I didn't really expect her to tell me, but she answered with sudden heat and contempt that surprised me. “A dozen ways. The very first thing you said to me in Turcos was ‘It has been a long time.’ You were supposed to ask, ‘How long has it been?’ I knew you were a dirty spy the moment you opened your mouth—and as soon as I told the driver to go to the Reforma instead of Juarez, he knew too.” Her lips curled. “You were easy to fool."
She didn't even sound like Monique any longer—and that thought gave me another small shock. Undoubtedly she wasn't Monique, at least that was, almost surely, not her real name. But she had tricked me—and Emilio had, too. Even the not-very-bright cop had easily crossed me up; the passwords and “childish” ritual had served their intended purpose after all.
I felt the nervousness and anxiety building up in me again. I knew most of it was due to whatever had happened to me in Amador's room, but even knowing the reason couldn't stop it from tearing at my confidence, filling me with unfamiliar doubts and fears. And I knew, too, that if I was going to help the doctor and Buff I couldn't go on making mistakes, letting myself be out-maneuvered. The next mistake might be, literally, my last. So, what I didn't know, Monique would have to tell me.
I looked at her, wondering if even now I could hurt her, torture her, fill her with pain until she had to speak. I looked at her lovely, sensual face, beautiful even with the lipstick smeared and her cheeks red where I had slapped her. Then I got the dead man's belt and strapped Monique's wrists and ankles together, pushed the driver to the floor, lifted her to the front seat, and climbed behind the wheel.
As I started the car she said, “Is he—dead?"
“That vanguard of the proletariat you've got your feet on? Yeah, he's dead."
I drove ahead until I could turn off the road, then bumped over rough ground until we were among trees, hidden from cars that might go by. I got out and looked in the Plymouth's trunk, found a piece of fine wire and some tools. I bent and broke the wire, then used it to bind Monique's hands behind her and her legs together. She didn't speak. I carried her out of sight of the car and placed her on the wet ground beside the trunk of a tree. Rain still fell in a drizzle through the limbs above her. I went back to the car and got the dead man, carried him to where Monique was and dropped him heavily in front of her. She shrank back from the limp corpse.
I talked to her, questioned her, but she wouldn't say a word. I was sure that if I could leave her alone with the dead man, as night fell and it grew darker and more quiet here, she'd finally break. But I didn't have that much time, and I had to make her talk. I went back to the car, out of Monique's sight and took off two of the hubcaps.
In a few more minutes I had taken out the car's battery, poured part of the acid from its cells into one hubcap, and replaced the battery. Into the other hubcap I put a mixture of gasoline that I'd squeezed from a rag dipped in the tank and water from the radiator. The diluted acid was strong enough to burn, to blister.
Monique couldn't see me as I carried both hubcaps back behind her. I put one of my improvised bowls behind the tree near which she lay, close enough so I could reach it with my hand, then squatted beside her with the other one.
“Look, Monique. That's acid in there, battery acid. You understand?"
She turned her head toward me, anxious, frightened now.
I said, “Monique, you have one of the loveliest, sultriest, sexiest faces I've ever seen. I know you're proud of it, proud of your beauty. And you should be. Few women are lucky enough to have beauty like yours."
“Shell,” she spoke finally, breathlessly. “What are you doing? What's all this?"
“You know what I want to find out from you. Culebra, his headquarters. Tell me about that, about the Doc and Buff, where they are and what's going on—everything you can possibly tell me—and all this means nothing. This is just in case you won't tell me without coaxing."
She licked her lips. “Don't, Shell. You know I won't tell you anything. I know I'm right, and I won't say anything to help you. You know I won't. Shell, you said you liked me, liked to touch my skin, kiss me, love me."
“That was last night, honey. Will you tell me? Now?"
“No. I will not, Shell. I won't.” She spoke positively, with conviction.
“All right. Then listen, Monique. Here's what you'll have to be able to stand. I'm telling you first because I really don't want to do it. Not to you. But I will."
I looked around. The weather would help. The fact that she had been tense for quite a while, and had just gone through an emotional shock would help, too. And she seemed tired, which was good. The defenses of her mind would be down more than usual. The time was made to order for a little repeated suggestion.
As I had told Doctor Buffington, almost anybody can be made to believe anything in the world, if he's properly prepared, kept in a state of fear and tension, properly conditioned; and if the right weapons—the right words—are used. It's the Soviet method of mind attack, perfected during years of use against its own and enemy peoples. I'd have to do the best I could with what I had at hand; but at least the weather was perfect, the mood was right.
The sun was just a dim glow in the gray sky behind heavy clouds. Rain pattered monotonously on the leaves above and dropped down upon us; lightning flashed far away while thunder rumbled occasionally, faintly, like great whispers. It was nearly dark here in the shadow of the trees.
I pulled the dead man closer to Monique, held her head so that if she looked she'd have to see that waxen face; and if she closed her eyes it would be even worse for her, because the imagination always paints more frightening pictures than the eyes can see.
I held her head in my hands and spoke from behind her back. “Monique, listen,” I said. I spoke very slowly, deliberately letting the words drag while my voice got lower, softer, deeper. “First I'm going to strip you naked, and strip the dead man naked. I think he's dead. I'm almost sure he's dead. And I'll bind you both together, your warm body pressed against his own and your face against his cheek. I'll tie his arms around you, and yours around him, and I'll leave you here alone, like lovers. You'll feel his body cooling, the flesh becoming cool and damp while darkness falls. And then it will be night, dark night, and you'll hear rustling all around you, in the grass and in the branches of the trees. Right now you think you'll know it's only wind, or crawling things, but when it happens you won't know. The sounds will crawl into your mind like worms."
I talked to her for minutes more, softly, as the darkness deepened, and finally I said, “And then, Monique, you'll feel the dead man moving, stirring, his body dead, and yet not dead, against you. It won't be anything unearthly, just rigor mortis, but you'll begin to wonder when his cold arms tighten against your back, pull you close against him like an obscene rape by Death. You'll think he's dead, you'll know he's dead, but still you'll wonder. Look at him, Monique. You can almost see the lips moving now, moving toward your mouth. Later—you'll have time to think, imagine. When it's dark and something rustles near you, when you're here alone with him, when he pulls you close and his body arches and his flesh crawls against your own, you'll know his lips are moving in the blackness, reaching for your mouth—"
"Stop it! Stop it!"
She was almost screaming, and the sudden piercing shriek of her voice startled me. I swallowed, kept talking softly. “But that's not all, Monique.” I fumbled for a leaf, dipped it in the acid and brushed it across the back of her hand. I kept talking till I knew she could feel the acid stinging, then brushed the leaf across her hand again. “Feel that, Monique? The acid? It's burning now, already eating at your skin. Before I leave, leave you here alone with him, there'll be acid on your face to eat your loveliness away, to eat the flesh, dissolve it from your bones. You'll feel it biting, burning, tearing out your eyes. First you'll go blind, and then—"
“Please—Shell—please—please—I know you won't. I know you wouldn't. You're just frightening me, trying to frighten me."
Without her seeing me, I
took the acid away, pulled over the other mixture of gasoline and water, picked it up in my hand. “I will, Monique.” I held the bowl over her face, rolled her onto her back. There was only faint illumination now, but she could see the bowl above her.
“Shell, take it away. My God, Shell, you couldn't do it—"
“Then tell me the truth."
She didn't speak. I tilted my hand and let the liquid spill. She started to scream even before it hit her face. She screamed in horror, rolling, trying to get away as I held her with my other hand. The liquid hit her cheek, splashed against her eyes. And all the time she screamed.
“My eyes, my God, my eyes! Stop it! Shell!"
“Will you tell me?"
“Yes. Just stop it, Shell!"
I put the hubcap aside, wiped her face with my handkerchief, pressed it across her eyes.
She was sobbing, crying. “Will it blind me, Shell? Oh, will it?"
“No,” I said. “It's all right now.” I felt as if I'd done something evil and unclean, and perhaps I had. It was her voice, the sob in her voice when she asked me if she'd be blind that got me most of all. To me, Monique was still the girl I'd held last night, and whispered to, and kissed. I hadn't had time yet to adjust to the other, stranger part of her, the evil in Monique.
She started talking. I didn't have to threaten her again. I just listened while she talked, and finally I had it all.
And when I did know all of it, I stopped feeling quite so sorry for Monique.
Chapter Fifteen
I understood most of the mess after Monique finished. When Doctor Buffington had accidentally stumbled on what I now thought of as his nerve gas, at first there hadn't seemed any need for secrecy. Consequently, most of the others at the Southwest Medical Institute understood vaguely what was going on; most of them considered the episode merely another failure on the difficult, experimental road to success. But at the Institute, as at virtually every other place where important or secret work is conducted, a handful of Communists also were employed, and the Communist mind is different from the free mind. The Communists there, one of them at least, saw the doctor's failure as, possibly, a success—in that it had killed. Killed horribly.
That one, a Doctor Philip Cranston, was a concealed Communist of long standing, and leader of the five-member Communist group at the Institute. He kept an eye on Buffington's experiments, coming to see in them, as they progressed, a potential military weapon of the utmost efficiency—and the visits by the Army men who had talked with Buffington increased Cranston's interest. If the doctor's discovery should turn out to be suitable as a weapon, that weapon, naturally, should be shared with the peace-loving Soviet Union. He passed the word along to his superior and was instructed to steal or photograph any and all of the doctor's pertinent notes and records. But then, before Cranston could get started, Buffington destroyed all of the notes and abandoned that particular line of research.
The plan to kidnap Doctor Buffington had started then, two months ago, because though the notes were destroyed the facts were still in the Doctor's mind. To the men in the Kremlin, from whom the order came, the solution was simple: snatch Buffington and force him to continue the work he had abandoned. Monique, who had been well trained at open and legal Communist schools in New York, and at other secret CP schools in the States, was assigned to get next to the Doc and Buff, worm her way into their confidence. She'd been able to accomplish that goal with ease, and had learned how thoroughly the Doctor was devoted to his peace-at-any-price doctrines, and that he was scheduled to make his ILP address in Mexico City in September.
Mexico had seemed an ideal place for the abduction to come off; everything could be well planned by then. The Doctor would be in a land strange to him, without his friends around him, and it would be nearly impossible to determine who had kidnapped him—or even that he actually had been abducted. Perhaps equally important was the fact that Culebra, a high-ranking Communist, was here at the Center, which would be a good spot to hide the Doctor. So the Commies started making their plans, which included fixing up a completely equipped laboratory at the Center, following Cranston's suggestions and the suggestions of others, and after the Doc's ILP address they grabbed him—and later grabbed Buff—and took them to the headquarters.
That was what I was interested in—the fact that both of them were now held prisoners at the Center, the gray building I'd seen momentarily, just before the driver and Monique had jumped me. It was about half a mile from here and Culebra was there. Culebra—Antonio Villamantes.
Monique had been at the Center for an hour during the afternoon and knew what was going on in there. Dr. Buffington was being forced to work in the laboratory by the threat of torture or death not only for himself but for his daughter. Buff was his Achilles’ heel, and Monique had known it; she had told Villamantes he could most easily force the Doctor to work by torturing Buff. So the Doctor was working. I'd seen the evidence of his success: Amador.
A Commie working under Villamantes had sapped Amador, carefully crushed a tiny sealed vial of the Doc's liquid on the floor near the unconscious Amador's head, then got out, fast. In a way it was crude, but in another way it had been clever enough: Amador's murderer would be far away when Captain Emilio visited the body, got the medical report and passed it on to Monique. And it had worked; Amador was dead.
It had worked on me, too, though to a lesser degree. When, on my hands and knees I had stared at those glittering bits of glass on Amador's carpet, there still had been enough of the gas remaining near the floor so that I'd inhaled a trace of it. Not much—but enough so I knew a little of what Amador must have felt before he'd died.
At this point in the experiments, what Villamantes was mainly interested in was knowing that the stuff would kill not an ape, but a man, quickly, efficiently; and that the Doctor was cooperating. If it appeared the gas was really effective, a potential weapon that the Russians could mass produce, the Doctor would eventually disappear completely—somewhere in Russia, like so many others before him. I knew from Dr. Buffington himself that the gas would make a terrible weapon, a monster. And I knew too, that he was “cooperating."
I asked Monique, “Why pick on Amador? Why him?"
“It didn't have to be him. It might have been General Lopez or one of many others."
“Yeah. Including me, I imagine."
She didn't answer for a while. Then, “We knew Amador was responsible for getting you out of jail, and that led to much trouble for us. I had to phone him for you, otherwise you might have learned I hadn't, and become suspicious. But I didn't think there was the slightest chance he could help you. We knew that if you were released from jail, and learned Dr. Buffington was missing, you'd look for him, try to find him—and whoever might be involved in his disappearance. We couldn't allow that. Then, when you got out, we knew you must be working for General Lopez’ wife, and of course we knew why. That was also very important to us. Obviously it was extremely important that you be—removed."
“Then you recognized Señora Lopez at the jail?"
“Of course."
She kept talking and cleared up one other thing that had puzzled me—after Amador helped spring me, one of Monique's chums had watched Amador's apartment, spotted me entering and leaving it shortly after the first attempt to kill me, and had tailed me to El Golpe, picking up three more bruisers for help.
She added, about Amador's death, “We couldn't be sure how much he knew of Señora Lopez’ difficulties, and we couldn't take any chances. Anyway, the test was up to Villamantes."
“A test. Amador the guinea pig. Or whoever else was handy."
“We had to know if the Doctor was betraying us or not; it had to be tried on a man."
I could barely see the outline of her face now. “Monique, I guess I'm lucky you didn't get word to your pals last night. It would have been me instead of Amador then, wouldn't it?"
She hesitated. “I—couldn't tell them, Shell, not—not after that, last night."
“The hell. If you could have gotten to a phone without my tumbling, I'd be dead now. You weren't thinking of last night an hour ago.” I thought of something. “When were you supposed to deliver this stuff—the medical report—to Villamantes?"
“By seven o'clock, at the latest."
I squinted at my watch, lit a match to be sure. It was seven p.m. already. I started to mention the time, then stopped. I said, “It's almost six-thirty now. What happens if you don't get there by seven?"
“I'm—not sure. God knows what he'd do. He's almost crazy sometimes. He'd know something was wrong, he might think the Doctor had only pretended to cooperate, made something harmless—I don't know."
“What would he do to the Doctor? He wouldn't kill him."
“No, not till Villamantes is sure he has the formula. There is another man there, a chemist who duplicates the Doctor's experiments. But—Villamantes whipped Buff before, to make the Doctor cooperate. He might do anything to her. He doesn't like—opposition to his plans. He gets very angry when things go wrong."
“It's after seven,” I said.
She started to laugh suddenly. She stopped and said, “I was telling the truth about him. He'll be furious, crazy. I know him. He won't hurt the Doctor. Not at first.” She laughed again.
I stood up. I didn't know what the hell I could do alone. If I could get in touch with the General, get his help—but he was too far away. It would take me too long to reach him and get back here. And there was no place where I could phone. Perhaps near the last village we'd passed through, where there'd been a Pemex gas station. But even if I phoned it would take the General too long to reach here with any help he might scrape up. And I didn't even have time to go back to that village.
I talked to Monique for two or three more minutes and learned how the Center was set up, where the Doctor and Buff were. The Center had once been a church, but it had been abandoned for many years. Then Villamantes took it over, acting for the Party. The Doctor was inaccessible in the lab. Buff was in a room at the northwest corner of the building. An armed guard stayed in the yard outside her room; another patrolled the grounds, which were behind a ten-foot stone wall that enclosed the building. About twenty people, mostly men, were out there now.
Pattern for Panic Page 15