The Revengers Read online

  “Us,” Eleanor said. She looked at me curiously. “As a matter of fact, I don’t quite see why you’re so interested in that phase of it. I mean, all you need to do is nail him for murder, if you’re going to be so law-abiding about it. He’s responsible for at least three deaths already—”

  “Prove it,” I said. “Harriet killed herself. Bob Devine was shot by a jealous husband. Bobbie Prince died in a boating accident, at least nobody seems to have proved otherwise and it seems unlikely that anybody will. And the word is discretion, remember?”

  She frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  “A popular new Senator gets into a feud with a not-so-popular old government agency; who’s going to get the best of that argument? With your articles running to show what a mean, sneaky bunch we are? We haven’t got a chance in the world of doing anything about him because he’s been mean to us. It will be a simple popularity contest, which we can’t possibly win. No, we’ve got to get something else on him, something that doesn’t concern us at all, like these sinking ships of yours.”

  She licked her lips. “Of course you could . . . just shoot him. That’s what you’re trained for, isn’t it?”

  I said, “Assassination isn’t all that simple, ma’am, or all that effective.”

  She laughed abruptly. “If it were, I’d be dead for what I’ve written about you, wouldn’t I? Instead of having a secret agent all my own, supplying me with booze and protection.” She yawned, and rose. “Well, I think that’s enough for one day, Mr. Bodyguard. Anything we’ve overlooked will just have to wait until tomorrow.”

  “Let me check your room before you go in there,” I said. When I returned, I said, “Don’t open the hall door for any reason without waking me. And any strange noises you hear in the night, I want to hear about right away.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Helm, sir.”

  I looked down at her for a moment. It had been a long day, but she didn’t really show it. The only indication of how much she’d drunk was that she looked softer and prettier tonight than when we’d met that morning. Or maybe that was an indication of how much I’d drunk.

  “I’d like to leave the connecting door open,” I said carefully, “if it doesn’t bother you.”

  She said coolly, “It won’t bother me if it doesn’t bother you. Suit yourself. Goodnight, Matt.”

  “Good night, Elly.”

  She was an odd, contradictory little girl—I couldn’t help remembering her panicky reaction to my touch, when I’d grabbed her outside the door. But she was perfectly self-possessed now.

  I had no trouble going to sleep, so the open door between us couldn’t have bothered me very much.

  Chapter 15

  I came out of bed fast on the side away from the connecting door, gun in hand. I didn’t know what had awakened me, but if you wait to find out you may not live to find out. As I crouched there warily, sheltered behind the bed, the sound came again: the gasping, sobbing sound of a woman suffering unbearable pain and terror. Barefoot in my pajamas, gun ready, I moved swiftly to the doorway.

  “No, I won’t!” I heard her gasp. “No, you can’t, oh you can’t . . . damn you, damn you, damn you I’ll kill you for . . . oh God, oh God, oh God, no. . . .. Ahhh!”

  I knew just about what I had to deal with, then. I pushed the half-open door gently aside and stepped past it. There was, of course, nobody in the room beyond; nobody except the girl in the big bed. She’d thrown off the covers and she lay on her back on the white sheet as if crucified there, helpless and vulnerable, her arms flung wide. She was more or less covered by a long disordered nightgown of some kind of printed stuff, but I couldn’t make out the pattern or color in the dim light from the window. Although without sleeves, it seemed to have much more material elsewhere than it really needed, spread out about her like a shroud.

  Eleanor Brand was breathing very deeply and audibly, lying there, dragging in each lungful of air as if it might be the last before rationing was imposed. Her eyes were closed.

  “I’ll kill them,” she whispered. “I’ll kill them, kill them, kill, kill, kill them, but oh God, oh God, why did they have to. . . ."

  Abruptly her eyes opened and she sat up with a start, staring at me. Her hair was matted and untidy; she reached up mechanically to push the damp strands out of her face. Then she drew a long breath and switched on the bedside light and looked at me again.

  “Don’t shoot, Mister,” she said in a normal voice. “Just a little old nightmare. Everybody’s got them. Go back to bed. Sorry.”

  “Sure,” I said. I noticed that the loose sleeveless gown had slipped from one shoulder; and that it was a rather nice shoulder. Well, a girl you comfort in the middle of the night is supposed to have nice shoulders; it’s in the rules. She pulled the garment straight while I laid the pistol aside and picked up the fallen bedclothes and reorganized them for her. She drew them up over her knees, sitting there. I asked, “How did it happen?”

  She didn’t pretend she didn’t know what I meant. She merely shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about it. There’s nothing to talk about. Hell, it’s a perfectly normal occupational hazard for young lady reporters who stick their noses where they don’t belong.”

  “Whatever you say,” I said. “Have you seen a shrink?”

  “I don’t need a shrink. I’m perfectly all right. I just have these dreams, but I’ll get over them. Go back to bed.” After a moment, when I didn’t move, she said, “All right, if you have to be nosy, get me a cigarette, damn you. Over there on the dresser. I didn’t really think it could happen to me.”

  I got the package for her, but the fingers with which she tried to extract a cigarette were clumsy, so I got one out for her, placed it between her lips, and lit it. I laid the package on the table beside her, put an ashtray handy, and sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “They never do,” I said.

  “Don’t be corny,” she said. “Look at me.”

  “I’m looking.”

  “Well, what do you see?” Her voice was impatient. “I have a face right out of the primate cage in the zoo, right? I’ve got a crazy, skinny, short-legged body with a couple of dumb little breasts stuck on it anyhow. My ankles aren’t bad but who’s going to get their gonads in an uproar about a pair of ankles these days?” She waited for me to speak, but she didn’t really want me to speak. She was busy tearing herself down and she wanted no interference from me, thanks. She went on, “With all the pretty girls around to violate, who’s going to bother with an ugly little monkey with a notebook? At least that was the way I had it figured; and anyway, you can’t spend your life being scared of things, not if you’re going to get any work done. I had to have two teeth capped afterward and you can still see the scar where the big one hit me in the mouth, here.”

  “It doesn’t show much,” I said.

  “Nothing shows much,” she said softly, “but they spoiled me, damn them, they really spoiled me, even if it hardly shows any longer. They spoiled everything. It’s not the same world any longer and it’s not the same me.”

  “Physically?”

  “Oh, all the pieces are still there. I had a checkup later and some tests to make sure they hadn’t . . . hadn’t given me anything, biological or pathological, if you know what I mean. But the pieces don’t work right any more. I’ve got these goddamned Victorian-old-maid reactions now. Not that I was ever a flaming sexpot—with my looks, who gets the chance?—but I was at least reasonably normal about it when it was offered, or mentioned. But now I can’t even talk about it normally. I can’t bear to be touched. Well, you noticed. I saw you notice.”

  “But you’re perfectly all right and you don’t need a shrink,” I said dryly.

  “What’s one of those creeps going to do for me?” she demanded. “He can’t turn the clock back; he can’t make it not have happened. They were waiting by the car when I came out of the place, kind of a low-down dive in a low-down part of town, but nobody bothered me inside and the man I’d come
to see was very polite and even bought me a beer. But they must have seen me go in and they must have been very hard up for it or something. They were laying for me when I got back to the car, a big one and a little one, real loose-lipped types. I tried to run but they caught me and dragged me around the corner of the building into a dark vacant lot and did it to me, beating hell out of me first when I tried to resist.” She drew a ragged breath. “It’s the unbelievable helpless humiliation of it, you know, as much as anything. They don’t leave you anything. When they’re finished with you there’s nothing left of your dignity as a human being, let alone your dignity as a woman. . . .”

  The hotel was silent around us. She wasn’t seeing me any longer. She was no longer talking for my benefit. She was revisiting the scene of her agony, deliberately putting herself through her ordeal again to test how much it still hurt after the time that had passed; to check how far the healing process had gone, how far it still had to go. Her voice was wickedly soft as she reminded herself of how it had been.

  “Sobbing in the dirt afterward among the cans and weeds and beer bottles, naked except for the shredded stockings down around my ankles and the grimy sweater up around my neck they hadn’t quite managed to rip all the way off me. Hurting all over, afraid to move at first and learn just how badly I’d been beaten; then terrified that somebody would come along and see me like that. Like a nightmare, bare-ass naked in the middle of the city with car lights going by only half a block away, finding my shoes and purse, and some useless scraps of nylon—well, I used them to scrub the stuff, you know, off my legs. Finding at last what was left of my skirt. Pinning the crazy rag around me, blubbering stupidly as I tried to do something with the hopeless wreck of my sweater, stumbling to the car like a falling-down drunk—and back in the automatic, thank God, hotel parking garage avoiding the elevator and hauling myself up the endless empty stairs and staggering to my room without meeting anybody; safe at last with the door locked behind me, turning on the light and coming face to face with this thing in the mirror, this crazy, tattered, filthy, bloody thing with its slitty little eyes all squinched up in its swollen fright-mask of a face, and its ghastly, mangled, broken mouth. . . .” Her voice rose hysterically. She stopped and swallowed hard and spoke in normal tones, “I guess I hadn’t really grasped until then what they’d done to me, what they’d made of me, how thoroughly they’d spoiled me inside and out.”

  She stared at me, blind and dry-eyed. I reached out, took from her fingers the cigarette she’d forgotten, and extinguished it in the ashtray. She shook her head minutely, as if in answer to a question only she had heard; she drew another long, uneven breath and licked her lips.

  “Okay,” she breathed. “If I can talk about it I’m getting better, aren’t I? Okay.”

  “Elly. . . .”

  “Just one thing,” she said. Suddenly her voice was hard and steady. “Before you get too sentimental about the poor innocent little girl all ravished and ruined by two dreadful big men, I’d better tell you that I fixed them afterward.” When I looked at her sharply, she said, “Well, did they think they could do that to somebody and not pay for it?”

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “I just told you!” Her voice was impatient. “I fixed them. They held them down for me while I did it with a knife I’d gotten in a hardware store, you know, one of those little two-bladed stockmen’s knives. I’d read up on it in a book on cattle and horses I’d found in the library there in Miami. The librarian, nosy bitch, was kind of curious about me, the crazy way my face was, reading up on a dull subject like animal husbandry. How to do it without losing a single head of livestock to hemorrhage or infection. They do it all the time to cattle and horses, you know, a very simple operation. Actually, when it came right down to doing it, it got to be kind of a ghoulish scene and I was sick in the bushes afterward, but I couldn’t ask anybody else to do it for me, could I?” She looked at me long and hard. “Now you can start the poor-little-ravished-girl routine.”

  The strange thing was that she looked so small and defenseless in the big bed, telling me about it. I hadn’t really expected anything like that, I hadn’t been braced for it, but I managed a grin to live up to my character as the tough secret agent, Superspook himself.

  “What am I supposed to be, shocked?”

  She shrugged. “I’d decided I’d better not kill them after all,” she said in conversational tones. “It wasn’t really worth spending my life in jail for; although why anybody should have to go to jail or even stand trial for ... I mean, goddamn it, it should come under the heading of public service, shouldn’t it? But the crazy way things are, whatever the verdict it would have been a mess, a public mess, and I didn’t want that. I didn’t want people knowing and looking at me funny and feeling sorry for me. I told everybody later, when I got back home to Chicago, what I’d already told them in Miami, that I’d been in a car crash and got thrown against the windshield. Doing it that way and not killing them, I figured there’d be no trouble with the police; they wouldn’t want to advertise what had been done to them, either. And I was right, nobody squawked, and it’s all taken care of now. I can forget them now. My mind can forget them. But my stupid body can’t forget them.”

  “Who did you get to help you?” I asked.

  “Somebody big and unpleasant in Miami Beach I did a favor for once, or he thought I did. I learned something and didn’t print it. Actually, it had nothing to do with what I was working on at the time so I had no reason to use it, but later he let me know he owed me. So as soon as I’d figured out what to do and researched how to do it, as soon as I could get around without crippling along like an old lady—to hell with how I still looked; that would have taken too long, actually it took months longer with the dentist and everything—I called him and said I needed three husky men and he sent them and we found them and fixed them and he doesn’t owe me any more, if he ever did. But I guess now you think I’m pretty horrible.” She said it quite flatly, watching me.

  “Horrible,” I said. “And ugly, too. Don’t forget ugly.”

  After a moment she laughed shortly. “It’s funny, I never told it to anybody else except those three musclemen who were helping me, who had a right to know why, and were guaranteed to keep their mouths shut. I even made up some story for the doctor; not that he really believed it, but I picked one who’d mind his own business. I don’t know why the hell I’m babbling it all to you.”

  I said, “That’s easy. I’m one of the few people you know who’s in no moral position to get self-righteous because you gelded a couple of jerks who raped you.” I studied her for a moment. “But you’d better make up your mind, Elly. What’s really bothering you, your guilt or your traumatic frigidity? Better concentrate on one or the other.”

  “I don’t have any guilt,” she said defiantly. “They got exactly what was coming to them. I just . . . feel kind of dirty for having done it, that’s all; I find myself wanting to wash my hands whenever I think of it. But after what they did to me, what’s a little more dirt?”

  I said, “I know, you were all soiled and spoiled already.” Anger flashed in her eyes. “Damn you, I don’t know why I picked a callous creep like you for my midnight confessions!” She stared at me with calculated malice. “And I most certainly don’t need Dr. Helmstein’s sure cure for traumatic frigidity, thanks just the same, you macho bastard!”

  I grinned. “Now you feel better, having gotten that out, don’t you?”

  “Well, it’s what you were thinking about, sitting on my bed, isn’t it?”

  “Naturally,” I said. “Wouldn’t any man, sitting on a lady’s bed at two in the morning? Do you think you can sleep now?”

  “I think you’re a phony,” she said. A sly look had come into :ier eyes. “Always boasting about fucking all these women everywhere. Hell, you’re probably impotent, really.”

  I said, “You’re not ready to play that game, Elly. And you don’t know me well enough.”

  “What game
?”

  “Actually, you’d kind of like for us to try it to see if maybe, just maybe, it will work now; but you’re scared for us to try it because it’ll be so lousy if it doesn’t. So you think if you insult me and make me mad I’ll grab you and make up your mind for you, like shoving a parachutist out of the plane who’s scared to jump.”

  There was a little silence. I saw her breasts lift sharply with her breathing, under the flowered stuff of her nightie.

  “Instant diagnosis by Dr. Helmstein?” she murmured, but now there was no malice in her voice. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m pretty obvious, aren’t I? It’s . . . such a lousy way to be crippled. I keep thinking if . . . just once with somebody I could really trust. But there’s no reason I should trust you, is there?”

  “Not any,” I said. “I’m the most untrustworthy guy you’re apt to meet. Did you trust Warren?”

  Her breath caught. “Damn you, that’s not any of your . . .” She stopped, nodded ruefully, and went on in a different tone, wryly amused, “The poor guy didn’t know what hit him. The lady’s signals were perfectly clear, he thought; and then suddenly he had this shrill, panicky wildcat in his arms. Oh, Jesus, it’s an awful way to be! I’m just telling you so you’ll be warned.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ve got a capsule if you want one to put you to sleep, but it’s not really a good idea on top of the booze.”

  She shook her head. “It’s too damned easy to get into the habit. If I ever start that, the way I’m feeling these days, I’ll never stop. I’d better just sweat it out without. Matt?”