Assignment - Karachi

by Edward S. Aarons

  There might—or might not—be a search for him.

  Help might—or might not—come.

  It was a matter of time, a balance between thirst and heat and exhaustion.

  He wondered about the others—Alessa von Buhlen, Rudi, Sarah Standish. Perhaps he was too late for everything. Perhaps they had all been killed by now, by other hired assassins, and his effort was in vain.

  He looked down at Mahmud Ali.

  “Get up,” he said, once more.

  And he saw that Ali was dead.

  He could do nothing for the dead man. He could not spare the strength to bury him or pile stones on him against the circling buzzards. He turned away and went on walking, moving south along the shore, and he did not look back when the silent wings of the birds came swooping down behind him on the currents over the surf and slanted in to the boulder where the dead man grinned at the bright sky.

  He walked for an hour, rested ten minutes, walked on again. The land did not change. The sea was the same. The sky melted, pouring down heat on him. He was hungry and thirsty, but he did not let himself think about it.

  Toward noon he saw a man on a camel that plodded along the beach. The man was bundled in white rags, with a dirty turban around his head, and the camel looked old and shaggy, with big patches of hair gone from his hide.

  Durell called out to the man and was astonished at the harsh, dry sound of his voice. The man stopped the camel and looked at him and swung about on the saddle, and from the other side of his body he produced an old rifle and pointed it at him.

  The man looked like his camel, old and ugly and morose, with speculation in his eyes as Durell walked as straight as he could across the sand toward him. Durell spoke in Urdu.

  “You have water?” he asked.

  “For myself,” the man said.

  “I must get to Hawk’s Bay. You are going there?”

  “If Allah wills.”

  “I will pay you to take me on your camel and bring me there.”

  “You have much money?”

  “I have enough.”

  The man’s rifle was of Pathan make, hand manufactured like a jewel in the far northern hills, polished and gleaming, the only clean and efficient thing about him. “You are alone?”

  “I have a friend,” Durell said.

  “I see no friend.”

  “He is here, in my hand,” Durell said, and showed the man the Schmeiser machine-pistol.

  It was a mistake, perhaps, but he could not keep staring into the muzzle of the other man’s rifle forever. The Arab looked at the machine-pistol for a moment and then shrugged and shifted his skinny weight on the camel saddle and then, with no other warning, urged the camel into an ungainly, galloping run away from him. Durell could have brought him down with a single shot, but he did not try. He couldn’t have caught the camel, anyway. He watched the two of them, old man and old camel, until they were gone from sight down the beach, and then he walked on again.

  He stopped to bathe twice in the warm surf during the next two hours. The second time, as he staggered out of the combers to retrieve his clothes, he heard the grinding of an engine and saw a yellow Land Rover with a fringed-surrey top and oversized beach tires come across the searing sand, directly toward him. He picked up the Schmeiser first and then saw that the driver was an Englishman, with a European girl in a white linen dress beside him, next to the driver’s seat. Durell dressed quickly, before the salt water dried on him. The girl looked away. The Englishman jumped down from the gaudy Land Rover and walked toward him.

  “I say, it isn’t really true what they say about us—noonday sun and mad dogs and all that—”

  “Can you take me to Hawk’s Bay?” Durell asked.

  “Of course. It’s only five miles down the way.”

  Five miles or five eternities, Durell thought. He smiled his thanks. “I’d be very grateful.”

  “We were looking for my sailboat,” the Englishman said. His eyes were bloodshot. “Sixteen feet, home-built, painted red, Marconi rig. New nylon sails from the States. She broke away from her mooring in the wind two nights ago. We went south yesterday, and were starting up here today. Perhaps it was stolen. It’s tiresome to have to nail everything down.” The Englishman was trying hard not to be curious, but it seemed to Durell that you could carry a national trait too far. He wondered if the girl was his wife. “Your car break down, old man?”

  “In a way,” Durell said. “Do you know Colonel K’Ayub?” “Naturally. Charming fellow. Throws wonderful cocktail parties. Liz adores him.” Now he seemed garrulous, for an Englishman. “What are you doing with the gun? Popping at buzzards?”

  “Yes,” Durell said. “Could you take me to Colonel K’Ayub?”

  “Well, my sailboat, old man, cost me a pretty penny. Lovely little thing—”

  “There isn’t any boat back there on the beach.”

  “I see. Well. You’ve got a bad burn, my dear chap. This sun can be treacherous—”

  “I’m in a hurry,” Durell said. “I’d be grateful.”

  “All Americans are in a hurry.” The Englishman sighed. “Hop in, please.”

  The pale, thin girl did not say a word on the drive south to Hawk’s Bay. But the gay, striped canvas top on the Land Rover made a cheerful flapping sand, and cast a small triangle of shade over Durell.

  There were pale pink stucco houses, blue villas with red tiled roofs, a few date palms in carefully watered lawns and gardens that had turned brown in the salt air and the sun. The Englishman turned off the beach onto a bumpy asphalt road and paid a toll of one rupee at the entrance booth to the European beach colony, then followed a lane used by Arab peddlers, camels, a troupe of acrobats in colorful rags performing for some solemn English children. A man in a blue turban thrust a baby monkey at the Englishman’s wife and offered it for sale, cheap. The pale-faced girl said nothing, as if the monkey and the man did not exist.

  The road between the modest houses was lined with tamarisk and wind-carved babul trees. White-necked crows crowded the branches and sat in long, silent echelons upon the sagging telephone wires. Servants in baggy white trousers called shalwars appeared here and there in the back yards. On the flat, sloping beach, blinded by the glare of the sun, a few more children played. Fishing boats out of Karachi floated on the brilliant sea. The surf looked heavy and sullen. Farther out, a few freighters plodded from the mouth of the Indus for the broader reaches of the Arabian Sea. “Here we are,” the Englishman said.

  He called cheerfully to the smart, khaki-clad young Pakistan soldier on guard at the villa’s iron gate. “Ali, is Colonel K’Ayub about?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Every second Moslem here is called Ali,” the Englishman said, as if the soldier could not understand him. “These Shiites consider Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet and the fourth Caliph to succeed Mohammed, as their most important Imam, or leader.”

  Durell got out of the Land Rover. “Thanks for the lift.” “Any time,” the Englishman said. “Good luck, old man.” Durell looked at the pale wife, but she was still silent and unsmiling. He went in through the gate, nodding as the soldier saluted, and walked up the steps into the house.

  Durell had to call upon another kind of patience to sustain him. Eight hours had gone by since his plane had touched down at the Karachi airport. He had been expected immediately at this big, cool, expensive house, and had not shown up, nor had the jeep which was sent for him returned, with or without the driver. Yet there was an atmosphere of easy complacence that made him bite down on his anger and ignore his own exhaustion.

  The rooms were big, cool, air-conditioned. He felt his energy returning. Another uniformed soldier told him to wait in a European styled living room that seemed to be partly an office, and when Durell asked for water, a servant in white muslin promptly appeared with a thermos jug and a bowl of fruit. He drank sparingly while he waited, ate some figs, enjoyed the cool dry air blowing out of the air-conditioner grill.

  He
waited five minutes, hearing voices dimly from somewhere else in the big house. No one had asked his identity or questioned the gun he carried. He waited another five minutes and then walked down a white tiled corridor and out through a sunny, Moorish doorway with ivory screening into a cool, shaded garden surrounded by a high cinder-block wall painted a pale gray.

  A man looked up at him from the table there.

  “Ah, Mr. Durell. I am sorry, I was finishing a report, you must truly forgive me—”

  “Colonel K’Ayub?”

  “Yes. We have been waiting for you. I recognize you from your description. What detained you?”

  “My plane landed eight hours ago,” Durell said.

  “It did? We thought perhaps you had missed it.”

  “You didn’t think to check the passenger list? Or wonder what happened to the driver you sent for me?”

  “We supposed he went to visit his family on Drigh Road, when you didn’t show up. He often does. He has my permission. Please be seated, Mr. Durell.”

  Durell remained on his feet. He did not like what he saw of Lathri K’Ayub. He had a soft face and a soft body and the pale yellow eyes of a lynx. It was Durell’s business to be suspicious, and he had reason to be; and he recalled that Henry Kallinger, in Istanbul, had not committed himself on the colonel’s reliability. K’Ayub had been eating mangoes from a brass plate, and he dabbed delicately at a bead of the juice that clung to his upper lip. There was a telephone on the delicately carved table where he sat.

  Lathri K’Ayub was part of a powerful political family in Pakistan, said to be ambitious for national expansion. Lathri had been educated at UCLA in California, had been an attache for a UN military mission in the Congo, and was part of a group that bloodily resisted all compromise with the Pathan’s struggle for independence. But his military rank had been earned the hard way—he had been in command of border patrol expeditions in the high Himalayas twice, and was said to be hard, tough and ruthless.

  Perhaps his soft face and soft body were deceiving.

  He said now, delicately, “You have had a difficult time, Mr. Durell? You have been out in the sun?”

  “I took a walk,” Durell said. He sat down and briefly recounted what had happened. Nothing changed in the other man’s lynx eyes. Halfway through Durell’s brief speech,

  Lathri K’Ayub held up a hand and used the telephone and spoke in rapid Urdu, ordering a search for the jeep driver’s body. Durell finished quietly. “I am quite anxious about Miss Standish’s safety. Do you know where she is?” “Of course. I am so sorry about all this. I do not know how to apologize.”

  “Will you take me to Miss Standish, please?”

  “It is not necessary, Mr. Durell. She is my guest, here in this house.”

  He sent a hovering servant inside to find Sarah. Durell felt deflated. He had fought his way here along the beach with a sense of desperate urgency, a feeling of impending disaster that his mission was defeated even before he had begun. The quiet and peace of Lathri K’Ayub’s house was disarming.

  “And the von Buhlens?” he asked. “Rudi and Alessa?” “Quite safe. I spoke to them less than an hour ago. They plan to go ahead to Rawalpindi to make sure the new expedition’s supplies and porters are properly organized for the day of departure, day after tomorrow.”

  “And there is one more man—the guide, Hans Steicher. No attempt was made on any of their lives? No threats received, no danger?”

  “None, Mr. Durell.”

  “I find it difficult to believe.”

  Lathri K’Ayub seemed amused. Or something like amusement glittered in his tawny eyes. “We have made a bad beginning, you and I. Yet we must work together in the future, for some weeks, or a month or two, in guarding this expedition. My government is as interested in relocating this alleged nickel ore deposit on S-5 as yours—or Miss Standish’s personal financial empire. Yet we must be patient. We must trust each other, you and I.”

  Durell said nothing.

  “Oh perhaps you, too, believe in the legend or myth about a fabulously valuable crown that was stolen from Alexander the Great and lost on that mountain?”

  “Do you believe in it?” Durell countered.

  “My country is a land of many strangenesses. A place of the unexpected. Anything is possible. Our history reaches far beyond the Portuguese, beyond the Moguls who conquered in the 16th century, beyond even the Aryans who swept down from the northwest in 2000 B.C. to destroy the many older civilizations here in this valley of the Indus.

  There are ruins everywhere, constantly examined by experts. Old books, like the Rig-Veda, turn up clues in their lines of poetry that suggest old invasions, the tides of conquering peoples, hymns that recall assaults on the cities of the Indus. Time is without limit here, Mr. Durell. Time is full and heavy and ripe with old, old stories. Man is nothing. His ruins and decay are under the sands of the Sind wherever you choose to dig.”

  “You are an historian?” Durell asked.

  “Let us say that I am aware of my personal insignificance, in the tapestries of history. I know that nothing is impossible.”

  “Does the crown exist?”

  “Miss Standish believes so.”

  “Do you?”

  Lathri smiled. “My mission, like yours, is very practical. I must verify the presence of nickel ore on S-5.”

  The Pakistani stood up. He was as tall as Durell, who stood over six feet, but heavier with flesh, and slower and softer in movement. He smiled beyond Durell’s figure.

  “Ah. Miss Standish. Please do join us.”

  Durell turned and looked at the young woman who came out of the house and walked toward them through the shaded garden.

  She was not Sarah Standish.

  chapter four

  SHE wore the same type of horn-rimmed glasses; but her eyes were pale blue, not gray. And her glance did not hold the cool objectivity and haughty remoteness that he remembered from past meetings. She looked frightened. She was a little shorter, perhaps a bit more fullbreasted, with a way of walking that not even Sarah’s tailored suit could hide. Her hair was the same, perhaps hastily tinted to match the rather pale sleek brown of Sarah’s, worn in the same severe fashion by having it pulled tightly back from a rounded brow into a prim, heavy knot at the nape of her neck. He thought, irrelevantly, that such a hairdo would surely be hot in Karachi’s climate. The impersonation was good enough to pass a casual inspection, a glance in a car, a glimpse from across the street, or identification from slipshod verbal description. But nothing could give this girl, posing as Sarah Standish, the innate quality of having been born into almost uncountable wealth, to power, to the rarefied atmosphere of lifelong social position and command.

  She did her best to hide her fear, but it was there, in the slight moistening of her full lips with the tip of her tongue, in the fractional pause before she nodded to Lathri and came toward Durell with her hand outstretched.

  “Mr. Durell. How nice to see you again.”

  Her voice as not the same, either. It was richer, with more body and timbre; but that could be because she was afraid.

  Nothing changed in Durell’s face.

  “It’s nice that you remember me,” he said.

  “Why shouldn’t I? I’m known for remembering names and faces—like a politician, they say. Perhaps I am, in a sense. Who knows?” She smiled briefly at K’Ayub, then returned to Durell. The sunlight glinted on her austere glasses. “We have been expecting you for some hours.”

  “I was delayed. I'm sure you know how difficult it is.” “You look as if—”

  “—I had run into trouble?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for the trouble? Or how I look?”

  She frowned slightly. “I don’t understand—”

  “Neither do I,” he said. “But perhaps it doesn’t matter, I just wondered if you were aware of the small difficulty I had reaching you.”

  “No. No, I—”

  Her voice trailed off
in puzzlement. He was aware of a slow apprehension growing out of his surprise at finding this impostor. Obviously, K’Ayub believed her to be the real Sarah Standish. But where was Sarah? He wondered what had happened to her, and then he wondered why this masquerade was arranged, and he wondered who had arranged it and coached this girl to look as much like the real Sarah Standish as she did.

  She was an amateur, he thought, hoping to find his memory faulty. There was danger in this, as there always was in Durell’s business, and there was no room in it for amateurs. They simply did not survive long. And although this girl knew enough to be afraid, she was doing her best to conceal it and carry out her act as best she could.

  But he had to find out about the real Sarah. He could be in danger here himself, in K’Ayub’s house. More than he had supposed.

  “May I speak to you alone, Miss Standish?”

  “Well, I—” She looked at K’Ayub.

  “It’s important,” Durell said.

  The Pakistani bowed, spread pale hands. “Naturally. I must make arrangements for our transport to Karachi as soon as possible. If you will forgive me?”

  With another bow, another smile, the cat-eyed man was gone.

  The girl drew a small breath between her teeth and walked to the table that held the telephone and helped herself to a cigarette from an ivory box. Durell reached beyond her for an enameled, jeweled lighter and held the flame for her. She blew out the smoke nervously and cocked her head as the cry of a peddler came dimly over the garden wall.

  “Sarah didn’t smoke,” he said quietly.