The Wrecking Crew Read Online Free PDF Page B

thought of this get-up. It must have been kind of like going to bed with your kid brother.
    I said, “Don’t bite me, Mrs. Taylor. If you want to go north with me, there’s certainly no objection on my part. But you’ll have to take up the matter of expenses with the magazine. I have no authority to put you on the payroll.”
    She said, “Oh, I’ll pay my own way. I won’t even try to stick them for it. But I do want to go along.” Then she smiled at me, half apologetically. “I’ve lived this story for months, Helm. Can you blame me for wanting to see how you handle your end of it?”
    When she smiled, her face got a kind of pixie look, half wistful and half mischievous. It wasn’t a bad face, as faces go. It had the proper features in the proper sizes in the proper places, and there were no visible defects or blemishes—but I did notice an odd, round little scar, relatively fresh, on her throat. Seeing this made a tingling sensation go down my spine; I had a few similar scars myself. I waited until she’d handed me my drink and turned to tap her cigarette ashes into a nearby bowl, and sure enough, on the other side and quite far back—you couldn’t see how it had missed the spine—was the small exit mark.
    I remembered Mac’s telling me she was supposed to have been wounded. There could be little doubt of that part of the story. This girl had been shot through the neck, not too long ago, with a jacketed bullet from a military weapon. You might say she was lucky. An expanding bullet in the same place would damn near have torn her head off.
    “Yes,” she said, swinging back to face me abruptly, “That’s why I croak like a frog, Helm. Not that I ever had much of a voice.”
    “Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to stare.”
    “I was lucky, you know,” she said dryly. “I’m alive. Hal—my husband—was killed.”
    “Yes,” I said. “I was told about that in New York.” It wasn’t much of a lie. At this distance, the four hundred miles separating New York from Washington dwindled to insignificance.
    “One of those damn little machine pistols,” she said. “It must have been nice being a foreign correspondent back in the old days when sentries had nothing but bolt-action rifles and you could run a long way between shots. We were over in East Germany. Hal had wangled it somehow; he was a great wangler. He was on the track of a story, or the follow-up of a story—maybe they told you about that at the magazine, too. He did quite a bit of work for them, from time to time. That’s why I submitted my piece there. Anyway, the man at the barricade signaled us to stop, looked at the license plate, and cut loose without a word. Hal saw it coming and threw himself on top of me, so I just got the one bullet… It was a deplorable accident, of course. The sentry had been drinking and the weapon was defective and ran wild when he brushed the trigger by mistake—and everybody was just as sorry as they could be, in several languages.” She made a face. “The fact is that Hal was on to something, or somebody, so they got him. They let me go only after they’d made sure he hadn’t told me anything of real importance.”
    “Somebody?” I said, keeping my voice casual. “Who?”
    “A man named Caselius,” she said, readily enough. “‘The Man Nobody Knows,’ to quote the title of my husband’s last published work—not exactly original with him, I’m afraid. The master spy of the Kremlin, if you believe in that sort of stuff. You’d be surprised how many supposedly intelligent people seem to. At least they use the word ‘intelligence’ in describing their activities. I may be slightly prejudiced, but I don’t think it fits very well.”
    I said, “You sound bitter.”
    “You’d be bitter, too, if… Look, I’ve lost my husband and I’ve barely recovered from this—” she touched her throat— “and all I want is to be left alone, and instead I can’t move for falling over these