Assignment Afghan Dragon (13 page)

“They will kill General Chan Wei-Wu,” Freyda went on slowly. “Wilma is part of the plan. She will keep Chan with her, in her apartment, so Chan’s personal guards can be quietly eliminated, and then they will come in and kill Chan. It is the Deputy Chairman’s idea. This new Deputy is against using the dragon as an excuse for war. He is sensible, secretly a scholar in the old tradition, Wilma says. He is a great admirer of the ancient scholar-artist, Tung Ch’i-ch’ang. The Deputy is a subtle man. It will look like suicide, on the part of the General. Wilma will be hurried out of the country and given to Hong Kong as a reward for her cooperation, and she will be safe. So Mr. Chou, from the Black House, will have no further business here in Meshed, when he learns that the General is dead. It will all be over. No more orders to Chou from the General. But I do not want to go on with the business. I do not wish to go on living like this. I want the dragon. For myself and for Wilma, who has suffered enough.”

Durell felt a weariness that was not betrayed in the lines of his face. Cross and double cross, and motives within motives. It was almost standard, something always to be expected in this business.

“When will the General be executed?” he asked.

“Tonight or tomorrow. Perhaps it has happened already,” Freyda said. She seemed more confident now. She looked down at her body as she lay sprawled beneath him and held her bruised breasts in both hands. Somehow, even now, the gesture was provocative. She said, “I mentioned the ancient artist, Tung, whom the Deputy Chairman admires?”

“He was a man who used brush and ink, shortly after the school of color painting flourished in the T’ang dynasty,” Durell said.

She was pleased. “
Ach
, yes. You know of him! Tung was a wen-jen, a true gentleman-scholar. He did not believe in debating with himself over each movement of his brush; the art of painting in his day came from the heart, the spirit. Therefore it was mostly truthful and serene. Tung was a master of all the strokes of the brush, from the lute string to the twenty-one ts’un, the wrinkled texture, as it was called. He had the vital rhythm, the ch’i-yun; he captured the ch’i, the spirit of his subjects, to a delicate perfection. You see, the Deputy Chairman is an artist like Tung Ch’i-ch’ang. It is important to know such things about a man. He will be successful. The murder of the General, to end the Dragon plot, will come off to a perfection equal to Tung’s art. Then Wilma will be free to leave China. And Mr. Chou, from the Black House, will find himself at a loss here in Meshed, with no purpose, no mission, no superior to give him orders, and no reason to pursue the dragon further. Do you understand now, Durell? All the effort of the Chinese team, of which I am a part—or was—will go for nothing. It will all be erased, cancelled. Without the General, the Russians cannot provoke war. So the dragon is up for—how do you say it?—up for grabs.”

He wondered if she was stalling for time. He had not needed the lecture on ancient Chinese artists. He had let Freyda go on with it, pondering the irony of what might be happening thousands of miles away in Peking, if she were telling the truth. And he considered how it affected his own assignment.

“
Bitte
,” she said. “Please. I have told you the whole truth now. Let me up. Please."

He released his weight on her warm body and got to his feet. The woman flexed her knees, rolled over, rested for a moment on all fours. She faced away from him. She did not seem to be conscious of her nudity. When she finally stood up, she leaned against a small, battered table in the comer that was part of the room’s primitive furnishings. Her hip went askew.

“Then you will help me, Cajun? I have been utterly honest with you. Can I somehow buy the dragon from you? I have not too much money of course, but I have much information you can use, on networks and post office drops and radio relays. Oh, much, much data. Better still if you would join with me. We can share the profits. We can—”

“No.”

“You truly do not have the dragon?”

“Put your clothes on, Freyda.”

“You are not much of a man, after all,” she sneered. Then, all at once, she made her move. He had been right about her having concealed a weapon in the room, the knife with which she had first attacked him on the bed, but he had not given her credit for arranging another backstop. With surprising speed for such a large woman, she opened the drawer in the small table she leaned against and snatched up a small, nickel-plated .28 pistol she had hidden there. Crouching, she fired at him twice, holding the gun in both hands. Her face was contorted by hatred.

The first slug went through the single window with a shattering crash of broken glass. The second bullet whipped past DurelPs throat with a hot, burning sensation. He gave her no time for a third effort. He dived hard at her, careless of the noise now, after the reckless shots she had fired. The whole hotel and neighborhood would be alerted and alarmed in minutes. He slammed her hard against the wall, saw the icy fury in her eyes, and hit her with his fist, saw blood spurt from her mouth, hit her again, caught the little pistol as she dropped it, and let her fall without ceremony to the floor in a naked heap.

He took a deep breath, straightened, and found that he was trembling.

Somebody shouted from the floor below. A piece of glass fell belatedly from the window frame. The garish movie lights on Pahlevi Avenue winked on and off.

Turning, he opened the hotel room door with caution. The narrow, dimly lighted corridor was still deserted, but footsteps thudded upward from the lobby. He turned to the right, moved down the back steps. Each tread creaked an alarm as he ran lightly downward to the alley entrance. He already heard the far-off hooting of a police siren.

People were craning over the edges of their roof terraces as he reached the alley floor. The smells here were noisome. A cat squealed and leaped away. Dogs barked. Lights were going on everywhere.

He ran to the end of the alley, came out on the street, turned left, walked two blocks north into a better lighted avenue. A bus came rumbling along. He put up his hand and boarded it and rode away.

The neighborhood was one of imposing villas, some in European style, most in the hidden Moslem design of a high surrounding wall enclosing an inner courtyard. Heavily leafed trees made pools of quiet shadow from which he moved toward the single door in the wall facing the street. The house bulked high beyond the wall, with terraced roofs, some with planted gardens. A fountain tinkled somewhere within the grounds. Durell lifted the traditional hand of Fatima as a door-knocker and rapped twice, then twice again. It was only nine o’clock in the evening.

He waited.

He stood close against the wall beside the door and watched the street. No vehicles. No pedestrians. They were far from the center of town, northwest on the road going to Qushan. Beyond the little suburb stretched flat fields of fruit orchards and vegetables. The moon rode high in a hot, clear sky. Low hills, rising to an occasional high peak, lay to the east and west, and atop the peaks here and there were the dim outlines of ancient ruined fortresses dating far back to the devastating Uzbek invasions of the area.

He knocked again.

This time he heard bolts withdrawn, a small bell tinkled, and a voice asked in Farsi what he wanted at this hour.

“Mr. E.K. Qam, please.”

“Not here, sir.”

“His brother, then. Mr. Nuri Qam.”

“Never heard of him, sir.”

“Tell him it’s Durell,” he said quietly.

“Durell?”

“Hurry.”

“Wait, please.”

The bolts were shot home again. It seemed like a long wait before the door was opened again and he was finally admitted. Two large Afghanis in tribal costumes stood to either side of him. They were armed with snubby-barreled automatic rifles slung over their shoulders.

“This way, Mr. Durell. Please be as quiet as possible. Mr. Qam does not wish to disturb the ladies, who are asleep on the roof.”

“Thank you.”

One of the men said respectfully. “You speak very good Farsi, sir.”

“Pashto, and Dari, too,” Durell said.

“Allah has blessed you. Come, please. Mr. Qam has been awaiting your arrival for several days.”

There was an inner court where a fountain played over a blue-tiled mosaic basin the size of a small swimming pool. Feathery trees grew up against the fretwork galleries of the second floor, and he heard the sleepy twitter of caged birds somewhere. The moonlight was bright enough to let him see everything quite clearly. None of the rooms on the lower floor were lighted, but as they crossed the inner courtyard a light bloomed up above, on a second-level terrace reached by a stone stairway that hugged a blank wall. A voice called softly and one of the Afghani tribesmen answered in a reassuring tone. The place was like a fortress, Durell thought; once within the gates, it revealed another world, private and secret, armed against intruders. Nuri Qam’s brother, who had offered Nuri sanctuary here against the hostility of official Kabul, was evidently a man of considerable wealth. In the gardens were relics of the antique past, bulbous serpentine columns and pieces of time-worn statuary. The scent of spices and aromatic flavors drifted on the quiet night air.

“Sam? Samuel? Is that you? Praise Allah, you got here at last.”

Nuri Qam came out of the shadows of the second-level terrace and beckoned him upward. In an altered voice, querulous and arbitrary, Nuri Qam dismissed the two genial guards.

“Sam, Sam. Have you eaten? Have you had dinner?”

“Not yet.”

“I shall order something from the kitchens. A real Afghan meal; you will enjoy it, I promise you, and we will talk while you eat, yes?”

Nuri Qam had changed since their university days together. In New Haven, Nuri was a thin, intense youth preoccupied with the future of his troubled, backward country. He had been religious and abstemious, of complete morality, and he ignored the normal undergraduate frolics. But now apparently some inherited wealth and the soft life of upper officialdom had worked its way with him. It was difficult for Durell to see the slender, dedicated youth in this gross, overblown, softly rounded man. Qam wore a full white silk embroidered blouse and loose trousers of dark material stuffed into soft boots. His fat hands were ornamented with too many rings, and he had grown bald except for a fringe of dark hair around his shining scalp. He carried a prayer book in his left hand as he wrung Durell’s fingers. His belly forbade the traditional hug and kiss, for which Durell was grateful. Qam’s face, round as the moon sailing in the night sky, was jowly and wreathed in smiles. But the moonlight revealed an inner caution, a reserve, perhaps, that echoed the hunted man as he surveyed Durell’s height.

“Good, good. I needed you, I sent for you, and here you are. Difficult to believe! Ever since our days at Yale, I have admired the good old U.S.A. I am in terrible difficulties, Sam, terrible. It is so good of your agency to lend you to me in this most embarrassing and awkward situation. And dangerous. Yes, I cannot stress that too much.

Dangerous.” Nuri Qam paused, his hand at Durell’s elbow, and looked up at him sharply. “You understand, you have been lent to me, to be employed only by me? That you work strictly for me?”

“That was the assignment.”

“Excellent, excellent. We shall get along very well in resolving this terribly urgent matter.”

“You’re talking about the dragon?”

“Of course. What else? It has preyed on my mind ever since that foolish little archaeologist, Professor Berghetti, tried to smuggle it out of Afghanistan.”

“And where is Berghetti now?”

“Later. Later, we shall talk. First you must eat, yes?” Nuri Qam clapped his ringed hands, and a stout, veiled woman appeared, to whom he gave rapid orders in Dari. Then Qam led Durell into the building, through a modified Moorish archway. The entire household was either asleep or moving about on terrified tiptoe, Durell reflected.

Twenty minutes later he was seated crosslegged on a cushion upon the floor, before a dark red embroidered cloth spread upon the Khorasan rug, being served a hot meal. He ate without reserve, feeling a sudden enormous hunger. The stout, veiled woman, who might have been Qam’s wife or merely the household cook, brought him maushawa, a soup that included beans and meatballs and tomato sauce, then
shashlik
. The triple squares of mutton were juicy and tender on the sir, the skewer, alternated with wedges of fat from -the sheep’s tail. Dish after dish appeared, yoghurt marinades of garlic and vinegar, more grilled kebabs with
pilaus
spiced with coriander and pepper, cardamom and cloves, topped with raisins and chopped nuts. He was served an Iranian wine in a tall goblet crusted with gold; very strong
chai sia
, black tea in scalding hot cups; and of course sweets of all sorts, figs and fruit and small rice cakes called
kolchas
. There were no utensils, and he used only the crusty nan, flat bread, to scoop up the food. Nuri Qam smiled continuously and did not join him until the desserts arrived, whereupon he reached across the cloth-covered rug and ate greedy handsful.

During the meal", Qam insisted on talking of nothing but his years in the States, his education, his brother who had gone to Cambridge and then emigrated to Iran, where his business had prospered enormously. The brother, Qam said, was presently in Tehran closing a deal. Qam did not identify the nature of the business or the deal, but Durell, surveying the long narrow room, with its masonry fretwork opening onto the long balcony, the opulent furnishings and the art objects, did not question his host about it. He noted, however, several fine European paintings, a French inlaid cabinet of rosewood and Cellini gold, along with antique objects from the Sassanid and the Seljuk dynasties prior to the tidal wave of armies led by Togrul Beg a millenium ago. There were fine gold-handled swords, round Mongol shields, an illuminated Koran, double the size of an average book. There were Turkoman robes and rugs, Uzbek helmets, all ranged around the high-ceilinged room which was decorated with tiles and mosaics inscribed with flowing Arabic script in gilt letters against blue.