The Ravagers (17 page)

“You cheap slut!” I said. “You lousy, teasing bitch! So you were going to run out and leave me holding the baby. The dead babies.”

She glanced helplessly at the kid and back to me. “Dave, I—”

I reached into my pocket and took out my little knife, and flicked it open one-handed. There are easier ways of opening it, but that one impresses people.

I said, “I tried to do it nice, Irish. I didn’t blame you for anything, did I? I didn’t complain about the way you got me into this mess and then tried to weasel out of the responsibility when it came up murder. All I asked was that we stick together, work together, to get all of us clear together if it could be done—and the minute I step out the door, you’re on your way without me, or trying!”

“Dave,” she said. “Dave, please, I didn’t mean—”

“You never mean,” I said. “Who do you think you’re playing games with, Irish, some little C.P.A. or professor of home economics? Mrs. Clevenger’s boy David isn’t about to face this rap alone. And if he’s got to die for it, he isn’t going to die alone. The next time you step out of line, I’ll kill you. I hope I make myself clear, ma’am. Now we’ll all go down to the car together, smiling and gay, and if anybody makes a wrong step or a wrong sound there’ll be a lot more blood on the hotel’s rugs than there is already. I don’t like guns but I’m real sharp with knives. That’s a pun. Get moving, both of you.”

It was, I thought, a pretty good speech for an off-the-cuff effort. It seemed to go over well. They moved into the elevator when it came, and they smiled and laughed when I told them to, and we got out at the garage level, and my car was waiting for us. Things were breaking my way for a change.

Montreal is a big city, and it took me a while to work my way out of it. I tried to get news on the Volkswagen’s radio, but all that came through on the local stations was Canadian hillbilly music and rapid-fire announcing in French, which is not my favorite language. This came too fast and too accented for me to understand it. Once out of town, however, the little Telefunken radio reached out and got hold of some English I could follow, and I learned that I wasn’t the only one with troubles.

The world was still in a sad state, and airplanes were still falling out of the sky like rain or hail, ships were sinking, cars were crashing, trains were leaving the tracks wholesale, and the U.S. Navy was still investigating the recently announced loss of one of its pet atom subs. There was some discussion of the fate of the
Thresher,
a similar vessel that had met a similar fate some years earlier. At least it had gone down and never come up, and I got the impression this was what had happened to the
Sculpin,
as the latest casualty was called. The weasel-worded reporting made it hard to be sure of even this word.

I drove along, listening and wondering. You’re never told everything a job involves; and sometimes, as in this case, you’re hardly told anything, but you can’t help trying to connect it up with stuff you read in the papers and hear on the radio. I couldn’t see what I could have to do with a missing submarine, but I didn’t dismiss the possibility that there was a connection. Well, for the time being the admirals would have to worry about their sick tin fish alone; I had other things to think about.

The newscast ended without a mention of a double killing with international implications in a Montreal hotel. It was early yet, I reflected, but if Johnston should come looking for his missing partner we wouldn’t have much of a lead, certainly not enough to do any driving in the wrong direction. I glimpsed an empty picnic area along the dark roadside ahead, and pulled in and stopped.

Jenny sat up and looked at me. I heard the kid stir in the cramped rear seat. After the display of team-work mother and daughter had put on tonight, I didn’t like having either of them behind me, but there was a limit to the number of human bottoms that could reasonably be accommodated, for a long drive, upon the two small bucket seats in front.

“All right, ladies,” I said. “Stage one has fired successfully and we’re off the launching pad. Now it would be nice if somebody would tell me which way to go. I’d hate to set course for Mars if it’s the moon we want.” Nobody said anything. I looked at Jenny, whose face was a pale blur above the dim white of her blouse. I said, “Come on, Irish. Don’t make me do a Larry.”

“A Larry?”

“That was the given name of the dead guy back there, the arm-twisting Fenton character for whom I may be taking credit if this getaway doesn’t work. Didn’t you know?” She shook her head minutely. I said, “I don’t just twist arms, doll. When I want an answer and don’t get it, things can get very rough.”

“What... what do you want to know?”

I said, “Well, right now I don’t really want to
know
anything. I just want what I asked for, a direction. I want to get out of this country fast, and I think you people must have something lined up. Well, don’t hog it. Your friend is dead; there’s room for another.” Nobody spoke. I said harshly, “Come on, now. North, east, south, west, or a point in between. Aim me the right way. Later you can tell me when to fire the retro-rockets.” Jenny said nothing. I sighed. “All right, here we go again. Penny, let’s get out of the car where I can take off my coat and roll up my sleeves. I know you probably feel like a human punching bag already, honey, and I’m real sorry, but your mother’s gone and lost her tongue again...”

I heard the kid stir in the darkness. “Oh, Mummy, for heaven’s sake
tell
him!” she gasped. “Don’t let him... I can’t
stand
any more tonight. Just tell him.
Please
tell him!”

Jenny drew a long, rough breath and said, “Northeast, Mr. Clevenger. Follow the St. Lawrence past Quebec City but stay on the south bank. Drive to a place called Riviere-du-Loup, then turn right toward Fredericton.” There was a little pause, then she said savagely: “That should keep you busy for a while. I hope it makes you very happy!”

“Sure,” I said, and it did. Not that I really needed the direction—I already knew where she had to go, remember, and she’d actually pointed us the right way—but the fact that she could be bluffed into giving it promised well for the future.

Mac said, “I don’t know, Eric. What are you trying to say, that Ruyter wasn’t as important to the operation as we’ve been assuming?”

“Something like that, sir. Not essential, anyway.”

It sounded weak, like a schoolboy saying it wasn’t a very big window he’d broken and it had been cracked anyway. Mac was silent. I could visualize him frowning, some five hundred miles to the south and west of where I stood in a little red roadside phone booth. We’d passed the longitude of Washington a day earlier. We’d come a long way, in more ways than one.

“It seems unlikely,” Mac said at last. “After all, our information is that he was the man sent from overseas to do the White Falls job. The woman is only a convenient tool he picked up when he got there.”

I looked out through the glass at the convenient tool sitting in the Volkswagen parked nearby. It was still dark but I could see that mother and daughter were taking advantage of my absence from the car to hold a conference, of which I flattered myself I was probably one subject. I would have liked to know the others.

I said, “I’m not sure we’ve been given the right dope on this situation, sir. I’ve got a hunch there’s an element our informants overlooked, somewhere. In particular, I don’t think they had this woman figured right.”

“In what way, Eric?”

“She was supposed to have been doing all this because she was crazy about Ruyter, wasn’t she? Well, I can testify that she has displayed no visible signs of infatuation, sir. I got a distinct impression that while she’d tolerated him as a bed partner a few times, more or less to spite her husband, she didn’t even think that much of him any longer. At one point she came damn close to asking me to help her escape from his clutches, or words to that effect. When he was shot, far from mourning over his body, she seemed a lot more concerned over Larry Fenton’s death— well, over the fact that a government man had got killed.”

“If passion isn’t the lady’s motive power, what alternative do you suggest?”

I hesitated. “Well, I think he had something on her, sir. Something big enough that she
had
to jump when he cracked the whip. Bigger, say, than a spot of casual adultery.”

Mac said, “The man is dead. He is cracking no whips. And still you seem to think there’s hope that she intends to carry his plans to completion.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “That’s the impression I get. Maybe the whip has been passed to someone else, someone here in the east. But even if it hasn’t, even if the possibilities of blackmail—if that’s what it was—died with Ruyter, what choice does she have now? She’s committed; she can’t turn back. What’s behind her except an embittered husband, a lot of law, and four dead bodies? She may not be legally responsible for all of them, maybe not for any of them, but once she’s caught up in the investigation she’ll never get free and she knows it. There’s also a little charge of dealing with her country’s enemies, technically known as treason. She can’t stop now.”

“You’re assuming she has somewhere to go.”

“Hell, she was going there when I stopped her in the hotel corridor, sir. I’m sure Ruyter had an international escape hatch up here somewhere; and he told the daughter enough before he died that mama thinks she can find it, or at least make contact with someone who’ll lead her to it.” I paused briefly. “Do we have any dope on how Ruyter got here in the first place? I mean, did he come by plane, or ship, or did he swim ashore like a seal? If we knew how he was landed, maybe we’d know more about how he was expecting to get away.”

Mac said, “It’s a reasonable thought. It occurred to me some time ago.”

“And?”

“And the people who have that information are not parting with it, Eric. Security is very tight in this area.”

I made a face at the telephone box on the wall. “One day we’re going to get so damn secure that the Russians will take us over and nobody’ll know it because nobody’ll dare talk to anybody else, about that or anything else.” I drew a long breath and played my lone ace. “Well, you go ask these secure people if the name Gaston Muir means anything to them, sir. He lives in a place called French Harbor. He has a boat there. According to my map, French Harbor is a small coastal village on Cape Breton Isle, Nova Scotia, not more than thirty miles from our ex-mining town of Inverness. I just got that out of the kid. I’m getting to be a terrible bully, sir.”

“Gaston Muir,” Mac said. “French Harbor. I’ll see what reaction it brings. This is what Ruyter told the little girl?”

I said, “If you call a teenager a little girl, you’re apt to get a poke in the eye, sir. But, yes, if she’s telling the truth, and I think she is up to a point, this is the dope Ruyter wanted Penny to pass on to her mother. Mrs. Drilling was to come to French Harbor properly equipped—I presume this means with the papers. She was supposed to make contact with either Ruyter himself or this Muir character at a certain waterfront joint at six o’clock in the evening the day after tomorrow—well, that’s tomorrow, now. In case of emergency, say if she couldn’t make it, she was supposed to get word to Muir by way of the general store; leaving a certain innocuous message. The kid wouldn’t tell me the code. She balked there, and I figured I’d got enough for the time being without getting really rough.”

“I see. Tomorrow evening, you say?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you think Mrs. Drilling will go through with it in spite of the changed situation?”

“I think she has no choice, sir. And in order to buy her way to safety, she’s got to bring the papers as instructed. Ruyter’s friends may possibly help her get away without Ruyter, but not without the stuff. She’s got to have something to bargain with.” I paused for breath. “What it amounts to, sir, is that we’ve lost one of our carrier pigeons, but with a little luck the message may still get delivered if we can all stay out of jail until tomorrow night. That’s up to you. I’ve got some seven-eight hundred miles still to go, and I’m not going to be able to do much hiding and dodging if I’m to stick to Ruyter’s timetable. Nor am I in any position to outrun the Canadian cops, with forty horsepower and two lady passengers. Somebody’s damn well got to tell them to look the other way as we go by.” There was a little silence. I didn’t venture to guess which way he’d decide. Even if he thought there was a chance of retrieving the mission, he might feel that the fumble-witted agent on the spot was just too damn incompetent to take advantage of it—and he’d have a point.

He said at last, “It will take a good deal of delicate diplomatic maneuvering to arrange a safe-conduct for you through three provinces, Eric, when the charge is murder. I don’t really know if it can be done, without causing disastrous comment.”

I said, “They shot each other, Fenton and Ruyter. At least I set it up that way. The authorities don’t have to believe it, but they can pretend they do for a day or two. That way they’re only looking for some missing witnesses. They don’t have to look too hard.”

“And how do you propose to handle a certain Mr. Johnston, who is presumably on the vengeance trail, or will soon be?”

“You handle him, sir. Have somebody call him off. For questioning about his partner’s death, say.”

“I can only make suggestions and recommendations. I have no authority over his department.”

“No, sir.”

“If I should fail in my efforts to have him withdrawn—”

I waited a little and said, “Yes, sir?”

“I hope you have no tender, brotherly feelings for the gentleman, such as you seem to have had for his youthful associate.”

“No, sir.”

“There is also the little girl—excuse me, the young lady. She may prove to be a nuisance. Since you do not seem to understand indirect orders, Eric, I will give them to you directly: if she, or anyone else, should again threaten the success of this mission, you will arrange for them to have an immediate accident, preferably fatal. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”

I said, “Yes, sir.”