Assignment — Stella Marni (13 page)

"Why were you late?"

Damion shrugged meaty shoulders. "Club business. Miss Smith had some papers for me to sign — applications to the immigration authorities for some new political refugees who had come here. I couldn't delay it. So I was late getting to meet Frank last night. I don't know what happened to him. I don't know who killed him, Mr. Durell. But some of it was my fault, I'm sure, and I can't forgive myself."

"Just what was your hunch?" Durell asked.

"Let me assure you, it wasn't anything more than that — just a wild idea. I simply wanted to talk to Frank about it and learn what he thought of it." Damion leaned over and pulled a folded copy of the
New York Times
from his wastebasket, and shoved it across the desk toward Durell. It was folded to the shipping news, and an item had been encircled with a red pencil. "Just a hunch. But up to the last time I spoke to Stella — that was yesterday morning — no provision had been made as to how she was to leave the country. Yet she told me she was advised that she would go within forty-eight hours. That was yesterday. Tomorrow night that ship sails."

Durell scanned the marked news item. It was in tiny print, a list of scheduled sailings, and among them was a Polish freighter, the
Boroslav,
from Gdynia, at Pier 27. It could be, he thought. He considered Damion's rugged, tired face for a moment. It could also be a trap.

"Have you gone down to the pier to look at this ship?" he asked.

"No, not yet. I was going to do that with Frank. When he didn't show up, I came back here to see if he had misunderstood me."

"But nobody had seen him here?"

"No."

"You mentioned the ship to him over the phone?"

"Yes, I think I did."

There was an intercom box on Damion's desk, and Durell looked at it. The switch was open. There were also buttons on Damion's telephone that indicated an intercom office telephone system as well. He got up suddenly and silently and walked to the office door and yanked it open. The room with the round conference table in the center was empty. So was Gerda Smith's little receptionist's office beyond. Silver Bells wasn't there. But there was a matching intercom box on her desk as well.

It didn't have to mean anything.

John Damion had guessed his suspicion. "My staff here is absolutely above reproach. They are all devoted, unselfish people, trying to help our unfortunate members. We try to provide a home away from home for them, so to speak, until they adjust themselves to our American way of life. The officers of this organization serve without pay, without publicity, without any remuneration whatsoever except the satisfaction of helping retrieve lost, frightened souls from whatever particular hell they've run away from."

"What is your official position with this outfit?"

"I'm executive secretary."

"Without pay?"

"Only my expenses."

"Room and board?"

"Yes."

Durell closed the outer office door, glancing at a wall clock in gold and black as he did so. It was now eleven o'clock in the morning. If Damion was right about the
Boroslav,
he had less than thirty-six hours to pull a rabbit out of the hat, to keep Stella Marni from going back to almost certain death or imprisonment, and to find Albert Marni.

"You didn't mention the
Boroslav
to Blossom when he was here earlier?"

"No, I didn't. As I told you, I don't think Mr. Blossom has the interests of our people at heart. Perhaps I was wrong. I'm a good citizen, Mr. Durell. I've been worrying about it. I don't like to hold back information from law-enforcement officers. But at the time, because of his angry and insulting manner, I hesitated to mention it because after all it's nothing more than this item in the newspaper, and it doesn't necessarily have to mean anything."

"Except that Frank Greenwald was killed after you mentioned it," Durell pointed out.

"Yes, there's that. Do you think I ought to call Blossom and tell him?"

"Yes, I do," Durell said. "But can you wait, say, two hours?"

"If you wish it."

"I'd appreciate it," Durell said.

Damion nodded. His big hands were clenched. "Mr. Durell." He paused. "I hesitated to ask you this. You said your interest in Miss Marni was twofold — official and personal."

"True."

"Are you in love with her?"

"I only met her last night," Durell objected.

"But she has that effect on men. I know. I'm as fond of her as a man can be, considering the difference in our ages. The men who've become interested in Stella in that way haven't had a very good time of it, even discounting what happened to Frank Greenwald."

"So?"

"Just be careful, that's all."

"Thanks. I mean to be." Durell said, and he went out.

He did not see Silver Bells on his way to the door.

Durell found a secondhand-clothing store two blocks from the New American Society and purchased a faded denim shirt, dungarees, work shoes, and a black leather jacket lined with fleece. The shoes pinched a little when he tried them on, but they would have to do. With the package wrapped in plain brown paper, he found a public rest room in the subway station on Seventh Avenue and locked himself in a closet to change his clothes, then left his suit to be pressed at a local tailor's and his shoes at a cobbler's for new heels. He carried no identification with him that connected him with the CIA. His gun was tucked under his blue work shirt and leather jacket.

He made two telephone calls. The first, to his hotel, reported no messages at the desk for him. He wanted then to talk to Deirdre, knowing how it was with her, if she felt at all about their last parting as he did at this moment, hating himself for having hurt her. He did not call her. His second telephone call was to the hospital, and he was advised that Art Greenwald was in the operating room, undergoing emergency surgery. Rosalie, Art's wife, was there, but Durell was given no chance to speak to her. He debated then trying Washington, to talk to McFee, but decided to hold off, for now at least, and quit the booth.

A cold wind was blowing off the North River when Durell reached the water-front docks under the roar and shadows of the West Side Highway. The river looked dirty and gray with the tide coming in, and on the Jersey side a pall of industrial smoke made the Palisade cliffs hazy and dim with smog. The
Boroslav,
at Pier 27, was a small 6,000-ton freighter of prewar construction, painted white once, but with neglect showing in the huge flakes of red rust on her sides and a generally unkempt air about her. He moved on into the shadows of the vast, echoing shed. Trailer trucks were backed up to the loading platforms, and there was a din of motors, whistles, and the harried shouts of laboring longshoremen. No one paid any attention to him in his working clothes.

He was still aware of the risk he had taken by telling Damion his true identity, but his hunch, based on his quick estimate of the man, had paid off in this lead. Not even Stella Marni had known the path chosen for her exit from New York. The information might prove to be all wrong, and in that case he would have to start over again. But he had a feeling of certainty as he entered the shed that this was the right path.

Weak sunlight played on the muddy, roiled surface of the North River. He stepped aside to let a string of handtrucks roll by, laden with wooden crates of farm machinery. The Polish freighter was loading foodstuffs and nonrestricted industrial equipment, to judge from the Detroit and Indianapolis stencils on the crates. The cargo was not his concern. The cargo would have been checked out by Customs and other agencies detailed to keep vital materiel from prospective enemies. He lit a cigarette and thought of Stella, alone in the little beach cottage he had broken into. Alone and waiting. He hoped she could wait with patience. He himself had learned how to be patient the hard way, in the rigorous training school established in the Virginia hills, in the closing days of the war when he was ten years younger and still full of the sullen heat of the bayou country. On countless occasions with the old OSS and later with G2, waiting had been more vital than action, waiting and watching and listening. He had been bored, sometimes, exhausted, too. But he had learned never to make the last crucial move until the time was exactly right. Stella did not have training of that sort. She was a frightened girl hiding behind her mask of cool impersonal detachment. He knew her now. And he knew she was not the proud goddess disdainful of men, the remote and chilling woman she had seemed to be.

He pushed her aside in his mind with a deliberate effort. Nobody had challenged him in the busy shed, where he wandered alongside the white, rust-streaked plates of the freighter. An officer on the bridge was shouting something down to the longshoremen astern, his voice garbled and echoing through a hand amplifying phone. Most of the loading was being done through tie cargo hatches aft of the center superstructure. But there were two loading ports in the side of the ship open to gangways nearby. So far as Durell could see, no one was on guard, and several men came and went on errands by that route, to and from the ship.

He walked that way. He had no longshoreman's badge authorizing him to be here, and he could be challenged at any moment. A burly man in cap and woolen jacket stood checking a manifest list nearby, and he looked up as if to speak to Durell as Durell walked toward the nearest gangway. But at that moment there came a crash and breaking sound from somewhere down the shed and a man's voice lifted in a hoarse shout of alarm. The checker put aside his writing board and ran down the stringpiece toward the ship's stern. A winch cable had snapped and for a moment there was a swirl of confusion and curses at the opposite end of the shed.

Durell walked quickly up the gangway and boarded the ship.

He was a little forward and below the high superstructure amidships, in a long gray-painted corridor that smelled of Diesel oil and cooking. To the left he verified his senses by spotting the entrance to the ship's galley. He turned aft, found a ladder that took him up to the next deck above.

A seaman hurried past him at the head of the ladder, muttering to himself in Polish. He paid no attention to Durell beyond a quick, blank look, and Durell walked with a purposeful, busy stride, as if he had a specific destination to reach. The general layout of this type of 6,000-ton freighter was familiar enough to him. Cargo holds fore and aft, with crew's quarters below the center superstructure, a few cabins above for a dozen passengers at most, and then quarters for the ship's officers. Hunting for Albert Marni might be like searching a rabbit warren. If Marni was a prisoner aboard, on the assumption that this might be considered a relatively safe place to hold the old man while Stella went through her ordered paces before the Senate subcommittee, he could be held anywhere. In the holds, the crew's quarters, or up above in one of the cabins. During the loading operation, however, the holds might be a little dangerous, and Durell dismissed that area for the moment. The crew's quarters would be logical, except that with the longshoremen aboard and the recent defection of the six Russian merchant sailors prominent in the news, there might be distrust on the part of the command for that area, too. Considering everything, only the officers would be top security risks for the abductors. It could be. Conceivably, during the loading operations, at any rate, Albert Marni would be moved topside, out of the area where the dock workers might wander.

Durell stepped out on deck, found a second ladder going up under the bridge, and mounted it. For the moment he was in plain sight of the cargo officer on the wing above, who was directing the longshoremen on the dock and the deck aft. There was no side deck amidships. To go aft, he had to enter the superstructure and walk along a partially open companionway. And as he stepped through the bulkhead door, he saw the short, burly officer waiting for him at the opposite end of the corridor, perhaps eighty feet away. Everything in the man's attitude suggested that he had been waiting to intercept Durell.

"You, there! Just a moment!"

Durell called, "Hello," and walked toward him with a smile. The burly man in the blue uniform was momentarily puzzled and disarmed. Durell said: "I've been looking for you, mate. There's some trouble up on the bridge — you're wanted up there."

The man said something in Polish, enough words to permit Durell to continue covering the distance between them. Suspicion flared in the officer's pale eyes too late to save him. Durell's attack was direct and swift. He chopped at the man's neck with his right, chopped again across the bridge of the man's nose, and paralyzed tiny eye muscles, breaking nerve connections, rupturing blood vessels to the brain. A strangled sound came from the man. He made a tentative move toward his right-hand pocket and never finished it as Durell hit him again with a judo blow that toppled him forward to the deck.

Durell caught him before he fell, hauled him back to a doorway leading to the cabins. The man was heavy and solid. His heels caught on the bulkhead tread and one of his shoes came off. A strangling noise came from him. His eyeballs rolled white and pale blue and his tongue showed between his teeth. It had taken only a second or two to reduce him to helplessness by paralyzing vital neural centers. And Durell had deliberately held back all of his strength from the blows.

It could have been an accident that this officer seemed to have been waiting for him. He hoped so. The other alternative, that a telephone call from the New American Society had put the ship's officers on the alert, was not to be dismissed, however.

A corridor led directly across the ship through a small, darkly paneled dining saloon. Nobody was in sight. Another corridor went fore and aft from the saloon, with four cabins forward, four aft, equally divided on port and starboard sides. Durell tried the first cabin astern and pushed open the shutter door. It was empty. A portrait of Stalin greeted him and he wondered why it hadn't yet been removed with the new gang in power. His burden showed signs of reviving and Durell removed a small blue-steel pistol of Czech manufacture from the right-hand pocket of the mate's blue uniform. The gun was loaded. He sat down on one of the bunks and watched the man on the floor for a moment.