Assignment Burma Girl

by Edward S. Aarons

  The explosion was sharp, sudden, and paralyzing.

  The house shook, jumped, vibrated. Dust came down from the ceiling, plaster fell, the radio was abruptly silent. Smoke boiled through the hallway entrance where Jackie Houphet, the pilot, had vanished.

  A woman began to scream in a high voice of terror.

  A man shouted and then joined the screaming.

  Durell was moving before the dust settled and the echoes ended. He pushed past the frozen, white-faced Merri Tarrant and plunged down the hallway beyond the living room. The bungalow was long and narrow. Bedrooms opened to the right and left. There was a dining room, a conservatory thick and green with epiphytes and creepers, and then a ragged, splintered doorway to the kitchen.

  The Frenchman was in there.

  The oil vapor stove where he had been making coffee had exploded and Durell knew at once from the damage that it wasn’t simply a case of the fuel igniting. The dust and acrid smoke made him cough. He paused and then called, “Houphet?”

  There was no answer, and he saw the French pilot’s body on the floor. The grenade, if that’s what it was, had tom away the slim man’s belly. He was as dead as he could be.

  “Durell, what—?”

  He turned and saw Merri Tarrant standing white-faced behind him. He pushed her back out of the smoke-filled kitchen.

  “You’ll have to call the police.”

  “But Jackie—”

  “He’s dead.”

  Her eyes were dazed. “Why? I don’t understand—”

  “You said Simon always made his own coffee?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “The stove was booby-trapped. It was meant for Simon.”

  “But why? Why?” she cried.

  He pushed her into the living room. Her shoulders felt stiff and trembling under his hands. He wondered if he could take care of her and decided there wasn’t time enough. He spoke quickly.

  “Listen to me. Can you understand me?” When she nodded, he added crisply, “Call the police, but don’t tell them I was here. I can’t get involved in this now. It will mean too much of a delay for me, do you understand?”

  She nodded again. Her mouth opened, closed.

  “Get yourself a drink,” he said. “And get in touch with Simon. I’ve got to see him at once. Can you suggest a place where we won’t be interrupted or noticed? Some place that’s busy, perhaps—”

  “The Shwedagon Pagoda, in the center of town—there are hundreds of people around, all the time—”

  “All right. In half an hour. Got it?”

  “But poor Jackie—”

  “He’s dead, and you can’t do a thing for him. You can help Simon.”

  “But there’s no reason—!” she faltered.

  “There is always a reason,” Durell said grimly. “Always, for murder.”

  He took a trishaw back to the center of the city, escaping through a throng of white-coated servants and startled women who crowded the bungalow compound, streaming from the kampong cottages that housed them. There was no sign of the Mercedes-Benz that had followed him from the hotel. Durell wondered about this, too; since no one in authority had shown up at the sound of the booby-trap explosion.

  A heavy, sultry heat had settled over the city, a miasma compounded of the delta mud, sweating humanity, inadequate sewage along the Hliang River, the smells of cooking food and the exudations from the teak mills and the refineries. Gaudy neon and electric signs sparkled, flashed and whirled in the Chinese quarter. Durell was hungry, but there was no time to eat. He paused to phone the hotel from a bar on Frazier Street, near the native bazaars that were a major tourist attraction. The desk clerk said there was a message for him.

  “From whom?” Durell asked.

  “The United States Embassy, sir. A Mr. Chet Lowbridge.”

  “I’ll call back, if he phones again.”

  “Yes, sir. There was also a request for your passport.”

  “Oh?”

  “From Colonel Savarati.”

  “I see. Thank you.”

  “What shall I tell Boh Savarati, sir?”

  “I’ll be back for dinner.”

  He walked toward the Shwedagon Pagoda.

  The structure was a fantasy out of a DeQuincy opium dream, exotic and colorful, dominating the central city with its gold leaf spire and solid gold hti, or crown, on top. Four enormously wide stairways of one hundred steps each led to the main platform, which was lined with stalls selling candles, incense, paper streamers, flowers and packages of gold leafs as offerings to the Buddha. Here and there were crowded shops of wood and ivory carvers who sold their wares on the spot. Hundreds of Burmese, Hindus and Chinese wandered about, apparently aimlessly, among the innumerable shrines and lesser pagodas that crowded the acres of platform space. Some of the devout used deer antlers hanging beside the huge bells to strike the gongs and call the attention of the nats, or spirits, to their presence.

  The sound of shrill, atonic music came from all about, mingling with the reverberating gongs. Yellow-robed, shaven Buddhist priests went about their votary business in serene contemplation, ignoring the crowds of sightseers, shoppers and worshippers. It was necessary to remove one’s shoes on entering the pagoda, but the massive stairways were so stained by the ever-present betel nut juice that paper sandals, offered for sale, seemed a wise compromise.

  Durell moved through the ferment of people, noise, color and smells, among the lesser pagodas and the countless serene images of towering Buddhas. He paused beside a stall where Burmese girls wrapped and rolled tobacco leaves into cigarettes and thin cigars. Farther down the platform, a shinpyu ceremony was taking place, where several young Burmese males were being initiated into monkhood. In another direction, at the head of one of the stairways, a snake-kissing show was going on between a Burmese woman and a king cobra.

  Durell paused before a row of votive candles flickering before tiers of darkly golden Buddhas rising into the shadows. He saw no one familiar. The few Europeans in evidence were obvious tourists. A little nagging worry began to gnaw at him.

  “Saya Durell?”

  He turned and saw a young Burmese girl, hair high and to one side in a chignon, wearing a longyi embroidered in harlequin crimson, gold and green.

  “I’m not a doctor,” he said.

  “The thakin is over by the jade merchant. There,” she said, pointing.

  “Thank you.”

  She smiled and vanished. Durell walked in the direction she had indicated, making his way slowly through the crowds of worshippers and sightseers. The jade stall was wedged between two dawrapalas, half-lion and half-man figures at one of the pagoda entrances. Behind it was a small green Buddha in the shikoh, the praying position of all Buddhists.

  Simon Locke stood beside it, waiting for him.

  He was tall and painfully thin, with sandy hair bleached white by the Asian sun, and a gaunt face with skin stretched as tight as paper over prominent cheekbones. He watched the players on the steps below dancing out their ritual performances, and his eyes had a far-seeing, yet blind quality. His white hair was crew-cut and he had enormous pale eyebrows to go with them, lowering over pale blue, worried eyes. Locke’s nose was badly sunburned, raw and peeling, and a dab of zinc oxide on it made him look somewhat barbaric. His white silk suit looked shabby. Durell felt a sense of shock at the deterioration in the man; he had known Simon in better days, when he weighed at least forty pounds more and had been a laughing riot of muscle, brawn and competence.

  They shook hands, smiling with pleasure.

  “Well, Cajun.” Locke had a Texas drawl, a flash of white teeth for a brief grin, a trap of a mouth. “You’re still alive.”

  “Surprised?”

  “Seeing what I know about your business, yes.”

  “Can we talk here?” Durell asked.

  “Why not? It’s as good a place as any. Merri set it up. She’s an efficient gal. Too damned much so. You know I proposed to her twenty times, and she still turns me
down? Says I’m not fat enough in body or bankroll.”

  “She seemed all right to me.”

  “She is. She uses spit and baling wire to prop me up. You’ve got a cigarette, Cajun? I’m all out.”

  Durell handed him one. Simon Locke’s fingers shook and he dropped it. The stone floor of the pagoda, stained with betel juice, deterred him as he automatically stooped to pick it up. Durell gave him another.

  “I’ve got the snakes,” Locke said. “But I’ll get over it. Don’t look so damned worried about me. You look as if you’re seeing a ghost.”

  “You seem like one,” Durell said. “What’s the matter? Been out here too long?”

  “I don’t like to get sucked into your business. I’m no damned patriot anxious to get my ass shot off by those lunatics up north.”

  “That isn’t all of it.”

  “Well, Jackie Houphet was a good guy. I’m a bit upset finding pieces of him splattered all over my kitchen. Is that good enough for you, Sam?” Locke lifted his massive, shaggy white eyebrows, looked beyond Durell and then to the right and left and behind him. He laughed uncertainly. “It’s the snakes, all right.”

  “Was the bomb meant for you?” Durell asked.

  “Hell, who knows? I’ve got enemies.”

  “No friends?”

  “Plenty of babes. I’ve done a bit of this and that with my BAT planes that some people don’t like. I’m square with the Union government—I think. But the Lahpet Hao has people everywhere. Jackie was a good egg. Always talking about going back to Paris some day and drowning himself in food and liquor on the Champs Elysées. Like I talk about a ranch in Texas.” Simon Locke paused. “He won’t make it now, and neither will I. I can’t ever leave.” “Why not?”

  Locke hesitated. “You’re looking at me like you know the truth already, Cajun. I’m hooked. It’s no crime out here, and the habit is partly respectable. It’s only a little hooking, but I like it enough to hate to give it up.”

  “Opium?”

  “An occasional pipe. It’s easy, here.”

  “Is that why you and Merri Tarrant—?”

  “She objects, sure. And hates poverty. Is that bad?” Locke drew a deep breath and scrubbed his knuckles into his stiff brush of silvery hair. “You still want me back in the business, Sam?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Locke said with sudden urgency, “Take me on, Cajun. Please. I kind of need it.”

  “You could get killed,” Durell said.

  “I’ve got to find out for my own good—”

  “Or you could get me killed,” Durell said.

  “Cajun, you know me—”

  “You’re not the same man I once knew,” Durell said. Locke rubbed a hand across his mouth. “But I need this. Just seeing you is a break. And you need me, too. They won’t let you go in after Paul Hartford, you know.” “Who won’t?”

  “Colonel Savarati, for one. The situation up beyond Myitkyina is rough. Those hill people are on their own, you know. The only reason Savarati let Paul go up there was because he thought Paul would be useful. But the central government hasn’t much say in things up north—it’s not trusted and not wanted. But Paul convinced Savarati that he had old friends in the north, and he was only going on a sentimental journey, so to speak.”

  “You talk about him as if he’s dead,” Durell said. “Well, he could be.”

  “We don’t know,” Durell said. “I’ve got to find out.”

  “He didn’t really want to go. He was yellow, you know? He had the snakes bad, Jackie said. But I guess it was that, or lose his rich and beautiful wife.” Simon Locke shook his head and grinned and abruptly looked ten years younger. “What I wouldn’t give for a crack at that Eva. She’s the original gal from Eden, Sam. Watch it with her. She’s gotten used to having everything her own way.”

  “She didn’t have it like that all her life,” Durell said. “Well, she had it with Paul. She sent him up there. And when he got clearance, Colonel Savarati gave him a little job of ambushing to do.” Simon Locke looked sideways at Durell. “Are you supposed to finish the job?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Going after this legendary Major Mong?”

  “Why do you call him legendary?”

  “Well, nobody down here really knows a damned thing about the son of a bitch, except that he’s the original ghost of the jungle. He knows the hill people; he’s a fanatic on Communist ideology; and he’s the most vicious and dangerous fighter the central government has come up against. They’d give a lot for his head on a tin plate, Cajun. But they won’t let you go up there after him now. Not after what happened to Paul.”

  “I thought you said you don’t know what happened to Paul.”

  “I don’t. But I can guess.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Dollars to doughnuts. Or he’s being cut into little pieces, an inch at a time. The bloody fool!” Simon Locke burst out. “He gets pressured into it first by his wife, looking for her brother’s grave, and then by Colonel Savarati. And then I lose Tackie Houphet over it. Where does it end?”

  “Can someone fly me up there, Simon?” Durell asked suddenly.

  “In one of my Dakotas? I don’t think so. I haven’t any to spare. And if I did, you’d have company. Eva Hartford already chartered one of the crates to go up into the hills. I haven’t exactly turned her down; but when Chet Lowbridge approached me about it, I held off on accepting the deal.” Locke hesitated. “It’s really the only ship I’ve got available, Cajun. You may have to take her with you, if you go.”

  “Who will do the flying?”

  “Me. That’s another condition.”

  Durell did not like it. He stared at the swarming crowds moving about on the vast area of the pagoda platform, at the complicated and gilded sculpture of naga serpents and chinthes, carved leogryphs, on the walls and columns around the jade merchant’s stall. The crowd seemed to be the same, with no one standing out to attract his special interest. The colors were blurred now as evening lowered. The flickering of the votive candles was brighter, and the reverberations of the gongs and bells sounded louder over the endless tidal sounds of voices, hawkers, scuffling feet and the atonal music from the wandering Pwe players.

  “Sam, take me in on it,” Locke said earnestly. “Don’t shut me out.” His pale eyes under the bushy white brows were tormented. “I’m on a downhill road with nothing but the snakes for company. I need out of here. If I can be useful to you, give me the chance to prove it.”

  “When can your plane be ready to fly north?”

  “I’ve got a Dakota at Pegu. The field there isn’t quite as controlled as the one here in Rangoon. We could take off, say, at midnight tonight. You could meet me out at the Mandarin Bar, at ten. That’s out near the race track. Any trishaw boy can run you out there.”

  Durell still hesitated. “You said Paul Hartford was afraid; but he went up into the hills, anyway?”

  “His wife made him do it. Little rich Eva. A sentimental journey to find her brother’s grave, if possible. Emmett Claye was an OSS guerilla leader among the Kachins, at the time that Merrill’s Marauders campaigned down the Ledo Road. Claye was killed on the trail—but he’d become Paul's buddy, I understand. That’s how Paul came to meet Eva Claye, his future wife, in the first place, I guess. But I don’t know. Paul drank a lot and talked a lot to Jackie Houphet flying up, but Jackie didn’t get it all straight, except that he reported that Paul acted real strange.”

  “Afraid, you said.”

  “The fact that Jackie got it today before he could talk to you doesn’t give me much hope that Paul Hartford is still alive,” Locke said. “I’d say that Paul went up there to his own execution.”

  Chet Lowbridge was short and stocky, and he wore a Princeton fraternity jacket and white slacks. In the midst of Rangoon’s strange sights and sounds, he was Ivy League all the way. He had an air of competence mingled with a thinly veiled contempt for everything around him, as if he endured his job and env
ironment only in the hope of moving on to something more to his taste. But there was shrewd intelligence in his brown eyes, a hard curve to his mouth, and a lithe aggressiveness in his tennis-player’s body.

  He was waiting in Durell’s room at the Strand, with Boh Savarati. The colonel was a slim, middle-aged man with gray hair and the smooth, flat Thai-Mongol face of Southeast Asia. He had a broad mouth and everted lips and dark, quiet eyes. His uniform was khaki, bush-worn but immaculate.

  “Mr. Durell?” he said, in a British accent. “Please forgive the intrusion. Mr. Lowbridge consented to accompany me for this interview, and I thought it best we reach an immediate understanding. You have been busy since you arrived in Rangoon. Commendable Yankee aggressiveness.”

  Lowbridge grinned. “Durell isn’t a Yankee, Colonel. He comes from the bayou country below New Orleans.” Savarati’s eyes flickered. “There is a difference?”

  “In temperament only.” Lowbridge shook hands with Durell. “Call me Chet. I’m the official greeter and smoother-outer of bumpy roads. I pour oil on troubled waters. Sorry I couldn’t meet your plane, but I was tied up with Mrs. Hartford. You can understand that.”

  “How did you know I was coming this afternoon?” Durell asked.

  “I told you, didn’t I? A certain elderly gentleman and a certain influential Senator.”

  “Mr. Durell,” Savarati said gently, “there has been some difficulty this evening at the home of a man named Simon Locke. Do you know anything about it?”

  Durell looked at the ceiling fan, where the microphone bug was hidden. “You know as much about it as I do.” The Burmese’s face wore a smile. “What you found was only a routine precaution with certain foreigners, you understand. Did you know the man who was killed? The French pilot for BAT?”

  “No,” Durell said. “Not at all.”

  “Can you suggest a reason for this tragedy?"

  “None at the moment.”

  Lowbridge said with false diffidence, “See here, old man, you don’t want to get mixed up with an adventurer like Locke. The authorities frown on his sort, and soon Locke will get his walking papers. His shoestring airline serves a purpose for the moment—it’s the only line that seems to get along with the rebels up north—”