She looked up suddenly. “Are you going to tell me that Bela is dead?”
“No, he isn’t. He’s here, in this country.”
She stood up. She was agitated, he could see, and he was relieved that his guess about a direct, blunt approach was working to this extent. He watched her walk, and the fine coordination of her magnificent body was exactly the same as he remembered it. He wished he didn’t think so often of the past, when he was with her.
“You don’t have him in custody, however, or you wouldn’t be here,” she pointed out.
“That’s true.”
“And you want him very badly.”
“That’s also true.”
“Not from me,” she said. “Never from me.”
“Sit down, Stella. I haven’t finished. Bela came in with the last group of refugees from your home town of Budapest. He broke out before he could be picked up and he left with a man named Zoltan Ske and a woman, Ilona, who posed as his wife.” He waited, but nothing changed in her face. “We’re pretty anxious to haul in all three of them.”
“Ilona?” she asked curiously.
“Posing as his wife,” he repeated.
“Do you imagine this makes me jealous?”
He grinned. He looked different for a moment. “I rather hoped it might.”
“You should know better than that. We cannot allow our private emotions to interfere with the work we must do. Surely you, who are one of the best, know all about that.”
“Doesn’t it bother you at all that he’s with another woman?”
She looked defiant and proud. “Why should it? I slept with you, did I not? Did it trouble you, then?”
“Stella—”
Now she was angry. “Why is Bela here? Do you know that?”
“He has announced that he’s going to kill me,” Durell said quietly.
She stared at him. Her pale lips were slightly parted. Then she shook her head stubbornly. “No, no. He would never do such a foolish thing. He is not an amateur. He would not give you warning first.”
“Well, he did. I guess you can understand why. It’s a ruse, of course, to throw us off balance while something else is accomplished.”
“So?”
“Which doesn’t mean he’ll ignore me. He’ll still try to kill me, all right.”
“Then you should be frightened, Sam,” she said softly. She was smiling again. “Bela is an expert at that sort of thing. He will succeed, you know. He has never failed yet. You are as good as dead, standing here right now, at this moment.” Her green eyes were searching, cool and objective. “But you never showed fear when I knew you. Can you be afraid now? Is this why you came to me, so I might help you to save yourself?”
“I want to find Bela before he gets someone else.”
“He has another target?”
“Of course,” Durell said. “I’m only secondary. Third-string objective, really. We’re pretty sure he’s covering for a bigger, entirely different operation, that concerns your countrymen and the freedom fighters who’ve taken sanctuary over here. Bela is trying to keep us off balance by looking for him while the real operation gets set.”
“Ah, you’re always so damned clever,” she whispered bitterly.
“Surely there’s something you know that can help us,” Durell insisted. “You could do yourself some good by cooperating.”
Stella Marni was silent. In the harsh glare of the single light in the barren room, she looked older and more drawn than before. Yet she was still one of the most beautiful women Durell had ever known. There was a sleek grace to the articulation of her body as she rose with her hands clasped before her.
She paced briefly back and forth across the little room. It was a good sign, Durell thought, all this agitation. Six months ago she would never have yielded to it. He tried to consider her objectively, forcing away all memories of past intimacies. He crushed out his cigarette in a glass ashtray on the desk and stood waiting until Stella Marni turned and looked at him. There was nothing but hatred in her eyes.
“I hope Bela kills you,” she whispered. “I hope he lets you know it is he, before he does it. And then you will know that it is being done for me, and for no other reason, just before you die.”
Durell sighed. “I had hoped you were changed.”
“You should have known better than that.”
“I suppose, in reality, I did.” There was nothing to be gained here, he decided. It had only been an off-chance, at best. He rang a bell on the desk for the guard, and Stella stood watching him, calm and lovely and wishing him dead, and nothing moved in her face.
When he left, he knew he would never see her again.
Chapter Five
He was being followed. Durell spotted the girl as soon as he left the building. The work was done clumsily, although he would have recognized a shadowing job even if it had been done by the most expert tail in the business. For a few minutes, during the taxi ride back to Pennsylvania Station, he wondered if Dickinson McFee had assigned someone to keep an eye on him and cover his back. But nobody in K Section would have been so obvious. Nor would McFee have put a girl to trail him his way.
She wore a red felt hat, which was a mistake, of course, and a belted cloth coat and red rubber boots against the sleet and slush that covered the city streets. He saw her when he hailed his cab, and knew that she had gotten into one that had been waiting for her. When he arrived at the terminal, she was only a few moments behind him. He could have lost her then quite easily in the crowded station, but he did not want to do that. Neither did he want to double back just yet and take her before he learned how far she was ready to go.
She got on the Washington-bound train with him.
It could be, he thought, that his move to see Stella Marni had been anticipated, and he was alert for danger, his reflexes primed for quick action. But nothing happened. The girl in the red hat took a seat about a third of the way behind him in the coach, on the aisle, and apparently became absorbed in her newspaper. Durell made no move to get a closer look at her just then. It would have been too obvious; she might have been alerted to his awareness of her, and perhaps frightened off. Yet he had a fair idea of her appearance, a hint of dark coppery hair tucked under the absurd red hat, crisp curls dampened by the snow, long legs under a primly conservative woolen skirt. Her face was pleasant, with prominent cheekbones, not striking or unusual, except for her large eyes that seemed to be dark brown, or perhaps black; he couldn’t be sure.
There was a delay of about ten minutes at North Philadelphia Station, and Durell got off the train to find a public telephone booth on the platform. It was growing dark now. He put through a call to Deirdre Padgett in Prince John, Maryland.
The telephone rang three or four times and Durell heard a click and then it rang again.
“Art?” he said.
There was silence.
“Come on, Art, this is Sam. Are you bugging Dee’s line?”
“Oh. Hi, Cajun.” It was Art Greenwald, the electronics expert of K Section. There was nothing Art couldn’t do with wiretaps and recordings. “Wish you were back in the bayous in this weather, Sam?”
“Where is Deirdre?” he asked.
“Around somewhere, I reckon.”
“Why doesn’t she answer?”
“Search me. The little Napoleon told me to tap all calls. What goes on?”
“Who's watching her house?”
“Lew Franklin and George Mester. I’m at a little place up the shore. Good place for ducks. She’s still at home, Sam. Don’t worry about it.”
“Let it ring some more, then,” Durell said.
He listened to the repetitive, mechanical sounds in the receiver. A strange urgency began to work in him. Through the glass of the telephone booth, he saw the girl in the red hat step off the train and look anxiously up and down the wet platform. She looked worried, and then she looked directly at him in the booth and turned away, a bit too quickly, betraying herself. She walked past the bo
oth to the newsstand nearby.
Deirdre did not answer the phone.
“Art,” Durell said. “Send George and Lew to look in on her.”
“Maybe she’s just gone for a little walk,” Greenwald suggested.
“I’d like to check on it.”
“Right, Cajun.” Greenwald paused. “One thing. If you want to see our little Napoleon before he leaves for London, meet him at the airport. Where in hell are you, anyway?”
“Philadelphia.”
“He’s taking off at eight. Can you make it?”
“I’ll make it. Let him know. And check Deirdre, will you?”
“Over and out,” Greenwald said lightly.
Durell hung up. His uneasiness and urgency did not leave him. When he got back on the train, the girl in the red hat was already in her seat.
He wanted to go straight to Prince John, but there wasn’t time for that. He reached the National Airport half an hour before flight time, and the girl in the red hat was still behind him—a little clumsier now, with darkness complicating her problem. Durell deliberately made it easier for her. He did not want to lose her any more than she seemed to want to lose him. Yet he could not allow her to see him make contact with Dickinson McFee.
It was raining in Washington, with a raw northerly wind whipping the huge airport. The waiting room was only moderately crowded. No flights had been cancelled, and Durell walked through, knowing the girl was still behind him, until he saw Dickinson McFee standing alone near one of the ticket booths. He did not stop or change his stride in any way, but as he went by the small gray man, he moved the fingers of his left hand in a signal that meant McFee was to follow. Durell went into one of the men’s rooms and washed his hands, smoked a cigarette, and wondered what the girl in the red hat would do now. He had to wait eight minutes before McFee showed.
The little gray man washed his hands at the next basin beside Durell. They did not look at each other, and McFee’s mouth did not move when he spoke under and through the mechanical sound of the speakers from the announcer’s booth. “The one in the red hat?” he said.
"She picked me up in New York,” Durell told him. “I went to see Stella Mami. Nothing doing there. She wishes me dead.”
“And they anticipated the move?”
“I sort of hoped Bela Korvuth would be there waiting for a try at me. No such luck. He sent the girl, instead. I gather she’s the one we know as Ilona.”
“Right. You’ve got a thread in your hand, with her.”
“But she’s working alone,” Durell said. “Nobody is on the tail with her. I’ve checked and double-checked.”
“So did I,” McFee said. “In the waiting room. Has she used a telephone yet?”
“Not unless she’s on one now, contacting Korvuth."
“Do you want her picked up?”
Durell reached for the roll of paper toweling and dried his hands. Several men had entered the washroom, and he could see them in the mirror before him, and the way he kept his hands was such that he could move either one instantly. For just a moment he met McFee’s gray eyes in the mirror.
“Looks clean. I don’t want the girl touched yet,” Durell said. “As you suggest, she’s a thread, and I don’t want to snap it too soon. It’s a piece of luck, perhaps. Korvuth got clean away in New Jersey, with Zoltan Ske. He killed Dunstermeir’s hired hand—a boy named Endre Stryzyk. The kid may have spotted him as top brass in Budapest’s AVH.”
“I heard about it,” McFee said. “We’ve got something working on the other track, too. The operation Korvuth is trying to smoke-screen. It figures that every one of the cells we suspect got in with the innocent Hungarians must speak perfect, idiomatic English, must be absolutely Americanized to speed their assimilation and disappearance into the populace. It’s quite a list, and maybe most of them covered what they know about the language. But Hungerford is checking that out, along with the FBI people. It will be a long job— a good many of those folks have scattered to new homes and jobs all over the country by now. There’s nothing you can do on that until you get the list. Even then, it will be a routine check job. Unless, of course, you manage to get the names somehow out of Korvuth. Bela might know, what with his background in the secret police, and all that. But he’s smart and tricky.” McFee dried his hands, too. “I can’t figure the girl tagging you, can you?”
“She hasn’t been well trained. She’s pretty clumsy.” “That’s what doesn’t check out,” McFee agreed.
“I’ll talk to her before the night is over. Anything else on Korvuth’s other quarry, aside from me?”
“Call the office on it. We’ve doubled security on all the top men in nuclear, rocket, and satellite work. But Korvuth is shifty. We may not know who he’s after, aside from you, until it’s too late. Pentagon is raising hell with us now, crying wolf for their egghead sheep. But you can’t watch these scientific people too closely; they’re temperamental. They don’t want to be coddled or swathed in cotton wool. And it takes more men than our budget allows to do the job right.”
“It will be easier to nail Korvuth before he begins executing,” Durell suggested. “Maybe our Ilona can help.”
“Use your own judgment. I’m off for London now. Anything else I can do?”
“I’m a little troubled about Deirdre. She doesn’t answer her phone in Prince John. Do you have anything on that?” McFee made a negative signal. “I wouldn’t go near her, if I were you. Not with this girl on your tail. Good luck, Sam.” The little man turned away from the wash basin and was gone. Durell went into one of the booths to wait a few minutes before following him out into the main waiting room. McFee had vanished.
The girl in the red hat was gone, too.
He used the telephone booth at the airport to call Deirdre again. Uneasiness still roweled him. And again the phone rang without reply until he heard Art Greenwald’s wiretap click softly.
“Art? Sam, again. What goes on?”
Greenwald sounded a little worried. “She’s there, Sam. The house is lighted, and Franklin can see her walking around inside. He went in to talk to her after you called before. He had to tell her a little of what’s happening. But everything seemed okay.”
“Then why doesn’t she answer the phone?”
“You’ve got me there, Cajun.”
Durell touched his small, dark mustache with a fingertip. From the booth, he could see most of the waiting room, and the girl known as Ilona had not reappeared. He wondered if he had dangerously underestimated her clumsiness. It could have been a smart subterfuge to make him careless about contacting McFee. Maybe she had followed him just to be led to McFee. His worry increased. But then she couldn’t have boarded the plane with the chief. She had to be somewhere in the near vicinity.
“Sam?”
“I think I’d better come over, Art.”
“I'll let the boys know.”
“All right. But keep them away from the house now. I don’t want to contact them when I arrive.”
“You think something is wrong?”
“Very wrong,” Durell said, and hung up.
His car, a dark-blue Buick coupe, had been taken back by McFee from the Prince John airport earlier this morning and parked in front of his apartment house. Durell took a cab to retrieve it. Nobody was waiting in ambush here, and he lifted the hood to inspect the engine briefly. It was still raining, and the night was dark and cold. He drove quickly and expertly through Washington’s traffic, found the small asphalt road that twisted through black countryside eastward, and arrived in Prince John at nine o’clock.
Deirdre’s house, on the Chesapeake shore, was at the end of a long lane that twisted through wooded countryside, following the water’s edge. He drove to within a quarter of a mile of the place and parked the car near a fenced pasture. The rain felt like a spray of ice against his face, and he turned up the collar of his coat against the wind, checking the weight of his snubby .38 in the under-arm holster of his conservative blue suit. From where h
e left his car he could see a gleam of light through the thrashing traceries of the trees, and as he moved farther along the lane toward the beach, he saw it was the riding light of old Tom Yordie’s pungy. He moved on like a shadow, soundless amid the restless crackling of small branches in the wind and the hiss and patter of cold rain on the carpet of dead oak leaves underfoot.
He was sure now that something was very wrong here.
Through the rain he heard the muted pulsing of the pungy’s old motor as the craft anchored in the cove. The gatekeeper’s cottage was dark and empty as he approached, and a shadow that was now only a shadow moved ever so slightly in the doorway, revealing a fleeting glimpse of a man’s angular face. Lew Franklin. Franklin had not seen him. Durell went by, close enough to hear Franklin sigh in discomfort in the rain.
The main house was an old Georgian structure of faded rose brick, with twin chimneys and a wide lawn and a once-famous rose garden. Deirdre was the last of the Maryland Padgetts, and she used this place only on weekends from her fashion editor’s job in Washington. Lights shone yellow from the library windows facing the Chesapeake, and another light shone from the Dutch door to the kitchen in the north wing, facing the oyster-shell driveway. Durell saw no movement inside. He waited and watched and waited again.
There was nothing to see or hear. Only the rain, and the idling mutter of the pungy’s engine in the cove two hundred yards beyond the gentle swoop of the beach. Durell paused under a dripping old giant of a sycamore tree.
He could almost smell the trap closing in around him.
It added up. Deirdre had no reason to refuse to answer the phone. The fact that Franklin had gone in to talk to her meant nothing. Lew didn’t know her, he couldn’t have been sensitive to the fact that she might have been acting, with seeming naturalness, under duress. He was sure now that someone else was in the house with Deirdre. Someone who knew he would come back for her.
It had to be Bela Korvuth.
Long ago, as a boy in Bayou Peche Rouge, Durell had learned to weigh odds with the cool and calculating precision of a professional gambler. His old grandfather, Jonathan, had taught him every trick of the trade, gleaned from a lifetime spent as a gambler on the old Mississippi sidewheelers. Standing there, watching Deirdre’s gracious house, Durell could see the old man now, straight and tall and white-maned, in the pilot house of the Three Belles, the old steamboat Jonathan had run into the bayou mudflats and used as his home. The old man had taught him carefully and patiently.
Assignment - Budapest Page 4