Assignment Carlotta Cortez

by Edward S. Aarons

  His face and his eyes were sober. “That’s why I’m here, Carlotta.”

  Her smile faded. “I don’t understand. You are here— officially?”

  “In a sense, yes. Johnny has been in an air accident.” He watched her. She was splendid. He did not seem to be watching too closely, but he was sensitive to the flicker of an eyelid, each tiny movement of the small muscles at the comers of her mouth, of the way her hands lifted, of the way she stood. She was flawless, he decided.

  “Please. . . .”

  “He may be all right,” he said quickly, as a solicitous friend would have said it. “We don’t know yet.”

  “But I do not understand—”

  “His plane crashed, Carlotta. I’m sorry to be blunt. But Johnny hadn’t been found yet. We think he might have wandered away from the wreck in a daze, you see—perhaps telephoned to you, not quite realizing what he was doing . . .”

  “No, no. We have heard nothing. I’m sorry, it’s a shock—”

  Her eyes moved with just the right amount of distraught restlessness, now looking at the carpet, then up again, wide and gray and enormous, filled with the shadows of fear, held in check was just the right amount of aristocratic pride and denial of ordinary emotion.

  “I still do not understand,” she said quietly. “Johnny crashed, you say. But he hasn’t been found. Did he land by parachute? Is he lost somewhere?”

  “We think so. Yes, he’s lost.”

  Their eyes met. Hers, gray and questioning and enlarged, had flecks of gold in them, as if to match the shimmering metallic substance of her sheath gown. In that moment, Durell knew the truth, and knew that they understood each other in undeclared, silent war. She was not fooled. She knew the truth of why he was here. He knew that she regarded him as an enemy. This mutual understanding came out of nothing said or done, but it was there, almost tangible, under the polite gaze they exchanged, hers with just the right amount of growing anxiety for a missing husband, his for a missing friend. And he began to know the extent of how dangerous this woman could be.

  Carlotta touched her throat. “I must speak to the General. He will want to hear of this, of course. Is there anything I can—anything we can do?”

  "Everything possible is already being done,” Durell assured her. “You will be kept informed, naturally.”

  “By you, Sam?”

  “Probably not. I simply came here because of knowing Johnny and you. To make it easier, if possible.”

  “It is kind of you. I did not know you were in military intelligence, Sam. I mean, I knew you were connected with something in Washington, and Johnny always wondered about you and your job, you know.”

  He did not correct her. “If I can do anything more, Carlotta please call me.” He gave her the number of his hotel suite. “I’ll be in town for a day or two. I’m sure everything will be all right.”

  “Couldn’t you—would you stay for dinner? Speak to father yourself?”

  “It’s late,” he said. “I don’t want to intrude.”

  She did not offer again to take him to the General. “I’m sure Johnny is all right. I can’t understand how he could disappear—” She thought of something suddenly. “The other members of the crew—are they safe?”

  “Yes,” he nodded. “They bailed out. They didn’t see Johnny do the same, that’s why we believe he landed with the plane and got out all right. I’m sure he’s not badly hurt. We just have to find him, that’s all.”

  “He will be all right,” she said firmly. “He will be found.”

  Again their eyes met, locked, like intimate enemies in a measuring, speculative, dangerous embrace.

  He left the house with the knowledge that Carlotta had known about the crash and about Johnny. She was upset by his disappearance, but she had not been surprised. He was sure of this. He had interrogated too many suspects in counterintelligence, and had been trained too finely, to miss the nuances that betrayed what she tried to conceal.

  It was still snowing when he returned to the street. The man walking the French poodle was gone. Nobody was in sight. He had not been entirely successful, he thought. He had hoped, after the polite dueling, that she would take him to General Cortez and the others in the house. He had seen very little of the interior, although he could guess at the general layout of the rooms. It might be necessary to know more. And he wanted to know who else lived there, and why, and who exactly belonged to the hopeful, desperate circle of exiles who had made this place the sum of all their angry, revengeful longings.

  Well, Wittington would have all that for him in the morning.

  He crossed the street with a long, purposeful stride. He felt as if he were being watched by someone in the Cortez house, perhaps at a darkened upper window. He did not look back. He did not make a point of studying the empty house at Number 11, which was diagonally across the way from the Cortez house. But he saw enough to confirm his opinion that no one at present was living there. It would make a perfect place to install Pleasure and use as headquarters for the stakeout that would be developed within the next hour.

  He walked to the corner, turned left, and halted. He listened. He heard no footsteps behind him. The side street here was rather dark. He walked on. An alley bisected the block, running along the rear of the houses flanking the Cortez place. He turned into it. It was like stepping into a black, cold pocket.

  The fences that defined the individual back garden areas and courts of each house were a uniform eight feet in height, and the alley was too narrow to give him much of a glimpse beyond the top floors and the uppermost rear windows of each house. Yet if the stakeout was to be successful, some kind of watch had to be set up here, too.

  He moved farther down the alley.

  There were trash cans, recessed gateways in the fences, and then suddenly a widening in the alley to a point where a car could be driven in. He saw that the other end of the alley was actually a kind of driveway for garages in the back, opening from the opposite side of the block. And a car could be driven to the rear fence surrounding the Cortez garden . . .

  Movement flickered just to the left, where the narrow part of the alley opened into the drive.

  Someone had been standing there, in a recessed gateway, on watch. Or on guard.

  Durell had no other warning.

  The movement was a darkness within the dark of night, just glimpsed from the corner of his eyes. He reacted with instinct, his trained reflexes making him drop with his right knee bent, swiveling on the toes qf his left foot. He couldn’t avoid the blow entirely. Something grazed his head, tore at his ear, slammed into the side of his neck. He was thrown off balance. He caught his falling weight on his outflung arm and kept rolling, forward and away from the dark shadow.

  There was no sound. And he didn’t roll quite far enough. A swift, expert foot caught him in the ribs and sent him crashing to one shoulder. His hat fell off. He rolled again, twisting, saw the man at last—a tall, slender man dressed all in black, suitable for his night watch. The face was just a pale, flickering blur of white above it. The expert judo kick came at Durell again. He took it, rolling with the impact, came up, slammed his shoulder into the man, and drove him crashing back against the wooden fence.

  The fence shook. The man grunted. Something hit the side of Durell’s head. Hard fingers stabbed at his throat. Durell caught the hand, then the wrist, and twisted, using the man’s weight against him and the momentum of the blow to help. It wasn’t enough. There was a roaring in his ears, and his throat was aflame. He couldn’t breathe. He wasn’t sure what had happened. The thought flickered through his mind that this was how it had ended for others he had known. A moment’s carelessness, a distraction, eyes too intent on looking for something else—and then death came, in the darkness of an alley.

  His opponent was tall and wiry, with supple strength. Durell glimpsed the narrow, mocking face. Pale eyes blazed and mocked at him. He was a man as expertly trained in silent murder as Durell himself.

  Dur
ell fought for his life.

  He chopped at the other’s throat, chopped again, lifted a knee, and drove his forearm across the paleeyed man’s chest. His opponent hit the fence again. On his narrow, anonymous face was a look of surprise, almost admiration. The light was too dim in the areaway to be sure. The only sound was the scuffling of their shoes in the wet snow, the harsh gasp of their breathing.

  All at once, the other man had enough. He twisted, elusive as an eel; he ducked under Durell’s last, killing blow, fell, got up, and ran. Durell took two or three steps, then halted, shaking his head.

  His throat still felt on fire, and his chest ached. He felt as if, in the space of the seconds of struggle, he had spent a day in battle.

  The other man was a dark, fleeting figure, running lightly down the driveway, outlined in silhouette for a moment against the street glow far away. Then he was gone.

  He saw no one else. Then his eye fell on a small, dark rectangle in the trampled slush at his feet and he bent and picked it up. It was a passport. He remembered how his opponent had slipped at the last moment, half falling to his knees before running off. Durell flipped open the officially stamped, gold-embossed booklet and looked at it in the dim light.

  It was made out to one Pablo O’Brien.

  He rfead the name twice, and studied the thin, mocking face ofxhis assailant smiling from the photograph on the inner page. A thick shock of black hair, narrow jaw, pale eyes that were probably blue, a hard and competent mouth.

  A Latin-American of Irish descent. It was not too uncommon. The occupation listed was given as a purchasing agent for an importing company in the General’s former capital city.

  Durell pocketed the passport. He looked up at the back of the Cortez house and saw lights go on in the attic rooms to the rear.

  He lit a cigarette and walked back to the street, and after a few minutes’ search found a taxi.

  Chapter Nine

  Pleasure was asleep when Durell let himself in twenty minutes later. She was curled up on the bed, wearing his blue flannel bathrobe, and her dark hair flowed upward from her calm, childlike face. Scattered in heaps around her were the clothes Sidonie Osbourne had obtained for her. He stood watching her for a moment, a small smile touching his grim mouth. There was an innocence about her that was strangely appealing.

  He closed the bedroom door quietly and went to the telephone, consulting the list of men Wittington had made available for him.

  He spoke to a man named Kenneth Jensen, ordered a rundown on Pablo O’Brien, citing data from the passport, and sent two men named Barney Kels and James Gorham to set up a preliminary watch on the Cortez house; then he asked Jensen to obtain a city plot map of the six blocks surrounding his objective. Jensen promised also to provide a list of everyone registered in residence at the Cortez place. As an afterthought, Durell asked for all newspaper clippings on the General’s background and recent activities. Kenneth Jensen promised everything within the hour. He sounded cool and precise and competent on the phone.

  Durell called Washington next. He got Wittington’s assistant, Kincaid. He didn’t want Kincaid. Wittington was not available, he was told. He learned that Major Johnny Duncan was still among the missing. Nothing more had been turned up by the roadblocks. Fritsch would be in New York very early in the morning.

  He hung up. He smoked a cigarette, wondered what they were putting into tobacco these days, and snapped it out. He stared at the impersonal walls of the hotel suite and waited for Jensen to show up. It was a few minutes after midnight. It had stopped snowing. He thought of the girl asleep in her innocence in the bed in the next room, and he envied her.

  Jensen came at half past twelve. He proved to be stubby and fat, prematurely bald, with a round, alert face. His owlish eyes peered through horn-rimmed glasses. He took off his homburg hat, then his overcoat and folded it with care on an armchair. His handshake was firm. Oddly, the palms of his hands were hard with callous, and Durell wondered at his real specialty.

  “Are we alone?” Jensen asked.

  “The girl who can identify the suspects is asleep in the next room.”

  “How much does she know?”

  “Very little.”

  Jensen looked at Durell with a small smile. “Tell her to move over. I share her ignorance. All I know is that it’s big.” Jensen paused and looked again at Durell. “You look calm enough.”

  “What have you got on Pablo O’Brien?” Durell asked. “Plenty. First of all, I’ve got the two men—Barney Kels is very good, by the way—on watch down in the Village. I have the city plot maps ready. And dossiers on the General’s coterie of exiles.”

  “O’Brien,” Durell said again.

  Jensen grinned. “He’s the lad who raised the lumps?” “Yes. I didn’t know they showed.”

  “They’re not too bad. O’Brien is the assistant jefe of the Policia Federal of Cortez’s former homeland. Sixth generation Latin-American, a big family down there, very wealthy, and an ancestor who fought with Simon Bolivar against the Spanish viceroys and lived to forget the peat bogs and raise a dynasty. If you run into the man again, don’t call him Pete O’Brien. It’s Pablo, all right. A point of honor.”

  “I’ll remember,” Durell said. “So he’s got a big job at home. What’s he doing here?”

  “At home, he’s the equivalent of J. Edgar’s right hand. Seems they have long memories down there. They don’t want Cortez back— or his daughter—unless it’s in a pine box. And it seems they’re afraid the General is ready to make his play to return to power. They’ve tasted democracy the past three years and it’s sweet, so they’d like to keep it. O’Brien is registered, by the way, nicely and properly as a foreign agent.”

  “Does he do his own leg work?”

  “We just don’t know, Mr. Durell.” Jensen looked at him. “We have his address. Should we pick him up?”

  “No,” Durell decided. “Not yet. Give me a run-down on the others in the Cortez house.”

  Jensen was brief and concise. He named the General and Carlotta, Justino and Professor Perez, a cook named Carlos and a maid named Muro. “Justino is a prize,” he finished. “He was former head of the SN, Cortez’s secret police. Cordially detested by one and all.”

  “And Perez?”

  “He was a boy with Cortez on the Cortez ranch. The son of a sheepherder. Taken up by the General’s parents and sent to schools abroad because of his precocious genius. Got a reputation as being utterly and completely devoted to the General. He’s not a bad expert on nuclear physics, by the way.”

  Durell looked at Jensen, and Jensen said blandly, “Did I say a dirty word?”

  “Go on.”

  “We have two locations for the stakeout. The house at Number 11 is owned by people named Morrison, and it’s temporarily empty since they’ve gone to Nassau. Good spot for streetside observation. We can phone them and ask permission.”

  Durell nodded.

  “There’s also a room available on the court driveway behind the house. I’ve already rented it. Barney Kels will be sitting in it now with night glasses. The telephones and tape recorders ought to be ready by now. We can hook Kels into Number 11, straight line, to coordinate things.”

  “All right,” Durell decided. “I’ll take over at Number 11 myself.”

  Jensen nodded, then looked toward the bedroom door.

  Pleasure stood there.

  She blinked sleepily in the light, her face faintly flushed, her hair tumbled, Durell’s robe held a little too loosely around her body. She looked like a child awakened by adults’ talk.

  “Mr. Sam?” Her voice was small.

  “It’s all right, Pleasure,” he said. “I’m glad you’re awake. I think you’d better get dressed again, because we’re going to move.”

  She objected immediately. “Why? I like it here!”

  “I’ve got a better place. And there’s a chance that we might find Johnny, where we’re going.”

  She looked at Jensen and sucked at her low
er lip, making a small, uncouth sound. “Can I take a bath at this new place?”

  “You’ve already had—” Durell began, then checked himself. “Yes, Pleasure. All the baths you like.”

  “Good, then. I’ll be ready right away.”

  Jensen asked no questions. . . .

  By dawn the stakeout on the Cortez home was complete. Still, Durell thought, the watchers had only Pleasure’s general' description of the hijackers. She did not have the ability to use words adequately enough for a precise identification. It still remained for her personal observation to make the ultimate move.

  Pleasure quickly became bored by the uneventful watching.

  She sucked at her lower lip, looked around and said sulkily, “I don’t like this house so much. I liked the hotel better.”

  Number 11 was perfect for their purposes. No lights were permitted in any of the forward rooms, in order not to arouse suspicion from the street, and Durell and Pleasure kept their vigil in darkness. Jensen had set up his headquarters, with a battery of telephones and a radio transmitter, in the big kitchen in the rear. The layout of rooms was almost identical with the Cortez house across the street. Durell went through each room, measuring the number of steps it took to get from one to another, pacing off the corridors, counting the stair risers on each flight. He memorized these things automatically, and once finished, he could have moved at flashing speed and complete certainty anywhere throughout the house, in total darkness.

  The room where he and Pleasure watched the street was an upstairs sitting room, on the second floor. Dim light came through the tall windows from the street lantern farther down the sidewalk. The dark red door and brass escutcheon on the Cortez entrance was plainly visible.

  Pleasure spoke into the gloom. “You’re a funny man, you know? Sitting there, like that.”

  Durell had chosen a straight-backed wooden chair by the window. He could see through the thin curtain, but he could not be seen from the sidewalks below. He did not smoke while he was at the window. Turning his head at the girl’s remark, he saw that she had curled up on a small settee near the brick fireplace in the opposite wall. She looked quite different from when he had first seen her, and he smiled wryly at the thought of himself playing Pygmalian. She had put on a wide, flaring skirt from among Sidonie’s selection of clothes, and she had found a yellow cashmere sweater in one of the upstairs bedrooms and put it on, riding over Durell’s protest.