"Yes, sir."
"That's all. I'll see what can be done at this end."
"Yes, sir."
I heard the connection being broken. I let my breath out softly. Well, I'd had it coming. And he was letting me go on, and even backing me, and I've been reamed out before. It could have been worse. But I still took off my hat and dried my forehead with my handkerchief as I went back to the car.
I made kind of a production of it, in fact. My harem, suddenly busy with comb and lipstick-you wouldn't have known they'd said a word to each other all the time I was gone-looked at me questioningly as I got in, still mopping my brow.
I said, "Phew. That was my boss in Denver. The F.B.I. has already been at him. He's washing his hands of me, he says. He wants no part of murder, particularly a murder tied in with something as big as this. That's the way he put it." I looked at Jenny in the semi-darkness. "What the hell have you got me into, Irish?" She didn't speak, and I said, "Well, whatever it is, you're going to get me out, hear? Clear out of the country. The kid's already told us where to go. French Harbor. But you're the girl who's going to tell us where to pick up our steamboat tickets. Right now."
Jenny licked her lips. "What do you mean?"
I said, "Don't act dumb, doll. Everybody's after something, something big, and you've got it or know where it is. Well, I want it. Your pal Ruyter had a getaway all arranged, but his friends aren't going to be happy about smuggling a stranger out of the country. Only, they aren't going to get what they want unless they do, understand? Because you're going to give it to me, not to them."
"Are you… are you threatening me, Dave?"
I laughed. "Cut it out, doll. I gave you a chance to play it smooth and nice-chivalry, romance, and the works- and you tried to run out. Now we're just two crooks on the lam, and I'm lots bigger than you, and lots tougher. And if you don't think I can learn every last thing you know, just try me." I grimaced. "Take my word for it. Now or half an hour from now, you'll talk. I didn't become a private op because I had a weak stomach, and my life's at stake. You can talk in one piece or you can talk all busted up. That's the choice."
The kid spoke from the back seat. "He means it, Mummy! You know he means it! Tell him!"
Jenny said, "Dave, do you know what it is you're asking for?"
I said, "No, and I don't give a damn. Just so it's valuable enough to somebody that they'll help me out of this mess you've got me into, and maybe throw in a little cash on the side."
"It's… some scientific information about a certain project of my husband's, a very secret U.S. government project."
"So what?" I laughed sharply. "Irish, you're not going to get on the patriotism kick at this late date? Jeez, look who's talking!"
She was silent. I waited. The kid stirred in back but didn't speak. Jenny drew a long breath and said, "Inverness."
It was no time to be hasty. I was David Clevenger. I wouldn't know where a lousy little mining town in Nova Scotia was located. Matt Helm might, but not Dave Clevenger. I got out a road map, reached up to switch on the dome light by my left ear, and checked the index.
"Inverness, J-6," I said. "Here we are, just down the coast from French Harbor. Irish, you might even be telling the truth. Where in Inverness?"
She hesitated only briefly. "The post office."
"I see. You mailed it to yourself. Bright girl. Under what name?" She paused again, and I said irritably, "Don't make me do my tough act all over again, damn it! Haven't I convinced you I mean it?"
Jenny glanced at the girl in the back seat, as if for advice or, maybe, moral support. Penny said quickly, "Go on, Mummy! Please tell him. After all, we're all in this together, aren't we? We need his car and his help to get there, don't we?"
Jenny sighed. "Oberon," she said. "Mrs. Ann Oberon."
"Sure," I said softly. "Sure. Sorry I had to talk so nasty. Mrs. Ann Oberon. Inverness. Nova Scotia." Well, it was part of the public record now. I was free to use it as I pleased. I drew a long breath and looked around at the kid. Now that it was all over, I was embarrassed to see that she looked a bit mussed; I'd had to shake her up some, earlier. I said, "And my apologies to you, too, Miss Drilling." She looked back at me with naked, serious eyes. I didn't think I was her hero any longer, even if I had licked two bad men with only a little stick to help me. That was a long time ago. I said, "You're in a bad way without those glasses, aren't you, honey? Let me see them. Maybe I can stick them back together temporarily."
She gripped her purse tightly and shook her head. She wasn't taking any favors from me. She knew I was just trying to salve my conscience by being nice to her. I took the purse from her fingers and got the glasses out. They weren't badly broken. A hinge had been twisted loose in her struggle with Fenton, that was all. I tightened the remaining screws with the point of my knife, and reinforced the corner with adhesive tape from a box of Band-Aids I had in the glove compartment. Then I picked up my handkerchief and checked the lenses, to see if I'd got any smears on them.
The car was very still. Nobody moved. I looked through the lenses, and remembered a pair of glasses I'd examined in their trailer, a pair of little-girl glasses with a very strong prescription. These were not the same lenses. They weren't even close. In fact, they had no prescription at all. They were just colorless sunglasses.
XIX
SOMEBODY MOVED at last. In the back seat, the kid brought a hand up from behind her. She was pointing something at my head. This much l knew without really looking around. Sooner or later I was going to have to turn and see just what she was threatening me with-if I got to live that long-but it seemed best to take a moment or two first to try to straighten out my scrambled thoughts.
I looked at the useless glasses in my hand. Penelope Drilling was nearsighted. This much was firmly established. When you came right down to it, it was just about all that was firmly established about her. Crazy as it might seem, nobody had ever made a real identification of the kid for me, and I doubted anybody had for Greg. As I recalled Mac's statement on the subject, the camp had been pointed out to Greg when he came on the job-just the camp. And shortly before that mother and daughter had spent a day unobserved in the mountains of British Columbia while the man who was supposed to watch them was having trouble with his low-slung Detroit glamor-buggy.
Apparently nobody had really checked that the two people who'd come down from that mountain lake had been the same two people who'd gone up. That was the only reasonable explanation I could think of for the evidence in my hand. After all, who looked at kids, anyway, on a job like this? To an adult agent concentrating on the behavior of the senior female Drilling after her temporary disappearance, one junior miss tagging along with spectacles on her nose and braces on her teeth would look pretty much like any other from a distance, particularly if she kept doing the same odd teen-age stunts with her hair.
It was very clever and tricky, like the rest of this operation and when I had time to work it all out I'd undoubtedly find that it cleared up a lot of problems that had bothered me-about Jenny's behavior, for instance-but first I had to survive the next few minutes.
I said carefully, in a puzzled voice, "That's funny. I thought-"
"What did you think, Mr. Clevenger?" It was the kid's voice, and still it wasn't. It had a cold, adult quality that no fifteen-year-old girl could ever achieve. "Don't move," it said. "Don't even look around."
"I said, "Honey, if that's a gun you're pointing at my head, go easy. I'm a mouse. I'm a little woolly lamb. You don't want to hurt me."
"What did you think, Mr. Clevenger?"
"Well, I was told that Penelope Drilling was nearsighted to the extent of eight or ten diopters, if that's the right way to put it. Anyway, she's pretty damn nearsighted."
"And?"
"Well," I said, "I came on the job kind of hastily, remember? After Mike Green had turned up dead, I was just sent out to make contact with a woman and a young girl associated with a certain truck-trailer combo. Color, make, license plates.
Thumbnail sketch of subject. These spectacles are windowpanes, honey. As a detective, I have to conclude that either they're not yours, or you're not Penelope Drilling."
"You put it very clearly, Mr. Clevenger. I'm not Penelope Drilling."
I drew a cautious breath. At least I'd got her to say it out loud and I wasn't dead yet. I shook my head ruefully.
"You must have had lots of fun laughing at me behind my back. And your so-called mother, here, who's she?" I didn't look at Jenny. "Do the freckles come off, too?"
"No." The kid's voice was scornful. "No, Mummy-dear is quite genuine, aren't you, Mummy-dear? But the real Penny-darling is being held in a safe place out west as a hostage for Mummy-dear's good behavior. Ugh. You may turn your head now, Mr. Clevenger."
I guess I should have felt smart. After all, I'd just said blackmail to Mac, on no more than a hunch, and blackmail it was. I turned slowly and looked at the weapon she was holding less than a foot from my face. This didn't make me feel smart, because I'd seen it before in the trailer, in a drawer of toys-seen it and passed it by without interest. It was a child's water pistol made of transparent plastic. That was the first impression. On closer examination-and I was plenty close-I could see that the supposed plastic was actually glass. The gadget was actually a cunningly made and ingeniously disguised syringe. The handle or grip was full of colorless liquid, and a little bead of the stuff had formed at the tiny orifice in what would have been the muzzle, had it been a real gun.
The kid said, "If I squeeze this trigger, Mr. Clevenger, you will never see again."
I said, "Sure, honey, sure. Just go easy. A guy without eyes isn't going to drive you very far." I shook my head wonderingly. "So that's what happened to Mike Green. Is it out of line to ask why?"
"Mr. Green had wandering hands," the cold young voice said. "Even very juvenile females were not safe from Mr. Green's casual, seemingly accidental, attentions. One day Mr. Green's exploring hands discovered… well, shall we say, indications that the child he thought to be Penelope Drilling was abnormally well-developed for her age, although she generally took pains to conceal the fact. At first the discovery merely intrigued him; then it made him think. Thinking, for Mr. Green, was a slow process, but I could see where it was leading him."
I glanced at the small, rather pretty white face, strange without the glasses and the innocent, childlike expression I'd come to know.
"Just how old are you, anyway?" I asked.
"I'm a little over twenty, Mr. Clevenger. Not that it's any of your business."
"And you left a glove behind in Mike's motel room that didn't belong to you."
She made a wry face. "As a measure of self-protection. I thought it was a reasonable precaution, but Hans was very angry. He said it was an error that could jeopardize the whole mission. He took steps to rectify it."
I said, "Yeah. I heard about those steps. Have you got a name?"
"You can call me Naomi."
"Naomi," I said. "Very pretty. One question, Naomi."
"Yes, Mr. Clevenger?"
"Why are you pointing that thing at me?"
That shook her a little. She blinked and said, "Why, I couldn't be sure how you'd react."
"How did you think I'd react?"
"I thought… well, that you'd be angry because of the way you'd been fooled."
I said, "Okay, I'll be angry tomorrow, or some other day when my conscience hurts me about the kid I was supposed to protect. That I never even got to see. Right now I'm tickled pink. Hell, I thought I was going to have to go clear to Nova Scotia and find this Gaston Muir character to make a deal about getting out of the country."
She hesitated. "And now you think you can make your deal with me?"
"Why, sure," I said. "With Ruyter gone, you're running this show, aren't you? I don't see anybody else in the picture, aside from this Muir, and I gather all he really does is run a boat."
"Yes, I'm running the show," Naomi said coolly. "And I may be dense, but I fail to see what you have to deal with, Mr. Clevenger. We've known all along the town where the documents are waiting; we told Mummy-dear to send them there. All I didn't know was the name of the fictitious person to whom they are addressed-she held out on us to that extent-but you've just given it to me. Thank you very much, Mr. Clevenger, and thank you in advance for the use of your car, and now if you and Mummy-dear will just get out… Keep your hands in sight, Mr. Clevenger!"
"Hell, I was just putting my hanky away… Okay, okay. Be careful with that damn thing!" I faced her over the back of the seat. "Listen, you can't just leave us here…"
I had the handkerchief ready. I shoved it up against the muzzle of the acid-gun, and got her wrist with my left hand, I in a way that made her fingers open before she realized I what was happening. Then I reversed the weapon and aimed it at her left-handed. She stared at me wordlessly, with hate in her eyes.
"Stay still if you want to stay pretty!" I snapped. "Irish!"
"Yes?"
I flung the damp handkerchief away from me, out of the car. I thought I could feel the flesh peeling from my b hand, but it could be just imagination. I didn't take my it eyes off Naomi.
"On the double, Irish. Take the keys, open the trunk-up front, remember. There's a two-gallon canteen full of water. Come around to my side and rinse off my hand, real quick."
I stuck my hand out the open window and waited until I could feel cold water running over it. I still seemed to have four fingers and a thumb.
"I think I've got it all off," Jenny said. "I don't think you got much on you. The handkerchief must have caught most of it."
I brought my hand back inside, under the light. A glance told me she was right. There wasn't even a blister visible. I looked at the girl in the back seat.
"Does that metal scaffolding come off your teeth?" I asked. She nodded silently. I said, "Well, take it off, then. Let's see what you really look like."
She put her hands to her mouth and worked for a moment, and took them down. She was really quite attractive, in a diminutive, fragile way. Well, so is a coral snake. I remembered what Greg had looked like after she'd got through with him. It occurred to me that Hans Ruyter's death might not have been entirely due to inefficiency on her part. He'd bawled her out; he was the boss. Now he was dead and she was the boss. Perhaps she had wanted it to happen that way. I didn't put it past her.
I said, "Let us reconsider, doll. Would you still say I have nothing to deal with?"
She looked at me for a moment, and at the glass gun I held. Then she smiled slowly. "You are a very resourceful man, Mr. Clevenger."
"I can be a very useful man," I said. "I want out of the country. A little money would come in handy, too, but I won't be greedy about it. Do we have a deal, Naomi?"
I heard Jenny, still standing outside the car, give an indignant little gasp of surprise and protest. To hell with her. She'd made her contribution. It was between the kid and me now.
Naomi's smile widened. "We have a deal… Dave."
I did one of the hardest things I've done in my life. I turned the vicious acid pistol around once more and gave it back to her butt first.
XX
JENNY AND I waited in the car outside the lone general store in a small town named after some saint or other. I suppose it was a kind of loyalty test. If we waited obediently where Naomi had put us, we proved one thing. If we drove off and left her, we proved something else, and she'd get on the phone and prepare a suitable reception for us at the Nova Scotia end of the line. She might do that anyway. In fact, I didn't think there was much chance she wouldn't.
Waiting, I amused myself by reading the various metal signs nailed up around the place. It was better than, for instance, worrying about cops and corpses and what Mac might or might not have been able to accomplish in the way of clearing trail for us. If anything can make Madison Avenue's cigarette and soft-drink slogans seem even cornier, it's being translated literally into French. Jenny stirred beside me.
"Dave."
>
"What is it, Irish?"
"You're not really going to… I mean, you can't possibly trust her!"
I glanced at my companion. She looked pretty good for having spent a hectic night in her clothes-well, mostly in her clothes. She looked attractive and resilient and, for an amateur, reasonably competent. It was a relief not to have to think of her in connection with a jug of acid. It was an association that had never seemed very plausible.
I told myself that mother love excused, or at least explained, most of her far-out behavior to date. I even considered trying to enlist her as a working ally. Acting together, systematically, we were much more likely to get the job done and get out alive afterward, than if we struggled along independently, hoping for individual breaks.
I was tempted. There's always the risk, in the business, that you'll get so damn wary and smart and suspicious that you won't take a chance on anybody, not even when it may mean the difference between failure and success. It was a mistake I didn't want to make here. On the other hand, I had my orders. Security was paramount. I was not allowed to take anybody into my confidence; I couldn't tell Jenny enough of the truth to sound convincing and persuasive after everything that had happened. And there was a conflict of interest. She was presumably concerned most of all with the safety of her daughter, while I had strict instructions to strangle any young girls who got in my way.
I said, as Clevenger, "Have I got a choice? Who else is going to get me out of this now? You?"
"She's a vicious, sadistic little monster," Jenny said. "You don't know what it's been like, driving with her all that way, living with her, pretending to be her mother, for God's sake! If I had a child like that, I'd dump it out of the crib and squash it underfoot! Like a tarantula!"
"Sure," I said. "What's the story on Penny, the real Penny?"
Jenny's expression changed. "They're holding her somewhere, somewhere out where we were a couple of weeks back. A mean-looking, farmer-type couple took her away. That's all I know. I could go crazy thinking about it, Dave. She's kind of a sensitive kid. Not a typical teenager at all. A shy, bright, studious fifteen-year-old, not really very pretty but awfully sweet. I suppose I should have left her home, as you keep saying, but my husband… well, it takes a special kind of man to make a reasonable home for a child all by himself. I knew Howard wouldn't even try. He'd be too busy with his light rays. I thought she'd be better off with me." Jenny moved her shoulders jerkily. "The way it turned out, I guess I was wrong. I was brought up too civilized. I didn't expect all this violence. Dave?"
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