Authors: Donald Hamilton
“The M.C. was in it, too,” I said. “He was searching the girl for something when we interrupted him.”
“Searching? She didn’t have much to search, just a bra and G-string.”
“She had it in her hair, whatever it was. She got it from that American tourist, I think. I never saw his face, but she patted his black hair nicely as she went by, and he reached up to grab her, remember?” I glanced back and said, sentimentally and uselessly, “Poor kid.”
“Yeah.”
This wasn’t all just idle chitchat, you understand. We were pooling what information we had, while we had the chance, in accordance with standard operating procedure in case only one of us got out to make a report. The woman between us tried to pull free and gasped with pain as we both clamped down—the cops used come-alongs made of chain and stuff, nicely chrome plated, but there are perfectly good grips that serve the same purpose.
“Let me go!” she protested. “Let me go!”
LeBaron was leading, since he knew the way. I was keeping an eye out behind us, so I was the first to see the Texas cavalry come charging to the rescue as we reached the curtains. Somebody had clobbered him good in the melee, but not good enough, and he stumbled up to the stage in his silly boots, with his face streaming blood from a cut over the eye.
“You there!” he yelled. “Get your cotton-picking hands off that lady, you sons of bitches!”
Then, so help me, he pulled a gun. In a place like that, with hell breaking loose already, he pulled a gun. A guy like that would light a cigar in a fireworks factory.
I shouted, using the name the woman had mentioned: “This way, Sam! Make it snappy! We’ve been waiting for you!”
It didn’t work. The invitation didn’t register. We were strangers; we were hostile; we were manhandling his girl, and you can’t do that to a Texan, suh. He took another step and stood there swaying, waiting for the weapon in his hand to settle down on something so he could shoot it.
“Left and out,” LeBaron said quickly, urging us through the curtains. “Jesus will get you across the river. Never mind the cowboy, I’ll take care of him.”
He started back across the stage. I didn’t wait to see what happened, but I heard a shot as I pulled the reluctant woman through the narrow passage and out through a door that stood open as if we weren’t the first to escape that way.
I waited just a moment outside, but LeBaron didn’t come. Maybe I’d see him again and maybe I wouldn’t. Like I said, trained men doing a job. You don’t have to love each other like brothers, but the next time, if there was a next time, he could talk about sex all he wanted, even if he had been a little slow in dealing with Elena...
“Cab number five!” a voice called softly.
We were in an alley of sorts. It was seemingly empty, the way certain parts of certain towns get when there’s trouble, but you could feel eyes watching from all the shadows. I headed towards the voice. A man showed himself briefly, beckoning. I ran after him through the narrow space between two buildings, dragging Gail along with a grip that wouldn’t let her resist without tearing some ligaments.
The parked cab on the street beyond was battered and ancient, but it looked remarkably like the promised land at that moment. I shoved my companion into the back and piled in after her. Jesus had the heap moving before I got the door closed.
A minute later we were on a street full of lights and people. It was hard to believe that there were still places in Juarez where tourists haggled innocently over so-called Swiss watches and native ponchos. Jesus turned off this street, driving circumspectly, and made some more turns that left me lost.
“There is the bridge, señor,” Jesus said presently without turning his head. “I do not think they will stop us on this side, there has not been sufficient time for an alarm, but on the other side there will be the usual questions. The lady is a citizen of the Estados Unidos?”
“Yes. At least I think so.”
“She must say it, señor. Remember that. They will ask and wait for the answer. They will act as if it is not important, but the words must be spoken, always.”
“Thanks, Jesus.”
It was nice to work with bright people. He had noticed that the third occupant of the cab wasn’t really happy in my company. I glanced at Gail. She was rubbing her strained wrist. In the darkness of the cab, she did not look noticeably disheveled in spite of what she’d been through. Her fluffy, tumbled hairdo was only a little more so, her dress and furs and gloves seemed to be intact, and if all went well nobody was going to examine her shoes and stockings, so I didn’t. But I did note that she had a tense, wound-up look that said she was only waiting for a chance to make trouble.
I took a ball-point pen out of my pocket without letting her see it. I couldn’t risk being separated from her by chivalrous immigration inspectors, even briefly. Right then, I couldn’t afford to let her out of my sight for a moment. I took her in my arms, rammed the pen into her side, and spoke softly in her ear.
“It’s a gun, Gail,” I said. “We don’t want trouble. But if there is trouble, honey, you’ll sure as hell get it first.”
She didn’t move or speak. I saw the bridge loom before us, and I laid myself against her and kissed her hard, holding the pen in her ribs. I claim no credit for originating the idea. It’s been done before, in the movies and elsewhere. The thing about it is that it often works. The cab stopped. Money changed hands as Jesus paid the toll. There were sympathetic words in Spanish, and appreciative laughter. The cab drove on.
“We have passed the Mexican side,” Jesus reported. “No sweat, si?”
My companion smelled nice, and she felt warm and feminine, but it wasn’t really much of a kiss. There was a noticeable lack of enthusiastic cooperation, and I felt considerably like a fool, slobbering over the face of a woman whose main reaction was probably a strong desire to throw up. The cab stopped again, and somebody asked a question. I came up for air and saw a face surmounted by a uniform cap at the window.
“Oh,” I said foolishly. “What was that, officer?”
“Did you buy anything in Mexico, sir?”
“Not this trip,” I said.
“What is your citizenship?”
“U.S.,” I said.
“And yours, ma’am?”
The woman in my arms hesitated. I nudged her with the pen. She drew a long breath.
“I’m American,” she said.
The uniformed character straightened up, stepped back and waved us on.
I said, “Honey, you shouldn’t have said it like that.” She glanced at me quickly, startled. “But—”
“Our neighbors don’t like it,” I said. We were driving away, but it seemed best to be heard talking naturally. “They’re not our continents, you know, either one of them, although sometimes we act as if we own them both. Jesus is American, too, aren’t you, Jesus?”
“Si, señor.”
“You, Gail, are a citizen of the United States of America,” I went on pedantically, “but from Hudson’s Bay to Tierra del Fuego we’re all Americans together... It’s the Hotel Paso del Norte, Jesus.”
“Si, señor.”
A few minutes later, I was ushering Gail into my sixth-floor room at the hotel. I locked the door behind us, and took my hand out of the pocket, leaving the ball-point pen there. I looked at the pretty, slightly rumpled woman standing in the center of the room.
“Now, Gail,” I said gently, “you’d better give me what your sister gave you, and you’d better tell me what she told you, word for word.”
After a moment, she laughed. Then, deliberately, she turned away from me and walked across the room to the dresser, studying her reflection in the mirror. She pulled up her long white kid gloves, grimaced at a smudged palm and tried to rub it clean. She smoothed down and brushed off her dress. The gleaming blue stuff was brocade, I noticed. My grandmother upholstered her sofa with it, but nowadays they wear it.
“May I have my purse, please?” she asked.
“No.”
She glanced at me sharply, and swung back to face me, settling the fur jacket about her shoulders.
“My dear man, let’s stop this foolishness. You haven’t really got a gun in your pocket, have you?”
It was my first opportunity to study her at leisure at close range in good light. She was a very attractive woman, slender and graceful, slightly above average height, but, unlike her sister, not conspicuously so. I’ve been calling her pretty, but there was more than prettiness in her face. She had very large, clear gray-blue eyes, skillfully accentuated by make-up. She had a slim, aristocratic nose. She had fine cheekbones, with that faint, delicately haggard hollowness below that the girls all try for...
I mean, she was almost perfect, but the mouth gave her away. Not that it wasn’t fundamentally a generous and well-shaped mouth, even if the lipstick had suffered some recent damage. It was a mouth with good potentials, but you could tell she’d never taken advantage of it. She’d never had to. She’d undoubtedly got by on her looks since she was a baby, and now, at thirty give or take a year or two, her mouth had the betraying, calculating, spoiled and selfish expression characteristic of the professional beauty.
There was the mouth to give her away, and there was the business of my alleged weapon. She hadn’t had the guts to call my bluff at the bridge, as her sister would have done. This wasn’t a woman who’d ever charge the muzzle of a loaded revolver, for any cause. No, she’d waited until it was perfectly safe to act brave and scornful.
I took the pen out of my side pocket, showed it to her without comment and clipped it to my inside pocket where it belonged. I got her purse out and looked inside it. Her various identity cards couldn’t seem to agree on her last name, but I gathered she’d been born Gail Springer and lived in Midland, Texas. I remembered that the name Mary Jane Springer had figured in Pat LeBaron’s report. I tucked the little wallet back into the purse and looked up.
“If you’re looking for something respectable to call me,” she said, “Mrs. Hendricks will do. He was the last, and I guess I’m still entitled to use his name.”
“The last?” I said.
“The last for the time being, anyway,” she said. “Before that, I was Countess von Bohm for a little while, and then there was that polo player from Argentina, and before that there was a cowboy named Hank, my only true love. I ran away with him when I was seventeen, and he broke his neck in a rodeo a month later.”
“Tough,” I said.
She moved her shoulders beneath the furs. “So? He only had one neck, and Daddy would have broken it for him, anyway, when he caught up with us. Or, we’d have got on each others’ nerves or something. This way I can remember how it was, bright and beautiful and unspoiled.”
She said it all with a perfectly straight face, but she was kidding somebody in a bitter sort of way, me, herself, or a boy named Hank who’d died to give her a pleasant memory.
I asked, “How’s Sam on horseback?”
“Sam?” She laughed. “What makes you think that phony can ride, those forty-dollar boots?”
“That’s about the way I had him figured,” I said. “What’s his full name?”
“Sam Gunther.” She drew a breath to indicate that her patience was at an end. “If you won’t let me have my purse, at least give me my comb and compact and lipstick. I’d like to go into the bathroom and wash my face, for obvious reasons.”
“No bathroom,” I said.
“My dear man—”
“My dear woman,” I said, “you stay where I can watch you until you give me what I want. Unfortunately, I didn’t see you hide it. There were other things of more compelling and immediate interest to observe.”
She said with sudden harshness: “Damn you! She was my sister! Don’t talk as if her death was just a cheap act for your entertainment.”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way, believe me. I knew her too, slightly.” I hesitated, but whether I liked Mrs. Gail Hendricks or not, she seemed to be genuine, and I had to give her the break of telling her a certain amount of truth. I said, “I went to that place to meet her. She worked for us, you know.”
The big, beautiful grayish eyes narrowed. “Worked for... What are you, a strippers’ agent or just a pimp?”
I said, “You’re selling your sister short, Gail. I’m an agent, all right, but not that kind. And she was an agent, too. Did you think she was working in that joint for fun?”
“No,” she said, “I thought—”
“What?”
She sighed. “Well, what would you think if your kid sister ran away from home in a... well, let’s call it a highly disturbed state of mind, and when you heard of her again, after several years, she’d dyed her hair and was stripping in a Juarez dive?”
I said, “You thought she’d just hit the skids, is that it?”
“What else could I think? When some friends—friends!—told me, with that ghoulish kind of sympathy, enjoying every minute of it, that they’d just been to Juarez and there was something I ought to know but they didn’t know quite how to tell me... Well, I couldn’t go alone, not into a joint like that, so I got hold of Sam, and we drove down together. He didn’t want to go, but I told him he owed her that much, we both did.”
“Owed her?” I said.
Gail moved her shoulders slightly. “A pretty little family triangle. You know, the attractive older sister—if I may flatter myself a bit—and the big horse of a younger sister, awkward and shy, and the tall, handsome young man. Sam was just doing it for kicks, or maybe he had an eye on her money—we both got quite a bit when Daddy died—but she was desperately in love with him. To her, he was the first man to see the true beauty of her soul underlying the gawky...” She stopped abruptly. “That was bitchy, I guess. She’s dead. I didn’t mean to make fun of her. Strike it from the record, please.”
I said, “So you took him away from her. To save her?” She shrugged again. “Thank you, sir. I’m sure my motives were lovely, perfectly lovely. They always are. Anyway, she caught us and... well, never mind the details. I’ll admit she scared me silly. I thought she was going to kill us both. She had a gun, and she’d always been good with horses and firearms and fishing rods and things. But she just threw the damn gun out the window. In the morning she was gone. I tried to find her, and I did catch up with her once, in New York, where she was doing some modeling, but she slammed the door in my face. After that, I let it go. If that was the way she wanted it...” Gail gave that little shrug again. “The next time I heard, several years later, she was in Juarez. The rest you know.” She looked at me steadily. “If you’re a government agent of some kind—I suppose that’s what you’re hinting at—show me something to prove it.”