Death of a Citizen

CHAPTER 23

IN the morning, I woke up alone in the room. There was sunlight at the window. They'd cleaned up the place. It looked tidy and innocent, like a room in which nothing had ever happened-and when you came right down to it, not much had. There'd been a little scuffle, that was all. Suspense and surprise, deceit and disillusionment, in themselves don't mark up the furniture.

The other bed was empty and neatly made up. I remembered vaguely hearing its erstwhile occupant being carted off to the hospital for some repair work on his larynx and windpipe. This should have made me feel terrible,-of course-a bright and patriotic young fellow undergoing emergency surgery on my account. But as I've mentioned, we were never strong on esprit de corps. The dope should have had sense enough to keep his throat out of other people's hands; and if he'd had any training at all, he'd been taught how to break a strangle-hold, either with a smashing upward drive of both arms-hands locked together-or finger by finger. It wasn't my fault if he panicked and forgot his ABC's.

The whole affair seemed, in retrospect, like a remarkably stupid business; and my part in it had certainly been no less stupid-to put it very charitably- than anybody else's. Well, you can't be smart all the time, but I had to admit that some people seemed to maintain a slightly higher average than others.

There was a knock on the door, and Mac came in without waiting for my response, followed by another man, who closed the door and made certain it was locked before coming forward. He gave the impression of being a man who'd spent his life locking doors carefully before discussing matters of vast importance. Since Mac had said there was a mike in the room, and I had no reason to believe it had been removed, I wasn't too impressed by this concern for locks and doors.

The man was, I judged, a well-preserved fifty, with the rangy, powerful build of a college football star who'd put on a little middle-aged weight and would have put on more if it hadn't been for the rowing machine and the handball court. His face had a hint of Lincolnesque angularity, of which he was aware. It was the only angularity about him. In all other respects he was a real smoothie.

I was interested to see that he was carrying Tina's handsome fur piece carefully folded. He held it gingerly, with a hint of dramatized embarrassment, the way some' men handle anything recognizably feminine, as if they want to make damn sure you understand they're not in the habit of fondling items of this kind and get no kick from it. You see them in the dress shops around December, putting on an act as if they thought the black lace Christmas lingerie would bite them.

I glanced at the mink stole as he laid it on the foot of the bed. It was a clue, no doubt, but I didn't try to interpret it. It could have been taken off her body-alive or dead-or she could have dropped it as she made good her escape. And why had it been brought here and planted conspicuously on my bedclothes? That, too, would become clear in due time. It was nothing worth wasting cerebral energy on until I knew more about it.

I looked at Mac and said, "How many keys are there to this trap, anyway? I might as well have put up a cot in a public john."

Mac said, "I brought Mr. Denison to see you. Show him your credentials, Denison, to make it official."

The latter-day Lincoln showed me some credentials that had impressive words on them, although I suppose he could have got them with a box of Cracker-Jacks.

I said, "Fine. He's seen me and I've seen him. What do we do now?"

"He wants to ask you some questions," Mac said. "Answer to the best of your ability, Eric. There's full cooperation between Mr. Denison's organization and ours."

I liked that little word "ours." It meant I was back in the fold, at least for the time being.

"Full?" I asked.

''Full.''

"Okay," I said. "What do you want to know, Mr. Denison?"

As might have been expected, he wanted the whole story, and I gave it to him. He didn't believe a word of it. Oh, I don't mean he thought I was lying. But he didn't think I was telling the truth, either. He didn't think anything about it, one way or the other. He was just collecting spoken words from one M. Helm, as a doctor might have collected specimens of my blood and urine.

"Ah, well, it looks like we've got most of it," he said at last. "You say-" He referred to some notes he'd taken. "-you say this woman at one point showed you a membership card in a certain subversive organization?"

"Yes. She claimed to have found it among the dead girl's effects."

"It was probably her own. You don't happen to recall the number of the card?"

"No," I said. "The code name was Dolores."

"If you'd examined the physical description of the holder with reasonable care, Mr. Helm, I think you'd have discovered it couldn't very well have applied to Miss Herrera."

"Perhaps," I said. "They were both dark-haired girls of about the same height. The eyes were different, of course." I found myself wondering, quite irrelevantly, just how some hardboiled party official had gone about describing the color of Tina's eyes.

"And you say the body is hidden in the old Santander mine?"

"That's right. Check with Carlos Juhan in Cerrillos, he'll tell you how to get in there. You'll have an easier job if you take a jeep or four-wheel-drive pickup."

"It seems to me…" Denison hesitated.

"Yes?"

"It seems to me you lent yourself to this scheme without much thought. I can't quite understand how a reputable citizen, with a wife and three small children, could allow himself to be persuaded-"

Mac spoke up abruptly. "I'll take it from here, Denison. Thanks a lot for coming up."

"Yes," Denison said. "Ah, yes. Of course." He went out, rather stiffly. Mac followed him to the door, and locked it behind him; then strode to a picture on the nearby wall, took a microphone out from behind it, and pulled out the cord by the roots. He tossed the mike into the wastebasket, and turned to look at me.

"You don't know how lucky you are, Eric," he said. I glanced at the door through which Denison had gone. "I can guess. He'd love to see me in jail." Mac shook his head. "I wasn't referring to that, although it's a point." He came to the foot of the bed, and reached down to stroke the soft fur of Tina's mink stole, without embarrassment. "She got away," he said. "She hid in the hotel, trying to wait us out, but they caught her outside. They got her gun and made her clasp her hands at the back of her neck, but it seems there was a little throwing knife…"

"I didn't know she had that. She must have taken it off the body when I wasn't looking." I grimaced. "I bet she didn't hurt anybody much. She never was much good with a knife."

"Well, one of Denison's men is having some stitches taken in his face, but I suppose you could say he wasn't seriously hurt. The other one just got this fur wrapped around his head. By the time he could see again, she was gone. So I guess you could call it a draw, this time. She got away, but at least you're alive to tell us about it."

I looked at him for a little. He did not speak. I asked the question he was waiting for. "What do you mean," I said, "this time?"

"Oh," he said, "she's used the same technique before, pretending to be carrying out my orders. But the other suckers were dead when she left them." He looked at me for a moment. "She's been looking up all our old people, Eric, the ones she worked with during the war. It's surprising how many of them seem to be ripe for a little excitement, even the settled ones with families. When I recognized the pattern, I sent operatives to warn all her likely prospects-but Herrera didn't reach you quite in time." After a little silence, he said, "She must be found and stopped, Eric. She has done enough harm. I want you to find her and stop her. Permanently."