The Intimidators

by Donald Hamilton

  “This is the old Royal Victoria Hotel, sir,” said Fred loudly, going into his spiel. “It served as unofficial headquarters for the wealthy blockade-runners back during your Civil War. A fine old place; maybe you’d like to walk around and snap some pictures, sir. That’s a kapok tree, the big one there, with the platform in it. Used to have an orchestra playing up there every evening… Just take your time, sir. Look around. I’ll wait right here.”

  I hesitated a moment; then I took out my gun and knife and dropped them on the seat beside him, having come to a decision I should have reached earlier. Well, if anything went badly haywire here, the weapons were better off with him than in my hotel room, where they might eventually cause a lot of international discussion about why a certain tall dead man had come to the Islands heavily and illegally armed. Fred glanced at me sharply over his shoulder and swept the weapons out of sight.

  I got out, opening my camera case, and made my way past the bicycle, admiring the elaborate ten-speed gearshift mechanism and the shiny levers for the rim-brakes, front and rear. I guess I really had an underprivileged childhood. My bikes had all had just one lousy speed and a single, lonely coaster brake—New Departure was more common, as I recall, but Morrow was supposed to have more class.

  The little white-suited blonde was coming down the steps from the orchestra platform up in the big tree. I saw that while she was small, she wasn’t quite small or fragile enough to be called tiny. As a matter of fact, she was constructed on quite durable lines for her size. If she’d been six inches taller, she might have looked overly substantial, particularly in pants; as it was, she just had a cute and cuddly look, helped out by her long, shining, Alice-in-Wonderland hairdo. She gave me a restrained little smile of thanks as I stepped aside to let her pass—but her eyes, that matched the scarf around her neck, studied my face just a little too hard and too long. I thought I could read a kind of desperate question in those blue eyes: was I the person she’d come here to meet, and if not where was he and how much longer did he expect her to hang around this derelict hostelry?

  It could have been my imagination, of course. I’m not a qualified reader of minds, particularly feminine minds. Still, you don’t survive long in the business by disregarding hunches; and a hunch was what I had, loud and clear. I was aware of the girl glancing at her watch as, having received no satisfaction from me, she moved on toward the driveway.

  I climbed the wooden steps to the weathered wooden platform supported by the thick, twisted branches of the great tree; and I went though the motions of adjusting the camera and taking a few pictures, making a kind of casual, panoramic series of shots—the box was actually loaded; we take our props seriously—the last of which caught the girl fiddling with her bike. It was a long shot for the normal two-inch lens I was using, a telephoto would have been better, but the face should turn out clear enough to enlarge if I hadn’t forgotten some important technical detail. It had been a long time since I made pictures for a living.

  I buttoned up the camera once more in its tourist-armor—no pro would be seen dead with one of those awkward cases—and strolled back to the taxi, trying not to make my steps too long or too fast, although I was aware of the seconds ticking away and of a small man in a sloppy summer suit getting a couple of steps closer with each tick.

  “Okay, driver,” I said, pulling the door closed. “Where do you suggest we go now?”

  Fred started the motor. “Well, sir, you can get a fine view of the city from the water tower.” He put the car into gear.

  “I’m leaving the camera,” I said when we were out of the girl’s hearing. “Have the film processed immediately and tell them to get right to work on the blonde. Frame seven or thereabouts; the last exposure. You can fill in the description; you saw her as well as I did. Now slow down and drop me off. Then get the hell out of here and keep going.”

  Fred glanced at me. “Don’t you want your gun?”

  “I’m under orders not to cause an international incident,” I said. “It’s pretty hard to shoot somebody in a foreign country and follow those instructions. Or knife them, either. Whoa, right there, where she can’t see us…”

  Then I was standing in the driveway alone. I slipped into the bushes and worked my way through the jungle to a point from which I had a view of the enormous tree up the hill. The girl in white was back on the platform. Apparently that was the meeting place that had been assigned to her. It was a hell of a spot for a secret contact, within plain sight of anybody lurking in the thick cover below. Actually, there was only one logical reason why you’d send a girl to a rendezvous wearing target white, and arrange for her to wait conspicuously up a tree in a deserted garden…

  I heard him coming before I saw him. I’d put myself in the right place, very near the spot I’d picked from above as most suitable for what he had to do—what he’d come halfway around the world to do. Okay, so I’d been wrong and he was going to take care of his job right away, within a couple of hours of his arrival here in Nassau. You had to hand it to the little man, I reflected, calmly sitting down to lunch when he found he had a few minutes to spare. No wonder he’d been mad when the food had not been forthcoming on time. It was enough to throw any virtuoso off balance, being plagued by such infuriating inefficiency just before a performance.

  I couldn’t hear the footsteps any longer. Then I saw him, slipping along the overgrown walk nearby, keeping well down so he couldn’t be seen from above. He stopped at the edge of a little paved circular opening around an old stone fountain, now quite dry. He crouched in the shelter of the ornamental shrubbery gone wild, close to me. I heard a faint clink of metal. He’d taken two items from under his floppy pants legs and was fitting them together to form a single-shot pistol. I’d never seen the weapon before, but I’d read descriptions: a fairly new U.S. product called, I believe, Contender.

  A tiny telescopic sight was already attached to the barrel. It’s only in the movies that you carry the telescope separately, stick it casually onto the gun after you have your target in view, and then make a lot of interesting final adjustments—I’ve always wondered what the hell those movie actors thought they were supposed to be accomplishing, fiddling with those knobs and dials. In real life, when there is serious shooting to be done, you anchor the optical sight firmly and immovably to the weapon, zero it in carefully, and never dream of monkeying with it again. You just hope to God that if you leave it strictly alone the outfit will still be shooting in the right place when the right time comes. Pavel Minsk opened his firearm and slipped a cartridge into the breech. I heard a faint click as the action closed again.

  Check to the tall gent trying to make himself invisible in the brush. I had a very simple choice. I had a job to do, and I could do it efficiently and safely by letting him shoot and then taking him before he could get his single-shot weapon reloaded again. Or I could be a stupid goddamn hero trying to save the life of a female stranger at the risk of my own.

  I wished I’d never asked Mac a certain question. Now I knew, because I’d been told, that he didn’t give a damn how many blondes got shot, or brunettes or redheads either, as long as Pavel Minsk didn’t survive them by very much, say two seconds. I couldn’t kid myself that maybe this diminutive wench should be preserved for some important international reason. If I saved her, it would be from pure, simpleminded sentimentality…

  The Mink was rising to take aim, using both hands on the gun; the approved, modern, handgun-assassination style. The old technique of holding a pistol one-handed at the end of a wobbly outstretched arm is strictly passé for business purposes. The girl was still standing up there with her shining white suit and her inexpensive camera, waiting for the person she’d been sent here to meet—the skull-faced gent with the scythe, although she didn’t know it. I heard the metallic sound of a pistol hammer being cocked; and I let out a loud yell and charged.

  The yell, and the crashing in the brushes, were supposed to disconcert Minsk long enough to let me reach him before h
e fired, or throw his aim off if he did manage to shoot. It was a fairly primitive tactic, but it had worked for me before. But this was the Mink, and his nerves weren’t vulnerable to loud noises, and he was faster than he had any right to be. If he’d had an ordinary repeating pistol, designed for fast, instinctive, close-quarters work, I’d have died right there—but in that case I wouldn’t have gambled that way. With his clumsy, telescope-sighted, long-range, one-shot weapon, Pavel had to decide whether to employ his single available cartridge for a snapshot as he turned, without using the sights, or risk taking time to line up the slow and awkward optical system for a certain kill. He went the snapshot route, firing the instant the weapon swung more or less into line. I saw the flame as I lunged forward, and even, I thought, the jump of the muzzle; and I heard the vicious crack of something more powerful than an ordinary pistol cartridge.

  Something hit the side of my head a savage blow. Everything seemed to go bright red; but in the middle of the redness remained a small tunnel at the far end of which I could see the little man desperately trying to stuff a fresh load into his one-shot weapon. I went in low and caught him about the middle and carried him backward across the paved area. The redness was closing in now, but I’d made all the calculations in advance. Three long steps, and I lifted little Pavel Minsk into the air and swung him down hard, as if he were a heavy sledgehammer with which I was trying to break up the sharp stone edge of the old, dry fountain…

  7

  As I said, it was dead easy. At least it would have been if I’d remembered, and acted upon, Mac’s very sensible remark to the effect that we in no way resemble any organization dedicated to humanitarianism and good works. As it was, having chosen to do an easy job the hard way, I woke up—well, there had been a couple of previous awakenings, but they’d been kind of hazy—in a hospital bed with a murderous headache. There were two identical little blondes in identical white linen pantsuits sitting beside my bed. It took a while, and considerable willpower, to make them fuse into one.

  “Oh, you’re awake,” she said, seeing my eyes open. “Thank God!”

  “Who’re you?” I whispered. I guess I could have spoken more loudly, but with my head the way it was, I didn’t want to risk cutting loose with any unnecessary volume.

  “Don’t you remember? In the hotel garden…”

  I licked my lips. “Sure, you’re the blonde with the cheap camera and the expensive bike. Is that how you get your mail: Mr. Postman please deliver to the blonde with the cheap camera and the expensive bike?”

  She laughed quickly. She was a very pretty girl when she laughed, but I kind of wished she’d curb her noisy gaiety.

  “It was a rented bike,” she said. “I’m Lacey Rockwell, Mr. Helm. The police told me your name. They gave me permission to wait in here. I felt so… so responsible. I wanted to be sure you were all right. How do you feel?”

  “Great,” I said. “Just as if somebody’s split my head open like a piece of kindling. A nice clean split… Lacey. What kind of name is that?”

  She moved her shoulders slightly. “I asked my parents that. They said they just thought Lacey sounded kind of nice… Mr. Helm?”

  “Yes?”

  “That man. I have to know. Was he… was he really trying to kill me?”

  I said, “What does he say, that he was shooting blackbirds for a pie? Or did he get away after I passed out?”

  Her face changed. “He… didn’t get away, but I’m afraid he’s not saying anything. When you tackled him, his head hit the edge of the fountain and… Well, he’s dead, Mr. Helm.”

  I was silent for a lengthy moment. It was a relief to know that, in spite of my sentimental aberrations, the job had got done in a reasonably workmanlike manner, but of course I couldn’t say that.

  “Jesus!” I whispered. “My God! I didn’t mean to kill the poor guy!”

  “Poor guy?” the little girl said with sudden sharpness. “Poor guy indeed! You’re forgetting that he was apparently trying to murder me and that he did shoot you—an inch to the side, the doctor said, and you’d be dead. I’m not a very bloodthirsty person, Mr. Helm, but I do not consider that wicked little man a ‘poor guy’! I think he got just what he deserved! When you shouted, and I looked down there and saw that nasty-looking gun pointing straight at me just before he whirled to face you…” She stopped, with a shiver. “I guess I’m just a sissy, but nobody’s ever tried to kill me before. I simply can’t get used to the idea. Why, Mr. Helm? Why would anybody want me dead?”

  It was hard to keep track of all the nuances. My mind didn’t want to stay focused on her, or my eyes, either, in spite of the fact that she wasn’t difficult to look at. There’s something very attractive about girls—particularly small blond girls—with that clear, smooth, delicate complexion. This one even had sense enough to let it speak for herself instead of trying to improve on it with makeup. She was really a very appealing kid, and a hell of a fine little actress, and I wondered just who it was she was putting on her bewildered act for. The most logical person, of course, was me.

  I licked my lips once more. “Is that another rhetorical question. Miss Rockwell?”

  She frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “First you ask if the guy was really trying to kill you; and then you tell me you looked right into the muzzle of the gun, so you know damned well he was trying to kill you.”

  “I’m sorry.” She laughed apologetically. “It’s just so unbelievable, Mr. Helm. I have a hard time grasping it. I guess I just want you to… well, to tell me what I saw with my own eyes, so I’ll know I wasn’t dreaming.”

  I said, “Well, the little man had a gun—a funny-looking pistol with a telescope on it—and I saw him assemble it, load it, point it in your direction, and cock the hammer, if that’s the correct firearms terminology. It seemed inadvisable to let him proceed to the next step: pulling the trigger. Yes, Miss Rockwell, I think it’s safe to say that murder was very much on his mind, and that you were the intended victim.”

  “But I’d never seen him before in my life! Why in the world…”

  “You didn’t know him at all?”

  She shook her head. “Mr. Helm, they let me look at him to make sure. It wasn’t a… a very pleasant experience. But he was a total stranger to me. That’s what’s so mysterious, so terrifying. If you can tell me anything that will make some sense of the whole thing, I’ll be very grateful.”

  I asked, “How can I? I didn’t know him either, any more than I know you… What’s the matter?”

  “But you must have known him! Otherwise, why…” She stopped.

  I frowned at her. Thinking was hard work, but it obviously had to be done. “What do you mean?” I demanded. “Why the hell must I have known him? I don’t know anybody in Nassau except a taxi-driver I owe a few bucks for a city tour we never finished, and I can’t even remember his name. Paul, or Mike, or Steve, or something. What happened was, I saw a crummy-looking punk pointing a gun at a nice-looking girl, and I decided, in my idealistic way, that something ought to be done about it.” I touched the side of my bandaged head in a cautious way. “Maybe next time I’ll be smart and mind my own business.”

  She said quickly, “I don’t mean to sound ungrateful or… or suspicious. Naturally, I appreciate what you did for me. I appreciate it very much. I’m just trying to understand… if you didn’t know Mr. Menshek, or whatever the police said his name was, why were you hiding in the bushes spying on him? Or… or were you spying on me?”

  I stared at her for a moment. Then, again because it had to be done, I threw back my head and laughed uproariously, and stopped abruptly, and waited for the blinding pain to go away.

  “Don’t be so funny, Lacey Rockwell. It hurts,” I whispered when I could talk once more.

  “But—”

  I said, “Look, doll, I’d been riding around in that cab, sightseeing. I’d had a late breakfast in my hotel room, with a big pot of coffee. The driver still had some places he wanted to show me,
and I wanted to get my money’s worth, and the town doesn’t seem to be really loaded with sidewalk facilities like some of those practical European cities where they recognize the limitations of the human plumbing… So, hell, I told the guy to drop me off down there where the bushes were nice and thick and wait for me outside the gate and I’d join him in a couple of minutes. Okay? And naturally I was a little sensitive about being seen, under the circumstances, so when I heard somebody coming I just kind of stepped a little farther back into that jungly stuff hoping he’d go away, but he didn’t. When I saw what he was doing, well, it just seemed like my duty as a good citizen to abort my primary mission, pull up my zipper again, and try to stop him…” I looked at her closely. “Why, Miss Rockwell, you’re blushing!”

  She was, too, and she had the right skin for it; it was a very pretty display. Before she could speak, the door opened and all kinds of officialdom, plainclothes and uniformed, black and white, invaded the room. In the van was a heavy, dignified-looking black man with short, gray hair, and a lean, good-looking white man with long brown hair, considerably younger. They were both in civilian clothes, but there were police uniforms behind them.

  The younger one spoke to the girl, who had come to her feet facing them. He said, “That was fine. We have it all on tape. It clears things up very well. Thank you very much for your cooperation, Miss Rockwell. You’re free to go now.”

  She moved toward the door without glancing my way. I said, “Miss Rockwell.” She stopped without turning her head. I spoke to her back: “Miss Rockwell, I’m surprised at you. You’re just a lousy little blond fink. Next time I see somebody trying to shoot you, I’ll help them call the shots.”

  “Now, now.” This was the dignified black gentleman. “Miss Rockwell was just following our instructions, Mr. Helm. You should be grateful to her. She’s cleared you very nicely, or helped you clear yourself.”