“But… but you can’t believe I deliberately brought on that attack of… Why, I almost died!”
“Yes, that must have been a nasty surprise,” I said. “And things had been going so well, too! There you were in the hospital with everything under control, ready to smile at me courageously from your sickbed, pale but lovely. Of course it was easy for you to be brave then. You knew your tachycardia was phony, induced by a careful dose of stimulant, self-administered; probably one of the compounds on the list the heart specialist gave me. You knew that even without treatment you’d soon be back to normal. It wasn’t hard to play the poor martyred lady bearing her cross heroically. But you were unlucky; they picked quinine to treat you with. Nobody knew you were sensitive to the stuff, including you. Suddenly that night it went all grim and real on you, didn’t it? It wasn’t a charade any longer. The gent with the skull face was right there by your bed rattling his bones and breathing his graveyard breath on you…”
She shook her head impatiently. “Please spare me the picturesque imagery!”
I said, “Sweetie, I’ve been there. I know that guy very well. One of my best friends, or enemies. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. Anyway, you hadn’t expected anything like that; you weren’t prepared for it at all.”
She started to say something, and stopped. We listened to a man and woman entering a room across the hall. The woman was laughing at something the man had said as if he was the sweetest, funniest man in the world, and maybe he was.
I went on: “So when I arrived, there you were, still not quite sure you were even going to live, and not knowing, if you did live, if you’d be permanently damaged in some way. And the thing you couldn’t bear to think about was that you’d done it to yourself: the clever, clever girl who’d outsmarted herself so ridiculously, and wound up lying there helpless, hooked up to a lot of medical plumbing, looking like something that had been pulled through a knothole backwards. Instead of the brave, bright, charming, convalescent glamour girl I’d been supposed to find there, and fall for, hard.”
Astrid regarded me for a long moment. At last she took a deep swallow from her glass that left it empty, and gave a defiant little shrug that admitted everything.
“You can’t prove it!”
I rose and refilled her glass, and replenished my own drink. Standing there, I studied her thoughtfully, until she looked down in a flustered way and did something feminine to the lacy ruffles at her breast. I grinned and raised my glass to her, seating myself again.
“For a beautiful lady, you’re a damn’ good man, Watrous,” I said. “But you have some very corny reactions. Why the hell should I want to prove anything? You know the gag you tried to pull. I know. I can’t see that it’s anybody else’s business, can you?”
She frowned quickly. “I don’t understand.” When I didn’t say anything, she asked, “How did you guess?”
“Well, you were much too bitter about that quinine reaction, as if you’d been double-crossed by somebody you trusted; and I guess you had been. By yourself, your own body. And you were working so hard.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Bible covers it very neatly:
The guilty flee where none pursue.
If I’ve got it right, and it is the Bible. Anyway, you were like a dame with an inconspicuous little run in her stocking, horribly self-conscious, feeling that everybody must be staring at her. Pulling at her skirt, crossing her legs awkwardly, anything to keep the dreadful blemish out of sight, actually calling attention to what she’s trying to hide. Only you were trying to cover up the fact, which seemed guiltily obvious to you now that everything had gone wrong, that you’d put yourself into that hospital deliberately.”
Astrid licked her lips. “For an undercover operator, you are a very great mind
“Yes, that must have been a nasty surprise,” I said. “And things had been going so well, too! There you were in the hospital with everything under control, ready to smile at me courageously from your sickbed, pale but lovely. Of course it was easy for you to be brave then. You knew your tachycardia was phony, induced by a careful dose of stimulant, self-administered; probably one of the compounds on the list the heart specialist gave me. You knew that even without treatment you’d soon be back to normal. It wasn’t hard to play the poor martyred lady bearing her cross heroically. But you were unlucky; they picked quinine to treat you with. Nobody knew you were sensitive to the stuff, including you. Suddenly that night it went all grim and real on you, didn’t it? It wasn’t a charade any longer. The gent with the skull face was right there by your bed rattling his bones and breathing his graveyard breath on you…”
She shook her head impatiently. “Please spare me the picturesque imagery!”
I said, “Sweetie, I’ve been there. I know that guy very well. One of my best friends, or enemies. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. Anyway, you hadn’t expected anything like that; you weren’t prepared for it at all.”
She started to say something, and stopped. We listened to a man and woman entering a room across the hall. The woman was laughing at something the man had said as if he was the sweetest, funniest man in the world, and maybe he was.
I went on: “So when I arrived, there you were, still not quite sure you were even going to live, and not knowing, if you did live, if you’d be permanently damaged in some way. And the thing you couldn’t bear to think about was that you’d done it to yourself: the clever, clever girl who’d outsmarted herself so ridiculously, and wound up lying there helpless, hooked up to a lot of medical plumbing, looking like something that had been pulled through a knothole backwards. Instead of the brave, bright, charming, convalescent glamour girl I’d been supposed to find there, and fall for, hard.”
Astrid regarded me for a long moment. At last she took a deep swallow from her glass that left it empty, and gave a defiant little shrug that admitted everything.
“You can’t prove it!”
I rose and refilled her glass, and replenished my own drink. Standing there, I studied her thoughtfully, until she looked down in a flustered way and did something feminine to the lacy ruffles at her breast. I grinned and raised my glass to her, seating myself again.
“For a beautiful lady, you’re a damn’ good man, Watrous,” I said. “But you have some very corny reactions. Why the hell should I want to prove anything? You know the gag you tried to pull. I know. I can’t see that it’s anybody else’s business, can you?”
She frowned quickly. “I don’t understand.” When I didn’t say anything, she asked, “How did you guess?”
“Well, you were much too bitter about that quinine reaction, as if you’d been double-crossed by somebody you trusted; and I guess you had been. By yourself, your own body. And you were working so hard.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Bible covers it very neatly:
The guilty flee where none pursue.
If I’ve got it right, and it is the Bible. Anyway, you were like a dame with an inconspicuous little run in her stocking, horribly self-conscious, feeling that everybody must be staring at her. Pulling at her skirt, crossing her legs awkwardly, anything to keep the dreadful blemish out of sight, actually calling attention to what she’s trying to hide. Only you were trying to cover up the fact, which seemed guiltily obvious to you now that everything had gone wrong, that you’d put yourself into that hospital deliberately.”
Astrid licked her lips. “For an undercover operator, you are a very great mind
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