Donald Hamilton: The Wrecking Crew

"Mr. Helm," the girl with the cigarette holder said, "I want you to meet Mr. Wellington. Jim, Matt Helm."

We shook hands. His grip was surprisingly gentle, the grip of a man who knows his own strength and guards it carefully. It was a point in his favor, to weigh against his virile good looks

"Lou tells me you're a photographer," he said.

"That's right," I said.

"Used to take pictures myself for a hobby," he said. "Won half a dozen prizes at our camera club back home in Baltimore, but I guess that's small stuff to you pros..

Well, I'll leave you to your business. See you, Lou."

He released my hand and wheeled toward the door, and in that moment I placed him. It had been during the war, at night. They'd brought this big kid up to me on the airfield saying that since I was lone-wolfing it this trip there was plenty of room, and if I didn't mind, it would save their making an extra run. He wasn't one of ours-he was OSS or something-and I wasn't crazy about having any outsiders knowing where I'd been dropped, but there wasn't much I could do about it.

Nobody bothered to introduce us. We didn't have names around that place, anyway; we were just cargo to be delivered. I shook hands with the boy, that was all. He'd been a knuckle grinder back in those days; apparently he'd learned better manners since. Then they called that the plane was ready and he wheeled toward it with that same aggressive football readiness of a big man who expects to be hit hard and intends to stay on his feet nevertheless..

I remembered the rest of that night clearly. We hadn't talked on the way across the Channel. We'd been just two young guys with different destinations, sharing a taxi for a few blocks, and I'd been wondering, as always, if this was the night my chute wouldn't open or I'd land in some hot wires and fry to death. He'd had his own thoughts, of a similar nature, probably. He didn't even wish me good luck when it was time for me to drop, but I didn't hold that against him. We had no sentimental traditions or customs in our organization, but in some outfits, I knew, just as among some hunters, it was considered bad form to wish anybody luck at parting.

"So long, fella," was all he said.

I never have liked people who call me fella, so I just gave him a nod as I went out. The hell with him. If you want to make buddies, join the infantry. The umbrella opened fine, and I landed in an open field, and I never saw the guy again until now.

He turned briefly at the door, waggled his hand in a half salute and looked at me casually, and I knew that he was double-checking, studying me from this new angle to make quite sure. After all, some time had passed. A horse born that night would be a pretty old nag by now. It was a wife and three kids ago for me. But he had a good eye, a trained eye, and he knew me, all right, and he went out without saying a word, which was the significant thing. He had recognized me, but he kept his mouth shut. It could mean a lot of things. After all, I wasn't joyously recalling auld lang syne, either.

"Who's he?" I asked, when he was gone.

"Jim?" Lou Taylor shrugged her shoulders. "Just a friend. He's kind of nice, actually. He's the Stockholm representative for a U.S. plastics firm, if it makes a difference..

Scotch or gin? I recommend the Scotch. The gin you get here isn't fit to drink."

"In that case, Scotch," I said. -

"I just want to get one thing straight, Helm," she said, turning to face me with the glass in her hand. "On the phone, you sounded as if you were planning to go up to Kiruna all alone. Well, don't kid yourself. This is my article, and I'm going to be right beside you when you shoot the pictures. I don't know much about photography, but I know the stuff I want, and I'm at least going to see that you get it down on film, whether or not it gets used later."

IT CAME so easily and naturally that it caught me by surprise. I'd expected to have to work for it. I'd thought she'd at least try to be cute about it. It was such a simple and obvious test.

"Try her," Mac had said. "If she's willing to let you go up to the Arctic and shoot these mining pictures all by yourself, her article is probably as innocent as it seems, and you're wasting your time. In that case, you'll have to dig up another lead somewhere. But if she insists on coming with you, you may be in business." He hesitated. "Eric."

"Sir?"

"Strictly speaking, the sex of your quarry has not yet been determined. I speak of him as a man only because Taylor's article refers to him as a man. But Taylor's information should not be accepted uncritically. We don't know where he got it or how reliable it is. He may even have had reasons for being deliberately misleading. As for the wife, nobody seems to know too much about her. Apparently she's just an American kid he met in Rome a few years back; everybody was rather surprised when they got married, since he hadn't been considered good matrimonial material." Mac smiled thinly. "Anyway, just because a suspect is female doesn't mean that she can be safely disregarded. Keep it in mind."

I was keeping it in mind as I faced Mrs. Taylor in her hotel room. It wasn't hard to do. She had no appeal for me at the moment. I've never had much use for women in pants. When I mentioned this idiosyncrasy to a psychiatrist friend, he said it was a subconscious defense mechanism against my incipient homosexual tendencies. He had me worried for a while, until I discovered that he explained all human behavior on the grounds of incipient homosexual tendencies. He was even writing a book about his theory, but I don't think he ever finished it. Somebody else beat him to it. The competition in the field of psychiatric theories is fierce these days.

Anyway, a woman in pants has very little interest for me, as a woman, and that goes double for all the strange britches women have taken to parading around in lately. Mrs. Taylor's snugly fitting nether garments-I wouldn't know precisely what to call them-came to an arbitrary end just below her calves, so that they looked like slacks badly shrunk in the wash. She was wearing soft black slippers. Her hair was dark, cut off short, and brushed back over her ears boyishly.

I couldn't help remembering that this was, or had been, a married woman, and wondering what her husband had thought of this get-up. It must have been kind of like going to bed with your kid brother.

I said, "Don't bite me, Mrs. Taylor. If you want to go north with me, there's certainly no objection on my part. But you'll have to take up the matter of expenses with the magazine. I have no authority to put you on the payroll."

She said, "Oh, I'll pay my own way. I won't even try to stick them for it. But I do want to go along." Then she smiled at me, half apologetically. "I've lived this story for months, Helm. Can you blame me for wanting to see how you handle your end of it?"

When she smiled, her face got a kind of pixie look, half wistful and half mischievous. It wasn't a bad face, as faces go. It had the proper features in the proper sizes in the proper places, and there were no visible defects or blemishes

– but I did notice an odd, round little scar, relatively fresh, on her throat. Seeing this made a tingling sensation go down my spine; I had a few similar scars myself. I waited until she'd handed me my drink and turned to tap her cigarette ashes into a nearby bowl, and sure enough, on the other side and quite far back-you couldn't see how it had missed the spine-was the small exit mark.

I remembered Mac's teffing me she was supposed to have been wounded. There could be little doubt of that part of the story. This girl had been shot through the neck, not too long ago, with a jacketed bullet from a military weapon. You might say she was lucky. An expanding bullet in the same place would damn near have torn her head off.