Hamilton, Donald - Novel 01 by Date, Darkness (v1.1) Page B

repacked them and closed the bag.
          "What did you expect to find?"
Branch asked.
          Nothing," she said. She gave the
suitcase a small push away from her, dismissing it. "Nothing," she
repeated. "I merely wanted to talk to you in private, Lieutenant."
She accepted the cigarette he offered her and allowed him to light it for her.
Because she was a quite homely and badly dressed middle-aged woman in whom he
could have no possible emotional interest it gave him a perverse pleasure to be
very polite to her, and he drew the heavy chintz-covered easy chair from the
corner for her, and sat down on the bed, facing her.
          "You're an intelligent man,
Lieutenant," she said. "I think you know quite well what the
situation is, even if I cannot describe it to you in detail."
          "Why not?"
          She glanced at him, brushing ashes from
her heavy skirt. "Because, as Georges said, our position is very bad
legally, and I do not want to give you enough information that you can go to
the police. In case I am not able to convince you...."
          Branch said, "Listen, tell me just
this: did she, I mean Jeannette, have anything to do with what happened
to--" He gestured in the direction of the smaller girl's room. "-her?"
          Madame Faubel hesitated. "No," she said finally. "She did not."
          "Did her husband?"
          She shook her head. "No. Not
directly, but ..."
          "I don't," Branch said,
"like people who pull a long and irrelevant sob story on me before asking
me to do something for them. I'm very sorry about the girl-"
          "There are hundreds of others like
her," Madame Faubel said angrily. "Thousands of others."
          "And the way to cure them is to drag
them around the country and expose them to passes by every wolf in Navy uniform who comes along?" He laughed sharply and went on
before she could retort. "Anyway, I don't see the connection, if neither
of them had anything to do with it."
          The woman's narrow white face was quite
expressionless. "We are not free agents, Mr. Branch," she said.
"We take our orders from the Central Committee. There are some to whom I
would like to attend personally, myself, but so long as I know they are being
attended to I do what I am told to do." She made a
sharp" gesture with her cigarette. "We are not agents of
revenge, but of justice."
          Branch sat silent and wished that his pipe
were cool enough that he could smoke it again.
          "You are quibbling, Lieutenant,"
the woman's voice went on. "Would it seem better to you if we were
avenging mere personal injuries?"
          "By God, it would," Branch
admitted. "Anyway, it would seem nice and normal and natural." He
laughed uncomfortably. "Tell me..."
          "Yes?"
          "If you could, would you shave her
head like in the pictures?"
          "Perhaps," Madame Faubel said stiffly. "If it did not
interfere with more important business."
          "Well...." Branch grimaced and
ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth. He got to his feet. "Well,
I certainly won't help you."
          Madame Faubel rose to face him. "If you had-"
          "But I didn't," he said. "I
wasn't. And I don't want any part of it. It stinks."
          He watched her go out of the room. Agents
of Justice, he thought, Central Committee, nuts. The door closed and he heard
her footsteps diminish down the hall in the direction of the staircase. When
the sound of them had ceased he went to the bureau and, with the whisk-broom,
brushed away the lint the coverlet of his bed had deposited on his uniform. He
went out of the room and along the hall in the opposite direction from that
taken by the woman.
          More than a minute passed between his
knock and the opening of the door.
          "I'm sorry, he said .
" Did I wake you?"
          She looked down at her rumpled dress and
brushed at it absently. "I must have fallen asleep," she said.