Assignment - Ankara

by Edward S. Aarons

  “I didn’t know about it,” she moaned. “I swear I didn’t!” Anderson said impatiently, “But where is the tape?” Durell stared at the small, tumbled heaps of packets on the captain’s desk. He heard Susan sobbing. The bag was empty now, the lining ripped apart, disintegrated by the fisherman’s further search. The captain tossed the bag aside and pawed impatiently through all the little packages.

  But there was nothing else.

  The tape was gone.

  Chapter Seventeen

  YOU never know, Durell thought. He looked at Susan and Anderson and knew that everyone in the captain’s cabin had been taken by surprise. He thought of John Stuyvers, that thin, fanatic man in the clerical collar of a missionary, carrying all that dope from Lebanon, hidden in the priceless, and now rained religious relics. It explained a great deal about the man’s behavior, and a few other matters that had puzzled him. He watched the captain shove the heroin aside with an expression of distaste on his bearded face. He ignored Anderson’s explosive breath and stood up heavily, facing Durell.

  Anderson said loudly, “It is a trick! The tape must be here! Look again!”

  “Be quiet, Comrade Spy,” the captain said. “I will question the woman first.”

  Durell said, “She does not understand Russian.”

  “She will understand my fist. Tell her what I want.” “And that is?”

  “This marvelously important bit of tape you two keep lying about. She knows where it is, eh? She had the bag, the drugs, and the tape was with the drugs, eh? I am not stupid. If the tape was in the bag, and you both expected it to be there, then she removed it. She will tell me where it can be found now.”

  Durell spoke quickly in English. “Susan, don’t say anything at all. Not a word, please.”

  She looked at him without comprehension and spoke through her battered lips. “Sam, believe me. Believe me, please. I didn’t know about John smuggling this heroin. Honestly. I didn’t know. I thought he was a real missionary, a little strange, perhaps, but I never suspected—”

  “Never mind the dope. Just don’t tell them what you did with the tape, no matter what happens.”

  “But I don’t know what happened to the tape!” she protested. “Don’t you believe me?”

  The captain crossed the room and slapped her hard across the mouth, without warning. Susan shrieked and fell to the deck again. Durell did not know if her scream was more for effect, an appeal for pity, or whether her pain and terror were genuine. He looked across the cabin at Anderson. The big man’s face was hard and gray. His eyes were cold, his wide mouth clamped shut, unfeeling, without emotion, watching Susan as if she were some biological exhibit mounted for classroom inspection on dissection techniques. The captain yelled at her and caught at her yellow hair and dragged her up on her feet again and shouted in Russian at her.

  “Where is it, you she-cat? Show me what it is these men are confusing me about, eh? Talk, do you hear?”

  “She doesn’t understand Russian,” Durell said again. “She knows what I say!” the fisherman snapped. “I can see she knows very well what I want.”

  He struck her again. Susan fell, sprawling, at Durell’s feet. She looked up at Durell through her tumbled yellow hair and her eyes held an appeal in them, and something else, in the shadows beyond her evident pain. She was trying to tell him something. Her lips moved, but he could not hear what she whispered, and he could not betray her attempt to tell him anything.

  He dropped to one knee to help her.

  “Let the bitch be!” the captain roared.

  “Don’t hit her again,” Durell said.

  “I want the truth, do you hear?”

  Anderson spoke flatly, tiredly, from across the cabin. “This man, Captain, exhibits all the stupid idealism and capitalistic notions of chivalry, you notice. He is concerned for the woman. Would he be what he says he is, if he acts with such Western gallantry?”

  The captain glared at Durell. “He is right, you know. I believe he is right.”

  “I only ask for humane treatment for the girl,” Durell said. “She has done no harm.”

  “A smuggler of dope?” Anderson asked drily. “A purveyor of drugs, a criminal, a whore—”

  Susan tried to shrink away from the fisherman’s booted feet. The captain reached down to grab her by the hair again and dragged her back to the center of the room. “No,” Durell said.

  His fist caught the captain a little high on the cheekbone, but it was a hard, crisp blow. The captain grunted and fell back, crashed into the ruined radio equipment, and cut his hand on the smashed tubes. He stared at the blood and yelled to the man on guard in the doorway, a rather stupid-looking fellow with restless hands on his machine-pistol. Durell swung and dived for the gun desperately. It was Anderson who stopped him. Anderson tripped him, and as he stumbled, the crewman with the pistol whipped him with it. Durell fell, and knew with dismay that he had played exactly the card that Anderson wanted. He tried to get up and Anderson’s knee caught him on the side of the head and threw him bodily back across the cabin. Susan screamed something he could not understand. He fell against her, felt her arm grab him to support him. Then he tried to get up.

  The captain kicked him in the side and knocked him over again. Pain slashed through him. He heard a roaring in his ears that muted the captain’s angry voice. He tried to get up once more. The captain kicked him again. This

  time he caught the captain’s booted leg and yanked hard and the bearded man came down with a shout of surprise and dismay.

  But there was no advantage in it. Durell started to rise, and something cold and hard cracked into his cheek and grated against his teeth. It was the machine-pistol. The stupid-looking crewman stood over him, only too anxious to pull the trigger.

  Durell expected to die in the next instant.

  But it was Anderson who saved him.

  Anderson spoke sharply, in a voice of command that brooked no more argument. The fisherman hesitated. In the brief respite, Durell pulled his head away from the gun. Anderson gave another order, and the fisherman grumbled and stepped back. The captain got heavily to his feet and peered at Durell with angry eyes and pulled at his black beard.

  “So. It is settled, then. You are the American spy.” “No,” Durell insisted.

  “You will tell us where this item is that you have been trying to steal from our military and take back to your country.”

  “I don’t have it.”

  “It was not in the bag. Where is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Anderson said in English, “Susan, did you take the spool of tape out of the bag?”

  The girl just stared blankly.

  Anderson went on quietly, “Susan, if I must, I will kill you, and Durell, and everybody with you. I must have that roll of tape. Can’t you understand? I do not enjoy being cruel. But cruelty is a necessary tool that must be used in my profession. I know it well, believe me. Where is the tape?” “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she whispered. “You removed it from the bag, didn’t you?”

  “No.”

  “It was you or John. I’ve watched and listened. Kappic had it, and he put it in Francesca’s sketch box. You saw the maneuver and stole it and put it in this bag with the books and the heroin.” He paused, and Susan just stared at him. “Does John have it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want me to kill John for it?”

  She spoke in a flat, dead voice. “I don’t care, now.” Anderson sighed. His strange eyes turned to Durell. “It was you, then. You’ve done something clever, I think. You know where the tape is.”

  Durell thought quickly. If he denied the accusation, he would commit the others to torture and perhaps death. He had no illusions about Anderson. He believed what the big man said about using cruelty as a tool and a weapon. He had been as surprised as anyone when the tape did not show up in the bag. But he could ask no more of the others. “Yes, I know where it is,” he said.

>   Anderson grinned. “On your person?”

  “You can search me.”

  “Not on you, then, if you are so ready to be searched. Where, then? I lose patience, Durell. And I have only a limited time, understand.”

  “I won’t tell you where the tape is.”

  “Oh, yes,” Anderson said softly. “Oh, yes, you will.”

  And the nightmare began. . . .

  He did not know how long Anderson’s questioning went on. The hours of pain were confused with the hours of the storm in which the trawler plunged and struggled to survive. The fisherman who followed Anderson’s orders was clumsy at this specialized job, and because of it there was the danger, Durell knew, that he could be permanently crippled. He did not think Anderson wanted to kill him. In fact, Anderson certainly was anxious to bring him alive to his superiors. So there was a limit beyond which the crewman was not permitted to go. But within that limit, the darkness waxed and waned, grew bloody and black, and the minutes fled screaming or dragged on bloody hands and knees across the floor of the night.

  He heard Anderson speaking to him as if from a great distance. “Must I really hurt you, Durell? I admire you, you know. We are much alike, you and I.”

  “No, we’re not. And you won’t really hurt me.”

  “We are in the same profession—”

  “I thought so, at first. But not now. Not for this.”

  “Where is Uvaldi’s tape, Durell?”

  “It’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “You’ll never find it.”

  “But is it on its way to Washington?”

  “Maybe.”

  “How did you do it?”

  Durell laughed.

  “You are bluffing, Durell. You couldn’t have done it.” Durell tried to plunge across the cabin at the man’s big, looming figure. The fisherman caught him and flung him back. Durell hit him with a back-handed swipe of his left arm that sent the man reeling. The captain yelled and struck him in the back of the neck with something and Durell went down again on the deck. It heaved crazily under him. He opened his eyes and saw Susan staring down at him, wide-eyed, as if he were something out of a dark and alien nightmare. Her pale topaz eyes were blank, wide, twisting away from his gaze.

  “Durell?”

  He turned and looked at Anderson.

  The captain said thickly, “Let me finish him, comrade. He is too stubborn. Or let me put him in chains and forget him until we make port.”

  Anderson looked thoughtful. “You may be right, Comrade Captain.” He smiled widely down at Durell. “After all, the tape is of no real importance to me. My mission was a preventive one. The tape is on this boat, or at the bottom of the sea. If it is on the boat, it can be found at our leisure when we reach port. It cannot, in whatever case, be on its way to Washington from this point, eh? And that is all I must be sure of.”

  “But are you sure of it?” Durell whispered.

  Anderson said, “It would go easier with you if you could co-operate, of course. I’ll have the captain take you below, to think it over.”

  Durell looked up at Susan. “And the girl?”

  “Unimportant. A criminal, a prostitute, a useless breed. I let her go with you.”

  It was a trick of some kind, Durell thought. But the beating he had just taken had slowed his mind, and he was grateful only for the respite. Susan helped him as he stumbled below. The pitching of the trawler in the stormy seas made him fall to one knee at the edge of the hatch. He told himself to hang on, no matter what else happened. He was beaten, but he would not give up. He could not give up. There was an answer somewhere. There had to be an answer. In a few moments, he told himself, he would find it. After a few minutes of rest. . . .

  Chapter Eighteen

  THE naked electric bulb in the hold swayed back and forth, back and forth, jerking and dangling on its wire with the erratic plunge of the trawler. Its harshness left no secrets to be exposed. Durell stared at the point of glaring light, hypnotized for several moments by its wild movement. He heard metallic bangings, clangs, thuds and dim shouts; the vessel creaked and groaned, and over all was the dimly heard, often felt, impact of the seas breaking over the blunt bows.

  He had slept briefly. He was not sure how long he had been out. He sat up, aware of painful bruises, but grateful that nothing more serious had been done to him up in the captain’s cabin.

  “Oh, thank God. Are you all right, Sam?”

  It was Francesca. She knelt beside him, and he saw Susan, too, crouching next to the blanket that covered him. Francesca’s dark hair and slanting gray eyes wavered before his gaze. He blinked and focused more sharply. When he drew a deep breath, something seemed to stab him in his ribs; he tried again, and it was better. Nothing was broken. “How long have I been out?”

  “Half an hour, or so,” Francesca said.

  He looked at Susan. Her face was pale, stunned. “Did they call you back?”

  “They stripped me and searched my body. Everywhere. I—” Susan paused and bit her lip. “I was telling the truth, Sam. I don’t know what happened to the tape. And I didn’t know about the heroin.”

  Francesca said, “You’re a liar.”

  Susan looked at the other girl and clamped her pale lips shut. Durell stood up painfully. The deck heaved and pitched under him. There was only John Stuyvers and the two girls in the hold with him now. Colonel Wickham was still absent. John Stuyvers sat a little apart and stared morosely at the sweating, chilly walls of their prison. Durell moved toward him, leaving the two girls without ceremony. The thin man had an unbalanced, fanatical look about him of explosive violence. Durell dropped to one knee beside him and spoke quietly.

  “John? I want to talk to you.”

  “Get away from me!” the thin man snarled. “Go back to your stupid games, huh? You’ve given me enough trouble. I wish I’d never seen you. They found the dope, Susan said. They tore up the books and found the stuff.”

  “Did Susan know about it? Was she in the deal with you?”

  Stuyvers grinned. “That pigeon didn’t tumble to a thing, even though I hauled her across Lebanon and half of Turkey. She swallowed the bit about the missionary deal hook, line and sinker.”

  “Then she was innocent of the dope deal?”

  “I needed her to round out the missionary front, I told you. Took her along to pose as my daughter.” The man’s thin mouth twisted and he looked at Durell with pale, violent eyes. “It was my big play. I schemed and sweated and killed for the stuff hidden in those books. Now the Russkies got it. And you know what they’ll do to me? I go to a slave-labor camp, if I’m lucky, if they just don’t stand me in front of a wall and shoot me. I thank you for it, Durell. You did just fine for me.”

  “You can still get out of this,” Durell insisted. “I’m not interested in the dope angle. But none of us can afford to give up now.”

  “Why not? If I helped you, what would I get from Uncle Sam? A life sentence in Alcatraz? I think I’d better choose Siberia.”

  “Your sentence could depend on what you do now,” Durell said.

  Stuyvers laughed bitterly. “You couldn’t change a thing. In any case, the fishermen have the stuff now. Have they dumped it yet?”

  “No. It’s all in the captain’s cabin.”

  Stuyvers licked his lips. “All that goddam beautiful money I was going to get. Down the drain, into the drink.”

  “Listen, John, I want your help,” Durell said. “It might get you a chance to go free, somehow. I want to know what happened to the Uvaldi tape. Susan put it in the bag, on the plane, and only you and Susan had your hands on the bag while we were in the air and down here. What happened to the tape?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never opened the bag.” The man’s voice lifted on the sharp edge of irrational rage. His eyes were pale, blazing, furious. “Now, get away from me, hear? Get away!”

  Durell stood up, bracing himself against the pitch and toss of the vessel, and m
oved away.

  John Stuyvers watched with brooding eyes as Durell went to talk to Susan. It seemed to John that Durell had something he ought to. think about, but he was content now to enjoy the dark spasms of hatred in him. This hatred gave him strength and a reason to exist. It had no particular focus. It covered everything around him. He had worked hard, and he had been clever, and his masquerade as a missionary had even fooled Susan. He had committed every crime in the books; he had run crazy risks, lied, cheated and killed. He had no remorse about this. It was a dog eat dog world, in which you struck first and you struck to kill, or you got it in the back from the other fellow.

  But he’d had it right in the palm of his hand, this time. Playing missionary, his passports were in perfect order, and Susan had worked out fine as a front. It had seemed certain he’d get the heroin through Istanbul to the Italian freighter to Naples, where the factory would refine and cut it for further transportation and distribution in the States. He was part of a big network and he could have won out, even with the U.N. International Narcotics Control Commission supposedly hot on his trail.

  He could have handled anything but what had happened on this boat. He had it in his hands, in the bag.

  He looked up, a sudden cunning in him. Durell had offered a deal, of sorts. And you could cut off your nose to spite your face, turning Durell down. Anything could happen. And things couldn’t be worse, could they? Maybe they could take over this stinking fish tub, which seemed to be what Durell had in mind. You could ride her someplace where you could jump off with the heroin. It was a chance, and Durell was offering it. . . .

  John looked across the hold to where Durell talked to Susan, and made up his mind.

  Susan was saying, “I’m sorry, Sam. I didn’t know. I haven’t anything to tell you or the captain. I honestly don’t know what happened to the tape.” She sat with her fine legs doubled under her on the blanket spread over the steel deck of the hold. Her yellow hair screened her face for a moment. “I told you what I did with the tape, when I took it from Francesca. I didn’t open the bag after that. Nobody did, as far as I know.”