Assignment — Stella Marni (11 page)

"Get back here by two o'clock this afternoon. I'll leave a message at the desk if you're not in. Dig deep, Tony. I think we'll need everything you can discover." Durell paused. "And don't get careless. Art Greenwald was careless last night, and you know what happened to him. If this ring smells you digging into them, even at a library or a newspaper morgue, there can be an accident. To you."

"I can take care of myself," Isotti said.

"See that you do."

Durell started to turn away, and Isotti said: "One thing, Sam. When I checked for you at your hotel, Deirdre Padgett answered. She flew up here last night on the one-o'clock plane. She's anxious to hear from you."

Durell was startled, but his face showed nothing. He felt a moment of guilt, and then resentment, because Deirdre had not remained here in the first place when he had asked her to, and then he told himself he was foolish to castigate himself about it.

"All right, Tony, thanks. Get to it."

He retrieved his rented car and drove along Central Park South before turning back to his hotel. The trees were bare, the greenery turned brown, and the city seemed to huddle for warmth within itself under the bleak gray sky. He left his car in a lot after circling the block three times for a parking space, and went into the hotel to find Deirdre.

She was in the coffee shop, the clerk told him. He scanned the other people in there with practiced care, but he saw no sign of Blossom or his fellow agents, and he walked toward her. She sat in calm serenity, her dark hair perfect under a small red hat, her dark blue eyes watching him first with unconcealed warmth and pleasure, then with caution. Her smile was natural. She wore a red wool suit that matched her hat, and white gloves. Durell bent to kiss her and her mouth was cool.

"I hope you weren't worried about me." He smiled.

"No, darling." She patted his hand lightly. "I used to worry, you know. But now I know you can take care of yourself. Now I just... have faith in you. It's all I have."

He drew a chair out at her table and signaled the waiter for a pot of coffee. He was aware of Deirdre's cool, objective eyes and he spoke out of a need to fill the awkward little vacuum of silence that began.

"I thought you weren't coming back. Tony Isotti told me you flew up on the morning plane."

"Yes. I didn't really have any work to do in Washington."

"Then why?..."

"I guess I was a fool. I guess I didn't want you to take me for granted. Your invitation for me to spend the night here was so casual, darling. That sort of thing can be upsetting now and then."

He said: "Dee, we know each other too well to begin playing this son of game with each other. I'm glad you're here now."

"Are you?" Her voice was a soft challenge.

"What is it?" he asked. "Why the cross-examination?"

She smiled ruefully. "I suppose I'm making noises like a jealous wife, and I'm not your wife, am I? And I may never be. When I learned you are not permitted to marry anyone who isn't fully cleared for security, the same as you are, I went and got myself cleared. And still we're not married. You're off to the West, or to Europe, or you disappear into Russia for a month, and I simply sit and wait for you to come back each time as if nothing had happened. I'm beginning to think well never be married, Sam."

"You're depressed. Why?"

She sighed. "I saw Harry Blossom an hour ago. He came here to the hotel, looking for you."

"Wild?"

"No. Quite calm." She poured coffee for Durell and herself. "He told me what you did to him last night. He said you spent the night with Stella Marni."

"Yes, I did," Durell said carefully. "And that troubles you?"

"She's a beautiful woman. Harry Blossom says she has a power over men, he says she can twist a man like you around her little finger."

"Blossom should speak for himself." Durell said. "But if you remember, you asked me to help her yourself."

"Not to the point of spending the night with her, Sam."

He smiled. "You're jealous. That it?"

She did not smile in return. "Yes, darling. Very, very jealous. I love you, Sam. All of a sudden I'm afraid I'm going to lose you. And if I do, it will be my own fault. I got you into this. It's true, I wanted you to help Stella Marni. She needs help. But Blossom says..."

"To hell with Blossom. Don't you trust me, Dee?"

"I know how you are, Sam. I know I'm not the only woman in your life. I knew that long ago. But I kept hoping I was something special."

"And you are," he said.

"But not special like Stella Marni."

"Dee, I don't think we ought to talk about this now." The coffee he swallowed tasted bitter. "Blossom has a thing about that girl. It's turned him from a damned good agent into a sick paranoiac. He's lost all sense of balance and proportion. He's as much a victim of this affair as any refugee going home in terror of death and imprisonment I don't know what he told you or suggested about Stella and me..."

"You spent the night with her. Did you comfort her, Sam, as you once comforted me?"

"She was frightened," Durell said.

"Did you make love to her?"

"In a way."

"Was she good? Better than me?" Deirdre insisted. Her face was very white. "Answer me, Sam."

"Nothing happened. She was close to hysterics. I helped to calm her down and got her to sleep."

"Am I supposed to believe that?"

He stood up, anger surging in him, an anger that he never thought in all his life would be directed against this lovely girl he knew so intimately. "You've got to believe it, because that's what I tell you and it's the truth. And if anything else had happened, I'd tell you that, too."

"Would you, Sam? Why are you so upset about it, if nothing happened?"

He stared down at her in masculine frustration. He saw the glitter of tears in her lovely eyes and he wanted to shake her and tell her — He did not know what he wanted to tell her. There was nothing he could say that would not hurt her even more, in her present state of mind. He could not deny to himself how the very essence of Stella Marni had stolen into him. It was simply there, and he could not explain it. And he could not cast her out.

Deirdre looked up and bit her lip and considered her gloved hands on the table. "I'm sorry, Sam. I couldn't help myself. I love you too much to be complacent about you, I guess, even though I hate myself for acting like a possessive female. But Blossom told me so many things about Stella that i hadn't known before. He called her a witch, a sorceress."

"Blossom is crazy about the subject," Durell said harshly.

"I know. I could see that. And I'm suddenly afraid it might happen to you, too, Sam." She stood up gracefully, her smile tremulous. "Please forgive me. I should have known better, darling." She drew a deep breath. "I've taken a room here and I'll stay in town as long as you're working on this case, if you'll let me. Come up with me, Sam."

Their eyes met, spoke of intimacies in the past, of quiet, tender love and the wild ecstasies of passionate moments.

"Dee, I'm sorry. There is no time," he said.

"No time — for me, Sam?"

"Dee, be reasonable. Stella Marni is in danger. I shouldn't even be spending these minutes here with you. I have too much to do, and I'm in trouble myself, and somebody else is likely to get killed if I don't stop this thing fast."

"Just half an hour, Sam."

"Not now."

She turned white. "I see. Last night you said you wanted me, but today you don't. Shall I go back to Washington, Sam? Perhaps I've been a worse fool than I thought."

"Dee, I love you. If you don't know that now, you'll never know it. But..."

"Don't say anything more." Abruptly she picked up her purse and then paused. Her eyes were dark and miserable. "If I say anything else, I know everything will be finished between us. I feel small and ugly and humiliated. I know your work comes first, and if you say there isn't time just now for me, then I know it's the truth, too. But I can't help being selfish. I want you. Now. I'm sorry." She kissed him lightly. "I'll be waiting here for you whenever you come back."

He stood quietly watching her proud, lovely walk as she left the coffee shop. Her name leaped to his tongue, but he checked it and did not call after her or follow her. He wanted to go after her and beg her forgiveness, to let her know, somehow more convincingly than he had done, that be did want her and needed her.

But he let her go.

He was followed from the hotel.

He was not able to identify the tail, but he knew the man was there. There was a bar at the corner and he turned into it and ordered bourbon and stood at the bar so he could watch the street Nobody passed along the sidewalk that he recognized. His thoughts swung from Deirdre to Stella and then to the job at hand, in a confusion that was rare to him. He had known all the rules, had listened to all the advice, had ingested all the catchwords that warn an agent against involvement with the subjects of his investigation. He had the example of Harry Blossom before him, and Frank Greenwald beyond that Yet he was involved. He had come here to help in a problem that needed a humane approach, needed sympathy and understanding, and perhaps he had gone too far. His thoughts about Deirdre were chaotic. He felt torn between Deirdre and Stella, not understanding himself, wanting them both, knowing that the chances were good he might never have either. What he felt for Stella was a thing entirely apart from Deirdre. And the problem of ending the blackmail and terror of people like Stella was, again, something else apart from either woman.

He had another bourbon, felt nothing from it, considered two men who had drifted into the bar, and went out again.

He was followed.

It was done carefully, expertly, almost invisibly. He was accustomed to surveillance, to overt contact and the shadow type of operation. He had been, at various times, both the subject and the shadower, the hunter and the hunted. He knew the difference between expert and amateur work. This was expert, and when he doubled back to trap the shadow behind him, it vanished in the lemony daylight of November noon. He took evasive action then, marking in his mind the big shape of the man he had noted, the long arms, the forward thrust of a giant's head glimpsed from the tail of his eye, and after twenty minutes, when he was reasonably sure he was alone, he retrieved his car and drove down Fifth Avenue to Greenwich Village.

The New American Society was housed in a red-brick building that had obviously been refurbished, painted, and redecorated. It was one of a row of similar houses converted to apartments in a small, narrow street that led toward the West Side docks on the North River. The street was like an island out of the last century, miraculously untouched by the endless change of New York. It was quiet and empty under the gray November sky, isolated from the rushing traffic around it.

There was only a small sign on the door to indicate the building's use. The door was not locked. Durell went in and found himself in a small, tidy foyer with welcoming signs printed in a dozen East European languages framed on the blue walls. There was a smell of foreign cooking in the hallway, a small reception desk like that of a miniature hotel lobby, done in padded red leather and brass nails, but nobody was behind the desk. To the right off the hallway was a sitting room furnished in more red leather, with two heavy sofas that would have gone for premiums at an antique gallery. But nobody was in the sitting room, either.

The rattle of china drew him farther along the softly lighted corridor and he looked into a tiny but efficient dining room with a pass-through window in the rear, through which he glimpsed the stainless-steel equipment of a community kitchen. Two elderly men and a white-haired woman who looked dressed for the Gay Nineties were seated in the dining room, each at a small individual table. One of the men looked up from a German-language newspaper and nodded, wiped enormous white Hindenburg mustaches, and murmured,
"Guten Tag."
Durell answered briefly in German and backed out.

From the main corridor a flight of carpeted steps led upward, and he was about to ascend when a girl appeared at the top and floated down. She did not seem to walk, but actually to float. Her wide yellow skirt swirled and her tiny feet in high-heeled shoes scarcely seemed to touch the carpeted treads. She came down toward him with the jingling sound of tiny silver bells. There were bracelets on her wrists, little tinkling bells for earrings, and, Durell suspected, more jingling silver elsewhere. Her dark red hair was piled high on her head in a complicated pattern of waves and curls, and she had a bust measurement, above a waist he could have encircled with his hands, of a woman twice her size. She was in her early twenties, he guessed, and at first glance she was the sort of doll that elderly men loved to dandle on their knees while they had their ears nibbled.

She spoke with a lisp, which did not surprise Durell at all.

"Welcome to the New American Society. You're a stranger here, aren't you? My, and you're a handsome one, too! Do you speak English?"

Her hand was hot and intimate in his and she stood very close to him, still on the lowest step of the stairway, and she still had to look up at him. At closer inspection, she still seemed to be in her early twenties, but there were little signs that indicated she was slightly shopworn.

"Well, my, how you
stare!"
she said.
"Don't
you speak English?"

"If you're the official greeter," Durell said, "I'm surprised the average membership age isn't much lower. Especially the male membership."

"Well! Himself does talk!" she said. She laughed, but not with her eyes. Durell had looked at and appraised feminine figures often, but he had never had the reverse experience before. He felt as if she had stripped off his clothes, examined him, and decided she liked what she had discovered and was determined to take it. Her tongue peeped briefly between tiny white teeth. "And himself speaks with a Southern accent, just like little old me!"