Assignment - Ceylon Page 5

  “You’re out of date,” Durell said.

  “You act like fuzz.”

  “You act like an idiot,” Durell said.

  He walked past the skinny young man and headed for the bungalow and Aspara. George’s giggling laughter followed him through the afternoon heat.

  Aspara was beautiful and serene. Her oval face showed no surprise at Durell’s sudden reappearance. She moved like a wisp of bright, silken cloud under her saree, and Durell remembered her long, smooth body, the voluptuous passion that could flame from her slightly slanted eyes. Her dark hair gleamed like midnight velvet, caught up in an intricate knot at the nape of her slender neck. Durell looked at the ivory pins that held her lustrous braids together as she bent to pour tea. An old glass lamp with a dark green shade shone in a corner of the big, teak-paneled room. The sliding doors were open to admit whatever vagrant breeze might come from the Indian Ocean.

  “I see you have met George,” she murmured.

  “Did you send for him?”

  “I did not know he was coming until his phone call at hour ago from the airport. I went to fetch him. I was glac of it. You left me lonely, dear Sam, and a bit confused.” He lifted a hand, then dropped it. “You should senc him back to the States.”

  Aspara raised her eyes from the tea service. “But I wan' this to be his home. He is Sinhala, he is of Sri Lanka.” “He’ll just be a burden. Send him away.”

  “Sam, it is his father who has been kidnapped.”

  “He doesn’t care about his father—or for you.”

  “You have already judged and condemned him?” Durell felt exasperated. “I’m in trouble, Aspara. I need help.”

  “I know. It has been on the radio—the police are looking for you. You did not tell them you spent the poya day with me?”

  “No.” ,

  “You were silent to protect me? If your safety is at stake, I will not let you sacrifice yourself for me.” She smiled. Her mouth was ripe. He remembered her kisses in the moonlight. “That is foolish. My political career could surely survive a scandal.”

  “Not in these times. Not if the newspapers knew I’d spent the time with you while your husband is missing.” “My ex-husband,” she said gently. “I have not seen Ira in years. Drink your tea, dear Sam. Are you hungry? I can get a meal for you.”

  “Later. I don’t want you to be personally involved. I couldn’t even tell you what the difficulties are. I don’t know them myself, as yet. But you alone know I was not in Kandy.”

  “I know that.” She sat on a large stool before him, her eyes solemn in her young face. “The poya day was a dream we shared. I am knowledgeable enough to have no illusions about lasting love between us. I am an ambitious woman, you might say. The fortunes of my country are chiefly in my heart. You understand this. The poya day was beautiful. But it is done and ended, is that not so? So we can begin as friends who love each other and wish to help each other, yes?”

  “The police—and others—are looking for me,” he said. “It’s very dangerous. I’ve already risked your career by staying with you. I just want to know more about Ira. I want to know why his kidnapping by local terrorists is so important. Somebody—someone—is going to a lot of trouble, more than it’s worth, going after bigger game than I can identify at the moment. You have to tell me,

  Aspara.”

  “But I know nothing more.”. She stood up, her every gesture a thing of grace. Durell wondered where her son had gone. He listened to a jet come in low overhead, headed for Bandaranaike Airport nearby. The sound was incongruous in this peaceful setting, although he knew there was 50 no peace for him anywhere. Aspara glided to the veranda window, then turned with her hands clasped before her. “It is my fault you are in such trouble. I asked at the American embassy, when Ira vanished, that you should be sent here to cope with it. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  She smiled. “I never forgot you, of. course.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “It is shameful for my country that this has occurred. That an American diplomat and distinguished archeolo-gist, helping my people rediscover their past, should be held for ransom by terrorists. And such strange demands! A half-million in cash, a jet plane, a guarantee of nonmolestation. We have only one more day—less than twenty-four hours now—to meet those demands. My government is not willing to yield to the PFM. It would continue the precedent set in other nations. But I think Washington is willing to pay the price. I did not think Ira was that important.” She made a mouth. “It is not from past affection that I became concerned in this, dear Sam.”

  “I know. By why did George show up just now?”

  “Why shouldn’t he?”

  “It’s not a coincidence,” Durell said.

  “Dear Sam, you are always too suspicious.”

  “I have to be. Have your police discovered what Ira had been doing in the Cinnamon Gardens when the PFM took him?”

  “He was at the museum of antiquities there.” She touched her silken black hair and then sat down in a fine Bombay chair across the room from him, as if she were carefully keeping a distance between them. The intimacy they had shared was gone. “We know it was the PFM,” she said quietly. “They shouted for their leader, the Naga, the Cobra’s Bow, and left their demands scrawled on a note for the curator. Nobody really knows what Ira was interested in, so far as old ruins are concerned. He dabbled. It was one of the depressing things about him. He never finished his projects; he was like a seed-flower blown on the wind. Did your men find anything in Kandy?”

  “They’re both dead.” He drew a deep breath and told her about Wells and his mission to kill him. His anger about it was controlled now. She listened passively. Behind her beauty was a quick, alert mind, able to absorb Ceylonese politics and the balance of forces between Buddhist, Moslem, and Hindu sects, the tensions of ancient wars, which had once ravaged the island. She said, “I have heard rumors about Ira’s interest in an artifact called the Buddha Stone. It is only a myth. Ira is a foolish, impractical man. For the rest, you know as much as I do.”

  He said, “A taxi driver mentioned the Buddha Stone, too. This Naga—this Cobra’s Bow—who is he?”

  She dismissed it with a wave of her long-fingered hand. “A terrorist. He is not deep or subtle. A youngish man, full of old angers. Or a pawn in power politics. Perhaps Peking pays him. Perhaps Moscow. There are pressures here to negotiate naval bases that might control the Indian Ocean. The Naga claims it would bring prosperity to us. I have argued in our government circles that it would reduce us to a puppet’s status. The Naga means anarchy and danger to our young nation. It is not to be tolerated. Please, dear Sam. Drink your tea. Have something to eat.” He shook his head. “I have to get to Kandy.”

  “How will you do that? The police—you will continue to look for Ira?”

  “That’s what I was sent here to do.”

  “But if your own people now want to—to eliminate—”

  “I still have my job to do. In the course of doing it, maybe I can clear myself.” He paused. “You haven’t seen anyone in Colombo who might look like me, have you? A man of my height, dark hair, similar features. Not a double, of course. But someone who might pass for me, at a glance, at a distance.”

  “No, Sam. No one like that.”

  He listened to the faint scuff of a footstep on the veranda and stood up. There was a"creak of porch steps, a crunch of gravel going toward the garage shed. “Excuse me,” he said. He moved fast toward the back door. The light outside was still dazzling. The outrigger fishing boats, with their square sails, were all drawn up on the edge of 52 the beach. A tree toad croaked in the branches overhead. The garden, with its jacaranda. Vesak orchids, and cabbage palms, was in sharp shadows. He drew his gun.

  “George!” he called.

  The sudden roar of a car engine in the thatched shed turned him that way. He was aware of Aspara behind him, her saree whispering. He jumped down the steps and ran toward the shed. Polished met
al flared in a slash of sunlight. It was the old Rolls-Royce. It swung toward 'him as he jumped for the vintage running-board and grabbed at the wheel. The boy grimaced, tried to shove him off, screaming at him. The heavy old car rumbled off the drive, slammed into thick shrubbery between the garden and the beach. Durell leaned far in and twisted the ignition key, heedless of the boy’s clubbing hands.

  “Oh, you bastard of a pig! You mother—”

  Durell hit him, not heard enough to break anything, but enough to slam George’s head back. He pulled open the door and dragged the boy from behind the wheel and dumped him without ceremony under a hibiscus shrub.

  Aspara called, “Sam, please—”

  “He was going for the cops. He listened to everything. I don’t know why. He’s here to make trouble. I smelled it in him the moment we met.”

  “You can’t judge my son—”

  Durell straightened. Aspara’s normally calm face was indignant, and he wondered if he had lost the only possible ally he could count on. Then her shoulders relaxed, and she knelt beside the sprawled young man, whose bare feet were blackened with dirt, whose hair was a wild mop over his face.

  “Poor George. It is not his fault that he does not know where he belongs,” she said. “His father was ineffectual with him. He is neither American nor Sinhalese. What a torment it must be for him.”

  “George or no George, I need your help,” Durell said.

  She looked at him. “What can I do?”

  “I can’t get into the hills alone. I have to start at Kandy. Can I have your Rolls? They might not suspect, if I’m driving it.”

  She shook her head. “Dear Sam, I’ll go with you. And we’ll take George too. We must. Otherwise, he will do you harm. I agree with you. I can feel his hostility too.”

  He thought about it for only a moment.

  “All right. Let’s go.”

  seven

  There were still two hours before sunset, but there would be a full moon that night. Durell agreed with Aspara; he had to take George with them. Alone in the bungalow, he would find some way to reveal Durell’s presence to the police. The boy was deliberately antagonistic. Durell wished he could simply knock him out, tie him up, put him out of action for a time. But needing Aspara’s help, he could not attempt that.

  Aspara drove the heavy, powerful Rolls. There was not too much traffic on the road to Kandy, that reminder of ancient kingdoms and crumbled glories. They did not return to the Victoria Bridge to pick up the main highway into the hills, but took a smaller road, paralleling the old Dutch canal. Traffic kept to the left, in British style. They passed bullock carts, a few venturesome farmers oh motorcycles rigged to carry passengers on either side of the rear wheel. Rice paddies, gleaming wetly in the lowering sun, stretched out on either hand. Coconut palms leaned over the road and made swift, flickering shadows, sometimes tunnels, through which they passed.

  It would take two hours to cover the climb to the city of Kandy. George sprawled sullenly in the leather rear seat of the open Rolls-Royce. His mop of dark hair blew in the wind. His blue eyes were heavy-lidded and blank; his mouth was partly open, showing small, uneven teeth. Durell wished he knew what the young man was thinking.

  Now and then they passed irrigation tanks, artificial lakes that looked bloody in the light of the late afternoon sun. Spoonbills and ibis stood on spindly legs and stared at them as they went by. Hornbills and flycatchers flashed in the dark foliage of the foothill forests, and once he glimpsed a sambhur stag, standing magnificently at the edge of a tank. The tall trees were festooned with vines and wild creepers, each with their own colored blossoms.

  They came to the crossroad at Mirigama, and a police car was waiting there.

  Aspara bit her lip. “We’ll have to bluff our way through, dear Sam.”

  Durell turned to meet the sullen gleam of George’s eyes from the rear seat. “Don’t make a peep, son.”

  “What if I do, pig?”

  “I’ll blow your head off,” Durell said flatly.

  “Bluff. Shit. You won’t touch me, because of mom.”

  “Don’t make a garbage dump out of every place you walk and breathe,” Durell warned.

  A uniformed patrolman- strolled toward' them, thumbs hooked in his gunbelt. The other man remained in the car. Halfway toward them, he recognized tire distinctive Rolls-Royce and touched his cap with a forefinger. He waved them on. Aspara smiled at the two men and shoved the car into gear, stepped on the gas pedal. Beyond the first curve, she drew a deep breath. “I was worried. George, you behaved very well.”

  “Just wait, mom. This p.D isn’t snatching me without paying for it. I didn’t come here to play cops and robbers with a fink like him.”

  “Why don’t you like Sam?” she asked mildly.

  “He knows why,” the boy said.

  Durell watched George’s eyes. It was no accident that he had flown in from the States at this moment. It wasn’t filial love for his vague, scholastic father, Ira Sanderson that had brought him to Ceylon. George was not concerned about that. Durell had the feeling that the boy knew all about it.

  “If he tries anything,” he told Aspara, “I’ll have to hurt him.”

  “No, Sam.”

  George snickered. “Big man, you don’t put a finger on me, right?”

  “Just behave, then.”

  “I’ll do what I’ve got to do,” George said.

  “You mean you have to follow orders?”

  “What orders?”

  “From the people who sent for you.”

  George shouted angrily, “Nobody sent for me! What are you talking about?”

  Aspara took the heavy Rolls around a sharp curve it the dusty road, and they began a sudden, steep climb toward looming hills ahead. Beyond were sun-torched mountain peaks, some reaching a mile high, clad in the acid green of terraced tea plantations, more rice paddies dense forest, and the occasional village clinging to the side of an artificial blue tank.

  “We’ll have to go through Kagalla,” Aspara said “From there, it’s straight on to Kandy—as straight as the mountain roads let us go, of course. There are several other towns on the way, and we’ll surely run into other checkpoints here and there. George, you must behave yourself.”

  “Why are you helping this spook?” George demanded “I know my rights. He’s taking me with you against my will. It’s an abduction, that’s what it is.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense.”

  The boy snickered. “The spook will never find old Ira anyway.” Then he subsided into the back seat again.

  The landscape changed abruptly. Beyond Kagalla the road climbed steeply. The wide paddies and little villages where country girls sold cadjanuts and pineapples to tourists gave way to sudden, dark gorges, where water rushed down from the towering mountains. Here and there were pools, and in one a herd of working elephants were being bathed by their keepers. The huge gray beasts lay on their sides in shallow water while the men in white breechcloths splashed and scrubbed them with soap. The sun was lower now. The flanks of the mountains were bathed in dark shadow. Near Kadugannawa, with its vast view of the distant table mountain called the Bible Rock, Aspara had to stop for gasoline.

  The valley far below was terraced in rice; the hillsides were sharp with the green of cropped tea plants. The air felt clearer than it had been down on the tropical coast.

  The gas pump attendant was a small man in a violent red shirt, with a toothy white smile. He recognized Aspara and bowed exaggeratedly.

  “Madame Aspara! May I offer condolences in regard to your former husband, Mr. Sanderson? Ah, it is young George—”

  “Thank you,” Aspara said calmly. Then she added abruptly, “George, please stay in the car.”

  George grinned. “I have to use the facilities.”

  The boy got but of the Rolls with a quick, vaulting motion, landed on the dusty ground, clapped his hands together. The station was only a thatched hut standing on stilts above the slopes, which dropped down
toward the tea fields below. Farther down, more elephants plodded homeward along a dirt track. The high shouts of their attendants came dimly through the echoing mountain stillness.

  Durell got out of the car quietly. Aspara’s face was pale. “Yes, you must stop him,” she said quickly. “It is true he acts strangely, so hostile—”

  George was already gone, scrambling up the rough ladder to the thatched stilt house. Durell followed quickly, paused in the interior gloom. A quick suck of breath from George warned him. Something whirred through the air, smashed against a bamboo pole. The boy’s face was a pale blob in the shadows of the hut. The floor creaked as he rushed at Durell, a heavy wrench in his hand. The tool whistled past Durell’s ear as he ducked the wide, swinging blow.

  “George, I meant it. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “You bastard, shacking up with my mother—”

  “You don’t know anything about it. Who sent for you1; Why did you come back here?”

  The wild-haired boy came at him again. The heavy spanner grazed Durell’s- shoulder as he jumped back. He did not reach for his gun. The floor shook and dust rose about their feet as he caught George’s arm, twisted, bent il backward. George yelped, but he was surprisingly strong Durell forced him backward until they struck a crude workbench. The boy’s hands scrabbled for another tool to use as a weapon. Durell pinned him against the sharp edge of the bench.

  “Now talk,” he said thinly. “Tell me what you’re doin^ here.”

  “I—I’m a patriot,” George gasped. “Let go—”

  “For which side?”

  “The People’s Freedom Movement—I’ve been working in it, raising money back in the states—”

  “And your father? The PFM took him, right?”

  “No, no—”

  “Who did, then? Who’s asking for the ransom?”

  “They’re using the leader—the Cobra’s Bow—but it’s all a front, I can’t tell you—”

  Durell bent him farther back. The boy groaned, reached out, found a hammer, swung it at Durell’s head. Durell drove the edge of his hand against the other’s neck. It could have been a lethal blow, but he held back at the last moment, aware of his anger and frustration at his own situation. The shock of the blow snapped George’s head to one side. The pale blob of his face, under his wildly swinging hair, slid way. All resistance went out of his thin, muscular body. Durell caught him before he hit the floor and eased him gently down.