The Revengers (46 page)

“I’d call it borderline, myself,” he said. “But the judgment of the agent on the spot governs, as long as that judgment seems to be reliable. A successful operation is generally considered evidence of reliability, so we’ll leave it at that.”

It was a gentle, if you want to call it that, reminder that berserk retaliation schemes and personal vendettas were frowned upon.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“And we have Miss Brand under light surveillance, for safety’s sake. Her safety. The Bellton Hotel, New York. No hostile attentions of any kind reported.” Mac studied me for a moment and went on carefully, “After the experiences you shared, one would think she would keep in touch with you.”

He didn’t often display curiosity, but I could see that he wondered if perhaps I’d made a too-heavy pass at the girl when she was under my protection out there at sea, or just repelled her by too-violent efforts on her behalf. I couldn’t help him out. I was wondering myself.

I said, “Yes, one would certainly think so, wouldn’t one?”

He smiled almost imperceptibly and said, “Well, if you feel competent to wrap it up, Eric, I think it’s about time.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

The Lorca winter residence in Miami—officially, of course, he lived much farther north—was the same kind of instant waterfront I’d seen down in the Keys: a dredged, well-bulkheaded canal with boats tied up conveniently at the bottoms of green manicured lawns. The house was not as big as I’d expected, but it had a great deal of glass that would, I thought, create problems during a hurricane. But then, he wouldn’t be in residence here during the hot hurricane season. I told the taxi to wait and I told the man who opened the door—who acted like a movie butler but looked as if he could use a knife if he had to—that the Senator was expecting me.

He led me through an elaborate living room with a glass wall into what was apparently the Master’s Study. There were guns and heads on the walls. I don’t have a great deal of faith in anyone who makes a big point of not having guns around and not killing anything—with a can of Raid in the kitchen and raw steer meat in the freezer—but I have even less faith in anyone who fakes the sporting bit and buys the stuff at auction. Lorca was sitting at the big desk and pretending to be working hard at something. He kept right at it. The butler-type indicated a chair and left me to observe the great man at his labors.

I had to hand it to him. He’d accomplished a lot in the way of self-improvement since I’d last seen him down in Mexico, when he’d impressed me as merely a well-dressed meaty thug with a few more brains than most. His long hospital ordeal had fined him down; he looked lean and hard and almost handsome. I would use the word distinguished if I’d ever figured out exactly what it meant. There was a kind of intensity about him that he hadn’t had before. And, of course, there was the scar and the dramatic streak of white in the black hair. He was wearing the pants of a summer suit and a white dress shirt without a tie, sleeves rolled up loosely. The jacket and tie were draped over the arm of the naugahyde sofa against the wall— apparently the butler-type’s duties did not extend to hanging things up neatly. I noticed that Lorca did everything very much right-handed, using the left only to hold things down clumsily so the right could operate on them.

“Long time,” he said at last, looking up. “How many years, Helm?”

But I wasn’t there to indulge in happy reminiscences. I rose and passed his daughter’s confession across the desk and went back to my chair to let him read it. Finished, he shoved it back toward me irritably.

“You’re bluffing,” he said. “You won’t use that. The speedboat thing, how are you really going to prove it was done on my instructions, and not just because a crazy girl thought it might please her daddy? And she made an anonymous phone call and sent an anonymous letter and fed some information to a reporter, big deal. In the big thing, her own thing, the ship thing, maybe you can trace some of the money she used to me, but you’ve still got to prove I knew what it was being used for. And you can’t afford to open that can of worms, can you, considering that the official explanation. . . .” He stopped. After a moment he went on as if nothing had happened. “The official terrorist explanation for that has already gotten a lot of publicity. You can’t afford. . . .” He stopped again, and waited, and went on, “You can’t afford to change it now.”

“That’s official,” I said. “I’m here unofficially. Seppi Velo has read that. He’s consulting some people you know better than I. We should be getting their reaction pretty soon. You have two things to worry about. One, that they won’t like what you’ve done in the past. Two, that they won’t like what we’ll do in the future. Because they know that with that much provocation we’ll keep after you until we get you, Lorca, and they can’t be sure just how many people we’ll manage to involve before we bring you down as a matter of self-preservation.” I shook my head. “I won’t venture to guess which way they’ll jump. But in the meantime, let me offer my deepest sympathy.”

He frowned. “For my daughter? For Serena? You think I give a damn about the girl after she did
that
to me?” His left hand made an awkward gesture toward the incriminating confession on the desk.

“And what did you do to her?” I asked.

His eyes stared at me across the desk. “Never mind my. . . .” Pause. “Never mind my daughter. Sympathy for what?”

“It’s too damn bad,” I said. “It was a brave effort, Senator, and although I have reason not to like you, I certainly admire the way you fought your way back after what happened to you, but. . . ."

His eyes were narrow. “What the hell are you trying to say?”

I rose again, picked up the confession, and dropped another piece of paper on the desk. “Of course, you’d try to keep it secret as long as possible, I understand that. Progressive deterioration is not a nice thought, is it? Of course, it’s all described in the proper medical terms there, but that’s what it amounts to. You must have known it would have to come out sooner or later.”

He looked down for a moment, reading, and lifted his head abruptly and glared at me. “That’s a god . . . a goddam lie! A lousy medical fake! There’s nothing wrong with. . . ."

The telephone rang. He swept it toward him with his clumsy left arm, and picked it up with his right hand.

“Who? Yes, of course I’ll talk to. . . . Yes, this is. . . . What?” He glanced at me sharply as he listened. Seppi Velo’s timing had been very good; but it was not Seppi’s old-man voice rattling the earpiece of the phone. I saw sudden perspiration appear on Lorca’s forehead. “But it’s all f-finished. . . .” He beat on the desk with his good hand in anger at the disability that prevented him from expressing himself fluently. “It’s all finished and forgotten,” he protested, with a glance at me that showed it was far from finished and forgotten. “It was something I had to do but it’s done, all over. Just because some busybody government snoops. . . . Just because old Seppi’s hated me for years. . . . You can’t throw away everything we’ve. . . He was silent, listening. He licked his lips. He spoke very quietly when he spoke again, “Yes, I understand. Yes, I know what’s expected. No, if that’s the decision, of course, I.... No. Yes. Yes, I understand what must be done. I understand very well. Yes.”

He put the phone down gently with his right hand and swept the set aside with the left arm and sat there for a moment looking straight ahead.

“You bastard!” he whispered. “There’s not a goddamned thing wrong with my health! If it hadn’t been for that, for the goddamned suspicions you’d planted, they wouldn’t have let the other stuff bother them.”

I took out the long-barreled Colt Woodsman I’d brought along, and laid it gently on the desk. “A present from a lady, Lorca,” I said. “She used it very effectively, so I know it’ll do a good job for you. And considering that medical report, which I assure you will stand up as well as it has to, everybody’ll understand. You won’t even have to write a note. Goodbye, Senator.”

There was a very cold place in the middle of my back as I walked out of the room; but I didn’t think he could jack the single .22 Long Rifle Hollowpoint cartridge, that was down in the clip, up into the chamber fast enough. It’s a two-handed job, and he didn’t quite have two hands to work with. But he would make it eventually, I was sure, or find another gun fully loaded. He would not dispute the verdict that had been handed down, the sentence that had been imposed, they hardly ever do. They know there’s no appeal, simply a choice between hard and easy, and mostly they prefer it easy.

The small muffled crack that I heard as the taxi drove away let me know that he had managed to use the .22, Harriet Robinson’s gun. I told myself that he’d had it coming many times over. I told myself that alive he’d been a serious threat to the well-being of the nation I served. I told myself it was a good job discreetly performed, according to instructions. I told myself that if I kept saying that long enough maybe eventually I’d start feeling good about it. . . .

The Bellton Hotel was small and inconspicuous outside, some distance away from the main New York action; and inside it was a quiet and pleasant place. The gray-haired woman at the desk said that Miss Brand was indeed in her room, which I knew. After using the house telephone, she informed me that Miss Brand would see me, which I hadn’t known, not for sure, not after the strange way she’d disappeared without explanations or farewells. Room 512. I rode up in the tiny elevator and the door was ajar when I got there. I knocked anyway. The voice I remembered very well, although it was not as distinctive as some I’d heard recently, told me to come in.

She was standing by the dresser lighting a cigarette. She was not, of course, the bedraggled stringy-haired little castaway I’d last seen, barefoot, wearing only a tom blue sweater pinned at the shoulder, and grimy white slacks rolled to the knees. This was a respectable professional woman in a neat blue linen suit and a white silk shirt open at the throat. Her nylons were very smooth, and her blue pumps had very high heels. Her hair was combed very smooth, too, in the businesslike way I remembered. There was a bare hint of lipstick on her mouth. But her nose still showed little pinky signs of having peeled recently.

The funny thing was, I couldn’t really see her clearly. I recalled looking at a very small picture once and finding certain flaws in the face it represented. I remembered meeting a smallish girl in a hotel room and considering that her appearance was pretty good in some respects but not so good in others. But that critical faculty seemed to have deserted me. All I saw when I looked at her was Elly Brand; and there wasn’t any way I wanted her changed. She was fine the way she was.

“It’s considered polite to say goodbye when you go away,” I said, closing the door behind me.

“I waited around until they told me you were going to be all right,” she said. She glanced at the cane. “Are you . . . is it really all right?”

“It’s supposed to be, eventually,” I said. “You’re kind of erratic, aren’t you, Elly? Taking off to the Bahamas like that. Taking off to New York like that. The impulse girl.” I looked at her hard. “An odd thing about those impulses, doll. They always seem to hit you when Martha Devine shows up. A very strong positive correlation, as we statisticians say. I had plenty of time to put it through the mental computer, lying in that damn hospital bed. After running all the calculations and computation, I came to the conclusion that you didn’t really light out for Nassau like a spoiled little girl just because the big boys wouldn’t let you go on a nice raid with them.”

She said, “Why did you come here, Matt? The job is finished, isn’t it? I saw on TV that Senator George Winfield Lorca shot himself yesterday on account of bad health. So I should be in no more danger from him; and the daughter is dead, too. So aren’t you wasting your valuable time here?”

I said, “Do you get mad at every guy who gets an infected leg, or does the guy’s name have to be Helm?” She said, “I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at myself, because I’ve been doing some very strange things—that’s what I came up here for—and I don’t really know why I’m doing them. I mean, I’m the nasty, ruthless little girl who never lets sentiment or friendship stand in her professional way, aren’t I? So I’ve thrown away all my research on one story just because . . . because somebody asked me to in a nice way; and now I’ve made my editor withdraw another that was just about to go into the works, and without even being asked!”

I looked at her for a moment. “I thought you told me it was much too late to cancel—”

She said irritably, “Why the hell don’t you sit down? It makes me dizzy to watch you holding yourself up with that dumb stick.” After I’d limped to a chair, and she’d seated herself facing me, she placed an ashtray on the floor by her feet and blew smoke my way. “Naturally I’d tell you that. That was back when I was afraid of you, remember? I was afraid that if you thought I could do it, you’d try to force me to do it, somehow. But you didn’t.” She grimaced. “So in the end I did it myself, stupid me.”

“Why, Elly?”

She drew a long ragged breath. “Because the story was all wrong, dammit!” she snapped. “Because you weren’t at all the way I’d written you. How could I let it be published when I knew it had no resemblance to . . . to the man who deliberately let himself be captured in order to look after me? Who listened patiently to my endless sad stories about my dreadful sad experiences, and cleaned up my messes, and never once took advantage of. . . .Not to mention saving my life. A real Gold Star Agent, Angel Division!” She glared at me. “You must be very proud of yourself, Matt. It was really a lovely job of gaining the lady’s confidence and respect and then having the sense to let her draw her own conclusions and make her own decisions, no coercion or persuasion at all. A real fine con job. Well, it worked. The ship story won’t be written. The other series is being withdrawn, costing me a lot of money and some professional standing. I don’t know why the hell I’m doing it, but I’m doing it. Maybe you can thank Bob Devine and the way I felt when I thought I’d got him killed because of my single-minded devotion to my profession. Maybe . . . maybe I just don’t want to risk the way I’d feel if I’d heard you’d been killed, knowing that I’d spend the rest of my life wondering if it had happened because of something I’d written about you.” She rammed the cigarette angrily into the ashtray. “But why are you wasting your time here? I tell you, it’s all taken care of. The personal touch is no longer needed, Mr. Helm; and don’t you have . . . have engagements elsewhere?”