Marchand Woman

by Brian Garfield

  “He’ll be wearing a silver bar,” Harry said. “Scrunch down a little.”

  She slid down in the seat until she could barely see over the rim of the windowsill. Anders hissed, “I don’t see him!”

  “Give him time.”

  The soldiers were separating, going to their cars. Right in front of the Bronco the battered ruin of a pickup truck started up, flicked on its headlights and gnashed away down the two-lane. By ones and twos the Guardsmen climbed into vehicles and the parking shoulders gradually emptied, streams of red tail-lights retreating in both directions. No one paid any attention to the Bronco. After five minutes nothing was left on the road shoulder except a glossy Trans Am with discreet racing stripes, parked directly opposite the entrance to the armory.

  Anders said, “I guess he didn’t come to the meeting then.” Was it relief in his voice?

  “Wait it out,” Harry said.

  “That’s the only car left. It must belong to the night guard.”

  “No. Leave a car alone on this road overnight and you’d come out in the morning and find you didn’t have any tires or battery. The night guard’s car must be parked inside the compound.”

  “That’s a point.”

  The scheme had been to follow the car and, given the opportunity, run it off the road and trap the driver. Apparently that no longer was going to be necessary—if in fact the Trans Am didn’t belong to a watchman.

  The armory door opened. Harry tensed beside her and she heard a quiet click behind her—Anders getting out a pair of handcuffs.

  For a moment the man stood silhouetted in the open doorway—she had an impression of size: big shoulders, a squarish head, legs too short for the powerful torso. Then the door closed and the man came down the steps under the exterior light; she saw then that he was quite young. The lights glinted off the insignia on the collar of his fatigues.

  “My God in Heaven,” Glenn Anders whispered. “Him!”

  “What?”

  “That’s the guy. That’s the guy who killed her.”

  Harry paused with his hand on the door handle. “Nothing stupid now, Glenn.”

  “What? Come on—let’s go, what’s holding you up?”

  “We don’t want him dead,” Harry said in a firm but quiet way.

  The big youth was crossing the street toward the Trans Am, tossing a casual glance at the Bronco. He took car keys out of his pocket and stooped to find the lock in the door.

  Harry was out of the Bronco by then; Anders clambered over the tilted driver’s seat and squeezed out after him, hurrying. Carole felt everything tighten—muscles, gut, throat. She saw the big young man recognize the gun in Harry’s fist and straighten up beside the car, going bolt still, his face rising into the light—fear, but defiant stoic acceptance with it.

  Anders was moving in fast from one side and Harry spoke quickly, harshly: “Glenn.” Anders slowed down and looked back briefly—a head-shaking frown like a puzzled baffled bull.

  “Easy.”

  The big youth’s eyes flicked back and forth from one to the other. He looked once toward the armory and she thought he might yell but Harry spoke again, his words too soft to reach her ears this time, and the youth slowly deflated. Anders was right beside him then and she found she was holding her breath expecting a shot from Anders’ pistol but he only showed the handcuffs to the young man and the youth slowly turned around and crossed his wrists behind his back, staring into the muzzle of Harry’s revolver.

  Anders fitted the handcuffs onto him and propelled the prisoner into the back seat of the Trans Am and then Harry crowded Anders aside and climbed in alongside the prisoner. Anders spoke—some sort of objection—and Harry must have answered him from within the car, for Anders threw his head back and she saw his chest rise and fall with a full slow breath. Then Anders looked back at her, at the Bronco, and made a vague signal with his hand: He managed to convey both instructions and bitterness with that gesture; then he got into the driver’s seat of the Trans Am and pulled the door shut. The exhaust puffed smoke and the lights came on.

  Trembling, Carole turned the key. The Trans Am rolled away and she put the Bronco in gear and followed it.

  She still didn’t know the way; she had to follow closely through the forest. Ahead of her the Trans Am, low-slung and sporty, bottomed several times in the ruts—she heard the clanking. The Bronco pitched her around on its hard springs but she had no trouble handling it and her only moments of fear came when, for brief intervals, she lost sight of the car’s red lights in the deep woods ahead. Each time, however, Anders waited for her. Then finally they were running down the bumpy track into Santana’s yard.

  By the time she’d parked Harry and Anders had the prisoner out of the car. She saw that Harry had tied a black cloth blindfold over his eyes. The big youth stumbled as they guided him across the weedy ground and hustled him inside. She followed them in through the back door and the kitchen.

  In the front room Santana switched off the television and looked at them all with a commendable lack of visible surprise. Santana must have been out in the fields; he smelled of it. He stood picking sunburnt skin shreds from his nose.

  Harry said, “You probably won’t want to know about this.” And Santana with a shrug and a nod picked up his can of beer and left the house.

  Anders went around turning off all the lights except one in the kitchen, which threw enough light into the front room to see by. When Anders came back into the front room he was trembling visibly, anger coursing through him and flooding his face with color.

  The prisoner, head high, hands shackled, waited with tight-mouthed endurance. The black velvet over his eyes gave him a slightly comical look—like a blindfold trick-shooting act in a county-fair carnival.

  Harry said, “In here,” and turned the prisoner toward the door of the cell Carole had been using as a bedroom.

  She waited at the door while Anders went in past her; she stood in the doorway to watch, too ambivalent about this to enter the room. Harry looked up at her—he had sat the prisoner down on the cot and was locking another pair of handcuffs, fastening the youth’s ankle to the crossleg of the cot. It wouldn’t prevent him from hobbling around but it would be an unpleasant anchor to drag—no chance he’d get far with that hanging from his foot.

  Harry took a wallet out of the pocket of the young lieutenant’s fatigues. He looked through it and held it up so Anders could see it. Anders’ face never changed; it was as if he feared any shift in expression might break the tenuous skein of his spurious dispassion.

  The young man was making surreptitious attempts to explore his boundaries: a tug and shift of the shackled ankle, sly shiftings of hip and elbow. He said, “Do you people know who I am?”

  “Emil Draga.” Harry tossed the wallet into the young man’s face. It was a gentle toss but Emil Draga, blindfolded, jerked away from it violently, almost upsetting the cot.

  “How much ransom do you plan to get for me?” It was mostly a snarl.

  Harry got to his feet. Anders watched him: “You going to make the phone call?”

  “Maybe we won’t need to.”

  “Now there’s a thought.” Anders thrust his automatic pistol toward Emil Draga. “Maybe you’re right.”

  “Why don’t you stop waving that thing at him? He can’t see it and you’re not going to use it until we’ve found out what we want to know.”

  Anders didn’t lower the pistol. “Ask him fast, then.”

  Carole said, “You’d better take it away from him,” to Harry, and afterward she was surprised because she had no doubt he could.

  Anders looked at her—a wry sour face—and then at Harry, who only stood there monolithically; Anders put the pistol in his pocket with a rueful show of reluctance. “Ask him now,” he said again, and stalked out of the room.

  Under the black blindfold Emil Draga had a waxen and slightly concave face—ugly but shrewd and arrogant, a rich youth who must have learned early that everything had a price
and could be purchased—probably the only sexual love he’d ever had was the kind you bought.

  “I suppose you people know what the penalty for kidnaping is.”

  Carole said, “Maybe you should have thought of that before you kidnaped—”

  “Let us handle this part, ducks.”

  “All right.” She propped her shoulder against the wall, folded her arms and smiled at Harry to show her trust. “I’d just as soon be watching this part from an airplane anyway.”

  Emil Draga blurted, “Who the fuck are you people?”

  Carole only watched Harry; and Harry shook his head, mute. The whole scheme was Harry’s: We’ll keep him blindfolded throughout. For one thing we don’t want to put Santana in jeopardy, do we. For another thing if the kid knows anything we’ll want to get it out of him. Deprive a man of one of his senses and he’ll begin to go up the walls pretty fast. The blindfold stays on.

  The plan had been to telephone the old millionaire and force him to come out of his lair. But that was before Anders had identified Emil Draga as one of Rosalia’s killers. If he was that deeply involved then he probably knew everything and that suggested there might be no need to drag the old millionaire into this.

  Abruptly Harry said, “Draga!”

  The youth almost leaped off the cot. He tried to control his trembling.

  Harry let the silence run on. Anders came back into the room and stood just inside the door with his hands in his pockets and his face closed up tight. He’d gone outside to collect himself; but he’d been unable to stay away. His eyes ran around, alighting fitfully on Harry, on herself, on the blindfolded prisoner.

  “What do you want from me?”

  When Emil Draga got no answer to that he began to shout. Tendons corded his neck and he screamed obscenities until Harry stepped forward calmly and slapped him hard across the ear.

  Emil Draga fell across the cot, struggled back to a sitting position and snapped his mouth shut, breathing hard and fast through his nose. He was, she saw, a youth who probably had the battlefield sort of courage—he could run screaming right into the guns—but he’d never had to learn endurance. And there was the torture of anticipation.…

  She turned away, not wanting to watch this, but Harry said, “You’d better stay,” and she understood: This was on her account and he meant her to accept the responsibility.

  Anders said in a chilly voice, “I guess it’s time we had a word with this citizen.” With a deliberation that shocked her Anders stepped forward, leaned down and slammed the barrel of his pistol against Emil Draga’s shin.

  The youth screamed.

  Anders stepped back, pocketing the gun. Harry gave him an unpleasant look but didn’t speak.

  Anders lifted shaking fingers and ran them through his hair.

  Emil Draga began to flay about him wildly with his free leg. He flung his torso off the cot and crashed painfully onto the floor and scrabbled about like a half-crushed beetle until Harry’s toe slammed him in the ribs and Harry bellowed something at him and the youth curled up fetally, cringing, trying to hide his head between his knees, the cot overturned across his legs.

  Harry let him whimper for a while and then got down and unlocked the ankle cuff from the cot. He set the cot back in place and beckoned to Anders. Between them they lifted Emil Draga to his feet.

  Harry motioned with his head toward the door and they manhandled Emil Draga outside, the loose handcuff clattering behind his right foot.

  Feeling nauseous, Carole followed them across the front room into the kitchen, where Anders held Emil Draga upright while Harry plugged the stopper into the sink and began to pump water into it.

  Immediately she understood, without having to be told, what they had in mind; she turned her face away and stared at the gray television screen.

  Somehow she comprehended without the need of explanation that it was in their minds to break him first—then ask questions. Unprepared, he would have no opportunity to rehearse lies.

  They were torturing Emil Draga by depriving him of basic sensory information. Harry was right, it was astonishingly effective: It was working on her—and she wasn’t even blindfolded.

  Harry’s mouth was screwed up in an expression of sour distaste. Two things amazed her: that he was capable of this, and that having learned the capacity he nonetheless took no pleasure from it. It was something essential she’d learned about him: Harry was hard but there wasn’t a shred of sadism in him.

  But Glenn Anders.… Anders looked on with his lips peeled back from his teeth, a burning intensity in his eyes: She’d never seen the hunger for revenge written so clearly on a human face. The eager glow sickened her. A week ago did I look like that?

  Harry abandoned the pump handle. A final gush flowed into the sink—it was about two thirds filled.

  Emil Draga said in a dull voice from which all feelings had been sucked, “Please—what do you want?”

  Anders snapped, “Before long you’re going to be getting your emissions from dreaming that this is over. Well it’s never going to be over, I promise you—it’s never going to finish. You’re in Hell, Lieutenant.”

  “Why—why?”

  But Anders only grinned unseen.

  Harry made a harsh gesture: Calm down, get a grip on yourself.

  Harry took Emil Draga from behind by both shoulders and pushed him gently forward until he stood facing the sink with his belly two feet from its rim. He moved to one side to position himself; Anders stepped in behind Emil Draga and hooked both hands strongly in Draga’s web belt. Draga stiffened, utterly rigid.

  “Spread your feet out,” Harry said mildly.

  When Draga didn’t move Anders kicked his Achilles’ tendon, not hard but it was enough to provoke reluctant co-operation: Draga slid his foot out to one side, then the other foot until he stood splayed, hands flicking open and shut in the manacles, head whipping back and forth and breath sawing through him. Then Harry’s fist slammed into his gut.

  It doubled him over. A gasp, a little cry—not so much pain as dread—the breath punched out of him and his head poised over the sink and that was when Harry shoved him down into the sink face-first.

  Draga struggled every way he could but there was no chance—he was pinioned by four strong arms and had no way to get purchase. Carole gripped the doorjamb with both hands and pushed her face into it and clenched her eyes shut, hearing Anders’ tremulous voice: “Amazing how a man can drown in just a few inches of water, ain’t it.”

  In the end she was unable not to look. The silent struggle had abated; Draga’s body was lurching with the heaves of choked nausea and he’d slumped so that the only thing holding him up was Anders’ powerful two-handed grip on his web belt.

  Harry lifted him by the epaulets, pulling his face out of the water. Draga blurted water from his mouth and nose. A choking cough; wheezing to suck air back into him—eyes popping, mouth working, panic.

  The sounds he made were so agonized that she had to leave. She stumbled into the front room, fell across the couch and covered her ears with both hands.

  But the not knowing got to her and she turned her face to listen.

  Draga was coughing now—a painful wheeze, a sucking gasp.

  Then Harry: even-voiced, firm, giving away nothing. “I’ll ask a question once. You’ve got one second to answer and then you go back in the water and you stay there twice as long next time. Are you listening? Where’s Cielo?”

  A mutter, then a cough; then, “El Yunque.”

  Anders was pacing back and forth, shoulders jerking with each turn. Harry sat at the table leaning over the topographical map. Sitting on the couch with her elbows on her knees she held the glass of rum in both hands and sucked at it. The door to the bedroom cell stood open and she could see one of Emil Draga’s feet at the end of the cot: They’d manacled him there, flat on his belly with his hands cuffed together under the cot. The chloral hydrate capsule would keep him unconscious for at least a few hours.

  A
nders said irritably, “It’s no good using a helicopter. They’d spot it.”

  “And nothing with wheels. It’s got to be on foot,” Harry said.

  Carole shuddered. She spilled a few drops of rum and wiped ineffectually at her shirt.

  Harry picked up on it. “Sorry ducks but you’re in that part of the world now.”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “Sure. I know you will.” Harry watched her a moment longer and went back to his map and put his finger on it again. “The farm’s here. The track goes back into the hills from there. There’ll be false trails and it’ll take us a while but we’ll have to get all the way back in there and scout them out. We can’t decide how to handle them before we know the position and the defenses. He said there are fourteen men—but suppose they’ve recruited more?” Harry glanced toward Emil Draga’s door. “Someone’s got to keep him on ice. That’ll be you, ducks. Take out whatever guards they’ve got on the place, seal up their exit route and Glenn and I will go in on foot while you sit on our friend there.”

  She said, “You’ve been looking for an excuse to leave me behind, haven’t you?”

  “Use your head, ducks. You’re hardly a veteran guerrilla. And we’ve got to keep little Emil and those guards locked up and fed until this is done.”

  “I don’t see why we have to wait hand and foot on them,” Anders said. “Remember what they did to Rosalia.”

  “When we get the job done,” Harry said, “you can take your choice of turning Emil Draga over to Castro along with the rest of the bunch or delivering him to the police and testifying against him for the murder. If you don’t mind going up against the Draga interests in court. That’ll be up to you—but you try putting this lady’s neck on the block and I’ll find things to do to you.”

  Anders put his head down. “I’m sorry. Wasn’t thinking.”

  “You’re doing a lot of that right now, Glenn. Not thinking.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’ll cool down.” Anders trudged into the kitchen; she heard him filling a glass from a bottle. Harry began to roll up the map.