The Ravagers

XV

WELL, IT wasn't quite as bad, I guess, as if it had never happened to me before. I'd been married once, myself. I'd had kids-they were growing up out West with the same mother but a different father-and I'd had a good chance to learn what it was like to have the most intimate moments interrupted by a small voice at the bedroom door. Still, it had been some years ago. I was no longer in the parental groove, so to speak.

"Oh, Christ!" I said, sitting up straight and wondering if I'd locked the door securely or if the kid was going to march right in on us. Then things began to add up-at least the possibility occurred to me that they might add up-and I drew a long breath and glanced at the woman lying on the bed beside me. "Congratulations," I said grimly. "That's real timing. You and that kid work well together, but she cut it pretty close, didn't she? Another couple of minutes and all would have been lost, as they say."

Jenny stared up at me. She looked pale and shaken, and shocked at my suggestion. She protested: "Dave, you can't think I-"

There was another rap on the door. I said, "Call her off, will you? Tell her she doesn't have to break it down."

Jenny sat up and pushed back her rumpled hair. "Just a minute, darling," she called. Then she turned to me quickly. "Dave, I swear… oh, what's the use!" She looked around angrily, and called, "For God's sake, Penny, you don't have to wake the whole hotel! Let me get some clothes on, will you, darling?"

In spite of everything, I was a little startled. I guess I have old-fashioned notions about what the young are supposed to be told, and what they aren't.

"Aren't you afraid you'll give her a trauma or something?" I asked.

"I thought your idea was that this was all planned between Penny and me," Jenny countered sharply. "And even if it wasn't, do you really think there's a modern teenager who doesn't know people go to bed together? What are we supposed to be doing in here, playing two-handed bridge? Get my dress, please." She spoke to my back as I got up. "Dave."

"Yes."

"You're wrong. You know you're wrong, don't you? I didn't plan it this way. I didn't… didn't even want it this way. If you don't believe me, come right back here. She can just stand there and hammer on the door and yell her damn little lungs out."

I glanced at her. "That's a hell of a maternal attitude."

"Motherhood, smotherhood. Even if I could do it to you, do you think I could do it to myself? My God, I feel as if I'm going to fly into a million pieces!" She drew a ragged breath. "Well, I suppose we've got to find out what she wants. You haven't got a tranquilizer handy, have you?"

"Sure."

When I came back with it, Jenny was sitting on the edge of the bed with her face in her hands. She raised her head when I spoke to her, took the pill, and swallowed it with a little water. She gave me back the glass. After a moment she sighed, rose, and hitched various displaced lingerie straps back where they belonged, rather like a farmer snapping his galluses. Then she went through the standard feminine after-necking routine of settling her girdle, and smoothing her stockings up and her slip down.

She caught the garments I threw her and started putting them back on while I turned to wrap my tie around my neck, knot it, and draw it tight like a hangman's noose. I guess it symbolized the way I felt. I looked at myself in the mirror and scrubbed off some lipstick with a handkerchief.

"Mummy, please!" said the voice outside the door.

Jenny said, "Oh, let the little monster in, Dave."

Parental tenderness wasn't exactly in the ascendant, I reflected. Well, it's only in the ads that everybody loves kids all the time. At the moment, I wasn't very fond of the brat myself. Nevertheless, I found myself somewhat abashed as I unlocked the door and let Penny enter to see the untidy bed and her mother standing by it, shoeless and disheveled, with unzipped dress and unbuttoned blouse.

It made things worse, somehow, that the girl was wearing flannel pajamas decorated with Disney-type bunnies: she looked about ten years old, although her hair was in curlers again, covered with a blue net nightcap thing that tied under the chin. She took in the scene gravely, glanced at me, and walked over to Jenny and started to fasten her up the back.

"You've got a run in your stocking, Mummy," she said tonelessly.

"I've got a run in my psyche, darling," her mother said. "I just snagged it on a stumbling-block named Penny. What's the big deal that couldn't wait until I got back to the room?"

"Oh!" Penny looked startled. Her reception here had apparently made her forget just what it was she'd come for. "It's… that man, Mummy," she said, glancing at me warily.

"Go on," Jenny said. "Mr. Clevenger, along with the rest of the U.S. government, knows all about Hans. Well, almost all. Go on."

It was no time to insist on my innocence of official connections. I just waited for Penny to speak.

"Well, he came with the instructions like he was supposed

Is it really all right to tell?"

Jenny made an impatient gesture. "Mr. Clevenger isn't a dope, darling. He's already guessed that I've been keeping him… distracted for a purpose."

Penny made a little grimace of distaste. "Some distraction!" she said. "Your hair looks like a hayrick after a hurricane, Mummy, dear." Her young voice was edged with scorn for these disgraceful grownup goings-on.

"Let's dispense with the comments on my appearance, Penny, darling. So Hans came on schedule."

"Yes. Mr. Ruyter came. He told me what… what you're supposed to know, what you're supposed to do. He was just about to leave when there was a knock on the door. Mr. Ruyter hid in the closet. I opened the door, pretending I'd been sound asleep. It was one of those two government men who've been following us-"

I asked, "The older one, Johnston?"

"No, the hairless one, the human skeleton." Penny didn't look my way as she answered my question. "He didn't believe me when I said I was alone. He must have seen Mr. Ruyter come in. I was… terribly scared, Mummy. He had a gun. He pushed his way in. I couldn't stop him. He started to search the room. When he had looked everywhere else, he pointed his gun at the closet door and told Mr. Ruyter to come out and. ".

"And what happened?" snapped Jenny as the kid stopped talking.

"I don't know."

"What do you mean, you don't know?" I demanded.

"I simply don't know!" Penny protested. "Don't b-both of you jump on me like that! I d-don't know what happened." She sniffed and gulped, close to tears. "The government man wasn't looking at me. He was… very tense, telling Mr. Ruyter to come out with his hands up and not make any false moves. He wasn't paying me any attention. I just slipped out and ran here to tell you. That's all I know, except that they're still in our room. They haven't come out. I'd have seen them."

And there it was. Check to the gent with lipstick on his hanky and a silly look on his face. There was a lot of stuff here I didn't understand: there was still a question of just what kind of a person my freckled, passionate, vitriol lady was. I hadn't got much closer to solving that problem.

There was also a new slant on the mother-daughter relationship to be assimilated. I'd been taking the loving Penny-darling and Mummy-dear faзade more or less for granted, but it had cracked a little tonight. Well, family life isn't always the pink lace valentine it's supposed to be; under the circumstances, some signs of strain could be expected. This hadn't surprised me as much as the various indications that Jenny had taken her young daughter into her confidence much more freely than I'd suspected, even to making the kid her accomplice in her dealings with Hans Ruyter.

But all this was unimportant beside the news that one of my special charges, one of my two cherished responsibilities, my handsome, girl-murdering baby, Ruyter himself, had gone and got himself trapped by a U.S. government agent.

Exactly what Larry Fenton thought he was doing wasn't clear. Unless he had much better connections among the local authorities than seemed likely, he was in no position, alone, to stage a legal arrest on foreign soil. On the other hand, he probably wasn't commissioned to deliberately remove Mr. Ruyter from the living and file him among the dead. Such commissions-contracts, they are called in underworld circles-are usually reserved for one government organization only, an organization to which he didn't belong and I did.

And if Larry had in mind just a quiet kidnapping followed by a quick trip across the border to the south, why had he picked the biggest hotel in the biggest city in Canada to close in on his quarry? A dark alley or country lane would have been more suitable. Probably Hans Ruyter had been counting on something like this when he took the risk of coming here tonight.

But this didn't really matter either. The grim fact staring me in the face was that Hans was in serious trouble. lie must not be harmed, Mac had said. They must get through You will go as far as necessary.

He had given me the blank check with his signature on it. It looked very much as if I was going to have to fill it in and cash it.