Soft Touch

by John D. MacDonald

  I had it the best. I was a vigorous twenty-eight with a gorgeous lusty and loving wife of twenty-two. The corporation was stagnant, but I was going to make the old flooph see the light and start to wheel and deal in some modern house construction.

  And that was only eight years ago. And now I was thirty-six, with the house, some cash value in insurance, and eleven hundred bucks in the joint checking account—if Lorraine hadn’t been shopping today. During the eight years the dividends on the stock had been too liberal. E. J. enjoyed passing out checks at Christmas. And both Lorrie and her mother had one approach to money—if it was there, spend it.

  “I’m going to get out,” I told her.

  She turned her back, huffed on her nails and then began to brush her hair. “You’re boring me, Jerry. Honestly you are. You won’t get out. Go take your shower or something.”

  As I was wondering how it would feel to spin her around and bust her solidly in the mouth, I heard the front door chimes.

  “Who the hell would that be?” I asked.

  “And how the hell would I know? Go answer it.”

  I went down and opened the front door. A man as tall as I am stood there, and the familiar grin was wide and strong.

  “Vince!” I said. “You bastard! My God, come in.”

  He came in, and he put his suitcase down in the hall, and we pumped hands and thumped shoulders and he said, still grinning, “Greetings, lieutenant.”

  The last time I had seen Vince was in Calcutta in August of 1945, thirteen long years ago. As my air transportation home had lifted off the runway I had looked down and seen him for the last time. He was standing beside the borrowed jeep between the two White Russian girls with whom we had spent the past two weeks, and he was drinking from a bottle and waving at the same time.

  I could see at once that he had weathered the years a little better than I had. He was deeply tanned and his grip was hard and firm. He is a big man, and something about his cat-lazy way of moving, his air of potential recklessness, has always reminded me of that Mitchum in the movies. Vince has a square jaw, high hard round cheekbones, and an odd slanting flatness about his eyes. There was a subtly foreign flavor about the cut of his suit, the trim of his hair, the large red stone in the gold ring on the little finger of his right hand.

  “I shall build drinks,” I said, “and you will become a house guest.”

  “What else?” he said, and followed me out into the kitchen to lounge against a counter top and watch me.

  Vince Biskay and I had achieved a special closeness during the war. We met when we were both assigned to Operations in O.S.S. Detachment 404 operating out of Ceylon under Lord Louis’s headquarters. Operations behind Jap lines had required a special kind of go-to-hell talent, and I suspect we were prime examples of what was needed. We worked well together. So we were sent together on one extended and three short operations, accompanied only by native agents. That was our war. A pretty nervous war, at times. You can lie on your face in the jungly brush and hear the Jap patrol clink and jangle by on the trail eight feet away from you, and when they are out of earshot, you can throw up because you’ve been that scared. Captain Biskay was in charge every time. We found out what they sent us to find out and radioed the data back to the Trinco tower. We destroyed what we could, and we armed the ones who wanted to fight. And I learned a lot they never taught me at Benning.

  And now, thirteen years later, he was in my kitchen and we clinked two strong Scotch and waters together, and I asked him how long he’d managed to stay in Calcutta after I left.

  “A couple of weeks more, I think. Then I had to get out while I had my health.”

  “You had my address. Not one damn post card in thirteen years.”

  “I didn’t say I’d write.”

  “What are you doing in Vernon?”

  He held his glass up to the light. “Came to visit, old pal. Came to see you.”

  “You look prosperous enough. What have you been doing?”

  “Many many things, Jerry.”

  “Married?”

  “I tried it. I didn’t like it.”

  He was being almost rudely evasive, yet I got the impression that he was studying me with great care. I could sense that he was under some kind of strain. He was just a little too relaxed, and I remembered that that was the way he had always been when we had something laid on and we were getting close to the time for jump off.

  Lorraine came into the kitchen bearing her empty glass, wearing her maroon tailored doeskin slacks and a white orlon blouse.

  “I heard you talking to …” Then she saw Vince and said, “Oh! How do you do?”

  “Honey, this is the fabulous Vince Biskay, the legendary guy I’ve told you about. My wife Lorraine, Vince.”

  I saw her react to him. I had seen a lot of women react to Vince. I felt a little twist of jealousy as I saw the heightened color, a shine in the eyes, a flirtatiousness in the smile, a barely perceptible arching of the back.

  They went through the so-nice-to-meet-you routine. I built Lorraine a new drink. I was very jolly, doing the happy marriage bit. Even as I was doing it, I knew it was off key. A good marriage has a distinctive and unmistakable flavor. It can’t be faked. There is a warmth about it. When it is a marriage of strangers, no affectionate gestures, no amount of folksy enthusiasm can delude the discerning observer. And I was certain that Vince, with that almost feminine intuition of his, sensed the drabness and sourness of our relationship.

  When I alerted Lorraine to the fact that Vince had his suitcase with him and would stay with us, she responded with unexpected enthusiasm. She usually avoids all house guests. She became the jolly hostess, and took Vince up to show him the better of the two guest rooms where he would stay.

  I went back out into the kitchen and told Irene there would be three for dinner. She is a drab and faded woman, so deeply and emotionally concerned with her relationship to her church that she seems remote to everything else in the world. She is a good cook and housekeeper.

  I went into the living room and I heard Vince and Lorrie coming down the stairs. I heard Lorrie laugh. It was her social laugh, the one she uses when she’s being particularly charming. But there was an added texture to it, a throaty sexuality.

  Lorraine was very vivacious during dinner, dominating the conversation. But immediately after dinner she began to sag in the familiar way. Her eyes went dull and her diction went to hell and she could not follow the conversation. At about ten o’clock she gave us a glassy good night and went wobbling off to bed, precariously carrying her bedside jolt of raw brandy.

  “And now,” I said to Vince, “you can tell me what’s on your mind.”

  2

  We settled into the breakfast booth off the kitchen with fresh drinks. Irene had cleaned up and gone home. The back door was open and the first bugs of the season were banging their heads against the screen.

  He smiled at me in a wry, wise way. “Old Jamison. Now you carry a Chamber of Commerce card.”

  “Junior chamber.”

  “And you’re all settled down. Maybe you’re too far settled down for … this little thing I have in mind.”

  “So try and see.”

  “First, I’m in the country illegally. I’m not a citizen any more. I’ve got a very good passport. Forged. My boss thinks I’m off on a hunting trip in Brazil. He’d get nervous if he knew I was in the States. He might even figure out what I’ve got on my mind. Something I’ve been thinking about for months. Two good men can swing it. Me, and somebody I can trust. Really trust. So I keep thinking of you, Jerry.”

  “Aren’t you sort of backing into this?”

  He grinned and became more direct. He told me he had adopted nationality. For reasons which will become obvious, I will call that country Valencia. It is a country in South America under a strong dictatorial thumb.

  “The things I tried after the war didn’t work out, Jerry. I was too restless. I got a license to fly. And then I decided to blow what was l
eft of my father’s estate in buying a plane and taking a tour of Central and South America. I had a ball for about a year. I began to run thin in the money department in Valencia. I met a man at a party. I told him the shape I was in. He took my hotel address and said he had an idea. The next day a driver came and picked me up in a fat Mercedes and took me out to be interviewed by a Señor Melendez way the hell and gone out in the country at his ranch. He wanted a man for odd jobs, a pilot with both English and Spanish, somebody who wouldn’t get alarmed if things might get a little rough now and then.

  “I went to work for him eight years ago. It’s been … very interesting, Jerry. As tests he set up certain … temptations in my path. But I was just shrewd enough to play it his way. So, insofar as Melendez trusts anybody he trusts Vincente Biskay. And it’s been profitable.

  “Outside of our semi-benevolent dictator, el General Peral, Melendez is the most powerful man in the country. He’s an industrialist. Never has operated in the political field. A cold and ruthless guy. Now we come to the meat. For the past three years Peral and Melendez have been moving toward a showdown. Through monkeying with the tax structure, Peral has been putting the squeeze on Melendez. Raoul Melendez has been getting too strong and powerful, and any dictator gets nervous when one of his subjects shows signs of getting too damn big. Peral has been trying to clip his wings. Raoul Melendez won’t stand for it. So, to keep from being sunk without a trace, he’s forced to go into the field of political action. And in that area, it means bullets. Follow me?”

  “Who is going to win, Vince?”

  “Pertinent question. I think Peral is the likely one. He has the hard core of the professional army in his pocket. Melendez has bought himself some young and ambitious army officers. They’ve been selected with great care, but I can’t be certain Peral hasn’t got a plant among them. Melendez has been planning the coup with great care. It is supposed to look like a spontaneous uprising of the people and a chunk of the army to depose Peral. If it’s successful the country will be governed by an army junta for a time, and then a man will go in as boss man and he will be one of Melendez’s tame ones. But I don’t think the dream will work. And if it shouldn’t work and I don’t get out in time, I might get some mortal knots on my head. So, I’m making other plans. It’s a horse race and I’m betting Peral on the nose.”

  “How?”

  He took a long pull at his drink and set the glass down empty. “I’ve got a special source of information very close to Raoul Melendez. Very damn close. In bed with him, in fact. She has a lively intelligence and a lot of curiosity, and a deft way of getting data out of Melendez. Melendez is stockpiling modern weapons for the great day. In a recent fracas in the Middle East, one country picked up a lot of stuff they didn’t need. They’ve put it on the open market. The top agent for it is a smart Greek named Kyodos who lives in the States. He like dollars. He has good shipping line contacts. So Raoul Melendez has been converting his holdings in other South American countries into U. S. dollars and turning them over to Kyodos. In return some very effective infantry weapons, some light artillery and some light armored vehicles are being landed right under Peral’s nose, marked as machinery and equipment for one of Melendez’s new industrial construction projects. It gets stockpiled at a remote hacienda, and one of my recent projects has been to train the willing peons in the use thereof. The flow is still going on. It’s a slow process because it takes time to accumulate enough dollars to make a respectable shipment of funds to Kyodos. It just so happens, ole buddy, that I know exactly how the next wad of currency is being shipped and exactly when. Does any light dawn?”

  “So far I’m not interested.”

  “Didn’t expect you to be. You’re a moral type. My deal with Carmela, Melendez’s tootsie, involves getting her out from under. Plus a share of the take. But not a big share. The big share is for me. And you.”

  “I don’t feel any reaction yet.”

  “It would not be theft, Jerry. Keep that in mind. It would be just a little job of hijacking the war funds of a greedy joker who is trying to overturn the stable and U. S.-recognized government in what promises to be a very bloody-type revolution. Hundreds of innocents killed. From the moral viewpoint we’d be doing the world a favor.”

  “Not ‘we,’ Vince. This sounds crazy to me. Listening to it in my own kitchen makes it sound crazier.”

  “At great personal risk, but with certain … pleasant compensations, I have been teaching the lovely Carmela to fly a plane. She only has to make one trip. And by the time it’s over, Melendez won’t be coming after her, because by that time he’ll be in one of Peral’s nice deep political prisons, or maybe a few feet deeper than that. Here’s how easy it will be, Jerry. I get out at precisely the right time to meet you at Tampa. With a plan I’ve devised, which takes two to handle it, we deftly remove the funds from the courier. At about the same time that is happening, Carmela is taking off, having made certain the complete plans of the whole operation are falling into Peral’s hands. The Melendez empire goes pfft, we arrange our split and part forever. Nobody is hurt. No agitated forces of law and order. Nobody in any shape to claim anything stolen. I need one other man to swing it, a man I can trust.”

  I tried to think of the right way to say it. He got up to fix himself a drink. I said, “Maybe we’ve grown apart in thirteen years, Vince. I’m not the same kind of guy I was then. I can’t even imagine myself capable of doing some of the things I did then, taking some of the risks. You can call me stuffy, but you’re operating out of my league. I wouldn’t want to take a chance of getting all jammed up like that even if there was … oh, a hundred thousand bucks in it for me. I’m just a businessman in a medium-sized city. I used to do risky things, but that was a war. You’re still living that way, Vince, but I’m not.”

  As he sat down opposite me he looked thoughtful. “Boy, are you leading the big warm happy life? There’s never been any kids in this house.”

  “That’s beside the point.”

  “No it isn’t. If the setup looked good, then maybe this would have been just a friendly visit. Your lady is a lush, friend.”

  “That’s beside the point too.”

  “I’ll ask a different kind of question. What do you think war matériel costs in this brave new world anyway?”

  “Quite a lot probably.”

  “Melendez is worth somewhere between a third and a half billion dollars, Jerry. So he’s investing maybe forty million in his venture into politics. And, my naïve friend, in the next shipment of funds to Kyodos there will be between three and a quarter and three and three quarters millions of dollars. Untraceable. Nobody will be anxious to claim it. The Greek won’t come after it. Melendez will be sunk. Peral will have no interest. The joker we take it away from will certainly make no squawk to the authorities. It’s a once in a dozen lifetimes chance, laddy. You’re thirty-six now. The split goes this way. I get two. You get one. Carmela gets the overage up to a half million. Anything over that you and I split down the middle. Your minimum will be one, your probable maximum one million one hundred and twenty-five thousand. But it could run to one million three. Then you have your choice. You can try to put it to work here without exciting the interest of the little men with the briefcases. Or you can become an expatriate and live in horrible luxurious indolence for the rest of your turn around the track. We planned a lot of cute things together, Jerry, and we pulled them all off and, believe me, this little hassle is simple as can be compared with some of those others. So don’t say no in too big a hurry. Think it over. Mind if I carry this one up to my bed?”

  After he had gone up, I made myself some coffee. I sat in the booth for a long time. I thought of certain small changes in Vince. There had been a lightness in him that was now deadened. I sensed a coldness. But, hell, I had changed too. I wasn’t exactly bursting with joy. For the past two years young Eddie had been working for E. J. Malton, and at more pay than he deserved. His willingness to try to give me orders indicated that
in his own mind he was the heir apparent. I suspected that if E. J. kicked off, young Eddie would inherit papa’s stock which, along with mama’s, would give him effective control. And working with the kid would be impossible, if there was any company left.

  One million dollars. Freedom from E. J. Maybe freedom from Lorraine too. Because I had had just about enough.

  And I found myself wondering if I might make room for Liz Addams. E. J. had hired her three years ago. The widow of a naval aviator, she had bought secretarial training with his insurance money. A tall, gray-eyed gal with pale, lustrous, creamy hair and a very direct manner. No coy feminine antics, and a good sense of humor. I had liked her from the beginning. About a year ago, for no reason at all, Lorraine started needling me about Liz. And only then did I begin to look at Liz from a different point of view—and see the curve of her waist, and the tilt of a hip, the long trim legs, and the soft and generous look of her lips.

  And I started to daydream about her a little bit.

  And took her to coffee and worked the conversation around to Lorraine’s accusations. Liz was amused and a little bit angry. “Buster,” she said. “May I call you Buster? If the next step in this little gambit is to tell me we’ve got the name, so let’s have the game, the answer is no. No office romances for Lizzie.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of just an ordinary romance,” I told her. “I was thinking of fleeing together to Samarkand or Pago Pago.”

  “Or Scranton. Let’s get back to work.”

  So now I daydreamed a little more. I added Liz to the million bucks and came up with an island, house boys, a schooner at anchor, and Liz swimming in the sunlight in the coral lagoon.…