Donald Hamilton: The Ravagers

I said, "Throw in a drink and a roast beef sandwich and it's a deal."

She laughed and turned away. It was a break of sorts, I thought wryly, watching her walk off. Without expending any effort, I'd learned that I had, after all, been observed earlier. I was now taking steps to identify the observer, as I'd been instructed to do.

SHE WAS standing at the dresser in the corner, operating on the cap of an interesting-looking bottle, when I entered the hotel room after knocking on the door and being told it was unlocked, come in.

"Your sandwich is over on the T\T," she said without looking around. "Help yourself, Mr. Clevenger. I'm sorry, they didn't bring up any mustard or catsup."

I said, "Who needs it? At the moment I could eat the damn cow with the hair on."

I went over and took a couple of bites and felt stirrings of returning strength and intelligence. I swung around to look at the small, wiry girl across the room. She was wearing slim black pants, a long-sleeved white silk shirt, and a little open black vest. What the costume was supposed to represent wasn't immediately clear to me, but then there's a lot about women's fashions I don't dig.

I asked, "Do I call you by a name or do you answer to any loud noise?"

She said without turning her head, "I'm registered as Elaine Harms. If you've got to call me something, that'll do."

"Sure."

"I hope you like Scotch. It's as cheap as anything up here, which isn't cheap."

"Scotch is fine."

Normally I'm a bourbon-and-martini man, but I don't consider it a principle worth fighting for at three in the morning in a strange girl's hotel room. Anyway, I was less interested in her liquor than in the face she was being so careful to hide from me. When she turned, there was something deliberate and challenging in the movement that would have warned me, had I needed warning. She came forward with a drink in each hand and a rather malicious gleam in her eyes, watching me for signs of shock. To hell with her. I've played poker since I was a boy; and I've seen plenty of men- and women, too-with damaged faces. Only a couple of hours back I'd seen a man with no face at all. She couldn't scare me.

I took the glass she held out and said, "Thanks. You're a lifesaver, Miss Harms."

"I hope your sandwich is all right, Mr. Clevenger."

"Swell," I said. "Two more like it would just about bring my day's intake up to the subsistence level."

It wasn't really very shocking. I mean, she'd had smallpox as a kid, that was all. It had left her skin with a general over-all roughness. It was too bad, of course, but not as bad as if she'd had the fragile type of good looks to which a rose-petal complexion is essential.

Instead, she had a kind of street-urchin face with a good big mouth and a small upturned nose. With a smooth skin, she'd merely have looked cute; now she looked both cute and tough. The smallpox scars did for her what a dueling scar does' for a man; they gave her a hard and dangerous look. In her pants and silk shirt, she resembled one of the deadly, often similarly pockmarked, sword-packing young dandies of centuries past, who'd skewer you as soon as look at you.

She said, "You sound as if you'd come a long way fast, without taking time to stop and eat."

"I was down in South Dakota at noon today. Well, yesterday."

"What brought you up here?"

"A phone call," I said. "A phone call about a stupid jerk who might have got himself into trouble." I had worked out some kind of a story, driver over here, utilizing as much of the truth as I safely could. "I was supposed to wipe his nose and send him home to daddy."

"Who and where is daddy?"

I shook my head. "You want a lot for a roast beef sandwich, Miss Harms."

She persisted: "What was your connection with Mike?"

I didn't know what she'd been told by Greg. I gambled and said, "We were in the same line of business."

"He claimed to be an insurance man from Napa, California. He said he was on vacation, just a tourist."

I said, "I've got a card somewhere that says I sell insurance in Trinidad, Colorado. If you believe it, you're dumber than I think. If you believed Mike, you're dumber than I think."

"But you aren't saying what you really do?" When I didn't answer, she said, "We aren't getting very far, are we?"

"I've got no place to get," I said. "I'm just here because I was invited."

She studied me thoughtfully. After a little, she said, "The redcoats are attacking Bunker Hill, Mr. Clevenger."

I don't suppose that makes much sense to you, in the context, but it made a few things clear to me. It was her way of telling me who she was and asking me to identify myself similarly, if I could. From time to time somebody makes a hopeful attempt to correlate all the various undercover activities of our vast and unwieldy government, to make sure that they synchronize properly, and that nobody unwittingly sticks a thumb in a colleague's eye. It doesn't work out very well, for several reasons, one being that no cynical and experienced agent is going to be happy entrusting his life and mission to the irresponsible cretins working for some other department. Half the time we don't even trust the people in our own outfit.

This girl was not one of ours. Mac would have told me if there was someone around I could call upon for assistance. That made her a member of another agency, and now I was supposed to give her a brotherly kiss of recognition and say something about waiting till we saw the whites of their eyes-that isn't the countersign we were actually using, of course, but the real one was on about the same level of corniness. They all are.

According to official theory, Miss Harms and I would then sit down and compare notes about the Drilling operation in an atmosphere of mutual trust and confidence, and work out a plan for a joint campaign. You can see how the idea might appeal to a bunch of Washington efficiency experts who'd never been asked to stake their lives on some unknown character's reliability, on the strength of a widely distributed phrase that could easily have been compromised.

I said, "You've lost me, doll. Anyway, it was really Breed's Hill, wasn't it?"

I won't say whether, under other circumstances, I would have given the correct response. Normally, we're told to cooperate within reason, but it's left to the discretion of the agent on the spot and it's always a ticklish diplomatic question. In this particular case, of course, I had my orders. Mac had put it quite plainly: Other agencies have not been informed of our participation, and are not to be informed.

Elaine laughed quickly. "I'm sorry. I guess my mind was wandering." She hesitated. "Well, would you mind just telling me what you're doing here?"

I said, "Sure I'd mind." She started to speak, and I interrupted: "Now don't go threatening me again with the Regina cops, Miss Harms. I bet you don't want cops any more than I do. If you want to know about me and my business, tell me who's asking. If you were to show me a little gold badge, for instance, my attitude could change very suddenly.,'

She frowned. "What makes you think I-"

I said, "Why don't we try operating on the assumption that we're both reasonably bright people, for a change? That was a password or something you just tried on me, wasn't it? That Bunker Hill crap. So, since you seem to want a lot of questions answered, suppose you first tell me who you are, and why you've been watching a room that's got a dead man in it, and following people who entered that room, and checking them out with corny countersigns. If it's Uncle Whiskers who wants information, I might oblige. If it's Little Red Riding Hood, or Smokey the Bear, to hell with them."

She smiled faintly. "You're getting very tough all of a sudden, Mr. Clevenger."