Assignment Burma Girl

by Edward S. Aarons

  His voice echoed and winged away among the round, Him shapes of the Buddha images in the shadows. The only light came from the two lamps before the largest statue. Beyond, all was darkness and mystery.

  He called again. “Eva? Paul?”

  Then he waited, his gun ready.

  The soft slapping of sandaled footsteps, moving without haste toward him, came in answer to his echoing shout. He could see nothing at first. Then a gong sounded, reverberating in brassy echoes from under the sagging pagoda roof. He moved forward, out of the corridor between the monastery cells, onto the pagoda platform.

  The stout form of Yan Gon, the Buddhist priest, greeted him. Durell watched the yellow-robed figure waddle slowly toward him with a sense of unreality and relief. The priest was unarmed and serene. His smile was contemplative, telling him nothing.

  “Those you seek are gone from this holy place, sir.” The Buddhist bowed. “There is only myself, Yan Gon, to remove the evidence of desecration.”

  “Major Mong is gone?”

  “He took the woman and the injured man.”

  “Do you know where?”

  “The man could not speak. And it is not permitted for a priest of Buddha to speak to or have any contact with a female. So I did not inquire. As for Mong—” Yan Gon shrugged. “He is a man who cries out against God and who will meet the inevitable cycle of his fate.”

  “Was the woman hurt?”

  “No.”

  “But you say the man could not speak.”

  “He is ill and injured,” the priest said. “But he is alive.” “And the soldiers who were here?”

  “They have gone to join the fighting.”

  “Mong didn’t go with them?”

  “No. He went to wait for the outcome. He is a man who is tortured by many things—by the hatred and love he will not admit. And in this moment it is not the battle that interests him the most, but the puzzle of his own existence.”

  “Don’t you know where he took the Hartfords?”

  Yan Gon nodded his bald, shaven head. “Down in the ruins below. If you go to seek him, I give you this warning. He is dangerous. Do you go to kill him?”

  “If it is necessary.”

  “He will kill you first. He has sworn to this.”

  “Perhaps,” Durell said. “We’ll see.”

  It was full night, but the pale moon that shone from the east made strange geometric shapes of the ruined walls and temples that clung to the hillside below the monastery. Durell followed a narrow path from the pagoda platform, moving with the caution of a hunter. Below was a maze of crumbled walls and roofs, vine-grown pagodas, statues of solemn Buddhas softened by centuries of rain and wind.

  He paused to dry his hand on his thigh and shift his grip on the gun. It could be a trap. He could trust no one— Ingkok or Tagashi or the Buddhist priest. Terror ruled this land and this night, and he was aware of an overwhelming loneliness.

  Long ago, when he was a boy in the Louisiana bayous, he had been lost in the swamps for two nights and a day, and he had felt something like this, alone in a dark, strange world without light or hope of escape. He had known panic, and had gone stumbling and shouting through the sloughs under the menacing shapes of gnarled cypress and gum trees, hunting for the old Indian cheniere that might lead him back to the safe world of highways and cafes and bright speeding cars, shrimp fishermen at their wine and oil roughnecks with their beer. But his panic had only taken him deeper into the swamp, until all landmarks were gone and he found himself in a strange gray world, hostile and unfamiliar, where he could count on no man’s help.

  For hours then he had sat quietly on a cypress knee, watching the direction of the shadows as the unseen sun, hidden high beyond the foliage overhead, moved in its eternal orbit and showed him which way to go. It had not been easy to control the screaming imps of terror that prodded him to get up and run again, that shouted to him to plunge headlong across the morass, promising him safety if he would only run, run.—

  He had gone slowly and carefully instead. And by dawn of the second day he stepped abruptly from a gray wilderness into the safe asphalt of a highway that led him not more than four miles into the outskirts of Bayou Peche Rouge.

  Durell wondered why this memory was so sharp in him now. Panic could easily take you out of control, become a monster that rode you and whipped you toward self-destruction—

  He paused and studied the dark shadows of the ruins. A moth brushed his cheek with feathery wings. He did not move. Something rustled in the debris of the jungle floor. He looked that way, saw nothing.

  He moved on, working his way down the steep slope along crumbling parapets, across vine-grown pagodas, around massive, tilted, sometimes-fallen images of Buddha.

  He found himself in a mass of inextricable ruins, without form or pattern, that had tumbled and collapsed all the way down the dark hillside to the river’s edge.

  There was no sign of Emmett or Eva or Paul.

  Yet a sense of caution kept him from pushing on too openly. They were here, if the priest had told the truth— and there was no reason to doubt Yan Gon. Mong—or Emmett, whichever person he happened to be at the moment—was also listening to the dim sounds of battle in the valley. He would be in a rage at the way his supposedly abject victims had stood up to fight against his terror. He would be looking for someone on which to work out his frustrated anger. The danger to Eva and Paul was immense, imminent and deadly.

  But where were they?

  He had the feeling he was walking straight into a trap.

  He had the feeling that Mong was waiting for him.

  A thin cloud darkened the moon, and for several moments he could see nothing. The dark loom of a nearby pagoda, rising in a thin spire among the young trees, merged with the tumbled background of other ruins and trees. A tenuous trail led from where Durell had halted in front of the pagoda and dipped sharply down the steep hillside in a series of huge, crumbled steps. But he could make out no details.

  Then something came crashing toward him out of the darkness, out of the momentary moonless night, smashing up the trail from the nearest pagoda.

  The gun jumped up in his hand, ready to fire. A huge dark shape lumbered like a behemoth toward him, implacable, destructive. He almost squeezed the trigger. Then, at the last moment, the thin cloud that obscured the moon

  drifted on. He saw what it was and side-stepped out of the trail in time to let the water buffalo, disturbed by something unknown, smash angrily past, snorting his annoyance to the dark night.

  Durell paused. He wondered if the animal had been here by accident, or if it had been deliberately driven up the path to draw his fire.

  He stepped out onto the path after the animal was gone—

  The shot and the scream came simultaneously.

  He did not see where it came from. The bullet smashed past him and he reacted with instinctive reflex bom of his training and threw himself flat on the trail. His ears rang from the close passage of the bullet.

  “Durell!”

  It was a man’s voice, with a peculiar echoing quality that bounced back and forth from all the ruined walls around him.

  He did not answer.

  “Durell!”

  He lifted his head and searched the dark shadows. The ruined pagoda just below him on the trail was in darkness. He wasn’t sure if it was the source of the shout or the rifle shot. He tried to remember the sound of the scream. Had it been from a woman or a man? He decided it might have been Eva. But he wasn’t sure.

  He lifted himself slowly, using infinite caution. There was no wind, and the foliage in the brush stood absolutely still. The other man’s eyes would be better adjusted to the night by now than his own. Any movement would be detected—

  The second shot came smashing out of the darkness and slammed into the ground to spray dirt over Durell’s head. He was exposed on the trail. His heart pounded, and he felt vulnerable. If he got up to run again, he would surely be seen more clearly, and make a
perfect target for the marksman. He did not dare move at all.

  Then the screaming began again.

  It came from the pagoda, and this time he knew it was Eva.

  And then it ended abruptly.

  Eleven

  She was conscious of a pain in the right side of her face, a burning sensation where her cheek had scraped against the rough stone when Emmett struck her to cut off her warning cry. Dazed, Eva leaned her head back and closed her eyes, fighting the weakness that filled her. She felt Paul’s hand reach out to touch her fingers. She did not react. She felt more dead than alive.

  Where had she made her mistake? What had gone wrong?

  With one part of her mind she heard Emmett move carefully away, each footfall silent and calculated, the pace and tread of a predatory animal. That’s what he was, she told herself. You have to face it. And yet he was still Emmett. He looked just as she had always remembered him. No, not exactly the same. He had changed; he was older. The dim image she had carried in the back of her mind since childhood had been idealized and made too romantic through all the years between.

  She rubbed her cheek slowly where it hurt.

  Paul touched her again.

  He did not dare speak to her, and she was afraid to reply. It was like being in a cage with a wild animal, where the slightest move or sound would evoke the rending destruction of enraged and murderous fury.

  You have to face the fact that this wild animal who just struck you might very well kill you. And he’s Emmett, the glorified image of the brother you always yearned for and wondered about.

  She heard him breathing in slow and conscious control. What had happened? He was shooting at Durell because he had called out Durell’s name in that thin fury that marked everything about him. But what was Durell doing here? Was he alone? And what was all the shooting about down in the village?

  They were hunting Emmett like a dangerous, wounded animal. His wounds did not show on the outside. They were like her own, deep injuries and unseen scars that never healed, no matter what means or men you took to try to heal them.

  And this was the end of the long road, the last and final step she could take to help herself.

  She did not know what to do.

  It had seemed simple, back in the Circuit House. Her mind had been filled with a strange, exciting sense of nearness to Emmett, an inner conviction that he was really alive and waiting for her.

  So she had not been surprised when the Japanese, Tagashi, appeared and asked her to come with him.

  Merri was asleep in the room next to Durell and Simon Locke. The Japanese was very quiet. He had seemed a kind and reasonable old man, but burdened by a strange inner grief when he looked at her and beckoned her outside. The guards were down in the public room of the hotel then, eating their noon ration of rice. She heard their voices, soft and placid, despite their weapons and warlike appearance. Merri did not waken when she got up and quietly went with the Japanese down the back stairs and out along the alley to the waterfront, past the silent shadows of the bashas on their pilings, crouching under them for a moment, then splashing on through the shallow water until they reached the safety of the brush and jungle at the edge of town.

  “Where are you taking me?” she had asked.

  “To Emmett Claye. You are his sister?”

  ‘Yes, but—” Her heart hammered with the excitement of his words and the meaning of what he had said, this realization of all she had planned. She had felt suddenly weak and faint. “He is here, isn’t he? You’re not lying?”

  “He is the commander of the Lahpet Hao.”

  “I don’t know or care anything about that,” she said. “I just want to see him.”

  “He may be dangerous,” the Japanese said quietly. “They are all dangerous men.”

  “I’m not interested in politics,” she said. “If Emmett is leading them, then I’m sure he thinks it’s the best thing to do.”

  Tagashi had looked at her curiously, then made a small gesture with his gnarled hands, as if he had made a small effort to tell her something, and now resigned himself to her deaf ears. He led the way up into the hills, and she followed eagerly along the jungle trail.

  It was an hour’s walk to Yan Gon’s monastery. Tagashi was patient with her when she had to rest against the steep climb up the hillside. She did not think about Durell or even Paul. Her mind was filled with Emmett, of how he would greet her, what he would say and do when she told him everything that had happened to her, about the big house she now owned and the incredible fortune that was hers, and of all the good and wonderful things she brought to him this day. He would come home to the States with her, of course. No other course was conceivable. Whatever he’d done, no matter how he had lived all these years, it didn’t matter. Everything would be smoothed out for him back home. Money could buy anything, she told herself.

  The time on the trail to the monastery seemed endless.

  She was hardly aware of her surroundings in the excitement and anticipation of meeting Emmett at last.

  And then she saw him.

  She remembered vague impressions of the crumbling temple walls, the strange carvings and leogryphs and endless tiers of Buddha statues. She remembered hurrying down the corridor ahead of Tagashi, who had been stopped by grinning, armed men in green uniforms; and her voice went crying out in strange echoes among the votary candles and the silent, serene images.

  “Emmett? Emmett?”

  She knew him at once when he stepped from the cell doorway, knew the pale yellow eyes, the thin tense figure, the twisted little smile. She dismissed the gray in his pale hair, the darkness of his jungle tan, the furrows that time had carved around his thin mouth.

  He was smiling.

  “Eva?”

  She rushed to him and he held out his arms and they hugged each other and she wept like a fool, unable to control herself, aware of him holding her at last, like a hand held out to her over all the lonely years of emptiness and humiliation and hunger.

  “Emmett, Emmett, is it really you?” she had asked, searching his face blindly.

  Then he was not smiling. “Yes. You’re quite the lady, Eva.”

  “Oh, so many things have happened to me—”

  ‘You could have come sooner.”

  “I didn’t know. I thought your letter was from a crank—”

  Then she looked into the cell behind him and saw PauL

  Later, she thought of it as a thunderclap, or as the sudden bursting of a child’s balloon, or as the abrupt dissolution of an image on a photographic negative.

  She saw Paul sprawled out in his filthy, ragged clothing, bearded and wretched, wounded and uncared for. He was helpless, and yet a calm strength and defiance came from him. It was strange how different he was from the Paul she knew and held in contempt It was his eyes that had changed the most.

  Paul’s eyes were fever-bright, and yet they looked at her with an expression of love and pity and a sense of waiting, as if he were holding his breath against some catastrophe that awaited her.

  “Paul? What happened?” she whispered.

  Emmett spoke harshly. “He says he’s your husband.”

  “Yes. Of course he is. How did you get hurt, Paul?”

  And Paul said, “Emmett did it. He shot me.”

  “I can’t believe that.”

  “It’s true,” Emmett said. “I may have to kill him.”

  She stared at his cold face. “What?”

  “It’s simple enough. We were friends once, but we’re enemies now. We’re on opposite sides now, Eva. And don’t look at me like a bewildered child. Don’t you understand what’s happening in this country? Don’t you know what’s happened to me?” Emmett’s voice rang out with a harsh, metallic clangor. He pushed her into the cell and followed.

  “Paul came here to spy on me and kill me. He’s admitted it.”

  “No, that’s not true,” she whispered. “I sent him. I wanted to know if you were still alive.”

  �
��And in sending him, you played right into the hands of the American agents who would like nothing better than to see me dead. In a way, you’ve betrayed me, too, Eva.”

  “What are you talking about? Don’t preach politics to me now, please. I don’t know anything about it, and I care even less. Paul isn’t a spy. He didn’t come here to kill you.”

  Paid said, “But it’s true, Eva.”

  She stared without comprehension at Emmett, thin and wiry, moving back and forth in the cell, with a crackling nervous tension as if driven by the demons that marked his eyes. And she looked at Paul’s calm face, seeing the evidence of what had happened to him these past two weeks, and not understanding why he seemed so different and sure of himself, as if he had just found something he had been looking for, for a long time.

  Paul said, “Your precious brother is a traitor, an enemy to everything we stand for. His life is dedicated to destroying us.”

  “You mean to take your money and distribute it to the people,” Emmett said, grinning. “It will happen, too. People like you are the curse of the century. You will be destroyed soon enough.”

  “Emmett, stop it,” she said pleadingly. “Please stop it. I didn’t come here to quarrel with you.”

  “There is no quarrel, Eva,” Paul said from his pallet. “You can’t quarrel either with a stone wall or a wild animal.”

  “Did you come here to tempt me, too, with the luxuries you got from Uncle Arthur?” Emmett asked her.

  She did not understand him.

  “If not, why did you come to look for me?” he went on.

  “Because—because you’re Emmett,” she faltered. And when she saw the contempt in his pale eyes, she tried again. “Because I always thought of you as—as the only one in the world who loved me—who might do something kind for me.”

  “That’s childish,” he said bluntly.

  “Yes. But it’s the only nice thought or memory I have from my childhood, Emmett.”

  “It’s foolish and romantic.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “According to what Paul told me about you, being a romantic is just about the last thing one could expect from you, Eva.”