WazN it was time to leave, our host was shocked to learn that Lou and I had arrived in a car and now intended to drive back to the hotel. It seems that the Swedish laws against drunken driving are so strict that you don't ever drive to a party unless one occupant of the car intends not to drink at all. Otherwise you play safe and take a cab. We were, of course, quite sober and capable, our host agreed, but we'd both imbibed detectable quantities of alcohol, and we couldn't be allowed to run the risk. A taxi would take us to the hotel, and somebody would deliver our car there in the morning.
At the hotel, we climbed the stairs in silence, and stopped at Lou's door.
"I won't ask you in for a drink," she said. "It would be a crime to dump whisky on top of all that lovely wine and cognac. Besides, I don't think I could stay awake. Good I night, Matt."
"Good night," I said, and crossed the hail to my own room, let myself in, closed the door behind me, and grinned wryly. Apparently she'd decided to give me some of my own medicine: two could play it cool as well as one. I yawned, undressed, and went to bed.
Sleep washed over me in a wave, but just as I was losing my last contact with reality, I heard a sound that made me wide awake again. Somewhere an ancient hinge had creaked softly. I listened intently and heard the click of a high heel in the hall; Lou was leaving her room. Well, she could be paying a visit to the communal plumbing. Her room, like mine, boasted only a small curtained cubicle with a lavatory and a neat little locker containing a white enamel receptacle for emergency use.
I waited, but she didn't return. I didn't even consider trying to follow her. It was a complicated game we were playing, but I still thought the guy who would win was the guy who could act dumbest. To hell with her and her midnight expeditions. It was something I knew that she didn't know I knew. It was a point for our side. Well, call it half a point. I turned over in bed and closed my eyes.
Nothing happened.~ Suddenly I had the keyed-up feeling you get from a lot of liquor partially neutralized by a lot of coffee. Sleep was no longer anywhere around. I stood it as long as I could; then I got up and walked around the bed to the window and looked out. The window was a casement type without screens, standard in this country. There was something strange and a little shocking about standing at a second-floor window completely exposed to the great outdoors. You get so used to looking at the world through wire netting that you feel naked and unsafe when it's taken away.
Although it was midnight, the sky was still lighter than it would have been in Santa Fe, New Mexico: we have black night skies at home, with brilliant stars. This wasn't much of a display, by comparison. My window faced a
– lake. I'd forgotten the name, but it would end in -jдrvi, since jдrvi was the Finnish word for lake and, as Lou had pointed out, the Finnish influence was strong here, within a hundred miles of the border. Standing there, I could feel geography crowding me-a feeling you never get at home. But here I was standing in a wedge of one little country, Sweden, thrust up between two others, Norway and Finland. And behind Finland was Russia and the arctic port of Murmansk…
A movement in the bushes drew my attention, and Lou Taylor came into sight some distance away. She'd left her coat in her room, apparently. With her dark hair, in her black dress, she was almost invisible. By the time I saw her, it was too late for me to duck out of sight. She was already looking up toward my window, where my face would be shining like a neon sign against the blackness of the room behind me. She turned quickly to warn the person with her, but he didn't catch the signal in time. As he straightened up, after ducking a branch, I recognized the big, footballplayer shape of the man I'd met in her Stockholm hotel room: Jim Wellington.
I stood therewatching them. Having already been seen, ~they took time to finish whatever they'd been talking about.
She asked a question. Whatever she wanted, he wasn't giving it. He turned and disappeared into the bushes. She made her way into the clear, with due regard for her dress and nylons and fragile shoes. She vanished around the corner of the hotel without looking up at me again.
It was getting cold in the room. I closed the window and drew the shade. The bed didn't attract me any more strong]y than before. I found my dressing gown, put it on, and turned on the light. I stood for a moment looking at the films from the day's shooting lined up on the bureau: five rolls of color and three of black-and-white. This didn't actually mean that I'd taken more subjects in Kodachrome; on the contrary, I'd taken less, but color is trickier than black-and-white and therefore I habitually protect each color exposure by bracketing it with two others, one longer and one shorter. It's cheaper in the long run than going back for retakes.
It was a poor harvest for a whole day's work, showing that my heart had not been in it. On a job that appeals to me, I can burn up several times that amount of film in a day and never work up a sweat. But circumstances hadn't been conducive to a fine, free, frenzy of inspiration. I'd been practically told what to shoot; I'd had little incentive to branch out on my own.
The knock on the door didn't make me jump very high. I'd already heard her footsteps in the hall. I walked over and let her in. When I turned, after closing the door behind her, she was taking advantage of the light to examine her stockings for runs and her dress for dust and woods debris. It was the same smoothly fitting jersey dress she'd worn to dinner in Stockholm, with the big bunch of satin at the hip.
"I thought you were asleep." Her voice was flat.
"I was heading that way, but you woke me up by going out," I said. "What's that Wellington character doing up here in Kiruna, anyway?"
She stalled briefly. "So you recognized him?"
I said, "A man that size is hard to miss."
It occurred to me suddenly that of all the people involved to date, Jim Wellington was the only one big enough to stick on a phony beard and give a rumbling laugh and bear a reasonable resemblance to Hal Taylor's description of Caselus.
Lou Taylor had turned away from me. She reached out absently and rearranged the films on the dresser before speaking. "What if I were to tell you it's none of your damn business what he's doing here?" she said at last.
I said, "I might not agree with you. But there wouldn't be much I could do about it, would there?"
She glanced at me over her shoulder. After a moment, she reached out and picked up one of the film cartridges. "Are all these from today? I didn't know we'd taken so many."
"That's not many," I said. "You should see me go through the stuff when I really get warmed up."
"What will you do with them now? Are you going to develop them right away?"
"No," I said. "The color has to go to a lab in Stockholm, anyway. I can't do that myself. The black-and-white
I I'll save until I have a place with reasonable facilities to work in. Maybe I can scare up somebody in Stockholm with a real darkroom I can use. I hate working out of a hotel closet." After a moment, I asked, "Do you owe this Wellington character anything?"
She put the film down and turned slowly to face me. Everything was sharp and clear. We were two people who'd been around. I'd caught her out, and I could now waste a lot of time asking a bunch of silly questions and forcing her to think up a bunch of equally silly answers. The end would be the same. We'd wind up facing each other like this, neither knowing any more about the other than before. There was really only one thing we needed to know, and only one way of finding it out.
"Why, no," she said slowly, "I wouldn't say I owe Jim Wellington a thing." Then, still watching me carefully, she said, "You've been pretending not to like me much, haven't you?"
"Yes," I said. "That's right. Pretending. I had some thought of keeping this strictly business."
"That," she said, coming forward, "was a very silly idea, wasn't it?"