The Threateners Page 9

  Like a butterfly on a pin, the girl was still hanging there, both hands clutching the hilt of the enormous bowie that transfixed her. To hell with her. Mark was dead. Madeleine was either unconscious or dead; at least she wasn’t hurting at the moment. I went to my dog, who was.

  Happy was still trying to get to me, but his rear legs weren’t working. He was badly cut up and his thick yellow coat was bloody. His soft brown eyes were asking me why anybody would do this to a good hunting dog who’d never hurt anybody, not even a duck. He’d stopped whimpering; he was licking my hand instead. His back was obviously broken. I started to reach for the. 381’d put away, but I found I couldn’t do it that loud and brutal way. I patted his head and went into my shattered house and managed to find the little kit we carry on duty. I loaded the spring-operated hypo with the red capsule that kills men instantly, hoping it would work as well on a dog. I went back and let him lick my hand some more and scratched his ears gently and talked to him a little. Never mind what I said; that’s between the two of us. The red capsule worked just fine.

  Then it was very quiet in the blasted patio. When the rough tongue had stopped licking my hand, I rose and made certain that Madeleine wasn’t breathing. It should have meant something to me, it should have meant a great deal, but it didn’t. In this business you lose people; it goes with the territory. This wasn’t the first loss I’d ever sustained; and I knew there was only one way to deal with it: don’t. Pull down the riot shutters and seal it off. Don’t think about what could have been. Don’t think about the fact that if you hadn’t been too stubborn or proud or stupid to go to her when you learned she was free, the two of you might have had at least a couple of good years together, and maybe . . .

  The girl with the knife through her suddenly tumbled to the ground, but the blade had merely pulled out of the wood of the fence; she was dead, too. Everybody was dead but me. Maybes were a waste of time, I told myself firmly. Sirens were beginning to scream in the distance. Suddenly, guiltily, I remembered something: they wouldn’t have come for Mark at last if they hadn’t worked out a plan for dealing with his notes and tapes. I hurried into the house and found that the phone still worked. I called the same number I’d called earlier in the day and drew a long breath when the same young-girl voice answered.

  “Andrea? Do you recognize my voice? I talked to you earlier.”

  “Yes, I recognize you. You’re Mr. Helm, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right. Your daddy has a message for you. Take your little sister and get out of the house and run away. A couple of blocks away, at least. If you have a place you like to hide away from home, go there.”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Helm. Why would we have a place to hide?"’

  In my day every kid had a favorite cave or bush or tree or old shack in the neighborhood that was his own place that nobody knew, but I suppose they don’t wander so freely around the countryside, or cityside, these civilized days.

  “Never mind,” I said. “Just get out of there. Some bad people are coming, Andrea. Take your sister and get out. Pretty soon you’ll hear sirens and see police cars. Then you can go up to a policeman and tell him who you are. Okay?”

  “I don’t understand. . . . Oh, okay, if that’s what Popsy wants.”

  "That’s what he wants.”

  I stood there for a moment, not wanting to go out back again. I’m pretty hardened to dead people, even dead people I’ve loved, but dead dogs kind of get to me. I waited for anger, but it didn’t come. What was there to be angry about? The girl who’d thrown the grenade was dead; there was no point in getting mad at her. The man who’d killed Mark Steiner had got away, but Mark hadn’t been a good enough friend that I felt obliged to work up a rage at his murderer. There was, of course, work to be done, but cursing and beating the wall with my fists wouldn’t get it done any fester or better, so I stood in my living room smelling dust and explosives, realizing that I was in the wrong place. What am I doing here? I asked myself. What the hell am I doing here?

  What was I doing there, a guy like me, in my line of work; what was I doing with a rose garden, and a pretty little house with a burglar alarm, for God’s sake, and Sunday-morning target games with a .22, and a dog who loved everybody but the UPS man . . . ? Who the hell did I think I was, Joe Average Citizen?

  I realized that I’d been sneaking up on it again, the normal life that I’d tried once before, years ago, until it blew up in my face. Nobody I loved had been badly hurt that time; my wife had simply done the smart thing and left me, taking the kids with her. She’d realized then, as I had, that I was simply the wrong man trying to live the wrong life.

  But I seemed to have forgotten the lesson I’d learned back then, so many years ago. I’d made myself a pleasant and peaceful little nest here; I’d even begun to give serious consideration to sharing it with a certain woman, a woman I’d asked once before. Now she was lying out in the patio, shrapnel-torn and dead, and my dog was dead with a broken back, and my cozy refuge had been blown wide open. It was very unfair to Madeleine and Happy, but it served me right for trying to be something I wasn’t and could never become.

  The sirens were closing in. I went out to open the gate for the police.

  Chapter 9

  We hung out over Dallas, Texas, for a while, or maybe it was Fort Worth, or maybe both, waiting for a thunderstorm to pass so we could land at the airport they share, called DFW. Meanwhile I tried to digest my American Airlines lunch, with some difficulty—those rocket-propelled flying coffins are bad enough when they’re traveling in straight lines in clear weather; when they start wandering in circles through a sky full of dirty absorbent cotton, they don’t do my gastric processes a bit of good. Besides, the lunch had consisted mainly of a salad of some kind of cold pasta that looked like curly white maggots. There had also been a chunk of wooden brownie for dessert, mahogany by the color. Fortunately, I’d managed to promote, for three bucks, a miniature of J&B to help it all down.

  Landing on a wet runway, with the storm still black in the distance, we taxied halfway across Texas to the gate, and then hiked, it seemed, the rest of the way over into Louisiana to pick up our connecting AA flight to Miami. I’d assumed that continuing on the same airline would make the plane-change easy; there was also a time when I believed in Santa Claus. Airborne again, we were treated to a snack consisting of a tough little breadroll surrounding some sliced ham. I helped it down with another three-buck dose of J&B.

  Having done some flying over water, presumably the Gulf of Mexico, we found land again and started losing altitude over jungly-looking terrain that I guessed to be the Everglades. We swung out over more water, presumably the Florida straits, curved back over the land, settled down onto another runway—dry this time—and taxied another fifty miles, more or less, to find a gate. Those jets seem to cover almost as much distance on the ground these days as they do in the air. Not to mention the mileage the passengers have to rack up on foot inside the interminable terminals.

  Reaching the baggage-claim area in Miami involved a typical airport exercise in pedestrian endurance, aggravated by the fact that we were both lugging the sizable carry-on bags that had been issued to us, baby blue with black lettering: WESTON WORLD TOURS. They were fairly heavily loaded, mine mostly with tourist camouflage in the form of camera gear and film. I had no idea what was in my companion’s. She’d refused to let me help her with her burden, telling me to restrain my condescending male chivalry; she was quite capable of managing her own belongings, thank you.

  The wait at the carousels was, as usual, considerable. When our patience was rewarded at last with two suitcases that matched the claim checks, I hired a gent with a uniform cap and a trolley, at an exorbitant price, to trundle our luggage to the centrally located airport hotel called MIA, not to sleep—the longest leg of the journey was still ahead of us— but just to kill time until we had to report for jet duty again, and to further indulge my alcoholic proclivities, in the rooftop restaurant and
lounge that had been recommended to me by someone, I forget who. It seemed quite pleasant, but then, after a day in the air almost any place firmly attached to the earth would have.

  “Do you really think you should?”

  The woman on the far side of the cocktail table was watching me tackle my latest Scotch. I spread some cheese on a cracker and offered it to her.

  “Have some Brie,” I said. “Keep your strength up. We’re supposed to take off again at nine p.m., but it’ll probably be close to midnight before they get around to feeding us dinner.”

  Ruth Steiner accepted my offering, but said stiffly, “Thank you, Mr. Helm, but I’m quite familiar with the schedule. I’ve made this flight before, many times. My first husband was stationed in Rio for several years. He was in the Foreign Service. But you know that.”

  "Yes, Mark told me.” I picked up my glass again and got the same pained expression as before. I said patiently, ‘ ‘Look, ma’am, what’s your problem? It’s not as if I’ll have to drive this DC-10 or whatever the hell it is we’ll be inhabiting next. Varig’s got a nice sober young chap in a natty uniform to operate it for us, I’m sure. If I want to go along for the ride slightly anesthetized, why not? As far as I’m concerned, it’s the only way to travel by air. ”

  Looking across the table, I decided that skinny, big-eyed blondes with ragged hairdos and big spectacles were not my favorite people. I gathered, from her expression, that she didn’t think much of me, either. If there had ever been a chance of our becoming soul mates, it had vanished when I whacked her with a shotgun butt. There was still a small scab at the top of her left ear. I could see no other evidence of the blow she’d taken, although there could be some fading cranial bruises covered by her hair. It was one way of getting acquainted with a lady, but it hardly made for a warm relationship.

  “Well, you’ll just have to get along with her anyway, Eric,” Mac had said when I mentioned the problem.

  He'd summoned me to Washington after using his clout to get things settled in Santa Fe. They’d taken quite a bit of settling. The fact that the man I’d almost decapitated with my king-size presentation bowie had been trying to crack my neck with a Thuggee scarf, and that the girl I’d skewered with the same giant blade—that Jo had given me as a joke and a wall decoration, never expecting a knife that size to be used in anger—had been about to blow herself and me to hell with a fragmentation grenade, had helped with the police, of course, but it had still been a considerable circus. The murder of a fairly well known author with a price on his head placed there by a kingpin of the drug trade would have been big news even without the gaudy trimmings.

  “How far along with her do I have to get?” I’d asked.

  Mac frowned. The bright window behind him that he likes to make us stare into made his expression a bit hard to read, but I’d had lots of practice; we’d faced each other across that desk more times than I cared to remember. His hair was no grayer than it had ever been, and his eyebrows were no less black. I couldn’t see that he’d aged significantly in the years that had passed since we’d first worked together. There were playful rumors around the place to the effect that he’d sold his soul in return for eternal life, but I didn’t believe a word of it. What soul?

  He spoke carefully: “It seems that the lady knows where some needed information is located. It also seems that the South American contacts that will enable us to obtain that information cannot be made without her.”

  I said, “Do I gather that contrary to what appeared on the evening news, Mark Steiner’s new book and all related materials did not perish when his house went up like a torch?”

  Mac looked surprised. “Didn’t Mrs. Steiner tell you?”

  I said, “After things quieted down a bit she called me on the phone and asked me how to get in touch with you—well, with the head of my agency. I gathered she was disenchanted with Dennis Morton and his bunch of undercover clowns. I didn’t try to find out what was on her mind. She still had a headache I’d given her, and her husband had died in my house. I figured I probably wasn’t one of her favorite people and I’d just antagonize her by asking questions; I’d better leave her to you.”

  Mac nodded. “You’re aware that the man you knew as Mark Steiner, who wrote under the pseudonym of Marcus Piedra, was actually Raoul Marcus Carrera Mascarena, scion of a fairly prominent Peruvian family. After all the political upheavals in the area they are not as outrageously wealthy as they used to be, but they could still afford a good U.S. education for young Marcus. It didn’t please them, however, when he left Harvard to study journalism in Columbia, Missouri; they wanted a Harvard MBA in the family to manage their remaining interests profitably. And they certainly did not applaud when he began investigating the various South American drug combines for different publications, and publishing his findings. I do not believe his family was actually involved with drags, but in those countries there’s an elite that continues to exist by accommodating itself to power according to certain rules, the main one being: one survives. One does not antagonize the dictator, or the junta, or the generals, or the drug lords. One does not necessarily make friends with them or entertain them socially, one may disapprove of them, one may even sneer at them in private as crude peasants, but one does not go out of the way to attack them publicly as Marcus did.”

  It seemed strange that now that he was dead, I was getting to know more about the man I’d called Mark Steiner than I’d ever known while he was alive. I’d been aware of his Latin origins, of course, but his English had been good, and as I’d told him, it isn’t something you pay much attention to in New Mexico, where half the people you meet have the same accent and ancestry. I’d wondered what he did for a living, but I’d never got around to asking, perhaps because I hadn’t wanted him to ask me the same question. It had surprised me to learn that he was a writer; it had surprised me even more to discover that he was kind of a celebrity.

  I said, “I don’t suppose his family was any more enthusiastic about his marriage than about his career; they’d undoubtedly have preferred to welcome a high-class Peruvian girl into the fold. However, families tend to be kind of clannish down there, and you can’t kill one of them, even an unpopular one, without taking a big chance of starting a blood feud.”

  Mac said, “Mrs. Steiner made the same point, indirectly. She seems to feel that she may be able to get some useful assistance from her relatives by marriage and their contacts in other South American countries, now that her husband has been murdered, even though they disapproved of the marriage while he was alive.”

  “Useful assistance in doing what?” I asked.

  He said, obliquely, “Like many modem households, the Steiner menage included a personal computer. I gather it was used entirely by the lady, mostly as a word processor. Steiner wrote his stuff on an old portable and she transcribed it on her machine, which used the small three-and-a-half-inch computer disks—I believe they are also called diskettes. Mrs. Steiner says that knowing that he was in danger, whenever he finished a certain number of chapters of his book, he would have her copy them onto an extra disk, encrypted a certain way—I gather many computer programs have provisions for such security measures. He would then put the disk into a protective mailer and send it to a friend in South America, a different friend each time. Apparently these friends were not given the access code or password that would let them read the disks; they were simply asked to keep them safe.” Mac shook his head grimly. “While Mrs. Steiner thinks she can remember the names of many of her husband’s South American friends, she has no idea which of them he trusted enough to look after these precious fractions of his magnum opus. Incidentally, she says he sent the last one off last week; the book was finished, except for an appendix he was working on, and of course the final revision and polishing.”

  I said, “You’d think Mark would have kept a master list to remind him, if he should need them, which chapters he’d sent where.”

  “He probably did,” Mac said. “It was p
robably hidden somewhere in the house; but you saw the house.”

  I had certainly seen the house, although getting to it had taken some doing. The first contingent of cops that had descended on me had been bound they were going to arrest me for something, since there was nobody else for them to clap their cuffs on—nobody living, at least. And I was the man whose house had been blown up, whose lady friend had been killed, whose dog had been so hopelessly injured as to require euthanasia. Naturally, by police logic, I had to be guilty of something, if only of the heinous crime of self-defense, since there were a couple of extra stiffs lying around.

  It had taken me a while to persuade them to take me, under escort, to 22 Butterwood Road on the south side of town.

  When we got there, we found firemen pumping water onto the black, smoking, roofless shell of the house I remembered. The fire had been hot, quick, and obviously of incendiary origin. Later, I learned that it had not been merely a matter of tossing a couple of firebombs through the windows; a car had driven up and two men had managed the front door somehow—a passing jogger, thinking little of it, had noticed that one had carried a husky catalog case and the other had seemed to have trouble finding the right key—and had gone inside and spent some time there before coming out again; the fire had erupted a few minutes later. No electronic circuits or disks could have survived the heat that had obviously been generated, and I learned later that no fireproof safe had been found in the ruins. At the time I hadn’t known that I was supposed to be interested in electronics.

  “There were a couple of little girls,” I’d said, looking at the hoses pumping water into the smoke.

  My police guardians weren’t interested in little girls, but a nearby cop glanced our way.