The Revengers (22 page)

She nodded, and started to ask a further question, but thought better of it. After a moment she said, “The Sacred Earth Protective Force, for God’s sake! A million-buck ransom or another ship goes boom! A hell of a funny way to protect the sacred earth, by blowing up ships and blasting oil all over her sacred oceans. I tell you it’s all wrong, Matt. I’m sure of it.”

“Which,” I said, “means that you’re not quite sure, doesn’t it?”

Then I was sorry I’d said it, because she stared at me oddly for a moment. I saw her face kind of crumple and her body kind of slump with the weariness she’d been trying to ignore. She looked around helplessly for a place to sit down. I pulled an upholstered chair closer for her. She sank down onto it and took a big gulp from the glass I’d given her—holding it in both hands—and shuddered. She spoke without looking up at me.

“You’re getting too smart about me, damn you,” she said softly. “Much too smart. Yes, I’m not quite sure. No, I’m not quite sure. Before . . . before it happened to me, I would have been. I was very bright and confident back then. I had it all figured out, always. But I was wrong that night, wasn’t I? I was quite certain I’d be safe there and I wasn’t. So what other mistakes have I been making in my cocky, cocksure way?”

I pulled another chair around and sat down facing her. “Well, I can think of two,” I said. She looked up sharply; and I went on, “Two coincidences that you seem to be accepting that just can’t be. I’m very sensitive to coincidences, Elly. In my racket you can’t afford to pass anything that even looks like a coincidence. Too many people have died that way.”

She drew a long breath, and reached down to slip off her shoes. She set them neatly side by side on the carpet and curled up comfortably in the big chair, giving a couple of quick, expert, feminine touches to her hair and clothes.

Suddenly she was the tidy, untiring lady journalist again, just relaxing—well, slightly—with a friend.

“What coincidences?” she asked. Her voice was a little stiff. “I wasn’t aware that I’d overlooked . . . oh, you mean Lorca being mixed up in this sea business, is that it?”

I nodded. “That’s number one. Let’s take a look at it once more. After doing an election piece on George Winfield Lorca, now Senator Lorca, you then washed your hands of him, you thought, and took on a totally different subject for your next article, well, series of articles. Us. Only it now seems very likely that the idea had been fed to you by a guy on Lorca’s payroll, right?”

She said, “To hell with where it came from; I told you I checked it out very carefully—”

“No criticism intended,” I said hastily. “But look what happens next. You finish up that job, us, and start on still another one, ships. And by God, there’s Senator Lorca in the middle of that one, too, if Hattie Robinson knew what she was talking about, and she usually did. I can’t believe that just happened, Elly. I won’t believe it, coincidence-shy as I am. There’s got to be a connection somewhere.”

Eleanor frowned. “You can’t think Lorca planted that idea on me, too! Getting me to investigate you, to make trouble for you, that figures, the way he feels about you; but it hardly seems likely that he’d set me to investigating himself. And then smother people when they start to talk to me, that doesn’t make sense! Anyway, I told you; I got the idea talking with your Captain Robinson.”

I said, “That was the first you’d heard of these sinking ships, when you interviewed Harriet the first time? It came as a great revelation to you? An inspiration from the journalistic muse, so to speak?”

Eleanor made a face at me. “You know it doesn’t work like that. I get lots of story ideas and I try to jot them all down, even though I know most of them will never get any further than my notebook. But every once in a while, one will kind of open up. It may have been lying around in my head and notebook for months. Then I’ll read something, or talk to somebody, like Harriet Robinson, and suddenly the subject will take some kind of workable shape, if you know what I mean. And I’ll wind up what I’m doing and tackle this new project. As I did.”

“So you had some notes on it already, before you visited Harriet?”

“Yes, of course. It was a possible article and one that would be fun to do, if I could sell the idea to somebody. When I realized how much she knew about boats and ships, I remembered this nautical problem I’d been kicking around. I pumped her about it after I’d finished asking her all about you. And by that time she was very happy to get away from all my snoopy questions about you and her and what mysterious things the two of you had been up to along the coast of Cuba, and tell me about ships instead. Of course, the next time I came around to confirm what she’d already told me, she wouldn’t give me the time of day.”

I frowned. “But you don’t really know where your story idea came from in the first place.”

She said, “My God, Matt, you’ve done a bit of professional writing yourself; you know how it goes. No I don’t know where it came from. Something I read in the papers, maybe; something somebody said—”

“Who?”

She started to speak angrily and checked herself. “All right,” she said after a moment. “All right. You may have something there. I do seem to remember . . . Serena.”

“Who?”

“Serena Lorca. The daughter. I was interviewing Lorca’s family: wife, Janine; daughter, Serena. The kid seemed to be hipped on the Bermuda Triangle, and wanted my opinion on whether the latest sinking—there had been only two at that time—could logically be connected with all the other outer space stuff. I said, hell, I didn’t believe any of it; but afterward, I got to thinking. . . ."

I said, “So it was this young girl, Serena Lorca, who got you to thinking about this project. Actually lined the whole thing up for you with camouflage story and everything.”

Eleanor shrugged. “Well, if you want to put it that way. But it doesn’t seem likely she did it on purpose, does it? And she’s really not that much of a kid. She’s a fairly husky young lady in her early twenties. I can’t really feel it’s terribly significant.” After a moment, she asked, “What’s the other coincidence?”

“That you just happened to get yourself kind of accidentally raped while doing an article on George Winfield Lorca. That, my dear young woman, is not within the realm of possibility.”

Eleanor said sharply, “I’m not your dear young woman, and it happened, didn’t it? I didn’t dream it, goddamn itl”

“I’m not saying it didn’t happen; I’m just saying it couldn’t have happened like that, accidentally and coincidentally.” I leaned forward. “Look, Elly, here’s a guy who had one pretty lady chopped up by a boat’s propellers for the sake of an old grudge. He sent a death message to another because she’d had the temerity to step out of line a bit. In between, he casually instigated, or had instigated, the shotgunning of a guy he didn’t know merely to embarrass some folks he did know and didn’t like. Just yesterday, he arranged for a young fellow who was talking too much to be terminated with a pillow. At least we have to go on the assumption that Lorca is behind all this; it’s the only safe assumption we can make. You don’t really think Jurgen Hinkampf was killed by one of the doctors at the hospital because he pinched the fanny of one of the nurses, do you?”

“No, but—”

I said harshly, “No, but you trustingly believe, it seems, that a sharp female journalist just happened to get herself clobbered, sexually and otherwise, by two wandering sadistic thugs with itchy pricks at just the time she was investigating this dangerous gent. Mama, tell me the one about grandma and the wolf!”    

Eleanor licked her lips. “But . . . but what would be the point, Matt? They’d been very cooperative, Lorca and his PR people; why would they suddenly send somebody to? . . . Anyway, those goons didn’t threaten me, or tell me to lay off or anything. No menacing speeches about how they’d get me even worse next time, like dead, if I didn’t drag my poor battered, tattered carcass home quietly and forget all about George Winfield Lorca. No warnings or ultimatums at all; just beat the dame into submission and . . . and strip her and screw her and run.”

“No words at all? Total silence throughout?”

She swallowed and said, “This isn’t fun for me, you know.”

“You’re not here for fun. And much as I enjoy your company, I’m not here for fun, either. We’ve both got jobs to do and we can’t do them blindfolded. What really happened? What was really said? Tell me about it. Play by play. Word for word.”

Her face was pale and stubborn. “But I did tell you about it. I poured it all out to you last night, like a hysterical little ninny—”

I shook my head. “Last night you told me about afterward. Tonight let’s hear about before. All I know is that it was terribly humiliating and did awful things to your dignity as a woman.”

She whispered, “Damn you, Matt, what are you doing to me?”

I said, “Damn you, Elly, you’ve overlooked something. Missed something. Forgotten something. Tucked something away that you can’t bear to look at. You’ve pretended to take this so-called casual rape for granted. Just a normal occupational hazard, you said; but was it? Come on, let’s have it without all the maidenly reticence. Hell, I helped haul one girl agent out of a Central American jungle after a whole revolutionary army had used her as a plaything for weeks; am I supposed to be impressed by your little one-night, two-man stand?”

“You bastard!” she breathed. “Oh, you lousy bastard!”

“Words,” I said insistently. “They talked, didn’t they? You’re the great investigative journalist, aren’t you, trained to recall conversations verbatim? So let’s investigate one Brand, Eleanor; or are you supposed to be sacred or something? Can you only dig up dirt on other people? Just your best friend who trusted you, a government department that’s doing its poor damned best according to its simple lights, and a young ship’s officer who was murdered in his bed for talking to you, but not you? Come on, Miss Front Page! There wasn’t just a lot of punching and fucking and heavy breathing. Let’s have the details, please. There were words. I want to hear those words.”

She drew a long breath as if preparing to scream abuse at me, but she let it out again soundlessly. She licked her lips. “ ‘Just be good to us, baby, and you won’t get hurt, much,’ ” she whispered tightly. “There are some words, goddamn you! How do they help?”

“And then?”

“Then I fought them the best way I could, breaking free and getting caught, getting knocked down, getting to my hands and knees half-dazed and catching a contemptuous kick in the rear that sent me sprawling again, rolling aside and getting up and trying to run, getting caught and hit and knocked down and casually kicked around some more, getting up. . . . I didn’t really hope to escape, I guess; I was just trying to delay it a little longer, to keep it from happening a little longer. And they weren’t really trying to smash me, break me, kill me; they were just playing with me, getting a big bang out of . . . of mussing me up and tormenting me before they. . . . But then I got my nails into the big one’s face and he got mad and took a real swing at me and I felt my teeth go like that—my mouth all numb, and a sickening jagged gap in front, and dreadful little bloody broken bits that I had to spit out so I wouldn’t choke on them. Details, Mr. Helm? Actually, I thought there was more damage than there really was. I had a horrible vision of ... of having them all knocked out if I kept on struggling; and spending the rest of my life like a little old toothless lady taking my dentures out at night and putting them in a glass of water. I couldn’t bear that. So I quit and just sat where I’d landed with blood running down my chin. ... I do hope this is all detailed enough for you, Mr. Helm!”

“You’re doing fine,” I said.

Her eyes hated me. “You really are a bastard, aren’t you?” She sucked in a deep uneven breath. “Then the big one hauled me to my feet and held me and the little one did some gloating. . . . Words? Okay, words. He said something like, now look at the proud little lady with her pretty face all messed up and her pretty clothes all dirty and her pretty stockings all tom just because she wouldn’t condescend to be nice to us peasants. Then he grabbed the neck of my sweater to rip it off but it wouldn’t rip, just the shoulder a bit. He got mad and got out a big knife that went click and tried to cut it, but it wouldn’t cut, not really, it was too soft and yielding and the knife wasn’t very sharp. He just made a crazy droopy mess of it, all holes and rags, a brand new cashmere sweater, oh, and it was pink before it got all stained and dirty, you did want the details, didn’t you? The big one said for him to stop horsing around and get on with it before somebody came. So the little one sawed through the waistband of my nice tailored beige skirt, well it had been tailored and nice before I got knocked down in it so many times—more details for you!—and he gave a big yank and tore it off and threw it away. He reached up under my sweater-rags and grabbed the front of my slip and jerked hard and hacked with the knife until he had that all off me, too. He started to toss it aside but stopped to admire the lacy stuff, all ripped and slashed as it was; there was enough light from the nearby street for him to see a little. He said. . . She stopped abruptly.

“What did he say, Elly?”

She hesitated. When she spoke, the bitter resentment in her voice had been replaced by an odd note of apology. “You’ve got to understand, Matt. I shut it all away afterward. I closed the door on it completely. I wouldn’t let myself think about it. This is the first time I . . . I’ve allowed it to come back. I couldn’t let myself think about it. It made me all sick inside, remembering.” Her anger returned. “It still does, damn you!”

“What did he say?”

“He said . . .he said I sure dressed pretty, even underneath, expensive like a princess; they must pay me plenty for being a lousy snooping muckraking little. . . ."

“Little what?”

She shook her head. “The big one told him to shut up and get on with the lousy job. That’s what he said, the lousy job. So the little one tossed my slip aside and—you wanted all the details—he made a funny, funny thing of, well, kind of operating on my panty hose with his knife, he really got a charge out of that, you can imagine. Then he laughed and laughed at the dumb way I looked with the ragged stocking-parts he’d left me sagging down my legs -after he’d sliced away the main . . . well, the panty part. I do hope you’re enjoying these details, Mr. Helm.” She swallowed hard. “But he didn’t put his knife away, although now I was . . . was stripped enough for all p-practical purposes. Exposed enough. He stared at me kind of funny and I knew he was thinking of other things he could cut with it, stick with it. Fun things. More fun than nylon and wool and polyester. He put the point against my naked stomach hard enough so a trickle of blood ran down but the big one behind me, still holding me for him, told him to quit it now. He said for him to put the goddamn slicer the hell away; he told him to remember that they weren’t supposed to spoil me too badly. I guess that’s where I got that word. I didn’t realize it before; I was trying so hard not to remember.”