Assignmnt - Ceylon

by Edward S. Aarons

  His Q code should have received a reply in no more than ten seconds. But Washington did not want to talk to him. There was no court, no judge, nowhere to appeal.

  He snapped off the radio.

  “Sir?”

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  “Where, sir?”

  “Come with me.”

  “Sir, that man in the room—did you kill him?”

  “No. I didn’t want to. He was mistaken in his orders.” He urged Mr. Dhapura out of the little cubicle and along the corridor back to the staff’s quarters. From the end of the hall, he could see into the lobby. Things had quieted down, but there was a uniformed policeman questioning the clerk at the desk. The clerk turned and pointed back toward Dhapura’s office, and Durell took Dhapura’s thin arm and urged him out through a side door.

  “Sir, I cannot leave the Royal Lanka. There is too much to be done here—clerical work—and my wife’s brother-in-law is coming to dinner, all the way from Jaffna, to stay with us. Besides, I am not accustomed to your sort of—ah—work, sir, and I would only be a hindrance to your efforts—”

  “Is your car outside?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll get it.”

  The parking lot behind the Royal Lanka was hot and stifling, boxed in by buildings on every side. Durell moved with Dhapura across the hot pavement. The car was a Toyota that had seen better days. Mr. Dhapura nervously unlocked it. There was a streak of dark sweat-stain soaked through the back of his drip-dry coat. He was growing bald on the top of his head. Durell was certain he carried no weapons. The parking lot seemed empty of any interested spectators.

  “Where to, sir?”

  “The general post office, at the fort. Stop on Queen Street, near Air India.”

  “The traffic makes it difficult to park there.”

  “We’ll find a place. See to it.”

  Mr. Dhapura drove with care through Colombo’s seething traffic, weaving the little car quickly among the pillarbox-red double-decker buses. He seemed calmer behind the familiar wheel of his car.

  “You do seem to be in grave trouble, sir.”

  “What do you know about it?”

  “Nothing, except that obviously someone is after you, someone very determined to kill you. This affair of Ira Sanderson’s kidnapping must be more important than you thought.”

  “Yes.”

  “May I ask why Washington did not answer your emergency call?”

  “I’m persona non grata,” Durell told him.

  “Sir, that is not possible. I do not meet many men like you, men who have been forged, so to speak, in the fires of your profession.” Mr. Dhapura seemed pleased with his speech. “You could not have done anything wrong. I have an instinct for people, sir, my wife always says so, I rarely make an error in judging personality and character. To me, if I may say so, you are an exemplar of your business. I would trust you with my life, sir.”

  “You may have to,” Durell said simply.

  In the general post office, amid Colombo’s smart new business buildings, Durell asked the Sinhala to stand watch in the center of the crowded floor, and then went to a pay phone, and went through the complicated business of placing an overseas call to Geneva, Switzerland. Monsieur Fouquier, the manager of the Suisse Banque Canton-ale de Geneve, would be just starting his business day in his office overlooking the gleaming Lac Leman, with its towering fountain. Durell had met the man twice on other occasions involving K Section business. He knew he certainly did not have a numbered account with M. Fouquier.

  He waited with some impatience while the operators whispered, chanted, and crooned their lexicon of formal signals. Luckily there was no extraordinary delay. The overseas cables were clear. He watched for ten minutes from the phone box while Mr. Dhapura nervously paced the crowded post office floor. Then at last the crisp tones of the Swiss banker reached him.

  “Oui, monsieur?”

  “This is Durell. Sam Durell.”

  There was a pause. “Ah?”

  “Do you remember me?”

  “But certainly, m’sieu.”

  “It seems I’ve done business with you recently.”

  “On the second of March, yes, M’sieu Durell.”

  “My account is in order?”

  “But of course, m’sieu.”

  “You remember the total balance?”

  “Precisely one half-million in American dollars, yes.” “You are certain?”

  “M’sieu, do you question my memory?”

  “No, Fouquier, I question the individual who opened that account in my name.”

  “But it was you, M’sieu Durell!”

  “Did I do so in person?”

  “I saw you in the bank from a distance that day. Unfortunately, I was hurried by a luncheon appointment. But you waved to me, I bowed, and later I learned the nature and purpose of your business.”

  “You saw me?” Durell asked.

  “Certainly, M’sieu.”

  “It is true,” Durell said, “that I was in Geneva at that time. But I did not visit your bank. You couldn’t be mistaken?”

  The telephone was silent for so long that Durell thought the overseas connection had been broken. Then, “But I have your signature before me at this moment. Please, can you tell me where you are? Your government—” There was another pause. “I could have your signature expertised, of course, but I do not understand. We are not anxious, m’sieu, to have another scandal in our banking system. You understand that such publicity works most adversely in our direction. No, there is no doubt.” M. Fouquier’s voice was firm. “I saw you. It is your signature.”

  “Merci,” Durell said.

  He hung up.

  Dhapura hurried toward him like a leaf blown before a tempestuous wind. “There are police at the main doors, sir.”

  “We’ll go out the other way.”

  “I worry about the reputation of my hotel. This man— this black man?—surely escaped, even if he was injured. But now that he is hurt, will he not give up?”

  “No, he will not give up.”

  Mr. Dhapura skipped a step .o keep pace with Durell’s long stride. “Where do you wish me to take you now?” “The police station on Maradana Road.”

  Dhapura was aghast. “The police?”

  “I’ll have to trust you. I want to make inquiries about my two men, King and Thompson.”

  “You wish me to go in to speak to the police?” Mr Dhapura smiled. “I am most pleased. It means that yo trust me, sir, and return my great admiration for you—”

  “I don’t trust you.”

  “But with the police, I could betray you—”

  Durell said quietly, “I don’t think you will.”

  In a side street Mr. Dhapura found some shade in which to park his battered Toyota. Durell got out and sat on a wooden bench set out on the sidewalk. He watched the cycles and buses and cars and carts; he watched the varied costumes of the Ceylonese drifting by in the late afternoon heat. Colombo was a clean city in contrast to most Asian towns. He felt alone in it. He had never felt so alone before. K Section had been his home for too many years, he thought. He was aware of a bitterness in him that could not be subdued, and regret about Harry King and Joe Thompson. They had been reliable, dedicated men Nothing should have gone wrong at Kandy. It was a routine check-out of Ira Sanderson’s empty house up there in the hills of central Ceylon. He listened to distant temple bells. Several shaven-headed monks shuffled by in the windless heat, chattering amiably, their saffron robe bright patches of color among the passersby. He could see the police station door from where he sat and waited for Mr. Dhapura. He realized he was beginning to accept what Wells had said. Someone had framed him by depositing five hundred thousand dollars in the Swiss bank, an by murdering King and Thompson and making it look as if he had done it himself. He had an alibi for that, if he wished to use Aspara. His loyalty was first to his own survival and the success of the assignment. That was a right for a professional. You k
new the risks and accepted them. But Aspara was innocent. Her career would be ruined if their weekend tryst became public knowledge. He was not ready to destroy her, as yet. In any case, K Section might not accept the alibi. The net that had been cast over him was too secure for that. Washington must be very sure he had betrayed K Section and sold out—to whom?

  He wondered. Someone had hired a reasonably close double to appear in Geneva when he was there last March and open the numbered account in his name. A look-alike who had been trained and who had practiced forging his signature. Which meant a long period of preparation, a far-reaching plan begun not yesterday but weeks and months ago. He mentally flicked through the dossiers he often studied at the Washington headquarters. Nothing came out of it. No special face or data emerged.

  There had to be a rational plan behind the scheme to make him look like a defector. It was a costly thing, involving half a million dollars and a cold-blooded killing of two men, simply to make him an outcast. Sooner or later, he would be approached by someone, somewhere, somehow.

  The thought made him feel better. If he could stay alive until then, avoiding Wells, he might catch a thread that would lead him into the center of this tangled web.

  As it was, he felt like a fly kicking at the sticky strands of a spider’s trap that had caught him.

  He began to feel even better, thinking of this. He did not underestimate Willie Wells, who was an angry man, a ruthless man, a mercenary devoted to returning due weight for his pay. Wells would not give up. There was no way in which Durell could get K Section to call him off.

  He watched the police station doorway.

  Mr. Dhapura did not appear.

  He checked his watch and saw two policemen come out of the station. They went the other way. The temple bells stopped their melodic chiming. He stood up. Pressure ran along all his nerves. His shoulder ached where Dhapura had bandaged the scratches and furrows made by the bomb fragments. He flexed the fingers of his right hand.

  The Sinhala was suddenly there on the sidewalk, flapping his arms and looking this way and that, as if lost.

  Durell quit the bench and went back to the gray Toyota and stood beside it. Someone who looks enough like me to fool M. Fouquier at a distance. The thought flicked through his mind. His mnemonic training at the Farm had given him almost total recall of the dossiers he had scanned. There was a Russian, an ndrei Kubischev . . . same build, same black hair touched with gray ,. . but Ku-bischev worked under Colonel Cesar Skoll of the KGB Not possible. He watched Mr. Dhapura flutter across the hot sidewalk toward him.

  “Sir. Quickly. Into the car.”

  Durell got in and took the wheel this time. “What did you learn?”

  “Poor men, they are truly dead. Foully murdered. An ambush, shot down at Mr. Sanderson’s empty walauwa outside of Kandy. It is dreadful, dreadful. I would no have believed it would come to such violence. I am not a violent man, sir. I detest harming so much as an insect, believe that all of God’s creatures have a divine right to exist, unmolested by man. I am a vegetarian, you know. Unlike some, who think the All-Knowing placed animals upon this earth for man’s use, I feel it is a crime against His Beneficence to take anything’s life. Those poor men. A tragedy—”

  Durell cut into the nervous flood of words. “What did the police say?”

  “I tried to be clever, sir. I identified myself as the manager of the Royal Lanka and mentioned the two guests Mr. King and Mr. Thompson, who mysteriously failed to return from a tourist expedition to the ancient ruins around Kandy. They were extremely grateful. They will examine my register to make certain. But your men are dead, Mr. Durell.”

  “You say they were murdered?”

  “The police are looking for you, sir. They believe you journeyed with them and for reasons of your own, you foully killed them. They were each shot in the back of the head, right on the doorstep of Mr. Sanderson’s vacant house. A tea farmer who was cycling by found the bodies—late yesterday afternoon.”

  “Why do they think I’m involved? Where did the police ever hear my name?”

  Mr. Dhapura swallowed. His dark eyes, which could sparkle with laughter or glisten with tears from moment to moment, slid sidewise at Durell as he drove the Toyota back into the center of the city. A pair of buses held him up for a moment.

  “They know all about you, sir. The American embassy has released a criminal file on you.”

  “A criminal file?” He had thought of the embassy as a refuge, a place where he might catch his breath. But it would be Wells’ headquarters now. “What does that mean, Dhapura?”

  But he knew what it meant. The buses moved, and he shifted gears in the Toyota and turned right on Lotus Road, not far from the Ceylonese House of Representatives. Flowers bloomed on carefully tended lawns. The hedges were neatly trimmed. He turned north toward the harbor, intending to turn again out Layard’s Broadway to Prince of Wales Avenue, which would lead either to Negombo, twenty-two miles away, or out along the Kelani Ganga to Kandy, a distance of seventy-two miles.

  “Sir, I do not know why, but I have faith in you,” Dhapura murmured. “I will do all I can to help, my own very meager best, I assure you, except that I must beg that you do not involve me in any violence.”

  “Fine,” Durell said. “I'll do what I can.”

  “I see that you are such a man—a man of violence, I mean.”

  “Only when necessary.”

  “You have killed people?”

  “Yes,” said Durell.

  “Many?”

  “Only when necessary,” he said again.

  “One could discuss the necessity of taking a human life under any circumstances. However . . .” Dhapura went through his hand-waving motions. “It seems that the police have been advised that for personal reasons, for which they have no clue, you tricked your associates—business partners, they believe—into traveling to Kandy with you, where you shot them, removed all identification from their bodies, and returned to Colombo. They know you by name, sir. I am sorry. I cannot imagine how they have come to believe this. But it is true they are looking for you. A manhunt, if I may use such a distasteful term.” Dhapura paused. “Sir, what will you do?”

  Durell pulled the car to the curb. Traffic flowed by without incident. Nobody seemed to be on their trail.

  “I suggest you get a taxi and go back to your job at the Royal Lanka,” he said.

  “Sir, I would like to do more, if I can.”

  “You’re a peaceful man, Mr. Dhapura. If you stay with me, you will find it more than distasteful.”

  “But you need help, sir.”

  “You can stand by for me at the hotel.”

  “But where will you go like this, alone and hunted? It is dreadful, dreadful.”

  “Yes,” Durell said. “It could even be fatal.”

  six

  The sun was an enormous, wavering red globe over the western horizon of the Indian Ocean when Durell drove into Negombo. The square patched sails of the local fishermen, returning in their catamarans with the day’s haul, were outlined in black against the glare. There was no relief from the heat. Bullocks, waiting for the men to return, were drawn up on the beach under the graceful coconut palms. The crowd was composed mostly of old men, women, and children. A barge chugged along the old Dutch canal. Buddhist priests were gathered under a huge, spreading tree, their robes a splash of bright color against the heavy green foliage.

  Aspara’s bungalow was at the end of a sandy lane not far from the highway. It had a thatched roof and a wooden veranda, the roof eaves upturned slightly in Eastern style. The garden was heavy with shadows. There was no sign of the police. Durell knew that if he concentrated too much on Wells’ pursuit, he would lose sight of his main objective. All the same, he was aware of the danger of a booby trap or Toyota to the back of the bungalow into a thatched lean-to covered with leafy vines. He could hear the distant murmur of the placid surf when he cut the engine.

  One of Aspara’s small penchants was her
yellow 1938 Rolls-Royce touring car. It stood like a gleaming, sleek monster beside Dhapura’s drab little Toyota. The long hood gave off a sharp ping! as he walked around it. He felt the heat in the smooth metal and wondered where Aspara had been in it. He was relieved to see that she had not yet returned to Colombo.

  Someone said arrogantly, in an American voice, “So who are you, chum?”

  Durell turned too fast, his knees flexed, his right hand moving for his pocket. Outlined against the light from the shed entrance was a tall, slim figure, not quite u man, too old for a boy. The mop of wild dark hair made him look savage in silhouette, and then he looked like all the rest of the uniform youth on campus and commune in the States. He wore patched and faded dungarees, was barefooted, and had a gold ring in his left ear.

  “You’ve got to be the American that mom was talking about,” the youth said. “Right? You look jumpy. About to rip off the old lady’s chariot? She’s not expecting you back.”

  Durell said, “Are you Aspara’s son?”

  “Georgie Sanderson, that’s me. The only scion and heir of my silly missing father. The bane of my mother’s existence.” Young Sanderson laughed; it was more of a giggle. Despite his dark Sinhala complexion, his eyes were a bright, brilliant blue, hostile under his smile. He finished, “So get lost, will you? Take your car and beat it.”

  “Where did you come from?” Durell asked.

  “It was a blast. Some rock under the pine trees in the park. America the beautiful, tin cans and litter and all. Colorado, man. And a beautiful flight on Pan Am to Katamuyaka Airport. I’d split from classes, man, when dear old daddy was snatched by the local activists. So when I read about it, I thought I’d come and lend moral support to my reactionary, nationalistic, chauvinistic mama.”

  “I see,” said Durell.

  “Do you think it’s a put-on, baby?”

  “Yes,” Durell said. “Do you think it’s fun and games?” “Oh, man, like it’s beautiful. Should I be wringing my hands? Old Ira just shoved me away from one school tc the other in the States. I’m not American, I’m not Sinhalese, I belong like nowhere, pal. It looks like a ball here. Are you an American cop? Fuzz? Pig?”