The Revengers (3 page)

“Maybe not,” I said. “But before I answer the question, there’s something I’d like to know. Why the hell did you marry him in the first place?”

Her eyes wavered. “Well, he was sick—”

“Cut it out, Martha,” I said. “Your Florence Nightingale complex isn’t that strong. And even if it were, you could have found a worthy invalid to marry who hadn’t spent all those years working for your daddy in an organization whose purposes and methods you detest.”

She licked her lips. “Well, it was your fault, really. On that crazy trip we took. You turned everything upside down for me. Everything I believed in. And after you were gone I discovered a dreadful thing. All my past was filmed in dull black and white, except that part of it we’d just been through. That was recorded on my memory tapes in living, vibrant color, as they say. And it stayed that way. Am I making sense?”

I grinned. “Hell, it’s the only part of your lousy little life you’d spent alive. Hunting and being hunted. Loving and being loved, if I may dignify our tricky relationship with such an important little word. What did you expect? All the rest of your girlish existence, like everybody else, you’d spent trying to be safe and secure and comfortable the way you’d been told since childhood your beautiful life was supposed to be. Jesus! A whole damn nation brought up to do nothing but be safe! No wonder it needs a few nasty unsafe guys like Bob and me to protect it. So you got your lovely comfortable safe security back and it didn’t feel so lovely any longer. Big deal.”

She made a face at me. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe when you’ve run with the wolves—hi, wolf—you kind of lose interest in cocker spaniels, bright and docile and well-trained though they may be. I kept meeting all these wonderful spaniel-men who bored me stiff. I kept thinking, if you’ll excuse it, how every damned one of them would have shit his pants full if they’d been where you and I once were with people shooting at us.” She shook her head. “And then Daddy took me to see Bob in the hospital and he was a mess, but he was not a spaniel, dammit. And he was a nice guy and he needed me and . . . and I knew what he’d done in the past but that was over. He was out of it now, so I didn’t have to reconcile his lousy work with my conscience. And I was lonely and I needed him, too, I really did. So I married him and it was rough for a while, while he was getting well, but then it was very good for a while. Very good. And then he disappointed me badly, hurt me badly; badly enough that I did something I’ll spend the rest of my life wishing to God I hadn’t. I spilled it all girlishly to somebody I trusted. I was a weepy little creep with too many drinks inside her, whining because her man had gone astray. My God, I knew the kind of guy I was marrying, didn’t I? Hell, you could tell just by looking at him that he could be relied on in every way but that way. Did I expect him to turn into a goddamned monk just because . . . Matt.”

“Yes?”

“Did they tell you how it was?”

“You mean the shooting? Not in detail.”

She drew a long, ragged breath. “We were hating each other, you understand,” she said. “Now we both had reasons: his roving eye and my blabbing tongue. So we went out to dinner hating each other but trying to be civilized, trying to retrieve something very important to both of us that had gotten lost; but cold, cold, cold. No real give on either side. And we came out of that restaurant without touching each other—you know the place on the Trail with the parking lot in back—and, as we headed for the car, there was a sound in the alley. I saw Bob start to throw himself down and aside. He could have made it, I think, he was very quick; he could have been safe on the ground behind a parked car. But he remembered me, the wife he hated, the wife who’d tattled about things that were none of her damn business, still standing there dumb and paralyzed. I guess I was thinking of my nice slacks and my pretty blouse and how dirty the ground was and how silly I’d look if. . . . He checked himself and took time to give me a great big sideways push that sent me sprawling. And the shotgun fired.” She cleared her throat. “When a guy does that for you, thinks of you first at a time like that, you kind of forget whom he slept with that he shouldn’t have.” She cleared her throat again. “Your turn.”

After a moment I said, “I’m here to help you if I can, of course. But I’m also here to see that you don’t take any embarrassing action.”

“Action?” She glanced at me and laughed, but her eyes were not quite candid. “You mean, like revenge? But how in the world could I? . . . I mean, even if I wanted to, even if I were capable of . . . I only caught a brief glimpse of the man in the alley. I wouldn’t have the slightest idea of how to go about finding him and I wouldn’t recognize him if I saw him. He was just something moving in the dark.”

I said, “We weren’t thinking of the man.”

She shook her head quickly. “Really, Matt, how melodramatic can you get? You know me. You know how I feel about. . . about guns and violence. Even now after what’s happened. You mean, little nonviolent Martha taking the law into her own hands and making some kind of a stupid vendetta? How could you, or Daddy, think I could possibly . . .” Her voice trailed off. I didn’t say anything. I waited. At last she licked her lips. When she spoke her voice was almost inaudible. “All right. I’m not fooling anybody, am I? But it’s necessary, Matt. You must see that it’s necessary. Nobody can be allowed to do what she did to us. To me. Nobody. Oh, publishing it, if she’d found it all out somewhere else, all right. She was supposed to be my friend, but I guess she has a job to do, so all right. But coming here and accepting our hospitality and taking what I told her in confidence when I was all broken up like that, using it like that. . . .”

There was a little silence. A car went by outside. Daylight was fading from the picture window.

“Have you got a copy handy?” I asked. “I’ve got one in my bag but I haven’t had a chance to do more than glance through it.”

“It’s right here. I wouldn’t be without it. I’ll treasure it the rest of my life. Maybe it will teach me to keep my damned mouth shut.” Her voice was grim. She opened the little black purse she’d put on the cocktail table and took out some stapled-together and folded-up magazine pages and held them out. “Here. I don’t have to read it again, actually. I know it by heart.”

I took the pages she held out and unfolded them. There was the standard dramatic closeup picture of a giant hand holding a giant gun aimed directly at the reader, supposedly threatening; but those magazine people don’t ever know anything about guns. They don’t realize that a Colt .45 automatic isn’t really much of a threat until you cock it. The hammer was down. And the old .45 is too bulky and clumsy and noisy for our purposes, anyway. But the page had a lot of impact if you didn’t look at it too closely or think about it too hard.

 by Eleanor Brand

I have two culinary specialties. I’m a good guy to have around at breakfast time; I’m handy with bacon and eggs. (On the other hand, I don’t recommend my coffee to the connoisseur; I’m lazy and go the instant route. I’ve slurped down too many strange brown concoctions under conditions of considerable stress to make a religion of coffee.) At the other end of the day, if you’ve got some leftover steak or roast around, and a few boiled potatoes, and some onions, I can whip up an exotic dish my Scandinavian ancestors called
pytt-i-panna
. A very loose translation is put-it-in-the-pan. Put any damned thing in the pan. Hash to you.

I was in my shirtsleeves with my funeral necktie off, concentrating on the latter delicacy, when Martha entered the kitchen after a half-hour absence. It had hit her suddenly while we were discussing the Eleanor Brand article, triggered by nothing in particular: an uncontrollable case of the weeps. She hadn’t wanted any sympathy or comfort from me. She’d apologized tearfully for being so goddamned stupid and told me to have myself another drink while she retired to chastize this dumb blubbering female severely. Now her face was washed, her hair was combed and the slight misty pinkness of her eyes was almost imperceptible. She was minus her high heels and funeral dress, and plus a pair of sandals and a long, loose, striped blue-and-green garment with the irresistible sex appeal of an umbrella tent.

“You don’t have to do that!” she said quickly. “I’m perfectly capable—”

“Sure you are,” I said. “The question is, am I? Let’s see how it turns out.”

“It smells good . . . Matt.”

“Yes.”

She hesitated, and I saw that she was uncomfortable about something. “I hope ... I mean, what I’m trying to say . . . I didn’t mean to give you a wrong impression, if you know what I mean, dragging you inside like that. I was just putting on an act for her. I mean—”

I grinned. Her embarrassment made it quite obvious what she meant. “You mean you don’t really want to fuck tonight.”

She gave me an honest-to-God blush. “If we have to be so goddamned explicit, yes. I mean, no. There should be a little ... a little respect, shouldn’t there? A small period of ... of mourning. Anyway, I’m pretty damned tired and morbid.” She giggled abruptly. “You wouldn’t want me to break into tears in the middle of it, would you?”

I said, “Actually, I wasn’t planning on laying the widow-lady right on top of the just-filled grave. But since I'm to be deprived of sex, maybe I’d better have a little more booze to console me. I think there’s some left in the martini pitcher. And then you can set the table. No heavy conversation. We’ll analyze the situation some more after we eat.”

The hash turned out quite well, if I do say so myself. The secret is a cast-iron frying pan hot enough to turn everything brown and crusty instead of merely warming the mixed-up mess; some dexterous stirring and turning helps. Martha ate hungrily and I managed a second helping myself. The last food I’d had, if you want to strain the definition of the word, had been on TWA. Martha stopped me when I started to clear the table.

“No, leave the dishes alone, damn you. And I’ll do the coffee. Whose house is this, anyway? You go out into the living room and sit.”

I followed orders and started to reread the Brand article but I found it hard to concentrate. I was very much aware, in a sexless way—well, an almost sexless way—of the quiet, comfortable, undemanding house and the starry New Mexico sky outside and the pretty girl making busy noises in the kitchen. I’d had this once, even to some offspring asleep in the rear of the house. I wondered how the kids were doing and if Beth was still happy in Nevada with her rancher-husband, a pretty nice and competent guy. I don’t check on them very often. I don’t like to leave a trail that way. There are people around who’ll use almost anything against you.

But this is a very good specimen, Mr. Helm. A little young for you, perhaps, but bright and brave, from durable and intelligent heredity, on the one side you know about, at least. Attractive to look at and, the record shows, quite a pleasant companion in bed and elsewhere. An unfortunate compulsion to save the world, perhaps, but even that seems to be subdued nowadays. Maybe she’s outgrown it. Too bad in a way, the world certainly needs it, but more comfortable to have around. All in all, a quite acceptable candidate, already well tested under rigorous conditions. And it would be pleasant to have a place like this to come back to and somebody like this to come back to, for as long as you manage to make it back at all, which presumably won’t be forever.

But you tried it once, you gave it a good long try, and it didn’t work then, so why should it work now? And she’s a hell of a nice kid who ought to do better for herself than a sick gladiator retired from the bloody arena, or even a healthy one not yet retired. And there’s always the danger that somebody wanting to hurt you will take it out on anybody you allow to become too important to you. So you just leave her alone, hear? Anyway, he’s all right to work for, he’s very good to work for, but would you want him as a father-in-law, for God’s sake?

I watched her come in with the coffee tray, the loose striped garment swirling around her. She set the tray down on the cocktail table, poured a cup for me and one for herself, and gave me mine. Then she settled down in her sofa corner with her feet tucked under her. We’re all supposed to be perfectly equal these days, male and female, but girls’ arms still aren’t hinged quite right to throw a baseball properly, and their legs are still articulated in a manner that allows them to assume strange catlike positions that would have a man screaming in agony in a very few minutes. It makes one wonder what other built-in inequalities women’s lib has overlooked.

I said, “This Brand female must not be harmed, certainly not by us or by anybody who’s connected to us in any way. You can see why, can’t you? To have the publicity she’s giving us is bad enough, but we can probably live through that; we’ve done it before. But if there’s ever a suggestion that an American government agency or anybody associated with an American government agency—and you’re damned well associated, both by blood and by marriage—would take violent retaliatory action against a respected American lady journalist for something she’d published, then the people who believe as a matter of faith that all spook shops are evil and should be abolished would have a lever handed to them that would probably destroy us.”

“She killed my husband,” Martha said softly. “Worse, she got me to help her kill him.”

“Maybe,” I said. “We won’t know that for sure until we learn who the hit man was and who gave him his orders. If we ever do.”

“Come on, Matt! I hope you’re not trying to convince me that a man with Bob’s background got himself shot down by a casual maniac—right after the publication of an article describing his career and giving his home address almost to the street and number. How coincidental can you get?”