The Threateners

by Donald Hamilton

  I said, “Us po’ folks do try to get along with what we have, ma’am; it’s the ricos who’re forever trying to pick up an extra million or two. . . . But we’re wasting time; they’ll be back to question us any minute. We’d better settle the ground rules for possible engagement while we have the chance.” I drew a long breath. “First of all, don’t jump the gun. In the movies they’re forever making monkeys of themselves trying to escape prematurely and getting themselves clobbered, just to keep the action moving on the screen. Forget it. We don’t give a damn about moving any action; if we have to sit here for a month waiting for the right moment, we sit. Or it may look good to me five minutes from now. I think I’ve been through this a few more times than you have, so let me call it. Wait for my signal. If you go without it, you’re on your own; and if you get yourself crippled up doing it, I won’t carry you when the time comes; I’ll just leave you. Understood?”

  Belinda made a face at me. “Ain’t you the tough one? All right, I understand. What else?”

  I said, “When we do make a break, if we make one here, remember that this is not a drill. I repeat, this is not a drill."

  “And just what do you mean by that?”

  It was time for the Speech, the one I find myself giving, in self-defense, to all die rookies and amateurs I seem to wind up with, before battle is joined. I always have to remind them that they’re in the real world now, not the bloodless TV dreamland they grew up in.

  I said, “I mean that this is not a fun-fun game with paint-firing guns and rubber knives. This is for real, baby, and I don’t want to be shot in the back by somebody you forgot to finish off. I want to know for sure that once you leave somebody on the ground, he isn’t coming after us, ever. Or she. Take an extra moment if you have to, to do the job right, but do it. Okay?”

  I heard her swallow beside me. “Okay,” she said after a moment. “I read you, Chief.”

  I said, “There’s just one exception. The Weatherford girl. I’ve got a use for her.”

  “What . . . Oh, never mind. I won’t ask. Obviously it’s love at first sight. . . . Oh, God, here they come again.”

  They were marching back in, in a purposeful way, having presumably held a council of war in the other room to decide how to deal with us if we proved recalcitrant. Leading the parade was the tall black girl, Lenore. She walked past me briskly and stopped in front of Belinda, looking down at her in a speculative way, like a cat lazily appraising a cornered mouse. Patricia Weatherford, less eager, came up to me and hesitated a moment before she spoke.

  “You heard what Mr. Palomino said before he left. We have to know who this woman is and what she was doing in your room with another man—”

  “Two other men,” I said.

  The freckled girl frowned. “Two? Nobody has said anything about—”

  I said, “If whoever you had watching me had done a reasonably professional job of surveillance, instead of just loafing in the hotel lobby ogling the pretty Brazilian girls, he’d have seen them bust in on me; and he wouldn’t have been quite so quick to give Palomino the go-ahead signal for the kidnapping.”

  Charles, standing behind the girl, asked sharply, “What was I supposed to do, lounge conspicuously for hours in the corridor outside your door?”

  The girl said, “Never mind, Charles, he’s just trying to provoke us. Who was the second man, Mr. Helm?”

  “Who the hell would he be?” I asked. “Belinda’s crazy husband, that’s who!”

  “That would be Mr. Roger Ackerman?”

  “No one but," I said grimly. "Apparently Mr. Ackerman has a few sexual problems due to aging that make him very sensitive about the fact that his young wife is attractive to men. . . . Hell, I’d never laid hands on the girl! But he’d seen her smile at me, I guess, she smiles at everybody, it’s no crime, but it gave him jealous ideas, and when his Number One Boy, who seemed to take surveillance a little more seriously than some people, saw her slipping into my room, he tipped off the boss and . . . Jesus, when I answered the door the old bastard came through it like gangbusters, foaming at the mouth and waving a gun. The guy was nuts. He was going to have his gofer kill us both and dump our bodies in the river, for Christ’s sake!”

  Patricia Weatherford took a moment to digest this; then she asked, “If your relationship was really so innocent, Mr. Helm, what was Mrs. Ackerman doing in your hotel room?”

  I was making it up as I went along, using the same phony straying-wife theme that Ackerman had employed as a distraction, for just about the same purpose. If they bought it, okay; if not, they’d believe the truth more readily for having been made to work for it. But I was a little slow in thinking up the next answer: just what had brought Belinda innocently to my room, in this version of the script? That’s the trouble with improvising; you can talk yourself into a comer before you know it. Before I could speak, Belinda intervened.

  She laughed sharply. “Don’t ask him what I was doing there; he never got a chance to find out. Ask me!”

  The Weatherford girl said, “Very well. What were you doing in Mr. Helm’s room, Mrs. Ackerman.”

  Belinda said, “To hell with innocent relationships; I’d had too damn much innocence at home! I was trying to get fucked.”

  Chapter 23

  A little silence followed Belinda’s pronouncement. I had to restrain a grin. Obviously the girl understood what I was doing, just putting out smoke, and she was playing along to the best of her ability, aware of the basic principle that a statement that makes you look bad is always believed a lot sooner than a statement that makes you look good.

  Patricia Weatherford seemed to be startled by the frank response. “But you’d spoken to the man less than half a dozen times! We were watching and we’d never seen anything to indicate . . . Are you trying to say that you deliberately visited the room of a man who was practically a stranger, just a casual tour acquaintance, in order to . . . ?” She hesitated, too fastidious, perhaps, to repeat the vulgar term.

  Belinda said, “Seduce is the genteel word you’re looking for, baby. . . . What the hell could I do? I had to get it somewhere, damn it; that old fart I was married to couldn’t get it up anymore. We’d just tried again. He didn’t even want to anymore, and he’d never thought much of morning sex anyway, but I made him try. Nothing! My God, I was ready to climb the walls, so I picked the only guy on the tour who wasn’t senile, and didn’t have a battle-ax wife sitting in the same hotel room, and looked like a reasonable character who might be willing to do the little girl a great big favor—”

  “They’re both kidding you!” This was the black girl, speaking to Patricia Weatherford. “They’re just cooking up a dirty story between them to keep you happy.”

  Patricia glanced at her irritably, seeming reluctant to dismiss Belinda’s interesting nympho fantasy. “What makes you think—”

  “Just look at them!” After a moment Lenore went on quickly, “Think about it! I’m not saying that Mrs. Sexy here wouldn’t climb into any bed that was handy, but if her husband is a respectable businessman—and we checked him out with the rest of the tour, remember—can you see him casually ordering his private secretary or whatever to throw his wife and her lover off a cliff? No, they’re just trying to sell us a hot passion triangle to keep us away from what they really . . . What’s the matter with your chest, Mr. Helm? I’ve noticed that you act as if it’s hurting you.” A moment later she had my shirt open and was pointing to the cigarette bums. “It looks as if somebody’s been interrogating this man rather drastically, Pat. Don’t you wonder why?” She looked down at me. “And please don’t try to tell me it was just dear old Mr. Ackerman trying to make you confess to being his wife’s lover. According to you, he was already taking that for granted when he broke into your room, wasn’t he?”

  She was a smart girl, and we’d played around long enough. I started to speak and let my words trail away. After a moment I gave an elaborate shrug of resignation.

  “All right, damn it, what d
o you want to know?”

  “First, why don’t you tell us who burned you like that?” I jerked my head toward Belinda. “Hell, she did.” That silenced them again and, after a little, I went on: “Well, she started it. When she started feeling a little icky about it, the boy scout took over.”

  “The boy scout?”

  “Dennis Morton. The jerkoff I tossed into the Parana River. It was a real pleasure.”

  Lenore said triumphantly to Patricia Weatherford, “I damn well knew just by looking at them that they weren’t even close to being lovers!” She spoke to me: “What did they want you to tell them?”

  I said, “It wasn’t me they were working on, really, it was Ruth. They figured her for the softhearted type who couldn’t bear to see a man suffer.”

  “Ruth Steiner? Well, what did they want from her?”

  I made the black girl work for it, but she wrung the whole gripping story out of me gradually. It was augmented by an occasional contribution from Belinda.

  At last I said, “Well, that’s about it. Ruth agreed to get the disks to save me, but having me alive made Ackerman nervous, and he figured, the way things stood, if he got rid of me, Ruth wouldn’t know until after she’d kept her part of the agreement, and there’d be nothing she could do about it then. He’d already have what he wanted. So he tipped the wink to pretty boy, who was willing but unable. I flipped him into the river, like I said. When I looked around, Belinda was missing. I went looking for her, and your boy Palomino got me with his lousy scarf, making two guys I’d let sneak up behind me inside a few hours. Not the brightest day of my life.”

  Patricia Weatherford, who’d been listening in silence, letting Lenore carry the ball, drew a long breath and asked:

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why would you bother to go looking for a female monster like you make Mrs. Ackerman out to be? First, you say, she burned you with her cigarette, and then she came along to help this Dennis Morton murder you. Why would her disappearance concern you in the least, Mr. Helm? I’d think you’d thank your lucky stars the sadistic bitch was missing and simply run away from that spot as fast as you . . . Lenore, I think this time you’re the one who’s being kidded!” “I disagree. . . .”

  Patricia waved aside the black girl’s interruption irritably and went on: "I have a much easier time believing in a homicidal love triangle than in this implausible tale of a career bureaucrat in government service ordering the torture and assassination of a fellow government employee just because the second man had usurped a mission originally assigned to him! I don’t doubt that there are people in the government who take their drug enforcement work very seriously. Maybe they even make something of a religion of it, and who can blame them—it’s something nobody can help feeling strongly about—but this is simply too ridiculous!” She stepped up to me and studied me for a moment. Then she slapped me lightly across the face. “I think you’re still playing games with us, Mr. Helm! I think it’s time you stopped trying to make fools of us with tales of panting nymphomaniacs and wild-eyed fanatics. At least give us a story that makes sense!”

  It was too bad. I entered her name carefully, just below Roger Ackerman’s, in the People-Who-Can’t-Keep-Their-Hands-to-Themselves file.

  After a moment I said, “Okay, okay, I’ll give you a sensible story, if you insist. It’s about a good-looking dame, bom in the chips, if you know what I mean, family really loaded. And it’s not as if she were a poor little rich girl condemned to a life of dull party-going and coupon clipping; the kid’s got talent, she’s athletic, she’s shown she can be right up there with the good ones in a certain sport." I shook my head as she started to interrupt, and went on, watching her: “No, let me finish, Miss Weatherford. So what does our heroine do? Well, this attractive and talented babe who’s got all the money in the world decides she needs another lousy little million. She gets a bunch of her greedy friends together to help her track down a man she’s never met and keep him located until they can sell him for blood money to one of the worst drug peddlers in the world. . . .” I held up my hand when she stirred angrily under my regard. “Oh, that’s quite all right, Miss Weatherford. I know it’s too wild a yam; I don’t really expect you to believe me.”

  The girl was quite pale; the freckles showed clearly on her square, rather boyish face. “You don’t understand,” she breathed. ‘ ‘You just don’t understand!"

  “That’s right,” I said. “I surely don’t understand. It seems like such a waste. I mean, you go to all this trouble to arrange it, tracing Mark Steiner to where he’s hiding under a new name and identity out west, trailing him around, checking on his friends and his friends’ friends, following them for weeks to learn their habits and make sure they won’t interfere at the last moment, very thorough, and then you let yourself miss out on the very best part of it.”

  She licked her lips. “The best. . . What do you mean?”

  I said, “I mean, baby, after sending for the stranglers, why weren’t you there when they moved in? You did send for them, didn’t you? Vasquez wouldn’t trust an amateur outfit like yours to carry out the actual execution; he had his own trained assassins for that. But he wasn’t about to expose those valuable men unnecessarily in a foreign land where they couldn’t operate inconspicuously—many of them probably can’t even speak English—when a bunch of nice American boys and girls, who’d blend right into the scenery, were willing to do the pick-and-shovel work for a mere million. Your job was to case the situation and let the Compañeros know when it was time to do their stuff, wasn’t it? But how could you bear to stay away and miss the show? Jeez, it was really something, Miss Weatherford! I mean, the way Mark Steiner’s face turned blue when your pal Palomino pulled the scarf tight, and the way his neck cracked like a tree breaking in a high wind, really a beautiful sound—well, if you’re into people dying violently a million bucks’ worth!”

  I guess the tennis people would have called it a big forehand, a powerful, open-handed swing to the side of my face that really rocked me. I mean, the girl had muscle. Roger Ackerman’s feeble slaps had been love taps by comparison. “You simply don’t understand!”

  Then she was burying her hands in her face and running out of the room, sobbing. The blond boy, Charles, stepped forward angrily.

  “Don’t talk to Pat. . . Miss Weatherford like that!”

  I looked at the black girl, who was apparently the most sensible, if also probably the meanest, of the lot.

  “Please enlighten me, ma’am,” I said. “Just what is this thing I don’t understand?”

  But it was Baldy who answered. He came forward, still holding the loaded revolver he’d been issued as if afraid it would bite him, which is actually a pretty good way to handle a loaded gun. He stopped before me and spoke pedantically.

  “There are plenty of people in the world, Mr. Helm,” he said. "There are too many of them, actually. We had to make the decision. One man’s life, the life of a member of a species that is in no danger whatever of extinction, against the survival of a whole species that is about to disappear from the face of the earth. It was unfortunate about Mr. Steiner, or whatever his name was back in his native land—”

  “Raoul Marcus Carrera Mascarena,” I said. “If you’re going to kill them, you should at least have the decency to remember their names right."

  “We kill nobody!” Baldy said sharply. “I made that clear to Senor Vasquez: we are an organization for peace and preservation. However, with our affiliated organizations, we have members all over die United States, and with the help of this membership network, I told him, we might be able to get him the information he required, for a price, the price he had already offered. What he did with that information was no concern of ours.” The plump man shrugged. “Apparently, his reward had found no takers up to that time. He was willing to settle for our terms. As you probably know, we twice found him the man he wanted, once in the east, where his men apparently fumbled the job, and again in t
he southwest, where they were more successful.” He shook his head sadly. “It was really too bad about Mr. Steiner. It would have been easier on the consciences of some members of this group, at least, if the man selected had been a wicked person whose death would have benefited society. However, Senor Vasquez had not offered his first reward for a criminal type, he’d offered it for the author of The Evil Empire."

  "His first reward?” I said. "I hadn’t heard of any others.” The bald little man smiled thinly. “Well, you wouldn’t, would you?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “One is for you.”

  I felt Belinda give a startled little jump beside me, but I had no trouble controlling my reaction. It wasn’t such a big deal. People have wanted me dead before and been willing to pay for it.

  I asked, “Satisfy my curiosity. How much am I worth today?”

  The bald man shrugged. “Only five hundred thousand dollars, I’m afraid, and in your case there were no conscience pangs. On the record—your record, which we finally managed to obtain—you are obviously the kind of man society can well do without. I tried to drive up the price on the grounds of risk, you are supposed to be somewhat dangerous, but half a million was as high as Senor Vasquez would go for you. And another half million for Mrs. Steiner. Here again the sentimentalists in the group made some difficulties since she is a woman, as if that made a difference, but I managed to convince them that if we turned down this money, we’d never reach our financial goal—three million was the project estimate, and we’ve received some eight hundred thousand in contributions, which, with the sum already received from Mr. Vasquez, leaves us short a million, two. The two hundred thousand we can probably raise somehow; but there are no angels waiting in the wings with million-dollar checks, none but Mr. Vasquez.”