Assignment - Cong Hai Kill (2 page)

From the sidewalk at the
gate, he could see the end of the 
klong
 where it entered from
the river, which in turn opened into a harbor protected by a low mole. Giap Pnom was
not much of a town, and less of a harbor; only one tramp freighter, rusty and
riding high, occupied the wharf. Beyond was a paradise of white sandy beach,
leaning palm trees, and a dark mangrove swamp, pierced by the single-line
railway coming south from Bangkok. Beyond the corrugated tin-roofed warehouses
and the white government buildings for Thai customs and police, the town was a
sprawl of native houses and twisting lanes that followed the river inland.

It was the sort of
place, Durell reflected, that Joseph Conrad might have described, and it hadn’t
changed much since Conrad’s day. Thailand was still known as Muang Thai,
the Land of the Free.

The problem was to keep
it that way.

And Anna-Marie Danat was
the key to that problem.

The red wooden gate in
the wall ahead was not locked; it yielded when he touched it with a careful
fingertip. He looked back at the canal with its distant shops and crowded
sampans, with the glow of charcoal fires cooking the evening meals. It was
eight o’clock in the evening. It seemed to Durell as if half a lifetime had
passed since he was thrown into the 
klong
. He heard the bell of a
trishaw go by, down the narrow lane, but nothing was suspicious except the
unlocked gate in the wall. There was no help for it. He pushed the door all the
way open and slipped inside.

There was a garden,
dreaming in early moonlight and shadow, with oleanders and orchids, shell walks
and formal flower beds, a carp pond and a small stone shrine and the soft glow
of more stone lanterns along the walks. The house loomed in rich privacy within
the compound. It looked deserted.

No one greeted him. And
no one followed him in.

He thought he heard a
small sound to his right, and he took his gun out and held it in his hand
again.

“Anna-Marie?” he called
softly.

A warm wind that smelled
of cooking and fish and tidal mud from the harbor made a wind bell tinkle. He
received no other answer, and called in French, this time:

“Anna-Marie, is it you?
This is Sam Durell.”

He felt a worm of worry
wriggle in his belly. He was angry with her because she had disobeyed all
orders in coming here. He did not know this house or who she was trying to see.
But Anna-Marie Danat did not belong down in the mud of the canal,
with her slender throat cut, and her rich body for the crawling things under
the water.

“Honey, come out here!”
he called again.

This time there was a
response, but not what he expected. From the shadows of an oleander against the
compound wall, a slender figure broke and ran—away from him.

He was after her in an
instant. The bloated moon showed her frightened, somehow innocent face, her
dark and troubled eyes. Her skirts flew. She ran noiselessly, having kicked off
her high European heels. She was trying to get around the dark, brooding house
to the other side.

He caught up with her at
the carp pond and seized at a flung arm, checked her, and whipped her about
toward him. She tried to claw free, scratching at his face. She cursed him,
panting, half her words Thai and half French, none of them printable and all of
them shocking, coming unexpectedly from her blonde, angelic face.

He slapped her. Hard.

“I’ve had enough, honey.
Behave yourself.”

“Murderer!” she gasped.
“Let me go!”

She wrenched away. He
tripped her deliberately and made her fall into the carp pond.

The splash sounded
enormous in the still compound. He didn’t care. In his frustrated mood, he was
ready to take on any and all interference.

The French girl
sputtered and wailed and splashed furiously. He felt sorry for the carp that
shot in panic across the pool, like silver reflections of the moon, trying to
avoid her. When he pulled her out, her silk frock clung satisfactorily to her
rich body. Her long hair was bleached almost white by the Thai sun, and her
arms had a tan that could only have been acquired by a lifetime on the tea
plantations that terraced the distant highlands.

He grinned at her fury
and dishevelment. “Take it easy, sweetheart.”

“You—you monster!”

“But I won’t hurt you.
Promise to stand still, will you?” He turned sober then. “Don’t run away
again.”

“I was not running!”

“You left the hotel
without permission. You promised to stay in your room and keep out of sight of
any Cong Hai who might be looking for you. I don’t have to tell you
how dangerous this way you just took could have been. As it was, it almost
killed me.”

She showed no sympathy,
even when her eyes touched the bruises on his face and the streak of blood on
the back of his neck. “It is my prerogative to change my mind,” she said
tightly. “I will no longer go along with you and Deirdre.”

“And what caused the
change of heart? Who lives here? Who did you hope to see and what did you hope
to do?”

“Oh, you are always the
policeman, aren’t you!” Her voice was scornful. Standing before him, dripping
water, diminutive but extraordinarily feminine, she looked like a child; but
Durell knew that Anna-Marie Danat had gone to finishing school with
Deirdre Padgett, and was in her late twenties. She said bitterly: “With you it
is always the questions, always the demand for blunt and brutal answers.”

“I don’t always get the
answers, Anna-Marie.”

“I came here to see
Uncle Chang." She lifted her small chin defiantly and slashed angrily at
her wet, almost white hair. “I’ve known Uncle Chang since I was a little girl.
He was always kind to me when Papa—when Papa was busy away from the plantation.
I thought I could slip out of the hotel and get his advice tonight.”

“About Orris Lantern?”

Her blue eyes darkened.
“And about you, Sam.”

“But mostly about Orris.”

“Yes.”

“You know I’m going to
find him and bring him home to the States, it it’s possible.”

“Yes. So you say.”

“Anna-Marie, it’s my
job,” he told her patiently.

“But I could see in your
eyes,” she said, “when you told me Orris was a traitor to your
country and had been a prisoner in Hanoi and Peiping for so long, how you hate
him. You call him a defector, a double agent, a man who chose treason, but who
now seeks sanctuary. You do not trust him. You do not know him, but you have
already judged and condemned him.”

She paused, then added
with a new and quiet dignity: “I will not help you or Deirdre anymore. If I can
prevent it, I will not let you take Orris Lantern home with you.
He—he loves me, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know,”
Durell said, and cursed silently over this omission from the briefing he’d had
three days ago in Washington. “Nobody told me you knew him that well.”

“Orris is fine and
good. I know. I feel it.” She touched her breast with a curiously old-fashioned
gesture. “And I cannot let you do what I know you plan to do to him. I cannot
let you kill the man I love.”

                                               
 
3

HE FOUND a pedicab in
a larger street only a few steps from the peaceful isolation of “Uncle Chang’s”
house on the 
klong
. He was careful about the girl, keeping a firm
hand on her slender wrist. She wept a little when he walked with her through
the empty house where she had sought refuge.

“Anna-Marie, I’m not
your enemy. Orris asked you to help him, didn’t he? And you called on
Deirdre, your old friend, and she called on me. I’m not a policeman, as you
seem to think—”

“No, I know What you
are,” she said bitterly. “The Cong Hai would call you an imperialist,
war-mongering spy-”

“Is that what you call
me, too?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I
don’t know what to think now. I’m frightened. I admit it. Perhaps I was foolish
to try to run away from you, after promising I would help.”

“What did you hope to
gain from this ‘Uncle Chang"?”

She smiled wanly. She
wore no lipstick. “He is not a real uncle. There are two brothers, twins, and
one is Papa’s plantation manager, named Paio Chu. Chang was also
employed in the mountains with the tea cultivation. But then he became a
merchant and moved back here to the sea and became very rich and important. I
haven’t seen Uncle Chang for-—oh, five years. But I—I always loved him, and
thought of him as a kind and wise old man.”

“But a Chinese?”

“Of course. Are all
Chinese suspect in your eyes?”

“Right now, yes.”

“Then you 
are
 a
monster, just as I said.”

“I’m trying to stay
alive. And to keep you and Orris Lantern alive, too. Where do you
suppose your Uncle Chang could be? No servants in the house, nobody around.”

“It is peculiar,” she
admitted. “But he is probably away on a business trip.”

“To Hanoi? Or Peiping,
maybe?”

Her eyes flashed with
quick Gallic fury, then she saw he was teasing her and she returned a small,
provoked smile of her own. “I do not understand you. You are a strange man, and
you frighten me.”

“Just don’t run away
again. I need you. But if Orris Lantern and you are lovers,
then 
he
 needs you, too.”

Nothing happened on the
way back to the single habitable hotel in Gia Pnom. No one followed
them, no one dashed at them with a murderous knife. Along the single paved road
that followed the curve of the tropical shore, he could see a faintly lingering
band of lime-green light over the Gulf of Siam, where the sea picked up long, oily
bands of starlit radiance in its stagnant, tepid lift and fall with the world’s
tidal breath. Lights shone along the Embankment Road, where French-built houses
of Victorian style, from the last century, made an impressive facade that hid
the tumult and color and seething native life behind it. The wind blew from the
sea, down the long tropical coast from Bangkok to the northwest, and it smelled
of many things——of exotic vegetation and cooking and death. There was death in
the very air here, Durell thought, hiding quietly behind the shine in every
man’s eyes. Death and terror, sliding like twin snakes into a garden of
paradise.

The Palace Hotel stood
in lush gardens on a small square facing the Government House, flanked on one
side by a Catholic church and on the other by an ancient Buddhist temple. After
the maze of canals and alleys of the native quarter along the river, it was
like being transported suddenly into a stage-setting of Victorian Europe. But
the tropical palms, the chattering monkeys, the silent saffron-robed Buddhist
monks, and the yells of the peddlers of spicy chili peppers and rice were
jarring notes that nothing could hide. Along the sidewalks were women in
traditional 
panungs
, the gaily colored cloth wrapped tightly about
graceful hips and falling in soft drapes to their tiny feet. The Thais were a
happy people who smiled easily and loved their traditional freedom and who were
fiercely proud of their ancient and honorable history here on the “Golden
Peninsula.” Modern ideologies that warped the international world seemed remote
from this provincial port town. But the enemy had filtered down over the
highlands and through the jungles, along the dense green riverways and
narrow roads that threaded past the rubber and teak and tea plantations, down
into the coastal lands where rice paddles glistened in a heat that numbed the
mind and drained the energy of Western man.

The enemy could be right
here in the hotel, behind its facade of quiet comfort.

Durell kept a grip on
the girl as he paid off the pedicab and waved away the solicitous
attendant at the door. Anna-Marie straightened her shoulders with pride.

“You need not hold me as
if I were a prisoner," she said. “I will not run away again.”

“Is that a promise?”

“Yes, I promise. For
now.”

“Okay. You’ve got a
parole, then.”

She walked proudly ahead
across the tiled floor of the Palace lobby, with its rattan furniture and huge
wooden fans. The fans were motionless, and the light came from scores of oil
lanterns and candles set about the lobby. The power had failed again. It could
be sabotage, or simple mechanical failure. The oil lamps might look romantic,
Durell thought grimly, but just now, they couldn’t be more dangerous.

He ignored the
solicitous comments of the alert Thai staff who noted his wet clothes and the
blood on his shirt and face. He muttered something about a minor accident and,
ignoring the useless elevator, ushered the French girl up the broad steps to
the upper floor and down the wide, shadowed corridor to his room. On the way,
he knocked lightly on Deirdre Padgett’s door and kept going; she would join him
‘in his own room in a moment, he hoped. ‘

“I must change my
clothes,” Anna-Marie protested.