Assignment Moon Girl Read online

  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 witho
ut 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?”

  “Some,” said Durell.

  “You don’t talk much," Sepah complained.

  “You make up for it, Ike.”

  “I went to a religious school—a medersa—when I was a kid. Papa was a member of the Majlis—the House of Parliament. I was kicked out when they caught me in one of those flashy, wicked nightclubs. They chased me all the way down the Lalezar, but I wasn’t quick enough. I was trying for the Bazar—that’s a real Persian word, you know-but didn’t make it. So I joined the army. Cavalry. I always liked horses. I’m not sorry.”

  “Watch the way you fly this plane,” Durell said.

  “You nervous, Shemouel? That’s Farsi for ‘Sam.’ ”

  “Just cautious."

  Sepah laughed. He had strong, white teeth. “Here we are. In case you don’t know it, I’m your guide, secretary, and general man Friday. Orders from upstairs.”

  “I guessed as much.”

  In Isfahan, crushed by the August heat that reflected a stony glimmer of the deserts, they were met by a Land Rover driven by a man named Hanookh Ghatan. Hanookh and Ike looked enough alike to be twins. They didn’t go into town. There were rifles, grenades, and what looked like a small rocket-launcher in the heavy car, incongruous attachments under a striped and fringed canopy that sheltered them from the stinging rays of the sun.

  “We go to the Englishman,” Hanookh announced.

  Ike Sepah laughed. “You see, it is all arranged. Very easy, very efficient.”

  It was too easy, Durell thought, and therefore worrisome. There were too many people involved, and it needed sorting out. He felt a nagging concern that Tanya, whether she had been on the moon or not-—and that would be the most dumbfounding Soviet space coup yet—was not rightfully K Section’s business. He had seen no sign of the KGB’s activity. They were around, he knew. He never underestimated them. Meanwhile, he apparently had Chinese, English, and Iranians to contend with. There was a smell of internal Iranian politics, too. He shook his head and sat back in the jouncing Land Rover, behind the two boyish Farsis, and watched the landscape go by.

  Long ago, in what seemed another time and another world, he had hunted in the bayous with his old Grandpa Jonathan, and the old man had taught him some basic principles of life and survival. He remembered the green and black shadows of the bayous, the stately shimmer of a heron’s wings, the mysterious angles of a cheniere under live oak and Spanish moss, and the slow rock of the pirogue as he poled the old man forward. Grandpa Jonathan was the last of the old Mississippi riverboat gamblers, who had won on a single throw of the dice the hulk of the old sidewheeler, the Trois Belles, that Durell remembered as his boyhood home.

  Once there had been a choice of game under their guns-—and he had hesitated, watching the deer and fox escape in that moment. The old man, however, made his selection at once, and his gun cracked once, dropping the deer.

  “You suffered an embarrassment of riches, Samuel,” old Jonathan had said. “You must learn to concentrate on one goal at a time. Don’t be distracted.”

  Durell seemed to hear the old gentleman’s words over the creak and roar of the Land Rover as they headed out into the desert from Isfahan. This land was far from Bayou Peche Rouge, where he had been born. Older in civilization, wise and weary, and as dangerous as a viper coiled on a desert rock, blending its color with the granitic stone.

  “There he is, sir,” said Hanookh.

  Durell looked back instead of forward. A plume of gray dust lifted like a feather against the hot sky.

  “We’re being followed.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Sepah. “I’ve noticed, too.”

  “Who is it?”

  “I thought we might double back after picking up your Englishman.”

  “He’s not my Englishman.”

  “Mr. Hannigan says you’re to work with him.” Ike grinned. “You think I know too much? But you and I are friends and partners, like a grape on the vine, eh?”

  “We’ll see,” said Durell.

  The Rover came to a rocking halt, and dust boiled up around them. They were in a canyon where shadows were black, nothing grew, and the sun was a blinding glitter on the rim above. A man stood on the top, waving his arms. He looked like a painfully thin scarecrow, with a ragged turban wrapped around his head. He wore tattered walking shorts, sneakers, a striped shirt. A rifle struck sun-sparks from the barrel as he waved it in his left hand.

  “Mr. Adam Beele,” said Sepah complacently, “is a bit mad. He always looks for Iskander’s Garden.”

  “I’ve heard of the fable.”

  “No, sir. It exists. But the archeologists’ team, to which Mr. Beele belongs as a cover for his British M.6 mission in my country, has not found it yet.”

  “You know he’s M.6 and don’t do anything about it?”

  “Why should we?” Hanookh put in. “He’s harmless.”

  Adam Beele came scrambling down the rocky canyon wall to meet them. As he approached, Hanookh took a rifle and two grenades from the Rover’s arms rack and walked back to the canyon mouth. The dust plume of the car that had followed them had now disappeared. Durell touched his own .38 in its holster under his cotton coat, pushed up his sunglasses, and got out of the Rover, careful not to touch any of the car‘s hot metal.

  “Durell?” The voice was pure Oxonian, an educated drawl that did not conceal a shortness of breath and the painful rasp of lungs in the canyon’s furnace heat. “I’m Adam Beele. What’s left of me, Yank. Welcome to hell.”

  “You’ve been hurt.”

  “I believe I have a broken rib,” said the Englishman. He was trying to ignore the pain, which was engraved on his lean face. “Perhaps two ribs. I fell, while running.”

  “Why were you running?”

  “Some people from the camp tried to tag along. Workers, I thought. Then I saw their weapons.” Beele looked at Ike Sepah. “Your people, laddy?”

  “Don’t know.” Sepah looked serious. “How many?”

  "Four. Very determined chaps.”

  "Get in,” Durell said. “We’re followed, too.”

  Hanookh ran back from the canyon mouth and dropped to a seat in front with Sepah. “All clear,” he said. But he kept his rifle in his lap.

  “Head north by northeast, Ike,” said Beele. He extended a thin hand to Durell. “Sepah is in the same profession, old man. We have an understanding. Glad you’re with us. We’ll get along. Object is to find that girl. Can’t keep the silly child, of course. But it would do a spot of good to recover her, have a brief chat, and then give her back where she belongs.”

  “Are those your orders?”

  “Yours, too, old
chap. Are you annoyed?”

  “We have too many cooks,” Durell said.

  Sepah drove, guided by the compass on the dashboard. An apparently trackless waste stretched northward. This part of the desert was known as the Dasht-i-Lut. It was rimmed by unsurveyed, barren hills, crossed by only one caravan trail from Podanu across a string of sparse oases to Darreh Bab. Its most distinguished landmark was a distant glare of sunlight on the towering peak of Kuh-e-Jamal, some sixty miles northeast. The floor of the desert was thin sand blown over rock, gravel, or tumbled stone. Nothing green grew to relieve the eye. The westering sun glared a baleful white and tried to fry their brains as the Rover rocked ahead. Sepah’s foot floored the pedal dangerously. The canvas top flapped and snapped and threatened to tear loose at any moment.

  “Allah’s garden for the damned,” Beele murmured.

  “Let me look at your rib.”

  “I’m all right.”

  But Durell took a first-aid kit from its straps and taped the Englishman’s side as best he could in the rocking vehicle. He noted that the Rover had cans of water, fuel, and food in addition to the weapons. They were reasonably self-sufficient in this desert of stone. Now and then he glanced back. But he saw nothing of their vague pursuers. In the mirror, he met Sepah’s dark, liquid eyes. The Farsi grinned, his teeth flashing white under his moustache.

  “They are there. We go tond, fast, and they keep up. I see the sunlight now and then, on both of them.”

  “Both?”

  “Do. Two.”

  “Can you lose them?”

  “Farda. Tomorrow.”

  Adam Beele smiled thinly. “Ike knows where I’ve been hunting for the girl. It’s a long trek. We turn west soon, head for the Chasmeh-e-Shotoran. I call it Satan’s Throat. It’s a sandy plain between two thrusts of higher land. Some old Achaemenid ruins there. Then we go across twenty miles of gravel, to Howz-e-Mirza. More ruins. After that, the really bad lands begin, the great salt desert of Kavir. Hope you can stand the heat.”

  After another hour, Sepah, guided by some mysterious sign in the changeless desert, abruptly veered west. The lowering sun was a blinding red ball before them. Durell appreciated his sunglasses. Beele sank down into a quiet abyss of pain. He was about fifty, with thinning sandy hair and a small yellowish beard, gaunt cheeks, and the bone structure of the British upper classes. His gray eyes, when not clouded by the pain of his broken rib, were smoothly intelligent.