Assignment — Stella Marni

by Edward S. Aarons

  And Karl would be back.

  The thought gave him his first real glimmer of hope. A sense of cunning took over, and he went around the cage on hands and knees again, searching for something, anything to help him escape. The cage was totally bare. Then he found the thermos bottle Karl had left him, and he deliberately finished the pint of water in it and weighed the empty cylinder thoughtfully. Then he took off the leather belt around his waist.

  He smashed the thermos bottle against the steel wall, heedless of the noise. He had hammered with the heel of his shoe often enough for the sound to raise no extra alarm, if anyone were below in the studio. When the thermos rattled with broken shards of glass, he used the prong of his belt buckle to extract several razor-sharp slivers from the outer cylinder. He scattered these with care on the floor just an inch or so inside the narrow metal hatchway. There was one longer piece of glass, about four inches in length, that he was lucky to find, and the end of this he wrapped in a strip of cloth torn from the tail of his shirt, so that when he gripped it in his fist, about two inches of the sharp, curved triangle was exposed as a crude hand knife. He checked the scattering of broken glass on the steel ledge inside the hatch, where Karl had rested his weight before, and then took his belt and coiled it with the buckle inside, the tip held between his clenched fingers.

  It would do.

  "Karl!" he yelled. "Help! Help, Karl!"

  He slammed his shoe against the floor and yelled again. The clamor he raised inside the steel cage was deafening. After a moment or two he paused and listened. Nothing. He yelled again, hammered again. This time he heard very dim squealing noises of metal far below him. He called Karl's name once more and then waited.

  It was about three minutes before he heard the clang of a bar being dropped away from the outside of the acorn, and then the door squealed faintly. Bright light flooded the inside of his cage. Durell was on his knees, his toes touching the edge of the arching sides of the cage behind him, his position a little to the left of the hatch opening. He remembered that Karl had looked to the right at first, when he had last appeared. After he had climbed up past the battery of lights, the inside of the acorn would appear to Karl like a black hole, until his eyes adjusted to it. Durell stared into the empty blackness. Then Karl's huge head and shoulders filled the opening for an instant; his face was in shadow, with the bright light streaming in from behind him.

  Angrily, Karl said: "What is it, mister? What's all the yelling for, eh? You sick or something?"

  "Yes, I'm sick," Durell said. "I'm sick of you."

  He had the tongue end of the belt in his hand when he flicked it forward. It uncoiled with the speed of a striking snake, and the bright buckle slashed hard across the ugly, angry face that peered at him. Karl gasped and then roared in rage and pain and brought his gun slamming down hard on the floor inside the cage. The heel of his fist bit into the sharp slivers of glass Durell had sprinkled there and a queer scream of pain and fury burst from him. At the same moment Durell flung himself forward, the glass knife replacing the belt in his grip. The glass edge slashed across Karl's wrist and blood spurted in a great gout as vein and artery were cut as if by a razor. Karl's gun roared. The sound was enormous inside the cage, utterly deafening. The bullet slapped around the top of the cage like an angry hornet and then Durell slammed his fist into the giant's stunned face.

  Apparently Karl's grip outside the cage was not too secure.

  He screamed.

  His head jerked backward, fell away from Durell's blow.

  He disappeared.

  There was a long ululating scream and then a far thud and then sudden silence, leaving only the bright light streaming in through the open steel hatch.

  Durell lifted himself slowly to hands and knees, shaking his head to rid his ears of the intolerable ringing echo of the gunshot. He was panting, and his heart pounded crazily. He stared blinkingly at the open door. It remained open. Nothing more happened. And after a moment he stuck his head through the hatchway and looked down.

  He saw the floor of Krame's studio, thirty feet below, beyond the banks of photographic lights. A portable steel scaffolding had been pushed into the center of the floor, tangled with the light fixtures and baby spots and drop nets used as photographic props. A ladder led up from the pipe scaffolding to a shaftlike entrance in the ceiling like that of a conning tower in a submarine, and this in turn yielded to the trap door.

  Karl lay on his back on the floor below.

  Even at the distance from which Durell looked down upon him, he could see that the man's neck was broken. Karl was dead.

  Chapter Fourteen

  According to the clock over Krame's desk, against the far wall of the studio, it was two o'clock in the afternoon. About thirty hours since he had left Stella in the beach cottage. He wondered if she was still there. She had promised faithfully to wait there until he returned, no matter what happened. But it would be trying her patience and trust beyond credulity if she had remained in hiding in the cottage for ail these long hours he had been imprisoned. A sense of desperate urgency filled him, but he didn't leave the studio at once.

  He found the bar and pushed aside the sticky, unwashed glasses that still remained as a token of Krame's dalliance with Gerda Smith, and opened a bottle of brandy and took a long swallow, then another. The liquor burned and exploded with warmth in his stomach. He found a small refrigerator behind a Japanese silk screen and took from inside a half loaf of stale French bread, some butter and Bel Paese cheese. He ate hungrily, chafing the stiffness from his arms and legs while he studied the vast, empty spaces of the studio. There was no sign of John Krame or Gerda. He was not interested in Karl's broken body under the portable scaffold.

  The brandy made him feel a little drunk, but the bread and cheese soon counteracted its effect. Except for the bruise on the back of his head and the muscular stiffness from his cramped imprisonment, he was not too much the worse for wear. He had slept, or at least dozed, through many of the hours that had just passed.

  There was nothing in the studio to interest him except a heavy steel Mosler safe mounted on rollers near the desk. The safe had a solid combination lock that defied his brief efforts to open it. Giving it up, he went to the telephone and called Tom Markey's office.

  Markey answered the first ring himself.

  "This is Sam," Durell said. "Don't blow your stack before you listen to me, Tom. I've had a little trouble."

  Markey was silent for a long moment. "You've got more trouble than you think," he said finally. "Don't call me your friend any more. I trusted you yesterday. I asked you to bring in Stella Marni."

  "I'm going after her right now."

  "No, you're not. You're off the case. McFee pulled you off last night when I complained to Washington. I raised the biggest stink I could about the way you've played footsie with me. and I don't apologize for it. For my money, you're out in left field and the ball game is over."

  "I've been slugged," Durell said. "I've been a prisoner."

  "Yeah, sure."

  "Has Tony Isotti looked you up?"

  "He's off the case, too."

  Durell stared at the black, impersonal telephone. He could think of no way to break down the implacable resentment in Tom Markey's voice. He said: "I heard they got Albert Marni out of the hospital. Is that true?"

  "Right Killed Dan McHugh doing it, too."

  "Then old Marni is gone again?"

  "We're looking for him. Everywhere. We haven't found him yet.'"

  "And Stella?"

  Markey's voice was biting. "You've got her, Sam. Come on in. It's no good, whatever you're trying to do. From here it looks like you've broken every damned promise you made to me, and I'm in the doghouse and so is General McFee and my top brass in D.C. have their backs against the wall because of your God-damn fumble."

  "Just one thing, Tom," Durell said. "Get over to John Krame's studio, where Frank Greenwald was killed. Bring a warrant and bench permit to crack the safe. John Kra
me and a girl named Gerda Smith or Schmidt have to be picked up. They're two of the people in the ring who have been blackmailing and terrorizing the refugees into going home to be repatriated."

  There was a long silence. "I suppose you've got proof?"

  "I can prove it."

  "All right. Anything else you've been doing to pass the time?" Markey asked sardonically.

  "Yes. Bring the morgue wagon. There's a third member of the ring right here in the studio now." Durell looked at Karl's giant figure with the curiously bent and twisted neck. "The third guy is dead," he said. "I killed him."

  He hung up then and got out of there.

  His rented car was still where he had parked it, with two traffic tickets stuck under the windshield wiper. He pocketed the summonses and drove out across the Brooklyn Bridge to the Belt Parkway, the windows rolled down, fresh air pouring through the car and into his lungs. It was half past two in the afternoon by then, a gray and cold day with a southeasterly wind pulling raw dampness from over the ocean. He drove fast, but carefully enough to avoid attracting any police attention.

  Presently he turned off the busy parkway toward the shore, recalling the route in detail when he saw Blossom's house standing gray and isolated against the bleak marshes. It seemed to be deserted and he did not drive down the dead-end cutoff that led to it, but he noted the drawn window shades, the locked garage doors, the boathouse and the tidal channel behind it. Blossom must have left for the West Coast by now.

  After another five minutes he came to the narrow causeway that led across the wind-swept marshland to the spit of sand where the colony of summer cottages huddled against the elemental thrusts of winter. The place looked barren and forlorn in the pale sunlight, and the surf pounded heavily against the debris-littered beach, thrusting heavy tongues of white combers almost up to the pilings of the first cottages.

  Durell found the green cottage where he had left Stella the night before without trouble. No one was about. The wind made a steady hissing sound in the tali yellow grasses that grew on the dunes. Far in the distance he could see the steady march of telephone poles and power lines on the mainland, three miles away, and the flicker of white development houses over there. Brooklyn, he reflected, was a place of many strange paradoxes.

  The sea wind cut at him as he trudged across the sandy trace of lawn to the front porch. The little colony was like a village of ghosts in the uneven sunlight under the scudding gray clouds. He knocked. There was no reply. He called Stella's name, apprehension twisting suddenly in his stomach. He had had a fifty-fifty hope that she had trusted him enough to remain hidden here, but it really had been too much to expect of her. A full day, a night, and this morning had elapsed since he had left her, and he could not blame her if she somehow had found a way to leave. She would have had to walk most of the way to the mainland, however, along the causeway. And with her picture so recently in all the newspapers, she'd have taken a great risk of being recognized and turned over to the police. Perhaps he should have checked the papers before driving all the way out here. But Tom Markey hadn't even hinted that he knew where Stella was. Wherever she had gone, she had not fallen into the hands of the cops. Or of John Krame's outfit, either. Not yet, anyway.

  He searched the cottage room by room, remembering the night he had spent here with her. There was still a faint trace of her perfume, a feeling and mood that she somehow left wherever she went. The fireplace was filled with cold ashes. The few dishes they had used had been washed and neatly stacked away in the kitchen cupboard. She had left no tangible sign that they had used the cottage at all, and he stood still, remembering her apartment, the sense of orderliness that expressed one facet of her puzzling personality. Then he remembered her hysteria and terror and the way she had come to him in the glow of the dying fire, clinging to him and demanding him with a fervor and ardor that had been completely contradictory to the cool, shadowy image of her other self.

  Remembering, he wanted to see her again, and the wanting was filled with an urgent fear for her safety. He had to find her. There was only a little time left, and if she had gone back to the city, she would have learned of her father's rescue from the Boroslav and his subsequent recapture from the hospital where he had taken the old man. In that case, she would once again be subject to the orders of the enemy.

  He searched for a note or message of some kind that she might have left for him, but there was nothing inside the cottage except the lingering ghost of her, his own image of her tall proud body and lovely face, of her shimmering pale hair and great jade eyes that had looked to him for help there before the dying fire.

  He went outside again and circled the cottage, not sure of what he was looking for. There were tire marks in the soft sand behind the house, and at first he passed them by, recalling that he had parked his own car there. Then abruptly he returned to kneel beside the dim ruts, watching a little trickle of sand suddenly collapse and pour into one of them. It had been raining when he was here last, and the sand was still dimpled by the marks of the hard-driven drops. As he knelt there, frowning, another tiny torrent of sand went sliding into the tire marks he considered.

  Durell straightened with excitement in him. It was clear that someone had driven a car in here not very long ago, perhaps within minutes, at the most only an hour before. Stella had bad no car, unless she bad walked back to the mainland and got one somehow and returned here for something. But if she had left and then come back in a car, she surely would have left a message for him to let him know what had happened.

  Someone must have come for her.

  But who?

  No one could have known or guessed that Stella Marni was here. No one except perhaps Harry Blossom. Blossom might have made a shrewd guess as to where he had hidden the girl after they left the agent's house the other night Blossom, who knew this stretch of desolate shore like the back of his hand.

  Abruptly Durell returned to his car, backed out into the road between the deserted cottages, and drove to the causeway again. It was no more than a few minutes' drive back to Blossom's house, standing in shabby Victorian isolation against the backdrop of flat salt marsh and bleak sea. When passing here half an hour ago he had only glanced this way and noted that the place looked deserted. He took a closer look this time.

  The wind was strong, and he heard something bang repeatedly at the back of the house, and when he got out of the car and walked that way he saw it was the door to the carriage shed that had been converted into a garage. Blossom's gray sedan was there, and the motor was still a little warm. Durell looked back at the house with bleak eyes. Blossom had been due to report in L.A. yesterday. But he hadn't gone. He was still here. And Durell was suddenly sure that Stella Marni was here, too.

  He tried the back door, found it unlocked, and walked through the kitchen and hallway to the front of the house, into the study with the Vermont marble fireplace where he had found Blossom and Stella before.

  They were here again.

  He saw Stella first. She was seated in a small armchair near the window that faced the sea, her hands gripping the arms of the chair until her small knuckle bones shone white through her skin. Her face was pale and she was staring at Blossom. She did not turn to look at Durell. She did not seem to be aware of him as he loomed in the doorway. Her eyes were fixed on the FBI agent and she seemed to be looking at something far away, at something too horrible to bear, yet too strong to permit her to tear her gaze free. She wore the same skirt and pale lime-green sweater he had seen her in before. Her hair was disheveled, a pale, wind-blown cloud of gold against her forehead and cheeks, and there was an ugly bruise darkening along the soft line of her jaw.

  Harry Blossom might have struck her, but he would never strike her again. He sprawled with his head and shoulders in the fireplace, his knees flexed under him. Ashes had been jarred loose by his fall and darkened his face and shoulders so that his features no longer seemed to be made of flesh and bone, but of some strange papier-mâché substance, a t
hing that was shredded and somehow unfinished and inhuman.

  He had been shot in the head, and he was dead.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Durell heard the sound of the surf, the whimper of the wind, the quick shallow breathing of the girl sitting frozen in the chair as she looked at the dead man. He scanned the room quickly for a gun. but he did not see one. It was obvious that Blossom had been standing before the fireplace talking to her when he had been shot. When he fell, his legs had buckled and he toppled backward from the knees, onto the hearth. It had not happened too long ago. There was still a liquid shine to the blood that had oozed from the head wound, although some of it had already coagulated on the cast-iron coal grate.

  "Stella," Durell said.

  She neither moved nor looked at him.

  "Stella, do you hear me?"

  She shivered very faintly. Her eyelids twitched, but she kept staring at the dead man. A faint, thin sighing came from her parted lips.

  "Stella, why did you shoot him?" Durell asked.

  A faint change touched her face. He moved soundlessly across the Sarouk carpet and brushed his fingers along the bruise on her cheek, then put his hand under her chin and tilled her face up so she was forced to look at him. He stood between her and the dead man, and the bulk of his figure acted as a screen that snapped the hypnotic pull of the murdered man's image in the girl's eyes. She looked blankly at Durell for a moment, not recognizing him, and then she made a choked, whimpering sound and a terrible shudder shook her body. Her hands came up and covered her face and her head fell forward and her fingernails began to dig into her temples until Durell caught her wrists and forced her arms down again.

  '"Stella, why did you kill him?" he asked again.

  "What? I... I didn't," she whispered.