Assignment - Karachi (9 page)

“No, I didn’t know that, either. I was upstairs when Mr. Durell came to the bungalow. I haven’t met him before—not until you gentlemen found me in that alley.”

“Yet you took evasive tactics in your drive that caused us to lose you and drop far behind. We only found you because of the distinctive car you drove. It attracted some attention.”

Rudi spread his hands. “Well, there you are. If I were trying to lure Jane secretly to that place, would I advertise my route by hiring that Ferrari?”

“You might,” Durell said.

Durell looked tall and angry. He had seen the butchery on Jane King, and the ugly image lingered in his mind. It was one thing, when you were in the business and knew the risks and balanced your training and reflexes against the wiles of the enemy. It was another to be a bewildered and helpless Jane King, accustomed to the sane and orderly world above the surface of Durell’s. He resented her death. It was unnecessary. And it had been brutally cruel. He was not satisfied with Rudi’s explanation that Jane had been mistaken for Sarah Standish. Possibly it was the truth—but not all of the truth, he thought.

He tried to be objective about Rudi. There are men you meet whom you dislike instinctively, as two male animals in a jungle will at once be charged with mutual enmity. The feeling was there between himself and the blond man. Rudi knew it. They both understood it the first time their eyes met. There was a smell of conflict between them that might only be resolved by violence. Yet nothing but a few polite questions and replies had been exchanged.

The Sikh sergeant came in and whispered something to K’Ayub, who gestured to his Pathan servant. Zalmadar went out with the Sikh.

K’Ayub said, “Herr von Buhlen, you were a friend of Miss King’s, were you not?”

“Not exactly a friend.”

“More, perhaps?”

“Once. Not any longer.”

“You were once lovers, is that it?”

Rudi nodded readily. “True.”

“But today your love had turned to hate, it had ended in jealousy, in a threat perhaps by Miss King to tell Miss Standish of your affair with her?”

Rudi did not look surprised. He paused for only a moment. “She was pregnant,” he said. “I suppose your doctor just reported that. Please don’t play clever games with me, Colonel. You and I may be together for some weeks, starting tomorrow. We may need each other. So I admit it, man to man, and trust you will understand. Jane King thought I should be named as the father of her unborn child.”

“And were you the father?”

“I couldn’t say. There may have been other men. I don’t know of any, frankly, but with a girl like Jane—” Rudi paused. “She wanted to discuss her predicament. We were going to have dinner and talk about it. I had no idea you were looking for her. She telephoned the house while you were there, Durell, and I went out to meet her and we got lost.

When she saw the native streets, she wanted to go farther. But I guess we were followed all the time. Not just by you. But by the Chinese killers.”

“We did not see them,” K’Ayub said. He looked angry. There was a small silence while the English doctor asked Rudi to hold still and then snipped off the end of the sutures and applied a square of gauze and tape to his wound. Rudi pushed his long hair back from his yellow and bruised face, straightened his necktie, shrugged into his coat. The Englishman offered him some brandy. Rudi said, “Bitte,” and gulped it down.

“Am I under arrest now?” he asked quietly. “Perhaps my story seems strange to you, but I’ve told you all I know about how it happened. Jane was mistaken for Sarah Standish. It was my fault—our getting lost, I mean—but I think it would have happened, anyway. The miracle is that it didn’t happen earlier, when she was wandering around alone.”

“Yes,” K’Ayub said.

Rudi looked worried. “Will your report on Jane’s condition be kept confidential? I’m naturally concerned about its effect on Miss Standish if she learns what I’ve confessed to you gentlemen—”

“It will not be necessary to publish this fact.” K’Ayub looked at Durell. “Nor is it necessary for any of us to remain here.”

He nodded for Durell to follow him into the outer room. K’Ayub was a strong man here, with power and influence, and his soft body and face were deceiving. The Pakistani minced no words.

“Durell, do you think he killed Jane King?”

“I think he arranged it,” Durell said.

“And his wounds are self-inflicted?”

“They’ll heal,” Durell said. “But Jane is dead. Will you hold him on a murder charge?”

“We are a new nation,” K’Ayub said thinly, “but we respect law and order. Murder is the same the world over. An investigation is required. Technically, all of you could be detained for inquiry. But our problem is awkward. Miss Standish has leased a plane from a local airline. When one need not count money, luxuries and comforts are automatic, eh? Our problem is that, if we hold Rudi von Buhlen in Karachi for the courts, or on any pretext, we may not merely delay the expedition to S-5, but Miss Standish may call the whole thing off. This might be deplored by my government, but it would end its interest in the affair. I happen to be in opposition to certain governmental factions that resist exploratory progress. We may gain nothing in the end, anyway. If Rudi is an enemy and has further plans, we would give him a little rope, you agree? And if we proceed, pending a further inquiry, he will be in a sense in our custody.”

“I understand,” Durell said.

“You and I can take care of Rudi when the times comes,” K’Ayub said, smiling thinly.

“Let’s hope so,” Durell said.

THEY flew from Rawalpindi an hour after dawn, through a sky already a molten yellow, swinging wide over the many mouths of the sluggish, muddy Indus. The sun flared brilliantly over the sand hills and the winding black road that followed the river north through the desert of the Sind. For a hundred miles, the scene was one of severe desolation, erosion, and emptiness.

The DC-3 had been hastily converted, with comfortable seats, a kitchen, and staffed with two turbaned Bengali servants who served tea and rolls and omelets when they were aloft. Constraint persisted among the passengers since Durell had brought back the news of Jane’s death. Sarah looked as if she had not slept at all, and she had changed her usual glasses for a pair with large green sun lenses that hid her eyes. She sat alone at take-off, and then Rudi came back from the pilot’s compartment and kissed her lightly. She murmured something in apparent annoyance. Her face was pale. He whispered again and she shook her head and then he spoke more urgently and she sighed and got up and went forward with him. The Pakistani co-pilot came back and took a seat in the rear and promptly fell asleep.

Colonel Lathri K’Ayub kept himself busy with a small knee desk on his lap, absorbed in correspondence. A busy man, Durell thought and a growing power in this dynamic Moslem country—the sort of military man with education and ambition who often entered politics, usually with a military coup, and helped to rule the new nation.

There had been radio reports of trouble on the closed Afghan border, but nothing had come through on the news program of Jane King’s death. It had been kept off the air and out of the newspapers, thanks to K’Ayub’s influence.

Durell noted that Alessa had not spoken to her brother Rudi at all. She sat at a window with the harsh sunlight glancing off the wing and reflecting in her oval face. Her pale hair, cut like a boy’s, made her look youthful and denied her scholastic air. She wore a white silk blouse, cut low, and when Durell stood beside her and asked if he might sit with her, he saw the smooth, taut swell of her breasts under the silk. Her smile was mechanical. She touched her blue skirt and nodded.

“Please do. I am most unhappy. I am not a superstitious person, and yet I feel we begin under a bad omen.”

“Jane’s death may only have been an unhappy coincidence,” he suggested, sitting in the chair beside her.

Her eyes were solemn. “Do you believe that?”

“There’s no point in jumping to conclusions.”

“You do not strike me as a cautious man,” she said. “Nor much of a diplomat, either. I was very fond of Jane.” “So was Sarah, and your brother. Perhaps it will all be explained, one day.”

“Maybe it will be best if we never find the answer,” Alessa murmured.

“It must be found, though. I mean to find it.” He paused. “Why wouldn’t you want to know? Are you afraid of the truth?”

“Perhaps it would serve no purpose,” she said.

“Still, murder must be punished.”

She turned away then, and pointed downward at the brown, seared landscape to change the subject. “There are the ruins of Mohaghadoro. Do you know about them?” There was a short, dusty airstrip inland from the Indus, a few nondescript mounds of mud brick ruins that seemed insignificant from the thousand-foot elevation. Alessa spoke animatedly, engrossed in her special knowledge, pointing to the ruins of a Buddhist temple in what had been a flourishing city in 2500 B.C., a community of pillared halls, public baths, granaries and watchtowers. Durell saw small rice fields, groves of tamarisk and babul trees that looked dusty silver in the morning light. Laboring bullocks and men in turbans and loin cloths looked infinitely small as the plane bore north through the brazen sky.

Alessa talked on about the Mohaghadoro artificats—gold, silver and alabaster jewels, tall vases and tools of copper and bronze. Her face grew absorbed as she talked of Indra, the war god of the Aryans who fought the local “barbarians” who built the walled cities, discussing the word pur in Sanskrit that meant a fort, and how the Rig-Veda described Indra’s destruction of ninety of these walled cities of the Indus valley.

The land lifted steadily for the eight-hundred mile flight to Lahore, capital of Punjab. The waste of the Arabia Sind was left behind. By noon the lush garden city came i sight on the banks of the Ravi. Sarah had remained wit Rudi in the pilot’s compartment all morning. Lahoi looked like a green jewel of wide streets, emerald pari with cricket fields, stately Victorian buildings from the British reign, and the terraces and canals of the fabulous Shalimar Gardens. The tomb of Mohammed Iqbal loomed in red sandstone amid golden domes and spires, minarets and pavilions and cypress trees.

They landed for fuel and lunch, and a visiting delegation of Pakistani and American officials greeted them, seeking out Sarah and murmuring polite offers of assistance. Durell ate lunch with Alessa until a messenger came up to them and he got up to call Donegan, back in Karachi.

Donegan’s voice was thin and crackly over the Ion; distance wire of the airport telephone.

“Nothing here, Sam. We’re sitting tight on everything. Had to cable home to the King girl’s parents, of course,. and that will break in the local Stateside newspapers; but can’t be helped.”

“Any word on the Chinese boy who got away?”

“It’s like hunting a needle in a haystack. The local cops are still pushing at it, checking the waterfront and the Chinese colony. But there are a few hundred thousand people jammed into a single square mile, like a rabbit warren. Nothing has turned up yet. Is Miss Standish all right?” “Yes,” Durell said.

Donegan hesitated. “I’m damned sorry about it all, Sam."

“So am I,” Durell said.

The flight from Lahore to Rawalpindi was one hundred and fifty miles, and the land lifted up an additional thousand feet of rough ravines and rock plateaus. The desert of the Sind had long yielded to fields of corn, cotton, melons and rice. Rawalpindi was the headquarters of the Pakistan Army, the largest military station in the country. Now, far to the north, the hazy buttresses and peaks of the Gilgit range and Northwest Frontier country, where the Muree hill station was located, loomed like a mirage against the shimmering sunlight.

There was another reception at the airstrip for Sarah and she responded with gracious restraint to the uniforme men who greeted her. Rudi remained at her side. An air conditioned limousine took them through the city, around the Liaqat Gardens with its bandstand and wide lawn and stately trees. From noon to four in the afternoon, the city’s business was halted by the heat. Shops closed, fields emptied of workers, bullocks were unhitched from their two-wheeled carts and tied to trees. From the speeding car, Durell noted women washing clothes in irrigation ditches, while the men slept in the shade of banyan trees, using their turbans as pillows.

A representative of the Pakistan-American Society, the USIS, and Embassy officials occupied Sarah Standish at the big bungalow when they arrived. Little attention was paid to Durell or Alessa. Colonel K’Ayub’s picked squad of mountain troopers were already on guard at the walled grounds that Sarah had leased from a retired British brigadier who had gone home to England for the summer. Alessa, uncomfortable with the reception in the big house, touched Durell’s arm.

“I must find Hans and check our supplies. Will you come with me?”

“Let’s find him.” Durell was glad to escape. He was dubious about the newsmen waiting to interview Sarah, and decided she was safe enough for the moment. He had noticed the big mountain guide, Hans Steicher, hovering on the outskirts of the crowd, but now the man had disappeared.

Alessa took his arm. The bungalow was big and rambling, built among a grove of peepul trees, with spacious lawns and a walled garden. Some ruins of an ancient temple abutted the south wall of the garden, overgrown with dark vines and wild shrubs. A series of go-downs provided quarters for the Britisher’s servants. Bougainvillaea blazed on the walls of the main house, dripping in waterfalls of color from the wide eaves. K’Ayub’s men were discreetly out of sight now.

Durell walked with Alessa down a shaded path to a warehouse in the back. The area was quiet and suburban, a relic of British rule when Pakistan and India were one, and not in bloody strife, accented by Hindu and Moslem rivalry. The warehouse had a corrugated tin roof, its rust covered by more bougainvillaea over the wide, open doors.

Alessa halted, her arm in Durell’s. He was acutely aware of her physically, aware of a kind of inevitable attraction in their relationship that couldn’t be denied. Her eyes were troubled.