The Infiltrators (15 page)

I’d had sense enough to pick up some ice while I still had my coat on—I’d also, since there were no room phones in this desert hostelry, made a call from a chilly outside booth to report our situation—and I set out drink materials on the low round table by the curtained window. Madeleine emerged from the bathroom with her windblown hair tidy once more, but she paused to examine herself in the dresser mirror.

“I seem to have caught up with you, Matt, did you notice?” she said wryly. “I remember that one of the things that made me wary of you when we first met was that you were an older man with more experience.”

“Thanks,” I said dryly. “Nothing makes a man feel great like being called a senile Casanova.”

She was not to be distracted. “But the woman in the office obviously thought we were a nice, well-matched couple just about the same age.” Madeleine made a face at her mirror image. “Well, you can hardly blame her.”

I said, “Come have some rejuvenation fluid, Grandma. Actually, I find older women quite delightful.”

I watched her come towards me and take the glass I held out to her and sink into the other chair, kicking off her damp shoes and tucking her feet under her. I noted that, while she was wearing her by now somewhat travel-creased brown suit, and her pink sweater, she had on her fragile new nylons. Her heavy brown hair in its new soft arrangement still did nice things for her face. But I was disturbed by the realization that these things no longer mattered. I mean, after a couple of days in her company I had stopped judging her by how well or badly she was dressed, or how well or badly she combed her hair, or even how she might not be quite as narrow as she should be in the middle. I knew her too well now—liked her too well, damn it—to worry about such minor external details.

“Tell me about prison,” I said.

Her face changed. “I don’t think that’s a very pleasant subject for the cocktail hour,” she said stiffly.

I shook my head. “You can’t dodge it forever. You’ve told me practically everything else. It’s time you got rid of that, too, by talking about it. What made you decide to kill yourself in there, with a couple of years of your sentence already behind you?”

She licked her lips. “If I wanted to be analyzed, I’d go to a shrink,” she said stiffly. Then she shrugged. “Oh, all right, I’ll satisfy your morbid curiosity. But I’ve already told you. Walter came to see me. Walter Maxon.”

I frowned. “I don’t understand—”

She made an angry gesture. “Of course you don’t understand! You’re not a woman, a woman who was… was once considered rather attractive, locked up in a bleak, destroying place like that for endless years. They thought I was stuck-up,” she said.

“Not surprising.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think I was, not really, except about the educational nonsense—I’d
been
educated, thanks. But otherwise I was simply scared shitless, trapped in that dingy environment with that kind of angry street mentality I couldn’t really understand, the kind I’d met only a few times before in the line of business. We didn’t get many clients like that, but there were a few.”

“Willy Chavez,” I said. “That hired gun you and Baron defended.”

“Yes, Chavez was like that, and I never understood his mental processes at all.” She drew a long breath. “But there in Ames we weren’t attorney and client any longer. I wasn’t the fine lady lawyer any longer, merely visiting the dirty jail on business. I was one of them now, I was inside right along with them, just another convicted criminal serving her time, even though it still seemed like a crazy nightmare. No, a mad horror show!” A shudder went through her. “See the gently brought-up, carefully educated, always so well groomed and handsome and self-confident young professional woman… Watch her terrifying transformation into a lank-haired, stoop-shouldered female convict shuffling around dully in an ill-fitting uniform, scared, scared, scared in that ghastly place she’s been sent to waste her very best years, years she’d expected to devote to her brilliant career and her blissful marriage. Scared of all the cheap tough women she’s got to live with now; but more scared of what’s happening to her beautiful life—that was while she was naive enough to think she still had a life! And most of all scared of what’s happening to
her
, mentally and physically, of what the endless regimented days of that unspeakably degrading and stultifying existence are doing to her.”

She stopped. Outside, the storm was getting noisier, and the windows rattled to the violent gusts. Madeleine looked at her glass, drained it, and reached for the bottle, but it was too far away. I got up and poured more whiskey for her, and for myself, and took the glasses to the bathroom for ice and water. She waited for me to return and sit down again, before continuing: “I could stand my folks visiting me when they could, there in the beginning, but then they got too ill to travel and there was nothing to break the dismal routine. Actually, I was just as glad not to have to make the effort to… to keep myself looking brave and cheerful for anybody. And the hours passed and the days passed and the months passed, God so slowly—and then Walter came.” She licked her lips. “Matt, you can’t imagine what it was like! Like seeing yourself in a mirror after being very sick, all gaunt and gray and stringy… I hadn’t realized how far I’d come, how far I’d sunk, until I saw the expression on his face! The starry-eyed young admirer who’d worshiped the golden girl from afar! Staring with horror at the ugly changes prison had made in me already, and I still had years and years of my sentence left to go! Of course he covered up very quickly and started talking to me as if I were still the same lovely creature he’d known, but afterwards I stood in front of the mirror in my cell and saw myself as he’d seen me. I saw what I’d already lost in the few years I’d been there. I realized that… that all of me, all that really mattered, would be gone long before I got out.”

She gulped her whiskey, not looking at me. A blast of storm shook the building, and we both waited, as you do, to see if anything was going to crack under the assault, but nothing did.

“I made up my mind then,” she said at last. “Why go through that endless grinding misery, all those remaining years of it, just to be tossed back out into the world at last with nothing, nothing, nothing? No marriage, no profession, no friends, no reputation, no money to amount to anything. And no… me. Particularly no me. Just a dull and unattractive lump of a woman who wasn’t me any longer, scratching out a drab living for the remaining hopeless years of her life… So I found a little piece of metal and spent weeks sharpening it, and did it, but they got to me in time and it was so messy and horrible that I could never quite bring myself to try again. I just… kind of let myself go dead inside and wandered through the rest of those dreadful years in an unfeeling and unthinking daze.”

“But you were wrong,” I said. “You were stronger than you gave yourself credit for being. You did survive.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Thanks to you I’m discovering that there seems to be something left inside me after all. Whether it’s enough to build a new life…” She shrugged.

“It’ll be enough,” I said. “And I didn’t have a damn thing to do with it. You’d have worked your way out of that tailspin you were in all by yourself.”

“Would I?” She grimaced. “Don’t be so damn modest and upbeat and therapeutic, Matt, and give me another drink; and if you tell me I’m not used to it and can’t hold it I’ll spit in your eye. You can clean me up if I make a drunken mess of myself. The way you’ve been cleaning me up, building me up, ever since you picked me up at Fort Ames.”

“Let me break out the new bottle,” I said.

When I’d refilled our glasses, we sat for a while in silence listening to the blizzard; then she said quietly, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be so… unpleasant.”

I grinned. “You sound as if it were something new.”

She glanced at her glass, and drank from it. After a little, she said almost shyly, “I really need this. Tonight. Because I want to ask a big favor of you and I’m embarrassed.”

“A favor? What favor?”

She said, “It’s a wonderful wild night out there, and it’s as if we were the only two people in the world, in here…” She looked at me directly, and I saw her throat work. She licked her lips and said, “I want you to make love to me, Matt, or try. If I can. It’s been so long. I have to know if I still after all these years… if there really is anything left. Please?”

I said, “No.”

She got up quickly and walked to the dresser and looked at herself in the mirror, and drank deeply from her replenished drink.

She said in very even tones. “It’s all right. I understand.”

“No,” I said harshly, “you don’t understand at all.” I set my glass aside and rose and went to her, and took her by the shoulders; I wanted to shake her angrily, but I restrained myself. “Why the hell don’t you snap out of it, Madeleine?” I said, speaking to her face, beside mine, in the mirror. “So you’re not a beautiful young girl any longer; who the hell is? You wouldn’t be that by now even if you’d never gone to prison. But you’ve got brains and guts and you can still look better than ninety percent of the women around when you take just a little trouble. You don’t have to ask any lousy man to go to bed with you as a
favor
, for God’s sake! It makes me sick to hear you!” I drew a long, ragged breath. “Jesus Christ, ever since I set up this cozy one-room deal I’ve been wondering, as a gentleman of sorts and the guy officially responsible for you, how I’d manage to get through the night honorably, to use a very old-fashioned word, without making an unwanted pass… And you humble yourself and say please love me, mister, when all you have to do is snap your fingers! No, I won’t make love to you as a favor, damn it! But if you’re really willing, and if you don’t feel that you’re under any obligation or coercion… If the lady will generously permit him to demonstrate his passionate desire for her, the gentleman will be most grateful.”

She freed herself from my grasp and turned, and studied my face carefully. She spoke rather stiffly: “It’s nice that you’re so concerned about my pride as a woman, since I’ve… kind of got out of the habit.” Then she smiled slowly. “But you certainly take a lot of words to say yes, my dear.”

Suddenly she was in my arms, soft and warm. Afraid to make a mistake that would spoil it for her—well, for both of us—I merely held her for a while, and touched my lips to her hair. At last I felt her arms tighten about me as she gained courage and turned her face up for a real kiss, tentative and exploratory. Her lips had a terrible innocence, reminding me of where she had been and how long it had been for her. Presently I eased her away from me and slipped the jacket off her shoulders and tossed it aside, undressing her tenderly, like a docile child. I started to work her sweater up gently, and she slapped my hands away, making a harsh little sound in her throat.

“Stop patronizing me, damn you!” she gasped. “I’m not a baby and I won’t break!”

The lips that found mine once more were suddenly fierce and adult. It was a grown-up, knowing body that moved hard against mine. The hands that drew me against her were those of a married woman who’d been here before and remembered the loving way of it. We fell onto the nearest big bed together fully dressed, learning each other’s shapes and movements through the rumpled and displaced and soon partly unfastened clothing, delaying too long with these breathless preliminaries, so that in the end we had to hastily, desperately, help each other off with the garments that had to come off, to hell with the rest… After a long, long time I became aware once more of the storm outside.

“Oh, God!” Madeleine breathed at last. “I didn’t know I could still… could still feel… I was afraid that p-place had spoiled me forever! All those deadly loveless years!” Presently she whispered, “Do you know that I love you?”

“Sure, I’m crazy about you, too,” I said.

She giggled, suddenly sounding very young and happy. “Try to say that with a little more conviction! But I really do love you in a way, Matt.”

“What way?”

“The way you love a man who does a lousy job the nicest, kindest way he knows how. I know I’m a decoy for you, and decoys often get shot full of holes, don’t they? I know you’d sacrifice me in an instant if you thought it necessary. But in the meantime you’re just as patient as you can be with the unreasonable and tiresome lady just out of the clink.” She drew a long, satisfied breath. “And now, well, that was an awfully small hamburger I had for lunch and I’m absolutely starving, and all that whiskey needs something to soak it up; but I do think I’d better change first, don’t you? After that uninhibited little interlude, this skirt isn’t fit to be seen in public.”

I laughed. “In the middle of a howling blizzard you’re worrying about a few creases? Everybody’s going to be wet and wrinkled tonight, lady.” Getting up and picking up my pants, I tossed a wad of nylon at her. “Pull your tights back on and let’s go.”

There were already six inches of snow on the level, and big drifts were piling up against the buildings as we dashed across to the cafe thirty yards away, the neon lights of which were almost invisible through the storm. There were many more cars outside now and several big trucks. I noticed that the motel’s
NO VACANCY
sign was lighted. Inside, the cafe’s TV told us that the highway was completely closed to the west. There was a pleasant, comradely feeling in the crowded restaurant; we were all stranded travelers together. The steaks were tough but tasty, and the French fries crisp and good. Nobody shot at us coming or going, but I took the usual precautions anyway.

At bedtime, looking almost bridal in her soft old satin-and-lace nightie, Madeleine made it clear that she wanted company in her bed; but then we discovered, laughing, that neither of us was really interested in anything but companionship and sleep. It had been a long hard day. But in the middle of the night I awoke when she stirred in my arms, turning towards me. She moved against me, and I felt her lips touch my face.

“Please?”

It was a sleepy, faraway whisper, and I realized that I wasn’t there and neither was she, really. This was the beautiful young wife who no longer existed requesting love from the handsome young husband who’d probably died nine years ago. I drew her closer and let my body obey the sleepy instructions issued by hers. I knew the moment she came fully awake and knew me. I heard her laugh throatily in the dark, accepting the situation and proceeding to show this new and untrained partner how to do what she wanted done. There was no great explosion of long-repressed emotions this time. It was just a friendly and satisfying act shared by two lonely people in the middle of the night.