The Threateners (15 page)

I was reminded of a question I’d been wanting to ask and turned to Ruth: “What’s all this stone business, anyway?”.

“Stone?”

It was obvious that she was wondering if I wasn’t already coming unfocused at the first sip.

I said, “Mark Steiner, Marcus Piedra. Operation Lapis. I suppose his next alias, if he’d lived, would have been Pebbles or Rockwell. But why the obsession with stones?”

She laughed. "It was a joke, a play on his real name, Matt. Don’t you get it?”

I thought for a moment and shook my head. “I’m slow today. Bear with me.”

“Maybe you’d be faster if you laid off that stuff.”

I spoke deliberately: “I can see why your first husband blew himself up. It was quicker and less painful than being nagged to death.”

She was silent for a little. “That was a nasty thing to say," she whispered at last.

“That’s right. And so was your comment on my alcohol consumption. Which makes us even. Okay?”

She swallowed and, after a moment, looked around to see if our little interchange had been overheard; but everybody was prattling gaily around us.

“Marble,” she said.

I frowned. “What about marble?”

“Don’t be stupid. Where does the best marble come from?”

“Italy,” I said. “Oh, I get it. But that’s Carrara, not Carrera.”

“He thought it was close enough. Carrera, Carrara, marble, stone, piedra. He thought it was amusing, and made it his literary signature, and later his alias when we had to go into hiding. He had a wry little sense of humor that would pop out when you’d least expect. . . . Oh, dear!”

She was groping in her purse, helplessly; I saw that her eyes were wet. I put my handkerchief, fortunately clean, into her hands, and she laid her glasses on the table and mopped at her face. She put the glasses back on and looked at me.

“I . . . I guess I kind of loved him,” she said. “It still hits me occasionally. I’m sorry. Let me go make repairs, please.”

Well, it was one reason for visiting a john; I wondered if she had another. I said, “Back in the corner, over there. Keep the hanky.”

I watched her go. She had to make her way around a small comer table; and Spooky Three was sitting there. She hadn’t been there earlier. I was annoyed with myself for getting so involved in conversation that I hadn’t seen her come in. She was wearing jeans, a white T-shirt, and a man’s blue shirt hanging loose and open like a jacket. There was a rather large, blond young man sitting with her, also in jeans and T-shirt. He wasn’t one of the ones I’d seen in Santa Fe, so I cataloged him as Spooky Five. They were both careful not to look at Ruth as she walked past.

I became aware that Belinda Ackerman, on my left, had spoken. I said, “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“I hope your . . . I hope Mrs. Steiner is all right.”

I said, “Oh, Ruth’s okay, she’s just. . . Well, she lost her husband quite recently and I made a mistake and said something that brought back the wrong memories, or maybe you’d call them the right ones. She’ll be all right as soon as she’s washed her face.”

Belinda asked casually, “You’ve known her a long time?” I said, “Actually, I was more a friend of Mark, her husband; but after he died suddenly—it was kind of a traumatic business—well, she needed a shoulder to cry on and, well, one thing led to another. So we decided to park her two kids and go away together for a bit and, well, really get acquainted and see just what we had, if anything. If you know what I mean.”

I’m not usually in favor of discussing my private relationships in public, but there was nothing to be gained by insisting on privacy here. They’d all be wondering about us, so give them the story, really not too far from the truth, of the brokenhearted young widow and mother clinging helplessly to her late husband’s hard-drinking friend.

I’d kept my eye on the rest room as I talked, but it was Spooky Three’s reaction that let me know Ruth was on her way back to our table. The freckled young woman gave a quick glance toward the rest rooms and then plunged into an animated discussion with her male friend, totally ignoring Ruth as she made her way past the table once more. It was really a pretty amateurish performance. I reflected that it didn’t match die professionalism of the black-clad stranglers, one of whom had almost got me while his partner was making quite sure of Mark Steiner. Apparently,
El Viejo
used a lot of fairly low-grade manpower—and womanpower—for surveillance purposes but called on his elite units when killing time came. I found myself watching Ruth as she approached; I realized that, fairly amateurish herself, she was looking tremendously relieved and a little triumphant.

“Contact accomplished,” she breathed as I helped her with her chair. “Now stay close to me until we get back to the hotel, Matt, please. I feel as if I were carrying a purse full of nitroglycerin."

That evening she knocked on the connecting door about an hour after we got back to the hotel, after spending the afternoon bravely riding the cogwheel cars up Hunchback Mountain and then climbing interminable flights of stairs to the great white statue with arms outspread that looks benevolently down upon the city of Rio. Christ the Redeemer. He has a fine view from up there, although I had a hunch the panoramic shots I took, to maintain my role as an obsessive tourist type snapshooter, would turn out a bit hazy. With sea breezes to help out, Rio de Janeiro doesn’t compare with the Latin pollution champion, Ciudad el Smoggo, Mexico— Mexico City to you—where the grunge is all confined in a big bowl hemmed in by mountains. However, as L.A. has learned to its sorrow, a handy ocean isn’t a surefire smog cure; and the Rio air isn’t exactly crystalline.

I opened the door to see Ruth standing there a bit uncertainly, still in her sight-seeing clothes. She had something in her hand: a small gray plastic square with some metal on it. I estimated the dimensions to be about three and a half by three and a half inches.

She licked her lips. “If. . . if I gave you this, what would you do with it?” Then she laughed a bit sharply. “Oh, it’s not the original diskette that was slipped to me in that restaurant john; I’m not trusting you with
that
. I’ve just been copying it so there’ll be a spare. ”

Beyond her I could see, on the spindly writing desk set against the far wall of her room, a small, flat, white computer with a keyboard and a flip-up screen; clearly this was the heavy object she’d been lugging through the airports in her carry-on bag.

I said, “Seems as if you computer aficionados are always copying everything, as if you’re never quite sure it isn’t going to fade away like skywriting. Don’t you trust your magic machines?”

She said, “It’s not the machine I don’t trust, Matt.”

“I see.” I looked at her for a moment. “But you do trust me? I’m flattered.”

She laughed shortly. “I’ve worked out a way of sending the disks to a safe place as I get them so they’ll be waiting for me when I get home and start putting Mark’s book back together. But even with you watching over me, something might happen before I can get rid of one. ... I mean, there are the Compañeros or, as you call them, Spookies; and then there’s Dennis Morton and his agency. Not to mention the fact that any South American city is a good place to get slightly mugged by independent operators. . . . I’m not thinking of just this diskette, but of the four others I’ll be picking up as we go along with the tour. They’re all scrambled, of course, so they’re no use to anyone but me; but I just unscrambled this one enough to see that it covers Chapter Eleven to Chapter Nineteen of the book. It’s obviously going to be like working a jigsaw puzzle. I have no way of knowing what disk Mark sent to whom; he said the less I knew about it the safer I was. I’ll just have to take them as they come and put them into the right order when I get them all home. But I can’t afford to lose a single one. Unlike Mark, I couldn’t begin to replace any missing material from memory, even though I did help him a bit with the manuscript.”

We were still standing in the doorway between our rooms. I said, "Come in and sit down. I’d offer you a real drink, but you’d think I was trying to sabotage your moral fiber. But there’s Perrier and Coke, and a couple of fruity-looking local soft drinks. Name your poison.”

She walked across to the window, presumably for a look at the ocean, and turned away, disappointed. However, although I didn’t have the sea view she had, being around the corner on the side street, my room was as pleasant as hers in other respects, with some prints on the wall that were abstract and, as far as I was concerned, incomprehensible, but decorative and not too hard to live with. The place came well equipped; not only was there a small refrigerator with a bar on top, stocked with an assortment of miniatures, but there was iso, in the closet, a little steel safe in which we were supposed to lock our passports and valuables, carrying only as much money as we thought we’d need for the day. Annie had given us the standing orders on the subject: men not to wear wallets in hip pockets, women not to carry purses dangling from shoulders, etc., etc. Apparently pickpocketing and purse snatching are honored professions throughout South America, so Ruth’s fear of losing her property, either to the opposition or to local talent, was not unfounded.

When she didn’t respond at once, I looked around from the bar. She’d seated herself in one of the two big chairs flanking the round table by the window, looking my way, but I couldn’t read the expression on her small face.

“Well, what’s it to be?” I asked.

Waiting, I twisted the cap off a tiny bottle of J&B for myself, and emptied the contents into a thick, low tumbler. Hooray for Argentina. No flimsy plastic U.S.-motel-type glasses here.

Ruth licked her lips. “Is there . . . is there bourbon?”

Startled, I studied her more carefully for a moment. “Look, you don’t have to be wicked just because I am. If you don’t like the stuff, for God’s sake don’t drink it just to keep me company.”

She said, “You seem to have decided that I’m some kind of a prig. A self-righteous, teetotaler prig.”

"The very worst kind," I agreed. "Sure. So you’re a prig, so what? You don’t have to unprig yourself just to get my help. For the moment, milady, I exist only to serve you, prig or no prig.”

“Well, serve me that Jack Daniel’s, then! No ice, just a splash of soda.”

She had sharp eyes in spite of—or maybe because of—her glasses; even from across the room she’d identified the black-labeled miniature on the bar. I shrugged, uncapped it, and dumped the contents into a glass.

“Now sit down,” she said when I brought it to her. “It’s time we had a little talk that isn’t in an airport or on an airplane or a bus. Somehow I can’t think very clearly with all those people around.” She tasted her drink, licked the whiskey off her lips, and nodded. “Yes, I remember now that it did taste rather good in a nasty way. You won’t believe this, but I really have no strong moral feelings about it, Matt. In feet, I used to enjoy having a pleasant drink or two with Richard until I realized that . . . that he couldn’t control it any longer. So I quit drinking altogether. I suppose I was hoping it would at least slow him down a little, but it didn’t. He just got very unpleasant about my precious sobriety, as he called it, but he kept right on. . . .” She stopped, and swallowed hard. “And then, afterward, when Mark came along, he assumed that abstinence was an important principle for me and, without being asked, sacrificed his own preferences. . . . Well, I told you. And when I got everything all straightened out in my head, it was too late, if you know what I mean. After Mark had gone to such lengths to please me, I could hardly tell him that he’d jumped to conclusions and I really wouldn’t mind his having a whiskey now and then and might even like to join him occasionally. Maybe I’d have got around to it, probably I would, but . . . but time ran out on us. But after listening to myself nagging at you in that priggish way for two whole days . . . It got to be a compulsive Pavlov reaction, I guess, during those last awful years with Richard. Say ‘alcohol’ and little Ruthie automatically frothed at the mouth. It’s time I stopped. ” She raised her glass.
“Salud!”

I returned her salute and drank with her, wondering a bit about her motives. Well, she wanted a favor, obviously, and it’s hard to ask favors of someone as long as you’re treating him like a moral leper.

I said, “Where’s that thing you were waving under my nose a minute ago?”

She fished it out of the pocket of her knitted blue-and-white shirt, hesitated, and laid it on the table between us, saying, “You still haven’t answered my question.”

I picked it up. Babes in their cradles seem to know all about computers these days, but it’s not a standard part of the Ranch training, although I wouldn’t be surprised if there was somebody there who could tell you what you needed to know about them if you needed to know it. I never had, and this was the first diskette I’d ever handled. It was approximately an eighth of an inch thick. Presumably it formed a protective envelope of sorts for a thin electronic or magnetic storage disk inside. There was a piece of shiny round metal in the center of the plastic, about the size of a quarter. There were two mysterious little holes in that, one centered and square, the other off center and oblong. I assumed they had something to do with the way the hidden disk was rotated by the computer, like a gramophone record, only, I suspected, much faster. A shiny, sliding metal gate at one side of the plastic square undoubtedly moved aside to expose the working surfaces when the machinery was in operation. Complicated.

I turned the diskette over and saw a label on which Ruth had printed with a felt-tipped pen:
MS-X2 (Ch. 11-19)
. I remembered her saying that Mark had called his current opus Manuscript X2. I decided not to flaunt my computer ignorance by commenting on the fact that the little object in my hand could hold nine whole chapters of a book—actually it could probably hold a lot more. Nowadays they can probably squeeze the whole Encyclopedia Britannica onto a single microdot. I laid the diskette back on the table.

I said, “In answer to your original question, let me quote my chief on the subject. His words were, roughly: ‘If you should gain the lady’s confidence to the extent that she’ll entrust the disks to you, you can pass them along to us, but under no circumstances are you to antagonize her by trying to take her property against her will. We are not particularly interested in obtaining Marcus Steiner’s literary revelations.' ”