Assignment - Mara Tirana (18 page)

“Then I think we should go ahead,” Adam said. “I think—”

They were not prepared for what came next. None of them could hear the motorcycle’s return because of the roar of the river, echoing back and forth from the rocky walls of the gorge, drowned out all sound on the road. The first warning they had was when the cycle and driver skidded around the bend ahead and slid to a halt in front of the cart. The old horse skittered nervously. They all stood frozen. Adam was caught in the open without a chance to get back to his hiding place in the cart.

The corporal who slid off the cycle was a barrel-chested young man with a thin face and a long, drooping moustache. His green eyes flickered from the old people to Lissa and Adam, and he grinned.

“Are you having trouble here?” he asked, shouting above the clamor of the river.

“No, no trouble,” Jamak said. “I lost my way, Corporal Nagatov. It is so long since I left Zara Dagh, I took the wrong turn.”

“Yes, I see.” The corporal’s fingers moved restlessly along his uniform trousers. He wore a fur cap, a cartridge bandolier, and a bolstered gun. He looked at Adam. “And you? Where did you come from?”

“I was walking along the road here,” Adam said haltingly. “These people were good enough to offer me a ride.” “Indeed. Where did you get those clothes?”

“They are my clothes.”

“And your accent?”

“I come from the south.”

“And your papers?”

“I lost them.” Adam tried to sound vague and stupid, but he knew it was no good. The corporal’s green eyes were too bright and alert. They had no chance. Everything gave him away. He looked at Lissa’s stricken face and insisted: “These people are complete strangers, Corporal, and have nothing to do with me. If you arrest me, remember they are innocent.”

“So?” The corporal spoke softly. “You are the American. You are wise not to deceive me. Turn around, please.” When Adam hesitated, the man drew his gun and his voice went shrill above the roar of the river. “Turn around, all of you! Jamak, get back on the cart. Lissa, stand still.” “Believe me—” Adam began again.

“Why should I believe you? They were helping you to escape. Everyone knows they are traitors and scum. Am I simple, not to understand what I find here? You are all under arrest!”

Adam saw only calamity for Jamak and Jelenka. He felt desperate. His escape plan had been impulsive, poorly planned, and it had brought them only a few miles, to this.

He looked up and down the empty road. There was no guard rail along the turbulent river bank. Down there, the water smashed in white foam against dark rock. He thought:
Only this man stops us. Only he can destroy us.

“What will you do with me” Adam asked.

“Why, you will be treated properly,” the coiporal grinned.

“And these people?”

The man laughed. “They will be shot.”

Adam turned slowly, as if to get into the cart. His first panic was gone. He felt sure of what he had to do. The corporal was only a few steps away. When he turned, as if defeated, he suddenly launched himself at the man, grabbing for the corporal’s gun. He almost made it. But his leg betrayed him. At the last moment the thrust of his leap made his foot slip under the strain and his hand slashed with only partial effect at the trooper’s arm.

The gun crashed thunderously in the narrow ravine. Lissa screamed. Adam was dimly aware of Jamak standing up in the cart, and then the corporal smashed viciously at him with the gun butt. He went down on hands and knees, his ears ringing. The corporal cursed. His first shot, squeezed off in surprise, had only spanked into the dust of the road. Now he raised his gun again and stepped back as Adam scrambled up.

“Adam!”

He heard Lissa’s cry as he tried to close with the trooper. But his injured leg could not match the corporal’s agility. He saw a glimmer of steel come down at him, and then the man’s eyes shifted in sudden alarm. Adam could not see what was going on behind him. He swung wildly; his knuckles cracked on the man’s jaw. The corporal staggered and sprawled in the dust, rolled desperately across the road, and came up again with the gun leveled.

Before Adam could jump again, the corporal fired. Adam twisted, hearing an echo. He saw Jamak on the cart with the ancient Turkish rifle in his grip. The corporal shrieked and the old man fired again, and the trooper’s body jerked and rolled almost to the edge of the road above the rocky, roaring stream. Still grinning, the man lay prone and raised his gun a third time. Adam tried to rise, but his head swam and blood ran into his eyes. Jamak tried to fire the Turkish rifle again, but the hammer clicked on a dead cartridge. With a strangled sound, the old man jumped between the corporal and those on the cart just as the policeman, with his dying strength, squeezed off a last shot.

Jamak’s bull-like charge carried him to the corporal at the edge of the road—and beyond. Adam saw a puff of dust jump from the old man’s chest where the bullet slammed into him.

Then, astonishingly, both men were wiped from sight.

Adam climbed slowly to his feet. Under the steady roar of water in the gorge, there was a great, suffocating silence. He walked carefully to the edge of the road and looked down. There was nothing to see but black rock and tumbling white water. Then footsteps ran behind him and he turned and caught Lissa in his arms. She was white and trembling.

“Can you see them?”    

“No. Neither one.”

“He—Papa saw the corporal aiming at me. And the J old rifle didn’t work a second time, so he—he—”

“Don’t.” He felt helpless, watching her stricken face. She breathed raggedly. He looked at Jelenka. The old woman looked blank, accepting her ultimate loss. “Go to your mother,” he said quietly. “I’ll get rid of the motorcycle.”

“What are you thinking of?” Lissa asked wildly.

“We have to go on.”

“But we can’t!” she cried. “Don’t you understand? Papa had the papers to get us across the bridge. Without the papers, we can’t go anywhere—except back to the hut. . .

She sank to her knees and stared into the raging stream below. There was no sign of either body. The rushing current was white with the crescents of ice in the shadows, and in a few days the water would be strangled in winter’s grip. Neither corpse might be discovered until spring.

He helped Lissa to her feet. She moved as if in a dream.

“Go back to the cart,” he said flatly.

When she turned away, like a sleepwalker, he went quickly to the cycle, wheeled it to the river bank, and sent it crashing to the rocks below. It was not completely hidden, but that could not be helped. By the time it was found, the issue would be settled, one way or another.

Adam walked slowly back to the girl and the old woman.

There was nothing for them to do but return to the hut.

Colonel Kopa lay on his hospital bed in Racz and gave orders. He ordered the oxygen tent taken away. He ordered Sergeant Banya brought to him for instructions. He ordered that a complete sweep of the countryside down toward Budapest be made. He dictated a memo to headquarters, to General Lubakatsky, and rejected all advice from the worried doctor who attended him.

“Colonel, you must rest. You have had a serious attack. Your system cannot stand the strain of this activity.” “It cannot stand the results of inactivity, either, Doctor.”

“Colonel, I cannot take the responsibility for your life if you disobey medical orders.”

Kopa felt driven as if by demons. He was an intelligent and ruthless man. He was ambitious to succeed, and he knew what the opposite face of the coin would mean. He had seen it happen to other associates who had bungled cases less serious than this matter of Durell and the astronaut. But he could not give up because of a ridiculous physical lapse. The doctor could keep him going for a few more days. After that, it would not matter.

When the massive, moustached Sergeant Banya arrived, Kopa asked for the list of suspected partisan sympathizers in the Racz district and ordered a swift combing to determine who could have been involved in the affair at the bridge. He gave the sergeant one hour to bring the prime suspects to the emergency room in the hospital clinic.

Sergeant Banya said heavily: “It will be difficult, Comrade Colonel. They will be hiding. You know how they hide after a job.”

“Find them!” Kopa screamed. “Bring them to me!” The doctor ran in with adrenaline as Kopa fell back,  coughing, his pudgy face bluish again. Kopa ignored the twisting pain in his chest. It would get better or worse. He could curse his physical distress for an eternity, but it would not change things. He had to go on.

When word came, an hour later, that Sergeant Banya had a suspect down in the clinic’s emergency room, Kopa got out of bed and dressed and walked down the steps with the doctor. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and the lowering sun sent shafts of reddish light through the narrow, dusty windows of the clinic. Outside, a streetcar clanged and rumbled across St. Stephen’s Square. The doctor, a slim man with a delicate face and slightly slanted, Mongol eyes, had brought his bag of surgical instruments, as Kopa had ordered.

The suspect was a young man of twenty, with square shoulders and lank yellow hair, a Magyar face, a defiant curl of lip. Blood ran from a broken tooth in his mouth. One eye was puffed shut. But there was much spirit still in him, Kopa decided.

“Young man, we want only a few words from you. We want a name, the name of the man who asked you to sabotage the bridge of Racz Prison.”

The boy spat blood on the floor and was silent.

“Sergeant, convince him he must talk,” Kopa said quietly.

Kopa sat in a corner and watched. There was the thudding of blows, the wrench of muscles, the cracking of tendon and bone, the sudden ululating scream from tormented lungs.

“Well?” Kopa asked.

The boy spat at Kopa.

“Doctor,” Kopa said, “can you make this young stallion something less than a man?”

“Colonel, I couldn’t—”

“It is an order. Omit the anesthetics. You need no nurses. Sergeant Banya will tie him down on the table.”

The doctor looked at Kopa’s mad face and said: “Yes, sir.”

The boy stared at them through battered eyes that did not comprehend. Without warning, Banya hit him and threw him to the floor. Another guard held the boy’s shoulders while Banya yanked off the trousers; then the two burly men swung the suspect like a sack of grain to the steel operating table. The doctor nervously switched on the overhead light. The boy’s eyes widened incredulously.

“Go ahead,” Kopa said. “Cut him.”

The boy shrieked: “No! No, you can’t—”

The doctor hesitated, scalpel shining in his thin hands. Kopa said: “Who ordered you to bomb the bridge?” 

“I—it was—I know only he came from the river—” 

“The Danube? A seaman?”

“His name is—is—” The boy sweated. He looked at the doctor’s scalpel and felt the guard’s tug at his arms until his shoulders seemed wrenched from their sockets. His legs looked pale, the muscles standing out in knots. Little muscular spasms rippled the bare skin of his belly. He stared down at himself in sweaty wonder.

“His name?” Kopa asked.

“Gija. It is all I know. It is everything I can tell you.” 

Kopa nodded. “Hold him for trial.”

By nightfall, Kopa was in Budapest, consulting the KGB files. A Lieutenant Smetsanov, a pale man with lidless, disappointed eyes, handed Kopa folders and dossiers. “These are the probable suspects, Colonel. But if I may say so—are you well, sir?”

“I am sick,” Kopa said. “Does that make a difference when a crime against the state must be uncovered and checked?”

“But your health, Colonel. I only thought—”

Kopa ignored him. His bald head shone under the lamp over the desk where he considered Gija’s dossier. Smetsanov smelled as if he needed a bath—an acrid smell like that of mildewed paper. Outside the walls of security headquarters in Budapest, traffic hummed, buses rumbled by, and the lights of the theater district made a haze against the night sky. Kopa had no interest in his surroundings. He was obsessed, carried along by only one thought.

“This is the one. Gija Zarije, aboard the barge
Luliga
. Phone the river check points and see if the vessel has passed Budapest yet.”

“Yes, Colonel. At once.”

“I only want the information—no interference with the barge, understand? And bring me a drink. Anything.”

“Yes, Colonel.”

Kopa sat back. He felt as if he had been running a long race. But exultation made him content. He rubbed his chest absently. The pain that had ridden him all day was easing. So the doctor was a fool. A man had to go on, ignoring his weakness; it was often the best way. Nature knew best. A man was made to work, not to pamper himself. Work cured everything. Devotion to duty made one forget pain. Success was worth anything.

When Smetsanov brought him a bottle of Hungarian brandy, he drank greedily. It was quiet in the file room. Yes, Kopa thought, he could afford this quiet moment now. The brandy warmed his belly. His eyes felt heavy from lack of sleep; but he could not afford to sleep yet. He would ask the medical officer for some pills, to keep going. Probably, the end would not come for a day or two.

Smetsanov returned. His pale, yellowish face looked oily. “The barge
Luliga
has just left the docks at Margueritan Island, Colonel. The man Gija is aboard. I have the patrol officer’s crew-list. Everyone you want is on the barge.” 

“Not everyone,” Kopa said. “Not Stepanic.”

“Shall I order the barge detained?”

“Of course not. We will watch it, fool. Let it go on down the beautiful Danube. We shall note where it stops and where Durell gets off and in this way, he will lead us to the elusive astronaut. Then—” Kopa held out his hands, fingers splayed wide, and suddenly closed them into twin fists that he knocked clumsily together. “Then we will take them all. The spies and the traitors and the saboteurs. All of them, at once.”

Smetsanov poured him another drink. It was eight o’clock.

The
Luliga
moved steadily downstream from the industrial docks of Budapest toward the Yugoslav border and the Iron Gates. First the river flowed south, through slowly rising mountains that loomed through the dark of early night in welcome relief from the flat monotony of the Hungarian plains. They passed Mohacs in early moonlight, the scene of Hungary’s greatest disaster, when the Magyars lost their independence to the Turks in a two-hour battle. Bending eastward, the river carried them through darkly looming Balkan mountains, past white houses in small villages, under a rare railroad bridge. There was an hour’s delay at the border, but the international agreements covering Danube commerce resulted in only a routine inspection at floodlighted docks. Durell wondered if an alarm had been sent out ahead. But everything was routine, and the
Luliga’s
blunt bow pushed a steady, chuckling wave of foam ahead.