The Silencers (3 page)

That was it for the floor show. By then it was ten-fifteen and time to go.

Outside, we ran the gantlet of taxi drivers and shills and the
porteros
of the various joints we passed who did their best to collar us and haul us into their respective establishments. A tall, gaunt, evil-looking character with a knife-slash across his nose was playing safety man for the Club Chihuahua. We let him make the tackle. It took him less than fifteen seconds to get us seated at a table in a dark room with a bar at one end and a girl undressing on a lighted stage at the other.

The stage was actually a rectangular, slightly raised dance floor surrounded by tables on three sides. At the far end was a curtain, an orchestra, a mike and a master of ceremonies.

“All the way, Corinne!” the M.C. was shouting into the mike. He pronounced the name Coreen. “All the way!” The girl was quite young, quite dark and had a sultry, childish look. Doing a little dance step in time to the music, she dropped her long, confining red dress, constructed so as not to make this operation particularly difficult. Then she did a rudimentary dance with some veils floating from her waistband. Flicking them teasingly at the ringside customers, she disposed of these also. This left her barefoot—she’d already shed her red high-heeled shoes— and in a red satin brassiere and little red satin panties with the approximate coverage of a Bikini bathing suit.

“Jeez, look at that kid!” said LeBaron admiringly. “She can’t be a day over sixteen, but jeez!”

I said, “You must have had it tough, keeping an eye on this place.”

He glanced at me. “Don’t knock it just because you don’t dig it, man. So I like to look at girls. It’s a crime?” He looked past me. “Uh-oh. Here come the bags.”

The portero was ushering a couple of women out of the shadows to sit with us. Mine wasn’t too bad—a full-blown dark lady in a short, tight gun-metal gray dress with a little jacket—but LeBaron’s prize was swarthy and heavy, not to say fat, with a rough sweater and skirt on that made her look like a female wrestler.

“Hi, boys,” LeBaron’s girl said. “I am Elena. This is Dolores.”

LeBaron performed the introductions from our side. The women sat down, and we ordered drinks which were put on the table almost before we said the word.

“All the way!” the M.C. was shouting. “Take it off! All the way, Corinne!”

The girl was still dancing barefoot around the stage— if you could call it dancing. She was a well-built kid, I had to admit, and she seemed to be enjoying herself, which was nice.

My lady, Dolores, stroking the back of my neck affectionately, was watching the show. “She is
India
— Indian. You do not have to hurry with your drink, honee. I will not hurry with mine. You will see. This is a friendly place, not a robbery like some of those others.”

The dusky young girl on the stage unhooked her red brassiere, snatched it off and ducked behind the curtains, waving it and laughing.

“A child,” Dolores said scornfully. “She cannot dance; she cannot sing; all she can do is walk around and take off the clothes. When I was of that age—”

“Where are you from, Dolores?” I asked.

“Chihuahua City, but there is no money there. Here I can still make thirty-five cents a drink. It is a living...”

Busy making conversation, I’d missed the M.C. introducing the next performer. I’d been listening for the name, of course, but he threw me off momentarily by pronouncing it Leela in the Spanish way. Suddenly she was there, the curtains stirring behind her then becoming still.

After the solidly built young Indian girl who’d preceded her, she looked seven feet tall. She wore a yellow satin dress that left her shoulders bare but encased her smoothly from breasts to knees, flaring below to give her a little room to move. Her hair had been dyed black since I’d last seen her. It made her look harder and older than I remembered her.

“All the way, Lila!” the M.C. shouted. “Take it off! All the way!”

She saw us at once, even though our table was at the back of the floor, and almost broke step. I saw the quick apprehension in her eyes. She might not recognize LeBaron, if he’d been careful, but she’d seen me before, and she’d know I wasn’t here with help just to take in her act.

I saw her recognize me, and I saw her remember the time I’d made her remove her clothes in a different place, for a different purpose, embarrassing her terribly. A funny little rueful look came to her face at the memory; she might have been regretting a lost innocence. Then she was at the corner, making her turn gracefully along the edge of the floor, using that trained walk I’d noticed— the walk of a high-fashion model, just a little exaggerated and done in time to the music. It was funny to see it in a dive like this.

“Jeez,” LeBaron said loudly, “that’s a lot of mouse, man. There’s six feet of her, if there’s an inch.” His elbow nudged me. “Identification okay?” he whispered.

“Okay.”

“I wasn’t quite sure,” he whispered, “from the pix. She was the right height and all that, in the right place, but I wasn’t, you know, positive with that hair, and I wasn’t supposed to risk trying for fingerprints or anything. Washington said you’d confirm. We don’t want to get the wrong one. Jeez, that would be something, wouldn’t it? Hauling a kicking, spitting Mex dancer across the international border!” He laughed at the thought then and stopped. “Okay, so all we have to do is wrap her up and take her home. The loving husband claiming his errant wife; get ready to make with the dialogue. She’ll come out and mingle with the customers as soon as she’s finished her act—that is, unless she panics and beats it.”

“Do we have any orders in that case?”

“Jesus will try to pick her up outside and see where she comes to rest.” He nudged again. “Behind you, when you get the chance. Company... What is it, Elena?”

The fat woman jerked her head towards the tall slender girl on the stage. “Americano,” she said scornfully. “No
tetas.
American women have no tetas.”

“Tetas?” I said, puzzled. Mr. Helm from California wouldn’t speak much Spanish. “What’s that?”

Fat Elena jerked up her sweater and showed me what it was. LeBaron laughed heartily.

“Tetas,” he said. “You know, like tits. Cover them up, baby...”

He touched me again with his elbow to remind me, and after a moment I looked around casually. There were tall Mr. Texas with his high-heeled boots and his pretty companion with her mutation minks and haystack hairdo. It seems like a hell of a place to bring your girl friend, was my first thought. But what could you expect from a guy who’d take a girl out to dinner dressed for a rodeo?

The woman was watching the stage with stiff fascination. I looked that way again. Sarah, Lila—or was it Mary Jane?—had made her circuit once. Coming back towards us, along the edge of the floor, with an undulating, rhythmic walk, she looked suddenly very young despite her height and the dyed hair and the sexy satin dress—tall and young and kind of scared—but she did not falter. She swung a hip towards a table full of Mexicans and slipped past smoothly, laughing, before they could touch her. She reached out and rumpled the hair of an American tourist, retrieving her hand gracefully before he could seize it.

“All the way, Lila!” somebody shouted from the back of the room.

She smiled. The bloodhounds might be on her trail, but she was going to do her stuff regardless. The kid had guts. Well, I knew that. She’d tried to jump me, the time we’d got our identities confused in San Antonio. I’d been holding two guns at the time, like Wild Bill Hickok, but she’d jumped me anyway.

“All the way!” the M.C. yelled, and the loud-speakers threw his voice at us from the dark recesses of the room. “All the way, baybee!”

She made her corner and passed across the front of the stage, swinging away from us. Her back turned toward us, she reached up and did something feminine and provocative with her hair, teasing, before she reached for the zipper. As the yellow dress opened from top to bottom, baring her back, a knife, coming from nowhere, buried itself to the hilt just below her left shoulder blade.

I made no apologies for letting it happen. My job wasn’t to protect her life, it was to get her out of an awkward situation alive or dead. I’d made sure that my instructions were quite clear on that point. If I’d been sent to preserve her from bodily harm, I’d have run the whole thing differently, and Mac would undoubtedly have worded his orders differently.

I heard two quick warning whistles, barely audible, from LeBaron, meaning watch at your right (three means on your left and one means behind you), but I’d been in this business longer than he, and I’d already taken care of Dolores. Maybe she was just a nice friendly girl from Chihuahua City, but she’d been planted on us by the management and I wasn’t taking any chances. She folded when I clipped her, and I laid her head gently on the table, tucked a five-dollar bill into the front of her dress by way of apology and looked around.

It was a nice hellish scene by this time. The long, dark room was in a turmoil as everybody tried to make it out the door before the police arrived. There were curses in Spanish, English and Texan. Meanwhile, on the brightly lighted stage at the other end, forgotten, the tall girl had gone to her knees in agony, feeling in back for the thing that hurt her. She couldn’t quite reach it, and she fell forward onto her yellow-satin stripper’s dress, spread out as if to receive her.

LeBaron had muffed it. Fat Elena knew judo, too, apparently, and she was giving him a hard time. I couldn’t be bothered with them. I started for the stage, and somebody running past knocked me off balance. I caught a whiff of expensive perfume and felt soft fur brush against me.

“Janie!” a woman’s voice gasped. “Oh, Janie...!”

I picked myself out of the chairs and tables, and made it up to the stage. The lady of the minks was ahead of me, but the M.C. was ahead of her, crouching over the fallen girl. She tried to pull him away so she could get in there, and he drove an elbow back and knocked her down. It was my turn, and I got him to his feet with a heave. He didn’t weight much, just a little white-faced, black-mustached runt in a loose-fitting dinner jacket.

He spun to face me, snarling, and reached under his shiny lapel. I did something flashy with my hands, and as he prepared to duck or parry the blow, I kicked him hard in the groin. He doubled up and fell down, moaning. I heard the one-whistle signal for danger behind and dropped on top of him. Something went over me. I rolled aside to see the tall, scarred portero raising a blackjack for another blow, but LeBaron was in back of him now. LeBaron dropped him with a chop to the neck.

I glanced at mine while LeBaron made sure of his. Mine was nothing to worry about. They weren’t going to straighten him out in less than half an hour with anything less than a block and tackle. LeBaron’s was his business and I left it to him. I heard the thud of a kick as LeBaron made sure we weren’t bothered for a reasonable length of time. I was already turning back to the girl on the floor.

The pretty lady of the furs was kneeling beside her. When I saw the two faces close together and the similarity of the bone structure, I knew, of course, what had caught my eye in the nightclub down the street. The girl opened her eyes.

“Gail!” she breathed.

The kneeling woman touched her cheek with a gloved hand, hesitantly, the way you touch the dying. “Don’t talk, dear. I’m sorry for everything, Janie. We’ll get you home where you belong...”

The girl shook her head, almost imperceptibly. She licked her lips and spoke with difficulty: “Under my hair, in back... Here. Take it.” Summoning all her strength, she reached for something at the nape of her neck, pulled it loose and passed it over. Her eyes looked up and found me. I thought I saw a sort of challenge through the film of pain. “Gail,” she breathed, “bend closer, listen, it’s important, the whole world... the whole world.”

Then she was whispering inaudibly, as far as I was concerned, in the older girl’s ear. A moment later she was dead. Gail looked up at me quickly, shocked and unbelieving.

“She’s dead!”

“Yes.”

“But she’s my sister. My little sister! When I heard she was working in this awful place, I came all the way from—”

“Sure,” I said. “Come on.”

“We can’t leave her like this!”

“She’ll be taken care of. Come on.”

I glanced at LeBaron, standing guard. He jerked his head towards the rear. He was mopping his cheek with a bloodstained handkerchief. The portero hadn’t touched him, but Elena had got in at least one good lick with her fingernails. I looked around. The place was still bedlam, but our particular part of it wasn’t popular. This was Juarez, where you didn’t associate with dead bodies if you could possibly help it—you went elsewhere fast. LeBaron put his handkerchief away and looked down.

“What about it?” he asked. “The man in Washington said get her out.”

I’d had a decision to make, but I’d already made it. It was a neat disciplinary point—there are certainly times when orders should be followed to the letter—but there are also times when a little judgment is advisable. I didn’t think Mac really had any use for a dead girl, particularly when there was a live one handy.

“She’s out,” I said. “Whatever she had, she just passed it. Let’s go... Come on, Gail.”

Sarah’s sister—or Lila’s or Mary Jane’s—was still kneeling there, numb and dazed. “But Sam, the man I was with—”

“The hell with Sam,” I said. “Have you ever seen the inside of a Mexican jail, honey?”

Even in that moment, in that place, she didn’t like being called honey. I was presuming on too short an acquaintance. I could see that we could spend all night there getting introduced properly, so I picked up her little white purse from the floor where she’d dropped it. I shoved it into my pocket and gestured to LeBaron. He got one arm and I got the other, and we set Gail on her pretty little blue high-heeled shoes and marched her towards the curtains at the rear of the stage.

“Left and out,” LeBaron said. “Jesus had better have the cab waiting, damn his black Yaqui soul.” After a moment, he said, “The portero threw the knife. I should have kicked him harder. I’m afraid he’ll live.”