The Revengers (14 page)

“Damn, I had one of the other drivers stationed to catch you at the front door and head you off while I took a phone call, but he must have blinked,” he said.

Strangely, I didn’t resent the goof, although it could have had serious consequences. People make honest mistakes and to hell with it; it’s being almost killed for their highfaluting humanitarian impuses—as I’d once almost been killed for one of Fred’s, involving a pretty little girl he couldn’t bear to shoot, even though she was about to kill me. That gets a bit trying.

“What goes on?” I asked. “Who called?”

“Brent was calling from Marathon,” Fred said. “I’m to tell you that you were right about the phone booth, whatever that means. The shipboard phone had received the same treatment, he said.”

I thought that over without pleasure. What it meant was that I was the one who’d carelessly tipped off the adversary about what Harriet had told me, which wasn’t nice to think about, not nice at all. The fact that I hadn’t realized that I’d entered a combat zone where wartime precautions applied was absolutely no excuse; we’re supposed to anticipate things like that. And the fact that the pay telephone near
Queenfisher
had been bugged, as well as the instrument on the boat itself, meant that I was up against somebody pretty thorough. It seemed hardly likely that I’d make it unless I hauled up my socks and started operating in a careful and professional manner for a change.

“Okay, thanks,” I said. “And what’s the story on my hotel room? I just took a very expert reaming from a lovely lady in
deshabille
, as the French call it—or is it
dishabille
? —who seemed to think she and her husband, if that’s what he was, had established rights to the premises in some way.”

“Yes, I’m sorry,” Fred said. “They must have rented the room right after I moved you to four-oh-seven in accordance with instructions from our subject. She’s waiting for you in the dining room. When the pilot called to report you were taking off from Marathon, I let her know you were on your way and mentioned a tentative ETA. She’s one or two ahead of you by now.” He reached out for the camera case I was carrying. “Suppose I take this and put it into your new room for you, so you can get right down there? She’s not a patient lady. I’ll leave the key at the desk for you.”

“Sure,” I said. “Thanks, and you might as well turn in this one, too.” I gave him the key I’d just used, or misused, with some regrets; it had not been an altogether uninteresting experience. I said, “And this time let’s set some indicators, both doors, bottom; I guess it’s time to start being careful. You know the routine. Any hostile activity noted?”

He shook his head. “Calm as summer.”

“To hell with that,” I said. “That’s hurricane season around here, isn’t it?”

When I entered the dining room, Eleanor Brand was holding down a table for two along the wall. She was wearing a short-sleeved white silk dress with big black buttons that marched down the front as far as I could see from the soft open shirt-like collar. She sat there smoking a cigarette and making notes on a pad in front of her and frowning thoughtfully at what she had written. Her hair was neat and businesslike and the cool white silk of the dress made her skin look smooth and warm. She looked up as I stopped at the table, and made a show of glancing at the stainless watch she still wore.

“Punctuality is part of the job, Mr. Helm,” she said with straight-faced severity. “You may sit down. . . . But I was informed that you would arrive half an hour ago, and laid my dinner plans accordingly. You have kept me waiting, a heinous crime.”

“Sorry, ma’am.” I spoke with equal formality as I seated myself facing her. “Headwinds, you know. Do I gather that I may consider myself employed, ma’am?”

She grinned abruptly. It was a big grin I hadn’t seen before and it lit up her entire face. It couldn’t make her beautiful, but she certainly wasn’t unattractive.

“Yes, damn you,” she said, “and, as a matter of fact, I’m very glad to see you. You really know how to spook a girl. I’ve been expecting a bullet in the back all day. Your man Fred is nice and conscientious, but he isn’t mean-looking enough to inspire real confidence.”

I laughed. “Am I supposed to take that as a compliment?”

She laughed also, and said, “I hope you don’t mind that we moved you in next door to me. I thought, since you were going to play bodyguard, that was what you’d want.” “It’s fine,” I said, “but what happened to the previous incumbent?”

Her expressive mouth went suddenly thin and firm. “Let’s not talk about that,” she said; and I was rather sorry for Warren Peterson, who’d first been badly humiliated by me and then, obviously, sent packing by the girl facing me without, I had a hunch, too many concessions to diplomacy. I guess my feelings showed on my face because she felt obliged to add, rather stiffly, “Mr. Peterson seemed to be slightly confused about the nature of our relationship. I had to . . . to straighten him out.” She looked at me hard. “Which brings us, Mr. Helm, to certain conditions governing your employment.”

She was cute as a monkey when she grinned, but that moment was past; and I reminded myself that I already had reason to know that this was a fairly ruthless and coldblooded little girl.

I said, “Don’t worry about it, Elly. I won’t presume upon our nonexistent friendship, if that’s what you’re driving at.”

She sat perfectly still for a moment, her eyes steady on my face. “ESP, too?” she murmured.

I said, “My job is to keep you alive and, incidentally, take some pictures for you. For that, friendship, or any other form of emotional involvement, is not required. Satisfactory?”

She frowned slightly. “Of course, but now you’re mad at me. Why?”

I said, “The poor dumb sonofabitch was doing his level best for you with a pistol he didn’t even know how to handle. He thought he was going up against a bunch of murderous government characters super-trained in the arts of killing, him and his silly little .38; but he was willing to give it his best shot, to protect you, because he liked you.” I grimaced. “I saw what you did to one of your good friends out west; now I've seen you deal with another. Don’t worry, Elly, the last thing I want is your goddamned friendship. It doesn’t seem to be a very rewarding relationship.”

Her face had paled. Her hazel eyes were still fixed on my face. I waited for an angry outburst, but it did not come. Instead I saw her relax slowly. She said a strange and totally unexpected thing.

She said, “I’m sorry. You’ve had a bad day, haven’t you? I should have realized.”

It startled me, and scared me a little. There was much more woman here than met the eye. I said harshly, “We should get along just fine, Elly. I’m hard on my friends, too. I’ve just come from one. Somebody sent her a message she couldn’t bear, so she put on her prettiest nightie and got into bed and fired a bullet into her brain. And I knew she was in trouble; and if I’d just taken a few more simple precautions. . . . Ah, to hell with it!” I cleared my throat. “So we seem to have a lot in common, everything except drinks. Does only the management drink around here and not the hired help?”

“It’s coming,” she said, and suddenly a waiter was placing a stemmed glass in front of me although nobody’d given the order; apparently it had been prearranged. She smiled faintly at my expression. “Martini, right? I’m the girl who wrote an article about you, remember?”

I took a stiff slug and drew a long breath. “Phew! That helps!” I looked at her across the table, feeling a little ashamed of myself. Warren Peterson’s problems were his own, after all; and she was not to blame for mine. I said, “Sorry. Like you said, a bad day.”

“We all have them.” She hesitated. “Is it . . . relevant? Am I allowed to ask about it?”

I told her about it; although it got a little awkward, trying to explain to this strange young lady the long and complex relationship that had existed between Harriet and me. It was a relief to get away from such intimate matters and try out on her the theories I’d already expounded to Brent in Marathon.

“So you think she was driven to suicide to keep her quiet,” Eleanor said at last.

“Something like that,” I said. “But since she’d already spilled some of the beans, perhaps most of them, it was also a matter of punishment And I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if our man got some mean satisfaction out of taking the fine lady down a peg—taking her all the way down to the bottom, in fact, to prison or to death. So we begin to get a picture of an arrogant man who expects to be obeyed, uses blackmail to see that he is, and retaliates savagely when he isn’t; a man who’s also small-minded enough to resent any indication of superiority—that lady-of-the-manor manner you referred to.”

“Small-minded,” she said. “Thanks a lot.”

“Present company excepted, of course,” I said.

“Of course,” she said dryly. “What else do you think Captain Robinson could have told you if she’d lived?”

I said, “What she gave me was pretty much the meat of what she had to tell: who and why. But she could have speeded things up for us quite a bit, probably, by telling us exactly what it meant, how she’d found it out and perhaps even where to look for confirmation. The man was obviously buying time when he silenced her, or got her to silence herself. He didn’t expect to achieve perfect security; he’d already lost that.”

“Buying time for what?” Eleanor asked.

I said, “Time enough to kill me, and now you, before we can take what Harriet told me any further. But I see no reason why we should help him out by voluntarily starving ourselves to death. . . .”

The food arrived within a reasonable time and was reasonably edible. Afterward, well fed and comfortably relaxed for the first time since I’d caught the plane from Miami that morning—I seemed to have been shuttling between the U.S. and the Bahamas all day—I tasted my cognac appreciatively and watched Eleanor take out a fresh cigarette.

“You don’t mind?” she asked, startling me a little as I held a hotel match for her. I guess I’m way behind the times, still living in the era when only the gentlemen apologized when they broke out the smokes.

"Puff away,” I said. “As far as I’m concerned, your lungs are your own business; and in my line of work, I don’t really expect that when I expire it will be from a little smoke drifting across the table from somebody else’s cigarette.”

She laughed. “Well, you’re a welcome relief after all the anti-emphysema crusaders. Warren was forever trying to save me from myself.” She drew a long breath. “But enough stalling. Now that we’re well fed and pleasantly alcoholated, we’d better get down to business.”

I said, “Yes, do tell me all you know about George Winfield Lorca.”

George Winfield Lorca, she told me, was a reformed character. He made no bones about the fact that he had once been an evil man, very evil; but he had seen the light of righteousness—although he would admit wryly that said light had to be kind of smashed over his head before he would accept it. In other words, he’d had a brush with death that had left him with a dramatic scar; there had been a long and terrible time when nobody thought— including George Winfield Lorca to the extent that he was then capable of thinking at all—that he would ever leave his hospital bed; or that if he did leave he could ever move, or be moved, any farther than the nearest institution providing special care for people who were badly damaged upstairs and incapable of caring for themselves. But while he was a hard-nosed guy who didn’t believe in mystical experiences, he had to admit that something had happened to him in that hospital bed that he could not explain: the way out of the darkness had been shown to him. Later he had paid his debt—he was a man who always paid his debts—by dismissing his wicked companions and mending his wicked ways.

“Of course he could afford it,” Eleanor said dryly. “He’d made a pretty damned good pile working for the syndicate; the corporation as they sometimes call it. And after being shot in the head like that—well, a man with a halfparalyzed arm, not to mention a slight speech impediment is pretty well disqualified from the strong-arm business that used to be his specialty. But you’ve got to hand it to him. He fought like hell to come back from the limbo into which that bullet had sent him; and he made it. And it gave him a good excuse to pull out of the rackets and spend more time with the wife and kids—well, kid. Usually they don’t get to retire comfortably until the boys are good and ready to let them go.”

She reached for another cigarette and I started to do my gentleman bit with the matches; but she lit it quickly, nervously, from the butt of the first, girl-reporter fashion, movie version, stubbing out the butt in the glass ashtray. Some uneasy questions were stirring in my mind. It was farfetched, but I’d once encountered a high-class syndicate muscle gent who’d got shot in the head; and although his name, the name he’d been going under at the time, had not been Lorca, it had been Spanish, not usual in an organization originally imported from Siciliy. But the man I was thinking of was dead, or was he?

Eleanor was speaking again before I could frame my question. She said, “What some of us media geniuses are wondering, Matt, is now that he’s entered politics. . . . Well, it seems to us the boys were just a little too ready to let him go, bad arm or no bad arm. And then they were just a little too tolerant of all the mean things he said about them during the recent campaign. Hell, they must know things about him they could have used to keep him quiet. He spent a good many years in a rough business; and repentance, even sincere repentance—if it is sincere—does not confer legal immunity. And as I said, he has a wife and child, who aren’t bulletproof. Lorca’s ex-associates aren’t known for being bashful about putting the pressure on somebody who talks out of turn. But Mr. Lorca’s cars never blow up when he turns the keys. His daughter goes driving and riding and sailing just like any normal girl— well, there was a bit of an uproar there for a few days, at one point, but it turned out that the kid had simply managed to capsize her boat in a storm while out cruising with a friend; she was picked up after drifting around for a while in a life raft. You can believe it was checked out, and it checked. And Mrs. Lorca visits the bank and the beauty parlor without a bodyguard in attendance, just as if her husband hadn’t been bad-mouthing his former colleagues all over the newspapers and TV screens and promising, if elected, to use his special knowledge to clean up this cesspool of corruption once and for all as a way of atoning for his own past sins. He was good all right, he used his scar and his handicaps to good advantage, and the people lapped it up. Senator George Winfield Lorca; and he’s been keeping a pretty low profile in Washington up to now, but fireworks are expected at any time. It’s rumored that the party’s even got its eye on him for the Number One spot eventually if he can keep the sparks flying—what the hell, he’s not the only potential candidate who ever had a cloud on his record, and at least Lorca’s frank about his. Well, you must have seen or heard him. It was a pretty spectacular show, like an old-time religious revival, except that it was crime that took a beating instead of sin. As I say, he’s been keeping pretty quiet lately; but at the time he got more election coverage than anybody else in his part of the country.”