The Revengers Page 3

  Chapter 3

  I have two culinary specialties. I’m a good guy to have around at breakfast time; I’m handy with bacon and eggs. (On the other hand, I don’t recommend my coffee to the connoisseur; I’m lazy and go the instant route. I’ve slurped down too many strange brown concoctions under conditions of considerable stress to make a religion of coffee.) At the other end of the day, if you’ve got some leftover steak or roast around, and a few boiled potatoes, and some onions, I can whip up an exotic dish my Scandinavian ancestors called pytt-i-panna. A very loose translation is put-it-in-the-pan. Put any damned thing in the pan. Hash to you.

  I was in my shirtsleeves with my funeral necktie off, concentrating on the latter delicacy, when Martha entered the kitchen after a half-hour absence. It had hit her suddenly while we were discussing the Eleanor Brand article, triggered by nothing in particular: an uncontrollable case of the weeps. She hadn’t wanted any sympathy or comfort from me. She’d apologized tearfully for being so goddamned stupid and told me to have myself another drink while she retired to chastize this dumb blubbering female severely. Now her face was washed, her hair was combed and the slight misty pinkness of her eyes was almost imperceptible. She was minus her high heels and funeral dress, and plus a pair of sandals and a long, loose, striped blue-and-green garment with the irresistible sex appeal of an umbrella tent.

  “You don’t have to do that!” she said quickly. “I’m perfectly capable—”

  “Sure you are,” I said. “The question is, am I? Let’s see how it turns out.”

  “It smells good . . . Matt.”

  “Yes.”

  She hesitated, and I saw that she was uncomfortable about something. “I hope ... I mean, what I’m trying to say . . . I didn’t mean to give you a wrong impression, if you know what I mean, dragging you inside like that. I was just putting on an act for her. I mean—”

  I grinned. Her embarrassment made it quite obvious what she meant. “You mean you don’t really want to fuck tonight.”

  She gave me an honest-to-God blush. “If we have to be so goddamned explicit, yes. I mean, no. There should be a little ... a little respect, shouldn’t there? A small period of ... of mourning. Anyway, I’m pretty damned tired and morbid.” She giggled abruptly. “You wouldn’t want me to break into tears in the middle of it, would you?”

  I said, “Actually, I wasn’t planning on laying the widow-lady right on top of the just-filled grave. But since I'm to be deprived of sex, maybe I’d better have a little more booze to console me. I think there’s some left in the martini pitcher. And then you can set the table. No heavy conversation. We’ll analyze the situation some more after we eat.”

  The hash turned out quite well, if I do say so myself. The secret is a cast-iron frying pan hot enough to turn everything brown and crusty instead of merely warming the mixed-up mess; some dexterous stirring and turning helps. Martha ate hungrily and I managed a second helping myself. The last food I’d had, if you want to strain the definition of the word, had been on TWA. Martha stopped me when I started to clear the table.

  “No, leave the dishes alone, damn you. And I’ll do the coffee. Whose house is this, anyway? You go out into the living room and sit.”

  I followed orders and started to reread the Brand article but I found it hard to concentrate. I was very much aware, in a sexless way—well, an almost sexless way—of the quiet, comfortable, undemanding house and the starry New Mexico sky outside and the pretty girl making busy noises in the kitchen. I’d had this once, even to some offspring asleep in the rear of the house. I wondered how the kids were doing and if Beth was still happy in Nevada with her rancher-husband, a pretty nice and competent guy. I don’t check on them very often. I don’t like to leave a trail that way. There are people around who’ll use almost anything against you.

  But this is a very good specimen, Mr. Helm. A little young for you, perhaps, but bright and brave, from durable and intelligent heredity, on the one side you know about, at least. Attractive to look at and, the record shows, quite a pleasant companion in bed and elsewhere. An unfortunate compulsion to save the world, perhaps, but even that seems to be subdued nowadays. Maybe she’s outgrown it. Too bad in a way, the world certainly needs it, but more comfortable to have around. All in all, a quite acceptable candidate, already well tested under rigorous conditions. And it would be pleasant to have a place like this to come back to and somebody like this to come back to, for as long as you manage to make it back at all, which presumably won’t be forever.

  But you tried it once, you gave it a good long try, and it didn’t work then, so why should it work now? And she’s a hell of a nice kid who ought to do better for herself than a sick gladiator retired from the bloody arena, or even a healthy one not yet retired. And there’s always the danger that somebody wanting to hurt you will take it out on anybody you allow to become too important to you. So you just leave her alone, hear? Anyway, he’s all right to work for, he’s very good to work for, but would you want him as a father-in-law, for God’s sake?

  I watched her come in with the coffee tray, the loose striped garment swirling around her. She set the tray down on the cocktail table, poured a cup for me and one for herself, and gave me mine. Then she settled down in her sofa corner with her feet tucked under her. We’re all supposed to be perfectly equal these days, male and female, but girls’ arms still aren’t hinged quite right to throw a baseball properly, and their legs are still articulated in a manner that allows them to assume strange catlike positions that would have a man screaming in agony in a very few minutes. It makes one wonder what other built-in inequalities women’s lib has overlooked.

  I said, “This Brand female must not be harmed, certainly not by us or by anybody who’s connected to us in any way. You can see why, can’t you? To have the publicity she’s giving us is bad enough, but we can probably live through that; we’ve done it before. But if there’s ever a suggestion that an American government agency or anybody associated with an American government agency—and you’re damned well associated, both by blood and by marriage—would take violent retaliatory action against a respected American lady journalist for something she’d published, then the people who believe as a matter of faith that all spook shops are evil and should be abolished would have a lever handed to them that would probably destroy us.”

  “She killed my husband,” Martha said softly. “Worse, she got me to help her kill him.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “We won’t know that for sure until we learn who the hit man was and who gave him his orders. If we ever do.”

  “Come on, Matt! I hope you’re not trying to convince me that a man with Bob’s background got himself shot down by a casual maniac—right after the publication of an article describing his career and giving his home address almost to the street and number. How coincidental can you get?”

  I said, “Everybody who matters already knew all that. I mean, we’ve got dossiers on practically everybody in the business; and everybody in the business has dossiers on us, at least those of us who’ve been around for a while. Do you think Moscow’s going to waste a good removal agent’s time on an opposition operative with a heart condition who’s obviously settled down harmlessly to spend the rest of his life working in his cactus garden and fishing for trout? Or Peking?”

  “Somebody he injured in the past in the line of . . . of duty, then,” Martha said stubbornly. “Somebody vengeful who’d been looking for him but might never have found him if I hadn’t opened my big mouth and Elly hadn’t printed what I said. Somebody who read that lousy article and knew that the . . . the end of the hunt was at hand.”

  “Again, maybe,” I said. “But there’s not a lot of that going around. We don’t make a practice of carrying on blood feuds, and neither does the other side, or sides. It’s the luck of the game; some live, some die. We do make a note of people outside the undercover community who interfere gratuitously. We make a point of dealing with them if and when it’s convenient. As your fath
er once said, they have to learn not to monkey with the buzz saw when it’s busy cutting wood. But within our tight little profession, no.”

  She shook her head irritably. “Pretty soon you’ll be telling me Bob didn’t die at all, I just imagined the whole thing.” She drew a long, ragged breath. “Anyway, I’m not a member of your lousy professional community; I’m just a wife wanting to get even for something awful that was done to her husband. And to her.” She grimaced. “ ‘Get even.’ It sounds so childish, doesn’t it? How can one ever get even! That would mean setting the clock back; and it doesn’t run backward. But goddamn it, Matt, she can’t go around trading on friendship and hospitality like she did and not have somebody kick her ass up between her ears.”

  I said, “Hell, if all you plan to do is boot her in the tail, be my guest.

  I thought you had something serious in mind.”

  “You mean . . . you mean like killing her?” Martha laughed heartily. “Matt, you must be kidding! I mean, really, do you think I’d go around with a gun chasing somebody down like an animal even if . . .” She stopped and made a face at me. “God, I’m such a lousy actress, and I’m so damned tired. Let me go to bed and stop making a fool of myself. You can find the guest room; it’s down the hall. Second door to the left. Bathroom, first door. Leave the dishes; I’ll get them in the morning.” She rose, and I rose, and she hesitated, facing me. “If you really . . . I wouldn’t want to think of you suffering or anything. After all, it’s not as if we’d never done it before.”

  I grinned. “Therapeutic, you mean? Thanks, I’ll survive.”

  “Don’t say that so positively. I might get the idea that I’m not irresistible. Good night, Matt.”

  Chapter 4

  I carried my jacket, tie, and suitcase back to the room she’d indicated. As a pro, I like to case the terrain in advance of the operation if possible, even if the operation only involves going to bed. I laid out my pajamas for future reference and got out the file Mac had given me, for immediate study. The room was small, with a small bed, and a good-sized loom set up against one wall along with some auxiliary equipment I didn’t understand; apparently Martha had taken up weaving as a hobby. It’s a recognized Santa Fe syndrome. We’re all frustrated artists or artisans here.

  I checked out the little hall bathroom on the way back to the living room, and used it. The plumbing worked. As if in answer I heard her flush another, similar device elsewhere in the house. It gave me a cozy and companionable feeling. In the living room I laid down the file, picked up my coffee cup, carried it to the picture window and parted the curtains to look out. It was a quiet night in the moderately high-class development known as Casa Glorieta. No traffic at the moment. There were lights in the house across the road but the picture window was covered and no sleek blondes were visible. A sturdy, four-wheel-drive vehicle was now parked in the wide driveway in front of the double garage: the fancy Jeep station wagon called Wagoneer. Well, most two-car families out here have at least one tough vehicle for hunting, fishing, or just taking the kids to school on a snowy day. There was probably something more civilized in the garage for the lady of the house to drive to the grocery and bridge club when the weather was good.

  The sight of the husky vehicle reminded me of my own personal transportation, another hefty station wagon on a Chevy 4WD half-ton-truck chassis, known as a carryall. I told myself that for the sake of the government that was paying the bills I ought to get it out of storage and turn in the expensive rental job I’d grabbed for my dash up here from Albuquerque. The airlines don’t fly to Santa Fe; you have to drive the last sixty miles or take the bus. (Not even the Santa Fe Railroad goes to Santa Fe; the town is serviced by a spur from the main line at Lamy.) I soothed my conscience by telling it that I probably wouldn’t be staying long enough for Avis to break the expense account.

  I let the window drapes fall back into place, took my cup into the kitchen and refilled it. I carried it back into the living room, sat down and dumped the contents of my big envelope onto the cocktail table. The Eleanor Brand article, my copy, was on top. I’d read the piece once, hastily, on the plane, and once more here with Martha watching me; now I settled down to give it a careful study without distractions. It was a thorough job. The girl reporter had dug up a lot of stuff, more than Martha could possibly have told her about. Active or retired, well or ill, Bob would never have confided in his wife to this extent; and Mac was certainly not one to whisper state secrets into his daughter’s ear. Obviously, Martha’s information had simply been used as a springboard for further research. Well, Freedom of Information is the name of the game these days. There was even a brief description of that ancient South American safari on which I’d made the useful acquaintance of chatty, friendly, little Rafaelita. My name was mentioned with a hint that I was an interestingly murderous chap whose gory history would be presented in detail in a later installment of this startling and revealing series.

  So Miss Eleanor Brand, or Ms. Eleanor Brand as she undoubtedly called herself these liberated days, was a skillful researcher, a pretty fair writer, and an indignant lady who’d grabbed, so to speak, the torch of nonviolent idealism from Martha’s faltering hand. She was also, it seemed, a fairly ruthless bitch who didn’t give a damn whom she betrayed or hurt or got killed in pursuit of her journalistic career. Well, considering the nature of my own career, I was hardly in a position to criticize.

  There was a picture of her down in one comer of the first page, and a small biographical blurb. Ms. Brand was twenty-seven years old, a graduate of Smith with a master’s in journalism from Columbia. She’d worked for a number of publications I’d heard of and some I hadn’t. She’d won some kind of a prize that meant nothing to me since it wasn’t either the Nobel or the Pulitzer. Currently she was down in the near-Caribbean acquiring a suntan and doing research on a projected article on the Bermuda Triangle.

  I frowned at that. It didn’t seem in character. I’d been exposed to that Triangle legend myself in the course of one assignment, and it didn’t seem like anything for this competent and cynical young woman to get her sharp little teeth into. I mean, hell, either you proclaim breathlessly that it’s all true, true, true, and there are sinister and unearthly forces at work here beyond our comprehension—and that’s been done. Or you announce coldly that careful scientific research proves conclusively that it’s all a lot of melodramatic superstitious crap—and that’s been done, too. This was a girl who obviously liked to find shocking new grist for her typewriting mill. Why was she wasting her valuable time on a bunch of old missing ships and disappearing airplanes that had already been exploited to the puking point and beyond?

  Studying the photograph, I decided that the original family name could not really be Brand or even Brandt. It was not an Anglo-Saxon or Germanic face. The head was brachycephalic rather than dolichocephalic. In other words, it was wide and short from front to back rather than long and narrow like, for instance, my own Scandinavian skull. She wore her straight darkish hair quite short, parted on one side and combed across to the other. Her face was wide and flat with a long thin mouth, a short bony chin, and a low snub nose. The eyes were set well apart but the sparse brows and lashes didn’t do much for them, and she obviously didn’t take the trouble to prettify them in any way.

  There was no way to describe her and make her sound particularly attractive. Her features, at a glance, were unspectacularly shaped and uninterestingly arranged. It was the pushed-in face of a clever and determined female monkey rather than the shining visage of an intelligent and lovely girl. Still, I had an uneasy feeling that if Ms. Brand ever came to the conclusion that you were worth it personally, or particularly if she thought you had something she wanted, or knew something she wanted to know, you might suddenly find yourself deciding that you had nothing against female monkeys after all—that, in fact, they were really rather charming creatures in an offbeat way. . .

  Well, that was a lot to read into a photograph hardly larger than a postage
stamp; and enough of Eleanor Brand. She wasn’t the only researcher around. I found a copy of the police report on Devine, Robert, deceased. The shotgun had been fired at slightly under thirty yards. A single twelve-gauge Magnum case had been found nearby—the short two-and-three-quarter-inch Magnum, not the long three-incher, which requires a specially chambered gun and is more shell than most hunters need. It had originally been loaded with Number One buckshot, a pretty good choice for a target the size of a deer or a man, although it’s Double-Ought buck that gets all the glory. Fourteen pellets of the load of twenty had struck the body. Eleven had been found in the course of the autopsy. The other three had been peripheral or glancing hits that kept on going after leaving their marks. Well, eleven solid hits with practically anything would certainly do the job. I once knew a man, hunting quail during deer season, who jumped a good-sized buck and dropped him dead with a fairly light load of fine birdshot. I frowned at the report for a while and glanced at an accompanying photograph, taken at the scene—Mac had apparently pulled strings to get total police cooperation. But it wasn’t a picture I cared to study at any length; it had nothing to do with a guy with whom I’d once visited a Colombian cathouse.

  I put all the materials back into the envelope and sipped my cooling coffee thoughtfully. Martha seemed to be asleep; I’d heard nothing from her room for half an hour. I picked up the coffee tray and carried it into the kitchen and, like a good house guest, rinsed off all the dinner dishes and loaded them into the washer while she was unavailable to lodge a protest. Besides making me feel virtuous, it killed some more time. Then I went into the guest room and, with a regretful glance at my pajamas, changed my clothes. I got into jeans, a navy-blue turtle-neck and a pair of soft, rubber-soled shoes. I dug the little five-shot Smith and Wesson out of the hidden compartment of my suitcase, checked the loads, and tucked it into my waistband, letting the shirt hang down over it. The metal was cold against my skin. I checked the little knife I always carry. I turned out the guest room, weaving room light, went back to the kitchen and started the dishwasher. The rushing and rumbling sounds of the machine apparently did not disturb Martha at the other end of the house; at least she did not come running to complain about my presumption in doing her dishes in her home. I set the latch of the kitchen door so I could get back in, and slipped outside with the noise of the washer to cover my stealthy exit.