Assignment - Cong Hai Kill (16 page)

Relief made a sob catch
in her throat. She dashed rain from her eyes with the back of her hand. Her
shirt and slacks were plastered to her slim, provocative figure. Overhead,
through the plank floor, they heard furniture scrape, and Giralda shouted
angrily at someone. Lightning clawed at the hills across the river. In the few
moments of the storm, Durell saw, the muddy, placid river had turned into a
boiling torrent. In the blue lightning, he watched Anna-Marie lick her pale,
wet lips.

“Please take me to him,
Sam. You said he’s hurt? How? Is it bad? What happened—?”

“Come with me.”

He took her cold hand
and followed the alley path along the river-bank to the godown. This part
of Dong Xo seemed totally deserted. The rain did not slacken, and the darkness
was almost absolute, and they had to grope their way along. Durell felt pressed
by a sense of emergency. He wished he could have seen Deirdre safely settled;
he could have used her good offices with this determined but frightened French
girl. But in a sense, Deirdre’s job was already done. She had come here to meet
Anna-Marie, who trusted her, and thus had made the original contact with Yellow
Torch. After that, Durell could have wished her on a plane safely back to
Washington. But she refused to go, and now she was an added worry in the back
of his mind.

Out of the darkness and
the elephant grass loomed Papa Danat, big and shaggy and bald, drenched by
the rain. But his greeting to his daughter was booming and jovial.

“
Ma petite!
 You
are well? We have your love safe and sound—well, not quite sound, but safe
enough—”

“Papa, let me see him.”

“One moment. You still
love this—this man the Americans regard with such contempt?”

“Orris is honest
and good. I know it. I feel it.”

“A woman’s intuition—”

“Papa, please! I cannot
bear it. Let me see him.”

Durell nodded, and the
fat man stood aside. The girl rushed in and they heard a little cry and then
the cool, dry drawl of Orris Lantern. Durell checked Danat as
the other man also started in and said, “We have to move him.”

“Yes, yes. Muong’s men—and
the villagers—when they collect themselves, they will come to this district to
check the warehouses to see what the Cong Hai took."

“Where can We put him?”

Papa Danat grunted.
“The lagoon, perhaps.”

“Where is that?”

“I will show you. No one
goes there, yet it is close by. His injury is not so bad that he cannot make
it.”

“All right.”

Lantern insisted he
could walk alone, without help. Anna-Marie. clung to him, hindering rather than
assisting, but he did not put her aside. Durell wondered how long he could keep
this man alive. All the odds were against him. His presence here couldn’t be
kept secret for long. It was a miracle-and Durell was always suspicious of
miracles that Lantern had survived the Cong Hai raid. But someone
would get to him. Sooner, rather than later, he suspected grimly.

He had to admit to a
grudging admiration for the man’s defiant spirit. Wounded, hungry, dirty,
Lantern managed to walk alone with the little French girl through the dark
alley and under a grove of ancient banyan trees and across a wooden bridge at
the eastern end of the town. Anna-Marie kept murmuring to him through the hiss
and rattle of the rain that almost drowned them. Papa Danat lumbered
along like a giant bear, and Durell kept up the rear with his gun in hand.

They had to pause once,
when a small group of villagers came trotting down a side lane, clad in strange
conical rain capes of woven canes, their heads and shoulders hidden under huge
conical hats. in the passing light of the villagers’ lamps, Durell saw that
Lantern’s bearded face was gaunt and haggard with pain. Everything else could
be a trap, an elaborate maze set to snare him. But Lanterns twisted grin was
genuine.

“Sorry, Cajun. I’m a
little beat.”

“Take it easy. How much
farther, Papa Danat?”

“A little way. “Ten
minutes,” the planter said.

“We’ll rest a bit,
then.”

On-is leaned against the
wet trunk of a tree that soared out of sight into the rainy darkness above.
Thunder roared again, but it was farther down the valley, moving away. The
storm would end soon.

“Cajun?”

“I’m here.”

“Listen, you got to
help. After all, we’re both Americans. I ain’t ashamed to say I’m scared—” Orris laughed,
then coughed and held his shoulder. “I know you don’t want to call me a
countryman, old buddy, but we are. And if things go bad, you got to
remember--I’m not the big fish you came here to fry.”

“No?”

Orris
 
ran
a shaky, dirty hand through his wet beard. “We’ll talk about it soon, if we get
a chance. But I’m a minnow compared to the big fish. Believe that. He’ll try
for me, for wantin’ to go home with you. I know a lot, but not enough.
Nothing to what he knows—”

“Who is he?” Durell
asked.

“I wish I could tell
you.”

“You mean you can’t, or
you won’t?”

“I don’t know who he
is.”

“But you’re the boss of
the Cong Hai here,” Durell said flatly. “They don’t call you Yellow
Torch for nothing.”

“I’m just the front man.
The publicity agent. They make a lot of capital out of me, as an American, here
in the jungle with them. But I finally figured it out. It got me sore. It made
me think. So I decided to pull out. And little Anna-Marie was the clincher, you
know?”

Durell was silent.

“Listen, Cajun, she comes
back to the States with me.

It’s got to be part of
the deal.”

“You don’t give a damn
for her,” Durell said.

“But I do. It‘s tough to
swallow, but I laid awake many a night, tryin’ to believe it myself.
Anna-Marie and me -well, it’s a good thing with us. You think I’m snowing you,
but it’s true. I’m in love with her.” Orris laughed, and coughed
again. “And you gotta help us, whether you like it or not.”

They came to the lagoon
as the rain ended. All at once, there was a thick, steamy silence, broken only
by the dark patter of drops falling from the tangled foliage. Mosquitoes
promptly swarmed in hungry clouds about them. They were beyond the village
perimeter, on an ox-cart trail that led inland from the river, They crossed a
rice paddy, then twisted left through a maze of creepers, with mud squelching
underfoot, and finally glimpsed open water that Durell guessed was Danat‘s lagoon.

A ruined temple loomed
up unexpectedly out of the jungle, dimly lighted by the swiftly reappearing
stars. Danat held up a hand to halt them and spoke in a harsh
whisper.

“This place is not used
anymore but some of the monks may have hidden here when the Cong Hat came.
Lantern said dryly: “It’s empty, Papa. But they’ll be comin’ in the
morning for their prayers, you can count on it. It’s no place for me to hide.”

“I intend to hide you on
the 
Lady
.”

Durell said: “The 
Lady?
”

“You will see. She
belonged to me, but it was not profitable to operate her when the diesel boats
could carry my goods more cheaply. Come.”

They passed the loom of
the temple, with its towering 
prangs
 and grotesque carvings,
and walked through  a grove of banyan trees and along a ruined wall
buried in dark magenta bougainvillea. A peasant hut looked pewter-gray in the
dim light. It was abandoned, and Durell thought of centipedes and snakes. At
the end of the lagoon, he looked back and was surprised to see that the jungle
had swallowed the temple and made it invisible again.

Then he saw the hulk of
the riverboat, festooned with vines, burdened by the quick and hungry growth of
the jungle that had grown up around its ancient berth.

It was like a mirage,
until the light brightened as the moon came out from behind the last shreds of
clouds and made the vessel’s outline clear to him.

Long ago, as a boy, he
had been given a series of double paintings, in which one image was concealed
within the outlines of another, until you suddenly caught the proper
perspective and the hidden picture stood out. It was like that with the old
steamer hulk. The moon came out like a disc of steel. You looked at the lagoon,
quiet and black, and saw only the jungle around it, the dark wall of twisted
vines. Then there suddenly leaped at you the surpriSing outline of
tall, twin stacks, their guy wires looped with creepers; you saw the decaying
pilothouse, the pattern of rusting rails, the fat semi-circles of side
paddle-wheel covers.

She was about a hundred
feet long, Durell guessed, and half a century old. Gingerbread scrollwork
remained where the jungle had not rotted or torn it away. She must have been in
service not too long ago, he reflected, or nothing would have remained of her
by now. She showed the results of a losing battle with blistering heat, warping
winds, and the cancerous effect of mud, insects, and hungry green vines. But
the guy wires from her stacks seemed strong and taut. The housing amidships was
square, with big windows dark in the pale moonlight. She had a pipe railing
around the upper deck and the pilothouse, built on poles before the stacks for
a better view of the river shallows. There was a galleried main deck with
gimcrack scroll-saw work like a Victorian bandstand, and there was even a
veranda aft with piping for canvas which long since had rotted away.

How and why she had ever
gotten into this distant jungle backwater, Durell could never guess. Probably
she had been imported long ago by some plantation owner and shipped
knocked-down, to be reassembled and floated for use on this river. Perhaps she
was the whim of some local prince in a time already forgotten. But once she
must have been a lovely sight, with her bright-work gleaming, her bell-mouthed
stacks belching smoke, her white, sharp prow cleaving the river on her passage
up and down the river to the coast.

How long had she been
rotting here, forgotten and neglected? Durell felt a sudden excitement, and
urged the others forward.

“When was she run last,
Papa?” he asked Danat.

The fat man shrugged.
“She broke down last five years ago, 
mon
 
ami
. We had no
mechanics to fix her guts, you know, so she has been dying here ever since.”

“Do you know what went
wrong?”

“Who can tell? I grow
tea, not pistons and valves.”

“Do many people come
here?”

“No one. This place
holds only ghosts and had memories. Our prisoner should be safe enough here.
But in the end, he cannot be safer than we ourselves, eh?”

“You think the Cong Hai will
come back soon?”

“I simply exercise my
nation’s outstanding gift, my friend. I am logical. We are all doomed.”

They heard a distant
funeral gong in the village. Somewhere, a man prayed in a loud, breathless,
eager voice. A fish jumped in the black waters of the lagoon. The steady drip
of rain water from the trees was ending.

Papa Danat led
them along a moss-grown stone quay overgrown with tiny white flowers that
winked in the moonlight. Durell kept his gun ready. Lantern slipped and almost
fell, and Anna-Marie supported him. The bearded renegade cursed softly, and
Durell told him to shut up. The man’s yellow eyes glittered as he turned his
head.

“Y’all seem more Worried
about the Congs than me. But you know what they’ll do to me if they
ketch me, hey?”

“My job is to see that
they don’t catch you.”

“And you hate it,” Orris grinned.
“A guy like you, you take your job too seriously.”

“Shut up,” Durell said
again.

“You got to take care of
me, boy. You got to take anything I throw at you, ‘cause they want me safe and
sound for that question box in Washington, right?”

“I’m only human, Orris.
Don’t push it.”

“But you know what
Peiping says about you? You got quite a reputation. They’d love to hang your
pelt on the quite a reputation. They’d love to hang your pelt on the Temple of
Heaven gate, boy. It’d be a great thing, for them. Better pray they don’t get the
chance, huh?”

“Get aboard,” Durell
said. “Papa, lead the way.”

The fat Frenchman was
puffing. “But certainly. There are some cabins still useful, I think.”

But as he stood on the
rotting deck of the old sidewheeler, Durell felt a strange disorientation,
as if he were a boy again in the Louisiana bayous, living on the 
Trois
 
Belles
 in
her berth at Bayou Peche Rouge. Old Grandpa Jonathan had made the Mississippi sidewheeler a
home for the two of them, and Durell’s earliest memories were of the old
gentleman polishing brass in the antique pilothouse, or wandering through the
dim, plush paneling and furnishings of the riverboat’s gambling salon; or
scrambling down into the engine room, where the great drive shafts cranked the
paddle wheels that had driven the gambling ship up and down the mighty river
from New Orleans to St. Louis half a century before the old, man won ownership
of her on the turn of a single card.