Such Men Are Dangerous

by Lawrence Block

  On the ride back to my room she unzipped my fly and told me how her husband was a bastard bird colonel who only got stationed where it was cold enough to freeze her blood. And by Gawd a girl had to do something to keep warm, didn’t she? Then she started giggling.

  In bed she behaved wildly, out of passion or practice, and seemed to enjoy herself. God knows why. Afterward she lay back with her head on my pillow and a cigarette in her mouth. When her eyes closed I took the cigarette from her mouth and carried it into the bathroom and flushed it away. I came back and sat down next to her and watched her. Her mouth had fallen open and she was breathing noisily through it.

  I studied her. Her hair needed reblonding. A full half inch of brown root showed. I touched her hair. It remained unruffled, artfully sprayed into place, and it felt like plastic.

  Old acne scars showed dimly beneath her facial makeup. The rest of her skin was a washed-out white. I touched parts of her and she made grunting sounds in her sleep. She felt unhealthily soft, like cheap latex pillows.

  I straddled her, leaned my weight on my elbows. I placed my hands on either side of her throat, thumbs together in front. I pressed, just a little.

  She opened her eyes and said, “Darling …”

  I made myself raise my thumbs, and then I crawled into my own head and walked around there for a moment, opening doors and looking inside, letting things sort themselves out.

  Puzzled, “Darling?”

  So I threw it to her a second time, a more symbolic and less permanent ritual of murder, and she heaved and bucked and perspired and moaned. I wouldn’t let her go back to sleep afterward. I made her get up and dressed, and I drove her to where her car was parked and helped her open the door and sag behind the wheel. She drove off, weaving all over the road, and I figured it was about even odds that she would kill herself on the way home.

  The smell of her was all over the room. I opened doors and windows, stripped the sheet from the bed, then went and stood under the shower for a long time. When I came back the air was cold but cleaner. I put the sheet on the bed upside down and killed the light. I got into bed. The pillow reeked of her hair spray, so I tossed it across the room and slept without it.

  There had been no pleasure in it, not in the anticipation or the execution or now, in the memory.

  No women exc. whores if you have to.

  She was not precisely a whore, and I hadn’t had to, so that did it. The slate was clean now. Since leaving the island I had broken all ten of my rules.

  My final night on the island had been very inactive once Dattner avoided going down for the last time. I brought him over to the fire and wrapped him in blankets and poured corn into him. He filled in details in a flat monotone. He must have talked for half an hour. I heard it all in silence, and when he was done and the bottle close to empty I bedded him down in the shack and piled all the blankets on top of him. I stretched out on the beach, positive that it was going to be a sleepless night for me. But I was too well trained, and sleep came in less than ten minutes.

  Two hours later, judging by the moon, I was awake again. My body was wet with perspiration and shook with chills. I could smell myself. I try to stay out of the water at night but now I waded in up to my knees and splashed myself clean. I toweled dry and sat down to think about things.

  The operation wasn’t bad. It had every chance in the world of turning sour, but what didn’t? The real question was whether or not I wanted to get involved.

  I could probably use the money, but that wasn’t the point, either.

  Then I played with the question of whether or not my life on the island needed an occasional change of pace. I went to Clint’s every sixth day, and not solely because that was how long a dozen eggs lasted. I needed the human contact involved. Maybe I also needed periodic doses of another sort of contact and involvement. Or, on the other hand, maybe this was another temptation, another vestigial complication that had to be suppressed until it stopped making periodic noises.

  I took a stick and sketched in the sand with it. I had a lot of lines furrowed before I realized I was roughing out a map of the Sprayhorn area. I started plotting movements on it, but that didn’t make sense because I had no real picture of the terrain or the installations or anything else. I smoothed out the sand and put the stick down.

  The Army was shipping the gear south in four trucks. There were two rumors—that it would be retained in Tampa for fast delivery to good-guy guerrillas if that policy was ever adopted, or that it had already been adopted and Tampa was just a way-station. Either way, the goods would be en route somewhere between the 3rd and 12th of February.

  That was all we really knew. The trucks might move out in a convoy or one by one. They could be almost any size, or different sizes. Each one would have a driver and a guard in the cab; there might be men in back, there might not. And there might be aerial reconnaissance scheduled, and there might be armored cars leading and backing up, and so on.

  We would have me on the inside, finding out things, and George on the outside, setting things up. The odds sounded ridiculous but he was right, it was feasible. You couldn’t prove it with a computer. Not enough of the data was available, let alone suitable for programming.

  But it could be done. That much I knew intuitively. It was the hows that took study. I ran a lot of the obvious variables through my mind and picked up some of the more likely problems and played at solving them. I was surprised how well my mind was handling the situation. I was thinking very clearly, getting a lot worked out. Of course it was all academic now, but I couldn’t go back to sleep, and—

  By sunrise, with the orange sun sitting fat and happy on indigo water, I knew there was no decision to make. The decision had been long made for me. Because for hours now I had not thought at all about the whether, but only about the how. The decision made itself while I was looking the other way.

  I made two cans of coffee and split the remaining shine between them. I gave George’s can the best of it, figuring he would need it. I carried his coffee to the shack, shook him awake. He was alert instantly, a good sign. I gave him his coffee, and while he gulped it I told him I was in.

  We were off the island by noon.

  We spent the hours until then talking. Good talk this time, crisp and clear, no interruptions, no cuteness, nothing in the way. We would make a part of a plan and fix it firmly and permanently in our minds, but at the same time we avoided getting married to any of our plans—whenever one of us spotted a hitch somewhere, we backed off and checked connections all the way down the line. Everything was loose and flexible and hypothetical, with more if-this-then-that then a twelve-horse parley. It had to be that way because of the glut of unknown factors. But at the same time these hours were more time than we would have together until the play was halfway home, and we had to get as much communicating out of the way now as possible.

  It wasn’t nonstop talking. We broke twice to swim and once to race around the island. I beat him with no trouble, but he was in better shape than I might have guessed, and this was another good omen.

  We worked out codes and schedules. The first hurdle was making do with as little communication as possible. By the middle of the day he said he couldn’t think of anything else, and neither could I.

  “We’ll go over the rest of it on the boat,” he said. “I’ve got most of your things aboard. Clothes and all, ID. The pictures I used of you showed you in a crew cut. And no beard, of course. And no tan, but that doesn’t matter in a picture. We can get your fingerprints in place aboard ship.”

  “You took a lot for granted.”

  “No, not really. It was a time problem, Paul. I couldn’t find out first and then start building a depth cover for you. If you weren’t what I wanted, or if you wouldn’t play, I was out a couple of thousand. It’s like putting a dime on a number, the odds are so long you don’t cry if you never hit. Let’s go.”

  “Go on ahead. It’ll take me a few minutes.”

  “Take your
time.”

  I did little cleanup jobs until he was well out of sight. Then I unburied my money belt and put it on. It was lighter now. I left a couple of thousand in the hole, neatly wrapped in a triple thickness of aluminum foil along with my personal papers and my list. When I took down the list I thought of the moonshine I’d added to my morning coffee, and the breakfast and lunch I hadn’t had, and everything else.

  I left my unbaited lines in the water. The third fish, which we hadn’t eaten, was beginning to smell. I left it where it lay. The tides would deposit dead fish all over my island while I was gone. There would be no one around to throw them out to sea. The birds would eat some of them, the tide would take some away, and the rest would rot.

  I went to the boat. He was standing alongside it smoking a cigarette. We shoved it free of its moorings and got in. The engine caught first try, and I stood in the bow and looked where I was going, not where I had been.

  More talk and more plans. He was going to run the boat straight down to Key West and let the owner send a cab for it. I would have to shave on the boat; he had a battery razor I could use. It wouldn’t work on my beard, but he also had a safety razor and a can of lather. I managed to get all but an eighth inch of stubble that way, then used the electric to eat up the rest.

  From Key West you can fly to Miami. I let him have the first plane out and agreed to take the next one. By the time I got to Miami he would be somewhere over the Carolinas.

  We went over everything a last time, and it looked tight.

  “One thing,” he said. “Last night, when I kept going underwater.” He made it sound light enough but that only showed that he was good at the game. “I didn’t know you would get that rough, of course. Or that you would have bought the straight story to begin with. But the part that gets me is this—you were supposed to spot holes in my opening story. I allowed for that, I set it up. If you hadn’t tumbled I would have found a way to make it even more obvious.”

  “I’m not surprised. You work that way, you like one cover on top of another. Layers.”

  “Wheels within wheels. It works, Paul. No, to get back to it, I used the first pitch to set you up for the second. That was the real curveball, and you didn’t even bother tearing it up. You tore me up instead.”

  “So?”

  “I thought it was a fairly solid story.”

  “I suppose it was.”

  “And one two three and I’m in the middle of the ocean. What tipped you off? How did you know I was lying?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You—”

  “I figured if you stuck to it through three duckings it was true, and if you changed it you would come up with the straight thing. It was a cheap investment.” I smiled. “Like buying clothes for me and setting up my cover in advance. Same thing. Give a little to get a lot.”

  He gave me a lot of silence. Then he told me he was glad we were on the same team. So was I.

  NINE

  THE MORNING AFTER I wished T.J. Morrison a happy birthday, I received a return telegram at my office in the compound. It was coded, a box cipher constructed upon the key word Superman, with the additional complication of a letters-for-numbers substitution cipher to back it up. I don’t think anyone on base could have cracked it, and doubt if anyone thought of trying, but this is what they would have read:

  BUYER SET PRICE FIRM BAKER FOUR NINETEEN HOWARD

  CARSON CAMERON TWO.

  The first four words meant that our outlet was prepared to take delivery at our price. Baker four nineteen was a rendezvous—I should meet him at seven p.m. at the second of our proposed meeting places on the fourth day following. Meanwhile, in two days I could reach him with a wire to Howard Carson at the Hotel Cameron.

  I burned the telegram, along with the three sheets of paper used to decode it. Then I left my office and wandered around the area trying not to look too much like a spy. After a day of this the word got out, and the base personnel went to great lengths to ignore me when I meandered into their areas of responsibility.

  Local security was not as weak as I had expected. General Baldwin Winden might be a clown, but the base ran itself fairly well in spite of his hand at the helm. No vehicle went in or out of the main gate without getting close scrutiny from the guard. On the inside, each of the concrete block buildings had its own informal security set-up. You didn’t need a pass to go from Point A to Point B, but if there was no obvious motive for the trip, someone was likely to take a second look at you. This happened to me the first day, until the word got around that I was a civilian snooper, and from then on I felt like the invisible man.

  It didn’t take too long to find out where the goods were being stored for shipment, and how they were guarded, and just how much space they occupied. Nor was it difficult to pick out the on-post intelligence types. They didn’t quite wear signs, but they might as well have. I kept moving, kept noticing things, and spent my night adding up all the bits and pieces and making a total picture out of them. It was a little like working a jigsaw puzzle—I wouldn’t know exactly where we were until the last piece went into place, but the closer I got, the better idea I had. I was learning things that cut down our variables, and the comforting thing was that no obvious flaw in our basic planning had yet emerged.

  After four days of this, I left the base around dinner time and drove to Pierre. It’s pronounced “peer,” it’s the capital of the state, and it has an airport which George’s wire called Baker.

  He was in a booth at the coffee shop when I got there. I sat in the booth next to his and ordered a hamburger and coffee.

  He said, “I have forty minutes between planes. Everything going good?”

  “So far.”

  “Did the MI people show?”

  “No.”

  “Good. They’ll be here at least three days before D-Day. Probably two of them. Today’s what? The 30th. If I had to bet right now, I’d say that they would ship on the 7th. I’ll be on the spot and ready by the third, that’s Monday.”

  “Not cutting it too close?”

  “I don’t think so. What have you got?”

  “A hundred small things. I’ve been—” I dropped it when I saw the waitress coming, waited until she was out of range again. Then, talking at my coffee cup, I said, “I’ve been keeping busy. The goods are all being stored in one spot. They haven’t been loaded yet, but I’ve got the carriers pinpointed. Four trucks, each about the size of a troop carrier. Say a capacity of 2500 cubic feet, top. That checks with my rough guess on the goods themselves. They could run ten thousand, but no more.”

  “That’s already a little more than we figured.”

  “A little. Trucks are armor-plated. They look like big Brinks trucks. They’re empty now, and I’m positive they’re scheduled to haul the stuff.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I drank some coffee. “We have to wait until they load and ship. To take them off now, we’d need ten good men and a lot of luck. Most important, we wouldn’t have any lead time. Those roads are rotten, most of them. We would only have one way out of Sprayhorn, we’d never make it.”

  “Go on, Paul.”

  “I sketched the next part. I’ll give you the drawing later, or do you want it now?”

  “Later’s fine.”

  “All right. They’ll have to go south from the post. There’s only one decent road and they’ll all have to take it. Now, here’s the problem—I get the impression from the general that the four trucks are going to four different places. One to Florida, one to Massachusetts, one to Texas and one to the Coast. California.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Right. He could be wrong, he’s no genius, but I think he knows something we didn’t know. That’s why I tried to find some way to pull it off inside, when everything would be in one place. Once those trucks start off on separate roads—”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But there’s a stretch of fifteen miles that they’ll all have to take. If they were going in a convoy
all the way to Florida, we could pick our spot. But we can’t count on that.”

  “So we have to hit them within fifteen miles of home.”

  “It’s the only safe way. Unless you want to settle for one load.”

  “The hell with that.” He fell silent, and I worked on my hamburger. Then he asked how certain I was that they would all leave the post at the same time. I told him I wasn’t certain, but it was the way I would do it if I were setting it up.

  “Why? Makes them a sitting duck, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes and no. Remember, they wouldn’t worry that someone would want all four trucks. They would just want to make sure that nothing happened to any of the trucks. And they would realize that the tight part is on the road leading south from the post. After that, on larger highways, they would have less to worry about. So that’s where they would want to use a convoy. In unity is strength, all of that.”

  “You’ll have to confirm that.”

  “I know.”

  “And find out what kind of contact they’ll use. They may send some cars along to ride shotgun.”

  “Or aerial surveillance.”

  “Christ, I hope not. Ten thousand cubic feet, that’s more than I thought. We’ll need two very big trucks, won’t we?”

  “Or a van. I have a few ideas, George.”

  “Let’s hear them.”

  I talked for a long time, and he listened, and again we worked together very well. He found a few holes in my approach, but they were not as bad as they might have been, and by the time he was ready to get on his plane I felt good about the way things were shaping up.

  “Just stay on top of it for now,” he said. “When the MI boys show up, that’s when you’ll get more of an idea of specifics. They’ll be able to tell you just how the whole operation is going to be staged.”

  “They’ll also check me out a lot harder than General Baldy Windy.”

  “That’s no problem.”

  “Oh?”

  “Your Agency card is a real one, Paul. That’s the thing to remember. All they can do is ask the Agency if you really exist, and all the Agency can do is say no. But that’s what we always say regardless, and MI knows it. They can’t possibly poke a hole in your cover.”