Chain Reaction

by Nicholas Guild

  The sky that was visible over the tops of the buildings was a sinister, transparent gray, as if it gazed down on the works of men with contemptuous disapproval. Jenny shuffled along, staring down at the sidewalk as it disappeared under her feet, not knowing where to go, feeling as if she should be out of sight somewhere. All the way down, she hadn’t really known what she was going to do—Erich would be waiting for her, even now, but she hadn’t known if she would have the nerve to go.

  And now she did.

  Because he too had some claim on her. She had an obligation to tell him, to his face, that it was over between them. It was both the right and the wisest thing to do.

  The entrance to the La Ventana Hotel looked just as it had the last time and every other time she had been there. A seedy place, a fitting scene for the sort of affair she had been conducting for. . . how long? With a certain uncomfortable thrill, she realized it had been over two months. The La Ventana hadn’t seemed so terrible then.

  The man at the desk didn’t glance up when she stepped across the lobby—had she become such a fixture as that? She made her way slowly up the stairwell, forcing herself along, counting the cigarette burns on the carpet to concentrate her mind on each step, as if each few yards contained the end of her journey. She could feel her heart pounding. It was almost painful; she was surprised people didn’t come rushing out into the corridor to see what the racket was.

  It was the same room. Somehow Erich always contrived to get the same room—perhaps he had come to some sort of understanding with the desk clerk. Perhaps he had brought so many women here that he had developed a certain proprietorship. Their regular patron.

  When the door opened, Erich simply stood there. His eyes were wide, and he hardly seemed to know what to do. He seemed surprised to see her.

  “Good morning,” he said finally, smiling suavely and stepping aside to let her in. The voice was just a little too smooth, as if he were reasserting his control over himself. “You’re early—what happened to your little luncheon group?”

  Jenny came inside, wondering, quite irrelevantly, why men were always so contemptuous of women enjoying each other’s company, as if they should properly just fade out of existence when there wasn’t a man around. She wished, just at that moment, that she could nourish a little resentment, but she couldn’t—she seemed to be past having any right to pride.

  She let him close the door behind her and stood in the center of the room, holding the strap of her purse with both hands. Erich came over and put his hands on her shoulders, but she twisted away. He didn’t seem to care; it was just a gesture he had been expected to make. He smiled, apparently waiting for her to answer his question.

  “I wasn’t hungry.”

  The smile broadened into something very like a grin—he was flattered. He thought she was saying that she couldn’t wait to be with him. And suddenly she discovered that she could resent him after all.

  “I can’t stay,” she went on, staring down at her hands. “And I won’t be coming back here.” She looked up, because all at once her fear and shame had left her—it was only Erich she was talking to, and there was no way he could hurt her anymore. “I don’t want to see you again.”

  The smile on his face became sympathetic, almost patronizing, and he seemed about to put his hands on her again. “Are you angry because I’m leaving?”

  “No. It’s better that way. Goodbye, Erich.”

  There, she had said it. What could he do, except perhaps tell someone that Jenny Springer had been his mistress? She would weather the gossip, if there was any, and then she would be free. And then she would do the right thing by Hal, whatever that might turn out to be.

  That was what she was thinking as she crossed back to the door. And then she put her hand on the knob and opened the door, and there was Hal.

  . . . . .

  He was just standing there, in the carefully pressed olive green uniform he had put on that morning, his feet slightly apart and his hands down at his sides. She noticed that he had missed a little spot on the left side of his jaw when he had shaved that morning, and that the creases around his eyes seemed a trifle deeper. There was time to notice all of this because time itself seemed to have slowed to nothing, just like her heart. She wasn’t sure that it hadn’t stopped altogether. Perhaps it had. Perhaps in another instant she would simply fall down dead of surprise.

  And then she noticed that in his right hand, which was hanging down limply at his side, just as if the nerves in his arm had been severed, he was holding his service automatic. That brought her back to life.

  The pistol came up until it was aimed at a spot just a little under her breastbone.

  “Get back in there,” he growled, his eyes narrowing as his face grew rigid with suppressed rage. He took a step forward, as if he meant to prod her backward with the muzzle of his gun.

  What did he want? What could he possibly be doing here? She had forgotten all about Erich. When she glanced back over her shoulder to see what was making that peculiar wheezing sound, she was surprised to see him. He was standing behind her, bent like an old man, his breath coming in rapid, rasping gulps. His face looked as if it had been bleached white, and it was covered with sweat. In the course of a few seconds he seemed to have been transformed into a frightened, elderly wreck.

  It was all just too silly. What was he so worried about? With a clarity that surprised her, Jenny saw all at once that there was no longer anything she had to fear from anyone. Hal wasn’t going to shoot her—he wasn’t even going to shoot Erich. Hal couldn’t kill anyone; he was just trying to work out some way to be a man still in his own eyes. Presently, when he had threatened and talked and satisfied himself that no one would think he was a coward—and he wasn’t a coward, he was only hurt and humiliated—then he would put the gun down and they would all leave this place as if nothing had happened. And nothing would have happened.

  And as for Erich—well, how could anyone be frightened of him?

  “It isn’t what it seems, Hal,” she said, her voice perfectly smooth as she stood there, clutching her handbag. She tried very hard to keep from looking at the gun. “We’ll go home now, and I’ll explain.”

  “You’ll explain! I like that.”

  The muscles in his face tensed into a cruel, painful grin. It was himself he was hurting—Jenny wanted to reach out and touch him on the arm, to give him some small sign of human sympathy, but of course it was too late for anything like that. So she remained where she was, being careful not to move or appear frightened or to seem to notice that her life was being threatened. The important thing was to keep from forcing Hal into anything he would regret later.

  And then, as if surprised and annoyed at the intrusion, he seemed to notice Erich for the first time.

  “Who’s this guy?” he asked, pointing at him with the automatic—the thing might have been a pencil for all the harm he meant; he gave the impression he had forgotten he was holding it.

  Erich looked at the pistol, and his eyebrows shot up. And then he actually smiled. He smiled and nodded, just as if they were being introduced at a dinner party.

  “How are you?” he said. The man was an idiot.

  Hal Springer and his wife exchanged a glance of mute incomprehension, and Jenny shrugged. They stood there like that for a moment, like the three points of a triangle—Jenny and Erich about nine feet apart, and Hal still just inside the threshold, the door still standing open behind him. No one, apparently, had thought to close it, so they were acting out their little drama in plain view of anyone who might walk past in the corridor.

  It occurred to Jenny that perhaps she ought to say something, but she decided that, no, she wouldn’t. It might be better this way—there were limits to how shrill things could become this way. They weren’t quite alone. The open door was almost a sort of insurance.

  And then, suddenly, they really weren’t alone any longer. Behind Hal’s back, as something no more distinct than a vague shape, there appeared a
fourth someone. He simply stood there, peering into the room over her husband’s shoulder, an observer, like the casual witness to an accident.

  It was a man, that was all Jenny knew with any certainty in that fraction of a second. He wasn’t a very distinct figure; he seemed to carry his own shadow with him. Just a tall, dark man, nothing more.

  And then he looked into her face, seeming to recognize her, as if they had known each other always. His finger crossed the thin line of his mouth, demanding her silence.

  And then Jenny’s eyes began to round as she realized, through some process she didn’t even begin to understand, that this was the furthest thing from a neutral spectator. This man was different, as different from Hal and Erich as if he had belonged to some other species. It didn’t matter that Hal’s back was turned; no gun in the world would have helped him, not against this man who appeared to think he could compel obedience with a gesture.

  She tried to speak. She opened her mouth, but nothing seemed to come out. Like a mouse charmed by a snake, there was nothing she could do except to stare. To stare, and wonder that Hal didn’t sense his own danger.

  “Then you’re the other man,” Hal said, still pointing with his pistol at Erich. It was astonishing, but he just went right on—he was the jealous husband, even now. The whole world had changed in the last few seconds, and he didn’t even know. “I hitched a ride into town and waited—I knew where they’d park. And then I just followed her. It was easy. And now you’re the one I have to—”

  He never finished. By then there was a hand around his neck, with the middle finger and thumb pressing against his larynx—he was being strangled, but with a curious delicacy.

  In the instant when he realized what was happening to him, Hal made a muffled little noise and the pistol in his hand began to jerk from side to side as he seemed to be pulling the trigger. Astonishingly, there was no flash, no sharp smell of burning gunpowder, no bang. The pistol wouldn’t fire; it merely twitched at the end of Hal’s arm, as if it were frantic to get away.

  Why didn’t he try to break loose? The fingers at his throat seemed to hold him with no more force than a woman’s caress, and yet Hal’s eyes were wide with helpless fear. His mouth opened and closed and the hand with the gun slowly sank back down to his side.

  And then he fell—his legs might have been kicked out from under him, it was so sudden.

  It was all over, almost before you could have realized anything had happened. He was lying there on the floor, twitching. He trembled and jerked as if an electric current were passing through him. His face was buried in the carpet, and his gun was still clutched loosely in his lifeless hand. Jenny couldn’t have said how she knew that he was dead, but somehow it was obvious. Hal had been killed, just as neatly and quickly as an apple is plucked from its stem. He was dead.

  The man standing in the door frame took a step forward and pulled the door closed behind himself. He was tall, dark, and slender almost to the point of seeming sickly. He was also strikingly handsome, something Jenny noticed, even at such a moment, with a strange detachment. It all might have been happening behind a sheet of glass.

  He was dressed in what looked like some sort of uniform; she was sure she had seen the uniform before, probably in the movies, but she couldn’t have placed it any more exactly than that.

  He reached over and picked up the pistol, which by then had slid out of Hal’s grasp and was lying on the floor beside him. He held it up, the handle pinched between his first finger and thumb, and smiled. He looked as if he were about to apologize.

  “As you see,” he said, his eyes fixed on Jenny’s face, “he had neglected to cock the hammer.”

  24

  The negotiations that followed were long and complex, one gathered, and conducted entirely in German.

  The tall dark man who had killed Hal was a perfect gentleman. He took Jenny by the elbow and led her to a chair, where she sat and stared at her dead husband and wondered what was going on. From where he was lying on the floor, Hal stared back through eyes that were growing increasingly lusterless and accusing. A thin trickle of blood came from the corner of his mouth, but otherwise he gave no sign of the sudden violence of his death. He just stared at her.

  “Von Niehauser, wir konnen die Frau nicht erst töten und sie dann noch dazu hier lassen. Man kennt mich hier! Von Niehauser, die Polizei! Wie könnten wir hier entfliehen? Wie. . ?”

  Erich was highly excited, gesturing wildly with his hands and sweating, while the other man sat quietly on the corner of the bed and listened. Once in a while he would nod, or speak a few words, or gaze at Jenny for a few seconds and smile his strange, apologetic smile. She gathered that his name was von Niehauser, but somehow it seemed unnatural to think of him as having a name at all. He hardly seemed human enough for that. He seemed to have forgotten that there was a corpse lying not a yard away from his left foot.

  It was obvious that they were discussing what to do with her. Jenny didn’t need to understand the words to know that. It was clear enough from the panicky look that came over Erich’s face every time he forgot himself enough to glance in her direction. She had decided that they probably would kill her—it seemed the inevitable thing—but the thought left her curiously unmoved. After all, what difference could it make?

  And, anyway, that would be up to von Niehauser, whom in her mind she thought of merely as “him,” as if they were alone in the room. They might as well have been—Hal was dead, and Erich was nothing. And she was as good as dead, so that just left von Niehauser. Him.

  She wished he would do something about Hal. It seemed so cruel to just leave him there like that. It seemed so unfair, so much the final indignity. She wished she had the courage to say something. . .

  As if he could read her mind, von Niehauser got up from the bed suddenly, stripped off the counterpane, and spread it out over the body on the floor. Then he sat down again and appeared to forget all about it.

  Nothing made sense anymore. Hal was a lump under a bed quilt, and Erich had been reduced to little more than an incomprehensible stream of foreign words, and the final arbiter of her life and future, a man whom twenty minutes ago she hadn’t known existed, was close enough that she could have reached out and touched him but hardly seemed conscious that she was there.

  As she held herself perched on the edge of the chair, Jenny realized for the first time how limited had been her experience of the world. Tragedy was a word she had learned in a high school English class, and death was as unreal as the mystery of the Holy Trinity. Both her parents were still alive, had never known a sick day in their lives, and her older brother was a naval lieutenant stationed in London, where his job was to write speeches for an admiral to read to women’s clubs. Perhaps that was what she had held so bitterly against Hal, that he had cheated her out of the knowledge of genuine fear.

  God knows, nothing had prepared her for the man who sat on the corner of the bed she had shared with Erich Lautner, who hardly seemed to move as he listened politely to Erich’s hysterical pleading, who answered in a soft, cultured voice, who killed as effortlessly as another man might have crumpled up a piece of newspaper. Who looked at her—when he did look at her—as if she were a child, or a part of the furniture, or invisible.

  God knows, she was frightened enough now, but not of death. Hal was dead. Lots of people were dead, and they didn’t seem to mind. But they hadn’t ever seen this man von Niehauser. That the world should hold such terrors, that was what was frightening.

  “All right, Lautner,” he said finally, and, for the first time, in English. “Have it entirely your own way.”

  He rose to his feet, as graceful a process as you could imagine, and turned to Jenny and, this time, didn’t smile.

  “As you can imagine, madam, we have been discussing what should be done with you. Your friend Erich is quite emphatic that we take you with us, since to leave you here, either alive or dead, would, of course, instantly connect him with the death of your husband.”
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  “Is this really necessary, von Niehauser?” Erich Lautner was leaning against the wall, with his elbow thrown over the top of the dresser. He seemed to be completely exhausted, and his eyes were red rimmed and puffy as he watched the other man the way a dog might watch his master weighing a stick in his hand. But von Niehauser hardly seemed to hear.

  “Yes, it is necessary,” he said finally, but to Jenny rather than to Lautner. “We must all understand precisely where we are—a man has been killed. Murdered, if you will.”

  Jenny glanced down at the lump under the bedspread, and then quickly away. She didn’t know where to look anymore. She would have liked to cover her eyes with her hands, but that seemed such a pointless thing to do. After all, everything would still be there again when she took them away.

  “You’re the devil,” she murmured, hardly loud enough to be heard. “I think I must be going crazy.”

  “As to that, madam, I shouldn’t like to offer an opinion, but I can assure you that my own association with the powers of darkness extends no further than the Security Service of the German SS.”

  And then he smiled once more, a weary, apologetic smile, and Jenny found she had to fight down a temptation to begin screaming.

  “Erich, you see, is a spy,” he went on, making a casual, contemptuous motion in the direction of the dresser. “He was recruited by Reinhard Heydrich in 1939 and ordered to defect to the West, and now I’ve been assigned to bring him home so he can tell our scientists all about that frightful weapon the Americans are building here in New Mexico. You see, we have hopes of building one ourselves—first. Or perhaps you didn’t know what all those men are doing up there on the Los Alamos Mesa.”

  She shook her head. She did know, but that too was supposed to be a secret. She wanted to tell him that she didn’t want to know, but she could tell from the expression on his face that this terrible man wasn’t interested in what she wanted.