The Threateners (18 page)

Ruth said, “I’m sorry I woke you.”

"Are you all right now?"

She hesitated, and her arms tightened around me. She laughed again, softly. “Well, there’s only one sure way to find out, isn’t there. . . ?”

In the morning, with shafts of sunlight lancing through the gaps between the heavy draperies at the windows, I left her asleep among the rumpled bedclothes, looking small and soft and young. The other bed in her room remained undisturbed, as did the two in my room. You might say we enjoyed a superfluity of beds. I suppose I could have mussed one of mine in the interest of respectability, but it seemed a waste of time and effort. Hotel employees aren’t easy to fool about what guest sleeps where, and I saw no reason to try. We’d already resigned ourselves to the fact that our fellow tour members had had us living in sin even before we were.

I called down for breakfast for two and sat down to scribble a hasty report before shaving. I was dressed and tying my shoes when room service knocked on the door. The meal came on a rolling drop-leaf cart that the waiter unfolded to make a neat little formal table with a white tablecloth; he then uncovered and unwrapped and arranged things very carefully, including a vase with a single white flower, don’t ask me the name. It was nice to see a man who took his profession seriously. There’s another kind of room-service waiter, who shoves a loaded tray at you and runs. The man paused at the door and looked back.

“Can I bring the senhor anything else? Some ice, perhaps?”

Although I have, as I’ve already indicated, been known to take a drink upon occasion, I don’t need ice at 7:30 in the morning even in countries where I trust the water, soft or hard. However, “ice” was the word that had been chosen, perhaps because somebody figured that down here south of the equator, but pretty far north of Antarctica, ice wouldn’t figure in normal conversations often enough to cause confusion. I could see some objections to the choice, but I hadn’t been asked. The bureaucratic geniuses who set up these operations never ask.

“Ice, what’s that in Portuguese?” I asked. We were supposed to go through some linguistic nonsense to confirm identification.

“
Gelo
, senhor. It is very close to the Spanish
hielo
.”

“I’ve been expecting you,” I said. “As a matter of fact, the stuff you’re to pick up is in the ice bucket in the bathroom.

It seemed like a suitable place for it, under the circumstances. What do I call you?”

“Armando will do.”

He was a slim, moderately tall, middle-aged gent in black pants, a white long-sleeved shirt, and a black bow tie. The formal tie, the thick, smooth black hair, a small black mustache, and a dark poker face gave him the look of a rather snooty headwaiter condescending to do a little work below his station.

I said, “Sure, Armando. Are you local or will I be seeing more of you on this tour?”

“I have your schedule; you will see me again. We will continue to make certain that your hotel rooms are clean of electronic surveillance and explosive surprises, as well as possible. It will have to be a hasty check each time, since the hotel desk seldom knows very far in advance which members of a tour will be assigned to which rooms. I suggest, therefore, that after being given your keys, you delay a few minutes in each new hotel before using them. You almost caught our security specialist yesterday.”

“Sorry about that,” I said. “I’ll take us to the bar for a drink next time. ”

“Of course, the limited time available is not altogether a handicap. It reduces the enemy’s opportunities as well,” Armando said. After a moment he went on: “Elsewhere, under normal circumstances, we will continue to assume that you are capable of protecting yourself and the lady without assistance, as you did last night; however, if we see anything very elaborate being prepared for you, we will let you know. Incidentally, the three young hoodlums you encountered are known to operate around these hotels; it seems unlikely that their attempt to rob you was anything but a coincidence.”

I saw no reason to tell him that Ruth had indicated otherwise. I said, “You’ll find a computer diskette with the films. Mrs. Steiner tells me it’s a copy of one she was given yesterday. She says she’s scrambled it in some computerized way so we can’t read it without her password. She’s just giving it to us for safekeeping—one copy for me, one for Washington—in case her original goes astray. Even if Washington should manage to read it, she hopes that it, and the ones to come, will not be released for action until she’s ready to take advantage of the publicity that will result. Well, it’s all in my covering report, if anybody can read my hasty scribbles. ” “I will transmit your suggestions orally as well.”

“I’ll want a gun at Iguassu Falls.”

"Any particular kind of gun? We don’t have a great selection. They are quite strict about guns here.”

“Any old clunker will do,” I said.

“Ammunition?”

“One cylinder or magazine will be enough.”

"Very well." He stepped into the bathroom and came out holding a white plastic bucket by the swinging gold handle-well, it looked like gold. He opened the hall door and looked back, speaking rather loudly: “Just one moment, senhor. I will return with the ice you requested. . . ."

When I entered Ruth’s room, the bed we’d shared was empty, and the window draperies had been pulled aside to let the daylight in. I could hear her in the bathroom. I tried to tell her that food awaited her, but with water running she didn’t hear me through the closed door, so I crossed the room and knocked.

“Breakfast, ma’am,” I called.

She opened the door, holding a comb and wearing a short beach coat, striped blue and white, with a belt that she hadn’t got around to fastening around her. As I’d already discovered, her body, while constructed on economical lines, wasn’t really skinny anywhere. She covered herself without any haste or embarrassment, reminding me that although she sometimes looked like a kid, she’d buried two husbands, so she was used to having a man around in the morning. We faced each other for a moment, assessing our new relationship, but we were both experienced enough to know that it wasn’t something to be talked about.

“Breakfast is getting cold,” I said.

“Yes, darling, I’ll be with you in a minute,” she said.

Sugarloaf was a bitch. Getting to the top of the tall, rounded peak, I discovered, didn’t involve just one cable car, but two, with an uneasy transfer stop on an intermediate knob of rock. Both cars were crammed with sightseers. Trying to stay protectively between Ruth and the other passengers wasn’t easy, but my bodyguard duties helped to distract me from the fact that we were hanging by a fragile thread—well, wire cable—over a bottomless abyss. Well, almost bottomless. In my next incarnation I suppose I’ll compensate by becoming an intrepid airman or mountain climber, or maybe even a steeplejack. It’ll be a welcome change.

The view of Rio from the top of Sugarloaf was spectacular, but I’d already seen one spectacular view of Rio from the top of Corcovado. I didn’t need another, thanks. The only view that really interested me, aside from the sight of ground that was reasonably horizontal, was that of Spooky Three lurking near the lower terminal when we finally made it back down there. She was wearing the beige pantsuit I’d seen more than once already; but although it was neatly pressed today and made her look quite respectable in her healthy tomboy way, it was hardly an invisibility costume. The tall boy with whom she’d lunched the day before in the restaurant with the smoky swords, Spooky Five, was acting as backup and, in jeans and T-shirt and windbreaker, was only a little harder to spot.

Next day we were expertly packaged, labeled, and shipped by air to Iguassu Falls, flying over a mat of dense green jungle through which silvery rivers gleamed. It was raining

a little when we set down on the Iguassu airstrip, a change from the bright Rio sunshine. We were met by a bus with a driver and a smiling girl guide, not quite pretty but close enough, an improvement over dour little Arturo. They took us to the Itaipu Hydroelectric Plant on the Parana River and drove us across the dam, which was new, high, and impressive, with a lot of water roaring down the spillway and throwing up clouds of mist. We spent about thirty seconds in Paraguay across the river, turning the bus around, then we returned to Brazil and, in the administration building, were shown a film of the dam’s construction.

The rest rooms, that came in handy after the bouncing bus ride and the dull half-hour sit, were marked MASCULINO and FEMININO. Photographing the toilet traffic as usual while waiting for Ruth to emerge, I had a little chat with Belinda Ackerman, in white jeans that were under considerable tension and a purple silk shirt that, by way of contrast, didn’t provide much restraint. She thought it was wonderful the way I seemed to find photogenic subjects everywhere.

Then onward to the Brazilian national park at Iguassu Falls and a picturesque old pink hotel with white trimmings. I didn’t think much of our accommodations as far as security was concerned—I get nervous in ground-floor rooms with big windows and lush vegetation outside providing convenient cover for any approaching malefactor—but they were carefully done in old-fashioned style. There were tall, black, lathe-turned bedposts and old engravings on the walls. At least they looked enough like old engravings to pass muster if you didn’t look too hard. The bathrooms were frankly modem, however, neatly tiled and offering all toilet conveniences including bidets.

I spent some time in my room organizing the rudimentary location notes I’d made to go with the day’s take of pictures. Finally, I removed the half-used roll still in the camera, added it to the collection, put everything into the ice bucket provided with the room, and loaded up with fresh film. Shortly afterward I heard a light code knock on the hall door. I opened to admit Armando. Good timing.

“Are the accommodations to your satisfaction, senhor? Can I bring you anything, some ice perhaps?”

He was in just about the same black-and-white waiter get-up I’d seen him wearing last. I wondered how he’d managed the transition to this hotel, but money is very effective down there, as elsewhere; and his position wasn’t necessarily official. No guests and very few employees are likely to challenge a man who marches through a sizable hostelry dressed pretty much like the rest of the staff and acts as if he knows where he’s going and what he’s going to do when he gets there.

“Ice, that’s
gelo
in Portuguese, isn’t it?” They like us to maintain the ID nonsense even after it’s become unnecessary and ridiculous. “Yes, we could use some ice, thanks. The bucket’s in the bathroom.”

He glanced at the connecting door and lowered his voice: “I have been instructed to inform you that ar preliminary check has been run on the credentials of all members of your tour; they seem to be what they claim. The computer diskette you sent could not be read by our people; it has been passed along to the proper technical section for analysis.”

So my fellow travelers were all genuine, at least as far as a preliminary check was concerned, which didn’t necessarily mean they were harmless. And Ruth’s computer had apparently managed to cook up a reasonably impenetrable code.

“What about the pix?” I asked Armando.

“Excuse me?”

Apparently his English wasn’t quite up to my photo slang. I said, “Pix. Pictures. Photographs. The color negatives I sent in. Have they got around to developing and printing them yet?”

He said, “Pix. I will have to remember that. Yes, the pix have been processed; and the results seem to be quite interesting.”

“Don’t keep me in suspense.”

“There were one hundred and forty negatives on the four rolls submitted. Among those images, I am informed, two faces reoccur with statistically significant frequency, one male, one female. That is, of course, excluding the members of your group.”

I studied the prints he gave me and said, “Yes, those two have been doing a pretty conspicuous job of surveillance. I saw the big blond guy for the first time having lunch with the girl yesterday, and I saw him again up on Sugarloaf today. The dame has been following me around for over a month. She had three helpers back in Santa Fe, but I haven’t seen any of them since we left the States. Maybe she left them behind and, when she got down here, picked up Blondie as a substitute.”

Armando said, “We have no information on the man as yet. We do have an identification of the woman.”

“Great, who is she?”

“Apparently she has no record as a criminal or as an international agent of any kind; no matching photograph was found in any files we would normally access. I am informed that her identity probably would have remained a mystery if one of our female colleagues hadn’t come into a certain office on another errand, and noticed the prints on the desk, and asked what in the world we were doing with photographs of Pat Weatherford. Apparently our lady agent was a tennis aficionado, the kind that can tell you precisely who won Wimbledon in what year, against whom, and with what score. Patricia Weatherford seems to be a typical wealthy young Yankee woman, riding horses, sailing boats, and flying airplanes. However, her
afición
is tennis. She is a player of professional caliber. She made a brilliant debut as a young girl, and great things were expected of her, but apparently she never quite lived up to her early promise. Our agent who identified her expressed the opinion that Miss Weatherford could have become a truly top-ranking player if she had been a little hungrier and worked a little harder; but prize money, of course, meant nothing to her, not with the Weatherford fortune behind her."

I said, “My God!
Those
Weatherfords?”

What I knew about the Weatherfords was what everybody knew: their wealth was old railroad money multiplied a good many times by modem manipulation. A while back I spent a little time in Newport, Rhode Island. One of the local landmarks was the magnificent old Weatherford summer mansion, still in family hands. I wondered what the hell a Weatherford scion—well, scioness—was up to, following me around two continents.