Murder for the Bride (9 page)

She was still asleep. The fan whirred softly.

I washed the grime off my hands and read an ancient magazine until twelve-thirty. Then I went into the bedroom, reached over her to the head of the bed, and clicked on the bed lamp.

She sat up with a hard intake of breath, her eyes wide, startled, fearful. She let her breath out with a great sigh.

“Sorry I startled you.”

“What time is it, please?”

“After midnight. There’s the stuff I bought you. I’ll wait out in the other room.”

As I waited I heard the far-off drone of the shower, and I thought of the many times I had heard the same sound as I waited for Laura. She had bathed so very often. Almost as though there were some dirt she was trying to scrub off that wouldn’t come off. Dirt that Tilda Renner had acquired, and Laura Rentane couldn’t remove. Ever.

At last the girl came out. She wore the lime and white print dress I had bought for her. She was barefoot, her dark blonde hair pulled tightly back, and wearing no make-up. She seemed younger than I remembered, and oddly shy. I was on the couch. She sat in a rattan chair facing the couch, one leg pulled up under her. She reached
over and took my cigarettes and matches from the coffee table.

“I suppose you want me to talk to you now,” she said.

“You suppose right. I always talk to people who hold knives on me. And you baffle me. Sometimes your speech is very American. And then it goes quaint all of a sudden. What’s your name?”

“My right name. Talya Dvalianova. I shall tell you the story of Talya. A very stupid story.” Her voice was an expressionless monotone. “My father was an engineer at a tractor plant in the Urals. I took competitive examinations. At fourteen I was sent to the special school in Leningrad because I am really quite bright. I have never been home since. I learned to hate everything American. Decadent capitalism, built on blood and oppression. I learned that I would gladly give my life if it would hurt your country. I was tested very carefully. The school is very clever. It has your magazines, prints of your movies, everything needed to teach us to pass in this country as one of you. And other skills were taught. I can kill a man, blow a bridge, plant thermite pencils. You see, I was turned into a weapon and told that I could be as valuable to Russia as a regiment of soldiers. I was proud and happy to be a weapon. I was—dedicated. Six months ago, the day after I became twenty-one, I was taken out of the country. I was taken at last to Havana. There, at night, a small fast boat took three of us to a Florida place. It is called, I think, the Ten Thousand Islands. In a city called Naples two of us were picked up by one of our people in a big car. We became tourists. The other one, whose name I never knew, was taken by someone else up to Birmingham, I believe. I was brought here. Here I am Betty Morin. I work in a dress shop. I have my birth certificate. It tells that I was born in Sharon, Pennsylvania. There are many foreign-born there, to account for my Slavic look. I have memorized street maps of Sharon, directory names of persons living near the house where the certificate says I was born.”

All I could do was stare at her.

“One thing we were taught, over and over. Do not be taken in by how good life
seems
to be in this country. I
was given no assignment. Each week I met the man to whom I report. I asked for work. He told me to be patient. The way it is organized, he is the only one I know. I cannot tell you just how it was. I tried to become Betty Morin, that Betty Morin from Sharon. Maybe I tried too hard. This Betty Morin, she became very contented. She went to movies. She bought pretty dresses from her pay. She had dates. It is hard to stay dedicated when one is having fun. For the first time. To Betty Morin the school at Leningrad became far away. Like something in a dream. This was new. Not to be watched all the time. To be free to come and go. Betty Morin sold pretty frocks. Betty Morin began to wonder if she could leave this city and go to another city or a small town, and continue to be Betty Morin. And last week, when I reported, the man was very excited. He said there was work. Important work. Emergency work.”

“Did he explain what it was?”

“He said that an important man had turned traitor and had given highly important data to a woman. He said the important man had been purged, and that the woman had reached New Orleans and wished to give the data to your government. It—it made me forget the dreams of Betty Morin. Once again I was Talya Dvalianova. I had work to do. Last night we followed you.”

“Just the two of you?”

“And two others whose faces I did not see. We learned that you were being clumsily followed by two men. You know the rest. I was instructed to kill you. Even two months ago I could have done it easily. Talya could have done it. Betty could not. I have become soft, Dillon Bryant. It is so hard to be two persons. And now, of course, I must be found and killed. I have a dream. I dream that I can go away and be Betty Morin in truth, with nothing left of Talya. But it is only a dream. There is no escape for me. No escape at all.”

“Why don’t you turn over all the information you have to this government, Talya, and ask for protection? It’s been done before.”

She frowned at me. “Maybe later I could. But not now. It is too big a chance to take, to take positive action
against
my country. Now I merely want to be a nobody. Just a girl who sells frocks. I want to be on neither side. Can you understand that?”

There was a look of pleading in her green eyes. Strangely enough, I could understand what she meant.

“And why do you tell me?” I asked.

She straightened her shoulders. “I owe you that much, Dillon Bryant. You helped me. You helped someone who could just as easily have killed you.”

“What did your friends say about the woman who had the data?”

“Just that she had been killed.”

“By them?”

“It is possible. They did not say. My contact seemed most upset. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics treats failure very harshly. He merely said that it was possible that you might have the data.”

“And they still don’t know.”

“So you must be very careful. The ones who guard you are not enough. This is important enough so that great risks can be taken by my people.”

“I have no data. What do these names mean to you? Ernst Haussmann. Tilda Renner.”

She shook her head. “They mean nothing to me.”

“You know, of course, that I should turn you over to my government.”

Her shrug was expressive. “I would tell them nothing. They would most probably deport me. And I would be punished by my people.”

“Will you describe your contact?”

“That can do no harm. He is about thirty. Sandy hair. Sunburned face. That sort of face in which you can read nothing. He has made himself very American.”

It sounded like the one Jill had seen, and the one Laura had looked at from the third-floor window.

“Do you know where he works?”

“I do not even know the name he uses here. He is the one who must find me, or be condemned for an additional failure.”

“Where did you report to him?”

“In a cafeteria on Canal Street.” She made a wry face.
“It hurts even to speak of a cafeteria, I am so hungry.”

I checked the kitchen. There was a can of beans. She heated them and I sat across the kitchen table from her and watched her eat them hungrily. Her fatalistic acceptance of what would happen to her was like a stone wall.

“Aren’t you even going to try to make a run for it?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I am guilty. I
should
be punished.”

“Think of my angle. I go out on a limb to find you a hideout. Then you want to walk out and take it in the neck. Seems like you wasted my time, doesn’t it?”

She looked at me. “You’ve been very kind, Dillon Bryant.”

“But your mind is made up?”

“I will go back to the shop tomorrow morning. This morning, I guess it is.”

She took the plate over to the sink. I sat and watched her. I remembered all I had read of the Russians being an Oriental race. She was certainly an enigma. I told myself that it was of no emotional importance to me whether she lived or died. But it did seem a waste. Her first reaction had been to run, to hide. Now she wanted to sacrifice herself. Bryant, the poor man’s psychiatrist. Bryant, missionary for life.

I went up behind her and put my hand on the curve of her waist, my arm around her. “When you’re dead, Betty, you’re dead a long time.”

She gave me a quick, startled look. “Please don’t,” she said.

As she moved away from me, I caught her wrists. Her hands were wet from the tap. She twisted her wrists against my thumbs and broke free easily. She backed into the kitchen corner and I moved over to stand in front of her. Her eyelids half covered the green eyes. There was a completely Slavic impassivity about her.

I put my hands on her shoulders. “It’s a nice thing to be alive,” I said.

Under stress her voice thickened, an accent becoming perceptible. “Do what you want with me. Maybe I owe it to you.”

Her eyes didn’t waver away from mine. I let my hands drop to my sides. I stepped away from her. “Not that way,” I said. “I’m having nothing to do with Talya. Nothing. I was just intrigued for a little while by a girl named Betty.”

I walked through into the living room and to the door. She followed me, her bare feet noiseless on the carpet. I glanced at her feet. They had a peasant broadness, yet the arch was high. Her ankles were sturdy and the calves swelled into ripeness.

“I’ll take the keys,” I said. “When you leave in the morning make sure the lock snaps.”

I opened the door. She still had not spoken. “Luck,” I said, and started to walk out.

She caught my right wrist in both hands and pulled me back. She was strong. She put one bare foot high against the door and slammed it shut with a noise as loud as a pistol shot. She stood and looked directly at the third button of my shirt. Her lips had a swollen look.

“This is Betty,” she said.

“No favors, Talya. No gratitude. No giving the boy a break.”

“I told you it’s Betty.”

“You owe me nothing. I take stray dogs to vets. I find homes for kittens. They don’t send me scrolls.”

Her eyes lifted slowly. Second button, first button, chin, lips, nose. They steadied at my eyes. Her underlip stood out like a shelf. The wide heavy cheekbones gave her face a sullen triangularity. She was all woman, and yet the smaller tendrils of her hair, curled at the temples, gave her somewhat the look of a child. Her eyes steadied on mine and slowly the jet of the pupils grew, crowding the brown-flecked green iris, as though she looked into darkness. Lost lamb. Little lost lamb who had followed the wrong flock and found, now, that the crowded ramp led not to green pastures, but the cold practiced stroke of the executioner. Nothing is so forlorn as a fanatic who suddenly ceases to believe.

In the bedroom the fan whirred. It turned its whirling face blandly from side to side, in metronome idiocy. Its moist hot breath plucked at the empty sleeve of the lime
and white dress. She was peasant-built. Thick round thighs, heavy bones, pelvic width, the incredibly narrow waist, and the flatness of peasant girlhood.

There was something oddly rustic about it all. Haymow. Barn warmth. An eagerness so elementary and so basic and so sweet. In comparison, Laura’s had been a contrived and sophisticated passion, full of languid tricks and symbols. They had superimposed on this girl a series of political hates and prejudices. The flaw in all that was her basic nature—woman, bearer of children. She went back to that. Back to directness and simplicity and an enormous and natural urgency.

She was strong. She was steel springs. She cried out, not in tones of pain or anguish, but with the sort of sound she might have made if, rounding some mountain corner, she saw spread out below a fertile and beautiful valley. And then she wept for all the lovers in the world, and then she slept as a child sleeps.

Much of physical love is meaningless. It is an erotic spasm that does not touch the heart or soul, and leaves one feeling soiled and disdainful. When indulged in as Don Juanian conquest, it is but a meager victory. As the executioner winds the guillotine blade high and sees the trembling of the victim, his heart beats faster. Then the blade drops and he stares at the head in the basket, faintly ashamed that now he feels nothing.

That is the way it could have been—should have been—with Talya. Except for her directness, that is the way it would have been. Simplicity is the master of all subterfuge. I watched her sleep and felt a great tenderness toward her. Not love and not pity. In the slant of the light there was a faint sheen of perspiration on her body. Her lips were parted so that the light made a highlight of her lower lip and glinted on the visible edge of her white teeth. A strand of the dark blonde hair was curled around her throat.

It made me remember something I had forgotten for many years. When the first stirrings of adolescence came, I used to have strange fancies about a postage stamp. A special stamp from Spain. A reproduction of a painting
of the Duchess of Alba. The Duchess and I were poorly matched participants in many waking dreams.

I dressed quietly without disturbing her. I made a neat bundle of her clothes, all of them, and took them into the living room and wrapped them up. I carried them out under my arm. I didn’t want one Betty Morin to report to a dress shop in the morning. I wanted Betty Morin to run like hell and find a small town and a nice guy and forgetfulness.

As I walked through the sticky night I found that I was grateful to Betty-Talya. I remembered reading of a medical treatment. To cure one disease they inject you with the virus of another. The induced disease brings with it a fever that helps knock off the germs of the original disease. It gives the antibodies a better chance to function. In that sense, Talya had helped cure another phase of Laura. It was like opening a window to clear a smoky room. You see, Laura had never wept. Not once. For the first time I realized that Laura had been a woman quite beyond tears.

It was another faltering step in my uncertain progress toward a genuine maturity. I had kept a large slice of adolescence right up through and beyond thirty. I had remained a “big boy.” Not quite the kind of big boy that goes around at Legion conventions goosing strange females with an electric stick and making paper-bag bombs, but a big boy none the less. Maturity implies the acquisition of a philosophy that not only functions, but that makes life satisfying. I didn’t have it yet. But I felt that I was closer.