Assignment Madeleine

by Edward S. Aarons

  “Then what ties L’Heureux to the missing money?”

  “We don’t know, but Orrie Boston did, and maybe that’s why L’Heureux killed him. It will be up to you to get to t e bottom of that one, too.”

  “And the missing money?”

  “It would be nice to get it back, I'm told.”

  “No idea where it is?”

  “Sure. Algeria."

  “With the rebels?”

  “With L'Heureux, we think.”

  Remington crushed out his cigarette. He used a pink ceramic bowl that looked remarkably and repulsively organic. “Algeria is important to us, Sam, because it’s part of the tug-of-war between East and West. What we would like is a peaceful, amicable solution that will suit both the French and the Algerians. It’s not our business to meddle here. But a man like L’Heureux, with the morality of an alley cat, can do everybody much damage.

  Bight now ho’s in a hot little cell in an outpost in Marbruk. He knows a lot about the rebels that we don’t know, and intelligence on it is vital to both the French and to us. So bring him back.”

  “I wish they’d send somebody else. If he killed Orrie—”

  “One other thing. That quarter-of-a-million in cool green American currency, in the hands of the rebels might be hard to explain to Brumont and his people.”

  “Does he know about it?”

  “No. One little item we managed to keep from him.”

  Remington’s eyes were shrewd. “L'Heureux has to be brought back with his tongue wagging. I know you wouldn’t mind seeing him dead, Sam. So would I. It’s a rough deal, because much as you’d like to break his neck, you’ll have to protect him from a couple of thousand enemies every inch of the way. The French over there blame him for the Marbruk massacre. The rebels want their hands on him because of some double-cross—probably the money matter. But you wrap him up in cotton wool and deliver him to the Embassy and Brumont. Those are your orders.”

  “Is the military situation in Marbruk really tough?”

  “Couldn’t be worse. The French military there are remote, isolated, no men to spare, especially since the rebels are running their offensive all along the Tunisian frontier. Nobody can be spared at the moment. We could wait a few days, of course, for the area to come back under control—it’s bubbling like a witch’s cauldron, right now —but you can get in and poke around, meanwhile.”

  “All right,” Durell said. “Is that all?”

  “Isn’t it enough?”

  Durell nodded. “Thanks for nothing.”

  He went downstairs through Madame Jacques’ kitchen and reached the front of the café a few moments later. He had been absent only ten minutes. He had left Deirdre and Madeleine at their table, eyeing each other like uninhibited jungle cats. Now they sat side by side, and the redheaded model was holding a handkerchief to her eyes while Deirdre patted her and made soothing sounds of consolation.

  Both girls looked at Durell as if he were the common enemy. Madeleine Sardelle smiled first.

  Chapter Five

  FAR BELOW was the Mediterranean, black and fathomless. The Air France plane to Algiers droned smoothly southward after its single stop at Marseilles. Madeleine Sardelle leaned back in her seat with her head pressed against the cushioned chair. Her eyes appeared to be closed, but they were not. From under the dark fan of her lashes she watched Durell, seated beside her. His face was in repose. A calm and dangerous man, this one, she thought. It would not be easy to fool him. He seemed quick and competent-and handsome, too. Something stirred in her as she thought about him, and she was annoyed with herself. When would she ever change? Those days were over, when a man—any man—meant someone to conquer and use and then discard. Charley was the last of a long series of faces she had known in passion and secret contempt.

  Soon it would all be changed, she thought gratefully. She had picked the right one at last, in L’Heureux. If all went well—and it was her job to see that it went smoothly—then the past would be buried and forgotten. There would be South America, the warmth and luxury of all the money they would ever need for the rest of their days. True, Charley might prove to be a bore; he was such a brute, so uncouth; but time would take care of that. She decided not to worry about anything in the future that was not specific.

  She had grown up in a hard, bitter school. She was going home now, but there was no happiness in the thought. Quite the contrary. She could remember back through the twisted years to her father, that huge man with his moustache, his Legionnaire’s uniform. And her mother, meek and veiled, a Moslem who had abandoned her people to live with a Frenchman. There were many memories afloat on the sea of her mind like drifting bits of debris. After her father had left them, her mother went home to her village with Madeleine, and they lived on the grudging bounty of an uncle, a local fisher-man. When Madeleine was twelve, she had been sold to a friend of her uncle’s for the price of a new length of anchor rope. That was one night she would never forget. That was the night when the curtain was torn and she made the vows by which she had lived ever since.

  Fortunately, she had inherited French looks and a figure from her father. The war years were only a tangled skein of memories, but the Americans who remained in Africa afterward had been a lucrative source of income. She learned English along with diversified arts of love; she learned to sing and dance in the nightclubs of Algiers; she came to use men and learned to Europeanize herself until no one guessed her origins.

  Thinking of this, she watched Durell from under the delicate arcs of her lashes. Brumont knew all the details of her life, and she wondered how much had been told to this silent man. She was a little afraid of Durell. He seemed different, more remote. She would have to be careful, she thought again.

  Odd about Charley. She had already heard about the big American, the wild one, the Happy One, in the months when she had moved in rebel circles on orders from Brumont. Brumont had given her the job because of the facts in her dossier; there had been long interviews at offices in the Deuxieme Bureau; she had convinced them of her patriotism, her love for France.

  Madeleine laughed silently. All that mattered was money and Brumont paid well. It was easy enough to contact L’Heureux. It pleased her vanity to play both ends of the game, and it paid well. It paid even better after that night on the beach at Nice, on that holiday they took together, she playing the part of an innocent type, a petite from Madame Sofie’s salon. She had gotten Charley drunk and let him think he had taken her by force after that struggle in the water, near the rocks. It had been amusing to let him tear the Bikini off her, to let him think he was the master. Now she was sure that Charley was in love with her. Her own feelings were confused. When she thought of him deeply, she felt fear, more than anything else. She never knew what he was thinking. She was more afraid of Charley by far than of this man beside her in the plane.

  But Charley had the money. And money was the future.

  Things had gone wrong because Charley’d had to kill that man, Orrin Boston, and he was in military custody now. But she had received his message by courier last night. He wanted her to accompany the agent being sent to take him back to Paris. The money waited for them out in the desert, amid the wild jebels of the south. She would help Charley to escape. Nothing could stop them.

  “Madeleine,” Durell said quietly.

  She opened her eyes wide, hearing his voice above the drone of the plane's engines. “Yes, m’sieu.”

  “A penny for your thoughts.”

  Panic touched her. Could he read her mind? “I was thinking of the American girl you introduced me to. Is she your fiancée?”

  “In a way.”

  “She is very lovely. And very sympathetic.”,

  “One of her endearing faults,” Durell said. “But you were not thinking about Deirdre. Charley is on your mind, right?”

  She persisted with Deirdre, clinging to the subject.

  “Are you in love with Miss Padgett, m’sieu?”

  “I think so, yes.�
�

  “Then she is a lucky woman, I think.”

  “She’s on her way back to the States. And I’m here with you."

  Madeleine opened her pale eyes wide. ‘She turned her face toward him as they sat side by side on the double seat, and in turning this way, her leg moved and her thigh pressed his. “Is there significance in what you have just said?”

  He met her smile. “I have my faults, too. And you and I understand each other. We are in the same business. We know the dangers of the world and its few pleasures, too, perhaps.”

  “You know that I am in love with my Charles.”

  “Tell me about him, then,” Durell said.

  “There is nothing to tell. Brumont made it plain what a woman’s role must be in this business of yours.”

  “The obvious one,” Durell said.

  “Yes. So I became the woman of Charles L’Heureux, in order to become his confidant, so to speak. Does that shock you?”

  “Not really.”

  “And I fell into the trap of my own making.”

  “I’m not so sure of that,” Durell said.

  “But I do love him. And I believe in his innocence.”

  “You know what he is. You know the crimes he has committed. An adventurer, fattening on a troubled world.”

  “But not a murderer,” Madeleine said flatly.

  “How can you be sure?”

  “When a woman lives with a man, she comes to know his capacities for matters other than love. If he is considered such a terrible man, why did your Mr. Boston take him into the service as an agent in the first place?”

  “We compromise when we have to. L’Heureux is perhaps the only American on the scene who knows as much about the rebels as he does. Orrin Boston heard about him and chose to use him.”

  “So you think my Charles killed him. But I will help Charles, if I can. You must understand that.”

  “There will be no help for him, if he killed Orrin.”

  “We shall see,” Madeleine said quietly.

  Durell looked at his watch. Africa, the bright city of Algiers, and the airport at Maison Blanche was just over the horizon of night.

  Chapter Six

  THE COMMAND POST of the chasseur unit stationed at Marbruk occupied a stone farmhouse on the lower slope of the jebel overlooking the valley. The farm had been a prosperous one, thanks to irrigation here on the fringes of the southern desolation. It had been owned by a René St. Leger, a wealthy Frenchman whose family had grown olives, and grapes for the strong Algerian wines, for three generations. René had been knifed in the back while patrolling the town with his territorial unit of home guards two months ago, and Captain DeGrasse had occupied the farm when the rest of St. Leger’s family, wife and two daughters, moved into their villa at Algiers.

  Aside from the main farmhouse, there were two stone barns, and in the northernmost of the barns, half a mile from the house itself, was the military prison. Two or three outhouses formed a cluster suitable for both defense and internal control.

  At nine o’clock, Charley L’Heureux slipped a small wad of hundred-franc notes to the private who guarded his cell in what had been the hayloft and accepted a bottle of cognac in return. A hot wind blew through the barred windows of his room, and sand hissed and moved along the Wooden floor. He could feel it against his bare ankles, like the stinging bites of a thousand gnats.

  “Mon ami,” L’Heureux; said to the guard, “a thousand thanks. This will save my life.”

  “Nothing can save your life. Not the life of a traitor.”

  The guard was a thin, tired man from St. Nazaire, and he was homesick and fed up with Algeria and the rebels. Nothing he had seen since he had been drafted could explain to his clerical mind what he was doing here. “And I am not your friend, understand?”

  ‘Who did I betray?” L'Heureux asked. “No one but myself, Pepi.”

  “One grows philosophical in jail, that is a fact.”

  “Look here,” Charley insisted. “I’m not French, am I?”

  “You have a French name.”

  "But I am an American. I was born in Arostuga, Maine, U. S. A.”

  “Then you are a traitor to your country, too,” Pepi said. He had a tommy gun slung by its strap over his neck and nestled against his belly. “I do not wish to discuss it with you. I spit on you.”

  “Yet you take my money.”

  “At home I am an accountant, and I know that money is money,” Pepi said. “It's all good and all bad, and I’m not a philosopher about money. One has no choice. It is needed.”

  “What will they do to me, Pepi? Have you heard?"

  “If I had my way,” the guard said, “we would do to you as the rebels did to the people of Marbruk. One fights fire with fire; it is as simple as that, to my mind. They kill and torture and mutilate. It is no better fate than you deserve.”

  “But the captain will not have me shot at dawn, eh?”

  The guard shrugged. “No, and I am sickened to have to relieve your mind of that.”

  The guard moved away, climbing down the steps to the stone floor of the huge barn. Charley listened to his footsteps die away, standing in an attitude of acute attention. Finally he heard only the endless rattle of the wind and the hiss of sand blown in through the window. He went back to the cot with the cognac bottle.

  He was a big man with powerful shoulders. His curly blond hair was cropped short over a broad, weathered face. His eyes were greenish, reflecting hard and ugly things. He had seen too much of North Africa, for too long. He had heavy brows that were black in contrast to his pale, boyish hair. His khaki shirt was open down to the waist, and the hair on his chest was also dark. His khaki trousers were ragged and sweaty, torn at the cuffs. His sandals were cracked. He looked at his hands around the cognac bottle, big, strong hands that had helped him out of many a bad corner. But he couldn’t remember as tight or bad a corner as this.

  He wanted to laugh and curse all at once. He had reached down low this time, really low; but he saw himself as if crouching in the dirt only for the final spring to the top, to ultimate success.

  He wondered if Madeleine had gotten his message. Better to do without her in this—for that matter, he'd like to forget her entirely, since he was tired of her and looked upon her as an Arab mongrel, hardly fit for the life he planned ahead. And he still didn’t trust her fully, knowing she was Brumont’s agent. Still, he needed her now. She could misdirect the agent coming for him, like a magician's assistant on stage. And even if it were only for a moment, it would be a crucial moment. The time for escape, and that would be enough.

  Charley sighed, thinking how he would have to take Madeleine with him for a short time, anyway. Until he found another woman, perhaps. He wasn’t constituted to lead a monogamist life for long.

  He lay back on his hard cot and drank from the cognac bottle, then fished in his ragged shirt pocket for a Gauloise cigarette. Only three left now. Tomorrow would be the last round of the game. It was too bad that Orrin Boston’s suspicions about the money and el-Abri had forced his hand prematurely. But it would work out all right. You had to learn to improvise, because the only thing certain in this world was that everything was uncertain.

  The wind blew steadily through the window. Sand scratched at the floor. Charley turned his body toward the wall. Against his wish, he remembered the pine woods of Maine and his boyhood in the Thirties. The old man’s potato farm went under the auctioneer’s gavel, the quarry job had finally killed him, and the years on relief after that were no things of joy for a kid to remember. There wasn’t much for a growing boy to do in those days. Occasionally he got a job as guide for New York hunters who tossed him tips like throwing bones to a dog. You went hungry often, and you fed yourself on hatred, which could keep you warm. And after a while the hatred filled your belly like a hot and satisfying meal.

  Later, in the war, he already knew how to take care of himself and make a good thing out of what others regarded as nothing. In the confusion of No
rth Africa, he saw a future untroubled by law or morality. It had taken time, and there were dead men on the hail behind him; but the end was now in sight. Charley smiled thinly in the loom of his cell. It wouldn’t be the end the Hadji el-Abri hoped for him, or what the agent, whoever he was, would want when he came for him.

  He sat up abruptly when he heard the gunfire. It came in sharp and spiteful echoes on the wind, snapping irritably on the southern flanks of the town. First a rifle cracked, then the rattle of a tommy gun followed, then more rifles, and finally the dull thumping of grenades. Charley moved to the window as footsteps pounded through the stone barn. Hoarse shouts and yells came from the compound outside. Floodlights blossomed into bright, glaring eyes that scanned the night with the wild insanity of a madman. From the window, Charley saw the first red flicker of fire on the southern edge of town. A jeep motor roared into life, then several trucks raced out through the gates to the road below.

  Charley swallowed a sudden dryness in his throat. It could be el-Abri out there, with his Kabyle guerrillas. They wanted him. Or it could be el-Abri’s rivals, another guerrilla faction. In either case, he had cause to fear, although fear was not in him normally. It was this cell, he told himself. Being trapped if the rebel raid swept this far. He turned and yelled angrily as several chasseurs pounded down the steps outside, their equipment clinking, tommy guns in their hands. None of the soldiers paid any attention to him. He returned to the cell window and gripped the bars hard. The gunfire was reaching into the heart of Marbruk now, coming this way up the slopes of the jebel, into the ruined vineyards and orchards of the farms. It was a strong, bold raid, and the thin company of French troops would have their hands full.

  Charley was suddenly sure that the wild desert men out there in the hot night were stabbing directly for him.

  Jane Larkin heard the gunfire with a sudden quickening in her almost like relief. From the window of her room in the only hotel Marbruk could boast, she heard the thud of grenades and the hoarse shouts of frightened people in the market place below. She leaned out through the narrow window, but the mud streets were confused and dark, and all she glimpsed were running figures in flapping robes and kachabias. Jane breathed a little more quickly, her lips parted. Her boredom was forgotten. ”