There was a little pause. “May I sit up?”
“You may even stand up, and pull your socks up and your skirt down, if you like,” I said. “Hell, you may ran out that door and yell for help, if you like. But I don’t think you will.”
“Why in the world would you think that?”
“Because you’re a newspaper woman,” I said. “A reporter. A journalist, and I understand a pretty good one. And if I have some information you need—and I think I do—you’re not going to run away from me screaming just because I’m a nasty man you’ve given some reason not to like you.”
I turned to look at her at last. She was on her feet, and she’d rearranged her clothes tidily but her hair was still mussed from our recent struggle. She shoved it back from her face and said, “For better or worse, my piece on you is finished and in the production line. What information could you possibly have that could interest me now?”
“You can learn that best by looking at it”
She stood there for a moment longer, and rubbed the pressure point on her neck that was probably a bit sore, and scratched her thigh absently through her skirt. Realizing what she was doing, she looked down briefly, puzzled. She lifted her skirt unabashed to investigate, finding the tiny spot of blood on the smooth nylon underneath.
“What did you do, give me an injection?” she asked. “Oh, of course. I remember the stuff you use. Since I woke up, that would be your Injection A, wouldn’t it?”
“Right,” I said. “And remember, there are two others.” She said evenly, “Injection B, which kills instantly but leaves traces. Injection C, which takes a little longer but is undetectable in the body after death. Very unpleasant. Why should I remember them?”
“Give it some thought,” I said. “I could have used either of them, hung a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door, and been out of the country before you and your friend were discovered in here—if I’d come to kill you. But I think you’ll admit that I’ve displayed no homicidal symptoms whatever. All I’ve done is deal in what I consider a commendably restrained fashion with a dangerous situation that you precipitated by sicking an armed man on me.”
“I didn’t know Warren was going to. . . . All right, I suppose I was responsible. I brought him along and I knew he’d arranged to get himself a gun. So your motives are pure and shining, Mr. Helm. So what?”
I said, “Hell, I had you at my mercy, wench, and I didn’t do a damned thing to you except put you to sleep for a short cooling-off period that I hoped would enable us to talk sensibly. And if you were to comb your hair with a comb instead of your fingers, you’d look almost respectable.”
But she came forward instead to kneel beside Warren Peterson, and checked his pulse in an almost-expert manner. I noticed that her watch was a businesslike stainless steel number with a sweep second hand, probably designed for nurses. Its efficient appearance seemed in character. “You’re sure he’ll be all right?” she asked, looking up.
“I don’t guarantee a thing,” I said. “Beating people on the head is always risky. There could be damage to the brain, but considering the brain, it wouldn’t be much of a loss, would it?”
She rose indignantly. “You’re too damned callous to live!”
“No, just too damned callous to die,” I said. “As I would have died if the stupid jerk had been brandishing a cocked automatic with the safety off instead of an uncocked revolver; and he probably doesn’t even know the difference! And why should you go into hysterics about my reprehensible attitudes? You’ve already done a large amount of research on me, so they can’t come as a terrible surprise. Go comb your hair and take a leak so we can talk like civilized people.”
She started toward the bathroom, hesitated, and looked back, wryly curious. “How did you know?”
I grinned. ‘That you need to go? After what you’ve just been through, it would be abnormal if you didn’t.” I kept on talking as she disappeared into the bathroom, raising my voice to carry through the door she closed between us. “One thing. About your gofer. I’m not going through that again. Assuming that he does wake up healthy, as I think he will, the next time he makes a hostile move I’ll take him out for good. He’s had all the breaks from me he’s going to get. Keep him in line or lose him. Understand?”
She didn’t answer. I had time to wonder if she was going to spoil her perfect record by locking herself in like a panicky TV-ingenue; then the john flushed in there, the door opened, and she emerged with her short hair showing the marks of the dampened comb she’d used to put it into order. She stopped in front of me and said, as if there had been no pause, “You’re rather incredible, aren’t you? You really mean it.”
“First I was merely surprising and now I’m incredible,” I said. “Goody, I seem to be gaining on it. Whatever it is.”
“You’re also a fairly brave man,” she said. “To do what you did with that gun. Or really crazy.”
I said, “I had no choice. Living in a world where a moron like that can wave a gun at me like that is not a prospect I care to contemplate. Much better to die courageously trying to remedy the situation. If it should come to that, which it didn’t.”
She studied me for a moment. “If that’s the way you think, it’s a wonder you’ve lived so long.”
I shook my head. “No. The most dangerous thing in this business is to let somebody, anybody, get the impression that you’re afraid to die. If that ever happens, they’ll cut you down instantly. Whether I really am afraid or not doesn’t matter. As long as I can kid everybody that I’m crazy enough—or brave enough if you want to be so flattering—to go for broke every time, regardless of consequences, I’ll probably survive. Nobody really wants to go up against a guy like that. And maybe I’m not even kidding. They don’t know, you don’t know, and maybe I don’t know, either.”
She licked her lips. “Maybe I should try to revise that forthcoming article a little before it comes out, after all. I’m afraid I didn’t get the picture quite right.” She shrugged resignedly. “Of course, you never do, quite. What is it you want me to look at here?” But when I started to pull out a chair for her, she hesitated and looked down at the unconscious man on the floor. “Would you mind if we put him on the bed? I’d feel better.”
I shrugged. “Whatever makes you happy. Grab the feet and we’ll tuck him in pretty.”
“This is really kind of weird,” she said after we’d lugged him to the bed and laid him out neatly. “A weird interview or whatever you want to call it. What are you really trying to accomplish, Mr. Helm?”
“Hell, I’m bucking for a job, Miss Brand,” I said, and went on before she could speak, “Isn’t it obvious? I’ve carefully demonstrated that my intentions are not violent; I could easily have killed you and didn’t. I’ve demonstrated that your current protection is totally incompetent as protection. Now if you’ll come over here, I’ll show you that I can even take better pictures than he can. Also that I have sources of information for your story that he can’t begin to touch. In fact, I’m a very desirable employee in every way. Over here, please.” Back at the table, I held a chair for her and sat down beside her. “Look this over, first.”
She took the stapled-together tear sheets I handed her. “ ‘Kiruna Today,’ ” she read aloud. “By Louise Taylor. Photographs by Matthew Helm.” She glanced at me. “Of course. I came across this old article before, when I was digging into your background. You were kind of a professional photographer at one time, weren’t you?” She frowned at the pages. “Kiruna, that’s the big mine way up north in Sweden, isn’t it? Who’s Louise Taylor?”
I grinned. “You’re supposed to be examining those pix with a critical eye, not asking irrelevant questions about irrelevant dames. She was in your line of work for a while, but over in Europe. I heard she got married later. We only worked together that once.”
It was a strange, almost eerie, business. I seemed to be stumbling over the past wherever I went. Bob Devine and Martha, Harriet Robinson, and now Lou Taylor. I
found that I remembered her quite clearly; dark and rather thin and intense, with that odd hoarse voice she’d gotten as a result of a bullet fired from the same submachine gun that had killed her first husband, in the hands of a sentry who’d had special orders given him by a foreign gent I’d finally taken care of. Strangely, that had ended it between Lou and me. She hadn’t liked the way I’d done it, even though it had avenged her husband and saved her life. Well, I hoped she’d found a very gentle man to marry who suited her better.
“Not bad,” Eleanor Brand said judiciously, studying the photographs. “Not very imaginative, but competent.”
“You mean he’s fired and I’m hired.”
She turned to look at me. “You are serious, aren’t you?” “Very serious.”
“Tell me why.”
“Figure it out,” I said. I was glad I’d laid it all out once for Harriet; it made the words come more easily now. “Think about it hard and you’ll realize that we can’t afford to let you get hurt as long as that article series of yours is running. Your life is very precious to us, Elly. And we can’t trust an incompetent beach boy like Junior to preserve it properly. So, Sir Matthew at your service, my lady.”
She stared at me a moment longer, taking it in at last. Her laughter* when it came, was unrestrained and infectious.
“You mean,” she gasped at last, “you mean you people feel compelled to protect me because you’re afraid that if I’m hurt somebody may think you . . . that’s really kind of beautiful, isn’t it? Ironical and beautiful.”
I grinned. “Every five years at the crack of New Years’, somebody discovers what a terrible outfit we are. I mean, in between lambasting the CIA and the FBI and various other dreadful, brutal, and snoopy government organizations. We’re hardened to that; we’ll survive it. Even an expert hatchet job like yours.” I stopped grinning. “But if it were suggested that we actually go around murdering pretty young U.S. journalist-ladies to hide our sins from the great American public, that could make things really tough for us. And it’s exactly what would be suggested if anything happened to you right now.”
“But why should anybody want to hurt me? Except you?”
I shook my head sadly. “Elly, you’re a big disappointment to me. Somebody or something is sinking ships out there, right? And you’re investigating it, right? And people have gone down with those sinking ships, which adds murder on the high seas to all the other nautical crimes involved—and Miss Brand can see no reason why somebody might want to stop her from looking into it? If that’s what you really think, you don’t need a bodyguard, you need a keeper.”
“I see.” She licked her lips. “Not only surprising and incredible, but intelligent, too. How did you figure out what I was really working on? I thought I’d covered myself pretty well.”
“That Bermuda Triangle nonsense?” I shook my head again. “It just wasn’t your subject. You’re not a cheap sensation-monger. Or let’s say that while you’re happy enough to monger a sensation, it’s got to be a genuine sensation, like a bunch of wicked assassins lurking in the halls of government, not just a lot of phony supernatural and outer-space bullshit.” I grimaced. “So I looked for another, more likely subject. And if I can figure it out, so can somebody else.”
She said, “There have been no attempts on my life, sir. The worst that has happened is that a big goon forced his way into my hotel room and yanked my skirt up and stuck a big needle into my tender flesh; and Heaven only knows what he did to me while I was unconscious.” She grinned. “And how the hell he got my panty hose back on so neatly afterward, I. . .”
She stopped abruptly; and something odd and frightened happened in her eyes. I could see that she was cringing inwardly at what she’d just said, wondering how she could have been so stupid and tasteless. Even though her comments might have been considered slightly off-color by some, it seemed like overreaction for a girl who’d been around; but I sensed that basically she found the whole subject of sex distasteful and regretted very much having brought it up. It was too bad. She was quite a girl, but I guess everybody has hangups somewhere.
She looked away from me quickly. “All right, say I’m trying to make sense of these sinkings, what have you got that’s supposed to help me?”
I slid a fairly thick file folder toward her. “This is supposed to be pertinent, but I haven’t made the connection yet.” Actually, I hadn’t had time to give it more than a glance. “I hope you can,” I said.
She looked at the tab. “George Winfield Lorca. What in the world is he supposed to have to do with it?”
I knew a small cold feeling of apprehension. It seemed incredible that Harriet Robinson should have more information about these ship sinkings than the girl beside me, an experienced investigator who’d been studying them carefully. Or perhaps it was not so incredible. Cap’n Hattie operated her boat daily in a busy shipping area off some islands that had once been a hotbed of piracy and still teemed with drug smugglers and other latter-day buccaneer types. She was known to be a lady who made a point of keeping her mouth shut. Furthermore, I reminded myself, she was a lady with a secret, who might be vulnerable to pressure; and she’d been in a disturbed and disturbing mental state when I’d seen her, depressed and uncertain and insecure, not the Harriet Robinson I’d known.
I said, “You haven’t come across this name at all in your investigations?”
Eleanor shook her head. “I know who he is, of course. As a matter of fact, I did a piece on him just before the last election.”
I thought irritably that everybody seemed to know who George Winfield Lorca was, of course; everybody but me. But I had no time to say it. The telephone rang. Eleanor Brand picked it up, listened, looked a bit surprised, and held it out to me. I took it and identified myself.
“Priority Red,” said a woman’s voice I recognized. I’d never met the woman who went with the voice; but she’d given me instructions before, here in Nassau. “Priority Red. Fred’s cab is waiting for you at the door. There’s a plane warming up on the field. All clearances have been waived. Priority Red. Execute.”
Fun and games. All these standby people must have been waiting eagerly for years for the chance to show how well they could execute a red priority mission, which means drop everything and don’t ask questions, just go. Now they felt like real secret agents.
All I felt was fear. After enough years in the business, you don’t ask yourself where you’re going on a hurry-up emergency deal like that, or why you’re going there, because you’ll be told soon enough, and the answer is never good.
Chapter 9
Not the Keys, I thought, please not the Keys.
After the' breathless telephone summons, the actual operation had turned out to be fairly undramatic. In a movie, of course, they’d have had the latest needle-nosed jet fighter waiting for me on the strip, and they’d have suited and helmeted me on the run, practically, and strapped me in and clapped down the canopy or however they do it, and I’d have hit the wild blue yonder with afterburners screaming, or whatever the hell it is that makes all that racket. The catch is that I don’t know what buttons to push to make those things go; and being less than a couple of hundred miles from the U.S. I didn’t need a thousand-knot airplane to get me back there. What I got was some kind of an executive four-place Cessna with two nice old-fashioned propellers, a middle-aged pilot with a bushy moustache, and a cruising speed of about one-sixty, judging by my passenger’s-eye view of the dials.
Not the Keys, I thought. How about it, Up There? Miami or Fort Lauderdale or Saint Augustine, okay; but please not the Keys.
I didn’t think it out beyond that. I could have figured it out all right, why I didn’t want to go there, why I didn’t want to find myself being dragged back there hastily under a hot priority red indicating that something drastic had happened there, something that concerned me, but why crowd it? If I didn’t bring it out into the open and admit the possibility existed, maybe it would go away. I couldn’t read the compas
s clearly from where I sat, so I watched the sun instead—we had a nice clear day for flying. A little past noon would put the sun a little past south; and it steadied just forward of the port beam or whatever you call it in an airplane. Course west or a little south of west. So we were heading too far south for Augustine or Palm Beach or Lauderdale; but it could still be Miami, I told myself. I didn’t have the geography that clearly in mind.
I watched the green-green islands of the Bahamas pass below, and the blue-green water of the endless shallows of the Great Bahama Bank, and the blue-blue water of the deep Gulf Stream. Then land again, and a dome of pollution-haze well off to starboard that was Miami, and we were flying down along the Keys on a closing course. Well, I’ve never had much luck with prayer. I should either practice it harder or give it up altogether, I guess.
The moustached gent who was driving the plane had nothing to say and neither had I. He had his thoughts, no doubt, and I had mine. He brought us in to the Marathon strip from seaward in a sweeping curve and put us down very gently and expertly. Brent, our young man in Miami, was there with some guy from customs or immigration or both, who didn’t give a damn about me, he had the word on me, but he felt obliged to do his stuff with the pilot and plane. I told the pilot goodbye and thanks and we left them to it.
Brent hadn’t changed much since the last time he’d come out of his standby Miami existence, whatever it was, to give us a hand—the last time I knew about, that is. He was a few years older now, of course, we all were, but he was still a compact youthful-looking redhead with crisp curly hair and sideburns, who kept himself in good shape.
I’d gathered that his specialty was the underwater stuff with the mask and fins but he was good with boats, too. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He didn’t tell me anything and I didn’t ask. I knew approximately what I was here for now, I knew what it pretty well had to be, to necessitate my being brought here, only the details were lacking; and talking about it wouldn’t help it any. It was lousy and it was going to stay lousy, talk or no talk.
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