Assignment - Manchurian Doll

by Edward S. Aarons

  “Nadja Osmanovna, naturally. If she does not talk, she is too dangerous to live, knowing what she knows now.”

  “I’ll decide about that,” Durell said.

  Isome’s painted face was like a mechanical doll’s. “A wise man admits danger, Mr. Durell. If you have scruples about killing her, you may deliver her to us. But you must make her talk first. If you cannot, again you must turn her over to us. We will be more successful.”

  Omaru said decisively, “I must have the girl now. I’ll send my men back with Durell to get her.”

  “Don’t push me,” Durell said.

  “I must be adamant about this, sir.”

  Omaru clapped his hands and the two Japanese gunmen reappeared in the doorway. Baroness Isome smiled and gave them orders in rapid dialect. They were obsequious toward her, as if her authority equaled the fat man’s. Durell wondered at the essence of pure evil that came through the woman’s mask. He could understand Omaru as an adventurer, interested only in money. Isome was different. Her essence was that of acid, of silent poison. Of course it was a risk to let the girl live, if she eventually refused to talk. But when he looked at Isome and her fat husband, he smelled the evil in them, and he could not agree under any circumstances to turn her over to them.

  One of Omaru’s men thrust a gun in his back.

  “Come, we take you to Tagashi, we take the girl.”

  “Put the gun away,” Durell said tightly. “I warned you, I find it disagreeable.”

  Omaru gave a rumbling laugh. “He only obeys orders, Durell. I almost suspect you of bourgeois sentimentality in reference to the girl.”

  The hoodlum jabbed with his gun. “Come. We go now.” One of the first things you learn when training for K Section at The Farm in Maryland is how much distance to keep when you cover a man with a gun, and especially how tight a grip to hold on your weapon. The Japanese hood was not a professional in Durell’s world. He was pitifully easy. Smiling, Durell turned and smashed the gun from the man’s hand. The man screamed, wringing a broken wrist, and Durell kicked the heavy gun aside. His partner lunged, and Durell drove a fist into his belly and smashed him through the wood and paper fusuma door. Omaru bellowed orders, his face convulsed with rage. The woman stood quietly beside him, contemptuous.

  Durell felt the sudden change to enmity in the air. He had to be quick now. The two gunmen had separated, the first one holding his broken wrist, his lips skinned back, his big teeth bared. His feet in a flying judo kick could be deadly, and Durell backed carefully away to the broken doorway.

  “I’ll take the car myself. Thanks for everything, Omaru.” Omaru said thickly, “I want the Russian girl. You are stupid to insist on keeping her.”

  “Call your men off, or I’ll kill them,” Durell said.

  “I will not tolerate this,” Omaru whispered. “You are a fool. I do not do business with fools.”

  He snapped something to his two men and they jumped for him again. Durell took the one with the broken wrist first, chopping at his throat and rupturing the larynx. The man fell to his knees and bowed forward, then rolled back and forth on the floor in anguish. The second man came back through the broken doorway with a small, bright knife in his hand, and the blade flickered and weaved in a bright, dismaying pattern of thrust and parry as he closed in toward Durell.

  Durell backed around the charcoal brazier in a spinning step, then kicked over the heater into Omaru’s lap. The hissing coals scattered over the fat man’s thighs. The hot iron hibachi crashed on one of Omaru’s small, pink feet.

  Omaru screamed. The charcoal, strewn over the straw floor mat, promptly caused it to smoke and bum. A tiny flame leaped up. Omaru lurched, his face yellow, and screamed to his men to kill Durell.

  The woman had shrunk away, but she still smiled, her winged brows lifted. She watched Durell in fascination, as he jumped across the small fire leaping up from the fat man’s chair and spun away from the men crowding in through the doorway. There was no escape in that direction. He caught the flicker of flying steel and ducked the knife, and dived for the broken wood-and-paper partition to his left. There he turned and drew his own gun, standing in the opening he had broken for himself. At his back was the cool, dark night, the sighing of the mountain wind.

  “Omaru!”

  The room was filled with smoke. There were shouts of panic from other parts of the inn now. The fat man lurched around and spread his enormous arms to hold his men back.

  “This was for Fingal,” Durell called.

  Omaru did not reply. He looked like some enormous demon rising from the red, steamy depths of hell, with the fire blazing behind him.

  Durell turned and ran across the inner court of the mountain inn. The cool sound of a tinkling wind bell was ironic. He smashed through a tall bamboo hedge and found the car still parked near the carved wooden gateway. He fell in, found the keys in the ignition, and started it.

  He drove away with his foot flooring the gas pedal.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Nadja tried the rope that lashed her wrists once more. Her flesh was raw, and the pain from her effort went up her arms in a shock wave of agony. She gasped and lay still, watching the dull afternoon wane into evening dusk.

  For a time she was passive, studying the restricted arc of her vision. She could turn her head only partially. She had slept fitfully during the day just passed, aware of a dozen alarms. She was surprised at her fear, because she always thought she could meet death bravely; at first she thought it was because her end would be useless this way, and it was her duty—as her instructors always maintained—to stay alive to the last possible moment.

  But it was more than that.

  During the tortuous drive down the mountains to the coast, she had been wrapped in blankets that hid her from passing traffic. She had been able to guess where they were, at different times. She knew when Tagashi cut through the outskirts of Akijuro and turned north along the shore, by the smells of the sea and the pines. The drive took four hours on the wretched roads. They had not fed her, so she was hungry when she was finally led into the fisherman’s house on the beach.

  She knew she was in the village of Miyako. Just before they halted, they’d had to wait for a suburban trolley to clang past, and she had a fairly good idea where she was.

  The big puzzle was why they kept her alive.

  She expected questions and torture, but nothing happened. Durell came in and gave her lunch of fish and rice and tea and sat there watching, silent, not asking anything. His silence troubled her. But then the other American agent, the young one with the yellow hair and freckles and boyish face, came in and said something in a slangy phrase and Durell took the lacquered bowls and teacup and tied her up again.

  She knew Durell was the most dangerous of them all. But her immediate fear came from Yuki Tagashi.

  Yuki came in shortly after Durell and the others left the house with Tagashi—she could hear them leave—and the teenager’s quiet appearance somehow struck a fang of terror in Nadja’s heart. Wearing pedal-pushers and a striped singlet, the girl simply stood at the window that let in the sea breeze and stared at her. Yuki’s round face was in the shadows. Nadja recognized her as an Embassy employee, of course, and felt rueful at her failure to spot the girl as one of Tagashi’s agents, since it was her job to run the security checks. But Yuki had managed to efface herself with a meek and pleasant manner.

  She looked different now, her small feet spread slightly on the waxed floor, her hands plunged deep into her tight pockets. There was a bright ribbon in her thick hair. “How do you feel?” Yuki asked suddenly, staring.

  “I am all right.”

  “Are the ropes too tight?”

  “Yes. They hurt.”

  “Would you like me to loosen them for you?” Yuki laughed and took the lines and pulled them tighter. “Do you think I am cruel and heartless?”

  “Yes, but it is because you do not understand.”

  “I understand you are my enemy.” Yuki
spoke rapidly. “And enemies must be destroyed. I promise to destroy you, whatever Durell-san says.”

  “Please leave me alone,” Nadja said. “Leave it to the men to decide about such things.” She considered the girl’s spiteful eyes. “You cannot frighten me, Yuki. But you are a cruel and vicious child.”

  “Am I?” Yuki said. “Listen, I was once in love with a boy, two years ago, and he worked for my father. He was sent somewhere, I don’t know where, just before we were to be married. Yes, he was a spy. But he was handsome and gentle. And he never came back, I never saw him again. But I think I will always love him.”

  “You don’t know what happened to him?” Nadja asked. “My father told me your people killed him.”

  “So you turn your hatred on me?”

  “Why not?” Yuki crossed to the mat where Nadja lay helplessly and prodded her in the stomach, experimentally, with her toe. “I hate you so much it is a sickness in me. Ordinarily, I do not think Western women are good to look at, but you are beautiful—or you could be, if you were cleaned up and put in decent clothes. I wouldn’t want you to die easily.”

  “Leave me alone, please,” Nadja whispered.

  Yuki kicked her, but since she was still wearing sneakers the blow might have been worse. As it was, Nadja gasped and doubled up as much as the ropes would allow. She could not escape. Yuki kicked her again and again, crying, the tears running down her face. Nadja felt dizzy and sick, and tasted acid in her throat. But the pain in her stomach was nothing, she told herself. Yuki did not know the tricks of making a person scream and beg for death. She rode out the storm of Yuki’s fury, and then was aware of silence in the room again.

  Yuki was gone.

  It had grown dark outside the fisherman's hut.

  Nadja lay still, breathing with disciphne, her eyes fixed on the dim oblong of the little window. There were wooden shutters, but they had not been closed. Durell had not come back yet. There was no one else in the house but Yuki.

  If she hoped to escape, now was the time. Nothing was impossible. There was always a way, always something to be turned to use—

  She saw the bright glitter of a steel comb that had fallen from Yuki’s hair when the girl kicked her.

  It lay on the tatami mat, within reach. Nadja held her breath. The wind smelled of fish and seaweed from the lowering tide on the beach, and filled the room with a dank chill. A tree branch scraped and rattled on the roof tiles. In the darkness, the comb was only a faint glimmer at eye level when she measured the distance. She could make it. It would hurt, but it was her only chance—

  She strained and stretched and caught the comb between her teeth. It was heavy and solid. She rested, panting. Then she maneuvered until the steel comb lay under her bound wrists and she could grasp it in her fingers. Once that was done, she set to work in patience to fray the ropes that held her.

  She did not know if there was time enough. Now and then, pausing, she heard Japanese voices in the courtyard, in the rude idiom of fishermen, or out in the darkness of the village strung along the shore. Durell did not come back. She worked on.

  Her thoughts lingered on Yuki, and she remembered how she had been at Yuki’s age. The worst years were over by then and she was already in Moscow, sharpening her mind and body for just such a moment as this. But those were the years after the nightmare. . . .

  She remembered her father, that severe and logical man in the mission that was burned and rebuilt and burned again. From her mature viewpoint, she could not understand his patience and persistence. He had his faith, but in the face of such adversity, of war and bandits, of Communist hordes and the grafting demands of local Chinese politicians of the old regime, it would seem that any man might yield.

  It had been necessary to kill him in the end, the new soldiers clubbing and shooting everyone in the compound. They had been especially vicious with her mother, that gentle and sad-eyed woman of part Siberian, part Manchurian blood. Nadja’s pale gold hair, almost like silver, was like her mother’s. But the rest of her mother’s face had belonged to Asia. Nadja had inherited her father’s Gallic idiom and mentality.

  She was only a child, but she learned about men when the guerilla soldiers came, and she survived the debauch on her body only by detaching her mind from the things they did to her. But she did not hate them. She was a resigned sacrifice, although in later years she often awoke shivering and screaming, her teeth chattering and her limbs weak. . . .

  And that was not all. Her mind wavered, hesitant to lift the curtain on the secrets that followed. Images, terrible and obscene, flickered through her thoughts. Durell had wakened the monsters again, she thought, in slow, cold panic. Memories she had carefully buried and neglected now came oozing up to the surface. She clenched her teeth, thinking of it. . . .

  Her thoughts deliberately skipped to the time when she was with other homeless children, shifted here and there; and finally Alexi came, tall and brave, and put her on the Moscow train and rode with her all the way across Siberia. She was twelve then; he was twenty. She fell in love with him at once.

  In the Moscow school, they taught her to be ruthless and clever and dedicated, never accepting defeat.

  Well, she would not be beaten now, either.

  With this thought, the last strand of line around her wrists frayed on Yuki’s steel comb and snapped apart.

  For a moment Nadja lay on her back, breathing deeply, eyes glittering, and startled at the pain that flowed through her released arms. She spread them wide and waited. She heard someone talking in another part of the house, and she thought she recognized Yuki’s sulky voice, but she was not sure.

  She stood up slowly and almost fell, clutching the wall for support. The trouble passed. She went to the window. It was not too generous in size. She looked out at a dark beach where fishing nets were spread to dry on high bamboo stakes. The night sky loomed somberly over her. The air felt tense, as if a storm were due to break.

  She paused to tie her thick hair into a knot at the nape of her neck, getting it out of the way, and she used Yuki’s comb to pin it in place. Then she opened the window carefully, listening for any alarm. There was none. A moment later she dropped to the sandy soil outside the house.

  There was enough light in the yellowish night sky to show her the long curve of the beach, with its wooden fishermen’s houses in a row facing the somnolent, oily sea. There was a small harbor behind a stone breakwater to the right, and a dozen trim diesel trawlers were moored there. A single modern building, a fish-processing plant, loomed against the sky. Behind the houses that faced the sea, there was an asphalt road and, parallel to the road, was the interurban trolley line she had heard. The trolley would take her to Akijuro, she was sure.

  Her heart thudded heavily. She could telephone to Tokyo as soon as she reached a safe place. The Embassy people could be warned about Alexi’s plan to smuggle himself across the Japan Sea and seek asylum with the Americans.

  She paused, hand to mouth, thinking of him.

  Confusion churned in her.

  He would be shot, and she would be responsible for his death. She had loved him for so many years; first as a big-eyed, frightened waif dependent upon him, then, growing up into a woman at the Moscow Institute, devoting herself to his gentle charm, even though she was just one more student in the school run for KGB women personnel.

  Nadja started carefully down the beach, away from the house. She kept close to the shadows on the seaward side of the village strung out along the shore road.

  She owed everything to the Soviet motherland that had saved her from a life of brutal degradation in Manchuria. Alexi was a traitor. Therefore he must die. It was simple. But not simple. The childish adoration she once knew for him had turned to a woman’s love, in those days in Moscow. But he still regarded her as a child, even then. He had saved her once, but he had only been doing a routine official job, selecting candidates for the school. Still, he was Alexi, he was the only man in her life who managed to save her from t
he nightmares, the horror of her memory, gently erasing them, soothing her, holding her once, long ago, while she wept and told him how it had all happened, how her father had been killed, and where, and what had been done to her. . . .

  She did not know what to do.

  Then she turned the corner of a house and almost bumped into Yuki, who was walking quickly down the village lane to the beach. The meeting was unfortunate for Yuki. Nadja still ached from the torment the girl had inflicted on her.

  Before Yuki could scream in alarmed recognition, Nadja was on her savagely, her hands slashing, the edge of her palm crushing the bridge of Yuki’s nose with one chopping blow, the second swing slicing at the side of Yuki’s throat. The girl fell, blood gushing from her mouth, coughing and choking. Nadja stepped lightly around her, took her time, weighed the fatal blow at the nape of the girl’s neck. Struck properly, it would put Yuki down forever.

  Nadja did not use it.

  Satisfied that Yuki was too busy simply trying to breathe through her bloody, broken nose, Nadja ran between the houses of the fishing village toward the trolley line.

  She paused at the tracks. A lemon-green light lay over the sea horizon. The air was quiet, electric with a sense of waiting. She had no money for the trolley, not even some yen for a public phone. Well, she would steal a car, find her way to the Shimbashi Hotel in Akijuro, where there were always Soviet employees on holiday. Maybe that was the best thing to do.

  But the village did not boast a single car that she could see. She looked up and down the shining tracks, listening for the approach of a trolley. For all she knew, service might be discontinued for the day.

  Quickly, she ran back to where she had left Yuki, wondering if Yuki had any money with her.

  Now it was her turn to be surprised.

  Two men were there, helping Yuki to her feet. The girl’s face was bruised and bloody, her eyes still dazed by the violence of Nadja’s assault. The men shook her, asking questions in growling Japanese. They looked tough, ruthless and hard. Nadja knew from the way they held Yuki that they were not Durell’s men.