Assignment - Lowlands (16 page)

When the dike is finally repaired, of course, there will be a direct land connection with Scheersplaat again. There was one once, you know. But in the meantime, the sea bottom is a wilderness of what was once farms, before the Nazis flooded us out and brought back the old tidal channels that make us an island today.”

“I think you know more than this,” Durell said after a moment. “The fishermen must have known exactly where their boat was, every minute of the time.”

“Well, yes.”

“So?”

“They would not tell me.”

“Why not?”

“They were paid not to. The Wildes paid them for their silence.”

“But they were dying! Surely they talked!”

The young Dutchman looked embarrassed. “I am very sorry. I did not recognize how serious their illness was, at first. How could I? And then, when it was imperative to get more information, it was too late. Some were delirious. Hans Dringen died first, four hours after he got off the boat. Piet Vliemann raved like a lunatic about a light on the sea, a light on the sea, over and over again.”

“What was that about?”

“I do not know. Those were the words he muttered.” 

“The light on the sea?”

“That is all.”

It seemed to Durell that he almost had something important in his grasp. It was just beyond the reach of his mental fingers, evanescent, evoking a familiar image that he could not seize and analyze. He dismissed it to question the Hollander further.

“All right. Let’s assume none of them actually saw where the vial came from. What happened, exactly? Surely they told you
something
to give you ideas.”

“All I could gather,” the doctor said, “was that at a certain point, at a certain place and time when the tide was just so, the Wilde brothers got
off
the fishing boat and rowed and waded somewhere out of sight, and when they came back they had the vials with them.”

“Vials? More than one?”

“Oh, yes. I am afraid so. More than one.”

“How many?”

“I do not know.”

“But Klaus Jenner had one?”

“And his wife gave it to me.”

“And its condition?”

“It had been uncorked. Klaus removed the seal.”

“And opened Pandora’s box of evils for the world,” Durell said.

“It killed him,” the young doctor said soberly.

“But not you?”

“I handled it carefully.”

“Do you have the vial now?”

“It was taken from my by Heer Van Horn who came here with credentials from Inspector Flaas. Inspector Flaas explained to me that Van Horn did not have it or turn it in to the authorities, however. It is believed that Heer Van Horn, in turn, was careless with it, or perhaps had the vial taken from him back in his hotel, the Gunderhof. There was evidence of a struggle there, Inspector Flaas said.” The young doctor looked apologetic. “I suppose I should have emptied the vial. Sterilized it. I thought I was doing the best thing, however, in trying to save the culture for analysis and laboratory work. These people of Doorn are very dear to me, and at the time I was afraid of a completely uncontrolled pestilence sweeping Scheersplaat and all of the Netherlands, perhaps all of the world. Well, I made a wrong guess. It did not turn out that way. I still stand by my decision, however.”

“I understand,” Durell said. “But the world is larger than Doorn or Scheersplaat or Holland, as you say.”

He stared at the sunlit sea, the bright dunes, the inland meadows where the cattle grazed, and the sweep of a sea gull’s wings on the breeze. He could appreciate how the young doctor felt. But he was aware of a vast frustration. He knew now how Piet Van Horn had died. Obviously, Julian Wilde had recovered the vial from him, and in the process, Piet had been infected. So much for those questions. No one could be blamed for it.

“You are sure,” he said finally to the doctor, “that none of the wives of the dead men can tell you where the
Moeji
sailed to pick up that vial of plague culture?”

“I asked them, over and over again, mynheer, in many different ways. So did Inspector Flaas. It is useless. None of the men spoke of it. They did not know they were dying, you see,” the doctor said simply. “I could not tell them.”

“So there is no one. to tell us where the island is?”

“No one,” said the doctor. “They are all dead.”

Durell took the noon ferry back to Amschellig, eating lunch aboard. He considered going directly to the Boerderij Inn, but instead walked along the dike road to his own hotel. The
Valkyron
was not in the harbor, neither was the
Suzanne
. At the Gunderhof, he went straight up to his room, expecting to find John O’Keefe waiting to report to him. But no one was there, and there were no messages at the desk.

He waited fifteen minutes, aware of an uneasiness in sharp conflict with the sunny day and the laughter of swimmers on the beach, cyclists and tennis players. He decided he could not stay passively in the room. He changed into a sport shirt, shaved, brushed his hair, considered trimming his small, dark moustache, studied his lean gambler’s face and then shook his head at himself in sudden exasperation and started walking back to Amschellig.

The Boerderij may have been a simple farmhouse a century ago, but decades of catering to tourists had added elaborate wings, cottages, outbuildings, and landscaping to the place, until all that was left of its humble origin was its name. In the fog last night, when he took Cassandra’s Mercedes from the parking lot, he had seen very little of it. Now he realized how easily the Wildes could lose themselves in the crowded anonymity of such a place. He wondered if Cassandra had known all along that Marius lived here. He decided she had. She denied an affair with the murdered man, but Durell had reservations about that. He knew he had made a bitter enemy when he rejected her on the beach; she would be a long time remembering what she had done and how she had done it, an hour after her husband died.

He asked at the desk if a Julian Wilde was registered, and the answer, after all, was simple. The clerk nodded and gave him the room number, 52, and said it was on the second floor of Cottage B. “Directly to your right, sir, and down the path beyond the swimming pool. Are you from the police?”

“I am associated with Inspector Flaas.”

“Mr. Durell, is it?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. O’Keefe is here. He said if you appeared, you were to join him at Cottage B.”

Durell concealed his surprise. “Thank you.”

He felt wary as he walked down the path toward the outbuilding that snuggled next to the high wall of the town dike. The cottage had a thatched, medieval roof with many gables; a lower-floor apartment that was occupied by a volatile family of French tourists; and a flight of outside stairs to a balcony level with the dike top, where a separate doorway served the second apartment. Durell went up quietly, aware of the Frenchman coming out to stare at him through rimless steel glasses in silent curiosity.

“Allo!” the man called sharply.

Durell looked down at him. “Yes?”

“When are you fellows going to be finished up there? It is very disturbing to have all of you tramping about like this. I shall complain to the management, you understand.”

“Go right ahead,” Durell said.

“If you are looking for the other man, he is gone.”

“Which man?”

“The redheaded one. He left with Wilde, ten minutes ago.”

“What?”

“Ten minutes ago.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am usually sure of my facts, m’sieu. They went along the dike.”

Durell stared at the man and hesitated. “Thank you.”

“Just don’t make too much noise about things, will you?”

He took only a moment to check the inside of the cottage apartment. The door was unlocked. No one was here. He went out into the sunlight again and the Frenchman was still standing there, exactly as before, and he made a sweeping gesture with his arm, pointing down toward the dike.

“They went there. Eleven minutes ago, now.”

Durell wanted to run. He went from the cottage to the dike, ran up the broad, grassy slope to the top, and looked to the left and right. He was on a level with the rooftops of the village now. He could see the harbor, with the moored boats and gray stone mole, and below, on the beach side, a small children’s playground had been set up by the hotel management, complete with slides, acrobatic mazes, a carousel.

A small crowd was gathered around the carrousel. A man yelled, and two other men began to run toward the hotel entrance.

Durell ran down the dike to a flight of steps that took him into the playground area. The carrousel had been stopped, and a small knot of tourists was crowded around it, pushing the children away with hushed whispers and sharp admonitions.

A man was mounted awkwardly on one of the miniature, ornately carved ponies. It was John O’Keefe. Everything about him told Durell he was dead.

It was like a harsh, challenging cry of defiance, a cruel and bitter and senseless gesture.

O’Keefe had been stabbed in the back. The handle of a knife stuck out of his coat between his shoulder blades, and the sun shone on the jeweled hilt and the enameled swastika emblem. Durell knew that this was a duplicate of the knife he had broken for Julian Wilde yesterday, in his hotel room.

He did not go near O’Keefe.

He stared at the redheaded man and remembered the lilt in his voice and the softness in him when he had spoken of his wife and the holiday he was planning with her.

Then he turned and walked quietly away.

He walked back toward the Gunderhof along the cycle path on the dike, and he appreciated the quiet shade of the beech trees planted with mathematical precision along the edge of the road. At the Gunderhof’s tennis courts he paused. He saw Inspector Flaas on the front steps of the hotel, talking to several subordinates with quick, angry gestures. He knew Flaas was looking for him, and if Flaas caught him now, he would be on his way back to Amsterdam within an hour, with an escort. Durell turned his back at once and walked the other way.

More than anything, at the moment, he needed time, a quiet hour in which to think and regain control of himself.

But time had turned into a commodity whose value had gone up sharply in the last hour. Flaas would not tolerate any more independent action. The Dutch security man would soon be on his way to Amschellig to investigate O’Keefe’s death. And most of the man’s agents would be alerted to spot Durell now, too. In the broad sunshine, exposed to the cool breeze and flat spaces of sea and land, there seemed no place to hide, no place to go where he could search out the answers to questions that seemed to hover just beyond the curtains of his mind.

He joined a group of tourists on the dike road, came to the cycle racks, and on impulse chose one when a group of youngsters ran up from the beach and made off with several of the vehicles. He hadn’t ridden a bicycle for some time, but it was a knack one never lost. He pedaled after the teen-agers, and from a distance he seemed to be part of the group; but none of the laughing boys and girls paid any attention to him as he followed them down the rijwielpad, beside the highway.

Four miles north of the Gunderhof he allowed himself to fall behind and finally found steps going down to a solitary stretch of beach. He sat with his back to the base of the dike and stared out over the shining sea, lit a cigarette, and tried to think around the painful image of John O’Keefe’s death.

He told himself not to think about O’Keefe. You make friends and lose them suddenly and senselessly in this business. You tried to find a reason why, thinking that perhaps you could learn from the victim’s mistake and prevent it happening to you, too. You never really thought it could happen to you, though; and John O’Keefe had been so sure of survival that he had planned his holiday trip with Claire and the children without hesitation.

He would have to see Claire, before he returned to the States—if he ever got that far, Durell thought.

Anger would achieve nothing, he knew, and yet he could not control an inner drive toward violence. There was something amoral in Julian Wilde, neolithic; a taint of the jungle that put him beyond ordinary consideration. This was a creature as deadly as the plague virus he carried with him—an animal who represented danger to every decent human being on the face of the earth.

He did not doubt that Julian Wilde could and would spread the Cassandra plague. It fitted the pattern of the man. He had compared Wilde to a man walking around with a bottle of nitro in his pocket; but the virus was worse than a localized explosive. And how do you approach such a quarry, whose slightest move could trigger a pestilence that might claim a million lives overnight?

He did not know.

He picked up a stone from the beach and threw it into the placid sea. He finished his cigarette and crushed it out, then lit another. The sun was hot. The breeze blew from the northwest, from over the reaches of the North Sea and the low, mist-shrouded islands off the coast. A gull rode down the wind and looked at him and veered away.

On the road above him, traffic hummed innocently on its way. He was safe here from Flaas and anyone else, for the moment. It was here that he had to find the answer. Here and now.

He tried to summarize the facts he knew to be true.

First, Julian Wilde had one or more vials of the plague culture; and he was a man who would use it if trapped and cornered.

Second, Julian Wilde knew where the bunker was hidden. He had visited it with Marius. He had opened it. He had waded and rowed to it from the fishing boat he’d chartered.

Why had he waded? Durell wondered.

First, to keep the
Moeji’s
crew from actually seeing where he went. But in this flat landscape, Durell thought, how could anyone hide in the drowned, reedy islands and the flat, shining sea?

Obviously, Wilde waded out of sight by going around and behind something that he put between himself and the curious fishermen from Doorn.

Durell searched the sea’s horizon from where he sat on the beach. But there was nothing extraordinary in the landscape to provide an answer.