The Infiltrators (12 page)

“Things are tough all over,” I said. “Let me give you a hand with the loot.”

“Matt.”

Her face was only a pale blur in the growing twilight, partially obscured by the dark silk scarf she was wearing about her head to protect her newly done hair. Even so, I could see the grim lines of surrender and despair had softened considerably.

“Yes?” I said.

“Please inform the treasurer of your organization that I had a lovely time spending his money. Thank you. And now I need to shower and change; and then I think the lady would permit the gentleman to take her out to dinner if he felt so inclined.”

But she took her time about getting ready. After showering and putting on, among other things, some more respectable trousers, I sat down to read my outdoors magazine while I waited; but the long silence next door began to worry me. At last I tossed the magazine aside and marched to the connecting door, hesitated, and knocked.

“Madeleine?”

To my relief, her voice answered immediately: “Come in, Matt.”

She was sitting in front of the dresser mirror, doing nothing that I could see, just sitting there. After a moment, she rose and turned to face me, smoothing down her dress. There was an odd little note of defiance in her voice when she spoke to me.

“Do I look all right?”

The transformation wasn’t quite overwhelming, of course. She wasn’t going to stop traffic on Times Square or even Main Street. Still, there was enough of a change to make my breath catch sharply. The beauty shop had put life back into her hair and cut and shaped it skillfully and arranged it becomingly about her face. Careful makeup emphasized the fine eyes and the strong, sensitive mouth. The simple, long-sleeved, zip-up-the-front beige dress she’d selected, while obviously not expensive, had good tailored lines that made her too-heavy figure look, if not exactly girlish, at least quite trim and pleasant. It was helped by the new sheer nylons and the new high-heeled pumps that flattered her always lovely legs and ankles.

“Hey,” I said, “I’m glad I put on a pair of pants with creases in them.”

“Don’t overwhelm the lady with your fulsome praise.” She grinned briefly and was serious again, a little shamefaced. “Do you know what took me so long, Matt? I’ve just been sitting here trying to muster the courage… I’ve suddenly discovered that I’m shy, damn it. The first time I’ve dressed up for a man in over eight years! You won’t believe it, but I’ve been sitting here all dithery and self-conscious and afraid to knock on the door because I was afraid my goddamn sinister bodyguard wouldn’t approve of my appearance! How utterly ridiculous can you get?”

I said, “You look beautiful.”

“Let’s not overdo it,” she said dryly. “Just tell the timid wench she’s not completely revolting for a change, and take her out and feed her, please.”

On the way out to the car, she had to take my arm to steady herself; and I felt a frightening surge of sympathy and affection for this woman who, having once had everything, was now having to learn how to live all over again, even how to walk in high heels. The restaurant beyond the underpass was a rustic place with a big fireplace boasting a genuine fire, and copper cooking utensils hanging from the ceiling. The dark wooden tabletops were two inches thick, and the waitresses wore gray Puritan-type dresses with little bonnets to match. Unsurprisingly, the place was called the Pilgrim Inn. We ordered drinks, and did our menu research while waiting for them to arrive.

When they did, and we’d given our dinner orders, Madeleine said, sipping her martini, “You’re going to have to watch me. I’m not used to this stuff yet.” She regarded me across the table. “You look like a man with more questions on his mind. You might as well start asking.”

I hesitated. “I hate to spoil a pleasant evening with a lovely lady with a lot of grim business.”

She shook her head gently. “Please, Matt. I’m not a lovely lady, I’m a barely presentable ex-convict who’s trying to learn who Madeleine Rustin Ellershaw really is after everything that’s happened to her. And a lot of glib, phony compliments don’t help me at all.”

I said, “Sorry. I’ll consider my wrist slapped. Okay, we’ve decided that you’re not the Mata Hari type, right? But I still don’t have a clear picture of your husband. What about Dr. Roy Ellershaw? How does he stack up as a mastermind of espionage?” She started to speak quickly, angrily, and I held up my hand. “Whoa, there! Don’t jump down my throat. He was your husband and you loved him. Or he is your husband and you love him. Depending on his present state of existence. But dead or alive, he was or is a man, not an immaculate, infallible saint. Or to put it differently: even assuming he was or is a great guy, isn’t it possible that he could have done what he’s supposed to have done for very pure, idealistic motives?” She didn’t answer immediately, and I went on: “
CADRE
. The Center for Advanced Defense Research. When they say defense research they generally mean attack research, these double-talk days. Could your husband have found himself working on an offensive weapon so terrible that he felt obliged to expose it in the hope of preventing its further development? Or distribute its plans worldwide to keep one nation—even his own nation, our nation—from having this fearful advantage and, quite possibly, using it?”

She shook her head quickly. “No, Matt. Roy was a true scientist. He believed that anything that could be known, should be known, and inevitably would be known sooner or later. Society would just have to figure out ways of coping with it. No, I can’t see Roy trying to stop, or betray, any scientific research, no matter where it might lead. And if he had felt driven to do it, which he wouldn’t, he most certainly wouldn’t have involved me deliberately in his act of conscience, the way he did by giving me those papers for safekeeping. In fact he’d have tried very hard to shield me from the consequences.”

We waited in silence while our rather pretty young Pilgrim lady put our dinners before us and walked away, her long skirts whispering. The restaurant was about half full. The customers were mostly quiet talkers and eaters, but a three-kid family at a round table in the corner made itself heard occasionally, reminding me, for some reason, that I had offspring of my own somewhere, although they were hardly kids any longer. I couldn’t see anybody who looked like a dangerous assassin, but they mostly don’t. Anyway, he wouldn’t come where I could get a look at his face if he could avoid it.

I asked, “Have you ever tried to figure out just what really happened, Madeleine?”

“Of course I have!” She was indignant. “When the roof falls on you and squashes you flat you try to understand what went wrong, don’t you? I’ve practically gone mad trying to figure it out!”

I shook my head. “I don’t think you’ve really tried, not using your trained brains the way they should be used. I don’t think you ever tackled it systematically and, let’s say, suspiciously. Did you ever analyze your harrowing experiences thoroughly, working on the assumption that everything you believed was true was true, and everything you’d been told was true was probably untrue, no matter who told it to you?”

She looked at me for a moment across the little table, frowning. “I didn’t quite follow all that. Run it past me again, please.”

I said, “I think you never stopped taking certain things for granted. I think you always assumed that certain things were facts that weren’t. I think you believed that certain people had to be telling the truth when they were really lying like hell. And I don’t think you had enough faith in your own feelings and instincts; I don’t think you ever followed your beliefs to their logical conclusions.”

I saw dawning interest in her eyes. “Go on, Matt.”

“Well, let’s start with your husband,” I said. “You don’t for a moment believe he was a traitor-spy, right? You feel he’s dead, probably killed to keep him quiet about something very disturbing he’d discovered—you said he’d had things on his mind those last few weeks—but also to give an impression of guilty flight that automatically condemned him as a criminal and, by association, you as well. Have I got it pretty straight?”

She licked her lips. “Yes. Yes, that’s what I thought—still think—but I could never get anybody to take the idea seriously.”

“Now you’ve got me, you lucky girl,” I said. “So we take that for one of our basic facts: Roy Ellershaw, murdered. You learned it in a dream, nobody’s come up with a body, but so what? Nobody’s come up with a live Roy Ellershaw, either, and they’ve been looking hard. We’re assuming that what we believe is true is true, so let’s see where this takes us. Your Roy hurried out of the house after receiving a mysterious phone call—”

“They claimed it was a warning that he was about to be arrested.”

“I know, you told me; but we pay no attention to their claims. We know they’re all pathological prevaricators, right? We assume that somebody decoyed him out of the house with that call so he could be grabbed and spirited away and killed, perhaps along with the subversive Bella… Where and when was she last seen?”

“Bella Kravecki’s movements on that night don’t seem to have been clearly established,” Madeleine said. “All that ever came out was that when they went to her motel to arrest her she was gone. Well, the man at the desk remembered that she’d stopped by to check for mail and messages a little earlier in the evening. She was wearing jeans as usual, and a purple silk blouse and a big concha belt and a squash-blossom necklace; she’d picked up some Indian jewelry since she’d come to Santa Fe, and she liked to display it. It made her look like a dressed-up horse. All right, I didn’t like her. Neither did Roy. A big, dark, overbearing woman in her early thirties; I guess you could call her handsome. She got a phone call too, they remembered. That’s all anybody knows. When they came for her, her clothes and luggage were still in her room, her rental car was still in its slot in front of her unit, but no Bella.”

“Well, to hell with Bella,” I said. “We don’t know enough about her to theorize about her—except that your husband did
not
run off with her for amorous purposes, right?”

“Roy wouldn’t have touched…!” Madeleine checked herself, and spoke in a subdued voice. “Right.”

I said, “So we assume that your Roy was lured out of his house, your house, so that he could be taken captive. We assume that he was then killed—killed that very night around two in the morning, if we accept your dream, so it probably didn’t happen too far from Santa Fe. Correct?”

Her face was pale. She nodded. “Yes. That’s what I think, what I’ve always thought.”

“How did he die?”

She moistened her lips again. “I don’t know that. How could I know it?”

I said, “I told you you weren’t using those good brains of yours. You heard him scream as he died, didn’t you? If you want to call it hearing. What kind of a scream was it? A scream of pain as they tortured him to death? A last wild cry of protest as somebody put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger?”

She swallowed hard. She closed her eyes for several seconds, recalling that shocking night nine years ago when her successful, beautiful life had, for all practical purposes, come to an end in a dingy cell in the city jail. She opened them again, wide and dark in her pale face.

“It was a… a falling scream, Matt.” Her voice was almost inaudible. “He was falling, falling, screaming, screaming; and then the scream was cut off short… Oh, God!”

After a little, I reached across the table to take her hand. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to get so rough. Do you want to stop?”

She squeezed my fingers lightly and freed herself. “No, I’m all right. Let’s go on with… with your game. Can we figure out where… it was done?”

I said, “You tell me.”

“High?” she said in a tentative way. “A cliff? An airplane? No, if they’d shoved him off, or out of, anything like that, the… the body would have been found eventually, wouldn’t it? Low, then. A well? But they’re mostly drilled wells out there, and nobody could fall down one of those narrow pipes. There are very few dug wells, these days. So, a mine shaft.”

She looked at me for confirmation. I nodded approvingly. “Now you’re getting the idea. It seems likely, doesn’t it? There are dozens of old mines within easy driving distance of Santa Fe. Gold, silver, coal, you name it. Used to be you could wander around that open country at will and you’d find old holes everywhere. Fences were just for cows in those days. If you really wanted to be dog-in-the-manger and keep people off your property you were supposed to use signs, but very few landowners bothered with
POSTED
or
NO TRESPASSING
signs. The good old days of the West. Nowadays the place is crawling with pompous characters with eastern ideas of property who think there’s something sacred about a few lousy strands of barbed wire. And many of the old mines have been bought up, and fenced and locked up, by speculators gambling that they can revive them profitably once the price of whatever-it-is gets up a bit higher. That was true even nine years ago. So you can no longer count on finding a nice accessible deserted mine shaft any time you’ve got a corpse on your hands.”

Madeleine was looking at me curiously. “You sound as if you’d lived in New Mexico a long time. I didn’t realize that.”

“I thought I told you. That was one reason I was picked for this operation.” I shrugged. “Hell, I was brought up in the state; I even lived in Santa Fe for several years, later, back when I was married.” I saw the question in her eyes and went on: “It was nice while it lasted, but she found out a little too much about the nasty character she’d picked to father her children, so she took off with the kids. A very gentle and nonviolent girl. That was back in the days I thought for a while I could turn gentle and nonviolent myself, but somehow it never seemed to work out.” I grimaced. “That was a long time ago. Skip it.”

Madeleine was silent for a little, watching me; then she said, “And later you met your cave girl?”

“My what?”

“The archaeologist lady who knew all about caves, the one who got the same telepathic message from that old high priest you told me about. Your voice changed when you mentioned her. Is she still your… your girl, Matt?”