The Damsel

by Richard Stark

  “All right. But I’m not hopeful.”

  “I am,” he said. “Aside from everything else, if this all works out, it’ll take care of a little problem of my own.”

  “What problem?”

  “I’m in this country illegally. I’ve got no papers, nothing. That’ll make it a little tough for me to get back out of the country without drawing attention to myself. If you manage to get to General Pozos, and if you manage to convince him you’re telling the truth, then the General is liable to be grateful to you and consider he owes you a favor. And the favor can be to rig some diplomatic courier route for me to sneak back into the States. Sensible?”

  She smiled. “Good,” she said. “Self-interest always helps people perform at their best.”

  “Is that right? You’re being a smart-ass again, you know that?”

  She squinted at him. “Are you really married?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shouldn’t you telephone your wife, or send her a telegram, or something?”

  “No. I told her I’d be gone for a while, and she knows the kind of work I’m in, so she doesn’t expect to hear from me till she sees me.”

  “I don’t know the kind of work you’re in.”

  “You’re not married to me.”

  She sat back, studying him, and said, “Some day I’d like to fill you full of truth serum and sit you down in front of a tape recorder and have you reel off your full life story. I bet it’s got some pretty odd moments in it.”

  “Only since I met up with you. You done with that coffee?”

  She looked into the cup at all the soggy butts. “Ugh! Are you kidding?”

  “Then let’s go.” He folded up the map.

  She said, “Shall we synchronize our watches?”

  “After we put on blackface.”

  “Yes, sir, Mister Interlocutor.”

  Grofield laughed and said, “You’re a lot of fun, Elly, my dear. Too bad you’re about to get killed.”

  10

  GROFIELD WALKED down a street lined on both sides with tourist shops selling goods made of silver—Taxco was the silver center of Mexico, besides being its other city-size national monument—and at the corner he found a taxi, a dilapidated old Chevrolet with a heavy bear of a man at the wheel. Grofield stuck his head in the side window and said, “I want to go for a ride. Out of town.”

  The driver turned his head and looked at him, like a man with nothing in this world but time and patience. “Where to?”

  “A round trip. Down through Iguala and down the road toward Acapulco. A few miles. And then back here again.”

  The driver turned it over, turned it over, and said, “Ten pesos.”

  Eighty cents. Grofield said, “Sold.” He opened the back door and climbed aboard.

  Slowly, with a constant shifting of gears, the driver pushed his Chevrolet southward out of town.

  Grofield sat back, adjusting his sunglasses on his nose. Back in town, Elly was waiting in a tourist restaurant, her blond hair covered by a white bandanna. The Datsun was parked on a side street, where it was less likely to be noticed. Not that there was much to worry about there, anyway. Since Mexico had no make of car of its own, all of its automobiles were imported, with a minority of them being the expensive, big cars from the United States. The smaller, cheaper Datsun was a very popular car around here and less noticeable than a Plymouth or Ford. Also, because of the bleaching quality of the tropic sun, light colors were the rule; a cream-colored Datsun was anonymity itself.

  “Drive slow,” Grofield said, when they cleared town. “I’m looking for friends of mine.”

  “Sure. You know, I used to drive a hack in the States. In New York City.”

  Grofield didn’t answer that at all; he couldn’t afford the distraction of a nice chat.

  The set of the driver’s shoulders, the heaviness of his silence, showed he was offended.

  The road skirted Iguala to the east, and a mile or so further hooked up with the main road between Mexico City and Acapulco. From here north it was a toll road, but southward to Acapulco it was free. Since Taxco the road had been all downhill, but now it leveled. They were still high on a plateau, and ahead of them, southward, Grofield could see the bulky mountains between here and the sea.

  “Slowly, now,” said Grofield. “My friends should be along here somewhere.”

  There were virtually no roads in Mexico more than two lanes wide, including the main highways, and this one was no exception. It was straight and flat at the moment, but narrow. Hilly, cultivated land flanked the road on both sides, and there were a last few buildings, bars, and restaurants. The government gas station, Pemex, had been back at the crossroads.

  Grofield nearly missed it when he came to it. The dark green Pontiac, back in condition again, apparently, and parked in the shade beside a broken-down, roofless mud shack off the right side of the road. Grofield saw it out of the corner of his eye, sat back in the cab seat, and waited while they went on by. Then he watched out the rear window until he was sure they hadn’t noticed him—they weren’t looking for him, they were looking for her, or for both of them together—and then he leaned forward and said to the driver, “Okay, that’s fine. We can go back now.”

  “I thought you were looking for friends.”

  “They aren’t here yet.”

  The driver shrugged and turned the car around. Going past the second time, Grofield could see Honner and three other guys sitting under a stunted tree near the car. They could take it easy and wait. They knew they had a faster car than Grofield and Elly, and faster than anything else they might have rented instead of the Datsun. All Honner and his boys had to do was sit there in the shade and watch the traffic, which was sparse, anyway, and when their quarry went by they could slowly get to their feet, brush their trousers off, stroll to their Pontiac, catch up with the Datsun and run it off the road—and the game would be over.

  Except, Grofield assured himself, that it wasn’t going to be quite that easy.

  On the way back to Taxco, winding and uphill, Grofield tried belatedly to get the driver into conversation about the old days hacking in New York, but it was too late. The driver’s feelings were hurt, and he wouldn’t talk. They were both relieved to get back to town and separate from one another.

  Grofield found Elly sitting over a cup of cold coffee, chainsmoking again. He sat down and said, “I spotted them. They don’t expect us this early, but they’re there just in case.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “Go back to that motel we saw, take a room, and wait.”

  “Till when?”

  “I figure about three o’clock in the morning would be about right.”

  She shivered. “What a thought.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t occur to Honner.”

  11

  “I’LL BE BACK as quick as I can,” Grofield said.

  “Good.”

  He shut the car door, making the interior light go off, and now they were in darkness. He stood up, putting one hand on the car to keep himself oriented, and waited for his eyes to accustom themselves to the night, but they didn’t seem to want to do it. The sliver of moon was even thinner tonight, and there was no artificial light anywhere in the world.

  The time was three-thirty in the morning, and the Datsun was on the dirt beside the road just a little way north of the shack where Grofield had seen the Pontiac. They hadn’t seen another car since they left Taxco. They might as well have been standing on a rock in the asteroid belt.

  After a while Grofield could begin vaguely to make out the difference between the flat, straight roadway and the less-black, less-even countryside. He moved away from the car, out onto the blacktop, and walked slowly along, keeping to the silence of the blacktop and off the soft crunching of the roadside dirt.

  He was weighted down with equipment. The Beretta was in one hip pocket, and a small bottle of gasoline was in the other. A foldaway knife was in his left-side trouser pocket, a torn-of
f strip of T-shirt and some matches were in the right side, and he carried another sock-and-soap blackjack in his left hand. He was, he hoped, ready for whatever came up.

  Ahead of him there was a faint flicker of light. He moved toward it, cautiously, hoping some late-night driver wouldn’t pick this moment to go tearing by, all noise and wind and bright headlights. But the blackness remained silent and empty, and Grofield moved slowly through it toward the flickering light.

  It came from the roofless shack. Grofield approached, cautious and silent, as in his head he heard background music, movie music; and he was an Apache creeping up on the wagon train, slow and silent with the deadly stealth of the red man, that lore of the forest that . . .

  They had a table in there, with a candle on it. They had folding chairs, and three of them were sitting around playing cards, Honner and two others. The fourth guy was nowhere to be seen.

  Grofield worked his way around the shack to the Pontiac, and was almost to it when he heard the voices. He stopped, startled, and listened.

  There were two guys in the Pontiac, talking together idly, the way people do when they’re bored and waiting and they’ve run out of all the good anecdotes. That made five, one more than this afternoon.

  No, six. The sixth one came walking along, a flashlight beam ahead of him, emerging suddenly out of the darkness. Grofield crouched behind the Pontiac, waiting and listening.

  The newcomer, with the flashlight, said, “Okay, time’s up. You get out there for a while.”

  “You ask me, they ain’t coming this way.”

  “That’s okay. It’s your turn to get out by the road.”

  “Marty, come along with me, keep me company.”

  A third voice—the other one who’d been in the car to begin with—said, “The hell with that. It’s cold out there.”

  They mumbled and groused among themselves a minute or two more, and then the changeover of the guard was made, and the new man on duty went shambling away with the flashlight, leaving this area in darkness again, while the two now in the car lit cigarettes and picked up the threads of an old conversation.

  There were two cars. In the dim side glow of the flashlight, Grofield had seen the other one, parked just to the right. A Mercedes-Benz 230SL, the fast sports car.

  It must have been further down the road this afternoon, when he’d come around looking. If he’d taken out the Pontiac then, and gone blithely on through, this Mercedes would have gobbled him up two or three miles down the road. But now they’d all come together to live through the grim Mexican night.

  Grofield took out the knife, opened the blade, and went crawling over to the Mercedes. While the two in the Pontiac talked, covering the small scrapes and hissings he made, he slashed all four tires. It would be morning before they’d get this car running again.

  As for the other one, the Pontiac, he couldn’t hit the tires with those two guys in it, they’d feel the car shift. So he’d have to be more drastic. He crawled away behind a tree to get ready.

  The bottle of gasoline, the strip of cotton cloth, the matches, when put together, became the revolutionist’s delight, a homemade hand grenade, the weapon that used to be called the Molotov cocktail. Grofield lit it, stepped out from behind the tree, and tossed it.

  The whole world lit up, red and yellow. There were two explosions, one after the other, as first the Molotov cocktail and then the Pontiac’s gas tank went off. Bits of hysterical flame fell everywhere, and before the sound was out of the air Grofield was off and running.

  He had maybe half a minute before they’d get over their surprise back there and start after him. In that time he could get well away from the fire glow, and then they’d play hell getting wind of him.

  Grofield almost overshot the car, running along blind on the blacktop. But Elly had the window open and heard his footsteps, and whispered hoarsely, “Over here! Over here!”

  He moved with arms stretched out in front of him, stumbled to the car, pulled the door open. The interior light went on, suddenly reassembling a chunk of space and reality, and he saw her face pale and frantic. “What did you do?”

  “Gave us light. Let me behind the wheel.”

  She slid over and he got in. He started the engine, shut the door, but didn’t turn on the lights. Ahead of him there was the flickering yellow-red glow. He drove toward it, more or less on the road.

  The Pontiac was burning like a Yule log. In the dusty light, silhouettes of men ran around like cartoon characters, waving their arms. They saw the Datsun as it passed them and came running after it. The Mercedes was limping toward the road like a dachshund with broken legs.

  “Down!” shouted Grofield. “Down!”

  They drove by with their heads down, with Grofield’s foot flat on the accelerator. They didn’t hear the sound of the shots, but starred holes appeared in the windows, something thumped the door.

  Then they were past, and Grofield switched on the headlights in time to see that the road meant to curve to the left. And start uphill.

  “My God!” she said, staring back at the little dot of red. Then it was out of sight.

  “Acapulco,” Grofield said.

  PART THREE

  1

  ACAPULCO. Friday morning, seven forty-five.

  Governor Luke Harrison stepped from his cottage into the sunlight, gazed for a moment out at the blue blue sea, then strolled over and sat down at the table prepared for him beside his swimming pool. The water in the pool was also blue, but tinged with green. Two stewards began to serve breakfast.

  The Governor was a tall man, heavyset, who through exercise and determination had kept himself in good physical condition through the years. He was the delight of his tailor, who did not for this one client have to strain his ingenuity to produce clothing that told white lies. His face was dominated by a strong, square jawline and by pale blue eyes of the utmost candor. His nose was perhaps a trifle too blunt, his mouth too thin-lipped, but all in all he successfully looked like what he was: a politician tending toward statesman, a former Governor, still an influential man in the upper circles of his party.

  Influential, but not indispensable, not anymore.

  Eating his breakfast, watching the sea, the Governor carefully kept his mind clear of all that, the past disappointments, the present dangers, the future uncertainties. Worry on first arising, worry during meals, worry at times of helplessness, all were bad for both the physical and mental well-being.

  This place, the Hotel San Marcos, was an excellent distraction, lush and lovely to the eye, as breakfast was lush and lovely to the taste. It called itself a hotel, but was something other than a hotel, something more. The main building, downslope, was two stories high, a rambling affair containing dining rooms, game rooms, offices, and so on. All the guests were in the smaller buildings scattered up the face of the steep hill behind that main structure, connected by gaily colored slate paths. There were square, two-story affairs containing four apartments, long, low bungalows of two apartments, and these single-occupancy cottages like the one where the Governor was staying and the one next door where Doctor Fitzgerald was still asleep.

  All of these buildings had been carefully suited to the natural contours of the rocky hill, and built of stucco and painted pink. In front of each there was a small, pink-tiled swimming pool.

  Down beside the main building were converted jeeps called sand buggies, with pink bodies and pink-and-blue striped tops. Each guest at the Hotel San Marcos had the free use of one of these sand buggies, which were seen bucketing around Acapulco all the time.

  The town of Acapulco itself was built on a flat, curving stretch of beach in a fold of mountains. Mountains ringed it on three sides, a dramatic backdrop of dark green, with the pale blue tropical sky above and the darker blue of the Pacific stretching away flat to infinity on the remaining side, the south. This hill, at the eastern edge of town, afforded one of the best views to be had, and the Governor, as he ate, gazed out to sea with perfect pleasure
.

  The two stewards, one a Mexican born in Chilpancingo and the other an expatriate Guerreran who eight years ago had escaped from General Pozos’ secret police, served the meal in deft silence. The Governor was unaware of their presence.

  With the coffee and the cigar—the first of the day—that capped breakfast, he allowed the crowding worries to begin to attract his attention. There was Edgar, for one thing, and Edgar’s idiot daughter, for another, and Juan, for a third, and young Bob, for a fourth, and his own plans for the future, for a fifth. Everything was so uncertain, so tentative, so complicated, so needlessly messy and sloppy.

  Why didn’t the old bastard just die, of his own accord, and be done with it? That would be simplest, taking everybody off the hook. No more worries about keeping Edgar keyed up to fighting pitch, no more fears that Ellen Marie would destroy everything, no more likelihood that Juan would turn his back on the Governor nor that Bob would—being so close, so close—guess the truth.

  But it wasn’t going to be simple and easy, because nothing in life ever is. Chomping on his cigar, glowering at the sea but no longer really seeing it, he mulled that thought, that nothing in life is easy and simple, no action is clearly and obviously good in all its ramifications nor bad in all its ramifications, that . . .

  It was the girl, that was the main thing. Find her, hold her, contain her until this thing was done and over and forgotten, and all the other worries would fade into the background, would deflate to their proper size and importance. But the girl had to be found.

  He’d been awakened at five this morning by a frantic phone call from Honner. The girl and that roustabout she’d picked up somewhere had broken through at Iguala, were on their way south now by road. It was two hundred and fifty miles, but all of it curving, twisting, narrow road through some of the wildest mountain country in the world; it was doubtful that they’d be able to make it in under seven hours, which would get them here no earlier than ten o’clock.