The Damsel

by Richard Stark

  “Come on,” said the talker. He took Grofield’s elbow, not gently.

  Grofield deeply regretted his physical condition. He was in trouble now, black trouble, of a source and purpose he didn’t understand, and he should be at his most alert and alive for it. Instead, he was woozy and stupid, reeling at the edge of a grave, surrounded by gorillas who might at any time get the notion to shove him on in. Standing, walking, moving his body, he was far more aware of his weakness and vulnerability than when he’d been lying comfortably in bed.

  He was being walked now toward the door, and all at once a single thought came pure and clear in his head and he said, “My suitcase.” He half-turned toward it, still being tugged the other way by the hand at his elbow.

  “You won’t need it. You can come back for it.”

  There it was, halfway across the room, on the rack at the foot of the bed. It was shut, but not locked.

  Grofield heard the girl say, “I can carry it for him,” and that pleased him, but then the talker said, “I said he don’t need it. It stays here to show the chambermaid he hasn’t moved out. Saturday, he can come back for it.”

  “You’re a bastard,” she said, and even though he was woozy Grofield understood it was the word Saturday that had stung her, and that it had been meant to sting her. So it was true, as he’d supposed, that she had to be somewhere on Friday. Acapulco? Maybe.

  The talker was saying now, near Grofield’s ear, “You don’t need it for nothing, do you? We already got your toothbrush from the bathroom, and you’ll be in bed all the time anyway, so what difference does it make?”

  Grofield retained sense enough to nod. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, and they led him out of the room and left the suitcase behind.

  PART TWO

  1

  “I’M SORRY,” she said.

  Grofield said, “Sorry? What for? What’s to be sorry about?”

  “You’re mad at me,” she said.

  Grofield said, “Give me another cigarette.” He’d left his Delicados downstairs.

  They were in the room directly above his old one. The hoods had rented a suite up here, three rooms with this one in the middle. There was a hall door, but it was double-locked and the key was gone, so you could only get in and out through the rooms on either side.

  And the window, of course. You could still go out the window, except the hoods had stripped the bedding from the bed, removed the curtains from the window, and even taken away Grofield’s belt. There was nothing to use as a rope anymore, so there wouldn’t be any more trips out the window.

  Grofield and Ellen Marie Fitzgerald were alone now, Grofield half-sitting and half-lying on the bare mattress, the girl prowling the room in nervous agitation. They’d been brought here five minutes ago and left alone, and until now neither of them had done any talking. The way Grofield felt, the silence could have gone on forever.

  But the girl had things to say, nice, useful things like I’m sorry. She also wanted to make amends; when Grofield asked her for a cigarette, she lit it herself before handing it to him. There was a faint trace of lipstick on the tip. She stood beside the bed, lit a second cigarette for herself, and said, “I’m sorry about the—”

  Grofield quickly overrode her, saying, “The way I see it, the only reason your pals left us alone like this is to hear what we have to say.”

  Her eyes widened, and she glanced toward one of the side doors. “You think so? Why?”

  “To see where I fit in, see if we know each other from somewhere. You ready to tell me the truth now?”

  She hesitated, biting her lower lip. Finally she said, “No, I can’t. I wish I could, I owe you at least that much, but—”

  “You owe me plenty, honey.”

  “I know. Believe me, I know, and I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

  “You can’t tell me much of anything, can you?”

  “No. I just can’t, that’s all.”

  Grofield said, “But there is a place you have to be by Friday. Or on Friday.”

  “Yes. On Friday, yes.”

  “And it’s the place you said before.”

  “Acapulco, yes.” She saw him glance at the door, and said, “Oh, they know about it. That’s why they’re holding me. They’ll let us both go on Saturday, I know they will.”

  Grofield said, “I’m not sure I can wait.”

  “I know I can’t wait. But what can I do?” And, looking wildeyed, she went back to the pacing again.

  Grofield let the silence stretch between them again, for several reasons. In the first place, he expected any minute she’d make a slip and say something about the money. In the second place, he wanted time to think about where he was and work out a way to be somewhere else.

  He hated the weakness of his body now, its stiffness and sluggishness. He was never sick, always in good physical shape, his actor’s preparations having included fencing lessons and tumbling, some acrobatics and horsemanship and ballroom dancing, so that he was ready at any time to take a role in The Prisoner of Zenda. Any time but now, when he needed it.

  Plus, as if the wound weren’t handicap enough, he was completely off his home field. He’d never been in Mexico before, had no tourist papers, didn’t speak the language. Except for the clothes he had on—and the suitcase full of money—he had no luggage, nothing to wear, nothing. He was unarmed, he had no local contacts or friends, and he didn’t dare go to either the Mexican police or the American Embassy.

  The more he thought about it, the more he had to accept the fact that he needed this girl’s help. She’d gotten him into a mess he couldn’t handle as a single, and she could damn well cooperate to get him out again.

  She was still pacing over there, looking panicky but intent. He said, “Come here.”

  She stopped, startled for a second, and then reoriented herself and came over toward him, but not close enough. He gestured impatiently for her to sit down on the bed next to him. She got a mistrustful look on her face, but he let her know with his own look of disgust that she’d guessed wrong. She said, “What—?” but he cut her off with a violent arm gesture that obviously meant shut up.

  When she finally sat down, elbow to elbow with him, their legs stretched out parallel in front of them on the bare mattress, he whispered, “This is the way we have a private conversation. Get it?”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered back. “I didn’t catch on fast enough, I was thinking about other things.”

  “You’re sorry a lot, aren’t you? All right, never mind, just listen. There are things each of us wants.”

  She nodded vigorously.

  “So we help each other,” he whispered. “You help me get out of here and get my suitcase back. I help you get to Acapulco on Friday.”

  “It’s a deal,” she said, maybe too quickly.

  Grofield looked at her, and she was as sweet and innocent as a ten-year-old nun. Unicorn bait. And in the brain behind those eyes, Grofield was convinced, she was planning to ditch him, with or without the money, the first chance she got.

  Well, the hell. You had to work with the materials at hand. Grofield whispered, “What about papers? You in the country legally?”

  “Of course.” She seemed honestly surprised, so surprised she almost answered aloud.

  “Ssst! Keep it down.”

  “Sorry. I—”

  “Again? Sorry again?”

  “I do say that all the time, don’t I?”

  “You have cause. What about a driver’s license? Got one?”

  “Yes.”

  “On you?”

  “In my bra. I put all my papers there when I went out the window.”

  “Fine. And here comes the capper. This is the one you’ve got to answer straight.”

  “If I can.”

  “You can. When you climbed down that sheet, the phone to call the cops is not where you headed. If we get away again, will your aunties call the cops?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Our dea
l is still on either way,” Grofield assured her. “It’s just we’ll have to work things different on the outside.”

  She sat up straighter, half-turned to face him, held up her right hand in the three-fingered Scout pledge. “I guarantee,” she whispered fiercely, “those rotten bastards have never spoken willingly to the police in their entire lives and nothing about what’s going on now is going to change that. They will not call the police, I swear it.”

  “All right. Good. So the next thing is to get out of here.”

  “You make it sound easy.”

  “Don’t you believe me. Help me off this bed.”

  “All right.”

  She scrambled off first, took his right arm, and helped him through that no-man’s-land of balance between sitting down and standing up. Once he was vertical he was all right.

  He looked around the room, and it was discouragingly bare. With the curtains off the window and the covers off the bed, the place looked naked, vacant, nobody home.

  Aside from the bed, there was the normal minimum of hotel-room furniture; a metal dresser with a fake wood veneer, a floor lamp with an atrocious pink shade, a Danish-modern armchair with green leatherette seat and back, a small writing table and chair in a style to match the dresser, and a low luggage rack at the foot of the bed.

  Grofield said, “Don’t you have any gear? Luggage?”

  “In the closet.”

  “Get it out, let’s see if there’s anything we can use.”

  From the closet she got two small white suitcases, very expensive looking. She set them both on the bed, opened them, and stepped back. “Take a look,” she said. “No guns or knives or hand grenades.”

  “Oh, shucks,” said Grofield. “I had such high hopes.” He went over and, right-handed, poked through both suitcases.

  It was all normal goods. Cashmere sweaters, cotton blouses, wool skirts. Bras and panties and stockings and garter belts, but no girdle. Four pairs of shoes, of varying styles, and some rolled pairs of socks. Toothbrush and toothpaste and a whole array of toilet articles and cosmetics.

  She said, sotto voce, as he kept poking, “You know, I’m beginning to get scared.”

  “That’s all right,” he said, distracted, thinking about other things. What to use, how to use it, what’s the plan.

  “Running away from them,” she went on, her whisper turning shrill, “sneaking away, that was one thing. But you mean to attack them, have us fight our way through them.”

  “Only way. We might tie bits of clothing together, make another rope, but I wouldn’t trust it to hold.”

  “No.”

  “Nor me to hold onto it. My left arm isn’t much use. I can hold a cup or a spoon with it, but that’s about all.”

  “So we have to go through them.”

  “Center of the line,” he said. “Off tackle.”

  “But there are three of them, and they’re all healthy, and they’re armed. And there are two of us, and we are half unhealthy and half a girl, and we aren’t armed.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Maybe we should wait and see what—”

  He held up a can, saying, “What’s this stuff?”

  “What? Oh, hair spray. You know, to hold a set.”

  “This is one of these pressure cans, right? And the stuff sprays out the top here.” He gave an experimental push to the button on top, and a brief fog hissed out. “Doesn’t go far,” he commented. “Dissipates in a hurry. You ever get this stuff in your eyes?”

  “Lord, no. It stings like fury.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well, I got a little in my eye once. It stings like soap, only worse. They tell you on the can, be sure and keep it out of your eyes.”

  “Fine.” He went over and set the can on the dresser. “Weapon number one,” he said, and went back to the suitcases.

  She said, “Hair spray? Against guns?”

  “You packed this thing, I didn’t.”

  “We’d better wait, really and truly. Maybe we’ll get a chance to sneak away again, and—”

  He turned and said, “In the first place, no. In the second place, they’ll be watching you closer this time and you won’t be getting any more chances to sneak away. In the third place, I can’t afford to wait. In the fourth place, we can’t just take off, we’ve got to lock them up before we do, so we’ll have a head start on them and I can stop off for my suitcase. And in the fifth place, don’t talk so loud, they might still be listening.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “And in the sixth place, stop saying sorry.” He went back to the suitcases again, and came up with a small pair of scissors in a clear plastic case. “What’s this?”

  “Nail scissors.”

  “Nail scissors. A weapon?”

  “They have blunt tips. Rounded tips.”

  “Too bad.” He tossed them on the bed. “We’ll think about them some more later. What else, now?”

  But there didn’t seem to be anything else. Reluctantly, Grofield gave up on the suitcases and looked around the room again, but the room itself was still as bare as ever. He went into the bathroom, a small white place with a vent instead of a window, and found nothing there either.

  Back in the main room, he said, “All right, we work with what we’ve got.”

  “But we don’t have anything,” she said.

  “Sshh, quiet.”

  Grofield prowled around the room, looking at this and that, thinking. He listened at the doors on both sides, hearing radio music from the room on the left and low conversation from the room on the right. So that was the disposition of forces, two and one.

  She said, “They don’t want to kill us, but they will if they have to.”

  “That’s the way I feel, too,” Grofield said. He unplugged the lamp, took the nail scissors, and cut the electric cord near the base of the lamp. He stripped about an inch of the two wires bare at the cut end, fastened these to the metal knob and lock of the door through which he’d heard the radio playing, and plugged the other end in again.

  She said, “Won’t that kill somebody?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe it’ll just knock him out. He won’t be coming in here, I’ll tell you that much.”

  “I think you scare me,” she said.

  Grofield flashed her his winning smile. “It’s only nature,” he told her. “The lioness defending her cub, the patriot defending his nation, me getting back to my suitcase. You don’t know the months of worry-free art that suitcase is going to provide me.”

  “Art? Are you a painter?”

  “There’s art and art,” Grofield said. He was disappointed in her. But then he smiled again and patted her cheek. “Don’t you worry your pretty head, Missy. We’ll see the plantation again.”

  “But it will never be the same,” she said. “Never.”

  Grofield liked her again now. He laughed and said, “Onward. Step two.”

  Among the toilet articles in her luggage was a fresh cake of sweet-smelling soap. He took this, and a white sock, and went into the bathroom, where he filled the sink with steaming water, too hot to touch. He put the soap in the sock, then draped the sock over the edge of the sink so the soap was submerged.

  She watched him uncomprehending, and finally said, “What’s all that about?”

  “Product of a misspent youth,” he told her. “We’ll let it sit five minutes or so, and then we’ll see.”

  “Some day,” she said, “you’re going to have to tell me all about yourself.”

  He laughed. “Right after you tell me all about you,” he said. He went back to the living room and looked out the window; it was raining. “Must be four o’clock.”

  Behind him, she looked at her watch and said, “Five after. How did you know?”

  He pointed a thumb at the window. “Rain. It always rains at four o’clock here in the summer.”

  “Is that right? I just got here this morning, I—that can’t be right. Every day?”

  “Almo
st. It’ll be over in five or ten minutes, and the sun’ll come back out.” He looked around the room. With the clouds and the rain, the room was somewhat dim, even though the window was bare. “We better make our move before then,” he said.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “An oldie. I’m going to have a sudden relapse, groaning and carrying on, on the bed. You hammer on the door—that one, not the one I wired—and call for help. They—”

  “They won’t believe it,” she said. “Even I wouldn’t believe it. They did that in every western movie ever made.”

  “I know. But I am sick and they know it, so it’s more likely to be legit in their eyes. Besides, I’ll holler my head off, and they’ll be in a hurry to stop me.”

  “All right,” she said. “It’s worth a try. So they come in. Now what?”

  “One or two of them come in,” he said. “In any case, we can figure only one of them will come over to me. The other will stay in the doorway, probably, or just a step or two inside the room. Now, the one who comes over to the bed is mine.” He picked up the can of hair spray and said, “I’ll use this on him, as soon as he gets close enough.”

  “What if he doesn’t get close enough?”

  “He will. The way I’ll be hollering, he’ll get close enough.”

  “All right. What do I do?”

  “You take care of number two.”

  “Good of me,” she said.

  “Clever of you, in fact. Come here, let’s see if it’s ready.”

  They went back to the bathroom and Grofield took the sock out of the water. “It’ll do,” he said, studying it critically. “Give me a towel, we’ll dry this.”

  She handed him a towel, and said, “I still don’t get it. Am I stupid?”

  “No. Merely overprotected.” He folded the sock in the towel, patted it dry, put the towel down, and walked back into the bedroom. “What we have here,” he told her, “is a homemade blackjack.”

  “We do?”

  “Right. The hot water melted the outer edge of the soap a little, and now as it hardens again, the sock sticks to it and you’ve got a nice, hard handy cosh here.” He held the sock by the loose upper end and showed it to her. “The other way,” he said, “is to fill the sock with sand, but we don’t have any sand.”