Assignment- Mermaid

by Will B Aarons

  "Dead? I can’t believe it. I saw the unfortunate servant at the door, but . . . Where is he?”

  Durell jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "That may be Panagiotes in there.”

  "It is. It could only be poor Costa,” Sirena said.

  Link came back from the doorway, his nose wrinkled. "Ghastly sight. Ghastly,” he said. "How—what happened?”

  "We just found him. I don’t know.” Durell spoke urgently to Sirena. "Have you any clothes here?”

  "Yes.”

  Link interrupted: "I came to deliver a message from Mr. Stone, in Athens. He said to inform you that the Nereid, on which Aleksei Lazeishvili is a stowaway, has been spotted by your people.”

  "Good. Where?”

  "At Port Said, third in line waiting to enter the Suez Canal. Its convoy leaves in a few hours.”

  "I have to get aboard it, somehow.”

  "Can you get to Port Said in time?”

  "No.” Durell’s eyes went dark and thoughtful. "But I know another place, in the canal itself. There are two convoys daily, from either end. They pass at al-Ballah and Kibrit, one anchoring and the other going on by. I think I can board the Nereid at al-Ballah, if I can get there. I’ll have to fly.” He turned his gaze on Link. "I’ll need a plane with enough range to take me, and a competent pilot I can trust.”

  "No problem, my friend.” Link look smug.

  "You can supply those?”

  "I feel reasonably certain of it.” He paused, then added: "If you will take me along.”

  "I appreciate the offer, but you can’t keep your mouth shut.”

  Link blinked, but retained his smooth composure. "Harshly put, but I suppose I deserved that. You may rely on my discretion. In any case, it wasn’t an offer. It was a demand—the HRC has a right to participate, wherever possible.”

  "It’s not possible.”

  "Then no plane; no pilot.”

  Durell gave it a moment’s thought. He could obtain the use of a military aircraft, but he shuddered at the thought of the diplomatic hassle if it were caught violating Egyptian airspace. "I thought you were a pacifist,” he said. "You ran away to avoid fighting for your country. It could get rough.”

  "Correction: I ran away to avoid fighting for South Vietnam. I’ll fight for what I hold dear. I just believe every man has a right to decide what that is for himself.”

  At least, Durell thought, the man stood on principle. "Can you shoot?” he asked.

  "Expertly.”

  Durell nodded. "Just remember you asked to come,” he said.

  "Very well.” Link’s tone was businesslike. "Sirena will fly us, won’t you, darling?”

  Her charming pink mouth smiled broadly. "Can I?”

  Link turned back to Durell. "She’s fully licensed. She often flew Panagiotes. I’ve been in the air with her, and I can tell you she was damned good.”

  "You don’t know what you’re getting her into,” Durell said.

  "It’s the same people that killed Costa, isn’t it?” she demanded.

  "Maybe,” he said.

  "I’ll pay them back.”

  "There may be bloodshed,” Durell said evenly.

  She replied in Greek: "Them beraze.” It doesn’t matter.

  An edge of excitement came through Link’s normally jaded tone, and he said: "We can take Panagiotes’ Learjet. I suppose he won’t be needing it.”

  Durell regarded Sirena, her arms still crossed modestly, and then Link, as they returned his gaze with intense eyes. He decided that good fortune could come in more unlikely packages—but he’d never seen one. Still, he could hardly reject them and expect to catch up with the Nereid.

  He spoke quietly: "Very well. It takes about fifteen hours for a convoy to transit the canal—I’ll have to get a schedule, but that won’t be difficult. We’ll make our try sometime tonight.”

  5

  Durell told Sirena to get dressed, then went to his Simca with Link and put a blue suit on over his bathing trunks.

  "Go back to town, buy an inflatable raft for tonight,” he told Link. "Don’t forget paddles. Here.”

  From his jacket pocket, he took a roll of currency amounting to more than a thousand dollars in Greek and US bills; peeled off several thousand-drachma notes; pressed them into Link’s hand, and said: "Bring the raft to the plane. I won’t know our exact takeoff time until I get the canal shipping schedule. When I have it, I’ll leave a message at your suite. You’re still at the Grand Hotel?”

  Link nodded, depositing the money in his wallet.

  "One other thing: keep away from me. I don’t want to see you until I go to the plane.”

  "Is that all?”

  "Don’t forget your gun.”

  He heard Link’s car start as he returned to the villa. Inside, a check of the telephone showed that it was dead. The line might have been destroyed by fire. More likely, it had been cut.

  His nerves were on edge.

  He and Sirena had been here too long.

  He went back out front. The dead man crumpled there requested attention. Sirena had surrendered the Beretta, which he now wiped clean of prints and dropped by the man’s side. He looked up the lane, then out to the silver-scaled Aegean, beyond descending gardens and swimming pool. There was no sign of the yacht, but he hadn’t expected any.

  Sirena came out wearing cork clogs, tight-bottomed tan slacks and bright print blouse of silken material that had been tied up to bare her midriff. Her hair, now dried and brushed, was like a fan of shining black coral down her back.

  "I’m ready,” she said. Her eyes avoided the corpse.

  "Where was that yacht moored? I didn’t see it when I came this morning.”

  She took him by a path that led around the house until he saw far below a still lagoon. It was almost cut off from the sea by a natural causeway, but there was a break in the middle. The promontory that held the villa rose sheer from the variegated green, blue and purple of the water.

  "A cozy nook,” Durell said.

  "It’s almost impossible to see from anywhere but here,” she told him.

  "Let’s get out of here. You will call the authorities when we get to Rhodes Town.”

  "The charofylakes?” She looked dubious.

  "The police, yes. The phone is out of order here.” He saw the worry in her eyes. "They will come sooner or later. It mustn’t appear like you delayed notifying them, or they might suspect you.”

  They walked back past the house, going to the Sim-ca. Cicadas whined in the hot afternoon. Golden oranges littered the earth beneath a tree.

  "What can I tell them; what should I say?” Sirena asked.

  "That you were swimming, below the cliff. You didn’t see or hear anything. When the phone didn’t work, you walked out the lane and caught a ride into town.” He paused, watching her as they walked. "Can you handle that?”

  "It sounds easy,” she said nervously.

  "They may try to trip you up, but it’s the truth, up to a point. Just stick to it.” Durell opened the passenger door of the little green Simca for her, then leaned against it, and said: "And leave me—and Link—out of it.”

  Backing out of the olive grove and starting up the lane toward the coastal highway, both saw the old man at the same moment. A wide-brimmed straw hat shaded his face as he shuffled along in socks and sandals. He led a donkey laden with cuttings.

  "Damn!” Durell slapped the wheel. "He must have been working in one of the orchards.”

  "Yes, I’ve seen him before,” she said as they passed the man.

  "Maybe we’re just another car to him.”

  "He might not go near the house.”

  Nevertheless, Durell had a feeling his luck was deserting him.

  A blinding white shone from walls of the island’s small, huddled villages, as the Simca sped along the coast in the midsummer heat. To their left, long, green valleys snaked back into sunbeaten mountains that formed the island’s spine. An elderly woman in a red kerchief tended goats from the shade
of a purple-flowered shasta tree.

  Sirena pointed at the tree, and said: "Did you know the ancient Greeks believed the scent of its leaves was an anti-aphrodisiac?”

  "Maybe I should go back and let you have a sniff,” Durell said.

  Her laugh was low and husky. "The world is so beautiful, after—something like this morning.” She watched as they passed a country cottage surrounded by groves of hibiscus and oleander. There were vineyards, almond and peach orchards. "This is the sun’s own island. Really. The sun god Helios chose it as his bride.”

  "Is this your home?”

  "No. Corinth. On the Peloponnese.” She sighed. "But I wish it had been.”

  She knew all about Rhodes. Three thousand years ago it had been the equal of any power in the Mediterranean. Lindians, perhaps ancestors of the fishermen who saved them, founded Naples as a colony in the 7th Century B.C. There was no Rhodes Town then; Lindos and its two sister cities commissioned its design as the island’s new capital in the 5th Century, and it became the most scientifically planned town of ancient Greece. There was art, thousands of statues, among them the Victory of Samothrace, now in the Louvre, and, of course, the hundred-foot high Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of antiquity. There was learning: Brutus and Cassius both studied rhetoric here. And there was law: the island’s progressive Commercial Law was adopted by Augustus Caesar for the whole Roman Empire.

  She leaned back against the headrest.

  A fragrance of wild thyme was on the scorching wind.

  They passed through the village of Asgouroti, where a Turkish minaret needled the porcelain sky.

  "I can’t get my mind off Costa,” Sirena said.

  "Did you love him?”

  She shook her dark tresses. "I—I don’t know. But it was great fun, having him in love with me.” In a rueful tone, she added: "I just don’t feel right about going away and leaving him there like that.”

  "There was nothing else we could do. Remember, that may not have been Panagiotes—”

  "How can you be so cruel?” she said, suddenly angry. "Don’t hold out hope where there is none.”

  "I wouldn’t do that,” Durell said, "but that body could be anybody’s. And Panagiotes’ yacht didn’t steer itself over us.”

  "So?”

  Durell glanced into the rear-vision mirror. "No strange cars were parked at the villa when we returned, right? So if the men who supposedly killed Panagiotes then took his yacht, where is the car they arrived in?”

  Sirena took a moment to think. "Some could have gone off in the yacht, and some in the car?” she said.

  "Maybe,” Durell said.

  They were in Rhodes Town now, and Durell turned onto Vironos Street, which circled around the most formidable fortifications of medieval Europe. These enormous walls and parapets of parchment-brown stone were built by the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, who had retreated here from the Holy Land in the 14th Century. Durell recalled that the order was a stem elite, open only to members of Europe’s most noble families. Bold and unforgiving, its war galleys had been the scourge of the eastern Mediterranean for two centuries, until Suleiman the Magnificent, with two hundred thousand troops, overwhelmed its six hundred knights and seven thousand soldiers.

  Now flocks of tourists in shorts and sunglasses, most of them Scandinavians who especially favored the island, strolled the ramparts.

  Durell’s hotel was within the three-mile circuit of battlements, which contained the old town, consisting of the Collachium, or Knights’ Quarter, and the Turkish District. Sirena’s apartment was in the Néa Chóra, the new town, outside the walls, with its wide streets, tavernas and patisseries, duty-free shops and government offices. Beyond the business district, high-rise hotels of bland international design with layered balconies, crowded toward the aquarium on the island’s northern point.

  Flowers and tourists were everywhere. Darting motor scooters, bicycles and burros made the streets treacherous, as Durell turned out of Vironos at the Bank of Greece Building with the knights’ castle rising behind him. A gleaming white cruise liner loomed up from Mandraki Harbor, its reflection burning on the water under a cloudless sky. Yachts and caiques were moored to a long stone pier on which medieval windmills spun thin shadows as their sails turned in the wind. At its terminus squatted Fort St. Nicholas, for the knights had fortified the harbor along with everything else.

  Durell drove past open air cafés, where Greeks with worry beads and visitors with cameras sipped Turkish coffee or oúzo, Tamtam cola or Alpha beer.

  He dropped Sirena off across the street from the Mosque of Murad Reis with its lacy white minaret. Pine and eucalyptus trees in its graveyard shaded headstones carved to resemble turbans.

  "After you call the police, phone me at my hotel; let me know how it went,” he said, and gave her his room number.

  As she set out for her apartment, a block away, he turned back up the hill, toward a gate where cypresses, date palms and citrus trees hid the lower reaches of the old town’s crenellated walls.

  His hotel, the St. John, was in a 15th Century stone building in the Turkish Quarter. It faced a little square centered around a mossy fountain in a brightly tiled basin. Beside it, a taxi, painted with a blue design to ward off the evil eye, waited for a fare. All around were shadowed arcades and small shops behind striped awnings. Sightseers posed beside a pyramid of ancient stone catapult balls, one of many in the old town. Others panted by on bicycles or haggled importantly with merchants.

  He entered the hotel through a Gothic archway and approached the desk across a lobby floored with a dolphin mosaic of black and white pebbles.

  "I believe some friends of mine checked in yesterday,” he told the clerk. "May I look at the register?”

  "Of course, sir.”

  Durell ran a quick finger down the listing, found nothing that joggled his memory. He pushed the book back, turned toward the elevator. It had been a faint hope, at best.

  He knew the names, real and fictitious, of scores of operatives in his business, but none had been in the register. They could be in any hotel, of course, waiting on any street, following in any car.

  It was possible that whoever had burned the villa was not after him.

  But it was only prudent to assume they were.

  As he entered the elevator, his eyes went once more around the lobby with its Afándou carpets and wall lamps styled after medieval lanterns. It was almost empty this time of day, but the few faces seemed harmless enough.

  He took the usual precautions entering his room. The furnishings were dark and bulky, made of massive chunks of factory-carved wood. Yellow and blue-striped cushions and sky-blue walls lessened the oppressive atmosphere. Pigeons muttered on the ledge of a window that gave a view of tiled roofs and the sea beyond.

  Durell showered, ordered up a lunch of barboúni mullet and pepóni melon.

  It was nearing four o’clock, and he began to wonder why Sirena had not called. There still was plenty of time. He dismissed a nibbling apprehension as he withdrew two plastic pillboxes from his suitcase, one red, the other pharmacy-white, and removed a varicolored collection of pills from them. A twist of his thumb inside the white box, and a cover lifted to reveal a perforated plate. He then unscrewed the exterior bottom cover, using the threads to insert a rubber collar, slipped the flexible collar snugly over the mouthpiece of his room telephone. The voice scrambler, made palm-size by the latest silicon-chip wizardry of electronic microtechnology, was ready for use. A similar preparation of the red pillbox, which was slipped over the earpiece to unscramble incoming pulses, completed the operation. It all took about a minute.

  An unfamiliar voice answered for Athens Control. Durell identified himself and requested scrambled transmission.

  "You’ve got it,” Control said.

  Durell touched pressure-sensitive areas on the attached mouth and earpieces and tiny red glowlights showed dully through the plastic. "Let me speak with Marty Stone,” he said.

&nbs
p; "Just a minute.”

  There came the click of a hold button. He gazed out the window. The glare of the sun hung like white fire over the city.

  "Sir?”

  "Here,” Durell said.

  "Mr. Stone is on his way to Rhodes.”

  "Coming here? Don’t tell me.”

  "Just did.”

  "Why?”

  "I’m not privy to that information, sir.”

  "All right, I’ll find out when he arrives. Do something for me.”

  "Yes, sir.”

  "It regards the schedule for Suez Canal convoys. What time does the next southbound convoy arrive at the al-Ballah Bypass?”

  "Hang on, I’ll look it up.”

  Durell sank back in his chair, stared at the lemon-colored ceiling. The distant cry of a muezzin came into the room, calling the few Turks left here to prayer. Most had returned to their homeland twelve miles away, when the Italians took over the island in 1912. It had become part of Greece again after World War II.

  The voice said: "One of the convoys for today just pulled into the bypass.”

  "That will be the first. I’m interested in the second. When is it due there?”

  "Twelve hundred hours, give or take a quarter of an hour.”

  "Thanks.”

  "Anything else, sir?”

  "That’s all. Thanks.”

  Durell replaced the scrambler paraphernalia and considered the time element. The Learjet could traverse the nine hundred miles to Port Said in about an hour and forty-five minutes, he reasoned. They could leave after dark and still make it with time to spare. But he hoped to cut it as fine as possible and arrive just as the ships anchored.

  Get in and out fast. The Egyptians would have plenty to say about violating their airspace, even in a civilian aircraft, if they caught them.

  He didn’t care even to think about the possible MIGs and SAMs.

  It would be a long night, and he would need all the rest he could get. He’d spent most of the previous night at gaming tables in the Grand Hotel Casino, creating an impression that he was simply Link’s free-wheeling pal. With his background, it had not been difficult to come out a modest winner. He had worked his way through Yale as a professional gambler.