Assignment - Cong Hai Kill (6 page)

He watched her cry and
looked at the motionless wooden fan in the ceiling and wished the power people
in the town would get their plant running again. The telephone rang again; he
walked over to it and was about to pick it up when he saw the microphone bug
under the table.

It was crude work, and
any pro would have spotted it easily, with any kind of search. The mike was
tacked just behind the ornate carving along the rim of the pie-crust table
where the telephone rested—a period piece of French antique style—and a bit of
metal from the bug had caught the oil lamplight and shone enough to attract his
eye.

It
 
had not been there
before.

The phone rang twice
more while he traced the wires into the wall, wrapped like a Virginia creeper
around the telephone cord. Then he picked up the instrument.

“Durell here,” he said
in French.

“Major Muong, sir.”

“Yes, Major?”

“Have you been in your
room all night, sir?”

“No. You know I
haven’t.”

“Correct. I am sorry,
but there was some disturbance in the Chinese quarter and a dead man was
reported to us, with a description of yourself—”

“That’s right. I killed
him.”

Major Muong was
silent.

“Where are you, Major?”

“In the lobby. May I
come up?”

“I’ll come down. In ten
minutes.”

“Mr. Durell,” the Thai
said in precise English, “you understand my orders are to cooperate with you,
and I do so willingly, but you must also cooperate in return.”

“I’ll be down in ten
minutes.”

“Very well. But no
longer.”

Durell hung up and blew
air angrily through his nostrils and wondered if he should make an issue out of
the bugged room. He decided not to. He’d have done the same, and more, in Muong’s place.

He took Anna-Marie with
him, to see Deirdre in her room down the hall.

He preferred the old
tiled corridors of the Palace here to the gleaming new establishments built all
over the world these days. They were too scented and sanitized to own any
distinct personality, and he preferred to know exactly where he was. He could
remember when each bed he slept in was distinctive, Whether in London or
Karachi. He had no wish to be sheltered from the realities of roaches, fleas,
snakes, centipedes, and the crude urinal stinks of overcrowded tropical cities.
Everything was new and changing, he thought; but everything in his business was
the same-dirty and frustrating and dangerous, never according to plan. Hence,
he preferred to be stimulated by sounds and smells that smote the senses,
rather than to be disarmed by the seductive cocoons of the glittering new
hotels.

Deirdre had finished
dressing for dinner, and appeared in a white brocaded sheath which defined and
accented all the fine articulations of her body beneath the Thai garment. She
wore a small string of pearls she had purchased in Bangkok the previous day,
much to his annoyance at this fernini.ne lapse; but he had to admit that her
appearance justified the effort. He felt his heart lurch a little, but he kept
his face blunt as he guided Anna-Marie into Deirdre’s room, adjacent to his
own.

“Dee, see if you can
clean her up and talk a little sense into her, will you? She’s 
your
 friend,
and obviously not mine.”

Deirdre looked at the
French girl with dismay. “What happened to you?”

Anna-Marie was like a
sulky blonde doll. “Perhaps I was foolish. I wanted advice, and not from either
of you.

Nothing works out the
way I hoped it would.”

Deirdre was all
attentive solicitude. Durell, watching the two girls, felt oddly like a bull in
a china shop, as if they were in league against him, sharing a certain
invisible bond that excluded him ‘from their private communion.

“She doesn’t trust me,”
he said. “She thinks I’m going to hurt her precious Orris. I don’t deny
I’d like to kill the son of a bitch, for all the damage he’s done our side.

But I told her, and you
told her—”

“Poor Anna-Marie.”
Deirdre’s marvelous gray eyes were hostile as she petted and soothed the
bedraggled blonde girl. “No wonder she ran away, the way you talk about the man
she loves.”

Durell was silent,
biting his tongue, and Deirdre said to the French girl: “But you must trust us,
darling. It’s too late for anything else now. I’ll keep Sam in hand, don’t
worry. . . . Just tell me what you were really trying to do when you ran away
from the hotel.”

“I only wanted advice,”
Anna-Marie whispered, rolling her blue eyes in animosity toward Durell.

“From a Chinese named
Chang,” Durell said.

“Uncle Chang is an old
family friend,” Deirdre returned. “Anna-Marie told me about him years ago, when
we were in school together. A very dear old man whom she can trust.”

“Well, he wasn’t at
home,” Durell said. “Nobody was there except a thug who tried to drown me. And
Major Muong is now waiting downstairs for an explanation of a dead
man floating in one of his 
klongs
.”

Deirdre shrugged this
off and asked him to leave Anna-Marie to her. “She’ll be all right. She won’t
do anything so foolish again.”

Durell snapped: “She
still hasn’t told us where we rendezvous with Lantern. We’ve got to know first. Muong wants
him, too, and we’re going to need some fancy footwork to keep Muong from
tearing Orris apart when we get him.”

“That’s your
department," Deirdre said aloofly. “Anna-Marie trusts me. She’ll behave
herself now.”

He had to swallow his
frustration. If Deirdre was trying to tell him anything with her attitude, he
could read little of it in her face. He checked her room and found a bug under
her telephone similar to the one in his own room; he showed it to her and suggested
she lock the door to keep Anna-Marie there, then went down to soothe Major
T.M.K. Muong’s ruffled feelings.

Major Muong had
bland brown eyes and thin black hair plastered close to a round, intelligent
head. He was taller than the average Thai, with clear brown skin and the
prideful eyes of a race that had gained freedom in the thirteenth century, the
“Dawn of Happiness” under the kingdom of Sukhothai and then, having
fought the mighty Khmer kings who had established vassal principates in
the territory, adopted the Khmer alphabet, introduced Hinayana Buddhism
under King Ramakamhaeng, and codified laws under the Ayudhya emperors
and Prince Ramatibodi. The ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia
testified to die despotism that the Thai people had overthrown to gain their
precious freedom. In Major Muong’s eyes was a reflection of that
stubborn spirit that had kept Thailand independent in an Eastern world of
vassals and slaves.

Muong
 
did
not look particularly dangerous. He wore a white suit and a silk necktie
somewhat askew under his thin neck, and his shoes were badly scuffed. His
Panama hat was of fine straw, but it had seen better days. Still, it was not
hard to reconcile an innocuous appearance with a tough reputation. He had some
doubts about Major Muong. But then, it was necessary to doubt everything
in his business.

When the Thai shook
hands, his fingers were as smooth and strong as a jungle vine. “You have been
exceedingly busy tonight, Mr. Durell.”

“We almost lost our
little pigeon,” Durell said.

“Yes. Forgive me, I had
men following you. I thought it necessary. But they were too slow to help.”

“Slow, yes.” Durell’s
smile matched that of the Thai. “I could have been killed. I assume you found
the dead man? He looked like a hill man, to me. A Cong Hai, to judge from
the snake emblem he wore in his headband.”

“Just so." Muong lit
a thin black Philippine cigar. “It depends. There should be no trouble about
the one you killed.” He took Durell’s arm and led him across the lamp-lit lobby
of the hotel. There were Chinese businessmen, two Englishmen, and an
astonishing tourist couple, both stout and perspiring, from West Germany. At
the hotel bar were two lean, whipcord, suntanned Frenchmen from the
plantations. Muong Watched Durell order imported bourbon. The label
looked fake. Muong said: “Everything depends on your cooperation,
sir. We both work for the same objective, yes? We must destroy the Cong Hai before
they gain a foothold in Thailand as their revolutionary brothers have done in
Vietnam and Laos. One destroys a snake by cutting off the head, is it not so?
But the crimes the American renegade, Lantern, committed were crimes against
the Thai people, and as such, will be punished by Thai justice.”

“We can leave that to
the authorities in Bangkok."

“But I know your orders,
Mr. Durell. You are to return your prisoner to Washington at once.”

Durell smiled. “Your
service is most efficient.”

“Better than you know.” Muong’s brown
eyes were without satisfaction. “You see, Mademoiselle Danat has not
yet revealed where Orris Lantern will surrender to you, but we can
guess now. The girl’s flight to Chang, a respectable businessman, suggests the
answer. We know that Chang went upland to the Danat tea plantation
and is due back on the riverboat tomorrow morning. I have checked the steamer’s
position by radio. It is a two-day trip, and there was some trouble. The boat
ran aground on a shoal, thanks to a pilot who jumped overboard to escape the
captain’s wrath. You understand, the steamer often goes aground. But I do not
like it that it went aground on this trip.”

“How much is the boat
delayed?”

“It will arrive tomorrow
morning, it there are no troubles with the Cong Hai. When it does, I
expect to find Mademoiselle Danat’s ‘Uncle Chang’ aboard. And with
him—the head of our snake, Orris Lantern.”

“I’m impressed.” Durell
smiled. “I was told you were a very good cop, Major.”

“Thank you. If that is
in my Washington dossier, I am flattered”

“Don’t be.” Durell’s
voice hardened. “There are some questions about you for the years of the
Japanese occupation during World War II. We understand you spent a lot of time
in China then.”

The brown eyes were like
marbles. “I was there on my country’s business. What are you trying to say?”

“What you were doing is
your affair, but it leaves a few raw ends sticking out of the package, you see.
If Orris Lantern is on that riverboat, and you’ve known of it for
some time, he had better arrive in one piece, and alive.”

A few minutes later he
returned to Deirdre’s room. Anna-Marie had washed and changed and bound up her
long blonde hair in a sleek casque. She looked almost smug, until Durell
announced that he knew where Orris Lantern was.

“Anna-Marie hasn’t told
you where we meet him, has she?" he asked Deirdre.

“You really shouldn’t
have frightened her so, darling,” Deirdre said, and shook her head.

“No matter. We’re
meeting the riverboat in the morning. Muong thinks Orris is
on it. Let’s hope Muong lets him stay alive until then.”

One look at the blonde
girl’s shocked face told him that Muong’s information was correct.

                                  8

THE river steamer was
some minutes upstream when Muong turned his battered Army jeep into
the crowded waterfront streets. Durell could see the boat, its twin stacks
belching smoke as it floated down on the muddy breast of the river. It looked
like an anachronism against the brassy sky and breathless, tropic lands of this
delta country—an illustration out of Currier & Ives, he thought, a
riverboat lifted from America’s Midwest of the last century.

He knew it well. It was
like seeing his boyhood again, spent aboard the decaying wonders of the 
Trois
 
Belles
,
that hulk thrust fast into the mud of Bayou Peche Rouge which served as a home
for old Jonathan and himself. As a boy, he had spent long hours exploring the
mysteries of engine room and pilothouse, plush stateroom and dusty, elegant
salon. Nostalgia twitched at him, and then Muong said carefully:

“I have two men here and
two at the market sheds. They will go to the gangplank. Here on the waterfront,
the Cong Hai have many eyes. If our best hope is confirmed, then
Lantern is in great danger from the people he once led. If he defects to us as
he once defected to them, they will kill him before our eyes. We must be very
careful, therefore. A show of force may raise suspicion. It you wish, I shall
go aboard alone.”

“I prefer to meet him
first myself,” Durell said.

“That may be dangerous,
but—very well. We will cover you thoroughly, of course.”

Durell crossed the wide
embankment with a long stride. The hot sun stung the nape of his neck, and the
sea to his left looked sheeted with lead in the early ting light. Leaving the
dusty garden area in front of the Palace, he went into the shade of the
Mauritius pains and through a stone gateway carved with dragons. This brought him
to the riverside markets and the steamer landing, into a teeming, milling mass
of Thais, Indians, Chinese, in a mélange of color, noise, and smells, with here
and there a Buddhist monk in a brilliant yellow robe making his way placidly
among the sheds with his begging bowl, his shaven head gleaming in the hot sun.
Food vendors were busy selling hot curries on rice, and a restaurant with
bamboo walls advertised “Bamboo Bar Grill Dancing" in English. He wondered
what sort of clientele they attracted.