Assassins Have Starry Eyes (13 page)

We made half a mile before a drift stopped us. I backed up and hit it twice more, but couldn’t break through. The last time she wouldn’t back out of it, either. The shovel brigade turned out; and I got out to open the hood and push the snow out of the radiator. They got it out from under the wheels and cleared something of a lane and got behind and pushed. We made twenty yards and stuck again. They shoveled some more. We made another twenty. They shoveled again. We pulled clear and kept on going, but they had to run after me a quarter of a mile before I found a place where I could stop with some hope of getting started again.

Then we had a long downhill run along an open hillside where the snow had blown thin, followed by a mean climb where it had drifted three feet deep and had to be shoveled all the way to the top. I spelled Van for a while when he showed signs of weakening. In the middle of the afternoon we passed the fire where I had found them, still smoking. Some time later we passed their car, half-buried in the snow. I was surprised they had got that far without chains. We had to dig it out and nudge it aside with the Pontiac before we could squeeze past on the narrow road.

It was five o’clock and twilight when we reached the end of the canyon, having spent four hours covering six miles. The state road had not been plowed, but a truck of some kind had come through leaving tracks that were like a paved highway after the stuff through which we had been driving. We only had to dig out twice in the next nineteen miles. The sky was clearing. The main highway had been plowed when we got to it. We reached the hospital in Espanola a little after seven, turned the boy over to the doctors, and sat down to wait for them to tell us something.

Presently Van came in the hospital front door, looked around, spotted us sitting there, and came over.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

Nina shook her head. “Nobody’s told us anything yet.”

“Well, your brother’s in good hands. Come on out and I’ll buy you both dinner.”

“Thanks, but I’d rather wait here.” She glanced at me. “You go ahead, Jim. I’ll be all right.”

I put back the magazine I had been reading. “Well, I’ll bring you back a sandwich and some coffee.”

Outside it was clear and cold. There was some snow around, but not very much. You would not think fifty miles and a thousand feet of altitude would make so much difference.

“That’s a nice girl,” Van said.

“How much are you selling her for?” I asked.

“What… Oh.” He laughed.

I said, “If I should decide to divorce my present wife and marry Miss Rasmussen, I’ll remember that I have your blessing.”

He said, “Okay. You don’t have to hit me with a brick; I’ll mind my own business.”

Espanola is a small town on the upper Rio Grande, big enough to have a movie and, as I recall, a traffic light, but not much else. It’s not as much of a tourist trap as most of those places, since it’s a little off the beaten track. The café we entered specialized in Mexican food. It was late and I was hungry enough to take a chance on my rebuilt digestive tract; I ordered the standard mess of tacos, enchiladas, and frijoles, which are beans. Van ordered a hamburger and coffee. It wasn’t a comfortable meal; we didn’t have much to say to each other.

When I returned to the hospital, Nina was not in the waiting room. A nurse said she was with her brother. I sat down and read a magazine. It was getting late and there wasn’t anybody in the place except an expectant father who seemed to be taking it pretty hard considering that, from what he said to the nurse, he was waiting for his fifth. Well, I was hardly in a position to sit in judgment on him, not having been through it even once, myself. The print became hard to keep in focus. When I opened my eyes, Nina was standing over me. She did not speak at once.

I sat up and said, “I brought your sandwich. I’m afraid the coffee’s cold by now. How is he?”

“They’ve got him full of sulfapyridine,” she said. “They say he has… a good chance.”

I looked up at her. She was so tired she was swaying. “Sit down and eat something,” I said, unwrapping the sandwich for her. “Then we’ll find you a place to sleep.”

She sat down beside me. “It’s all right,” she said. “One of the nurses is a darling; she’s fixed me up in a room they’re not using. Jim?”

“Yes?”

“Does ‘Ararat’ mean anything to you?”

“Not except as a mountain in the Bible. Why?”

“After you left the cabin to get help this morning, he woke up. We talked a little. He wasn’t very coherent, but he knew me. I mean, he wasn’t delirious. I asked him… what I thought you’d want to know. About your wife. He said ‘Ararat Number Three.’”

“Ararat Number Three. Did he say anything else?”

“He said ‘mine.’ Then he said ‘uranium’ and laughed. When he laughed, it hurt him, and he stopped talking. Later he started to cough. I didn’t get to ask anything else. I’m sorry.”

I said, “You did fine. I’m very grateful.”

“It’s not much. I hope it helps you find her.”

We looked at each other for a moment. I said, “Yes, I guess that comes first, doesn’t it?” I got to my feet; and she rose also.

She said, “It’s funny. I used to hate you.” After a silence she said, “It was just a kiss. It doesn’t obligate you in any way. Remember that.”

“Sure,” I said. “Well, so long, Spanish.”

“Jim.” She looked down, unfastened the two lower buttons of her wool shirt, and reached inside. “Here,” she said. “You may need this, wherever you’re going. You can’t always carry that big rifle with you.”

I looked down at the pistol she was offering me: a .22 automatic with a slim, short barrel. The weapon was familiar. I had had an opportunity to study it carefully from the wrong end some months before. The police must have given it back to her. I looked from the gun to her face. She blushed. It was an interesting phenomenon, and one you don’t see very often these days.

“I—” she said, and stopped.

“I’m hurt, Spanish,” I said. “You didn’t trust me. You brought a gun along to protect yourself from me.”

“Yes,” she said, “and there was a time or two when it looked as if I might need it, too.” Her smile faded and she looked at me steadily. “Bring it back if you can,” she said. “If not, it doesn’t matter. Don’t worry about it. Good luck.”

EIGHTEEN

A HUNDRED YEARS ago, if you’d been snowbound up in the Chama country, it would have taken you a decent number of days to work your way back to civilization as represented by Santa Fe, and even then the transition would not have been overwhelming, since Santa Fe was a fairly crude town at the time. Today you can practically step out of a snowdrift into a hot shower. It puts a strain on a man’s adaptability. What it did to me was upset my digestion, or perhaps I should put the blame on the enchiladas.

I had a rough night; in the morning, the worst was over, but I felt weak and tired. Also I seemed to be catching cold again. It seemed advisable to take things easy lest I wind up back on the sick list; I had tea and toast sent up to the room, and called the hospital in Espanola and was told Miss Rasmussen was sleeping and her brother was holding his own. I got a boy to run the Pontiac to a garage with orders to tighten any nuts and bolts that might have worked loose, wash and grease the thing, and hang onto it until I came or called. Then I hung out a
Do Not Disturb
sign and slept until two o’clock in the afternoon. I had some clear bouillon sent up although I was hungry enough for steaks.

I started to call Espanola again, but stopped when I realized that I was much less interested in how her brother was making out than in just talking to her; and we didn’t really have a great deal to talk about. I hung up the phone, therefore, found a pencil and paper and, sitting in bed, wrote:

Ararat #3

Mine

Uranium
(laughter)

It looked like a neat puzzle for Sherlock Holmes. I got on the phone again and called a lawyer I had met socially. He said that a lot of mines had screwy names like that—Biblical names, in particular, were quite commonplace—but that tracking down the location of the property was a little out of his line. He referred me to a man named Garcia who, since I could not come to the office, sent over a young fellow named Montoya—the Garcias and Montoyas are the Smiths and Joneses of New Mexico. Bob Montoya turned out to be a nice-looking dark kid in his early twenties. They run to extremes. A nice-looking Spanish-American kid you would trust with your life and your daughter’s virtue; a mean-looking one looks as if he’d slit your throat for a nickel and give back four cents’ change.

“I get the idea, Dr. Gregory,” Montoya said after I’d explained the situation as far as I thought necessary, which wasn’t very far. “I’ll see what I can do for you, but I’d better warn you it could turn out to be a tough and expensive assignment. Nobody knows just how many people are wandering around out there with Geiger counters staking claims they figure will make them rich by Christmas; and their notions of surveying are pretty inaccurate. There’s supposed to be at least one county up in Utah where the filed claims add up to twice the total area of the county… It looks to me as if what you’ve got here is the name of the hole and not the company, if you get what I mean. I’d say a couple of fellows calling themselves, say, the Jackrabbit Mining Association, had at least three claims which they called Ararat One, Two, and Three. That’s the usual custom. Do you know anything about uranium mining, Dr. Gregory?”

I really didn’t know a great deal about how the stuff got out of the ground and into the laboratory. I said, “Not very much. I hope to learn.”

He grinned, his teeth very white in his dark face.
“Sí, Señor.
So hope about a million other people. I suppose you’ve got a kind of roundabout tip on this Ararat property?” I nodded. He said, “You can’t tell me any more about it?”

“No,” I said. “That’s all I’ve got to go on.”

“Well, I’ll do my best to find it for you.” He rose from his chair and grinned at me wisely. “I suppose you want it kept real quiet.”

If I’d told him I wanted just the opposite, it would only have confused him. “Well, don’t broadcast it,” I said, and watched him go out, and hoped he would not run into trouble but could see no reason why he should, since I had made sure his boss and the lawyer also knew I was looking for a mine called Ararat. It seemed unlikely that anyone would tackle the job of silencing us all.

The following morning I woke up strong and healthy. I called Espanola and learned that, barring complications, the patient would live. Miss Rasmussen was not in the building, which was just as well. I had the garage send my car around, checked out of the hotel, and drove down to Albuquerque. It was a clear and beautiful spring day, so warm that I had the windows open. If it had snowed down here at all, no traces remained. The Sandia Mountains made a friendly and homelike shape behind town as I approached; the air was so clear that I could see the TV towers on the crest quite distinctly, even at this distance. I picked up some groceries at the nearby shopping center, drove home and parked in the drive, and carried the stuff inside. The house was cold and empty. It seemed much too big for one person. I made myself some lunch in the kitchen, feeling like a tramp camping out in a barn.

Eating, I read the mail that had been stuffed into the box while I was away. One envelope had no stamp; it had apparently been delivered by hand. I knew an odd little moment of expectancy as I tore it open, but the slip of paper inside bore the heading:
William Walsh Enterprises, Inc.
The typewritten note asked Dr. James Gregory to call Mr. William Walsh at the Alvarado Hotel at his earliest convenience. I leaned back, snared the kitchen phone, and got the number. A switchboard operator and a secretary later, I had my father-in-law on the line.

“Hi, Pop,” I said. “When did you get into town?”

“Where the hell have you been?” he demanded. “I’ve been trying to reach you for two days. Where can we talk? I’m tied up this afternoon; but how about the bar downstairs at five o’clock?”

“Five’s fine,” I said. “Be seeing you, Pop.”

The kitchen clock read a little after twelve. I got up and washed the dishes and put things away. I went out and organized the gear in the trunk of the car, but did not unpack. Instead, I replaced the supplies we had consumed up in the mountains. I took the .270 into the house, cleaned and oiled it thoroughly since it had been wet, and put it back into the trunk. That made the car ready. All it needed was a place to go.

I went back into the house. It seemed as empty as a vacuum chamber. I opened Natalie’s door. The black-and-white room had a well-preserved and lifeless look, like a bedroom at Mount Vernon. I closed the door and went into my own room, drew the Venetian blind, sat down on the bed, took out Nina Rasmussen’s little .22 automatic and cleaned it. The clip was fully loaded. It held ten cartridges. She had not given the gun to me with a shell in the chamber and I did not jack one in now; I’d rather risk being a little slow getting a shot off when I wanted it than have one go off when I didn’t want it. I tucked the weapon back inside my shirt. Wearing it was both illegal and uncomfortable, but I didn’t want to leave it around where anyone could see it. A .22 isn’t much of a firearm, but a .22 that nobody knew I had might come in handy. At four-thirty I dressed and drove downtown.

The bar of the Alvarado Hotel is an insult to New Mexico, being a dead ringer for any New York cocktail lounge. What’s the point of living in the great southwest if you have to do your drinking in a chrome-plated martini trap to the tune of, so help me, a character with a Hawaiian guitar? Not that I’ve got a thing against martinis, or Hawaiians, either; but I do like a little local atmosphere with my drinks. Mr. Walsh was sitting in a booth dictating to an earnest young lady with a notebook and horn-rimmed glasses. He waved her away when he saw me coming. Receding, she looked less earnest and more interesting; I found myself wondering if her duties involved anything besides typing and shorthand, which was probably unfair to my father-in-law. He was a solid, medium-sized man with stiff gray hair cut quite short all over his head. The steel-gray hair made a nice contrast to the deep sun-tan he had picked up somewhere recently, probably in Florida. I don’t know anything about men like William Walsh, and I make no effort to learn. His daughter is a big enough problem for me to try to solve. I had wired him the bare details the night she disappeared, and had not been in communication with him since.