Assignment Lili Lamaris Read online

  One

  DURELL FLEW from New York via an Alitalia airliner directly to the Ciampino Airport outside of Rome, and he used the regular bus service to get to his hotel on the Via Veneto, not far from the Palazzo Margherita, where the American Embassy was located. It was November and raining that day, and there were not many tourists to crowd the hotel or the city streets. The room had been reserved ia advance for him, and it should have been safe enough; but after he unpacked and changed his shirt and shaved, he went over all the fumitmre and prints on the walls anyway, just to be sure. He found nothing. He had lunch at the hotel and at one o'clock telephoned to Harvey Shedlock from a booth, using the number he had been told to memorize ia Washington. The CIA drop was near the stairway of the Piazza di Spagna. He met Shedlock at a cafe beyond the wide steps to the Via Condotti, and they took a cab to a small house oflE the Via Margutta, in the artists' quarter of Rome.

  Nobody followed them.

  The rain was warm, and the taxi was stuffy and smelled of old leather and damp wool, but it was not warm enough to warrant the beads of perspiration on Harvey Shedlock's thin, aristocratic face. They spoke briefly of the weather, using Italian only, as two friends might who had met for a casual afternoon, and for a time Durell stared out at the streets, the hurrying crowds, the gray stone buildings of Rome. The sky was dark and lowering.

  "You look fine, Sam," Shedlock said. 'Taking a rest cure?"

  "I was about to start on one." The taxi halted, and Shedlock paid the fare, and Durell added, when the cab drove off: "I understand I'm being tossed to the Narcotics Division of Treasury. How come?"

  "Not exactly that way. It ties in with State, of coinrse, or we wouldn't be in it at aU. That's why K Section was asked to lend you on this one. Narcotics and espionage often go hand in hand, you know."

  "Who's in charge?" Durell asked.

  "You are, now." Shedlock smiled uncertainly. It's your baby, and we're dropping it into your lap. I'm afraid it's grown into a hell of a monster."

  "I wasn't briefed in Washington," Durell pointed out.

  "I know. That's my job. Come on, we'll go up and dry out. I've got some brandy and Cinzano and soda, if you like."

  "Fine," Durell said.

  He wondered how much Shedlock had already had to drink.

  The house off the Via Margutta was another CIA drop, a small, narrow building crammed between others of the same stamp, surrounding a wide-bricked court reached by tunnel-like arcades that pierced the ancient buildings at the street level. The rain had emptied the big courtyard, but there was a muted hum of radios, television, voices, the clinking of bottles, the shrill lift of a woman's voice in argument. Artists' quarters were the same everywhere in the world, Durell reflected, and he let Shedlock lead the way up twisting flights of dark stairs to the fourth floor, and then down a long corridor. Here and there a room door stood open and afforded a glimpse of the occupants' lives: a rumpled bed with a woman drowsing, twisted languorously in the sheets; a stout, bearded man staring blankly at a clean canvas on an easel; a quartet of men and women drinking, laughing, leaning on a rickety table. Shedlock headed for a studio in the back of the house. Nobody met them here, and Harvey used a key to let himself in. His thin hands trembled a little, trying to find the lock, and Durell said, "What's the matter, Harvey? Nerves?"

  Shedlock's grin was too quick and gaunt. "A little."

  "You've been hitting the bottle, haven't you?"

  "Good reason to."

  "Not in this business."

  "I can't help it," Shedlock said thinly. "I've been getting some nasty premonitions lately. And I haven't been able to sleep mudi."

  They went inside the studio. Shedlock forgot to close and lock the door, and Durell did it for him. Shedlock paid no attention to the open windows that yielded on an iron-grilled balcony overlooking the wet courtyard below, and Durell stepped out into the rain briefly and saw that the balcony was not connected to the next studio, but came back and closed the windows, anyway. Shedlock was pouring a drink from a bottle on a dark walnut cupboard. Durell checked the drop quickly, finding only a small tiled bathroom with an ancient zinc tub, a marble washstand, ragged towels. There was a gas burner for cooking and a shelf of canned provisions. The high-powered shortwave radio was poorly concealed in a chest shoved under the old, sagging, brass-posted bed. Durell's lean, dark face was expressionless, showing none of his dissatisfaction.

  "Did you know Purdy Kent?" Shedlock asked suddenly.

  "I've heard of him. Narcotics man."

  "He's been coddling the monster up until now. Working it through this girl, subject Lili Lamaris. She*s living down the coast a way, and Purdy was due back last night to report. He got back to Rome, all right, yesterday morning, but he only made it as far as the morgue. The monster up and cut his throat in an alley not far from here. The local police found him. His cover papers made him a Swiss, but the Embassy people got wind of the body and I went to take a look. It was Purdy, all right."

  Durell spoke quietly. 'Was he careless?"

  'Who knows?" Shedlock shrugged narrow shoulders. He looked middle-aged and tired. "You've been in the business long enough, Sam. You know how it goes—a damned shadow war, and you need eyes in the back of your head all the time. Purdy Kent must have looked the other way for a minute, that's all."

  Dinrell said nothing. He had known Kent, a chunky man with a bristling crop of yellow hair, only casually. But even so, it was never easy to learn that another man had fallen. Death came in many ways to men he had worked with. Sometimes it came with a cut throat in a Roman slum, or a sudden shove under a London bus; or maybe you were found floating, belly up, in the Red Sea, with a mutilated body and blind eyes staring at the Arabian sun. It was simply the business they were in, as Harvey Shedlock said.

  The room was momentarily quiet, and he could hear the soft whisper of the rain on the balcony dripping to the courtyard below. There was an easel over near the windows holding an unfinished abstract in muted blues and greens that made him think of an Amy Ressar, and that had a stained-glass quaUty that surprised him, since Shedlock's cover here as an artist in the Via Margutta was not his usual stint. Shedlock had been a comparative analyst for State until two years ago, when his knowledge of the Continent at a time when the field force was shorthanded required his transfer to the unit in Rome. His voice was thin and jerky, as if the words were pulled out of him by wires.

  "Where does K Section fit in with Narcotic Operations?" Durell asked.

  "I told you it's tied to an espionage ring," Shedlock said. "And our only key is this Lili Lamaris. My job is to get you an opening with her, so she'll trust you—and I don't know if that's a break or a death warrant."

  "She sounds interesting. Put away the bottle, Harvey," Durell said. "You've had enough."

  "Sorry. I didn't think it showed."

  "It shows plenty."

  "I put in a request to be sent home, you know. I've had enough. A bellyful. And now with Purdy Kent in the morgue I guess my nerves are a bit shot. I keep having the feeling that I'm next."

  "Tell me about Lili," Durell said. "And take it easy."

  "She's our only lead. I'll work the old one-two game with you—I play the heavy, you play the hero and save her from me and earn her undying gratitude. If you can climb into the hay with her, so much the better."

  "Go on," Durell said.

  "Well, if the gimmick works, you stick with Lili until she gets you to where we want you to go."

  Durell listened quietly as Shedlock spoke. Durell was a big man, with dark, thick hair and a small, carefully groomed moustache. He moved with an air of supple, easy muscular coordination, and he gave the impression of being able to sit and listen for an indefinite tim
e without moving, absorbing everything about him with all his senses. His eyes were dark with perpetual caution, since caution was the key to survival in his business. He missed nothing around him. His hands were long and strong and dextrous—a gamblers hands—and his tendency to gamble when all the rules of his trade called for the extreme calculation of risk was the despair of General Dickinson McFee, chief of K Section of the Central Intelligence Agency of the State Department.

  Durell had been at this sort of thing for a long time —longer than he cared to remember. In his thirties now, he had begun in the old OSS during the war in Europe, shifting from Army G2, and afterward he had gone through the intensive training at the Farm estabhshed in the Maryland countryside when the CIA was organized in the postwar years of the cold war. The war had never really ended for men like Shedlock and himself, he thought; but it was a dififerent sort of war now—one of shadows, as Shedlock put it, fought in the alleys and byways of the cities of the world. It was a never-ending battle of stealth, ingenuity, swift decision and swifter death. Casualties came with no blare of trumpets, and no medals were awarded to the victors in the struggle. You died quietly and anonymously, Hke Pin-dy Kent had died in an alley nearby. If you hved, it was partly through luck and partly due to the never-ending caution, and you went on to the next job, never knowing which straw might ultimately tip the scales in this divided world balanced on the fine edge of ultimate destruction.

  Long ago, during his boyhood years in the Cajun bayou country of Louisiana, he had been taught the art of hunting and trapping by his old grandfather, Jonathan, who had been the last of the Mississippi side-wheeler gamblers. Home for Durell in those boyhood years had been the old hulk of the steamboat Trois Belles, run up on the mud banks of Bayou Peche Rouge. The old man had taught him every trick of the gambler's trade; but more important, he had inculcated in him the psychology of the hunter whose game was not necessarily the prey of the swamps, but man himself, to be stalked with the most patience and guile, and with infinite care.

  He thought of this while he listened to Harvey Shed-lock's briefing.

  Shedlock was saying: "We've been aware of the sudden increase in die number of espionage personnel trained against us. People from every country, in all walks of life. Not necessarily trained agents, but informers, spies, snoopers. Little people, who are paid phenomenally well—in American dollars. That sort of thing takes a lot of money and an unwholesome amoumt of U.S. currency. It was Purdy Kent who discovered where the money was coming from. Remember, I said American dollars, Sam, paying for an army of spies working against us."

  Durell glanced at the windows that opened on the balcony overlooking the courtyard. The afternoon was noisy again, above the rain.

  "Purdy Kent," Shedlock continued, "got wind of the American currency floating around Switzerland and Austria and ran it down. It turned out to be syndicate money flowing from a narcotics ring operating in the States. They buy their heroin here in Western Europe. The source of the dope gave us a lot of trouble, but Purdy was good at his work—up to a point." Shedlock paused, and his eyes stared into a dark void for a moment. "Purdy traced the heroin to Red Chinese sources —and a quantity from the Middle East, too. They distribute the narcotics in a flood through whatever consulates and embassies are recognized in this part of the world. Some of the trade is legitimate, of course, channeled into medical supphes. But a big part of the stuff is being sold to organized American criminal syndicates, in exchange for U.S. cash, which, in turn, is being used to finance and subsidize this increase of agents working against us here."

  "And Purdy's next problem," Durell anticipated, "was to locate the specific source of the American cash."

  "Right. Treasury- got into it by tracing synndicate money over here. When it came out that this money was buing a whole army of spies and informers. State came into it, and K Section—and here you are."

  "This Lili Lamaris,** Durell said. "Is she the ballet dancer the magazines have written up recently?"

  Shedlock nodded. "Have you seen her performances?"

  "No. I've only read about her casually."

  "She's the hottest entertainment attraction on the Continent. Or at least, she was, until she suddenly retired three months ago, pleading exhaustion. She made the lads stand up and take notice whenever she came on stage. A sensation. Beautiful," Shedlock sighed. "Poor little rich girl who made good on her own. You know about papa?"

  "Dante Lamaris, the ship owner?"

  "The same. But they dont get along, apparently. And although our Lili lived a sheltered life, for all of her public exhibitions, she changed completely when she met and fell for Mitch Martin."

  "The fellow who was up before the Senatorial Investigating Committee that tried to clean up the Mafia and the other syndicates?"

  "Right," Shedlock said again. "Purdy Kent verified all this right down the line. Her dossier is on file now at the Embassy on the Via Veneto. You can check it there. Colonel Powelton has it."

  "I'll take your word for it. I'd like to stay away from the Embassy."

  "Whatever you say. But do you know about Mitch Martin?"

  "Suspected kingpin of the narcotics peddlers in New York. Indicted by the Kings County Grand Jury in '57," Durell said. "About forty, big, handsome, college educated. No evidence for the prosecution, though—no witnesses left around to testify. Where is he now?"

  "Last seen on the Riviera, in Nice, about a month ago. He Hves high, you know. Pretends to be a gentleman. He vanished, dropped clean out of sight one afternoon," Shedlock said flatly. "We think he's got close to a million in syndicate cash, hard American currency, on him somewhere. Do you want the trackdown on the cash? Treasury did a lot of research."

  "I'll take your word for it," Durell said again. "I'm not an accountant."

  "We had six men covering Mitch Martin, but he got away from us anyway. Dont ask me how. If anybody knew, Purdy Kent could have told us. As a matter of fact, he was coming here to make his report on it, but he only got as far as the alley. That's where somebody opened his throat for him."

  Durell stood up once more and walked to the iron-railed balcony and looked down at the courtyard below. A man in a black raincoat and a green Panizza hat stood smoking a cigarette in the afternoon shadows, just inside the timnel entrance that cut through the rabbit warren of artists' quarters. He watched the green hat and considered what he knew about Mitchell T. Martin, filling in a mental dossier from his memory.

  Martin was the new breed of domestic criminal, educated and handsome, with legitimate business interests to cover his illegal enterprises. Durell had seen news photos of the man—muscular, well-dressed, with cropped brown hair and pale eyes like a tiger, defying the press and the court. The man had a quick, arrogant mind, a penchant for danger, a ruthless personaHty. Durell listened quietly as Shedlock described how Lili Lamaris, the ballerina, and Mitch Martin, the criminal, had met on the Riviera and fallen in love. There had been a whirlwind courtship, an attraction between magnetic opposites, it seemed. And the weight of evidence showed that, of the two, Lili was far more deeply involved than Mitch Martin. She had cancelled her tour contracts and retired, announcing to the newspapers that she was in desperate need of extended rest. After that, she wasn't seen very much in public. The Narcotics Bureau people, working through Purdy Kent, had added her to their Hst of suspects; and when Martin disappeared, Lili Lamaris had waited two days and then taken the train to Rome, and from here she had gone on down the coast halfway to Naples, where she shut herself up in a villa in a small fishing town named San Eufemia.

  'We've got to pick up the trail on Mitch Martin again," Shedlock said. "We're pretty sure he's got the American cash with him, and there's no doubt he's ready to make the meet and pick up the heroin in exchange for the cash. But we can't find him. The girl is our only clue. If we lose her, we lose the whole game."

  'What makes you think Mitch will contact her again?"

  "We intercepted a telegram delivered to her from Martin just bef
ore she left Nice. He asked her to meet him on the twenty-second, next week, but no meeting place was specified. It must have been prearranged. We have to assume she knows where to find Mitch."

  "She hasn't been approached directly for help?"

  'Washington hasn't authorized it yet."

  "Doesn't she realize what kind of man Mitch Martin is?"

  Shedlock shrugged. **How could she help not knowing? But love can do strange things to a woman."

  Durell remained at the window to watch the man in the black raincoat and green Panizza hat. Then a girl in a plastic shcker came hurrying down the iron steps to the inner courtyard and ran, awkwardly, hip-swaying, toward the waiting man. The man took her arm and they vanished into me tunnel to the street.

  He turned away. You had to be careful, he told himself. Even though the Panizza hat had been waiting for a date, it could mean something. Or nothing at all.

  *We've got six men," Shedlock said, "working around the clock in shifts, watching the girl in her villa at Eufemia. The local police are out of it, of course. We've tried to shake down the villa, thinking Lili might be the carrier for Martin's cash; but we haven't been able to get inside. And we don't want to alarm the girl. She may really be perfectly innocent, but it might blow up the whole thing. At the same time, we don't think her move from Nice to San Eufemia was just a spur-of-the-moment thing. It looked to Purdy Kent as if this was a preliminary arrangement worked out by Martin. She's laying low until she goes to meet Martin again."

  "Couldn't she be trailed without all this hocus-pocus?"

  Shedlock moved his shoulders in a shrug. "It would be easier to do it if we got a man inside the organization. We'll try to follow her, of course. But you know Mitch Martin's reputation. He's tough and cunning. He must know by now that we're trying to tag him. And he'll be careful how he works on the girl, too."

  Durell said, "Martin could be using her as a blind, to decoy us away from his transaction."

  "Maybe. But what can we do about it?" Shedlock looked at the floor, kneaded his hands together, licked his lips nervously. He looked worn out and exhausted. "The main thing is to nail Mitch Martin. Stop the narcotics delivery, confiscate the American currency, and dry up the paymaster ring that's buying this expansion of espionage personnel operating against us."