Chain Reaction

by Nicholas Guild

  So it had all been for nothing. They stood facing each other, perhaps no more than twenty feet apart, and Jenny found she had to blink hard to keep back her tears. Three people were dead, and nothing had changed. The war was still right here.

  “And now, madam, the time has come when we must decide your own particular fate.”

  He stood there, in the center of the road, listing a little to one side, staying alive, it would seem, by sheer force of will. The man had two bullet holes in him, was probably bleeding internally, and he seemed to dismiss all that as if it hardly mattered.

  “I ask myself what could have brought the police down on us,” he went on, his face hardening. “I ask myself why Lautner bolted like that, what he expected from those two—I’m not such a fool as to imagine that he was all eagerness to help his country in its hour of peril. And then I remembered that gas station, where the two of you were alone.”

  “I left a message—Erich knew.” What the hell. She squared her shoulders. She would at least show him he wasn’t the only one who could fight back. He had obviously figured it out for himself anyway.

  “Then you are a brave woman,” he said. “Braver than most men, braver than Lautner. I don’t blame you. I would have done the same thing in your place. Doubtless you could face death as fearlessly as most, but unfortunately this will not be your opportunity to prove it. Because, you see, I have need of you now. Get in the car.”

  She tried, except that, just at first, she couldn’t seem to move. Was there such a thing as delayed fear? She had felt courageous enough when she was reasonably sure that von Niehauser planned to shoot her within the next fifteen or twenty seconds, but now, having been reprieved, she rediscovered her terror of him. She had the distinct impression that if she risked taking a step forward she would probably fall flat on her face.

  Von Niehauser had a simple way out of the difficulty, however. He just cocked his pistol and aimed it at her head.

  “I am not sure that my wounds will allow me to drive, madam. But if you decline to help me, I shall have no choice but to leave you here with a bullet through your face and manage on my own.”

  And that was how Jenny Springer found her legs. One foot at a time—right, left, right, left. It got easier as she went along. She was fresh out of heroism, she discovered; it was easier to stay alive.

  “I haven’t driven a car in two years,” she said, settling in behind the wheel. She adjusted the front seat forward a few inches. The key, surprisingly, was still in the ignition.

  “Then this will give you an opportunity to practice,” von Niehauser answered dryly. He was on the seat beside her, and his pistol was pointed in the general direction of her heart.

  “Shouldn’t we do something about that?”

  She glanced significantly at the bloodstains on the sleeve of his overcoat—the bullet had torn a huge, ragged hole in the fabric, like a wound in its own right.

  “I hardly think this is the place for that. I have a first-aid kit in my suitcase, and we only have another two hours or so to drive before we reach our destination—or, at least, a place where we can stop with relative safety. That will be soon enough.”

  It was the first time she had seen his face close up since they had stopped, and the skin around his eyes and nose was the color of buckskin. He was perspiring heavily. He looked withered. He looked like he was dying. Only two hours—two hours without painkillers, two hours in which to bleed away his life a little more.

  Why should anything be that important to anybody?

  She turned the key and listened as the engine coughed and came back to life. She would drive the car, because she hadn’t any more excuses and, anyway, she was no match for this man.

  They pulled away, leaving the main road and the dead behind them.

  . . . . .

  It was getting dark. They had long since left the paved roads and were bumping over a dirt track that was passable only because the ground had been frozen hard for weeks. Von Niehauser had tied his bad arm to his belt with a packing strap he had found in the trunk, but their lurching progress along this thread of a mountain road must have been almost unbearable for him.

  The map was neatly folded on the back seat. He never looked at it—he seemed to have committed it to memory. The revolver rested in his lap, like a small animal that had gone to sleep.

  The country had changed, almost as soon as they had left Highway 25. The land was rising again, becoming more broken and ragged as the mountains—abrupt and raw, with hard, sharp faces of broken stone—crowded closer and closer in on them. Except for the road itself, the last evidences of human presence had long since been left behind.

  “The road will fork in a few miles. Stay to the left. I shouldn’t think it will be much longer.”

  It was strange, considering that he had been shot to pieces and was probably half dead from loss of blood, but all along his attitude toward her had been conciliatory, even gentle. He talked to her as if she were a frightened child, and his voice seemed to reflect none of the terrible physical suffering that was etching itself so clearly into his face. The threats had never been repeated; the gun was always there but seemed to have been forgotten. It was almost as if he had decided they were allies, that he had made some decision to trust her. Or perhaps he was simply becoming accustomed to her, or the pain and the bleeding had taken their toll and he was beginning to get careless. At any rate, she had almost ceased to be afraid of him. And, if he wanted to trust her, that might be something that would come in handy later on.

  He looked awful, worse and worse as the time passed. It seemed a labor for him even to close his eyes. But the mastery over himself never weakened—so maybe entertaining any hopes of catching him off guard were just so much wishful thinking.

  At last, there it was, a NO TRESPASSING sign and a rutted trail that led away from the road to the crown of a hill, as barren a place as God ever made. There were no indications that anyone had been there in months.

  The cabin, which they saw as soon as they had skirted around to the other side of the hill, was a tight little box made of rough boards. For some reason, the sight of it filled Jenny with a curious elation.

  She nosed the car up to the side wall, which happened to be windowless, switched off the engine and the headlights, and waited.

  “I am afraid I shall have to be so ungallant as to ask you to carry the bags inside,” von Niehauser said quietly, sounding as if he had just awakened from a profound sleep. “You will find the front door unlocked.”

  She opened her door, stepped outside, and was surprised all over again at how cold it was—the wind at this altitude was much stronger and almost palpably laden with ice. The sky was black now, but there was a bright full moon that shone like a searchlight.

  The cabin, as it faced south, seemed to be perched on the edge of a saucer. The land sank slowly for about a mile and then began to rise again until it ended abruptly in a chain of mountains that stretched in both directions for as far as you cared to look. In between, the ground was dotted with rocks, some of them the size of a refrigerator and some no bigger than a man’s hand. One wondered what could have possessed anyone to build here.

  She opened the trunk and got out the long leather rifle sleeve and a small leather suitcase held together with two leather straps. Erich’s bag was there, a brown wooden thing with metal corners, covered with travel stickers; it gave her a strange feeling to see it, almost as if it had been his corpse tucked up there next to the spare tire, instead of just a battered box with a pair of canvas handles. She decided to leave it where it was. If von Niehauser wanted it, he could come and get it himself.

  There was an old-fashioned iron stove standing in the precise center of the cabin floor, and an orange crate filled with kindling next to the door. Von Niehauser was already feeding a tiny flame when she came in. Within a few minutes you could feel the heat.

  “And now, with your assistance, I can see to this,” he said. He was sitting at the foot of one o
f the two twin beds that were jammed into that corner, at right angles from one another. He was untying his left arm from his belt, and when it dropped lifelessly to his side his head snapped away and a faint, whimpering groan came from between his clenched teeth. It was several seconds before he let his breath out.

  And then, slowly, he began to undo the buttons first of his overcoat, and then of the military tunic underneath, and finally of his shirt. He slipped his right hand inside and began feeling around, exploring the wound on that side, and then he moved his fingers to the back of his rib cage.

  “Good—I can feel the bullet. It’s resting directly under the skin, so there should be no difficulty in cutting it out.”

  His eyes rested on her for perhaps a quarter of a minute before it sank in that it was she whom he expected to do the cutting.

  “Help me to take these things off.”

  He freed his right arm first, snaking it out through the three layers of sleeve and then picking up the revolver again, which he had kept beside him. Then he stood up, letting the weight of the overcoat pull everything else away until it was all hanging from his left shoulder like a bullfighter’s cape. When he sat down again, she began working the left overcoat sleeve down his arm. She could tell from the way he was breathing that the process was a torment for him.

  It wasn’t until she had gotten it free, and saw the way the arm of his tunic was matted and stiff with blood that had dried to a blackish purple, that she understood what he must have been going through for the past couple of hours.

  “We’ll have to cut this away,” she said, her voice shaking as she wiped her hands off on the front of her coat.

  “I expect so. You’ll find a pair of scissors in the first aid kit in my bag.”

  The whole time, while she peeled away the pieces of cloth that had glued themselves to his flesh, while she cleaned out the wound, while she bandaged it and splinted his arm to a flat length of board that had apparently been used to hold the cabin window open on warm days, he never made a sound. It seemed to be a point of honor.

  “And now the little detail of my back,” he whispered, smiling his strange, apologetic smile as his face streamed with sweat. The ordeal had blanched his skin to a pale gray.

  He pulled a small folding knife out of his trousers pocket. “The blade is too short to kill me with—unless one is much more skilled in these matters than I suspect you are, madam. I shouldn’t advise you to try.”

  He pried it open with one hand and held it out to her. He had been right about the bullet. It was a little lump halfway up his back, just a few inches from his spine. She braced herself, took half a breath, held it, and cut. The thing popped out into her hand, which was then very rapidly covered with blood.

  When everything was over, and she had retreated to the end of the other bed and was struggling to get a hold on herself, he sat there, bracing his good arm against the other knee, looking tired but somehow oddly indifferent to what they had both been through.

  “I should like to thank you, madam—it occurs to me that until this moment I have somehow neglected the courtesy of inquiring your name.”

  “Jenny,” she answered, as if in her sleep. “Jenny Springer.”

  “Then thank you very much, Mrs. Springer. I am in your debt. And tomorrow my friends will come for me, and I will trouble you no longer.”

  He smiled, and closed his eyes, and allowed his head to sink down a little toward his naked breast, and for that instant he looked like one of those icons of death you saw all over Santa Fe, painted on the walls of the churches. Implacable death, who knows neither gratitude nor mercy. And then he opened his eyes and became human again.

  The little door to the iron stove was standing open; otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to see by that time. The two of them sat on opposite sides of the narrow triangle of reddish, wavering light.

  “I wonder if there is anything to eat,” he said suddenly. The remark was somehow as startling as if he had all at once declared the end of the world, and Jenny had to catch herself to keep from starting. “Perhaps we ought to have a look.”

  They didn’t find any food, but they did find a gas lantern. They hung it from a hook in the center of the ceiling. Somehow, with the cabin flooded with light, the space within those four walls seemed to define them. She was merely she, freed for the moment from both past and future, and von Niehauser was merely a man who would not let his pain show. The events of the last several hours seemed to belong to other lives—all of that was far less real than the hissing of the gas lamp and the sound of the wind outside.

  “I saw some painkillers in the first aid kit,” she said.

  But he shook his head. His temples had grown hollow and there were black smears under his eyes, but still he shook his head.

  ‘‘I’ve gone without them before. It’s something I learned fighting in Russia—men don’t die of pain; they die of other things. Besides, the pain will help to keep me awake. What would I need to do with you, Mrs. Springer, before I could allow myself the luxury of falling asleep?”

  The silence that followed was almost a third presence in the tiny room. No, this wasn’t just a man with a few holes in him, and the past was real.

  “But there is no reason why you should not sleep.” He made a small, diffident gesture toward the other bed. “And you needn’t have any anxieties. I am not Erich Lautner, and even if I were. . . poor flesh has its limits.”

  For a moment she simply stared down at the floor, as if she hadn’t heard, and then, for some reason, she glanced up at the gas lantern and had an idea.

  “I think some of your sandwiches are still out in the car. If you’re still hungry. . . I know I am.”

  “Then go and get them.” His eyes narrowed and one corner of his mouth lengthened slightly, as if he could see through into her mind and was amused by what he read there. “I will retain the key, if you don’t mind.”

  He held out his hand, and she hunted around in her coat pocket and surrendered the keychain.

  “I wouldn’t know where to run to anyway,” she said. “I don’t even know where this place is.”

  He smiled in a way that made it impossible to tell whether he believed her or not.

  Outside, there was that damp smell in the air that she had learned, since coming to New Mexico, to associate with the approach of a winter storm. According to the radio weatherman, there was supposed to be a genuine killer coming up from the south—they had been headlining it for the past two days, and now it was possible to believe them.

  “And tomorrow my friends will come for me, and I will trouble you no longer.”

  They might, or they might not. If these mountains were under a couple of feet of snow they might not. They might think twice about picking up their German spy if the wind was forty miles an hour and they couldn’t see to the end of their arm. They might not come then.

  But von Niehauser had killed two policemen this afternoon, so maybe his friends weren’t the only ones looking for him.

  And they would need something to look for.

  It was a slim chance. In twelve hours there might be nothing moving between Denver and Mexico City, but there were still those twelve hours. And she had to do something.

  It was a simple enough matter—you didn’t need the keys to turn on a car’s headlights. There was a little switch to the left of the steering wheel. Parked on that side of the cabin, where there were no windows, the car was as invisible from inside as if it had been buried in a rockslide.

  As she sat there on the front seat, she found herself prey to a conflict of emotions she wouldn’t have been able to imagine even two hours ago. Part of it was fear, simple anxiety to survive—if von Niehauser found out, what wouldn’t he do then? And he would find out. By tomorrow morning, in this cold, with the lights on, the car battery would be as dead as those two state troopers back there. As dead as. . .

  So, if she threw that switch she was probably committing suicide. She wouldn’t be crashing her
plane into a fuel storage tank or pulling the pin on a hand grenade and holding it to her bosom—she had seen Lana Turner do that in a movie once; or maybe it had been Veronica Lake—but the effect would be much the same.

  And then there was the sense of betrayal, as if, after all, it was a mean thing to do. Von Niehauser was. . .

  “I have my notes and my memory. . . I think I know enough to help my people build their bomb.”

  She put her hand on the switch and twisted, hard. The lights came on with a click. She had gone halfway back to the cabin before she realized she had forgotten the bag of sandwiches.

  “I see you’ve brought them,” von Niehauser said, brightening visibly as she closed the door behind herself. He was just pulling on a clean shirt, gingerly nursing his splinted arm down through the sleeve. “How many are there left?”

  After an instant of hesitation, as if she couldn’t decide how he expected her to know, she opened the bag and looked inside.

  “Three—and a bottle of Squirt.”

  “You might save me a swallow of that.” He smiled. “I should hate to go to my grave without knowing what something with such a picturesque name tasted like.”

  She was astonished at her own hunger; she ate two of the sandwiches almost without stopping. Von Niehauser merely tasted the corner of one and then set it aside. Somehow it was impossible to think of him sitting down to a big meal.

  Had he ever had a wife? Had he ever had anyone? Jenny found herself studying his face, wondering what recognizable human passions had ever crossed it. No, he wasn’t Erich Lautner. He seemed to have refined out of his character everything that didn’t relate to the business of being his country’s agent: lust, mercy, fear, even cruelty. There seemed to be nothing left of the man except will, cunning, and a certain gentlemanly deference for people’s feelings.

  She was alive, she sensed, merely because she was useful to him—or, at least, not in the way. When the time came he would murder her easily enough, but without either pleasure or brutality. And he would probably apologize. It was like being with a civilized cobra.