“Cheers for Rafe Hannigan.”
“You are in good spirits, and that is fine. It makes me happy. A cheerful man is talkative.”
“I don’t have the map anymore.”
“What did you do with it?”
“I destroyed it two days ago.”
“Did Beele have another, do you think?”
“I think not.”
“Could you draw another one for me?”
“I doubt it.”
“Try. Sit at the desk. There are pencils and paper in the top drawer. Don’t look for a weapon in there. I am not that foolish, you see. Draw me a copy of Beele’s map?
“You’re awfully anxious,” Durell said.
“Har-Buri is an enemy of the state.”
“And you want to get at him, do you?”
“Naturally.”
“By bashing out my teeth?”
“Forgive my methods. I have no sympathy for foreign agents who operate in my country.”
Durell walked slowly around the desk and sat down. The tin-shaded lamp shone in his eyes. Saajadi was in the shadows. He opened the drawer and took out a sheet of fine bond paper and sharpened pencils. There was nothing else in the desk. Saajadi was a tall and elegant shadow just beyond the pool of yellow light. Durell scratched. The filthy robe itched. He felt a bit foolish in the costume. It had served its purpose, but it seemed out of place here. He wished he had his gun. It had been taken from him before he entered Saajadi’s office in Teheran, and he hadn’t objected then. He
sighed, thinking of McFee, and said, “Your daughter is very clever, Colonel.”
“Yes, she is. Draw the map.”
“She changed McFee’s memo to me, didn’t she?"
“Your chief had a few details about me that might have seemed alarming, had you read them before coming to me.”
“Such as the fact that you really work for Har-Buri?”
Saajadi laughed softly. It sounded like breaking glass. “Ah, you are such a clever man.”
Durell turned the sharpened pencil over and over in his fingers. “Am I right?”
“Perhaps.”
“I’m right. And poor Hanookh has no idea.”
“None at all. The map, please.”
“No idea that his boss is the real traitor.” Durell idly tested the point of the pencil. It was very sharp. “Why don’t you ask me about the girl? Aren’t you interested in Tanya Ouspanaya?”
“I will come to that subject, afterward.”
"What will you use? LSD? Pentothal‘? And if you get her, what of it? How do you plan to use her?”
“I grow impatient, Durell.”
“And I’m itchy. It makes me nervous. Cantankerous. That’s an American backwoods word. I wonder why you insist on speaking French, Colonel?”
“I like its elegance. You are quite good at it, too. A touch of Provence accent, perhaps. Otherwise, quite good."
“I had a teacher from Provence, at the Maryland Farm. That’s where we bad guys, agents, saboteurs, imperialist reactionaries, and so forth, get briefed at how to do you in.”
“You are playing for time, Durell. It will do no good. Do you wish to die right now?”
“I’d hate to die lousy,” Durell said. “And since you like French so much, sauvequ’il peut.”
He pulled the desk drawer off its runners with a swift, smooth gesture and threw it at Saajadi, and then came over the desk with the sharp pencil in his hand. A corner of the lightweight desk drawer caught Saajadi on the /forehead and he ducked backward, gun raised high in his hand. Durell aimed the sharpened pencil at the man’s exposed throat. The gun went off in reflex action as the pencil pierced Saajadi’s carotid artery. He used his thumb to drive it in all the way. The report of the gun was deafening in the stone-walled room. Saajadi’s scream was drowned in it. He went down with blood gouting from his neck. His eyes opened unnaturally wide and glittered for an instant. He tried to get the gun to bear on Durell. Durell snapped it from his fingers and quickly searched Saajadi’s pockets. He found a ring of keys and took them, and a wallet stuffed with rial notes, and he took the money, too, since he was short now, and didn’t know when he might reach Hannigan again. By the time he finished, Saajadi was dead.
The room was quiet. There was no alarm. He arm-locked the heavy, plank-paneled door to the cellar room. The corridor and stairs beyond were empty. He kept Saajadi’s gun ready. Somewhere in the place were
Saajadi’s three hashishim who had helped to put him down here. He tried to remember if the colonel had given them any instructions. But the attack had come too fast and furiously. The villa felt empty.
The warm sunlight threw showers of diamonds from the fountain in the courtyard. He could see no eyes peeping at him from the carved stone balconies over the garden. The smell of roses was overpowering. Bees
buzzed there, in almost as many numbers as the questions in the back of his mind. He drifted silently up the wide, elegant staircase. His robe smelled of rancid lamb fat, sweat, and charcoal smoke.
Upstairs, the corridors were sunlit and perfumed. He found Colonel Saajadi’s private apartment without difficulty. The windows gave him a splendid view of the mountainside and distant Teheran. Rococo cupids leered at him with gilt faces from the corners of the plush bedroom. He opened another door and saw a bath the size of the Taj Mahal pool. The taps were solid gold. He turned on the hot, and was rewarded with a quick gush of steaming water in the green marble tub. He left his nomad’s robe on the tiled door as he walked back into the bedroom, locked the big double-leafed door, and picked up the green telephone beside the colonel’s round bed.
He waited, finally got a few clicks, an operator, and gave the embassy number and then Hannigan’s extension. The phone rang four times.
“Economics,” a girl said.
The voice was familiar. “Miss Saajadi?”
“Yes, sir. Who—"
“Get me Hannigan, please.”
“Not here, sir. Who—”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know, sir. Wh—”
“Durell. Remember me?”
There was a long silence. She was pretty good. Finally she said coolly: “Mr. Hannigan‘ is looking for you, Mr. Durell. Where shall I tell him you can be found, when he comes in?”
“You know where,” Durell said, and hung up.
He estimated he had fifteen or twenty minutes before visitors arrived. He still wondered why the three goons had vanished. Perhaps Saajadi liked privacy when he played his games with private prisoners. No matter. He needed answers, and the cost would he high If he were right, he’d find out just where his private threshold of pain might be. He grimaced, put it from his mind, and settled into the tub of gloriously hot water.
There were alternatives to staying here in Saajadi's private palace. He could return to Teheran somehow, taking the lice with him. He could find Hannigan, contact the Soviets, even through the net of Har-Buri’s assassins spread around the place. But he didn’t think that would buy him too much. Tanya was always first priority. She had to be found—and quickly. The Russians did not know where their girl was. It was up to him to return her to them, compliments of the U.S.A. Considering what he had done to Saajadi, and the difficulty of proving that the dead man was a traitor, he also had to do something to make Iranian Security consider extenuating circumstances. He didn’t relish the idea of spending the next twenty years in a Teheran jail. Tanya was the key to everything-Tanya, and the elimination of Har-Buri from Iranian politics.
The key was not at the Soviet embassy, as he had thought. But someone might bring it to him right here, if his guess was correct.
But the price would be painful.
Birds trilled in the courtyard, singing as if in accompaniment to one of Omar Khayyam’s love songs. He got out of the tub, dried thoroughly, examined every inch of his body for surviving lice. Satisfied, he checked Colonel Saajadi’s luxurious wardrobe. The shirts were a bit tight in the chest, but the elegant fawn-colo
red English slacks were perfect. Durell never let his hand wander more than a few inches from Saajadi’s gin as he dressed. He found an electric razor and labored at the stubble he’d acquired in the desert. When he considered his reflection, he thought he had a hungry look.
They came as he finished shaving.
He heard them cross the garden court on quick, sliding feet. A man called a soft order. A door slammed. He chose a necktie from a vast selection in Saajadi’s closet as they came up the stairs with a feral rush. He put the gun in his pocket and unlocked the door
Miss Saajadi, her thick black hair a bit unkempt, was ahead of the others. Close behind her was a slim, very pretty Chinese girl with a round face and big brown eyes and a rich 'figu.re in an afternoon frock. The Chinese girl stood to one side to permit an older Chinese woman to come by. It was a very feminine vanguard.
And behind them came Hung Ta-Po, smiling like the pleasured lord of a private harem.
Chapter Ten
MISS Saajadi trembled. She looked as if she wanted to tear Durell to shreds. “You killed the colonel!”
“I don’t apologize.”
“But it’s monstrous—”
“Please, my dear," said Ta-Po. “You’ve gotten carried away with your role. Saajadi was not in truth your father, but simply a cover for your agency work.
Please stand aside.”
“He has a gun. He’s not a fool. He’s been waiting for us. It‘s a trap—”
Hung Ta-Po flicked a hand at the distraught girl. “Take her away.”
Like twin hounds, two Chinese jumped forward and caught the girl before she launched herself at Durell. She started to struggle. Hung Ta-Po made a small click of annoyance and one of the men hit her in the side of the neck and she went down with a small choking sound. She didn’t look dead, but she might be, Durell thought. He waited.
“We are moving in,” said Ta-Po genially, “in the event you are wondering why I have brought my womenfolk. This place has been arranged for our strictest privacy. We will not be disturbed here. I am happy to see that you are willing to join me in conference. Do you want money? You shall have it. Safety? That, too. Any arrangement you wish to make. Or is this truly a trap, after all?”
“No trap,” Durell said.
“I am pleased now that we did not catch up with you in the desert. This is much better. Oh, certainly, much better.”
"I'm glad you’re pleased.”
Ta-Po snapped his fingers. “Lotus?”
The young Chinese girl slipped past Durell and checked the bedroom and the bath and the windows, looked out at the garden, called down to someone there, came back and bowed her sleek, dark head to the huge Chinese.
“Everything is in order."
“Go, then.”
The older woman had said nothing, done nothing. But Durell was aware of her as he would have been aware of a deadly snake slithering into the room. Something about her made the flesh tingle at the nape of his neck. She looked at him with utter impersonality, as if he might be a rabbit impaled on a stake, waiting for her to dine on him. She had been beautiful once, and there was something in that shadow of past beauty that was faintly familiar.
“Madame Hung,” he said,
“Yes.” The sound was sibilant.
“The former Madame Ouspanaya?”
“Yes.” .
“Mother of Tanya?"
“You belabor the obvious, Mr. Durell. I am puzzled.” She did not look in the least puzzled. “Are you here to make a deal, as Ta-Po thinks? Or do you have something else in mind?”
Durell irritated her by turning to Ta-Po. The Chinese looked even bigger, fatter, and more bland than before. He wore his Russian-style blue serge double-breasted suit as if it were a tent, and even then his enormous belly strained at the girth of his trousers. His round head looked absurdly small on those fat shoulders.
“I am willing to make a trade,” Durell said.
“So. What do you have to bargain with?”
“Your life.”
Ta-Po laughed softly. “But I am in no danger.”
“If you are declared persona non grata here in Iran and a great deal of publicity is published in the local newspapers about how you disagree with the Maoist Cultural Revolution, will you be happy to go back to Peking?”
“Ah. And how will you do that?”
“The process is in the works,” Durell said.
“You are bluffing."
“Are you sure?”
“You had no time to set it up. But it is clever of you to suggest that it might be so. Let us assume you have such cards. What do you want from me?”
“Tanya Ouspanaya.”
The woman hissed. Ta-Po quieted her with a lifted finger. His smile was gone. “But this is precisely what we want from you. My adopted daughter, my wife’s dearest child, long an exile and prisoner of the reactionary Soviet imperialist technology. We long to have her back with us again. And you know where she is. You see how honest I am with you? We do not have her. We look everywhere for her. It is so difficult, I admit, since so many others search, too. But you have injected yourself gratuitously into this affair. It does not concern the U.S.A. None of the principals involved are citizens of your decadent society. Iran is not your country or your concern. You seek to build credit for yourself, I suppose, with the Iranians and the Russians. It would seem to betray a weakness, a need for such credit if I did not know as much about you as I do, Cajun. I understand your true motives. Information of any kind, piled grain upon grain, assumes impressive proportions, after a time. Nothing is too minor to be ignored. The dear child has been on the moon. Ergo, she has inestimably valuable information to give to your NASA space program. So you want her long enough to dehydrate the poor child’s mind and soul of anything to your power-seeking monopoly. Well, you shall not have her. And you do not fool me for a moment. You know where she is.”
We have no basis for bargaining, if you think so," Durell said quietly. “But I have another objective."
“Har-Buri.”
“Ah, yes.”
Lotus came back and whispered something to Madame Hung. The young Chinese girl’s eyes regarded Durell with singular interest as she cupped her hand over her mouth to deliver her message. Durell smiled at her. She was a very pretty girl. Her glossy black hair was done in straight bangs over lovely eyes that shone with vitality. She smiled fleetingly in return. Her luscious lower lip was very red.
“Har-Buri,” Ta-Po said, “is a close and precious friend of the Chinese People’s Republic. You may wonder how this relationship involves my dear, adopted daughter. Har-Buri seeks to rectify social injustice and capitalist crimes against his countrymen. We would aid him in these goals, naturally. It is not a secret. return for our aid, he promises us Tanya. Our prior bargain must be kept, Mr. Durell. I would not betray him.”
“Unless I delivered Tanya to you?”
Madame Hung said thinly: “You waste time, my husband. know you enjoy such games with this man. You admire Durell professionally. Such emotions of feudal chivalry do not belong in the heart of a right-thinking communist man. I think you should begin the questioning at once.”
“I have a gun,” Durell pointed out.
“And we have men behind you. Lotus just informed me. Very adept and silent, don’t you think? They climbed the wall from the garden and came in through the bathroom window. It is not a trick. I would not stoop to such a childish ruse. Look for yourself.”
Durell did not need to. He felt the cold muzzle of a gun at the nape of his neck and smelled the fishy breath of a man who had dined on shrimp and caviar.
Very carefully, he took Saajadi’s gun from his pocket and placed it on the floor.
“I give up,” he said. . . .
Ta-Po was puzzled. He was irritated, impatient, annoyed, and angry. But most of all, he was puzzled.
It was some time later. Durell did not know how many hours had passed. It could still be daylight outside, but there was no way to determine this
. But he guessed it was probably night, by now. He was back in the cellar room, with its tin-shaded lamp and silence. They had taken Colonel Saajadi’s body away, but there had been a lot of blood pumped from the dead man’s severed artery, and only a token of it had been cleaned up.
His hands were bound with leather straps, and his fingers felt numb from loss of circulation. The cellar room was cold. His bath had done little good. He tasted the dust of the floor in his mouth, and there was grit between his teeth, together with clotted blood in his mouth. He thought one of his ribs might be cracked. Pain was something you learned to live with, somehow. You endured, or you died. You died physically, or in other ways. The other ways were the worst. Pain was not a stranger to Durell.
Ta-Po loomed over him, breathing heavily.
“Why did you do it?”
“Do what, comrade?”
“Why did you give yourself to me?”
“Maybe it was out of brotherly love.”
“Your spirits are still high?”
“Why not?”
“What did you hope to gain from me?”
“I’ve already got it,” Durell said.
“I see. It is the question of Tanya?”
Durell nodded. His neck creaked “Yes, poor Tanya. You don’t have her, and I don’t have her, and—“
“But you know where she is.”
“No.”
“Yes. You do.”
“No."”
“Very well.”
Ta-Po went away. Durell was thirsty and hungry again. The temperature kept dropping, After all, the villa was quite high up in the mountains. He decided it was time to go. He thought about it, and made his mind obsessed with the thought of escape, but nothing happened. No ideas came to him. He knew now that Ta-Po wanted Tanya for what she might know about the moon trip. It couldn’t be that the Chinese People’s Republic was technologically prepared for a similar
venture, Eventually, but not now. The eventuality fascinated for a time. He tried to imagine the moon as an adjunct, a province, of Peking. It might come to that, some day. But Tanya today was a propaganda device, a prop for the confused, violent power-struggle going on between the factions of command in Peking. Whoever had her would gain leverage. The price Ta-Po was willing to pay for Tanya was Chinese aid to Har-Buri. If Har-Buri upset the apple-cart in Iran, that would merely be an added bonus drawn from the troubled pot of Middle Asia.
Assignment Moon Girl Page 9