The innkeeper was genial and accommodating, glad for the business in these troubled times. When he asked for the surrender of their passports, a formality normally required in Mobundu, he willingly accept a small bribe instead.
Durell took the usual precautions, deftly and with practiced speed inspected all readily accessible places, such as lights and fireplace, for hidden listening devices. It was habit. A good habit. He moved to the beveled-glass window, surveyed the parking lot, the dark lane that led into it from the street, the shaggy rise of a foliage-clad hill behind the inn. Night-blooming cereus scented the darkness. They might have been a hundred miles away in the bush, instead of within the city limits of the capital.
For the first time this evening, he began to relax. Deirdre’s voice came across the room. "I wonder where Jerry is now,” she said. "Perhaps I should call his room again.”
"No phone calls,” Durell said. "They can be traced. His room may be bugged.” He turned to her; she sat on the blankets of a fat mattress.
"You mean we’re cut off from the world, sir—just the two of us?”
"So it seems.” She made him feel like smiling.
"Then come to bed.”
He did as he was told.
10
Durell dressed by the dim light that came through the beveled windows, trying not to awaken Deirdre. They had made love first, unhurriedly; then they had talked in the darkness. Now she lay snug and sated, copper-tinted ebony hair coiled about her patrician cheeks. Her lips were parted in sleep, and he kissed her lightly, and they felt dry and warm. She would take a taxi back to her hotel.
The fog had crept higher, and it was darker outside, as he strolled to the Volvo. The eerie cry of a bushbaby echoed from the nearby forested hill, the only token of life besides frogs and crickets. The moon was low and looked like a piece of old bone through the fog.
First he would go to his hotel. He’d like to shower and shave, change clothes and take a taxi from there. No point in having to park his Volvo near the scene of business—if anything went wrong, it could be remembered and point to him like a signpost.
He drove up the twisting road past the Haga Brewery, with its big red sign, then turned left and followed Highway Two until he came to the floodlighted hydroelectric dam, built into a natural bottleneck where the river emptied from the lake. As he crossed the spillway, he saw two men in a rowboat far below hauling a human form out of the swirling water. The huge floods made it like an ink-and-sepia drawing. Then he was past, and on the other side, headed into the main city. He remembered that President for Life Ausi paid the boatmen to keep the pool beneath the dam free of corpses, so that morning commuters wouldn’t be disturbed by the ghastly evidence of his work. Of course, the army and the SB had other means of amusing themselves, and they ranged from mass slaughter of large groups penned in rooms or compounds to forcing each in a succession of prisoners to kill the one who preceded him.
The city seemed deserted at five in the morning. Even the soldiers must have gone to bed.
The International sat on a landscaped block of fuchsias, palms and flamboyant trees. His room was in a wing extending from the main building, so he followed the drive past the glass-fronted lobby with its excellent Tanzanian Makonde sculpture and parked among other cars and safari buses near the entrance to his room.
He got out of the car and stood briefly and scanned the area. His snub-nosed revolver was heavy under his arm. A car engine started somewhere in the parking lot. It was out of his vision: he discounted it and started for his room, 14-A. He had just put the key in the red steel door when a sound iced his heart.
The footfall of a man. Right behind him.
Then, in an urgent hiss: "Sam; I thought you’d never come back.”
It was Jerry Chase.
Durell’s anger was abrupt and scathing. "What are you doing here?” His eyes slid quickly over the parking lot. "Get inside.”
"I’ve been hiding; I had nowhere else to turn,” Jerry said as he entered the room.
"Deirdre says—”
Durell, coming after Jerry, was interrupted by a retching sound. He saw the photographer’s arms bend up to his face, looked beyond him saw the reason.
In the middle of the bed, visible in a wedge of light falling from the bathroom and staining the zebra spread with gore, was a man’s head.
"My God,” Jerry choked.
"It’s the man from the Ruwenzori; the one the Second Bureau used to harass Deirdre in the bar,” Durell said.
The face sagged misshapenly, its half-open white eyes moist, the puffy lips seeming almost to smile. He swallowed down a wave of nausea as a fly crawled out of the nose.
Jerry ran to the bathroom and slammed the door. Durell checked outside from the edge of the window, hearing him vomit. When he came back, his red hair . flamed atop a face now eggshell-white. "My God,” he repeated, and shook his head. "They’re savages. And to think I—” He turned eyes on Durell that showed the horror of the thought.
"Deirdre says you will be all right,” Durell said, his tone rough, unsympathetic.
"How can she be so sure?”
"There’s no one else to photograph Teresa; no photos, no magazine story; no story and Ausi will be a very displeased president for life.”
Jerry glanced from the corner of his eye at the grisly thing on the bed. "Poor sonofabitch. They ran out of uses for him, so they just. . .” He searched Durell’s face. "But why did they leave him—it—here?”
"They hadn’t run out of uses,” Durell said. "But this was his last. To shock me and shatter my confidence. To let me know they know—”
"They know?” Jerry bit a fingernail.
"Yes. How much, I can’t say.” Durell’s eyes went dark and hard against Jerry. "The question now is how they found out. Who told them, Jerry?”
"You’re asking me?”
"You’re the candidate, mister. I’d trust Dee and Willie with my life any day of the week.” He paused, pushed a finger into the other’s chest, and said: "But not you.”
Jerry backed against a wall. "Sam—you gotta be joking, babe. Would I have jumped that guy if I hadn’t been on your side?”
"Sure. You may have blown my cover right there.” Durell unholstered his pistol.
Jerry’s face flushed angrily. "You’re crazy!”
"It’s a crazy business.”
"Sam—you think you’re God almighty?” He pushed his palms out.
"I have a Q clearance, full latitude to act as I deem necessary in all matters—”
"You’re wrong. You’re wrong, Sam! Would I come here?”
"Why not?”
The phone rang. Both men stiffened. Jerry’s face was bright with sweat. Durell didn’t answer it immediately. Instead, he talked to Jerry. "Get out,” he said.
"Where will I go?”
"Your hotel.”
"I can’t. They might—”
Durell raised his voice, as the phone continued to ring. "You will. As if nothing had happened. And you will go to work as usual this morning.”
"But—”
"If you fail me, I’ll come after you, so help me,” Durell threatened.
Jerry’s blue eyes were filled with horror and incredulity. Durell was aware that the man might be innocent of intentional betrayal; he could have said something, done something, inadvertently. But Ausi knew about Durell and had made a connection between him and Dee—otherwise, why had the head not been in her room? Durell continued to regard Jerry—you didn’t take chances, so why didn’t he pull the trigger? Because he would take a chance that gave Jerry his life— this time.
"I told you to get out,” he said, and waved his revolver.
This time, Jerry did not hesitate. When he was gone, Durell picked up the phone. He waited, without speaking. A coarse, deep voice spoke in thickly accented English. "Mr. Samuel Durell? This is President for Life Field Marshal Azo Ausi.”
"To what do I owe your call, sir?”
"Have you been well treate
d in Mobundu? Does everything meet with your approval?”
"I have no complaints. Room service is a bit sloppy.” Durell kept his tone bland, waiting for Ausi to come to the point.
"It must seem strange, the president calling you this time of night.”
"Somewhat.”
"Please understand”—the voice became decidedly sinister—"I do so only out of regard for the well-being of certain visitors.”
"I’m pleased to be in that category.” Durell moved to the window, phone in hand. He saw no one out there, but realized his room must have been under surveillance when he arrived.
The president had no intention of mentioning the grisly object that fed flies on Durell’s bed. He was toying with him.
Ausi said: "You must learn about our customs; the blood rite, for instance. Are you familiar with it?” He did not wait for an answer, but continued: "You see, when a warrior kills another, he is obliged to drink his blood. The blood then becomes part of the victor and protects him from the ghost of the vanquished. For surely a ghost will not harm that which is of himself. You see?”
"I see.” Still carrying the telephone, Durell moved to the bathroom, switched off the light. Now the only radiance came from outside, as he watched through the window.
"Yes. Well. We do this with a thrust of the knife into the dead man’s body. We lick the blood from the knife, and it is done.”
"Goodbye, Mr. President. It’s been a fun conversation.”
Ausi’s laugh was satanic.
Hanging up, Durell decided that Ausi was a maniac, capable of anything. He still held his .38 S&W. The grip was damp, so he switched hands, wiped a palm against his trousers, took it back into his right.
Someone was out there. There had to be. He cracked the door, hung back in the shadows, waited to a count of ten. When nothing happened, he slipped out and headed down the flagstone walk that ran in front of the rooms, gun held loosely by his side. Palms drooped in the still darkness. The low moon shone down the valley, over snaking ground fog. There was the touch of dew, the fragrance of jasmine.
A taxi rank waited at the main building. The drivers were asleep, slumped in their seats, billed caps shielding their eyes from the lights on the marquee. Durell glanced over his shoulder, still saw no one, shook the first driver awake. He told him to take him to the train station in the heart of the city.
As they left, a car swung quietly into their wake.
11
Durell studied the headlights that followed him, but they drew no closer.
There was no siren, no blinking lights.
The night was chill, but he felt sweat prickle his pores. The damp street hissed under their tires as they passed under Freedom Arch and around a traffic circle that held a statue of Field Marshal Ausi in its grassy center.
The following car kept its distance at half a block. The city was beginning to stir; municipal buses cruised the curbs; traffic was picking up generally. It still was dark. The railway terminal hove into view on the right, a big neoclassical building with granite columns.
Kenshu had started as a mission, but rapidly turned into a railroad town; there had been a Kenshu before there was a country named Mobundu. Kenshu meant "cold spring” in Ndolo and in 1903 the native village here had become a watering stop on the five-hundred-mile Pan African Railway, then under construction by the Germans. The railroad had brought prosperity, and the English expanded it when they took over after World War I. It was the English who had given the region its map name, Mobundu—which meant "Land of the Moon”—to distinguish it from other map places, such as Kenya and Uganda and Tanganyika. None of it made much sense to the tribes whose borders the new lines split.
You couldn’t go anywhere outside the country by rail now. The other three nations with which Mobundu had operated the rail system in common could no longer stomach President Ausi, so they had kicked his country out of the league.
But Durell was not going to the station to make a trip.
He paid the cabbie and tipped him, counting out the blue paper shilling notes under a streetlamp in front of the station. From beyond its facade came the chuff and throb of a large railyard. The other car—a gray Peugeot, he saw now—had slid into a space in the parking lot, on the east side of the building. Two men got out, as Durell strode toward the entrance. He tasted copper. Whatever they had in mind could range from a little intimidation to lots of bloodshed: he didn’t care to find out. He hastened his pace and ducked inside, twenty yards ahead of them.
The station had been remodeled, probably to impress delegates to some conference, but that had been some time ago. Now it was unswept and begrimed. A number of passengers waited there, most of them country folk normally awake at this hour, who kept watch over caged chickens and rope-bound bark valises. A wrinkled fedora covered the face of a man in ragged jacket and walking shorts who slept on a marble window ledge.
Durell cut through the first boarding gate he came to, heard the steamy hiss of a 1930s locomotive, saw blue passenger cars barring his way. He swung to the left, aiming for a red lamp that marked the end of the train.
A shout came from behind, as they rushed through the gate.
He was running now, amid a whir of steam pumps that sang against the metal walls and glass roof. There was an odor of creosoted ties, a reek of hot oil and grease. His breath came with conditioned ease, as he sailed on long, fluid strides. Nearing the end coach, he glanced back and almost ran down a startled trainman
in blue uniform who swung down from a car into his path.
Then he was around the last coach, cutting across the railyard. The steel tracks gleamed wetly in long stretches, a surrealist grid in the misty half-light. A switching engine labored toward him, its headlamp making slow ovals, bell clanging.
A shot cracked the night; a slug whizzed.
He ducked to a crouch, zigzagged, looking for cover. Two more gunshots and a bullet rang on a rail inches from his foot.
He whirled, drew, fired. They stumbled to a skittering halt in the darkness, as if this possibility hadn’t occurred to them. The pause lasted only a second, but it was fatal. Durell was on a knee now, aiming with both hands, and he dropped the one on the right with a solid score to the heart. The other backpedaled, snapping wild shots as Durell took another second to aim calmly and deliberately. Durell’s gun bucked in his hands, and the man spun half around and folded without uttering a sound.
Durell stayed on his knee for a long moment, gun still out before him, his breathing slowing. The switching engine had passed only a few yards away, but its crew seemed oblivious. He carefully studied the area a full turn around, watching and listening. There was no sign the gunplay had drawn attention. He rose warily, reloaded from a handful of cartridges in his jacket pocket and set off across the rails, cinders crunching underfoot.
He had been taught to kill only when necessary.
And when it was, to do it quickly and ruthlessly.
He felt no remorse, only the burning tension and twisting urgency of a man on the run. There could be no going back: they would find his victims soon, and he would be as good as dead in the mind of Azo Ausi. He might have saved himself that by surrendering to arrest. And he might have destroyed the mission. It had been his choice.
But if they caught up with him again it would be the end.
* * *
Darkness still lingered in the air when Durell arrived at the little stone house on Mulehe Street, across the railyard, behind the sprawling African market. The big square was busy with people unloading and arranging farm produce, meats and products and trinkets of all kinds. There were shouts and whoops, curses hurled at balky animals, a gabble of tribal languages mixing with the sounds of the railyard. Durell knocked at a plank door, and it was opened by a grizzled old man who held a kerosene lamp. The yellow light of the lamp oiled the man’s prominent cheekbones and kindled a defiant fire in his sloping eyes. He was black, but his features seemed almost oriental. He wore patched khaki walking shorts
and rubber sandals, nothing else.
"Mkondo? I am Sam Durell. Let me in.”
The old man stared him up and down, his face suspicious and cunning.
"It’s all right; Willie Wells—remember?”
"Yes.”
Durell wished he knew Mkondo’s tribal language, but Mkondo was supposed to know some English: it had been the official tongue here in Mobundu for sixty-odd years. He wondered if the old man always wore that frown of distrust.
Mkondo said: "Come.” He led Durell to a rope-handled door that opened into a concrete-floored latrine.
Durell nodded approvingly, and inspected. The toilet was a hole in the floor; footprints on either side showed you where to stand or squat. There was a high, open window, so the cubicle did not smell too badly. A trickling noise of flowing water gurgled up from the sewage stream several feet below the hole. The hole-and-feet section, cast in a square of concrete, could be lifted like a trap door for servicing the sewer.
"Now?” Mkondo asked.
"No.” Durell came out of the latrine. "Where can I wait?” He looked about. The only furnishings were straw mats, cupboards made of shipping crates and a thick-stomached water jar in which banana pombe beer cooled.
Mkondo pointed toward a pole-and-thong ladder and indicated that Durell should go up. It led to a single room containing an iron bedstead that displayed medals and mementos, along with various intertwined wax and paper flowers. A worn patchwork quilt covered the mattress; hooks on the wall held a few items of clothing. Overhead papyrus thatch was old and gray and looked like a nesting place for every kind of vermin, but the room seemed clean enough.
Durell moved to the side of the window with care; he could see most of the market from here. A tigerish-orange hue low in the east hinted at the coming day.
"This is good,” he said.
Mkondo nodded. His sloping eyes were resolute. "I help,” he said.
Assignment- Tyrant's Bride Page 6