Assignment - School for Spies Page 2

  "Durell?" It was a woman's voice, young and impatient, with that strange businesslike quality sometimes achieved by career girls.

  "I'm here," he said.

  "I have five hundred Swiss francs for pocket money and four hundred American dollars and a first-class ticket on Swiss Air Flight 22 for New York tomorrow at ten hundred hours. Leave your package in the Oberhaus safe. Ill send the money and tickets over by messenger, who will pick up Central's item for me."

  "Don't waste your time," he said.

  "My dear man, I'm only obeying orders, and they come from Geneva."

  He told her what he thought of Geneva Central. "I'm coming over to talk with you," he said. "I want some help."

  She spoke with an exaggerated patience. "Mr. Durell. You are shingling off the roof here, and you know it." She had a strong Midwestern accent, and said "ruf" instead of using the long Eastern "o." She sighed again. "If you keep on your present course, you may blow our operation here."

  "That's up to you. I'm still coming over."

  "But I have orders, I told you. Now, please—the shop has been closed for the day—"

  "I'll see you soon. I assume you're Marge Jones."

  "Is there a law against that?"

  He hung up.

  He breathed angrily. He would have liked a drink of bourbon, but decided against it. He unpacked only the necessities from the grip he had bought in Athens en route to the Hellenikon airport four days ago. A lot of time had been wasted. Geneva had deliberately delayed him. Now he had burned too many bridges behind him ever to go back. What he had refused to do for Deirdre, in the peace and safety of the Chesapeake shore house, he had done without hesitation the moment he heard of her defection.

  Her alleged defection.

  He didn't believe in it.

  He never would.

  Not if it killed him, as it well might.

  He'd had a bad time of it recently. He'd both won and lost on his last job, and had cut short his recuperation and leave in Athens when he'd heard about Deirdre. Perhaps he was off-balance, emotionally and physically. It was not a promising condition for survival in his business. But he couldn't go back now.

  It was a lonely feeling, to defy orders and feel betrayed, not by any one individual, because he did not believe the dossier on Deirdre, but by events that had rapidly turned him into something of an outcast. He'd always thought of himself as a homeless person, but he knew now that he had been part of something vital and important, and that he had belonged within a pattern of meaning that was also vital and important to him. Now it seemed as if he knew nothing, and shadows waited for him everywhere, hiding pitfalls that yawned underfoot.

  Not that Switzerland did not put on her usual display of spectacularly tidy, sunny beauty. The air was crisp and clean when he left the hotel by a side door and crossed the parking lot where the Ferraris and Mercedeses and the VW's waited in a new democratic patience under their burdens of ski gear. The wind was cold. The sun was warm. The mountains loomed in massive, incredible silhouettes against the afternoon light. He heard a church bell somewhere, and the flat clonking of a cow bell. A girl laughed, a man called, and there was congenial movement behind the wide glass windows of the lounge where the guests met in moist, alcoholic clots before the fireplace.

  He carried the coding machine in its handled case on the short walk to Marge Jones' shop.

  The village street was lined with other shops adapted from the original peasant houses of Tiigensberg. They catered to the tourists, the sports lovers, the Alpinists, and the lovers of secret, dark corners and strong drink. An early snow lingered in the corners and byways and on the overhanging, rustic eaves of the old houses. The street looped back on itself at a lower level, and at the corner some workmen were taking down a sign that announced in four languages, somehow omitting English, a fashion show sponsored by Gritti of Roma. Since Deirdre worked as a fashion reporter for Washington newspapers and stateside magazines, she was often in Europe for just such assignments. Durell hesitated, and looked back the way he had come, up the storybook street.

  The man he had recognized as a Gehlen operative out of Munich, who had been in the lobby when he checked in, was sauntering along behind him. He had a girl with him now, and they looked like lovers on a mountain holiday. The girl was very pretty, very busty, in a woolen sweater and stretch slacks of a bright plum color. The plum was a mistake, of course, but then she might be an amateur, picked up by the German out of sudden need.

  He waited for them. The man he knew as Kampp didn't want the confrontation, but he had no choice, and he was professional enough not to pull anything like pausing to stare into a shop window in the empty village street. He came on with a wry smile.

  Durell looked at him with blue eyes that seemed black with his impatience and anger, and said: "Herr Kampp, I know who you are, and I'm telling you, quietly and just once, to buzz off. Right now, and for good."

  "I am sorry, it is my job, Herr Durell. You know me then? It is flattering." When Rudolf Kampp smiled, he showed marvelously white, even teeth; he was a regular toothpaste ad with his handsome, bronzed, Nordic face. He smiled a lot. He was proud of his teeth, even if they were false, and the way he had lost his real ones might be an interesting story, Durell thought. Kampp said: "I have been assigned as liaison with Geneva Central on the problem you create, sir. Really, Herr Durell, you outrank me, but in these unusual circumstances, when one of our own people blunders out of line—"

  "I don't blunder. And I'm not one of your people. Is that what Geneva says I'm doing?"

  "By coming here, you directly disobey orders."

  "I'm on leave of absence."

  "You were recalled and ordered back to New York."

  "So I didn't get the message, right?"

  Rudi Kampp was really very proud of his teeth. They flashed in the bright afternoon sunshine. "May I give it to you now, then? I shall be happy to escort you to the bus stop. One of the postal buses will be along at exactly 1410, ten minutes from now. You can be in Geneva in time for dinner at a fashionably late hour."

  Durell looked at the girl in the tight plum slacks. She filled them vibrantly. "Who are you?"

  She pouted at his bluntness. "Lotti Schmidt."

  "The housekeeper's daughter at the inn?"

  She laughed. "Yes, I am at the Oberhaus, and Mama is m charge of housekeeping. But I am here only for the season, a holiday from the University of Geneva."

  It could be, Durell thought wearily. "Lotti, I want you to listen carefully. Take sick and insist that Herr Kampp here take you back to the Oberhaus, right now. Don't delay, don't ask questions, just go. Do you understand?"

  Lotti frowned. "No."

  Kampp said: "Really, Herr Durell, it is all in friendship, and as allies, in a sense—"

  "We're not allies. You're a paid mercenary, and a high-level policy mistake at that. So obey orders and get out. Get away from me and stay away."

  "I am sorry, but I cannot do that. My orders—"

  Durell slipped. He did it neatly, because he didn't know for certain how deeply the girl was in it. As he lurched on the patch of ice on the slanting street, his elbow came up and aimed at the flashing teeth in Rudi Kampp's handsome face. Rudi was ready for it, but not fast enough, and his counter-move was expected. Durell pretended clumsiness in his fall and dragged the other man down with him with a heavy crash. The girl yelped in surprise. As they fell, Durell pulled Kampp's braced leg out from under him with a hooked ankle, and brought his elbow down with all his weight on Rudolf Kampp's toothpaste smile.

  Always hit them where they are vulnerable.

  There was a thin crackling sound. The teeth were false, as Durell had expected. Someone else had knocked out the real ones long ago.

  Kampp screamed and spat blood and the girl cried out in a burst of outraged German. Kampp's eyes were wild. He looked like an animal who finally understood the meaning of the gun pointed at him. He started to roll away on the snowy street, and Durell said: "It's
all right. Just stay away from me, from now on. Do you understand it yet?"

  "What are you talking about?" Lotti Schmidt cried. She bent over the handsome Rudi with solicitude, her curves made more apparent by her posture. "What are you men fighting about? Rudi—"

  "Shut up, Liebchen" Rudi said.

  Durell picked up his little grip containing the code machine and walked away. He regretted the violence. But he had no use for the Gehlen organization, which played both ends against the middle, and which existed neither for the Bonn government or the Americans who employed them, but who operated for themselves as a perpetuation of something begun in the sickness of the Nazi days.

  Four

  The shop had a simple sign above a golden door that read, Marge Jones, Pour Le Ski. The multi-paned window displayed a single cashmere sweater marked in Swiss francs at the equivalent of eighty dollars. The building was one of several narrow, tall medieval types, with baroque facades. The street pitched on down toward the little cog railway station and the single road out of the valley. There was no traffic, and the picturesque depot with its flower boxes was empty. Overhead, a Boeing 707 droned north from Milan to Zurich, high above the jagged teeth of the Alps.

  The exclusive little shop was closed. The upper windows showed no signs of life. Nothing moved behind the thick lace curtains drawn across them.

  Durell walked on down to the shedlike station building, picked a chrysanthemum from the flower box in defiance of the Swiss sign sternly forbidding it, and walked back up the next street, a narrow little affair the width of an alley. High fences sheltered the back entries to the baroque houses. There were wooden doors with rounded tops and fancy finials on the fences. He had no trouble selecting the one he wanted.

  He tested it, and it was not locked.

  He let out a quiet breath of relief. He had won that much, at any rate. Marge Jones was ready to see him.

  He took five minutes to get upstairs above the shop. It was a strange feeling, to suspect your own men of lying in wait for you, somehow.

  But there was no trap, no sudden assault. Marge Jones was almost enough.

  She was as American as apple pie, the co-ed who had belled it over the campus, the all-around girl, sweet and bright, tall and leggy, frank and ingenuous, the kind you could happily bring home to mother, but would rather take out for a romp in the woods. She wore a close-fitting woolen skirt with a fine green check in it, a white blouse, a cardigan with the standard single strand of finishing-school pearls. Her voice, with its strong Midwestern accent, was cheerful enough.

  "Come in, come in, Sam. Nothing's going to bite." He smiled briefly. "I'm not so sure of that. Are you quite alone?"

  "I'm the whole operation. It's a small post, and Central only gives me help when needed, so I'm the chief cook and bottle washer on the premises. . . . You drink bourbon, don't you?" "That's right."

  "Geneva briefed me, even down to the scar on your hip. I've got a fifth, still sealed, so don't worry about going bye-bye and waking up in dear old Manhattan, compliments of K Section." She lifted a long eyebrow and smoothed the soft wool of the skirt that clung to her round hip. "You don't sound like a Cajun. You don't have a Southern drawl."

  "Cajuns were once French, but I lost my identity at Yale, a long time ago." He decided she would be quite tall, quite lanky, if she ever lost her air of languid weariness and stood up. She had thick red hair, filled with dusky fire, the milky complexion of a true redhead, and enormous green eyes. Her mouth was full-lipped and very provocative. He thought that if he had met Marge Jones when he was still a young man down in Bayou Peche Rouge, he might never have left home.

  Yet for all her Midwestern air of corn, she managed to look also experienced and expensive, as rich and warm as the Italian Renaissance furniture in the room, and the paintings of Lugano and Stresa in the Italian lake country which she had hung artfully on the wall. She might have been Venetian, he thought, if it weren't for the outrageous accent. Her bourbon turned out to be excellent.

  She sat sidewise to him and arched her brows and spoke over her knee, where she rested her chin. "I'm really disappointed, Sam, because it will be a stupid loss."

  "What win be a loss?"

  "Your suicide. Why do you insist on it?"

  "I'm only asking for help. It's the first time since I started in this business. Is it too much?"

  "You bet it is. Don't you think there's a big enough hoo-hah over your girl back in Washington? They're working on it. And because you're so involved, we're not going to let you touch it."

  "All I want is some information." He waited in silence. Her green eyes were sympathetic. "Marge, you know the details, since you were here when it happened."

  "It didn't all happen here. He came from Vienna. And other points. He's got a Schloss on the banks of the blue Danube. Oh, very romantic and quite, quite the Man. It's being worked on, you see."

  He was angry again. "Just who is working on it? I've got a stake in the job, and it reflects on me."

  "Yes, that's true, Sam, and a man with his mind on personal matters can easily get killed. The thing that burns Central is that Deirdre defected willingly, and we can't force her to return, even if we catch up with her."

  "But I don't believe that." He paused and said carefully: "Deirdre wouldn't by any chance be working on a job out of Geneva, would she? Geneva could have hired her—"

  Marge was startled. "You're grabbing at straws, Cajun," she exploded. "She's too thoroughly known by the other side, through her relationship with you, to be a safe employee. I know you'd like to believe that's the case, but—" She bit her lip, and showed her distress plainly. "No, Sam, you're dreaming. Deirdre isn't working for us. The only question that remains is whether she was taken by force, somehow, or whether she went with Count Faulk willingly."

  "She wouldn't do it on her own. I still don't believe it," he said stubbornly.

  "You'd better. Otherwise, it's all the more reason for you to stand clear. Lookie, do I spell it out for you? If your beloved Deirdre didn't go over the line willingly, then it was pressure, yes? And why? Wouldn't the whole thing just be a trap to get you diving in after her? A snare, Cajun, set just for little old you."

  He was not surprised. "That's just what I think it is."

  "Then stay out of it and let someone handle it who isn't in love with the gal. I told you, Washington and Geneva have been in a big enough hoo-hah over all this, without you complicating things. They're not sitting on their hands, Sam. Everything that can reasonably be done is being done. If it's at all possible, we'll get your girl back for you, if the case is the way you think it is. But don't make the job tougher for our people. And that's not just a request, Sam. It's an order." Marge Jones' smile was sad and her mouth looked wet. "You are in love with her, aren't you? You should have married her before somebody else got to her."

  "You may be right," he said quietly.

  "She's quite something, Sam, and you were a bloody fool and altogether much too self-righteous and masculine to make sense when you turned her down. You see, I know about it because she talked to me one night, when she was here during the Gritti fashion show. I think she was trying then to make up her mind whether or not to go off with Count Faulk. She needed a home-town shoulder to cry on, and that's all I'm going to tell you about it."

  "Marge, you can bend the rules a little."

  He wanted to beg for her help, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. Then he wanted to shake her and beat it out of her, but that wouldn't work, either. If she were responsible enough to be given this station, she was tough enough to fight back.

  He was reluctant to give up the thought that Deirdre might have motives of her own in all this, aside from the obvious ones suggested by surface appearances. The more Marge Jones and Geneva tried to discourage him, however, the more stubborn he felt about getting at the truth for himself.

  He got up impatiently and walked to the window and looked down at the snow-clad street and the impossible mountains that surro
unded Tiigensberg. The Alpine valley was already shadowed in royal purple. There was some traffic now, coming down from the ski runs in VW microbuses painted a bright scarlet. The skiers looked very young to Durell. He saw no one he recognized in the business.

  He turned back to Marge Jones. She seemed little older than the chattering kids who'd been up on the mountainside, but he guessed she was near thirty. Her eyes were clever and intelligent, as well as beautiful and sympathetic.

  "Can you tell me, at any rate, why Geneva decided to hook into the Gehlen Bureau out of West Germany, on this operation?"

  "But we haven't," she said promptly.

  "I just knocked some dentures out of one of their bully boys, getting to you," he said bluntly. "He talked as if he had orders either from you or Geneva. Everybody wants me to go home, it seems. I'm an embarrassment to the w T hole apparatus, just being here. But that's too bad, because I intend to stay on until I learn enough about Deirdre Padgett's disappearance to move somewhere else."

  The redheaded girl bit her rich underlip. "I think that's very disturbing—about Gehlen people talking to you. They have no business mixing into this."

  "Are you sure?" he challenged. "You don't know why Deirdre took off with this Count Faulk and allegedly defected and went behind the Curtain with him, and you don't know why this should interest West German intelligence, right? But if they're not hired by Geneva, why are they in it? It goes to prove that I'm right."

  "No." She shook her head vehemently. "Love is blind, Sam, and you're too eager to believe that your girl is innocent and still in love with you. Your male pride is hurt. But I'll tell you a secret we have between us girls, darling. Deirdre may be in love with you still, but she was certainly in love with Faulk, too. That's not impossible for a woman. Bruno Faulk is quite some hunk of man, anyway."

  "He's just a name to me," Durell said. "It doesn't ring any bells, big or small. What do you know about him, Marge?"