Hamilton, Donald - Matt Helm 14 (12 page)

           
Lorna swung her feet off the bed and
stood up. "It's something I'm better off not knowing, anyway," she
said. "If I don't know, it wasn't I who spilled it. Excuse me, folks,
while I go wash my face."

           
The younger woman watched her go,
waiting until the bathroom door had closed fully.

           
Then she looked at me once more.
"If you betray him, I'll kill you!"

           
I said wearily, "Oh, shut up,
doll. Don't make loud noises about things you're not going to do. You're the
little girl who doesn't believe in killing anything, remember?"

           
She glared at me. "Damn you!
Why do you have to be so-" She stopped and drew a long, ragged breath.
"It's in
Florida
," she said, "but I don't know the exact. - . - There's a man
Daddy goes fishing with, a friend, Hank Priest, Congressman Henry Priest, who's
got a waterfront place near a little town called
Robalo
,
on
Robalo
Island
. That's on the west coast. You're supposed
to get in touch with him. He'll tell you where to go and get you a reliable
guide. Give yourself time enough so you can pick the right tide. It's somewhere
out in that maze of mangrove islands off the edge of the Everglades, I think,
but you'll never find anything in there without a guide-anything, that is,
except snakes, alligators, and mosquitoes."

           
"It sounds real inviting,"
I said wryly.

           
"Of course you're supposed to
make sure nobody follows you."

           
"Of course," I said.
"Naturally. A station wagon the size of a Greyhound bus towing a great big
white boat, and I'm supposed to drive it invisibly across two-thirds of the
continent-"

           
"It's spring. The roads are
full of cars towing boats. Anyway, Daddy's got confidence in you for some
reason. He knows, with the information I've given you, you'll make it
good."

           
I nodded slowly. "All right,
I'll try to live up to his goddamned confidence in me." I regarded her
deliberately, until she shifted position and licked her lips as if to protest.
Then I said, "Now tell me how much of all this is the truth, if any, and
who really told you what to say. Lorna!"

           
The bathroom door opened, and Lorna
stood there in her stocking feet, with her little revolver steady in her hand.

           
Martha Borden stared incredulously
at the armed woman in the bathroom doorway. "Now what do you think you're
doing with that silly little pistol?" she demanded.

           
Lorna shrugged. "Ask Helm. It's
his play."

           
"Matt, have you gone absolutely
crazy-"

           
"Over here," I said.
"Hands against the wall. That's right. Hold the pose." Moving in to
make the frisk, I apologized to Lorna over my shoulder: "Not that I think
you'd miss anything that was there at the time, but she was outside for several
minutes getting the candy just now.

           
She could have picked up some kind
of a weapon." I went over the girl carefully, finding nothing. "Okay,
you can lower your arms and turn around."

           
Martha's eyes were hot and angry as
she swung to face me once more. "Well, that's one way of getting a cheap
thrill!"

           
"Relax, little girl," I
said. "I hate to disillusion you, but your body isn't all that
stimulating. I've frisked lots more irresistible ladies without blowing a
fuse." I studied her for a moment longer, frowning. I wasn't sure, of
course. Either she was a hell of a good actress-better than she had any right
to be-or I was making an embarrassing mistake; but it had to be checked out. I
felt around the edge of the bed where she'd been sitting earlier, and found nothing
there, either. "Sit down," I said. "Keep your hands where I can
see them."

           
"Watch it!" Lorna said
quickly. We both looked at her, startled. She said, "Don't sit on the
candy bars. I guess I will have one, after all."

           
I raked them all up and handed them
to her. She put her gun away and moved to a nearby chair and sat down,
carefully peeling a Hershey's with almonds.

           
Martha asked, "Well, should I
sit or shouldn't 1?"

           
"Sit," I said.

           
Lorna munched chocolate and nuts and
asked, "What's the problem, anyway?"

           
"There are two problems,"
I said. "The first is that she knows too much. The second is that she's
probably a lousy little traitor."

           
I made it rough deliberately, so
that I could study the reaction. Martha made a shocked sound of protest, but
whether or not it was genuine was hard to tell.

           
Lorna asked, "How do you figure
that, Helm?"

           
I said, "I've been playing
along with her to find out what she was going to say. Now we've got to figure
out how much of what she's told us was the truth, if any of it was. If it
wasn't, we've got to figure out who got her to lie, and what the real truth
is."

           
"Everything I told you was the
truth!" Martha blurted indignantly. "You have absolutely no reason to
call me a-"

           
"Every reason in the world,
doll," I said. "We'll come to the evidence in a minute."

           
Lorna swallowed another bite of
chocolate and said calmly, "I gather you're not contending that she isn't
Martha Borden. You're saying that Martha Borden is a traitor-a
traitress
, to be precise."

           
"That's right. The resemblance
is too damned close. She's got to be the right girl. Only she's gone wrong.
Well, she's not the first kid who's turned against her parents these
days."

           
"What makes you think she
has?"

           
"Like 1 said, she knows too
much. A lot of the names she used were those of genuine agents; maybe all of
them were. But the really interesting thing is what she doesn't know, or says
she doesn't know. She can't tell, an impostor from her own father. At least she
pretends she can't."

           
"What do you mean?" That
was Martha, jumping to her feet. "What do you mean, an impostor?"

           
"Sit down!" I waited until
she'd obeyed. Now that I was marshalling the evidence, it looked fairly
convincing. I spoke to Lorna. "Suppose you were to dial the special
number, Mrs. Holt. And suppose the voice at the other end, a fairly familiar
voice, told you he was afraid a gent named Leonard intended to decimate our
organization to the last man, what would you think?"

           
Lorna's eyes widened. "Mac
never said that!"

           
"You're damn right Mac never
said that," I said. "But the man at the other end of the line-a line
carefully rigged to be nice and weak and noisy-said just that. And the dutiful
daughter here listened to him saying it and made no comment. In fact, she's gone
out of her way this evening to point out how I'd talked to her father so lie
must be alive and doing well. Hell, anybody who knows him, knows Mac couldn't
have said a fool thing like that in a million years!"

           
Martha licked her lips, looking lost
and bewildered. "But I . . . I don't understand! What's the matter
with-"

           
"Oh, cut it out, Borden!"
I snapped. "That poor-little-stupid-me line is getting pretty damn
stale."

           
"Just a minute, Eric."
Lorna peeled the paper off a second candy bar and spoke patiently:

           
"My dear girl, your father
speaks English, not gobbledygook. The word 'decimate' comes from the Latin word
for ten. In the old days, if a conquered village misbehaved, the Romans were
much nicer about it than we are nowadays. They didn't wipe it out with bombs
and napalm.

           
They simply marched a legion into
the place and lined up all the male inhabitants. Then they yanked every tenth
man out of line and stuck a spear or sword into him. That's decimate, to kill
one-tenth of. The word has also been used loosely to mean inflict large losses
upon, but it does not and cannot possibly mean to massacre or annihilate. It's
logically impossible to decimate to the last man. You'll always have nine men
left."

           
Martha looked indignant. "You
can't accuse me of treachery because of a silly old definition that nobody pays
any attention to-"

           
I said, "In my previous
conversation with
Washington
, when I called from
Nogales
, the same gent told me he was disinterested in a certain murderer. He
also said that a certain agent was presently in a certain town in
Oklahoma
and that I was supposed to contact him
there. Obviously, they've got a mimic sitting at that phone who's got a pretty
good ear but no brains. He's got the voice down pat, but he's been talking
Washington gibberish and hearing others talk it for so long, that it simply
doesn't occur to him that some people do prefer the English language. And I
gave you the direct quotes, Borden, and you didn't even raise an eyebrow.
That's when I first began to suspect that everything wasn't as it should be
between you and your pa."

           
The girl's face was pale. "I
really don't understand. Please, I'm not trying to act dumb or anything,
but-"

           
Lorna spoke in the same calm and
patient voice: "Miss Borden, disinterested does not mean the same thing as
uninterested, which is presumably the word for which the man on the phone was
fumbling."

           
"A judge is supposed to be
disinterested," I said. "That means he's got no obligations or
commitments to the parties appearing before him: he's quite objective about the
case. But he's not supposed to be uninterested. That means he's just bored with
the whole proceeding, and that is the meaning the man in
Washington
really wanted to convey."

           
Lorna said, "And presently does
not mean the same thing as at present, Miss Borden; and your father is very
sensitive about this distinction."

           
"But everybody says-"

           
"Not everybody," I
corrected her. "Not Mac. The office girls would catch hell if he heard
them telling somebody that he was presently in conference, meaning right now.
Presently, to him, means in a little while, as it meant to everybody until a
relatively few years ago, when ignorant people started fancying up the language
regardless of meaning. The correct, old-fashioned usage is, 'At present, Mr. Mac
is in conference, but he will see you presently.' That's what Mac learned in
school and what I learned a generation later. The fact that some permissive
dictionaries may already have adopted the recent bastard usage doesn't make it
sound any less affected and pretentious to his ears or mine." I drew a
long breath. "And, honey, contact is not and will never be a verb in your
father's vocabulary. Anybody who orders me to contact somebody just damn well
isn't Mac, and you know that as well as I do."

           
"But I don't!" the girl
protested desperately. "I mean, all these ridiculous little grammatical
distinctions, who cares? Who pays any attention to that stuff these days? I
mean, really Mr. Helm, with all the big, relevant issues. . . ." She stopped,
breathless, looking from me to Lorna and back again.

           
I stared at her. The idea that our
language had suddenly become irrelevant while my back was turned was difficult
for me to grasp. I turned towards Lorna, who seemed to have become the acting
referee.

           
"Is the kid serious," I
asked, "or is she putting me on?"

           
"I don't know. I really don't
know." Lorna frowned at the seated girl. "Remember, she'd apparently
never heard of Cassandra or
Ragnarök
. We have to face
the possibility that the young lady is practically illiterate."

           
Martha jumped to her feet. "I
don't have to take a lot of insults-"

           
"Sit down," I said.
"Goddamn it, sit down!"

           
"But she said-"

           
"Don't worry about what she
said. Worry about the fact that if you can't come up with something that makes
a little sense, I'm going to have to take you out somewhere and shoot
you."

           
"Shoot me!" Martha sank
onto the bed. "Why. . - why, you're mad!"

           
"What the hell do you think
happens to double agents who get caught? And don't think being Mac's daughter
will save you, sweetheart. If you've sold us out, well, he knows the rules, and
he knows they go for everybody. After all, he made them."

           
She licked her lips. "But I'm
not a. . - I haven't. . - ."

           
Lorna interrupted. "Just how
clear was the voice on the phone, Helm?"

           
"Not very clear. And, as I say,
the guy was a good mimic. On that bad connection, I'd have accepted him as Mac
if he'd said the right things." I shook my head. "But, hell, we all
know Mac's little language
hangups
. You can't tell me
his own kid-"

           
"You're behind the times, Eric.
Nobody listens to language any more. It's no longer a means of precise
communication, it's a club to hit people over the head with; and the exact
meanings of words no longer count. 1 think the girl is quite serious. I think
she never in her life stopped to listen to how her father talks. Besides, he's
been a very busy man as long as we've known him. The chances are, she hasn't
had even as much communication as we have."

           
"You're so right about
that!" Martha's voice was stiff. "He's been practically a stranger
around the house as long as I can remember. I . . - I was all shook up, a few
weeks ago, when he asked me into the study to have a serious talk. I thought he
was going to tell me about the birds and the bees, or something, at my age!
Instead of which . . . instead of which he asked me to undertake this
melodramatic. . .

           
She stopped. There was a little
silence. At last Lorna said, "You're forgetting something, Eric. You're
forgetting that I was on the list."

           
"So?"

           
"So if she'd sold us out, if
she'd passed that list of names on to Leonard, or got it from him, he'd have
known I was at the ranch. His men would have come looking for me when they
seized the place, if only to prevent me from getting away to spread the news of
the raid. But nobody came."

           
I regarded the girl for a moment
longer. Instinct told me that she was dangerous and not to be trusted.
Depending on anybody with her attitudes was simple suicide. However, I could be
wrong in this particular instance. That she'd betray us, and me in particular,
if she got the chance, I had no real doubt. She'd think it was her duty to
humanity and society. However, her chance might not have shown itself yet. In
any case, she wasn't going anywhere I couldn't keep an eye on her, so I might
as well pretend to be convinced of her innocence.