Stranger in the Dark

by Nielsen, Helen

  The dread Larry had been entertaining began to give way to curiosity. Hansen was a sailor and had a right to live on his own boat if that’s what he wanted, but it didn’t seem much of a home for that shapely blonde Larry remembered encountering at the police yard. It wasn’t even much of a boat, and there were no feminine touches at all. No curtains peeking out from behind the small windows of the cabin, no flower boxes, no light laundry blowing in the breeze. They boarded her and made their way forward toward the cabin. A huge white cat sleeping on a coil of rope opened one eye as they passed, but there was no answer to Valdemar’s loud “Hallo, hallo!” The craft seemed deserted.

  “The cabin door is unlocked,” Valdemar reported. “We might as well go inside.”

  For the second time in as many days, Larry was guilty of invading the privacy of another man’s home, but Hansen, at least, wouldn’t mind. This time it took only a matter of seconds to ascertain that the cabin was empty. Two bunks, neatly made, a few pieces of chipped china on the table, a little food, and a few utensils…. It wasn’t surprising that a woman would waste no time in clearing out of a place like this, particularly if she’d had a hand in arranging her own widowhood.

  “The whole place smells of fish,” Valdemar complained. “Let’s get out of here.”

  It was a pleasant thought, but Larry was still taking stock. He opened the door of a small storage closet and made a quick survey of the contents. A pair of paint-stained denims, a sailor’s waterproof and hat, a pair of rubber boots—

  “Wait a minute, there’s something funny here,” he said.

  “Funny?” Valdemar echoed.

  “Peculiar, then. See, two pairs of boots, but they’re nowhere near the same size.”

  “One pair must belong to Frue Hansen.”

  “No, they’re a man’s boots. Leather. Military style.”

  A military boot! The significance of his own words set Larry clawing at that closet. He couldn’t be sure, of course, not unless there was some kind of marking. He pulled out one of the leather boots and began to examine it in the light of the open cabin door. It was an expensive boot, the kind of boot that a high-ranking officer might wear.

  “It’s not Danish made,” Valdemar volunteered at his shoulder. “I’m almost sure of that. Here, let me see. I think there’s some kind of lettering inside.”

  “Dragon hunt!” Larry muttered. “Maybe now you’ll stop heckling me—”

  But Valdemar never had a chance to look for the markings because of the way the light suddenly stopped coming from the doorway. Larry looked up and found himself facing an unshaven giant with a scowl on his face and a club in his hand.

  He wasn’t really a giant, of course. The doorway of the cabin was low, and Larry’s imagination, properly stimulated, was enormous; but it was no kind of visitation for a nervous man to take lightly, and all that saved the new arrival from getting that boot in his unshaven face was Valdemar’s quick lapse into his native tongue. For the next few moments Larry was just the wide-eyed bystander with a tingling scalp, and then Valdemar began to translate.

  “He wants to know what we’re doing here,” he said. “It’s a good question, don’t you think?”

  The club didn’t seem to be going anywhere, and so Larry lowered the boot. “You might ask him the same one.”

  “I did. He says Hansen asked him to keep an eye on his boat when he left last night. He didn’t want anybody hanging around.”

  “Tell him—”

  Larry hesitated. Now that the man in the doorway looked smaller he could think again, and now that he could think again something significant came to mind. Whatever his size, that club in the hand of Hansen’s watchdog was no welcoming bouquet. Was this the way Hansen usually greeted strangers who just possibly might come aboard to inquire after the rental of his boat? If a man sold plows that way, he’d starve to death. He consulted Valdemar on the matter, and Valdemar relayed the query.

  A shrug needed no translation. The rest of the story was more complicated. No, Hansen had never asked to have his boat watched before, the club-wielder admitted, but last night he’d been worried about something. The shrug meant that the man in the doorway wasn’t sure what Hansen was worried about, but he’d been having a beer with him at a little place across the street when the evening papers came out. It was something in the paper, he thought, that really set Hansen off.

  “No wonder!” Larry cried. “It’s just as I thought. That news leak wasn’t on the schedule.”

  But the newspaper wasn’t the only thing. The man in the doorway rubbed his unshaven chin thoughtfully. Hansen must have been in some kind of trouble, he said. Money trouble, maybe. He’d mentioned something about being followed, something about a man in a black sedan.

  “Did he say who the man was?”

  Larry had to wait while Valdemar relayed the question and the answer, and the answer was only what could be expected by a man fast running out of luck. The man with the club, whose blue eyes were still bright with suspicion, was just an acquaintance from the vessel at the next mooring. He wasn’t one to nose around in another man’s business. As for Hansen’s last voyage—and there was no need to mention now why it was his last voyage—he knew nothing at all. He’d gone out himself a little before dawn yesterday, and Hansen’s boat was out then. It was back at its moorings when he returned. Another question and another shrug. Yes, it might have been out all night for all he knew, maybe longer.

  … All night. As Valdemar relayed the story that boot in Larry’s hand became as convincing as sworn testimony. He wasn’t familiar with the waters around Denmark, or with the speed of a boat like Hansen’s, but surely it would take that much time to make a fast run to and from the German coast. But no amount of questioning would get any more out of the man in the doorway. He was fast remembering the eviction he’d come to effect, and the club was beginning to get restless against his thigh.

  Larry tossed the boot back into the closet. No chance of making off with the evidence under the eyes of this one-man protective service, and no object in explaining why they’d come aboard. This was no hit-and-run accident he was involved in now; it was something that could lead to sudden grief if a man talked too much to the wrong stranger.

  But there was still one question for Valdemar to put to the man in the doorway.

  “Ask him if he knows where we can locate Hansen’s wife,” Larry said. “It’s pretty obvious that she didn’t live on this tub.”

  Valdemar asked, but the answer was no help. The answer was a stare, a silence, and then a burst of laughter that made Valdemar’s translation quite unnecessary when it finally came. Holger Hansen hated women. His only wife was the sea.

  Larry shouldn’t have been surprised. Now that he knew the truth, it seemed that he must have known all along. There had to be something wrong about the woman he’d seen at police headquarters being married to a fisherman. He recalled a brief but vivid impression, the glimpse of a blonde-framed face behind a veil, and the long look at a small but interesting figure walking across the police yard and on down the street to that black sedan. That was most of what seemed wrong—the walk. The widow in black hadn’t walked like a woman who lived on the deck of a boat and did her housekeeping in a pint-sized galley.

  But whether it was a surprise or not, the revelation that Holger Hansen left no widow was a blow that required time out for recovery. Last night it seemed so easy. Find the widow, find the ugly man, find the answers; but now the easy street was closed for repairs and there was nothing for a pair of unemployed dragon slayers to do but report back to Maren with another unfinished story.

  They had a date for lunch. The place was a busy sidewalk café overlooking the square, and the time was when the chimes in the tower struck twelve. The sky had done a lot of lightening in two hours’ time, and the girl on the thermometer had gone back for her bicycle. Maren was waiting. She looked bright-eyed and eager, and Larry hated to let her down with another uncompleted mission; but Valdemar had plunged
into a mood of dark silence since leaving the boat, and one of them had to feed her curiosity.

  She listened with slowly comprehending eyes.

  “Then it must be the widow!” she exclaimed. “You were right, Larry. The woman who posed as Hansen’s wife has to be one of them.”

  “Yes,” Larry sighed, “but who is she and where is she now? We’re right back where we started unless Valdemar can start remembering names.”

  Two pair of eyes focused on Valdemar, who was studying an arm’s length sandwich menu.

  “I’m hungry,” he said. “I can never remember anything when I’m hungry.”

  “Well, I remembered something,” Maren announced proudly. “I remembered it last night while I was telling you about going to Mac’s apartment to feed his fish when he was away, I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure.”

  “You didn’t go back to that apartment!” Larry exclaimed.

  She looked up to it. She’d left off the blue hat today, and the nearly new sunshine was kindling a golden fire in her hair. She looked courageous, determined, and wonderful, and capable of storming the Kremlin if she thought it would bring the desired result.

  “No, I didn’t go back,” she said, “because what I remembered very likely wouldn’t be there by this time anyway. This was weeks ago when Mac was supposed to be in Aalborg.”

  “Supposed to be?” Larry echoed.

  “Yes, because now I’m not sure that he went there at all. I remember thinking at the time that something he did was strange. He gave me the keys to his car and said that I could use it while he was away, but always before he’d driven to Aalborg on these trips. Then, one day when I was feeding the fish, I saw an airline schedule on his desk with a flight to Berlin circled in pencil. When Valdemar noticed the place of origin on that wire last night, it started me thinking. I checked with that airline this morning, and my hunch was right. Mac did fly to Berlin when he was supposed to be in Aalborg.”

  Maren looked quite pleased with herself. At least one of this trio had made good use of the morning, and the reason for that flight seemed pretty obvious.

  “That must have been when he contacted this fellow ‘Brad,’” Larry reflected. “A deal as big as this one would take time to set up. Oh, it figures all right, but to what? We’re still left with one information leak to account for, only now we’re not even sure that it was Hansen’s widow. She might have been used for just that one performance.”

  “Performance—” Valdemar repeated. It was the first unsolicited contribution he’d made to the discussion, and Larry waited for whatever profound observation might follow. But Valdemar didn’t speak more than this one word. He was too busy checking items on the sandwich list.

  “I don’t quite understand what that routine at police headquarters was all about,” Maren interjected. “Why was it necessary? Why did there have to be a widow?”

  “To claim Hansen’s wallet and papers,” Larry said.

  “But why? Could three hundred dollars be that important?”

  “Perhaps not.” Larry had to consider the matter a moment. Nothing was going out of style so fast as yesterday’s theories. “Maybe the ugly man thought Hansen had something on him,” he added, “an address, a phone number, something to indicate where they could find your friend McDonald. It’s the general they’re after, remember, and anything that might lead to his whereabouts would be worth taking any risk to get.

  “But what’s the use of talking about it? Unless Valdemar can remember the name of McDonald’s important client, we’re sunk! And I still think the trouble started at that dinner party. It stands to reason that McDonald kept his mouth shut about the plan; he didn’t even tell you that he was going to Berlin. As for Hansen, if he was as close-lipped as he seems to have been with his club-toting neighbor, there’s no reason to believe that he gave the show away. No, any way you look at it, the trouble had to start at that party.”

  Larry wished that he was as positive as he sounded. If the wording of that telegram meant what it seemed to mean, the trouble might well have started at the other end of the escape route leaving the dinner party as innocent as a Sunday-school picnic; but the whole idea of this build-up was to give Valdemar the incentive to co-operate. What was so difficult about remembering a name? An actor was trained to remember.

  “Lines, Herre Willis,” Valdemar murmured when he was pressed. “I can recite every soliloquy from Hamlet on a moment’s notice; but how can I be expected to remember the insignificant name of an insignificant man who had done nothing with his life but accumulate a great deal of money from the manufacture of dog food?”

  “Dog food!”

  The exclamation had two voices. Valdemar looked up from his menu. He seemed rather surprised at his own words, and quite pleased.

  “Imagine me remembering that!” he said. “Yes, dog food. I recall now that there was quite a tedious discussion of the subject before McDonald veered the conversation toward my contribution to the evening. It took place between McDonald, our host, and some muscular gentleman in a white dinner jacket. Horrible taste! For the tropics, yes, but not in this climate.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” Maren cried, looking almost as pleased with Valdemar as Valdemar was with himself. “All we have to do is check all of the hotels for a wealthy American visitor who is in the dog-food business!”

  “Oh, no!” Larry groaned. “Not that again! Keep trying, Valdemar, maybe you’ll remember something else. What about the other guests at the party? You remembered the man in the white dinner jacket. Can you remember anyone else?”

  Valdemar stared across the square with pensive eyes. At midday it was a teeming crossroads for a city intent on the vital matter of lunch. The little sandwich stands were crowded with camera-carrying tourists bolting a quick snack before the departure of the next tour bus, and the sidewalk cafés were filled to capacity. Valdemar didn’t appear to notice any of these things. Valdemar was concentrating.

  “There was a woman,” he reflected, in a distant voice. “No, two women. One was quite lovely.”

  “An American woman?” Larry suggested.

  “I don’t think so. I had no opportunity to converse with her. The white dinner jacket saw to that. She was small and very blonde.”

  “The widow!” Maren cried.

  Valdemar frowned. “It’s possible, but I thought we had just decided that the widow gave only one performance.”

  “Never mind what we decided,” Larry said. “About this blonde, did she have a name?”

  “They usually do,” Valdemar sighed, “but I can’t see that it’s important. If the lady was the sinister spy you suspect her of being, she wouldn’t have used her correct name at that party any more than I did. Now, there’s a thought for you, Herre Willis. Perhaps I am the villain in this drama. How can you be sure that I’m not a dangerous foreign agent with a valise full of atomic hand grenades hidden in my rooms?”

  “Valdemar!” Maren scolded. “Be serious!”

  “But I am serious, my dear. After all, what’s left for me now that everything is finished?”

  Valdemar fell silent. The exasperating thing about the man was that it was impossible to know when, if ever, he left off acting. Larry tried to read Maren’s eyes for some clue to what he was talking about, but it was then that the waiter arrived to take their orders and Valdemar’s mood brightened.

  “I will remember everything after lunch,” he announced. “You will see, Herre Willis. It has started to come back already.”

  Larry wasn’t optimistic. Too many times he’d knocked at the door of a solution only to have it slammed in his face. Why should his luck change now? He let Maren order for him, hoping that whatever she ordered didn’t turn out to be those beady-eyed prawns staring at him from the plate of a neighboring diner. They looked so innocent and accusing.

  Across the table, Valdemar relinquished his sandwich list and called out an afterthought to the waiter.

  “And a bottle of beer,”
he said, “a bottle of—”

  That awkward silence was a lot more than indecision. Larry realized that when he saw the light spreading over Valdemar’s face as bright as the sun that had just torn loose from a patch of clouds above the bell tower.

  “Carlsberg!” he cried. “That’s it! That’s the name—Otto Carlsberg!”

  9.

  … OTTO CARLSBERG. WITH A NAME TO WORK ON, PLUS TWO companions who knew both the city and the language, the hotel-check routine was highly successful. Within an hour after lunch they had the residence and room number of a visiting dog-food tycoon who didn’t want to speak to strangers until Valdemar got on the house phone with his Polish accent and gave another performance. It was a matter of extreme importance, he insisted. A matter concerning Ira McDonald and a subject they had discussed at dinner a few weeks ago. After that it was easy; just a short ride in a whispering elevator and three anxious people were being ushered into a luxurious suite occupied, at the moment, by an elderly man with a short temper and a middle-aged man with a long face.

  The younger man introduced himself as Sheldon Garth, Carlsberg’s secretary. The elderly man didn’t wait for an introduction.

  “Who are these people?” he roared, glaring at the new arrivals over the rim of his bifocals. “I said that I’d see Dr. Majewski, not a whole damned convention! Sheldon, get them out of here!”

  Sheldon Garth had the jaw line of a comic-strip hero and wore his broad shoulders high, but he obeyed orders like a boot-camp rookie. That is, he tried. “I’m afraid there’s been some mistake,” he began, but Valdemar broke up the eviction by reverting to character again.

  “You seem not to recognize me, Herre Carlsberg,” he said. “Perhaps with my hair mussed a little, and a slight stoop, so. A prison camp does age a man, I’m afraid.”

  Valdemar delivered his speech with gestures, and the old man gasped.

  “Dr. Majewski!” he cried.

  “At your service, Herre Carlsberg, although I do prefer my own name of Valdemar Brix.” Valdemar executed a slight bow and then nodded toward his companions. “And now allow me to introduce my friends,” he said. “The lovely young lady is Frøken Maren Lund, a close friend of both myself and Ira McDonald. The American is Herre Willis, who has something to do with farm machinery and bears an unfortunate resemblance to McDonald in a raincoat. Do we stay now?”