Ruth glared at him over the wad of Kleenex. “What will you do if I don’t tell you? Hit me again?”
“No, but Mrs. Ackerman will apply the lighted end of her cigarette to Mr. Helm’s chest. And Mr. Morton will blow his brains out if he tries to object—well, let’s be generous and allow him to squirm just a little, shall we? And small moans will be permitted, but no loud screams that could disturb the occupants of neighboring rooms. . . .”
"I don’t believe this!" Ruth protested. ‘‘You work for the U.S. government! And you know that I’m a respectable American citizen; I was married to a member of the Foreign Service and later to a well-known author. Mr. Helm works for the U.S. government just as you do. What gives you the right to march in here with . . . with your slaps and your torture; what makes you think you can get away with it?” She appealed to me: “Matt, has he gone absolutely crazy?”
I shrugged. It wasn’t the time or place to go into the question of Ackerman’s sanity. As far as I’m concerned, they’re all nuts, but then I’ve spent my life in a fairly hard-boiled profession and I never can understand the soft-boiled folks who make careers of saving people from their own bad habits. Go ahead and smoke up a storm for all I care. It’s your emphysema.
I said, "Maybe yes, maybe no, but for the moment he has the guns. Moral and legal rights are all very well, sweetheart, but in the crunch it’s the guns that count, always.”
Ruth licked her lips. ‘ ‘But how can he expect to get away with—”
Ackerman didn’t want us to get into that. He snapped, “All right, Belinda!”
The blond girl, with the cigarette dangling between her lips, pulled open my already unbuttoned shirt with both hands. When she leaned over me, I got an intimate view of her chest in return: the rather spectacular white breasts were, I noted, quite unconfined inside the purple blouse. At the moment I didn’t find them unbearably stimulating, but I’ll admit to a small reaction, of which she was aware. She smiled at me affectionately, puffed hard on the cigarette, blew the smoke into my face, and pressed the glowing coal against my breastbone.
There was the well-remembered, instant blaze of pain, of course, and the familiar smell of burned chest hairs and scorched skin mingled with the odor of tobacco. I mean, I’d played this scene before too many times, with all conceivable variations. I’d long since learned that suffering doesn’t become any easier with practice, but this time, at least, I didn’t have to pretend it didn’t hurt, as is sometimes required. I believe I performed the expected squirm-and-moan act quite convincingly; and how much of it was truly an act is none of your damned business.
“You sadistic bitch!” I gasped. Corny verbiage was also expected.
Belinda grinned. “I’d just love to hurt you a different way, lover, and have you hurt me right back, but since this is all the fun we can share today, just relax and enjoy it. Your lady friend doesn’t seem to be talking, so . . ." She leaned forward again.
“Forty-three!”
That was Ruth’s voice, sounding a bit dim through the pain haze, as Belinda set another small part of me afire.
Ackerman’s voice said, “What did you say, Mrs. Steiner?”
The girl above me withdrew temporarily, leaving my chest throbbing. I saw that Ruth’s face was set and shiny. She’d taken the Kleenex from her mouth. The bleeding had already stopped. There was some swelling of her lower lip where Ackerman’s blow had caught her. Maybe a double amputation was in order. You wouldn’t want to go to all the trouble of chopping off one just to have him learn how to slap even harder and oftener with the other.
Ruth snapped, "You wanted to know the number of chapters, damn you! There are forty-three of them. The total number of manuscript pages completed is five hundred and thirty-four. There was to have been an appendix—Mark thought it would come to some fifteen pages, for a total manuscript of about five hundred and fifty double-spaced pages—but he never got enough of the final section written out, and revised to his satisfaction, to put it on a disk and send it away.”
“Very well. Now the names.”
“What will you do to them if I tell you who they are?”
It was time for me to be brave. I whispered hoarsely, “Ruth, you don’t have to. . . . Hell, in this business a little toasting session is all in the day’s work. These dumbos always reach for the cigarette or the soldering iron or the blowtorch and think they’ve invented a lovely new form of interrogation, as if the Spanish Inquisition hadn’t beat them to it by centuries! I’ve had it done to me so many times I’m practically fireproof. Don’t tell the bastard a damn thing you don’t want. . . . Ahhh!”
“Don’t be a hero, hero,” the plump giii said, taking the cigarette away and puffing it back to good, bright ignition. “Well, Mrs. Steiner?” Ackerman asked.
Ruth hesitated.
“Ahh-ahh!” I said as Belinda did her stuff once more. I decided that the antitobacco crusaders had missed one good argument against the filthy weed: Mrs. Roger Ackerman.
“That doesn’t seem to be one of your fireproof spots, lover,” she said solicitously. “But let’s check it out again. . . ."
“Ahhhhh!”
“Stop it, stop it! ” Ruth cried. ‘ ‘Please, what is it you want to know, Mr. Ackerman?”
“Where are your other contacts to take place?”
She licked her lips. “Lima, Santiago, Quito. There was supposed to be one in Buenos Aires, but I switched it to Itaipu at the last minute.”
“The two disks Mr. Morton found in your room, are they copies of the one you just received at Itaipu?”
“Yes.”
“Where is the original?”
“It was . . . picked up a few minutes ago. A man came to the window and I handed it out to him.” She shook her head quickly. “You don’t need to know who he was. As a matter of fact, I don’t know who he was, myself. Over the phone, I’d asked Lenny Otero to arrange it, just giving me time to fire up the computer and run off a couple of copies of the disk before I passed it on.”
Ackerman pounced on the name. "Otero? Is that the name of your Buenos Aires contact, or somebody here in the hotel?”
Ruth looked annoyed with herself, then she shrugged. “What difference does it make? She doesn’t have what you want any longer. Lenny’s the one in Buenos Aires.”
“You made two copies?” Ackerman said thoughtfully. “One for you and one ft»r Mr. Helm?”
“No, one for him to keep for me and one to send to his people in Washington. The same as I did with the disk I got in Rio. One copy of that must already be on its way to Washington, since you found only one on him.”
“To Washington!” Ackerman turned on me sharply and started to speak, but changed his mind. He swung back to Ruth: “But no copy for you? That seems odd.”
She said sharply, “Nothing odd about it! The way I had it planned, we’d have one copy of each diskette with us, the one Matt was holding, in case I needed immediate access to it. There was no sense in my carrying still another, and I didn’t want too many floating around. Three seemed enough to ensure . . . Well, if one of the originals didn’t make it by the route I’d arranged, there would be Matt’s copy right at hand, and if something should happen to that, there would still be a backup in Washington.”
Ackerman was silent for a little. At last he asked, “These Mends your husband trusted to safeguard his work, were they all female friends? You said your contact in Buenos Aires was a girl. And the one in Rio? We think your rendezvous there was also a sanitario—in that restaurant where we had lunch on Monday, am I right?—which would make her a woman, too.”
Ruth drew a long breath. “I’m afraid my husband was kind of a ladies’ man in his younger days, Mr. Ackerman. Of course he also had a good many male friends and acquaintances down here, but yes, the people he asked to keep his disks safe for him were all women.” She grimaced. “Fortunately for this project, as it turned out, he hadn’t been exactly reticent about his ... his premarital relationships. Or you could say he�
�d just been painfully honest when he came courting me, to use the old-fashioned term, telling me what kind of a man I’d be getting and swearing that it would never happen after we were married, even though keeping a mistress was an old Spanish custom. He kept his word. He ... he loved me. But I did get to know a considerable amount about the women in his past. Strangely, he seemed to have remained friends with practically all of them. Well, he was a very nice guy. I even kept meeting them socially when I accompanied him on his journalistic travels around South America. A bit embarrassing at the time, knowing what I knew, but useful later when I was trying to track down the ones who’d received the disks.”
“Yes, I can see that. Now the names, if you please.”
She licked her lips. “I can’t. . . . What will you do to them?”
"They will come to no harm if they turn over the disks."
“I’m afraid I don’t trust you. If ... if one of them gets a bit stubborn, you’ll hurt her, too, just as you’re hurting . . . No, I don’t think I care to betray them to you!”
“Belinda!”
When there was no immediate groan from me, Ackerman looked our way. Belinda Ackerman—whatever her real name might be—was taking a final long drag at the stub of her cigarette. She crushed it out deliberately in one of the hotel ashtrays.
Ackerman said irritably, ‘ ‘Belinda, you are not on stage; a dramatic production is not required. Just light another and . . .”
The blond girl shook her head. “No.”
Ackerman looked startled. “What did you say?” he demanded.
Belinda spoke calmly: “That’s enough sadism for little Linda, the Krafft-Ebing girl. I’ve had my kicks for today, thanks, Mr. Ackerman; now let the boy wonder take a crack at it. Hell, this guy owes him one, from what I hear, or vice versa. I’ll just hold the gun and watch the fun for a change. ”
I should have noticed. I suppose, if I hadn’t been distracted by my own discomfort, I would have seen that the girl was in trouble. Her voice had been steady enough throughout, but now her face was quite pale, even a little greenish, and there were drops of perspiration on her forehead. She’d sweated through her sexy silk blouse under the armpits.
I didn’t like it. I prefer to deal with psychopathic creeps. The girl had suddenly become human, just a hardworking junior agent who’d been plugging away to the best of her ability at the new job assigned to her. She’d been professional enough not to let herself be distracted by the right and wrong of a spot of interrogation—ethics don’t play a very large part in our training—but in the end what she’d been ordered to do had turned out to be just a bit too much for her. Maybe she was just a nice girl at heart. Too bad. It’s easier to pull the trigger on the opposition when the time comes, or push the blade all the way home, if you can tell yourself you’re dealing with a bunch of conscienceless freaks from outer space, not real, vulnerable human beings.
Ackerman asked, “Are you refusing . . . ?”
"The poor girl’s got a weak stomach." This was the handsome character holding the silenced automatic. He laughed scornfully. “I haven’t. Certainly not where this quickdraw cowboy is concerned. Let me take over as she suggests, Mr. Ackerman.”
“Well, all right.” The older man threw a baleful look at Belinda. “But I’ll speak with you later, young lady.”
After that it was just more and worse of the same, complicated by the fact that Mr. Dennis Morton clearly wasn’t accustomed to defiling his lungs with tobacco. This led to a considerable amount of coughing as he sucked inexpertly to keep the cigarette fired up and choked on the resulting smoke. A real comedy routine; but the fact that he was aware of making a fool of himself with the unfamiliar fags after volunteering so bravely for torture duty only made him all the more eager to take it out on me: he was faster to start a bum than Belinda had been and slower to stop. Ruth stalled a little, but gradually she let it all come out. The woman in Santiago was Conchita Perez. Address. The woman in Lima was Rafaela Hoffman. Address. The woman in Quito was Evelyn Herrera Gonzales. Address.
Then there was a little silence. At last Ruth looked up at Ackerman and asked sharply, “Well, are you satisfied?”
“One more name,” he said.
“There aren’t any more!”
“Oh, yes there are. There is. The name of the man or woman, I presume back in the States, to whom you’re sending the original disks after you get them copied. . . . Dennis!”
“Oh, stop it!” Ruth said wearily. She sighed. “Why don’t you use your brains for a change? Who in the world would I send them to except Mark’s publisher?”
After taking a moment to consider her answer and decide that it made sense, Ackerman asked, “The name of the firm?”
“For heaven’s sake! You can read it off any copy of his first book; if you knew your business, you already would have. Horizon Press. New York. I don’t have the street address in my head. . . . Oh, all right, all right, don’t start that again, let me think! 243 Mackey Street. Zip 10022, if I remember right. Actually, our dealings were with one of their senior editors.”
“Name?”
“Paul Rentner. But I’m not sending them to him directly. We were sneaky, we didn’t think it would be smart to address the packages so obviously to a publishing house, so Paul arranged to have a young associate editor receive them at home and bring them to him at the office. Elizabeth Johns."
“Address?”
Ruth gave it, and Ackerman copied it into the little notebook in which, rather clumsily since he also had to juggle Morton’s revolver, he’d been recording the information as it was extracted. He flipped to a new page.
“And now,” he said, “now we’ll have the code or whatever you computer people call it, please, Mrs. Steiner, and the unpleasantness will all be behind us.”
“No.”
“Dennis!”
“You’re getting tiresome,” Ruth said wearily. “I’m not going to give it to you. You can fry him to a crisp—I’m sorry, Matt—and you can toast me like a marshmallow on a stick, but you won’t get that out of me. I know there are drugs that could make me talk, but if you had access to those you’d have used them already instead of going in for these . . . primitive methods." She drew a deep breath. "Forget about Matt, Mr. Ackerman. He doesn’t have the information you want, and nothing you do to him will make me give it to you. He’s a nice enough person, but he doesn’t mean that much to me. Tell your junior-grade inquisitor to come over here and work on me. I assure you, he’ll die a long, lingering death from lung cancer before I talk, if he doesn’t rupture something vital first, the way he keeps coughing. . . ."
The slap knocked her glasses off. I decided that a hatchet would be too quick; when the time came I’d do a slow job with a dull hacksaw. No-Hands Ackerman.
“You’ve been stalling, you bitch!”
She made no move to touch her bruised cheek; she just straightened up in the chair, adjusted her glasses once more, and laughed at him.
“That’s right, I’ve been stalling,” she said. “I’ve been making you work for a lot of names and addresses that mean nothing at all, because even if you get the disks, what good will they do you if you can’t read them? Oh, I’ll be sorry to lose them; they represent Mark’s last work and I hate to see it wasted; besides, I had greedy hopes. . . . But never mind that. Obviously there’s a drug-related evil no one talks about, that’s worse than the drugs themselves: the lovely power the so-called drug wars give to certain ambitious, ruthless people, the power to push and slap people around with impunity. The majority of your colleagues are probably honest and sincere and maybe even reasonably considerate law enforcement people, Mr. Ackerman, but you and men like you make the whole noble crusade stink. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a much greater danger than Gregorio Vasquez; at least everybody knows what he is. He’s not a hidden menace like you, a secret threat to everything our country stands for. As I said before, you’ll never get your hands on my husband’s book. You’ll never use it to further
your dirty career. Never!"
Chapter 18
Ackerman took a quick step forward. He was pale with fury and he might very well have smashed Ruth’s face with the revolver he was holding if Belinda hadn’t stepped forward quickly and caught his arm.
“Please, Mr. Ackerman! Somebody’s coming!”
Footsteps approached the door and stopped. There was a polite little knock, very different from Ackerman’s recent assault on the panels.
“Matt?”
It was a woman’s voice, that of our tour manager, Annie. Ackerman reached out and grabbed Ruth’s chin left-handed to hold her head steady. He placed the muzzle of his gun-well, Morton’s gun—between her eyes. I decided that the way he kept losing his temper, he might be a bit screwy after all, as Ruth had suggested; or perhaps the fact that he was on very shaky legal ground here, actually no legal ground at all, was affecting his nerves adversely—not that any of us spend too much time brooding about legality.
Ackerman glared at me over Ruth’s head and whispered, “Answer, Helm! Very, very carefully!”
I raised my voice and said, “Yes, Annie?”
She spoke through the closed door: “The tour to the falls is about to start. You and Ruth said you were planning to come with us.”
It was no time to be clever; the room was infested with too many nervous people with guns. I said, “I’m sorry, I think we’ll have to pass after all. Ruth’s a bit tired.”
The woman outside the door said, “Oh, that’s too bad!
Well, we’ll go ahead without you. When she’s had a little rest, maybe you can just take her across the road in front of the hotel and over to the river, it’s only a couple of hundred yards. You can get a nice view of the cataracts from there, and you can follow the cliffs upstream toward them as far as she feels like walking, there’s a good path along the edge. It’s quite a spectacle. You really shouldn’t miss it.”
The Threateners Page 17