Assignment — Stella Marni (9 page)

"You wouldn't automatically become an American citizen. You'd have to go through the same procedure as anybody else. And even then, as you say. it wouldn't help yow father. Haven't you any idea where he is?"

"None. He has — vanished."

"But you're sure they're holding him to make you do as they ask?"

"There is no other reason he would disappear."

"Who has contacted you about it?"

"Only a voice on the telephone. A man. And two letters, unsigned. When Papa disappeared, the telephone call came first, then a letter the next morning, then another telephone call telling me what to say to Senator Hubert's committee."

"You've never actually seen any of these people, Stella?"

"No."

Durell kept watching the rear-vision mirror. The road was empty and black behind them. Nobody followed. His headlights fanned out over bleak, cold marshland, and then a white-painted guard rail curved off into the darkness of the sea to his right and the tires rumbled hollowly over a small wooden bridge that spanned a salt-water creek. The road became a sandy path, and a long row of empty, ramshackle summer cottages flicked by under the glare of his headlights. They were on a small sand spit used as a summer colony, deserted now in this November weather. The road dwindled and came to an end. There was nothing ahead but a beach and the curling, cold combers of the Atlantic beyond.

Durell braked, then backed the car until he could turn around, and drove slowly back the way they had come. There were perhaps a dozen small summer shacks in all, standing on wooden pilings above the grass-grown beach. Most of the windows were boarded or shuttered against the winter gales, and probably none of them would be visited again for months to come, until the spring. He pulled the car off the sand road and jounced to a halt behind a green-painted cottage that had a chimney, indicating a fireplace inside.

Stella looked at him questioningly. "Why do you stop here? There is not a soul for miles."

He smiled reassurance. "You're not afraid of me, are you?"

"No, I... no, I trust you."

"Harry Blossom will turn the town inside out trying to find us. We won't last long if we go back to Manhattan. I know. You can't hide forever. But one of these cottages ought to gain some breathing time for us, and you'll be safe here."

Her face went oddly blank and still for a moment. Then she spoke in protest. "But I cannot hide. I don't dare. My father... If they think I have disappeared deliberately, they will have no mercy. They will believe I have betrayed them — double-crossed them, isn't that the way you describe it? And they will kill him."

"I'm getting tired of they' and 'them,'" Durell said. "I wish you would trust me, Stella."

Her voice echoed despair. "I do not know what to do. You are alone, too, you have cut yourself off from any hope of co-operation from the police. What can you do, all alone? Harry Blossom will make things very difficult for you. You will have to answer all kinds of questions about the way you got me out of Mr. Krame's studio and helped me avoid answering police questions." She sat up straighter, breathing at a slightly faster pace. "Could you somehow find my father? In the next forty-eight hours?"

"I'm going to try," Durell told her simply.

"If you could, then I would be free. I would not have to go back home..."

"That's the general idea," Durell said. "But first things first. You need sleep, and so do I. It's three o'clock now, and there's nothing we can do except to stay out of Blossom's hands for the present. You have to trust me, Stella," he said again.

She nodded slowly. "I do. I want to. Yes, I do."

He got out of the car. The wind coming off the beach was cold and cutting, but the rain had stopped and beyond the shredding, low-scudding clouds were a few glimmering stars. The breakers crashed and thundered nearby as he walked through knee-high grass to survey the cottage he had chosen. Every window was boarded up, but the back door was secured only by a simple ward lock. Stella followed him, hugging herself against the icy, salt wind. He borrowed a pin from her, tinkered with the lock, and got it open in less than a minute.

"In you go. I'll get some driftwood for a fire," Durell said. "No one will ever know the difference out here."

There was no electricity on the little sand pit, but there were oil lamps in every room and a kerosene stove in the big kitchen. The interior of the cottage smelled mildewed and damp, but it was comfortably furnished with simple maple furniture. Sand had blown in under the front door and formed a long tongue reaching toward the stone fireplace in the living room. There were two bedrooms with red linoleum floors and double beds. Stella took one of the oil lamps and investigated the kitchen pantry and called out with delight when she found shelves stocked with canned goods and canned coffee.

"How thoughtful of our unknown benefactors!" she laughed. "They have left us all the comforts of home, as you say."

She was looking better now. There was a simple excitement in her explorations that erased some of the desperate tension she had shown before. Her blonde hair gleamed in the soft light shed by the kerosene lanterns. Durell told her to start the coffee boiling and went outside, taking a flashlight he found hanging beside the back door, and in ten minutes he returned from the beach with an armload of driftwood for the fireplace. The kitchen smelled of perking coffee in the gray enameled pot. A simple hand pump provided fresh water for their needs.

"It is silly, but suddenly I am absolutely starved," Stella said. "And I feel good, somehow." Her green eyes smiled as she came to stand close beside Durell at the fireplace. "I am so grateful to you. I do not know what I would have done at Blossom's house if you had not come."

"Don't think about it now." he said.

"Yes, you are right. For these moments, I will just pretend that everything is safe, that this is our little house and..." She paused, suddenly blushing furiously in the growing light of the fire. "I really am getting foolish, am I not? It's just that I have been carrying such a burden all alone for so long, so much worry and trouble, and suddenly you come along and all at once I feel safe. Safe! I feel as if you will help me and make everything come out all right somehow.

Abruptly she turned and went back into the kitchen. Durell stared after her. The fireplace was drawing well, radiating heat in the dampness of the rustic, pine-paneled room. He did not follow Stella. Picking up the flashlight, he went outside and circled the house again. There was nothing to see. The crude causeway that led to this spot was lost in the darkness, and no car lights moved on the landward side. They were safe enough for the moment.

Stella had coffee ready when he returned and she was sitting on the floor in front of the driftwood flames, combing her long hair. Her smile seemed to light up and warm the formerly cool lines of her grave face; but it was a tentative and very timorous smile, and it did not last long. Her husky voice and scent filled the room. He looked at her eyes and wondered if she had been crying.

"I really am a very good cook," she said. "Please sit down. You look so uncomfortable standing there like that. So tall and stern. Do I make you uncomfortable?"

"In a way. yes." He sat down on a maple chair beside the patch of straw carpet where she knelt before the fire. Her eyes were bright and oddly expectant. He said: "You don't mind spending the night here like this?"

"It may be unorthodox, a very little, and I am sure people would frown and suspect the worst." She laughed softly, deep in her throat. "But the situation is not one that demands all the social niceties, is it?"

"Where did you learn English?" he asked.

"Do I speak well? It was in Budapest, of course. Oh. long, long ago. I used it there whenever I could. I practiced very diligently. I suppose I knew even in those early years that I would come to America someday. I was so ambitious! I worked so very hard! Those were difficult years, you know, when the Russians came in. We were hungry, unhappy. I swore an oath to myself that I would make things better for myself, I would force the shape of things for my future. It was not pleasant. I made myself into something — something quite different from the child who watched the Soviet Army march into the city."

She paused, and for the briefest moment Durell glimpsed something different in her, too. It was as if a mask had slipped from the soft contours of her body. He felt strangely disturbed, conscious of the long curve of her thigh under the green skin, her slender waist where the wide leather belt was buckled with a replica of the insigne he had noticed on her beret that afternoon. She had taken off her shoes and her nyloned legs were outstretched toward the fire. He had never seen a woman so simply beautiful, and he told himself not to be a damned fool, Frank Greenwald and Harry Blossom were enough.

As if aware of his thoughts, she rucked her legs under her.

"Please don't stare," she murmured.

"But I like to look at you."

"Most men do. It is something I learned long ago, when I was — that other person, that ambitious child. I learned to use men to my advantage. Is that frightening to you?" She smiled, shook her head, thick blonde hair swinging softly. "I am sorry. I know it is all right with you. And I can never repay the help you have given me tonight. If you had turned me over to the police. I think my father would have died tonight. They would not have trusted me to keep silent, faced with a murder charge."

He was relieved to talk about something else. "And you have absolutely no idea where they may be keeping him?"

"No. None."

"You said something about having only forty-eight hours in which to stay here. After that, I suppose you mean to go back to Hungary."

"Yes."

"By plane? or ship?"

"I do not know. I was told to obey orders and give my testimony today — yesterday — as I did, and after forty-eight hours — from yesterday afternoon, that is — arrangements would be made for me to leave this country and all would be well. And my father would come with me."

"Do you believe that?"

"What choice do I have?" she countered. "I can only hope they will keep their part of the bargain, I must believe that. Otherwise. I think — I would want to destroy myself."

He sipped at the coffee she had made. Outside, he heard the wind in the tall, wild marsh grass, a darkly brooding melody in counterpoint to the steady crash of the surf nearby. The driftwood fire crackled and sparked. Durell frowned and turned his thoughts back to other things.

A ring of Americans, Frank had said. Two women, four men. Doing the filthiest kind of work for the Communist satellites. To Durell, there was obscenity in the fact that Americans would help in this sort of thing. He was not consciously a patriot, although he loved everything in America, from the great city behind him, with its polyglot peoples, its glitter, and its slums, to the width and space and grandeur of the West, to the secret green fastnesses of the Louisiana bayous, and the strength and beauty of Washington. He had risked his life time and again to defend all this, and he knew with a quiet certainty that he would never hesitate to risk his life again. Treachery within, for the simple sake of cash profit, sickened him and made him want to crush it as one would crush an obscene parasite under one's heel. The cost to himself was not important; he did not count it or consider it.

And there was more to it. Art, who might die. And this girl, Stella Marni. Looking at her, Durell felt an undeniable hunger. His face showed nothing of it. His face was lean and hard and dark; his eyes had seen gambles won and lost; his mouth had tasted the lips of many women, some in treachery, some in love. But Stella was different. She stood apart. There was something electric about her that responded to a need in him, although every instinct and every trained reflex in him told him not to trust this feeling. Women had destroyed more good intelligence agents than almost any other cause. Emotion should have no part in the game he played.

Yet he could not help himself. He was attracted to her. He wanted to know her. He wanted to solve the obscure riddle she presented to him.

In a short time, unless he could help her, she would vanish forever behind the curtain drawn across half of Europe, a victim of terror, coercion, blackmail. Less than two days. Somehow in that time he had to find her father, unmask the terror ring, free her of the grip they had on her that made her a slave, murmuring words she hated and did not believe.

And after that...

Again he shrugged and switched the course of his thoughts.

"Why do you suppose Frank was killed, Stella? He was supposed to meet you at Krame's studio, and he got there ail right, somehow, with his brother. Art. But before that at your apartment he received a phone call that excited him enough to make him break away from me. It was something important, of course. He was trying to help you, Stella. I got the distinct impression that perhaps he had learned something vital."

"And that is why I suppose poor Frank was killed," Stella whispered. Her eyes did not meet his. "I was fond of Frank, and maybe I would have married him, after all. He was persistent, but he was kind and good. But I warned him, I tried to be cool toward him in order to make him stop his foolish and inexpert interference. These people are dangerous, they are experienced in danger and violence, and poor Frank was — well, he was just a pleasant, overweight, comfortable businessman." She paused, spread her hands on her thighs, and studied them with grave and minute concentration. "Well, you know what Frank was like."

"Could he have learned where your father was being held as a prisoner?"

"Perhaps."

"Didn't he give you any hint as to what he was doing?"

Stella said reluctantly: "I never gave him a chance to talk about it. I was always warning him not to interfere. I did not want to see him hurt. But apparently he kept right on asking questions, and I suppose he did stumble upon something very dangerous, which he wanted to tell me, and which caused them to kill him. I think his brother was just an innocent bystander, so to speak." She looked troubled, frowning faintly in the firelight.