Assignment — Angelina (9 page)

The bank was now sealed.

Unless a customer arrived in the next few minutes and created a disturbance trying to get in, there would be no trouble at all.

Mark moved toward Miss Bunting's cage. He was conscious of the discomfort of the nasal wads and the distortion of his voice when he spoke.

"I would like to open a checking account, please," he said, and smiled. "Perhaps you had better take me to Mr. Freeling. It will not be a business account, however. Just personal. I'm here only for a short time."

"I see. Are you visiting Peche Rouge for business purposes, though?"

"You might call it that," Mark said.

He watched her pink face closely. Tension was building in him. The gas ought to be going in by now. It ought to start its sudden work at any moment. But there was no change in Miss Bunting's brisk movements as she left her booth and walked around to open the gate that led to Mr. Freeling's cubicle. Suppose Erich's gas didn't work this time? Or suppose the nasal wads that should keep him conscious for six or seven minutes failed to do the job? He heard the front door rattle suddenly. A bulky man with gray hair and fisherman's clothes stood there, a bank book in his thick hand. Jessie was moving toward the door to wave him off.

"This way, please," Miss Bunting said.

She looked curiously at the door where the customer stood rattling the knob. "Why doesn't he come in?" she said impatiently. Then she looked at Mr. Freeling, behind his desk. "Mr. Amos — is anything the matter?"

The pudgy bank manager held his head in his hands. Miss Bunting looked alarmed. She sat down suddenly and her hand went to her throat. "Oh, dear, I..."

Her face went white. She began to tip to one side and Mark put his hand on her shoulder and straightened her out on the chair. Her frail body felt boneless.

He spoke to Freeling. "Hey, you son of a bitch."

The bank manager didn't move. Elation shot through Mark. He looked toward the front door. Jessie had her back to the street, but the fisherman was still outside, looking confused.

"Where is the guard?" Jessie called. "Make sure of him, Mark."

"Get that man away from there!" he said harshly.

"I can't. And don't talk any more. You'll breathe... Mark!"

It was too late. He had forgotten Corbin's repeated warning and had inhaled through his mouth. A wave of dizziness swept him, and he felt his legs turn rubbery. A strange curiosity touched him when he found himself on his knees beside Freeling's desk. He saw Jessie through a vast, darkening distance.

"Mark?"

Her voice echoed back and forth in the black caverns of his mind. He was aware of dismay, anger, sudden panic; but he didn't open his mouth again to gasp or yell. He inhaled deeply through his nostrils, through the nose wads stuffed in the breathing passages. Weakness kept him down. He told himself to get up, but he couldn't. Precious time was slipping away, sliding away like quicksand. Jesus, he thought, I've wrecked it now! He forced his panic down and drew another deep, careful breath through his nose. His hand came up and he looked at it and he hauled himself up by pulling at the edge of Freeling's desk. He looked curiously at the bank manager and Miss Bunting. They seemed like wax images, paralyzed, not moving. How much time was left? Five minutes? Four? There was only a small quantity of the gas in Erich's portable pressure tank.

What was Jessie doing? He heard her sharp footsteps on the marble floor, moving through the teller s gate. She was scooping up loose cash from Miss Bunting's cage, cramming it into the big straw handbag she carried. Mark forced himself to move down the short hallway to the vault. The old bank guard had fallen from his chair and lay shriveled on the floor. The vault was open. There was a pile of currency in an open box. The keys, he thought. Where are the keys? He started to hunt aimlessly, then scooped up the visible cash and went back to Jessie and dropped it into her handbag. Her eyes were scornful. Only two or three minutes were left.

The fisherman had gone away from the front door.

It seemed endless, but finally it was done. All the money in sight had been shoved into Jessie's handbag. They would have to be content with it. Mark waved to the door and Jessie spoke, exhaling as she formed the words.

"Are you all right now?"

He nodded. A groan came from Mr. Freeling, sprawled at his desk. He would be revived in a moment. Miss Bunting was stirring, too.

"Let's get out of here."

Mark turned the thumb latch on the door and they stepped out into the hot blast of sunshine that baked the courthouse square. Jessie went straight to the parked Cadillac with the handbag. There was no alarm. Nothing had disturbed the tranquility of the town. Miss Bunting and Mr. Freeling, thanks to the peculiar actions of Erich's gas, would scarcely remember them. Certainly not enough to give the police an adequate description. Then Mark saw the gray-haired, burly fisherman who had been at the bank door. He was across the square, talking to a dark-haired girl who had come out of the general store. Both the fisherman and the girl were staring at him. The fisherman's arms moved in quick, excited gestures, and then the girl put a hand on his shoulder, as if to restrain him.

"Hurry," Jessie said thinly. Mark nodded and started to pull the irritating wads from his nostrils, and she said: "Don't throw them away here. Get in."

"That local spotted us. Over there, with that girl."

"Never mind. There isn't time. Let's go."

He got into the car with her and she backed easily out of the slot and drove around a corner of the square. A few cars moved slowly in traffic across the way, and some pedestrians walked on the diagonal walks under the live oaks in the square. Everything was quiet.

"How much do you think we got?" Mark asked.

"Not enough. You almost went under, didn't you?"

"I'm sorry. I forgot."

"Don't apologize," Jessie said coldly. "I shouldn't have spoken to you in there. I almost forgot about it, myself."

They turned the corner. Slago and Erich were waiting for them with the equipment. The canvas hood had been removed from the air-conditioning vent in the back wall of the bank building. Slago heaved the pressure tank into the back seat.

A boy in blue jeans lay sprawled in the shadows by the rear door of the bank.

"What happened?" Mark asked.

"A nosey kid," Slago rumbled. "I put him out."

"Did he get a good look at you?"

Erich said nervously: "He saw us, but I am sure he will be afraid to talk, after Slago."

"I don't like it," Mark said. "We were spotted by a couple on the other side of the building, too."

Jessie drove the Cad out of the side street. Mark looked back at the courthouse square. The fisherman and the dark-haired girl were walking rapidly toward a car parked in front of the general store.

They were halfway out of town before Miss Bunting came to the front door and began her confused screaming.

Durell drove his rented car into the parking lot in downtown New Orleans and left it there. The Galleon Bar was off St. Charles, a businessman's luncheon place decorated with fake beams and yellow-glass ship's lanterns and a half-hearted attempt to instill a pirate atmosphere into the fixtures. Big wooden fans slowly stirred the air around the booths beyond the bar.

Durell walked slowly back toward the booths, which were all occupied, mostly by men. One booth had four women in it. They looked like tourists.

It was noon of the third day since he had found Pierre Labouisse in the pirogue, and he felt as if he had stood still while time raced by and he accomplished nothing.

Turning, he walked back to the bar and found a stool. He ordered bourbon from the fat bartender and looked at a very bad oil painting above the racked tiers of bottles on their mirrored shelves. A young man who looked as if he wasn't many years out of college came in and took the stool next to him and looked at Durell's drink and ordered bourbon, too.

Then they looked at each other in the mirror.

"Like our weather, Sam?"

"I was born to it," Durell said.

"This place all right?"

"Good enough," Durell said.

"Why not my office?"

"You have secretaries. Other agents, in and out."

"So? Is it that restricted?"

"Top secret."

"I'm flattered."

"Then get with it," Durell said. "What did you pick up?"

The young man's name was Kevin MacCreedy. He was a field agent out of the New Orleans district office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, but he was not in charge of the office. His name had been given to Durell by Daniel Kincaid in Washington. MacCreedy wore a fine Panama straw, a suit of pale cream, and mesh shoes. He had slick blond hair and a cheerful face and his eyes were a dark gray. He looked like a young lawyer or a young businessman or something equally innocuous. Last year he had walked unarmed up a flight of tenement steps in the French Quarter and with a shattered left shoulder he had taken Redleg Greer, third on the wanted list.

"You want a report here?" MacCreedy asked.

The fat bartender was at the other end of the bar. "Yes."

"We've got Labouisse on ice. Literally. Officially, he's still listed as a missing person, and the local sheriff is beating the bayous for him. There'll be some friction when it comes out we've been holding the body. How long do we sit on it?"

"Not much longer," Durell said.

"Somebody did a wicked job on him."

"Did you check Joe Tibault's boat and crew?"

"Personally. We know Fleming met Labouisse, picked him up, and they drove away together. Old war buddies, hey? We know it was Fleming from the description you gave us. Tibault has good eyes, too."

"How many men have you got looking for Fleming now?"

"Not enough. An even half-dozen, including me. You want more, Sam, you'll have to ask Washington. Who are you working with now, anyway?"

Durell said: "Do you have to know?"

"Well, you swing a lot of weight, that's all."

"You haven't uncovered any rocks where Fleming and his crowd might be hiding?"

"We're
working the highways, motels, tourist homes — that sort of thing. The delta is a big territory. Happy vacation paradise for one and all. So is New Orleans. They could be in town. They could in Mobile. They could be on the moon."

"They're here," Durell said.

"Maybe the locals could help."

"No local cops on this," Durell said. "Just keep looking. What about the photostats I gave you?"

"We got a lab report back on it from Washington." MacCreedy looked at the bartender, who was wiping the bar nearby, and ordered another bourbon. When the fat man slid his glass toward him, MacCreedy waited until he went farther away. "It's part of a chemical formula for an anesthetic gas, they think. Sort of a nerve gas, an ether derivative. Nothing sensational. No real military application, anyway."

"Then why do they want it so badly?"

"Who?"

"The lad who did the art work with the knife. And his friends."

MacCreedy drank his bourbon. "Search me. Washington isn't excited. At least, my office isn't. They're not sure, mind you, because the whole formula isn't there. It will take some lab research to work it out. Maybe we'll hear more about it by tomorrow." MacCreedy paused. "Meanwhile, what do I do with the body on icer"

"Can you hold it for another twenty-four hours?"

"Sure. But the sheriff will be sore as hell for holding out a murder on him. And the newspapers will jump on the mutilation angle."

"See that they don't get it. It's important. The people I'm after have to keep thinking Labouisse died in the swamp and hasn't been found."

MacCreedy shook his head. "I don't understand, but you're the boss, Sam. Washington says to give you anything you ask for."

"Ill have another bourbon," Durell said.

For two days he had worked with MacCreedy and come up with nothing, no sign of Erich Cortin or his wife, or Mark Fleming and Slago. He was sure Slago was with the group now. Washington had not been able to turn up a trace of the man anywhere in the country, and a memo from Wittington via MacCreedy had advised him that a connection had been made between Fleming and Slago in New York, over three months ago, prior to Slago's subsequent disappearance. Slago had been in a trucking racket, which made him all of a piece with Fleming's background. Thinking about this accomplished little for Durell. He still had no idea where to find them, nor could he guess what they would do next.

He left the FBI man a few minutes later. The noonday heat on the street was intense. He wondered if he ought to return to Washington, and then he walked down to the corner and a headline caught his eye and he stopped.

The Bayou Peche Rouge National Bank had been robbed.

Mysterious circumstances were hinted. Nobody had seen the robbers. A strange gas apparently had been introduced into the ducts of the air-conditioning system, stunning the occupants for some ten minutes while the robbers helped themselves to the ready cash. Apparently the robbers had used an antidote that rendered them immune to the gas.

Over seventeen thousand dollars had been taken.

Durell drove south from the city to Peche Rouge. It was one o'clock when he parked on the landing beside his grandfather's steamboat. The hulk looked calm and placid in the sunlight that laved the dark bayou. As he got out, his elbow touched the horn ring of the Chevy, and the sharp blast momentarily disrupted the misty beauty of the scene. Herons and pelicans flapped away into the dark gloom of the cypress groves on the opposite shore. Jonathan came out on deck and called to him.

"You heard about the robbery, Samuel?"