Chain Reaction

by Nicholas Guild

  “Give it up, Niehauser. Gomá is dead, so there’s nobody to help you get away. If you try to cross into Mexico now, you’ll never make it—you’ll die out there; you can see what’s coming just as well as I can.”

  “I have seen wind and snow before, my friend.”

  “Like this?”

  “Yes, like this—and much worse.”

  “But you weren’t alone then. And somebody hadn’t shot you full of holes.” He paused for a moment, and they both looked at the ragged tear in von Niehauser’s coat, just to the right and a little under the first rank of buttons. There was no blood visible—it was a heavy fabric and doubtless all the spattering was on the inside—but neither was it possible to doubt how it had gotten there.

  “So you have discovered my little secret,” von Niehauser said finally. “Good for you.”

  Havens only shook his head.

  “Don’t try it. What chance have you got? Even if the storm somehow doesn’t kill you, even if you got across to Mexico, the first break in the weather and this whole area will be crawling with federal agents who aren’t going to pay any attention to borders anyway. You can’t run that far.”

  But von Niehauser only smiled, the same smile that had never left his lips, as if he were being called upon to explain adult truths to a child.

  “So you recommend that I stay, and die at the end of an American rope in two or three months’ time? I’m sorry, but the possibility doesn’t attract me. Besides, there is always the faint chance I might surprise us both.”

  He began to rise to his feet, leaning heavily on the rifle—he really was in a bad way. It seemed a miracle that he could even have walked the few hundred yards from his place of ambush.

  But he made it into the saddle. The horse, which had grown restive as the storm rose with greater and greater intensity behind them, calmed under his hand.

  “Goodbye,” he shouted—it was now necessary to shout. The wind was like some cry of animal despair. “I know you cannot wish me luck, but I can thank you for remembering the truth. Goodbye.”

  “Niehauser! NieHAUSER!”

  It was perfectly useless, of course. Even if he had heard—and in the midst of such a gale, where the snow whipped along the ground so fast that it was nothing except a blur, how could he have heard?—but even if he had he wouldn’t have stopped. It wasn’t very long before he disappeared completely, like a man who has stepped behind a curtain.

  It was perhaps to his credit that Havens’ thoughts at that moment were more about von Niehauser’s survival than his own. When he tried getting to his feet, and discovered finally and forever that his left leg just wasn’t going to take the weight, it was from some half formed idea of going after the by then hardly visible figure of his adversary. It wasn’t until he collapsed back to the ground, and felt the wrenching pain that hardly left him able to breathe, that he began to get scared.

  George, you could die out here too, he thought. He wondered if that was what von Niehauser had intended—if that could be why he wasn’t dead already. After all, the man had given sufficient evidence to date that he was playing for keeps.

  He twisted around and discovered that he could still just make out the peaked roof of the little cabin. If he could see it, maybe he could get to it. Maybe. . .

  Not a chance. It was two hundred yards—at least. How could a man crawl that distance, even if his life depended on it?

  Maybe he couldn’t. But even if he couldn’t, at least he could show von Niehauser that the Germans weren’t the only ones prepared to die trying.

  He had made perhaps seventy-five or eighty feet, and his hands, even inside his gloves, were torn and scraped, and his bad leg was pounding like an anvil, when he saw something moving ahead of him. He stopped for a moment—it wasn’t a hard decision to make—and wiped the snow from his eyes and looked again.

  Something had moved. But that really wasn’t very surprising—every goddamned thing in the world seemed to be moving. The storm was playing tricks on him, that was all. Anyway, in this snow he was nearly blind.

  And then, as he tried nerving himself up to see if he couldn’t manage another three or four yards, he felt someone take hold of the shoulder of his coat. It was a strong tug—that was no trick.

  “Try to get up,” the voice said. It was shouting, and from only a few feet away, but it sounded as thin as a woman’s. “Is your leg bad? Lean on me.”

  Jesus—it was a woman’s voice. All of a sudden he found himself resting his arm across a pair of narrow shoulders in a tan coat that was almost white with snow. She wasn’t very big, but the arm he felt around his waist seemed as though it intended to hold him up all by itself.

  For the rest, he could wait. All he knew—all he cared about—was that all at once he had a chance to die old.

  They didn’t say anything more. They didn’t have the breath to waste, and the wind and stinging ice didn’t make them want to pause and get acquainted. Havens concentrated on keeping his feet under him.

  He could see the cabin clearly now, and the car parked nose in beside it. It gave him a reason to keep going.

  Sixty yards. . . One foot in front of the other, balancing to keep the strain off his leg. Fifty yards. . .

  He could count the boards in the front wall now. He could see the shape of the door handle. He could. . .

  One step at a time. Twenty-five yards. . . twenty. . . God, his leg hurt so bad he could hardly feel it at all.

  Thirty feet. . . fifteen. . .

  He almost fell through the door—it wasn’t even closed. He just collapsed onto the floor and crawled to the center of the room. There was a stove going. He could hear the hiss of the updraft. He couldn’t feel the heat yet; he was still too cold to feel anything, but he didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything else in the world, except that he was inside. All he wanted to do was to remember how people breathed.

  Finally, after he had heard the door slam shut behind him, after he could feel his hands again, when he could believe that it was finally finished with and he could stop worrying about his eyelashes freezing shut, he remembered.

  He turned over onto his side—it wasn’t easy, but nothing was easy—so he could see behind him, and she was still there, leaning against the door as if she thought the armies of the shady night were outside trying to get in, as if she thought there was nothing but her slender little body between the two of them and destruction. Three minutes ago, there hadn’t been. It was an odd feeling to owe one’s life to a pretty little woman with light brown hair and the eyes of a frightened child.

  He cleared his throat, just to make sure that it still worked. It did—he could probably manage five or six words as well as the next man. And now he even had somebody to listen to them. So he might as well find out.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  30

  It never stopped, all the rest of that day. The wind sent the snow snapping against the front of the cabin like gravel—it even got in under the door and went snaking across the floorboards until Havens stuffed the crack with old rags. You couldn’t see out the window; it was frosted over, inside and out. Every once in a while a kind of shudder would pass through the whole structure, as if it too had reached the end of its strength and was about to collapse under the unwavering pressure of the storm. It was like being buried.

  There was nothing to do except to keep the fire going. There was nothing to eat, but they were only hungry enough to be uncomfortable. There was nothing to distract Havens from the more or less continuous contemplation of his own physical and spiritual misery. He concentrated on his leg, which hurt like hell but from a purely functional point of view seemed to improve from the moment the fire started to thaw it out. It was only a bad sprain, apparently. Within two hours he could stand on it again, and by the middle of the afternoon he could get back and forth to stoke the stove if he used a broom handle for a crutch.

  His head, though, was another matter. He hadn’t realized that anything could hur
t that much for that long. He could put his hand up next to his ear and feel his heart beating through the bruise. But he imagined he would live through that too.

  And they were stuck. It would have been an act of madness to have gone outside, and the car wasn’t going to take them anywhere anyway.

  “The batteries are really dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “How come?”

  “I left the headlights on.”

  It was said without any emotional coloring at all. She might have been telling him the price of the wallpaper. She just sat there, on the edge of one of the two beds that took up that part of the room, drained of every human feeling. Havens found himself staring at her, as if she were the eighth wonder of the world.

  “On purpose?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he didn’t kill you?”

  For a moment she didn’t answer. She just turned her great blank eyes on him like a couple of searchlights. She seemed to think the question was stupid—if she thought anything about it at all.

  “He didn’t kill you either,” she said finally. It would seem that was all the answer anybody should need.

  And she was right. Von Niehauser hadn’t killed him. He had gotten on his horse—and it was his horse, by right of conquest—and he had ridden off, knowing that there was someone to make sure that Havens found his way to safety. He had left one enemy to fend for another—it was all very tidy.

  Or perhaps, by that time, he had given up on the notion of having enemies. Perhaps he had decided to renounce the luxury.

  “Is there any chance of his getting away?” she asked, the way someone else might have asked, “Will it rain?”

  “If it were anyone except von Niehauser, I’d have to say no chance at all. As it is, I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  She might as well not have been listening. The man had murdered her husband, had kidnapped her, threatened her, led her into the worst kind of danger, and now, one gathered, how she might or might not feel about the fact that the odds were all in favor of his being as good as dead was going to have to remain her secret.

  Because, of course, she had told him all about herself, the whole sordid story, almost the first moment they were alone together inside the cabin. It had come out in fits and starts, as if it were something she was pulling out of herself by force. It was a confession she was making. She was Hester Prynne on her own private scaffold.

  “How bad is he hurt?” Havens asked, when the spectacle of all that self-contempt began to make him uneasy and he found it convenient to remember that he was an intelligence officer and von Niehauser was, in addition to everything else, an enemy agent.

  “He’s shot—here.” She pointed to a spot about eight inches below her right breast. “And in the elbow. He’s in a lot of pain, and I think he’s probably bleeding inside. He was pretty weak this morning.

  “But not weak enough to keep him from shooting me. And from coming down and catching my horse.”

  She looked at him as though he were reproaching her. “He didn’t have to catch the horse. It just stood there waiting until he came and got it. And I couldn’t have stopped him from shooting.”

  “I know that.”

  They didn’t talk anymore after that.

  . . . . .

  The next morning, when he woke up and discovered that the wind had subsided, Havens pushed open the cabin door and found that everything was a glistening white, almost as far as he could see. The sun was out. Everything was over.

  The snow was piled up in drifts in front of anything that had stood in its way, but otherwise it was only six or seven inches deep. They wouldn’t have had any trouble getting around, except that there wasn’t anywhere to go.

  Mrs. Springer came out, and they stood together in front of the cabin, looking south to the mountains. There was nothing alive out there, but they hadn’t expected there would be. Havens wondered how many hours it would be before the search teams from El Paso found them.

  “What’ll you do after you get out of here?”

  “After?” She stared at him as if the concept were strange to her, and then she shrugged her thin shoulders and took a ragged breath. It seemed to be the first time it had occurred to her that she had a future life to get through.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I’ll go home.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “New Jersey.”

  “I grew up in Brooklyn.” He looked at her and smiled, wondering why he had said that.

  “Yes?”

  And she smiled too. She seemed almost human again, standing there in the snow with her hands pressed against the waistband of her coat. She would probably have some pretty bad times in front of her, but she would be all right.

  “God, I wish we had something to eat. You sure there isn’t anything in the car?” Without waiting for an answer, he went around to where it was parked and opened the door. There was nothing except a couple of bloodstains on the front seat. Havens turned away, wishing he had left well enough alone. He was beginning to feel cold, and his leg was bothering him again. He went back inside the cabin.

  It was a few minutes after ten when he heard a loud buzzing sound and rushed outside again to see a search plane making its slow pass over the cabin. He waved his arms and shouted, perfectly aware that there was no way he could be heard; but the plane made a second pass and dipped its wing, so at least they knew he was there.

  Half an hour later he could look down where the road would have been and see a jeep churning up the snow. It was wearing chains and wasn’t doing more than fifteen miles an hour, and there were two men inside. Havens recognized the man in the passenger seat as Charlie Rice.

  “What kept you?”

  “Don’t be a smart ass, Havens. Where’s our spy?”

  Havens raised his arm and pointed to the southern mountains. The expression on his face suggested a certain distaste.

  “You mean he got away?”

  “I mean that the last time I saw him he had a horse and was on his way to Mexico. That was yesterday morning.”

  “Yesterday MORNing?” Charlie’s ponderous face seemed to broaden with anxiety. “Well then, he never made it. We’ve had guys waiting down there at that slaughterhouse of yours ever since last night, and he never turned up.”

  “He wouldn’t go there—he knew that Gomá was dead.”

  “And how did he happen to know that?”

  “I told him.”

  “You WHAT?”

  “I told him.” Havens made an impatient gesture that seemed to dismiss the subject. “Have the planes seen anything?”

  “Not a thing. Who’s the woman?”

  She had been there beside him for perhaps half a minute and somehow he had never noticed her. In that instant, he discovered, he hated Charlie Rice like poison.

  “This is Mrs. Springer,” he answered, in his best official voice. “She and her husband ran afoul of our friend in Santa Fe, and Mr. Springer was killed. Von Niehauser took the lady hostage. She’s the one who sabotaged his car.” He stared at the car, as if he hated it too, as if its flat battery were some sort of visible wound that should have been obvious even to Charlie Rice. He knew that Jenny Springer was staring at him, and it made him feel uncomfortable.

  “Have you got anything to eat?” he asked suddenly.

  They didn’t have much time. The search teams were converging around the cabin—two or three people would come up through the mountains from Mexico, retracing Havens’ route—and in an hour or so someone would take Mrs. Springer into El Paso, where she would be questioned and examined by a doctor and would be able to make a start at putting her life back together. Havens insisted that he was going to stay with the search, arguing that he certainly would have known it by then if von Niehauser’s bullet had done him any real harm. Since he was the officer in charge, no one was prepared to argue with him.

  The best Charlie Rice could do in the way of food was a Thermos of hot coffee, and H
avens and Mrs. Springer stood out in the sunshine and drank it while the others went inside to visit the stove. It was probably the last time they would be alone together.

  “Stick as close as you can to the truth,” Havens murmured, clasping the coffee cup between his hands and watching the cabin door suspiciously. “Just tell them that you and your husband went into the hotel together. You won’t convince them, but that won’t matter—they aren’t really interested in anybody except von Niehauser and this guy Lautner. I’ll see to it that your version gets written into the official record.”

  He handed the cup to Mrs. Springer, who seemed glad to have a reason for not looking him in the face.

  “Thank you for lying for me.” She paused and cleared her throat. Her voice was hardly more than a thick whisper. “You didn’t have to. It isn’t very important if they. . .”

  “Maybe you don’t think so now, but you will in a month or so. You don’t owe it to anybody to appear on some police blotter as the scarlet woman; these things never come out very close to the truth anyway. And the Bureau can afford to cover for you—after all, you were the only one who managed to slow our friend down any. Also there’s the small matter of my life.”

  She smiled, not very convincingly, and Havens thought perhaps he understood why von Niehauser hadn’t killed her when he found out about the headlights. She was no coward, was this lady. And she wasn’t going to lie to anybody about anything.

  But that didn’t matter either, because he was going to doctor the report under any circumstances.

  Ten minutes later he climbed into the jeep, leaving a faceless young man from the El Paso office to take care of Mrs. Springer while he and Charlie Rice set off to look for von Niehauser.

  He would have been in a mood for a little conversation, but Charlie turned out to be one of those people who couldn’t drive and whistle “Dixie” without serious risk of a crackup. Twice they almost got bogged down in snowdrifts before Havens decided that he had better shut up.