Assignment - Afghan Dragon

by Edward S. Aarons

  Durell made his way to the back of the jeweler’s stall. The merchant glared angrily at him and raised a brief shout, and then subsided as the muezzin’s call from the minaret clamored brazenly again. A curtained doorway led Durell swiftly into a back lane.

  He turned right, thankful to see no one here, and ran a distance down the lane until he saw a second doorway, this one of wood, and pressed against it. It was open. He looked back just as the curtained exit began to open outward with Chou’s pursuit. Chou did not see him. He found himself in a back storeroom that smelled redolently of spices. The darkness inside was broken by a thin film of light beyond the kegs and barrels stacked to the ceiling. He listened, moved forward, heard voices suddenly resume bargaining, and walked through into the shop from the back way. The shopowner was busy with a client; neither man noticed him. He slipped out and went to the right again, seeking the Way of the Silversmiths.

  Prayers were over as suddenly as they had begun, and the crowded alleys resumed business as usual, Now and then he looked back as he took one twisting lane after the other. Towering high over the jumble of sheds and shops were the minarets of the mosque and the bulk of the museum, the only building at the sacred enclosure not denied to foreigners. It contained Shi’ite Islamic art, a collection of ancient Korans, ceramics, brocades, arms from the Safavid dynasties. He skirted through the crowd at the museum and found himself on Chour Street next to the mausoleum of the great mystic, Pir-i-Palandus. The delicately colored dome loomed over the narrow street and cast its shadow upon the surging visitors. Durell turned left this time, thought he saw the two Afghans who worked for Chou, and turned his back to the crowd, stopped to purchase a yost, a string of black prayer beads, and two small clay tiles designed to rest the forehead when prostrate in prayer. Nothing happened. Nobody accosted him. Three minutes later he was in the street of the silversmiths and found the shop he wanted.

  The place was next to a madressah, a religious school, and Durell could hear a rhythmic chanting of male voices through the thin walls of the shop.

  “I have been waiting for you, Mr. Durell,” said the silversmith.

  “How did you know I was coming?”

  “You must not linger here. I think I am being watched. Perhaps I shall be of no value to your people in the near future.”

  “Who is watching you?”

  The man shrugged. “Several men. They change posts, and I do not know them. I think they are ferengi, some of them. In any case, come, have some tea; but then you must not stay longer.”

  “No tea, thank you. How did you know I would be here?”

  “Mrs. Fingal, she is the one who told me you would soon arrive.”

  “Sarah Fingal?”

  “Yes, sir, she is the one.”

  The proprietor busied himself with a small samovar set up on a plank behind his tiny smithy. The shop glittered with bangles, earrings in great hoops, silver necklaces with turquoise insets, teapots, even a silver sword. He was a thin, cadaverous man who looked as if he had worried about his health from childhood. He had a long, drooping gray moustache, thin hair, and sunken eyes that kept straying past Durell to the lane outside the tented entrance to his shop. Durell moved so that he, too, could watch the passersby. He did not see anyone who looked dangerous or even interesting.

  He waited, watching the silversmith, the doorway, the narrow street beyond; he listened to the chanting of the madressah students, the clamor of an argument outside when a donkey blocked the street. The samovar bubbled quietly. The proprietor sipped his tea and smoothed his luxurious gray moustache.

  “Sugar is very high,” he murmured.

  “Yes.”

  “The cost of everything has risen. I understand it is so even in your very rich country.”

  “Yes,” Durell said again.

  “Would you like to know where to find Sarah Fingal? She waits for you.”

  Durell took out his Iranian rial currency and peeled off several bills and placed them on the glass countertop above the dim and dusty silver jewelry.

  “You do not expect to work for us again, is that it?” he asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “Are you frightened?”

  “I do not wish to be harmed over a matter that does not truly concern me.”

  “But you have been paid for information before. You have been paid well to relay information to Mr. Fingal.”

  “And to his Jewish wife, Mrs. Fingal,” the silversmith murmured. “Is it true, as they say, that it was he who took her name when he married her, and not the other way?”

  “Yes, it is true.”

  “A strange thing, is it not?”

  “It depends on your point of view,” Durell said flatly. He stared at the silversmith and waited for the inevitable. “Fingal,” the man said. “It is not a Hebrew name.”

  “It’s Irish,” Durell told him. “I understand that her father was Irish.”

  “Oh, yes. Yes, I see. But is it not true that if the mother is Jewish, the child is the same?”

  “Sarah is Jewish, yes,” Durell said. “Does it trouble you?”

  “Perhaps. Could she not be an Israeli spy?”

  “No.”

  “Ah. You sound positive. Do you like Jews?”

  “As much as I like Iranians,” Durell said.

  The silversmith met his flat gaze for just so long, and then dropped his eyes. His face was impassive. Two centuries ago, the man would have been a wild tribesman riding to glory in Khorasan, wearing bandoliers and pistols, behind the leadership of the great Nadir Shah.

  Durell said, “How much will it cost me if you tell me where to find Mrs. Fingal?”

  “I think it is too dangerous to be involved in this matter. It is one thing to report on what the people in the bazaar say and think. I do not mind. I am not a traitor, I think it is harmless to make a little extra money by selling useless information and opinions to your people. But I am sure now I am being watched. Pehaps I should be silent.” “Very well.” Durell turned away. “I’ll find her myself.” He walked to the shop entrance and started out through the crowds thronging the bazaar. The silversmith watched him go until he was almost out of the place, and then called quietly, “Sir? Wait, please.”

  Durell turned but did not reenter the shop. He made himself look impatient. The silversmith came forward toward him, suddenly smiling.

  “For this matter, and because I think you will now recommend that I do no more reporting for your people, I must have five thousand rials.”

  “Too much,” Durell said.

  “Five thousand, sir. Nothing less.”

  Durell went through the formalities of bargaining with a sense of distaste. Bargaining was necessary. Finally he learned what he needed to know. Unless the man was lying. Unless the silversmith had been bought, either by the Chinese or the Soviets. Unless he was being directed into a trap.

  10

  The apartment was in a small building the color of sandstone, near the park on Khwajerabi Avenue, in the northeast quadrant of the city between the park and the railroad station. It was an area of modest homes and narrow lanes, and the houses facing the street showed only blank courtyard walls with small doors recessed into the plaster. The afternoon was beginning to wane, but the accumulated heat of the day’s unrelenting sun had built up within the city. Durell took a taxi to the park and walked back along Khwajerabi, threading his way through the impatient crowd, and turned off to find No. 55 Kough Road. There was a small cafe on the comer and an Indian store crammed with cheap general merchandise. He circled the irregular block twice, checking for vehicles, watchers, those who might be waiting here for his arrival. He saw nothing suspicious. Finally he went up a narrow stairway between two ochrous plastered walls and rapped on the blue-painted doorway, using a bronze knocker shaped in the hand of Fatima that was an emblem of good luck. It occurred to him that Homer Fingal had not had much luck at any time in his short life.

  After his second rap, Sarah Fingal opened the door about
two inches, recognized him, and threw back several bolts and chains to admit him. One glance at her, and he knew that she had already been informed about the death of her husband in the Seistan. She was a small, darkhaired woman with the faded blue eyes of her Irish father and the self-sufficient manner inherited from her mother. Perhaps she was a bit older than the unfortunate Homer had been. She wore a loose, elaborately embroidered Iranian robe that concealed her slight body. Her face was attractive in an intense way. Her pale eyes had violet smudges of grief smeared beneath them. Her voice was low and husky. She wore a scarf over her thick black hair, which was coiled in a tight, prim bun at the nape of her neck. The climate was too hot for that sort of thing, but her heavy hair did not seem to bother her. She touched her cheek with her left hand as she extended cool fingers for Durell’s grip.

  “Oh, Sam. I knew you would come. I just knew it. Did Harun tell you where to find me?”

  “The silversmith? Yes. But I think you should change your address. He told me, but I think it’s the end of his work for us,” Durell said quietly. “I think he’s been bought away from us.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. Did he suggest that I might be an Israeli spy?”

  “Among other things,” Durell paused. “I’m sorry about Homer. I got there too late. It was unavoidable, but I don’t think either of us expected trouble on this.”

  She nodded, giving no answer to that. The tiny apartment was still littered with the evidence of Homer Fingal’s scholarly research. She had been packing books in Chinese, some Sanskrit manuscripts, bric-a-brac that Homer had collected to analyze and perhaps write an academic monograph about. Cartons crammed with papers and small wooden crates stood about among the sparse Arabic furnishings in the apartment. He felt a sense of utter control about Sarah that was dangerous, leading sooner or later to an inevitable explosion of sorrow and mourning.

  Sarah clasped her hands together. “Sam, I—”

  “Wait.” He lifted two fingers to warn her, then moved about quietly in a search of the apartment. There were two windows and a small door off the bedroom that opened onto an inner gallery. The little balcony overlooked an inside court of the building, floored with worn and faded tiles that had once formed a beautiful geometric design. A leashed dog down there looked up at him and began to bark. There was a stone outer stairway leading up from the balcony to the communal sleeping terrace on the roof. He went up quickly and quietly and looked about. No one was up here. Back in the apartment, he checked the bedroom and the bath and finally returned to the living room. The clutter prohibited anything but a cursory search for listening bugs or potential explosive devices. There was nothing he could do about the clutter, but he searched as well as he could. Sarah continued to stand motionless with her clasped hands before her. He came to her, kissed her lightly on her cold cheek, and said, “How did you learn about what happened to Homer?”

  “It shows, doesn’t it?”

  “Of course.”

  “General McFee notified me. Your message to him from that village in the Seistan, via the Tehran circuit, eventually got through to Washington. Naturally, I haven’t heard anything from Homer’s father, as yet. I doubt if I will. The last signal came through the new jewelry shop near the INTO Tourist Bureau on Jahanbani Avenue. Do you know it?”

  Durell nodded. “It was part of the briefing.”

  She said tightly, “But they didn’t brief you or Homer about the real meaning of the assignment, did they?”

  “Maybe McFee didn’t know everything, then.”

  She turned away to the window. “Poor Homer. The perennial student. I loved him truly, Sam.”

  “I know.”

  “For once in his life, Homer tried to take an active role in today’s world, instead of dwelling in the dusty past he loved so much. And it ended everything for him, past, present and future. He’s dust himself now. Part of the past. Can you tell me how it happened?”

  “He’s dead, Sarah. Beyond pain. How it actually happened doesn’t matter now.”

  “Do you know who did it?”

  “A man who posed as an American, under the name of Mortimer Jones. He was a Russian agent, an assassin whose true name was Kokin, Leonid Kokin. I’m sure he wasn’t really from the KGB, however. It’s part of the things that bother me. In any case, Kokin is dead now.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m glad. I believe in an eye for an eye . . ."

  Sarah paused, touched her dark hair with the backward edge of her palm. Her mouth quivered briefly, and she covered it by aimlessly picking up a half-dozen books and adding them to those in one of the empty cartons. She spoke with a first touch of helplessness. “I don’t know who to send these things to, Sam. I simply can’t keep them.”

  “Send them to General Wellington, his father,” Durell said.

  “Him?” A world of dismay, distrust, frustration and pain welled up in her single word. “Homer’s father disowned him because he married me. Because Homer wasn’t strong enough to become a military man; because Homer loved books and scholarly things, not weapons and military trappings and fanfare and all the Washington scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours political rat-race. Because Homer, as an act of rebellion, took the name of my Irish father instead of keeping his own when we married.” She made a sad mouth. “A modern thing. One of the few modern things Homer ever did. He never really lived in today’s world, you see. But we were in love. We loved each other. We were happy.” She paused again, this time for a longer interval. “Let me get you some tea, Sam.”

  “Wait,” he said.

  He checked the stove, the gas line, and the burners. She paused with the lighted wooden match in her fingers, until he straightened and nodded and said, “Go ahead.”

  “You’re very careful, aren’t you?”

  “I have to be.”

  “Homer wasn’t careful enough, was he?”

  “Homer wasn’t trained for this business.”

  “But nobody is interested in me, Sam. I’m really quite harmless. Like Homer.”

  “Not any more,” Durell said. “Somebody might think you know more than you do, Sarah. Somebody might believe you have something they want.”

  Her eyes were unafraid. “To hell with them.”

  “Just the same, be careful.”

  “Should I leave Meshed? Should I go back to the States?”

  “No. I may need you here, until this is over.”

  “Can I help about Homer?”

  “You might.” He watched her set the tea kettle to boil over the blue gas flames. “I came here to learn if Homer knew where to contact and locate Nuri Qam, the Afghan Deputy Interior Minister. It’s part of my assignment. Qam asked Washington for my help in the dragon matter. I knew Qam years ago, back at Yale. The whole thing wasn’t supposed to be much of a job. Merely a small favor. It certainly was not supposed to cause Homer’s death.”

  “Nuri Qam has some answers to give in Kabul, back in Afghanistan, because he lost Professor Berghetti and the Chinese artifacts—including the dragon—that Berghetti’s archaeological team dug up on the Afghani side of the Seistan border.”

  “Berghetti also did some digging on the Iranian side of the lakes,” Durell said.

  Sarah nodded. “That was before he moved to Afghanistan to go on with his search. Berghetti doesn’t matter. He was a thievish little man who tried to take the art treasures out of the country illegally. He’s a fugitive now, and for all we know or care, he could be back in Rome at present.”

  “Or dead,” Durell said.

  She looked at his tall figure. “Maybe. Yes. But why do you say that?”

  “Where can I find Nuri Qam?”

  “He’s right here in Meshed, Sam. Hiding out with his brother from the Afghani authorities. The brother fives here. He hopes you can help him when you arrive. He hopes you can find the dragon for him and recoup the mistake he made when he allowed Berghetti to escape with the rest of the national treasure.”


  “Tell me what’s so important about the dragon.”

  “It’s only an excuse,” she said wearily. “They’re making fools of us.”

  “Who are ‘they?’ ”

  “Idiots. Lunatics. General Wellington, for one. And you’ve heard of the Russian general, Goroschev? He leads the hawk faction in Moscow, those who are always pressing for a preemptive war against the Chinese. And of course there are fools in Peking who would also welcome a showdown at this time. It’s always a question of supremacy in the Communist world. I know it sounds like a conspiracy to enlarge a small incident—the matter of the dragon—into a Sino-Soviet war; a conspiracy that’s eagerly encouraged by elements on both sides. Do you think I’m crazy, Sam?”

  Durell said, “If Wellington is in it, even if only by spurring them on from the sidelines, by using Homer and me, then he’s inadvertently caused the death of his own son.”

  “But he won’t lose much sleep over it,” the girl said bitterly. “Considering how he felt about Homer.”

  Durell had met John Wellington several times in the man’s plum-draped suite of offices in the EOB—the Executive Office Building close to the White House. He remembered the man’s comfortable leather chairs, the highly polished oval conference table where Wellington spoke to McFee for the President, the efficient bar that could be rolled about, and the slide projector and flat screen built into the walnut-paneled walls. Wellington was a man who did not deny himself very much. He had come to the White House from the Pentagon, as a personal aide, perhaps for political reasons, and had made what seemed to be a permanent place for himself there. He had a broad Southwestern accent, an imposing physique with a mane of iron-gray hair. His physical aura usually dominated even the hard-boiled Washington press corps. He indulged in brandy and long, thin cigars and what seemed to be plain speaking.

  He expressed his opinion often and forcefully about McFee’s “spooks,” all of it in derogatory terms. Durell remembered the man’s heavy voice, heavy legs, polished Texas boots. The request for Durell’s aid from Nuri Qam had come through Wellington. It hadn’t seemed to be a major matter then. A question of good will toward the Afghanis, Chat was all. The only time that Wellington mentioned his son Homer, in Meshed, was to direct Durell to contact him for help in finding Mr. Qam. Even then, the man’s hostility and contempt toward Homer and Sarah was only too evident.