The Threateners (34 page)

Vasquez nodded approvingly. “A clear statement. Do you feel the same sense of responsibility for anyone else at this table, Miss Nunn for instance? You two recently spent several days together.”

I looked across the table and spoke deliberately: “Belinda’s a nice kid, but she’s no responsibility of mine, no.”

Vasquez looked at me hard. “You realize what you are saying?”

I said, “I’ve been here before, sir.” It always helps to throw in a respectful “sir” or two; even the smartest ones go for it. I continued: “I’m just one man, sir; I can’t be responsible for the whole world. My instructions do not involve the protection of anyone but Mrs. Steiner. As far as I’m concerned, all others are on their own.”

Belinda’s face was pale, but her voice was steady enough: “Well, now I know how it feels to be thrown to the buzzards! Thanks loads, you bastard!” She looked at the man beside her. “I don’t suppose I’ll get any support from you, either!”

"You quit rather loudly, remember?” Ackerman said, with some satisfaction. “If you want support, buy a girdle.” Belinda started to make an angry retort, but gave it up. I saw that her eyes were frightened. She signaled the nearest attendant for a refill of the sticky staff in her little glass.

Vasquez said, “Mr. Helm, do you wish me to believe that you are here entirely because you were ordered to protect Mrs. Steiner, that you have no personal—”

“Personal means nothing in my business, sir.”

Vasquez cleared his throat. "Then we are in different kinds of business. Personal means much to me, Mr. Helm. My son was killed, as you undoubtedly know. I mean to exact payment by doing everything in my power to damage the arrogant country responsible. But you claim that you are not motivated at all by the death of your lady friend, Madeleine Rustin? Not to mention that of your dog, Happy? You have no desire for vengeance? If you’ll excuse my saying so, you do not look like a forgiving man. And I do not think you are a very good liar, Mr. Helm.”

I said, “Everybody tells me that, but I keep trying.”

Vasquez said, “To be frank, I feel no real responsibility for the woman’s death. She chose to disfigure another woman, who retaliated violently; we merely employed the girl’s anger for our purposes. In this case, the fact that the implement used, a grenade, was supplied by people employed by me, is not significant; without it, the scarred young woman would simply have accomplished her purpose with another weapon. Do you agree?”

After a moment I nodded reluctantly. “Okay, Madeleine asked for it in a way, I suppose, although she had plenty of provocation. But Happy—”

“Where the dog is concerned, the nature of the weapon is certainly significant, ” Vasquez said. “If no explosives had been provided—if the girl had been forced to use a knife, say, or a gun—the dog would most likely not have been harmed. To this extent I owe you, as I believe you say in your country. There is no way I can make complete restitution, but—”

He turned his head to speak to the silent attendant behind the wheelchair, a large, heavy man with rather long black hair, and a piratical black mustache in a round, almost Oriental, face. The man pulled something from his pocket, a dog leash, snapped it onto Bravo’s collar, and gave a little jerk, signaling the dog to rise.

“Un momentito.”

Vasquez’s voice sounded oddly hoarse. His hand reached out to touch the massive head of the Chesapeake pup, who looked around and gave it a couple of licks before it was taken away.

“Very well, Bo.” Vasquez watched the dog being led around the table and spoke to me. “Take the leash, Señor Helm. The dog is yours.”

Well, they do it down there.
Mi casa, su casa
and all that stuff. I said, “No, I—”

“Please do not tell me that no dog can replace another dog in a man’s affections; I am well aware of that. But this is the best I can do. You will want another hunting dog eventually, and Bravo is a good one with a fine pedigree. . . . But you confuse him; he thinks you reject him. You are a dog man, you know what he wants. Do it. ”

I didn’t give a damn about hurting Vasquez’s feelings by rejecting any presents he might choose to give me, but as he said, I was a dog man, and you don’t leave a young dog standing around bewildered. I started to offer the back of my hand in the customary way so Bravo could check my scent.

“Oh, no! Be careful!”

That was Ruth, beside me. She’d cringed as the dog was led past her chair; I remembered again her reasons for being afraid of them, and particularly of this one.

Vasquez said impatiently, “Go ahead, Mr. Helm, make his acquaintance. Bravo does not bite.”

Ruth spoke sharply. “How can you say that? I was there, I saw—”

Vasquez shook his head. "It was dark and you were frightened; you did not see what you thought you saw,” he said. “Mr. Ackerman, you oversaw the rescue of Mrs. Steiner, in which one of your agents lost his life. Now give us the truth. Was there a single tooth mark on the dead man’s body?”

Ackerman licked his lips. “My report. . .”

Vasquez made a sharp gesture. “Of course your report would state that the poor fellow was ripped apart by vicious hounds. You would hardly admit officially—at least not if there was an alternative—that your people are so incompetent that they fire their guns at random in the dark and shoot their own colleague. You covered up by putting the blame on my dogs and somehow persuaded a medical man to make the proper findings. Mrs. Steiner’s hysterical testimony was all the additional confirmation you required. But we are not official here, so please be so kind as to let us have the truth.” Ackerman shrugged. "All right. With two big dogs charging around in the dark, and an agent and the subject in apparent danger, somebody got trigger happy and let a shot go when he couldn’t really see his sights. Melvin’s spine was smashed by a thirty-eight-caliber bullet. There were no bites.”

Ruth licked her lips. “But I
saw
—”

Vasquez said, “It was a totally incompetent performance from everyone except the dogs, Mrs. Steiner. The dogs did what they were supposed to; they alerted us to a stranger on the premises. But they were not supposed to be released. Why release them? If there had been a duck or a goose to be retrieved, very well; but they were not man-hunting dogs. But an idiot boy, hearing that the prisoner was escaping, opened the kennel door. So there the dogs were, released after being penned most of the night, and I presume they did what dogs do under such circumstances. Having done it, and finding themselves still free, they looked around for entertainment and saw some people running and, of course, ran to join them. One gun began to fire, and then more guns, making them even more eager; gunfire, to them, meant retrieving business, their main purpose in life. One of the running figures fell down; they investigated that and went on to the standing figure beyond, trying to find the reason for all the interesting shooting: there simply had to be some dead birds, somewhere. At that point they heard my whistle and came in, disappointed at not being able to bring me a single feather.”

I saw that Ruth was remembering her misinterpretation of Happy’s behavior when she’d slipped into my yard with a gun; then she recalled something else and said stiffly, “That’s a good story, Mr. Vasquez, but they were bloody; there were smears on my clothes where they’d sniffed me.”

Vasquez cleared his throat. “You have to understand about Chesapeake retrievers; they are bred to operate under very severe conditions. Tell her, Mr. Helm.”

I said, "A golden retriever will cry pitifully if you tap him lightly with a folded newspaper; a Labrador may wince if you slug him with a baseball bat; but you can run over a Chesapeake with a truck, or shoot him, and he won’t condescend to admit he’s hurt. They’re really tough. . . . I suppose your two dogs had blood on them because they were wounded, Mr. Vasquez?” I made it a question.

Vasquez nodded. “Mr. Ackerman’s man, the one who performed the rescue, seems to have been a different breed of marksman from the ones who were firing so wildly from the edge of the field. Before he was shot by his friends, he put a small groove into Bravo’s skull—you can see the healing scar—and he put two bullets into Bravo’s dam, Bella. She died with her head in my lap as we drove away. But of course, being stoical Chesapeakes, neither she nor Bravo gave any indication of being wounded.” Vasquez drew a long breath. “So, after all the dogs I have had, Bravo is my last and I give him to you, Mr. Helm. He needs training, he needs hunting, he needs to be taken for long walks in the mountains. He does not need an old man in a wheelchair. Take him,
por favor
, as payment for the debt I owe you.”

It was a sentimental moment that would have played well on the TV screen. Anything involving mean old men humanized by lovable dogs plays well on the TV screen. I had to remind myself that this was a fallacy, and that a good man with dogs could still be a very bad man with people. But I took the leash and scratched the dog’s ears briefly. He really was a good-looking pup in his husky Chesapeake way. Big Bo returned to his station behind Vasquez. Ruth stirred beside me.

“And what about the debt you owe me, Mr. Vasquez?” she demanded harshly. “My husband is dead. Are you going to offer me another husband to replace the one you had killed?”

Vasquez regarded her for a moment and asked, “Why are you here, Mrs. Steiner?”

She frowned at the question. “You know perfectly well why I’m here! I’m here because your men grabbed me at the hotel and brought me here. If you mean, why am I in South America, you know that I’m here to retrieve the computer copies of my husband’s book, the manuscript of which was burned when your arsonists destroyed our house. Fortunately, as you’re well aware, Mark had sent copies of everything to friends in various cities of South America. Fortunately for me. Not so fortunately for you. It’s all on the diskettes, everything Mark found out about you; and he found out plenty!”

“Diskettes like these?”

With a small flourish, like a magician producing a live white rabbit, Vasquez held up a thin stack of computer disks; I couldn’t tell how many until he spread them on the tablecloth like a short hand of cards. Three. Disregarding duplicates, there had been only two the last time I’d been involved with them; well, according to what she’d told me, Ruth had been supposed to pick up another in Santiago, Chile—but I was willing to bet that wherever it had appeared on the tour, it was not Santiago.

“Where did you get those?” The sharp question didn’t come from Ruth, but from Ackerman.

Vasquez spoke without expression: “Your communications with Washington do not seem to be entirely secure, Mr. Ackerman.”

“You snoopy son of a bitch!”

Vasquez said calmly, “Let us say merely that I am a man who keeps an eye on his own interests. I hold here Chapters One to Ten, Chapters Eleven to Nineteen, and Chapters Twenty-seven to Thirty-four of Mr. Steiner’s work. Would anybody care to inform me how many chapters the manuscript contained.”

I said, “Forty-three.”

Ruth looked at me, sharply and accusingly. Vasquez merely nodded. "So there are still two disks missing, if Mr. Steiner sent off, for safekeeping, book sections of approximately equal length. Where were the last two contacts to be made?”

I said, “Lima, Peru, and Quito, Equador.”

Ruth was glaring at me angrily. “Matt, what in the world do you think you’re doing?”

I said, “Shut up, sweetie. I know that masochism is habit-. forming, and I suppose if I let you, you’d stay stubborn and get beat up some more and love every minute of it, but my job is to keep you intact as far as possible and you look prettier without another fat lip. So answer the man’s questions or I will.”

“Matt, damn you—”

I said, “For Christ’s sake, Ruth, what’s the point of holding out now? You got where you wanted to be, didn’t you? You’re right here, and there’s your man, so why go through a lot of tight-lip nonsense now?”

She glared at me, but before she could speak again, Vasquez said, “These disks are encrypted, Mr. Helm. Do you have the password that will enable us to read them?”

I shook my head. “No, but she’ll tell you—”

“I will
not
tell him!”

I looked from her stubborn face to the man at the head of the table and said, “Mr. Vasquez, let’s stop playing games. Don’t harass the girl just for fun; you know you don’t need her cotton-picking password. You know there’s nothing on those damned disks of any interest to you. I don’t know how you know, but you do. If you didn’t, you’d have waited until you had all five diskettes before you brought us in like this. ”

There was a little silence. Ruth was staring at me. “Matt, how long—”

“How long have I known?” I shook my head. “Don’t play tricks on a pro, Ruth. How long was I supposed to believe in these ladies’ john contacts that always took place somewhere where they hadn’t been scheduled? The restaurant instead of the funicular. Itaipu instead of Buenos Aires. And the pickups, my God! A gang of street kids trying to mug us, a mystery man sneaking up to your hotel window— an invisible mystery man, because I was kind of nervous about those ground-floor windows and kept my eye on the approaches to yours as well as I could. Obviously, you were just making it up as you went along—”

Ackerman said, “You mean the bitch never met anybody at all?”

I said, “The lady simply announced a successful contact whenever she felt like it, always picking a place where nobody had been watching her too closely. Then, back in her hotel room, she cooked up a new disk on her handy-dandy little computer and presented it proudly as what had been given her in the potty place.” I hesitated. “She had a contact scheduled for Santiago, Chile. Did she make that?”

Ackerman said, “No, and she acted very upset about it, but then we took a bus tour to Valparaiso and she came back from a public john all smiles.” Ackerman glared at Ruth. “But there had to be something on those damn diskettes; Dennis said it came out gibberish because he didn’t have the code or password, but
something
was there!”

Vasquez said, “D’Arcy.”

We’d almost forgotten where we were, and who’d brought us here. Now we all looked toward the head of the table.