Death of a Citizen (2 page)

“Oh,” she said, ‘I wouldn’t dare!”

I saw that Tina and her suede-jacketed escort were starting to work their way around the room through a barrage of introductions, under the inexorable leadership of Fran Darrel, a small, dry, wisp of a woman with a passion for collecting interesting people. It was a pity, I thought, that Fran would never know what a jewel of interest she had in Tina…

I turned my attention back to the girl. She was quite a pretty girl, wearing a lot of Indian silver and one of the squaw dresses, also called fiesta dresses, the construction of which is a local industry. This one was all white, copiously trimmed with silver braid. As usual, it had a very full, pleated skirt supported by enough stiff petticoats to form a traffic hazard in the Darrels’ crowded living room.

I asked, “Do you live here in Santa Fe, Miss Herrera?”

“No, I’m just here on a visit.” She looked up at me. She had very nice eyes, dark-brown and lustrous, to go with the Spanish name. She said, “Dr. Darrel tells me you’re a writer. What name do you write under, Mr. Helm?”

I suppose I should be used to it by now, but I still can’t help wondering why they do it and what they expect to gain by it. It must seem to them like a subtle social maneuver, a way of skillfully avoiding the dreadful admission that they never heard of a guy named Helm or read any of his works. The only trouble is, I’ve never used a pseudonym in my life—my literary life, that is. There was a time when I answered to the code name of Eric, but that’s another matter.

“I use my own name,” I said, a little stiffly. “Most writers do, Miss Herrera, unless they’re pretty damn prolific, or run into publication conflicts of some kind.”

“Oh,” she said, “I’m sorry.”

It occurred to me that I was being pompous, and I grinned. “I write Western stories, mostly,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I’m leaving in the morning to get some material for a new one.” I glanced at my Martini glass. “Assuming that I’m in condition to drive, that is.”

“Where are you going?”

“Down the Pecos Valley first, and then through Texas to San Antonio,” I said. “After that I’ll head north along one of the old cattle trails to Kansas, taking pictures along the way.”

“You’re a photographer, too?”

She was a cute kid, but she was overdoing the breathless-admiration routine. After all, it wasn’t as if she were talking to Ernest Hemingway.

“Well, I used to be a newspaperman of sorts,” I said “On a small paper you learn to do a little bit of everything That was before the war. The fiction came later.”

“It sounds perfectly fascinating,” the girl said. “But I’m sorry to hear you’re leaving. I kind of hoped, if you had a little time… I mean, there’s something I wanted to ask you, a favor. When Dr. Darrel told me you were a real live author…” She hesitated, and laughed in an embarrassed way, and I knew exactly what was coming. She said, “Well, I’ve been trying to write a little myself, and I do so want to talk to someone who…”

Then, providentially, Fran Darrel was upon us, with Tina and her boy friend, and we had to turn to meet them. Fran was dressed pretty much like my companion, except that her blue fiesta dress, her waist, her arms, and her neck were loaded even more heavily with Indian jewelry. Well, she could afford it. She had money of her own, apart from Amos’ government salary. She introduced the newcomers and the girl, and it was my turn.

“…and here’s somebody I particularly want you to meet, my dear,” Fran said to Tina in her high, breathless voice. “One of our local celebrities, Matt Helm. Matt, this is Madeleine Loris, from New York, and her husband... Hell, I’ve forgotten your first name.”

“Frank,” the blond man said.

Tina had already put out her hand for me to take. Slender and dark and lovely, she was a real pleasure to look at in her sleeveless black dress, and her little black hat that was mostly a scrap of veil, and her long black gloves. I mean, these regional costumes are all very well, but if a woman can look like that, why should she deck herself out to resemble a Navajo squaw?

She extended her hand with a graciousness that made me want to click my heels, bow low, and raise her fingers to my lips—I remembered a time when I had, very briefly, been forced to impersonate a Prussian nobleman. All kinds of memories were coming back, and I could recall very clearly—although it seemed most improbable now—making love to this fashionable and gracious lady in a ditch in the rain, while uniformed men beat the dripping bushes all around us. I could also remember the week in London... Looking into her face, I saw that she, too, was remembering. Then her little finger moved very slightly in my grasp, in a certain way. It was the recognition signal, the one that asserted authority and demanded obedience.

I’d been expecting that. I looked straight into her eyes and made no answering signal, although I remembered the response perfectly. Her eyes narrowed very slightly, and she took back her hand. I turned to shake hands with Frank Loris, if that was his name, which it almost certainly wasn’t.

From his looks, I knew he was going to be a bone-crusher, and he was. At least he tried. When nothing snapped, he, too, tried the little-finger trick. He was a hell of a big man, not quite my height—very few are— but much wider and heavier with the craggy face of the professional muscleman. His nose had been broken many years ago. It could have happened in college football, but somehow I didn’t think so.

You get so you can recognize them. There’s something tight about the mouth and eyes, something wary in the way they stand and move, something contemptuous and condescending that betrays them to one who knows. Even Tina, bathed and shampooed and perfumed, girdled and nyloned, had it. I could see that now. I’d had it once myself. I’d thought I’d lost it. Now I wasn’t so certain.

I looked at the big man, and, oddly enough, we hated each other on sight. I was a happily married man without a thought for any woman but my wife. And he was a professional doing a job—whatever it might be—with an assigned partner. But he would have been briefed before he came here, and he would know that I’d once done a job with the same partner. Whatever his success in extracurricular matters—and from the looks of him he’d be the lad to give it a try—he’d be wondering just how successful I’d been, under similar circumstances, fifteen years ago. And of course, although Tina was nothing to me anymore, I couldn’t help wondering just what her duties as Mrs. Loris involved.

So we hated each other cordially as we shook hands and spoke the usual meaningless words, and I let him grind away at my knuckles and signal frantically, giving no sign that I felt a thing, until the handclasp had lasted long enough to satisfy the proprieties and he had to let me go. To hell with him. And to hell with her. And to hell with Mac, who’d sent them here after all these years to disinter the memories I’d thought safely buried. That is, if Mac was still running the show, and I thought he would be. It was impossible to think of the organization in the hands of anyone else, and who’d want the job?

The last time I saw Mac, he was sitting behind a desk in a shabby little office in Washington.

“Here’s your war record,” he said as I came up to the desk. He shoved some papers towards me. “Study it carefully. Here are some additional notes on people and places you’re supposed to have known. Memorize and destroy. And here are the ribbons you’re entitled to wear, should you ever be called back into uniform.”

I looked at them and grinned. “What, no Purple Heart?” I’d just spent three months in various hospitals.

He didn’t smile. “Don’t take these discharge papers too seriously, Eric. You’re out of the Army, to be sure, but don’t let it go to your head.”

“Meaning what, sir?”

“Meaning that there are going to be a lot of chaps”— like all of us, he’d picked up some British turns of speech overseas—“a lot of chaps impressing a lot of susceptible maidens with what brave, misunderstood fellows they were throughout the war, prevented by security from disclosing their heroic exploits to the world. There are also going to be a lot of hair-raising, revealing, and probably quite lucrative memoirs written.” Mac looked up at me, as I stood before him. I had trouble seeing his face clearly, with that bright window behind him, but I could see his eyes. They were gray and cold. “I’m telling you this because your peacetime record shows certain literary tendencies. There’ll be no such memoirs from this outfit. What we were, never was. What we did, never happened. Keep that in mind, Captain Helm.”

His use of my military title and real name marked the end of a part of my life. I was outside now.

I said, “I had no intention of writing anything of the kind, sir.”

“Perhaps not. But you’re to be married soon, I understand, to an attractive young lady you met at a local hospital. Congratulations. But remember what you were taught, Captain Helm. You do not confide in anyone, no matter how close to you. You do not even hint, if the question of wartime service is raised, that there are tales you could tell if you were only at liberty to do so. No matter what the stakes, Captain Helm, no matter what the cost to your pride or reputation or family life, no matter how trustworthy the person involved, you reveal nothing, not even that there’s something to reveal.” He gestured towards the papers on the desk. “Your cover isn’t perfect, of course. No cover is. You may be caught in an inconsistency. You may even meet someone with whom you’re supposed to have been closely associated during some part of the war, who, never having heard of you, calls you a liar and perhaps worse. We’ve done all we can to protect you against such a contingency, for our sakes as well as yours, but there’s always the chance of a slip. If it happens, you’ll stick to your story, no matter how awkward the situation becomes. You’ll lie calmly and keep on lying. To everyone, even your wife. Don’t tell her that you could explain everything if only you were free to speak. Don’t ask her to trust you because things aren’t what they seem. Just look her straight in the eye and lie.”

“I understand,” I said. “May I ask a question?”

“Yes.”

“No disrespect intended, sir, but how are you going to enforce all that, now?”

I thought I saw him smile faintly, but that wasn’t likely. He wasn’t a smiling man. He said, “You’ve been discharged from the Army, Captain Helm. You’ve not been discharged from us. How can we give you a discharge, when we don’t exist?”

And that was all of it, except that as I started for the door with my papers under my arm he called me back.

I turned snappily. “Yes, sir.”

“You’re a good man, Eric. One of my best. Good luck.”

It was something, from Mac, and it pleased me, but as I went out and, from old habit, walked a couple of blocks away from the place, before taking a cab to where Beth was waiting, I knew that he need have no fear of my confiding in her against orders. I’d have told her the truth if it had been allowed, of course, to be honest with her; but my bride-to-be was a gentle and sensitive New England girl, and I wasn’t unhappy to be relieved, by authority, of the necessity of telling her I’d been a good man in that line of business.

Now, in the Darrels’ living room, I could hear Mac’s voice again:
How can we give you a discharge, when we don’t exist?
That voice from the past held a mocking note, and the same mockery was in Tina’s dark eyes as she allowed herself to be led away, accompanied by the Herrera girl, whom Fran had also taken in tow. I’d forgotten the color of Tina’s eyes, not blue, not black. They were the deep violet shade you sometimes see in the evening sky just before the last light dies.

The big man, Loris, gave me a sideways look as he followed the trio of women; it held a warning and a threat. I slipped my hand into my pocket and closed my fingers about the liberated German knife. I grinned at him, to let him know that any time was all right with me. Any time and any place. I might be a peaceful and home-loving citizen these days, a husband and a father. I might be gaining a waistline and losing my hair. I might barely have the strength to punch a typewriter key, but things would have to get a damn sight worse before I trembled at a scowl and a pair of bulging biceps.

Then I realized, startled, that this was just like the old days. We’d always been kind of a lone-wolf outfit, not noted for brotherhood and companionship and esprit de corps. I remembered Mac, once, saying that he made a point of keeping us dispersed as much as possible, to cut down on the casualties.
Break it up,
he’d say wearily,
break it up, you damn overtrained gladiators, save it for the Nazis.
I was falling right back into the old habits, just as if the chip had never left my shoulder. Perhaps it never had.

“What’s the matter, darling?” It was Beth’s voice, behind me. “You look positively grim. Aren’t you having a good time?”

I turned to look at her, and she looked pretty enough to take your breath away. She was what you might describe as a tallish, willowy girl—well, after bearing three children I guess she was entitled to be called a woman, but she looked like a girl. She had light hair and clear blue eyes and a way of smiling at you—at me, anyway—that could make you feel seven feet tall instead of only six feet four. She was wearing the blue silk dress with the little bow on the behind that we’d bought for her in New York on our last trip East. That had been a year ago, but it still made a good-looking outfit, even if she was starting to refer to it as that obsolete old rag—a gambit any husband will recognize.

Even after all this time in the land of blue jeans and squaw dresses, of bare brown legs and thong sandals, my wife still clung to certain Eastern standards of dress, which was all right with me. I like the impractical, fragile, feminine look of a woman in a skirt and stockings and high heels; and I can see no particular reason for a female to appear publicly in pants unless she’s going to ride a horse. I’ll even go so far as to say that the side-saddle and riding skirt made an attractive combination, and I regret that they passed before my time.

Please don’t think this means I’m prudish and consider it sinful for women to reveal themselves in trousers. Quite the contrary. I object on the grounds that it makes my life very dull. We all respond to different stimuli, and the fact is that I don’t respond at all to pants, no matter who they may contain or how tight they may be. If Beth had turned out to be a slacks-and-pajamas girl we might never have got around to populating a four-bedroom house.