The Silencers - Страница 2

Доступ к книге ограничен фрагменом по требованию правообладателя.

I frowned at the report, stuck it back in its envelope and dropped it into my suitcase, making no effort to hide it. In addition to giving me some new background material, it was a prop to establish my character here, if anybody came snooping.

I cleaned up a little, went downstairs, and, rather than get the pickup out of hock, paid sixty cents to have a taxi take me to the international bridge. Two cents let me walk across the Rio Grande into Mexico. The river bed was almost dry. The usual skinny dark kids were playing their usual incomprehensible games around the pools below the bridge.

Stepping off the south end of the span, I was in a foreign country. Mexicans will tell you defensively that Juarez isn't Mexico-that no border town is-but it certainly isn't the United States of America, even though Avenida Juarez, the street just south of the bridge, does bear a certain resemblance to Coney Island.

I brushed off a purveyor of dirty pictures and shills for a couple of dirty movie houses. I side-stepped half a dozen taxi drivers ready to take me anywhere, but preferably to the house of a lady named Maria who had lots of girls, it seemed, one of whom, at least, was the girl I'd been looking for since birth. If I didn't like girls, there were interesting alternatives. I was surprised to learn how many.

But the Matthew L. Helm who'd gone to the trouble and expense of hiring a detective agency to find his missing wife would, I figured, be keeping himself pure for the encounter. I stopped at a bar and had a Margarita cocktail, which is an iced, shaken and strained concoction of tequila, Cointreau and lime juice, served in a glass with a salted rim. You still get a cactus taste from the tequila, which some people can't stand, but I've lived in the south-west long enough, off and on, not to mind a little cactus.

I asked the bartender about places to eat. He said La Cucaracha and La Fiesta nightclubs both served excellent food, with good floor shows, too, but it was too early to go there yet. Nine o'clock-eight o'clock Texas time- was about when the first show came on.

"What about the other places?" I asked. "The ones with real entertainment."

He looked at me reproachfully. "I thought you were asking about food, Senor."

I said, "Somebody was telling me about a place called the Club Chihuahua."

"There is such a place," he said. "But you will get no food there. Only liquor and girls. Very bad liquor."

"What about the girls?"

He shrugged. "I will tell you, Mister. My advice, if you want real entertainment-" He glanced around guiltily. "-My advice is, you go to a cat house, if you know what I mean. There, at least, you get real drinks for your money, and you can go to bed with the girls. These other places, they are a big waste of time. They get you all excited, and then what do you do? You still have to find a girl to do it with."

I finally got out of him the fact that the place in which I was interested was up the street from La Fiesta night club, just a block off the street I was on. I walked over that way. With the exception of the nightclub itself, which had a gaudy and impressive front, it was a street of cheap dives, with small knots of shabby, idly talking men blocking the narrow sidewalk here and there. I took a look at the outside of the Club Chihuahua, as dingy as the rest, and got out of there before I succumbed to the temptation of accidentally bumping into a worthy Juarez citizen- hard enough to send him sprawling.

On my way back to the bridge, I stopped to buy my quota of duty-free liquor, one gallon, which I took half in tequila and half in gin. They sell good rum, too, but it's a taste I never acquired. The border whiskey isn't fit to drink. With my armload of bottles, I crossed the river again-it costs one cent going north-and told the man at immigration that I was a U.S. citizen, showed my liquid loot to customs and paid tax on it to the state of Texas, although why Texas should have the right to tax the private liquor of residents of other states has always been a mystery to me.

I came out of the building fairly certain that my activities were a matter of interest to no one-which was what I'd started out to determine in the first place. When I got back to my hotel room, the phone was ringing.

I closed the door, parked my load and went over to pick up the jangling instrument.

"Mr. Helm?" a hearty male voice asked. "This is Pat LeBaron, of Private Investigations, Incorporated. I just wanted to welcome you to our city and make sure you got our last report all right."

"Thank you, Mr. LeBaron," I said. "The report was waiting for me when I arrived."

"You're lucky to have made El Paso today," he said. "It looks as if they're in for some weather up in New Mexico and Colorado. We may even get a taste of it here." He paused. "I saw a dove flying south," he said.

"It will return north soon enough," I said, completing the password I'd been given by Mac. That kind of silly, secret-agent stuff always makes me feel self-conscious, and apparently it affected LeBaron the same way, because he was silent for a moment.

Then he said quickly, "Yes, that's very true, isn't it, Mr. Helm? Spring always comes, if you're around to see it. Is there anything we can do for you while you're in town? I don't want to sound as if I were trying to drum up business, but I thought you might be planning to visit a certain place in Juarez, maybe tonight, and… well, it's not a town you want to wander about alone after dark, if you know what I mean. I feel kind of responsible for bringing you here-"

"How responsible?" I asked.

He laughed. "Well, I'll tell you, we have a set fee for escort work, of course, by the day or hour, but you've been a good client. If you'll just buy me a steak at La Fiesta, I'll go up the street with you afterwards and make sure everything goes okay."

"Well-" I made a show of hesitating.

LeBaron said, quickly and understandingly, "Not that I don't think you're perfectly capable of taking care of yourself, haha, Mr. Helm, but I probably know Juarez a little better than you do. I'll pick you up at eight."

At eight on the dot, he called me on the house phone. I took the elevator down to the lobby. A short, sturdy, dark young man got off a sofa and came up to me. For all the width of his shoulders, he had a sleek, patent-leather gigolo look. He had dead-white skin and brown eyes. I'm a transplanted Scandinavian myself, and I have an instinctive mistrust of brown-eyed people, which I admit is perfectly ridiculous.

"Mr. Helm?" he said, holding out his hand. "I'm Pat LeBaron. I'm real pleased to meet you in person, after all the dealings we've had by mail and phone."

I murmured something appropriate, took his hand and gave him the little-finger signal we have, the one that confirms recognition and, at the same time, tells the other guy who's running the show. His eyes narrowed slightly at my immediate assertion of authority, but he gave me the proper response. We stood like that for a moment, taking stock.

No brotherly love flowed between us in that moment. It never does. It's only in the movies that people in the business are partners unto death, linked by iron bonds of friendship and loyalty. In real life, even if your assigned assistant is someone you might like a lot, you damn well don't let yourself. Why bother to get fond of a guy, when you may have to sacrifice him ruthlessly within the hour?

There seems to be a theory among modem business organizations that a man has got to love all his fellow workers in order to cooperate with them. Mac, thank God, has never made this mistake of confusing affection with efficiency. He knows he'd never get a bunch of happy, friendly guys to do the kind of work that we're doing, the way it's got to be done.

He pointed out to me once, in this regard, that the Three Musketeers and their pal D'Artagnan were no doubt a swell bunch of fellows, and that the relationship between them was a beautiful thing, but that when you studied the record you came to the sad conclusion that Louis the thirteenth would have got a lot more for his money, militarily speaking, by hiring four surly swordsmen who wouldn't give each other the time of day.

So I didn't worry when LeBaron and I didn't take to each other on sight. He was a trained man; I was a trained man, and we had a job to do. I could always find some other guy to get drunk with, afterwards.

"The car's out front," he said, releasing my hand. "If you don't mind, we'll walk from the bridge. Things sometimes happen to American cars parked in Juarez at night. It's bad enough leaving it on this side."

"Whatever you say, Mr. LeBaron," I said.

"Hell, call me Pat."

"Pat and Mart," I said, as we went outside. "It sounds like a comedy team."

He laughed heartily. "Hey, that's a good one, Mr. Helm… I mean, Matt. I'll have to remember to tell my wife."

He drove us to the bridge in a blue year-old Chevy sedan and parked it in a lot under one of the long sheds that keeps the sun in summertime from turning your car into an oven. Not that Juarez, or El Paso, either, is much of a place to go in summer. Last July, when I was in Juarez, the temperature was a hundred and twenty in the shade.

We both paid our two cents, crossed the bridge and walked through the carnival atmosphere of Avenida Juarez. The short block to the nightclub was darker, quieter and less reassuring. Going into La Fiesta, we were set upon by taxi drivers who wanted to take us elsewhere, now or later.

"Cab number five," one man kept shouting. "Hey, Mister! Cab number five!"