The Menacers Read Free Page B

the woman, and I turned casually to seaward as I pounded the water out of my ears, and there she was, coming towards me, smiling faintly.
    “I wondered how long it would take you to recognize me, Matthew,” she said.
    For a moment I still wasn’t quite sure. I mean, the lady whose name popped into my mind had been pretty good at changing her appearance to suit the job, but she’d always been a fairly well-developed specimen of womanhood. She’d often been described as sexy in official reports—sometimes even as voluptuous—but never as slender. But it was Vadya, all right. There was no doubt about it. I’d slept with her a couple of times and shot her once; I ought to know.
    I said, “I’m ashamed of you, Vadya, trying to fool your old friends like that. When did you decide to go on a diet?”
    “Diet, hell,” she said, “if you’ll excuse it, darling. Do you know how many operations they had to make after you were so ungentlemanly as to put a bullet into me, and how many operations to erase the signs of those operations? I was a shadow, a skeleton, when they finished carving me up and putting me back together. And then it seemed like a good idea to try to keep my new svelte figure. Some people do not have as sharp eyes as others. Obviously. I have been here for several days. If anyone among your people had recognized this sylph-like creature as Vadya, you would not have been sent here, would you? They would have sent someone I did not know, instead.”
    “You knew I was coming?”
    “Of course not. We did not know who was coming; but we knew someone else probably would be, besides those already here. It is not a job for a college boy with a degree in accounting or foreign relations, even if he can draw his pistol in a fraction of a second and make magnificent scores on the targets that look like men but are really paper. Nor is it a job for an unclaimed maiden with beautiful ideals and strange yearnings.” Vadya smiled. “It is a job for crude, realistic people like you and me, darling. Of course, now that you are here, I will probably have to kill you, but I am glad to see you nevertheless. Let us get out of these soapsuds and have a drink.”

3
    Some people have a thing about fraternizing with the enemy. They seem to feel that disloyalty is something you can catch across a table, like the common cold. They act as if the only safe way to remain faithful to duty and country is to quarantine yourself with none but certified patriots in a place where no sinister bacteria of subversion can possibly reach you from the infected creeps on the other side.
    Personally, I have a little more faith in my loyalty than this, and if the enemy wants to fraternize, I’m happy to be fraternized with. Why work like hell to ferret out someone’s intentions by devious methods, when you can maybe get him, or her, to tell you all about them over a cold rum Collins?
    As I settled down in a wooden chair under one of the numerous brown-thatched cabanas that sprouted like mushrooms from the sand in front of the hotel, sharing beach space with some green palms and a rustic life-guard tower, I reminded myself that Vadya undoubtedly had reasons of her own for renewing our old acquaintance. She hadn’t picked the exact moment of my arrival to go gamboling in the surf for nothing. Well, that was all right. We’d played this game before, and while the score had been very close upon occasion, I was a little ahead on points. At least I’d never had to have any of her bullets dug out of me.
    I sat back and sipped my drink and listened to the surf, therefore, waiting for her to break the silence first and set the conversational mood however she pleased. Far up the beach some kids were popping firecrackers. It’s about the only thing I really have against the Mexicans. They don’t wait for the local equivalent of the Fourth of July; they’ll set the damn things off any time of the year, day or night—and in our business we tend to be