The Terrorizers (14 page)

I grinned, and stopped grinning. “That Ross guy. I get the impression I don’t rate among his very favorite people. Is he jealous or something?”

Kitty looked shocked. “Of you and me? Heavens, no! I’m sure he hasn’t the slightest personal interest, at least he’s never given me any indication… It’s something else, I think. He was very displeased when the U.S. agent assigned to help us—they had to have somebody who wasn’t known here in Canada—turned out to be you. Apparently he’d had dealings with you before. Rather unfortunate dealings, I gathered, although he never went into detail.”

“I see. An old professional conflict of some kind? I was wondering why he gave me such a hard time last night.” I grimaced. “And now let’s talk about platonic.”

“What?”

“The platonic engagement of Miss Davidson to Mr. Madden, or vice versa,” I said. “Platonic. It doesn’t sound like me, what little I know about me. And it doesn’t sound like what little I know about you, either, if you’ll forgive my saying so. And still the two of us are supposed to have lived together in this apartment without—”

She said quickly, “Oh, we weren’t really,
living
together. You’d just spend the night here when you were up this way on a photo-story, or when you arranged for some other plausible excuse to drive up from Seattle because I’d signaled you—we had a code we used over the phone—that I had something to report. We were together just enough to make our relationship look convincing to anybody who might be checking up on me.”

“You mean like your contact with the PPP. Joan Market.”

“Yes. We wanted to lay the groundwork, so to speak, so you
could
move in permanently to protect me if things started looking dangerous, without arousing her suspicions. But we didn’t want you actually living here until it became necessary—Mike Ross didn’t—because we were hoping she might come to see me and we didn’t want anybody else here to frighten her away. Mike had somebody watching all the time in the hopes of following her and learning where she was hiding, but she never gave him a chance. She’d been sociable enough back east; but once I moved out here she never came near me. It was all tricky messages and complicated telephone routines, that sort of thing.”

“Market. I wonder if that could have been Marquette originally, and what the hell difference it makes.” I shook my head. “But you’re still dodging, Kitty. Do I gather that all those times I spent the night here I got into my pajamas like a good little boy and retired to the living room couch? And you went into the bedroom and locked the door behind you?” I glanced towards the bedroom door. “I must be more of a gentleman than I thought. It doesn’t look like all that much of a lock.”

“Gentleman? You were an obstinate mule!” Kitty laughed ruefully. “Of course we got off on the wrong foot. The trouble was, I was warned about you in advance. It seemed I was going to have to play house with a horrible
macho
-gunman type who undoubtedly expected every girl he met to fall swooning into his virile arms. If arms can be virile. Anyway, that was what I was braced for, darling. When the time came, when you came, I was determined not to give you the slightest encouragement. It was all going to be strictly business between us. I made that absolutely clear.”

I said, “Obviously, Mr. Ross is never going to be mistaken for John Alden. I’ll have to thank him for the great buildup.”

She smiled. “Well, as your PR man he does leave something to be desired; but no matter how wonderful you turned out to be, I really wasn’t interested—or didn’t think I was. I’d just had my heart broken, remember?”

“Sure. Your husband.”

“Yes. Roger. Roger Atwell—I kept my maiden name at work after we were married. Actually he broke my heart twice. Once when I learned what he’d got himself mixed up in. I suppose it was selfish, but the fact that he’d let me marry him without telling me, well, it was never quite the same after that. And then, perversely, when he got himself killed it was a terrible wrench just the same. Because he was basically a very nice person in spite…”

“In spite of playing dynamite games with a bunch of fanatics,” I said when she stopped.

She nodded gravely. “But it was being such a nice person, such a sensitive person, that got him involved. He couldn’t stand all the suffering and oppression he saw, or thought he saw, around him. He felt he had to do something about it. He just did the wrong thing, at least by most people’s standards and, as it turned out, by his own. The newspaper stories about the San Francisco explosion upset him terribly. At the time, of course, I didn’t understand; I had no idea he had anything to do with those maniacs. But when they actually came to Toronto, where we were living, and told him that now it was his turn as a loyal member of the PPP…” She was silent for a moment. I didn’t speak. She went on: “That was when he broke down and told me everything. He said he was going to the police as soon as he learned their plans, but he wanted me to know… He said there was plenty of time to stop it, almost a week, but it was that night the railroad station blew up. He’d thought Dan Market was just taking him there so they could look over the ground and make preparations. Roger was going to tell the authorities the following day; he just wanted to have all the information… I know he wasn’t lying to me, I
know
it. They suspected him, they fooled him by giving him the wrong date, they tricked him there and killed him to keep him from betraying them.”

She was getting pretty intense about it. I said deliberately, “So you swore revenge and took a vow of chastity; no man should touch you until the PPP had paid for its crimes.”

She started to get angry; then she relaxed and made a face at me instead. “It isn’t nice to make fun of the girl when she’s baring her soul. There wasn’t any stupid medieval vow; there was only the simple fact that after going through all
that
I didn’t think I’d want to get involved with another man, ever. Well, not for a good many years. And then, gradually, as you turned out to be a good deal more human than I’d expected, your gentlemanly restraint began to seem, well, rather unflattering, if you know what I mean.” Her face was pink again. “I knew you were doing it just to be perverse, because I’d hurt your damned little feelings when we’d first met, but just because the girl talks a lot of don’t-touch-me nonsense at the start doesn’t mean the boy has to keep taking her at her idiot word forever!”

I grinned at her resentful tone. Last night’s uninhibited performance began to make more sense. Not only had we both been drinking fairly heavily after a long dry spell, not only had we been feeling strong reactions after our escape from terror and torture, but there had been a lot of old frustrations needing release, even if I couldn’t remember them consciously… Well, to hell with the psychological analysis.

“Did you tell anybody that your husband had confessed to you before he was killed?” I asked. “That he’d been planning to go to the cops?”

She shook her head. “No. Not then. Of course Mike Ross got the whole story later when I asked him for help, but at the time I played innocent and ignorant as hard as I could. I was hoping that sooner or later somebody from the PPP would come around to see if I was actually as blind and stupid as I seemed. Of course they didn’t have to come around. Joan Market was right there. Once somebody in authority realized that two of the casualties weren’t innocent victims like the rest, but had actually been members of the PPP, that put us, the wives, in line for special investigation and questioning, so Joan and I had to spend a lot of time together in a lot of dismal offices and waiting rooms.”

“Had you known the Markets before?”

“Oh, no. And Roger hadn’t, either, until they made contact with him in Toronto. The PPP has—well, they claim to have—members scattered all over the United States and Canada, but these people act more or less as scouts. Like Roger in Toronto. Then, when the council in Vancouver picks a target, a small strike force moves in and does the actual work with the help of the local member. If you want to call it work. Joan and Dan Market were part of the mobile strike force for the Toronto operation. Of course I didn’t learn all that until later.”

“How did you get Joan Market to accept you as a recruit?”

“It was more the other way around; she made the first advances,” Kitty said. “I made it easy for her with a lot of glib anti-establishment talk. I wanted to see what she would do. When the police couldn’t prove anything against either of us and finally let us go, Joan took me out to dinner to celebrate, in a dirty little place where the air was practically solid marijuana smoke. She made the great revelation, watching me closely to see if I showed proper surprise. Naturally, I pretended to be shocked, but not too shocked. It was war, she said, and our husbands had died battling heroically side by side in the front ranks of the fighting underground army, didn’t I want to keep his memory bright by taking his place in the great crusade? Once I got over being terribly, terribly hurt at the way Roger had kept his secret from me—to protect me, Joan said—I told her of course I did.” Kitty grimaced. “The hardest part was keeping her from knowing that I knew they’d blown my hero-husband into little pieces to keep him quiet.”

I frowned. “Did she tell you how her husband came to be killed along with yours?”

“It was apparently an accident. It was a home-made bomb constructed by Dan Market himself, and it exploded prematurely before Dan could leave Roger sitting there on some pretext and sneak off to safety. Of course Joan didn’t tell me
that
.” Kitty buttered a piece of toast in an absent way. “A few weeks later I got my first instructions from the PPP, meaning Joan. I was to request a transfer to my company’s Vancouver office claiming I couldn’t stand it any longer in Toronto after everything that had happened. Obviously the PPP wanted to get me away from everybody I knew and out near their headquarters where it was easier for them to watch me closely, just in case I was more clever than I looked. I’ll admit I was frightened; I thought there was a good chance they were simply decoying me out here to kill me. That was when I got in touch with Mike Ross, very cautiously. He said for me to do just as Joan said, and he’d find somebody out here to protect me. The rest you know.”

“Well, more or less,” I said. “Just what the hell kind of cop is this Michael Ross, anyway?”

“He seems to be a fairly highpowered investigator of some kind, although he makes rather a point of referring to himself as a simple policeman.” Kitty hesitated. “It’s Michel Ross, actually. He says he had a Scottish father and a French mother; but with a striking face like that I’m sure he’s part Indian. Not that it matters.”

I said, “I thought the Mounties and Indians spent all their time shooting at each other. Well, it’s a crazy, mixed-up world. Is there any more of that coffee?”

She used the last of it to refill my cup, and carried the empty pot out into the kitchen. I watched her go, rather startled to find myself thinking how pleasant it would be to be able to sit like that every morning, watching her. I realized abruptly that I didn’t really want my memory back. To hell with the past. Judging by what I’d learned so far, it contained a lot of fairly ugly stuff. I wasn’t ashamed of it, somebody always has to do the dirty work, why not me? But everything indicated that I’d put in my time and earned my graduation points. And recently, it seemed, I’d made a serious professional error that had almost got me killed, or at least met a man who was too tough for me. Call it a sign, omen, warning, it wasn’t something I could ignore. Quit while you’re ahead, I reflected. Quit while you still have a life and somebody to share it with—assuming she’s willing, that is.

I watched her return, liking everything I knew about her and wanting to learn more. I’d misjudged her badly at the start. Lovely as she was, fragile as she looked, she’d shot a woman last night for motives she’d considered adequate. She’d watched me kill a man and helped me hide his body. She’d deliberately led us into some fairly undignified sexual behavior for therapeutic reasons. Obviously she wasn’t the gentle, civilized young lady she seemed—but with my background, what would I do with a gentle, civilized young lady? This was a real person, not a saccharine dream.

She sat down facing me again, and regarded me a moment with an expression I couldn’t read. Abruptly, she said, “I put on fresh coffee for Ross. He ought to be here shortly. When… when he gets here, let’s tell him we’re through, Paul. Finished, fed up, tired of the whole crazy mess.”

I still couldn’t guess her thoughts. “Why?” I asked.

She said deliberately, “I think that is a very foolish question, darling. You’re not a foolish man ordinarily. Or… or was it just a relaxing drunken orgy with a cooperative female playmate, exact identity unimportant?”

I studied her for a moment. There was no mistaking her meaning now. I just hadn’t let myself believe that her thoughts could be so similar to mine.

I said plaintively, “What happened to all those nice, shy Victorian maidens who waited for the man to do the asking?”

Kitty said unsmiling: “They all got to be old maids sipping sherry on the sly and blubbering into their dainty cambric hankies as they remembered the handsome gentlemen who’d got away from them.” She paused, watching me. “
Were
you going to ask?”

I nodded. “But let’s approach this sensibly, ma’am. You’ve just lost one character with blood on his hands—well, at least he was involved with that kind of people. Do you really want to acquire another?”

“You forget, I seem to be slightly homicidal myself,” she said steadily. “After last night. I’m hardly in a position to criticize, am I?”

“You’re a forward wench,” I said. “First you rape me and then you shove a ring on my finger—I assume we are talking rings and such. Well, at least you seem to be willing to make an honest man of me, but what about the Great Davidson Revenge Crusade?”

“I’ve had all the revenge I need,” she said. “I killed one of them stone dead, didn’t I? An eye for an eye, a life for a life, and it didn’t feel all that good when I did it, not good enough that I care to make a habit of it. As far as I’m concerned, Roger can now rest in peace. As for my duty as a citizen, I’ve made my public-spirited contribution towards breaking up this gang, haven’t I? If Ross and Company can’t take it from here, that’s their problem. They’re paid to do it. I’m not.”