Assignment Maltese Maiden

by Edward S. Aarons

  “The military?”

  “No. Madame Hung.”

  Chapter 11

  From the orchard to the highway was about two hundred yards of untilled, sandy vegetable fields, and straight across it, in the light of the morning sun, the tracks of their truck were plainly visible. There was a low rise to the north, where two goats grazed amid the limestone columns of the ruins. Nothing else was in sight.

  Durell said, “How do you know, Carlo?”

  Perozzo said, “Two Mercedes sedans. Six men. She may be in one of the cars herself. They’re all armed, fanning out. We have only a few minutes.” Perozzo waved his arm. “Three from there. Three from the other way. They’re being careful.”

  “Chinese?”

  “Uh.”

  “Thugs?”

  “Yes. They look like they mean business.”

  Durell turned. “Keefe, forget the truck. We’ll leave here in style. We’ll take one of the Mercedes.”

  Perozzo lifted his brows. “How, Sam?”

  Durell went to Saad and the boy and told them to get into the farmhouse and stay there. In half an hour, he said, they could have their truck and return to Tripoli. Keefe said, “They’ll go straight to the police. They know all about us. That kid will go straight to the revolutionary intelligence offices and describe every one of us.”

  “No matter. Damon? Skoll?”

  Tom Damon stood up, his pistol in hand. His shoulder wound was bothering him, and his intellectual face looked gray. Skoll was like a shaggy bear in the morning light.

  “Give Skoll a gun,” Durell told Keefe.

  “Are you crazy?”

  “He’s on our side in this. They’ll kill him as quickly as they’d kill us. Do you understand, Cesar?”

  “Against Madame Hung, you can trust me,” Skoll said.

  “All right, then. We go for the road. Spread out a bit,” Durell said.

  He hoped that Hung’s men would assume they would run for it in the opposite direction. A sudden frontal attack might throw them off-balance. Durell moved at a smooth, fast pace toward the ruins atop the rise. The grazing goats turned away. He was almost to the old Roman tomb columns when the first three Chinese appeared, their faces toward the glare of the rising sun. He gave them no warning. There would be no quarter in this lonely spot. He began firing, with Keefe a split-second behind him, and did not stop his run up the slope. The racket of the guns filled the sky. A bullet chipped a small puff of limestone from one of the ancient pink columns. One of the Chinese fell and slid face down on the sandy ridge. Another spun about, grabbing his stomach, and went to his knees. The third hesitated only a second before deciding to retreat. His gun chattered and Perozzo fired from the flank in return, and the man vanished on the other side of the slope. Durell came over the top first.

  The two Mercedes sedans were parked a quarter of a mile apart, facing south. The sun glinted on their black, waxed bodies. They were 600 models, limousines with small windows in the back. Durell ran past the two fallen Chinese and yelled to Damon to pick up their guns. The third Chinese was staggering toward the farthest car when he turned and fired again. The other trio, hearing the shots, came running back toward the road. One of them fired, and the bullets kicked up a long spray of dust and stones close to Durell’s feet.

  They had been too sure of themselves. The Mercedes 600, gleaming in the hot sun, stood empty and unguarded.

  “See if there’s a key,” Durell said.

  Keefe jumped ahead and ran around the car on the black paving. There was return fire from Perozzo and Damon, to the rear. For the first time, Durell noted that the Russian was missing.

  “Skoll!”

  His call was drowned out by the increasing rattle of gunfire. The three Chinese were determined to come on. Far down the road, the second Mercedes limousine moved forward a bit, then halted again. Durell could not see through the sun’s glare on the windshield to tell who was in it. He swore quietly as Keefe looked up behind the wheel and held up empty hands to indicate the ignition key was gone. Then Keefe bent down again to work on shorting the wires. Durell fired at the nearest approaching man, drove him to cover, and fired again. They were being careful now. Perozzo backed up toward the edge of the road, his square face grim.

  “It’s Damon,” he said tightly.

  Tom Damon lay flat in the middle of the sloping field, one arm thrown forward, one leg drawn up. He did not move.

  “Let’s pull him back,” Durell said.

  “No use. He took one right between the eyes.”

  Durell swore angrily. He hadn’t expected casualties like this. Now the job had cost two fives, he still had no idea where McFee or the Pilgrim Project papers might be, and there was the added complications of the KGB and the Hung people tied into it. There was no time for regrets. He heard the Mercedes start up as Keefe finally shorted the ignition, and he fired a long covering burst at the approaching men that sent them jumping for cover among the Roman ruins. In the moment’s respite, Perozzo jumped for the car door and yanked it open and Durell followed him inside. Keefe, at the wheel, tramped on the gas.

  The heavy limousine lurched forward. Two bullets spattered the side of the car and another starred the small rear window.

  “Keep down. Keefe, turn around.”

  “Toward the other car?”

  “Straight at it,” Durell said grimly.

  The Mercedes lurched and slewed across the road, backed up with a clash of gears, hit the embankment, bounced, and roared forward toward the other limousine, leaving thick dust behind the spinning wheels. There were dim shouts from the enemy gunmen left on the ridge. Perozzo fired at them as they ventured to appear again. One went down, the others kept running for the road. Durell ignored them and watched the other Mercedes. He thought he saw movement behind the glare on the windshield but couldn’t identify the occupants. The other car started up fast, heading toward them.

  Keefe laughed in his throat. “It’s a chicken game, Cajun. How do we play it?”

  “Straight,” Durell said. “Crash ’em, if you can.”

  Perozzo braced himself as the two heavy cars closed distance rapidly. Durell wished he were behind the wheel himself. But it was too late to change positions now. From the height of the road, he thought he saw Colonel Skoll running for the empty farmhouse; but it was too late to do anything about that, too.

  The powerful limousine accelerated fast under Keefe’s eager foot. The other car showed no sign of swerving aside. Perozzo made a small sound in his throat. In seconds, they would crash head-on. The speedometer needle already vibrated at eighty.

  “Easier, Keefe. We may want to turn.”

  Keefe ignored his order. Now Durell could see through the other windshield. The distance between them was being eaten up at an appalling rate. A younger man was at the wheel of the other car, a Chinese, he thought; but he couldn’t be sure. In the seconds remaining, he saw the woman seated beside the driver.

  Their eyes met across the deadly, diminishing space. No mistake, Durell thought. Skoll was right.

  It was Madame Hung.

  He would never forget those almond black eyes in that beautiful Oriental face. No one could guess her age; she had paid the price of indeterminate youth with evil. She looked calm enough, although death faced them all almost instantly. She smiled slightly, and he remembered her cold cruelty—and then the driver beside her turned his head to say something, and she made a negative gesture—

  Time and space was gone, ended, over with.

  Later, Durell wondered if Keefe would have pulled the wheel over at the last instant. Madame Hung would never have yielded. But her driver gave way to terror. He yanked in panic at his wheel, and the other car lifted on its side, swerving to the left, and then they crashed, swiping each other sidelong. There was a long moment of noise, shock, crashing. Glass broke, flying through the interior of the Mercedes. Durell was thrown toward Perozzo. Through the crashing and jolting, he felt Keefe wrench the wheel to straighten them out
. They headed for a ditch. There was an extra, louder crash from somewhere and Durell felt something slam across the back of his head, and he fell forward in the front seat. The daylight slipped away, turned into a gray void where he lingered for long moments, fighting to escape. . . .

  “Cajun?”

  He, felt hands anxiously touching his head. He shook them off. “I’m all right, Carlo.”

  “Sure?”

  He sat up. The Mercedes was moving along the road in fits and starts as Keefe fought to keep it going. Two of the side windows were broken. Durell touched blood on the nape of his neck, and Perozzo said quietly, “Almost cut your spinal cord, Sam. Lucky shot from the lady back there,”

  Durell looked behind him, down the highway. He felt a momentary dizziness, but it passed. Perozzo tore a strip of cloth from his djellabah and pressed it to the back of Durell's neck, and Durell said, “Where is the other car?”

  “Heading for the boondocks.” Keefe laughed. “I think we sprung a leak somewhere. No chance to follow them. The other guy turned aside at the last possible second. They got away, in better shape than us, but they went off the road to pick up their men and then headed south.”

  “Stop the car then, Keefe.”

  Durell got out and looked at the damage. Dust now covered the sleek body of the limousine. The left side looked as if it had come from a junk heap. One headlight was smashed, and the radiator was leaking. The hot sun slammed down on his head and made him dizzy again. Behind them, the highway was empty. They had come several miles from the abandoned farmhouse.

  “The bitch,” Perozzo said. “She must have had an in with the military. Maybe monitored their radio, Sam. Anyway, she figured out where we’d be and spotted our tracks going to the farm. Almost got us, too. A quick jump, she figured, and we’d be out of the picture.”

  Durell nodded. A massive headache began to pound at his temples. He considered the drugs in his kit, in the pockets of his jumpsuit under the Arab robe, but he did not take any of the amphetamines provided for them all. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go on.”

  “Where?” Keefe asked.

  “Tripoli. To find Signorina Anna-Marie Bertollini. And hopefully, General McFee.”

  Chapter 12

  Tripoli was a bright, clean confusion of buses, motorcycles, donkey-carts, Alfa-Romeos, camels, push-carts, sidewalk cafes, oilmen and Texas accents, khaki-clad militia, new hotels and apartment-houses. The women who walked in front of the crowded cafes ranged from blonde Italian types to gypsy-brown and black Fezzani; the men who sipped espressos or sweet Arab tea or lemon sodas ogled all the girls. Their hands were heavily ringed with gold jewelry, these Berbers with blond hair and hazel eyes, the Italians, Russians, and Texans.

  Among the smart girls in Italian dresses were Beduwi women in rust-red barracans and only the left eye showing. Now and then a wife released from the orthodox harem-style of living could be seen driving by in a smart car, heavy gold chains and pendants covering her breasts with crescents and stars to ward off evil. From Omar Mukhtar Street and the Piazza Spagna rumbled heavy tractor-trailers up from the port, carrying oil pipes, machinery and supplies to the wells that pumped new wealth into the countryside. Along the Lido, where the Mediterranean sparkled with a blinding jade translucency, vendors sold sweet cakes and tea while a tethered camel waited patiently for its burden. Above the endless cries of vendors of almond pastries and honey cakes, from the tall minarets and domed mosques glinting among the new buildings, the metallic voices of the muezzins made a resonant and adamant call to prayer that now often went unheard. Traffic did not pause along the broad, tree-lined boulevard that paralleled the sea.

  Tripoli was really two cities—one was the Medina el Kadima along the sea front, behind its tall crumbling fortress walls, with dark and secretive lanes, narrow alleys, crescent-topped minarets and a maze of twisting streets, souks, rundown hotels and tall, leaning white houses. The new, modern city, started by Italian colonialism was the second, with garden courtyards, running fountains, and riotous jasmine and bougainvillea everywhere—accompanied by a paranoid devotion to Mellaha Racecourse.

  Durell chose the medina for their headquarters, and in that secret enclave he found, at Perozzo’s suggestion, a hotel with a view of the massive old Barbary Coast castle, which had been occupied by Byzantines, Turks, Spaniards and the Knights of St. John from Malta. In the narrow streets, fierce-eyed boys screamed, “Felus! Money!” at the occasional tourist who wandered by. The heat was like an oven. There were smells of lamb cooking for cous-cous, Cairo perfumes, swarms of flies and fleas, donkeys and camels, the jingling of bells from horsedrawn gharries and the endless twittering of sparrows in the vines and batum trees.

  Perozzo said, “It’s been a long time since I was a boy here in the Italian days. I remember my father used to quote an old Arab proverb: ‘To feed the sparrows, one must first feed the horses.’ We’re going to have to buy information, Sam, or we’ll get nowhere.”

  Durell nodded. “You go to the Tripolitania People’s Bank, Carlo. See if you can get a local address for the girl under the Bertollini name. You know the town. Do the best you can.” He paused. “Keefe, you go into the new city and get a line on Madame Hung’s place. There won’t be too many Chinese here. She likes luxury. It’s her pattern. She’ll either be in the best hotel, which I doubt, or in a rented villa, the biggest, most expensive, most secure. Take two hours at it, both of you, and then get back here.

  And keep an eye out for the KGB. You might locate Skoll, if he returns here, at the Soviet Economic Mission. Be careful.”

  Keefe indicated his tattered Arab robes. “I feel funny in this outfit. And my Arabic stinks.”

  “Never mind. Say as little as possible. Use English, if you have to. The oil wells have brought in plenty of American well-drillers and engineers. Carlo?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Make sure the landlord doesn’t talk about us being here. Give him enough money to make him happy, but not too much.”

  “Karim was an old friend of my father’s.”

  “That was long ago. Don’t trust him today.”

  Perozzo hesitated. “You going to stay here, Sam?”

  “For the moment.”

  “How is the head wound?”

  “I’ve taken aspirin,” Durell said.

  “Your vision okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “I don’t like to split up like this,” Perozzo said.

  “Don’t worry about it. Go ahead.”

  Keefe said, “And if we run into trouble? If the local police or intelligence people intercept us—”

  “Use your own judgment.”

  “That’s no help,” Perozzo said stolidly. “I don’t want to kill any innocent people just because I cross the street the wrong way.”

  “If you’re careful in your procedures, you’ll be all right.”

  When they were gone, Durell stretched out on one of the rickety beds and stared at the cracked, blue-painted ceiling. The heat was suffocating, although the wooden louvers over the two tall windows were closed tightly. Perozzo had led them to this battered place in the medina. The shattered Mercedes had attracted no attention when they entered the city. The police and Libyan militia were still looking for Saad’s old vegetable truck. In a sense, Madame Hung had helped them by providing the cover of a new vehicle for getting into town. Keefe had prudently abandoned the car outside the old city’s walls, so, for the moment, unless Perozzo had misjudged the obsequious manager of this place, they were safe.

  But there was no safety anywhere near Madame Hung, Durell thought. Or near Colonel Cesar Skoll.

  He had showered in tepid water in the blue-tiled bathroom and looked down through the palm fronds of a tree that hugged the white stone side of the hotel. In the busy alley below was a souk. He had eaten an Italian-type meal of pasta and local lamb, and had finished with a bottle of pie yellow Cyrenaican wine. The noise of bargaining, the hammering of a coppersmith, the distant clatter of
motorcycles and the bray of donkeys did not help his headache.

  He had deliberately sent Perozzo and Keefe away in order to be alone. The one modern amenity in the old hotel was a telephone on a carved taboret inlaid with mother-of-pearl. It stood near the corner window where he could glimpse the sapphire bay where once Stephen Decatur had raided the Turkish pirates of Tripoli in an attempt to end their harassment of American shipping. The sun sparkled on the clear water, touched a few bright fishing boats and a sleek Russian freighter moored close under the grim walls of the old fortress. The houses of Tripoli were a glare of clean white cubes set against the tawny land and the blue sea, marked by the green and yellow of palms, almond trees, and the bright cerise of bougainvillea. Minarets pierced the white sky everywhere, and he heard again the mechanical voices of the muezzins calling the faithful to noonday prayers.

  Durell got up and went to the phone and hoped the one-eyed, jolly little Libyan who ran the place was appreciative of the money Perozzo had given him. Karim had been cooperative about their passports, shrugging them aside with a brief remark about the danger from the police, which caused more money to be slapped into his outstretched palm.

  The telephone was surprisingly efficient. In less than ten seconds, he heard the number he called being rung.

  “Mr. Fuad?”

  “Yes, effendi.”

  “Cajun here.”

  “Yes, sir. I was briefed from Rome that you might need assistance. I am at your service, effendi.'”

  “Any luck?”

  Fuad was the only K Section employee in Tripoli. He had come from Benghazi originally, before the Wheelus Field base was dismantled on orders from the revolutionary government. The senator had included Fuad’s name in his briefing, and from Rome, Durell had contacted the man in a brief, coded message.

  “I have learned the girl’s name,” said Fuad quietly.

  “So have I. And I know where she usually lives. But I don’t know where she stays when she’s in Tripoli.”