Death of a Citizen (3 page)

“What’s the matter, Matt?” she asked again.

I looked in the direction Tina and her gorilla had taken, and I rubbed my fingers and grimaced wryly. “Oh, those strongarm guys just get my goat. The louse almost broke my hand. I don’t know what he was trying to prove.”

“The girl is rather striking. Who is she?”

“A kid named Herrera,” I said easily. “She’s writing the Great American Novel, or something, and would like a few pointers.”

“No,” Beth said, “the older one, the slinky one with the black gloves. You looked quite continental, shaking hands with her; I thought you were going to kiss her fingertips. Had you met her somewhere before?”

I glanced up quickly; and I was back again where I didn’t want to be, back where I was watching myself every second to see how I was going over in the part I was playing, back where every word I spoke could be my death warrant. I was no longer working my facial muscles automatically; the manual control center had taken over. I signaled for a grin and it came. I thought it was pretty good. I’d always been a fair poker player as a boy, and I’d learned something about acting later, with my life at stake.

I put my arm around Beth casually. “What’s the matter, jealous?” I asked. “Can’t I even be polite to a good-looking female… No, I never saw Mrs. Loris before, but I sure wish I had.”

Lie,
Mac had said,
look her in the eye and lie.
Why should I obey his orders, after all the bloodless years? But the words came smoothly and convincingly, and I squeezed her fondly, and let my hand slide down to give the little bow at her rear an affectionate pat, among all those chattering people. Briefly, I felt the warm tautness of her girdle through the silk of her dress and slip.

“Matt, don’t!” she whispered, shocked, stiffening in protest. I saw her throw an embarrassed glance around to see if anyone had noted the impropriety.

She was a funny damn girl. I mean, you’d think that after more than a decade of marriage I could pat my wife on the fanny, among friends, without being made to feel as if I’d committed a serious breach of decency. Well, I’d lived with Beth’s inhibitions for a long time, and normally I’d have thought it was just kind of cute and naive of her, and maybe I’d have given her an additional little pinch to tease her and make her blush, and she’d have wound up laughing at her own stuffiness, and everything would have been all right But tonight I didn’t have any concentration to spare for her psychological quirks. My own demanded my entire attention.

“Sorry, Duchess,” I said stiffly, withdrawing the offending hand. “Didn’t mean to get familiar, ma’am… Well, I’m going over for a refill. Can I get you one?”

She shook her head. “I’m still doing fine with this one.” She couldn’t help glancing at my glass and saying, “Take it easy, darling. Remember, you’ve got a long drive tomorrow.”

“Maybe you’d better call Alcoholics Anonymous,” I said, more irritably than I’d intended. As I turned away, I saw Tina watching us from across the room.

For some reason, I found myself remembering the wet woods at Kronheim, and the German officer whose knife was in my pocket, and the way the blade of my own knife had snapped off short as he flung himself convulsively sideways at the thrust. As he opened his mouth to cry out, Tina, a bedraggled fury in her French tart’s getup, had grabbed his Schmeisser and smashed it over his head, silencing him but bending the gun to hell and gone…

A short, dark individual in an immaculate white jacket was presiding over the refreshment table with the grace, dignity and relaxed assurance of an old family retainer, although I knew he was hired for the occasion as I’d been meeting him at Santa Fe parties for years.

“Vodka?” he was saying. “No, no, I will not do it, señorita! A Martini is a Martini and you are a guest in this house.
Por favor,
do not ask me to serve a guest of the Darrels the fermented squeezings of potato peelings and other garbage!”

Barbara Herrera answered the man laughingly in Spanish, and they tossed it back and forth, and she agreed to settle for another honest, capitalist cocktail instead of switching to the bastard variety from the land of Communism. After he’d filled her glass, I stuck mine out to be replenished from the same shaker. The girl glanced around, smiled, and swung about to face me with a clink of bracelets and a swish of petticoats.

I gestured towards her costume. “Santa Fe is grateful to you for patronizing local industry, Miss Herrera.”

She laughed. “Do I look too much like a walking junk shop? I didn’t have anything else to do this afternoon, and the stores just fascinated me. I lost my head, I guess.”

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“California,” she said.

“That’s a big state,” I said, “and you can keep all of it.”

She smiled. “Now, that isn’t nice.”

“I’ve spent a few months in Hollywood from time to time,” I said. “I couldn’t take it. I’m used to breathing air.”

She laughed. “Now you’re boasting, Mr. Helm. At least we get a little oxygen with our smog. That’s more than you can say up here at seven thousand feet. I lay awake all last night gasping for breath.”

With her warm dark skin and wide cheekbones, she looked better in her squaw dress than most. I looked down at her, and sighed inwardly, and braced myself to do my duty as an elder statesman of the writing profession.

I said in kindly tones, “You say you’ve been doing some writing, Miss Herrera?”

Her face lighted up. “Why, yes, and I’ve been wanting to talk to somebody about… It’s at my motel, Mr. Helm. There’s a rather pleasant bar next door. I know you’re leaving in the morning, but if you and your wife could just stop on your way home and have a drink while I run over and get it… It’s just a short story, it wouldn’t take you more than a few minutes, and I’d appreciate it so much if you’d just glance through it and tell me…”

New York is full of editors who are paid to read stories. All it takes to get their reaction is the postage. But these kids keep shoving the products of their sweat and imagination under the noses of friends, relatives, neighbors, and anybody they can track down who ever published three lines of lousy verse. I don’t get it. Maybe I’m just a hardened cynic, but when I was breaking into the racket I sure as hell didn’t waste time and effort showing my work to anybody who didn’t have the dough to buy and the presses to print it on—not even my wife. Being an unpublished writer is ridiculous enough; why make it worse by showing the stuff around?

I tried to tell the girl this; I tried to tell her that even if I liked her story, there was nothing I could do about it, and if I didn’t like it, what difference did it make? I wasn’t the guy who was going to buy it. But she was persistent, and before I got rid of her I’d consumed two more Martinis and promised to drop by and have a look at her little masterpiece in the morning, if I had time. As I was planning to leave before daybreak, I didn’t really expect to have time, and she probably knew it; but I wasn’t going to spoil my last evening at home reading her manuscript or anybody else’s.

She left me at last, heading across the room to say goodbye to her host and hostess. It took me a while to locate Beth in one of the rear sitting rooms of the big, sprawling house. We’ve got plenty of space in this southwestern country, and few houses, no matter how large, are more than one story high, which is just as well. You wouldn’t want to have to climb stairs at our altitude. When I found my wife, she was talking to Tina.

I paused in the doorway to look at them. Two good-looking and well behaved and smartly dressed party guests, holding their drinks like talismans, they were chatting away in the bright manner of women who’ve just met and already don’t like each other very well.

“Yes, he was in Army Public Relations during the war,” I heard Beth say as I came forward. “A jeep turned over on him while he was out on assignment, near Paris I think, and injured him quite badly. I was doing U.S.O. in Washington when he came there for treatment. That’s how we met. Hello, darling, we’re talking about you.”

She looked nice, and kind of young and innocent, even in her Fifth Avenue cocktail outfit. I found that I wasn’t annoyed with her anymore; and apparently she’d forgiven me, also. Looking at her, I was very glad I’d had the good sense to marry her when I had the chance, but there was a feeling of guilt, too. There always had been, but it was stronger tonight. I’d really had no business marrying anybody.

Tina had turned to smile at me. “I was just asking your wife what you were a celebrity at, Mr. Helm.”

Beth laughed. “Don’t ask him what name he writes under, Mrs. Loris, or he won’t be fit to live with the rest of the evening.”

Tina was still smiling, watching me. “So you were in public relations during the war. That must have been quite interesting, but wasn’t it a bit risky at times?” Her eyes were laughing at me.

I said, “Those jeeps we ran around in caused more casualties than enemy action, in our branch of service, Mrs. Loris. I still shudder when I see one. Combat fatigue, you know.”

“And after the war you just started to write?”

Her eyes did not stop laughing at me. She’d undoubtedly been supplied with my complete dossier when she received her orders. She probably knew more about me than I knew about myself. But it amused her to make me read off my lines in front of my wife.

I said, “Why, I’d done some newspaper work before I went into the service; it had got me interested in southwestern history. After what I saw during the war, even if I never got into combat… Well, I decided that men fighting mud and rain and Nazis couldn’t be so very different from men fighting dust and wind and Apaches. Anyway, I went back to my job on the paper and started turning out fiction in my spare time. Beth had a job, too. After a couple of years, my stuff just started to sell, that’s all.”

Tina said, “I think you’re a very lucky man, Mr. Helm, to have such a helpful and understanding wife.” She turned her smile on Beth. “Not every struggling author has that advantage.”

It was the old behind-every-man-there’s-a-woman line that we get all the time, and Beth winked at me as she said something suitably modest in reply, but I didn’t find it funny tonight. There was that patronizing arrogance in Tina’s voice and bearing that I knew very well: she was the hawk among the chickens, the wolf among the sheep.

Then there was a movement behind me, and Loris appeared, carrying his big hat and Tina’s fur wrap.

“Sorry to break this up,” he said, “but we’re having dinner with some people across town. Ready, dear?”

“Yes,” she said, “I’m ready, as soon as I say goodnight to the Darrels.”

“Well, do it quick,” he said. “We’re late now.”

He was obviously trying to tell her that something urgent required their attention; and she got the message, all right, but she spent just a moment longer adjusting her furs and giving us a pleasant smile, like any woman who’s damn well not going to let herself be hurried by an impatient husband. Then they were going off together, and Beth took my arm.

“I don’t like her,” Beth said, “but did you pipe the minks?”

“I offered you mink the last time we were flush,” I said. “You said you’d rather put the money into a new car.”

“I don’t like him, either,” she said. “I think he hates small children and pulls wings off flies.”

Sometimes my wife, for all her naive and girlish looks, can be as bright as anybody. As we walked together towards the front of the house, past little groups of people grimly determined to keep the party going no matter what time it was or who went home, I wondered what had happened to send Tina and her partner rushing off into the night. Well, it wasn’t my problem. I hoped I could keep it that way.

Fran Darrel kissed me goodnight at the door. Amos kissed Beth. It’s an old Spanish custom which Beth detests. Just about the time she outgrew the unpleasant chore of kissing her New England aunts and grandmothers, and could get a little selective in her osculation, she married me and moved to New Mexico, where, she discovered to her horror, it was her social duty to take on all comers.

Amos, to do him justice, was one of the less objectionable male kissers of our acquaintance, satisfied with a token peck on the cheek. I think he made that much of a concession to local custom only because Fran had told him that he might hurt the feelings of some of her friends if he didn’t. In all social matters Amos took his cue from Fran, since it didn’t mean a thing to him, anyway.

Afterwards, he stood there with his vague, bored look while the women went through their goodbye chatter; and I stood there, and found myself suddenly wishing he’d get the hell back inside and out of the light. A guy of his scientific importance ought to have more sense than to hang around in a lighted doorway below a ridge full of desert cedars that could conceal a regiment of expert riflemen. It was a melodramatic idea, but Tina and Loris had started my mind working in that direction. Not that Mac’s people were any threat to Amos, but their presence meant trouble, and once there’s trouble around, anybody’s apt to find a piece of it coming his way.

“It was sweet of you to come,” Fran was saying. “I do wish you wouldn’t rush off. Matt, you have a nice trip, hear?”

“The same to you,” Beth said.

“Oh, we’ll see you again before we leave.”

“Well, if you don’t, I hope you have a wonderful time. I’m green with envy,” Beth said. “Good night.”

Then the Darrels were turning away and entering the house together, and nothing whatever had happened to either of them, and we were walking towards Beth’s big maroon station wagon where it stood gleaming with approximately four thousand dollars worth of gleam in the darkness.

I asked, “Where are they going?”

“Why, they’re going to Washington next week,” Beth said. “I thought you knew.”

I said, “Hell, Amos was in Washington only two months back.”

“I know, but something important has come up at the lab, apparently, and he’s got to make a special report. He’s taking Fran along, and they’re going to visit her family in Virginia and then have some fun in New York before they come back here.”