Helen gave her the fierce, scary, tight-lipped smile I had not yet gotten used to. “I hope you’re counting me as teeth.”
“I am now,” Paula assured her. “Okay, all in, and we’ll see if I still remember how to drive.”
“You drove last night,” I pointed out.
“Everybody doesn’t know that, and we might as well give ’em a thrill.” She popped the door of the bus open and hollered “All aboard” much louder than necessary. At least one of us was really having a good time.
The drive was short, and sitting behind Paula I could see what a complicated job it was—she had to work what I figured out must be a shift-and-clutch arrangement, point the wheel, and work a foot throttle and brake, all without looking away from the road. I figured out that the thing in the middle that looked like an old-fashioned clock was the speedometer, and the thing marked E-----F was obviously fuel, but the other gauges were mysteries to me, particularly the one called TACH which didn’t seem to have anything to do with how fast we were going. “That looks awfully complicated,” I said, after watching her for a while.
“It gets to be automatic,” she said, “and a big part of it is just knowing that you can do it. If we get the chance on the mission, I’ll teach you—we could use more drivers, and I’m afraid it’s just me and Roger that know how to drive. And he hates it, for some perverse reason all his own. If you’d like to learn, having another one of us able to drive could save a life or two.
I shuddered; I liked the idea of learning to drive, I had always enjoyed manually operating vehicles of all kinds, but I didn’t much like being on an expedition where “saving a life or two” could be an issue.
We pulled up at the cafe, and the only person sitting in the outdoor area was Jesús Picardin, wearing a loud floral print shirt, a ridiculous Panama, bright red shorts, and heavy leather sandals. It was the ugliest impression of a tourist I’d ever seen, with his feet up on the table and a mostly empty beer bottle beside him, but somehow he managed to look dapper while doing so.
“If we’re doing what I think we’re doing,” Paula said, “you should be able to leave your gear on the bus. I’d take along a weapon, if you carry, and maybe anything really precious to you.”
I just carried what was in my pockets, but I noticed Helen sliding an extra knife into her pocket. I suppose in some lines of work a person just can’t be too careful.
The cafe would have been a pleasant enough place, and the company nice enough, if it had all just been a social occasion. I hadn’t been to Mexico before, but the beer lived up to its reputation, and we all sat, chatting and waiting for something to happen, getting to know a little bit about each other. I observed that the version of Helen here—the weapons-proficient secret agent— seemed to bond instantly with Esmé and Paula, and was not altogether sure that I liked that; I missed what I was now thinking of as “plain old Helen,” a term I was trying to lose track of as quickly as I could because I didn’t want to think of the Helen that I really wanted as either plain or old. Jesús and Roger both seemed to have a knack for waiting that I desperately envied; I’d have thought after my four years in the Navy I’d have mastered the skill of sitting about waiting to be useful, but I was tense and nervous.
At least Ulrike was responding reasonably—she was fidgeting too. We spent a while talking about academic life, since in her world she had been a professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University, but there wasn’t much to say that it hadn’t been possible to say since the 1100s when the first universities came into being: administrators had no idea what was going on, faculty politics was vicious and silly, students were often lazy and sometimes plain stupid, and nobody cared very much about human knowledge. Ulrike’s situation was the mirror image of Helen’s— Helen had crossed over into this adventure for which she was well prepared, where apparently Ulrike’s more adventurous self, the hired assassin, had crossed out of this world and left the Ulrike now sitting across from me to hold the bag.
There weren’t many people passing on the street, which might have been any street in a poor section of a city in the sunny part of the developed world, or a middle-class street in any of the poor countries. There were a few whitewashed buildings and some walls of plain CBS block, interspersed with some wooden structures that seemed to have been put up improvisationally. Cables and wires ran everywhere, antennae and dishes sprouted from every flat surface, and crude handbills covered anywhere that people didn’t walk. Little breezes stirred pale gold-yellow dust on the broken asphalt now and then.
I had gotten so used to the scene being static that I would start, just a little, every time that someone went by, or even when a dog emerged from an alley. After pretending to listen for five solid minutes to Ulrike whining about her department chair and all the credit that got stolen, I suppose I was getting desperate for something to break the monotony, since my other choices for conversation were the three women chattering about what nine-millimeter round had the greatest stopping power and the two men discussing fine points of baseball.
That was when the two women came around the corner. The older of the two, who might have been in her late twenties or early thirties, was strikingly beautiful, a honey blonde with her hair done in an elaborate coif from which several tendrils descended in tight curls, wearing a crisp white dress that revealed perfectly tanned arms and shoulders, and rounded, strappy sandals with midheels that seemed to have been specially chosen to exactly complement the perfect calves.
Beside her, the other figure seemed a little awkward and clumsy; the much younger woman, perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old, had pleasant but not extraordinary features, a saddle of freckles across the nose, mouth too wide, pale blonde hair cut very close, and was wearing a silly-looking pair of Ben Franklin wire-rimmed glasses, a bright pink T-shirt, and a baggy denim skirt with knee socks and sneakers. Both were carrying suitcases.
They approached the cafe, heading directly for our table, and I had a sense that I had seen someone move that way before. I stopped listening to Ulrike entirely, which was probably a good choice. The honey blonde stood still in a very attractive pose, looked over the whole table of people, then spoke with the kind of clear voice that comes from years of training, and said, pointing at Roger, “Now, you’ve got to be the Colonel. And that means you—” she pointed at me—”must be Lyle. But I can’t figure out which of you is Helen.”
“That would be me,” Helen said, “and—good golly. Kelly and Terri, aren’t you?”
Kelly nodded and said, “Yes, that’s me. Geoffrey Iphwin called me late last night and told me to pack a bag and go to Josef Stalin Airport—that’s just outside Paris—and that there would be a ticket and a person waiting for me. The ticket was for Mexico City, and the person was Terri, here.”
“Glad to meet you all,” she said, clearly trying to look poised and confident at the moment when she was unexpectedly face to face with all her adult friends. She didn’t do badly. “You wouldn’t believe how long Mr. Iphwin had to talk to my father to get me permission to do this, and I’m still not sure how he did it. We’ve been arguing all the way here about whether that airport was named after Stalin or Petain.”
They sat down to join us, and we made introductions all around the table. The energy that had dwindled into idle conversation, just as if this were a long afternoon off from our regular jobs for all of us, picked back up in a burst of eager babble, and just as it was getting hard to hear among the too-many voices clamoring for your attention, a waiter came running out of the cafe, carrying a phone with a speaker attachment, and set it down on the table among us.