Assignment Moon Girl (2 page)

He was not a man for the gimmickry thought up by the lab
boys, and his Cajun temperament, derived from his boyhood in the Louisiana
bayous, leaned more toward the informed gamble than to the plodding teamwork
that seemed to reduce everything to a lowest common denominator. He spoke a
score of languages and dialects fluently, and knew intimately an amazing
number of the world’s dark and crooked alleys. He could make himself at home
anywhere—in a Mayfair flat in London, a Paris existentialist’s salon, the
Libyan desert, a Hong Kong sampan, the Thai jungles. He was big, with a heavy
musculature, but he walked with a lithe agility that sometimes betrayed him. He
could kill with his fingers, a needle, a rolled newspaper—and he had done
so, more often than he cared to think about. There was a red tab on his
file at KGB headquarters at No. 2 Dzerzhinsky Square in Moscow, and
another in Ta-Po’s security office in Peking. Chang Hung Ta-Po, head of Mr.
Mao’s intelligence service, had personally sworn to dismember his dead body.
This did not trouble Durell, either, except to increase the care he took in so
many small, vital things. He never turned a corner with ease, or opened a door
without proper procedure. He had seen good men die because of a moment‘s
hesitation. It had put gray in his thick black hair and darkened his blue eyes
and added cruel lines to his mouth. He was different. He walked apart from
others. But there could never be another kind of life for him.

Avram Yigit met him in Istanbul.

“Come with me, Cajun,” Yigit said, gripping his right arm
with iron fingers.

Durell disengaged his arm from the Turk’s hand. “Won’t you
ever learn, Avram?”

The man who ran Istanbul Central for K Section smiled
apologetically. “Sorry, Sam. It is a habit, to touch, to grasp people. I am a
little excited, I think.”

“You have something for me?”

“Over coffee. There is time. We're clean here. And I have
four men within call.”

“You never know,” Durell said.

The coffee in its tiny cup could have walked across the
table by itself. Durell lit one of his rare cigarettes and watched the crowd in
the airport cafe over Avram Yigit’s thick shoulders. The Turk had smooth
cheeks, small shoe-button eyes, thick hands. He had operated Istanbul Central
for six years. The things against him were his wife and five children,
and an occasional yen for an opium pipe. He was the best that could be had.

“You’re supposed to brief me,” Durell said.

“I only have partial information, Sam. But you are to
find Tanya Ouspanaya.”

“The Soviet cosmonaut? The one who could win a beauty
contest without half trying?” Durell paused. “I know her father. Met him in
Brussels once, at a science conference. I covered as a clerk there. Fine man.”

“Brilliant. A Chinese wife, you know?”

“She’s still in China,” Durell said.

“But Tanya, their daughter, has been on the moon,” Yigit
said quietly. “
And
returned.” The
words were spoken without stress, almost with weariness. Durell looked at the
Turk. Yigit smiled sadly. “It opens—how do you say it?—a can of worms.”

“It’s not possible,” Durell said flatly.

“How, not?”

“We’d know it. Our monitors would show it.”

“It was done. They were up there.”

Durell put his hand flat on the small café table.
 
“With no propaganda release?”

“A campaign was planned. Moscow was all ready for it, when
she returned. But then—nothing.”

“What do you mean, nothing?”

“Not a word. They do not have her.”

“Where is she, then?”

“That is for you to find out,” Yigit said. “Urgently.
With top priority.”

“Is she alive?”

“We don’t know.”

“Do the Russians know?”

“They are looking. Desperately. Others, too. Your friend,
Chang Hung Ta-Po, is in Teheran. The People’s Republic of China claims Tanya
Ouspanaya as a citizen, since her mother opted for Peking.”

Durell’s eyes went dark. “Pandora’s box, indeed.

Why in Teheran?”

“That is where Tanya was last seen.”

It had been reported by an embassy employee, not as an official
account, but as amusing coffee-shop gossip. The Soviet people had tried to
suppress it, but it appeared as a squib in the English-language newsletter.

Her name was given. Her description fit. Her
Sino-Siberian beauty couldn’t have been anyone else’s. Everything about it,
however, was like a dream recounted by a hashish-eater.

She had been seen running down
Ferdowsi
Street, then near the
Golestan
Palace. Her hair was
wild and unkempt, her face dirty and burned by the sun, her clothing—the
remnants of an astronaut’s suit, if the gossip were true—torn and disheveled.
She had babbled wildly in Russian and Arabic. She seemed drunk, or hysterical,
and completely disoriented. Her words to the policeman who stopped her made no
sense at all.

“Which way was she running?” Durell asked Yigit sharply.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Which way? To or from her embassy?”

“I see. It was away.” The Turk spread thick hands. “But my
account is fourth- or fifth-hand, Cajun.”

“Was she arrested? Taken into custody?”

“She got away from the policeman. She acted wild. Insane. He
was a bit afraid of her, it seems."

Durell was skeptical. “Was she moon-struck?”

Yigit ignored his smile. “Who knows? But it was Tanya
Ouspanaya. The Russians are in a quiet uproar. Making urgent demands for her
return. Claim violation of international rights. Piracy. Kidnapping. You name
it, the Soviets have called it.”

Durell finished his coffee. He had five minutes
until flight-time to Teheran. “What happened after she got away from the
local cop?”

“She was reported twice after that. Once again in Teheran,
the same night. Four days later, in Isfahan. The first time, still alone.
In a cafe. She burst in, giving her name, saying she had been on the moon. Some
English were there. They tried to give her a drink and calm her down. She
almost killed one of them, hitting him with a chair. That tore it. The cops
were called, but she got away, down an alley. They think she climbed over a
wall into Ishmael Har-Buri’s former private palace. You know about Har-Buri?”

“Political anathema in Iran, yes.” Durell nodded. “I thought
he was ordered imprisoned by the Shah.”

“He escaped. He’s in hiding.”

“Then Har-Buri has the girl?”

“We don’t know.” Yigit sighed. “As for the sighting in
Isfahan, it was vague, indefinite. An American with an archeological team
working out of Persepolis, way into the Dasht-i-Kavir—horrible desert—says he
saw her on a camel.”

“On a camel?”

“In a caravan, heading north into the sands.”

“It sounds like Alice in Wonderland,” Durell said.

“They’ll have more for you in Teheran,” Yigit said. “She’s a
lovely girl. You’ll enjoy finding her.”

Teheran, under the loom of Demavend’s high peak, enjoyed one
of its rare summertime rains when Durell landed. The taxi was temperamental, as
always; the multi-colored streetcars gleamed and sprayed water under the iron
wheels; the debonair policeman on duty at
Yusefabad
Square ignored the drizzle with elegant nonchalance, although his prideful
moustache drooped and dripped. The rain did not relieve the insufferable heat.
But it fell democratically on the bicycle traffic, the white caps of
military police, the costumed scholars from the Military Academy, the
corrugated iron roofs, and the neo-
Achaemenian
sculptures of ancient archers at the National Bank, where Durell changed Swiss
gold francs into Iranian currency. It was four in the afternoon when Hannigan
appeared through the crowds of schoolboys with shaved heads and schoolgirls
with braids and gray pinafores. Teheran, which had been founded by the Qajar
dynasty as its capital in 1796, still looked raw and unfinished in many
districts. Hannigan, who was the K Section man at the embassy, looked equally
disheveled and discontent.

“Welcome to our Persian garden, Cajun.”

Rafe Hannigan had pale, brilliant green eyes and a swarm of
orange freckles across a homely face. His rumpled seersucker revealed thick
shoulders. His elfin eyes never left the passersby on the sidewalk of the
café not far from the Park Hotel, where Durell had checked in. Traffic on the
wide Shah-Reza and
Ferdowsi
Boulevards seemed heavier
than he had remembered it. Near the old
Tup-Khune
Square, the picturesque shops were still jumbled with Italian accordions,
American hair-creams, German typewriters, Parisian perfumes, and bookshops
displaying medical sex books next to Persian pamphlets on dialectical
materialism. Hannigan watched two men greet each other with kisses, and sighed
heavily.

“I was followed here, Cajun. Couldn’t help it. Do you see
him?”

“I see him,” Durell said. “The third table to the right.
Chang Hung Ta-Po, the old Buddha with the Stalinist line. I understand he’s
interested in the
sitnation
.”

“He put a watch on us. Brace yourself, laddy. He’s coming
over, and that takes a hell of a gall.”

Hung Ta-Po was a mountain of smiling yellow flesh who
glided between the tables with the grace of a swan in a country pool. He wore
the old Russian-style double-breasted suit, which bulged with his enormous
girth. His thick black hair was as stiff and grizzled as the spines on a hog’s
back. He walked lightly on the balls of his toes, like a Japanese sumo
wrestler, and there was a strange elegance in his massive nod to Hannigan and
the way he turned his head with slow solemnity to regard Durell.

“Where the prey has fallen, there the vultures gather,” he
said, in impeccable English.

“If that’s Confucius—which I doubt,” said Durell quietly,
“he’s not in good odor these days in your country.”

“True. It was my own phrase. One is not surprised to note
your arrival here, Mr. Durell.” Ta-Po smiled. “Nor are you surprised to see me,
sir. We know you quite well and have marked a day of reckoning for the various
injuries you have done us.”

“You could get thrown out of the country for that remark.”
Durell’s smile was carved in stone.

“We are all
persona
non grata
very quickly, if this strange matter of my countrywoman is not
cleared up."

“Your countrywoman?”

“I will be frank with you,” said Hung Ta-Po. His black eyes
glittered, then became opaque. “We consider Tanya Ouspanaya as belonging to
China, whatever the Soviets may claim her to be.”

“She made her own choice,” Durell said.

“Ah, but the poor girl is not in her right mind. We agree on
this. She needs help, her mother’s tender care—”

“I can imagine its tenderness, Chang.”

“So I warn you, Durell. We know where to look. We will find
her. Our men are already in Isfahan. You see, I hide nothing. Ishmael Har-Buri,
the Iranian patriot, cooperates with us.”

“Har-Buri is your puppet,” Hannigan snapped angrily. “An
agitator for Peking, using your help to bid for power against the Shah.”

Hung Ta-Po’s eyes rolled briefly to Hannigan, then
dismissed him and returned to Durell. “Your fellow imperialist spy here will
direct you to Isfahan, sir, to cooperate with the English
M.6
agent there, Mr. Adam Beele. One would suggest you accept discretion as the
better part of valor, and take the next plane back to Geneva. This affair does
not concern you. If you interfere, you will suffer grievously. And on your way
home, by the way, you may give my felicitations to your Turkish agent, Mr.
Yigit. I understand he is the proud father of yet another daughter.”

The Chinese stood up massively and bowed his grizzled head.
He seemed amused, but Durell wasn’t sure. He didn’t like the opacity in Ta-Po’s
stare. And for just an instant, the hatred that gleamed there struck him like a
physical blow.

“Good day, sir. You have been warned.”

Durell sat silently, hands flat on the cafe table, and
watched Ta-Po amble away. Hannigan sighed, shook his head. His freckles stood
out brightly across his face, and his bright green eyes were dulled.

“I suppose time is of the essence, to coin another
non-Confucian phrase,” he said. “I’d better brief you.”

Durell smiled without mirth. “Not necessary now. Hung Ta-Po
just told me all I need to know.”

Isfahan, pearl of the south, was a city of beautiful tombs,
minarets, mosques, palaces, and gardens, built by the great Shah Abbas upon a
foundation of Parthians,
Sassanids
, and Arabs, and
since then in deep and lovely slumber, after the
Qajars
moved the capital to Teheran_ Durell arrived by private plane, provided by
Hannigan and flown by a young and reckless Farsi named Isaac Sepah.

“Call me Ike.” Sepah’s English was casual, and his moustache
a brilliant, luxuriant black. He was thin and handsome, and Durell was sure he
worked for Iranian Security. Everyone was after Tanya Ouspanaya. “I’ll show you
the sights," Ike said. “The Maiden-e-Shah was once a polo ground, you
know? I play polo, too. Beautiful. You know the Masjid-e-Shah—the blue marble
mosque, all mosaics? Blue and gold. Like a soft dream. Peaceful. Then there’s
the Ali-
Qepa
, the royal banquet hall, and the oldest
mosque,
Jum’a
. I can get you in. And the
Chehel-Sotoon
, hall of forty columns—only there’s just
twenty real ones, and their twenty reflections in the pool. That makes
forty, eh? Pretty girls, too. But very religious city. Even some Zoroastrians
at
Nafjabad
, nearby. Everything is poetry, like at
Shiraz, where
Saadi
lived and wrote the
Gulistan
. The
Nightingale of Shiraz. We Persians are still very romantic. Hafiz wrote
some nice poetry, too, in the fourteenth century. You know any of it?”