Assignment - Budapest

by Edward S. Aarons

  “There be all kinds of traps, Samuel, and the important thing is to learn how to use ’em, every one. First thing, know they’re there. Then look it over real careful and figure how you can make it bite the trapper. If you can’t do that, steer clear. If you can, then you win pot, table, and break the bank.”

  Durell watched the house. The thought that she was in danger, the knowledge intuitive in him that something was wrong here, with Deirdre being used as a lure to bring him to his death, kindled more than anger. He had an impulse to charge inside and get her safe and free. But he held everything in check, the fear and the anger together, waiting until the cool, analytical training imposed on his temperament gained the upper hand.

  The house was quiet. The light shone with a steady yellow from the windows, bleaching the rain to silver. The pungy still idled in the nearby cove. He looked back for Franklin, did not see him. Franklin’s partner was also invisible, and Durell guessed he was stationed at the boathouse on the shore side of the house. Nothing moved that he could see. Then he suddenly glimpsed Deirdre rise from a wing chair inside the library and move toward a table and take a cigarette. Her back was straight and stiff. She had changed her clothes and wore a flannel gray skirt and a dark red sweater that accented the sweeping raven wings of her hair. He could not see her face clearly, but there was enough in the way she moved to help confirm his estimate of the trap.

  There were French doors in the north wing of the house, opening into the unused dining room. Durell moved silently toward them, trying the bronze lever handles very slowly, very gently. The doors were not locked. He left them as they were, being too inviting, and did not enter that way.

  Another door, leading into what had been the servants’ quarters in the same wing, was tightly closed. Durell worked at the lock with a small instrument he carried in a pocket of his wallet. In three minutes the door swung open and he stepped inside out of the rain.

  This end of the house was closed off and unheated during the winter months, and the air felt cold and clammy, smelling of the salt-water tides in the Chesapeake. The darkness was like black velvet across his eyes. He knew his way, however, and eased down a short corridor that had windows opening to the marshes nearby and the scrub pines edging the cove. The riding light of the pungy winked through the rain; and then he was beyond the windows, at a stairway that led up to the servants’ bedrooms. He reached the second floor this way and drifted toward the center of the house and the main staircase of the central hall. Light shone ahead of him, edging up from the lower floor. He was careful not to let his shadow slide along the wall ahead of him.

  There was no sound at all from below.

  He waited and listened.

  Then he heard Deirdre say something indistinct, her words muffled by the library doors. A reply came—a man’s voice, brief and sharp. Then silence. He seemed to hear the house breathing, sighing, waiting through the muted rattle of the icy rain outside. He moved down swiftly then, stood in the center hallway, aware of shadows all around him. His hands

  and whole body were integrated either for attack or defense. Deirdre made a sudden muffled sound of pain.

  Durell opened the library door, going in fast with the swing of the panel. Something moved in a blur beside him. He felt the jolt of the blow on his left forearm, saw Deirdre swinging to face him, the back of her hand to her mouth. Terror shone in her eyes. He saw the second man behind her and the glint of the gun in his hand—and he knew they had been waiting for him exactly like this, aware of his rejection of the open dining-room doors, thinking one step ahead of him all the way—until this moment.

  Both men were good at their business. It was Bela Korvuth who stood behind Deirdre—a small, meek-looking man except for his eyes and his smile, this killer from the Hungarian AVH. The second one, Zoltan Ske, stepped from behind the door. His face was nervous, thin and horselike, with disheveled straw hair. The gun in his hand prodded at Durell. His English was perfect, even to a faint New York accent.

  “You will be so good as to stand quite still, friend.” Korvuth nodded and said, “We've been waiting for you, Mr. Durell.”

  “I know that,” Durell said. He looked at Deirdre. “Are you all right?”

  “They’ve been here for hours,” she whispered quickly. “Here, in this house. They’re going to kill you, Sam.”

  He looked at Korvuth. “Can you tell me why?”

  Korvuth’s smile was cold and bleak. “Perhaps because of Stella, and what you did to her. Because it has been decided by higher echelons that you are too dangerous and should be eliminated to end your record against us. We know all about you, Mr. Durell. You have been on our list for some time.” “I’m flattered that they sent an expert like you. But you didn’t come over here just for me.”

  “Naturally not. I have other errands to perform.”

  “But none are really the main objective, are they?” Korvuth sighed. His gun was held steady in Deirdre’s back. He looked like a small, shabby business man in an old overcoat and a battered felt hat of brown. His dark, knitted tie was slightly askew under a limp, stained collar. It was his eyes that kept Durell immobile. They were pale, as hard as agates, void of any depths. A killer’s eyes, with a mind behind them that had gone beyond any ordinary humanity, the eyes of a man who measured all life in only cold, mathematical terms, empty of any saving emotion.

  "You are intelligent,” Korvuth said softly. “Naturally, you guess what my real mission is. You know that I do not matter. And neither do you, except that your elimination may be of some small help to us."

  “Let the girl go,” Durell said. “We can do our business outside.”

  “On the contrary. I am not that simple. I understand your Western, bourgeois impulses toward chivalry. While I threaten her, you will not make a move. I respect your abilities, Mr. Durell, and I know your medieval impulses. One of the great weaknesses of your culture, this sloppy sentimentality. Zoltan?”

  The nervous blond man beside Durell nodded jerkily. “We have been here too long already.”

  The trap was ready to spring, to deliver its death blow. Durell breathed lightly and easily. He looked at Deirdre and suddenly remembered what they had discussed that morning, at that peaceful breakfast, in a time that seemed to belong to another life and world. She had wanted to work for McFee, and he had warned her that her safety could not take precedence over his job. Now she read what he was thinking; she saw it in his eyes. And before her growing dismay became evident to these two men, Durell did what had to be done.

  Zoltan Ske was just a little too nervous and anxious. He stood too near to him. Durell’s move was fast, accurate, deadly. His hand chopped down precisely for the nerves in Ske’s wrist. The gun jumped from the man’s paralyzed fingers, hit the floor, bounced along the rug. There came a muffled report from Korvuth’s gun. He saw the expression of surprise in Korvuth’s flat face, the disbelief that Durell would act with the gun in Deirdre’s back. Korvuth had counted on an emotional factor in Durell, and not on the training that had crushed and eliminated it. And because Korvuth had been sure Durell would yield to his threat against Deirdre, the man was thrown off balance for a few decisive seconds.

  Deirdre fell, crumpling to the floor. Durell struck once more at Ske, driving the blond man stumbling against the wall, and then he jumped for Korvuth. The man fired wildly. The bullet chunked plaster from the ceiling. And then Durell had him, just for a moment, feeling the wild strength and agility of the man under his paunchy, nondescript façade.

  Korvuth’s gun went off again. It was an accident—the man was not aiming and couldn’t aim while Durell gripped him— yet it happened, and Durell felt the jolting smash of the slug high up in his arm. The force of it broke his grip and he spun away, his hand still clinging to Korvuth’s gun. But the man was free now, turning to the window. Durell pulled himself up, stumbling over Deirdre, and saw Zoltan Ske move toward the window, shouting something. There was a different shout from outside. Franklin’s voice. Korvuth
spun away toward the front door, panting, while Durell raised the man’s gun. There was defeat in the other’s pale eyes, and a promise of terror in the future. He got through the door before Durell could fire. And Durell, his right arm numb, managed to switch the gun to his left hand. He followed, nausea moving up in him, feeling the warmth of blood running down his arm under the texture of his suit. Zoltan Ske was already outside. A shot cracked. Korvuth was behind his companion, out in the rain on the wide, black lawn.

  Durell yelled a warning to Franklin, but it was George Mester who made the mistake, coming at a dead run from the boathouse on the beach where he had been stationed. For an instant, it looked to Durell as if the trap had been sprung, in old Jonathan’s words, to bite the biter. Then Mester fired, aiming well, and Zoltan Ske plunged face down on the lawn. Durell tripped over him and fell on his wounded shoulder, and an incredible shock of pain exploded all through his right side. He lost the gun he had taken from Bela Korvuth. He heard Mester shouting, and forced himself up again.

  Lew Franklin ran up. “Sam, for God’s sake, how did you get in there?”

  “Never mind,” Durell gasped. “Go after Korvuth.” George Mester joined them, a chunky man with gray hair. “He’s in the woods, over there.”

  “Then get after him.”

  Lew Franklin nudged Zoltan Ske with his toe. In the rain and the darkness, Franklin looked young and uncertain. “What about this one?”

  “I’m afraid he’s dead,” Durell said. “Damn it, I wanted to question him.”

  “Jesus, I’m sorry, Sam,” Mester said.

  “It’s all right.”

  Both men looked at him, sensing something in his voice that should not have been there. “They were in the house, with Miss Padgett? They had her boxed in?”

  “They wanted me,” Durell said. “Korvuth had a gun on her. He thought it would keep me from making the play.”

  “Oh, hell,” Franklin said. “I heard a shot in there, but I didn’t think you’d-—”

  “Korvuth shot her,” Durell said flatly. “Go ahead, get him.” “What about you? You’re bleeding—”

  “It’s my arm. Nothing to worry about.”

  He watched the two men turn and run back across the lawn to the black edge of the scrub pine woods that bordered the marshes and the cove to the north. His stomach squirmed. He thought he was going to be sick. His legs felt weak. He held his right arm tightly, above the wound, and wondered how bad it really was. When he turned to walk back toward the house, the dark night reeled around him, but it was no darker or more despairing than the blackness inside him. He did not look back at the shapeless lump of shadow that Zoltan Ske’s body made on the frozen lawn.

  The front door stood open, streaming yellow light on the wet, crystalline grass. Durell swallowed. There was a feeling of unreality to the light, a feverish red tinge to it, as he walked slowly back up the steps into the house. He did not want to go inside. It was as if a vast, iron door had clanged shut inside him, since that moment he had made his move with Korvuth’s gun on Deirdre. He had sacrificed her for the job. There was no other excuse he could give. He could not think about this and remain sane. It was as if something had torn apart inside him and he walked as if balanced on a delicate razor’s edge, an empty pit of remorse to one side, a dreary waste of the future on the other. But he moved ahead mechanically to do what had to be done, a man who was more like a machine than flesh and blood.

  He stood looking in the doorway to the library for a long tormented moment. There was a taste of bitter acid in the back of his throat.

  Deirdre had not moved from where she had fallen in a crumpled heap to the carpeted floor. A pool of blood had gathered under her body, as brilliant and red as the sweater she wore. He noted the way the curve of her hip and thigh was held under the skirt and he remembered the fine, miraculous integration of her skin and flesh and bone. There was nothing about her that he had not known. She was as much a part of him as the bloody, shaking fingers he raised from the edge of the door.

  “Dee?”

  Her face was upturned, like a pale, crushed flower. Her eyes were closed. She did not seem to be breathing.

  Chapter Six

  Sam Durell walked into the room slowly and knelt beside her. The wound was in her shoulder, below the collar bone, and from the slow pumping of blood he knew a large vein had been severed. He lifted her limp wrist and felt for a pulse. There was a dim and faraway beat that felt thready under his anxious fingers. She was still alive.

  “Dee,” he whispered, “Dee, forgive me. I had to do it.”

  A faint whisper of breath between her lips made him wonder if she had heard his anguished words. He was no longer conscious of the pain from his own wound. He wriggled out of his coat and folded it and lifted her head to rest upon it, and then he took his handkerchief and made a rough bandage over the bleeding bullet hole, ripping at her clothing to get at it. Leaving her, he went to the telephone and dialed the operator, knowing that Art Greenwald would be listening in.

  “There’s been an accident,” he said tersely, and he gave Deirdre Padgett’s name. “Send a doctor and an ambulance at once.”

  When the operator rang off, Durell held the line open for a moment, and Greenwald said: “Sam? You all right?”

  “It’s Deirdre. Korvuth was here.”

  “Damn it, how could—”

  “We need some men, fast,” Durell said. “He’s in the woods nearby. Zoltan Ske is dead. No sign of the girl. And Korvuth got away.”

  He hung up and went back to Deirdre. As he knelt beside her again he saw that her eyes were open and watching him steadily, and he felt a vast wave of relief and thankfulness wash over him, leaving him shaken and uncertain. “Dee, can you hear me?”

  “Yes, Sam,” she whispered.

  “You’re going to be all right. I’ve sent for a doctor.”

  “Yes, I heard you.” Her voice, her eyes were remote. “Thank you.”

  “I’m sorry, Dee. So sorry.”

  She turned her head away from him. Her mouth shook and he thought for a moment she was crying, but he couldn’t be sure. He looked down at the blood on his hand from his own wound, conscious of a dull throb of pain now.

  “I had to do it. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “Did you get—did you kill him?”

  “No. He got away.”

  She turned her head suddenly to look at him. Her eyes were cold, bright, incredibly angry. “Then you’re wasting time, aren’t you? Why bother to help me? You want to get out there and hunt him down, don’t you? Don’t waste any sympathy on me. You don’t have to pretend anything. You’ve called for a doctor, and now you can go and do what you really want to do. Hunt and kill. It doesn’t matter who else gets hurt, does it? I don’t matter, and you don’t count yourself as of any value to anyone, either, do you? Certainly not to me. And you—”

  He touched her lips with her fingers. “Please, Deirdre.” She looked away from him again. “Leave me alone,” she whispered.

  Her eyes were closed, but he knew she was still conscious and able to listen to him. But he did not know what he could say or do to make her understand. He had never felt so helpless in his life. He had never known such torment as he knew now, looking at her, hurt and helpless, because of what he had done.

  “Deirdre, listen to me. Don’t turn away from me, honey. He was going to kill you. I had to do it. I had to take the chance, don’t you understand? I’m sorry you got mixed up in it—I had men here to protect you, because this man wanted to hurt me through you. He’s dangerous and he’s got to be stopped. I’m not important and neither are you, compared to the damage and destruction he may do. I had to stop him, even if it cost—at whatever cost,” he said gently. “He was counting on the fact that I would do as he asked to save you. But I knew he meant nothing he said. I knew he would fire, anyway. I had to call his bluff.”

  “You didn’t care if he killed me,” Deirdre whispered.

  “It isn’t that
,” he said desperately. “Deirdre, you know I love you. I know I’m doing a poor job at explaining it, but you’ve got to understand. I’d give anything if I could have prevented this happening. We were lucky. You’re going to be all right. We’ll still get him. Now, look, don’t try to answer me now. I’ll see you tomorrow. You’re going to a hospital, and when you feel better, we’ll talk about it.”

  She turned her head to look at him again. Her eyes were cold and remote. Her face was a mask of cameo. Her lips moved for a moment before she spoke.

  “I don’t ever want to see you again, Sam. Not ever again.” She closed her eyes. “We’re finished. Forever and for good. I know the meaning of your love now, and I don’t want any part of that kind of love. Don’t come to see me. I don’t want to talk any more. Just go away now. Go on with your hunting. That’s what you’re really anxious to do right now.”

  He heard a siren keening distantly in the night. The front door opened and closed, and Lew Franklin came into the library and paused, his young face lean and sober. Durell straightened, wincing as his arm gave him a sudden stab of pain.

  “Any sign of Korvuth?”

  “Not yet,” Franklin said. He kept looking at Deirdre. “Is she going to be all right?”

  “Of course.” Durell’s voice was suddenly harsh. Then it softened. “You look beat,' Lew. Stay here with her. The ambulance is coming. See that she gets the best of care, will you? I’m going out after him.”

  “You could use a doctor yourself,” Franklin said.

  “Later.”