“I should hope so,” I said. “If not, we’ll have to send my associate back to marksmanship school.”
After a shocked moment, she managed a little ghost of a laugh. “Thanks,” she gasped. “Thanks for not feeling obliged to lie unconvincingly and tell me I’m going to be fine, just fine.”
“That bullshit is for amateurs,” I said. “We’re all pros here, aren’t we?”
“Yes, but how did you know?” she breathed. “I thought… I thought I was doing… very well. But all the time you knew, damn you. How?”
“It was too easy, doll,” I said. “You were good, you were great, you were cuddly and cute, I wanted to believe in you with all my heart, but it was just a little too damned easy all the way.”
I stopped talking. There was nobody left to talk to. There was just a white dress with blood on it, and a pair of white shoes, and a white purse, and some other inert material. People were running up at last, and it was time for me to become a helpless sort of photographer chap all broken up by the shock of having a sweet and innocent young girl foully murdered right before his very eyes…
11
It was daylight before I finally made it back to the hotel after putting on my dramatic performance for several interested audiences, including the Nassau police and Mr. Ramsay Pendleton. I took the elevator up to the right floor, dug out the right key, and started to enter the room in the heedless manner of an innocent citizen bone-tired after a tragic, sleepless night. Then I thought better of it and took a few precautions as prescribed by the book. It was just as well.
“I’m glad to see you’re being careful, Eric,” Mac said from the chair by the window.
I looked a bit grimly at the familiar figure in its familiar gray suit; and the familiar face with its heavy black eyebrows, beneath the familiar crisp gray hair. Like a school kid looking up to see the principal standing over him, I wondered what the hell I’d done wrong now. He gets out of Washington now and then, but not so often that we’re really hardened to falling over him in the middle of an assignment.
I said, “I might as well set up a cot in the airport waiting room, for all the privacy I get around here.” I closed and locked the door. “Welcome to Nassau, sir.”
“How did you make out with the authorities?”
“Well,” I said judiciously, “I won’t say everybody believed me implicitly, but nobody called me a liar out loud. Officially, everybody’s looking for a mysterious longhaired gent, who was following the poor girl around and scaring her to death.”
“I received a report on the situation from our local people, but there were some gaps. I’d like you to fill them. There was also a complaint.”
I reflected that it was funny the way people who seemed quite reasonable face-to-face could turn into real pains when they were no longer in your presence and had phones in their hot little hands.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “He really keeps burning up those airwaves, doesn’t he?”
“Fred’s a good man.”
“Nobody’s questioned his manhood, that I know of,” I said. “It’s his marksmanship I was criticizing; or rather, the time he took getting around to exercising it.”
“He’s claiming prejudice, Eric.”
I looked at Mac grimly. “He’s perfectly right, sir. I’m prejudiced against guys who let me play target while they’re making up their cotton-picking minds whether or not to pull their triggers.”
“I believe what he had in mind was racial prejudice.” Mac spoke without any noticeable expression. “He claims you were abusive last night; and that previously you’d spoke to him in a derogatory fashion, calling him a big, brave, lion-eating Masai warrior, if I remember correctly.”
“I apologized for blowing my stack last night,” I said. “Even though I had a certain amount of provocation. As for the rest, I’m sure the Masai will be surprised to hear that it’s derogatory to call a man a Masai warrior. No derogation was intended, in any case. I’ll be happy to make that a formal statement, if you like. Freddie’s a great guy. He’s just godawful slow on the draw.”
“How slow?”
“Well,” I said judiciously, “if we’d been dealing with an old pro like Minsk instead of a relatively young and inexperienced female agent, I’d have absorbed a full clip of short 9mm stuff before Fred got around to discharging that overgrown Webley once. Jesus! His instructions were to signal and shoot the instant he saw a firearm displayed.”
“I’m informed that he only waited long enough to make absolutely sure the girl really intended to—”
“Who the hell asked him to make sure of anything?” I demanded sharply. There was no sense to this. It had been a private matter between Fred and me. I would have let it stay that way; but if he simply had to unload his sensitive soul, well, I had a sensitive soul, too. I drew a long breath and went on: “I explained it to him very carefully ahead of time. It was a perfectly simple proposition. If she had a gun, she wasn’t Lacey Rockwell. Innocent young oceanographer ladies don’t smuggle illegal firearms into foreign countries, not even when they’re looking for missing brothers. Even in the unlikely event that they should want to, they’d be scared to try, with all the hijacking precautions the airlines are taking nowadays. Therefore, if she had a gun, she was a phony, and a dangerous phony. Therefore, if she had a gun and showed it, he was to shoot her down instantly. To hell with his making sure. It wasn’t his job to make sure. Of anything. Except that I stayed alive and unperforated. That was his responsibility, his only responsibility; and the only way he could be certain of carrying it out was to fire the instant he saw a glint of metal in her hand. The rest of the responsibility was mine and none of his goddamn business—”
I was interrupted by a knock on the door. I didn’t really mind. I’d said more than I’d intended. It was a remarkably stupid intramural argument, and I had to admit to myself that it had apparently been triggered by my careless, kidding remark early in our relationship that had apparently given Fred the notion, although he’d hidden it well, that he was dealing with a confirmed racist. The knock was repeated. I looked at Mac.
He said, “I took the liberty of ordering breakfast for both of us.”
If he was planning to break bread with me, as the old phrase goes, he probably didn’t intend to reprimand me very hard; although we both knew I’d made a professional goof. It’s the job of the agent in the field to get along with the local people and utilize them only within the limits of their capabilities. With the big boss’s eye on me, and the situation mildly strained, I made a real secret-agent production of getting the door opened safely. It was a waste of time. Outside was a genuine waiter with a genuine breakfast tray. At least the man didn’t attack us and the food didn’t poison us.
The distraction served to switch us onto other subjects; and by the time we’d finished eating I’d filled in the gaps in Mac’s factual information and was embarked, upon request, on a resumé of the theoretical background.
“As I said before, it was just too easy, sir,” I said, walking to the window with my coffee cup and looking down at the sunny lawns and the beach and the people, mostly dark-skinned, mostly young, and mostly wearing very bright beach clothes. I went on: “I mean, for instance, the way the Mink just happened to come striding by, looking neither right nor left, just as I happened to emerge from the elevator that first day, for God’s sake! At the time, I had an uneasy feeling it might be a trap. I should know better than to ignore my uneasy feelings. All I had to do was fall into step behind him, determine the way he was heading, figure out his most likely destination in that direction, and beat him to it—to find a pretty girl pacing back and forth impatiently and glancing at her watch in an obvious way! It was just too damned good to be true.”
“As you describe it, it implies a considerable amount of organization, Eric.” Mac’s voice was neutral, expressing neither belief nor disbelief.
“Oh, they had organization, all right,” I said. “Fred’s people have come up with a waiter i
n the hotel restaurant who has the right connections—or the wrong ones, depending on your point of view. There must have been somebody else upstairs here, keeping an eye on my room, maybe the man she called Morgan, ready to pass the word down that I was heading for the elevator and it was time to give Minsk the signal to slam his napkin on the table and march out indignantly. Our local geniuses are also running a check on the cabdriver who took the girl and me to the Café Martinique last night. His little speech about the casino up the hill with its readily available taxis could have been a coincidence, of course, but it made a very handy excuse for her to lead me up the dark path to be shot, maybe a little too handy—”
“That’s all very well, but you seem to be ignoring the fact that Minsk died at your hands, Eric,” Mac said. “Is it your theory that the plans went wrong, or that he was sacrificed deliberately?”
“I have a hunch it was a little more than just a sacrifice play, sir,” I said. “We’ve had them feed us agents before who’d come to the end of their usefulness. My feeling is that Pavel, although he didn’t know it, was actually one of the two main objectives of the exercise; the other being, if you’ll pardon the lack of modesty, me.”
“You’re guessing,” Mac said.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “But the girl indicated that somebody’d spotted me loafing around the Keys this summer and passed the word. Apparently plans were laid to take me, discreetly. Just as we laid plans to take Pavel discreetly the minute we learned he was coming—as they knew we would. He was the ideal bait; we’d been after him for years; now they were going to let us have him. All they had to do was move him into my neighborhood, let us know where he was heading, and they could pretty well count on your getting instructions to point me in that direction immediately. Pavel was undoubtedly told there’d be a backup man to help him take care of me when I showed myself. That was why he left himself wide open in such an uncharacteristic way. It was part of the overall plan, the way he understood it. Remember, he’d always been a great one for setting traps for agents deluded enough to think they could tangle with the Mink and live.”
“In other words, you think his associates double-crossed him.”
“I think the whole plan was an elaborate, official double-cross, sir,” I said. “Minsk was probably told that somebody like the longhaired Mr. Morgan would be waiting behind me with an accurate rifle or other suitable weapon, ready to take me out before I could do any real damage. Only Morgan, if he was the assigned sniper, had secret instructions that Pavel didn’t know about, and stayed home.”
“We’ve had no indications that Mr. Minsk’s services were no longer appreciated,” Mac said slowly.
“As far as I can see, on this job our sources, whoever they are, have been passing us only information deliberately leaked to them by the opposition. I think you might suggest to the intelligence boys that a slight shakeup is in order.” I grimaced. “It would be a carefully guarded secret, anyway, wouldn’t it, sir? You wouldn’t want to risk letting a guy like the Mink get wind of the fact that you were planning to get rid of him—and how do you dispose of a guy like that, anyway? It’s kind of like the aborigine trying to throw away his old boomerang. You could lose a lot of valuable young agents, trying to remove one experienced old assassin who’d outlived his time. Much better to let the other team do the job for you.”
There was a little pause. Mac glanced at me rather sharply. “I can see that you’ve given the matter a great deal of thought, Eric.”
“Not a great deal, sir,” I said, poker-faced. “But some. I thought of it particularly last night when friend Freddy was so damned slow on the trigger.”
Mac rose to the occasion, as I’d thought he would. “I can assure you,” he said calmly, “that if the time ever comes that you must be removed, I will assign the task to a first-rate operative of ours, and not trust to the fumbling and inefficient efforts of the opposition.”
I grinned. “Thank you, sir. Flattery is always appreciated.”
He went on without changing expression noticeably: “Your theory is, then, that Moscow was killing two birds with one stone: using you to remove Minsk, and at the same time using Minsk to set you up for the young lady.”
“Yes, how could I suspect her when she’d apparently almost got killed, herself, by that dreadful Commie gunman?” I shook my head quickly. “And of course I had no suspicions at first. But, well, in spite of what I told her when she was dying—there was no need to rub it in—she really wasn’t very good, sir. I mean, psychologically the character she wanted me to believe in was a mess. Hell, she was positively vicious about Pavel Minsk after he was dead, to take just one example. Now, you know that a nice young university liberal with an assortment of bright intellectual degrees would never, never come out in favor of violence, even if said violence had saved her life. She’d feel morally obliged to express all kinds of mushy regrets about the terrible incident that had resulted in a man’s death, even if it had prevented hers. But this particular young lady had to say nasty things about Minsk, alive or dead—or felt she had to—so nobody could possibly suspect there was a connection between them.”
Mac didn’t say anything. I watched a boat heading out of the harbor; a big, sportfishing boat with tall outriggers. As I watched, the mate started lowering one of the long poles into fishing position. I wished I were on board, with nothing to worry about except sailfish and marlin, and maybe a small bonito or two.
I said, “And then, of course, there was that business of cooperating with the police to put me on the spot, even though I’d risked my life for her. Again, she just didn’t dare antagonize them and maybe have them digging into her background and discovering she wasn’t the real Lacey Matilda Rockwell—but it was hardly proper behavior for a young Maine lady with a stern New England sense of obligation.” I turned away from the window to look at him where he sipped his coffee at the small table by the wall. “It didn’t come to me all at once, sir, but it kept adding up. When she went into that corny white-lighthouse routine, it got to be a little too much to swallow. Waiting for her to change for dinner last night, I sat down and refigured the situation on the basis of her being a complete phony, and saw that everything added up much better that way.” I waited for Mac to speak. When he didn’t, I said: “I guess that just about wraps up the job, unless you want me to carry on with the Haseltine business just to keep fifty million dollars happy. Or is it five hundred million?”
Mac looked up, surprised. “We can hardly call it wrapped up, can we, Eric? After all, there’s still that Florida marina named after a lighthouse to be investigated. I’m informed that the place does exist and that it is part of a well-known and very pleasant and respectable resort complex in the town of Marathon, on Key Vaca, about midway between the Florida mainland and Key West. And then, of course, there’s the person who put the finger on you in the first place, who must be dealt with—”
“No, sir,” I said.
He regarded me closely. I was pleased to see, that he had to squint a little. For once I was the one with the bright window behind me.
“Explain yourself, Eric,” he said.
I said, “We both know the name of the person involved. At least I do, and your memory is usually at least as good as mine. Hell, I don’t have so many vindictive females in my past that I can’t spot one who (a) is knowledgeable about boats, and (b) speaks with a refined American accent, east and a little south. The fact that the female in question is supposed to have drowned in Chesapeake Bay when she deliberately ran her eighty-foot schooner aground one night in the tail end of a hurricane is irrelevant. No body was ever found; and that lady wasn’t good drowning material, hurricane or no hurricane.”
Mac said, “You are assuming that the girl really received a telephone call sending her to that deserted hotel; and that she described the voice of her caller correctly.”
“Why not? Everything indicates that they staged this whole thing very carefully, why not a real phone call? And why not describe a r
eal voice? I have a hunch that phase two of the original plan involved leading me to the Keys with that lighthouse story and getting me interested in the mystery lady in question, so my little blonde girl friend could lower the boom while I was looking the other way. Something like that. Only something I said or did tipped her off that I wasn’t quite happy with her, so she tried to rush the job.”
“That’s not airtight,” Mac said, “but assuming I accept it, how does a knowledge of boats become significant?”
I moved over to fill my coffee cup again. I said, “I was entertained all through dinner with a long lecture on nautical subjects. The girl, whatever her real name was, had all her terms perfectly straight, as far as I could determine by reference to my own limited seagoing vocabulary. Okay, she was impersonating Lacey Rockwell, and she’d have done a certain amount of homework; and okay, she’d even talked to the real, captive Lacey Rockwell enough to get a feeling for the character she was to play; but that salty jargon is hell to master, sir. Somebody had really drilled it into this kid but good.”
“That somebody being the mystery lady you think you can identify?”
“Our girl never got all that stuff out of a book, or a frightened girl prisoner, either. Somebody had learned a lot about Harlan Rockwell and his boat—just about everything about them—and passed it along. Well, the boy spent several weeks in the Keys preparing for his round-the-world jaunt. I figure he made the acquaintance of a nice lady down there—maybe a nice lady with a boat in the same marina—who could talk his sailor-language like an expert; and who listened to his plans and dreams and nautical problems, and gave him advice and encouragement. She may have had nothing sinister in mind at the time. Later, however, after young Rockwell had sailed away, she spotted me hanging around the Keys making like a fisherman, and remembered her old grievance. She got in touch with her former associates, I figure, if she hadn’t been in touch with them right along. When a plausible cover story was needed, she remembered the vanished Ametta Too and all the recent publicity about the deadly Bermuda Triangle. She remembered the boy and his boat; maybe the sister—the real Lacey Rockwell—really gave her the idea by turning up in the area making inquiries about her brother, missing at sea. Our ingenious, vengeful lady saw how all these elements could be combined into a story I’d be likely to swallow—”
The Intimidators Page 9