The Vanishers by Donald Hamilton

Author:Donald Hamilton
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Titan

15

The kitchen was big and old-fashioned, like that of the guest villa at Torsäter. It had a well-worn gas range and an ancient refrigerator, manufactured back in the days when, to paraphrase Henry Ford, you could get a kitchen appliance in any color you wanted as long as it was white. The Swedes, at least the ones with whom I was associating, had apparently not yet joined the disposable society; they believed in hanging on to stuff as long as it was working, whether or not it had long since gone out of style.

There was a wooden table against the wall and three wooden chairs. Although everything was old and showed evidence of hard use, it was quite clean; and the thin white curtains on the single window were crisp and immaculate. I found myself attributing this to Olaf’s bachelor fussiness, although I had no really good reason to think he didn’t have a wife somewhere around. They marry the damnedest guys, I reminded myself; one even married me, once. I’m not counting the times, including a recent night in Oslo, when I’ve faked the man-and-wife routine in the line of duty.

Olaf called through the door in Swedish, telling Karin to blow her nose and haul her ass in here. Well, that’s a loose translation. She came in reluctantly and, on instructions, turned on the lights and pulled down the heavy roller-blind.

“In that chair,” Olaf said to me. “Sit down, please.”

I sat down. Karin came over; and shortly I found myself attached to the sturdy wooden chair by two-inch duct tape, the immensely strong, silvery stuff that has largely transformed the prisoner industry, rendering obsolete the old-fashioned methods of restraint employing ropes, wires, chains, or manacles. Then the small blonde girl disappeared silently, closing the kitchen door behind her. I wondered how many people there were in the apartment; I sensed the presence of some I hadn’t seen. Certainly two more would be coming as soon as Karl and Greta got the Mercedes tucked away in its garage. Well, they had the troops. I could only hope it would make them overconfident.

Olaf stared at me for a moment after we were alone. He turned abruptly and walked over to the stove and lit one of the burners. The equipment was old-fashioned enough that he had to use a match. A sharpening steel hung beside a knife-rack on the nearby wall. It had a black plastic handle and a cross hilt to prevent you from slicing your fingers off when you were whipping the knife back and forth against the steel like a show-off chef. The business end was a tapering length of round stock about a foot long and almost half an inch in cross-section at its thickest point. Of the visible props, it was the one I’d have chosen if I’d been planning on staging the ordeal by fire. Olaf was of the same mind: he took down the steel and arranged it carefully on the stove top, with the end in the burner flame.

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