Assignment - Cong Hai Kill

by Edward S. Aarons

  “Yes. I’m sorry, too.”

  Paio Chu was no ordinary Chinaman transplanted to the southern jungle, Durell reflected. He was taller and somewhat fatter than his dead twin brother,. although he had the same round, bland face and dignified Mandarin beard as Chang. Paio looked prosperous and thoroughly Westernized, however; a result of his long service on the Danat plantation, Durell guessed. He felt a twinge of irrational suspicion, and dismissed it. Not all the millions of Chinese outside of Red China could be condemned simply for being what they were.

  Durell spoke quietly. “Your brother’s murder was as senseless as the raid on this village, Paio. These people ask the same questions. Why were they killed?”

  “But these Cong Hai wage war upon us—”

  “And your brother Chang was involved in that War.”

  “With Yellow Torch? It is what I hear."

  “Didn’t Chang confide in you?”

  “Only a little. He was most—evasive. I did not understand his visit, except that he was homesick for the plantation. He was fond of Mademoiselle Anna-Marie. She called him ‘Uncle Chang,’ as you know.”

  “And she showed no such affection for you?”

  Paio bowed slightly and smiled self-deprecatingly. “I am a man of business, always concerned with the estate. It is a big job, sir. Much work must be done, at all times. And in late years, especially—since M’sieu Danat became —ah—careless of his personal habits.”

  “Since he became addicted to drugs?”

  “I cannot control his customs, sir. As for the native woman, Giralda—” The Chinese shrug was eloquent. “You must imagine him as a lonely, elderly man, a Frenchman—”

  “Where does he get his opium?”

  “Oh, but that is common here. In the Chinese shops of Dong Xo, you see—well, we are far from authority. We try to live in a civilized fashion, as best we can.”

  “All right,” Durell said briefly. “You said Major Muong wants to see me.”

  “Of course. I regret interrupting you with my petty, personal affairs.”

  The fat Chinese turned away down the village street. He wore a fine yellowish linen suit and a white shirt and a dark necktie. He was by far the cleanest and most collected man in Dong Xo, Durell thought.

  Durell smelled the acrid Dutch cigar smoke before he saw Muong. The slender Thai officer stood on the front seat of his jeep. He had just finished addressing the villagers and posting his slim platoon as guards along the town’s perimeter. Viewed against the dark thunder that now rolled over the river valley, they all seemed nakedly exposed to the terrors that might lurk in the jungle around them.

  Major Muong jumped down from the jeep.

  “Ah, Durell. The women have been quartered in the government post, over there. Two rooms were suitable for them. May I ask where you’ve been?”

  "Only a little. He was most evasive. I did not understand his visit, except that he was homesick for the plantation. He was fond of Mademoiselle Anna-Marie. She called him ‘Uncle Chang,’ as you know.”

  “And she showed no such affection for you?”

  Paio bowed slightly and smiled self-deprecatingly. “I am a man of business, always concerned with the estate. It is a big job, sir. Much work must be done, at all times. And in late years, especially——since M’sieu Danat became —ah—careless of his personal habits.”

  “Since he became addicted to drugs?”

  “I cannot control his customs, sir. As for the native woman, Giralda—” The Chinese shrug was eloquent. “You must imagine him as a lonely, elderly man, a Frenchman—”

  “Where does he get his opium?”

  “Oh, but that is common here. In the Chinese shops of Dong Xo, you see—well, we are far from authority. We try to live in a civilized fashion, as best we can.”

  “All right,” Durell said briefly. “You said Major Muong wants to see me.”

  “Of course. I regret interrupting you with my petty, personal affairs.”

  The fat Chinese turned away down the village street. He wore a fine yellowish linen suit and a white shirt and a dark necktie. He was by far the cleanest and most collected man in Dong Xo, Durell thought.

  Durell smelled the acrid Dutch cigar smoke before he saw Muong. The slender Thai officer stood on the front seat of his jeep. He had just finished addressing the villagers and posting his slim platoon as guards along the town’s perimeter. Viewed against the dark thunder that now rolled over the river valley, they all seemed nakedly exposed to the terrors that might lurk in the jungle around them.

  Major Muong jumped down from the jeep.

  “Ah, Durell. The women have been quartered in the government post, over there. Two rooms were suitable for them. May I ask where you’ve been?”

  “Our governments both want this man you call Yellow Torch. Let them decide what happens to him. For you and me, our task is clear. We bring him to Bangkok and let higher authorities discuss it.”

  “Fine. We’ll settle it that way for now.”

  “Then take me to him, please.”

  “I don’t think that would be wise,” Durell said. “The villagers are Watching us. Some of them are Congs, you can be sure. We can’t be Judas goats and lead" them to slaughter our Orris Lantern.”

  Muong’s dark eyes flickered, then he jerked his head up as a violent burst of thunder shook the air. Lightning ribboned and split the vault of the night sky like an egg being cracked.

  Then the rain came.

  Muong stood there, a slim, straight, defiant figure.

  “Now we cannot use the jeeps. We are trapped here,” he said softly. “I had best see the village priest about quarters for my men. Until later, I hold you responsible for Yellow Torch and his safety.”

  “Thanks for nothing,” Durell said.

  He felt the heavy rain pound his shoulders with brutal force as he turned away.

  18

  IN THE DARK and the rain, it was impossible to see more than a few feet in any direction. Even the glimmering oil lamps of the village were blotted out. Land and air dissolved. The rain seemed to fill the lungs with water; the mud dragged at the muscles. Durell turned to Giralda’s house, where he had found Danat. Now was the time to move Lantern to a safer place.

  He turned the corner of the big native house on the riverbank, ducking his head against the water pouring from the upturned pagoda eaves, and someone clutched his sleeve.

  “M’sieu Durell. Sam. Please!”

  It was Anna-Marie. She’d been hiding in the gloom under the ladder-stairs, and the rain had darkened her blonde hair and plastered the thick strands to her small head. Her eyes seemed luminous in the night. She touched Durell’s chest with a nervous, tentative gesture.

  “Please.” She lifted her voice against the hiss and thunder of the rain. “Forgive me. For what I tried to do in the hotel, I mean. It was so foolish.”

  He ignored that. “Where is Deirdre?”

  “In the government rest house, with Uncle Paio and Muong’s sergeant and some soldiers. I slipped away to find you and Papa. Where is Papa?”

  “Where you want him to be, I think. With Orris.”

  “You have seen him? You have seen my Orris? He is well? He is safe?”

  “He’s been hurt; but he’s all right.”

  “You have not—you did not—?”

  “No”

  Relief made a sob catch in her throat. She dashed rain from her eyes with the back of her hand. Her shirt and slacks were plastered to her slim, provocative figure. Overhead, through the plank floor, they heard furniture scrape, and Giralda shouted angrily at someone. Lightning clawed at the hills across the river. In the few moments of the storm, Durell saw, the muddy, placid river had turned into a boiling torrent. In the blue lightning, he watched Anna-Marie lick her pale, wet lips.

  “Please take me to him, Sam. You said he’s hurt? How? Is it bad? What happened—?”

  “Come with me.”

  He took her cold hand and followed the alley path along
the river-bank to the godown. This part of Dong Xo seemed totally deserted. The rain did not slacken, and the darkness was almost absolute, and they had to grope their way along. Durell felt pressed by a sense of emergency. He wished he could have seen Deirdre safely settled; he could have used her good offices with this determined but frightened French girl. But in a sense, Deirdre’s job was already done. She had come here to meet Anna-Marie, who trusted her, and thus had made the original contact with Yellow Torch. After that, Durell could have wished her on a plane safely back to Washington. But she refused to go, and now she was an added worry in the back of his mind.

  Out of the darkness and the elephant grass loomed Papa Danat, big and shaggy and bald, drenched by the rain. But his greeting to his daughter was booming and jovial.

  “Ma petite! You are well? We have your love safe and sound—well, not quite sound, but safe enough—”

  “Papa, let me see him.”

  “One moment. You still love this—this man the Americans regard with such contempt?”

  “Orris is honest and good. I know it. I feel it.”

  “A woman’s intuition—”

  “Papa, please! I cannot bear it. Let me see him.”

  Durell nodded, and the fat man stood aside. The girl rushed in and they heard a little cry and then the cool, dry drawl of Orris Lantern. Durell checked Danat as the other man also started in and said, “We have to move him.”

  “Yes, yes. Muong’s men—and the villagers—when they collect themselves, they will come to this district to check the warehouses to see what the Cong Hai took."

  “Where can We put him?”

  Papa Danat grunted. “The lagoon, perhaps.”

  “Where is that?”

  “I will show you. No one goes there, yet it is close by. His injury is not so bad that he cannot make it.”

  “All right.”

  Lantern insisted he could walk alone, without help. Anna-Marie. clung to him, hindering rather than assisting, but he did not put her aside. Durell wondered how long he could keep this man alive. All the odds were against him. His presence here couldn’t be kept secret for long. It was a miracle-and Durell was always suspicious of miracles that Lantern had survived the Cong Hai raid. But someone would get to him. Sooner, rather than later, he suspected grimly.

  He had to admit to a grudging admiration for the man’s defiant spirit. Wounded, hungry, dirty, Lantern managed to walk alone with the little French girl through the dark alley and under a grove of ancient banyan trees and across a wooden bridge at the eastern end of the town. Anna-Marie kept murmuring to him through the hiss and rattle of the rain that almost drowned them. Papa Danat lumbered along like a giant bear, and Durell kept up the rear with his gun in hand.

  They had to pause once, when a small group of villagers came trotting down a side lane, clad in strange conical rain capes of woven canes, their heads and shoulders hidden under huge conical hats. in the passing light of the villagers’ lamps, Durell saw that Lantern’s bearded face was gaunt and haggard with pain. Everything else could be a trap, an elaborate maze set to snare him. But Lanterns twisted grin was genuine.

  “Sorry, Cajun. I’m a little beat.”

  “Take it easy. How much farther, Papa Danat?”

  “A little way. “Ten minutes,” the planter said.

  “We’ll rest a bit, then.”

  On-is leaned against the wet trunk of a tree that soared out of sight into the rainy darkness above. Thunder roared again, but it was farther down the valley, moving away. The storm would end soon.

  “Cajun?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Listen, you got to help. After all, we’re both Americans. I ain’t ashamed to say I’m scared—” Orris laughed, then coughed and held his shoulder. “I know you don’t want to call me a countryman, old buddy, but we are. And if things go bad, you got to remember--I’m not the big fish you came here to fry.”

  “No?”

  Orris ran a shaky, dirty hand through his wet beard. “We’ll talk about it soon, if we get a chance. But I’m a minnow compared to the big fish. Believe that. He’ll try for me, for wantin’ to go home with you. I know a lot, but not enough. Nothing to what he knows—”

  “Who is he?” Durell asked.

  “I wish I could tell you.”

  “You mean you can’t, or you won’t?”

  “I don’t know who he is.”

  “But you’re the boss of the Cong Hai here,” Durell said flatly. “They don’t call you Yellow Torch for nothing.”

  “I’m just the front man. The publicity agent. They make a lot of capital out of me, as an American, here in the jungle with them. But I finally figured it out. It got me sore. It made me think. So I decided to pull out. And little Anna-Marie was the clincher, you know?”

  Durell was silent.

  “Listen, Cajun, she comes back to the States with me.

  It’s got to be part of the deal.”

  “You don’t give a damn for her,” Durell said.

  “But I do. It‘s tough to swallow, but I laid awake many a night, tryin’ to believe it myself. Anna-Marie and me -well, it’s a good thing with us. You think I’m snowing you, but it’s true. I’m in love with her.” Orris laughed, and coughed again. “And you gotta help us, whether you like it or not.”

  They came to the lagoon as the rain ended. All at once, there was a thick, steamy silence, broken only by the dark patter of drops falling from the tangled foliage. Mosquitoes promptly swarmed in hungry clouds about them. They were beyond the village perimeter, on an ox-cart trail that led inland from the river, They crossed a rice paddy, then twisted left through a maze of creepers, with mud squelching underfoot, and finally glimpsed open water that Durell guessed was Danat‘s lagoon.

  A ruined temple loomed up unexpectedly out of the jungle, dimly lighted by the swiftly reappearing stars. Danat held up a hand to halt them and spoke in a harsh whisper.

  “This place is not used anymore but some of the monks may have hidden here when the Cong Hat came. Lantern said dryly: “It’s empty, Papa. But they’ll be comin’ in the morning for their prayers, you can count on it. It’s no place for me to hide.”

  “I intend to hide you on the Lady.”

  Durell said: “The Lady?”

  “You will see. She belonged to me, but it was not profitable to operate her when the diesel boats could carry my goods more cheaply. Come.”

  They passed the loom of the temple, with its towering prangs and grotesque carvings, and walked through a grove of banyan trees and along a ruined wall buried in dark magenta bougainvillea. A peasant hut looked pewter-gray in the dim light. It was abandoned, and Durell thought of centipedes and snakes. At the end of the lagoon, he looked back and was surprised to see that the jungle had swallowed the temple and made it invisible again.

  Then he saw the hulk of the riverboat, festooned with vines, burdened by the quick and hungry growth of the jungle that had grown up around its ancient berth.

  It was like a mirage, until the light brightened as the moon came out from behind the last shreds of clouds and made the vessel’s outline clear to him.

  Long ago, as a boy, he had been given a series of double paintings, in which one image was concealed within the outlines of another, until you suddenly caught the proper perspective and the hidden picture stood out. It was like that with the old steamer hulk. The moon came out like a disc of steel. You looked at the lagoon, quiet and black, and saw only the jungle around it, the dark wall of twisted vines. Then there suddenly leaped at you the surpriSing outline of tall, twin stacks, their guy wires looped with creepers; you saw the decaying pilothouse, the pattern of rusting rails, the fat semi-circles of side paddle-wheel covers.

  She was about a hundred feet long, Durell guessed, and half a century old. Gingerbread scrollwork remained where the jungle had not rotted or torn it away. She must have been in service not too long ago, he reflected, or nothing would have remained of her by now. She showed the results of a losing b
attle with blistering heat, warping winds, and the cancerous effect of mud, insects, and hungry green vines. But the guy wires from her stacks seemed strong and taut. The housing amidships was square, with big windows dark in the pale moonlight. She had a pipe railing around the upper deck and the pilothouse, built on poles before the stacks for a better view of the river shallows. There was a galleried main deck with gimcrack scroll-saw work like a Victorian bandstand, and there was even a veranda aft with piping for canvas which long since had rotted away.

  How and why she had ever gotten into this distant jungle backwater, Durell could never guess. Probably she had been imported long ago by some plantation owner and shipped knocked-down, to be reassembled and floated for use on this river. Perhaps she was the whim of some local prince in a time already forgotten. But once she must have been a lovely sight, with her bright-work gleaming, her bell-mouthed stacks belching smoke, her white, sharp prow cleaving the river on her passage up and down the river to the coast.

  How long had she been rotting here, forgotten and neglected? Durell felt a sudden excitement, and urged the others forward.

  “When was she run last, Papa?” he asked Danat.

  The fat man shrugged. “She broke down last five years ago, mon ami. We had no mechanics to fix her guts, you know, so she has been dying here ever since.”

  “Do you know what went wrong?”

  “Who can tell? I grow tea, not pistons and valves.”

  “Do many people come here?”

  “No one. This place holds only ghosts and had memories. Our prisoner should be safe enough here. But in the end, he cannot be safer than we ourselves, eh?”

  “You think the Cong Hai will come back soon?”

  “I simply exercise my nation’s outstanding gift, my friend. I am logical. We are all doomed.”

  They heard a distant funeral gong in the village. Somewhere, a man prayed in a loud, breathless, eager voice. A fish jumped in the black waters of the lagoon. The steady drip of rain water from the trees was ending.

  Papa Danat led them along a moss-grown stone quay overgrown with tiny white flowers that winked in the moonlight. Durell kept his gun ready. Lantern slipped and almost fell, and Anna-Marie supported him. The bearded renegade cursed softly, and Durell told him to shut up. The man’s yellow eyes glittered as he turned his head.