The Revengers

by Donald Hamilton

  I nodded. “So you have no idea why Pete Swallow never called you as he’d promised.”

  Eleanor shook her head. “No. As I keep saying, I just shut that whole ghastly evening out of my mind; it was the only way I could continue to function. But I’d better do a little checking right now, hadn’t I?”

  I said, “It can wait until morning. You ought to get some sleep.”

  “Go to hell,” she said. “You worry about your goddamn health and let me worry about mine. I may need a bodyguard but I don’t need a male nurse.” She frowned. “I’ll see if I can get hold of Spud Meiklejohn in Miami. He probably can’t do much tonight, but he owes me, and he’ll get what’s to be got as soon as things open up tomorrow.”

  “Don’t have him send it here. We’ll pick it up over there.”

  She glanced at me sharply; then she grinned. “You’re supposed to be guarding the body, Mister; not pushing it around. But what’s the plan?”

  I said, “What’s left for you to do here in Nassau? The man you wanted to interview is dead. The police gave you clearance; best to get the hell out before they change their minds and think of more questions they want to ask you. And I want you to introduce me to somebody.”

  “What somebody?”

  “That big man in Miami Beach who lent you three thugs when you needed them.”

  “Velo? What do you want with Giuseppe Velo?”

  “Is that his name? I presume he has syndicate connections.”

  “None better. He was the syndicate down there for many years; he’s kind of semi-retired now. A very tough old buzzard, and I do mean buzzard. That’s just the way he looks.”

  “Good. Just the man I want.”

  “But does he want you, Matt? And do I want to be responsible for bringing the two of you together? Velo is a good man to do a good turn for, but I wouldn’t want to do him a bad one without a very good reason.”

  I said, “Hell, I can do it on my own, Elly. I know some names, too. But if you’ve got a pipeline to a big local guy like Velo it’s easier. You might as well do that first. There’s the phone over by the bed. Tell him to check with Otto Rentner in Milwaukee about the man from W who was with Heinrich Glock, known as Heinie the Clock, when he died with a twelve-gauge shotgun in his hands.”

  She looked at me for a moment. “What’s W?” she asked at last.

  “You should know that, after all the research you did on us. That’s what they call us in the syndicate. W for waste.”

  She shivered a little. “And I don’t suppose you mean garbage. No, I never came across that. It’s very . . . picturesque; I could have used it.” She hesitated, and went on, “Well, all right, I guess you know what you’re doing. But run that past me again, please, slowly. . . .”

  It took an hour. There were the two calls to the U.S. and then a wait for the first party called to call back. At last the phone rang and she picked it up.

  “I see,” she said. “Yes, of course. For lunch. Yes, I know where it is. Please thank Mr. Velo very much.” She put down the instrument and looked at me. “It’s okay. Apparently you checked out okay. He’s seeing us for lunch at his place tomorrow.”

  “Thanks, Elly. It’ll all become clear eventually. I’m trying to get the kiddies off the street, that’s all.”

  “If I’m supposed to understand that,” she said, “you’d better repeat it in the morning when I’m thinking clearly again. My God what a day! Who makes the plane arrangements?”

  “I do,” I said.

  “Well,” she said, “well, I’ll let you have your phone.” But she didn’t move at once, sitting there on the edge of the big bed, my big bed. She seemed to have dismissed the natural hostility she’d felt toward me for the way I’d goaded her into unearthing all the buried ugly memories of her ordeal. She looked rather small and vulnerable, sitting there; and there’s nothing more dangerous to virtuous masculine resolutions than the natural masculine feeling that, no matter what the lady’s sexual hangups may be, no matter how they might have been incurred, you’re just the guy sent by Fate to cure them. By the traditional method, of course. She looked up at me and smiled faintly, rising. “No, dear,” she murmured. “The patient is not yet ready for the Helmstein Treatment.”

  “Madame will inform me when she thinks it is the proper time?”

  “Proper is hardly the word, Herr Doktor,” she said. “But Madame will certainly inform you. Goodnight, Matt.”

  “Goodnight, Elly.”

  Chapter 19

  In the morning, inevitably, there were afterthoughts. Breakfast was a remote meal. Psychologically speaking, socially speaking, the distance across the table could have been measured in rods, even miles, instead of feet. Although I’d been aware of no nightmares, she’d obviously spent an unsatisfactory night; her eyes looked bruised and tired.

  I knew she must have relived the whole dumb evening; hating every stupid revealing word she’d uttered, herself for uttering it, me for bullying her into uttering it and then sitting there listening avidly to her recital of the awful indignities that had been inflicted upon her. Now I was the man who knew exactly the abysmal depths of humiliation to which she’d been brought. I even knew her ultimate degradation—that she’d probably intended to tell to no one, ever—the fact that in the end she’d deliberately allowed herself to give some satisfaction to the men violating her in order to save herself from further injury. Her cold defensive attitude this morning made it clear that she’d decided that I must now consider her very soiled and damaged goods indeed; and a lousy little coward to boot.

  Well, I guess there are men around who deal only in perfect, unblemished dream-girls; just as there are other men around who deal only in perfect, unblemished stamps that lose most of their value if they’re used, certainly if they’re damaged in any way. Of course they must all, girls and stamps, be sheltered and protected very carefully to preserve their perfect purity, their pure perfection. Well, dream-girls are nice to dream about; and I suppose every man has at least one dream-girl in his past—I was married to mine for a while—who meant a great deal to him at the time but didn’t prove very practical when the going got rough. I mean, there’s a limit to how far you can go to shelter a woman from reality.

  Then there are the real girls who’ve been dirty and hurt and maybe even a little broken at times, who’ve done what was necessary for survival no matter how distasteful it might be, and who’ve picked themselves up afterward and washed themselves off and patched themselves up and gone on with the business of living. You don’t have to save them from use, they expect to be used, they like being used; they know that’s what women, like men, are for. While you’d like to protect them from harm, it’s not a tragedy if you fail a little. They don’t lose their value so easily. This one was getting very close to becoming a very real girl, at least to me; and I wasn’t at all sure I wanted her to. Dream-girls come and go, but real girls can be forever; and there’s no good place for forever girls in our line of work.

  “When do we catch the plane?” Eleanor asked, glancing at her businesslike watch.

  “Whenever you say,” I said, getting to my feet. “It’s waiting on the field.”

  She rose and started to move away, but her innate fairness made her pause and look back. “Well, there’s something to having a high-powered bodyguard after all. Private air transportation, yet. Very nice, Mr. Helm.” She hesitated and glanced down at herself a bit self-consciously and went on, “It’s not a deliberate act of hostility, Matt.”

  I looked where she’d been looking, and grinned. “Oh, you mean the slacks.”

  “I know you said you don’t like women in pants and I don’t like me in them either; but I was just too damned tired to wash out a blouse last night and this is all I had clean in my suitcase. I’ve been moving around too fast to get any laundry done the past week or so.” She grinned. “Anyway, Seppi Velo just loves trousered ladies; he’s always got at least one blonde around in skintight pants. I think he likes to pinch them
where they’re tightest. At his age, it’s probably all the excitement he can stand.”

  “In those,” I said, “you’re going to wind up with your ass black and blue before Velo ever gets a crack at you. My fingers are itching already.”

  But that was going too far; I was taking unfair advantage of her moment of friendliness. She looked at me coolly. “I think we’d better get moving if we’re going to be in Miami Beach in time for lunch,” she said.

  I watched her walking briskly ahead of me in her high-heeled blue sandals, crisp white linen slacks and a thin little navy blue sweater with a round neck and short sleeves. The slacks weren’t really outrageously snug, they just fit as well as they should; and I thought that, some day when we were friends again, I’d have to tell her that in addition to having very nice shoulders and ankles she had a very nice little bottom. When we got to the airport I saw a couple of young men in greasy coveralls look up from their work to watch her go by on her way out to the waiting plane, not the prettiest girl in the world, perhaps, not the most beautifully proportioned body in the classic sense, but a neat, taut, youthful figure, unique and unmistakably feminine, a specimen any girl-watcher would be proud to add to his private collection of attractive memories. I didn’t at all mind being the man fortunate enough to be her escort and thereby earning their brief envy. It seemed too bad that she was psychologically incapable of recognizing and enjoying their admiration.

  It was the same two-propeller, four-person plane with the same silent moustached pilot. We got into the rear seats although Eleanor indicated that she wouldn’t really mind if I sat up front where my long legs would be more comfortable. Apparently she wasn’t yearning for my companionship; but as we took off I felt her fingers find my arm and tighten briefly. It was nice to know that planes still scared her a little, even after all the traveling she must have done. They scare me, too.

  When she removed her hand, I glanced at her, and saw that her face was faintly pink. “Only the little ones,” she murmured. “I can take the big ones, but the little ones still bother me a little. I’m never quite sure they’ll get all the way off the ground.”

  “I know,” I said.

  She hesitated, and looked at me directly. “I’m a bitch,” she said.

  “So what else is new?”

  “No, let me apologize. I just felt so . . . naked this morning. Now you know everything about me.”

  “Well, you know a hell of a lot about me, too, so I guess we’re even,” I said.

  We sat for a while, listening to the motors and watching the colorful islands of the Bahamas pass below.

  “Matt.”

  “Yes?”

  “That girl,” she said, looking straight ahead. “The one in the jungle?”

  “What girl in the jungle?” I asked. “Oh, that girl.”

  “The girl agent you said you rescued.” Eleanor gave me a sidelong, glance. “Sheila Summerton was her name, wasn’t it? That was one of the operations I did get some information on.” After a little she said dryly, “The record wasn’t clear on the point, but I bet you slept with her, too.”

  I remembered the starved and abused scrap of female humanity we’d brought out of the jungle, all bones and eyes, and the slim, big-eyed, haunted girl she’d become. We’d managed to lay to rest a few of her ghosts eventually, if you’ll excuse the phrase. But it hadn’t worked out in the end. She’d been too gentle for the business. Her gentleness was what had betrayed her in the first place, when she’d been unable to pull a trigger that needed pulling badly. Later, her gentleness had almost got me killed. She’d left us and I hadn’t heard from her, or of her, since.

  I said, “As you add up my sex life, Miss Brand, you might keep in mind that you’re referring to a handful of ladies encountered over a considerable number of years. It’s not quite as if I’d serviced them all last week.”

  She shook her head quickly. “Please don’t get mad. That girl . . . she’d had a hard time, too. Can’t you see that I might be interested?”

  I said, “Yes, ma’am. Since you ask so nicely, I did sleep with her. Later, after fattening her up a bit. She was pretty skinny when we got her out of there. I felt, well, a bit guilty about it, considering everything, but she laughed at me and said that after going through all that why shouldn’t she go to bed with a man she liked for a change? I realize that didn’t say much for her taste in men, but otherwise it seemed like a healthy attitude.”

  Eleanor was silent. Maybe she didn’t think it was a healthy attitude; or maybe she felt it was a little too healthy for a girl who had, after all, been through considerably more than she, Eleanor Brand, had. Maybe she thought I was making comparisons, not altogether in her favor. As a matter of fact, I had spoken without really thinking how it would sound to her. I was just a bit stale on Miss Eleanor Brand’s psychosexual problems this morning. I had a few problems of my own, like just what to say to that Miami Beach godfather type, Giuseppi Velo.

  But before I could get that problem solved, and it wasn’t really solvable until I’d gotten some notion of Velo’s attitude, we’d landed in Miami and had another problem presented to us, or at least a distraction. Airports with all those strangers running around aren’t good places to be if you have somebody to protect, and I was doing my best to pick up possible hostile blips on the radar screen as I followed along behind Eleanor, aware that she, too, was looking for somebody; the difference being that she knew who.

  He turned out to be a tall man with cynical eyes and wild sandy hair, who handed her a large manila envelope, kidded her briefly about some past incident or assignment they’d shared and took off, never having spoken to me. I didn’t belong to the inner journalistic circle; I was just part of the view. I was watching him move away and making another sweep of the premises when I heard Eleanor make an odd strangled sound that had me whirling and reaching for my gun instinctively. By using a private plane we’d short-circuited the hijack-scanners, so I hadn’t had to go through that firearms-shuffle again.

  But Eleanor was standing there unharmed. Her face was very pale, however; and I reached for the photograph she’d been staring at. She shook her head quickly.

  “No, look at this one first. Arlette Swallow.”

  It was a stock eight-by-ten-inch glossy glamor photo of a pert, pretty young woman with fluffy blond hair, an interestingly inadequate costume, and a big guitar. I gave it back to Eleanor and she handed me the second print.

  “Arlette Swallow.”

  It would have been worse if I hadn’t already seen her reaction to it; but it was bad enough. The girl in this picture was dead. It was a police photo and, although the features had not been damaged by whatever had killed her, there was hardly enough resemblance to let me recognize her as the same girl. The blond hair had darkened and looked as if it had been stringy and uncared for even before death. The pert nose had become oddly flattened and a little crooked; but the cutie-pie mouth was the feature that had changed most. The upper lip was marred by a great slashing scar, like a badly repaired harelip. There was another ugly scar across the right cheek. I cleared my throat.

  “Standard beer-bottle job,” I said. Eleanor glanced at me. I said, “Okay. Chivas Regal. Piper Heidsieck. But the one I saw on a man was a good old Budweiser operation. He got it busted across his face and then he was chopped up with what was left. Looked worse than this, but then he hadn’t been very pretty to start with.”

  Eleanor shivered. “And I’ve been making a big deal of how terribly I suffered with a couple of black eyes and a couple of chipped teeth! The poor kid! All she had was her pretty face, really; and he got mad or drunk and . . . spoiled it for her. And wouldn’t even get her to a good surgeon who could, at least, have minimized the damage! No wonder she got bitter enough to want to hurt him publicly, seeing that in the mirror every day.”

  “What are the other ones?” I asked.

  She licked her lips. “Brother Pete, of course. Pre- and postmortem, also. They were both killed in the same auto
accident the day after I got. . . worked over.”

  I said, “And if you swallow that accident, we’ll try you on the Easter Bunny. And I’d say that was a deliberate job of face-wrecking, not just an ugly-drunk act. My hunch is the girl was dumb enough to play around and Lorca/ Sapio caught her at it. It would be his early Sapio style, to fix her so no man would ever want her again. But later, as Lorca, he couldn’t afford to have her arising from the ashes of his lurid past, with that face, and lousing up his new goody-goody image, not to mention his election.” I gave her back the photo and watched her slip it into the envelope. “So now we know why he turned his wreckers loose on you when somebody tipped you off to the name ‘Swallow.’ Let’s go visit Mr. Velo.”

  We arrived at the tall waterfront building right on time and a sun-burned young man in a very flowery sports shirt, worn over very white pants, came forward to help us out of the taxi and steer us to the private elevator at the rear of the lobby, which took us straight up to the penthouse.

  There were a couple of men at the door, also dressed in a casual way, but their attitude was not quite so casual. One of them followed along behind us as our tanned young guide led us through the gleaming apartment and out onto the sun roof, where a very brown old man awaited us in a wheelchair under a green plastic awning that shaded a table set for three. The man who had followed us hurried past and whispered in the old man’s ear.

  I said, “If it’s the gun that’s bothering him, you’re welcome to it, Mr. Velo. I’ve been assigned to protect the lady; but I’m sure she’s quite safe here.”

  I opened my jacket invitingly; but the old man shook his head quickly. “They only do what they are told to do,” he said. He waved the man away and the young guide as well. When we were alone, he said, “You’re Helm? Also known as Eric, ha! From W, ha! So many tricks and codes and ciphers, like little boys playing Blackbeard the Pirate. And the little newspaper girl who is so tough; my soldiers were impressed and they don’t impress easily. Come here, girl.” Eleanor stepped forward, and the old man reached up and touched the faint scar on her lip with a bony brown finger. “They said you’d taken a beating, but I see it’s better now.