Assignment - Budapest

by Edward S. Aarons

He went out, aware of the strange look on Franklin’s face as he stared at Deirdre again. It had finally stopped raining, but the night was cold and dark and dripping wet, with an icy wind blowing from the east, over the Chesapeake. Nobody had touched Zoltan Ske’s body. Durell walked past it, down the path and into the woods to the north, bordering the cove. He drew in long, deep breaths of the icy air and told himself that Deirdre was shocked right now and not sure of what she had said, and it would be all right tomorrow. It had to be all right between them. He had to make her understand why he had risked her life in order to try for Korvuth. He told himself he could do this, and yet one dark part of his mind kept telling him that he had lost her forever.

  It was an effort to turn his attention back to Korvuth. He halted just inside the pine woods and tried to put himself in the other man’s place. A narrow path meandered through the wet pines toward the water’s edge and he moved that way, his gun in hand, aware of a growing weakness in him from his own wound. But there was no time to think about himself. From his left, inland, came the flickering of flashlights as George Mester was joined by Art Greenwald’s crew. In a few more minutes there would be a dozen, maybe a score of men joining the search. But Korvuth had escaped this sort of cordon before, and there was no reason to think he couldn’t do it again. He had spent over ten minutes with Deirdre— time enough for anyone with training to get away.

  He called to George Mester and moved toward the lights. A narrow dirt road, frozen hard, ran northward along the edge of the woods, and it was here that the searching men were gathering, trying to establish a cordon to keep Korvuth bottled in against the shore. A car came along fast, and three more men from the Maryland State Police joined the search. Durell put Mester in charge and struck off alone toward the waterfront. Some of what Deirdre had said to him was true. He felt in him a deep and sullen rage, a lust to kill. His objectivity was gone. He wanted Korvuth for himself now. Nothing else would satisfy him. And for this reason he wanted to search alone, following the hunch that teased the back of his mind.

  The bullet hole in his arm had stopped bleeding, but he had to hold himself carefully. The path toward the waterfront twisted and turned between the soughing, dripping masses of pines. Now and then the wind strengthened and a shower of icy water drenched him, and he shivered with the chill. When he came out on the rough shingle of the beach, the wind from the open Chesapeake cut bitterly through his wet clothing.

  There was no sign that anyone had passed this way, but that did not necessarily mean anything. He turned north, moving in the shadows of the pines until he came to a swampy area that he knew was a favorite spot for duck hunters. Several old blinds had been built along the waterfront here, visible now through the brittle reeds growing along the ice-crusted shore, and Durell checked each one carefully before going on. The path led inland for a short distance and then came out again on the shore, this time to the north of the cove. Tom Yordie’s pungy was still out there, its riding light dimly visible through the laced pattern of brittle weeds. Apparently it was at anchor, because he couldn’t hear the sound of the old engine. He could see no one aboard, either.

  The Prince John Gun Club used this area occasionally, and its members had built a shelter hut over on the far point. Durell had walked here with Deirdre many times, and he knew the ground well. A stretch of swamp, often inundated with tidal water, served as a barrier between the shelter hut and the more solid land to the west, where the search was going on. Durell looked back, but the lights of the searching men were obscured by the trees. He held his gun a little higher and walked through the cold darkness to the point.

  Without a torch to guide him, he had to move with care, and slowly, through the black night. Only a faint, luminous glow to the north, from the street lights of Prince John village, broke the utter darkness, but the reflected light from the low, scudding clouds only served to make shapeless shadows and strange patterns out of the land and the bay, the massed swamp oaks and pines and the dully glistening expanse of the Chesapeake. Durell moved forward to within twenty yards of the shelter hut before his straining eyes identified its vague shape against the deeper blackness of the night. A small, rickety wharf projected into the cove, and two skiffs had been pulled up and overturned on the shingle nearby. Durell looked out at the anchored pungy, then at the low, looming bulk of the shelter hut. Suddenly he was sure he had come to the right place. Korvuth was here. He was somewhere nearby. Every instinct told him this, and he stood very still, watching and listening, hearing the lap of icy water against the shore, the sigh of the wind, the brittle clashing of branches behind him. His training urged him to go back for help. But he wanted Korvuth for himself. This was something that had to be settled between the two of them.

  Nothing moved in the windy darkness. He stepped forward again, closing the distance toward the hut. Now he saw that one of the skiffs on the beach beside the pier was not overturned, but rode on the tide, moored with a line to one of the pier pilings. His pulse quickened, and he turned back to the shack.

  The shot and the scream of warning came simultaneously. The muzzle flare came spitting from the hut. The scream seemed to echo from the shadows under the pier. Durell threw himself flat. The voice that had warned him was a woman’s, and it came again, sharp and clear. He did not understand the words. She seemed to be talking to the man with the gun who had been waiting for him. Talking to Korvuth, in rapid, bitter Hungarian. A curse answered her. Another shot cracked the silence wide open. From far away, beyond the tongue of marsh that almost made an island of the point, came the alarmed yells of the searching troopers.

  Durell was pinned down on the beach. There was agony in his arm and shoulder, because he had dropped instinctively, without thought for his wound. It was bleeding again, and for a moment the earth heaved and turned under him.

  “This way!” the woman called.

  He did not think he could get up. A wave of weakness kept him on his belly on the beach. He looked up and someone was running from the hut, back toward the dark swamps. He got his gun up with an effort and fired once, twice. His vision was blurred. The woman called out to him again and he got to his hands and knees and tried to stand. He had missed. The running man, Korvuth, was gone. He did not understand what was happening, but he turned toward the beach. His legs were like rubber, and he felt the warmth of his blood running alarmingly down his arm and off his fingertips. The girl came toward him, up the slope of the beach, with a gun in her hand. She wore a red hat. She was the girl who had followed him from New York.

  “Oh, you fool,” she said. “You let him get away!”

  “Ilona?”

  “Who did you think?” she said bitterly. She came close to him, her gun held warily, and he could see the anger in her face. “What is the matter with you? Are you hurt?”

  There was a strange roaring sound in Durell’s ears. He tried to reach for her gun and his hand went wavering off to one side and he looked at it in surprise before he felt his legs slowly buckle and he pitched forward and down.

  Chapter Seven

  For some time there was darkness, and a strange mechanical creaking sound, and a feeling that the world had become a queasy, unsettled place, without stability or solidity. He felt hands on him and heard the girl's voice talking, and he listened to learn if someone answered her, but no one did and he guessed she was talking to herself, bitterly and angrily. He felt himself being pushed and hauled and once the pain in his shoulder became so great that the darkness swallowed him again for several long minutes, and when he opened his eyes again he was not sure what time it was or where he could be. He felt a vibration all through his body, as if an engine were running and shaking the bunk on which he lay on his back, and he looked up at the silvery light that seemed to have no earthly point of origin. This last was correct, because he turned his head and looked out of a small porthole and saw that the wind had scoured the sky clean and a half-moon was shining, cold and distant and bleak, upon a waste of water, reaching everywhere
in the small arc that he could see beyond the glass. He was on a boat, and he was sure it was the pungy.

  He turned his head and looked at the bunk on the other side of the narrow cabin. An old man sat there looking at him. Durell had never seen the man before. Shaggy gray hair, shaggy beard, a weathered face like ancient leather, bright eyes alert with curiosity under massive eyebrows. The old man had no teeth, and he mouthed his gums a moment before he spoke.

  “Feel pretty sick, hey, young feller?”

  “I’ve felt better.”

  “She took pretty good care of you, son. Right smart girl. Kind of frightening, in a way. Ain’t used to women like that no more.”

  “Are you Tom Yordie?” Durell asked. “This is your boat?”

  The old man nodded. “She come out in the skiff and hauled you aboard. Made me help, at the point of a gun. Then she used my medicine kit to take care of that bullet hole in you. You were lucky, young feller. The slug went in and out, clean as a whistle. No trouble at all. She knew what she was doing.” The old man chuckled. “Here, have a nip of this. Made it myself. Always prefer my own mix.”

  Yordie extended a gnarled, rope-hardened hand with an old brown bottle. Durell took it, nodded thanks, and swallowed deeply. The liquor was not unlike the mule he had known long ago, back in the bayous. It exploded warmly in the pit of his stomach and spread its heat through his body. He looked at his shoulder and saw that a neat bandage covered the wound. He looked for his gun. It was gone. Tom Yordie grinned.

  “She thinks of everything. We’re halfway across the bay by now, and them roosters on the shore ain’t got the foggiest idea you’re here. You gonna tell me what this is all about, young feller?”

  “I thought you might know,” Durell said flatly.

  “Don’t know nothing. Go on, drink up. I can always make more.” Tom Yordie watched Durell take another long swallow of the white liquor. “You drink like you’re used to the stuff. I like that. Some of them namby-pamby Washington folk come out here to hunt an’ fish, they fancy their own liquors. Like water. Can’t stand the stuff.”

  “You haven’t answered my question,” Durell said.

  “All I know is some feller come rowing out to my boat late in the day an’ when I invite him aboard, he rewards me with a crack on the head. I wake up tied up and alone, until the girl shows up, maybe an hour ago. She looks at me and then she goes back ashore and then she comes back with you. That’s all. She untied me when she needed help hoistin’ you in. You’re a pretty fair load, even for her.”

  “Where is she now?” Durell asked.

  “At the wheel.”

  Durell swung his legs off the bunk and stood up. The tiny cabin had a low overhead, and he had to duck, clinging to the bunks on either side. Tom Yordie didn’t offer to help him. He had to sit down again after the first try, aware of a cool moisture breaking out all over his body. He took a deep breath and stood up again. This time he remained on his feet.

  “You a cop?” Yordie asked suddenly.

  “No.”

  “Rob a bank?”

  “No. Stay here.” Durell made his way to the small hatch and ladder leading up to the stern deck. For a few moments he did not think he would get up the steps. He was weaker than he thought. Then he drew a deep breath and pushed the hatch open and stepped out into the night wind.

  They were two or three miles offshore. A deep swell was running with the incoming tide, and the pungy pitched in the uneasy current as it quartered against the thrust of the seas. The wind was cold and sharp, but it had scoured the skies until the stars and the moon were out, and he could see the distant mass of the Maryland shore, the cluster of town lights a little to the south, the regular flash of a beacon not far away. Durell braced himself against the pitch of the deck and looked at the girl. She stood easily at the wheel, watching him', her figure only a slight, dark outline against the stars. Then he saw the gun in her hand.

  “Do not come too close to me, please,” she said.

  He saw that she had tied the skiff astern and was towing it. He did not go near her. In the moonlight she looked young and defenseless, but he knew that this was an illusion; her shoulders were straight, her stance alert, and the face she turned toward him was a mask that was neither friendly nor inimical.

  “How do you feel now?”

  “Tom Yordie’s corn helped. You helped, too. Korvuth might have killed me back there on the beach. You yelled and startled him and he took off. Why did you do it?”

  “Perhaps I’ve had enough of killing,” she said quietly. “Sit down over there. I don’t trust you.”

  “You don’t trust me, but you saved my life and then hauled me out here. Kidnaping, practically.” Durell’s laugh was dry. “You patched me up, got me into a bunk, and sailed out into the middle of the Chesapeake. All this, after following me from New York. Can you tell me why?”

  “I want to talk to you. I know who you are, you see.”

  “All right, go ahead and talk.”

  “It is rather confusing. I am not sure what course of action I should take. But I do not like that old man to hear anything of what I have to say to you. Our talk must be strictly confidential. So I think we should get rid of him.”

  Durell said flatly: “He hasn’t done anything to hurt you. He’s just a harmless old fisherman.”

  She looked at him with bleak eyes. “I am not a monster. I do not intend to kill him, as you seem to think. But he is strong for an old man, and he can easily row ashore from here in the skiff.”

  “So we get rid of him. And then?”

  “We talk. I can help you, although it is dangerous for me. And you can help me.”

  Durell looked at the skiff and then at the distant shore. It was not too far. There was a bite of decision and command in the girl’s voice, and a way she held her gun, that made him shrug and raise no objections. Curiosity moved in him, more powerful than the sense of defeat and frustration he had felt a few moments before. There were enough men on shore to take care of the hunt for Korvuth.

  He nodded, and the girl said, “Get him.”

  It took no more than five minutes for Tom Yordie to climb into the skiff, ship his oars, and begin his long row for shore. The old man raised no objections. Once he started to ask a question, then looked at the girl’s face and the gun in her hand and shrugged his bowed shoulders in resignation. He spoke to Durell as he climbed into the skiff. “Take care of my boat, young feller. I don’t know who you are, or what’s happenin’ rightly, but this boat is all I got in the world. It’s my home, and I don’t want her wrecked. You’ll look after her?” “Sure,” Durell said.

  “I left you the rest of that bottle.” He looked at the girl again. “I reckon you might need it, at that.”

  When he was gone, a small bowed figure bent to the oars of the little skiff, Durell turned back to the girl. “You understand that he will call the police as soon as he gets ashore?” “It will be several hours until then. The matters we must discuss will be decided by that time.” The girl turned the switch on the wheezing old engine, and the pungy was suddenly quiet except for the lapping of water along its white sides. The boat lifted and fell, drifting easily on the tidal current. “I do not think it will be dangerous for us if we simply allow the wind to push us,” she said. “I am cold and I could use a drink. Let us go below and talk.” She moved her gun. “After you, Mr. Durell.”

  He went down into the tiny cabin, found the bottle Yordie had left, handed it to her, and then sat down on one of the bunks. It was cold aboard now, with no heating equipment in the cabin with the engine off, and only the planks of the hull to fend off the icy wind blowing over the bay. In the dim overhead light he saw the girl clearly for the first time. She took off the red felt hat and shook her coppery hair free, and he saw it was long and silken, more than shoulder-length. Her face with its prominent cheekbones might have been beautiful except for the lines of exhaustion marked around her mouth and the violet shadows under her dark-brown eyes. Little f
lecks of gold shone in them as she sat down, the gun beside her on the bunk, and took the bottle from him. She still wore the woolen skirt and sweater and the tweed coat he had seen her in before.

  She drank and coughed and he could have taken the gun from her then, but he did not move. She looked up and smiled. “There is no subtlety in American liquor, is there?” “It’s home brew,” he said. “Tom Yordie's own mash. People get to like it, after a while.”

  “Another example of American individuality and independence?”

  “You could call it that,” he said. “You speak English well. Were you trained in Moscow?”

  “Of course. I expected you to recognize that.”

  “You did a poor job of shadowing me,” he told her.

  “I wanted you to see me and know where I was.”

  “Have you split with Bela Korvuth?”

  She nodded slowly. “It is definite now. I could not stand it. So much has happened, in only one day.” She ignored the gun beside her and clasped her hands together in her lap and leaned forward toward him. She shivered a little. “I can help you, Mr. Durell. But you must help me in return. That is why I needed this private conference with you. Anywhere else, it would be dangerous. Korvuth would find us, or you would not listen. Here, you and I can talk as two people, apart from everything else.”

  “I’m willing to listen.”

  “Of course. We know all about you. I thought you would prefer to talk. We consider you one of the most dangerous men against us. I do not know if what I have done so far is right. Perhaps I will be killed for it and perhaps I will deserve it. I will not lie to you. I came over here as part of Korvuth’s apparatus, to kill you, to get you off our books.”

  “That wasn’t all of your job,” he said.

  “No. Not all of it. Neither was Endre Stryzyk.” She shuddered, and for a moment she looked as if she were going to be sick. Durell reached across the narrow cabin and simply picked the gun off the bunk beside her. She did not move or object. All at once she made a sound of sickness in her throat and stood up and went quickly up the hatch to the deck again. Durell pocketed the gun and sat quietly, waiting for her. His shoulder throbbed, but she had done almost a professional job on the bandaging. His arm would be stiff for a few days, but if he could get a shot of penicillin soon, it shouldn’t trouble him too much. He waited for the girl to come back.