The Silencers - Страница 3

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LeBaron nudged me lightly. I glanced surreptitiously towards the yelling driver, a dark individual with a strong Indian cast to his features. Then we were inside.

Even though I'd been there before, years ago, it was something of a shock, after the gaudy front of the building and the sidewalk hubbub, to be standing suddenly on thick carpeting in a place as hushed and elegant as a good Eastern or European restaurant.

"You saw Jesus?" LeBaron asked softly. He pronounced the name Haysoos, in the Spanish manner. "If we get in a jam, he'll try to bail us out."

"Good enough," I said.

He started to say something else, but the headwaiter came up, bowed and showed us to a small table at the side of the room. LeBaron ordered bourbon whiskey, specifying the brand. I'm always tempted to switch bottles on a guy like that, to see if he can really tell the difference. I ordered a Martini and had another on top of it. No more Margaritas for Mr. Matthew Helm from California. He was no longer in an experimental mood. He was fortifying himself for the ordeal ahead with liberal portions of a known tipple.

As far as I could see, I could have ordered milk or prune juice, and it would have made no difference. Nobody around us showed the slightest interest.

"Is anybody watching this show, do you know?" I asked.

"Or are we just performing to an empty theater?"

"We're just doing it for fun," LeBaron said, "unless rye goofed somewhere along the line. In which case we're still just private dick and client."

He had the tough and unreliable look, I thought, of a pool-hall character, and his clothes were flashy enough to point up the resemblance. Well, we can't all look like 0-men. He was supposed to be a private investigator, after all, and it's not the most respectable profession in the world.

"How long have you been using this private-eye cover?"

I asked.

"Three years," he said. "My wife thinks the government check that comes through once a month is a disability pension from the Veterans' Administration. That's the way it's marked. Well, it's none of her damn business. She's glad enough to get the money and spend it, too."

"Sure."

"Before that, I was in the insurance business in San Francisco. Same deal. Piddle along at a lousy little job until the phone rings and a voice tells you to drop everything… Well, you know how it is."

I nodded, although I didn't really know. I'd never had this kind of long-term standby duty. There had been a war on when I joined the organization, and they broke us in fast. The waiter came up. I ordered steak because that was the safe and conservative thing Mr. Helm from California would order tonight. LeBaron ordered steak, too, but he couldn't just say medium rare, he had to make like a gourmet, describing the exact shade of pink he expected to greet his first exploratory incision with the knife.

Waiting for him to finish briefing the waiter, I watched a couple come in and sit near the dance floor. The woman was quite pretty, with soft light-brown hair done in one of those big, loose, haystack arrangements currently fashionable. Her gleaming light-blue cocktail dress was cut very simply and fitted very nicely indeed; the little fur jacket she casually shrugged back was of a pale golden color no animal had ever heard of when I was a kid, but they can get a mink to do the damndest things these days.

In contrast to her smart and attractive appearance, the man looked as if he'd dressed for roping cows-boots, stagged pants, checked gingham shirt, suede sports jacket. He was one of those tall, hipless Texas characters who always act as if they'd mislaid a horse somewhere-that is, until you get them out into the back country and show them a real pony with an honest-to-God saddle on it, and it turns out they were never closer to one than in the nearest jeep.

The two of them showed no more interest in us that did anyone else in the place, but something about the woman kept drawing my attention their way. When LeBaron had completed his gustatory arrangements, I gave him the signal, and after a while he turned around casually and looked. He turned back to me and gave the negative sign: he'd never seen her before. Well, that was all right for him, but I'd been something of a photographer once, for a good many years. Faces had been my business, and this one meant something to me, I wasn't quite sure what.

"Not that I'd mind having a piece of it," he said, seeing me still looking that way.

I brought my eyes back where they belonged. "Yeah,"

I said. "Sure. Not bad at all."

I mean, with a certain type of guy, you've got to pretend to be leching after every woman in sight or he'll think you're not normal. It turned out that my new assistant was one of those who, having once started, could discuss the subject indefinitely. I'd had a long day and several drinks, and I found it hard to keep from yawning. Not that sex itself bores me, you understand, but talking about it just seems like a pointless form of masturbation.

Presently the waiter shut him up by presenting us with our steaks. The orchestra began to play. It was a typical Mexican band, built around a single strident trumpet with power enough to knock you across the room. When Gabriel blows his horn, nobody in Mexico is going to pay any attention-they'll think it's only Pedro or Miguel practicing for the evening's mariachi performance.

A sleek Latin-type male sang a song about his corazуn. In case you're not up on your Spanish, that's his heart. A very blonde girl in a spangled black dress did some singing, too, as she danced around the floor with the mike, kicking the cord aside when it got in her way. A man in a dinner jacket came out and was funny with a xylophone. That was it for the floor show. By then it was ten fifteen and time to go.

IV

Outside, we ran the gantlet of taxi drivers and shills and the porteros of the various joints we passed who did their best to collar us and haul us into their respective establishments. A tall, gaunt, evil-looking character with a knife-slash across his nose was playing safety man for the Club Chihuahua. We let him make the tackle. It took him less than fifteen seconds to get us seated at a table in a dark room with a bar at one end and a girl undressing on a lighted stage at the other.

The stage was actually a rectangular, slightly raised dance floor surrounded by tables on three sides. At the far end was a curtain, an orchestra, a mike and a master of ceremonies.

"All the way, Corinne!" the M.C. was shouting into the mike. He pronounced the name Coreen. "All the way!"

The girl was quite young, quite dark and had a sultry, childish look. Doing a little dance step in time to the music, she dropped her long, confining red dress, constructed so as not to make this operation particularly difficult. Then she did a rudimentary dance with some veils floating from her waistband. Flicking them teasingly at the ringside customers, she disposed of these also. This left her barefoot-she'd already shed her red high-heeled shoes-and in a red satin brassiere and little red satin panties with the approximate coverage of a Bikini bathing suit.

"Jeez, look at that kid!" said LeBaron admiringly. "She can't be a day over sixteen, but Jeez!"

I said, "You must have had it tough, keeping an eye on this place."

He glanced at me. "Don't knock it just because you don't dig it, man. So I like to look at girls. It's a crime?" He looked past me. "Oh, oh. Here come the bags."

The portero was ushering a couple of women out of the shadows to sit with us. Mine wasn't too bad-a full-blown dark lady in a short, tight gun-metal gray dress with a little jacket-but LeBaron's prize was swarthy and heavy, not to say fat, with a rough sweater and skirt on that made her look like a female wrestler.

"Hi, boys," LeBaron's girl said. "I am Elena. This is Dolores."

LeBaron performed the introductions from our side. The women sat down, and we ordered drinks which were put on the table almost before we said the word.

"All the way!" the M.C. was shouting. "Take it off! All the way, Corinne!"

The girl was still dancing barefoot around the stage-if you could call it dancing. She was a well-built kid, I had to admit, and she seemed to be enjoying herself, which was nice.

My lady, Dolores, stroking the back of my neck affectionately, was watching the show. "She is India-Indian. You do not have to hurry with your drink, honee. I will not hurry with mine. You will see. This is a friendly place, not a robbery like some of those others."

The dusky young girl on the stage unhooked her red brassiere, snatched it off and ducked behind the curtains, waving it and laughing.

"A child," Dolores said scornfully. "She cannot dance; she cannot sing; all she can do is walk around and take off the clothes. When I was of that age-"

"Where are you from, Dolores?" I asked.

"Chihuahua City, but there is no money there. Here I can still make thirty-five cents a drink. It is a living…"

Busy making conversation, I'd missed the M.C. introducing the next performer. I'd been listening for the name, of course, but he threw me off momentarily by pronouncing it Leela in the Spanish way. Suddenly she was there, the curtains stirring behind her then becoming still.

After the solidly built young Indian girl who'd preceded her, she looked seven feet tall. She wore a yellow satin dress that left her shoulders bare but encased her smoothly from breasts to knees, flaring below to give her a little room to move. Her hair had been dyed black since I'd last seen her. It made her look harder and older than I remembered her.