Assignment - Karachi (3 page)

Kallinger looked embarrassed. “I blew all my conceit in quoting Rudi’s dossier, Sam. We don’t have as much. Beautiful and brainy. Her Ph.D in history came from the Sorbonne—Greek history, naturally. They say the tumble-down family schloss—their old castle outside of Vienna—is a museum of antique pieces. An athletic type, too—she skis and climbs mountains. No romantic attachments we know of. Does all this give you ideas, Cajun?”

“Some,” Durell said.

“Have fun, then.”

On his way to the airport later, Durell reflected on what he knew of Sarah Standish. He had met her at two Washington cocktail parties and once had been invited, with Deirdre Padgett, to the Standish summer estate at Southampton, on Long Island. Deirdre went to finishing school with Sarah, and they were reasonably good friends—or as friendly as you can be with eight hundred million dollars.

Durell’s impressions of Southampton were not the best. Maybe it was the aura of all that money which, whoever the individual owning it, lends an air that sets you apart from normalcy. Vast wealth has its corollary in isolation— splendid, perhaps, but inevitably disturbing. It lent an arrogance and indifference to the normal problems and ethics of ordinary men.

Sarah Standish was not popular in the gossip columns; she did not belong to the celebrity set, like other fashionable heiresses. She was quiet, repressed, not beautiful, given to tweedy suits and painfully simple hair styles. Her escorts were always discreet and anonymous. Until her engagement to Rudi von Buhlen in Switzerland last year, no hint of romance had ever touched her austere personality. Until then, the private life of the Nickel Queen was an enigma, jealously guarded against sensationalism.

During the Southampton weekend, Durell had seen very little of his hostess. But what he saw, he remembered.

She rarely smiled. She had a rather wide mouth, only faintly touched with lipstick, a broad and intelligent forehead, wide and solemn gray eyes, pale and smoky. Her manner was earnest, whether playing tennis or sitting at the head of her dinner table. A tall girl, she affected only the simplest of jewelry; her quiet voice gave the impression that she was thinking of things other than her immediate words. She took a personal interest in the complex corporate structures of Standish Nickel. Part of her weekend had been taken up by lengthy conferences with executive types who came up to the rambling estate, closeted themselves with her in her office, and drove away again without mingling with the other guests.

Durell remembered Deirdre Padgett’s comment about Sarah’s engagement.

“I’m worried about it,” Deirdre said. “From what I know about Rudi, he’s the type who can break Sarah’s heart.” 

“You can’t do anything about it,” Durell told her. “A girl like Sarah Standish is going to do whatever she pleases.”

“I know. And that’s the trouble. She’s really shy, intensely lonely, and quite starved for affection, I think.”

“Under that grim exterior?”

“I may be wrong. I’ve really lost touch with her, after all these years. But she’s reaching for love, and she may be hurt. Not all the Standish money can help her in that.” Durell had had other matters on his mind then. He never expected to cross Sarah’s path again. And now he was assigned to play bodyguard to her arbitrary and neurotic personality.

He did not look forward to it.

He left Istanbul an hour after his conversation with Henry Kallinger, catching the Pan American Orient jet that set him down in Karachi just before dawn.

PATIENCE was something you learned, absorbed, and had pounded into you by its exercise and the grim examples of those who had failed to practice it. Patience could mean long days of solitude in a dismal, ill-smelling room, watching a doorway across the street—-or simply doing nothing, until the other side made a move, goaded by your inactivity. Or it could mean facing frustration with new resolve and new tactics. Or enduring the monotony of a routine that involved the hurry-up-and-wait tempo of war.

Patience in this case, Durell thought, consisted of steadily, grimly, unendingly putting your left foot ahead in the soft, yielding sand, throwing your weight forward on hip and knee, and using the momentum thus gained to get your right foot up there for just one more step ahead. And then another. And another. Again and again.

Patience meant to keep walking. To stay alive.

There came a time when he had to stop. And this, too, was a part of his patience.

The sun and the heat were incredible. Plodding between the brazen sand and the shining sea, he seemed to be motionless, making no progress, like a bug in the bottom of a deep, slippery bowl where all the unbelievable radiance of the sky, desert and ocean poured in and concentrated in one vast flame to destroy him.

The buzzards and the kites circled steadily overhead now, dark and silent shadows in the brilliance of the morning sky.

The ancient Arab watchtower was out of sight behind him. Ahead, there was nothing different. He saw another dhow far out on the Gulf. There was no wind. He was grateful for this, because the wind would have cut at him like a hot, melting knife. Inland, to his left, there was nothing but sand, rock and scorpions, a series of natural terraces devoid of any scrap of green, rising to a shimmering and unnatural horizon.

“For the love of Allah!” Mahmud Ali gasped.

The man fell to his knees in the shadow of a bronze-colored boulder.

“Leave me here,” he whispered. “Or kill me now.” Durell stood on his feet. “Get up and walk with me.”

“I cannot.”

“You must!”

“I want to die.”

“So you shall,” Durell said. “Very slowly, and with much more pain than you now suffer.”

The man’s face was skeletal. He coughed a little sputum, and there was some blood in it. His broken arm dangled uselessly at his side as he swayed on his knees. Durell looked down at him without expression. His mouth was as dry as the sand; his body ached and flamed. He had tom part of his white shirt as a bandage to stop the superficial bleeding of his left leg, and so far he had been able to go on, determined to live. He held the Schmeiser lowered, in his hand at his right side.

The assassin had told him little, until now. When he had stopped the jeep in the dawn at the base of the watchtower, two hours ago, he had been following simple orders to kill Durell. Durell had acted first, but in the struggle, Mahmud Ali fell from the jeep, the car went over the cliff to the beach below, and Durell fell free with it. Mahmud Ali had managed to crawl to the top of the tower to look for him. He had not been able to find strength to fire at him until at last he squeezed off the single shot that had warned Durell. Now they were both abandoned, dying, lost. Durell would not admit this.

“Am I the only one who was signed for death?” he asked.

“No,” Mahmud whispered.

“Who are the others?”

“The rich one. The rich American lady.”

“Sarah Standish?”

“That is her name.”

“And who else?”

“All the others who would climb the mountain.”

“Why?”

“I am a simple man. A soldier. I never ask why. It is not for me, such a question. To ask it is to ask for the sword at my throat.”

“Suppose you were to ask, anyway?” Durell insisted. “Who would you ask such a question?”

The man said nothing.

“You are dying,” Durell told him. “Will you speak of murder to Allah?”

“If He asks,” Mahmud whispered.

“Get up. You will speak of it to the officials in Karachi.”

“I cannot get up.”

Durell paused. He did not know how much farther he had to walk through this inferno to find someone who might help. Perhaps all day. Or forever. He did not know if anyone even knew he was missing. Kallinger, in Istanbul, had told him to work with Colonel K’Ayub, a Pakistan security officer who would command the escort patrol with the expedition. Was K’Ayub even aware that he had landed in Karachi early this morning and had been swallowed up in the sands of the Sind? Did K’Ayub even miss his jeep, his military driver who was supposed to meet Durell at the airport?

There might—or might not—be a search for him.

Help might—or might not—come.

It was a matter of time, a balance between thirst and heat and exhaustion.

He wondered about the others—Alessa von Buhlen, Rudi, Sarah Standish. Perhaps he was too late for everything. Perhaps they had all been killed by now, by other hired assassins, and his effort was in vain.

He looked down at Mahmud Ali.

“Get up,” he said, once more.

And he saw that Ali was dead.

He could do nothing for the dead man. He could not spare the strength to bury him or pile stones on him against the circling buzzards. He turned away and went on walking, moving south along the shore, and he did not look back when the silent wings of the birds came swooping down behind him on the currents over the surf and slanted in to the boulder where the dead man grinned at the bright sky.

He walked for an hour, rested ten minutes, walked on again. The land did not change. The sea was the same. The sky melted, pouring down heat on him. He was hungry and thirsty, but he did not let himself think about it.

Toward noon he saw a man on a camel that plodded along the beach. The man was bundled in white rags, with a dirty turban around his head, and the camel looked old and shaggy, with big patches of hair gone from his hide.

Durell called out to the man and was astonished at the harsh, dry sound of his voice. The man stopped the camel and looked at him and swung about on the saddle, and from the other side of his body he produced an old rifle and pointed it at him.

The man looked like his camel, old and ugly and morose, with speculation in his eyes as Durell walked as straight as he could across the sand toward him. Durell spoke in Urdu.

“You have water?” he asked.

“For myself,” the man said.

“I must get to Hawk’s Bay. You are going there?”

“If Allah wills.”

“I will pay you to take me on your camel and bring me there.”

“You have much money?”

“I have enough.”

The man’s rifle was of Pathan make, hand manufactured like a jewel in the far northern hills, polished and gleaming, the only clean and efficient thing about him. “You are alone?”

“I have a friend,” Durell said.

“I see no friend.”

“He is here, in my hand,” Durell said, and showed the man the Schmeiser machine-pistol.

It was a mistake, perhaps, but he could not keep staring into the muzzle of the other man’s rifle forever. The Arab looked at the machine-pistol for a moment and then shrugged and shifted his skinny weight on the camel saddle and then, with no other warning, urged the camel into an ungainly, galloping run away from him. Durell could have brought him down with a single shot, but he did not try. He couldn’t have caught the camel, anyway. He watched the two of them, old man and old camel, until they were gone from sight down the beach, and then he walked on again.

He stopped to bathe twice in the warm surf during the next two hours. The second time, as he staggered out of the combers to retrieve his clothes, he heard the grinding of an engine and saw a yellow Land Rover with a fringed-surrey top and oversized beach tires come across the searing sand, directly toward him. He picked up the Schmeiser first and then saw that the driver was an Englishman, with a European girl in a white linen dress beside him, next to the driver’s seat. Durell dressed quickly, before the salt water dried on him. The girl looked away. The Englishman jumped down from the gaudy Land Rover and walked toward him.

“I say, it isn’t really true what they say about us—noonday sun and mad dogs and all that—”

“Can you take me to Hawk’s Bay?” Durell asked.

“Of course. It’s only five miles down the way.”

Five miles or five eternities, Durell thought. He smiled his thanks. “I’d be very grateful.”

“We were looking for my sailboat,” the Englishman said. His eyes were bloodshot. “Sixteen feet, home-built, painted red, Marconi rig. New nylon sails from the States. She broke away from her mooring in the wind two nights ago. We went south yesterday, and were starting up here today. Perhaps it was stolen. It’s tiresome to have to nail everything down.” The Englishman was trying hard not to be curious, but it seemed to Durell that you could carry a national trait too far. He wondered if the girl was his wife. “Your car break down, old man?”

“In a way,” Durell said. “Do you know Colonel K’Ayub?” “Naturally. Charming fellow. Throws wonderful cocktail parties. Liz adores him.” Now he seemed garrulous, for an Englishman. “What are you doing with the gun? Popping at buzzards?”

“Yes,” Durell said. “Could you take me to Colonel K’Ayub?”

“Well, my sailboat, old man, cost me a pretty penny. Lovely little thing—”

“There isn’t any boat back there on the beach.”

“I see. Well. You’ve got a bad burn, my dear chap. This sun can be treacherous—”

“I’m in a hurry,” Durell said. “I’d be grateful.”

“All Americans are in a hurry.” The Englishman sighed. “Hop in, please.”

The pale, thin girl did not say a word on the drive south to Hawk’s Bay. But the gay, striped canvas top on the Land Rover made a cheerful flapping sand, and cast a small triangle of shade over Durell.

There were pale pink stucco houses, blue villas with red tiled roofs, a few date palms in carefully watered lawns and gardens that had turned brown in the salt air and the sun. The Englishman turned off the beach onto a bumpy asphalt road and paid a toll of one rupee at the entrance booth to the European beach colony, then followed a lane used by Arab peddlers, camels, a troupe of acrobats in colorful rags performing for some solemn English children. A man in a blue turban thrust a baby monkey at the Englishman’s wife and offered it for sale, cheap. The pale-faced girl said nothing, as if the monkey and the man did not exist.