She started to speak, then stopped. Presently she said, “You’re a funny person. All right, and where are we now?”
“In the back of a truck in a blizzard,” I said, “slowly turning to solid ice while you make up your mind where and how you’re going to spend the night.”
Her head came up. She stared at me. “You’re not really conceited enough, are you, to think I’d still consider...?” I didn’t say anything, and presently she laughed. It was a real laugh, soft and warm and kind of nice. “Oh, hell,” she said, “I’m certainly not going to wade back through three feet of snow to that cast-iron front seat, and if I stay here you’ll probably ravish me before morning, anyway.”
I said, “Damn, I hate women who think they’re irresistible. Do you want me to sleep in the cab, just to prove something?”
She said, “No, darling, I think you’ve proved quite enough for one night. Well, almost quite enough...”
13
The first thing I noticed, waking, was the silence. There wasn’t a sound anywhere, inside or outside the truck, except for the quiet breathing of the woman in my arms.
Gail stirred sleepily and burrowed closer. The temperature must have dropped twenty degrees during the night—as it often does out there right after a storm. I stuck my head out of the covers and saw there was light under the canopy. The windows were white with frost. I summoned my courage and squirmed out from under the sleeping bag and blankets piled on top of us, tucking them back around Gail. I put on coat, hat, and boots, and opened my suitcase to find a pair of gloves.
I found them all right and stopped in the middle of pulling them on, looking at a small, unfamiliar, paper-wrapped package tucked in among my belongings. The printing on the wrapper said: RODRIGUEZ CURIOS, JUAREZ, MEXICO. I hesitated, pulled off the gloves again, opened the package and looked at the rolled-up belt inside—obviously a farewell gift from Mac, something he thought I might be needing on this job.
It looked innocent enough, just a handcarved leather belt with a heavy, ornate buckle. It was, I knew, almost as innocent as it looked. There were no secret compartments, no razor blades concealed between strips of leather, no steel spring knives or saws. The only gimmick was the buckle, carefully designed to serve a number of purposes, some quite lethal. It was a grim reminder that I hadn’t come here to play amorous games in the snow.
“Good morning, darling,” Gail’s voice said behind me. “Is it as cold as I think it is?”
“Colder,” I said. “You stay wrapped up until I get the cab warm. How’s the glamor girl this morning?”
“She never felt less glamorous,” Gail laughed. “I’d make a terrible Eskimo; I like to take my clothes off when I go to bed... What have you got there?”
“Just something I picked up in Juarez.”
The falsehood was a little harder to manage convincingly, I noticed, than it would have been the previous day. I dropped the open package in front of her.
“Oh, a belt,” she said, and let it lie rather than expose herself to the cold by reaching out to investigate. “I don’t like those damn big fancy cowboy belts. I think a man looks much smarter in a plain, narrow belt.”
“I’ll remember that,” I said, “the next time I want to look smart.”
Outside, I warmed myself quickly by shoveling the snow clear of the truck’s exhaust pipe. Then I shoveled a path forward and started the motor to warm it up. The pickup rocked a little to indicate that Gail was moving around in back. I went back to investigate and found her sitting up with a blanket over her shoulders, pulling on a fresh pair of nylons. The snow was still frozen on the ones she’d had on the night before.
I said, “I told you to stay put.”
She made a face at me. “It’s not so cold.”
Her breath made a misty plume on the still air. Her legs, in those sheer stockings, looked colder than anything on earth. I reached out and pinched one of her toes through the nylon.
“Can you feel that?”
She looked startled. “Why, no, I—”
“You,” I said, “are a lovely dope.”
I grabbed her by the ankles and pulled her towards me, disregarding her squeals of protest. I gathered her up in my arms, carried her around to the cab and shoved her inside.
“It’ll start to get warm as soon as the sun rises, but in the meantime,” I said, “you put that coat on and stay in there all covered up if you want to get out of this with a full complement of toes and noses, not to mention fingers and ears. What do they teach you Texas girls, anyway?”
She gave me a grin. “After last night, darling, need you ask?”
I started to close the door and stopped, looking at her. Something had changed in her face. It wasn’t just that the hardships of the night had inflicted serious damage on the smooth, hard polish with which she’d embarked on this journey—that her elaborate hairdo was a tousled mess and her careful make-up mostly missing. She didn’t even have much lipstick on. Then I realized that it was the mouth itself that had changed. It was softer and prettier than I remembered it.
“What’s the matter, darling?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said, “but you’d better comb your hair. You look like a sheep dog.”
I went back to melt some snow for coffee on the Coleman stove and told myself that a woman always looks more beautiful after you’ve made love to her, but I was suddenly a little scared. I didn’t want her to turn into a nice girl with a sweet warm mouth. It didn’t fit in with my calculations at all.
We had no trouble getting back to the highway, and it didn’t take us long after that to reach Carrizozo. For some reason I found myself remembering the time I was working for an Albuquerque newspaper before the war—before Mac got hold of me and taught me a different profession—and had driven through Carrizozo in the spring when the cottonwoods were pale green and the tamarisk hedges were just turning pink. There were no pale new leaves on the cottonwoods today, and no feathery sprays of color on the tamarisks. There were just bare branches and tracked-up snow.
We needed gas, and Gail wanted a nice rest room. When it comes to selecting a place to go to the john, any woman can keep looking much longer than seems natural or safe, and she was no exception. The one she finally picked was no better than the three we’d passed up, as far as I could see, but it sold a brand of gas for which I had a credit card, so I turned in gratefully before she could change her mind.
The man who came up to fill the tank, after setting aside a snow-shovel, was wearing high-laced hunting boots and a red plaid cap with earflaps. He was on the young side of middle age, but not much so, and he had that kind of broad, freckled country face with a long, rubbery, lugubrious mouth and sad light-blue eyes that wouldn’t change till he died.
“You folks come far this morning?” he asked. “Have any trouble? No, I reckon you wouldn’t in this rig.” He patted the fender of the pickup approvingly and glanced up. “Place you want is right around the corner of the building, ma’am, but you’ll have to get the key off the cash register inside.” He watched Gail walk away, with the veiled expression of a man who has his dreams. Then he glanced quickly at me. “You’ll want the regular, I reckon, mister.”
“That’s right.”
He uncapped the tank and brought the hose over. “We get a big snow just about every year,” he said, “but damn if people don’t act like it was the end of the world every time it happens... You want me to take those chains off for you? You’ll beat them to pieces if you leave them on, now the blade’s been over the road. Cost you fifty cents.”
“It’s a deal,” I said.
He got a big hydraulic jack and rolled it over. I stood by, waiting. I saw Gail come around the corner of the building, picking her way where the snow was packed so she wouldn’t damage her fragile blue pumps. She’d made the necessary cosmetic repairs, combed her hair smooth and hung her pearls back around her neck. Her expensive sweater and skirt were telling no tales. There are still problems to be solved in the fie
lds of science and medicine and international relations, but the ladies’ garment industry has got it licked. Nowadays, a girl can spend the night out under quite strenuous circumstances and still greet the morning without a pleat out of place.
She looked pretty and feminine, tiptoeing through the snow like that, but I wasn’t watching her just for aesthetic pleasure. I saw her discover the telephone booth nearby—or pretend to discover it. She glanced my way, and I nodded. She made her way over there and picked up the directory without closing the door. Watching her leaf through the pages, I saw her frown quickly and go back a page. She looked up, with a startled expression on her face. I walked over there.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“It isn’t there!”
“No Wigwam?”
“No Wigwam,” she said. Then I guess the tone of my voice gave her a belated hint, because she looked up, her gray eyes wide and accusing. “You knew!”
“I knew we wouldn’t find it in the phone book,” I said.
“How—”
“It was checked two nights ago along with your personal history and various other things.”
She frowned as if completely bewildered. “You knew, and still you had us come all this way? You let me—” She stopped, and said naively, “You might at least have told me!”
I said, “It was your wild-goose chase, glamor girl. I just came along to watch the show.” She gasped, and I said, “Sure, I let you put on your act. It was very good. Congratulations. The double-take, the surprised expression... Anybody’d have thought you really expected to find a place called the Wigwam!” I grimaced. “Now, why don’t you just break down, Gail, and tell me what your sister really said, and why you went to the trouble of making up this crazy story about an Indian lodge...”
“Excuse me, sir.”
The voice came from behind me. Well, I should have known better than to pick a public driveway for the scene, but I was just about through, anyway. I’d done my part to establish the Unbearable Mr. Helm for another day. He’d slipped a little last night; he’d been almost human early this morning, but now he was right back in form. I turned.
“That’ll be three-eighty for the gas and fifty cents for taking off the chains, plus tax,” the filling station man said. His stolid, freckled face said that quarrels between his customers were none of his business, much as he’d like to know what the hell it was all about. “Oil and water okay. I put your chains in back.”
I gave him my credit card. The sound of running footsteps told me Gail was gone; I heard the truck door open and close, hard. I followed the man into the station to sign the ticket.
“There wouldn’t be a place called the Wigwam in town?” I asked casually. “A motel or a restaurant or something?”
“There’s nothing called the Wigwam, mister, but the Turquoise Motel’s a nice place to stay, and if you want something to eat or drink, there’s the Cholla Bar and Grill...”
When I got behind the wheel, she was sitting at the other end of the seat, looking straight ahead. I started up the truck and drove away. At the end of town I stopped at the junction where our north-south highway intersected the big paved road going east over the mountains to Roswell in the Pecos Valley, and west over the mountains to Socorro, on the Rio Grande. I turned left and drove out of town. A little way down the road a sign—similar to ones we’d seen while crossing the missile range farther south—warned that the road was occasionally closed for one-and-one-half hour periods during tests. Ahead, the road dipped down into a wide, desolate, snow-covered basin.
“The mountains straight across,” I said, “are called the Oscuras, I think. The Army’s got a lot of stuff back in there, or did the last time I was through. It’s all restricted as hell back in there. Those mountains, just visible, to the south are the Manzanitas.”
That got a small reaction from her; she deigned to turn her head and look, but she didn’t speak.
“Yes,” I said, “that’s where the underground test will take place shortly, if it goes off on schedule. It’s already been postponed once, and this weather is going to make things rough out there.” I paused. “We don’t think much of your Wigwam story, Gail, but we’re inclined to buy Carrizozo. You can see how it might be the logical place for a drop—that’s the jargon for an underground station or post office. It’s right where the main highways cross. Anybody going into or coming out of the test area wouldn’t need much of an excuse to stop off in Carrizozo to pick up instructions or deliver the goods.”
She didn’t answer, of course. Her profile was very handsome, but as cold and lifeless as the face on a coin. I drove back and zigzagged through the town, saying nothing. It took three-quarters of an hour, but she finally broke down and spoke.
“May I ask what we are doing?”
I said, “Giving you the benefit of the doubt, glamor girl. I don’t think much of that Wigwam story, but I’m willing to be convinced. Now that you’ve finally come out of your trance, suppose you watch that side of the street while I watch this one. Any sign you can’t read, just holler and I’ll stop.”
She turned at last to look at me directly. “But—”
“So maybe it isn’t in the phone book,” I said. “And maybe it isn’t a motel or restaurant, maybe it’s a little curio shop or candy store without a phone. Maybe it’s a private residence, with a cute sign out front, only listed under the owner’s name.”
“But you said—” She paused. “You implied... dreadful things!”
“Gail,” I said, “in this business, there’s a maxim that goes: suspect everybody once except a woman you’ve slept with; suspect her twice. You will admit it’s odd that there’s no such place in the directory, won’t you?”
“But you don’t really believe—”
“At this stage of the proceedings, I don’t believe anything,” I said. “I don’t disbelieve anything, either. What do you want me to do, take you on faith?”
She flushed slightly, “No, but—”
“Hold it,” I said. “We can argue about it later. Look over there.”
“What is it?” Her voice was suddenly eager. “Is it—”
“Not what we’re looking for, but there are an awful lot of government cars congregating at that motel up ahead. They weren’t there the last time we came by... I’ll be damned!” I said. “There’s Rennenkamp, Old Man Atom himself, the director of the test. I’ve seen his picture in the paper. Looks like something has got him in a real calm and objective mood as befits a scientist of his age and reputation...
I shouldn’t have slowed down, of course. Making a U-turn to avoid passing the place again would have looked too obvious, but I should have driven past rapidly, looking straight ahead, instead of gawking like a tourist at the tall, white-haired old man who was violently haranguing a shorter, darker man in front of a gray car with U.S. GOVERNMENT—INTERAGENCY MOTOR POOL stenciled on the side.
I guess I was curious as to whether the old gent wanted to get started, snow or no snow, and they wouldn’t let him, or whether he was telling them he was damned if he was going to risk getting stuck out in the valley today, and to hell with scientific progress and national prestige.
It certainly wouldn’t hurt to get some idea as to whether or not the test might be delayed again—but as I came abreast of the place with my bare face showing at the open cab window, a man came out of the motel office and stopped to stare.
“Matt!” he shouted, starting across the sidewalk. “Matt Helm! What the hell are you doing here, you old bastard?”
It was the last question in the world I wanted to be asked in that particular place at that particular time.
14
The funny thing was, I didn’t even know him. I mean, I’d have passed him on the street without recognizing him, it had been that long, and even after I remembered who he was, it took me a while to dredge up his name, although I’m supposed to be good at faces and names. But he belonged to that youthful, pre-war period of my life when I’d carri
ed a big 4x5 Speed Graphic camera like a shining sword and worn a press pass in my hat like reporters do in the movies—at least I did until I was laughed out of it by the reporters on the paper, one of whom was this man.
There wasn’t anything to do but pull into the driveway and get out and go around to meet him and let him pump my hand enthusiastically. He was one of those ageless, pink, chubby, baby-faced characters who remember everybody they’ve ever met and are always glad to see them. I don’t know why. Personally, I’ve met a lot of people I’d just as soon forget.
“Well, if it isn’t old Flashbulb Helm,” he said. “How’s the newspix racket after all these years?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said, improvising. “I’m freelancing nowadays.” Well, that checked with my original cover as Mr. Helm, photojournalist from California. “What the hell are you doing out here in a snowdrift?” I asked. “I heard you’d gone to Washington to become a political expert or something.”
I’d remembered his name then: Frank McKenna, but nobody had ever called him Frank. He’d been universally known as Buddy, and I had no doubt he still was. I remembered Gail, at the window of the truck, and I said, “Honey, this is Buddy McKenna. Don’t believe anything he says, even if you read it in the papers.”
Buddy gave Gail an appreciative look. “Is that nice?” he asked me reproachfully. He turned to Gail. “Accuracy is the watchword with McKenna, ma’am. I may not get the story, but I’ll damn well spell your name right... What did this oaf say your name was?”
I said quickly, “Her name is Gail, and you keep your cotton-picking hands off, old pal, old pal.” I looked around. “Just what’s going on here, anyway? Isn’t that Rennenkamp over there having a hemorrhage about something? Who’s the dark-haired guy arguing with him—the intense one with bifocals?”
“That’s Naldi, the seismograph man. He can record the rumbling of a hungry stomach through a thousand yards of solid rock. He’s been planting his instruments all over these damn mountains; hell, they postponed the party once so he could finish the job. He just drove up to meet us and go in with us—that is, if we do go in. There seems to be some question, weather-wise.”
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