Assignment - Manchurian Doll (16 page)

“Thank you. You are a kind man,” she murmured. “You remind me of Alexi.”

“Do you still love him?”

“I have not seen him for a long time.” Her head was bowed. “I never expected to hear from him again. But he did not forget me, did he? I wish—I do not understand myself. I know I loved him in an idealized way, you see. Not as a man and a woman can and should love. It couldn’t be that way, for me. I remembered too much of what had once happened to me. He was gentle about it. He understood. But now I am sorry I did not—now I feel free of the things that were like nightmares to me. Can you understand? But it is a freedom that is both exciting and confusing.”

“Nadja, you don’t know where he is?”

“It’s all vague, mixed up with fears and ugly memories. I didn’t tell Omaru. I couldn’t.”

“Would you tell me?”

She began to weep. “I don’t know. I think so. But I can’t recall. It was where he found me, I think. He would remember better than I, because it’s all something I tried to forget. I was sick and delirious when Alexi took me from the old man’s hut—”

“Where was it?”

“That’s just it. I was too sick and feeble to know.” Durell walked slowly, letting her keep pace with him. Behind them, two huge monolithic rocks loomed against the yellow sky. It was warm on the beach. Over a grassy rise and a stone wall, they heard the clang and racket of the interurban trolley heading for Akijuro. Nadja looked out across the dark sea.

“Would you like my professional opinion?” She turned tormented eyes toward him. “I would drop this project.”

“Abandon Kaminov?”

“Yes.”

“They would find him. They’ll shoot him.”

“But it is a trap for you, too. They are using Alexi to trap you. He wants to be free—” She smiled ruefully. “I used to think I was free, and I never understood him before. He is a simple man, really. He has put his life in my hands, and I have failed him.”

“Not yet,” Durell said. “You can join him in the States. The same conditions apply to you, as a political refugee.” “I do not know where I want to go.”

“You can’t stand still, Nadja. They’ll hunt you down and kill you, too, otherwise.”

“I know.”

“Nadja, I want you to go in the boat with us tonight. We can delay no longer, whatever the weather. Do you know the village of Ospesko?”

She started. “Yes. It is—familiar.”

“Do you remember it?”

“I think—yes.” She bit her Up. “May I sit down?”

“Of course,” he said quickly.

They had come to a curve in the beach where no houses were visible. The village was behind them. He found a place in the black sand under an outcrop of rock, and the girl sat down stiffly, favoring her injuries. The water moved in a bright pool at their feet. There was a strange and primitive beauty this place, a privacy and intimacy that touched them both simultaneously. The girl looked at the gush of tidal seas that came and went in the pool below them and bit her lip.

“I do not want to go with you,” she whispered.

“Maybe, if you are there, you will remember more than you can from here.”

“I do not want to remember.”

“You’ll never be yourself again, if you don’t. And Colonel Kaminov will have to come out of his hiding place and give himself up to his executioners. Do you want that?”

“No!”

“Then help us,” he urged.

She shuddered. “I don’t want to go back.”

“There is no other way to go.”

She nodded, nodded again, hung her head in despair. A hot wind blew from the sea, and on a dark rock at the end of the high promontory, a wild cormorant perched to watch the sullen waves. The sea was clouded with a shining surface vapor that hid the rocky offshore islands, detaching them from their anchorages in the ocean so that they seemed to float like shadows on the horizon of strange light. Behind them was a grassy field and then a pine woods that reached in a long tongue of trim green toward the shore.

“My name was Natalie,” the girl whispered abruptly. “They changed it in Moscow. My father was a French doctor in a mission near Ospesko. I remember this. They killed him—the guerilla soldiers. And my mother. She was half Manchurian.” She smiled. “He used to call me his Manchurian doll.”

“Your father?”

“No. Alexi. When he found me and took me with the other refugee children to Vladivostok. It was all confusing, I was terrified, I’d been a prisoner so long—”

“Where?”

“I don’t know where. It was an old man who kept me.” She shrugged. “He fed me and kept me alive. But it was terribly dirty. He was Pere Jacques, a crazy Chinese, an old man with old and filthy habits. I don’t want to talk about it. I was only twelve years old then.” She hung her head once more.

Durell was quiet, aware of the importance of her words, but not wishing to disturb her. “How far was it—the old Chinaman’s place—from Ospesko?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you told Alexi Kaminov about it—”

“No, don’t you see?
He
knows where it is, because he found me there, when he was doing a military survey of the coast there. I was sick by then, delirious, almost as crazy as the old Chinaman, and I don’t know how long I was in the hut. I never stepped out of it for weeks, for months.” “Didn’t you try to escape?”

“I was afraid to go outside. The old man—Pere Jacques —kept telling me they were still hunting for me and would kill me. I believed him—a child of twelve, tormented, half crazed by what had been done and by what was being done all the time—I had to do everything the old man said. I had to submit in every way, in that filthy, horrible place.”

She began to shudder violently. Durell waited. Then he said: “You were, to all intents and purposes, a slave.”

“Yes. To old Pere Jacques.”

“Do you know your real name?” he asked. “Your father’s name, I mean? If you were really someone named Natalie, you were French, not Russian.”

She shrugged, breathing deeply. “It made no difference. I was less than human then, less than an animal, and I was grateful to belong anywhere. I clung to Alexi as if he were a god. I worked and studied hard to please him, when he took me with him, along with the other children, across Siberia to Moscow. He was like—like a knight, so handsome and brave, so clean and gentle. I loved him. And then, as I grew up, I loved him differently. And I think—I don’t know—I was grateful for any word he gave me, any glance he turned my way. He never touched me,” she added suddenly. “He knew I couldn’t bear it. It—it made me think of the old Chinaman, and I would get hysterical if I thought a man—” She paused again. “But I think I’m over that.”

Durell looked at the water and felt the warm wind on his face. Out at sea, the small black islands seemed to float like ships on the mist. A feeling of electric oppression in the air gripped him. Small breakers curled upon the black volcanic beach. Nadja gripped his hand convulsively.

“I don’t want to go back there,” she whispered.

He felt an overwhelming pity for the child she had been, a deep and terrible anger for the cruelty of man against man. He recalled her reputation as an efficient and heartless agent of the KGB in Tokyo. It was all a fraud, a cover and a defense for a frightened girl who still cowered in the body of a beautiful woman.

“Will you kiss me?” she asked quietly.

“Do you want me to?”

“Yes. It is important. It may tell me something about myself and you and Alexi. I don’t want to stay a schoolgirl forever, wrapped in a dream that perhaps never existed for Alexi.”

He kissed her. Her lips were firm and cold. The thick strands of her silver-white hair were scented with the sea wind and the pines. He felt her body shudder. He held her gendy. Then her arms came up and around him, and he could feel the effort it cost her, and then he pulled her body to him and held her in the warmth of a quiet embrace. Her mouth moved. She stirred, made a small sound in her throat, and her lips softened and yielded to his. He felt her breasts against his chest, through the thin shirt she wore. Her arms tightened convulsively. He held her gently.

She drew back then and stared at the islands floating in the misty sea. Her lips were parted, and her eyes were filled with tears. Her breathing was irregular.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Was it so bad?”

“No, it—it—” She was pale. “I will go with you.”

“To Ospesko?”

“Wherever I must go. I can promise nothing. I may not be able to find the place where Alexi first discovered me. He must be waiting there. But I may not find it.” “Without you,” Durell said, “he is lost.”

“Without him,” she said, “I will die.”

The
Okiku II
was a steel diesel trawler of 200 tons, with a rakish bow, twin screws, and the latest electronic equipment in radar and sounding gear. She drove ahead, solitary in the hissing Japan Sea, under an evening sky of dark yellow that was clouded from horizon to horizon, striated with an elemental movement that arched from circle to circle of the hemisphere. From the south, the wind blew like the hot breath of a wakening dragon. The dragon stirred in the slow, deep heave of the sea that gleamed with a ceramic quality in the lessening light, glazed under the heavy ground swell that felt like the breathing of some primeval creature. The course was 280° and the speed was a steady 22 knots.

The crew had been replaced by Tagashi’s men, half a dozen Japanese from Miyako who worked the ship with ease, their white headbands gleaming strangely in the dusk, their naked feet gripping the steel deck. They did not chatter or quarrel as fishermen normally would.

Tagashi stood forward, scanning the horizon as it merged with the lowering night. Nothing was visible except a dim haze to the west that might be the mainland, or might be a lower cloudbank on the rim of the sea. He adjusted the lenses carefully and spoke to Durell.

“The timing has been correct, Durell-san. In one hour, we shall be in sight of the shore, but it will be dark by then. Unfortunately, radar knows neither night nor day. We may be expected, if Omaru made contact with new radio equipment.”

“We should count on it,” Durell said grimly. “But Omaru doesn’t know our exact course or our landing point.”

Tagashi nodded at the circling sea. “The net waits for us, Durell-san. It will be spread far and wide. In one hour, we will know.”

“But they want Kaminov, too,” Durell pointed out. “They won’t move too soon. They’ll watch for us and let us land and hope we lead them to Kaminov, wherever he is. So it will seem easy at first, but we mustn’t deceive ourselves. They will let us in all right and try to follow us.  lf we locate Kaminov, our troubles will then begin. But then we have one point in our favor: the Chinese and the Russians are secretive, even with each other. Their cooperation may not be too good. And don’t forget, Omaru is being paid to handle this operation. They will insist that he carry out the action.”

“Perhaps.” Tagashi looked moody. “I dislike the sea. I am not a man of the sea. It makes me uneasy.” He sighed. “Well, then, we know they will wait and watch and let us land. And we will know that what seems easy is only a trap.”

“Maybe we can make it snap on their own fingers,” Durell said.

The smoothness of the sea was deceptive. The heavy ground swell made the sharp prow of the
Okiku
dip deep into the glazed green water. Then the boat lifted, spuming, shaking foam from its rails. The crew went about their business of tending the big dragnets and winches. The world seemed to wait in hushed fear under the breath of the southern dragon.

The Hokkaido radio chattered out its first definite typhoon warning for the area. Only the beginning of the report could be heard above the abnormal static in the radio. All ships at sea were warned to expect winds of 100 to 150 miles per hour velocity. The operator who gave the expected direction and course of the tropical storm faded into a series of abominable cracklings at the crucial moment. They could only hope for the best.

Durell found Nadja seated on the edge of her bunk. The mate’s cabin had been given over to her, and another to Durell and Tagashi in the crew’s quarters aft of the main holds. The
Okiku
lifted, rolled, plunged, creaked and trembled with the drive of her powerful engines.

“Did you get any sleep?” he asked.

She wore dark slacks and a black singlet and dyed black sneakers. She shook her head. “No. I cannot sleep.”

“We’ll be there soon. The coast is just over the horizon.” “I know. I can feel it. Will the storm be very bad?”

“We may be lucky. We may stay in the fringes of it.”

“I saw a typhoon once,” she said. “I hope never to see another.” She looked up, questioning. “We will land near Ospesko?” Her eyes searched his face. “It is a rocky shore, except for the river banks there.”

“We’ll make it. Do you remember the town?”

“A little, now. I have been trying to recall. My father went there on administrative business for the mission, now and then.” She smiled. “It was usually a holiday for me. In those days, a, French doctor and a Chinese wife had no difficulty in moving about. I remember swimming there, on a small beach a few miles to the south of the river mouth.” She paused. “It is a protected place. We could land there.” 

“Good.”

She looked at her hands. “Do you think he is still alive? Do you think Alexi is waiting for us?”

“Yes, I think so.”

‘‘But you are not sure?”

“No.”

“They will kill you, if you are caught.”

“And you? Aren’t you afraid?”

“Not any more,” she said. “Except—”

“Except what?”

“I don’t want to go back to that awful place.”

“I’ll be with you,” Durell said.

“Yes. That makes it better.”

Durell said: “Tell me more about this swimming place that you remember. Omaru’s code books direct a landing a few miles below Ospesko, too.”

“It may be the same place. The rest of the coast is very rugged, with steep cliffs and rocks.” She smiled wanly. “It is coming back to me. I remember a small trail down the mountainside. There was a hut there, and an old Chinese watch-tower. But all that may be gone now. It was over ten years ago.”

“Was the tower lighted at night?”