The Infiltrators

by Donald Hamilton

  “Sheer genius,” I said. “They had several kinds in the little bakery and I got two of each. They’re both yours. I’m a cinnamon man myself.”

  The awkwardness between us faded gradually as we sat there eating our doughnuts and sipping our coffee. I saw it happening to her now, what I’d expected to see at the penitentiary gate. Relaxing on the wooden bench, she breathed deeply as she looked about the pleasant rest area with its trees, undoubtedly prettier in the summer with green leaves and grass, but obviously beautiful to her as she savored her freedom at last, forgetting for the moment the prison ugliness that lay behind her and the bleak ex-convict existence that probably lay ahead.

  I could see the girl I’d known like a blurred image viewed through wavering layers of unclear water, and I was aware of an angry sense of waste. Something valuable had been wantonly destroyed here. The question was whether she’d wrecked her life, and herself, through her own criminal folly, or whether she had been the victim of vicious plotting by others. It was all very well for Mac to say that the problem of her innocence or guilt was academic, but I wouldn’t know how to deal with her until it was solved.

  “I want to apologize,” she said abruptly, turning to look at me at last.

  “What the hell for?” I asked, surprised.

  “A little while ago I said I didn’t believe anybody could be trying to kill me. I as good as called you a liar. But I’d promised myself that when I got out I’d never ever do that to anybody else after the way they treated me.” She drew a long breath. “Maybe it sounds childish, but it was the horrible rudeness that shocked me so, the total lack of consideration, as if I had no feelings that mattered to anybody; and I guess I didn’t. Men contradicting me flatly, men calling me a liar to my face, men telling me what a dumb broad I was to expect them to be taken in by… I mean, after the verdict, all right. I suppose all right. I was legally guilty then, legally a felon, with no further right to polite and respectful treatment. But that was a year later. Before, damn it, when I was first arrested and questioned, I was Madeleine Rustin Ellershaw, Attorney at Law. I was Mrs. Roy Ellershaw. I had a very good position with a very good law firm. I was the wife of a respected research scientist. I had a lovely house in the best section of town. I was accustomed to a little… a little courtesy.” She shook her head irritably. “Oh, I’m making it sound so petty, aren’t I? But when you’ve been brought up, well, gently, tenderly, always treated as an important human being, you can’t quite cope with people suddenly acting as if you were… dirt.”

  I said, watching her, “Don’t talk about it if you don’t want to.”

  She licked her colorless lips. “I have to talk about it,” she said quietly. “I’ve been living it over and over for eight years, nine since they marched into my beautiful home like storm troopers and showed me the warrant and mouthed Miranda at me and dragged me away all dressed up in my new and very smart and expensive black crepe with the rather good diamonds Roy had given me for my birthday. And sheer black stockings and pretty high-heeled pumps and my hair up because he always said he found the back of my neck very sexy. Oh, God, I still remember every detail of that awful night. I keep thinking of all the things I should have done to protect myself—you’d have thought I had no legal training at all, the things I let them get away with! But the whole thing was so totally unexpected, so completely incredible… I think I was actually in shock. I kept telling myself it was all a ridiculous mistake, it just had to be, and the best thing to do was just ride along with it, and in a minute somebody would come in and say, sorry, we got the wrong Ellershaw, and they’d take me home with abject apologies and Roy would be there waiting for me, wondering where I’d got to.”

  She stopped. I remained silent, letting her find her own way. I just divided the remains of the coffee between her cup and mine and shoved the box of doughnuts closer to her. She hesitated, glanced down at herself, shrugged, and took one.

  “I really shouldn’t, of course, I’m much too big already; but I didn’t eat either breakfast or lunch today, I couldn’t.” She drew a long breath. “It had been a very busy time for me at the office, Mr. Helm,” she said. “I knew something was bothering Roy, but I had so many business problems of my own to think about that I never took time to… I know now that he must have wanted to talk about it, but I was full of my own important affairs. I thought I was doing quite enough when I ran some stupid little bank errands for him.”

  She stopped, and discovered the doughnut in her hand, and took a bite, watching the flickering colors of the freeway traffic through the sheltering, leafless trees. At last she breathed deeply once more and went on.

  “In fact, I was rather annoyed that he’d bother me when he knew how busy I was. And then I got a nice bonus, big enough to let me know they really had their eyes on me and were making wonderful plans for my future with the firm. We had to celebrate, of course, and Roy made the dinner reservations; and we got dressed up for the occasion; but as he was tying his tie the phone rang. It was a very short conversation. He only said that, yes, this was Dr. Ellershaw. He listened a bit and hung up. He reached for his coat and told me he had to step out for just a minute. I… I was annoyed at the delay and reminded him that our reservation was for seven-thirty. He kissed me gently on the cheek so as not to smear my fresh lipstick; and he said that it really wouldn’t take a minute, he’d be right back… But he wasn’t. Ever.”

  She was silent for a moment, watching a pair of crows flying over the trees, talking raucously to each other. They settled in the woods behind us. Madeleine went on as if there had been no pause.

  “I waited and waited, getting madder and madder of course. He was spoiling that wonderful bonus glow I’d had. The doorbell rang. When I opened, they shoved their way in with their warrant and a couple of them grabbed me and… and suddenly I was standing there staring incredulously at the handcuffs on my wrists! Handcuffs! They took me away like that in full view of the neighbors—that popular young Mrs. Ellershaw being roughly marched away between two big men, stumbling down the front walk of her fine house in her high-heeled party pumps with those… those things shining on her wrists! And then making my phone call downtown and trying to explain the mad things that were happening and not being able to get hold of anybody but Walter.”

  “Walter?”

  “Walter Maxon. A young attorney who’d just joined the firm. Well, actually he was a year older than I was, but he acted very young. I will say he came right away; but he might as well not have. He was a shy boy and he’d had no experience at all with criminal cases; he’d never had to deal with anything like that before. They bullied him mercilessly; he was no use at all.”

  She paused again, and sipped her coffee, staring into space, into the past, but at last her voice continued: “Hours and hours of questioning! Where was my husband? Where did he say he was going when he left? Who helped him slip away so neatly right from under their noses? Who’d tipped him off that the warrants had been issued? Where was I going to meet him? When was I going to meet him? Liar, liar, liar, don’t try to pull that innocent line on us, we know you’re in it up to your pretty neck, where did he go? And was this my signature on this safe-deposit form or wasn’t it? Come on, baby, forget that stuck-up lady-of-the-manor crap. It’s no good, we’ve got you cold and you know it, so why don’t you come clean and make it easy for all of us, the court will take your attitude into consideration and maybe you’ll only have to serve four-five years, think about it, the Rosenbergs got the chair, remember?” She drew a long, ragged breath. “And Walter trying to protest, trying to remember his law, and I sitting there stupidly trying to explain that I didn’t know what in the world they were talking about—my God, they were threatening me with imprisonment and execution and I didn’t know anything! And knowing I was the more experienced attorney there, I should take charge and put a stop to it. Knowing they were way out of line, legally, and Walter was being no help at all so it was up to me, but I… I was just so shocked by it all, and so
worried about Roy, that I couldn’t seem to pull myself together… And being shoved into that cell at last with my eyes aching from the lights, my head aching, crying helplessly as I fell on the cot, like a dumb ingenue instead of a competent professional woman. And then the dream, if it was a dream.”

  I saw her hand reach out for still another doughnut; but she glanced down at her fairly substantial figure and drew it back empty. We sat for a little in silence, listening to the cars and trucks roaring by beyond the trees.

  “And then it was morning,” she said. “I’d finally gone to sleep, exhausted; and they came and told me that Walter had arranged for immediate arraignment, and I hardly recognized the awful creature in the mirror. My elaborate hairdo was a crazy bird’s nest, my face was a streaky mess of tears and makeup, and my lovely new cocktail dress was a wrinkled and slept-in ruin with a big smear of mustard on the front from a hamburger they’d given me in the middle of the night—I’d never got to dinner, remember? And my sexy black hose had runs in them. They made me look like a cheap whore after a hard night on the streets, so I peeled them off and threw them away; and I managed to clean myself up a bit, tidy myself up, but I still wasn’t exactly the well-groomed lady attorney when I came up before Judge Hillman, stringy-haired and bare-legged in my crumpled black dress. I thought I’d die of humiliation. And two hundred thousand dollars bail, my God! And then having to face the newsmen and their cameras like that…!” She shook her head abruptly. “Not that it really mattered. Nothing mattered anymore, because Roy was dead.”

  She drew a long ragged breath, and I saw that her eyes were wet. After all the years, she could still cry for her lost husband. Or, I reminded myself sternly, pretend to cry for him, for my benefit.

  “I was right about that,” she continued. “It didn’t matter a bit in the long run. There was much worse to come. But even then, when I forced myself to go to the office the next day, the chill in the air told me where I stood. The crown princess had slipped on a banana peel and got egg on her face, to scramble a few metaphors. She’d suddenly become a liability to the firm instead of an asset. But they were nice about it. They gave me leave of absence and continued my salary clear up to the verdict. And Mr. Baron himself handled my defense. But I knew that even if he got me off, my special favored place with the firm, that I’d worked so hard to achieve, was gone forever, and nothing in my life would ever be the way I’d hoped.”

  There was a sudden flutter of black wings over the trees as the two crows, disturbed by something, rose and flapped away into the distance. A crow isn’t normally the most graceful flier in the world, although he can soar like an eagle if he feels like it, but he gets the job done in a professional and businesslike manner.

  Madeleine licked her lips. “Strangely, those are the only things I remember clearly, the early things: the pleasant married business of getting all dressed up for a celebration dinner with my husband, the terrible shock of seeing those handcuffs on me, the ghastly trapped-animal feeling of being locked up in a cell for the first time in my life, and the dreadful indignity of having to face the court and the newsmen looking like that. Of course, that was only the beginning, but the rest… I guess I was kind of numb through all the rest. I didn’t really feel anything through all the months of legal maneuvering, even the verdict and the sentencing and the appeals. Denied. And then being shipped across the country, passed from one federal marshal who happened to be going the right way to another, mostly in handcuffs with everybody staring at the depraved female criminal on her way to the pen; and those dreadful little jails where they parked me along the way; and arriving all bedraggled again, like that first morning in court, but by then I didn’t even care how awful I looked in my grimy slacks and soiled blouse after all that traveling. I… I’d even picked up some bugs, you know, in one of those horrible little cells into which I’d been stuck between the various stages of the journey. It wasn’t until later that I realized it was all deliberate.”

  “Deliberate?” I asked.

  She didn’t look at me. She went on, staring at the busy highway, “Yes. To break me down. They couldn’t kill me, like Roy; to have us both disappearing and dying under suspicious circumstances would have been too much. So I had to be framed into prison, and not only framed, but broken, smashed, demolished as a thinking, potentially dangerous human being. It wasn’t hard, considering my sheltered upbringing. The self-confident and self-satisfied young lady was very vulnerable. Drag her rudely out of her lovely home in handcuffs, throw some terrible charges at her, take advantage of her initial shock to expose her to scorn and ridicule at her very first court appearance on the… the wrong side of the law, continue to humiliate her at every turn, convict her of a dreadful crime against her country, sentence her to the most brutal penal institution available, and soften her up for it by shuttling her from one unspeakable little jail to another for a couple of weeks, presenting her at the penitentiary at last all filthy and lousy, stinking of the disgusting cells in which she’d been held, quite unrecognizable, even to herself, as the proud young professional woman she’d been.” Madeleine drew a long, shuddering breath. “After that, of course, the prison routine took over. They stripped me and inspected me like a cow, every hole in my body from ears to anus, and scrubbed and deloused me, and stuck me into an ugly uniform that didn’t fit, and herded me from place to place; but by that time I wasn’t really there anymore. It was all happening to somebody else. Being brutally arrested and subjected to a shameful public trial like that had been degradation enough; but this simply couldn’t be happening to me, not to wonderful, beautiful, intelligent, very superior me.”

  I heard the warning whistle in the woods near where the crows had taken flight. I grabbed my companion and swept her from the seat to the ground. A shotgun boomed from the brush at the edge of the trees, and buckshot ripped the dead winter grass nearby and splashed against the concrete uprights of the heavy picnic table that protected us. I slapped Madeleine on the rump and she worked her way obediently under the table. I had my own gun in my hand—a short-barreled Smith and Wesson .38 Special, if it matters—and I saw her look at it with interest. There was, I noticed, absolutely no fear in her expression. In fact her face was flushed and rather pretty with the excitement of the moment.

  The shotgun boomed again, but the charge did not come near us; the heavy report was answered by a burst of fire from a lighter weapon. Silence followed.

  “Oh, shit!” I said. “Stay here… No, you’d better come along. There might be another one. You’re all right?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  I raised my voice. “Coming out,” I shouted.

  A man’s voice answered from the trees: “All clear here.”

  I backed out of our hidey-hole and she followed me and sat up, a little embarrassed because her skirt and slip had ridden up about her waist as she extricated herself. She pulled them down, and examined the torn knee of one stocking.

  “I’m surprised,” she said calmly. “I didn’t think you could damage these armor-plated hose they bought me with anything short of an axe.”

  I helped her up, and we walked together towards the woods, where two men now stood looking at something on the ground.

  I said, “If you’ve got some objection to dead men, you’d better wait here. I think it’s safe enough now.”

  She said, speaking in cold, even tones, “No dead man ever hurt me. It’s the live ones I worry about.”

  The sudden hostility in her voice made me look at her in surprise. I saw that her exhilaration had vanished, and that she was regarding me with none of the friendliness she’d begun to show earlier; but I didn’t have time for her at the moment. I moved forward and looked at the man on the ground, of medium height, dressed in wind-breaker, jeans, and scuffed work shoes. And a lot of blood; he’d been pretty well riddled by pistol bullets, 9mm at a guess. I didn’t know him. A heavy 12-gauge automatic shotgun lay beside him. Remington Model 1100, if it matters. I looked at the lined farmer-fac
e of the older of the two men standing over him. Jackson was a wiry man with pale blue eyes. He was holding an automatic pistol; and I’d guessed the caliber correctly.

  “You plan to use a Ouija board to interrogate him, I suppose,” I said softly. “The word was he was to be taken alive, amigo.”

  “I don’t play games with shotguns,” Jackson said stiffly. “He was about to cut down Marty with his next load of buck; I had to ice him.”

  I looked at the younger man for a moment, husky and dark-haired. Unlike Jackson, who was in city clothes, he was in jeans, like the dead man. Well, I guess denim goes just about everywhere these days, although sometimes I wish it wouldn’t. I nodded at the boy, reminding myself that Marty and I had worked together before and he’d done all right. Okay. It happens. Bringing them back alive isn’t all that easy. Back to the old drawing board.

  I said, “Well, find out who the hell he is and see if you can learn who’s been talking to him recently. If you can. I won’t hold my breath. Come on, Mrs. E. Let’s put it on the road.”

  But she avoided the hand with which I tried to lead her away and stood looking down at the dead man for a moment longer, her face impassive. I sensed that she was testing herself. Once she’d been a civilized young lady living in a kindly and protective environment, and the sight of a bloody corpse would have left her shattered for days; but since then she’d spent eight years in Fort Ames. Now her world was a dreadful, cruel, primitive place without light or hope, and the bullet-torn body on the ground was just another indication of how far she’d come from what she’d been. She wanted to learn how this new creature, this destroyed woman who had once been Madeleine Rustin Ellershaw, could cope with the sights she could expect to see in this living hell to which she’d been condemned.

  She turned without expression and walked beside me to the Mazda. She opened the door before I could do it for her and took out her brown flannel jacket, put it on, and buttoned it meticulously and unfashionably, top to bottom, before getting into the car. She didn’t speak another word to me the rest of the afternoon.