Assignment Burma Girl

by Edward S. Aarons

  He watched the tall, thin man approach with the soft, easy stride of a jungle fighter. He noted the gun belt, the bandolier of cartridges, the neat green uniform. He did not look much older than when Paul had last seen him.

  “Why did you shoot me, Emmett?” he asked quietly. “It was a mistake, I admit. You startled me. It was like seeing and hearing a ghost, Paul.”

  “Are you Major Mong?”

  “I call myself that.”

  “And you’re on the enemy side, now?”

  Emmett Claye looked puzzled. “Let’s not discuss the naive stupidities of your political theories, Paul. The big problem is what I’m going to do with you.”

  “It would have been simpler if you had shot straighter,” Paul said. “Then you wouldn’t have a problem.”

  “I cannot tolerate an American spy here. If you were anyone else, Paul, it could be solved as you suggest. Why did you come here?”

  “Eva suggested that I might find your grave.”

  “Does she think I’m dead?”

  “I don’t know. I suspect there’s more to her motives than she told me. I’ve been quite foolish about her. Afraid of too many things lately, ever since we were married. Did you know that I married her, Emmett?”

  Nothing changed in the tiger’s face “When?”

  “About a year ago.”

  “For her money?”

  “At first, yes. But now I must admit that I love her.”

  “And Eva?”

  “I don’t know how she feels about me.”

  “Is she well? She’s rich, I know. But is she happy?” “She wants to find you, I think, and share everything she has with you. I think now that’s the reason she insisted I come here. I don’t mind admitting that I only wanted to find your grave, at first. I didn’t want to give up anything that’s Eva’s to you. But maybe it’s better this way. She’ll know what you are, and that will dispel the ghosts that haunt her.”

  “How was she living before—before you found her?” Emmett asked.

  “She was a whore,” Paul said.

  His words, spoken quietly, fell into an abrupt silence like the hush before a violent storm. Beyond the broken wall of his cell, beyond the screen of vines and wild orchids that shielded his view of the valley far below, the sun shone and the birds sang. Tagashi, hearing the words, held his breath lest the tiger spring. The priest, Yan Gon, bowed his shaven head.

  Emmett only made a thin sound in his throat.

  He said, “And you married her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “For her money, at first. I told you.”

  “You have the courage to say this to me?” Emmett whispered. “Do you want to die now?”

  “I’m only speaking the truth. It’s time for it.”

  “You said it was her money at first. And then?”

  "Then I fell in love with her,” Paul repeated simply. Somehow it was this, and not his other words, that tripped the trigger of Emmett Claye’s rage. He reached down savagely and yanked Paul from his pallet, careless of Paul’s wound or his weakness. He smashed his fist into Paul’s face, driving him back against the wall of the cell. As Paul crumpled, Emmett caught him and struck him again, and again. No protest came from Paul’s bloodied mouth.

  “Liar!” Emmett shouted. “You took my sister only for her money, you wanted to find me dead so you could keep it all for yourself—”

  “Do you want Eva’s money?” Paul whispered. He stood up, gasping, and leaned against the wall. “Why not come home for it, then? Why don’t you do that?”

  “What?”

  “Or are you afraid? You’re a traitor, you know. A deserter and a defector. You fight for our enemies, against your own country!”

  “I don’t owe you anything,” Emmett whispered. He brutally pushed Paul down to the pallet and stood over him, trembling. “What do I owe you, or anyone, after what was done to me? Can you answer that? How can you know the things that happened to me, the things I had to do, just to survive? Who helped me? Who had a kind word for me? What did I have to come home to? Who had a kind word for my sister?”

  He paused, shaking, his lean face pale and contorted. With an effort, he drew a deep breath and continued in a calmer tone.

  “When Ingkok betrayed me, afraid of reprisals if he couldn’t placate the Japanese, and knowing how they had been hunting for me with a price on my head, I was wounded and hiding in his basha. But it was Tagashi, a very unusual Japanese commander, who decided it might ease his conscience if he gave me a chance to die in the jungle instead of shooting me like a sick animal. But I didn’t die in the jungle. I crawled on my belly for a week, eating roots and leaves and berries, trying to catch up to you, Lieutenant Hartford, and the rest of the Marauders, hoping for help. But you were long gone. You didn’t come back to look for me.”

  “They said you were dead,” Paul said quietly. “And perhaps you did die, Emmett. I understand things better now. You’re sore at the whole world because you think you got a raw deal.”

  “Didn’t I? I know I got a raw deal. The worst was being bom behind a slag heap in the crummy coal town back home. These people here were better to me than anybody back home, until they, too, turned against me. But I didn’t die. I had some scores to settle. I stayed alive. I don’t remember much of it now. It was most of a year that I wandered around in the mountains of Yunnan, out of my head with fevers and sickness. When the Communists took over China, they took me in, too. They sent me to Peiping to study, made a mining engineer out of me, and I worked in Mongolia and Manchuria and even visited Moscow once. I made a whole new life for myself, up there.”

  Emmett gestured toward the dim, hazy green mountains on the Chinese border. His face was grim and unnatural, his yellow eyes were ablaze with a feral anger that never seemed to leave him.

  “When I heard of the new push to the south, I volunteered to help. I know this country intimately. I fought over it, I survived in it. I’m going to govern it,” he said simply, on a quiet note. “I’m going to be the boss here.”

  “You’re sick,” Paul said. “Like I was sick, in a way. You need help, Emmett. Listen, it’s not too late for you to come home. Eva wants you. And I’m surprised to find that I do, too.”

  Emmett Claye looked at him with unseeing eyes. Paul had the feeling the man did not hear anything that was said to him. Emmett Claye, as Major Mong, was consumed with a cancerous hatred that soon would destroy him. Paul saw this with his new-found clarity of thought, an understanding he had never before possessed. He wondered if it had come to him too late to help Eva. He did not know. It depended on Emmett Claye, a man he no longer knew.

  “Paul?” Emmett asked quietly.

  “I’m listening.”

  “Did you know that Eva arrived here this morning?”

  “Here?”

  “In Nambum Ga.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Paul said. “It would have been better if she stayed away from here entirely. Are you sure?”

  “I have people in Rangoon and Nambum Ga who get information to me. I want to see her, Paul. She was just a kid, the last time I saw her. I left her in an orphanage, and now she’s a young and wealthy woman. I don’t care to hear any more of your lies about her. I want to hear about her from her own lips. Somebody will pay for all the things she had to suffer.”

  “She’s doing fine without you,” Paul said. “Leave her alone.”

  But Emmett swung to the Japanese, Tagashi. “You will go into the town and get her for me—quietly, without letting anyone know. Do you understand?”

  Tagashi nodded slowly. “Yes, Boh Mong.”

  “Bring her to me this afternoon. If you fail—” “I understand. You will kill me.”

  “And your woman and your children.”

  “Yes. That will be natural now, for you.”

  “Go, then.”

  Emmett began to laugh. The sound was thin and unnatural in the quiet peace of the monastery walls. He turned back to P
aul.

  “She didn’t come here alone, you know. There’s an American agent with her—a spy. I receive good intelligence by radio from Rangoon, you see. The man’s name is Sam Durell. Did you know about him?”

  “No.”

  “He was sent here to get you out. So you were not forgotten completely, eh?” Emmett Claye thoughtfully looked out through the broken wall of the cell at the dim green mountains and the valley below. “Yes, Durell is his name. I want him, too. I’m going to kill him.”

  Nine

  Durell awoke at four o’clock in the afternoon. He had slept fitfully through the heat of the midday hours, after his failure to convince Pra Ingkok that the best defense against the Lahpet Hao terrorists was to take them by surprise by attacking their small contingents that ringed the town. He had hoped that Ingkok’s people would remember the Marauders and the OSS guerilla groups of long ago, and that their memories of resistance against terror could be freshened. But he had run up against the yielding, spongy wall of their pacifism, and no amount of argument had broken through to them. He had returned to the Circuit House under guard and found Simon Locke apparently asleep in the single broken-down chair in the room. He felt worn down himself, by the heat

  and his defeat, and threw himself on the bed and let sleep overcome him.

  He had dreamed of Eva, and in his dream he ran through the jungle with her, helpless and unarmed, through a dark and endless night. A vague, unidentified terror pursued them and closed the distance remorselessly. No matter how much he urged Eva to hurry, she could not keep up a safe pace. She stumbled and fell and he picked her up to carry her and found that she was naked. She wanted to make love to him. Her body was knowing and wise, frantic with passion. He could not resist her. Eva’s arms and legs were entwined around him when the formless enemy burst with a rashing sound from the jungle brush to rend and tear them with tooth and claw—

  He awoke suddenly, bathed in sweat. His dream still shuddered inside him. Durell lay still, staring up from the bed at the hole in the broken plaster of the ceiling, seeing the open log rafters and the bats that hung like balls of gray fur from the beams in the shadows.

  The town and the hotel were strangely quiet.

  He was alone in the room.

  “Simon?” he called.

  He stepped quickly to the veranda, looking for Locke. The guards were gone. From the balcony the streets and alleys of Nambum Ga looked dusty and deserted. Turning, he walked quickly back through the dim, cobwebby room to the corridor door, opened it, and stepped out into the hall.

  No guards were here, either.

  He went to the girls’ room and knocked harshly.

  “Eva? Merri?”

  Merri’s voice, vague with sleep, said, “One minute.”

  She opened the door for him and stepped back as he pushed quickly inside. She was alone in the room. Her dark hair looked tumbled, and her eyes were dusted by the oppressive heat. She still wore the slacks and blouse she had started out with, from Rangoon.

  “Where is Eva?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. The lady’s room, I guess.” She grinned crookedly and managed to look like a disheveled pixie. “There’s only the one to each floor, you know. Not exactly like the Ritz, eh?”

  “All right,” he told her. “Stay here.’'

  “Is something wrong?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He had the feeling that something was very wrong. He should not have slept, he thought. But two hours ago there had been nothing to do except search his mind for a way out of the trap that the town had become for him. He went down the wide corridor to the door marked Dames and knocked heavily.

  “Eva?”

  There was no answer. After a moment he knocked again and then opened the door. No one was inside. The window beyond opened onto a narrow balcony and a flight of wooden stairs that led to an alley on the river front. Durell swore softly, looking to the right and left. He did not see any guards here, either. He wondered why they had withdrawn, where Simon had gone, and if he was with Eva. His uneasiness deepened. Long shadows lay on the river where the sunlight slanted over the jungle on the opposite bank. A bullock wallowed in the shallows of a mudbank. Turning, he bumped into Merri Tarrant, who had followed him into the primitive lavatory.

  Her face was very white.

  “Where is Simon?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And Eva?”

  “She’s gone, too.”

  She began to tremble. “Oh, God, he’s gone and done it again. Oh, the poor fool!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He must have gone to look for some place where he could find a pipe of opium. That's his big trouble, you know. I’ve tried my best with him, and he promised me faithfully he’d try to quit, but I guess he couldn’t hold to it under these circumstances.” She bit her lip hard. “If it wasn’t for that, I’d—I'd stick with him—but he’s only a shell—”

  “Would he have taken Eva with him?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense, does it?”

  He said decisively, “Stay here. I’ll go look for him.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m not sure, but—”

  “I’m going with you,” she interrupted. “I won’t stay here alone, whatever you say.”

  He hesitated, saw her point about remaining unprotected in the hotel, where anything might happen to her. He nodded shortly.

  “All right, come along, then.”

  He ran downstairs to the lobby with Merri at his heels. No one stopped or challenged them. Ingkok’s soldiers were not in sight. But a slim, elderly Indian in a white seersucker suit of Western make stood behind a battered desk and looked at them with mild, liquid eyes, and then lowered his gaze and busied himself ostentatiously with the mildewed register book.

  Durell strode up to him. “What happened to our guards?” he asked. “Where is everybody in town?”

  “The guards were withdrawn, sir. It is said that every man is needed to defend the town,” the Indian said in soft English. He still did not meet Durell’s stare. “You were left here on your honor, sir.”

  “What happened to Mrs. Hartford? Where is she?”

  “Is she not upstairs in her room?”

  “You know damned well she isn’t. Now—”

  Merri interrupted. “And what about Simon Locke? Where did he go?”

  The Indian spread his hands in a resigned, negative gesture. A fine beading of perspiration on his face warned Durell that the man might be lying. “I could not say, miss.”

  Durell reached over the desk and slammed shut the register book the man fingered in his nervous hands. “You saw Locke go out, didn’t you?”

  “I am not sure—”

  “Didn’t you?”

  The clerk said quickly, “I want no trouble, sir. He said it would be all right. He promised me that there would be no objection and that he would be back very shortly.” He turned his head and stared at a tin alarm clock that ticked on a shelf behind him in the cavernous lobby. “That was two hours ago, sir.”

  “Was Mrs. Hartford with him?”

  “No, sir. I have not seen that lady.”

  “You’re lying,” Durell snapped.

  “No, sir, I—” The Indian paused, looked from Merri to Durell. “Mrs. Hartford was not with Mr. Locke when he left the hotel.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “He—he asked me about Luang-shi’s house.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “A place where you can smoke opium,” Merri murmured. “Si told me about it, when he’d flown up here at other times.”

  Durell stared at her. “Would Si really slip up like this, now?"

  “I—I’m afraid he—yes,” she whispered. She looked as if she were about to cry, and then bit her lip hard. “It’s not Simon’s fault, he—he’s just been slowly going to pieces. I guess I haven’t been smart enough to give him much help—or good enough, or something.”
r />   “Luang-shi’s place is about a mile up the river, sir,” the clerk said. “It is not known as a reputable house. The men who go there are—” He shrugged expressively. “I warned Mr. Locke that the Lahpet Hao might move down the river in that direction at any time. But Mr. Locke was very nervous and upset. He gave me a hundred kyats not to mention this to you, sir—until you asked, that is.” “Can you show me the way to Luang-shi’s?”

  “I am sorry, I am not permitted to leave the Circuit House. But if you go along the water front to the end of town, there are small fishing punts which can be used to skirt the marsh and the rice paddies there. It is the only building on the other side of die rice fields, at the edge of the forest. There is a trail from the landing. But I would not go there after him if I were you.”

  Durell stared at him. “Because of the Lahpet Hao?”

  The clerk shook his head. “By now, your Mr. Locke may be in no condition even to walk. He will be in a state of bliss, sir.”

  A moment later Durell left the hotel with Merri. The ominous silence that shrouded the steamy town made him balance the danger in leaving her here alone against taking her with him. In any case, there was a look of determination about the small, dark-haired girl that made him decide not to waste time arguing about it.

  They left by the back door and turned right, away from the street toward the river. Over a fence made of hammered tin cans and bamboo lathes, he could see Van der Peet’s river steamer, idle at its dock. No one was working aboard to load it, and the crowd of refugees that had greeted their arrival in the morning had dispersed. He wondered where the Dutchman had gone, and then turned along a path that followed the weedy river bank, twisting between crude bashas built on pilings out over the water.

  Some small naked boys playing in the river stopped to stare at their unexpected appearance, but no one else showed up to intercept them. It took only a few minutes to reach the end of the town.

  The river above the town landing became abruptly broad and shallow, with a rocky bed and white rapids that made small rainbow arcs in the slanting sunlight. Durell looked north up the valley and saw how the mountains abruptly pressed in to pinch the water course between high cliffs and precipitous slopes. Here and there in the sides of the cliffs were vague geometric shapes of overgrown temple ruins, blended with the misty greens and grays of the jungle. On a peak nearby on the western bank was a more clearly etched temple in a better state of repair.