The Infiltrators (21 page)

She said, “Even if… even if I come back to Santa Fe now, after serving my sentence, looking just reasonably presentable, pretty much the same woman who was hauled away to stir, only eight years older—well, looking about the way I do this minute—my return will have no real impact. The few people who remained my friends and were sorry for me when it happened, and maybe actually believed me innocent, will be relieved to see that I haven’t suffered too badly from my incarceration. Those who just loved seeing the hotshot lawyer girl knocked off her high horse will be disappointed that I show so few effects of my prison ordeal. But nobody’ll be particularly afraid of me. It will just be the same Madeleine Ellershaw back again after having—whether as innocent patsy or guilty accomplice—paid eight years of her life for her folly in loving and trusting the wrong man. And everybody knows that, whatever may have happened to her, Mrs. Ellershaw was brought up to be a real little lady who couldn’t possibly do anything crude and vengeful no matter what the provocation.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “But what’s your point?”

She drew a long breath. “Matt, what we need is a truly shocking change in me that’ll make them sit up and take notice. Well, we had one that was shocking enough, but thanks to you and this outdoors torture chamber of yours, that flabby, pasty-faced dame is gone. She wouldn’t have been much good for menace, anyway; she wouldn’t have scared a sick mouse.”

“So what do you suggest?”

“Let’s face it, I’m not a real little lady any longer.” Madeleine pushed her empty plate aside and leaned forward earnestly. “After Fort Ames and this place, I’m not any kind of a lady. I’ve… lost faith in all the things that supported me before: my upper-class family, my careful upbringing, my expensive education. They couldn’t keep me out of prison, and they didn’t do me a damn bit of good while I was in there. But now I have something very simple and primitive to sustain me instead: the fact that I can toss any bastard across the room who annoys me. Or blow his brains out with a gun. Or spill his guts with a knife, or break his neck barehanded. It scares me, as I told you, but it gives me confidence, too. So let’s use it, damn it!” Her voice was suddenly harsh. “Let’s show those sinister creeps who framed me, who’ll undoubtedly be watching, what a cheap, crude, vengeance-hungry female animal their damned maximum-security correctional institution has made of the nice, bright, polite young career girl they ruined and sent away to prison. My idea is, you’re the conscientious trainer trying to restrain me, trying to keep me off people’s throats, and I’m your savage killer-Doberman-bitch straining at the heavy leash, just panting for blood. What do you think. Matt?”

“Colorful,” I said. “But promising, if you’re willing to make yourself look that bad.”

She said rather grimly, “You’re forgetting the dismal dame who was dragging herself homewards so humbly before you got shot. After facing the idea of coming home like
that
, I find anything an improvement. This way I at least get to spit in their eyes. I’ve got it all set, the way I’m going to dress; I’ll show you in the morning.” She laughed. “You won’t like it, but as you told me once under similar circumstances, I’m not putting on this act for you.” She hesitated, and glanced at me a bit uncertainly. “Matt?”

“Yes?”

“I don’t mean to be a take-charge girl. Slap me down if you want to. After all, you’re the professional here. I’m just a wet-nosed amateur.”

I grinned. “I just love that phony humility; you know you’d bite my head off if I really—” I was interrupted by a soft knock at the back door of the unit, which led out to a little patio where the dude-ranch guests used to sunbathe in private. When Madeleine glanced at me quickly, I said, “I called somebody from my room and told him to stop by, somebody I want you to meet. I’ll let him in.”

The young man who entered when I opened the back door was wearing a sports shirt and slacks. He was very pretty, and his hair was very pretty, too; one of the blow-dry boys. He could have been the star of any current TV show—John Wayne, where are you now that we really need you?—except for his eyes. They were brown eyes, and they were opaque and deadly as he stepped inside expecting a trap because he’d been trained to expect traps everywhere. Then he saw me clearly and saw that I matched the description he’d been given. The wary tension went out of him and suddenly he was just a nice young fellow with smiling brown eyes.

“Eric?”

“I’m Eric,” I said. “This way.”

We didn’t shake hands; this was business, not friendship. I followed him into the big room, where Madeleine stood by the fireplace, waiting.

“Madeleine, this is McCullough,” I said. “Take a good look at him. You know Jackson, and young Marty, and after all those days nursing me in Santa Paula, you can probably recognize some of the other men who were watching over you. That’s the first line of defense. McCullough, here, is the second, with a backup crew. I thought you’d better see what he looks like so you don’t shoot him by mistake some time when things get a bit hairy. Now that you’re a dangerous lady with a limited hunting licence… I mean field qualification.”

Madeleine nodded. “Hi, McCullough.”

“Mrs. Ellershaw.”

“Okay, McCullough. That’s it,” I said.

“I’ll be around,” he said. “Good night, ma’am.”

There was a little silence after he’d gone, then Madeleine whistled softly. “Am I right in thinking that he’s not as sweet as he looks?”

“We hope not. One of the new ones. Like me, he’s been recuperating from a few anatomical perforations.”

“I haven’t seen him around.”

“There are quite a few things around this place you haven’t seen. And people.” I grinned. “Old soldiers like me don’t worry too much about showing their faces around. I mean, we’re known, we’re in dossiers all around the world. Our covers were blown long ago, and sometimes it works just as well that way. When a miscreant hears that Horrible Helm is after him he just lies down and dies, or cuts his throat obligingly, saving me a lot of trouble. But often an unknown face is needed, and we try to keep the new young ones, like McCullough, from being spotted too soon. So they don’t wander around this place openly and ogle the pretty girl trainees, unlike some people.” I studied her for a minute, and said, “Well, it’s been a long day and planes make me tired. I think I’ll thank my hostess and retire to my own quarters, if she doesn’t mind.”

Madeleine looked a little surprised. I was aware of her gray eyes following me questioningly as I picked up the sling I’d discarded to eat and put it back on. She didn’t speak until I reached the door.

“Matt?” The question that had been in her eyes was in her voice also. Then she came quickly across the room to me. “Was I so obvious, my dear?”

“I got the message,” I said. “Just a friendly dinner in front of the fire for old times’ sake. But no cozy shared bedrooms, no slinky negligees, no seductive smiles. You made it pretty clear: I was not to take you for granted now because of anything that had happened between us in the past. All seigneurial privileges revoked, right?”

She licked her lips. “I didn’t mean… Oh, God, you must think I’m an ungrateful bitch!”

I said, “Let’s leave gratitude out of this.”

She spoke breathlessly: “I’ve been regimented for so long, Matt! I… I’ve belonged to other people for so long. They took me away from me; they left me no say in what was to become of me. For years I’ve had no rights in myself, in my own body, do you understand? And now… now at last I’m free enough and strong enough to take myself back from all the people who’ve owned me and controlled me. Including you. Even you. I don’t want you to think for a moment that I don’t appreciate—”

“To hell with appreciate,” I said. “I think it’s swell. Just put me on the list for when you’re ready to be courted properly, Mrs. Ellershaw.”

She smiled slowly. “Right at the top,” she said. “Thank you, Matt. Thank you for being so understanding.”

Tired though I was, I took quite a while to get to sleep. Being understanding always gives me insomnia.

It’s roughly five hundred miles from Tucson to Santa Fe. With an early-morning start, we were passing Albuquerque, sixty miles south of our destination, by three in the afternoon, with the Rio Grande off to our left and the Sandia Mountains, the steep west face of them, towering on our right. They once flew an airliner into that five-thousand-foot wall of rock and had a hell of a time getting to it afterwards; but of course there wasn’t much left to get to.

Half an hour later we came up over the top of the great black escarpment called La Bajada—the descent or drop, obviously named by folks traveling the other way—and saw Santa Fe ahead, nesting in the foothills of the tall Sangre de Cristo mountains, the southernmost extension of the Rockies proper. I glanced at the woman behind the wheel, who was showing no signs of weariness although she’d been driving since daylight. She was costumed for her new role: still another Madeleine Rustin Ellershaw for me to get used to. The girl was a real chameleon.

There had been the proud young lady lawyer so long ago, and more recently the beaten ex-convict, and the comfortably unspectacular and undemanding lady who’d watched TV with me in the hospital, and the taut, self-possessed, suntanned woman who’d greeted me with some reserve upon my return from Washington. Now I had a defiantly sexy tight-pants broad on my hands, in too-snug jeans that weren’t very clean, and a cheap white knitted shirt that was little more than a glorified T-shirt, also very tight, so that her fine breasts flaunted themselves arrogantly through the thin, strained material. No brassiere, of course: nipples boldly on display. There were high-heeled sandals at one end of her and a considerable amount of makeup at the other, particularly around the eyes.

It was sleazy, provocative kid stuff in a way; and the fact that she was very obviously not a kid but a mature and handsome woman—boldly handsome now, with that blond-streaked hair—made it all the more disturbing. I hated to see her do this to herself, but then, as she’d said, she wasn’t dressing for me. She glanced at me with a little half-smile as she drove us towards the distant city we’d taken so long to reach.

“Don’t look so disapproving, darling,” she said. “You should be getting used to it by now.”

I said, “I’m grateful for small favors. At least you didn’t go in for the floppy pantaloons or baggy knee-britches and bloomers they all seem to be wearing this year.”

She laughed. “After all the work I did getting my ass trimmed down to size, I wasn’t about to drape the sleek new femme fatale in those lousy manure sacks even if they are fashionable at the moment. Anyway, I’m not supposed to be fashionable. I’m supposed to be a bitter female ex-con angrily rejecting the wealthy fashionable world she used to know before it has a chance to reject her.” She drew a long, rather shaky breath, and studied the view ahead. “There it is!” she said softly. “Santa Fe. There were… times when I thought I’d never see it again. And times when I didn’t really want to, when all I wanted was to crawl into a hole somewhere far away where nobody’d recognize me.” She grimaced. “Well, it’s supposed to be very good for the character to face up to things. I should have one hell of a character by the time all this is over. But…”

“But what?” I asked when she hesitated.

“Stay close and hold my hand when I need it, please. It’s going to be rough; and even though I’ve had lots of practice, I don’t really know how much more humiliation I can take.”

We spent the night in a convenient motel, one of the older ones just a few blocks from the city’s main plaza. It was a pleasant, rambling place with tree-shaded grounds, which hadn’t changed very much in all the years I’d known it. In the morning I couldn’t help remembering that, long ago, as a respectable freelance photojournalist, I’d occasionally brought my wife to dinner in the restaurant where Madeleine and I were now breakfasting. Afterwards, leaving the car parked in front of my unit, we hiked the few blocks downtown to keep the appointment I’d made by phone when we got in the previous afternoon—Madeleine had also called her parents’ lawyer and set up a meeting after lunch.

We had to pause briefly on the way to our destination for her to gape, aghast, at a tall new bank building—well, tall for the town. Originally a picturesque southwestern desert village of low adobe houses, often little more than mud huts, Santa Fe keeps fighting to stay that way, or at least stay looking that way; but this was a relative skyscraper.

“I didn’t know they were allowed to do that!” Madeleine protested.

I glanced at her, a little amused but also rather touched. In spite of what had been done to her here, in spite of where she’d spent the past eight years, in spite of the indignities and dangers that undoubtedly lay ahead of her, she could still be distressed by what had happened to her quaint old hometown during her enforced absence.

“I gather nobody else did, either, until they did it,” I said. “Come on, let’s go say hello to the cops.”

The police station was just across the street from the new bank. The shabby, two-story, territorial-style building—meaning that the pseudo-adobe walls were topped with brick—hadn’t altered much in spite of the changes in its surroundings. I felt Madeleine grow tense as she approached it, and thought she was simply experiencing a recurrence of the old prison fear of uniformed authority that she’d conquered once. Then I realized that this was probably the building to which, expensively dressed and bejeweled for a festive dinner with her husband, unable to believe what was happening to her, the young Mrs. Ellershaw had been brought under arrest with those
things
shining on her wrists to be rudely questioned and thrown into a cell on the last day ever of the good life she’d once known.

But that would have been the wing that housed the city jail. We entered the administration wing instead, and after a little wait outside the office barricade were admitted to the presence of the Chief of Police, Manuel Cordoba, a compact, dark-faced, uniformed man with a mustache, whose eyes widened slightly with recognition, and some shock, at the sight of Madeleine. She was still in yesterday’s cheap and provocative costume, a little more grubby for a day’s wear, but since spring mornings are chilly at Santa Fe’s altitude of seven thousand feet she was also wearing, open, an inexpensive ski jacket she’d bought while costuming herself for the part she planned to play here. The quilted garment was a strong, almost luminous, shade of violet.