The Infiltrators (33 page)

I started to speak and stopped. Outside, somebody started a car and drove it away. Madeleine gave a hard little laugh.

“God, isn’t that ridiculous?” she said harshly. “But you’ve got to remember the kind of girl I was, the way I was brought up. The fact is, I simply can’t bear to be a… an untouchable, like this. I want my lousy respected upper-class status back, damn it! You can snicker anytime. Isn’t that a tacky little ambition for a girl who was once going to set the whole world on fire?”

I looked down at her, lying there, so torn between the shining world she’d lost and the shabby world in which she found herself.

I spoke very carefully: “Since the subject of matrimony was mentioned earlier, let’s explore it a little further. Is there any possibility that you’d feel respectable enough as Mrs. Helm?”

After a startled moment she said, “Matt, you dope, I wasn’t hinting… My God, you gave me back my life in more ways than one, you don’t have to marry the girl!” She frowned at me. “Are you serious?”

“It can’t have escaped your notice, particularly since last night, that I find you attractive,” I said. “And I don’t normally propose to ladies in jest, ma’am. I’ll admit I haven’t given the subject the consideration it deserves. I’ve had a few other things on my mind, like keeping us both alive; but the more I think about it, the more intriguing I find it. At least I’d like to discuss it with you; but you said flatly that you didn’t need a government agent for a husband. Is that a firm decision?”

“Oh, God, Matt, you’re making me feel awful!”

“I see,” I said. It was strange, I reflected, how you could regret the loss of something you hadn’t even known you wanted. “So it is a firm decision.”

She licked her lips. “You’re making it very hard for me… Oh, damn it, I’ll be blunt. As Mrs. Helm I’d be the mysterious wife—with a prison record, yet—of a mysterious man who’s always disappearing to do mysterious, and probably very disreputable, chores for the U.S. government. Very strange couple, my dears; not quite, quite, don’t you know? Matt, that isn’t what I want. That isn’t what I need: to keep on being a subject for gossip and curiosity and speculation the whole rest of my life.” She shook her head quickly. “Not even if a very nice man is included in the package. No.”

There were many things I could have said, but I didn’t say them. She was a bright lady, and she’d have said them all to herself already. She’d obviously been unable to argue against the bitter hurt and shame of coming home a despised ex-convict; and if she couldn’t convince herself, what chance had I?

“So what’s the battle plan now?” I asked.

She glanced at me warily. “No arguments, Matt?”

I grinned. “You’re thinking I can’t want you very much to give up so easily. You don’t understand. This is where I display my true nobility of character for you to remember if your plans ever change. This is where, if the dumb female I happen to want wants something or somebody else, I give the idiot wench all the help I can. All the time knowing that she’s making a terrible mistake of course; she’d be much better off with wonderful me. And hoping she’ll come to her senses and realize it.”

She swallowed hard. “Now you’re making me cry.”

“No law against it. But you’ll have to supply your own hanky, this birthday suit is a little short of pockets.”

She sniffed a couple of times, and gulped a bit. Then she said, with careful steadiness, “First, I want to be cleared, exonerated, vindicated. Totally and completely. There’ll always be a… a stigma, of course; prison is prison no matter how you got there. But maybe in time people will forget, if I do nothing conspicuous to remind them.”

I said, “Even if Waldemar Baron doesn’t come through as promised, I think we can probably manage to arrange that. So let’s take it from the point where you’re a full citizen again with your reputation publicly rehabilitated and all your civil rights restored. That won’t be good enough?”

“No, Matt. You know it won’t. I’ll still be a public freak, a curiosity, a woman with a past, somebody people whisper about.”

“Move one state over and not a soul will recognize the name.”

“No! I have that much pride at least. I’m going to find it—what I’m looking for—right here where I lost it. I’m going to cram myself down their lousy throats and make them accept me again, all the ones who rejected me. But to hell with all my big career ambitions. It’s been going on too long, Matt, and I’m too tired, and too far behind after all the lost years, to make a fresh start and try to catch up. I just want…” She paused, and drew a long breath, and went on: “This is very cold-blooded and you’ll despise me for it, but I intend to marry a certain very straight and respectable young lawyer—I think he’s willing, or I can make him willing—and be the best wife to him I possibly can, and the best mother to his children if it comes to that; and maybe one day when I walk into a store the manager won’t even remember that the dame was once notorious. He’ll just remember she’s the rather attractive, or at least well-preserved, spouse of a prominent citizen and pays her bills on time. That’s all the ambition I have left, Matt.”

“Sure.” I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead in chaste brotherly fashion. “You want a Maxon, lady, we’ll get you a Maxon. But I think we’ll have a better chance of tracking down a good specimen if we don’t let ourselves starve to death. There’s a meal called breakfast you seem to have forgotten.”

“Matt.”

“Yes, Madeleine.”

She reached out to touch the healing scar on my naked shoulder, the nasty-looking place in front where the late Maxie Reis’s expanding 7mm rifle bullet had emerged, taking a bit of me with it. The entry wound behind was merely a cute pink dimple.

Madeleine licked her lips. “I’m… not thanking you very well for saving my life.”

I was a very patient and forbearing fellow, but I didn’t have to take that kind of crap. “That,” I said, “was a stupid and insulting thing to say, Mrs. Ellershaw; and don’t ever let me get the idea that you’re considering entering my bed, or my home, for some screwy notions of girlish gratitude. Maybe you’d better get out of that slightly beat-up glamour gown and into some jeans. You’re not so pretty in pants, but you seem to make more sense.”

That left a certain coolness between us; and at breakfast we discussed the day’s plans in a very businesslike manner. She had her ten o’clock appointment with the lawyer, Joe Birnbaum, of course; and after that—well, after lunch—she’d initiate me into the mysteries of certain state buildings where old property records were stored. Since I wasn’t about to let her wander around those offices alone and unprotected, I might as well help. She’d show me how to assist her in searching for the mining property in which we were interested.

“But it’s an awfully long shot,” Madeleine said dubiously. “Now that I’ve had time to think about it…”

I said, “You’re feeling pretty negative today, aren’t you?”

“It’s… kind of a negative world, Matt. I just keep forgetting it now and then. And this property search… I mean, even if the shaft we’re looking for does exist, it doesn’t have to be recorded as a mine. There are a lot of big ranch properties with old forgotten diggings on them, for instance. And anyway, the whole theory is based on a crazy-lady’s crazy dream.”

“It’s been nine years,” I said. “Nine years since young Dr. Roy Ellershaw told the girl he’d married that he was just stepping out of their pleasant home for a moment and would be right back to take her out to a gala celebration dinner. Nine years of lonely hell for the wife he left behind. Would he have left you to face all that by yourself, Madeleine, if there had been any way he could possibly get back to you?”

She shook her head. “No. We’ve been through all that. No, Roy is dead. I know that. But the mine and the shaft… that’s stretching intuition or ESP or whatever you want to call it pretty far.”

We’d both got up, finished with our meals, and I took her bright ski jacket from the back of her chair and helped her into it. She was still wearing the same skintight jeans, and the same high-heeled sandals, but today she had on an elaborate white Mexican wedding shirt, prettily ruffled and rather becoming. However, instead of buttoning it up properly like a modest señorita, she’d left it hanging partly open in front, in sexy peek-a-boo fashion. Of course, the idea of buttoning any shirt or blouse tidily, even if it was designed to be worn that way, seems to be considered positively subversive these days—wearing a necktie comes under the heading of high treason, of course. Madeleine’s heels rapped smartly on the tiled floor as we headed through the lobby towards the motel’s front door.

I said, “Alive or dead, your husband didn’t vanish from the face of the earth. He’s got to be somewhere. So, assuming he’s dead, as we both think, let’s look in the likely spots where he wouldn’t be found under normal circumstances. Even if we disregard your dream, a mine shaft ranks pretty high among the places a body could stay hidden indefinitely in this country.”

“Well, all right,” she said ungraciously. “By all means let’s go look for your hole in the ground. As soon as I’ve seen Joe Birnbaum and learned what kind of a two-bit heiress I… Oh, my God! That lousy, jealous little bitch!”

She’d stopped to stare at the morning paper visible behind the transparent cover of the vending machine by the front door. One of the smaller photographs on the front page showed a face that was recognizable as hers, but only barely.

I dropped a quarter into the slot, opened the machine and took out two papers, and gave one to her. Brought up honest, I put in an extra quarter for the extra copy I’d taken, and closed the machine. Then, not looking at Madeleine but hearing her paper rustle as she opened it, I unfolded my own to read the story, noting that the admiral’s offspring had even got herself a byline, by God. Well, I guess it helps when your daddy owns the rag.

“MONSTROUS INJUSTICE” CLAIMED

by Evangeline Lowery
The Daily Journal Staff

SANTA FE
—Former Santa Fe attorney and society figure, Madeleine Rustin Ellershaw, recently released from the federal penitentiary at Fort Ames, Missouri, after serving an eight-year sentence for crimes related to the national security, has returned home, she says, to set the record straight…

That much was pretty straightforward, but then it got rough. There was a resume of the events preceding the trial, and of the trial itself, which gave the impression that the pretty young wife of Dr. Roy Ellershaw, left behind to take the rap by her fleeing genius husband and his seductive Commie accomplice, had been caught red-handed with stolen top-secret scientific documents in one hand and a fistful of roubles in the other. Mrs. Ellershaw would be remembered as a smart and popular young member of a prominent local family, employed by a well-known local law firm. Now disbarred from her profession, and displaying the grim effects of her long incarceration, Mrs. Ellershaw, 34, had been interviewed in her cheap motel room dressed in soiled jeans and T-shirt. Brandishing a drink in her hand, Mrs. Ellershaw had loudly proclaimed her intention of proving that she’d been framed by the prosecution, betrayed by her own lawyers, and railroaded into prison by an impressionable jury and an incompetent judge.

The photograph heading the column showed an aging, angry woman with a raddled face and untidy hair. There was also, much as I’d predicted, a smaller cut showing a glamorous young Mrs. Ellershaw at the time of her marriage, in glorious wedding attire. I’d forgotten what a lovely young girl she’d been. Even though I knew the tricks that had been used for the more recent shot—and, for that matter, for the super-flattering wedding portrait—I found the contrast between the two pictures heartbreaking. When Madeleine made a little sound beside me, I glanced her way apprehensively.

But she was laughing wryly. “‘Brandishing a drink in her hand,’” she said. “What the hell was I supposed to brandish it in, my foot? But the kid isn’t as dopey as she looks. She writes a mean story, doesn’t she? And takes a mean picture? God, don’t I look
awful
?”

“Madeleine—”

She laughed again. I could detect no hysteria in the sound. It was good, healthy, if somewhat rueful, laughter.

“Relax, Matt. I’m not going to kill myself again. As a matter of fact, as far as this story’s concerned, it couldn’t be better, could it? Not only for you, but for me.”

“I don’t understand.”

She said quietly, “People don’t like seeing people kicked around, Matt. Normal people don’t, not really. The vicious little brat has done me a favor. Yesterday I was a dangerous spy and traitor in the eyes of a lot of folks who just knew I’d been in the pen but didn’t really remember the whole story. But now it’s all out in the open again, and I’m merely a poor loving girl who stupidly helped out the husband she doted on, a treacherous fiend who then deserted her for another woman.”

She drew a long breath, and folded up the paper deliberately, and tossed it into a nearby waste receptacle. She took mine and did the same thing to it.

“Don’t you see, darling, I’m no longer a sinister female menace,” she said. “I’m just a pitiful dumb wife who, even if she was technically guilty as her husband’s accomplice, has paid for her crime; and who might just be an innocent patsy like she claims. And who, now that she’s come crawling home broke and shabby, leaving her youth and her looks behind in prison, is being picked on by a great big powerful newspaper that ought to have the decency to leave the poor thing alone—hasn’t she been punished enough already?” Madeleine glanced at me. “Matt, I’m sorry. I woke up so damn depressed and kind of took it out on you. But I’m all right now.” She looked at her watch and took my arm. “It’s getting late, let’s go see Uncle Joe.”

As we walked downtown together, I asked myself how I’d managed to survive so long without understanding other people at all, particularly people of the opposite sex. I glanced at the woman marching along beside me at a brisk pace more suited to her practical trousers than her impractical high-heeled shoes, and wondered a little resentfully why being made love to by me last night should have left her in despair, while being slandered and ridiculed in the public press this morning seemed to have cheered her up tremendously. But I reminded myself that there are times when even I don’t make much sense to anybody, even myself.