Assignment - Manchurian Doll (12 page)

At regular intervals, dim light bulbs illuminated the way. A small platform was built at the top of the flume. Rain spattered through a natural crevice above, but the platform was twenty feet below the topmost opening. Durell tried a small door in the platform wall. It was not locked. He opened it and stepped through.

Two of them were waiting just beyond the door, apparently alerted by some alarm signal he had missed. He saw at a glance that he had stepped into a radio control center—there were banks of instruments, transmitting apparatus, a metal swivel chair, a green metal desk, a straw carpet on the floor. The operator’s headphones lay on the desk blotter, and a low, persistent whine came from them. Durell felt the two men jump at him the moment he stepped over the threshold.

He struck first, at the biggest and toughest of the two. Then he swung at the other man, who wore glasses—the radio operator, he guessed. The first opponent crashed back and bounced up again as if made of rubber; the radio man was more fragile. He fell, lost his glasses, and smashed them underfoot. He wailed, resting on hands and knees as he groped about for them.

The first man returned with a chop at Durell’s neck and Durell slashed back with his gun over the other’s left eye. There was a small sound of a crushed bone, and the Japanese dropped as if pole-axed. There remained only the muttering, panic-stricken radio operator.

Durell hauled him to his feet and slammed him into the swivel chair, then yanked him forward by his shirt front. “You run the radio?”

Myopic eyes blinked blindly at him. “I am Akiru—yes, I am radio man. I am nobody. I am here all the time.” 

“You have no relief man?”

“Not necessary, sir. I always send messages for Omaru-san. Very best equipment, very latest.”

“Is your outfit licensed?”

“Omaru-san makes his arrangements with the police.” “Did you send any messages tonight?” Durell snapped. The man blinked, opened his mouth, shut it, then said, “Omaru-san is waiting. No messages yet.”

“You’ve got a code book, haven’t you?”

The man kept blinking rapidly as he squinted at Durell. “The code book is in the safe, sir. Here, behind the Oshigaru print.”

There was a print of the old Tokkaido Road on one wall of the radio room. Durell stepped over the first man, who lay unconscious, breathing noisily, and pushed aside the print to reveal a steel safe front with a red dial. He pointed his gun at the radioman.

“Open the safe. I want the code book.”

“Only Omaru-san has the combination. It is impossible. I cannot! Please, it is impossible!”

The man sweated, and Durell could smell the acrid stink of his fear. “You’re expecting to have to send a message out tonight, right? To Manchuria?”

The radioman hesitated, nodded. “Yes.”

“All right. Turn around. Over to the wall.”

He used his gun butt on the back of the other’s head to drop him. Now there were two, out cold, on the floor. There was a large steel closet, with the key in the door, and he opened it and found it empty except for two raincoats and a hat. He crammed both limp men inside. There were vents in the door to admit enough air so they wouldn’t suffocate. Then he locked the door and pocketed the key and left the radio room.

Another door opposite the one he had entered led him up another flight of steps. He felt a breath of salt wind and stepped out into a garden hewn from the very pinnacle of the island. He was standing behind the tiny Shinto shrine he had spotted from the landing down below at the water’s edge. The wind slapped him with raw vigor, but the rain had stopped and the moon gleamed fitfully from behind ribbons of vapor.

From inside the temple came a thin, sharp scream, abruptly silenced, then another, fainter this time.

Durell walked around the red-lacquered building and opened the ceremonial gate. He recognized Omaru’s rumbling voice and then the thin laughter of Isome. A smell of burnt flesh touched him and he tightened his grip on the gun and pushed open the door.

Stone lanterns illuminated the interior. The cedar floor smelled of lemon oil. In a niche was a lacquered bowl containing yellow chrysanthemums. Isome looked drunk, a rapturous glaze in her pale eyes, and she stood holding a steel rod that glowed hot from having been kept in the flame of one of the lamps. Her back was to Durell as he paused in the doorway.

What was left of Nadja groveled in a corner on the floor, almost naked, her body glistening with sweat and blood. There was blood along her inner thighs and on her left hand from torn fingernails. Her face behind her tangled wheaten hair was almost beyond recognition. A repetitive denial came from her broken lips, and her eyes stared blindly at Durell.

He did not think she saw him. He did not thirds she could see anything.

Omaru sat in a chair of heavy leather and dark teak. His bald head gleamed in the radiance of the stone lanterns. His tiny eyes sucked up the spectacle of the tormented girl and Isome, who moved toward her with diabolical steps.

“Hold it,” Durell said.

His voice snapped the spell for Omaru. His head jerked about and he stared. Isome seemed not to hear. Neither did Nadja, whose voice monotonously repeated the negative phrase, again and again.

“Omaru, stop your wife or I’ll shoot her,” Durell said flatly.

The fat man lurched to his feet. He smiled. “So. You have come back to do business with me, after all.”

“I’ve come back for the girl only. Do you want me to stop Isome with a bullet?”

Omaru grunted, shrugged his massive shoulders in his red kimono, and said something sharply to the woman. Isome turned her head slowly to stare at Durell. Her mouth was slack, drunken. She dropped the glowing rod with a clatter, and it smoked and fumed on the polished cedar floor. Omaru spoke to the woman again, and she complained in a whining voice. But she moved away and stood sullenly against the opposite wall.

“We can still do business, you and I,” Omaru said. “Yet you seem determined to annoy me, my friend.”

“I am not your friend,” Durell said.

“But you cannot have the girl. I have promised her to Isome. You learned nothing from her, eh? But Isome can make her talk. She seems to be suffering from some sort of traumatic amnesia, unless she has fooled me completely. You had your chance with her, Durell. Now it is mine. If I get the information, we may still come to some arrangement about Colonel Kaminov.”

“Nadja will tell you nothing. She’ll die first. But not here. I’m taking her away with me.” Durell looked at the girl, who whispered her small litany over and over again out of a battered mouth. He spoke sharply. “Nadja! Get up and come over here to me.”

She did not stir. Her muttering went on. Durell crossed the shrine, holding the gun loosely in his hand. He wondered how soon the guards he had knocked out would get here. It was ironic that this torture chamber should be in use so near the big villa where polite amenities were taking place. He knew he had very little time.

“Nadja, come with me,” he said. “Come along. You won’t be killed. No one will oblige you that way, no matter how much you want to die. You won’t be hurt any more. Can you hear me? Can you stand up?”

Her muttering ended. The blindness slowly faded from her eyes as Durell’s quiet voice reached her. She touched her puffed and bleeding mouth with a swollen hand and looked craftily across the room at Isome. The other woman breathed quietly and deeply, like a sleep-walker.

Durell held out his left hand to Nadja.

“Come, it’s all right.”

Like a striking snake, the crazed and tortured girl lunged forward and bit his hand.

Durell pulled back, reluctant to hurt her. From somewhere in the temple came the distant, vibrant boom of a gong. And he saw that in the moment his attention was distracted by the girl, Omaru had tugged at a signal cord. The island fortress was totally alerted now.

He stepped back again, his mouth taut.

“That was a mistake, Omaru.”

The fat man grinned. “Put down your gun, please—or you are a dead man. There are weapons trained on you at this moment from three points in the balcony above this room. You will not leave here alive, unless I permit it.” There was a frieze of latticework eight feet up the four walls of the temple chamber. Durell scanned it quickly, saw the glint of a gun barrel in one place, the shine of a second and a third in the opposite wall. He felt a moment’s panic. He had not underestimated Omaru, yet the fat man still had a few tricks in his bag. But he wasn’t finished yet.

He did not drop his gun. “You see I can blow a tunnel through that fat belly of yours, Omaru,” he said. “Even a reflex shot if I’m killed will do it. The gamble is yours.” “Yes. Very well. What do you want, then?”

“Get over there with Isome,” Durell rapped.

Omaru made a small sign with his pudgy hand to the three unseen marksmen behind the wooden screening and moved ponderously to the wall to stand beside the woman. Isome made a tittering sound and spoke in English. “Why not wrestle the American for the girl, darling? It would be interesting.”

“Be quiet, Isome,” Omaru snapped.

“But you always brag so much and do so little,” the woman complained. “You watch others, and do nothing yourself.” Her smile was a little crazy. “Show me, darling, and kill him by holding him in your strong arms.”

Durell looked quickly at Nadja. His left hand ached where her teeth had left deep marks in the flesh of his palm. He thought her eyes, when they met his, seemed a little less remote than before. But he couldn’t be sure.

Omaru spoke again to his men behind the screen. The guns were withdrawn. He turned his bald head to Durell, and his winged brows lifted.

“Perhaps Isome is right. If you can beat me in a fair fight between us, you can take the girl. And if you lose, you are dead, and then what I do cannot matter to you, eh?” Omaru shrugged off his red kimono and stepped out of his sandals. “Come, you have your gun, and you can kill me. But my men will kill you, in return. One of us must die, eh? I will wrestle for the girl. You have my word that you can take her, if you can make me fall.”

The man’s bulk shone with a tawny pallor, and it was not all fat. His musculature was enormous, rippling. He took a sumo wrestler’s stance, feet spread, toes pointing outward, knees flexed. His bald head seemed to shrink into his meaty shoulders, offering no grip on a nonexistent neck. Only his enormous paunch and flesh, dimpled legs seemed to be vulnerable.

“Come,” he urged. “Americans are sportsmen, are they not? You have no choice. The other way, one or both of us must die.”

Durell looked up at the lattice screen. The guns still covered him. There seemed no way out. Shrugging, he tossed his weapon aside. It landed on a tatami mat midway between him and the motionless, cringing figure of the prisoner.

With a shriek, Nadja snatched up Durell’s gun and fired it, again and again.

She squeezed off three shots before Durell jumped and reached her and silenced the clamorous gun. The echoes were deafening. Fine inlaid wood flew in splinters from the first bullet; the second hit a brass bell with brazen reverberations. And the third bullet dropped Isome.

Then Durell caught Nadja’s wrist and wrenched the gun away. The air shook with the reports and the echoes of the bell. He pulled Nadja around to his back and slammed the muzzle of the gun into Omaru’s naked belly.

“Hold it.”

The fat man looked shaken. “But Isome is hurt—this girl is insane—”

“Don’t move, Omaru. Tell your men to clear out of the gallery. Do it now.”

Omaru heard the harsh warning in Durell’s voice, but he shook his head. “No, I offered you a fair trial of strength. Nothing has changed. We both die. You can still kill me, but my men are certain to kill you immediately afterward. It is a stand-off.”

“There’s been a change,” Durell said tightly. “Look at your wife. Look at Isome.”

The woman’s elaborate coiffure had tumbled in disarray when she fell against the wall. A trickle of blood oozed from her left shoulder. She looked aged and bitter, no longer a delicate puppet; she was a crone unmasked behind the fine arts of her cosmetics. She spoke in a thin whisper.

“Omaru. Omaru, you are a fool. Let it be. I need a doctor.”

“You are only scratched,” the man said impatiently.

“It is an order. I need no heroics from you. One must be intelligent in these matters, too, as well as brave. I know you are brave, Omaru. But it is an order.”

“But we cannot allow him—”

“Nor can we allow open bloodshed here. It is stupid to think he came here without friends who wait his safe return. Can we afford a police investigation tonight, or tomorrow?” “He would call the police anyway—”

“No. In his work, he would not. But his friends might, you see. Do as he says.”

Isome’s words were sharp and authoritative. Durell noted the way she expected to be obeyed, and made a quick re-evaluation of his opponents. Isome was not a pretty doll used by Omaru for public appearances. She was the brains, the one in charge of the enemy operation. This much was obvious, just from the exposed relationship between them now.

Omaru nodded slowly, his eyes glittering; then he barked a command in Japanese to the men behind the screen. The guns disappeared. There was a rustling and slapping of sandaled feet. Omaru moved to Isome and considered her wound, tore a strip of cloth from her kimono and bandaged it roughly. Then he looked at Durell with bitter eyes.

“We could have done business, Durell-san,” the fat man said. “All my efforts have been to assist you—for money, of course, but still, we could have worked together. This girl is a common enemy to both of us.”

“You have not sent your message to Kaminov yet that we are coming for him,” Durell said harshly. “Let’s do it now.” “There is a certain time for such transmissions. In the morning—it is impossible now—”

Durell pushed his gun hard into Omaru’s fat belly. The big man winced and shrugged.

“Let me put on my kimono, please.”

Durell waited. Nadja cowered behind him. She was like a shivering animal, her eyes feral, never leaving Omaru and Isome. Yet she seemed to have accepted Durell’s protection