Assignment - Karachi

by Edward S. Aarons

  He awoke with a dacoit strangling cord around his neck.

  There was no time to think or question what was happening.

  It was simple enough. He was being strangled quickly and silently and expertly.

  His body, his screaming lungs and shocked nervous system made his muscles writhe and convulse, answering everything for him.

  But the only answer was to get air into his lungs again. In that instant, all his thousands of reflexes, memory cells, habit patterns, likes and dislikes, past regrets and future hopes, became nothing. He had to breathe. Nothing else. He was a dying organism, and he responded with blind instinct, flailing, struggling, aware of the swift and terrible outflow of strength and life in him, that could end everything in a few more seconds.

  He clawed at the cord around his throat. Through eyes that rapidly lost focus, he saw the moonlit room, heard the efficient silence of the deed against the explosive thunder of his heart, saw the dim loom of the thin figure garbed in black, belted robe and dirty tunic, arching over him on the bed.

  The cord cut deep into his flesh. He could not even get a fingernail under it. Wrong technique, he thought dimly. Like following the hand of a carnie pitchman to divert the eye from the pea in the shell game. Check. Useless to fight the cord. Impossible to reach the hands that twisted and held it. Waste of time. Then try what they taught you at the Farm, in Maryland—that murderous school where friend turned to foe with a smile and handshake that landed you mercilessly on the hard ground, to teach you to trust nobody. Where you were taught anatomy, the secrets of the neutral centers, the use of hand and finger, edge of palm, rolled newspaper, making these innocent objects into lethal weapons to stun, paralyze, kill.

  He arched his body, belly up, fell down, flexed his legs and kicked at the dark form bending over him. His naked foot caught the side of the man’s neck, but not quite right; the turbaned head snapped aside, an instant too soon, making the blow of his heel glance off.

  There wasn’t much time left now. Nor much strength, either.

  His lungs shrieked, his muscles trembled. There was a roaring in his ears. Once more. The turbaned head had retreated a little in caution. But not quite far enough. It could be done.

  Now.

  He flexed, arched, doubled, kicked. He knew at once his heel had caught the right spot in the man’s neck, behind the maxillaries, under the ear. With that blow you could dislocate the jaw, rupture arteries, permanently deafen, and kill.

  The cord around his neck fell loose.

  He heard the man stumbling away, and there was a wild whistle of air sucked into his chest, and he rolled aside to the left, fell off the bed, hit the floor on hands and knees. The carpet rocked and heaved under him. Another breath. He heard a noise that didn’t sound human and he tried to crawl around the bed where the strangler lay. The other man was trying to drag himself out through the open French doors to the veranda where the night darkness waited.

  Durell pushed himself around the bed. The other man was halfway to the veranda, sobbing. He paused, the air in his throat like molten brass, then lurched and stumbled forward and fell on the black-robed man.

  A hissing sound came from the gaping mouth, a fragment of Urdu. “A mistake—sahib—in Allah’s mercy—”

  Under the long tunic was a khukri knife, curved, wickedly sharp. Durell pulled it free. He rolled away from the man and held the knife at his throat and said, “Be quiet, dog.”

  The room smelled of the man’s fear.

  Durell stood up and leaned against the wall and sucked in air in long, measured breaths, waiting for the room to stop spinning. The man’s route of access was easy—from within the grounds. A clever and careful man, dressed in black, could scale the compound wall, drop into the shadowed garden, climb the bougainvillaea to the second-floor veranda— But how had he chosen the right room?

  He looked at the man who shuddered on the floor, still halfparalyzed by Durell’s blow. It might pass soon—or the damage could be permanent. Durell felt no sympathy. He rubbed his throat and walked back to the bed and got his gun, sat down and put on his shoes, trousers and shirt. The house was quiet. The bridge game and iced drinks and quiet conversation downstairs had ended. They had all gone to sleep. Maybe.

  Perhaps someone was waiting to come into this room soon, to find him dead with his black tongue sticking out, his eyes like plums in a congested face. Someone who had told the strangler which room to choose, which way was easiest over the compound wall. . . .

  Even as he thought of it, staring dully at the figure that twitched on the floor, someone knocked softly on the door.

  He got up and walked to it, keeping his head turned toward the other man. He could be faking, gathering strength to streak like a fleeing snake out to the veranda and over the rail, to escape in the dark shrubbery below.

  He faced the door panel. “Yes?” he said quietly.

  “Sam, are you all right?”

  It was Alessa’s voice, soft but worried.

  Alessa? he thought.

  He turned the big brass key. “Come in, honey.”

  “I heard a noise, a thumping in here. The others are asleep. I couldn’t rest, thinking of all the details of starting tomorrow morning—”

  She slipped into the room. Her hair was pale and sleek, a silvery casque around her small, proud head. She wore a dark skirt, a printed silk; blouse. Her hand touched him. He wished there were more light in the room. Was she surprised? Dismayed? Or just mildly worried at a strange sound in the night, as she implied?

  Then she saw the man on the floor and she clapped fingers to her open lips. “Oh—”

  “I had a visitor,” Durell said. “Keep your voice down, please. I don’t want to waken the others.”

  “Your voice sounds—”

  “He tried to strangle me. Classic silk cord and all. My throat is a bit sore.”

  “Sam, I don’t understand—”

  “Neither do I—yet. But we’ll see what he has to say, if he can talk.”

  “Shall I call the Colonel? Phone the police?”

  “No. I have a feeling this might be something personal.”

  “But you can’t just force him—”

  “I can do anything with him,” Durell said. “If I have to, I’ll kill him.”

  He walked quietly to the shivering man on the floor. The shivering was a nervous reflex, a series of spasms resulting from Durell’s blow. Durell knelt and looked at the man’s dark, ugly face. He put his gun to the man’s ear. It was just a face, he thought, like several millions of other faces on the subcontinent. To be bought and sold, to live and die, to lie and laugh, to spit and swallow and breath.

  “Can you hear me?” he whispered in Urdu.

  “Yes, Durell sahib—”

  “You know my name?”

  “I was told.”

  “Who told you to kill me?”

  There was no answer. And he could not force an answer here. “Get up and walk with me,” he said.

  “I cannot. There is a devil shaking my body—”

  “Try,” Durell said. “Or you go straight to hell.” He pushed the gun muzzle into the man’s ear. The man got up. His body spasmed, and one arm hung limp, and he dragged one foot. “Outside,” Durell said.

  Alessa stepped forward. “Sam—”

  “You had better come with me,” he said. “You should watch this. We’ll go to the shed behind the house. It will be private there.”

  “I think I ought to call K’Ayub.”

  “Come with me,” he said again.

  She followed, her face blank as it suddenly was revealed in a slash of moonlight they crossed on the veranda. Durell still felt uncertain on his feet. His throat burned, and there was an ache in his chest. He threw the khukri knife over the railing and heard it drop with a dry rustling in the vines that grew up the side of the bungalow. He pushed the turbaned man toward the wooden stairway that led down to the garden terrace. Lights shone on the lawn from some of the go-downs at the rear of
the property, fifty yards away. If any guards patrolled the grounds, he did not see them.

  No one was in the warehouse shed. Durell pushed the man in, waited for Alessa, and followed into the gloom. A shaft of moonlight guided him. There were the bulks of the two transport trucks and jeeps loaded with canvas bales of supplies that even included skis in case any snow prevailed in the mountains. In the moonlight, the man sat with his hands flat on the dusty floor behind him. His eyes rolled with fear. “How are you named?” Durell asked.

  “Ali, sahib.”

  “Everyone is named Ali, dog.”

  “It is a good name. My father gave it to me. He was named Ali, too. Ali Hamadourji.”

  “Who sent you to me?”

  “Shaib, he will cut out my tongue and feed it to the crows.”

  “He is not here, and I am,” Durell pointed out. “You will speak the truth to me.”

  “I have not even been paid, sahib!” the man moaned. “I was promised one hundred rupees, but I have not seen one anna yet!”

  “Killing is your business?”

  “No, sahib, I swear by Allah, I have only killed two idolaters in my life.” He referred to Hindus. “And those were in riots which caused blood to run wild, like a river in flood time—”

  “I am waiting for your tongue to run like a river, too,” Durell said. He knelt down and pushed his gun muzzle under man’s jaw and forced his head back until the throat was stretched and corded under the pressure. “Speak to me. Who hired you?”

  “I cannot tell!” the man gasped.

  “Was it Red Oboe?”

  “I do not know this name.”

  “Tell me!”

  “I cannot—”

  Durell hit him with the gun barrel, and when the man tried to roll away, scrambling on all fours. Durell used his fist and smashed him back against the nearest truck fender. He had no pity, remembering the moment of strangling in his bed. The man fell to his knees and whimpered. Durell looked at Alessa. Her face was white and strained.

  “Must you do this?” she whispered.

  “Memsahib!” the man groaned. “Have mercy!”

  “There is no mercy,” Durell said. He hit the man again, harder, and heard a small bone break in the man’s nose. Blood gushed from his nostrils and he coughed and choked. “Who hired you?”

  “In the bazaar of Qissa Khani—”

  Durell waited.

  “—in the Street of the Storytellers—”

  “I know it. Tell me no fables, Ali.”

  “I am employed there by Omar, the Storyteller. The old man—everyone knows him on Jehanistan Lane. I run errands for him. I do everything. He is an evil old man. He promised me one hundred rupees to do this terrible thing, but I am an honest man and I do not like it. I have a wife, sahib, and six children, six hungry little ones I must always feed—”

  “You are lying!” Durell snapped.

  “I swear by Allah! It was Omar who ordered me to kill you.”

  Durell paused. If he exerted more pressure, the man would shriek and scream in hysteria. It would waken the others and bring Colonel K’Ayub into it. But he wanted to take care of this matter alone. It was not mere personal pride or outrage at the attempt made on him. He had been selected by name, but more than that, he trusted no one, not K’Ayub or Alessa or even Sarah Standish, whose love affair with Rudi von Buhlen had blinded her to normal realities.

  He found some cord in one of the trucks and tied up the turbaned man, lashing the wrists tightly, then the ankles, then taking more cord to lash him to the rear wheel in the shadows of the shed. Before he finished he searched the man, found only a few coins, a police identity card with the name Ali Hamadourji on it. He put them back and walked to the door of the shed. Alessa moved with him. In the moonlight, he looked at his watch. It was only a few minutes before eleven, to his surprise.

  “What are you going to do?” Alessa asked.

  “I am going to the Qissa Khani. That street never sleeps.”

  “Don’t you think the police—” She frowned anxiously.

  “You’re coming with me. It may be dangerous, but I’d feel safer with you in sight, even in the Qissa Khani. I want no interference.”

  “You don’t trust me to be quiet here?”

  “No,” he said.

  There were dancing boys with bobbed hair walking hand in hand in the twisted lanes, and fakirs and blind beggars, one-legged beggars and naked beggars in the yellow-lighted dust. A radio in one of the Arab tenements spewed out the latest hate-hysteria propaganda from Cairo. Another radio played American jazz, relayed from the European hotels in Karachi or perhaps from as far away as Bombay. Camels and donkeys vied with the surging humanity that crowded the lanes between the shops, where gasoline lanterns added to the fragmentary electric street-lighting. The smells of coffee, curry and hides filled the air. A flute wailed somewhere, candy vendors monotonously hawked their wares. A lemon-drink seller bobbed up in front of Durell, urging a drink from the huge copper jug on his bent back. He poured the sweetish, sticky fluid from a long spout into a cup he took from his pocket, before Durell could wave him away. The man had one eye only, the other a shriveled, puckered socket. Durell gave the man a coin and turned the drink over to a naked urchin tagging at his heels. He reflected that everything was for sale here—live birds, fortunes, bullet belts, fruits and every diversity of women.

  A cool wind from the northern hills had washed away the day’s heat. In the Qissa Khani, he had no difficulty finding Omar. The man held forth in a lane of shops not far from the teahouse of Swerji Hamad. Above the shops were rooms with balconies where the bazaar merchants lived and dispensed their more profitable products—stolen goods, opium, women and bhang—the ubiquitous derivative of Indian hemp, which is smoked, chewed, eaten in sweetmeats and downed in drinks throughout the sub-continent.

  Omar’s operation was a little more elaborate than his competitors, Durell noted. Two musicians, one with a horn and another with a goat-skin drum, banged out ear-splitting Pathan music while a girl of ten, her eyes already indicating trachoma, stamped out a mountain dance in the dust. The crowd was appreciative, throwing coins to the men and the child.

  Then, with a showman’s gesture, the old man stepped from a curtained doorway and the music stopped as he settled to a squatting position on a dusty pillow. The drummer went around collecting a rupee from each spectator.

  Omar was the most famous of the entertainers in the Street of Storytellers. The old man wore a green gown that accented his sallow face in the flickering kerosene lamps. His straggly white beard and dark, piercing eyes and sunken cheeks gave him a diabolical appearance that he apparently cultivated. A fat Punjabi stood behind him, studying the crowd with careful impassivity.

  The old man began with the usual glorification of ancient Arab conquests in the Sind, went on to diatribes against the British and their machinations—relayed directly by the Cairo radio, Durell thought—and for emphasis, the old man flourished a glittering dagger and drove it with hatred into the ground again and again between his folded legs. His voice lifted and fell, grew sad, dripped vitriolic hatred. The crowd listened with rapt attention.

  Then he began on his special tales of long ago, fables of Alexander the Great and Roxana, the virgin daughter of King Oxyartes. The sum of his narrative, told in detail with much lewd emphasis, was how Roxana had induced the Greek conqueror to swim naked in a pool with her on a cold night, maddening the Macedonian with her ivory body, her pomegranate breasts, her hips and loins, and how Alexander then caught a chill and fever and died as a direct result of Roxana’s plan.

  “The crown!” someone muttered. “Tell us of the crown, old man!”

  Durell tried to see who had called for the story, but the voice had come from the thick of the audience, and he could not identify anyone. More rupees were collected, and Durell felt Alessa’s hand close on his arm in tight anticipation.

  There were many embellishments about King Mahandra, sovereign over eighty purs, wh
o had bowed to the conqueror from the West and offered a fabulous ransom for his cities in the form of a jeweled crown. There was a description of brave Xenos, the Greek zamindar, loyal captain of a thousand in Alexander’s army, and how one night a thief slipped into King Mahandra’s palace and stole the crown and fled into the Gilgit mountains and beyond, across the valley of Kashmir and into the towering Himalayas. Xenos volunteered to find and punish the thief and the tribesmen who sheltered him, and was ordered to march into the mountains. Xenos never came back. It was said that the gods who ruled at the time were angry at the invaders and shook the mountains and trapped the Greeks, every man of the thousand, and they died of thirst and starvation and cold in a black valley especially created for them by the gods, after they had sacked and tortured the hill tribes and found the crown.

  And ever since, Omar said softly, his satanic eyes glistening, the skulls of the hated enemy rest in a black void somewhere in the Himalayas, piled high upon the golden, flashing crown of jewels given by King Mahandra.

  The music of horn and drum began at once, when the old man whispered the end of his tale, and the mountain girl returned to stamp out her tribal dance in the dust of the Qissa Khani. The old man in the green gown vanished through the curtained doorway, and the crowd dispersed. Alessa was frowning.