Assignment Afghan Dragon (9 page)

“Ah,” she said. “This looks interesting. Let us stop here a moment,
bitte
.”

He was aware of her large leather handbag looped over her right arm as they paused in front of a rug seller’s mart. “In here,” the blond woman said.

“I’d rather not. I have no interest in rugs.”

“
Bitte
,” she said again.

He was interested to see how far she would go, and now he found out. She dipped her hand into the bag and pressed it against his side, under his arm, and he knew the undeniable sensation of having a gun shoved tightly into his ribs.

“I ask you politely,” she said, and smiled.

“A gun is not polite.”

“Inside. Quickly.”

He did as he was told. He had his own .38 in his waistband, and he did not intend to give it up. The dealer in carpets, a Khorasan farmer turned merchant, was haggling with a pilgrim trying to sell a Shiraz rug in order to make an offering at the holy shrine. The bazaar man simply nodded to Freyda and went on bargaining. The blond woman urged Durell into the darker shadows at the rear of the open stall, which was curtained by more carpets hanging on horizontal display poles. She had been here before and knew the way. It was like a maze, moving between the corridors of dusty carpets, but Freyda kept close behind him, the gun in his ribs urging him on.

Finally he came to a wooden wall and a wooden door. Freyda reached past him and knocked briefly in a sharp, coded series of taps. The door was opened immediately. Beyond it was a small room, a cubicle made of rough boards like a shed behind the bazaar rug shop. Part of the room was piled with small three-by-five Baluchi carpets and
poustines
, the locally embroidered lambskin coats and vests. The Chinese gentleman who had been on the plane from Zahidan sat on a pile of the coats.
Herr
Hans Hauptman-Graz sat on the pile of rugs. Both men stood up as Freyda ushered Durell inside and closed the plank door behind them.

“Good,” said the Chinese. “You have brought 'him. But he is still armed, is he not?”

Hauptman-Graz said gutterally, “Your gun,
Herr
Durell.”

Durell leaned back against the wooden wall. “You people are damned inefficient. I assume, Mr.—?” He looked at the Chinese.

“Chou. Mr. Chou.”

“From the Black House?”

“As you wish. Give the lady your gun.”

“Nonsense,” Durell said. He had his hand on the .38 tucked into his waistband under the safari coat. “If she fires, I can still get off one shot at you. Depend on it. I won’t miss. She should have asked for it earlier, outside.” Freyda made a clucking sound. “There were so many pilgrims in the crowd, Mr. Chou—”

The Chinese smiled. “Never mind. After all, we do not wish to have violence here. We are not on a mission that requires such activity. I am sure Mr. Durell will be amiable in our discussion. He will tell us what he is up to and why, and what he has done with the dragon that rightfully belongs to the Chinese People’s Republic as a national treasure. Will you not, Mr. Durell?”

“It depends. Why do you want it so badly? I understand it was found in Afghanistan. After seven centuries, I should think it belongs to the finder. It is an Afghan national treasure now, I should think.”

Mr. Chou said softly, “Our new deputy chairman is a man obsessed by our past heritage. He has requested that it be returned to Peking. Diplomatic representations have been made to Kabul, with no reasonable response as yet. If we can simply—obtain—it, there will be no difficulty at all.”

“And if you don’t get it that way?”

“Diplomacy is the art of arguing with a gun in your hand, after all.” Mr. Chou shrugged. He was short and stout, with thick black hair tinged with silver above his ears. He wore silver-rimmed round glasses that gave his face an owlish, benign look. But there was nothing beneficent about him, Durell knew. Anyone from the Black House in Peking was a mortal factor to be reckoned with. Mr. Chou said, “Where did you find the dragon? And what do you intend to do with it, sir?”

“I haven’t found it. But I intend to,” Durell said. “When I do, it goes to the Kabul government in Afghanistan. After that, it’s none of my affair or my government’s concern.”

Mr. Chou said patiently, “We know all about you, Mr. Durell. Your code name is ‘Cajun,’ is it not? We know that you are on loan, so to speak, from Washington, at the request of your old friend, Nuri Qam, to help the Afghanis recover the dragon. I warn you, our Deputy Chairman means to have it. There will be no equivocation about the dragon. One way or another, at whatever cost, he will have it in Peking. It is not important in itself, of course. We both understand that. And it is not the concern of your country. True, the Russians—certain of them—would like to irritate the Deputy Chairman into making aggressive moves. It could certainly be done.” Mr. Chou spread his hands, and Durell could see in the gesture the deadly mushroom clouds of a thermonuclear holocaust. “A showdown between the legitimate claims of the Chinese People’s Republic for Siberian territorial adjustments and the nationalist, imperialist expansionist aims of the deviationists in Moscow may certainly become inevitable. Would you want that? Of course not. No reasonable man would destroy the world for such foolishness. So be reasonable, Mr. Durell. We three—
Herr
and
Frau
Hauptman-Graz and myself, are not the totality of the forces at work to prevent you from taking the dragon to Nuri Qam. Your trust, in any case, is misplaced. Mr. Qam has his own ideas as to the eventual disposition of the art objects. You would be better off to cooperate with us.”

“I don’t have the dragon,” Durell said flatly.

“Come, come.”

“Not yet,” Durell added.

“Ah. But you have learned where it is?”

“Perhaps.”

“Tell us, then,” Mr. Chou said gently.

“To hell with you and the Black House and your nuclear threats and your new Deputy Chairman.”

“You are angry, I see. But it was not we who tortured and killed your friend Mr. Fingal. That was the work of the Russians. That perverted man, Kokin. Do not blame us for that.”

Durell was silent. Freyda emphasized the pressure of her gun in his ribs. The big blond woman looked eager to pull the trigger. She would have done well in Nazi times, he reflected. Her stout little husband also produced a gun, a Luger, and pointed it at Durell.

Durell said, “And what if I don’t cooperate with you?”

“All men are mortal,” Mr. Chou said. “We must all face death sooner or later. But better later, I should think, than now, at this moment. I am not a patient man, contrary to your Western concept of Orientals. If I cannot get the dragon from you, I shall retrieve it from your pretty Russian companion, Miss Talinova. Yes, we know about her, too. And Pigam Zhirnov. And the sadist, Kokin. We are efficient. We can be ruthless. And at the moment, I am impatient.”

Durell suddenly knew that Chou would not let him leave this little room alive. The red tab on his dossier in Peking made him fair game for killing by any Black House agent.

It was stiflingly hot in the plank shed behind the carpet dealer’s shop. The sound of crowd noises from the bazaar were muffled by the multiple layers of carpets that hung outside the door. A shot, or several shots, would surely go unnoticed and unheard by those outside. There were no windows in the wooden room, but the walls seemed to have been knocked together from thin plywood crates. There were no other doors except the one by which he had been forced to enter.

“So, Mr. Durell?”

Freyda was breathing faster than normal in her eagerness, and she pressed the gun closer to him. He said, “All right,” and then shrugged and turned inward toward her, forcing her to shift the gun in her hand. The next moment, with exaggerated care, he removed his .38 with two fingers from his waistband. Mr. Chou sighed and smiled. Freyda looked at the Chinese and Durell made his move the moment she shifted her gaze.

His gun slammed a single shot at Hauptman-Graz, who happened to be the nearest target, and in the same moment, he used his left arm to drive Freyda’s gun away from his body. It went off a split-second after his own shot, and the double roar seemed deafening in the tiny, closed room. The Luger’s slug went wild. The woman squawked and shouted something in German as she saw her husband topple backward off the pile of rags, Mr. Chou came off his seat of poustines, holding a gun.

Durell dropped down, sliding forward on one knee, fired at the Chinese, missed, and his shoulder knocked Freyda down in a tumble atop him. Her flesh was soft and yielding. Mr. Chou had no qualms about his target. His gun crashed and Durell felt Freyda jerk as the bullet grazed her, aimed at Durell. The woman’s Luger fell to the floor. Durell came up and hit Chou in the stomach with his head. The man fell backward, upsetting the balanced pile of embroidered coats and vests. He became entangled with them for a moment, and Durell heard Freyda swear softly in German, saw her grope for her fallen gun, and waited no longer.

The plank door to the rear of the carpet shop was not locked. Durell drove through it, found himself in the maze of hanging carpets dependent on their long bamboo poles across the back of the shop. A bullet thudded through them from behind as Chou recovered his balance. Durell dropped flat, urged himself on hands and knees under the hanging rugs rather than to try to fight his way through the narrow passages they formed. The carpet dealer had concluded his haggling with the pilgrim and was alone in the shop. He stared at Durell with mouth agape. Durell wasted no time on him. He ran for the front of the shop and the crowds of people in the great bazaar. The place was a rat’s nest of alleys and lanes, each one devoted to special crafts—coppersmithing, jewelry, more carpets, clothing. Shouts and pleas and arguments filled the hot afternoon air, but the deep lungsful Durell drew felt relatively cool after the sweaty heat in the little room behind the carpet shop.

He shoved his way rapidly through the motley crowd. Looking back, he saw Chou and the woman come out after him; he moved faster, but not too fast as to attract the attention of someone in the crowd or of the occasional uniformed policeman who patrolled casually through the bazaar. Members of the crowd, motivated by their intense religious fervor, would gladly seize the opportunity to mob him, recognizing him as an obvious
ferengi
, a foreigner.

It was not until he reached the first comer that he noticed two others closing in on him. From the minaret of the Gauhar-Shad mosque came the sudden ululations of a muezzin, calling the faithful to prayer. The cries were amplified by loudspeakers and inspired a tidal wave, sending all the Moslems in the crowd for their prayer mgs. The two men at the corner were Afghans, dressed in tribal costume—big men, with fierce moustaches, heavily muscled under their white shirts. They hesitated, aware of the fact that they would stand out in the vast crowd if they refused the call to prayer that boomed out from the minarets. Finally they responded by crouching in the proper position. For Durell, fortunately, there was an open shed where a jeweler practiced his craft on local turquoise stones. He stepped quickly inside, out of the crowded, dusty lane. Behind him, he saw Chou hesitate. Freyda, heedless of local customs, kept coming on, a vengeful Valkyrie in a sea of prostrate forms.

Durell made his way to the back of the jeweler’s stall. The merchant glared angrily at him and raised a brief shout, and then subsided as the muezzin’s call from the minaret clamored brazenly again. A curtained doorway led Durell swiftly into a back lane.

He turned right, thankful to see no one here, and ran a distance down the lane until he saw a second doorway, this one of wood, and pressed against it. It was open. He looked back just as the curtained exit began to open outward with Chou’s pursuit. Chou did not see him. He found himself in a back storeroom that smelled redolently of spices. The darkness inside was broken by a thin film of light beyond the kegs and barrels stacked to the ceiling. He listened, moved forward, heard voices suddenly resume bargaining, and walked through into the shop from the back way. The shopowner was busy with a client; neither man noticed him. He slipped out and went to the right again, seeking the Way of the Silversmiths.

Prayers were over as suddenly as they had begun, and the crowded alleys resumed business as usual, Now and then he looked back as he took one twisting lane after the other. Towering high over the jumble of sheds and shops were the minarets of the mosque and the bulk of the museum, the only building at the sacred enclosure not denied to foreigners. It contained Shi’ite Islamic art, a collection of ancient Korans, ceramics, brocades, arms from the Safavid dynasties. He skirted through the crowd at the museum and found himself on Chour Street next to the mausoleum of the great mystic, Pir-i-Palandus. The delicately colored dome loomed over the narrow street and cast its shadow upon the surging visitors. Durell turned left this time, thought he saw the two Afghans who worked for Chou, and turned his back to the crowd, stopped to purchase a yost, a string of black prayer beads, and two small clay tiles designed to rest the forehead when prostrate in prayer. Nothing happened. Nobody accosted him. Three minutes later he was in the street of the silversmiths and found the shop he wanted.

The place was next to a
madressah
, a religious school, and Durell could hear a rhythmic chanting of male voices through the thin walls of the shop.

“I have been waiting for you, Mr. Durell,” said the silversmith.

“How did you know I was coming?”

“You must not linger here. I think I am being watched. Perhaps I shall be of no value to your people in the near future.”

“Who is watching you?”

The man shrugged. “Several men. They change posts, and I do not know them. I think they are
fereng
i, some of them. In any case, come, have some tea; but then you must not stay longer.”

“No tea, thank you. How did you know I would be here?”

“Mrs. Fingal, she is the one who told me you would soon arrive.”

“Sarah Fingal?”

“Yes, sir, she is the one.”

The proprietor busied himself with a small samovar set up on a plank behind his tiny smithy. The shop glittered with bangles, earrings in great hoops, silver necklaces with turquoise insets, teapots, even a silver sword. He was a thin, cadaverous man who looked as if he had worried about his health from childhood. He had a long, drooping gray moustache, thin hair, and sunken eyes that kept straying past Durell to the lane outside the tented entrance to his shop. Durell moved so that he, too, could watch the passersby. He did not see anyone who looked dangerous or even interesting.