Assignment Maltese Maiden Read online

  “Did you look at this?” he asked Randolph.

  Randolph nodded his narrow, silvery head. “The general in uniform, A colonel then. Probably during World War II.”

  “Who is the child?”

  “We don’t know. We’ve run it through the computer ID files. No results at all.”

  The little girl beside the small, erect figure of a younger Dickinson McFee couldn’t have been more than three years old. She was laughing, with straight hair that seemed light brown or auburn. She wore a ragged white dress in the hot sunlight that pervaded the old scene. She was eating a piece of a GI chocolate bar. There seemed to be a small ring on her right middle finger, and in her left arm she clutched a small peasant doll, dressed in what seemed to be gray. The photo was a black and white print.

  “I want this blown up,” Durell said. “Twenty, fifty times.”

  “It’s a poor snapshot, at best. The background is out of focus.”

  “It’s identifiable,” Durell said.

  “Oh?”

  “It’s Valetta Harbor. After the Allies took Sicily. On the island of Malta, former home of the Knightly Order of St. John of Jerusalem, after the Turks drove them from Rhodes. The Grand Master made his base in Malta afterward. The Great Siege by the Turks in 1565 stopped their westward expansion in the Mediterranean.” Durell paused. His voice was flat, neither ironic nor caustic. “Just recently, the new nation of Malta kicked out NATO’s naval base at Valetta, right in the throat of the Med.” “There was—” Randolph began.

  “I know. A map of Malta and its neighboring island, Gozo, in McFee’s desk. I’ll take it with me.”

  “Whatever you say,” Randolph agreed. “Do you think there is some connection between that child on Malta and McFee’s disappearance?”

  “We don’t know if McFee has disappeared, as you put it,” Durell said. “The snapshot may not mean anything in this. We know nothing about the general’s private life. He’s gone abroad before, on high-level work that only he could do. It might be that. Something to do with the Soviet moves to run then fleet through the Suez, hotting up the Mideast, maybe threatening the Israeli line in Sinai. His vanishing could be entirely legitimate.”

  “So you think-—”

  “I’m not thinking anything. I’m going to see Deirdre,” Durell said. “And I’ll take the map and snapshot with me.”

  Chapter 4

  All that had been only two days ago, Durell thought. He stood silently in the hallway of the former Contessa Bertollini’s villa on the deserted western shore of Libya. Keefe came upstairs, bounding lightly like a big cat, his square face tight with excitement. He hugged his gun to him. Perozzo looked at Keefe with open disgust and went downstairs to join Charley Mills at cracking the safe.

  “Yo, Cajun. Everything is secure,” Keefe said.

  “But no girl.”

  “No. A picture of her, though.” Keefe dug in the pockets of his baggy gray jumpsuit. They had all been issued the outfits aboard Hammersmith. “There’s been some traffic on the road, too. Two trucks, a Libyan Army jeep, a Fiat and an old Chevy. The trucks and jeep were heading west at about forty. The Fiat had two fancy-looking Arabs in it, puttering along. The Chevy was driven by a chauffeur, believe it or not, going east. They didn’t stop, slow down, or look at this place.”

  “The picture,” Durell said.

  “Yeah. It was in the library. This is a fancy joint, but it’s going to pieces. There’s some sand blowing outside. What did you say this storm is, that we’re getting?”

  “A ghibli. From the Fezzan Sahara.”

  The tinted photograph showed a youngish woman in her late twenties. The age would be about right. She could have been thirty, give or take a couple of years. The hair was straight and looked nearly black. She was short, small-boned, but with a rich figure, seen through cut-off denims and a horizontally striped, tight skivvy shirt that showed firm, pert breasts. Standing in the bedroom corridor, Durell pulled from his pocket an enlarged copy of the child’s photo that he had first found in McFee’s apartment. He did not attempt to compare the general features of the woman in the silver-framed color photograph with the faded snapshot of McFee at Valetta Harbor. The overall differences between the woman and the three-year-old child would be too great, too inconclusive. But certain things about human physiological structure did not change. The ears, the shape of the hands, the fingers. The copy he carried of the child’s picture had been blown up so that just her face filled the six-by-nine frame. Her hair had been cut short and her ears showed. The woman in the new photo also exhibited her ears, her dark hair being pulled back in a knot at the back of her head. In both cases, the ears were small and set close to the head, with lobes not separated from the back line of the jaw.

  He compared the hands. Long fingers. The child was still eating her GI chocolate bar, clutched in her fingers at her mouth. The little gold ring still sparkled in the Valetta sunshine of long ago. The fingertips were spatulate, the bone from the knuckle to the middle joint unusually long. The woman’s hands looked the same, holding a tennis racket. They were the same. He considered the eyes, large and round and dark, very luminous. Yes, he thought. Yes. The same person.

  “Okay, Cajun?” Keefe asked.

  “Just fine. Which was her bedroom?”

  “Haven’t looked yet.”

  “I’ll see the prisoners first. They’re all secure?”

  “Charley tied them up in circus knots. I hear we caught a big one.” Keefe licked his lips. His green eyes were speculative. “A Colonel Skoil. An old buddy of yours?”

  “Hardly a buddy.”

  “You and Skoll, in Morocco, worked together, didn’t you?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Durell opened the various bedroom doors, being careful about it, leaving the one which held the Russian men for last. Charley Mills, the Paris safecracker, came upstairs to say he’d gotten the box open. It was empty, except for some old bank statements and legal papers with addresses in Tripoli.

  “Hold them all for me,” Durell said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Is the truck driver alive?”

  “Yes.” Mills looked at Keefe. “Pretty badly shook up, though.”

  “Tell Damon to start talking to him. Calm him down. I’ll want to speak with him soon.”

  “We don’t have much time to spare, Perozzo says. How do we get back to Hammersmith?”

  “Maybe we don’t.”

  The third bedroom had been the girl’s. Durell wished he knew her name. Nowhere had there been the slightest hint of her true identity. Nothing had been written on the back of either photograph he now had of her. But she had been living here, until recently.

  The bedroom was furnished in faded, Neapolitan rococo elegance. Gilded cupids smiled down from each comer of the ceiling. The room was silent and empty, flooded with harsh morning sunlight. Tall french windows looked out on a marble-balustraded balcony and the terraced swimming pool below. From here, he could see the wide blue glint of the sea and the curve of the shore as it swept northward toward the Tunisian frontier. There was no sign of Hammersmith beyond the horizon. An airliner made a tiny silver flash in the white sky at thirty thousand feet. He could see part of the highway from the window, too. There was no vehicular traffic on it at the moment.

  There was sand on the terrazzo bedroom floor, blown in from under the french windows. It made a gritty sound under Durell’s boots as he considered the girl’s room. He did not touch anything. He simply looked. The wardrobe closets held a few sports clothes—slacks, a pink pants suit, some sheer silk dresses, not quite mini-length. The labels were from Dorio, in Naples. The sizes were eight, except for one ten. There was a faint scent of Tuvache perfume on them. He finally opened a dresser drawer. Pink, lacy underthings. An inlaid Morocco box for jewels, decorated with mother-of-pearl. Empty. Several handbags, one a Gucci, another of straw with a Tripoli label, and one of Arabic leathercraft from Malta, a shop on St. Paul Street near the market, and a lace h
andkerchief from the Phoenicia Hotel.

  “Sam?” It was Keefe, in the doorway. “Guess what?” “There’s no time for guessing games.”

  “I’ve checked the kitchen. Russian food, all right. But some other leftovers. Chinese.”

  “Chinese?”

  “A Chinese lady was living here. Real Mandarin. And some men, too.”

  Durell’s eyes looked black. “What the hell?”

  Keefe grinned. “That’s right. A real gasser. Are you going to talk to Colonel Skoll? He’s raising hell.”

  “Are the prisoners still secured?”

  “Oh,yes.”

  “In another minute, then.”

  Durell went downstairs, moving fast. Charley Mills had the contents of the wall safe spread out on a carved Venetian table. The place was a hodgepodge of furniture— Bombay chairs, modem sling canvas couches on the terrace faded by the North African sun. Through the windows, he saw that the sky was no longer piercingly blue but had turned faintly ochre with the coming sandstorm.

  “We’ve got the girl’s name,” Charley Mills said. The Parisian safecracker looked pleased. “Checkbooks, old account ledgers. Look ’em over, Cajun.”

  “Good. Go upstairs and stand by the prisoners.”

  “Right.”

  Durell flipped through the ledgers on the table. The oldest were carefully kept in a thin, spidery Italian hand. He assumed these were written by the elderly Contessa Bertollini. The newest and latest were in another handwriting, firm and young, but still a woman’s. The canceled checks, on a Tripoli bank, were signed “Anna-Marie Bertollini.”

  A daughter? A granddaughter? Durell wondered. It did not mean anything yet. Anna-Marie could be anybody. Adopted? No use speculating. The last checkbook stub was dated only two weeks ago. He looked out the window at the potted flowers growing on the terrace. They were moving in the wind. The sea had a faint chop to it.

  He went into the kitchen. Cans of food, mostly Russian stuff exported to Egypt, were scattered about. In a small, neat group were boxes of rice, cans of lichi nuts, canned pork, water-chestnuts, Chinese noodles. Shanghai labels were on them—from the People’s Republic of China.

  It didn’t make sense.

  “Damon?”

  Tom Damon had herded the truck driver and the boy into the house. The front door was closed. Durell felt impatient and frustrated. Staying in the villa any longer was like playing ping-pong with a time bomb. He heard the sound of a jet plane going over, neither high nor low. He couldn’t see it from inside the front hallway where he was standing with Damon and the Arab vegetable man, but the sound of its whistle lingered and bothered him. There was too much to do, too much ground to cover in the time allotted for safety. There was no margin for error.

  The truck driver was frightened. His face was badly bruised, and several teeth had been knocked out by Keefe’s gratuitous blow. The twelve-year-old boy looked angry and sullen, resenting Durell’s group.

  Durell spoke in Arabic. “Old man, when did the Contessa die? Did she die hi this house?”

  “She died as Allah willed, as we all will die. Some die sooner, some later, full of years. You will die sooner,” the old man said.

  “Tell me when? We will not hurt you again.”

  “It does not matter. She is not dead.”

  “She must be. She was a very old lady, long ago.”

  “Ah. You knew the old one?”

  “The younger, she is the one who is not dead? The Contessa Anna-Marie Bertollini?”

  “A fine woman, for a Christian. For an Italian imperialist and colonialist, oppressor of Allah’s poor and miserable ones.”

  “When did you see the girl last?”

  “Ten days ago. I deliver weekly. She was here.”

  “Alone?”

  “When she is here, she is alone.”

  “No servants? No friends?”

  “No one.”

  “And when she is not here? Where does she go?”

  The vegetable-dealer said, “I am a simple man. I do not ask Allah for reasons for His acts, both His blessings and His curses. I do not ask the Contessa where she spends her faithless time when she is away.”

  “No men ever here?”

  “I do not see any.”

  “Did you ever see her in Tripoli?”

  “No.”

  “Did she go back to Italy? Malta?”

  The boy suddenly burst into a spate of guttural Arabic, his black eyes brimming with hatred. The gist of it was an angry criticism of his father for talking to the capitalistic enemy. His words were flavored with all the cliches of neo-nationalism, revolutionary socialism, and anti-imperialism, taken from propaganda posters. It had been a long time, however, Durell reflected, since Mussolini’s legions tramped through Libya. Longer since the Romans and Greeks settled here.

  The father said, “My son shows his anger. I do not. But I feel as he does. I will say no more.”

  The sky began to tremble.

  Durell looked up and then stepped out the front doorway of the villa and stared down the low, sandy coastline to the east. They were coming fast, three of them, in a ragged formation, flying low over the beach and the dunes, following the highway. MIG-2 l’s, from the Libyan airbase beyond Mursa el-Auega. According to the charts he had studied aboard Hammersmith, there was a new military airfield near there, at En Nofilia. The sleek jets thundered overhead, shaking the villa. They were quite low, for visual observance. They passed by, dipped their starboard wings, and hurtled out over the sea, heading north until they were shining dots over the horizon. Over Hammersmith, too, Durell thought. There goes the ball game.

  At the same time he heard one, then two, then three shots from upstairs in the villa.

  “Keep the truck driver here,” he snapped to Damon. “Watch the boy especially. He’ll try to kill you, Tom.”

  Durell took the steps three at a time going up. A man lunged at him from the top landing. He was burly, with a cropped head, a bloody eyebrow, wearing slacks and a white shirt. He had Charley Mills’s automatic in his big fist. The gun chattered and roared and marble chipped and flew from the balustrade, and then Durell hit him coming up from below, at the knees. The man bellowed and fell over backward and Durell grabbed for the machine-pistol and missed and rolled away. The other man grinned. He had a gap in his front teeth. From the comer of his eye, Durell saw Charley Mills lying on his face far down the hallway, his legs sprawled and twisted, outside the door to the room where the prisoners had been tied up. This prisoner had gotten loose somehow. Durell heard Keefe shout, and there was another series of shots, but he had no time to think about it. His opponent had raised himself to his knees and was swinging the gun around again. Durell chopped at the thick neck, felt his leg pulled out from under him, and went down on top of the Russian. The man’s breath smelled of garlic and vodka. He was enormously strong. He was a professional. Durell suddenly knew he was fighting for his life.

  He got his knee in the man’s groin, came down with his weight on it, and received knuckles in his throat for a reply. The man grinned, showing his steel teeth. A swipe of his big paw knocked Durell’s gun aside. Durell, although he was not a small man, felt himself lifted bodily and heaved aside. He kicked out, caught the man on the side of the head, and was rewarded with a grunt. The Russian scrabbled for his gun, trying to break free. They rolled over against the corridor wall, smashed into a pedestal, and a Greco-Roman bust of an ancient lady shattered on the floor. Durell snatched at a piece of the marble and slashed at the man’s throat with it. It did not go deep enough, but a red gleam of alarm showed in the small eyes under the bushy brows. Durell heard Keefe yell again, and there was a pounding on the stairway. He got a grip on the man’s shirt and pulled the Russian to him, halfway to his knees. Blood ran down the man’s throat. Durell heaved with all his strength and shoved the Russian toward the stairs. There was a shout, a sudden thump, a quick series of shots. Damon stood there at the foot of the staircase, firing at the other’s tumbling body.
It hit the bottom of the steps at Damon’s feet and lay there.

  Durell drew a deep breath.

  “Thanks, Tom. Go back to the truck driver.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He turned and walked down the corridor to where Charley Mills sprawled outside the prisoners’ room.

  Charley was dead, shot squarely through the heart.

  “Keefe?”

  “Here. I guess. Wow.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was talking to them—”

  “Just talking?”

  “To Skoll.”

  “And—?”

  “He used his feet. Kicked my gun away. Son of a bitch. He looked peaceable enough.”

  “Knocked you out?”

  Keefe grimaced. “Yeah.”

  “You killed Charley,” Durell said flatly.

  “What? Me? I didn’t—”

  “You were careless, and one of them got away. Go downstairs. Wash up. We’re packing out of here. There’s been an alarm out, all right.”

  “Oh, Jesus. Charley? You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Durell went in to see Colonel Cesar Skoll.

  Chapter 5

  Thirty-six hours before, it had begun to rain in Washington, a cold slow drizzle that heralded the spring cherry blossoms. An evening fog began to drift in from the Potomac. Durell did not leave No. 20 Annapolis Street by the front door. It was an innocuous graystone structure not far from DuPont Circle, but far enough away so it could not be included among the mansions on Embassy Row. There was a fist of ambiguous firms neatly lettered on the brass plate beside the front entrance, and the casual visitor who strayed into the dingy lobby was greeted by a stout, middle-aged building guard who always convinced the intruder that the firm he was seeking was certainly not housed here.

  If you worked at No. 20, you could only use the elevator that took you to the area where you belonged, passing several TV cameras hidden in the gingerbread ceiling moldings, several metal detectors, sensors that registered body temperature, heartbeat. In the round elevator button was a device that took your thumbprint, and, by using computers, it instantly identified you for what you claimed to be.