The Infiltrators (7 page)

“Yes,” I said. “That was the kicker, wasn’t it? Actually, as far as I’m concerned, the Kravecki woman is a mark in your favor. I find it a bit hard to believe in a Commie courier who associates openly with the spies from whom she’s supposed to pick up the stolen secret formulas. But that’s kind of beside the point, isn’t it? The cold fact is that super-classified materials
were
stolen from your husband’s lab, presumably by him, since very few others had access. They were recovered from a safe-deposit box rented by you. You never denied renting it. You never denied putting the stuff into it. You did deny knowing what it was, but that denial didn’t carry much weight—”

“It was true!” she protested.

“You couldn’t convince the jurors of that. They felt that if you’d really been an innocent uninvolved young wife tricked by a sneaky spy husband into hiding stolen national secrets unknowingly, which was what you were saying, you’d just naturally have been mad as hell at him—why, the creep had even slipped away to safety that last night without warning you that the cops were on their way! How could you help hating a treacherous louse like that, running off with another attractive woman and leaving you, the scapegoat, to stand trial for his crimes?”

“That’s ridiculous!” she protested. “Bella wasn’t particularly attractive, and Roy detested her. He’d never in the world have—”

“There you are,” I said. “I hand you your defense on a platter and you kick it across the room. As you did at your trial. You refused to admit on the stand that there could have been anything between your husband and this Communist mystery woman. You refused to put on a convincing act of hating the deceitful louse; in fact you tried to stand up for him. For a while you even tried to present him as a totally innocent victim who’d been murdered by unspecified villains, which you’d learned through extrasensory perception. Pretty farfetched, wouldn’t you say, the wild defense of a guilty woman struggling against the net of evidence in which she was caught? And let’s consider the fourth item of evidence you mentioned.”

She licked her lips. “That was the
real
frame-up. I did rent one bank box; and I did use it for some rather fat envelopes Roy gave me. But I knew nothing whatsoever about a second box—”

“A second box under your name in a different bank in a different town,” I said. “Las Vegas, New Mexico, to be exact. A second box that contained fifty-five thousand dollars in used bills that you couldn’t explain away and that hadn’t been declared on the joint income tax return of the Ellershaw family.”

She said stiffly, “As I said in court, I didn’t rent that box and I had no idea where that money came from. Anybody can rent a safe-deposit box under any name, Helm.”

“Two bank employees in Las Vegas identified the renter as you. And in those days you weren’t a girl it was easy to mistake for anybody else, Mrs. E.”

Then I was sorry I’d said it, in view of her present appearance. After a moment, she said in a subdued voice, “Those tellers were lying. I don’t know why they were, but they were!”

“And then there’s clue number five,” I went on ruthlessly, “which you’ve neglected even to mention. The fact that your financial situation wasn’t quite as happy as you’ve tried to make me think. You glossed over all your debts, and your husband’s, very smoothly when you were talking earlier, but it wasn’t quite such a cheerful picture, was it? You’d gone on a spending spree like a couple of kids when you got married, and the payments on the cars and that fancy house and its fancy furnishings were bleeding you dry. You
needed
that fifty-five grand—”

“We weren’t that much behind!” she protested. “If things got really critical I was going to ask my folks for help whether Roy liked it or not—he didn’t—but that bonus I got would have gone a long way towards satisfying our creditors.” She grimaced. “That’s why we had to celebrate! We were off the hook at last, and it was such a wonderful relief!”

“But you didn’t know such a big bonus was coming until you got it,” I said. I shook my head. “No, Mrs. E, it was a pretty convincing case. As far as I could make out, the only thing that saved you from a much longer sentence was that you were obviously only a minor character in the spy drama concocted by your husband and this Kravecki woman. They’d used you and discarded you. So in the end the jury recommended a certain degree of clemency, whatever the legal terminology is, and you got off with eight years.”

She said angrily, “You make professional ruin and being buried in a dungeon for most of a decade sound like a slap on the wrist! Where the hell is that dessert? Fuck it, I don’t want it, I’m all out of the mood. I’m going back to my room.”

“Not alone,” I said. “Wait until I’ve signed the check, please.”

Walking her back, I took her as far as the outside door to her unit, and stopped. I said, “Make sure this door is locked when you get inside. Do you have everything you need? What about something to read?”

“Don’t
do
that!” The anger burst out of her stormily; she’d apparently spent the short walk reviewing her wrongs. “That phony considerateness is going to drive me right up into the rafters! You need me and I’m stuck with you unless… unless I want to be killed, and I guess I really don’t; but you don’t give a damn about my comfort, any more than they did in… in Fort Ames, so for God’s sake forget that greasy solicitous act. Just tell me which way you want me to jump and stand aside. I’m well trained; I’ll jump. Yes, Mr. Helm, I will lock my fucking door. No, Mr. Helm, I don’t need
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
to entertain me.” She hesitated, and started to speak further, and checked herself.

“What?” I asked.

“All right, since you asked, if you’ve got a sleeping pill… It’s going to be a bit strange, in a real bed with a big room all to myself.”

I said, “Well, I do have some sedatives, but why don’t you try without, first? If you really can’t sleep, knock on the connecting door and I’ll dig one out for you.”

She said contemptuously, “Nobody’s going to catch you dispensing drugs without a license, huh? I’m sorry I asked. Good night.”

“Leave the connecting door on your side unlocked, please.”

She turned to look at me with cold and hopeless eyes. “God, do you think I dare risk it, a lovely desirable slim young thing like me? Good night again!”

I read for a while, a hunting-and-fishing magazine I’d brought along, and wondered idly how the duck hunting had been down along the Rio Grande that fall. I’d been busy and hadn’t been able to get away during the season. I don’t go after big game much anymore after all the years of tracking the biggest—or at least the most dangerous—game in the world, but there’s still something special about wing shooting. I listened to the shower running next door, and the john flushing, as the woman who’d been put into my care prepared to retire to the soft bed that was probably well over twice the size of the hard prison cot or bunk to which she was accustomed.

I remembered the happy, confident girl she’d been, and I reviewed in my mind the disturbingly erratic behavior of the hopeless, suspicious woman she’d become. Well, after long confinement it couldn’t be easy to cope with liberty, particularly a liberty that held out very little promise. I was tempted to look in on her before going to bed, but I told myself she’d had eight years of bed checks; she deserved to be left alone on this, her first night of freedom. But I was uneasily aware that I’d leaned on her pretty hard at dinner, needing her complete story to confirm the judgment I’d formed of her much earlier. I couldn’t help remembering the ugly scars on her wrist. Even after I’d turned out my own light, a bright line showed under the connecting doors; and after a while I found myself getting up again, putting on dressing gown and slippers, and extracting a small plastic vial from my toilet kit.

There was no answer when I knocked on the door. A sudden panic moved inside me, and I pushed my way into the room beyond. She was sitting on the side of the nearest big bed, in the big, brightly lighted double room, looking bleakly at nothing. After a little, she turned her head, acknowledging my presence. Then she smiled very faintly, and opened the hand that was clenched in her lap, displaying the little knife I had given her, closed.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I wasn’t going to. Do you want it back?”

“Not if you weren’t going to,” I said.

“I had to know,” she said. “It
would
be an answer, wouldn’t it? To everything. But sitting here I decided it was the wrong answer. Hell, I survived Fort Ames after a fashion; maybe I can even survive being out of Fort Ames. May I have that sleeping pill now?”

“Yes, of course.”

I went into her bathroom for a glass of water. Returning, I gave her a capsule and the glass. The knife was lying on the bedside table. I left it there and helped her to rise and prepared the bed for her. When I looked at her again, standing there, she was smiling that faint strange smile of hers once more.

“Service,” she murmured. “Do you tuck in all your clients, Mr. Helm?”

“We aim to please, ma’am.”

I saw that she was wearing a nightgown that was very different from her cheap and unbecoming daytime clothes. Obviously expensive, it had two thin satin shoulder straps, some fine lace at the breasts, and a loose cascade of peach-colored satiny material to the floor, with more lace around the hem. It made her look almost pretty. For all its richness, it had a soft and comfortable appearance, indicating that it wasn’t new. She saw my surprise and laughed wryly.

“The only garment out of my past that still fits me, because it’s cut like a tent,” she said. “Walter sent it to me when I let him know I was getting out at last. Along with some other clothes I’d stored that I couldn’t possibly get into now. The skirts were all the wrong length, anyway.”

“Walter Maxon, the kid lawyer from your office? He’s kept in touch with you?”

She nodded. “Well, as my attorney of record, Mr. Baron has too, or tried to. After a while I stopped writing back. But Walter seems to feel… very responsible for me, in a way. I guess he realizes he should have done better by me the night I was arrested, when I was too… too shattered to look after myself. Not that it made any difference in the long run, but I think he still blames himself a little. He must be a better lawyer now; he wouldn’t still be with the firm, and doing pretty well with them, if he weren’t. I let him take care of some things for me when I… went away. He even came to see me once in Fort Ames. I think the poor boy had fallen a bit in love with me in a perverse and guilty sort of way: the glamorous office colleague whom he’d failed in her hour of need. Even seeing me in that drab p-place looking just like all the other gray-faced female convicts in my baggy uniform didn’t seem to disillusion him. He asked for permission a couple of times later, but that was after”—she glanced at her scarred wrist—“after I couldn’t bear to have visitors gawking at me anymore. They made me feel like a mangy, scrawny female mountain lion I’d once seen pacing her stinking little cage in a roadside zoo, obviously dreaming of the sleek, glossy creature she’d once been and the wild, free, glorious life she’d led before the trap closed on her.” She hesitated. “There was a note with the clothes Walter sent. Apparently he even got his partnership recently. Perhaps the one I would have had if… She stopped, and swallowed hard. “God, such a tragic figure! Don’t I just make the tears pop into your eyes? Thanks for the sedative. I’ll be all right now.”

In the morning I made a phone call from my room, reporting to Mac, whose official day would already have begun, considering the one-hour time differential. When he answered, the sound of his voice let me visualize him at the desk in front of the bright window, apparently indestructible, no grayer now than when I’d first gone to work for him. Sometimes I wondered uneasily what would happen to the organization when time finally caught up with him. Mac said it was too bad we hadn’t been able to take the shotgun specialist alive, and he’d been identified as an independent operator named Victor, George Victor, born Georgio Victoroff, from New York City; and while the woman he lived with off and on had known he was away on a job that promised to be quite remunerative, she had no idea who his employer had been, except that the name Tolliver had been mentioned, but she’d thought that was merely the contact man who’d arranged the contract. No, she didn’t know how the fuck it was spelled. Taliaferro? If it was spelled Taliaferro, wouldn’t they
say
Taliaferro, for Christ’s sake? Mac said for me to stay with the subject; it seemed more than likely there’d be another attempt on her life. I said I could hardly wait, and hung up.

I shaved and put on a clean shirt and looked at my shapeless slacks, but to hell with them. Cross-country travelers are supposed to have sloppy pants. I was running a comb through my hair and reflecting that if the face in the dresser mirror had picked me up at the prison gates I’d have thought a long time before trusting it, when there was a knock on the connecting door.

“Come in,” I said.

I made a final pass with the comb, which didn’t achieve any sudden miracles of rehabilitation or rejuvenation. I gave up and put the comb away and turned to look at her. She was waiting in the doorway. She was back in yesterday’s drab traveling costume, but there were small but important changes. The brown hair was still unbecomingly cut, but it had been brushed very smooth and seemed to have picked up a little healthy gloss. The shoulders seemed to be a bit more square than they had been, and the back more straight. And the bitter mouth seemed to have softened slightly, and had even been treated to a touch of lipstick. She was still no young glamor girl; but then I could hardly be called a young glamor boy, either. She colored a little, selfconsciously, under my regard.

Then she said firmly, “Mr. Helm, could we start over, please? I was totally impossible yesterday, just a manic-depressive bitch. It was… it was the first day, and I simply didn’t know how to behave after years of being told how to behave. We need each other, apparently, and there’s no reason we shouldn’t get along.” She held out her hand, with a wry little smile. “I’m even going to allow you the tremendous privilege of calling me Madeleine, if you care to do so.”