The Threateners (8 page)

“I was sure . . . Well, never mind. How is your wife?”

I turned away to lock the gate. When I returned, Mark was saying: “. . . a mild concussion but no fracture. They’re keeping her in the special rest home for a few days. Thank God the girls are old enough to stay by themselves for reasonable periods of time."

“Your children?”

“Andrea, thirteen, and Beatrice, eleven.” Mark glanced at me. “Andy said you sounded like a nice man over the phone.”

“You’d better teach the kid better judgment,” I said. “Come on, let’s go inside.”

I waved him ahead. As we made our way along the side of the house to the door I glanced at Madeleine. It was the second time she’d been right behind me with her little gun when things could have got sticky.

“Thanks for the backup, babe,” I said.

“Any time, buster,” she said. “Any time.”

I remembered that we’d worked very well together five years ago. I remembered other things from five years ago, but it wasn’t the right time to compare nostalgias. After a moment she went on to follow Mark into the house. Happy greeted his friend exuberantly as we entered and got his ears scratched briefly before I put him out into the yard.

I asked, “Have you had any lunch, Mark?”

“No, I was just fixing something for the girls and me when you called. Ruth had gone to lie down with a headache. At least I thought that’s where she was.”

Madeleine said, “I’ll get him something. . . . What do you want with it, Mr. Steiner? There’s coffee; and I think I saw some beer in the refrigerator."

"Beer, please." When she’d disappeared into the kitchen, Mark looked at me. “Nice lady. But she holds a gun as if she’d seen one before.”

“Never mind her,” I said. “Let’s talk about you.”

He shook his head. “There’s nothing I can tell you.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “What you mean is, you could tell me a lot but you’re not allowed to.”

"If you want to put it that way.”

He looked around as Madeleine returned to put a plate and a bottle on the table. Carta Blanca, if it matters.

“Do you want a glass?” she asked.

“No that’s fine, thanks, Miss Rustin.”

“Let’s make it Madeleine and Mark. What about you, Matt? More coffee?”

I said that would be great, and I told Mark to sit down and joined him at the table. It gave me an odd feeling to play host with a pretty lady playing hostess; I realized that it reminded me of my long-ago marriage. I wondered how Beth was getting along these days. The breakup hadn’t been my idea. I’d just been young enough to fall in love, and foolish enough to think I could dismiss the past and settle down to a nonviolent life with a nonviolent wife. I seemed to have spent my life with disapproving ladies. Maybe what I needed was one who’d played my game and knew the score. . . .

“There you are,” Madeleine said, placing a steaming cup in front of me and sitting down beside me with another.

“Real service,” I said. I looked at Mark Steiner. “If you can’t tell me anything, why are you here?”

He swallowed a mouthful of hash and washed it down with Carta Blanca. “Officially, I am here to impress on you the fact that you are not going to be told anything and that you are not going to snoop around trying to find it out.”

“And unofficially?”

He grinned. ‘ ‘I am here to punch you in the nose for slugging my wife.”

“Just how do your friends plan to stop me from snooping if I feel like snooping?”

He said, “They have discovered, much to everyone’s surprise, that you also work for Uncle Sam in some mysterious capacity, and they are having their top man in Washington demand that your top man in Washington order you to keep your long nose out of their business. ” He laughed. “I don’t think Mr. Dennis Morton likes you very much. What did you do to make him so angry?”

Madeleine said, “Need you ask? He made you angry, too, didn’t he? Earlier, he made me angry. He makes everybody angry. It’s the secret of his success.”

I said, “Dennis Morton? Is that his real name or did he make it up for the occasion?” When Mark didn’t answer, I said, “Demand? That should lead to fun and games. My chief just loves other departments demanding that he run his agency to accommodate them; it gets his adrenaline flowing very nicely, thank you.”

Steiner smiled thinly. “It seems that all governments operate in the same ridiculous fashion, each branch fighting with every other.”

I studied him for a moment. “Under circumstances of such fearful security, I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what the hell Lapis is all about; why my chief, who’s pretty good at digging things out, could get only a hint of it in Washington, and why Morton blew his stack when you picked it for a password.”

He started to say no, he wasn’t going to tell me. His intended refusal was quite obvious. Then he checked himself and looked at me more sharply, frowning.

He spoke carefully: “The hair covers it now, but early in the summer . . . I would say you received a bullet crease along the head not too long ago. Although you are tall enough, I do not think you got that scar from cracking your head on a low doorway,” he said. “And from the cautious way you moved when we first met, I would not be surprised if you’d had another projectile taken out of you. Just what is it you do for the U.S. government, amigo, that gets you shot up like that?”

I looked at him for a moment. I suppose I should have told him he had a hell of a nerve expecting me to answer his questions when he wouldn’t answer mine, but that kind of verbal sparring would only waste time. He was leading up to something and I needed to know what it was.

“We call it counterassassination,” I said. “In other words, if a certain department of the government—say Dennis Morton’s gang—starts losing people to somebody or somebodies too tough for them to deal with, they call in the specialists. Us.”

He studied me for a long moment. “So you have killed people?”

I nodded and remembered my thoughts at the rifle range. “Haven’t you?”

He shook his head quickly. “Shooting is a sport with me. I love firearms, yes, but I have never pointed one at a human being.”

“Lucky you,” I said.

“You do not believe me?”

“You were a little too casual about winning this morning for a gent who’s never fired a gun in anger."

He smiled thinly. “Matt, before I had to flee my country, I was national champion with the large-caliber rifle and the big silhouettes. That is real shooting, out to five hundred meters, where only a small wind will carry the bullet far off target. Should I clap my hands and jump with joy because I win a small-caliber match at no more than a hundred meters, against a few Sunday shooters who, if you will excuse me, are not really very good?”

It was a fair enough answer. I said, “So you aren’t an American citizen?”

“You flatter me. Is my English so beautiful, then? I have still some years before I can become a citizen here.”

I said, “Hell, you communicate real good, and Spanish accents are a dime a dozen here in this great southwest of ours. I never thought about it one way or the other.”

“You mean, to you I was just another goddamn greaser, hey?” He grinned and stopped grinning. “You ask what is Lapis.”

“Yes.”

He poked himself in the chest with his thumb. “Me,” he said. “I am Lapis.”

One of those damn cedar logs exploded loudly and we all jumped. I got up, kicked back into the fireplace some coals that had been expelled, and returned to my chair, trying to make sense of what I’d heard.

I remembered discussing with Mac the question of whether Lapis was a person, an organization, or an operation. It seemed that I’d found the answer: Lapis was an operation organized to protect a person, a foreign national, male, who’d married an American girl—there was nothing Latin about Ruth Steiner, either in appearance or accent—and lived elsewhere in wedded bliss for a while, but had been forced, with his family, to flee that happy home and hide out here in New Mexico where his wife hated everything. The big question was: what made Mark Steiner important enough that the U.S. government, at least Dennis Morton’s minor branch of it, would take the trouble of establishing a new identity for him out here—I assumed he’d changed name as well as residence—and watching over him?

I saw that Madeleine was studying Mark thoughtfully. Suddenly she snapped her fingers.

“Lapis! That’s it! Lapis means ‘stone’ in Latin, doesn’t it?”

I said, “Great. There’s nothing like a classical education, I always say.”

“And stone is ‘stein’ in German. Mark Stein. Mark Steiner.” She went on without waiting for my comment: “And stone is also
piedra
in Spanish. Don’t you get it?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Keep trying.”

I saw that Mark was listening with a total lack of expression.

“
Piedra
, for God’s sake!” Madeleine said impatiently.

"Doesn’t that mean anything to you? Marcus Piedra. It was in all the papers and all over TV a couple of years ago.”

I said, “It doesn’t mean a thing to me. Who’s Marcus Piedra?”

“
That’s
why his face looked so familiar! It was on the dustcover of his book,
The Evil Empire
. Somebody down in South America didn’t like what he’d written and put a price on his head, a million dollars. As far as I know, the reward has never been withdrawn."

I glanced at Mark. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might be a writer, but I guess they come in all shapes and sizes. Hell, I’d beat on a typewriter a bit myself, once, in between bouts with a camera.

“I always wanted to make a quick million,” I said. “But I thought the name was Rushdie and the book was called
The Satanic Verses
and the price offered by a certain bearded Iranian gent, since defunct, was five million. Sounds like our friend here is dealing with a bunch of Latin cheapskates. What kind of a takeout man can you get for a mere one mil?" 

“The Latins obviously got the idea from the Rushdie case,” Madeleine said.

“Not necessarily.” Mark spoke at last. “Bounties and bounty hunters go far back in history. Many an ancient king offered a reward for the head of someone who had annoyed him. And Gregorio Vasquez has as much power as many ancient kings, or even our more modem ayatollah, the only difference being that Khomeini dealt in Mohammed, and Vasquez deals in cocaine. The point seems to be that it is not safe for irreverent writers to criticize either religion—and if you do not believe that cocaine is a religion, you should interview some true believers, as I have done.”

“Cocaine?” I sighed. “Oh, God, here we go again! You mean that government character I almost shot is just another dope hound?”

“Morton’s organization is concerned with illicit substances, yes. Actually, it is a task force that was originally constituted to deal with the South American threat, but has widened its target area in response to recent developments. ’ ’ “That figures,” I said. “A bureaucrat like Morton is always going to find an excuse to widen his target area.” I drew a long breath. “Maybe I have the wrong attitude, but I can’t help remembering that the world has a few other things besides dope to worry about. It scares me, the way we’re all getting obsessed with a bit of feel-good powder to the exclusion of everything else."

Madeleine was frowning. “But don’t you agree that the trade must be stopped?”

I laughed at that. “Stopped? Who the hell is stopping anything? My God, I’m not in favor of the stuff! If they were stopping it, I’d have nothing to say, I’d be all for them.” I drew a long breath. “But the whole business reminds me of a guy I went hunting with once. The flies were pretty bad around camp, the way they get in those mountains in the fall, and some of them even bit a little—deerflies or something— but what the hell, if you spend any time outdoors at all, you learn to put up with a few bugs. What drove me nuts wasn’t the flies, it was that jerk fighting a hysterical pitched battle with every fly that came near him. My God, I couldn’t drink or eat or sleep in peace for him chasing winged insects frantically around the lousy camp. Just like the way, these days, I can’t seem to do a simple job in the line of duty without running into a bunch of single-minded fanatics who don’t give a damn how important my mission is. If I’m not helping them eradicate the traffic in chemical evil, I’m just something in the road and they’ll drive right over me. Or try. ” I made a wry face. “Granted it’s a menace, but like I said it’s not the only menace we have to deal with these days. We do have a few other minor problems, like AIDS and nukes and starvation and oil and war and terrorism. I could bear having these crusaders in my hair if they were accomplishing something. But they aren’t stopping it, any more than that frantic hunting partner of mine was stopping the buzzing insects. I think he managed to get one horsefly or deerfly or whatever they were in one whole evening of waving his arms like a windmill. That seems to be about par for the course, with flies or drugs.”

Madeleine said, “That’s a pretty negative attitude, Matt. Do you have a better answer to the problem?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s simple. Create a world in which living will be such a pleasure that nobody’ll need to resort to chemical joy. Nothing to it. The market for drugs will collapse and we’ll all be happy. Next question?”

She made a face at me. Mark Steiner cleared his throat. “I gather you have not read my book, Matt.”

I shook my head. “I’m afraid I hadn’t even heard of it until just now. I must have been incommunicado on a mission somewhere when your big fuss took place. Sorry about that.” I looked at him for a moment. “Are you hiding out here in Santa Fe to do another book, a sequel to
The Evil Empire
, perhaps? What’s this one called,
The King of Coke?
”

As long as he’d been Mark Steiner, his accent had been minimal and his attitudes had been Yankee and it had been possible to kid him safely. But now he’d dropped his
Americano
act for the moment, and the real Marcus Piedra seemed to be a stuffier Latin type, with more strongly accented English, who liked to be taken seriously.

He spoke stiffly: “I am working on a sequel, yes. My first book was an intensive study-in-depth of the relevant countries of South America with emphasis on the political, economic, and social effects of the trade in drugs, particularly cocaine.” There’s nothing quite as pompous as an author explaining his own book to a heathen who hasn’t read it. He went on: “I reported on the illicit organizations involved, like the Medellm cartel in Colombia, and I suggested that rather than being independent kingdoms of crime, they had recently become only parts of a greater illicit empire that included the whole continent of South America, plus Central America, ruled by an upstart former lieutenant of the Ochoas—”