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.”
I took the hand and bowed over it. “Sir Matthew at your service, Lady Madeleine. Matt for short.”
“I know. We went through all that twelve years ago, so I was being pretty silly yesterday, wasn’t I, getting on my high horse like that?” She drew a long breath. “Now that we’ve got that out of the way, you can take it out and feed it, Matt.”
In the motel coffee shop, waiting for our breakfasts, we studied each other warily across the table, almost as if we were getting acquainted for the first time.
“Well, let’s get this operation organized,” I said after a moment, and I took an envelope from my inside jacket pocket and pushed it across the table. “Some credit cards; any reasonable charge will be covered. Five hundred dollars in fifties; better break a couple of them as soon as you can and be sure you always have telephone change on you. You’ll fi
nd you can make a credit-card or collect call from most pay phones these days without a coin—I don’t think it was that way at the time of your involuntary withdrawal from society—but there are still a few that have to be fed.”
She laughed softly. “‘Involuntary withdrawal from society.’ I’ll have to remember that. It sounds much better than being thrown into the can.”
“Spare key for the Mazda,” I said. “A note stating that you have the owner’s permission to drive it, just in case you meet a busybody cop who decides that, with your record, you must have stolen it. And a current New Mexico driver’s license.”
She reached for the envelope and hesitated. “Matt, I don’t understand.”
I said, “We still don’t know how it will break. We could get separated, as I said before, or I could be disabled or killed. I want you to be able to jump into the little heap and blast out of there and take care of yourself alone until you’ve made that phone call and somebody comes to look after you. You can manage a stick shift; you had a sporty little Fiat or something, didn’t you? Watch out for that rotary mill, it’ll rev up to its seven-thousand red line before you know it. You can’t double-clutch it, there doesn’t seem to be enough flywheel to keep it spinning; they recommend the heel-and-toe technique if you want to get fancy.”
She shook her head ruefully. “You’re way beyond me. I don’t know those racing tricks. I don’t even know if I remember how to shift gears normally.”
“You’ll remember,” I said. “And if you do get in a bind, keep in mind that it’s a real sports car in spite of the air conditioning and the plushy seats. It’ll out-corner practically anything that comes after you. Slam it into a curve wide open and watch them go off into the bushes trying to stay with you. But we hope you won’t have to.”
She drew a long breath and nodded. She picked up the envelope and tucked it into her purse, saying, “You could have given me this yesterday.” I said carefully, “I didn’t know you yesterday.”
She looked at me for a long moment. “I see,” she said a bit coldly. “You had all the bases covered. Or to put it differently, this is Program A. If… if after studying my reactions so carefully—I wondered why you kept prodding me to talk so much about myself—if you’d come to another conclusion about me, you’d have had another approach.”
I said, “Actually, this is Program B. You went and loused up our favorite Program A by… well, well get to that in a moment. Here comes the food; to hell with idle chatter.”
We tackled our breakfasts in silence. At last she sat back with a little sigh. “God, I keep making a pig of myself; but it just tastes so damn good after what they fed me in… in there.” She glanced at me almost shyly. “Matt, do you mind if I do a little theorizing aloud, just so you’ll know what I’m thinking?”
“No, of course not.”
“Well,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “well, there’s an obvious point that comes to mind. You must have been working on something important involving… well, involving CADRE, before you ever got that. mysterious phone call saying I was to be killed.”
I frowned, “CADRE? Oh, the Center for Advanced Defense Research, where your husband was working. Okay, go on.”
She said, “It doesn’t seem likely that a specialized government agency like yours would have concerned itself with a contract being put out on just any stray female being released from just any old federal penitentiary, or that your informant would have thought he was doing you a great big favor by telling you about it. My… my proposed murder had to be connected with something in which you were already interested, already involved. Otherwise you’d have dismissed it as mere nuisance information and passed it along to the proper authorities, wherever they might be.”
I looked at her with respect. “That’s pretty good theorizing. It happens to be slightly wrong, but that’s my fault. I let you think the phone call saying you were to be killed came directly to us. It didn’t. It was the kind of gratitude deal I described, all right, but I can’t tell you what agency was involved because I simply don’t know. We were merely given the information, told how it had been obtained, and ordered to do something about it without asking any nosy questions about things we didn’t need to know about. That’s how our great government works, if you want to call it working.”
“I see. But the organization that did receive the tip was presumably interested in CADRE, since otherwise why would they care whether I lived or died? The only thing about me that could possibly concern anybody in the U.S. government is the fact that I’d been—still am, officially, since he’s never been declared dead—married to Roy, who was employed there. And that I was supposed to have helped him carry out his nefarious espionage scheme. They must have thought I knew something important after all, that I’d kept to myself all these years. Or was in a position to learn it, now that I was being set free.”
I said, “Obviously, somebody else thought so, too—thinks so, too—or they wouldn’t be trying to kill you.” I frowned. “You haven’t any idea what it might be?”
She said rather stiffly, “I don’t expect you to believe me, but I really don’t.”
I grinned. “You may be surprised at what I’ll believe. But let’s skip it for now. Maybe it will come to you, whatever it is, or we’ll be able to figure it out as we go along.”
After a moment, she relaxed and gave me a reluctant little smile. “And in the meantime I’m a docile decoy, trying not to scream every time somebody slams a car door hard. Now get me some more coffee, please, and a little more jam for my toast, and tell me all about Program A, the favorite one I’ve managed to ruin for you somehow.”
I passed her requests along to the waitress and said, “Program A was based upon the assumption that there was an evil lady serving a well-earned prison sentence, let’s call her Mrs. Mata Hari Ellershaw. This reprehensible female had conspired with her husband and another woman to steal documents that compromised the security of the United States of America in a very dangerous way. However, the plot went sour and she found herself deserted by her accomplices and left behind to take the rap. She spent, her prison term kicking herself for being such a sucker, but fear of eventual retaliation kept her silent about certain important things she’d learned. Also the fact that, disbarred and discredited and penniless, she was going to need help when she got out. But her wicked associates considered her too dangerous to be allowed to go free at the end of her sentence, or maybe they simply didn’t want a sullen, resentful ex-convict lady around to embarrass them. They laid plans to deal with her permanently upon her release from the penitentiary. My chief decided that somebody—like me—should be there when our Mattie, as we’ll call her, realized the further double-cross to which she was being subjected. When she discovered that her husband, not satisfied with having thrown her to the wolves, so to speak, nine years ago, was now actually conspiring to have her killed, she might well get angry enough to break her self-imposed silence and supply us with valuable information, maybe even some hint, of where to find him.”
Having already creamed and sugared her coffee liberally, Madeleine was spreading large quantities of red jam over an already generously buttered slice of toast. Well, her figure was really none of my business.
She spoke without looking up: “But the evil female didn’t react properly?”
I said evenly, “It turned out that we’d made a mistake, a rather grave error, in fact a real booboo. When the guns started firing, the lady in question obviously hadn’t the slightest idea of who was shooting at her. She showed none of the anger of a woman subjected to a terrible betrayal, none of the shock and disillusionment of a woman learning that the associates she’d counted on to help her rebuild her broken life had turned against her. In fact, she just looked kind of pleasantly excited. It was very disappointing, after all the careful planning we’d done. There we were, stuck with a sadly misjudged and mistreated lady who didn’t know any more than we did about why she was scheduled to be killed. A lady wh
o, it appeared, was probably quite innocent of everything she’d been accused of.” I drew a long breath. “Of course, being careful professionals, we’d allowed for the possibility, remote though it had seemed. There were other ways of utilizing this victimized dame. Scratch Program A. Institute Program B.”
She was watching me steadily. “So that’s why you were so anxious to keep me talking, yesterday, to confirm—”
I nodded. “Having already studied your file pretty thoroughly, I wanted to hear your side of the story. Actually I never did really buy the case against you, persuasive though it seemed. As I said yesterday, that Kravecki woman was very unconvincing as a secret courier. And as for the money in a bank box under your name, hell, somebody set up exactly that frame for me once, so I know how easy it is. As far as the rest is concerned, well, damn it, I’ve stayed alive longer than some because I don’t often go too far wrong about people. My chief was going by the evidence, and I had to play along with him up to a point. But I’d met you and he hadn’t. There are lots of crimes you could commit, Madeleine, but spying for the nasty Red Russkies, particularly for money, isn’t among them.”
The gray eyes were very wide and a little shiny, staring at me out of the prison-pale face. I don’t know what I expected—a little pleasure perhaps, a little gratitude for my faith in her innocence. I didn’t get it. There was a lengthy silence. When she spoke at last, it was in a low, savage, shocking voice.
“Damn you!” she whispered. “Oh, damn you, damn you, damn you! The one man in the world who believes I didn’t do it, and he comes to me eight years late, after it’s all over, after it’s all been done to me, after my life’s been totally smashed and there’s nothing left to salvage!” She drew a deep shuddering breath. “Where the hell were you when I needed you, Matthew Helm? Where, where, where?”
She jumped up, snatched up her purse, and ran out of the restaurant. I sat there for a moment rather stunned by the outburst. Then I reminded myself sharply that I had a job to do, and that the big emotional crises were times of distraction when things often happened that shouldn’t have been allowed to happen. I rose and moved to where I could watch through the windows and make certain she got safely across the parking lot to her room.
The Infiltrators Page 6