Assignment - Manchurian Doll (18 page)

Durell halted.

“Is that the place?”

Nadja was silent.

“Is it?” he asked.

“It seems so different, in the night—after so long—”

“What was it like when you lived here?”

Her voice sounded faint. “There was the mission church, of course. And the hospital. One of the richer villagers had donated a house for the clinic, with much ceremony, you know—a parade and firecrackers and an announcement by a crier specifying how much money the man had given and how generous he was. It’s the custom not to hide one’s light under a bushel in charitable works here. The hospital was there, on the hilltop. But I don’t see it now.”

“There are only ruins. You said it was all burned.”

“Yes.”

“But this is not the place where you were kept a prisoner by the old Chinese, afterward.”

“N-no.”

“Can you remember any more about it now? How far he took you after your parents were killed? And after they left you for dead, too?”

She shuddered. “I cannot remember anything now.” “Nadja, you must!”

“I cannot! I do not want to go on.”

“You’ve got to. It’s no use, coming this far.”

“I know,” she said wearily. “I had hoped it would come back to me—how it was, and just what happened to me. But I cannot remember anything, after they shot me.” She paused. “All I can think of is that filthy little hut, where that old man kept me locked in for weeks, for months—Pere Jacques—and what he did to me, day after day—”

Her voice lifted. He tried to stop her, but it was too late. Someone came walking toward them, calling out in a thin, querulous tone.

It was an old woman.

There was no chance to run or hide. They stood in the lane that twisted up the hillside and waited for the old woman to approach. She carried a lantern, and she wore baggy coolie trousers and a blue shirt and dirty sneakers. Her face looked centimes old, canny and cruel in the rays of the lamp.

Durell said quickly to Nadja: “Did everyone here know the old man as Pere Jacques?”

“Y-yes.”

“Ask her about him, then.”

“But—”

“Ask her.”

Nadja spoke to the old woman in quick Manchurian dialect. Her voice was shaky, and the old woman lifted her lantern to inspect them. Her face closed abruptly when she saw they were not Chinese. She started to cry out, and Nadja caught her arm and said something very quickly and harshly, and the woman lowered the lantern and looked at them sullenly. She did not reply to Nadja’s questions. Her eyes kept sliding away, as if she wanted to escape. She had been carrying a small hamper on a pole over her shoulder, and she finally put it down and said something angrily and pointed downhill toward the farm hamlet they had just circled.

Nadja shook her head and pointed upward toward the ruined mission compound. The peasant woman spoke in an offensive tone and started away. Durell blocked her path. She glared at him with fear in her eyes.

Nadja said: “I told her we were Russians. There have been some Russian military inspection teams here. She does not believe me.”

“Why not?”

“Because we are not in uniform. All Russians are in uniform, she says.”

“She does not remember you?”

“I think she does. It has been ten years, but—I think so. Perhaps that is why she is suspicious.”

“Is the military activity in the neighborhood normal? Ask her that,” Durell suggested.

Nadja spoke again to the old woman. She shook her head sullenly. Then she asked another question, and the old woman laughed. Nadja looked pale.

“What is it?” Durell asked.

“I wanted to know if the old Chinaman, the crazy one they called Pere Jacques, was still alive around here. She says yes, he is.”

“Does she know the way to his house?”

Nadja shivered. “She says it is not far.”

The old woman jabbered and pointed up the hill. Durell was curious about her hamper, and reached down and opened it. Instantly the crone swung to him in shrill anger.

“Tell her to be quiet,” he said flatly.

Nadja spoke, and the old woman stood in huddled, anxious defiance. The hamper contained only two bottles of rice wine, nothing else.

Nadja said: “This old woman says everything is normal. There are always patrols, she says. But no one has been to the mission ruins for years. She says only ghosts live there now. The white imperialist-devils, she calls them. None of the farmers ever go there now. As for Pere Jacques, she says he lives only with the wind. But she won’t explain it. Maybe she does not know any more. She simply says he lives with the wind.”

She paused abruptly. The sound of crunching footsteps on the lane suddenly came to them. Durell turned and saw the wavering shape of a man climbing the hill toward them. The man carried a lantern, too, and the rays of light gleamed on brass buttons. He wore a military uniform, with a sergeant’s insignia on his sleeve. His rifle was carried in the crook of his left arm. As he walked, he muttered to himself and sang bits of song and rolled drunkenly.

It was too late to move on or try to hide. In any case, the old woman began to scream shrilly, crying out and pointing to Durell and Nadja. The Chinese sergeant stopped and looked at them from under thick, lowering brows. He was sweating, with dark stains under his armpits. He paused with his booted feet spread firmly apart, and glowered at them.

Nadja spoke to the old woman, who jabbered something and tried to snatch back her wine bottles. It was just the diversion needed for the sergeant.

He lurched forward and shoved the old woman brutally aside, and grinned as he plucked the two bottles from the hamper and waved them high in one hand, his fingers looped around the glass necks. His rifle muzzle sagged from the crook of his arm.

Durell spoke in authoritative Russian.

“Sergeant, can you understand me?”

The man grinned and nodded. He was big, tough and muscular, approaching middle age. “Yes, comrade. A little. You have trouble with this old witch?”

“You may have her wine. A brace soldier deserves such a gift.”

“Thank you, comrade. It is proper. The soldiers of the People’s Republic of China salute the technicians of the Soviet Union, eh?”

The man broke the neck of one of the bottles on a stone at his feet and tilted it up to let the contents gush into his wide, gaping mouth. Most of the wine splashed down his chin and sweaty throat.

The old woman began to wail calamity.

The sergeant belched. “Are you lost, comrades?”

“We are looking for someone who lives near this village. He may be an imperialist spy, but we are not sure. He is a crazy old man who thinks he is a priest of the Western church.”

“What’s his name? I’ll have him shot,” the sergeant said obligingly.

“We only wish to question him,” Durell said. “You know there is an alert along this part of the coast tonight?”

The big Chinaman winked. “It is so. But your people are taking care of it. Our orders are not to interfere.”

“But there is a lot of activity from your camp.”

Again the man winked. “One shoots off firecrackers to appease the devil dragons.” Then he looked stubborn. “It’s your headache, not ours.”

“This is the attitude of your superiors?”

The man looked worried for a moment, lest he had said too much to a Russian. But Durell had learned something he had wanted to know. It was obvious that the Chinese troops were only making motions toward cooperation, for reasons of their own. It meant that his major danger came only from Omaru. He had counted on a certain amount of truculent jealousy from the two allies here.

But then the sergeant dropped his bottle and abruptly unslung his rifle. He waved the gun at Nadja. “What is the matter with her? She is shivering.”

“She is cold.”

“The wind is warm.”

“About this old man we wish to find—” Durell began. But it was too late. The sergeant’s drunken cheerfulness changed to sudden suspicion. Perhaps he feared he had talked too much about his superior’s orders. His thick brows made a dark brush across his squinting eyes. The old Woman babbled something and pointed to Nadja. The girl shrank away. Durell, unable to grasp the quick Manchurian dialect, saw the sergeant’s rifle lift and point at the girl.

“You are under arrest,” the soldier said in Russian. He laughed. “We were not supposed to interfere, but since you walk into my arms, I must hold you.”

Then the trooper shouted for the guard, and an answering yell came from down the walled lane, followed by the sound of trotting feet lower on the dark hill. There was no help for it, Durell decided. He knocked the gun muzzle up and wrenched the weapon aside.

Fortunately, the gun didn’t go off. The Chinese was big and powerful, but his reflexes were slowed by liquor. He grunted and staggered and started to yell again, and Durell hit him in the mouth and drove him against the stone wall beside the lane. The old woman screamed. She smothered the sound at once as Durell twisted the rifle free and slammed it across the sergeant’s head. The man would not fall. Desperate, Durell struck again, aware of querulous calls from the hamlet below. The Chinese swung a massive fist that caught Durell on the side of the head. The rifle clattered to the stones between them. The man grinned, drooling spittle and blood from his broken mouth. He glanced down at the rifle—and Durell jumped him, took him to the ground, and rolled over and over down the lane with him.

The man was a strong, vicious fighter, despite his drunkenness. He snatched up a stone and crashed it against Durell’s head, and for a moment everything blacked out for him. Then Durell drove a knee into the man’s belly, chopped at the sweaty, bloody face, and the other went limp all at once, gurgling in his throat as his eyes rolled up.

Durell got slowly to his feet. He looked down the lane toward the coolie huts, but nothing moved there.

“Nadja?” he called softly.

There was no reply. He looked along the shadows of the wall, but she was not in sight. He drew a deep breath.

“Nadja?” he called, a little louder.

The old woman was gone, too. Her bottles of wine lay smashed in the stony lane.

But Nadja had disappeared.

She ran, not knowing where to go.

She was spurred by a panic that took her beyond all reasonable control. She had seen Durell go down, and then the old woman had clawed at her and shrieked, and the smell of the old woman was the same smell she remembered from the hut of Pere Jacques. It was as if a floodgate were suddenly smashed within her, and an animal instinct to run and hide from dark and filthy terrors seized her.

For several moments she was content with the wild, physical exertion of scrambling up the hill. Her mind did not function. Her lungs pumped air, her heart thudded, the muscles of her legs stretched and tightened, her feet struck solidly on the stony earth, the warm wind tangled fingers in her hair. . . .

She ran.

She did not look back. Durell must be dead, the sergeant had killed him, and the old woman—the old woman who smelled like that crazy old man who had used her twelve-year-old body for dark eternities of imprisonment in a black and smelly cell—

She fell, lay in the wet mud, wept and laughed.

She got up and ran again.

Papa? Papa?

She heard voices calling, heard laughter and the chatter of coolies, heard the brazen sound of a temple gong.

“Papa!” she called.

She tripped and fell again.

A trembling seized her, and she could not get up. She lay in the mud and wept. The smell of the old woman clung to her like dirt, creeping into her nostrils, her eyes and ears, the very pores of her skin. She coughed and choked and pushed the solid earth away from her, her arms extended rigidly. Her pale hair came loose and hung thickly before her face. She brushed it away and stared.

She had reached the top of the hill, where the ruins lay black and weedy and vine-grown in the dark night. What had happened? She was aware of time gone by, of many changes wrought by wind and weather. The chapel had been here, to the right, just beyond the compound wall. The two gate posts still stood, stark against the strange light in the night sky. The heavy wooden gates were gone, of course. The peasants would have used them for firewood. It was here that the guerilla fighters had broken in, clubbing fat John Lee, splashing his brains on the dusty ground. Father Pierre, the Jesuit, had died with a bayonet in his belly, impaled against the chapel door, pinned there like Christ, dying slowly in the hot sun. Here little Mary Choong had been thrown to the ground and raped, and had died screaming in pain.

Nadja walked slowly, like a sleepwalker, through the ruins of her childhood.

Papa?

A few crumbled walls still remained, dark against the darkness of the night. The infirmary had been here, to the right. Only a dark, muddy hole existed in the ground now, filled with rain-water and mud. Something splashed in the water. A frog? Nadja dropped to her knees and peered with rapt interest. But she could see nothing in the black water that filled the hole.

She pushed her hair back from her face and looked around wonderingly. She had played here long ago. How long ago? What had happened in between? She stood up slowly. Bits of moist earth clung to the palms of her hands, and she brushed them away convulsively, shuddering. She turned right, walking through the waist-high weeds. Nothing was familiar, but everything mocked her with memories that ended in screaming and horror.

She took a few faltering steps toward the ruined foundation walls. A gaping doorway beckoned to her. Yes, that had been the cellar, under the house. She had fled there from the rioting soldiers as the house burned above her, hearing the scream of tortured wood. That was where one of them had caught her again and dragged her out to be shot against the wall.

She touched the scar on her scalp where the bullet had gone.

She stopped, shivering.

The place was empty now. Memories could not hurt her. There was no danger here now.

She backed away slowly from the doorway and the steps that led down into the dark hole in the earth.

Someone was in there.