Assignment - Karachi (15 page)

“And you came to help?”

“Naturally. As quickly as possible.”

“Well, I could have done without you, finally.”

“Perhaps. But you must still find the way out of this maze. Omar has many thugs at his command.”

Durell looked at Alessa. In the glow of the flashlights, she was stooping, like a golden, naked goddess, for her

clothing. Omar cowered in a corner, whimpering curses. The lights were turned delicately aside as the girl dressed.

“Are you all right, Alessa?” Durell asked.

“I think so. Yes.”

“Then let’s get out of here.”

Swerji Hamad never forgot business. “I trust you will take my arrival here into consideration when we settle our account, Mr. Durell.”

“You’re too late, Swerji. Omar got my wallet.”

The fat man turned mild eyes on Omar and said something to his evil-looking followers. Omar babbled in return and delved under his muddy green robe and threw Durell’s wallet to the center of the cell. Durell picked it up. All the money was there, with his ID cards and passport.

“Let’s go.”

“Not as we came,” Swerji murmured. “There are too many men to overcome that way. Wisdom is sometimes better than bravery. Follow me. I have something to show you.”

They went out quietly into the corridor, turned right, went up a flight of stone steps. Durell walked with Alessa. She was shivering. Her eyes avoided him. He wondered if it was shame at having been stripped before his eyes.

Swerji Hamad led them on a devious path through empty rooms, down more steps, across a courtyard, up a ladder to a roof, down again into a well-like shaft and through storage rooms of camel saddles, rice, brass manufacture, an opium den in which their passage was hardly noted by the men and women on the low string beds. Not once did they come out on a street. At last Swerji paused before another door.

“You were looking for Ernst Bergmann, Mr. Durell. Your agreement was for two thousand dollars, American cash?”

“Fifteen hundred,” Durell said. “It was for the chart.”

“It was for Mr. Bergmann,” Swerji insisted.

Durell was too tired to argue. “All right.”

“Your man is in here. I am sorry.”

Durell looked into the cell. It smelled of death. He saw the elderly, skeletal old man with the bullet hole in his chest and the skull exploded by a second bullet in the back of his head.

“This was Bergmann?” he asked quietly.

“You have my word for it. He has been dead some hours. I do not know who did this,” Swerji told him. “This place is a Chinese information center, run by Kou Li, a famous patriarch and a good business man. His teahouse is prosperous. Would you like to question him?”

“I want Bergmann’s chart,” Durell said.

“Kou Li held this man prisoner for the past month, and questioned him. Then you arrived in our city, and Bergmann is killed. It seems to me,” Swerji said, “that Bergmann was finally induced to talk and then was executed, his usefulness over. In that case, your enemies obtained the map. But my part of the bargain—”

“Get us to the street,” Durell said. Alessa’s appearance alarmed him. But he made her look at the dead man. “Is this Bergmann?”

“Yes,” Alessa whispered. “This was Uncle Ernst.”

Swerji Hamad was nervous. “Perhaps we had better go. There is one problem left.”

They stood just within a doorway to the street as the fat man explained. Kou Li’s men were in the outer street. If they were spotted, they could never escape. If they could get to the corner, under cover of some confusion—

Swerji Hamad had arranged for it all. Later, Durell would have chosen some other tactic to get by this last hurdle, but by then the damage was done, and it rested on Swerji’s rather plastic conscience. Piercing the cries of the hawkers and merchants on the crowded street of bazaar shops came a single, outraged shriek from a thin little man in a white suit and floppy Panama hat.

“Infidel! Unbeliever! Defiler of Moslem women!”

An utter and complete silence, like the ticking of a bomb, fell on the crowded scene. The object of the small man’s rage was a tall, thin Hindu whose face drained of blood and whose eyes abruptly rolled in terror. He tried to walk around the smaller man, his back stiff, his head erect. The other caught him by the arm, struck him in the face. The Hindu did nothing to retaliate. He tried to leave again, and found himself surrounded by a close press of near-hysterical, angry people in the bazaar.

The tensions of poverty, propaganda, centuries-old hatreds and religious fanaticisms made what followed almost inevitable. There were other Hindus in the crowd, trying to reach the beleaguered man. Their efforts only provided the spark that touched off the riot. In a moment there were shrieks and curses rising to a crescendo. A stone flew. A shot cracked. A man went down, screaming, and was trampled in the dirt underfoot. Sticks, articles of merchandise whipped through the air. Beyond the doorway where Durell and the girl crouched with Swerji Hamad, the street turned into a raging, insane torrent of panic-stricken humanity, each man and woman fighting for survival in the mindless massacre that began.

“Now we may go,” Swerji whispered. “Follow closely behind me.”

“You arranged this?” Durell asked harshly above the tumult.

“They are my men. They will manage to get away. In the distraction, we shall escape, too.”

“But those people are killing—”

“It is their destiny to love and hate and die.” Swerji was not interested. “We must hurry.”

There was nothing Durell could do. He held Alessa close to him, sliding along the shop-fronts away from the center of the human vortex. The faces of the mob of mixed Moslems and Hindus reflected racial and religious panic, an hysteria that could be answered only by explosive violence. From far away came the sound of a military siren, always alert and prompt to respond. But for the moment, Durell was concerned only with getting Alessa away.

A man with a bloody face and a gouged eye ran full tilt into them. Alessa gasped, screamed, and Durell spun the man aside, back toward the mob. He vanished, swallowed in a storm of fists and clubs and knives. Screams and curses filled the air. Smoke from a fire billowed over the scene.

“This way, Durell sahib,” Swerji muttered.

They reached the halfway point to the corner. The Hindu and Moslem who had started the riot had long vanished. There was no sign of Kou Li’s men. Swerji Hamad cursed and kicked aside a bloody man who was trying to crawl out from under the trampling feet of the mob. Shots sounded, and more smoke swirled as the military police arrived. A car waited at the corner.

“Get in,” Swerji gasped. “Get in, before they turn on us.”

Durell glanced back. The police were swinging clubs and rifle butts on the panic-stricken crowd. A few bodies lay sprawled in the narrow lane, Hindu and Moslem alike, victims of volcanic passions. Then Swerji pushed at him.

“Hurry, please.”

They left the scene without being challenged.

It was past midnight. The bazaar was quiet again. In Swerji Hamad’s office, Durell gave the fat man two thousand dollars from his wallet, mostly for future good will. Swerji was honest in that respect; he would recognize the unspoken debt on both sides, and perhaps perform with greater capacity the next time a K Section man called upon him.

Swerji Hamad turned his car and driver over to Durell and Alessa. Durell rejected the driver, said he would take the car himself.

“You will be safe now,” the fat man murmured. “The riot is over. These things can be useful, but most distressing. We live in troubled times, when every man here fears his neighbor, shouts spy against an Indian, just as the Indians murder Moslems in panic. One must use the tools at hand. Do you understand?”

“I understand, but I didn’t like it,” Durell said. “Too many people were hurt.”

“Well, you will be safe now,” the fat man said. “Do not trouble yourself about my car. Leave it wherever it is convenient. I shall get it back in the morning. May you go in peace, Mr. Durell.”

“You learned nothing more about Red Oboe? Or the chart?”

“Herr Bergmann left his appointment with Mr. James Howell at the U.S.I.S. office in Regency Lane and vanished two blocks north, taken by an unidentified taxi, perhaps directly to Kou Li’s place. That is all I know.”

“Thank you, Swerji. Go in peace.”

Alessa was silent as Durell helped her into the car and drove away from Qissa Khani. But he sensed that her silence was different now.

“I’m sorry about Bergmann,” he said. “You were very fond of him, weren’t you?”

“Rudi and I called him uncle, although there was no real relationship,” she said in a low voice. “His end was so ugly, I—feel sick, betrayed—”

“Betrayed?”

“Perhaps that is the wrong word.”

She sat very close to him in the little car, and every now and then he felt an uncontrollable tremor go through her. He drove to the old U.S.I.S. office on Regency Lane, a street of stone Victorian buildings almost a century old. It was quiet and deserted, relatively clean and modern. Policemen were evident two corners away. He drove slowly in that direction, considering the European shops that wen dark and shuttered at this hour. An ambulance stood at the second corner, and a small crowd had gathered, kept from the doorway of a music shop by armed military patrols. The broken window showed several antique Persian and Chinese instruments. The name on the broken glass was German.

Durell stopped the car and spoke to the young subaltern in command. The Pakistani spoke English with an Oxford accent.

“Yes, sir, the proprietor was shot. A plain case of robbery, sir. His safe was opened, you see.”

“Thank you,” Durell said.

He returned thoughtfully to the car. It seemed probable, in view of tonight, that this was where Bergmann had ditched his geological survey chart—-with a fellow countryman. He wondered if there was any significance between the music shop and the name Red Oboe. He decided il merely might be coincidence.

But the fact remained that Bergmann’s chart was now in enemy hands.

THE thug who had tried to strangle him had escaped from the warehouse. The ropes still lay around the rear wheel of the truck, slashed by a knife. Durell sent Alessa into the house and spoke briefly to Colonel K’Ayub about what had happened in the past few hours. K’Ayub did not look as soft as in Karachi. His pale, amber eyes were objective, and he merely nodded and went into the house to telephone.

Everyone was accounted for. Sarah Standish came downstairs in a silk Chinese robe, her hair tousled from sleep, but wearing her defensive, horn-rimmed glasses. In answer to Durell’s question, she said flatly, “Rudi took me sightseeing after the bridge game ended. We were alone together for some time, and he was never out of my sight.” She added, flushing faintly. “After all, we will be married when we return to Europe. Am I to gather from your questions that you suspect one of us of betraying our plans?” “Perhaps I just have a suspicious nature,” he said. “Would you mind if I asked everyone to permit a search of their personal belongings.”

She flushed again. “Yes, I would mind it.”

“I’m afraid I must insist.”

“I forbid it,” she said flatly. “You are all my guests, and I will submit no one to such an embarrassment.”

“You’re being unreasonable, Sarah.”

Her voice was cold. “I have often been accused of that, in making executive decisions for Standish Nickel. Most business men seem to think I am incapable of rational and intelligent behavior—perhaps because I am young, and a woman. I assure you I make few mistakes. In this case,

[ feel that trust among us is essential if we are to share danger in a few days. I will not permit you to air your suspicions.”

“We’ve got to have that map,” he insisted.

“I disagree with your opinion that it may be here.”

There was no arguing with her autocratic nature. She simply :urned away and went upstairs, leaving him with her decision.

Hans Steicher hovered like a granite mountain over Alessa, his face shocked at her mud-streaked appearance, his mute eyes having to guess at what had happened to her. The look he gave Durell was one of hatred and outrage that his goddess might have been in a moment’s danger. Hans said he had not been out of the house at all. He had missed Alessa, then checked on Durell, and discovered them both gone. He’d had a couple of drinks and turned in. Durell thought he looked a little drunk, and dangerous.

When they were gone, he called Karachi on the telephone, giving Donegan’s number. He did not have much faith in Donegan, and he had no regrets at routing the man out of bed. But Donegan’s sleepiness evaporated when Durell told him what he wanted.

“Sure, we’ve got a couple of radio monitoring stations up north, part of the CENTRO outfit. But most of them are directed across Afghanistan, to pick up Soviet stations in Kazan and the Kirghiz Republic.”

“Turn them on Sinkiang and Tibet, where the Chinese are. See if anything special went through that way tonight.” “Check.” Donegan seemed quicker and more efficient, now that Sarah’s safety was no longer his responsibility. “I’ll come back to you in half an hour.”

Durell went upstairs to his own room. A servant had straightened the rumpled bed and the wrecked furniture from his struggle with Omar’s strangler. He stripped off his muddy clothes and got under the antiquated shower, staying there for fifteen minutes. The water was still tepid from the sun-heated storage tank on the roof. He soaped and toweled vigorously, then shaved, keeping his wallet—which still held three thousand of Henry Kallinger’s money—in plain sight next to his gun. His .38 needed attention, too. He stripped it, wiped mud from the barrel, and from his grip took a can of solvent and oil, cleaning the mechanism until it shone. He threw away the cartridges that had been in the chamber and reloaded with fresh bullets. Then he put the gun and his wallet under his pillow, checked the veranda doors again, and turned out the light.

In a moment, someone knocked softly on his bedroom door. He got up and opened it. Alessa stood there, in a pale red robe.

“May I come in?”

He held the door wide and she passed him and sat down on the bed and shivered. A cool wind came through the veranda doors, but it was not that cool. In the moonlight, she looked very pale, her eyes defenseless.