The Silencers

IV

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. "Oh, 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 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.