The Threateners (17 page)

"Pretty," Ruth said, the first time she’d spoken since we’d sat down.

“Only pretty now, but she’ll be a knockout senhorinha in a couple of years,” I said.

Ruth said, “As a matter of fact, senhorinha is correct for the Portuguese in Portugal, but here in Brazil they give it a few twists of their own and their word is senhorita, very close to the Spanish.”

I said, “I’ll be happy when we get to Argentina and a language I’m familiar with, even though I don’t claim to speak it much. Shall we order?” The waiter was hovering around us suggestively.

“That enormous fruit plate they’re eating next door looks good,” Ruth said.

“I’m a meat-and-potatoes man myself, but after the feed we had at lunch, I guess I’ll go for the melons, too, or whatever they are. How about a drink, or are you back on the abstention kick?” She wasn’t. Having settled all that to the waiter’s satisfaction, I waited for him to leave and said deliberately: “Let’s talk a little business. Five disks, you said earlier. Including the one you’re carrying, right?”

She hesitated; then she said, “Wrong. I’m not carrying it any longer.”

I looked at her for a moment, noting the small gleam of triumph in her eyes. She, too, like the kid pickpocket, had put one over on the cocky professional. I drew a long breath.

“You’ve had three chances to unload it since you left your room,” I said. “You could have slipped it to the waiter just now while I was looking at the menu. You could have got rid of it in the rest room. Maybe somebody was waiting for you in there; or maybe Belinda Ackerman, who went in after you . . ."

“I wouldn’t trust that roly-poly, blond, man-eater with a used Kleenex!”

I laughed and stopped laughing, watching her. “And then there’s the possibility that the abortive robbery on the beach was a put-up job to let you make the transfer, in which case you are a damn fool, Mrs. Steiner. Pulling a stunt like that with a bodyguard in attendance could easily get somebody killed. At the very least it shows you don’t mind making your escort look like an idiot.”

She licked her lips. “I know and I’m sorry : I didn’t realize. . . . I guess I’ve just seen too many movies with actors being excruciatingly clever, just like that, and nobody getting hurt." Ruth grimaced. "Well, you don’t have to worry about it happening again. Even if we thought we could get away, plausibly, with another phony mugging attempt, I have a feeling that volunteers are going to be very scarce after what happened to two of those boys, even if you made it look veiy clumsy and accidental. But in the confusion I did manage to slip my little package to the one who ran away unharmed.”

I said, “So there are four pickups left to go. Presumably that means four cities, unless you’ve arranged to double up somewhere. Which four?”

She hesitated, drew a long breath, and said, “I suppose, after the dumb trick I just pulled, I owe you. . . . All right. In chronological order: Buenos Aires, Argentina. Well, I already mentioned that. Santiago, Chile. Lima, Peru. Quito, Ecuador.”

I said, “I can see why this tour was selected for you. It takes you exactly where you want to go. ”

“And a few places I don’t, like Iguassu Falls. Ugh.”

“Why ugh?”

“It’s a hole in the jungle full of biting insects, and I’ve already seen it once. Richard took me when we were stationed here. I guess it’s spectacular, all that water falling off all those cliffs, but once is enough.”

I said, "My folks took me to Niagara as a kid, and just like you I figure, you’ve seen one waterfall, you’ve seen ’em all. And then, if I remember the schedule correctly, after Lima and before Quito, two cities where you have contacts waiting, there’s Cuzco, Peru, from which we make a day trip by rail to the ruins at Machu Picchu and back." I shook my head ruefully. “If you don’t have business there, I’ll be happy to pass up that excursion. Judging by the pictures I’ve seen, those damn Incas, or whoever they were, built their stone city on top of a mountain peak with thousand-foot cliffs all around; and you know how I am about high places.”

She laughed. “Well, I’m not much for archaeology, myself. We can probably find something interesting to do in Cuzco while the rest of them are riding little trains around the Andes and chasing dead Incas around the rocks.” It would have been all right if she hadn’t blushed.

I mean, she hadn’t really said anything outrageous. There were undoubtedly, in Cuzco, interesting native markets and interesting souvenir stores galore, not to mention interesting Indians with interesting beasts of burden—Peru was the land of the llama, I recalled—and interesting museums and old churches. A fascinating place, according to the tour literature supplied us, Cuzco, Peru, eleven thousand feet in the air. There was absolutely no need for a girl to blush merely because she’d suggested that the city might have possibilities for a man and woman who’d deserted their tour group to spend a day together.

But her face did turn quite pink, betraying the thought that had come to her. I realized that the same thought hadn’t been far from my mind. At least I’d become sensitized, let’s say, to the point where I was looking hard for provocative bikinis, and very much aware of shapely legs and plump white breasts, and unnaturally intrigued by—if you want to call that unnatural—a juvenile senhorita in a snug, wet, one-piece swimsuit. What I mean to say is that traveling with a member of the opposite sex who’s neither senile nor deformed, you can ignore the biological realities only so long before the pressure starts to build.

The waiter came to the rescue, placing our drinks before us. Ruth reached for hers as if it were the last life preserver on a sinking ocean liner and, for a recent nondrinker, did a good, fast job of inhaling about half of it.

“Did you hear about the Priestlys?” she asked without looking at me. “Belinda told me in the rest room that Grace had had her purse slashed. I didn’t tell her about our little experience. . . ."

We discussed our tour companions extensively during dinner; they made a nice, safe subject. The melons, some of which I didn’t recognize, were excellent, and the pineapple was a different fruit, sweet and tender, from the tart, stringy stuff served in all states of the U.S. except Hawaii. Then we were in the elevator and getting out at the ninth floor. I made a point of checking the rooms meticulously, both rooms, before I let Ruth come in. Then I beckoned her forward, into her room, and closed and locked the door behind her. We stood facing each other. She drew a long breath, looking up at me. Her lips were full and moist, and I wondered why it had taken me so long to realize that she was a very pretty girl.

“I . . . I’m a grieving widow,” she said. “I really am, you know. I shouldn’t even think of. . .”

“Mark wouldn’t want you to grieve too long,” I said.

She licked her lips childishly. “I don’t know what. . .I thought I hated you. You hit me so hard with the butt of that big gun.”

I reached out to touch the side of her head gently. “But it’s all right now, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said, and suddenly she was in my arms, “it’s all right now.” But she held back for a moment. “You’re supposed to take my glasses off before you kiss me, darling.”

So I took the glasses off her, and moments later, some other things off her, and we determined in the most convincing way possible that everything really was all right now.

The scream brought me out of a sound sleep. Instinctively I grabbed the little knife I’d tucked under the pillow as I joined her in the bed. Kicking myself free of the bedclothes, I hit the carpet with a thump, rolled to get well clear, and on my stomach, spent a moment getting my diminutive weapon open two-handed, since it hadn’t been designed for fast-draw work.

Actually it was a Swiss army knife about the size of the boy-scout knife I’d carried as a kid, but better equipped. This little red-handled implement had flat screwdrivers in two sizes, one also serving as a can opener while the other pried caps off bottles; in addition it had a Phillips screwdriver, a punch, a toothpick, and a pair of tweezers. It even had two blades, an inch-and-a-half job for fine whittling and a two-and-a-quarter-incher for heavy carving. Two and a quarter inches of steel isn’t much, but it beats no steel at all, and the little slicer had the tremendous advantage that, with all its innocent-looking tools, it hadn’t upset the airport inspectors a bit, either in Albuquerque or Miami. Well, they’d passed the Thuggee scarf also. Any sensible assassin who doesn’t insist on packing a four-pound .44 Magnum with an eight-inch barrel through the gates won’t find airport inspections much of a hindrance to his trade.

I’d taken my time with the knife because there had been another whimpering cry from the bed and I’d realized what was going on and felt a little ridiculous crawling around on the rug with a miniature stabber in my hand. But I finished opening the knife. You don’t want to get into the habit of stopping halfway for any reason; the next time, that sharp little blade, open, might make the difference between life and death. Then I snapped it shut, rose, and dropped the knife on the chair toward which I’d tossed my clothes a few hours earlier, hitting with some, missing with others in my breathless haste, that contrasted strongly with the fine relaxation I now felt in spite of my sudden awakening. There was also, of course, a small sense of guilt, not involving the girl in the bed, but another woman with whom I’d shared a similar breathless moment not too long ago. I told myself that Madeleine would have laughed heartily at the thought that she’d expect me to be faithful beyond death. . . .

Ruth was thrashing around desperately in an effort to escape an invisible danger. “Oh, take them away, take them away!” she moaned.

I went around to that side of the bed and managed to knock something off the bedside table as I fumbled for the light switch. It turned out to be a fat paperback called
Trumpet in the Dust
by a best-selling novelist I’d heard of, named Johnson D’Arcy; the cover showed a terrified young lady fleeing a dark manor house that had light in one window. I guess I was still half-asleep; instinctively I picked up the book and replaced it tidily on the table before attending to the lady in distress, taking her gently by the shoulders.

“Easy now, take it easy,” I said. Her eyes came open suddenly. “Dogs?” I asked.

She licked her lips and nodded. “They were just about to catch me again. Their teeth were all bloody. That poor man had tried to shoot them but it was dark and they were coming so fast and he missed and his friends were shooting from the edge of the field but they were too far away. . . ."

She shuddered. I sat down on the edge of the bed and held her. “Tell me.”

“I don’t want to talk about it!” After a little she drew a long, shuddering breath. “Well, all right. I suppose it’s better to talk it out. Locked up in that room, I heard a sound in the middle of the night, and there he was, picking the padlock that held the bars shut, it was kind of a swinging grill.

He got me out through the window. We sneaked away, trying not to make any noise; then we ran. I never knew his name. I never really saw his face; it was night and he was in camouflage and all smeared with black. He said some friends were waiting for us with a car on the other side of the field. He hadn’t expected dogs; he thought we had it made until we heard them barking. Then somebody turned them loose and we could hear them behind us, coming up fast. They weren’t barking any longer, just rushing after us silently. When they got close, he told me to keep running and took out his gun and turned to deal with them, but it was too dark, like I said, and he missed, and his friends were shooting from the edge of the field, but they were too far away. The dogs charged him and knocked him down. Two of them. Well, I already said that, or didn’t I?”

She was holding me tightly, her voice muffled against my chest. Neither of us had any clothes on. Of course, if I’d been a true gentleman comforting a troubled lady, I wouldn’t have been aware of her nakedness, only of her distress.

She went on: “I just stood there. I suppose I could have tried to find a club or something to beat them off; at least I could have taken the opportunity to run like he’d told me while they were still busy with . . . with him, but it was a big open field in which they were bound to catch me. So I just. . . just waited for them to come and kill me, too. And they came up to me and sniffed at me all around, later I found bloody smears on my jeans, ugh! I stood perfectly still. Then I heard the whistle—it was supposed to be supersonic, I think, but I have very good hearing—and the dogs started whining, and the whistle blew again, and they turned and trotted away.”

“Dobermans?”

She shook her head. “Dobermans are the sleek, lean, dark ones, aren’t they? I don’t know much about dogs, but these were heavier. Big, stocky, yellow-brown brutes.” She cleared her throat. “I must have fainted. The next thing I knew I was in an ambulance. They caught some of the men who’d held me prisoner, but they never found the dogs or the old man who’d handled them.”

I glanced at her sharply. “How did you know he was an old man? Did he let you see his face?”

She shook her head and hesitated, thinking back. “Well, he was there with the dogs when they carried me into that house where they kept me. He looked old, a little bent and slow. Still fairly tall, but he looked as if he’d been taller, you know how they start kind of shrinking. Of course he was all in black and wearing a ski mask like all the others, so I never saw his face. He seemed to be quite fond of his dogs; you could tell by the way he touched them. He wore a big green stone on his left hand. He had spotty hands; that was another giveaway. He didn’t say anything, of course, nobody said a word to me the whole time I was there, but I assumed he was showing me the dogs so I’d realize there was no point in trying to escape.”

The information she’d given me made me forget, for a moment, that I was holding an attractive girl with no clothes on to whom I’d just made love. It seemed incredible that wealthy and influential and aging Gregorio Vasquez, originally of Colombia—wherever his current residence might be—would travel clear to New England to risk his neck supervising a minor abduction. On the other hand, it was equally incredible that a gang of kidnappers would burden itself with a shaky senior citizen unless he had a lot of authority. . . . Well, if the two-dog man was actually
El Viejo
, it was a hopeful sign. It meant that he didn’t just hide in an inaccessible aerie handing out orders; he could occasionally be found taking part in the action, just like Mac, who sometimes gets antsy sitting in that office chair and joins us peons hoeing the fields.