“To me?”
“It could happen to you.”
“Why to me?”
“Because you may have started something you can’t stop. Because you stepped into a mess you know nothing about. Because you wanted to know about your brother Emmett, and because after all these years, your curiosity can’t have been the result of accident, or impulse, or romantic illusion. You’re not the romantic type.”
She began to curse him in a low, thin voice. “Oh, God, how I hate you! How I hate all of you!”
“Why, Eva?”
Her language was darker and deadlier than any he had heard a woman utter. In a moment she betrayed all her beginnings, all the squalor of whatever her earlier years had been. He listened to her fury and watched her tawny eyes blaze. She looked as if she wanted to strike him dead, and he decided there could, be only one reason for it.
“Tell me,” he said. “Is Emmett still alive?”
And she began to weep.
He gave her a drink and another cigarette. She gulped the drink greedily, like a thirsty child, her hands trembling on the glass. She dragged deeply at the cigarette. Occasionally she made a gasping, sobbing sound and leaned against him heavily so he felt the firm contours of her body. But he did not raise his arms to touch or comfort her.
She spoke in a low, crying voice. “How can I trust you? How can I trust any man?”
“You have to begin some time. Didn’t you trust your husband?”
“Paul? I don’t know. I wanted to.” She tilted her head and stared up at him with glittering eyes. “You know, Paul would be shocked if he ever heard me swear like that. I never did, not to him, even in those first days when he found me and handed me all that wonderful money and told me how Emmett once saved his life and how he’d been sent by Uncle Arthur to find me and make a lady out of me. I didn’t want to shock him by letting him know how bad I was.”
“You’re not bad, as you put it.”
“No? Look at me,” she said harshly. “Look good and close. Can’t you see how rotten I am?”
“Why do you say that?”
She drew a tremulous breath. “Because I think I killed Paul. Because I did a rotten thing to send him up there without telling him why.”
“Didn’t you tell him about Emmett?”
“I didn’t say anything to you about Emmett!”
“You don’t have to, now. What makes you think Emmett’s still alive up there? Twenty years is a long time for an American to spend in the Burmese hill country. It isn’t possible for him to have lived up there, even if he hid as a native, without some word coming back about him.” Durell spoke persuasively. “Maybe fifty years ago the world had some remote corners in it where such things could happen. But not today. The world is small today, Eva. Crowded and tied together, for better or worse.”
“Why couldn’t Emmett still be alive? It could happen!”
“Some word of it would have come back to you in the States.”
“Why? He didn’t even know I was still alive then!”
“Or perhaps he didn’t care,” Durell said.
She spoke in low fury. “Don’t say that! Emmett loved me! I’m his sister. I’m the only family he has in the whole world.”
“Men have gladly forgotten their families before. You’re simply romanticizing a childhood memory of him, Eva. Can’t you see that?”
“No. He’s alive, all right.”
“Why are you so sure of it?”
“Will you help me, if I tell you?”
“I can’t promise anything,” Durell said.
“You’ve got to promise. I’ve done some low things in my life. You don’t know; nobody will ever know. But I wanted to do one good thing. I’ve been lucky—so lucky, it’s still like a dream.”
“Did you have the idea you could find this long-lost, long-dead brother and share your good fortune with him? Is that it?”
“Yes. Oh, yes,” she whispered.
“But you didn’t let your husband, Paul, know that you think Emmett is still alive somewhere.”
“No, I didn’t tell Paul. Because I couldn’t trust him. I can’t trust any man. Not even Paul.”
“Paul loves you, doesn’t he?”
“I don’t know.”
“A woman usually knows such things,” Durell said. “All right, Paul loves me!” She flicked her cigarette into the Japanese fish pond in the garden. It made a small red arc and died, hissing in the water. The garden was very dark now. Traffic jingled on the road beyond the compound wall. She said, “But I wanted to be sure. If I told Paul that I knew Emmett was still alive up there, how hard would he look for him? Why should he? He’d know I planned to give half of what I have to Emmett. Would he want that? I don’t know. Paul likes my money, you see. We made a bargain about it when he first found me. And he made a lady out of me, for Uncle Arthur. Paul has a funny thing in his mind about the money. He said he sold his soul for it, and therefore he wouldn’t want me to give any of it to anybody.”
“So you didn’t tell him about the information you received that Emmett was alive. What is it, Eva? How did you learn about him?”
“It was a letter,” she whispered. “It came to me, back in the States.”
He waited.
“It was addressed to me in Pennsylvania, at the place where I worked. And it was forwarded half a dozen times. It was in pretty bad condition by the time I got it, six weeks ago. It was sent originally from here, from Rangoon.”
“Do you have it with you now? I want to see it. Who signed it, and what did it say?”
“I don’t have it. But it was written by Emmett.”
“Are you sure?”
“He signed it. I don’t know if it’s his handwriting, of course. I want to believe that it is. It was brief, and the date was more than six months ago. It simply said he’d heard about me in the news reports and that he was alive and well and would write again. But he didn’t. At first I thought it was a crank, playing a cruel joke—the sort of thing people do when your name gets in the papers and they think they have a right to demand money, or help, donations, anything—as if they had a right to share my inheritance.”
The girl was silent suddenly. Although the night was hot, she hugged herself and shivered as if she were suddenly cold.
“Was it a joke, do you think?” she asked suddenly. “Am I a fool to believe it? I think I’m hard and practical, but— when it comes to Emmett, I’ve got a chink in my armor, I guess.” She smiled ruefully. “I dreamed of playing Lady Bountiful to him, making up for all the hardships he must have suffered. But I suppose it was all a hoax. It can’t be true.” She looked up at Durell. “You must think I am a fool to sacrifice Paul for such a thing.”
“No.”
“Bad, then. Evil. Testing my husband’s love against his greed for my money, to see if he’d share it with Emmett.” “I don’t—”
There was a faint movement in the shadowed shrubbery of the garden, beyond the fish pond. At the same moment, something small and dark sailed out of the night and landed with a thud on the veranda floor, rolling toward Durell and the girl.
Durell jumped past her, diving and scooping for the object all in one motion. It was a grenade. He picked it up and threw it back toward the pond, spun on his heel and knocked the girl sprawling against the Bombay chair. He fell with her, pinning her flat to the floor at the moment the grenade exploded.
The sound shattered the hot night. The fish pond seemed to leap into the air with great gouts of mud, stone and water.
For a long moment debris clattered and banged down against the house, breaking windows. Water pattered down, drenching them.
“What—?” Eva gasped.
“Stay here. Don’t get up.”
He vaulted the veranda rail, digging his heels into the soft garden loam. The miniature wooden bridge over the pond was askew, tilted in the air at the far end. Durell’s gun was in his hand. He heard screams from the servants’ quarters, but paid no attention to that.
He crouched a little, thinking there might be another grenade. The smell of cordite choked off the scents of jasmine and other flowers. Smoke drifted past him. Then the black mass of an oleander moved slightly.
“Come out of there!”
The shrub jumped with movement. There was a wild yell as a dark figure ran for the compound wall. Durell fired once, twice. The man staggered, did a strange tiptoe run for another few steps, and then dropped. Durell slowly walked forward aware of shaking anger. He had no mercy for terrorists. It was an area where he gave no quarter. He moved carefully around the wrecked fish pond wondering if the man had had a companion. But there was no one else.
“Are you all right?” Eva called.
“Stay where you are!”
Servants ran from around the house, stopped when they saw Durell, and huddled in a whispering group. Durell came to the man he had shot. One bullet had gone through his chest and smashed his spinal column and killed him instantly.
The dead man was small, with the broad face and round head of the hill people of northern Burma. He wore a pair of Western slacks and a striped silk shirt and canvas sneakers. A short, curved kris was hooked in his pants belt. The eyes stared in dead wonder at the night sky. Durell knelt beside him and put his face close to the dead man’s and smelled a peculiar, stale smoky odor from the dead man’s mouth. Hashish, or marijuana.
He walked back to the veranda where Eva Hartford waited.
“What was it? Is the man dead?”
“Yes. He tried to kill you. Or me. I think it was you.”
“Me? Why me?” She did not look frightened, but there was shock in her voice and in her eyes. “Whatever for?”
“It’s probably the same man who set the bomb in Simon Locke’s kitchen and killed Houphet, the French pilot. Don’t you know the reason?” he asked harshly. She shook her head negatively and he took her arm. Her skin felt cold. “Listen to me,” he said. “The police will come here soon. Do you want to find Paul, really?”
“Of course, but—”
“If the police question us, we’ll be tied up for days. By that time, Simon won’t be able to help us with a plane to fly north.”
“Will you take me with you?”
“I think you’ll be safer with me,” he said. “But if the police delay us, we’ll never make it. Can you come as you are. I’m to meet Simon at ten, at a place called the Mandarin Bar. We’ll keep moving until then so Savarati won’t catch up to us. We’ll drive to Pegu, where Simon has a plane. I think we can make it.”
“All right,” she whispered. Her face was pale. “I guess I have to trust you, after all. I do want to find Paul. I want to ask him to forgive me.”
Five
Paul Hartford awoke again at dawn, to the taste of dried blood in his mouth. The blood had coagulated on his lips and chin and on his teeth, and he panicked for a moment when he felt that his mouth was sealed by it. He painfully picked the clots away and listened to the sound of the monkeys screaming insanely in the bamboo forest around him.
Rain pattered down on the leaves that curtained his cage. After removing the blood clots from his lips, he came out of sleep like an exhausted swimmer and became aware of consuming hunger and thirst. The cage swayed perilously when he sat up and looked around for Tagashi through the thinly falling rain. But the Japanese was not in sight this morning.
During the night he had tried to chew his way out of the bamboo cage. It had occurred to him that it might be done, and in fact had to be done, if he was to survive any longer and keep sane.
The cage was about seven feet high at its apex, six feet in diameter, and had a plaited bamboo floor over a log base. It was impossible to cut through the logs. But the bamboo bars were lashed together, and there was a place near the twisted iron hinges of the entry gate where the hinges had worked some of the bamboo struts loose. The gate itself was sealed with an enormous iron padlock, and he gave up all hope of getting out by opening the lock.
When it was dark he began to chew on the bamboo stmts to the left of the hinges, gnawing steadily and persistently. It did not take long for his teeth to ache in protest. His gums began to bleed, but he could stand that, too. He made some progress. However the dryness of his mouth and lack of water to ease his pain slowly became an increasing torment. In his debilitated state, he could not maintain the necessary crouching position for very long. His pauses to rest became more and more frequent. And although the night was cool, he began to sweat feverishly, and sometimes his body shook so hard that he could not support himself on his hands and knees to continue the chewing.
Finally the bamboo splintered and stabbed the soft tissue of his palate and he began to bleed in earnest. For a few seconds he went on chewing and spitting blood. The blood, he hoped, might soften the rigid bamboo fibers. But it didn’t.
Toward midnight a second splinter pierced his inner cheek and gave him excruciating pain. He could not help screaming. His voice went echoing away through the dark jungle like that of a lost soul. His fingers shook violently when he reached in his mouth and summoned all his will power to pluck the splinter from his flesh. Afterward, he thought he would drown in the gush of blood that filled his mouth and throat.
He had to give up the plan of chewing his way out of the cage. The bleeding would not stop, and he kept spitting endlessly. Sometimes he swallowed the blood, but this presently made him vomit and he lay down on the matted, filthy cage floor and sank into oblivion.
Several times that night he woke up coughing and strangling from the blood that ran down his throat. Then the thought of suicide came to him. He could tear loose a large splinter of bamboo and pierce a vein in his neck or wrist.
Anything would be better than the cage.
When the moon came up and filtered dimly through the interlaced branches above him, he inched back to the gate of the cage and tried to tear loose a fragment of bamboo splinter. But his fingers were too weak, and he only stabbed his hands with the sharp fragments. He finally gave up in tearful frustration.
Eventually, the bleeding in his mouth stopped and he slept. He awoke to the sound of the rain and the disappointment that Yugi Tagashi had not yet come.
Paul listened to the monkeys and watched their dim shapes flit through the trees. The rain was cold, and he shivered. His ragged clothing was soon soaked, plastered to his skin. His belly cramped in sudden pain, and for a time everything went away from him as he lay in a half faint. When he could sit up again, the rain had stopped, the sun was out and the jungle returned to its steaming, incredible humidity.
And still Tagashi did not show up.
He sat very still, waiting, and slowly a sense of fear built up in him. It was a strange thing. From a place of horror and filth, the unnatural prison where he was penned like some freak of nature, he had come to regard the routine of his days in the cage with a sense of security. Every day for the past two weeks had been exactly the same, until now. This morning was different. It was because Tagashi hadn’t shown up with the extra, secret provision of rice. Panic touched him as he wondered if he had been forgotten. And there was the remnant of his dream, a nightmare that had haunted his sleep toward dawn. It was as if time had turned back, a little more with each day he spent in the cage, wiping out the years between his first time in these hills, and today’s reality. Nothing had changed. He frowned, trying to recall what had been in his nightmare that made things different this morning.
He had heard distant explosions.
Grenades, mortars, the spiteful cracking of rifles.
Yes, that was it.
He had heard men screaming, from far down in the valley where the river ran to the south.
Or was it a dream, a tag-end fragment of the nightmare of his days in the jungle war against the Japanese?
He wasn’t sure. He felt confused. He wanted to weep again in frustration, because of his cloudy thoughts and his inability to separate past from present.
He thought he had buried all the ugly memories of the tortuous Myitky
ina campaign with the Marauders. Those had been months of pure, unadulterated physical anguish, hacking through the jungle on an empty belly, waiting for the air drops that gave you just enough food and ammunition to go for another two or three days while you marched around the Japanese positions to throw a roadblock behind them.
Exhaustion, disease and hunger had not been all of it, of course. There was always the sudden attack, the spiteful crack of a sniper’s rifle, the quick sharp rattle of a Nambu machine gun. The Japanese were tough, seasoned campaigners, the victors of Singapore. They did not yield easily. And the forgotten, betrayed, maligned rag-tag men of the 5307th (Provisional) endured it all—the heat, rain, mud, the mules and the stink, the wounds and the endless terror, fighting through the end to Myitkyina airfield. In retrospect it was a'* brilliant campaign, wrung from the guts, sweat and sanity of three thousand volunteers.
What you did then was done by instinct and reflex and training. You just put one foot in front of the other and slogged on. You suffered dysentery and typhus mite and malaria and you swallowed Atabrine and halazone tablets by the handful and prayed for an eventual end.
You found a buddy, then. Young Emmett Claye, a tough kid from the Pennsylvania coal mines, a kid with no home to go back to, as he said, which wasn’t worse than the Kachin Hills. Twice Emmett saved your life when the Japanese sprung ambushes along the mountain trail. There was the time when the platoon fell out beside a rushing stream, and you were too weary to go farther at the moment. You couldn’t resist the idyllic, peaceful pool below the rapids. While you stripped and bathed, the Japanese moved in, and the first warning you got was the incredible blasting explosions of knee mortars and Nambus ripping through the bamboo. You scrambled naked to the stream bank and saw the big Japanese looking down at you, grinning, rifle leveled, and you knew the end had come at last. It was all over. And in that instant while your guts turned watery and your knees collapsed and an unspoken cry for mercy stuck in your throat, the strange young man in green shorts and shirt leaped silently from the bush and buried a knife with horrible efficiency into the Japanese soldier’s back.
Assignment Burma Girl Page 6
