The Damagers

by Donald Hamilton

  “Ziggy, look out!”

  My shout came too late. A second man rose out of the brush behind her and swung something at her head. She went down. I fired, as the dark figure over there picked up the .22 that she’d dropped. I’d held high for the head to keep the bullet away from her, and the distance was too great for that kind of marksmanship with a snub-nosed .38. I missed and took aim again but did not fire; it would have been just another hope shot without much chance of connecting. As the man straightened up, his face moved into a beam of light from one of the parking-lot lamps, and even at that range I knew him. In Mac’s office I’d seen photographs of him as a younger man; and far up in northern Scandinavia a good many years ago I’d known, and killed, an older man with very much the same features, a man named Caselius. His father.

  Roland Caselius seemed to be taller than Raoul Caselius had been, but he was still not a big man. He was wearing dark clothes, slacks and jersey, and he moved like a young man in good condition. With Ziggy’s .22 in his hand, he looked my way for a frustrated moment— both of us holding firearms that were inadequate for the distance between us—then he raised the pistol barrel in a kind of duelist’s salute and turned away and lost himself among the trees.

  I kept myself from charging after him. If he wanted to get away, and had transportation handy, pursuit was a waste of time; with his head start, he’d reach his car long before I could catch up. And if he didn’t want to get away, if he decided this was a good night for avenging Daddy after all, he’d have too big an advantage if I blundered heedlessly into the darkness of the little woods after him. I waited, reloading the fired chamber of my revolver.

  At last I heard a car start up and drive away, and I saw Ziggy stir and sit up, groping for her pistol. Not finding it, she stood up shakily, feeling her head. I was surprised at the strength of my relief at seeing her relatively undamaged—well, except for her earlier injuries. Hell, I’d only spoken to her once for a matter of minutes.

  “Matt,” she called. “Matt, where are—?”

  She stopped abruptly. Looking around, she’d caught sight of the man on the ground. She stared at him for a moment and turned away, and bent over. Even at the distance, I could hear her being violently ill.

  I rose and hurried over there, taking a chance that Caselius might, after driving off a little way, come sneaking back. I was motivated by a growing sense of urgency. While a shot or two might have gone unremarked in these rural surroundings, we’d put on enough of a firefight that somebody must have called a policeman or constable or sheriff or whatever law-enforcement official operated locally. When I reached her, Ziggy was wiping her mouth with a Kleenex.

  “It’s Roger Hassim. I… I never shot a man before,” she said shakily. “And I did a lousy job, he’s still alive, just lying there looking up at me… Oh, God, here I go again!” She turned away, retching. I stepped over to the body. Hassim was still alive, but that was about all that could be said for him. I suppose it was too bad in a way: as I’d been told more than once, he was, or had been, a very beautiful creature indeed. He had a face off an ancient frieze, Egyptian or Abyssinian or whatever, such as I’d once seen in a museum, but with the racial characteristics subdued. It had only a trace of the beaky, hawklike look that Mrs. Bell had a lot of and Dorothy a considerable amount; it was simply a remarkably handsome male face cast in bronze—well, the skin could just have been heavily suntanned but wasn’t.

  The torso, in light slacks and a sport shirt, had obviously been terrific, also, but three .22-caliber bullet holes—two in the chest and one in the left side of the neck—had apparently destroyed some critical operating circuits, and the man simply lay there looking up at us with big liquid eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” the girl said, coming up beside me. “I was hiding over there, watching. I didn’t have a clear shot when you yelled, I couldn’t keep him from getting off that first one. And then it took me three to put him down.”

  I said, “You did fine.”

  The lovely man on the ground just watched us with his beautiful brown eyes.

  Ziggy went on: “When I shouted to distract him, he tried to bring the gun around to shoot me, but my first bullet made him let one go prematurely that just blasted splinters off the top of the table. Even so, he kept trying, and almost made it. I missed my second shot altogether, trying to shoot too fast. Then I managed to hit with the next two, and he went down at last. God, for a while I thought those damn little bullets weren’t doing anything; I was beginning to think I’d have to beat him down with the gun barrel!”

  Reaction had her talking too much; but she’d earned the right. The man on the ground made an involuntary moaning sound and choked it off.

  I spoke to Ziggy. “This is the guy who worked you over?”

  “Yes, of course. I told you. Roger Hassim.”

  “Do you want to finish him off?”

  “What… Oh, God, no!” She licked her lips. “It’s funny how often I’ve dreamed of killing him, but…”

  I sighed. “Then I guess I’ll have to.”

  I started to raise the .38; then I saw the big shotgun lying on the ground beside the picnic table with the buckshot-splintered top. I picked it up. It was what we used to call, in our technical innocence, an automatic shotgun; nowadays, in the interest of accuracy, we’ve got to say semiautomatic or self-loader. They’re commonplace in twelve-gauge, but there are only a few that take the big ten-gauge shells, perhaps only the one. I haven’t checked the catalogs recently. It had been loaded with the legal waterfowl-hunting limit of three shells; there was still one in the chamber.

  I aimed and fired; the gun spouted its impressive tongue of flame, made its ferocious blast of sound, and pushed me back a step with its heavy recoil, fortunately a long, strong push rather than a sharp blow. At this range, the massive load of buckshot, where I’d aimed it, tore Roger Hassim wide open, disemboweling and castrating him. It did not kill him instantly; he had time to look down weakly at the ugly wreckage of his body, and raise his eyes to me, shocked and accusing. Then the lovely brown eyes filmed over, and he was dead.

  The girl grabbed me by the arm and started shaking me. “No! she cried. “No, even if I hated him, I didn’t want… You didn’t have to do it like that! Oh, that was dirty!”

  It takes them awhile to understand that dead is dead, whether you’re drilled neatly through the head with a little .22 bullet or ripped wide open by a massive ten-gauge load of buckshot.

  I said, “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  “Damn you, Matt Helm, I’ll have nightmares…”

  Her insomnia was no concern of mine; I just took her by the arm and hurried her away. When we were out of the trees, I stopped her.

  She blurted, “Why did you…?”

  I said, “For Christ’s sake, Kronquist, snap out of it. I’m beginning to think you’re the total loss I was told you were. Remember that there are two kinds of animals that walk on two legs, thems and usses. What’s lying back there was a them, not an us, and what happened to it was of no significance. Now get over to one of those phones and call Mrs. Bell while I head for the boat and warm up the diesel; we’ve got to get out of here before the law arrives. Tell Mrs. Bell to get here fast and clean up after us. Then come running and help me cast off… Oh, here. “I gave her my revolver. “You may need this; Dorothy Fancher’s around somewhere. Last seen swimming in the canal, but she could be armed if she’s managed to climb aboard one of the boats out there and steal a weapon.”

  “All right, Matt.”

  Her obedience was mechanical, and she turned toward the phones stiffly, moving like a zombie. I dug Dorothy Fancher’s little .25 out of my hip pocket for something to carry. Now that the evening’s emotional peak was past, I hoped, I had the self-conscious feeling you always get, muddy and wet, in a world full of clean, dry people— well, almost full. I couldn’t afford to forget the other soggy specimen, female, that was somewhere around. I headed toward the nearest crosswalk and was almost t
here when Ziggy’s voice hit me.

  “Matt, no!”

  I turned to see her running toward me in her halting way. “What—”

  “You can’t go out there!” She stopped in front of me, panting. “I… I’m sorry, I’m all shook up, I almost forgot. While you were in the restaurant with that woman, a man boarded Lorelei III carrying something; he didn’t have it when he came ashore. I was starting to leave my hiding place to go inside and tell you when I realized that another one had come into the trees with that great big shotgun; he kind of had me trapped in that awkward spot. I… I figured, if I tried to slip by him, and he got me, there wouldn’t be anybody to warn you about the boat, so I’d better just wait.”

  I said, “Hell, I should have known. That’s why Dorothy waited around while I made my phone call; she wasn’t about to go on ahead and board a booby-trapped boat. It must have been young Caselius you saw, the same guy who got you from behind.”

  “I saw him leave; I thought he’d gone for good,” she said.

  “How long did he spend on board?”

  “Not very long. Ten minutes at the most.”

  I said, “Okay, go call Mrs. Bell. Tell her the situation.”

  Ziggy interrupted: “It’s probably a bomb, isn’t it? I’ll ask her to send an expert.”

  I shook my head again. “We haven’t got time for that. We’ve made enough of a racket that somebody must have called it in; there has to be fuzz on the way. If they catch us here, it’ll take Mrs. Bell days to pry us loose. I’ll go aboard and see what I can find. If he only spent ten minutes out there, he couldn’t have done anything very elaborate or hidden it very well.” I shook my head ruefully. “The old double whammy. Mrs. F gave me a lot of crap about how she’d come to seduce me; but it was all just a smoke screen for this. Even after being creased by a bullet, she insisted on taking me to dinner on shore so Hassim and Caselius could set it up. I guess she figured that if I managed to escape the shotgun ambush on my way back to the boat, I’d be feeling so smart that it wouldn’t occur to me to take any precautions going aboard.”

  “Matt, you can’t… Do you know anything about defusing bombs?”

  I said, “Sure, I know the red wire is negative and the black one is positive, or is it the other way round?” When she started to speak again, I said, “Go on, dammit, make your phone call. And don’t come out to the boat until I signal all clear, okay?”

  She hesitated, and said reluctantly, “All right, Matt.”

  I was only vaguely aware of her walking away; I was forcing my feet, squishing in their wet shoes, to move me out across the little wooden bridge to the long dock—I guess I’m really not very fond of high explosives. Then a left turn. Then eleven steps, and a smart right-face; and I was confronting the sliding door that would admit me to Lorelei III’s deckhouse.

  Everything looked perfectly normal. There didn’t seem to be any odd wires attached to the door; and Ziggy had said Roland Caselius had actually gone aboard. If she’d seen him just crouching on the side deck wiring up a whizbang, she’d presumably have mentioned it.

  Okay, you’ll be needing both hands for this, so put away the peashooter… Now step aboard very lightly, don’t rock the damn boat unnecessarily. Key in lock—how did he manage that? Well, it’s a simple lock, easy to pick. Click. Key back in pocket. Now slide back the door very gently. No loud bangs, goody. Still no dangling wires…

  I looked at the familiar interior. The lights were on, as we’d left them. I took stock of my indicators. One corner of the carpet not fully tucked away under the wooden molding, check. Helmsman’s stool set aside not quite parallel to the side of the deckhouse, check. Unless he was very good indeed, with a photographic memory, he hadn’t moved out the furniture and pulled up the carpet and visited the engine room and done his stuff down there, and then put everything back exactly as I’d left it— well, in ten minutes, he’d hardly had time.

  On the other hand, the teak top of the little corner cocktail-and-breakfast table, just a friction fit on its metal pedestal, was now exactly square with the boat. I’d left it slightly cockeyed. Obviously he’d bumped against it and carefully squared it up the way he figured a tidy seaman like me would have left it. Encouraging. He could make mistakes. And the black tape marker on one of the steering-wheel spokes—it helped me center the rudder when I was maneuvering—that spoke was in the upright position instead of being lined up with one of the corner screws of the console…

  I stood for a moment longer trying to get into the mind of Mr. Roland Caselius, coming aboard my boat, vengeance in heart, bomb in hand. I remembered the jaunty salute he’d given me ashore, before turning away. Sure. Why should he indulge in a risky long-range pistol duel when he had a lethal surprise waiting for me here? He was probably sitting in his car a quarter of a mile away, hoping to hear a big bang and see a burst of light above the trees.

  Ten minutes, I reflected. Something simple. He could have knocked against the table on his way to just about anywhere on the boat, but why had he messed with the steering wheel?

  Well, why not, stupid? Isn’t the steering console where practically all the ship’s electrical connections are located?

  I stepped down into the deckhouse at last. No pressure-sensitive gadget hidden under the carpet blew my foot off. I lowered myself cautiously to kneel in front of the wheel, and looked at the little plywood door below it that gave access to the bottom of the console and the two big master switches inside, one for the engine battery and the other for the two batteries that, wired in parallel, provided light and refrigeration. There was a lot of other wiring higher up inside the console; but if you wanted to work on that, you had to remove the steering wheel, take out half a dozen long screws—make that seven by actual count— and pull off the whole front panel of the console; but that was more than a ten-minute job in itself.

  I reached out cautiously, and my hand retreated of its own accord. Chicken! I made myself reach out again. I found the catch with my finger and swung open the little plywood door, and nothing blew, and there it was…

  “Matt.”

  Startled, I jerked back and hit my head on the little table behind me. Ziggy stood in the doorway.

  “Jesus Christ!” I said. “Don’t sneak up on a man like that. I told you to stay on shore, dammit!”

  “Don’t be silly, I want to help,” she said. Apparently Roger Hassim’s gruesome death was forgiven, or at least shelved for the moment. “What can I do?”

  Well, if the fool wench was bound she was going to get herself blown up proving she was really a very brave girl after all, who was I to stop her?

  I said, “Come around me carefully. Get the flashlight from the ledge behind the settee, and some paper towels from the galley, and a roll of black tape, electricians tape, from my toolbox over there… Okay. Now hunker down beside me and shine the light in here so I can see what I’m doing.”

  I couldn’t help wincing as the flashlight beam hit the thing; but apparently it wasn’t photosensitive. It just lay there, inert, at the bottom of the console.

  Ziggy cleared her throat. “It… looks just like a bomb, doesn’t it?”

  It did look just like a bomb, not the round black anarchist kind from the comic strips, with the sputtering fuse, but the crude four-sticks-of-dynamite-taped-together kind, with a couple of wires coming out of it. Both wires were black. Well, I don’t suppose polarity means much to a detonator; it’ll happily take its current in either direction.

  “A little higher,” I said.

  Crouching beside me, Ziggy directed the light upward while I craned my neck to see where, in the incomprehensible tangle of colored wires that ran the boat, the black ones ended. Okay. Two alligator clips, not very far up. What were they hooked to? Don’t ask; I didn’t. I disengaged myself cautiously, although it didn’t seem likely, now, that the thing was going to be set off by movement. Some water from my wet clothes had dampened my hands, and water is an electrical conductor. I didn’t want any electrical c
onductors dripping around, so I dried my hands carefully on the paper towels Ziggy had brought me. I picked up the roll of tape.

  “What’s that for?” she asked.

  I said, “I want to tape those clips as I take them off, so they don’t accidentally make contact with each other.”

  She said, “I shouldn’t think that would set it off. It obviously has no battery of its own; I can’t see any, and why bother with little dry cells when you have twelve volts and several hundred ampere hours handy in the boat’s big batteries?”

  I said, “Who’s defusing this damn bomb, anyway?”

  “Sorry.”

  I reached up and disconnected one clip, and nothing happened. I brought it out cautiously, letting it touch nothing on the way, and wrapped rubbery black tape around it—probably quite unnecessary, as Ziggy had said, but tape’s cheap. I brought out the other clip the same way, for the same treatment. Easy. Hey, where’s the nearest bomb-disposal squad, and do they take hero-volunteers?

  I said, “It doesn’t seem to be attached in any other way, does it?”

  “No.”

  “Then I guess I’m safe in lifting it out now,” I said. “Well, we’ll soon know.”

  I lifted it out. It wasn’t attached, and it didn’t explode. I coiled the wires carefully and taped them to the already tape-wrapped bundle of dynamite sticks.

  “Do you want me to throw it overboard?” Ziggy asked.

  I studied the thing. It could, of course, have a timing device in addition to the contact wires; it could be booby-trapped in a dozen ways, and I wouldn’t know the difference. On the other hand, it’s only on TV that the hero makes a habit of throwing away useful weapons he encounters in the course of his adventures, or leaving them behind, and DAMAG hadn’t shown any great flights of imagination so far, although I had to admit this double-barreled effort tonight had been fairly ingenious.