray females was at a low ebb that morning, for reasons both emotional and glandular, and this one was wearing pants-bright plaid pants at that-so I didn't even bother to examine her rear view closely as I headed for the dining-room door Her voice caught me by surprise.

"Good morning, Cousin Matthias."

I swung around to face Elin von Hoffman. That ki could do the damndest things to herself and still be beauti ful. This morning, in the loud pants and a heavy gray sl~ sweater, without a trace of makeup besides that bus lipstick she'd worn the night before, she was still some thing to make you weep for your wasted life. She held out small key by its tag and chain.