Assignment - Ankara (22 page)

“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.”

“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 moved 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.”

“Did you tell John about it?”

“No, I—I didn’t mention it at all. And you saw what happened on the plane when Anderson tried to grab the bag.” “I know, but isn’t it possible that someone else might have gotten into it?”

“Who’d know what to look for?” she asked. “And where?” Her question stopped him for a moment. Then he said, “But in the plane John dozed for long stretches at a time: he was drinking raki with Colonel Wickham. . . .”

“That’s true, but I doubt if anybody could be light-fingered with John,” Susan said. She looked at him with dull, tawny-yellow eyes. “I don’t suppose you believe me, now that the business of the heroin has come out. I didn’t know anything about it. John used me. But it’s too much to ask you to accept that. Still, I wouldn’t lie to you, Sam. Not ever. I didn’t know about the heroin. And I don’t know what happened to the tape.”

He did not know of anything more to say. He turned away, and Susan watched him go with disenchanted eyes as he crossed the hold to speak to Francesca next.

Susan knew now that the dreams Durell had stirred in her were futile and meaningless, a last glimmer of the girl she might have been, if the world had treated her differently. Durell would never belong to her. He could not trust her, and therefore he was incalculably beyond reach. Last night he had pretended interest because of the missing tape. But it was all a game, a cruel joke that life played on her, twisting this last, desperate trip with John into a kind of dark, gray nightmare of cold and hunger and fear.

She did not hate Durell because he turned her down. She knew what she was and all the things she had done, up to and after what happened with Ali Khalil in that deadly olive grove. Since then, with John, she had thought John’s kindness marked a new beginning. She had not known that she was only someone useful to his scheme in the criminal conspiracy to smuggle heroin into the States.

Now she knew there was something sick and evil in John.

But it was all over. There was no way out of the trap. Whatever happened now, she was the loser. Nothing could be more helpless than her situation at the moment, she thought.

And, thinking this, she began to feel better, as if some dark weight had suddenly lifted from her.

She began to consider how she might help Durell. . . .

Francesca Uvaldi sat quietly on her blanket, one shoulder pressed against the cold plates of the bulkhead. Her head was tilted back, resting against the hard comfort of one of the refrigeration pipes, now fortunately not in use. Her eyes seemed to be closed as Durell walked over to her, but he felt she had been watching all the time he was with Susan. Somehow she had managed to braid her dark, shining hair into a regal coronet that framed her oval face. Her mouth was in repose, but the corners drooped a little in sadness and exhaustion. She shivered in the cold of the trawler’s hold.

“Francesca?” Durell said. “You know I need your help?”

She opened her gray eyes and he saw the way her dark lashes made delicate fans across the immaculate perfection of her skin.

“I can’t help you, Sam,” she said. “I know what you want; I heard you with Susan, but I can’t help, either. Of course, Susan may be lying. I don’t know. That’s not for me to decide any more.”

“Was it ever your decision, Francesca?”

She nodded. “Yes. It’s time for all of the truth now, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

She said wearily, “I’ve been after a shipment of heroin that we suspected John Stuyvers and Susan of smuggling from Lebanon. That’s all.”

“ ‘We?’ ” he repeated.

She smiled ruefully. “I really do work for Illini of Roma, Sam. I’m a designer, all right. But some time ago I was approached by some people from our Embassy in Rome, acting for the U.N. International Narcotics Control Commission. They thought that with my sketch book and ‘cover’ identity, I could snoop around down in Naples and spot a heroin refining factory there.” Francesca shrugged. “I was successful in helping them, and it was exciting, so I went on from there. I worked with an Englishman, but the syndicate killed him in Ankara. I had to go on, to Karagh. Our information identified the smuggler as posing as a missionary, and as soon as I spotted John and Susan Stuyvers, I knew I had it. But in the confusion of the earthquake—there was no law to appeal to, and you were after the Uvaldi tape, you said; but I couldn’t be sure who you were, really, or where Anderson fitted into the picutre—so I decided to wait and see. I had to be certain that Stuyvers had the heroin with him. I couldn’t trust anybody, just as you couldn’t trust me.” She paused and smiled ruefully. “I was so sure of myself. I’d been successful before, in Naples, and I thought I could handle anything. I felt as if I didn’t need help. But I was really all mixed up about things. I’m afraid I’ve bungled everything, for myself and for you.”

Durell nodded. He was not surprised by Francesca’s admissions. It fitted the pattern of activity she had developed, and although he had not come to a decision about her before, he accepted what she said now without comment, and went back to his main purpose.

“About the tape, Francesca,” he said. “Susan claimed she had it in the bag, while we were in the plane. Do you think she was in the heroin deal with John?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think she’s as black as she paints herself. But you’re not really interested in the heroin, are you, Sam?”

“I’m only interested in finding that spool of tape.”

“Yes, you would be.” She sighed. “And what will you do then?”

“We’ll get out of here,” he said quietly. “There must be a way.”

“And if you got out of the hold? There are all the men in the crew. Perhaps not all of them are armed, but—” “All I need is a gun,” he said.

“And you’d try to take over the boat?”

“I have to,” he said. “I must try.”

“They’ll kill you, of course. Some of us may be killed.”

“Are you afraid?”

She shook her head. “I’ll never be as afraid again as I was last night, when—Anderson, I guess; he’s the one, isn’t he? —when Anderson attacked me outside the Stuyvers’ hut.” “You have to stop thinking about that,” he said gently. “But I don’t want to. I don’t think I should forget it, because it’s important to think about, and there are too many thinks I skipped around and avoided lately. If it wasn’t for the lucky arrival of that old peasant woman bringing the tape to Stuyvers, and scaring him off—and he attacked me because he thought I saw him wandering about like that, right?—well, he’d have killed me.” Her gray eyes regarded him gravely. “I’m sorry, Sam, but I really don’t know where the radar tape is. I never saw it. I never saw Kappic slip it into my sketch box, and I never saw Susan take it out.” He nodded. “Did you see anybody touch Stuyvers’ bag in the plane?”

“Only Anderson, that one time.”

“No one else? You’re sure? Please—try to remember.” She frowned in thought. “I have the odd impression—I was busy taking care of poor Lieutenant Kappic most of the time—but before that, while I was talking to him—it must have been after he had his change of heart and put the tape in my sketch box—I got the feeling that someone got up while John was asleep with the bag on his lap and—and stood beside him for a few moments, doing something. I saw it from the comer of my eye—”

“Who was it?” Durell asked.

She laughed without humor. “I have the silly notion it was Colonel Wickham.”

“Of course,” Durell said quietly, and he stood up.

He looked very tall, a lean shadow in silhouette against the naked light bulb in the hold, as he stood before Francesca in the corner. His face was in the shadows, and she could not read anything there.

She felt somehow stripped naked under his gaze, and yet the thought was not displeasing, and it went beyond the physical desire she felt for him. She understood her need for this man, for however brief a time they might be allotted each other; it was due to her awareness of death the night before; she wanted him, in order to assure herself she was still alive. In that way the maniacal, battering attack on her person, which had shattered all the deluding security of self and her immortality, could be put in proper, healthy perspective. She wanted him to make love to her soon. If they lived. If it could be arranged. But it was more than that, too. She no longer wanted to be alone.

She no longer felt adequate to move through the world’s maze in prideful isolation. What she needed was assurance from a man like Durell that she could still go on somehow, doing her job for the U.N. Commission, using her brain, which was good, and her courage, which had never been questioned before, toward something useful, something no longer academic. Up to now, she had never really hated the smugglers she was pitted against. The jobs assigned to her has been like objective mathematical problems to be coolly computed and resolved. But she hated John Stuyvers now, and regarded Susan without pity—and some jealousy, too. No, nothing would ever be the same again.