Assignment Unicorn

by Edward S. Aarons

  All that happened was that someone inside the big shed shot at him.

  The report echoed flatly against the quiet beat of the surf on the nearby beach. The bullet winged past Durell’s head and thudded into the bole of a tree behind him.

  As he dived for the ground beside the tracks, the rifle slammed again, and the slug hit the rusted rail near his hand and screeched off into the distance, leaving behind it a scar of bright steel.

  He got up and sprinted and found shelter behind the half-loaded flatcar. The third shot followed him futilely.

  “You son of a bitch!”

  It was a girl‘s voice, all right.

  She sounded fearful and frustrated.

  “Yo!” he called.

  “Come on,” she coaxed. “Come on out where I can see you, you murderer!”

  “Wait a minute,” he called, against her hysteria.

  “Come on!”

  Sunlight glinted off the rifle barrel thrust through a small square window in the big shed, just to the right of the doors where the WDT diesel was parked. Durell swore softly. He was trapped here in the open, sheltered by the flatcar but too far now from the trees to make a run backward and too far for a sprint into the shed. The girl wouldn’t miss the next shot, he thought. He had nowhere to go.

  It was possible to drop her—he could see the pale glimmer of her face in the tiny window, searching for him. He could do it with a single careful shot from the .38. He had loaded the S&W with cartridges converted by himself, slit across the nose and partially hollowed out into dum-dums. Any kind of a hit would blow the girl’s head off. But he didn’t want to do that.

  He noticed that the flatcar he crouched against had its rear wheels chocked to prevent it from rolling backward, and then he saw that the graded tracks across the point of land slanted toward the tin-roofed shed. A pushpole, like a heavy boat hook, was fastened to the rusted side of the flatcar. The trucks dripped melting grease. It was possible, he thought.

  The shallow sea glittered with a thousand diamond points beyond the rust-red roof of the ramshackle building. Behind him, the rows of palm trees stretched into mathematical infinities. A heap of sea-wrack had piled up on the beach to his right. White gulls lofted in the wind at the tip of the promontory. On the horizon, a giant tanker plodded westward before making the turn north to the hungry ports of Japan.

  Durell lowered himself carefully to his knees and moved toward the front of the flatcar. The chocks behind the wheels were merely palm logs, jacked between the two wheels of the bolster. Fortunately, only the one truck had been checked, on his side, and he did not have to crawl under the car to loosen any others. Even then it was difficult to get leverage to release the logs. He worked at them for several long minutes, pausing now and then to listen for the girl with the rifle. When he pulled the last chunk of wood free, he was drenched with sweat and the flatcar still remained motionless.

  He crouched low and lifted the pushpole from the hooks on the rusted side of the ear, jammed it into its socket, and shoved hard.

  The car finally moved. There came a creak of rusted metal, a heavy groan, a rumble from the wheels on the narrow track. Durell moved with it, keeping down, using the bulk of the car to shield his body. He thought he heard a cry from the girl in the warehouse. Slowly at first, then faster as the car gained momentum in its gravity ride, he approached the structure. In a matter of seconds, he had to trot to keep up with its speed. It was heading straight for the nose of the diesel loco that poked out of the high double doors.

  With less than twenty feet to go, Durell leaped upon the floor of the flatcar, keeping low behind the crates and barrels it carried, then wriggled across to the other side. The car rumbled under him as he lay fiat on the splintered plank floor. The diesel engine seemed to rush at him. He could not see the girl with the rifle now, in the small window to his right. At the last moment, ho rolled off and jumped for the shadows inside the warehouse door.

  The crash when the flatcar hit the nose of the parked locomotive was thunderous, echoing within the high, shadowed building. The boxes and crates piled on the floor scattered and flew in every direction. Durell landed lightly on his feet and raced for the bulky protection of geared machinery, a shredding table, and then a low partition that divided one end of the plant. He smelled the dusty odor of coconut fibers and shredded husks. Sunlight came through a high window on the seaward side of the structure in a long, slanting beam. Dust motes danced in it. The shattering echoes of the crash died away. Durell breathed easier. He kept his gun ready.

  The girl was hidden in a partitioned office in one corner of the long building. He could not see her at first. He moved carefully, without sound, behind a sorting table, an endless belt that stretched toward crushing rollers powered by a steam donkey engine that bulked in the rear of the plant. The door to the partitioned office was open. The girl appeared there, holding a Remington rifle in both hands. She looked as if she knew how to use it.

  The light inside the building was uncertain. Durell kept still. The girl looked at the wrecked flatcar that blocked the double doors. The car had derailed and now lay tilted to one side, heaped up with a buckled, splintered floor around the nose of the diesel. She stared in puzzlement and moved toward the side of the building where Durell crouched. When she came within reach, he jumped her.

  She was a tall girl, in her middle twenties, and she wore faded denims and a man’s shirt with the tails tied about her midriff. Her hair was skinned back, pulled tightly into a knot at the nape of her neck, the hair a dark-red color obscured by dust; there were smudges on her face. Her full breasts did not seem to be restrained by a bra. She had a narrow waist, full hips, long and solid legs. The striped shirtsleeves were rolled up above her elbows.

  Durell came at her fast from behind, hit her just below the waist. She gasped and grunted as she went forward with the impact, her arms going out instinctively to check her fall to the floor. The rifle slammed on the concrete with a hard clatter. She yelped and tried to retrieve her grip on the gun as Durell rolled, came up on his feet, and stamped a booted foot on the barrel. She gave a cry of pain as her fingers were pinned under the metal. Her swearing could have been learned from Donaldson, whose vocabulary had been famous. There was nothing weak or feminine about her resistance. She tried to get her knee into Durell’s crotch, failed, flailed with her right fist at his face, then stiffened her fingers and stabbed at his eyes.

  “Hold it,” he gasped.

  “You murdering mother—”

  He hit her hard enough to cloud her eyes for a moment. Her head snapped back and her face was in profile against the concrete. He was aware of her loose breasts against his chest, the pillowing of her hips under him.

  “Now just shut up,” Durell said. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

  “No? Liar! You helped kill Daddy—”

  “Donaldson?”

  “Ah, go to hell,” she said. “Go ahead, kill me.”

  “Are you Donaldson’s daughter?’

  “What else?”

  “Listen,” Durell said. “Stop fighting me. I’m on your side. What’s your name?”

  “Maggie. What's yours?”

  “Sam Durell.”

  She stared up at him. Her eyes were a pale dusty blue.

  They stared up widely, inches from him.

  “The Cajun?” she asked, suddenly quiet.

  “Yes.”

  “Good Lord. I almost killed you.”

  “Maggie?”

  “Yes?”

  “Behave?”

  ”Yes.”

  He let her up.

  7

  SHE SAT against the rear warehouse wall, facing the sea, watching Durell as he washed off the mud he had plastered on his face and retrieved his sunglasses from his shirt pocket. He made a point of taking the rifle with him and keeping it out of her reach. The girl lowered her head on her forearms and hugged her knees. Everything about he r indicated exhaustion and defeat.

  He wondered when s
he had eaten last. Now that he had a good chance to look at her, he wondered if she had been spending the hours since the attack on the plantation hiding out in the inland swamps. She wore no shoes; her feet were caked with dried mud and her legs were scratched and dirty. She was a mess.

  “I didn’t know Donaldson had a daughter,” Durell said.

  “That’s me. Maggie Donaldson.” Her voice was muffled in the bend of her forearm. “Listen, it’s not safe here, you know?”

  “He never told me.”

  “Well, he told me enough about you.” She lifted her head. “Listen, is it true? You worked with Hugh in Malaysia, long ago? And you take all your orders straight from General Dickinson McFee, getting all the crappy jobs?”

  “It’s my business,” Durell said.

  “But it’s true?”

  Durell thought about it. “Yes.”

  “Daddy was a little afraid of you.”

  “I expect so. Maggie, what are you doing here in Palingpon?”

  “I came to visit Hugh.”

  “From the States?”

  “I was in school there. Working on my doctorate at Yale. I gave it all up, It was just a crock of shit.”

  “Why do you talk like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Obscenity is childish,” Durell said. “Why did you come here?”

  “I’m hungry,” she said.

  “Yes. Why did you leave school?”

  “I told you, it was a crock—”

  “How long have you been hooked?"

  “What?”

  “Those needle marks on your arm.”

  “Oh, those.”

  “Is that why you left the States?”

  “I kicked it.”

  “Nobody kicks it,” Durell said.

  “Listen, does your grandpa really live on an old Mississippi paddlewheeler, down in the bayous?”

  “Yes. Did you really kick it?”

  “I did. Months ago. Living on an old steamboat would really be neat.”

  “Are you clean now?”

  She said, “I mean to stay that way. It was just one of those things. You know. A friend of mine, a boyfriend, I thought he was fantastic, he taught me. But how he taught me. The son of a bitch. Great lover. Lousy bastard. He gave me the shi—the stuff.”

  “And you’re sure you’re clean?”

  “Sure.”

  “What made you think I was coming in to kill you?”

  “Well, with that mud on your face, at first I thought you were one of them. You looked like them.”

  “I gathered that the assassins were Malays. I don’t look like a Malay,” Durell said.

  “I could eat a horse,” said Maggie Donaldson. “That’s why I’m getting a bit hippy in the thighs, I mean.

  Nerves. Since I kicked it. Since I asked Daddy for help and he sent me the plane fare to come here from New Haven. I want to eat all the time, now.”

  “You look in fine shape to me,” Durell said. “I heard the killers were Malays.”

  “No, they were not.”

  “They were brown—”

  “They were white men. Painted up. They were Europeans. Or maybe Americans. I don’t know.”

  Durell was silent.

  “Hopped to the eyes,” she said. “I ought to know.”

  “Maggie, are you sure?”

  “I ought to know.” She nodded emphatically. “They all wore some locket or medallion or something. I had a good look at them when they came into the house. I didn’t know they’d already been in Palingpon, already killed Daddy. They all passed within a foot of me—I was in the downstairs john and peeked out when I heard them. They came into the house like a bunch of lunatics. So fast. Maniacal. I was lucky to get out the back door in time. I didn’t know what was happening. I still don’t. I hid out on the other side of the plantation, past the trees. It’s a big swamp out there. Then I headed for the village, the other side of here. Nobody was there but an old man.

  He had a radio. He told me about Premier Shang and Daddy.”

  “These lockets. Did you get a look at them?”

  “Sure. They were all the same. Like gold coins.”

  He waited.

  Maggie stood up and brushed the tight seat of her denims. “They had an animal engraved on them. Like a unicorn,” she said.

  8

  CHARLEY LEE had somehow managed to walk out of the Donaldson plantation house and had driven away in the rented Toyota. Maggie refused to go into the house. She never wanted to see it again. She said there was an old jeep in the village, and if there was any gas in it, they could use that to get back to town. Otherwise, it was an eight-mile walk.

  The jeep was in the village. Nobody else was there, not even the old fisherman she had mentioned. The houses stood vacant and forlorn, the fishing boats were drawn up tidily on the beach the other side of the promontory. The concrete dock where the plantation products were loaded onto barges stood empty and glaring in the hot sun. The wind had died. The air was humid, breathless. Nothing stirred. The place was dead.

  It was well after three o’clock in the afternoon when Durell got the girl a room at the Willem Van Huyden Hotel. The room was big and airy, with high ceilings, wooden fans, louvered windows. A gallery opened out of french shutter doors and overlooked the klong. It was reasonably quiet, except for the muted shouts of the sampan men on the canals, a hum of traffic over a nearby bridge, the muted echo of the gamelan orchestra in the lobby, getting ready for teatime. A poster in the lobby announced that a Filipino rock band would play in the bar starting at nine that evening.

  Durell ordered a meal sent up for the girl from the dining room, then went upstairs with Maggie and locked the door from the inside. His height topped the girl’s by only two inches. He sent her into the bath to shower and clean up, then went down again to the shops in the lobby, locking her in first, and bought a batik blouse and slacks, stockings and boots, a pair of white pumps, a straw hat with a wide brim, several shirts—small-size men’s—a woven straw purse, a native woman’s dress in colorful silk from Thailand, somewhat like a Hawaiian mumu. He added a comb, brush, toothpaste, toothbrush, lipstick, powder. He went back upstairs.

  She was sitting at the tall windows in a Bombay chair, wrapped in a towel, her feet tucked under her ample hips. She wasn’t interested in the things he had bought for her.

  “Maggie, I have an appointment at four o’clock with Colonel Ko. Do you know him?”

  “I’ve met him. The local fuzz?”

  “Sort of. Will you wait here until I come back?”

  “I don’t have any place else to go.”

  “Will you stay right here, in this room?”

  “Sure.”

  “And lock yourself in,” he said.

  “You don’t have to worry about me. Why are you going to all this trouble?”

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “You’re funny,” Maggie said. “Strange, I mean.”

  “How, strange?”

  “Daddy told me you were quite an orientalist. Said you speak half a dozen Asian languages, including Mandarin. Right now, for instance, I can see you discussing T’ang pottery, or maybe interpreting those crazy bits from the Tao Te Ching. Is that the real Sam Durell behind those sunglasses? Or is the real Durell the guy who came barreling into the warehouse behind that freight car, with your .38, scaring me half to death?”

  “I don’t know,” Durell said.

  “You a kind of schizo?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You have the best of both of your likable worlds, is that it?”

  “Perhaps.”

  There came a knock on the door. It was the waiter with the meal Durell had ordered for the girl. The waiter was a quiet, deft, middle-aged Palingponese in a white mess jacket.

  Maggie sat and looked at the food without interest.

  “I thought you were hungry,” Durell said.

  “I'm not, now. Not anymore.”

  He paid the waite
r and added a tip, then peeled off several large notes and put them on the table in front of the girl.

  “You’ll need some money, later.”

  “No, no,” she said. “I’ve got plenty of money, in the Palingpon State Bank. Daddy put it there for me. Daddy is—was-—quite wealthy. Now that he—he—well, he always said I’d have plenty of money when he was gone.”

  “Take it easy,” Durell said.

  “And now he’s gone, right?”

  “Yes. He’s dead.”

  “I’ve been too scared to think about it, until now. Last night in the swamp, all alone, and all. And then you showed up.”

  He thought of something. “What made you scream out there among the trees, when I was in the house?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maggie, don’t lie to me.”

  “I wanted you to chase after me,” she said.

  “So you could kill me?”

  “I told you, I thought you were one of them.”

  “One of the unicorns?”

  She looked up at him. Her face was clean and scrubbed and shining, after the shower. He saw that she might be a very pretty young woman.

  “Yes, you could call them that,” Maggie said. She looked at the faint row of needle marks in her left arm.

  “I really kicked it, you know. I really did.”

  “I believe you.”

  “And now Daddy’s left me rich.”

  She began to cry, suddenly and soundlessly.

  9

  COLONEL KO wore his uniform again. His boots gleamed, his gold braid glittered. His round brown face and black eyes were composed, self-sufficient. He did not sweat. His boot heels added two inches to his slight stature.

  The mortuary was in a Dutch-style house on a narrow street off the Embankment, a wide avenue that skirted the waterfront a short distance from the commercial piers. It was a place the Dutch settlers had tried to use as a promenade, a century ago, while their sailing ships loaded up with spices and tin and added to the guilders clinking in their counting houses. There was no sign over the house to indicate its present use.

  Colonel Ko sent the attendant away and led him down the stairs to the cellars. He snapped a switch and a string of cold fluorescent lights winked and chattered in the ceiling, then settled down to a steady, merciless hum. It was icy cold. A large, rather old-fashioned wooden door with heavy nickel-plated hinges and automatic locks filled most of one end of the room. Colonel Ko gave Durell a small, apologetic smile.