Assignment — Angelina

by Edward S. Aarons

  He was not in love with her any more. He was in love with Deirdre. It didn't matter that Deirdre was in Paris today, and Angelina was here with him now. Angelina had nothing he could accept.

  Forty-five minutes had passed, and she hadn't returned.

  * * *

  The door to Corbin's house opened and Mark Fleming and Jessie came outside into the evening rain. They were laughing at something Mark said, and they held hands, and even at this distance, they looked like lovers, the way they walked and touched each other. They waited on the sidewalk, and after a minute a cruising cab stopped and they both got in and the cab turned south on Madison.

  The apartment was now empty.

  Durell waited a minute or two longer for Angelina, and then he couldn't wait any longer. He left his window and quit the shabby room and walked outside. The rain was fight and warm and gentle. The street lights came on, although it was still an hour before true dusk. He had a rented car parked around the corner, and he would have followed his quarry if it had looked as if they were leaving for good. But there was every indication that they felt secure enough to come back to this place. There might be time enough now to make a quick survey of the rooms over there and see what he could turn up.

  The street door was locked, and he did not want to arouse the other tenants by pushing any bell at random, so he tried the next house. He rang two bells and when the buzzer buzzed, he stepped into the small foyer. A woman looked at him from a first-floor doorway and at the same time a man's voice called down from above. He said, "Excuse me, wrong bell," to the woman and went upstairs. The man had called from the third floor. Durell waited on the second landing until he heard a door slam in exasperation above, then he kept going noiselessly up to the fifth and top floor. A door opened easily onto the roof from here.

  There was a high iron fence between the two roofs, and it took some precarious moments while he swung around the back end, hovering for a second or two over the courtyards far below. Then he was on the roof of the Corbin house. The door going down was locked, but he took a flat leather case from his pocket and manipulated several pieces of flat steel in the lock, finally getting inside. He drifted silently down to the second floor and repeated his manipulations with the lock-picks on Corbin's door, and in a few moments he was where he wanted to be.

  No lamps had been left on, but enough light shone through the windows from the street to show him the way. He saw the high-ceilinged elegance of the living room and the long baroque table with its blueprints, and he touched the rolls tentatively, then turned down a wide hallway with a tesselated floor, passed a windowless kitchen, and entered the huge bedroom at the rear. A low balcony, under which were situated double baths and wardrobe rooms, occupied the inner end of the bedroom. Durell paused in the gloom, noting the rumpled condition of the bed, a big bath towel on the floor, the repetition of mirrors on the plastered walls. Suitcases stood on a luggage rack near the windows, but they were closed and locked and he knew he might leave a scar on the leather if he forced them open.

  He was not sure what to look for. Wittington wanted to give them rope enough to find out where they had seen the flaw in the nation's defenses. Maybe it had nothing to do with defense or national security, however. Maybe it was strictly a criminal operation. He didn't know, and that was what he had to find out.

  He wondered if Angelina had returned to the room.

  He began searching the bedroom, swiftly and methodically. Jessie Corbin's clothing had expensive labels and reflected a European flare for style. He knew very little about her. The dossier that Wittington had given him at the Special Bureau office had mentioned a Midwestern farm background, college at Des Moines, a frustrated year trying to break into the Broadway theater, and then some years abroad with dubious liaisons throughout Europe. Durell wished he knew what she wanted. She had married a man twenty years older than herself. Not for love; not a woman like this. Not even for money. Corbin was a refugee, a man in flight. Then where had the money come from to rent this place, to buy these clothes? There was nothing here to tell him.

  He gave up the bedroom and checked the baths, noting the Spartan simplicity of Erich Corbin's possessions as opposed to his wife's taste for luxury. An odd couple. He remembered how Jessie had looked leaving the apartment with Fleming. Something interesting there. Did Erich condone it? The rumpled bed told an interesting story. Who gave the orders in this strange group?

  He returned to the living room. The street was dark and quiet now. A cab went by, tires hissing on the wet asphalt. It was an ordinary, peaceful, residential street. He could see the window of the room he had rented diagonally across the way. No light shone there. He began to feel it had been a mistake to let Angelina go. He didn't quite trust her.

  * * *

  He checked the blueprints on the baroque table. He wished he could risk a light, but he respected Corbin's intelligence. Jessie, too, would know if she had left a light on and if she returned too soon and saw the windows bright, she would be warned. He took the blueprints to the window and tried to make something of the complicated pattern by the light of the street lamp. They were air-conditioning plans for a vast and complex structure on many levels, but there were no labels to give him the slightest hint of what this place was or what its function might be. Whatever it was, it was big and important. It vindicated Wittington's theory that another much bigger target was Corbin's goal.

  There was a name in neat, architectural script in the lower corner of the prints. Durell risked a match to read it. Carl Amberly. And under it: Groversville, Penna. August, 1957.

  Durell replaced the rolls on the table exactly as they had been before. There seemed to be nothing else in the apartment to tell him anything. He stood looking at his tall, dim reflection in the mirrors that reflected the room endlessly. He saw frustration in his dark face. His white shirt looked very white, his suit very dark, in the uncertain light. He took out a cigarette, put it into his mouth, and decided not to smoke it and put it away.

  Returning to the bedroom, he closed the door and risked a light, which would not show on the street. There was an extension phone beside the bed, and an address and number book in tooled leather. He opened the book and leafed through it and saw the numbers of grocers, tailors, a beauty parlor. No familiar names of associates. But on the back cover, scribbled hastily as if jotted down in a hurry, was another name to go with that of Carl Amberly.

  George Johnston. Beside it was, 3 rms, $450 season. And again: Groversville, Pa. He wondered if Johnston was a realty agent.

  Excitement moved in him. He had something tangible, something he could work with. He looked at his watch. It was after seven. He wondered if he should call Wittington to put someone to work on these names and places. He would have liked to describe the blueprints in better detail, too. Thinking of this, Durell returned to the living room for the big rolls of heavy paper, then walked back to the telephone. Just as the operator asked his number, he heard a key turn in the front door.

  Durell quietly put down the phone. The blueprints were in his hand. There was no chance to return them to the living room now. He stood up and turned off the lamp and went to the bedroom door. He took out his gun.

  The front door opened and someone came quietly into the apartment.

  Chapter Thirteen

  At seven o'clock Slago backed the station wagon up against the loading platform of a warehouse in lower Brooklyn. Erich sat beside him, leaning slightly forward. Slago was surprised, because he thought Erich was drunk, and he had never seen Erich drink before. There was something on Erich's mind that had nothing to do with their appointment here, and Slago wondered if Mark had made a slip about Jessie. Dames were dames. They were all alike to Slago. He couldn't see why Mark had to mess around with Jessie in particular, when they all had to get along smoothly for the next few days. Slago did not consider himself clever or intelligent. He knew his limitations. He knew what he could and what he could not do, and because of this he operated very efficientl
y on the levels where he chose to function. His drives were simple and primitive, and because of his simplicity, he often fooled cleverer and subtler men.

  He was worried about Erich, because Erich wasn't himself. Erich was usually cold and precise, the Teutonic personality that pushed emotion and irrelevancies aside and stuck to business. Right now, Erich didn't seem to be aware of the job they had to do here.

  The warehouse was dark, closed for the night. Slago got out of the car, leaving Corbin wrapped in his cloak of dark thought. The doors on the loading platform were closed, but as he went lightly up the steps, one of them slid aside and a bald man in short-sleeved pink shirt stepped out. He carried a watchman's clock on a leather shoulder strap and a holstered gun.

  "You're right on time."

  "Have you got what we ordered, buddy boy?" Slago asked.

  "Sure thing. Have you the money?"

  "I got five hundred for you."

  "I had a lot of trouble juggling the books upstairs to cover this on die inventories, the watchman said nervously.

  "You said five hundred."

  "I know, but..."

  "Come on, then, let's roll it out."

  The bald man was afraid of Slago, but he stood his ground. "Pay me first."

  Slago took the money from his pocket and tossed it to the deck of the loading platform. The watchman licked his lips angrily, but he looked again at Slago's bulk and picked up the money meekly and went inside.

  The loading went without difficulty. There were two compressed gas cylinders, dials and instruments to be attached to the nozzles, a dozen boxes of chemicals, and two carboys. The station wagon took it all without difficulty. Slago preferred this Buick to the Cad, which was too flashy ror his taste and didn't have the capacity of the station wagon. The watchman was worried and he nodded once to Erich, seated in the car, and said, "Why doesn't your pal help?"

  "He's got his troubles."

  "Look, I ain't curious, mister, but I'd like to know..."

  "No, you don't want to know," Slago said. "You'd be goddam sorry if you knew anything at all, right?"

  "Maybe so."

  "Damn right. Just forget everything now, huh?"

  "Sure. Any time you want to do more business..."

  "I'll look you up, don't worry," Slago said. He laughed, a short spurt of gravelly sound, and got back into the Buick. "We've loaded everything, Erich."

  "That is fine."

  "Don't you want to check it?"

  "I trust you. I'm not worried about you, Slago."

  "But you're worried about something, huh?" Slago started the car and when the watchman opened the high wire gate he turned on the headlamps because it was getting dark. He headed for the Belt Parkway and the bridges to Manhattan. "You ain't yourself, Erich," he said slyly. "And when a smart guy like you takes a tailspin, it's got to be a dame. It's your broad, isn't it?"

  "My wife," Erich said, kneading his hands together.

  "There are plenty of other broads around, buddy."

  "You don't understand. I love her."

  "So she's got something different."

  "For me, yes."

  "Jesus, you guys kill me. We don't need her, buddy."

  Erich looked pale in the intermittent light that came into the car as they drove along the parkway. His nose looked pinched and white. "You still do not understand. We cannot drop her, even if I so desired it. Even if I could bring myself to do it. She humiliates me. She sleeps with Mark, did you know that?"

  "Sure," Slago said. "So it costs you something?"

  "I would kill her, if I had the true courage. I have been thinking of it all afternoon. She brings mad thoughts to my mind. But we cannot get rid of her, Slago, because it is all her money. She had financed all this. Why? I know she never truly loved me, but she helped me come across the border to the West. She has her own plans, her own goals. Do you know how much she hates this country? She thought she had great talent that was once rejected. She told me one night, in London, how she was given an acting part, a good part in a great show, and then she was kicked out for another actress because the other actress had a man who put money into the production. So she gave it up and left, with her bitterness and her hatred, and she came to Europe. All of this is her idea, Slago. She is after something she will not talk about, but I don't know what it is."

  "I thought it was simple," Slago said. "I thought we were all after just one thing — money."

  "She wishes for something else."

  "And you're sure you don't know what it is?"

  "I can guess. I do not want to talk about it."

  "Maybe you better talk about it," Slago said.

  "She is using Mark. She is using you and me. She is smarter than all three of us together."

  "Nobody's smarter than the knife. That cuts 'em all down to fish bait. Keep talking, Erich."

  "No, I have said enough."

  "You said too much and not enough. Tell me, Erich."

  Corbin looked up and saw Slago's face and he remembered who and what Slago was.

  * * *

  At a little before seven, Angelina sat on a stool in the bar of the Belmont Hotel and sipped straight rum from a shot glass. She hoped Durell would not worry about her. She hoped he understood how she felt about Pete, which had very little to do with how she felt about Durell. It was something she owed Pete, she told herself, and it didn't matter that Sam had other ideas about how to handle them. Sipping the rum, she recalled what he had said about abandoning her if she didn't obey his orders. But she couldn't believe he would do this. She knew him too well; she remembered too much about him. Remembering, she smiled, the languid warmth of a bayou afternoon probing deep inside her.

  They were here in this ratty hotel, the men who had killed Pete Labouisse. She was not afraid of them. All her life, she had known how to maneuver men to satisfy her own whims. She had given little, actually, and it was not her fault if her face and body promised so much. ! She had long ago discovered that men always jumped to the same conclusion about her, but they never found out the truth until she had gotten what she wanted from them. And what she had always wanted until now was very simple. She wanted money.

  At least, this was what she had wanted until Sam came back. Now she had to admit to a certain amount of confusion. She was still in love with him. For Sam, it was all only a pleasant memory, a warm area of patterns that made him what he was today. But she felt sure she could make him love her again. Once this was over, there would be time. She would make him love her, and then things would be the way they used to be. So if she could hurry things up, instead of just waiting and watching, the way he wanted to do it, then she could settle things sooner.

  Angelina finished the rum just as Slago returned to the hotel. He came in alone, moving slowly, and he turned straight to the bar, just as she had hoped he would.

  Angelina felt a quickening of tension, but she put the shot glass down with a steady hand, Her face was lovely and serene, reflected in the bar mirror. There were two men at the far end of the bar, arguing about baseball, and a middle-aged woman with a Martini held in a deathgrip in her ringed fingers. Slago took a stool two removed from her and ordered rye and then looked up under his heavy brows and saw her in the mirror.

  For a moment nothing changed in his broad, flat face. His brush of salt-and-pepper hair and his big, powerful hands were the things Angelina remembered.

  She smiled at him.

  He looked at her, and there was a flatness in his eyes that momentarily turned her stomach to jelly. She kept the smile there, working at it, trying hard to get across to him what she wanted. He didn't understand. She saw shock and then disbelief, and then fear and rage, all mirrored fleetingly in those pale eyes in the mirror.

  He got up and took the stool next to hers and said in a hoarse whisper: "You're dead, sister."

  "Do I look it?" Angelina asked.

  "You're fingering me, huh?"

  "For the cops? No."

  "Where are they?"
<
br />   "I'm alone. Can't you see that?"

  "I believe that. Like the moon is green cheese. They move in now, right now, and you're dead, right here at this bar."

  "They're not here. I'm alone. I didn't know whether you'd recognize me or not. We're a long way from where we saw each other last."

  Slago wet his lips. His heart still pounded from the shock she had given him by showing up here. He looked at the bartender, but the man was down at the other end of the bar, entering the baseball argument with his two other customers. The woman with the Martini had a drunken fixity in the way she held her glass and stared at nothing. Slago turned his head on his thick neck. He looked into the lobby, he looked through the Venetian slats on the bar window at die dark street. He looked back at Angelina.

  "I don't get it"

  "I'm here on business."

  "What business?"

  "We'll talk about that later," Angelina said. "Buy me another drink. Just rum. Cuban, please."

  His mouth was open. He was sweating. She had him, he thought. Seeing his confusion, Angelina felt elation until she told herself to be careful, reminding herself that this was the man with the knife, and he had done that thing to Pete, and there was no telling what went on inside that skull of his.

  "You saw me at Moon's," Slago said. "I had my hands on you and you got away. Now you're here. How come?"

  "I told you. I traced you because of business."

  "What business? Who are you?"

  "I want to make a deal. May I have that drink, please?"