Assignment - Palermo

by Edward S. Aarons

  “Stay here,” Durell repeated.

  It took over ten minutes to push the farm truck down the valley to the corniche along the lake. Lightning flickered in the Alps, and rain came down, lightly at first and then with heavier intensity. It grew prematurely dark. A wind came that shook the old truck and made it sway on the road. He met no other traffic.

  When he came out through the tunnel, the first thing he saw was his own Caravelle still parked by the hedges and then he saw the red Mercedes roadster. He suspected at once that it belonged to Ginny Jackson and he swore softly, with cold anger, at Amos Rand. Both cars were empty. No one was in sight. He parked the truck directly in front of the bronze gates of the villa and got out, touching his pocket where he had put O’Malley’s written list of sabotage targets.

  The bombs were gone from the Caravelle engine. He walked to the Mercedes and saw them on the back seat. So Rand had been here. Rand was still here. He saw a lipstick on the floor under the wheel. Maybe Ginny was here, too. He turned a dark face with stark eyes toward the villa, walked back to the gate, and pulled on the ornate wrought-iron bell chain.

  There was no answer.

  He pulled again and tried the gate. It was still barred. He walked around the wall, ducked under the hedges, and came out below the terrace with its Roman antique statues, where he had talked to the blind old man only a few hours ago. The tumbled jigsaw pattern of village roofs below the terrace looked black now in the falling rain. He could not see across the lake through the curtains of mist that blew across the water. Thunder crashed again. He jumped, caught the bottom flagstone of the terrace floor, slipped back, jumped again, got a better grip, and hauled himself up over the marble balustrade behind one of the pale white statues that glistened in the rain. The light was fading fast. He saw the cushioned settees, where he had sat with Mignon, still on the terrace where they had been before, the backs toward him. No one had bothered to lower the striped awning over them.

  Mignon had promised to get him a complete rundown on the recent organizational shifts and replacements in the Fratelli della Notte. If any outsider could get that secret information, the blind man had that capacity. He had contacts everywhere. His knowledge was encyclopedic. Durell knew that Mignon could get him more data than O’Malley, as an amateur, could ever learn. Mignon had promised and he would deliver.

  Durell walked quietly across the terrace toward the chaise the blind man had sat in. The tall French windows into the villa were open. The wind blew the draperies in great snapping flutters that sounded like popguns. He saw the colonel’s big dark glasses on the flagstones. Then he saw the colonel’s gnarled hand, knuckles down, resting on the wet stone beside the glasses. Someone had stepped on the lenses, and they glittered in a hundred fragments, like a tiny puddle of dark green in the rain.

  “Colonel?” he said softly. He didn’t feel the rain on himself, and Mignon no longer felt it, either.

  The blind man lay on the chaise almost exactly as Durell had left him. He had been brutally beaten about the head and body. His jaw had been broken; and his teeth, smashed and they clung in bloody, dark ivory fragments to his lips, like jagged froth. The hand that rested on his lap had been twisted, the wrist broken, the fingers bent back until they looked like shattered twigs, all at odd angles. The old man’s eyes were open, and his face turned upward, and the rain fell softly on the grotesque caricature of his battered features. The old scars and damage done by the acid didn’t matter now.

  He had died hard.

  The villa was empty. The servants were gone. Durell went all through it, room by room, sliding like a dark shadow through the rainy darkness. He kept his gun in his hand and he wanted to use it, wanted to expel the anger in him with one great burst of bloody violence. But there was nothing here. The house was deserted.

  He returned to the terrace. He was shaking, his anger was too great, and he wanted to check it somehow. Nothing was changed here. The old man was still dead, forever silenced. Everything he had known was gone for all eternity.

  The rain slackened. Water gurgled in the leaden gutters of the villa. He started to pocket his gun, knowing he had come back too late, wondering where Amos Rand might be, what had happened, who had done it, a hundred questions flickering all at once through his mind, slowly eroding the heat of his anger, replacing it with something cold, very hard, very bitter.

  He heard someone call his name. It was like the broken cry of a wounded bird.

  “Sam? Sam?”

  He looked over the balustrade of the terrace and saw the summer house, saw movement in there, blonde hair, and knew Ginny was down in there. It was perhaps fifty yards away. The light was growing worse. The birches and pines swayed in the cold wind blowing upward from the lake, making a lacework through which it was difficult to see.

  He left the terrace the way he had come, dropping lightly down the wall, his knees loose, rolling away from the terrace and down the slope into brush that grew along the rock ledges of the mountainside. Lights gleamed in the village below. One of the ferryboats from Lugano was coming in.

  Ginny was crying in a strange, keening manner, a thin sound that touched his spine with a cold finger. He walked along the ledge until he came to the path above the summer-house door and could look down and inside. Ginny knew he was there. She called his name and rocked back and forth, squatting on the carpet, her pale body gleaming in the dim light, more naked than not. He saw that she held Amos Rand’s head in her lap, and her eyes were insane and wild, beyond reach or understanding at the moment.

  He did not move.

  He thought of Colonel Mignon’s advice earlier that afternoon. Of all the mistakes a man could make when someone wanted to kill him. And of the mistakes a man could make when he wanted to kill.

  Only his eyes moved.

  He saw the shape of the summer house, with a little gilded wooden cupid perched atop the conical roof, one chubby arm outstretched, wet with rain. The path divided at the little lattice building, going to the right and the left. Below it was a stone fence, then a sharp drop of at least thirty feet to the next terraced level. The tiles of another roof gleamed in the rain, just visible over the top of the stone wall. Cypress trees bent and swayed in the wind, making a dark wall beyond that. But there was a gate in the wall, and obviously steps went down the drop in the ledge. The angle was bad, however. The trees were behind him, moving and shifting. He looked to the right, and a car suddenly went by on the road above with a shocking blast of wind and whining of tires and thunder of engine that promptly echoed in the tunnel and took a long time to fade away.

  Ginny called to him, wept, and whimpered.

  To the right, away from him and away from Mignon’s villa, there was another row of cypress trees, marking the property line. He could not see through them to the next house. But there was an allée from the entrance to the summer house, a thick privet hedge taller than he, and the gleam of statuary at its far end amid more shrubbery. Like a target gallery, he thought. Go to Ginny, answer her cry, see how badly Rand was hurt—but he knew Rand was dead—and when you crossed the allée—

  That was it.

  Ginny called a third time. She cradled Rand’s bloody head to her naked breasts. She was covered with Rand’s blood all the way down to her waist.

  He called quietly to her. “I’m coming, Ginny. Right now.”

  He started down the path, deliberately brushing the shrubs to make them crackle and shower down their burden of raindrops. Nothing else stirred. He was five steps from crossing the allee to the summer-house door when he suddenly changed direction. He had been walking heavily and steadily. Now he abruptly swung to the right, above the hedges that formed the allée, and with a speed and lightness born of long training, reflexes, and the instinct of a hunter, he slipped through the rhododendrons and oleanders that grew on the mountainside, moved like a shadow, a grim nemesis, as swift as a dark stalking panther.

  He had calculated the time when he might have been expected to cross the allée.
Five more steps and he would have been exposed. It was over fifty feet to the stone property wall. He couldn’t make it in time to prevent the first stirring of alarm in the mind of the man who had to be waiting there for him.

  But it was time enough.

  He came over the wall with his left hand and rigid arm supporting the long swinging leap of his body, just as the dark shadow who crouched behind the statue at the end of the allée began to rise. He saw the man’s flat face, the Tartar cheekbones, the wide mouth still fixed in a faint, superior smile of anticipation. He saw the gun, the cylinder of the silencer, the way he had been set up for it, just as he had thought, like a target at the end of a shooting gallery.

  His .38 would be too noisy. He didn’t want to use it. His right hand flashed and caught the man’s gun wrist with the edge of his palm. Bones broke with small popping sounds. The man’s wide mouth opened like a fish, his eyes bulged, and he made a small sound of dismay, while a look of black rage and despair flickered in the eyes under his shaggy brows. The gun with the silencer skidded into the brush. The man came up with a lunge, his raincoat dark with wet about massive, heavy shoulders. He took Durell in the belly, and Durell fell off-balance, came down off the wall all the way, rolled, came up like a big cat, and chopped at the thick, bulging roll of fat at the nape of the man’s neck. The assassin fell forward, tried to check himself with his hands flat on the ground, and collapsed with his broken wrist folding under him. Durell chopped at the neck once more and then aimed a last and careful blow.

  There came another cracking of bone, more distinct this time. Blood vessels ruptured. Neural centers were crushed. The man’s head fell to one side at an awkward angle. His neck was broken.

  Durell dropped to his knees beside him, breathing in long, strained gasps. The rain felt cold on his face when he looked up at the darkening sky.

  9

  “HE KILLED Colonel Mignon,” Durell said quietly. “He killed Amos Rand for really no good reason at all, except that he liked to kill. Murder was his business. Mignon said Kronin might make the mistake of sending someone else to do the job on me. But Kronin won’t make the same mistake again.”

  “Who was he?” Arnie Thompson asked.

  “Among other names, he called himself Mahmud Dugalef. Algerian, Albanian, Swiss citizenship—you name it,” Durell said. “Dugalef would have any papers needed, provided by Kronin. He was one of the most expert assassins in the business. He was Kronin’s shadow. We spotted him last in the Congo. We’ve got his dossier at Annapolis Street, and NSA has him filed at Fort George Meade, the French have him in the Surete, the British in their M-six records. Probably Moscow has him listed at Number two Dzherzhinsky Square, too. Peiping’s L-five Group used him in Hong Kong. He was always linked with Karl Kronin.”

  “Well, Dugalef is dead now.”

  “And it’s a mess,” Durell said.

  It was almost dawn of the next day, and he felt a bone-heavy weariness, a grittiness in his eyes from lack of sleep. He had called Thompson in Geneva at once from Mignon’s empty villa. He needed help to clean it all up. There was no point in involving the local police and getting stories in the newspapers, starting a wave of international rumors. In Durell’s business a cardinal rule was to keep things quiet.

  Everything had gone wrong that could possibly have gone wrong. Perhaps if Rand had gotten there sooner, perhaps if he had gone alone instead of succumbing to Ginny’s charms—or perhaps if he himself had been more persuasive with O’Malley—

  Because O’Malley was gone, too, with his two friends, Bruno Brutelli and Joey Milan.

  When he finally got back to the farmhouse, it was only to learn that the three men had cleared out everything, without a trace or hint of their destination. They had taken the Cadillac but only as far as the railroad station in Lugano, where he and Thompson had found it parked about two hours before midnight. Thompson had called the rental agency in Zurich then and made arrangements for it to be driven quietly back there, without questions. But no one could tell them, in the busy railroad station, where the three Americans had gone, or when.

  Arnie Thompson, the Chief Resident of Geneva Central, had been quick and efficient when he arrived. He was a pro, and Durell used his talents without wasted motion. There was nothing to be done about Colonel Mignon; they had to let the police find his body sooner or later. But Dugalef had been dropped into the deep water of the lake, and Amos Rand’s body went the same route. There was no help for it. They couldn’t stop to answer questions for the police or the newspaper reporters.

  Ginny Jackson had been another problem. She was numb, paralyzed with hysteria, her eyes red and swollen and blank with shock. They had managed to clean the blood off her, wash her face, get her clothes back on, and quietly hustle her to the car and to a doctor that Thompson knew who could keep his mouth shut— for a price.

  Thompson complained about his budget. “I don’t know where we can fit this into the expense records. The accountants will raise hell with McFee.”

  “Put her under ‘miscellaneous,’ ” Durell said.

  “And then what?”

  “Pay her doctor and hospital expenses. Keep a man with her as long as possible. Threaten her with scandal if she opens her mouth. Tell her she’ll be sent home to her congressman uncle at once if she talks.”

  “She’ll talk.” Thompson sighed.

  “But maybe not too soon to hurt us.”

  The doctor had taken Ginny in his own car to a shall, private clinic where she would be given a two-week rest under close guard. She would be all right when she was finally released. But nothing would ever be the same for Ginny Jackson again.

  Now, with dawn light breaking over La Saleve above Geneva, turning Lake Leman to pure silver, Durell stood in the upper rooms above the bookstore on the Grand Rue that was K Section’s headquarters for Geneva Central. Thompson was yawning. He was a tall, spare man, almost bald, with a fringe of golden hair above his ears, a slow and easy manner that belied his quick intelligence and devious mind. He was more than competent, and Durell was grateful for his help.

  Thompson had quickly encoded the list of sabotage targets Durell had obtained from O’Malley and used the small, powerful radio transmitter in the attic of the old Calvinist house to notify the London relay office and transship the information to Washington and General McFee. The answer came back at four in the morning. The fist checked out: places, dates, targets. A railroad bridge in Massachusetts on the New Haven line had mysteriously collapsed twelve hours earlier. Sabotage was suspected, and it was still being investigated.

  The radio reply had a Triple-A urgent /priority tag. Durell was ordered to get more data. Get to the top man in the Fratelli. Smash the plot and do it at once.

  Thompson’s heavily hooded blue eyes were sympathetic. “How? Where do you go from here?”

  “I need O’Malley again. He bugged out and he knows more than he told me, I think. Two to five, as he’d say, he’s hunting for his girl, Gabriella Vanini. She’s his weak spot. He’s in love with her, and she’s connected to the higher-ups in the Fratelli, somehow. Kronin is certain to connect her to him and cut her out. O’Malley wants to protect her but he doesn’t quite trust me because I worked with Rand. O’Malley is a volatile, impulsive man. That’s how he got into this mess in the first place—out of anger, and outrage at finding domestic sabotage after he fought in Vietnam.”

  “If that’s all he told you about Gabriella Vanini, then it’s impossible to find her.”

  “We must,” Durell said. “Find her, find O’Malley. If I don’t get to her fast, Kronin will see to it that they’re never found again. We don’t have all the data we need, Arnie. But O’Malley and the girl could lead us to the top.”

  “You need some sleep,” Thompson said.

  Durell shook his head. “We’ll do it together.”

  He called Lem Gray in London and asked him to check every telephone directory in every major city in every country in Western Europe. It was a long and ted
ious task, with only small odds for success, but the London office had an F-67 Whirlwind computer, the only one available. He also asked Lem to check with FBI documents for their records on O’Malley, Joey Milan, and Brutelli, using SIPP files—Search and Inquire, Photo Plastics records. Lem called back from London in twenty minutes. Durell could hear the whir and click of the computer working in the background.

  “They’re feeling pretty shook back there, Sam. They don’t like the report on Amos Rand.”

  “Did you get anything?”

  “They got stuffy. They say it’s all classified.”

  “All right. Get me Don Hine at Annapolis Street.” Hine was put to work checking stateside police blotters for data on O’Malley, beginning with Las Vegas, with emphasis on O’Malley’s girl friends. By this time it was clear daylight in Geneva, and' Durell suddenly realized he had eaten nothing since noon of the day before. His eyes were scratchy as he turned to the little kitchen in Thompson’s apartment and scrambled himself eggs and made a pot of coffee and swallowed a tumbler of Thompson’s best bourbon. He thought of the massive Brutelli’s passion for cookery. Maybe there was something in that; but he couldn’t think what it might be.

  Lem Gray, using the overseas cable, checked a Major Keenan in the Pentagon for a rundown on O’Malley’s military record. “It’s better than clean, Sam. Wounded twice, awarded a Bronze Star, was a perfect liaison man with the Montagnards and Viets. They were proud of him. They wish they’d had more like O’Malley with Special Forces.”

  “What about his payroll records? Any commitments back home?”

  “Nothing, Sam. No wife, mother, family.”

  “Any letters to girl friends, out of censor’s office?” “I asked. They don’t keep track of stuff like that.” “All right. Check back with Don Hine, right?”

  The search of police blotters in the States showed no local records anywhere. Joey Milan had a count of three burglary charges, a one-year term in Idaho for breaking and entering, and disbarment from the Jockey’s Association for complicity in rigging a race at Aqueduct. Bruno Brutelli had done a two-year stretch in Sing Sing for manslaughter. The comments of the police chiefs were invariably bitter.