The Threateners (14 page)

Ruth hesitated. “I don’t believe I’ve thanked you properly.”

“You’re very welcome.”

She licked her lips. “I don’t mean just for finding a safe place for them. Before that. . . well, you were pretty heavy with that shotgun butt, and I let it prejudice me against you. But it has occurred to me that I owe you a debt that far outweighs a bump on the head. In a moment when you were surrounded by death and destruction—it must have been a dreadful experience, even if you’ve known a lot of violence— you still remembered two little girls alone in their home and made the telephone call that got them out of there before the arsonists arrived. Andy and Bea thank you. I thank you.”

I’m not very good with thanks, perhaps because I get so few of them. I said, “I didn’t talk much with your Bea, she was a little shy with me, but your Andy seems to be a smart and gutsy kid. We can’t afford to lose any like that. . . . Well, call me if you see or hear anything that worries you.”

The following day we toured Rio in a large sightseeing bus carefully designed to make it impossible to see the sights. Well, the passenger in a right-hand seat had something of a view out the window directly to starboard, and the passenger in a left-hand seat had some visibility straight out through the glass to port, but the poor souls on the aisle could see nothing but their fellow tourists on either side and the towering, head-high headrest of the seats in front of them. They could console themselves by thinking about how comfortable they could have been reclining in their lovely, supportive seats on the long cross-country ride they weren’t going to take, and how safe they were, protected from whiplash under all conceivable circumstances. Ironically, the city buses we passed, of which there seemed to be hundreds, had nice low seat backs, giving a wonderful all-around view to the commuting local citizens, who didn’t give a damn since they’d seen it before.

“Wouldn’t you like to know just how many buses this big actually get hit in the rear hard enough to give the passengers whiplash?” Ruth asked.

She was craning her neck in a vain effort to see the passing points of interest being described by the little man up front with the mustache and the mike, whose name had turned out to be, not Avocado, but Alvarado. We were supposed to call him Roberto. I’d asked Ruth to take the inboard seat so I could use my camera, not that I’d get very good results, technically, shooting through the glass of the bus window, but at the moment I was just establishing my character as a typical, shutter-happy, tourist type. Now I glanced at my seat companion uneasily; there’s always something disturbing about finding somebody thinking your thoughts, particularly when it’s somebody you don’t particularly care for.

I said, “When the human race dies out, it will be because it was brainwashed to be so totally, completely, utterly safe that it no longer dared to keep on living, a risky business at best. The fact that we’ve managed to invent a tour bus that surrounds us with safety devices so completely that we can hardly catch a glimpse of the picturesque foreign scenes we’ve traveled several thousand miles to see, shows that we’ve got our priorities so badly screwed up that we’re approaching extinction fast.”

Ruth laughed and changed the subject. “That was quite a party we had last night,” she said dryly. “A real bash.”

Although they speak Portuguese instead of Spanish, the Brazilians seem to have pretty much the same customs as other Latins, which means that they don’t dine until fairly late at night. Our American tour group had therefore had the hotel bar, and later the dining room, pretty much to itself until people started filtering in around nine, by which time we were getting ready to break up and go to bed. As Ruth had indicated ironically it could hardly have been called an orgy. Our traveling companions all seemed to be devotees of the modem cult of sobriety. With two Scotches before dinner and a couple of glasses of wine with the meal, I was the lush of the party—I had a feeling that the others, not necessarily excepting my traveling companion, had expected me to either pass out on the floor or break into happy song after such reckless indulgence in spirituous liquors. It had made me feel like an elderly gent yearning for the free and easy days of his youth, when nobody counted your drinks or, for that matter, expected you to apologize for your cigarettes. Gad, what wicked lives we lived back then!

“What did you learn from the male Ackerman?” I asked.

As I’d told Ruth, I’d wanted us to zero in on one of the couples who were not on the printed tour list, and she’d managed to corral a stocky older gent named Roger Ackerman, leaving to me his fairly young wife, Belinda, blond and plump and quite pretty. Roger had been wearing a sharply pressed cord suit that made me ashamed of my travel-creased seersucker, and Belinda had displayed her ample charms—as the old romances used to refer to them discreetly—in a confection of drifting blue-gray chiffon that undoubtedly made Ruth unhappy about her simple blue linen even though she’d got the hotel to press it so it looked smooth and crisp.

“Roger?” Ruth said. “Oh, Roger makes a lot of money doing something quite incomprehensible on Wall Street. Well, I guess it’s only a reasonable amount of money; if he were a millionaire, he wouldn’t be taking his enchanting new little wife—number three, I believe—on a cheap ten-thousand-dollar tour; he’d buy her a villa on the Riviera.”

“Yes, I gathered they were married quite recently,” I said.

Ruth said, “They live out on Long Island somewhere. I don’t think he’s our man. He seemed quite authentic as a money man; at least he had all the stuffy finance jargon at the tip of his tongue, right out of
The Wall Street Journal.
How did you get along with Belinda?” Ruth glanced at me slyly. “Why do I ask? You seemed to find a lot of interesting things to talk about. She’s not unattractive in her overripe way, is she? If you like plump little phony blondes forty years old. And the dress she was wearing! Roger must have sold a lot of bonds, or whatever he sells, to pay for that little number.”

Actually, I didn’t think Belinda Ackerman was much over thirty; unfortunately she thought she looked even younger than that and acted accordingly.

I said, “Well, she seems to be a typical New York girl whose world is bounded by Connecticut to the east and New Jersey to the west—South America is just a confusing illusion to her, mildly interesting while it lasts. Unlike Manhattan, it doesn’t
really
exist. Neither, of course, does New Mexico. Belinda was surprised to learn that we carried U.S. passports; she thought we came from a distant foreign land and it was clever of us to speak such good English. But then, she seemed to think that anything west of the Adirondacks was Indian territory.”

Ruth laughed. “I don’t think you’re being quite fair to the poor girl. . . . Did I hear the man say we’re going to stop up ahead?”

I nodded. “Corcovado coming up. Hunchback Mountain to you. We get to ride a funicular railway to the top and take pictures of the Christ statue, lucky us.”

Ruth laughed again. “I get the impression you’re not entirely sold on sight-seeing.”

“Hell, I don’t mind sights; it’s those damn cogwheel trains climbing up perpendicular precipices that get me. Just wait until we ride the cable car up to the top of Sugarloaf tomorrow, swinging gently and sickeningly in the breeze, and you’ll see real panic. Ugh!”

Ruth studied me for a moment and smiled. “Well, a man who admits he’s scared of heights can’t be all bad. The ones I can’t stand are the heroes who boast that they aren’t afraid of anything. . . . Matt.”

Something in her voice made me glance at her sharply. “Yes, Ruth?”

She spoke without expression: “We seem to be stopping. When we get up there, find me a rest room, please. I feel a strange dizzy spell coming on; I’m going to have to wash my face in cold water to snap out of it. I’d rather you didn’t get too far away.”

I looked at her for a moment. She was letting me know that action was imminent. I saw that she was not about to give me any additional information and that questions would not, repeat not, be welcome.

I said, “You picked one of the few places on earth outside my sphere of protection, but I’ll keep myself as available as I can.”

“I didn’t pick it. Messing about in johns is not my idea of glorious intrigue.” She grimaced. “But there’s one good thing about this stupid rendezvous: I’ll have a toilet handy if I get so scared I’m in danger of disgracing my panty hose while I wait for this mysterious contact. Isn’t that what you call it, a contact?”

It was interesting but a little unnerving, watching the rather reserved widow lady unbending to the point of making scatological jokes at her own expense.

I said, “Contact is the word. Good luck. Here we go.”

It was a popular place, at the foot of the steep mountain and its funicular track. There were gaudy kiosks dispensing food, drinks, and souvenirs; and there was quite a line of people waiting at the train terminal. Our guides, big white-haired Annie and little black-haired Roberto, told us to have a look around while they checked the situation. As Ruth and I moved off I spotted a small, bright green building with a big sign: sanitario. I nudged my companion.

“I think that’s the local word for the facilities, ma’am.”

She said irritably, “I know, I lived in this country for several years, remember? But I have a feeling the rest room I’m supposed to visit is up above at the end of track. . . . Well, I’d better check this one out, just in case.” She licked her lips. “Please don’t go away.”

I said, “One scream and I’ll crash the door marked damas if it means my life.”

I watched her disappear into the sacred, segregated premises. A slight figure almost thin, she looked more like a schoolgirl than a double widow with two half-grown kids. Waiting, I busied myself with my camera. Photographically, the zoom lens is the greatest invention since Kodachrome. The early ones weren’t very sharp, but they’ve got them licked now, and just twisting the zoom collar of my 28-70 certainly beat switching back and forth between the two or three lenses I used to have to carry to cover the same focal range. I’d been instructed to stock up with a type of film I hadn’t played with much, a fairly fast emulsion designed for the production of color prints. Back in my working photographic days I’d used slide film exclusively when I wanted color. However, for our present purposes, I was told, the color-print stuff, that I’d always considered suitable only for amateur snapshots, lent itself better to fast processing and checking.

I concentrated on some bright red flowers in a bed in the center of the patio, shooting from an angle that didn’t give me the best light for the blossoms—don’t ask me what they were—but allowed me to cover the door through which Ruth had disappeared, snapping everyone who entered that door. To be sure of getting a recognizable face, I took them coming out as well, not sighting through the viewfinder since they were looking my way, just letting the camera point casually in that direction while studying my flowery subjects and pressing the shutter release inconspicuously. The framing might be a bit cockeyed, but with the zoom lens at its wide-angle setting, I wasn’t likely to miss completely, even hip-shooting like that; and the fancy auto-focus mechanism should give me sharp pictures that could be enlarged for careful examination by the backup crew.

“Hey, take our pitcher, mister.”

It was my blond dinner companion of the night before, with a comfortably well-upholstered, gray-haired older woman whose name was . . . I dug around in my memory for a moment and came up with it: Grace Priestly, wife of Herman Priestly, a lean bald man with gold-rimmed glasses who had something to do with Texas oil. Like the Ackermans, they were not on the list, which made them possible candidates for a Spooky spot. Mrs. Priestly was wearing a print dress; Belinda Ackerman had on a crinkly brown jumpsuit with fashionably baggy pants that did nothing for her generous figure. My instructions were to supply photos of everyone on the tour as soon as possible, so I snapped them both, trying to get one in which the younger woman wasn’t mugging for the camera in her cute, girlish fashion.

They vanished into the john and, presently, emerged and wandered over to one of the souvenir stands. At last Ruth came out, looking frustrated.

“No luck?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I couldn’t stay in there forever. A woman told me there is another
sanitario
at the upper terminal, as I thought; I’ll have to try that when we get there.”

She giggled abruptly. “I’m glad it isn’t a doctor’s office and I don’t have to give them another sample; I’m all peed out. ”

I looked at her for a moment, realizing that she was really a rather shy person whose faith in humanity hadn’t been strengthened by her kidnap experience or, for that matter, by being thumped on the head by me. But she had apparently decided, after sharing a few airplanes with me and remembering that I’d saved her kids, that I wasn’t so bad after all. In any case she was stuck with me, and she was damn well going to relax and be herself, and if I disapproved of her daring little rest-room jokes, to hell with me. Then Annie came to round us up: apparently there were so many people waiting for the funicular that we might have to stand in line for an hour, and it was almost lunchtime anyway. They’d decided to take us away and feed us; maybe the crowd would be smaller when we returned later. I heard Ruth groan softly beside me.

“Oh, dear, I wanted to get it over with so I could relax—well, until the next rendezvous.”

“Where is that scheduled?”

She laughed. “Don’t be nosy, Matt. I’ll let you know when we get there."

I said, "I understand that our next stop after Rio is Iguassu Falls, Brazil’s answer to Niagara. According to the poop sheet, it’s just one hotel with a lot of jungle around it and a lot of water falling off some cliffs, a nice place to dispose of a body or two. Don’t leave me working in die dark too long." She hesitated. “All right. I have nothing scheduled for Iguassu; the next contact, after this one—if it ever comes off—is in Buenos Aires. Satisfied?”

Returning to the bus, we were delivered to a rustic-looking restaurant in town, where we all sat at one long table and our meat was brought to us in chunks on lethal-looking, fire-blackened swords. I made myself conspicuous by asking for Scotch and persisting even after Roberto warned me that it was terribly expensive here, senhor. A bottle of Teacher’s was finally brought to the table and placed before me, with considerable ceremony; it had a strip of adhesive tape down the side marked in half centimeters. Apparently I could pour as much as I wanted; and at the end of the meal Id simply be charged according to how many centimeters I’d lowered the liquor level. Drinking, I could see the guides, and my fellow travelers, deciding that they had a real bottle baby on their hands. Swell. Maybe the word would get around that the troublesome widow of Raoul Marcus Carrera Mascarena was being guarded only by an incompetent stumblebum who spent most of his time in an alcoholic daze.