The Revengers

One national cemetery looks pretty much like another at burying time, from Arlington on down—this one happened to be located in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In my line of work we get accustomed to, if never quite hardened to, losing a fellow worker now and then; and since many of us have worn uniforms in the past, the final rites often taken place on government ground. As a result, although appearing at such funerals isn’t very good security, we bend the rules often enough out of respect for our dead that the scene tends to become familiar if never exactly comfortable.

There are always the rows upon rows of identical white headstones marching across the green lawns in strict military formations. There’s always the sad, somber, and rather untidy little funeral party—no military formations here— almost lost in the great tidy fields of the dead. Sometimes it rains, but not always. It’s only in the movies that the scene is always misty and dismal, punctuated by picturesque black umbrellas the prop departments must obtain from a special source, since I haven’t seen that many black ones all together in years except on the screen; in real life these days they’re mostly either transparent or brightly colored.

But today, in real life, there were no umbrellas. The sun was shining brightly in spite of the fact that we were burying Bob Devine with a back full of buckshot—rather ironical considering the fact that he’d been retired a few years back, at a fairly early age, due to a heart condition, after surviving innumerable dangers that should have killed him, a few of which I’d shared. He’d married and settled down to a peaceful life in my old home town, probably because I’d painted it in such bright nostalgic colors during one of those times that come in our business, when you have nothing to do but kill time, preferably by talking about matters of no importance, since you’ve already settled everything involving the mission at hand. So Bob De-vine had retired and let his guard down and the past had sneaked up behind him with a shotgun. If it was the past That remained to be seen.

There was a little snow left on the Sangre de Cristo peaks above us; but the small wind was off the desert, warm and dry. It stirred the short dark hair of Martha Devine, beside me, and tugged at the black dress she was wearing that looked a bit too festive for the occasion, with pretty black ruffles encircling neck and wrists and hem. It was obviously a party dress but if people didn’t like it, her attitude said, to hell with people. It was black, wasn’t it? There were tears in her eyes, weren’t there? What did they want, blood?

I guessed that she had picked the dress simply because it was the only long-sleeved black dress she owned and she hadn’t seen any point in buying a new and less frivolous one. It wasn’t as if she buried husbands often enough to justify investing in a special funeral costume. She was a moderately tall girl, perhaps a bit too big for dainty, little-girl ruffles, even in black; but I remembered that Bob had liked his girls ruffly and feminine. I found myself recalling for some reason the time in a certain Colombian house of ill repute, to use the old-fashioned designation, long before he married the girl beside me. We were there together in he line of duty and it was necessary for us to behave in a mnner appropriate to our surroundings or we would lever, of course, have dreamed of sampling the merchandise and charging the experience to Uncle Sam. Bob had skillfully maneuvered to get himself, of the two willing ladies who’d adopted us as we came in, the rather attractive one in the fluttery summer dress, leaving me the skinny me in the skintight pants. It could have created a real problem for me since ladies in pants do very little for me and I’m not enthusiastic about the idea of sex as a business proposition anyway. Besides, at the time, I wasn’t at all certain that the dangerous characters we were tracking through that part of South America weren’t hanging around in the hope of taking advantage of our preoccupation in a rather lethal way, a consideration that also tended to inhibit my virility.

As it turned out, my girl was a bright and observant kid who was just as happy to earn her money in conversation as in copulation, laughing at my atrocious Spanish all the while; and the information she gave me led to the swift completion of the assignment that had brought Bob and me to that part of the world. Funny. I hadn’t thought of Rafaelita in years.

But this was hardly the time to be thinking of whores and whorehouses, or my sexual quirks, either. Or even Bob’s. Particularly Bob’s, now that it was time to say goodbye to a pretty nice and competent guy whose luck had not been good, bringing him first the treacherous heart and then the fatal shotgun; a guy whose wife now stood beside me registering an emotion that was only partly grief. There was anger, too; not unnatural considering the way Bob had died.

She’d apparently been willing to go along with her husband’s frilly preferences, at least where her party clothes were concerned; but that was largely, I knew, because clothes didn’t mean much to Martha Devine. Unless a few years of matrimony had changed her drastically, she was a slacks-and-jeans girl at heart. She was wearing no hat and to hell with custom and tradition. The black dress was custom and tradition enough. She even had stockings on, and high heels, for God’s sake. She was decently and respectably attired; and you had to draw the line somewhere. She’d never gone in for lady-type hats—Stetsons and fishing caps don’t count—and she wasn’t going to playact her grief now by masquerading ridiculously in some fancy black millinery complete with mourning veil. She wasn’t Scarlett O’Hara, dammit, she was Martha Devine.

“It’s . . . rather a private matter,” Mac had told me in his Washington office, with a hint of hesitation that was unusual for him. He wasn’t normally a hesitating man. “Well, it concerns us professionally, too, of course; the violent, unexplained death of any agent, even one who is retired, requires investigation, but . . . it’s impossible for me to leave Washington at the moment, and I think my daughter may need some help. At least, let us say, some support; and I don’t like to send a complete stranger. You remember my daughter, Martha, don’t you, Eric?”

Matthew Helm is the name I was born  with, or at least acquired shortly after birth; but Eric is how I’m known around that office and in a number of government files, maybe because it’s a Scandinavian name and I have Scandinavian ancestors. That’s just a guess. Exactly how he picks the code names has never become clear to me, even after working for him longer than I care to remember. (Bob Devine was Amos in the files, don’t ask me why.)

Mac seemed to be looking at me a little harder than necessary; and his question was strictly rhetorical. He knew perfectly well that I remembered his daughter, Martha. His expression wasn’t clearly visible to me at the moment because of the bright window he always liked to have behind him; but I didn’t need to see him clearly. I knew what he looked like; a lean, gray-haired man with heavy black eyebrows, in a neat gray suit and conservative tie. He looked like a banker, perhaps, or an investment broker, or a highly placed business executive; and the last was close. (He’s an executive all right, and a good one, but his business isn’t making money or providing goods or services. At least the service he supplies—we supply—is not generally offered on the open market.)

His surname isn’t Mac-anything; the Mac is derived from his middle name. His real name is Arthur McGillivray Borden, but I’m not really supposed to know that, nobody is, and knowing it I’m supposed to forget it. But he was making forgetting difficult today, reminding me that he had a daughter whom I’d once known—known rather well, if only briefly—as Martha Borden. As I say, he was looking at me a little too hard, as if to let me know that he was quite aware that I’d slept with the girl, his little girl; but she hadn’t been so damn little even back then, and what the hell had he expected when he sent us on a dangerous cross-country expedition together in the service of our country? At least my goals had been simple and professional and maybe even kind of patriotic; hers as it turned out had been slightly more complex and confusing, all mixed up with youthful crusading idealism. But that had all happened several years ago. Now she was the wife, or widow, of Bob Devine.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I remember your daughter, Martha.”

“As I say, it’s my private affair to a degree, a family affair, and I’ll understand if you prefer not to—”

“Support?” I said. He was just going through the polite motions of giving me an out we both knew I wouldn’t take. I went on, “Do you mean protection, sir? Is there any indication that the guy who got Bob may be gunning for his wife?”

Mac shook his head. “No. They were together at the time, leaving a restaurant side by side. If the assassin had wanted Martha, too, all he’d have had to do was shoot twice. And perhaps support isn’t exactly the right word. In fact, come to think of it, it’s exactly the wrong word. The word I should have used was restraint.”

I grimaced. “I’m slow today, sir. You’ll have to spell it out for me.”

He said, “My daughter is normally, as you may recall, a very gentle and humanitarian person with strongly nonviolent principles. One might say she even makes a career of it, probably as a protest against me, if I may indulge in some amateur psychology. Most children, it seems, are in rebellion against their parents these days, and everything their parents stand for.”

“Not only against you, sir,” I said. “She didn’t like any of us very much. In fact she thought we were all pretty horrid people; and, if anything, I was the horridest of the lot. She had no hesitation whatever in saying so. I’ve never figured out how she came to marry one of us in the end— not that Bob wasn’t a hell of a nice guy. Well, for somebody in this line of work.”

Mac gave me a sharp, questioning look with some impatience in it; we were wandering away from the real subject he wanted to discuss. But he answered carefully, “Amos was a sick man when they met, sick and hopeless, the way a strong man can become who has never before experienced a real illness—”

I said, startled, “Hell, Bob had put in as much hospital time as any of us.”

“For damage incurred in the line of duty.” Mac made a sharp gesture. “Irrelevant, Eric. Certainly, Amos was prepared to accept injury from without; that’s a risk any agent must face. He could have coped with the crippling result of a bullet or knife wound, or even deliberate torture. What he could not endure was the knowledge that this disabling blow had come from within; that his own body had weakly betrayed him. . . . Martha gave him something to live for, to fight for. I suspect that, on her side, there were other considerations as well, that you should understand better than I.”

He gave me that meaningful look once more. I had an uneasy feeling that he was under the impression that his daughter and I had once achieved, if only fleetingly, a great passionate understanding.. .. Actually, the girl had used a bed only to gain my confidence, that old Mata Hari routine, never mind her complicated, idealistic motives. When it was all over, she’d made it perfectly clear that no matter how much innocent, or guilty, fun we’d had together, no matter what clever, sexy games we’d played in pursuit of our different goals, her basic opinion of me hadn’t changed a bit. As far as she was concerned, I still belonged way out in Transylvania, somewhere on the bloody far side of Count Dracula.

But that wasn’t anything I cared to explain to her sole surviving parent, who happened to be the man I worked for. After a good many years together we understood each other pretty well, but not that well.

It was better to get away from this phase of the subject altogether, and I said, “Anyway, she did cherish some fairly sentimental notions, I agree. Up to a point.”

“Precisely,” Mac said. “Up to a point. But as we both recall, regardless of her peaceful principles, she once took rather drastic action in order to save her own life, and yours.”

We seemed to have discarded, somewhere, the notion that I might have casually erased his daughter, Martha, from my memory. As a matter of fact, I remembered very clearly the drastic action to which he referred. After all the deceit and trickery, when it had come down to a simple matter of survival, she’d fired a flare gun, the only weapon available to her, into the face of a man who was about to shoot me very dead, first, and then turn his gun on her. The results had been spectacular, ugly, and effective.

“Yes, I still owe her one for that,” I said. “Of course, it made her very sick to her stomach and she carried a load of guilt around for days, maybe for years. I wouldn’t know about that. I haven’t compared notes with her lately. In fact, I haven’t heard from her at all since I said goodbye to her down there in Florida, shortly afterwards. Except for the wedding announcement she sent me; and maybe that was Bob’s gesture toward an old comrade in arms.”

“Nevertheless,” Mac said, “guilt or no guilt, she might be capable of . . .” He stopped, and went on, “What I am trying to say, Eric, is that gentle theoretical principles are all very well; but as we have seen, they don’t often survive a practical, life-and-death situation. The question is: would they survive seeing a spouse practically cut in two by a shotgun blast?” He cleared his throat. “To put it differently: my daughter has demonstrated that she is capable of acting violently to save her own life, not to mention yours. Could she also do so to avenge her husband’s death? As it happens, the answer is of considerable importance at the moment.”

“I see.” I frowned. “You think she may go after the guy responsible?”

“Something like that. It’s a possibility we have to keep in mind. Of course, she has no facilities for locating the man who actually pulled the trigger, or even of determining his identity. The police are working on that. However, it is not as if he had committed a serious offense like smoking marijuana or allowing his dog to defecate on the pavement, so I am not too hopeful of their success.” He said this without expression. I wondered how, two thousand miles away, he had come to the same conclusion about the forces of law and order involved that I had reached living there for years; but maybe he was simply disillusioned about modem law enforcement in general. He went on, “But I rather doubt that my daughter’s anger—if I’m judging her correctly—is directed at the man who wielded the shotgun. She’s an intelligent girl and, for one thing, she must know that she has neither the experience nor the organization necessary to track him down. For another, she probably realizes that hating a man like that is as senseless as hating the brand of firearm he employed. At least, it seems fairly certain from what we know that the murderer, like his weapon, was merely a tool.”