Assignment - Manchurian Doll (23 page)

The man nodded his shaggy blond head. I understand that. How can I express my gratitude to you? I searched my soul for many years, but it is difficult to leave everything at home and go to a strange place, among strangers, and join those one always regarded as enemies.”

“I am not your enemy,” Durell said.

“I knew that long ago. That is why I asked only for you.” Kaminov paused. “Well, I shall try to be grateful. I have much information for your military people about the Peiping troop movements recently ordered in Southeast Asia. You shall receive it in time to take counter-measures, I am sure. It is all memorized—and it is all accurate.”

Durell said dryly, “We would appreciate having it, Colonel Kaminov.”

Far out to sea, a light winked briefly and then disappeared and did not come on again.

It was the
Okiku
.

Durell awoke with the sunlight shining in his eyes, warm and friendly. It soaked in a golden flood through the screens of his room in the Japanese inn. For a brief moment he still felt the surge and lift and fall of the
Okiku
as it fought its way back across the Japan Sea. But that had been three days ago. The feeling passed as he sat up.

Tagashi sat at a low lacquered table near the window, drinking tea and eating a breakfast of raw fish and rice. He wore an ornate kimono of heavily embroidered yellow silk, and his cropped gray head looked dark in outline against the sunlight. The inn was quiet, except for a maid’s dim giggle somewhere in the kitchen area. They were fifteen miles from Haneda Airport in Tokyo. Beyond the windows, the small formal garden, landscaped with meticulously miniaturized trees and rocks and streams, looked golden and

beautiful with its banks of chrysanthemums. The late September sun was warm. The sound of bees filled the air. Tagashi sipped at his tea and did not turn his head. "You are awake, Durell-san,” he said quietly.

“Yes. How did you know?”

“I listened to your breathing. One falls into the habit of listening for many things. You are rested?”

“Yes. And you?”

“Quite well, thank you.” Tagashi’s voice was formal. “I have also been listening to the radio. And I received a dispatch from our own information office on Hokkaido. There has been no official protest as yet, according to Washington. It seems that the matter will end in silence.”

“How are our guests?” Durell asked.

“Quite safe.”

“Are they nervous?”

“They feel strange. The girl is most helpful, however. She is familiar with Japan, which Colonel Kaminov is not. She does not leave him for very long. Together, they have been dictating a report on the Chinese military dispositions. A man from the SEATO office in Tokyo was here an hour ago and took it away with him. He asked me to thank you. He said he knew Eliot Barnes.”

Durell nodded slowly. “We paid a high price, Tagashi.”

“It could have been higher,” the Japanese returned. He turned his head and looked soberly at Durell. His dark eyes were without depth. “I did not expect to survive. I did not wish to. There were too many memories in this that haunted me. I thought I would let the sea take me. I almost permitted it. But then I felt that I should try to take you back here. It would have been impossible if I had yielded to my instincts, would it not?”

“I’m grateful,” Durell said.

“One must to live, it seems, in this new world of ours. It is not a happy place. Each generation sees changes. The young can adapt easily. It is more difficult for us, who knew the older and more secure ways of authority and discipline.” Durell stood up. He ached here and there from various bruises all over his body. His ribs still seemed to crack with each breath he took, and he remembered Omaru’s deadly grip with a small shudder as he poured some tea for himself.

“And the Baroness Isome?” he asked.

Tagashi said: “She is dead.”

“How did she die?”

“It goes back to Yuki’s young man—the one who worked for me two years ago. I sent him into Isome’s service and he vanished. That evil, licentious woman used him for her own purposes. She drugged young men and burned them out in the flame of her evil. Somehow she discovered that the boy was really my agent. She tortured him and killed him.”

“Did Yuki learn this?”

“No. She does not know the whole truth. When we returned, I found Isome at the island house of Omaru. I gave her a choice of public trial, pretending to have proof enough to bring to court, or a quiet end by her own hand. She was Japanese, after all. A traitor to the nation, but she did what was required, when I suggested it. She was not an ordinary woman.”

“You sound as if you knew her quite well,” Durell suggested.

Tagashi looked away. “Yes.”

But he spoke no more of Isome.

Durell had breakfast and Tagashi went away to make security arrangements for the trip to the airport and the Pan American flight that would take Colonel Kaminov and Nadja to the States. Tagashi was a careful man. It seemed to Durell that the Japanese had found some kind of peace with himself.

When he finished his tea he went outside into the sunlit, garden and sat down on a stone bench near the carp pool and waited for Colonel Alexi Kaminov. He knew that Kaminov would come to him. He did not have to wait there long.

The Russian had shaved his ragged beard and cut his long yellow hair. He looked younger and fresher than Durell remembered. Tagashi had gotten a light gray suit for him, with a sport shirt and imported English shoes from Hong Kong. His blue eyes were sober, and then he smiled briefly and sat down. His English was only slightly accented.

“We will leave soon, I understand. I will let Nadja sleep a little longer. I cannot think of her as Natalie, although that is the true French name her father gave her. We will be married in California, if there are no legal objections. I suppose we shall have to live quietly for a long time. When our work for you is done, we will have to disappear, because the KGB has a long memory and a long arm for revenge.” Kaminov paused. “I explained all this to her. But she looks forward to it. She is a wonderful girl.”

There was a moment’s silence. Kaminov sighed. He looked at the fish in the carp pool, at the flowers, at the bees that hummed and flashed over the garden. He spoke on a note of sadness.

“She is not as I remembered her, my friend.”

“You remembered her as a frightened child,” Durell said. “A child who adored you. She is a woman now. You will have to discover her all over again. But you, Alexi, are not quite the same, either.”

Kaminov laughed softly. “Yes, I have changed. You were always a perceptive man, Durell.” He paused. “You knew all along it was just a trap, set for you?”

“Yes, I knew.”

“But you came, anyway?”

“It was my job.”

“Did you know I was part of the trap?”

“I suspected it,” Durell said.

“Our business deals in involuted circumstances. One sees white—and suspects black. One walks a straight path—but it is really crooked. Lucky for me,” Kaminov said easily. He crossed his artificial leg over the other. “I was assigned to lure you to the mainland. I had reported fully on our encounter some years ago, at the Hungarian border. It is part of your dossier on file at KGB headquarters. The organization never forgets details. It is most efficient. It picks this and that from the machine, estimates probabilities, and plans future projects. It chose me, because of you.”

“Did you intend to go through with it and trap me?”

“At first, yes.”

“And I would have been executed,” Durell said softly. Kaminov’s eyes smiled candidly, but under their blueness was an opacity like that in Tagashi’s eyes. Durell wondered what he himself looked like, to others. The business changed everyone, sooner or later.

“Surely,” Kaminov said, “you knew I could not have reached you through Omaru without the connivance of my superiors. It was all arranged. They had already appointed the prosecutors for your spectacular trial in Moscow. At the moment, Moscow feels a need to cry outrage on the international scene. And you have long been a great problem to them. I thought I had made peace with myself, but—are you angry, Durell, because I would have helped to execute you?”

“There is no purpose in anger.”

“Of course, the trap snapped on those who would have snared you. And all because of my sentimental protectiveness toward Nadja. I gave her pity, thinking her a child all this time. Now it is different. She is a woman.” Kaminov smiled ruefully. “It is like suddenly finding a fortune when one is fumbling for a cigarette in the dark. I do not quite know what to do with the gift. It—it overwhelms me.” 

“Do you still love her?”

“Not as before. She was a child, in my eyes, and now—I am a little frightened, I think. The feeling is so strong, this new kind of love I feel—”

“How did Nadja get into your boss’s plot?”

“Oh, they are very clever. She was unexpected, of course—called in to safeguard my suspected tendencies. But they outsmarted themselves. I changed everything when she was included in the operation. Somehow, I—I felt she was more precious to me than anything else in the world, a little human being who had been entirely dependent on me for survival. And I suppose her need for me filled a like need in myself. At any rate, I was suddenly sick of the plan to trap you. I changed the rendezvous point in the coded message through Omaru’s pipeline, and then I simply disappeared. Vanished from the face of the earth.” Kaminov laughed softly. “Ah, Peiping and Moscow must have been quite disturbed!”

“Was it only then that you decided to defect?”

“Yes, really only then. Because of Nadja. Can you understand, Durell? She represents an idyll, a sweet dream, the one lovely moment in my sober life. Oh, I know her reputation as a KGB field officer, hard and dedicated and ruthless. But this image did not agree with the weeping, dirty-faced child I had saved in Manchuria long ago. I decided to see if she would defect with me, and step by step, the dream became reality and I risked everything to make it come true, thinking of how our lives would be together, in the West.” Kaminov sighed. “But she is different.”

“She has had a very bad time,” Durell said.

“Yes, very bad.”

“She’s different because she is not a helpless child now, but a full-grown woman, True, she no longer needs your strength as she once did, and she feels that you need her now, in turn. So she has gained even more strength by knowing you need her. Does she seem such a stranger to you?”

“Strange—and wonderful.”

“You must pretend to need her, for a time yet.”

“Yes, I intend to.” Kaminov paused and looked at the garden. “I
do
need her, you know. Desperately.”

Durell stood up. “You took a chance, Alexi. When she was called in and you disappeared and decided to make your fake defection a real one, you didn’t really know how she would react, did you? You were playing a double game with yourself. On the one hand, you always leaned toward defection, anyway. But you wouldn’t have gone along with it if Nadja had refused, am I right?”

“That is true.”

“How could you trust her to agree with your plan?”

“I did not, until the last moment.”

“Suppose she came to Ospesko with me, also on orders, and when we found you, suppose she had betrayed us both? You would have stood before a firing squad with me, Kaminov.”

“I think not,” Kaminov said. “Although for a moment, when she first walked into that hut, I wasn’t sure of her at all. She was so different. She was a woman.”

“But suppose she had betrayed us?” Durell insisted. Kaminov spoke quietly and sadly.

“I love her, you understand. But I would have killed her.” “Does she know that?”

“No.”

“Don’t ever tell her,” Durell said.

Kaminov glanced sharply at Durell. Durell looked tall and dark against the peaceful sunlight. He looked dangerous. Then Kaminov smiled slightly and stood up, too.

“She will never know. You see, I thought that if I had to kill her—why, then, I would have turned the gun on myself and killed myself, too.”

Nadja walked quietly beside Durell to the sedan that Tagashi had provided for the trip to the airport. The car was parked inside the gateway to the inn. There was a burly driver and another Japanese in the front seat, and Kaminov had already gotten in. Another car would precede them along the highway; a third would follow.

The girl walked slowly down the immaculate shell path, deliberately delaying so she could be alone with Durell. He noticed that the leaves on the momiji, the red maples, were tinged with brown, losing their brilliance to autumn. The girl’s golden hair seemed to pick up all the colors in the radiant sunlight, but her face was serene, and a small, secret smile curved her lips as she paused to consider the flower beds inside the gates of the inn.

“Have you spoken to him?” she asked quietly.

“Yes,” Durell said.

“Please. What did he say? What did he tell you?”

“He loves you,” Durell said. “But you have surprised him.” “How?”

He laughed. “You’ve grown up.”

“He thinks of me as a woman now?”

“Yes.”

“It took a long time.” She sighed happily. “Soon he will know how much of a woman I can be for him. He will be even more surprised.” Her smile was small, fleeting. “Do you think he will be disappointed, though? His love for me was different.”

“It’s a man’s love now, for a woman.”

“Still—one loses something. Childhood fancies don’t always stay the same in this real world, do they?”

“You and I and Kaminov haven’t lived in the normal world,” Durell said. “Our work prohibits it. It changes us. It takes something—perhaps our dreams—away from us. But you and Alexi are luckier than most. You’re both getting out. I envy you, a little, for that—and for the rest of it, too. Alexi will find you an equal now, a woman. I suspect he’s in for some surprises.”

She laughed. “Pleasant ones, I think.”

She held out her hand to him and her pale gray eyes searched his face for something, and he thought he read a fleeting offering and a wish in her look, but he could not be sure and he knew he could make no move to encourage it.