The Revengers (12 page)

I said, “You haven’t come across this name at all in your investigations?”

Eleanor shook her head. “I know who he is, of course. As a matter of fact, I did a piece on him just before the last election.”

I thought irritably that everybody seemed to know who George Winfield Lorca was, of course; everybody but me. But I had no time to say it. The telephone rang. Eleanor Brand picked it up, listened, looked a bit surprised, and held it out to me. I took it and identified myself.

“Priority Red,” said a woman’s voice I recognized. I’d never met the woman who went with the voice; but she’d given me instructions before, here in Nassau. “Priority Red. Fred’s cab is waiting for you at the door. There’s a plane warming up on the field. All clearances have been waived. Priority Red. Execute.”

Fun and games. All these standby people must have been waiting eagerly for years for the chance to show how well they could execute a red priority mission, which means drop everything and don’t ask questions, just go. Now they felt like real secret agents.

All I felt was fear. After enough years in the business, you don’t ask yourself where you’re going on a hurry-up emergency deal like that, or why you’re going there, because you’ll be told soon enough, and the answer is never good.

Not the Keys, I thought, please not the Keys.

After the' breathless telephone summons, the actual operation had turned out to be fairly undramatic. In a movie, of course, they’d have had the latest needle-nosed jet fighter waiting for me on the strip, and they’d have suited and helmeted me on the run, practically, and strapped me in and clapped down the canopy or however they do it, and I’d have hit the wild blue yonder with afterburners screaming, or whatever the hell it is that makes all that racket. The catch is that I don’t know what buttons to push to make those things go; and being less than a couple of hundred miles from the U.S. I didn’t need a thousand-knot airplane to get me back there. What I got was some kind of an executive four-place Cessna with two nice old-fashioned propellers, a middle-aged pilot with a bushy moustache, and a cruising speed of about one-sixty, judging by my passenger’s-eye view of the dials.

Not the Keys, I thought. How about it, Up There? Miami or Fort Lauderdale or Saint Augustine, okay; but please not the Keys.

I didn’t think it out beyond that. I could have figured it out all right, why I didn’t want to go there, why I didn’t want to find myself being dragged back there hastily under a hot priority red indicating that something drastic had happened there, something that concerned me, but why crowd it? If I didn’t bring it out into the open and admit the possibility existed, maybe it would go away. I couldn’t read the compass clearly from where I sat, so I watched the sun instead—we had a nice clear day for flying. A little past noon would put the sun a little past south; and it steadied just forward of the port beam or whatever you call it in an airplane. Course west or a little south of west. So we were heading too far south for Augustine or Palm Beach or Lauderdale; but it could still be Miami, I told myself. I didn’t have the geography that clearly in mind.

I watched the green-green islands of the Bahamas pass below, and the blue-green water of the endless shallows of the Great Bahama Bank, and the blue-blue water of the deep Gulf Stream. Then land again, and a dome of pollution-haze well off to starboard that was Miami, and we were flying down along the Keys on a closing course. Well, I’ve never had much luck with prayer. I should either practice it harder or give it up altogether, I guess.

The moustached gent who was driving the plane had nothing to say and neither had I. He had his thoughts, no doubt, and I had mine. He brought us in to the Marathon strip from seaward in a sweeping curve and put us down very gently and expertly. Brent, our young man in Miami, was there with some guy from customs or immigration or both, who didn’t give a damn about me, he had the word on me, but he felt obliged to do his stuff with the pilot and plane. I told the pilot goodbye and thanks and we left them to it.

Brent hadn’t changed much since the last time he’d come out of his standby Miami existence, whatever it was, to give us a hand—the last time I knew about, that is. He was a few years older now, of course, we all were, but he was still a compact youthful-looking redhead with crisp curly hair and sideburns, who kept himself in good shape.

I’d gathered that his specialty was the underwater stuff with the mask and fins but he was good with boats, too. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He didn’t tell me anything and I didn’t ask. I knew approximately what I was here for now, I knew what it pretty well had to be, to necessitate my being brought here, only the details were lacking; and talking about it wouldn’t help it any. It was lousy and it was going to stay lousy, talk or no talk.

We got into Brent’s car—at least I assumed it was his, since it looked like private transportation—one of the sporty Datsuns designated by a number ending in Z. He drove us along the island and over to a house, mostly glass, on a man-made inlet on the ocean side, one of the concrete-lined canals that have taken over most of coastal Florida. You dig a ditch and use what you get out of it to fill in the sea marsh on either side, carefully ignoring the screams of the ecologists. Instant waterfront property. In the canal was a dock and at the dock was a boat that was more like it. The movies would have loved it, a long and rakish speedster with a small padded cockpit and an endless deck aft with big hatches hinting at monstrous power plants lurking underneath.

“Anybody’d think we were in a hurry,” Brent said. “They tell me it’ll do over sixty, which is moving for a boat. I’ll take their word for it.”

I didn’t offer to help with the docklines. He knew what he was doing and I didn’t, really. I can handle simple powerboats in an amateurish fashion, but I don’t know the stylish way of doing the nautical bit, so mostly I just leave it alone if I can manage without seeming pointedly unhelpful. I just parked myself in the cockpit, knowing enough to stand up and get a good grip on the bar they give you to hang onto. At speed, those things will break your back coming off a wave if they catch you sitting, and I didn’t have too much faith in Brent’s leisurely attitude. Horsepower is almost always addictive. But he took her out very gently, down the canal and out the channel between the mangrove islands beyond. Reaching open water he just put her up on plane and let her run easily, setting no records. I

got myself oriented. We were heading back up the Keys with the sun behind us, still well up in the sky; and it had already been one of the longer days of my life.

It wasn’t too long before Brent spun the wheel and we cut through some pretty shallow water past the end of a sandy key and there was the boat I’d been hoping not to see. It told me that my subconscious had been right all along, but that was no help at all, being right.

“Bonefish Harbor,” Brent said. “One of the better anchorages along this coast.”

Queenfisher
was anchored in the little bay, lying very still with the anchor rope showing no strain and the tail tuna tower casting broken reflections in the slightly rippled water. A man sat in the cockpit, fishing. At least he was holding a fishing rod and dangling something in the water. He reeled in his line and laid the rod aside and fended us off as we slid alongside. We climbed aboard the larger boat and left him to secure the smaller one.

“Where?” I asked. It was a silly question. A forty-footer isn’t all that big.

“Up forward,” Brent said. “Go on. I’ll wait out here.”

I entered the familiar deckhouse. It was spotless and tidy except for a sheet of paper on the table on which I’d served us breakfast yesterday morning, apparently a letter, held down by a small green box of cartridges—.22 Long Rifle Hollowpoint. Remington, if it matters. Winchester-Western uses yellow. Federal uses red. I didn’t stop to read the letter. It could wait.

She was in the double berth forward. She’d done it nicely, as nicely as such a thing can be done. She’d fixed her hair and colored her lips discreetly and even done something to her eyes, although even as a fashionable lady up north she’d never been one for a lot of eye makeup. She’d put on her pretty nightgown, the one I’d seen; and she’d gotten into the big bunk and done it from the far side, using a quick-expanding little hollowpoint bullet so there would be no chance of total penetration, an ugly exit wound and a big mess in her boat. Or maybe that was just the ammunition she’d happened to have handy, but I didn’t think so. She’d never been one to leave things to chance. At first glance she seemed to be just lying there peacefully asleep with the .22 Colt Woodsman on the pillow beside her. There was very little blood.

One of the longest days of my life and one of the worst; I should have sensed how terribly vulnerable she was and taken much greater precautions. But there were a few things to be done before I could stop and think—feel—just how bad it really was. I examined the gun as carefully as I could without disturbing it, and there was nothing wrong that I could see. She was right-handed, I remembered; and she had used her right hand here. And it was right for her, as right as such a thing can ever be. Nobody setting it up could possibly have gotten it so right: gown, makeup, hair, everything. There were no jarring discrepancies, there were no psychological impossibilities, there was nothing out of character here. It was her goddamned life. She would live it as long as it was worth living, and then she would put an end to it cleanly, and to hell with you and your moral or religious scruples, which she’d thank you to keep to yourself.

I went back up into the deckhouse and read the letter. It was very short. Actually it was a carbon copy of a letter— to the States Attorney of the State of Maryland, Annapolis, Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Be advised that the fugitive Mrs. Robin Rosten wanted for conspiracy to commit etc., etc., is presently residing in Marathon, Florida, under the name Harriet Robinson. Signed, Concerned Citizen. Across the top had been written blackly with a felt-tipped pen: ORIGINAL MAILED THIS DATE. And yesterday’s date.

I wondered how many times she had read it before making the decision, but that was stupid. She would have made that decision long ago. Probably she had made up her mind from the start that she would never submit to the indignity of being dragged in handcuffs back to her former home and friends for a lurid trial even if, particularly now after so many years, there might be some question about the outcome. Once in the hands of the law, she would have lost her freedom of choice; and it was a risk she could not take.

I don’t intend to go to prison, my dear, she had told me, I couldn’t endure that. She had visualized clearly the grimy humiliations and degradations to which she would be subjected there. She had known that, the privileged kind of person she had once been, the protected way she had been brought up—accustomed to receiving respect and consideration and courtesy from everyone—she could not possibly survive intact the treatment that would be visited upon her in such a place. The exile years had tempered her to some extent, but not, she knew, enough. Prison would either kill her—in which case why not do it decently now and get it over with?—or, worse, it would simply break her, finally and completely. One day she would wander out of there fully, at liberty again but uncaring, a gray shell of a woman, beaten and prideless; and that could not be allowed.

I went back down and stood by her for a while. She had, of course, been bom out of her time as the saying goes. She should have been up on the ramparts in velvet gown and wimple, or whatever they wore back then, calmly supervising the preparation of the boiling oil with which she would greet the attacking miscreants when the dumb gents in the iron pants failed to keep them off the castle walls. The fierce, undisciplined pride that had driven her to her ruinous rebellion against authority in this century would have done her no great harm back then; it was expected of people like her in those days. Some gesture was needed, and I touched her hair lightly—goodbye, Milady—and got the hell out of there.

“Tell me,” I said to Brent, in the cockpit.

Brent gestured to the other man. “This is Marco. He’ll tell you.”

Marco was dark-faced and black-haired, with a big nose. “I kept an eye on her as ordered. She had a visitor in the afternoon. Not a visitor, just Benny with a letter or something for her. Maybe that one in there.”

“Benny?”

Brent said, “Benjamin Crowe. Works around the marinas. Not too bright. I have the details.”

“Go on,” I said to Marco.

“After Benny had gone, about half an hour after, she took her boat out. I had my own boat ready with the boy aboard—he’s waiting around the point to pick me up now. Didn’t want too many boats cluttering up this anchorage, attracting attention. Anyway, she took this one out. No customers. Alone. Way out into the Stream, no land in sight. Stopped and watched a school of dolphins. Seemed to be just playing around out there with the boat. Run a little and drift, just sitting up there on the bridge, looking around. Came back in and anchored here about sunset. Had a drink in the cockpit, just the one that I could see, ate, worked on the boat. Engines, too. Looked like she wanted to get it all in good shape for something. Took a short swim in the dark, showered; calm night, I could hear it running across the water. Then sat in the cockpit, just sat there. All night, what was left of it. Sunrise, she watched the birds a little, they fly good here in the early morning. Went below. Half an hour. Small noise, like a stick breaking; but I know a .22 when I hear it. Went aboard, saw her, made my report. That’s it.” He looked at me for a moment and made a defeated gesture. “Sorry. Don’t know what I could have done to stop it.”

“There’s no blame,” I said. That wasn’t quite true, of course; but any blame there was, was mine.

“Nobody came near her,” he said. “I would have moved in, on that.”

“I know,” I said. “She had her mind made up. She was just saying goodbye to her friends out here on the water. To everything out here.”

Brent looked at me. “You’re satisfied?”