Assignment The Cairo Dancers

by Edward S. Aarons

  Gordon puffed quietly on his pipe. "This Carole Bainbury who's following you has an M.A. from London University. She's British, right enough, aged twenty-six, and an archaeology aide. She was with the Ehidley-Smythe expedition digging up Nabatean cultural remnants in the Negev Desert. Is any of that pertinent, Sam?"

  "I don't know yet," Durell said.

  "We have nothing critical on her. Ostensibly, she's on an autumn holiday, doing the Continent."

  "A very English type," said Durell.

  "Very. Tweed skirt and horn-rimmed secretarial glasses. Probably eyestrain from peering at all those dusty, ancient shards, what? She's a cataloguist, whatever that may be, and she's been in Germany for two weeks. This was before our subject flew here, eh? Which might or might not mean anything."

  "I think it does. What about the British M.I.6? Could she be working for them?" Durell asked.

  "Can't say. I checked it out, of course. They won't give anything away. They never heard of her. Of course, they might change their tune tomorrow. That's the way the game is played, right? As for Carole, I got a physical rundown: plain brown hair, brown eyes, good legs, a hint of a helluva figure under that heavy Scottish skirt." Gordon grinned.

  The K Section resident agent looked like a pleasant businessman; his record included ten years as a professional espionage field chief. He had killed a top-priority opposite number in a Soviet apparat working last year in Geneva, and he should have been pulled back to the States to cool off. But they were all shorthanded, Durell reflected, and some of the people in his own group hadn't gotten contract renewals, so Gordon was kept on. It was risky, but necessary. Gordon was tough and competent, and his cover job in Munich was to run an auto export house for Mercedes-Benz.

  He added: "That's all I can get on Miss Bainbury just now, Cajun." He looked at the distant Alps from the Peterskirche tower and turned lazily, elbow on the parapet, to consider the slowly moving throngs of tourists up here for the view. "Shall we take her in today and ask her why she's so interested in you, Cajun?"

  "Of course not. I want to know who she operates for."

  "No one, as far as we can tell."

  "Dig a little deeper, Henry."

  Gordon said: "You're edgy, old man. Are you in such a big hurry?"

  "The biggest."

  Gordon raised bushy black brows that contrasted with his bald scalp. "I gather we close this one quickly, or we're all verdammt, eh? I'll scoop deeper into the mud pie, then."

  "Don't waste time sleeping," Durell suggested.

  At the Platzl Inn the night before, only an hour after his arrival, amid the usual Bavarian singing and dancing, he had definitely confirmed his suspicion that the tall, meek-looking English girl—whose glowing tan betrayed many months in the deserts of the Middle East—was following him. He had walked out into the balmy September night and gone down the Orlando Strasse and then through an archway to the Alter Hof, that ancient homestead of the Dukes of Bavaria. She followed along at a discreet distance behind him. But nicely bred, scholarly English types do not usually stroll about strange foreign cities without an escort. Durell went into the brightly lighted confusion of Marienplatz in the center of Munich, and down Kaufinger Strasse to let her stare at the glittering and prosperous shop windows that reflected the booming economy of the West German Federal Republic. She did the bit perfectly, and seemed to lose him for a time in the traffic flow of fat-cat Mercedes sedans that almost outnumbered the beetle VW's. Then she popped up again outside the Frauenkirche. He shook her there, doubled back through an alley, and became the hunter instead of the hunted.

  He watched her from the shadows of a medieval doorway as she took off her black-rimmed glasses and bit the end of one bar in perplexity. She had strong, white teeth. Then she shrugged and adjusted her big shoulder bag—he would have liked to go through that kit and see what sort of weapons she carried—and she took off briskly, her sensible heels rapping smartly on the cobblestones, and retired to the modest Hotel Prinz near the Bahnhofplatz and the railroad station.

  It was too easy to follow her, and this was when he grew suspicious that he might be doing precisely what she wished him to do.

  But he didn't mind.

  Perhaps she could get him a ticket on the invisible railroad he was seeking.

  Chapter Four

  HE HAD checked in at the Bayerischer Hof, one of Munich's luxury hotels, and after leaving Gordon he returned there and ordered all the local newspapers sent to his room, along with the London Times and the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune. The day remained sunny and sparkling. The flurry of sensation over Dr. Hubertus Steigmann's arrest, escape and vanishment was dying down in the press. It always did, Durell reflected. One could not and must not embarrass the Federal Republic, even though the German tribunal in Karlsruhe that handled war-crime trials had become as matter-of-fact and casual as a municipal traffic court.

  He waited until eleven o'clock for Inspector Bellau, of the West German Federal Intelligence Service, to telephone him. But the telephone remained silent.

  He did not like this.

  Durell was a tall man, with a heavy musculature and thick black hair touched by gray at the temples. He had a lean and careful face, with blue eyes that turned black when he was angry or impatient. He had been in espionage for a long time—sometimes he thought it had been too long—and he tried not to tag himself with personal idiosyncracies in dress or habit. He wore inconspicuous dark suits, white button-down shirts, dark knitted neckties. Aside from his height, and the way he carried himself—which a trained observer could identify as the walk of a dangerous man—he could lose himself in most crowds. He preferred bourbon and the chicory-flavored coffee native to the bayous of his home in Louisiana. But aside from these personal tastes, he was adaptable to all the ordinary habits of any country he happened to visit.

  He had been a sub-chief for K Section long enough to know that his survival factor had worn precariously thin. As a troubleshooter, he operated in all the strange comers of the world, usually with a team, but preferably alone. He worked, ate, slept and made love in the perpetual shadows of danger.

  The telephone did not ring.

  He had undergone a bitter training to get rid of his Cajun drawl and overlay it with a faint New England nasality picked up with his law degree at Yale. He spoke a number of languages and dialects with varying degrees of familiarity. The training at the Farm, in Maryland, included varied methods of murder, as well as a psychological indoctrination that made you suspicious and quite alone in a world henceforth regarded as hostile. He could kill with a rolled newspaper, a pencil, the edge of his palm, a roll of coins, a sewing needle held between thumb and forefinger. It was a matter of knowing the precise, vital neural centers of the human anatomy. His hands were strong, as clever as a gambler's—and he had learned all the tricks of gambling from his Grandpa Jonathan, as a boy, back in the hot shadows of Bayou Peche Rouge. Old Jonathan had been one of the last of the Mississippi riverboat gamblers. He had made Durell what he was—a man who could hunt other men and who, in turn, was not afraid to be hunted.

  It set him apart. He could have taken a desk job in Analysis and Synthesis at No. 20 Annapolis Street, working up extrapolations for Joint Chiefs and the White House, but he couldn't go back across the gulf that separated him from everyday life. Each year, the notations on his contract renewal offered a recall from field work, but he could not return. He had become different from other men.

  In Moscow, in the square named after Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Russian Bolshevist bom in Poland in 1877 and the founder of the dreaded Cheka and OGPU, Durell's record was on file in the offices of the KGB, This was at No. 2 Dzerzhinsky Square, opposite the ill-famed Lubyanka Prison. His dossier was marked with a red tab, and both the MVD and the "Center" of the Kommissariat Gosudarstvennoi BezopasU notsi —the KGB, Commissariat of State Security—had a remarkably complete account of his work, according to a CIA cell who had reported on it seven months ago. (The cell was executed not long
after his microfilm report was passed through the Berlin Wall.) Nothing in that red-tagged file promised Durell a long or peaceful life.

  The telephone rang at 11:27.

  "Herr Durell?"

  "I am here," Durell replied in German. "I must beg your pardon for the delay. Please understand, we have been very busy, and we are shorthanded."

  "Who isn't? But go ahead, Inspector Bellau. I assume this line isn't bugged?"

  "Bugged? Oh, yes. Rather, I mean, it is not."

  "But you are taping this conversation?"

  "It is routine, sir, so there will be no misunderstanding in the future about our cooperation." Bellau paused. "We have found the missing prison guard who helped Steigmann escape. But, alas, the man is dead."

  Durell was not surprised. "Was he eliminated?"

  "It seems to be suicide."

  "Remorse?"

  "It is possible."

  "But not probable. I want to see the body."

  "Naturally. I will be at your hotel in a few minutes. You will be ready?"

  "I'm ready now."

  Inspector Franz Bellau picked him up in the usual black Mercedes sedan in front of the hotel on the Promenadeplatz. Bellau was not as cheerful as the sparkling September sunshine. He could be classified as a dwarf, but seated on the plush gray seat of the car, giving the uniformed chauffeur an address beyond the suburbs of Munich, he seemed of normal height, except for an over-large head and thin neck. He had protruding, yellowish eyes, and he wore gray suede gloves and a flowing blue-polka-dot ascot tie, and carried a sword-cane that qualified as an antique from the days of Frederick III.

  In Munich's suburb of Pullach, there was a building compound surrounded by high concrete walls which enclosed the headquarters of the West German Federal Intelligence Service. The FIS cooperated closely with the CIA, which here was known simply as the "Special Detachment." In this fortress of intrigue commanded by a man called the "Gray Colonel"—who had somehow survived de-Nasdfication— Inspector Bellau was secure behind his Atlantic Wall of secret files. His physique prohibited any field work, and Bellau's temperament made him unsuited for such, in any case. His mind and memory were like electronic computers; his cold and analytical brain sought survival first, last, and always. It was said in the business that Bellau's memory could indict half of Bonn, if he were moved to reveal all that was hidden in his secret dossiers.

  The heavy car sped swiftly and luxuriously through the busy streets of Munich. Bellau closed the sliding glass between the rear seat and the driver, using the delicate tip of his gleaming stick, and said: "We have complete privacy, Herr Durell. You may speak freely to me."

  "How many bugs are rigged in the car?" Durell asked. He reached for the flowers in a small glass vase beside the door and plucked out a tiny microphone no larger than his thumbnail. "Is the tape recorder in the back trunk?"

  Inspector Bellau smiled and took the blue blossom from Durell and tucked it in his lapel. His lower lip was stained by tobacco, but he was not smoking now. "We must keep an official record of our conversations, my dear Durell,"

  "But I'm not here, officially."

  "True. But the Special Detachment makes demands of my office that must be recognized."

  "What I'm here to do is to find Dr. Hubertus Steigmann and take him back to the States," Durell said.

  "I wish I could produce him for you. The task is not easy. Or as simple as you pretend." Bellau's yellow eyes were amused. "How, if I may be impertinent, did Hubertus Steigmann ever get away from you, over in America, in the first place? You will forgive me if I sound cynical."

  "Let us not cast stones, Herr Inspector, or call the kettle black. We use whatever tools come to hand. Dr. Steigmann worked at Huntsville for eighteen years as an expert on optics. We knew that he's not yet in his sixties, and that his wife was killed by a Soviet tank that knocked his house to rubble in Berlin. But we had no record of his living daughter over here. He was a solitary man, devoted to his work, and seemed satisfactory on all counts."

  "We know," Bellau said, "that he made remarkable advances in laser development."

  Durell looked at the fastidious dwarf. "True."

  "Your press, Herr Durell, is a source of vital information for every espionage department in the world. From that viewpoint, your open society has many faults. One of your more sensational New York tabloids called Dr. Steigmann the 'Father of the Death Ray.' "

  "We don't control our press as you do, Inspector. You put your finger on it before. We have a free society."

  "Too free, perhaps. But I should not criticize. America has been more than generous to those she has conquered. Witness our prosperity and the manner in which we have been—ah—forgiven our alleged crimes."

  Durell said nothing.

  Bellau added mildly: "It is true that Steigmann was a wanted war criminal who vanished completely from our records. We assumed the Soviets had him and closed our files. The puzzle is, why did he risk returning to Germany from the safety of your laboratories in Huntsville, Alabama? One would not expect sentiment in such a man."

  "I hold no brief for Steigmann," said Durell. "If he's guilty of atrocities in the past, he should be punished as the courts prescribe."

  "We abase ourselves in our guilt. We heap ashes of remorse on our heads," Bellau murmured.

  Durell's eyes were dark and cold. "Steigmann's record is clean as far as we can determine. He was cleared for a conference at London University involving laser and maser beam developments. He was kept under surveillance during a side trip to Edinburgh last week, but he got away from our people and took a plane for Munich. We had no information about his daughter or his sentiment for her." He paused. "It seems to me that if Steigmann were guilty of wartime atrocities, he would have changed his name twenty years ago in order to hide his identity. Since he didn't, he's either naive or foolish, and I don't think he's either. Until he's proved guilty, therefore, we must consider him as innocent."

  "But his own daughter denounced him, my dear fellow! A lovely young woman, full of her German guilt. We know Hubertus visited her. Is it usual for a daughter to charge her father with the vicious crimes of working electronic experiments on prison-camp inmates in Poland?" Bellau sighed and sniffed at his boutonniere and gave a brief order to the driver through a speaking tube. The sleek car turned into a wide thoroughfare and headed west in the sparkling noon. Bellau added: "As for Fraulein Lisl Steigmann's denunciation of fier father, one must remember her youth, her indoctrination in our nation's guilt, and her desire to atone for the crimes we committed."

  "Did your office have all this data about Steigmann's record in Poland? Was all this in your files?"

  "Of course, Herr Durell. But we thought he was dead."

  Durell sighed, too. "All right. Steigmann came to Munich, presumably on a sentimental journey to see a daughter he had abandoned in her infancy. She turned against him, shocked by his rising from the grave, so to speak, and called your headquarters at PuUach and denounced him. The warcrimes tribunal at Karisruhe was informed, and he was arrested."

  Bellau spread his elegantly gloved hands. "What else could we do? Fraulein Lisl also called the newspapers."

  "Yes. And the first night Steigmann was held in custody, the guard, a man named Hans Dorpler, a former SS sergeant, allowed him to escape. And Dorpler vanished after him."

  "So it seems."

  "And Dr. Steigmann, with a head full of laser data, and especially the details of a new model—"

  "The 'death ray,'" Bellau said. He smiled coldly. "It is amusing how we grow immune to the enormous threats that hang over humanity, Herr Durell."

  "It is not amusing to us. In any case, we want Steigmann back. But you have found no trace of him at all?"

  "We found something this morning," Bellau told him. "We found Hans Dorpler, the guard you mentioned, the man who betrayed us by letting Steigmann escape and go free."

  "And it's Dorpler who is dead?"

  "Precisely."

  Chapter Five


  IT SEEMED to Durell that Bellau held back more than he gave, but this was one of the rules of the business. He settled back and wondered how Lisl Steigmann had known about her father's past, if Steigmann's records were dusty and buried in Bellau's files. She'd been an infant when Steigmann had fled to America. Someone must have informed her of her father's alleged history. Bellau? Durell held judgment in abeyance, but he wondered why the Germans, so thorough and eflBcient, hadn't hunted for Steigmann in the U. S. laboratories in Huntsville, Alabama. Surely, Bellau hadn't slipped up there in the hunt for war criminals. He wondered again why Steigmann, if he were guilty of the crimes Bellau said he was guilty of, hadn't changed his name twenty years ago to elude the hunt. Durell saw the whole pattern of Steigmann's risky trip to Germany, his denunciation, imprisonment, and carefully planned escape simply as a complex operation to snare the man onto the underground railway. Others had taken the same route before him. But—to where? He had no idea. And he kept his doubts about Bellau to himself.

  The heavy car crossed the Isar, from Zweibriicken Strasse, with the sprawl of the Deutsches Science Museum off to their right. Durell looked backward. A red VW had followed them from the center of the city, and he did not think it was an accident. The Mercedes hissed into the countryside, lifted smoothly over a stone bridge, and slid down a lane of beech trees turning copper in the autumn sun. Farms flashed by, and then a wooded area, and in the center of the woods they rolled through the medieval gates of an enormous country house with an iron-fenced courtyard and a baroque fountain centered among Belgian cobbles. Tall windows glinted in the bright sunshine as they halted.

  "What place is this?" Durell asked.

  "It is a hospital for the defective and crippled." Bellau's yellow eyes shone like the leaves that stirred in the warm breeze that swept the areaway of the Schloss. A man in a leather apron and a police officer came through the central doorway. "It was set up for victims from the concentration camps, and then continued as a hospital for them and their dependents."

  "And the guard who let Steigmann escape—was he found here?" Durell's memory flicked through reports and dossiers. "Isn't Fraulein Lisl Steigmann connected with this place?"