Assignment - Lowlands

by Edward S. Aarons

  The young Dutchman looked embarrassed. “I am very sorry. I did not recognize how serious their illness was, at first. How could I? And then, when it was imperative to get more information, it was too late. Some were delirious. Hans Dringen died first, four hours after he got off the boat. Piet Vliemann raved like a lunatic about a light on the sea, a light on the sea, over and over again.”

  “What was that about?”

  “I do not know. Those were the words he muttered.”

  “The light on the sea?”

  “That is all.”

  It seemed to Durell that he almost had something important in his grasp. It was just beyond the reach of his mental fingers, evanescent, evoking a familiar image that he could not seize and analyze. He dismissed it to question the Hollander further.

  “All right. Let’s assume none of them actually saw where the vial came from. What happened, exactly? Surely they told you something to give you ideas.”

  “All I could gather,” the doctor said, “was that at a certain point, at a certain place and time when the tide was just so, the Wilde brothers got off the fishing boat and rowed and waded somewhere out of sight, and when they came back they had the vials with them.”

  “Vials? More than one?”

  “Oh, yes. I am afraid so. More than one.”

  “How many?”

  “I do not know.”

  “But Klaus Jenner had one?”

  “And his wife gave it to me.”

  “And its condition?”

  “It had been uncorked. Klaus removed the seal.”

  “And opened Pandora’s box of evils for the world,” Durell said.

  “It killed him,” the young doctor said soberly.

  “But not you?”

  “I handled it carefully.”

  “Do you have the vial now?”

  “It was taken from my by Heer Van Horn who came here with credentials from Inspector Flaas. Inspector Flaas explained to me that Van Horn did not have it or turn it in to the authorities, however. It is believed that Heer Van Horn, in turn, was careless with it, or perhaps had the vial taken from him back in his hotel, the Gunderhof. There was evidence of a struggle there, Inspector Flaas said.” The young doctor looked apologetic. “I suppose I should have emptied the vial. Sterilized it. I thought I was doing the best thing, however, in trying to save the culture for analysis and laboratory work. These people of Doorn are very dear to me, and at the time I was afraid of a completely uncontrolled pestilence sweeping Scheersplaat and all of the Netherlands, perhaps all of the world. Well, I made a wrong guess. It did not turn out that way. I still stand by my decision, however.”

  “I understand,” Durell said. “But the world is larger than Doorn or Scheersplaat or Holland, as you say.”

  He stared at the sunlit sea, the bright dunes, the inland meadows where the cattle grazed, and the sweep of a sea gull’s wings on the breeze. He could appreciate how the young doctor felt. But he was aware of a vast frustration. He knew now how Piet Van Horn had died. Obviously, Julian Wilde had recovered the vial from him, and in the process, Piet had been infected. So much for those questions. No one could be blamed for it.

  “You are sure,” he said finally to the doctor, “that none of the wives of the dead men can tell you where the Moeji sailed to pick up that vial of plague culture?”

  “I asked them, over and over again, mynheer, in many different ways. So did Inspector Flaas. It is useless. None of the men spoke of it. They did not know they were dying, you see,” the doctor said simply. “I could not tell them.”

  “So there is no one. to tell us where the island is?”

  “No one,” said the doctor. “They are all dead.”

  Sixteen

  Durell took the noon ferry back to Amschellig, eating lunch aboard. He considered going directly to the Boerderij Inn, but instead walked along the dike road to his own hotel. The Valkyron was not in the harbor, neither was the Suzanne. At the Gunderhof, he went straight up to his room, expecting to find John O’Keefe waiting to report to him. But no one was there, and there were no messages at the desk.

  He waited fifteen minutes, aware of an uneasiness in sharp conflict with the sunny day and the laughter of swimmers on the beach, cyclists and tennis players. He decided he could not stay passively in the room. He changed into a sport shirt, shaved, brushed his hair, considered trimming his small, dark moustache, studied his lean gambler’s face and then shook his head at himself in sudden exasperation and started walking back to Amschellig.

  The Boerderij may have been a simple farmhouse a century ago, but decades of catering to tourists had added elaborate wings, cottages, outbuildings, and landscaping to the place, until all that was left of its humble origin was its name. In the fog last night, when he took Cassandra’s Mercedes from the parking lot, he had seen very little of it. Now he realized how easily the Wildes could lose themselves in the crowded anonymity of such a place. He wondered if Cassandra had known all along that Marius lived here. He decided she had. She denied an affair with the murdered man, but Durell had reservations about that. He knew he had made a bitter enemy when he rejected her on the beach; she would be a long time remembering what she had done and how she had done it, an hour after her husband died.

  He asked at the desk if a Julian Wilde was registered, and the answer, after all, was simple. The clerk nodded and gave him the room number, 52, and said it was on the second floor of Cottage B. “Directly to your right, sir, and down the path beyond the swimming pool. Are you from the police?”

  “I am associated with Inspector Flaas.”

  “Mr. Durell, is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. O’Keefe is here. He said if you appeared, you were to join him at Cottage B.”

  Durell concealed his surprise. “Thank you.”

  He felt wary as he walked down the path toward the outbuilding that snuggled next to the high wall of the town dike. The cottage had a thatched, medieval roof with many gables; a lower-floor apartment that was occupied by a volatile family of French tourists; and a flight of outside stairs to a balcony level with the dike top, where a separate doorway served the second apartment. Durell went up quietly, aware of the Frenchman coming out to stare at him through rimless steel glasses in silent curiosity.

  “Allo!” the man called sharply.

  Durell looked down at him. “Yes?”

  “When are you fellows going to be finished up there? It is very disturbing to have all of you tramping about like this. I shall complain to the management, you understand.”

  “Go right ahead,” Durell said.

  “If you are looking for the other man, he is gone.”

  “Which man?”

  “The redheaded one. He left with Wilde, ten minutes ago.”

  “What?”

  “Ten minutes ago.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I am usually sure of my facts, m’sieu. They went along the dike.”

  Durell stared at the man and hesitated. “Thank you.”

  “Just don’t make too much noise about things, will you?”

  He took only a moment to check the inside of the cottage apartment. The door was unlocked. No one was here. He went out into the sunlight again and the Frenchman was still standing there, exactly as before, and he made a sweeping gesture with his arm, pointing down toward the dike.

  “They went there. Eleven minutes ago, now.”

  Durell wanted to run. He went from the cottage to the dike, ran up the broad, grassy slope to the top, and looked to the left and right. He was on a level with the rooftops of the village now. He could see the harbor, with the moored boats and gray stone mole, and below, on the beach side, a small children’s playground had been set up by the hotel management, complete with slides, acrobatic mazes, a carousel.

  A small crowd was gathered around the carrousel. A man yelled, and two other men began to run toward the hotel entrance.

  Durell ran down the dike to a flight of steps that
took him into the playground area. The carrousel had been stopped, and a small knot of tourists was crowded around it, pushing the children away with hushed whispers and sharp admonitions.

  A man was mounted awkwardly on one of the miniature, ornately carved ponies. It was John O’Keefe. Everything about him told Durell he was dead.

  It was like a harsh, challenging cry of defiance, a cruel and bitter and senseless gesture.

  O’Keefe had been stabbed in the back. The handle of a knife stuck out of his coat between his shoulder blades, and the sun shone on the jeweled hilt and the enameled swastika emblem. Durell knew that this was a duplicate of the knife he had broken for Julian Wilde yesterday, in his hotel room.

  He did not go near O’Keefe.

  He stared at the redheaded man and remembered the lilt in his voice and the softness in him when he had spoken of his wife and the holiday he was planning with her.

  Then he turned and walked quietly away.

  Seventeen

  He walked back toward the Gunderhof along the cycle path on the dike, and he appreciated the quiet shade of the beech trees planted with mathematical precision along the edge of the road. At the Gunderhof’s tennis courts he paused. He saw Inspector Flaas on the front steps of the hotel, talking to several subordinates with quick, angry gestures. He knew Flaas was looking for him, and if Flaas caught him now, he would be on his way back to Amsterdam within an hour, with an escort. Durell turned his back at once and walked the other way.

  More than anything, at the moment, he needed time, a quiet hour in which to think and regain control of himself.

  But time had turned into a commodity whose value had gone up sharply in the last hour. Flaas would not tolerate any more independent action. The Dutch security man would soon be on his way to Amschellig to investigate O’Keefe’s death. And most of the man’s agents would be alerted to spot Durell now, too. In the broad sunshine, exposed to the cool breeze and flat spaces of sea and land, there seemed no place to hide, no place to go where he could search out the answers to questions that seemed to hover just beyond the curtains of his mind.

  He joined a group of tourists on the dike road, came to the cycle racks, and on impulse chose one when a group of youngsters ran up from the beach and made off with several of the vehicles. He hadn’t ridden a bicycle for some time, but it was a knack one never lost. He pedaled after the teen-agers, and from a distance he seemed to be part of the group; but none of the laughing boys and girls paid any attention to him as he followed them down the rijwielpad, beside the highway.

  Four miles north of the Gunderhof he allowed himself to fall behind and finally found steps going down to a solitary stretch of beach. He sat with his back to the base of the dike and stared out over the shining sea, lit a cigarette, and tried to think around the painful image of John O’Keefe’s death.

  He told himself not to think about O’Keefe. You make friends and lose them suddenly and senselessly in this business. You tried to find a reason why, thinking that perhaps you could learn from the victim’s mistake and prevent it happening to you, too. You never really thought it could happen to you, though; and John O’Keefe had been so sure of survival that he had planned his holiday trip with Claire and the children without hesitation.

  He would have to see Claire, before he returned to the States—if he ever got that far, Durell thought.

  Anger would achieve nothing, he knew, and yet he could not control an inner drive toward violence. There was something amoral in Julian Wilde, neolithic; a taint of the jungle that put him beyond ordinary consideration. This was a creature as deadly as the plague virus he carried with him—an animal who represented danger to every decent human being on the face of the earth.

  He did not doubt that Julian Wilde could and would spread the Cassandra plague. It fitted the pattern of the man. He had compared Wilde to a man walking around with a bottle of nitro in his pocket; but the virus was worse than a localized explosive. And how do you approach such a quarry, whose slightest move could trigger a pestilence that might claim a million lives overnight?

  He did not know.

  He picked up a stone from the beach and threw it into the placid sea. He finished his cigarette and crushed it out, then lit another. The sun was hot. The breeze blew from the northwest, from over the reaches of the North Sea and the low, mist-shrouded islands off the coast. A gull rode down the wind and looked at him and veered away.

  On the road above him, traffic hummed innocently on its way. He was safe here from Flaas and anyone else, for the moment. It was here that he had to find the answer. Here and now.

  He tried to summarize the facts he knew to be true.

  First, Julian Wilde had one or more vials of the plague culture; and he was a man who would use it if trapped and cornered.

  Second, Julian Wilde knew where the bunker was hidden. He had visited it with Marius. He had opened it. He had waded and rowed to it from the fishing boat he’d chartered.

  Why had he waded? Durell wondered.

  First, to keep the Moeji’s crew from actually seeing where he went. But in this flat landscape, Durell thought, how could anyone hide in the drowned, reedy islands and the flat, shining sea?

  Obviously, Wilde waded out of sight by going around and behind something that he put between himself and the curious fishermen from Doorn.

  Durell searched the sea’s horizon from where he sat on the beach. But there was nothing extraordinary in the landscape to provide an answer.

  Yet he felt excitement build in him.

  A third fact was that Piet Van Horn had developed a theory about the location of the bunker laboratory. He had tried to tell Durell about it before he died. He had pointed to the auto-tourist map of Friesland and Groningen.

  The map had to mean something. At the moment, it was taped to the back of the heavy wardrobe chest in his room at the Gunderhof, unless it was already in Inspector Flaas’ pocket. In any case, he had already studied it, and there was nothing to be seen that might yield a clue to the bunker’s location.

  Obviously, Piet had not had time while here to doctor the road map in a way that would require laboratory analysis—use of ultra-violet light or special techniques to bring out any written messages. Whatever was on the map, Durell decided, was in plain sight, to be seen by anyone with the eyes to recognize it.

  Durell threw another pebble into the sea.

  Or maybe there was nothing at all on the map, after all. Maybe there was nothing special to see. Maybe it was the map itself, taken as a whole, that meant something. Maybe Piet had tried to tell him something with the idea of an old map.

  Durell sat up straighter, startled by this thought.

  The idea of an old map? The tourist map had a prewar date, in the late Thirties. Before the war. It showed the location of villages, farms and roads that had been under the surface of the sea ever since the Nazis’ sabotage of the dikes.

  That must have been what Piet had tried to get across before he died—the idea of consulting old maps.

  And what had he said about a church and a light?

  Groote Kerk Light.

  Then, sitting on the beach not far from where he had been with Cassandra last night, when the rhythm of the lighthouse out at sea had given impulse and brilliance to her spasm of passion, he suddenly saw the answer as clearly as that forgotten beam of light.

  Even the fisherman of Doorn, dying, had muttered in his delirium about a light upon the sea. A lighthouse. A submerged lighthouse named Groote Kerk Light? Had it been marked on Piet’s map, after all? Durell could not remember. But suppose that, at low tide, part of the ruins of an old lighthouse showed above the surface of the sea. And the Wilde brothers, in the Moeji, had waded around the ruins and out of sight of the fishermen; and, when hidden by the bulk of the ruins, had opened the sealed entrance to the Cassandra laboratory bunker.

  Durell stood up suddenly and stared hard at the sea.

  It was out there. It had to be.

  At ebb tide, at
a certain place and a certain time, it could be reached and destroyed.

  He was already running toward the steps to the top of the dike as his mind jumped to the next move. He remembered the rolls of hydrographic charts in the construction shack atop the Wadden Zee Dike. If any chart existed to show the Groote Kerk Light as it had once been, it would be there.

  Then he paused at the top of the stone steps where he had left his bicycle.

  A uniformed Dutch policeman stood beside it, thumbs hooked patiently in his belt, waiting for him.

  Eighteen

  The policeman saluted. “Mynheer, is it your cycle?”

  “Yes,” Durell said.

  “I must warn you, then— by the way, you are English? American? Yes. Well, I must warn you that you are to use the rijwielpad south to Amschellig from here without option and according to the signs.” The policeman pointed to a metal standard down the road. “Bicycles must use the path wherever the signs are round and blue in shape and color. Optional use is permitted only where the signs are oblong and black. You left your bicycle illegally standing out of the lane.”

  “I am sorry,” Durell said. “Is that all?”

  “It is very important for your safety, mynheer.”

  “Of course. I appreciate your courtesy.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  The patrolman saluted and drove away. Whatever Flaas’ efficiency rating might be, Durell thought as he pedaled toward the Gunderhof, it did not include alerting the local highway patrol.

  He found a public phone booth near the hotel and used his supply of guilders to get the information operator. He asked to be connected with the Wadden Zee project, and specifically with Heer Moejiker, the construction engineer in charge. The telephone hummed through a short delay. Beyond the glass booth, he watched the tourists stroll and laugh and enjoy the sunshine. Somewhere in the same sunshine a man named Julian Wilde walked about with sudden death in his pocket, knowing he was trapped, perhaps coming to realize the desperate futility of his solitary challenge to the whole civilized world.