Assignment- Tiger Devil

by Will B Aarons

  'You were lucky," Durell said.

  *Yes, sir. You only run across the wish-come-true man once every three-four years."

  Durell made no immediate reply as they passed drainage canals, Ruimveldt Industrial Site, the modem buildings of the Banks Brewery. He did not think they were being followed, but sensed that he was no longer merely the hunter, but the hunted as well.

  He told Ajit: "Just don't stir up any hornets."

  "Yes, Mr. Durell."

  "If you learn anything and can't reach me, don't wait. Call Chad Mitchell at the American Embassy. Chad Mitchell."

  "I understand."

  Soon they were rolling south on MacKenzie Road through humid farmland, its flat sugar and rice fields and meadows gridded with canals that were pewter under the stars. Palms with enormous shellburst crowns bent and twisted against the trades that rode them. The smell of wet earth brought to mind Louisiana's delta parishes. Durell did not turn as the road to the Morera plantation flashed past. Ajit questioned him against the battering of wind through open windows.

  "There's another stop first," was all that Durell said.

  They swept on, and the engine's whine shouted back from a village of stilted, peak-roofed houses and high stick fences. The community faucet on a rusty pipe reared beside the road, then the fluttering canvas awnings of a small marketplace, desolate in the night. An abandoned donkey cart. Ditches choked with hyacinths, Azolias, Marsilias and lotus.

  Far to the east lightning shot from a billowed mass of black clouds.

  Durell slowed, angled the car into a cavernous overhang of trees and vines. The metallic orange of animals' eyes peered from foliage beside the red dirt trail. In places like this, Durell reflected, you could almost believe in the francup, a one-eyed giant who eats the unwary; and duppies, who cry like children and lead hunters to death in the forest.

  Ajit said nothing as he watched the spray of light that advanced ahead of them.

  The car rocked and joggled as its tires spun and slewed in the mud.

  Abruptly the jungle reeked of dead embers, and Durell's senses tightened.

  A last turn into a clearing that was high in weeds, and Durell cut the ignition and stared out the window. Seen through trees to his left was the river, a taut gray skin huroming between its banks.

  On his right was Peta Gibaudan's shack—or what remained of it. A heap of fire-blackened debris.

  Durell regarded the scene grimly. He did not know if the shack had been burned as a warning or as a funeral pyre. He did not know if Peta were dead or alive.

  A bubbler frog under the riverbank made a fountain sound over the creakings and sawings of insects. The jungle was impenetrable to sight, shadow layered on shadow.

  Durell stepped out of the car, pistol held at waist height, approached the wreckage, sniffed the air.

  Ajit stood beside him, distinctly uncomfortable, eyes rolling right and left. "Nobody's here, sir. Don't you think we should go back to Miss Morera's plantation?"

  Durell returned to the car on reluctant feet. He felt abruptly weary and remorseful. He'd smelled burned flesh out there.

  It might only be a deer haunch, he thought.

  Ana's plantation was a one-by-four-mile rectangle coming off the river on its narrow side along lines surveyed by the Dutch more than 250 years before. With the flooding river diked in front and the back-dammed swamps in the rear, existence here was in precarious balance—a microcosm of the world as a whole, Durell reflected. The only relief from several square miles of sugarcane was a grid of ditches, drains and twenty-foot-wide irrigation canals dug by slaves when the land first was reclaimed from pestilential swamps. Where the plantation drive cut through the fields, the cane made oppressive walls twelve to fourteen feet high, and it occurred to Durell that a man might get lost here—or hide—almost as easily as in the jungle.

  There was nothing to indicate that he had been followed from Peta's; no evidence to show that harm awaited him where the blackish-green ramparts glimmered past.

  But it was difficult to ignore a sense of apprehension that gripped him while the potholed lane continued through the obscuring cane stalks.

  He wondered where the men from the Peerless were now.

  The road opened onto a space where towering palms fussed over an enormous gray-shingled house of Georgian style. Beyond were a bam; a pair of rusty standpipes for household water; and several rows of ramshackle ranges that once housed slaves, but now were quarters for workers' families. Near a confluence of canals, where iron cane barges were tied in a row behind a sluice gate, was a large sugar mill constructed of galvanized steel sheeting— the only building of modem vintage to Durell's view. A huge incinerator smoldered with burning bagasse, the waste of cut, shredded and pressed cane.

  Durell drove around the bam, where he parked between a pair of International Harvester farm tractors. Ajit extended his hand in the dark. It was bony and hard. He said, "I shall be alert, Mr. Durell."

  "Just stay out of trouble."

  Ajit nodded. "YouVe hired the right man."

  "I hope so."

  Durell watched him go across the puddle-strewn ground of the ditched and barren workyards to the workers' quarters. A warm scent of forage and manure came through the walls of the barn, and the air was touched by the perfume of hibiscus and water hyacinths. Over all was the sugary fragrance of the mill.

  The breeze was chill, the squishy ground flaked with cane chaff, as he strolled to the big house. A light glowed from somewhere deep in its interior. Even considering the hour, the place struck Durell as too quiet, as if holding a secret—or afraid. There was no sound of livestock, no sleepy duckings, no barking dogs. Even the insects were muted, here in the open. There were only the frogs that peeped and croaked and boomed with distant rancor.

  Durell knocked on the door and waited. He could not shake off a sense of unease. Ajit was out of sight. Palm fronds, aluminum under the stars, clashed and gestured high above. The storm cloud, seen earlier from the Mac-Kenzie Road, had disappeared.

  Durell tried the door, found it unlocked, pushed it in, his concern for Ana mounting. Abruptly the knob was jerked from his grasp, the door yawned open.

  The man who stood in the interior gloom might have been smiling; it was difficult to say.

  His face was a ribbed mask of scar tissue.

  Chapter Fourteen

  There was no time to think.

  It was reflex, pure and simple, that urged Durell's shoulder up to protect his neck from a jolting chop; and he knew by the aching impact that the blow was meant to kill. He gripped the arm and twisted. The faceless man flew over his back, crashed against the floor, rolled and bounced onto his feet with steely resilience. In the split-second they faced-off, Durell realized a vague familiarity that went beyond their encounter at the Toucan Patio, something in the black eyes, like volcanic incandescence seen at night. Then the man's booted heel shot out to break Durell's kneecap, missed, ripped painfully down his shin, and Durell reeled against an ebonized wooden cabinet. They grappled with grunts and stifled breath as bric-a-brac rattled and splintered, each seeking the other's weakness with feral speed and merciless efficiency.

  Durell sensed now that he was fighting for his life; that this man was good, too good for anything but a deeply experienced professional; and that, moreover, he was enjoying the test of bone and muscle and skill, was in a kind of bloody exhilaration.

  Blood dribbled thickly from the noses of both.

  Tall as Durell was, the other man was slightly taller, but without Durell's depth of chest. They were evenly matched. Everything depended on skill and daring, quickness and heart.

  Suddenly Durell felt the breath squirt from his lungs as the man rammed him with head and shoulder. He was slammed back against the staircase wall, and it shuddered as if struck by a torpedo. Durell thrust his knee low, toward the vulnerable face, felt a satisfying crunch. The man's head popped up, and he staggered back. Durell snatched a razor-edged shard of china and swiped
at his opponent's neck, and a red gleam of fear came into eyes that were like black beetles on a shriveled melon. Even hurt and off-balance, the man blocked the blow with a sharp chop to Durell's right wrist that numbed it.

  They circled each other cautiously. The man's bloody teeth flashed, and it could have been a grin or a snarl on his pulpy face. Their heavy breathing was the sound of storm surf in the narrow hallway.

  It was the first break of sufficient duration to make Durell think he had a chance to reach the .38 in its holster below his right kidney.

  He plunged his hand under his coat and became aware too late that the hand still was benumbed, useless to grasp the weapon. His startled thoughts lingered an instant too long on his predicament, and the man charged with an elated grunt, pinning Durell against the wall with only his left hand free. Cabled muscles stramed as their bodies flattened together there, the other man with all the advantage. Durell heaved and sweated and smelled garlic and pepper on the other's breath.

  His opponent's hand clawed ruthlessly toward the pistol, and they swayed, locked together. Suddenly Durell felt it come free, saw its glint in the dim light, and witii a final surge of desperation lobbed his knee into the man's groin. The man yelped, bent, and then Durell's knee caught the side of his head, and he spun away, the pistol tumbling from his hand.

  He saw that Durell would beat him to the snub-nosed revolver, chose to run and hurled himself through the door, before Durell could bring the gun to bear in his left hand.

  Durell could see nothing out there.

  He thought again of the men from the Peerless, cursed, slammed the door shut and locked it. Let them come and get him, if they cared to try. He vented a deep breath, rubbed a hand that was beginning to tmgle with renewed life.

  Then his night-blue eyes moved up the dusky staircase and there was Ana, her youthful curves sculpted under the flowing drapery of an apricot silk satin nightgown. Her long hair was down now and made rippled black curtains beside her cheeks. Her face was very white.

  She spoke his name as if coming out of shock, and she said: "I was asleep—I heard all the commotion—I . . ."

  "It's over. All over," Durell soothed. He wiped his nose with his hand, looked at it and asked for a damp cloth. She hurried away and hurried back, the satin whispering, and Durell regarded her with relief. She still was safe. Then his eyes sobered, because he did not know how that could be—unless she'd been a willing partner to the man who had just tried to kill him.

  Ana surveyed the damaged hallway, eyes brassy with dismay.

  "Why did you attack my foreman?" she asked.

  "Your foreman?"

  "His room is down here." She strode back and forth through the mess, all of a sudden angry—almost too angry. "I suppose you came barging in and frightened him—I tell him to lock the door, but he never does." Durell just watched her for a long moment.

  'You didn't tell him to expect me?" he asked.

  'I didn't think it was necessary. It didn't even occur to me."

  "Where did you get him?" Durell's voice was quiet.

  "Costa Rica." Her slender throat made a pinched sound of vehemence. "You know, some of these things are irreplaceable."

  "I'll get a voucher for them. When did you hire him?"

  She put her hands on the roundness of her hips. "Money just can't buy them, Sam." Then, abruptly, her irises changed from fire to sugary brovm, and she reached up and held his cheeks in her hands, standing close to him, so that he felt the soft, vibrant arches of her body. She sighed. "Never mind," she said in a solemn tone. "Are you all right?"

  "When did you get him?" Durell repeated.

  She saw the look in his eyes, and her hands dropped away from his face. "Three months ago."

  "What do you know about him?"

  She spoke rapidly and angrily. "Leon Perez. Forty-six years old. Born near San Jose, reared on a sugar plantation that was subsequently lost—along with his family— in the eruption of the Irazu volcano in 1963." Her voice turned almost insolent, as she added: "That's how his face got all those terrible scars, if you want to know. Trying to save his wife and children when a cloud of hot ash burned their home. Anything else?'*

  "How many children?"

  "Oh!" she hissed impatiently, eyes glaring.

  "How many?" Durell insisted.

  "Three, two boys and a girl, four, seven and nine years old. All dead. Along with their mother."

  "Of course. So that he didn't have to give you any names. He had the best of both worlds—" Durell spoke sardonically "—-he was a family man with all the stability and reliability that implied, but no family to get in the way."

  Ana made a shocked sound. "You really think he s involved with the people who killed Dick, don't you."

  Durell no longer knew if he could trust Ana, but he was not through with her yet. He took her elbow, and said: "You remember. Ana—I told you about the man who had spied on us at the Toucan Patio?"

  Her brown eyes looked at him expectantly.

  "Leon was that man," Durell said.

  She gasped through trembling fingers. "I don't believe it. Why are you trying to frighten me?" ^ ^

  "I'm only telling you the truth. I'd appreciate it if you'd bring Leon's letters of reference, whatever information he gave you as his employer, up to my bedroom. I hope you will allow me to go through them." ^

  "Well, I don't know, Sam. Isn't that confidential?

  "Ordinarily, yes." Durell's smile was unpleasant.

  She swallowed, staring at the blue-black eyes. She said, "I'll think it over."

  "Don't take too long," Durell said.

  "It's breaking a trust."

  "You pleaded to help."

  She hesitated another second, then went to get the man's file. At least, Durell thought, he could relay the information to Chad to be checked out. He would have to do it immediately, before something else happened. He reckoned more violence was in store; it was just a matter of when, and where—and who survived.

  As Ana showed Durell to a bedroom at the top of the stairs, she said: "How about a nightcap? I think I could use one. I'll bring something in."

  "Fine," Ehirell said.

  When she was gone, he h'fted the telephone and dialed Chad Mitchell's number. As the phone rang and rang, he glanced at his watch, saw it was almost two am and gave a tired sigh. He had hoped for four or five hours of badly needed sleep, but would dare now only to doze. It would be rest of a sort, anyhow. It was necessary that he get away before dawn—the risk would increase with daylight.

  Chad's voice was sleepy and irritable.

  Durell said, "I want a background check, Chad. A man named Leon Perez, probably other A.K.A.'s as well, alleged Costa Rican."

  "Wasn't in Boyer's files?" Chad asked.

  "Would I be calling?"

  "Well, goddamn, this time of night and everything, am I supposed to be rational?"

  "I need it fast." Durell filled Chad in on the details that Ana had supplied.

  "We'll have to tap the computer bank in D.C.," Chad said irascibly. "What about the blackout you ordered on our communications? What about security?"

  "What security?" Durell struggled to hold back his anger. "Just send in the clear."

  "Look, Sam, that's—"

  "Don't argue, Chad. We won't be telling the opposition anything they don't already know. They'll be expecting us to check out Perez now. And tell embassy communications to monitor my receive band from 0600 to 0700 hours—it's K-2, they can look up the frequency in their book. Something should come through in cipher. I'll pick it up from you when I call back about Perez."

  Over the line, Durell heard the fizz of a match bursting into flame as Chad lighted a cigarette. "Sam?" The voice was uncertain.

  "Yes?"

  "Did you have to steal Eisler's car? T told you to be careful with him. He's hot under the collar—he's been to the ambassador, Sam. And the ambassador is most pissed-off." Chad's voice continued with unaccustomed reasonableness, even pleading: "No
w this reflects on me,

  Sam, even though Fm supposed to be a diplomat, and K Section was a long time ago, and I happened to get stuck with embassy security through no desire of my own. Sam —^please—what do I tell the ambassador?"

  "Don't tell him anything," Durell said flatly.

  There was an angry pause. Then Chad snarled: "Well, where the hell are you? I'll just tell him and let you handle the questions."

  "In a hole, looking out." Durell hung up.

  Ana brought glowing golden whiskey in a cut-glass decanter and two matching crystal glasses. As she poured, Durell's eyes ranged around the room, took in the two Demerara windows that looked toward the river, and a jalousied door onto a balcony that ran the full length of the second story. There would be a stairway onto it from the outside. He judged the room to be only marginally defensible, but supposed it was as good as any in the house. It was furnished with a Heal wardrobe inlaid with pewter and ebony, a writing desk decorated with sycamore marquetry, and a comfortable old Morris chair. The bed was a vague reminder of an English galleon, with carved scrollwork on forecastle and poop.

  Ana handed a glass to him and raised hers, and her hair swung in a long ebony fan around her shoulders.

  "To Dick," Durell said, a remoteness in his eyes.

  Ana sipped. Durell tossed down his double and it curled warmly in his stomach. He said: "I brought that Asian here with me, the one who had the gun in the hotel."

  "What for?" She sounded dismayed.

  "I want him to ask a few questions of your East Indian employees."

  "About Dick? They know nothing."

  "How can you be sure? I thought I had best tell you; you're likely to see him around."

  "But I don't want him here." The moist lower lip of her small mouth swelled with petulance.

  Durell eyed her sharply.

  "I mean—it's rather embarrassing," she explained, "after the hotel room. Those people are very moral. I'm supposed to set an example. Please—send him away."