Death of a Citizen (9 page)

“Yes,” she said. She looked around at the saw-tooth silhouettes of the surrounding mountains against the midnight sky full of stars, and shivered. She pulled up her long gloves to cover her bare arms, hugging herself against the cold. “Well, we had better get to work.”

“Yes,” I said. “That was one nice thing about the war. You could leave them where they fell.”

It took us two trips to get everything out of the truck that did not belong there. Driving away, we did not speak for several miles. Presently she turned the rearview mirror towards her and started combing the dust and cobwebs out of her hair by the glow of the dashboard. I heard a small sound and glanced at her. She was laughing.

“What’s funny now?” I asked.

“Mac
said
you’d know what to do.”

I didn’t really think it was very funny. “I appreciate his confidence in me. When did he say this?”

“We hadn’t expected to make the touch so easily or so soon. I telephoned him long distance for instructions. That is why I was not waiting for you in the studio when you came. Also, I had to wear her coat and drive her car to her motel to pack her things.”

“What else did Mac say?”

She smiled at me. “He said that, having lived here so long, you should know where to dig a nice deep grave.”

I said, “Mac should try digging graves in this country some time. That adobe clay is like rock, which is why I settled for a ready-made hole. How deep a grave did he want?”

“Two weeks deep,” Tina said. “Maybe three weeks, but certainly two.”

“What happens then?”

“Everything is explained, very quietly, to the satisfaction of the police.”

“This I want to see. How do you go about explaining dead bodies in peacetime?”

She laughed. “You think this is peace, my darling? What a beautiful and quiet life you people must lead out here in the West—with gauze over your eyes and cotton in your ears!” She took the purse from her lap, groped inside, brought out a small card, and held it out to me. “We found this among the Herrera’s belongings. It only confirmed what we already knew, but I saved it to show to you. Stop the car,
chéri.
It is time we talked.”

The card identified a female person by the code name of Dolores, with thumbprint and physical description, and stated that she was to be given any assistance she might require in the pursuit of her assigned mission. The card didn’t state what that mission might have been. I gave it back.

“So?”

Tina looked surprised. “That’s right,” she said. “I forget, you have not fought this enemy. They were our noble friends and allies in those days. Well, this is the standard membership card for the action groups, as opposed to the groups of intellectuals who sit around and drink tea and talk about Marx and feel terribly wicked… No, not standard. I take that back. This is a very special card for a very special group. There are very few members of this group,
Liebchen.
Almost as few as there were of us. And the qualifications are the same.” She glanced at me. “Do you understand what I mean?”

I had a little of the feeling that, I suppose, a Martian might have upon unexpectedly bumping into a nice, green, goggle-eyed fellow-Martian in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel in New York, or the Hollywood Knickerbocker.

“That kid?” I said. “Hell, she looked as if she wouldn’t hurt a fly. I thought I could spot anyone in our line of work across a four-lane boulevard on a dark night.”

“For a child who would not hurt a fly, she was well provided with fly-swatters, was she not? You are soft,” Tina murmured, “your senses have gone to sleep. And she was good, one of their best. We expected a great deal of trouble, Loris and I. And as for her age, my sweet, how old was I when we met?”

It was starting to make sense. I should have known that Mac wouldn’t have authorized the death of anyone whose removal wasn’t dictated by high strategic necessity, whatever that might mean in peacetime.

“We’re not avenging angels,” I’d heard him say once in London, “and we’re not judges of right and wrong. It would satisfy my soul to sign the death warrant of every concentration camp official in the Third Reich, for instance, but it wouldn’t contribute much towards winning the war. We’re not in business to satisfy my soul or anybody else’s. Keep that in mind.”

There was, of course, one exception to this rule. Whether to satisfy our souls or prosecute the war, we did try for Hitler himself—that is, certain optimists and egotists among us did, on three different occasions. I had no part in that. It was on a voluntary basis, and I’d taken a look at the preliminary reports on the job and come to the conclusion that it couldn’t be done, at least not by me. I wasn’t going to get myself killed volunteering for the impossible, although under orders I’ll stick my neck out as far as anybody.

After the third attempt—from which, like the first two, no one returned—counter-intelligence started hearing of queries from the continent, reaching the German espionage apparatus in Britain, concerning the possible existence of an Allied
Mordgruppe
aimed at
Der Fuehrer.
This, of course, although a little off the beam, wouldn’t do at all. For the Germans to suspect the existence of anything remotely resembling our organization—whether aimed at Hitler or anybody else—was bad enough; what really worried Mac, however, was the possibility of the rumor getting back to the States.

All the Germans could do, aside from taking a few precautions, was squawk; but the outraged moralists back home could put us out of business in short order. Killing Nazis was very commendable, to be sure, but it must be done, they’d cry, according to the rules of civilized warfare: this
Mordgruppe
sort of thing was dreadful, besides being very bad propaganda for our side. I wonder just how many good men and good ideas were sacrificed before the little shiny, cellophane-wrapped god of propaganda. There were times when I got the distinct feeling that even winning the damn war was frowned upon because it might have an adverse effect upon our public relations somewhere, perhaps in Germany or Japan.

Anyway, our activities were sharply curtailed for several months, and all further volunteers for the Big One, as we called it, were told to relax and forget it; henceforth we’d confine our attentions to less conspicuous targets.

Tina was speaking: “Do you think Mac is the only one ever to think of such a scheme, Eric? They have their specialists in death, also, and Herrera was one of them. And she was working very hard. But now she will disappear. She has checked out of her motel. Her clothes and possessions will disappear. Her car will stand unrecognized on an Albuquerque used-car lot with new paint and new identifying numbers, eventually to be sold to some honest citizen. And I, too, will disappear. But I will disappear without my car, with nothing but the clothes on my back and the purse in my hand. My husband will look for me at the hotel; he will be very upset when he does not find me—perhaps even upset enough to notify the police. Maybe it will be announced in the newspapers shortly that I have been found dead somewhere, the victim of a bullet from a certain type of .38 Special revolver, or the blade of a certain type of knife. And Herrera’s people, Eric, what will they think? What would you think, in their place?”

“That you’d tangled with the kid and come off second best. That’s assuming they don’t know you very well.”

She. laughed. “It is sweet of you to flatter me. But we hope you are right. They probably already know who I am, who Loris is. If they don’t, they will be permitted to find out. They will assume that Herrera met me in the line of business and was forced to dispose of me. They will guess that she went into hiding to see if there would be trouble or if it was safe for her to proceed with her job. They will wait to hear from her, for a reasonable period, at least. Meanwhile, we have gained time. In a week, Amos Darrel will have his report ready and delivered in Washington. He will have adequate protection there.”

“Amos?” I said. I wasn’t as surprised as I might have been. Instinct had already warned me, I recalled, that Amos might be in danger.

“Who else? Are
you
important enough to be selected for removal, my dear? It may be true that the pen is mightier than the sword, but these people are not known for their devotion to literature. I doubt that they would risk a good operative on you, not even to keep you from perpetrating another book like—what was it
?—The Sheriff of Hangman’s Gulch.”

I said quickly “I never wrote—”

She shrugged her shoulders prettily. “You can’t expect me to recall the exact title,
chéri.”

I grinned. “Okay, okay. But I didn’t realize Amos was quite that important.”

“He is important enough. Who are the generals of today, where are the battles being fought, Eric? Oh, people like Loris and I and Herrera, we have our little skirmishes, but the real front lines are located in the laboratories, are they not? And if a key man here and there should meet with death, how better to disrupt a research program? They have learned their lesson as we learned it; they do not strike at the big public figures. But an obscure little man in Washington was run over by a truck six months ago, and, as a result, a million-dollar project had to retrace its steps quite expensively. A certain rocket specialist was shot to death on the West Coast, apparently by a drunken workman he had offended; a great deal of valuable information died with him. You have never heard of these men, very few people have. You have only heard of Amos Darrel because you happen to live in the same city, and the city happens to be close to Los Alamos, and his wife happens to collect literary and artistic figures as some women collect antiques. Yet Dr. Darrel is an important man in his line, and his death would mean a serious setback for the research he is directing. Do you wonder that, in desperation, certain people in Washington, remembering Mac’s wartime work, summoned him and gave him authority to meet this threat ruthlessly, in his own way?” She wrinkled her nose. “It took them very long to reach this decision, of course. Washington is the city of the soft heads and the chicken hearts.”

“And Amos?” I said.

“He would be dead now, quite possibly, if we had not reached him in time. She came well prepared, with a letter of introduction and a background of college journalism. What eminent man is going to deny a pretty girl with writing ambitions a few minutes of his time? They would have retired to a private room for the interview. There would have been a shot. Perhaps she would have fled through the window, or perhaps she would have been found standing over the body, dazed, gun in hand, with her hair disheveled and her dress torn.” Tina shrugged. “There are many ways of doing it, as we know; or have you forgotten a certain General von Lausche? And operatives, even pretty female operatives, are always expendable. But we were there. And the girl recognized us and knew why we were there, and knew that she did not have long to live if she did not find a safe place to hide.” Tina smiled. “Her manuscript would be her excuse, if you should come to the studio and find her. It is too bad that we deprived you of the scene she planned to perform for you. It would undoubtedly have been most interesting.”

“Undoubtedly,” I said. “So Mac is now running a kind of government bodyguard service?”

“Not exactly,” Tina said. “There are two ways of giving protection, are there not? You can watch your subject day and night and hope to be alert enough to intercept or deflect the knife or bullet when it comes. Or you can identify and remove the would-be assassin. The police, the F.B.I., operate under a handicap. They cannot convict and execute a man for murder until he has murdered someone. Or a woman. We do not have this trouble. We hunt out the hunters. We execute the murderers before they commit their crimes.”

“Yes,” I said, turning the key in the ignition and putting my foot on the starter pedal. “Just one more thing. You’re going to have to stay under cover for a while. Did you and Mac have a place in mind?”

Tina laughed softly, and leaned forward to place a hand on my knee. “But of course, my sweet,” she said. “With you.”

They build roads in New Mexico the normal way, except for one small aberration. After they’ve got the surface on, while it’s still nice and soft, they give the signal to a drunk with a big disc harrow, who sets off at top speed along the fresh pavement, weaving artistically from side to side…

Well, maybe it doesn’t happen that way, but I can think of no better explanation for the long, parallel, crooked furrows that decorate our southwestern blacktop roads. They aren’t conspicuous. You probably don’t even notice them in your softly sprung, balloon-tired Cadillac or Imperial, but in a truck with 6.00 x 16 tires inflated to thirty-five pounds it’s like driving along a set of insane streetcar tracks laid by a madman for the sole purpose of throwing your heap into the ditch.

Along about dawn, I got tired of fighting the steering wheel and turned off onto a dirt road leading west across somebody’s ranch. I followed this for a mile or two, until the growing light showed me a kind of hollow to the left where the desert cedars grew more thickly than elsewhere. I headed down there without benefit of road.

Parking in a little clearing among the low, twisted evergreens, I climbed out stiffly and eased the door closed without latching it, so as not to wake Tina, who was curled up asleep under her furs at the far end of the seat. Then I walked to the top of the nearest rise and stood looking at the brightening yellow-pink sky to the east. It was going to be another clear day. Most of them are, in our part of the country.

Little weak lights crawled across the dark plain under the beautiful sky, over where the highway was. I had that curious feeling of unreality you sometimes get after a sleepless night. It didn’t seem likely that, some hundred-odd miles to the north, there was an abandoned mine containing a pretty girl with a sheathed throwing knife at the back of her neck and a bullet in her head—laid out neatly at the side of the black tunnel with a raincoat over her and her luggage beside her, and covered with as much protection in the way of rocks and earth as we’d been able to scrape together with the tools at our disposal. Tina had considered this a sentimental waste of time, and she’d been perfectly right, but I felt better for having done it. As she kept pointing out, I was soft, these days. I couldn’t help thinking of things like rats and coyotes.