The Silencers (5 page)

I said, “We don’t carry badges. They have a habit of cropping up at inconvenient moments.”

“I’m supposed to take your word for it?”

“It would make things easier on both of us,” I said.

“I don’t doubt it would make things easier for you!” she said scornfully. “But you’re forgetting one thing, aren’t you? I was there. I saw it. Mary Jane didn’t want to give you anything. She didn’t want to tell you anything. You were standing right over us, and she looked you straight in the eye and turned to me. How do you explain that, Mister So-called Agent?”

“I don’t explain it,” I said. “I don’t have to.”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

I said, “When we have finished in this room, please remember that I told you the truth from the very start. I told you that I am an agent of the U.S. Government. I asked you to turn over to me certain property and information given you by your sister, a member of the same undercover organization as myself. These are facts. I probably shouldn’t have revealed them to you, and I may even catch hell for doing it, but I’m putting my cards on the table and asking you nicely—”

She said, “My dear man, if you expect me to believe you without any evidence whatever, you must think me an awful fool!”

“Oh, I do,” I said gently. “I think you’re the sophisticated kind of fool who’d rather play safe and assume all men are liars than risk trusting one and maybe have him make a sap out of you. But I had to give you a chance, if only for your sister’s sake.”

She said angrily, “Why in heaven’s name should I trust you, a man I’ve never seen before! A man who ran out and left his friend in the lurch!”

“Don’t talk about things you know nothing about, Gail,” I said. “When two men on the same team are running down a field, and one is carrying a football, does he lay down the ball when trouble occurs and go back to help his poor outnumbered teammate, or does he keep plugging for the goal?”

“It’s not quite the same thing! This is... I don’t know what it is, but it certainly isn’t a game!”

“No, and you’re not a football, either. But the principle remains.” I looked around for something you find in most hotel rooms. It wasn’t in plain sight, but I found it in a dresser drawer—a Gideon Bible. I placed my hand upon it and looked the woman in the eye. “What I have told you is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.”

I put the Bible away. There was a little silence; then Gail shook her head quickly. It was corn and she was no goose; she wasn’t going to swallow it.

“Mary Jane obviously didn’t want you to have it,” she said. “I can’t just take your word. If you had
something
to prove—”

I said, “It would take me anywhere from a couple of hours to a day or two to get proof here that would satisfy you. That’s too long to sit in this room watching to make sure you don’t do something clever with what you’re carrying, or just something perverse to spite me. We’d both get pretty damn tired of it, not to mention such details as eating, sleeping, and going to the john. I’ll tell you this. Mary Jane’s feeling against me was probably personal. We got at cross purposes once, we got our signals mixed...” I told her about the incident in San Antonio. “That was before she was assigned a job that involved undressing in public and got over being embarrassed by the idea. I know of no other reason why she should have acted the way she did tonight.”

That was still the truth, if only just barely. I didn’t know of a reason, even though Mac’s attitude had indicated there might be one.

Gail hesitated, watching me. “What were you and Janie doing in San Antonio?”

I said, “That comes under the heading of classified information.”

“What branch of the government do you work for?”

“Same answer.”

She said, “If you’re really a government man, why did you have to smuggle me through immigration, with a pretend gun in my ribs?”

I said, “For one thing, I was afraid they might separate us before I got my story told and confirmed; I didn’t want to let you out of my sight. For another thing, my chief doesn’t like us letting other government agencies into the act when it isn’t absolutely necessary.” I paused, and went on: “Gail, I’ve already told you more than I should. There are a million questions you could ask, most of which I couldn’t answer, either because I don’t know the answer or because I’m not free to give it. And at the end of it, you’d still have to look at me and decide whether I was lying or telling the truth. So let’s not waste the time. Make up your mind. Are you going to trust me or aren’t you?”

I saw at once that I’d overdone it. The word “trust” killed it. You can use it once, kind of diffidently, but essentially it’s a dirty, conniving, treacherous, sneaking word these days. If you ask somebody to trust you, twice, he knows you’re playing him for a sucker—if he’s smart, and she was smart. Nobody was going to put one over on her.

“No!” she said.

I drew a long breath. “Well, in that case... It seems that every time I meet one of the Springer girls, I have to ask her to take her clothes off.”

She stared at me, shocked. “My dear man—”

I took a step forward. “As they said in that place: all the way, Gail. All the way.”

She took a step backwards and wound up against the dresser. She drew herself up in a dignified way. “Really—”

I said, “You’re being pretty silly. You’re not Mary Jane. You can’t possibly be embarrassed, not a woman who’s had four husbands and a Sam Gunther, at the very least. Incidentally, if you try to scream or go for the phone or anything like that, you’ll wind up sitting on the floor with all the wind knocked out of you.”

She said angrily, “You wouldn’t dare! If you think you can bluff me again—”

There was that, of course. I was starting from behind; I’d already bluffed her once, with a ball-point pen, and it rankled. She wasn’t going to fall for my tough-guy act again. She knew that behind my crusty exterior lurked a marshmallow heart.

If it had only been a matter of searching her, I might still have tried to work it our peacefully, but she not only had to be made to give me something, she had to be made to tell me something. I had to impress her, somehow, with my fundamentally vicious nature. Now she was talking again, in her haughty and indignant way, and her attitude gave me a pain, anyway. I just reached out and yanked the dress off her.

It didn’t come off quite as easily as that, of course. It wasn’t a movie break-away garment or a stripper’s dress with a smooth-working full-length zipper. It was a smart and expensive and well-constructed cocktail dress of strong material—as I said, my grandmother used that shiny figured stuff for upholstery purposes—so I had to get a good grip and pull down quite hard, twice, slantingly right and left, just to break it loose from her shoulders and out from under her furs.

She took a moment to realize what was happening; then she grabbed for the dress as it tore away, and we had a breathless and undignified struggle over the garment before I captured her wrists and got them into my left hand. With my right, I got another grip on the slick, heavy brocade, which had slipped to her waist as we wrestled. Holding her by the wrists, I gave a long, slashing, sideways jerk that ripped open the seam down the side. A final tug burst it apart at the hem, and I had it all.

I stepped back, releasing her. She started after me instinctively, reaching out, but checked herself, realizing, I guess, that even if she could get it back, the crumpled rag I was holding wouldn’t do her much good.

We faced each other like that. She looked kind of silly standing there in her furs, her long white gloves, her blue high-heeled pumps—plus brassiere, pantie-girdle and stockings. She looked like one of those leggy pinups, you see in bars and garages, that are always getting their skirts snagged on barbed-wire fences in interesting ways. But she wasn’t quite as young as those models. Not that there was anything aged about her face and figure. She just wasn’t a laughing, teasing kid, that’s all. She was a grown woman, humiliated and furious.

I said, “All the way, Gail.”

She started to speak and couldn’t; she was too angry. And the terrible thing is there was nothing she could do about it, dressed as she now was, that wouldn’t look perfectly ridiculous and at the same time rather provocative. She had the sense to know it, and she drew a long, uneven breath, and forced a rueful smile with all the warmth and sincerity of a Borgia kiss.

“Well!” she breathed. “A man of direct action!”

“I gave you a chance,” I said. “I gave you every chance in the world. You wouldn’t believe me, not even with the Bible thrown in. Now I ask you again, do you give me what I’m looking for or do I have to strip you completely to get it?”

She glanced down and grimaced. “Damn you. That dress cost me a hundred and seventy-five dollars last week in Dallas. I’d never worn it before.” After a moment, she said wryly, “Well, I can’t see much point in putting up a losing battle for my girdle and bra. Here.” She reached two fingers inside her brassiere, pulled something out and gave it to me. I took it and found it to be a small metal cylinder wrapped in something sticky, like double-faced Scotch tape. That would make it easy to hide, under the hair or elsewhere; it would stay put. Inside the cylinder was a tight roll of microfilm. I don’t know how the undercover professions got along before the stuff was invented.

I glanced up briefly. Gail had peeled off her long gloves and was removing her mink jacket, which was smart if not modest. A fashionable lady, gloved and furred for the street, who suddenly misplaces her dress, is a rather comical sight, but there’s nothing funny about a beautiful woman in stockings and undergarments. It can be irresistible, or it can be merely embarrassing, but it isn’t funny. She came to stand beside me—now deliberately unself-conscious about her half-clad state— and took cigarettes and a lighter from her purse on the dresser. I didn’t stop her.

“What is it?” she asked.

I had pried the microfilm out of its tiny cartridge. There were only five exposures on the strip, and it had been rolled so tightly it was difficult to handle. I could barely make out the letterhead on the first frame. The rest of the printing was much too tiny to decipher with the naked eye. I rolled up the strip, returned it to the cartridge and put it in my pocket.

“Well?” she said,

I shook my head. “It’s none of your business, certainly, and maybe none of mine. Anyway, I can’t read it without a viewer.” This wasn’t quite true. As an ex-photographer, I travel with a bunch of camera junk among which is an achromatic seven-power magnifier that would have done the job after a fashion, but at the moment I had more important matters to concern me. “Now give me the rest of it,” I said.

She smiled slowly, lit the cigarette she had placed between her lips and blew smoke at me. She was a beautiful woman without too many clothes on, and she knew it.

“Make me,” she said.

I said wearily, “Gail, you never learn, do you?”

Her eyes narrowed slightly. “What do you mean?”

I said, “Haven’t you got it through your pretty head yet that I’m going to get that information from you, one way or another?”

“It sounds—” She blew more smoke at me. “—it sounds as if you were planning to torture me. How quaint!”

I said, “Don’t talk about torture as if you know what it meant. You haven’t the slightest idea.”

She smiled slowly. “Then tell me.”

I’d shaken her for a moment, or my violence had, but she’d recovered fast. Losing a dress was, after all, not really a tragedy. She’d undoubtedly had several nice dresses torn or hopelessly mussed in her life—I judged it had been that kind of a life—and she’d made a man pay for every one of them. She was going to try to make me pay for this one, sooner or later. In the meantime, she was going to make me as uncomfortable as possible, lounging there sexily with a cigarette between her fingers.

“Tell me,” she murmured. “Tell me about torture, darling.”

“Very well,” I said. “There are two forms. One is long and sure. It consists of breaking the subject’s will to resist by inflicting severe pain and physical injury— but not fatally—over extended periods of time, combined with other forms of humiliation and hardship that add to the psychological effect. No one is immune to this. During the war, for instance, many brave and dedicated underground workers betrayed their comrades after being in the hands of the Gestapo for a while. This was expected, and operations were therefore conducted by small units, the other members of which fled to safety as a matter of course the minute one person was captured.”

She put the cigarette to her lips. “Go on, Professor.”

I said, “No one should ever criticize the man who breaks under prolonged torture, except to say that he shouldn’t have let himself be captured alive in the first place. In our business, if an agent has information that’s important and dangerous, it’s taken for granted that he’ll kill himself rather than be captured. He’s given the stuff to do it with. It’s the only sure way even a trained and loyal man, or woman, can keep from being made to talk.”

Gail said, “And is this what you’re going to do to me?” I thought her voice sounded just a trifle shrill.

I shook my head. “I haven’t the time or the facilities, and I don’t think I need to.”

“What does that mean?”

“Just what it says,” I said. “I don’t think I need to break you that way, Gail. An attractive woman is very vulnerable. The second form of torture is a kind of bargain. You tell the subject what you can do to him— or to her. You show that you’re ready and willing to do it. And then you ask if he—or she—really is willing to have these unpleasant and fairly permanent things done to him—or to her—just for the sake of a little information that probably isn’t very important, anyway.”

She said, sharply, “You seem to think it’s important enough!” Then she drew a long breath and said, “You wouldn’t dare! If you really are a government man—”

I said, “For God’s sake, Gail, make up your mind! If I’m really a government man, there’s no problem, is there? You can tell me what you know with a clear conscience. In fact, it’s your duty to do so.” I waited. “Well?”