The Threateners (37 page)

However, I no longer seemed to be one of her favorite people.

She spoke abruptly, after a brief silence: “Oh, nevermind the dog, I’ll hold the damn dog. But do you realize what you’re doing? All you’re doing is turning Vasquez’s whole gigantic enterprise, that Mark died fighting against, over to another, younger man, the man who . . . who really killed him!”

I said, “Hell, if you want a crack at Palomino, I’ll lend you the gun again. Be my guest.”

She licked her lips. “That’s not fair! You know it’s something I just can’t do to anybody. You saw. . . . Well, maybe if somebody’s actually trying to kill me, or hurt my children, but not. . . not in cold blood. I thought I could, but I can’t.”

I said, “Well, it’s your grudge; it’s not my grudge. And I’m not here to solve Ackerman’s problems, either. Drugs are his concern, not mine. Maybe he’ll be happy to learn that Palomino has no intention whatever of burying America in a flood of cheap cocaine; he plans to keep right on charging whatever the traffic will bear. Whether that’s good or bad is up to the drug experts, but actually it’s Palomino’s real motive: he couldn’t bear to think of all those millions going down the drain just so Vasquez could take revenge on a whole nation for his boy’s death. The other business was just the trigger that finally set Palomino off.”

Ruth was studying me closely. “Matt, what is your concern if it isn’t revenge and it isn’t drugs? What are you really here for?”

“To keep a certain lady alive,” I said. “Those were my official instructions. Of course, in our outfit, a lot of instructions aren’t even given unofficially. It’s simply taken for granted that we understand what’s expected of us.”

“And what is expected of you, and how do you expect to accomplish it standing out here in the hall talking to me? Talking rather loudly, I notice.”

I said, “Hell, I’m just waiting for an invitation. . . . Ah, I think it’s about to be delivered.”

Somebody rapped on the inside of the door. “Senor Helm. Are you ... are you lonely?”

I had heard the voice before, bellowing in angry Spanish during the battle in the dining room. I saw no reason to educate Bo to the difference between "alone" and "lonely."

I said, “There is a lady with me.”

There was a brief consultation on the other side of the door; then Bo said, “It is permitted that you enter with the lady.”

The door opened. I let Ruth walk in ahead of me, followed her in, and turned and shot Bo twice in the head as he was locking the door behind us. The noise, as always indoors, was tremendous, leaving my ears ringing. The big man fell facedown and didn’t move. A trickle of blood ran across the floor that here, as in the dining room, was covered with rather crude tiles, probably of local manufacture, the kind that artsy gringos will travel miles to find and pay fancy prices for. Covering Vasquez, I moved to the door and checked to make sure it was securely locked.

“Bravo, no!”

The curly-coated brown dog had shifted uneasily beside the wheelchair, but Vasquez’s command checked him before he could move. Ruth, white-faced, was staring at the dead man.

I said, “The leash is in his right-hand hip pocket. Get it, and go get the dog. Walk up to him slowly, speak to him—
good Bravo, good dog Bravo
—let him sniff your hand, and snap on the leash, and lead him away from the wheelchair. Okay?”

“Matt, I. . . What in the world do you think you’re—”

I said, “For Christ’s sake, Ruth, go get the flicking dog before he gets all worked up and I have to shoot him!"

Then everything waited while she approached the body gingerly, pulled out the leash, and started toward the wheelchair.

“Not that way!” I snapped. “Don’t get between us. Come around behind me.”

Vasquez and I watched her approach Bravo cautiously and hold out a nervous hand. “Good Bravo, good doggie.”

I said, “Stroke his head a little. Okay, now the leash. You’re doing fine. Now give a little jerk to die leash and come this way. Great. Stop right there. I want you to hear what this is all about, although I can’t understand why it’s such a mystery to everybody. Mr. Vasquez, do you have some questions?”

It was a monastic white room with heavy dark furniture rather like the supposedly ethnic stuff that had come with the little house I’d bought in Santa Fe. There were none of the religious objects you usually see down there, Christs and crucifixes and gold-framed pictures of the Virgin Mary. Vasquez had his own religion, and it wasn’t Catholicism. He had watched the whole performance without expression; I’d have hated to play poker with the old guy. Now he glanced toward the body by the door.

“I suppose that was necessary.”

“Yes,” I said. “If I didn’t take care of him before, I’d have to deal with him afterward.”

“Afterward. I see.” Vasquez sighed. “I thought we had agreed that none of you had reason to—”

“No. Where I was concerned, we didn’t agree to that at all. We just agreed that I had no personal reason.”

“I see. ” After a moment he went on scornfully: “So you are working for the drug enforcement people just like your friend Mr. Ackerman. Anticipating that he would prove unable to touch me legally, they sent a government assassin to deal with me when he failed. You.”

I said irritably, “This is the damnedest case: nobody who’s involved seems capable of keeping his, or her, eyes on the ball!”

“The ball? I fail to understand—”

I said, “As far as I’m concerned, as far as my organization is concerned, Mr. Vasquez, you can peddle your shit until hell freezes over. We disapprove, we think you’re a terrible man, but your business is not our business. As Roger Ackerman would be the first to point out, he’s paid to worry about drugs and so is a whole army of dedicated government employees; but that’s not what we’re paid for.”

Ruth spoke, beside me: “What are you paid for, Matt? I asked you in the hall just now, but you just talked around it.”

I said, “We’re the counterassassins, baby. When somebody’s so big and tough and deadly that nobody else can handle them legally, the nice law-abiding little government boys and girls call on us to handle them illegally. Like when somebody who considers himself untouchable starts putting million-dollar prices on authors’ heads. That’s when the word goes down and the wolves go out. Just call me Lobo for short.”

Vasquez said, “This is why you have come? Because the money was offered?”

I said, “Yes, Mr. Vasquez. This is not considered acceptable behavior. I have been sent to discourage it. As a former journalist of sorts, I am happy to do so.” Nobody spoke for a moment; then I went on: “Salman Rushdie went to the British for help. I don’t know what kind of preventive measures are being taken on his behalf. I would like to think that the old ayatollah didn’t die a natural death, and that the new one is soon to go, and they’ll continue to fall until the bounty is withdrawn, but the British are gentlemen and I’m undoubtedly only dreaming. But we’re not gentlemen. Raoul Marcus Carrera Mascarena, alias Mark Steiner, came to the U.S. for help and we failed him; the least we can do is make certain you don’t ever threaten another writer or journalist or TV reporter or whatever with your drug millions, and that anybody else who considers silencing his critics with the same threat will think again.” I glanced at Ruth. “Please take the dog out into the hall. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

Spring in New Mexico had a great deal in common with fall in Peru. There was the same mountain chill in the air even on a bright day. At the rifle range I shot sixty rounds, the quota I set myself. The bullets went pretty much where I wanted them to, with only a few fliers. I was getting back into shape, mentally as well as physically; Mac had commented on the fact that my after-mission checkup had shown considerable improvement over my previous evaluation.

“Operating at eleven thousand feet seems to have done you good,” he’d said.

The window behind him showed a green Washington; it’s a lousy city, as far as I’m concerned, but if you’ve got to go there, spring is the time. Maybe I’d take in the cherry blossoms on this visit; I’d never seen them.

“Did Armando make out okay?” I asked.

“Yes, he apologizes for not being able to help you at the end, but he couldn’t penetrate the security.”

“He did all right; he’s a good man,” I said. Curiosity made me go on: “I had him pass along a computer diskette. Did our backroom boys manage to unscramble it?”

“They said that those standard encryption programs are really very good; but the password was Anemone and the text was some chapters from a novel by a lady named D’Arcy. A rather sexy novel, they said.”

I said, “I’ll have to read it sometime. Have you heard anything from Roger Ackerman?”

“Having tried to have one of my people killed, Mr. Ackerman is hardly likely to get in touch with me,” Mac said stiffly. “I gather he took quite a beating, but unfortunately he seems to be recovering well. Do you wish any action taken there?”

I said, “Hell, no. If we start going after every fanatic we meet, we’ll never get any work done; the world is full of them. Besides, when he’s on his feet again, he’ll probably go after Palomino, and that’s not half a bad idea. There just wasn’t anything I could do about the guy, the way things worked out.” I shrugged. “One thing, I doubt that we have to worry about Señor Hector Palomino Escobar putting prices on writers’ heads, no matter what they scribble about him. I believe he got the message.”

“I have been thinking about the Rushdie problem,” Mac said thoughtfully. “It is really a matter of world concern, Eric. Since the British seem reluctant to deal with the current ayatollah, whatever his name is, maybe . . .”

I said hastily, "Don’t look at me, sir! I don’t speak Arabic worth a damn.”

It turned out that cherry-blossom time was over, which was just as well, since I wouldn’t have taken time to see them anyway, getting out of Washington as fast as I could. I didn’t think he was serious, but you never know. Now I packed my gear back into the Subaru and called the dog. I had to admit that he was better about answering the whistle than Happy had been, but I had a hard time keeping him in the rear seat of the car. I suppose he Was used to limousines where he rode up front with the chauffeur.

I said, “No, goddamn it, get in back!. Kennel up, you pigheaded mutt! What does it take to get it through your thick skull—”

I broke off, because a very familiar van had just rolled into the parking area; for a moment I expected Mark Steiner to step out and start pulling his shooting equipment out of the rear. But it wasn’t Mark, of course. I went over there.

“Hi, Ruth.”

“Hello, Matt. The girls wanted to say good-bye to you.”

“Only the girls?”

She said, “Is Bravo giving you trouble?”

“It takes a while, but he’s a good pup.”

She said, “That was the last thing he asked, in that room, wasn’t it? That you’d really take his dog and look after him. ” I said, “The trouble with this business is that the bad guys often have redeeming traits and the good guys are often real bastards. . . . What’s that?”

She was holding out to me a small plastic box, a square, about half an inch thick and four inches to the side. I glanced at her, took the box, opened it, and looked at the computer disk inside.

She said, “No, this is not Mark’s book; that’s really gone, just as I said. But I told you once that there was an appendix he hadn’t finished. For every name in the text there was a footnote referring the reader to a fairly complete dossier on the person mentioned, at the rear of the book. Mark kept a backup copy of the appendix in his tackle box or whatever you call it, right here in the van. Actually, it holds more really incriminating stuff than the main body of the text.” She pushed it into my hand. “It’s yours. Do what you want with it. After all, you saved my life.”

I looked at the disk for a moment; then I grinned. “If it’s all right with you, I think I’ll send it to Ackerman, from the two of us.”

She looked startled. “To Roger? But—”

“Coals of fire,” I said. “If it helps him get Palomino, think how he’ll hate us, wondering every minute if we’re going to pop up and claim the credit.” I stopped grinning. “Besides, he’ll probably make better use of the information than somebody who goes by the rules, and I don’t really think the drug business should be encouraged, even though it’s not my problem, officially speaking.”

After a moment Ruth said, “You’re really kind of a nice guy, in a way.”

I said, “I don’t hold grudges very long, just long enough to keep me in adrenaline when I need it.”

“Of course, you’re also kind of an awful guy, in a way,” she said.

We stood for a moment in silence, in the cool high-country sunshine. The Jemez Mountains on the horizon were not as spectacular as the Andes. The two little girls were picking up spent cartridge cases as if they were pretty seashells on the beach. It occurred to me that I wouldn’t really mind having them as my little girls.

“It wouldn’t work, Matt.” Ruth’s voice was soft.

“I know.”

“I don’t think you do. You think I’m a super-sensitive little idiot who can’t bear to pull a trigger and can’t stand thinking about that old man you executed so deliberately, not to mention the others. . . . Oh, I saw what you did with that machete. Ugh. But it’s not that, really. It’s just that the dangerous work you do . . . well, I’ve had two husbands who died violently. I don’t need a third. The girls don’t need another dead daddy, damn it. And what if . . . what if somebody shooting at you were to hit one of them?”

Then the little girls came running, and I told them that the short, fat ones were .45s, the medium ones were either .38 or 9mm, and the little bitty ones were .22s.

“I got to shoot a twenty-two in the secret place where we were,” Andrea said proudly.

“Mommy’s going to get us a puppy,” the little one said. “She promised.”

I glanced quickly at Ruth. She smiled. “That’s another one I owe you. I think I can stand a puppy now, if it’s a small puppy.”

There was a little pause; then I said, “It’s okay, Ruth. Everything is okay. Take care.”

I watched the van drive away. I’d left the car door open and Bravo had gone off again, but he came racing in to the whistle as before and jumped in where he was supposed to, making the little station wagon rock on its springs. He was a very substantial pup and I looked forward to seeing him with a duck in his mouth. Or make that a goose; he had the size for it. When I reached home, there was a car parked in front of my gate. It wasn’t one of the workmen who were doing the final repairs in back. One of them might be driving a small red sports car shaped like a watermelon seed; but this was Sunday. I remembered another Sunday when I’d seen a UPS van that wasn’t.