The Silencers Read online

“How responsible?” I asked.

  He laughed. “Well, I’ll tell you, we have a set fee for escort work, of course, by the day or hour, but you’ve been a good client. If you’ll just buy me a steak at La Fiesta, I’ll go up the street with you afterwards and make sure everything goes okay.”

  “Well—” I made a show of hesitating.

  LeBaron said, quickly and understanding, “Not that I don’t think you’re perfectly capable of taking care of yourself, haha, Mr. Helm, but I probably know Juarez a little better than you do. I’ll pick you up at eight.”

  At eight on the dot, he called me on the house phone. I took the elevator down to the lobby. A short, sturdy, dark young man got off a sofa and came up to me. For all the width of his shoulders, he had a sleek, patent-leather gigolo look. He had dead-white skin and brown eyes. I’m a transplanted Scandinavian myself, and I have an instinctive mistrust of brown-eyed people, which I admit is perfectly ridiculous.

  “Mr. Helm?” he said, holding out his hand. “I’m Pat LeBaron. I’m real pleased to meet you in person, after all the dealings we’ve had by mail and phone.”

  I murmured something appropriate, took his hand and gave him the little-finger signal we have, the one that confirms recognition and, at the same time, tells the other guy who’s running the show. His eyes narrowed slightly at my immediate assertion of authority, but he gave me the proper response. We stood like that for a moment, taking stock.

  No brotherly love flowed between us in that moment. It never does. It’s only in the movies that people in the business are partners unto death, linked by iron bonds of friendship and loyalty. In real life, even if your assigned assistant is someone you might like a lot, you damn well don’t let yourself. Why bother to get fond of a guy, when you may have to sacrifice him ruthlessly within the hour?

  There seems to be a theory among modern business organizations that a man has got to love all his fellow workers in order to cooperate with them. Mac, thank God, has never made this mistake of confusing affection with efficiency. He knows he’d never get a bunch of happy, friendly guys to do the kind of work that we’re doing, the way it’s got to be done.

  He pointed out to me once, in this regard, that the Three Musketeers and their pal D’Artagnan were no doubt a swell bunch of fellows, and that the relationship between them was a beautiful thing, but that when you studied the record you came to the sad conclusion that Louis XIII would have got a lot more for his money, militarily speaking, by hiring four surly swordsmen who wouldn’t give each other the time of day.

  So I didn’t worry when LeBaron and I didn’t take to each other on sight. He was a trained man, I was a trained man, and we had a job to do. I could always find some other guy to get drunk with, afterwards.

  “The car’s out front,” he said, releasing my hand. “If you don’t mind, we’ll walk from the bridge. Things sometimes happen to American cars parked in Juarez at night. It’s bad enough leaving it on this side.”

  “Whatever you say, Mr. LeBaron,” I said.

  “Hell, call me Pat.”

  “Pat and Matt,” I said, as we went outside. “It sounds like a comedy team.”

  He laughed heartily. “Hey, that’s a good one, Mr. Helm... I mean, Matt. I’ll have to remember to tell my wife.”

  He drove us to the bridge in a blue year-old Chevy sedan and parked it in a lot under one of the long sheds that keeps the sun in summertime from turning your car into an oven. Not that Juarez, or El Paso, either, is much of a place to go in summer. Last July, when I was in Juarez, the temperature was a hundred and twenty in the shade.

  We both paid our two cents, crossed the bridge and walked through the carnival atmosphere of Avenida Juarez. The short block to the nightclub was darker, quieter and less reassuring. Going into La Fiesta, we were set upon by taxi drivers who wanted to take us elsewhere, now or later.

  “Cab number five,” one man kept shouting. “Hey, mister! Cab number five!”

  LeBaron nudged me lightly. I glanced surreptitiously towards the yelling driver, a dark individual with a strong Indian cast to his features. Then we were inside.

  Even though I’d been there before, years ago, it was something of a shock, after the gaudy front of the building and the sidewalk hubbub, to be standing suddenly on thick carpeting in a place as hushed and elegant as a good Eastern or European restaurant.

  “You saw Jesus?” LeBaron asked softly. He pronounced the name Haysoos, in the Spanish manner. “If we get in a jam, he’ll try to bail us out.”

  “Good enough,” I said.

  He started to say something else, but the headwaiter came up, bowed and showed us to a small table at the side of the room. LeBaron ordered bourbon whiskey, specifying the brand. I’m always tempted to switch bottles on a guy like that, to see if he can really tell the difference. I ordered a Martini and had another on top of it. No more Margaritas for Mr. Matthew Helm from California. He was no longer in an experimental mood. He was fortifying himself for the ordeal ahead with liberal portions of a known tipple.

  As far as I could see, I could have ordered milk or prune juice, and it would have made no difference. Nobody around us showed the slightest interest.

  “Is anybody watching this show, do you know?” I asked. “Or are we just performing to an empty theater?”

  “We’re just doing it for fun,” LeBaron said, “unless I’ve goofed somewhere along the line. In which case we’re still just private dick and client.”

  He had the tough and unreliable look, I thought, of a pool-hall character, and his clothes were flashy enough to point up the resemblance. Well, we can’t all look like G-men. He was supposed to be a private investigator, after all, and it’s not the most respectable profession in the world.

  “How long have you been using this private-eye cover?” I asked.

  “Three years,” he said. “My wife thinks the government check that comes through once a month is a disability pension from the Veterans’ Administration. That’s the way it’s marked. Well, it’s none of her damn business. She’s glad enough to get the money and spend it, too.”

  “Sure.”

  “Before that, I was in the insurance business in San Francisco. Same deal. Piddle along at a lousy little job until the phone rings and a voice tells you to drop everything... Well, you know how it is.”

  I nodded, although I didn’t really know. I’d never had this kind of long-term standby duty. There had been a war on when I joined the organization, and they broke us in fast. The waiter came up. I ordered steak because that was the safe and conservative thing Mr. Helm from California would order tonight. LeBaron ordered steak, too, but he couldn’t just say medium rare, he had to make like a gourmet, describing the exact shade of pink he expected to greet his first exploratory incision with the knife.

  Waiting for him to finish briefing the waiter, I watched a couple come in and sit near the dance floor. The woman was quite pretty, with soft light-brown hair done in one of those big, loose, haystack arrangements currently fashionable. Her gleaming light-blue cocktail dress was cut very simply and fitted very nicely indeed; the little fur jacket she casually shrugged back was of a pale golden color no animal had ever heard of when I was a kid, but they can get a mink to do the damndest things these days.

  In contrast to her smart and attractive appearance, the man looked as if he’d dressed for roping cows—boots, stagged pants, checked gingham shirt, suede sports jacket. He was one of those tall, hipless Texas characters who always act as if they’d mislaid a horse somewhere— that is, until you get them out into the back country and show them a real pony with an honest-to-God saddle on it, and it turns out they were never closer to one than in the nearest jeep.

  The two of them showed no more interest in us than did anyone else in the place, but something about the woman kept drawing my attention their way. When LeBaron had completed his gustatory arrangements, I gave him the signal, and after a while he turned around casually and looked. He turned back to me and gave the ne
gative sign: he’d never seen her before. Well, that was all right for him, but I’d been something of a photographer once, for a good many years. Faces had been my business, and this one meant something to me, I wasn’t quite sure what.

  “Not that I’d mind having a piece of it,” he said, seeing me still looking that way.

  I brought my eyes back where they belonged. “Yeah,” I said. “Sure. Not bad at all.”

  I mean, with a certain type of guy, you’ve got to pretend to be Ieching after every woman in sight or he’ll think you’re not normal. It turned out that my new assistant was one of those who, having once started, could discuss the subject indefinitely. I’d had a long day and several drinks, and I found it hard to keep from yawning. Not that sex itself bores me, you understand, but talking about it just seems like a pointless form of masturbation.

  Presently the waiter shut him up by presenting us with our steaks. The orchestra began to play. It was a typical Mexican band, built around a single strident trumpet with power enough to knock you across the room. When Gabriel blows his horn, nobody in Mexico is going to pay any attention—they’ll think it’s only Pedro or Miguel practicing for the evening’s mariachi performance.

  A sleek Latin-type male sang a song about his corazón. In case you’re not up on your Spanish, that’s his heart. A very blonde girl in a spangled black dress did some singing, too, as she danced around the floor with the mike, kicking the cord aside when it got in her way. A man in a dinner jacket came out and was funny with a xylophone.

  That was it for the floor show. By then it was ten-fifteen and time to go.

  4

  Outside, we ran the gantlet of taxi drivers and shills and the porteros of the various joints we passed who did their best to collar us and haul us into their respective establishments. A tall, gaunt, evil-looking character with a knife-slash across his nose was playing safety man for the Club Chihuahua. We let him make the tackle. It took him less than fifteen seconds to get us seated at a table in a dark room with a bar at one end and a girl undressing on a lighted stage at the other.

  The stage was actually a rectangular, slightly raised dance floor surrounded by tables on three sides. At the far end was a curtain, an orchestra, a mike and a master of ceremonies.

  “All the way, Corinne!” the M.C. was shouting into the mike. He pronounced the name Coreen. “All the way!” The girl was quite young, quite dark and had a sultry, childish look. Doing a little dance step in time to the music, she dropped her long, confining red dress, constructed so as not to make this operation particularly difficult. Then she did a rudimentary dance with some veils floating from her waistband. Flicking them teasingly at the ringside customers, she disposed of these also. This left her barefoot—she’d already shed her red high-heeled shoes— and in a red satin brassiere and little red satin panties with the approximate coverage of a Bikini bathing suit.

  “Jeez, look at that kid!” said LeBaron admiringly. “She can’t be a day over sixteen, but jeez!”

  I said, “You must have had it tough, keeping an eye on this place.”

  He glanced at me. “Don’t knock it just because you don’t dig it, man. So I like to look at girls. It’s a crime?” He looked past me. “Uh-oh. Here come the bags.”

  The portero was ushering a couple of women out of the shadows to sit with us. Mine wasn’t too bad—a full-blown dark lady in a short, tight gun-metal gray dress with a little jacket—but LeBaron’s prize was swarthy and heavy, not to say fat, with a rough sweater and skirt on that made her look like a female wrestler.

  “Hi, boys,” LeBaron’s girl said. “I am Elena. This is Dolores.”

  LeBaron performed the introductions from our side. The women sat down, and we ordered drinks which were put on the table almost before we said the word.

  “All the way!” the M.C. was shouting. “Take it off! All the way, Corinne!”

  The girl was still dancing barefoot around the stage— if you could call it dancing. She was a well-built kid, I had to admit, and she seemed to be enjoying herself, which was nice.

  My lady, Dolores, stroking the back of my neck affectionately, was watching the show. “She is India— Indian. You do not have to hurry with your drink, honee. I will not hurry with mine. You will see. This is a friendly place, not a robbery like some of those others.”

  The dusky young girl on the stage unhooked her red brassiere, snatched it off and ducked behind the curtains, waving it and laughing.

  “A child,” Dolores said scornfully. “She cannot dance; she cannot sing; all she can do is walk around and take off the clothes. When I was of that age—”

  “Where are you from, Dolores?” I asked.

  “Chihuahua City, but there is no money there. Here I can still make thirty-five cents a drink. It is a living...”

  Busy making conversation, I’d missed the M.C. introducing the next performer. I’d been listening for the name, of course, but he threw me off momentarily by pronouncing it Leela in the Spanish way. Suddenly she was there, the curtains stirring behind her then becoming still.

  After the solidly built young Indian girl who’d preceded her, she looked seven feet tall. She wore a yellow satin dress that left her shoulders bare but encased her smoothly from breasts to knees, flaring below to give her a little room to move. Her hair had been dyed black since I’d last seen her. It made her look harder and older than I remembered her.

  “All the way, Lila!” the M.C. shouted. “Take it off! All the way!”

  She saw us at once, even though our table was at the back of the floor, and almost broke step. I saw the quick apprehension in her eyes. She might not recognize LeBaron, if he’d been careful, but she’d seen me before, and she’d know I wasn’t here with help just to take in her act.

  I saw her recognize me, and I saw her remember the time I’d made her remove her clothes in a different place, for a different purpose, embarrassing her terribly. A funny little rueful look came to her face at the memory; she might have been regretting a lost innocence. Then she was at the corner, making her turn gracefully along the edge of the floor, using that trained walk I’d noticed— the walk of a high-fashion model, just a little exaggerated and done in time to the music. It was funny to see it in a dive like this.

  “Jeez,” LeBaron said loudly, “that’s a lot of mouse, man. There’s six feet of her, if there’s an inch.” His elbow nudged me. “Identification okay?” he whispered.

  “Okay.”

  “I wasn’t quite sure,” he whispered, “from the pix. She was the right height and all that, in the right place, but I wasn’t, you know, positive with that hair, and I wasn’t supposed to risk trying for fingerprints or anything. Washington said you’d confirm. We don’t want to get the wrong one. Jeez, that would be something, wouldn’t it? Hauling a kicking, spitting Mex dancer across the international border!” He laughed at the thought then and stopped. “Okay, so all we have to do is wrap her up and take her home. The loving husband claiming his errant wife; get ready to make with the dialogue. She’ll come out and mingle with the customers as soon as she’s finished her act—that is, unless she panics and beats it.”

  “Do we have any orders in that case?”

  “Jesus will try to pick her up outside and see where she comes to rest.” He nudged again. “Behind you, when you get the chance. Company... What is it, Elena?”

  The fat woman jerked her head towards the tall slender girl on the stage. “Americano,” she said scornfully. “No tetas. American women have no tetas.”

  “Tetas?” I said, puzzled. Mr. Helm from California wouldn’t speak much Spanish. “What’s that?”

  Fat Elena jerked up her sweater and showed me what it was. LeBaron laughed heartily.

  “Tetas,” he said. “You know, like tits. Cover them up, baby...”

  He touched me again with his elbow to remind me, and after a moment I looked around casually. There were tall Mr. Texas with his high-heeled boots and his pretty companion with her mutation minks and hayst
ack hairdo. It seems like a hell of a place to bring your girl friend, was my first thought. But what could you expect from a guy who’d take a girl out to dinner dressed for a rodeo?

  The woman was watching the stage with stiff fascination. I looked that way again. Sarah, Lila—or was it Mary Jane?—had made her circuit once. Coming back towards us, along the edge of the floor, with an undulating, rhythmic walk, she looked suddenly very young despite her height and the dyed hair and the sexy satin dress—tall and young and kind of scared—but she did not falter. She swung a hip towards a table full of Mexicans and slipped past smoothly, laughing, before they could touch her. She reached out and rumpled the hair of an American tourist, retrieving her hand gracefully before he could seize it.

  “All the way, Lila!” somebody shouted from the back of the room.

  She smiled. The bloodhounds might be on her trail, but she was going to do her stuff regardless. The kid had guts. Well, I knew that. She’d tried to jump me, the time we’d got our identities confused in San Antonio. I’d been holding two guns at the time, like Wild Bill Hickok, but she’d jumped me anyway.

  “All the way!” the M.C. yelled, and the loud-speakers threw his voice at us from the dark recesses of the room. “All the way, baybee!”

  She made her corner and passed across the front of the stage, swinging away from us. Her back turned toward us, she reached up and did something feminine and provocative with her hair, teasing, before she reached for the zipper. As the yellow dress opened from top to bottom, baring her back, a knife, coming from nowhere, buried itself to the hilt just below her left shoulder blade.

  5

  I made no apologies for letting it happen. My job wasn’t to protect her life, it was to get her out of an awkward situation alive or dead. I’d made sure that my instructions were quite clear on that point. If I’d been sent to preserve her from bodily harm, I’d have run the whole thing differently, and Mac would undoubtedly have worded his orders differently.

  I heard two quick warning whistles, barely audible, from LeBaron, meaning watch at your right (three means on your left and one means behind you), but I’d been in this business longer than he, and I’d already taken care of Dolores. Maybe she was just a nice friendly girl from Chihuahua City, but she’d been planted on us by the management and I wasn’t taking any chances. She folded when I clipped her, and I laid her head gently on the table, tucked a five-dollar bill into the front of her dress by way of apology and looked around.