Assignment - Suicide

by Edward S. Aarons

  Valya came out of the bath pink and scrubbed and radiant. Over the robe that outlined her statuesque figure, her long thick hair shimmered down to her waist. She smiled tentatively at Durell and looked quickly at the front door and gathered up the tea cups and the samovar. Her hands were trembling slightly. She was beautiful, but she had the awkward grace of a young filly, of a bayou child trying to play the part of a seductive temptress. He did not underestimate her. She could be dangerous. But at this moment she was someone who needed help and gentleness.

  She returned to sink onto a long couch, hugging the robe around her figure. She bit her lip. Durell came away from the front door with the gun in his pocket and said: “You’re troubled.”

  “I was wondering about Mikhail."

  “Does he know about this place?”

  “I think so. I can’t remember if I mentioned it."

  “Would he betray you to the MVD?”

  “He would not betray me, but he has taken a great dislike to you. He is jealous, of course. He might do something to hurt you, if he could do so without hurting me.”

  He smiled. “Then I’m safe as long as I stay with you.”

  "Perhaps."

  “Tomorrow I’m going to try for the Embassy again, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll make a break for the American Chancery. If I remember correctly, that's next to the National Hotel on Macovoia Ulitza.” When she nodded, he said: “Will you help me then, Valya?"

  “The Chancery can he reached from the Savarin. That's a Gypsy restaurant around the corner from the National. And there’s a subway entrance nearby.” She frowned. “I have been thinking it all over, as I told you. I don’t want any more killing. I don’t think I could stand it if anything happened to you or to any more of us. I feel strangely responsible for your being here, you see. I’m sick of the thought of bloodshed. Your way is better, Sam."

  She clasped her hands tightly before her. It was dim and warm in the room. He looked at the gleaming ivory ikon. On the river a tug hooted again, a train whistle screamed in the cold April night. He sat down beside her. She was shivering.

  He said: "What else is there you want to tell me?”

  “Nothing. I am afraid, that’s all. It‘s so strange—I was never really afraid in the old days. I hated it, it was terrible, but somehow I never felt like this before.”

  “Is your fear for yourself or Mikhail?”

  “Neither. I am afraid for you.”

  “But you said we were safe here.”

  She made a low whimpering sound and quickly hit her lip. “But tomorrow? And the day after? And if you are successful, what will happen to the rest of us? You can go back to your country and forget it all, but—” She was crying silently. He took her face in his hand and tried to lift her chin so he could look into her eyes. “I’m being silly. I’m a fool."

  “Would you want to come with me when I go back, Valya?" he asked. “Is that what you mean? You could live in freedom, away from nightmare—”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what I want!” She started up, but he held her down beside him. She trembled violently at his touch. “Please, I know I am confused. I don’t know what has happened to me.”

  “I could help you get away, if that is what you want."

  “How can I tell you what I want when I don't know myself?” she cried. He read the appeal in her large eyes, saw the misery in the quivering of her mouth. He knew then that she had fallen in love with him.

  His own feelings were mixed. He knew it was dangerous to confuse pity with love. He wanted to help her. He felt gentle and tender toward her. He saw that in her naive way she was offering him love, offering herself to him in warmth and despairing companionship, like two people alone on a raft in an alien sea. He wanted her. He could not deny the stirring of desire in him.

  Her mouth was warm and clinging and shaken when he kissed her. Her arms encompassed him in desperation and her lips moved against his and her words were moaning sounds. “I don’t know, I don’t know, hold me, please hold me . . ."

  He picked her up in his arms. Her eyes were closed. Her long hair brushed across his face, silken and perfumed. He carried her into the bedroom, kicked the door shut, and put her on the bed. She did not want to take her arms from around his shoulders.

  “Everybody needs someone,” she whispered. “I’ve been so alone all my life! When I first saw you, at the dacha of Mikhail’s uncle, I thought—I cannot say what I thought. I have not stopped thinking of you from that first moment . . ."

  There was a sudden sharp snapping sound from outside the house.

  Durell stiffened. He pulled her arms violently from around his neck and freed himself. Her eyes came open, wide with alarm.

  “What is it?”

  “Is someone outside?” he whispered harshly.

  “No. How could there be?”

  “You bitch,” he said, looking down at her.

  “I don‘t understand—"

  He took the P.38 from his pocket. “I’m supposed to forget about Mikhail and your friends While I pay attention to you—is that it?”

  What she saw in his hard, dark face seemed to frighten her. She put the hack of her hand to her quivering mouth. “But I heard nothing.”

  “Stay here,” he snapped.

  He snapped off the light in the main room of the dacha. The dark swooped and folded in around him. There was no sound from the bedroom. He held his breath and listened. A dim throbbing of engines came from the river, but he heard nothing more from outside.

  He slipped out through the back door, a tall shadow mingling with the shadows of the birch trees that stood slim and delicate and white against the darkness of night. He stood fiat against the wall, waiting, listening, looking.

  The river glimmered under the cold moon. A bird rustled and sounded sleepily in the piney brush. There was no repetition of the snapping sound he had heard. It could have been an animal in the brush, or the snap of a limb in the cold night air.

  Or the breaking of a twig under a man’s boot.

  The narrow road they had driven in upon was empty—what he could see of it. Nothing stirred in the shadows of the trees and brush around the wide-eaved house. He circled the place warily, sliding from one pool of darkness to the next. He found nothing—nobody.

  He waited five minutes, ten minutes.

  At last he went back inside.

  He did not turn on any of the lights as he walked to the bedroom. Moonlight came through the narrow windows, shining on the huge bed. Valya sat there, waiting for him. Her face was in the shadows.

  “There was no one outside,“ he said. “I am sorry if I frightened you."

  “Yes, you did frighten me,” she said. Her voice was cool and formal, and she spoke in Russian again. “You were a different man. All in a moment, you changed. I had forgotten what you were and how you were. I think I wanted to forget, that’s all. But I do not like you after all, I think.”

  “Valya . . .”

  “I am going to sleep. Where there is no trust, there can be no love.”

  He stood in the doorway, looking at her for a long moment before he turned away and went to the couch in the other room. He stretched out in the darkness with his eyes wide open, the gun on the floor beside him, ready at hand. His anger persisted, and was a long time ebbing.

  He got up once, cat-footed, and felt behind the ivory ikon in its corner niche. The map Marshall had died for was still there.

  He was not sure what hour it was when he finally fell asleep.

  Chapter Nine

  DURELL awoke to sudden violence.

  He heard the sound of the footfall while he was still almost asleep, and his eyes were still closed when a hand was clasped hard over his mouth. The hand smelled of coarse bread and machine oil and onions, and the palm was horny and rough and strong. He was awake at once then, awake and moving, at the first contact. All his first moves were pure reflex. He jerked his head to the left, out from under the smothering hand, and at the same mo
ment he threw his body also to the left, off the couch where he had been sleeping. He hit the floor hard, slammed against someone‘s legs, opened his eyes, and lunged upward. It was gray dawn. The room was dim and shadowed. Before his eyes he saw the outline of a black Russian boot, uplifted to stamp down on his face. He rolled again desperately, drove his fist behind the man’s knee, felt the man‘s legs fold and collapse, and the other’s weight tumbled down upon him.

  Valya screamed, a thin quickly muffled sound that was cut off at once, as if by another hand over her mouth.

  A fist rocked his head, a boot kicked at his stomach. He came up, throwing the man's weight from him by main strength. There were two men in the room, and another slighter figure by the open front door. Fog moved in thin gray tendrils outside. A sharp command, reflecting irritation, came from the slim figure in the doorway. A gun gleamed. Durell drove at the first man’s thick, barrel-chested body, smashed at the broad, startled face in the gloom, felt his knuckles crack on cartilage and bone. The face fell away from him. A curse ripped through the dark air. The second man leaped for him, a thin sprawling figure, arms wide, body unprotected. Durell ripped him with a left in the stomach and as he folded over, chopped at his neck with a judo stroke. The second man hit the floor, got in the way of his first assailant.

  Durell went for the door.

  The slim figure in the doorway lifted the gun and could have killed him. but for some reason the gun was not fired. He went spinning into the armed figure and discovered with a jolt of surprise that it was not a man but a slim, dark-haired woman with a face that was as cold and beautiful as a face of marble. He checked his bone-crushing blow at her head just in time, diverting his strength in a sweep of his arm at the gun. It clattered to the floor. The first man landed on his back in a flying leap that drove him to his knees just short of the threshold. Furniture crashed and shattered under his weight. A gun caught him behind the head in a short, chopping blow. His head rang. He felt his strength ebb away, then flood hack again. He came up, throwing off the massive weight of the man on his back, caught at a wildly swinging arm. twisted it, rammed the man in a running push at the woman in the doorway. The woman screamed with a high, tight sound. The man grunted and collapsed and Durell crashed through the doorway toward freedom.

  An arm swung around his throat as he plunged into the open air toward the dim shape of a small sedan parked in the road. Something pricked through his clothes to inflict a sharp Stinging pain just under his left shoulder blade.

  “Enough, snakomi,” a voice said quickly. “If you would live, friend."

  Durell stood still. The knife was pointed upward at his heart, requiring only a little pressure to slip through muscle and lung. It was more effective than a gun. He breathed deeply, the sound of it harsh in the chill gray air of dawn.

  “Hello, Mikhail.”

  “Turn around. Slowly.”

  He turned around. A quick hand took the P.38 from his pocket. He could not see where it went. The pressure of the knife in his back was unrelenting. He was pushed through the doorway, back into the dacha. The black-haired woman faced him, holding a narrow hand spread over her stomach. She wore a dark blue cloth coat with a squirrel collar and fur-topped boots. Her face was momentarily malevolent, a narrow face with a sharply defined widow’s peak. Her eyes were intelligent, but there Was a bitter set to her mouth that must have been of long standing. She looked hard, competent, beautiful and utterly ruthless.

  “Very good, Mikhail. Be careful. He is dangerous.”

  The burly man who had first wakened Durell pushed her aside and said: “I have never seen anything like it. The way he woke up fighting us. Not even during the war did I see anything like it. Another moment and he would have escaped altogether.”

  “Is Valya all right?" the woman asked.

  “We would not hurt her, Elena.”

  “See to that. Come in, American.“

  There were two guns pointing at him now—the P.38 in the big man’s fist and the woman’s gun which she had retrieved. Mikhail released the pressure of the ‘knife in his back. They watched him warily, with expectant interest, as if he were an animal they were totally unsure of. Mikhail closed the door against the chill, foggy dawn. The dancer looked slim and dandified, but there were sharply etched lines around his sensitive mouth; his face was chalky white, and a faint tremor kept going and coming through his body.

  “I need a drink," rumbled the burly man.

  “You will not get drunk, Gregori,” snapped the woman. She snapped a finger against her neck in the traditional Russian gesture that meant drunkenness. “We have had enough trouble with those who get piani.”

  “Does one teacup make an ocean? Does one drink mean I am senseless? Let me find the vodka.” The burly man grinned at Durell with no animosity whatever. He came up to Durell and thumped him heavily in the chest with his knuckles. “You are very good, Americanski. Very good, indeed. I respect and admire you. I have never seen anything like it,” he said again. He shook his shaggy head slowly. “The way you woke up. You would have gotten clean away from all four of us.”

  Elena said, “Take care of Vassili.”

  The second man was groaning on the floor where Durell had left him. He was younger, in his twenties, and as thin and stringy as Gregori was huge.

  “I‘ll get him some vodka,” Gregori said cheerfully. He had thick black brows and thick dark hair and a gold tooth gleamed in the left side of his mouth. He thumped Durell chest again. “Very, very good, gospodin. We will be friends.

  Turning, Gregori hauled his younger comrade to his feet and into the kitchen. Durell looked into the muzzle of Elena’s gun and decided not to try anything. Gregori might be cheerful and friendly enough after the fight, but there was cold death in the woman’s black eyes.

  “Sit down, spy,” she said.

  “Who are you?”

  “We are Valya’s friends.”

  He looked toward the bedroom door and saw Valya standing there. She was fully clothed in the gray flannel dress she had worn before, and he was suddenly conscious of the torn flannel robe he wore, with his muddied trousers underneath, and the boots in which he had decided to sleep. Valya’s pink lips trembled, parted as if she wanted to say something to him, and then closed stubbornly under his hard glance.

  “Did you call them?” he asked her.

  “No, Sam.”

  '“But you knew they would come. This is one of their hide-outs. This is where you were to rendezvous with Mikhail, isn’t that so?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then everything you told me was a lie.”

  “Not everything,” she whispered.

  The black-haired woman looked from Durell to the girl with sharp and cold interest. She was about thirty, slim under the hulkiness of her winter coat. She held her gin familiarly. There was an air of command in the set of her shoulders and the severe, mannish cut of her dark hair.

  “Did he reach the Embassy, Valya?” she asked.

  “No, Elena.”

  “So this man still has the map?”

  “Yes, he has the map, Elena.”

  “Good.” Elena turned to Durell, who had sat down in one of the shabby, mouse-colored overstuffed chairs. “You will give me the map that your comrade Marshall gave to you in Leningrad."

  “You’re well informed,” Durell said.

  “It is my business. Where is the map?”

  “Suppose you find it,” Durell suggested.

  She looked at him with annoyance. Gregori and Vassili came back from the kitchen, each with a bottle of vodka. They were grinning. Gregori‘s black, thick hair was streaked with gray. The younger man‘s eyes were now clear. Elena looked at Valya. and said shortly: “Do you know where he put the map?”

  Valya did not meet Durell’s eyes. She whispered: “It is in his boot. I saw him put it there. The left one.”

  Gregori rumbled: “You were not very successful with him, doragaya.” His eyes slid from Valya. to Durell, squinting. “Yo
u did not succeed in disarming the Americanski."

  “You learned the kind of man he is,” Valya said coldly.

  “Da. Very much of a man. In his boot, you say?"

  Mikhail still spoke softly. “Allow me, Elena.”

  He advanced toward Durell. There was an unnatural look in his eyes that Durell had seen before—in the eyes of the sadistic guards at Belsen and Buchenwald. Mikhail’s knife flickered in his hand.

  “The map, gospodin spy.”

  Valya whispered, “Please take off your boot, Sam. Please!”

  He did not look at her.

  Mikhail’s narrow face shone with sweat. The knife glittered inches from Durell’s eyes. Gregori rumbled a dim protest, but the dark-haired Elena and Vassili did not seem interested. Durell shrugged.

  “I don‘t have the map.”

  “It is in your boot, spy,” said Mikhail.

  Durell took off his right boot. His movements seemed casual but there was care in him as he measured his chances. “I don’t have the map anymore,” he said. “I got rid of it last night when I was with Valya."

  Mikhail took the boot carefully and felt inside. His mouth twitched. It could have been a smile. “The other boot, gospodin.”

  Durell took off the other boot and held it out in his left hand, and as Mikhail reached for it, more eagerly than for the first, he slammed it against the knife in the dancer’s hand. The blade flickered through the air and clattered against the wall. Mikhail tried to leap backward, alarm and chagrin on his handsome face, but he was not quick enough. From the corner of his eye, Durell saw the gun in Elena’s hand leap up, but Valya jumped for it, caught the other woman’s wrist, and struggled to divert the muzzle. By then he had Mikhail’s body in a powerful grip, arm twisted up between the man’s shoulders to immobilize him. He shoved the dancer hard toward the front door. Mikhail whimpered in pain.