Assignment — Stella Marni (20 page)

"Has Tony Isotti looked you up?"

"He's off the case, too."

Durell stared at the black, impersonal telephone. He could think of no way to break down the implacable resentment in Tom Markey's voice. He said: "I heard they got Albert Marni out of the hospital. Is that true?"

"Right Killed Dan McHugh doing it, too."

"Then old Marni is gone again?"

"We're looking for him. Everywhere. We haven't found him yet.'"

"And Stella?"

Markey's voice was biting. "You've got her, Sam. Come on in. It's no good, whatever you're trying to do. From here it looks like you've broken every damned promise you made to me, and I'm in the doghouse and so is General McFee and my top brass in D.C. have their backs against the wall because of your God-damn fumble."

"Just one thing, Tom," Durell said. "Get over to John Krame's studio, where Frank Greenwald was killed. Bring a warrant and bench permit to crack the safe. John Krame and a girl named Gerda Smith or Schmidt have to be picked up. They're two of the people in the ring who have been blackmailing and terrorizing the refugees into going home to be repatriated."

There was a long silence. "I suppose you've got proof?"

"I can prove it."

"All right. Anything else you've been doing to pass the time?" Markey asked sardonically.

"Yes. Bring the morgue wagon. There's a third member of the ring right here in the studio now." Durell looked at Karl's giant figure with the curiously bent and twisted neck. "The third guy is dead," he said. "I killed him."

He hung up then and got out of there.

His rented car was still where he had parked it, with two traffic tickets stuck under the windshield wiper. He pocketed the summonses and drove out across the Brooklyn Bridge to the Belt Parkway, the windows rolled down, fresh air pouring through the car and into his lungs. It was half past two in the afternoon by then, a gray and cold day with a southeasterly wind pulling raw dampness from over the ocean. He drove fast, but carefully enough to avoid attracting any police attention.

Presently he turned off the busy parkway toward the shore, recalling the route in detail when he saw Blossom's house standing gray and isolated against the bleak marshes. It seemed to be deserted and he did not drive down the dead-end cutoff that led to it, but he noted the drawn window shades, the locked garage doors, the boathouse and the tidal channel behind it. Blossom must have left for the West Coast by now.

After another five minutes he came to the narrow causeway that led across the wind-swept marshland to the spit of sand where the colony of summer cottages huddled against the elemental thrusts of winter. The place looked barren and forlorn in the pale sunlight, and the surf pounded heavily against the debris-littered beach, thrusting heavy tongues of white combers almost up to the pilings of the first cottages.

Durell found the green cottage where he had left Stella the night before without trouble. No one was about. The wind made a steady hissing sound in the tali yellow grasses that grew on the dunes. Far in the distance he could see the steady march of telephone poles and power lines on the mainland, three miles away, and the flicker of white development houses over there. Brooklyn, he reflected, was a place of many strange paradoxes.

The sea wind cut at him as he trudged across the sandy trace of lawn to the front porch. The little colony was like a village of ghosts in the uneven sunlight under the scudding gray clouds. He knocked. There was no reply. He called Stella's name, apprehension twisting suddenly in his stomach. He had had a fifty-fifty hope that she had trusted him enough to remain hidden here, but it really had been too much to expect of her. A full day, a night, and this morning had elapsed since he had left her, and he could not blame her if she somehow had found a way to leave. She would have had to walk most of the way to the mainland, however, along the causeway. And with her picture so recently in all the newspapers, she'd have taken a great risk of being recognized and turned over to the police. Perhaps he should have checked the papers before driving all the way out here. But Tom Markey hadn't even hinted that he knew where Stella was. Wherever she had gone, she had not fallen into the hands of the cops. Or of John Krame's outfit, either. Not yet, anyway.

He searched the cottage room by room, remembering the night he had spent here with her. There was still a faint trace of her perfume, a feeling and mood that she somehow left wherever she went. The fireplace was filled with cold ashes. The few dishes they had used had been washed and neatly stacked away in the kitchen cupboard. She had left no tangible sign that they had used the cottage at all, and he stood still, remembering her apartment, the sense of orderliness that expressed one facet of her puzzling personality. Then he remembered her hysteria and terror and the way she had come to him in the glow of the dying fire, clinging to him and demanding him with a fervor and ardor that had been completely contradictory to the cool, shadowy image of her other self.

Remembering, he wanted to see her again, and the wanting was filled with an urgent fear for her safety. He had to find her. There was only a little time left, and if she had gone back to the city, she would have learned of her father's rescue from the
Boroslav
and his subsequent recapture from the hospital where he had taken the old man. In that case, she would once again be subject to the orders of the enemy.

He searched for a note or message of some kind that she might have left for him, but there was nothing inside the cottage except the lingering ghost of her, his own image of her tall proud body and lovely face, of her shimmering pale hair and great jade eyes that had looked to him for help there before the dying fire.

He went outside again and circled the cottage, not sure of what he was looking for. There were tire marks in the soft sand behind the house, and at first he passed them by, recalling that he had parked his own car there. Then abruptly he returned to kneel beside the dim ruts, watching a little trickle of sand suddenly collapse and pour into one of them. It had been raining when he was here last, and the sand was still dimpled by the marks of the hard-driven drops. As he knelt there, frowning, another tiny torrent of sand went sliding into the tire marks he considered.

Durell straightened with excitement in him. It was clear that someone had driven a car in here not very long ago, perhaps within minutes, at the most only an hour before. Stella had bad no car, unless she bad walked back to the mainland and got one somehow and returned here for something. But if she had left and then come back in a car, she surely would have left a message for him to let him know what had happened.

Someone must have come for her.

But who?

No one could have known or guessed that Stella Marni was here. No one except perhaps Harry Blossom. Blossom might have made a shrewd guess as to where he had hidden the girl after they left the agent's house the other night Blossom, who knew this stretch of desolate shore like the back of his hand.

Abruptly Durell returned to his car, backed out into the road between the deserted cottages, and drove to the causeway again. It was no more than a few minutes' drive back to Blossom's house, standing in shabby Victorian isolation against the backdrop of flat salt marsh and bleak sea. When passing here half an hour ago he had only glanced this way and noted that the place looked deserted. He took a closer look this time.

The wind was strong, and he heard something bang repeatedly at the back of the house, and when he got out of the car and walked that way he saw it was the door to the carriage shed that had been converted into a garage. Blossom's gray sedan was there, and the motor was still a little warm. Durell looked back at the house with bleak eyes. Blossom had been due to report in L.A. yesterday. But he hadn't gone. He was still here. And Durell was suddenly sure that Stella Marni was here, too.

He tried the back door, found it unlocked, and walked through the kitchen and hallway to the front of the house, into the study with the Vermont marble fireplace where he had found Blossom and Stella before.

They were here again.

He saw Stella first. She was seated in a small armchair near the window that faced the sea, her hands gripping the arms of the chair until her small knuckle bones shone white through her skin. Her face was pale and she was staring at Blossom. She did not turn to look at Durell. She did not seem to be aware of him as he loomed in the doorway. Her eyes were fixed on the FBI agent and she seemed to be looking at something far away, at something too horrible to bear, yet too strong to permit her to tear her gaze free. She wore the same skirt and pale lime-green sweater he had seen her in before. Her hair was disheveled, a pale, wind-blown cloud of gold against her forehead and cheeks, and there was an ugly bruise darkening along the soft line of her jaw.

Harry Blossom might have struck her, but he would never strike her again. He sprawled with his head and shoulders in the fireplace, his knees flexed under him. Ashes had been jarred loose by his fall and darkened his face and shoulders so that his features no longer seemed to be made of flesh and bone, but of some strange
papier-mâché
substance, a thing that was shredded and somehow unfinished and inhuman.

He had been shot in the head, and he was dead.

Durell heard the sound of the surf, the whimper of the wind, the quick shallow breathing of the girl sitting frozen in the chair as she looked at the dead man. He scanned the room quickly for a gun. but he did not see one. It was obvious that Blossom had been standing before the fireplace talking to her when he had been shot. When he fell, his legs had buckled and he toppled backward from the knees, onto the hearth. It had not happened too long ago. There was still a liquid shine to the blood that had oozed from the head wound, although some of it had already coagulated on the cast-iron coal grate.

"Stella," Durell said.

She neither moved nor looked at him.

"Stella, do you hear me?"

She shivered very faintly. Her eyelids twitched, but she kept staring at the dead man. A faint, thin sighing came from her parted lips.

"Stella, why did you shoot him?" Durell asked.

A faint change touched her face. He moved soundlessly across the Sarouk carpet and brushed his fingers along the bruise on her cheek, then put his hand under her chin and tilled her face up so she was forced to look at him. He stood between her and the dead man, and the bulk of his figure acted as a screen that snapped the hypnotic pull of the murdered man's image in the girl's eyes. She looked blankly at Durell for a moment, not recognizing him, and then she made a choked, whimpering sound and a terrible shudder shook her body. Her hands came up and covered her face and her head fell forward and her fingernails began to dig into her temples until Durell caught her wrists and forced her arms down again.

'"Stella, why did you kill him?" he asked again.

"What? I... I didn't," she whispered.

"Look at me."

"No."

"Stella, it's all right. You're all right now. I'm back. Did Blossom tell you I wasn't coming back?"

She whispered huskily: "He said you were dead. He... he said they had killed you."

"Nothing like that happened," Durell said quickly. "I got your father off the ship. He was ill, but he was able to walk ashore with me part of the way, anyway. And I took him to a hospital. But then I ran into trouble at Krame's place, I walked right into another trap, and they kept me a prisoner through last night until I got away an hour ago. They got your father back, too. I'm sorry about that, Stella."

She said nothing. She wouldn't look up at him.

"Stella, are you listening?"

"Yes, I heard you."

"Why didn't you wait at the cottage for me?"

"But I did. I waited all day yesterday. And then evening came and you weren't back. And I waited all through the night. And this morning. Then Blossom came."

"When?"

"Not long ago. About an hour back."

"Did he say how he knew where to find you?"

"No, it was just a guess, I think. I think he had been searching all this time, up and down the beach, checking all the cottages. I'm sure that's how he did it." Her voice was a whisper so low that he had to strain to catch the meaning of her words. "He was terrible when he found me."

"Did Blossom force you to come here? Listen to me, Stella, and think. Did he force you to come with him?"

"Yes. He said you were dead, and then — I somehow didn't care any more what he did." She looked up at Durell with anguished eyes. "It was as if everything ended when he told me that. You are the only man who knows the truth about me — what happened in Budapest, with those soldiers, how it's been with me with every man, the need I feel to use men. I'm trying not to be like that any more, Sam. I'm trying to be — like any other woman. You helped me so much. You gave me hope that it could be right and — and beautiful. When he — when Blossom said you were dead, I just gave up all hope. And he seemed so pleased with himself. He said you had got just what you deserved for meddling and ruining his career. He said he would give me one last chance."

"A chance to do what?"

"He insisted I knew something or could tell him something about who is making the other refugees go back to Europe. He demanded that I tell him everything I knew. He said I had to know more than what I had already told him." Again the girl looked up at Durell's lean, dark face above her. And again he had the feeling that just for an instant he was catching a glimpse of the real woman behind the mask she wore. He believed her. "I kept saying over and over that I didn't know anything that could help, but he never wanted to accept what I said. He just wanted — me."

"What happened when you got here?" Durell asked.