The Frighteners (3 page)

Mr. Somerset chuckled. ‘‘For a man who doesn’t know much about Mexican politics, you paint a very clear picture. With Cody’s rather colorful background in the oil industry, and his international connections, obtaining and transporting arms would not be difficult. He undoubtedly has unsavory contacts around the world. As you say, his big problem would be finding somebody who wants the weapons
and
is in a position to pay well for them; but apparently it’s a problem he’s managed to solve. He’s come to an agreement with a minor but well-financed Mexican political group that calls itself the National Liberty Party or, in their political shorthand, PLN. We understand that the guns are on their way.”

“Where and how?” I asked.

He hesitated. “Unknown.”

“And I presume my job is to make it known,” I said.

He nodded. “Yes, that’s the major objective of your mission.”

I thought about it for a moment. I could see a lot of ramifications, mostly unfavorable to success, and probably even to survival.

I sighed. “Well, give me the gory details. I suppose the idea is that somebody’ll make contact with me on this Mexican honeymoon and whisper everything you want to know in my eager ear. . . .”

It was apparently one of my better guessing days. I was pretty close, and he straightened me out on the details and gave me elaborate instructions; and here we were behind the big Safeway store watching the man whose bridegroom spot I was supposed to usurp—well, within limits—get out of the rice-sprinkled and tin-can-adorned Caddy. Bareheaded at the moment, he had exactly the lanky, dressed-up cowboy look that Arthur, the makeup artist, had made a big effort to bestow on me.

Men who spend their lives working in the sun don’t generally worry about getting smooth, even, facial tans; they wear hats or caps habitually to keep their brains from frying. Although he’d made his millions, Buff Cody had the mark: the weathered face and the pale, protected forehead. Old habit made him reach behind the car seat now and bring forth a white Stetson identical to the one in my lap and clap it on his head.

The face I saw across the parking lot, the same face I’d seen in Arthur’s color photographs, was that of a tough, opinionated man who’d been, as we say out west, to the head of the creek and the top of the mountain. I wouldn’t expect him to have many scruples, and I wouldn’t want to cross him without a club in my hand. On the other hand, he wasn’t a man I disliked or despised on sight. He looked like a reasonably cheerful old ruffian. I’d expect all his sins to be large ones. He carried a little more weight than I did, but not a significant amount. His movements were those of a younger man, so I wasn’t going to have to pretend to creeping senility; and he held himself straight, so a kink in the spine would not be required. The neat, closely trimmed bristle of gray beard made his face pretty anonymous under the wide hat brim. It might work out at that, I reflected. Cody went to the rear of the car to cut the strings holding the tin cans, using a pocketknife of modest size.

“That’s not the kind of knife I’m carrying,” I said.

“We hope you won’t meet anybody who knows what kind of knife Mr. Cody carries. If he does, he’ll probably also know what Mr. Cody looks like. . . . There’s the young woman now. ”

“To hell with the young woman,” I said. “I’m going to have plenty of time to look at her later.”

Beyond a quick glance, I paid no attention to the girl who’d emerged from the convertible and, after smoothing down her white suit, had reached into the back of the car for a small whisk broom, with which shed started brushing away the rice. I’m as dedicated a girl-watcher as anybody under ordinary circumstances, but the man was the one I’d have to impersonate, and this was the only chance I’d have to study him before I went into my act. . . .

“Able, Able, this is Baker.”

Mr. Somerset reached for the microphone. “Able here.”

“One man tailing bridal couple. We’ve taken him out of circulation.”

“Nobody else interested?”

“No. The Caddy’s clean now.”

“Very well. You may send in the arrest team.”

“Acknowledged. Baker out."

Waiting there, we saw two men, one long and one short, both in neat, three-piece suits, appear from somewhere among the parked cars and cross the lot briskly. They were marching in step, which, considering the disparity in leg lengths, took some doing. Horace Hosmer Cody, having got rid of his car’s noisy decorations, straightened up and turned to face them as they approached. He looked as if he was wondering, in a normal way, who they were and what they were up to; I could detect no other reaction. He studied the IDs he was shown, started to protest, and was quickly and expertly spun around with his wrists yanked behind him, instantly handcuffed. For a man with a moderately violent background, he’d been easy to take, I reflected; but the Mutt-and-Jeff team had known its business, and I guess a man isn’t at his most alert on his wedding day. The girl in the white suit stood looking after her husband of less than an hour as he was marched away. I couldn’t read her expression.

“Come on, Helm,” said Mr. Somerset. “I mean, Mr. Horace Cody. Let me introduce you to Mrs. Cody.”

The girl was breathtaking in the way a work of art can be breathtaking. She would, of course, have been even more spectacular in a long satin gown, a jeweled tiara, and a veil; but she was still a vision in her smart silk wedding suit with her blond hair piled onto her head in golden swirls. Some kind of retaining spray had obviously been used to insure that not a single rebellious strand would escape. She was a moderately tall girl, nicely constructed, slender but by no means ethereal. The jacket of her suit, worn without a blouse, was cut low enough above to reveal the graceful throat and, discreetly, the upper curves of the breasts; it flared a bit below to emphasize the narrow waist and rounded hips. The skirt was slim and straight.

The elaborate wedding gown customarily worn, and the endless yards of veiling, tend to overpower the human being inside the bridal glamour, giving the impression that the face is a beautiful blank. Even in her less formal costume this young woman was, to some extent, victim of the same effect. It was hard to analyze the girl-face behind the meticulous lipstick and dramatic eye makeup, all framed by the intricately sculptured hairdo. I had to concentrate on it, feature by feature, to determine that the eyes were blue, the cheekbones were good, the nose was straight, but the mouth could probably pout given an excuse— well, many rich kids tend toward that spoiled and dissatisfied look.

Gloria Pierce, now Gloria Cody, merely nodded in response to Mr. Somerset’s introduction. She had something more important on her mind.

“You did make the legal arrangements, I hope,” she said. “I would hate to think that I was really married to . . . to that man!”

Somerset said soothingly, “Have no fear; we took all steps necessary to insure that the ceremony would not be valid.”

“Well, it wasn’t a very nice experience anyway! I found it very hard to keep smiling at him in proper bridal fashion. ” She condescended to look my way at last. ‘‘What’s this one’s name?” 

“You don’t need to know his name, Miss . . . Mrs. Cody.”

She sighed unhappily. “Yes, I suppose I’ll have to call myself that for a while, won’t I? Until this man gets your job done, whatever it is. . . . The resemblance isn’t really very great.”

“He isn’t supposed to fool anybody who really knows Mr. Cody; we aren’t playing The Prisoner of Zenda here.”

‘‘Has it been explained to him that if he takes this pseudomarriage too seriously the whole deal is off?”

“It has been explained to him.”

“Then what are we waiting for?” She spoke directly to me for the first time: “Horace always did the driving, so you’d better.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I helped her into the car and went around to get behind the wheel. Since Cody was as tall as I was, the seat was already set right for my legs, and the steering-wheel adjustment was comfortable. I started the engine and studied the dials for a moment, not so much to see what they read as to learn where they were. Well, at least the bridal barge did have instruments.

“Well?” said my companion impatiently.

I waved a friendly hand at Somerset, although his friendship wasn’t something in which I had much faith, and took us out of there. When the Safeway and its parking lot had vanished behind us, I said, “Helm. Matthew Helm.”

She glanced at me sharply. “Your name?”

I nodded. “That need-to-know nonsense is a pain in the butt. Those bureaucrats get all tangled up in their own security.”

She was looking around, frowning. “Where are we going? You should have kept straight at that last intersection, for Juarez.”

I said, “We’re not going to Juarez.”

“But we have reservations—”

“Buff Cody never had any intention of picking up that hotel reservation in Juarez. He was planning to make contact with someone at dinnertime in a small Mexican town called Cananea some two hundred miles to the west. Mr. Green’s Restaurant, if you’ll believe it. Fine old Spanish name. We’re going to keep Mr. Cody’s appointment. Afterwards, he was planning on spending his wedding night with you in the Hotel Gandara in Hermosillo, about a hundred and fifty miles farther on. With luck we’ll make that, too, without too much night driving, which is not recommended in Mexico.”

She said, “That’s around three hundred and fifty miles. I thought we’d just be ducking across the Rio Grande to our honeymoon hotel.” She glanced down at her shining costume. “I’m not exactly dressed for long-distance touring.”

I said, “Cody was probably counting on that, figuring that nobody’d expect him to take any vigorous evasive action with both of you still in your wedding clothes.”

She said, “Now we seem to be heading north. That’s hardly the way to get to Mexico. ”

Well, at least the girl knew her compass directions. I said, “We’ve lost our tail, at least temporarily. Buff Cody’s tail. He was taken into custody just before Cody himself, to clear the scene for the substitution. Presumably Cody had figured out some other way of escaping surveillance. We don’t know what route he planned to take to Cananea, but we’re taking the interstate west, I-10. We’ll run it as far as Lordsburg, New Mexico. Even though it takes us a little out of the way, we can make better time up there on the U.S. freeways than we could on the little Mexican roads south of the border. From Lordsburg—well, a few miles beyond Lordsburg—we’ll cut back down across a corner of Arizona to Douglas, which is on the border. From there we'll cross over into Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico, and continue west on their Highway 2. Okay?"

She asked, “How do you know what . . . what Horace was planning?”

I grinned. “Don’t ask. I didn’t. I think there was a snitch involved, an informer. Actually, I understand you met him; he’s the guy who told you some unpalatable truths about your elderly fiance that made you decide to cooperate with Mr. Somerset.”

Gloria made a wry face. “Yes, a nasty little man, but would he know all of. . .all of Horace’s plans in such detail?”

I said, “Perhaps not, but Cody’s activities had already attracted attention, and I’m sure Somerset had him under close surveillance. I don’t think our federal friend is a man who bothers with official authorization for every wiretap he uses; and then there are gadgets like parabolic mikes. . . . Unfortunately you see before you an obsolete secret agent. I don’t know much about that newfangled stuff'. My main qualification for the job is that I learned to shoot pretty good as a kid. ”

“I hate guns,” she said.

I managed to stifle a groan, I hoped. I was heading into a foreign country pretending to be a man I didn’t look much like and messing with a potential revolution in a way that could make me a target for both sides. All I needed to make it a real suicide mission was to be stuck with one of the beautiful, nonviolent, gun-hating people as my partner.

I said, “It’s going to be a long drive. Why don’t you recline that fancy seat and take a nap?”

She turned on me fiercely, “Don’t you dare change the subject in that condescending way! I think guns are terrible and I think men who use them are terrible. That’s one reason why I had to do that to Horace! Regardless of everything else, he was my father’s partner, and I’ve known him a very long time. I couldn’t have deceived him like that, smiling at him in the chapel in front of all those people and giving him his wedding kiss like a female Judas if . . .” She drew a long breath. “But Mr. Somerset said he was going to import all kinds of dreadful weapons for people who planned to overthrow the Mexican government by force, as if we didn’t have enough violence and enough stupid, bloody revolutions in this world already. If there was a chance of stopping it by helping Mr. Somerset. I had to do it, didn’t I?”

She sounded as if she was trying to convince herself; and I thought better of her for feeling a touch of guilt—after all, whether or not he deserved it, she had deliberately used her feminine wiles to first lead a man to the altar, and then to the slaughter.

I said, “Horace. Is that what he liked to be called by you?”

She said, “Well, all my life I’ve called him Uncle Buffy, but I could hardly go on calling him that after we decided to get married; I’d have sounded like an idiot child playing at matrimony with her mama’s diamond on her pinkie. And I wasn’t going to call him Buffalo Bill like some of his roughneck friends, or even Buff; and in this day and age I wasn’t about to go all respectful and call him Mr. Cody even if he was somewhat older than I. So we settled on Horace for him, and he called me Glory.”

“Hi, Glory.”

She gave me a reluctant smile. “Hi, Horace,” she said. The smile faded. “And I do hate guns and violence. Do you think I’d have betrayed him like that otherwise? Even though he . . .” She stopped.

“Even though he what?”

She shook her head. “Not now. We’ll talk about it later. I think I will rest a bit now. It’s been . . . a lot of strain, playing Delilah.”

She used the tricky seat adjustments to allow her to lie back comfortably, first making sure that her skirt wasn’t tucked up so it would wrinkle or show me anything I wasn’t supposed to see. She closed her eyes. We were soon out of Texas; in that direction it terminates a few miles outside El Paso. As I followed the big four-lane highway across the arid New Mexico plains, with a steep, jagged mountain range off to the east, I saw that her breathing was soft and steady in sleep. . . .