Donald Hamilton - The Menacers

I ALWAYS FEEL A little bad about smuggling a firearm through Mexican customs. The boys in khaki make their inspection so nice and casual you feel you're taking advantage of their courtesy. Of course, if you're found in their country later with an unregistered gun, particularly a revolver or pistol, and most particularly a big.45 auto-the Mexican Army caliber-they'll throw you in jail and lose the key, but that's a chance you take in a good many countries with much less violent histories than Mexico.

Mine wasn't a.45, just a little.38 Special, and it was pretty well hidden in a compartment designed for the purpose, so I wasn't really worried when the man approached my suitcase. I needn't have given it a thought. He saw that I stood innocently ready with the key, so he didn't even make me open it. He just hefted it briefly to determine, perhaps, if I was packing any large gold ingots or weight-lifting equipment. A moment later my bag was on its way out to the plane on the ramp.

I had to wait half an hour longer, with a lot of other people, before they'd let me aboard. The Juarez terminal building isn't air-conditioned; however, Mexican beer is very cooling and it was good to be working again after spending most of the summer at the goddamn ranch.

The goddamn ranch-we hardly ever call it just the ranch-is located in Arizona, which is no place to be in summer. But even with ideal weather, the goddamn ranch is no place to be. It's where we're sent when somebody decides a thorough mental and physical overhaul is required. I wasn't really in bad shape, but 1 had collected a scar or two, and perhaps a disturbing memory or two, since the last time they'd checked me out, and that spring there was apparently nowhere in the world that my talents were needed for the moment, so 1 was shipped to Arizona for a good going-over.

I'd finally managed to get myself sprung by claiming urgent personal business in nearby Santa Fe, New Mexico-well, it's only some five hundred miles away-but not before I'd been given the works in every department from psychiatry to marksmanship. I was so damn healthy and efficient and dangerous I could hardly stand myself. I'd been in Santa Fe, where I'd lived in a previous incarnation, trying to tear myself down a bit at the local bistros with the help of an attractive acquaintance of many years' standing-named Carol, if you must know-when word had come through, never mind how, that I should transport myself to Mexico City immediately by the most direct and rapid method available.

This happened to be, to start with, a small commercial prop plane that fluttered down to El Paso in an erratic manner, touching earth here and there on the way. From the El Paso airport an eager taxi driver had rushed me south across the border into Juarez and halfway through Mexico, it seemed, before he caught up with the elusive Juarez airport somewhere far south of that city and collected his seven bucks fare.

He could have saved some of his Stirling-Moss-type efforts. I had time to spare, plenty of time in which to show my passport to the Mexican immigration man and receive my tourist card from him, and to smile at the nice customs official who passed my suitcase containing the little Smith amp; Wesson revolver and some other gear that he'd probably have found interesting, had he come across it…

The Aeronaves de Mexico plane also had a few stops to make, so we didn't reach Mexico City until well after dark. I got into a taxi with some other people-they have kind of communal airport cabs down there-and gave the name of the hotel at which I'd been instructed to stay. The driver wasn't sure he'd ever heard of a hostelry called the Monte Carlo, but I had the address, and he finally managed to get himself going the right way on a narrow, dark, grubby one-way street in an older part of town. He pulled up dubiously before a tremendous, dark, shabby doorway above which burned a small illuminated sign with the right name on it.

Well, it's only in the movies that a man in my profession gets to spend all his time in the best hotels surrounded by the most beautiful girls. I retrieved my suitcase, gave the man some U.S. currency since I didn't have any pesos, and approached the great doors cautiously. I mean, I supposedly had the word straight from Washington, but codes have been compromised before. There are, unfortunately, a few people in the world who don't like me, and one of them could be in Mexico, D.F.-which is what they call their capital city, the equivalent of our Washington, D.C.

It was, in other words, a good place for a trap, but nothing happened when I stepped inside. I just found myself in the spacious lobby of what had once, obviously, been a magnificent luxury hotel, now grown rather old and tired. A polite individual in a neat dark suit came around the desk to introduce himself as the manager and to ask, in perfect English, if I was Mr. Helm, Mr. Matthew Helm, who had a reservation.

When I said I was, he had a boy relieve me of my bag, and personally escorted me up a great marble staircase guarded by a fine brass railing that was nicely polished but didn't look as if, after all these years, it would bear a great deal of weight. He established me in a room with a ceiling at least fifteen feet high and made me promise that, if anything was needed for my comfort, I would call him at once.

After he'd departed, taking the bellboy with him, I looked around my quarters. I decided that I liked the place. It wasn't just another nylon-carpeted cell in another chrome-plated beehive. It had character. It also had clean sheets on the beds, and a full complement of working plumbing in the bathroom, including that practical European gadget known as a bidet. I was inspecting this curiosity when the telephone rang. I went back into the bedroom and picked it up.

"Seсor Helm?" said an accented voice in my ear.

"This is Helm," I said.

"You seem to be in the clear so far," the voice said. "Nobody's tailing you that we can see. How do you like your accommodations? Very picturesque, don't you think, amigo? Hah! These people with their urgent missions, they expect one to perform instant housing miracles in the middle of the tourist season! Anyway, in that grand old place you can probably trust your phone; nobody'd bother to bug it since nobody stays there any more. I have a call for you. Just a minute." There was a silence as the relay man worked on the connection. He was a man I would probably never see, and if I saw him I wouldn't know him, and that was the way he liked it. His voice reached me again, speaking to someone else: "I have Helm on the line now. Go ahead, sir."

"Eric?" said a faraway man whose voice I recognized, using my code name, as was his custom. At least I thought he was far away. I figured he was probably calling from Washington, but of course he could have been right around the corner, modern communications being what they are.

"Eric here, sir," I said, and we went through some mandatory secret-agent stuff to satisfy the rule book.

Mac said, "You have a reservation on Mexicana Airlines Flight 906 leaving at eight-twenty tomorrow morning for Guadalajara, Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlбn, Guaymas, and Los Angeles. You will get off at Mazatlбn, which is, I believe, a west coast port, beach resort, and sport-fishing center, of some seventy-five thousand people. An agent will make preliminary contact with you at the airport. You will check into the Hotel Playa Mazatlбn, about three miles north of town, and behave like a vacationing tourist until she gets in touch with you again."

"She?" I said.

"Your contact is female, brunette, under thirty, and not unattractive, I'm informed. She is going under the name-it may be her own-of Priscilla Decker. She will be wearing white linen trousers, a flowered silk blouse, dark glasses, and one of those crazy palm-leaf hats that are sold on the beach. The adjective is not mine. I thought female trousers were not approved for public wear in Mexico."