Annotation

Most blondes are dangerous — but Stella Marni was murder on heels…

Locked inside that beautiful head was the key Sam Durell had to find — the identity of the leader who trafficked in souls between New York and Budapest.

Hungarian refugees were vanishing like smoke — and turning up dead behind the Iron Curtain. The C.I.A. assigned Sam Durell to stop Stand Stella Marni was his only clue.

She was one of the most desirable women Durell had ever seen. She had the kind of cool, unearthly beauty a man would lie, betray, kill for-and follow to the brink of hell.

A nation had entrusted Durell with its secrets. He carried a gun to defend them, but against a woman like Stella Marni there was no weapon to keep a man safe…

- Edward S. Aarons

- Chapter One

- Chapter Two

- Chapter Three

- Chapter Four

- Chapter Five

- Chapter Six

- Chapter Seven

- Chapter Eight

- Chapter Nine

- Chapter Ten

- Chapter Eleven

- Chapter Twelve

- Chapter Thirteen

- Chapter Fourteen

- Chapter Fifteen

- Chapter Sixteen

- Chapter Seventeen

- Chapter Eighteen

- Chapter Nineteen

Edward S. Aarons

Assignment — Stella Marni

Chapter One

Durell was waiting with Art Greenwald in an inconspicuous car outside the Federal Courthouse in Foley Square when the girl came out. It was raining, a grim November day in New York. Traffic hissed on the asphalt and pedestrians hurried along under umbrellas and raincoats. It was after four o’clock, and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee hearing was over for the day.

There were lights inside the wide building doorway, and for a moment the girl hesitated, her tall figure limned against the glow behind her. She wore a dark green raincoat and a beret of green suede with some kind of metal insigne pinned to it. Durell could see her clearly from the car where he waited. She carried herself well, with an air of pride and defiance. A news photographer came out of the building and talked to her and gestured with his camera, and the girl shook her head and said something to him and he made an argumentative gesture with the Graflex.

“That her?” Durell asked.

“Yes,” Greenwald said. “Stella Marni.”

“Can’t say I blame your brother a bit”

“He’s gone haywire over her, Sam.”

“Knowing she’s an unfriendly witness?”

“Politics never meant anything to Frank. All he can think about is that Stella.” Art’s voice was bitter. “Just look at her. The bitch. Not a worry in the world. Her father gone, Frank missing, and she sits in there in front of Senator Hubert and says yes, she wants to go back to Budapest, back to the old country. Frank doesn’t care. He’d go with her.”

“Is that what he says?”

Art shook his head in a small negation. “I don’t know what Frank says. My only brother. If I can get my hands on him, I’ll slap some sense into his stupid head.”

“We’ll find him,” Durell said.

“Yeah. Dead in a ditch.”

The girl came down the courthouse steps. Durell liked the way she walked. She didn’t seem to mind the rain. She had long legs and a high waist and nice articulation; fine ankles, a proud lovely face, long blonde hair that glistened with the rain where it curled from under her suede beret. She cut across the wide street as if she were walking directly toward them. Durell lit a cigarette. Art Greenwald picked up a newspaper in his lap and bent his head as if absorbed in reading it.

She paid no attention to them, although she walked directly in front of the car and skirted the fender when she stepped to the sidewalk. She passed three feet from Durell, behind the wheel. His first estimate of her went glimmering. She was more than just attractive. She was one of the most beautiful women Durell had ever seen. She had large green eyes as cold as a frozen mountain lake, a mouth a little wide, with a generous lower lip that could have been soft and passionate except for the tightness at the corners of her mouth and the defiant tilt of her chin.

“Cold,” Durell murmured.

“You can’t get near her, Sam.”

“I’ll try.”

“Your pleasure. I told Frank. I said he was in love with a damned marble statue. He laughed at me. Said I didn’t know Stella Marni. His Stella. That babe never gave anything away. She never belonged to any man.”

“All right, take it easy. Art.”

“I just get so sick and mad, Sam. With worry over Frank. Where is he?”

“We’ll find him,” Durell said again.

“McFee will cut some throats if you interfere. This one is sewed up by the FBI. They work with the Senate Internal Security people. You know how they are. They’ll scream bloody murder that we’re infringing on their sacred territory. They’ll scream to the Pentagon and the White House and State. All those yells will funnel down to K Section and Dickinson McFee. The little general will give it to you in the neck.”

“It’s my neck,” Durell said. “A pleasure.”

The girl was beyond them, at the corner, where she had paused to look for a cab. As usual on a rainy day in New York, those that were in sight were all occupied. A cold wind blew misted rain down the street, flapping the skirts of the girl’s green raincoat. Her legs were very good. As he watched, Durell saw a heavy-set man in a trench coat hurry up to the girl and take her arm and talk rapidly to her on the street corner. The girl turned a cold, devastating profile toward him, said something briefly, and shrugged off the man’s importuning hand.

“Who is that?” Art asked.

“Dmitri Zobolev. A junior member of the Soviet UN staff.”

“I told you she was mixed up with them.”

Durell said, “If so, she isn’t very happy about it”

The girl had turned away from the squat man and walked out of sight around the corner, still apparently in search of a cab. Zobolev looked after her with grim annoyance, took a step as if to give chase, then shrugged thick shoulders and went down into the subway entrance nearby.

A car slid by, tires hissing richly on asphalt. Durell glimpsed the man who drove as the car turned the corner after the girl. Pale hair, narrow face, hard mouth, small and careful eyes under a dark hat.

“Regular parade,” he murmured. “We’re supercargo, this trip.”

“Something?” Art asked.

“Do you know Harry Blossom, FBI? Supersleuth. The man with the bloodhound nose. My old grandpa Jonathan could have used him down in the bayous, hunting coon,” Durell said.

“You crazy Cajun. This is serious.”

“All right, then, Art, go join the parade. Keep your eye on Marni. I’ll meet you at the hotel for dinner. Good hunting.”

Art Greenwald got out of the car quickly for all of his short, muscular bulk. He was the electronics expert for K Section of the CIA, and there was nothing much he couldn’t do with bugs and tapped wires. He was a youthful, dark-haired man with thick brows, a worried mouth, and a friendly normally humorous face. His eyes were grateful to Durell when he glanced back and flipped a hand in a parting gesture.

“Art?” Durrell called.

Greenwald turned back.

“The keys to Stella’s apartment. Got ‘em?”

“Oh, sure. I lifted them from Frank’s dresser and made a couple extra. Here.”

“I’ll see what I can see. But there won’t be much there if Blossom has had first crack at her boudoir.”

“Thanks, Sam. Anything you can do…”

“Go on. She’ll have her cab in a minute.”

*

Twenty minutes later Durell stood with his feet slightly apart in the middle of Stella Marni’s living room. The apartment was in a convened brownstone in the East Seventies, a quiet, sedate building where the rents ran at least three hundred a month. He wondered where Stella Marni, a refugee without passport or papers, got the money.

There had been no difficulty making his entry. He knew he had been watched by the man lounging in the doorway of another brownstone diagonally across the street, but he was not troubled by this. He pinched his nose and exhaled softly and stood where he was, soaking in the feel of the place.

Durell was a tall man in his early thirties, with black hair and dark blue eyes that turned to coal when he was angry. He was angry now. He resented Art’s being worried by this, and he resented Stella Marni for biting the hand that fed her. It was none of his business, really, except that he owed Art Greenwald more than he could ever repay, and it didn’t matter if State went into a flap and the Pentagon’s eagles shrieked and the Attorney General’s office muttered about infringement on constitutional areas of operation. Art wanted help, and Durell was here to give it to him.

Durell looked dangerous. When he moved, it was with superbly refined muscular control, without wasted effort, lightly, like a jungle animal. Training and natural aptitudes and conditioned reflexes had made him what he was. He was a hunter by instinct and for pleasure. He was subchief of K Section of the CIA, based in an anonymous building simply labeled No. 20 Annapolis Street in Washington’s suburbs. He had a gambler’s face, lean and impassive, and a gambler’s hands, quick and sure and strong. His Cajun heritage had given him a quick temper, which he had learned to control, since a spy who reacts emotionally rather than rationally is soon a dead spy and of no use to anyone. He had been in the old OSS and later with G2 in the Pentagon, and now he was with the CIA. He could conceive of no other way of life for himself.

Standing motionless, his head forward a little, he absorbed the sights and sounds and smells of Stella Marni’s living room. Delicate French perfume, gray modern furniture against neutral walls, an Amy Bessar abstract in cool blues and greens over the couch, muted simple lamps. Rain tapped against the casement windows overlooking the quiet crosstown street It was growing dark outside. The apartment consisted of this living room, an octagonal central foyer off the self-service elevator that faced a tiny kitchen, and a large bedroom in the rear with a vast mirror between two tall windows, looking down upon a small garden court in the back of the building. When Durell moved, he caught the glimmer of his tall reflection in the high bedroom mirror, all the way at the opposite end of the apartment.

He switched on one of the lamps.

Cloisonne ash trays were clean and sparkling, a bowl of yellow chrysanthemums rested on a hi-fi recording cabinet He opened shutter doors to a dressing closet, put his hands lightly on the rack of trim autumn dresses, looked at the expensive Fifth Avenue labels. Quite an investment in clothes. A dark red leather shoulder-strap handbag hung inside the shutter door. He took it down and carefully spread out the feminine accouterments on a polished table, and put them all back. He began to feel the girl’s presence in these rooms. She was fanatically meticulous and clean. Almost sterile. Her perfume was delicate. A tall, cold-eyed girl, perhaps too ambitious. An intelligent, cultured girl, here as a foreigner from behind the Iron Curtain via Havana, appealing originally for political asylum, and economically successful while her cause was pending before the immigration authorities. She did modeling, Art Greenwald said.

Durell moved through the kitchen, touching this and that, looking here and there. The kitchen was used, not merely decorative. There were racks of herbs and spices that indicated a gourmet’s taste and the ability to cook what she liked to eat. Copper skillets and saucepans shone in the dusky room.

The telephone rang in the foyer, a softly muted sound.

He let it ring, his eyes annoyed.

He had never met Stella Marni, never seen her before this afternoon at Foley Square. He wondered what made her tick.

The telephone rang again, and then stopped.

He went into the bedroom. None of your business, he thought again. If Stella Marni wanted to be repatriated to Hungary, why try to stop her? Durell knew all about the “come home” campaign being waged by the governments behind the Iron Curtain. It was moderately successful, a propaganda victory being exploited all over the world. Some aspects of some of the cases, however, were troubling State and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. There had been the forced departure of those Russian merchant seamen, for instance. And ugly rumors of coercion, blackmail, bribery, threats. Yet Stella Marni had stood up coldly before the subcommittee today and told them she preferred the old country to living in New York, that she was disillusioned and homesick. The Daily Worker would make propaganda capital out of her every word.

Still none of your business, Durell thought. Except that Art Greenwald had a brother named Frank, and Frank was in love with Stella and had gone haywire and Art had asked Durell, as a personal favor, to come up to New York to do what he could. And Deirdre had asked him, too.

The image of Deirdre Padgett, cool and beautiful and desirable beyond any woman Durell had ever known, drifted before him and obscured the image he was trying to get of Stella Marni. Long ago Durell had traveled a lonely path, confirmed in his belief that in his business of being a spy, the difference between the quick and the dead often depended on objectivity, a detachment from emotion. He had discarded love until Deirdre came along and broke down the wall he had built around himself. When he thought of Deirdre now, a warmth grew deep inside him. Deirdre had come to him with Art Greenwald last night, to tell him about Stella Marni.

“I know this girl, darling,” Deirdre had said. “I met her when I worked on the Journal two months ago. She was perfectly happy and contented, praying for just one thing — to be allowed to continue her work as a photographer’s model and to be allowed to stay in this country. She even told me about Frank, Art’s brother — how he wanted to marry her. And everything she’s done this past week that’s making headlines is wrong and out of character for her. Something has happened, and you can find out what it is.”

“I understand Frank Greenwald is a steady-going businessman,” Durell said. “How did he meet a glamorous model like this Stella Marni?”

“She worked as a model in a studio in Frank’s building, I believe. He saw her there, coming and going, and got to know her, that’s all. You will do something, won’t you, Sam?”

“The FBI is on it,” Durell objected. “It doesn’t come under our jurisdiction.”

“But you can help Art. And do it for me. She’s a wonderful girl, darling. Just don’t fall in love with her yourself.” Deirdre had kissed him lightly. “Help her, Sam, talk to her. You’ll see what I mean.”

Durell had grinned. “On your head be it, sweetheart. I’ll take the train up tomorrow.”

Now he stood in Stella Marni’s bedroom and gradually the image of Deirdre faded from his mind. He filled his senses with Stella’s personality, the intimacy of this woman who apparently, with casual disdain, wounded her friends and presented an enigma to all who knew her.

Long legs, fine firm hips, breasts high and full. He went through her lingerie expertly, searched her secretary-desk, searched the night table, the closet shelves, the racks of shoes, the dresses, the silver-chased combs, the perfumes and cosmetics in cut glass on the dresser. Nothing to show there was a man in her life. Nothing of Frank Greenwald’s — no picture, no souvenirs, no whispers of love.

He listened to the rain, the whine of the elevator, the muted murmuring of a television set somewhere in the brownstone house. Stella Marni. Who and what was she?

There was only one picture in the room, a photograph of a smiling gray-haired man with a gentle face and a small beard, whose eyes looked at you with tragedy and compassion. This would be her father, in that European suit and shirt. Albert Marni. Nobody important. A small businessman, uprooted, desolate, lonely. Missing since his turn had come as witness for the subcommittee last Saturday. Missing since he said he was willing to be repatriated back to his native land. A man who had testified with fear in his eyes and a seal on his lips.

Where was Albert Marni now?

Nobody knew.

Very few people cared.

He searched the kitchen again, looked in the sugar and flour canisters, flipped through the telephone book, looked at a month-old copy of Nepszava, a Budapest daily, in the wastebasket, looked into the water closet, the medicine chest The medicine chest in the green-tiled bath was abnormally tall, with a high hidden shelf above the door. Durell groped in it, felt cool metal, pulled it down.

A gun. A chrome-plated Colt .28. He snicked back the barrel, dropped the cartridge, picked it up. heeled out the magazine, saw the little vicious row of lead-nosed bullets in their shiny copper jackets. He sniffed at the gun, reloaded the chamber, wiped his prints from it, and put it back.

He heard the front door open as he stood in the bathroom. A key snicked, the door groaned slightly, and footsteps sounded in the small octagonal foyer.

“Stellar someone called.

Durell stood against the wall and waited.

Chapter Two

The man in the foyer breathed gustily, as if he had been running. For a second or two he did not move, while Durell waited just inside the bathroom door. He had left lamps on in the living room and one in the bedroom. Whoever had come in knew that the apartment was occupied. A shoe creaked and the man finally entered the living room. Water dripped from his coat.

“Stella? Are you in?”

The man’s voice was high and tight and tense.

“Stella, baby?”

Rubber heels squeaked as the man walked down the short hall to the bedroom. He passed the doorway where Durell waited, and Durell glimpsed him briefly: a man of medium size, curly damp brown hair, heavy brows, a thin bald spot, a rain-soaked topcoat. Durell stepped out into the hall.

“Frank,” he said. “Frank Greenwald.”

The man turned, mouth open, eyes suddenly opaque with surprise and shock. He made a small swallowing sound in his throat. Then he lowered his head and charged, arms flailing.

His head struck Durell in the stomach and knocked the wind out of him and threw him back into the living room. A small rug skidded out from under his feet and he went down. The man made a small screaming sound and tried to kick Durell’s head and Durell jerked aside and caught at the ankle and yanked hard. The man tumbled down on top of him. Durell caught his wrist, slammed a fist into the man’s throat, heard a strangled wheeze of struggling breath, rolled out from under the other’s weight. His reaction was quick and savage. He hauled the man upright, slapped his face hard, slapped him again, flung him back to the trim gray couch. The man bounced, started to come up in a crouch, big fists balled, knuckles shining white.

“Don’t,” Durell said.

The man paused. His eyes were wary and frightened.

“You son of a bitch,” the man said.

“Who do you think I am, Frank?”

“Where is she? What have you people done with Stella?”

“She isn’t here, Frank.”

“Where did you take her? To her father? You done the same to her as you did to him? Tell me! Tell me or I’ll kill you.”

Durell said, “Sit down, Frank.” He told him his name. “Your kid brother. Art, pulled me up here from Washington to try to help out”

Muddy brown eyes stared up from under twisted brows. The man’s mouth opened and shut He breathed hard. “Durell?”

“Right.”

“The guy Art works for. calls the Cajun? Art won’t talk about his work. You’re his boss?”

“Right.”

“Give me a cigarette.”

Durell tossed him a pack. He stood watching the heavy man breathe hard. Perspiration ran down Frank Greenwald’s face. There was a faint resemblance; Frank was older, fatter, less alert than Art. He could not reconcile Frank Greenwald with the image of the cool goddess who lived here. They didn’t go together. It was all wrong. Frank looked like the disheveled, small-time businessman that he was. There was no glamour, not much money, not much of anything in Frank Greenwald. He was just an ordinary guy, too excitable, too scared, too confused by being pulled out of his safe rut of business and bachelorhood and dropped into a whirlpool of intrigue and hatred and danger. His mouth was shaking. The hand that held the cigarette trembled and Durell touched his fingers and lit a match for him.

“Thanks. Guess I blew up good, huh?”

“No bones broken,” Durell said.

“None of mine, you mean. You could’ve killed me.”

“Perhaps if it had been someone else, he might have,” Durell said. “Who did you think I was?”

“One of them.”

“Who?”

“Look, don’t think I don’t appreciate Art’s getting you up here. But I didn’t ask Art for help. The kid brother thinks he’s big now, working for you, getting on the inside of all that Washington political stuff. He forgets how it used to be with us, when we were kids. He’s still just a kid. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. Never any real sense. I’m all right I don’t need any help. I’ll work this out all right”

“You’re talking to the wind,” Durell said. “Stop shaking.”

“Huh?”

“You’re as close to hysteria as a man can be without climbing the walls. Calm down. Sit still a minute. You don’t have to talk.”

Durell turned his back on him and went to the window overlooking the crosstown street. It was dark now. The rain made the night blacker, and the street lamp cast slick rays of iridescence on the wet asphalt. Two cabs went by. A woman in a plaid slicker walked a black French poodle that also wore a plaid slicker. There was a shadow leaning in the doorway of the house diagonally across the street. It didn’t seem to have moved a bit since Durell first entered the apartment.

There was a sudden move behind him, a quick wrenching at the front door. Durell caught Frank Greenwald before he got out. He hauled the man around and flung him back again, not saying anything; he kicked the door shut and pushed Frank into the living room, shoved him into his chair again.

“I’m not going to waste words with you,” Durell said. “A lot of people are worried about what happens to you, God knows why. You aren’t grateful and you want to kick in the ears of those who want to help. Like Art. He’s sick with worry over you. You haven’t helped the Senate subcommittee, you haven’t helped the FBI, and you’re not helping yourself. But you’re going to tell me what this is all about and we’ll begin with Stella Marni and what you know about her and what she told you about her plans.”

Frank Greenwald looked up with angry eyes that didn’t match the anger in Durell’s. He wiped the flat of his hand over his mouth and shrugged his coat straight. For a moment Durell thought he was going to come up in another bullheaded charge. Then Frank began to shake, quietly, clasping his hands together and leaning forward as if he had a cramp in his belly.

“What are you afraid of?” Durell asked quietly.

“I’m afraid for Stella *

“Is she in any danger?”

“Of course!”

“From whom?”

“I don’t know! If I did, I’d know what to do about it. I want to help her. I want her to stay here. I know what she told the Senate subcommittee, but it isn’t true! She doesn’t want to go back to Budapest. She hated it there. Her father hated it, and she wants to stay here.”

“That isn’t what she told Senator Hubert”

“Yes, but what else could she do?”

“Has she herself been threatened or coerced?”

Greenwald said flatly, “She can’t find her father. They’ve taken him somewhere and they’re holding him as a hostage to ensure the way she’ll testify.”

“Is that what Stella Marni told you?”

Greenwald said bitterly, “She hasn’t told me anything. Stella will hardly talk to me now. She’s changed. We were in love. I’m still in love. I’d die for her. I know I sound like a schoolboy, but that’s the way I feel. I’ve been lonely a long time, Mr. Durell, and then Stella came along. She worked for Mr. Krame — he’s a photographer, you know, in the studio above my place of business. I used to see her now and then, when she’d step out of the elevator, or when she’d be waiting for it. It took me a long time to get up the courage to speak to her. But finally I did, and we liked each other — anyway, I thought she liked me — and I fell in love. At this late date.” The man smiled wryly, and for a moment he looked more like Art. “I know what they say about the dangerous forties, Mr. Durell, how a man can lose his sense of perspective and act like a damned fool over a woman. But from the first time I saw Stella with her little model’s hatbox, waiting there for the elevator just outside my office door, I knew this was the real thing for me.”

“You’re a bit older than Stella, aren’t you?”

“She’s twenty-six.”

“And wise for her years,” Durell said dryly.

His irony was missed. “Yes, she’s a wonderful woman.”

“And all you know is that she’s willing to sacrifice herself and go back to Europe because her father is missing and she’s being threatened with his welfare unless she agrees to do as she’s told?”

“Yes.”

“Who are the men threatening her?”

“I don’t think even Stella knows.” The man looked up at Durell’s tall figure. Rain hissed and rattled against the casement windows. “You have no idea how well organized they are. That Mr. Blossom, from the FBI — when I told him about it, he just laughed. He said their organization wasn’t possible, or he’d have known about it. He was damned sure of himself. He made some pretty nasty remarks about Stella. I guess he sort of antagonized me, because I didn’t tell him anything more. He wasn’t worried about Stella’s safety, or Alberts. He called me an old fool. He said Stella was a tramp, a tart.”

Durell looked around the calm, cool, immaculate apartment. “Hardly that,” he murmured.

‘“Stella and her father aren’t the only ones.” Greenwald spoke in short, blurting sentences. “Nobody knows how bad things are. With the people who came here for political asylum, like. They thought they’d be safe — and they were, until this ‘come home’ campaign got started. They use every trick in the bag, Mr. Durell. They coax and wheedle and hold up their system like a shining light. They try to get ‘em back like a moth to a flame. And when they go, they disappear — like a moth with burned wings. I met a lot of them, through Albert. There’s a club, a sort of association, they formed. The New American Society. I’ve been there. They’re all scared, sick people now. But it used to be fun. They’d make fine citizens over here. You can’t imagine. But one by one they go back, they disappear as if a curtain had been dropped behind them. As if something swallowed them, Mr. Durell. Stella will be swallowed up.” And nothing can be done about it.”

“Who contacts them? How do they get word to go back?”

Greenwald kneaded his knuckles. “There’s a ring here in New York, and so far I’ve figured there’s about six in it, working with the UN delegations — but not officially, you understand. And you’ll never tie ‘em together. They’re too smart for that.”

“What about this ring?”

Greenwald said bitterly, “They’re Americans.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“They’re doing it for money. So much per head. It’s a racket for them, an easy way to make some sugar, that’s all.”

Durell’s eyes darkened. “Who have you told about this, Frank.”

“I started to tell Mr. Blossom, but he shut me up. He got sore at me and insulted me about Stella and I wouldn’t tell him any more. But I’m on the right track. I may be dumb and inexperienced about these things, but I’ve got somewhere. Four men and two women. That’s who they are. I found out from Johnny Damion, at the New American Society. He told me. Johnny’s in the accordion business — he used to have a little plant in Warsaw. His wife vanished two months ago. Do the cops care? Does the FBI do anything? Hell, they’re not American citizens, they’re only here on sufferance, so nobody thinks it matters.”

Durell said gently, “You’re wrong, Frank, it does matter. We don’t want to lose potentially good citizens. And we don’t want the other side to win any more propaganda hands than we can help. It matters a lot.”

“That’s what you say.”

“That’s the way I feel.”

Greenwald’s eyes were dark and brooding. His mouth was slack. “Art told me about you. He swears by you. He thinks you can do anything. But he also said you’re out of your own pond when you fish in this thing. If I know Blossom, he’ll clobber you if you interfere in his job.”

“I’ll interfere,” Durell said. “I’ll help you.”

“And invite trouble for yourself?”

“I’m used to trouble.”

“Not just from your own people, either. This crew is tough. They’ve killed and, tortured and pulled out all stops. They’ll clobber you first, if Blossom doesn’t get you transferred to the Aleutians.”

Durell touched his small, dark mustache. He was aware that something was being held back behind Frank’s nervousness. The man was impatient to get out of here. He was afraid. When the elevator hummed and stopped at the floor below, he twisted his head and listened.

Then the telephone rang again, muted in the foyer with its soft gold Chinese tea paper. Frank jumped.

“Don’t answer it,” Durell said. “You’re not here.”

“But it might be Stella!”

“Leave it alone,”

The telephone rang again and again. Rain tapped on the windows. A car beeped its horn, very gently and discreetly. The phone rang a fourth time. Frank jumped up, slid under Durell’s restraining arm, and snatched at it.

“Stella?”

Durell stood watching him with troubled eyes. There was a long moment while a voice crackled unintelligibly in the receiver. Whatever was being said, Frank had no answer for it. Durell couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman speaking. He saw the muscles twist and knot on Frank’s jaw, and there was a touch of white at the corners of the man’s mouth.

“Yes,” he said hoarsely. “Yes. I’ll be there.”

There was more crackling on the phone.

“No, I’m alone. Yes, I swear it! Yes, all right. Please, don’t do anything until I get there. I’ll come alone. Of course. Yes.”

Frank Greenwald hung up, turned to face Durell. His eyes were suddenly dangerous. His breathing was ragged, and he pointed a finger. “You stay out of this. I’ve got to go somewhere, meet someone. It’s important. I’m going alone. With some money. If I’m followed, Albert Marni will be killed. And worse things will happen to Stella.”

“Who was that on the phone?”

“Nobody you know.”

“Frank, don’t be a fool.”

“Leave me alone,” Greenwald said. He was sweating suddenly. “I warn you. I know what I’m doing.”

There was a small Chinese ceramic pillow in yellow glaze beside the telephone. Frank Greenwald scooped it up and threw it at Durell with one swift motion. As Durell ducked, the other man spun through the hall doorway and plunged out. The pottery crashed against the wall. Durell yelled and sprang after him. Greenwald hadn’t waited for the elevator. His clattering feet pounded on the stairway to the ground floor. Durell hit the treads fast, cursing the man’s stubborn, frustrating fear. This was no game for amateurs to play.

Greenwald’s desperation lent him unsuspected speed. He was through the narrow lobby, yanking at the street door, before Durell turned on the last landing. Cold rain slashed at his face as he came up the steps to the pavement level. Greenwald was running diagonally across the street. A car stood there, motor idling. A man shouted something from it and Greenwald swerved, looked back at Durell with a white, frightened face, and yanked open the back door of the waiting car. The sedan lurched, pulled away from the curb as Durell started across the street for it. A taxi came around the corner, and he had to duck back.

He stood motionless on the pavement, watching the sedan disappear. The license number registered hard on his mind, a New York plate. There was no point in giving further chase. Greenwald was gone.

Chapter Three

The shadow no longer stood in the doorway across from Stella Marni’s apartment.

The wind was cold, angling down the street from the East River. Traffic flickered and hissed by on Madison Avenue, Durell looked at his watch. It was a little after six. He started walking toward Madison, to get a cab to his hotel. Deirdre had said she might take the train up from Washington to have dinner with him, and he suddenly wanted to see her and look into her eyes and feel the anger purged from him.

He was halfway to the corner when Blossom stepped from a doorway to intercept him. “Durell!”

He halted and looked at the FBI man. Blossom was tall and thin, and his hunter’s face was narrow and bloodless. Durell had run into him here and there, but not too often, since Blossom was attached to his New York district office. There had never been too much coordination between K Section and the FBI, except when their orbits of duty overlapped. Blossom’s face was like the blade of a hatchet, steel-cold.

“Was that Frank Greenwald in the car?” Blossom asked.

“Weren’t you watching?”

“I got the number. What are you mixing into this for, Cajun?”

“My own reasons.”

“You’re out of step. This one is our baby.”

“And if I make it mine?” Durell asked.

“Your throat gets cut.”

“That’s official?”

“Official and personal.”

Durell said, “What’s eating you, Blossom? Why the hate on this job? You warned off Art Greenwald, you made a flap to Senator Hubert, you pulled wires all the way back to Washington, just because Art asked you a few questions. Art is only worried about his brother.”

“He’s got good reason to be worried.”

“Well, what is it? I’d like to help.”

“Stay out of it, Cajun. This one is all mine.” Blossom’s narrow face was hard. His pale eyes glistened in the light from the street lamp. He grinned quickly and turned it off just as quickly. “I hate these people,” he said. He had a high, grating voice. “These bastards who don’t know enough to be grateful for the break we give ‘em by letting them into our country.”

“That’s a hell of an attitude.”

“It’s mine. That’s the way I feel.”

“Your boss know how much you love ‘em?”

“I haven’t made any secret of it.”

Durell said, “Then maybe you don’t belong on this job. These people need help. Not hate. Not bigotry. I’m surprised you stay with it.”

Blossom laughed. “Take it easy with me, boy. I’ve heard about you, and I never went for what I heard. McFee’s fair-haired Cajun lad. You’re tangling with something else when you tangle with me. This one, this bitch, this Stella Marni. You heard what she told the Senator today? Cold-blooded, icy-faced babe. Beautiful, so damned beautiful. I’m going to fix her. She’ll wish she never came here and she’ll wish she never chose to go back.”

Durell felt suddenly wary as he listened to Blossom’s grating voice. He had known good men who went bad, for one reason or another. Usually it was a persona! reason. He sensed the change in Blossom’s voice when he mentioned Stella Marni. Not good. Worry moved in him. Now and then, in spite of careful screening, in spite of everything administrative checks could do, a sour apple got into the barrel. There had been Swayney, in K Section, a traitor, a man beguiled by visions of power and money. For every sour apple, there were hundreds and thousands of hardworking, sincere, devoted men who gave up sleep and careers and even love to pursue their jobs. Durell felt as if he had put his foot into an evil-smelling quagmire when he listened to Blossom’s voice.

Blossom pushed a thin forefinger against Durell’s chest.

“So you stay out of it, Durell. Go back to Washington. Stay in your own backyard. This is a matter of internal security, and State doesn’t have any say in how we handle these cases. So that leaves you out.”

“And if I don’t stay out?”

“I told you. Hang by your thumbs. You get no more from me.”

“Fair warning.” Durell said. He tasted anger in his throat, pushed it down. “Take your hand off my chest.”

“Sure.” Blossom stepped back. “You’ve had your chance. There won’t be any rules next time.”

“Dealer’s choice,” Durell said. “You picked the game.”

He walked to the corner. He could feel Blossom’s strange, pale eyes following him. He didn’t turn around to look back.

Deirdre was waiting for him in the lobby of his midtown hotel. He saw her at once, with that instinctive searching of eye that would always pick her out, no matter what the crowd. She sat alone, long legs crossed, sheathed in nylon, small red rain boots on her patrician feet, a small red felt hat aslant on the raven hair that curled with the rain about her ears. Her smile and the look in her eyes were just for him as he approached. They would always be just for him. He knew this with a warm certainty that made him grateful just to know her.

“Sam, dear.”

He kissed her and said, “Isn’t Art here yet?”

“Was he supposed to join us?”

“He said he would. Never mind. We’ll have dinner right here.”

“I’m sorry,” Deirdre told him. “I must get the next train back. I’m a working woman, you know, and something came up, a story with Congressman Jordan’s wife that I have to cover tonight. I’m really terribly sorry.”

“I thought you might stay over,” he said.

Her blue eyes met his, remembering nights that only the two of them knew, remembering passion and tenderness, joys and fears they had shared. She was beautiful in a way that made the breath catch in his throat, beautiful all over, from lustrous dark hair to her toes. He knew her as intimately as she knew him, and he would never tire of her and never stop wanting her. There was a breathless electricity between them always.

She patted his arm. “Take me to Penn Station. Didn’t you get anywhere today, Sam? You look so angry. Didn’t you see Stella Marni? Didn’t I tell you she was lovely?”

“I haven’t met her yet. I hope to, tonight.”

“In public, I trust,” she said smiling.

“Jealous?”

“Always.”

“You’re the one who asked me to help her. You and Art.”

“I know. But if you’re a scamp and a Lothario, I might as well know it now as later.” She said very earnestly, very quietly: “I love you, Sam.”

He had no need to answer.

“Will you ring General McFee in the morning and tell him I’m taking a few days up here?” he asked. “On my own, of course. There’s going to be some trouble about it, but the General will get the brunt of the squawks, from the White House on down.”

“Is it that serious?” Deirdre asked.

“Worse.”

He did not tell her more about it. She understood how it was with him now, although in the early days when they were together they had sometimes come to the verge of breakup because of the nature of his work, his secrecy, his taciturn refusal to discuss any aspect of his job with her. And she did not press him now.

He ate in a restaurant on Seventh Avenue after leaving Deirdre at the train gate. He felt curiously let down, empty and frustrated. He had hoped for and looked forward to this evening with Deirdre in New York, where few people knew them and they could do as they pleased. For one reason or another, it had been a long time since they had spent the night together, with that candid, sweet freedom of giving and loving that was unique with Deirdre. Restlessness moved in him, and he felt tense and frustrated. He wondered how legitimate Deirdre’s new assignment was. Then he felt guilty for doubting her. But there was no denying that he needed and wanted her.

He phoned his hotel to inquire if Art was there, but Art had not come in and there was no message. He phoned Senator Hubert for an interview, presuming on a brief acquaintance he had made with the man in Washington; but the Senator was not available. He stepped outside the booth and looked up Frank Greenwald’s address in the phone book. He was registered at a small apartment-hotel on Central Park West. Durell dialed the number and let it ring half a dozen times before he gave up. He consulted the business directory for Greenwald’s name, using the “photog supplies whls” after his name as a key. He found Greenwald’s name under “Chemical Wholesalers” at an address on Fourth Avenue, debated for a moment whether to try to phone there, decided it would be futile, and went out for a cab.

It was still raining. The chill November night made the city seem bleak and dark. For once, the cab driver was not garrulous. Durell did not know whether or not he was chasing a will-o’-the wisp; it was possible he might have been better off refusing Art’s plea to mix into this, Frank certainly didn’t want any help.

His mind drifted back to days and nights in New York when he studied law at Yale, his dates with girls here and in Connecticut. He recalled several in particular in those free, wanton days when he had been a dealer in a New Haven joint, earning his tuition at the poker table and using the skills Grandpa Jonathan had taught him as a boy in Bayou Peche Rouge. He pushed those days and nights from his mind. He wanted Deirdre now, tonight, not memories of long ago.

The address he sought was a twelve-story office-and-loft in the lower Twenties. It looked closed and empty except for a dim light in the lobby. The entrance was deserted and the elevator doors were closed, with a worn, printed sign indicating that no service was available after six p.m. It was almost eight o’clock now. If there was a watchman assigned to the building, he was not in sight. Shrugging, Durell consulted the directory and learned that Frank Greenwald’s business quarters occupied the entire twelfth floor. There was a penthouse-studio in the tower above that, rented to a professional photographer named J. Krame. The elevator doors were locked and he had no choice but to walk up.

He did not know why he persisted. It was probably a fool’s errand, since the place was certain to be closed. Yet he felt the tingling of a hunch that had served him in the past, a feeling of something left undone and unchecked, and he could not ignore it. He began the slow climb up the dimly lighted, bare, dirty staircase to the twelfth floor.

There was that haunted, echoing feel to the building that comes after business hours, Durell moved soundlessly, saving his breath as he climbed, and when he reached the small corridor at his goal, his respiration was light and even.

The name painted on the pebbled glass door was faded and peeling. A dim light shone behind the frosted glass. He listened, but there was no sound, nothing but the wind in the stone gargoyle ornaments at the corners of the building. A red light shone over the stairway entrance, and he saw the steel spiral of another stairway going up into the darkness of the lower above. The wind whimpered through an open window lost in the black up there. An arrowed sign pointed to the photographer’s studio, apparently closed at this hour.

Durell tried Frank Greenwald’s door. It was not locked.

He pushed it open two inches, listened, waited. Nothing. But he had the feeling he was not alone.

He pushed the door all the way open, stepped inside quickly, flattened against the wall. He was in a shabby little receptionist’s office, containing a secretary’s desk, filing cabinets, a case of sample bottles of photographic chemicals and gadgets, all dusty and long untouched. A yellow raincoat hung on an old-fashioned clothes tree. He touched it and found it dry and brittle. The dim light he had seen from the hall came from a second glass door beyond the office entrance.

There was an idealized photograph of the building on the wall, showing a conical Gothic tower above the twelfth floor. Under the photograph was Frank Greenwald’s name and the word “owner.” Durell’s mouth tightened. Obviously, Frank was not the small-time, struggling businessman he seemed to be.

Beyond the receptionist’s office was another, cluttered and with a dark, rain-spattered window. Durell wasted no time here. He went beyond and found himself in a vast stockroom, filled with cartons and shelves of camera equipment and a series of wrapping and sorting tables to the rear.

“Frank?” he called softly.

His voice echoed through the still emptiness.

“Frank, are you here?”

There was no answer. Yet the feeling persisted that he was not alone.

He heard it then. A faint thump, a muffled cry. He could not tell where it came from. He stood and listened. He heard the rain, dim traffic sounds far below on the street. Nothing else. He took the short-barreled .38 revolver that he carried in his dark blue suit, held it ready in his hand.

Something clanged and rattled out beyond the entrance door, in the outer hall. He moved fast, a dark shadow sliding through other shadows. Beyond the closed elevators he paused again and stared up at the iron circular stairway going up into the tower. He felt roweled by uneasiness, a queer apprehension. And then he took the spiral stairs two at a time, climbing into the darkness above.

The girl was just starting down from the top landing. She was only a tall shadow, a white face staring down as he ascended. He saw her eyes go big; he heard the sound of terror she made; and then her skirts swirled as she swung and ran back.

“Miss Marni!” he called.

He heard another sound from her, then her high heels clattered up the rest of the steel treads. He was only a few feet behind her when a door slammed. He hit the panel at the top of the steps hard, felt a bolt snap, heard the girl give a muffled scream of fright, and then it burst inward. He stumbled in to darkness, recovered, straightened.

Cloth rustled. Something creaked. He heard her quick, terrified breathing. For a moment there was nothing to see, and then as his eyes adjusted he sensed the faint outer light that came from circular windows high overhead, at least another story above, and an artist’s studio window opposite him, dimly outlined from the night glow of the city. Vague patterns of easels, platforms, photographer’s props became defined.

“It’s all right, Miss Marni,” he called. “You won’t get hurt.”

He heard her breathing. He could not see her.

“Who are you?” she finally asked. Her voice was oddly hard, contradicting her frightened breath. “What do you want?”

He told her his name and mentioned Art and Frank Greenwald. He could see her now. She stood under one of the high porthole windows, opposite him. Her hands were at her sides. Her pale hair looked burnished.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Looking for Frank. And looking for you.”

“You have no business with either of us.”

“I’m making it my business, Miss Marni.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re in trouble. You need help.”

Her voice was cutting. “A good Samaritan?”

“Call it what you like.”

“But I don’t want your help. I don’t need you. Or anyone. Please get out. Is that a gun you have in your hand?”

“Yes,” Durell said.

“I am unarmed,” she said scornfully. “I can’t hurt you.”

“We’ll see.”

He found a light switch and blinked in the glare of baby spots and fluorescent tube fixtures pendent from wires in the ceiling above. The room was fantastic. It was enormous, comprising the entire tower of the building, soaring over two stories high to the pointed ceiling lost in shadows. There was a feeling of silent isolation up here, of windy vastness, of a room designed for a giant’s habitation. There were huge blown-up photo murals on the wall, a model’s dais, cameras, a whole wall of painted flats and props.

“Well?” the girl said. Her voice was a challenge. “Satisfied?”

“Where is Frank?”

“I’m sure I don’t know.”

“Didn’t you call him at your apartment?”

Something retreated in her pale green eyes. “I? No.”

“What are you doing up here?”

“I don’t have to answer your questions.” She had a faint, intriguing accent, but there was precision to her English inflections. Her mouth looked cool, tight at the corners, and there was the trembling of a tiny muscle there and he saw her pulse jump in her long, soft throat. “But I suppose,” she said wearily, “I had better let you know, so you will not bother me. I often come up here to Mr. Krame’s studio. He is in Florida now, so don’t bother trying to check with him. I used to work for him. He gave me my first modeling jobs when I came to America. I met Frank here. His office and business place is downstairs. We used to see each other quite often in the building corridor, and finally he introduced himself to me.”

“Why are you here tonight, if Krame is away in Florida?”

She looked away, toward the tall dark studio window. “I wanted to talk to Frank. I was supposed to meet him downstairs, but no one was there and I just walked up to look around. For old times’ sake, perhaps.”

“Why did you scream just a moment ago?”

“I… I heard someone calling. I didn’t know who it was. I suppose it was you, wasn’t it? But suddenly I felt frightened.”

“And you’re still frightened. Why?”

“Please put away your gun.” she whispered.

He pocketed the .38 revolver.

“Have you a cigarette?” she asked.

“You look as if you could use some brandy.”

“Perhaps. Krame has a liquor cabinet here. In that walnut chest.” She gestured. Her movement was neither fluid nor graceful. “Please. I could use a drink.”

“Get it yourself,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I don’t want you running out on me the way Frank did.”

She didn’t move. One hand was behind her. and she might have been holding something, but Durell wasn’t sure. There was a strange tension in her, a silently screaming hysteria. He could see nothing in the studio that could cause her terror. There was something wrong in the way she stood, in her large green eyes. Even with Deirdre fresh in his mind, be had to concede that Stella Marni was one of the most desirable women he had ever seen. Under her cold facade, he knew this woman to be unusual. There were few men who wouldn’t follow at a flick of her finger. And he wasn’t totally immune himself.

Their eyes clashed, hers reflecting fear and a knowledge of what he had been thinking. Her smile was a tremulous, fragile effort.

“I’m so sorry,” she said quietly. “You must think I am an awful fool. But I’ve had a trying day. I’m sure you know all about me. And I do hope you won’t ask any questions about my decision to go back to Hungary.”

“No, I won’t ask about that,” Durell said. “The choice is yours. Or maybe it isn’t yours, entirely, but you can’t help yourself.” He paused. “I understand your father has disappeared.”

She made no reply.

“And you were to marry Frank Greenwald soon.”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Was Frank lying, or simply misled?”

“He misled himself. I am not in love with Frank. I never have been. He’s been good to me and we are good friends, and he presumed too much, he wanted it to be more and in his mind it became more. I tried to tell him I couldn’t love him.” She paused and bit her lip. Unaccountably, tears starred her green eyes. “I’m so sorry about it all,” she whispered.

“Sorry? You’re driving him crazy with worry over you.”

“I’ve told him not to worry.”

He said suddenly, “What are you holding behind your back?”

She made a small sound. She had not moved toward him from her position near the big studio window. She shook her head. “Nothing.”

“Did something happen here before I came?”

“No, no!” She was a shade too vehement. “Nothing happened.”

“Are you sure Frank isn’t here?”

“I… No. He isn’t. He’s gone.”

“He was here?”

“Oh, please,” she whispered. “Please get me some brandy.”

“Show me your left hand.”

“No.”

He advanced toward her. Her head came up, defiance in her cool jade eyes. And then as he reached for her she suddenly crumpled, all at once. Something clattered from her hidden hand to the floor and he caught her wrist and flung her aside. She stumbled and caught at his arm for support. Her delicate perfume touched him. He ignored it, looked at the object she had dropped.

It was a piece of strap iron, a mechanic’s tool, dark and clotted with blood.

He did not touch it.

He straightened slowly, looking at her. She had changed. Her haughty pride and defiance were gone. In that instant, she looked small and frightened and helpless.

His voice was a lash, striking at her.

“Where is he?”

She gestured vaguely. “Out there. The studio window. On the terrace.”

“Frank?”

“And your friend. His brother Art. They’re both dead.”

Chapter Four

Durell said: “Come out there with me.”

“No. No, I couldn’t.”

“I don’t want you out of my sight.” He opened the big studio window, felt rain slash in at his face. It was dark, wet, and blowing out there, on the dimly outlined terrace. He gestured impatiently. “Go on.”

“M-must I?”

“Yes.”

She squeezed past him as if reluctant to make physical contact with him again, giving him one quick, frightened look from the corner of her eye. She stood still at once, just beyond the threshold. In the light that flowed out of the studio, her face looked rigid, carved in a pattern of revulsion. Durell went by her and ignored the rain that struck at him as he searched the terrace that completely encircled the tower studio. He saw the dim outline of a few deck chairs, a metal table, the grinning beaked shapes of limestone gargoyles leering at the street from their corner pedestals twelve stories above the sidewalk. There was an ornate iron railing that looked flimsy and of little protection at the edge of the drop.

“Where?” he asked the girl.

Stella Marni moved her hand. “At the corner. I was to meet Frank here. Your friend Art — Frank’s brother — was following me from the courthouse, he said.”

“Art spoke to you?”

“I deliberately went into a bar. I knew he’d come in, too. I spoke to him first. He told me who he was. He said he was Frank’s brother and wanted to talk to me. And so I called Frank at my place and told him to come here. And Art insisted on coming here, too. Then an FBI man named Blossom picked me up and questioned me for half an hour — the same old things — and when he let me go I came here and — f-found them. Both of them. Out here in the dark. In the rain I couldn’t — I was sick. And then I heard you…” Her voice was thin, spiraling up to the limits of her control.

Durell spoke more gently. “Take it easy, Stella. Stay where you are.”

“I won’t run away.”

“See to that.”

He moved outward into the rain. Beyond the small grouping of chairs and the metal table with its ragged little umbrella, the terrace seemed bare and unused, slick with running water. The wind was cold, the rain felt like ice pellets against his cheek. He couldn’t see anything. When he looked back, the girl’s figure was outlined against the bright light beyond the studio window; she was standing rigidly, hands behind her against the wall, head turned to watch him. The light outlined the soft curve of her cheek, touched a highlight on her parted lips.

He found the two men just at the corner of the terrace, under the grotesque, batlike wings of the ornamental gargoyle there. They were sprawled against the stone like prisoners who had just been stood up in an execution yard.

Frank Greenwald’s body was nearest to him. Durell turned him over gently. The man’s face was flaccid and empty in death, his baldish head shining oddly in the rain. The back of his skull had been crushed in as if with one brutal giant’s blow. The rain had washed away most of the blood. Durell made a sound deep in his throat, turned, and looked at Art Greenwald.

Art was sprawled on his back. At first glance, it looked as if he, too, had been killed with one crushing blow. It was impossible for both men to have been killed this way, like sheep awaiting the slaughterer’s hammer. But it had happened. He couldn’t conceive of Art standing patiently waiting to be killed.

He felt for a pulse. Art’s wrist was cold. He felt nothing, and probed deeper, willing Art to be alive. Something beat under his fingertip, thin and shallow and fragile. He drew a deep breath, watched Art’s chest move slightly as if in sympathy with his own respiration. Art’s face felt abnormally cool. His eyes were closed. But there was still a seeping of blood from the wound on the back of his head.

He was alive.

Durell stood up. Under the grotesque wings of the gargoyle, Art was dry, sheltered from the rain. He knew better than to attempt to move him alone, without medical advice. He carefully searched for other wounds, but there were none. Just the one crushing blow on the back of the head. Art could remain like this for some time without too much danger to him, until a doctor could be summoned.

Durell turned away, memories in him. He had known Art for a long time. He had visited Art’s apartment, laughed with his wife, Rosalie, a plump, happy woman. Art had stood by him at a time when he had been alone, forced into isolation and suspected of treason on McFee’s orders. There was so much he wanted to repay him. And now it might well be too late. Much too late.

Durell felt badly shaken. He had never felt quite like this before. There had been no real hint of danger in this when they had come up from Washington on the train this morning. An had simply been worried about his older brother’s infatuation for Stella Marni. There had been no hint of ruthless murder looming with shadowed face in the future.

He looked at the tall girl in the terrace doorway. She had not moved. Her face was hidden in the shadows. There was a rigidity in her posture, as if she had to exercise every ounce of control to stand there and watch him. She looked as if she would take flight at any instant.

Durell’s eyes were dark and hard. He blamed her. He hated her. Because of her, Art might die, and Rosalie’s tears would never cease to flow.

He did not know how he could explain this to McFee.

He blamed himself.

Art was an electronics man, not a field agent. He should have seen to it that Art was careful, that nothing happened that Art couldn’t handle.

His face was turned to the girl, like stone.

“Are they both dead?” she whispered.

“Art is still alive. He’ll need a doctor. But you ought to know. You arranged to get them here.”

Her eyes were enormous. She still held her head twisted to one side. “Please. Don’t say that. I didn’t know what would happen.”

“You knew about the danger, though.”

“Yes. Yes, I did. That’s why I tried to keep Frank away from me. I tried to insult him, to make him stop loving me, to make him forget me. I didn’t want him to be hurt.”

“Who did it?” Durell asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Stella, don’t lie to me now. I warn you.”

“But I don’t!”

He took her arm roughly and pushed her back into the studio. The vast ceiling high overhead seemed to oppress him. Shadows seemed to hang there, grinning down at him. The girl stumbled over the threshold, and almost fell, but he made no move to help her. She sank into a chair.

He went to the bar she had indicated before and found a bottle of brandy and some glasses and poured a small amount for her. Their fingers touched when he gave it to her, standing over her like a tall, dark shadow. She looked up quickly, took the brandy, sipped at it, shuddered.

“This fellow Krame, who runs this place,” he said. “You’re sure he’s in Florida?”

“Oh. yes. He has nothing to do with it.”

“Where is he staying in Florida?”

“Some Miami Beach hotel. The Carillon, I think.”

He swallowed his brandy. It did nothing at all for him. The girl’s fingers had felt cold. Looking down at her, he hated her and at the same time was moved by her helpless beauty. She leaned forward a little, elbows on her thighs, her eyes lowered, holding the brandy glass in both hands. Her mouth shook. Two tears trickled down the classic soft curves of her cheeks. He damned himself for feeling attracted to her. He told himself he ought to know better. But he couldn’t help it. When she looked up at him and their eyes met, something happened. It was electric, an indefinable knowing, a drawing together, a mutual surprise and wonder.

To hell with all that, he told himself.

His voice was savage. “I’m going to call the police and an ambulance. Anything you want to tell me before I do?”

“Is Art vour friend?”

“The best.”

“I know how you feel then. Please don’t look at me like that. Please! I didn’t want anybody to be hurt or killed.” She looked down and her soft pale hair fell in a loose screen across one side of her face. Under her green raincoat she wore a gray jersey skirt with a wide, brass-studded black belt and an apple-green sweater with a gold pendant around her neck. There were no rings on her fingers. She whispered, “Must we leave them out there in the rain?”

“Yes. Frank’s beyond help and to move Art without a doctor’s assistance might mean death. They can’t be moved.”

“It seems so cruel.”

“Death is always cruel. Death like that is even worse. It’s unspeakable. But why should you cry about it?”

She shook her head, didn’t answer.

“More brandy?”

“No,” she whispered.

“Nothing to say?”

“I can’t tell you anything.”

“You can’t — or you won’t?”

“I don’t dare.”

“Afraid for your father’s life, too?”

Her head came up sharply this time. Now her eyes hated him. resented him. They searched his face for compassion, and when she found none, her mouth tightened in silence. He wanted to slap her. He wanted to shake the truth out of her. He had never felt such a deep, abiding rage before. He knew it was dangerous, against all his training, against all the cool objectivity he ought to maintain. He felt confused, twisted by a dark sympathy for this girl, twisted between hate and admiration for her. There was no explanation for how he felt.

He looked around for the telephone and found it on a Chinese taboret near the door to the vast studio. He looked down the iron spiral stairwell, but there was no sound anywhere else in the deserted building. Returning, he picked up the phone and dialed the number of Blossom’s district FBI office. His mind grew cool and calculating.

The girl came up with a rush, caught at his arm.

“Don’t, please.”

He hadn’t finished dialing. “Are you afraid?”

“Yes. They’ll kill my papa. Or they’ll do things to him.”

“They?”

“The people who want us all to go back. To come home.” She shuddered. “You know how it is or how it has been lately.”

“You don’t want to go back?”

“No, no.”

“But you told the Senate subcommittee you were quite willing.”

She said wildly, “What else could I do? What choice do I have? In two days it will all be over.”

He put down the phone. “Two days?”

“Yes. That is all.”

“Tell me about it”

She hesitated. Her blonde head was lowered. She stood in an attitude of defeat and he wanted to shake her again and he wanted to put his arm around her and comfort her. He wanted many things all at once, and time was running through his fingers — time for himself and for Art Greenwald.

He said gently: “You’re in trouble. I know about it. But you’ve refused help. Why haven’t you been honest with the Senator and with Blossom?”

“Blossom?” she shivered. “No. Not with him.”

“Has he bothered you?”

“I don’t know what to call it. He is strange. I made him mv enemy.”

“How?”

She wouldn’t look at him. “He came to me almost two weeks ago. At first he was pleasant enough and I began to trust him. But then he — he fell in love with me. I know how that sounds, but it is the simple truth. He was like a man — I don’t know how to describe it — he was like a madman. I never met anyone like that before. I could not control him. And when I — rejected him, he began to hate me. He never let me alone. He was always after me. On the phone, waiting for me on the street, insisting I come to his office to make statements. And always his eyes on me, hungry, waiting, hating, and hoping/’

Durell sighed. He was not surprised by her words. He had suspected it from his first meeting with Blossom. If only he had more time…

As if she sensed his thought, Stella said, “Your friend. He needs a doctor badly.”

“Will you talk to me or to the police?”

“Why must you be so cruel?” she begged. “I do need help. You men are all alike, it’s always been like this, the hounding, so cold-eyed and angry with me when I say no. I can’t…”

“Make up your mind.” he said. “You know a lot. I want to have everything you know. I’m going to smash this group that tortures you people. I won’t rest until I do. Do you understand? Do you believe me?”

She looked up at him and something changed in her despairing green eyes. Something glimmered deep inside her as she searched his face. It was quiet in the huge, strange studio. There was no longer even the familiar sound of rain.

“If I told you, I would risk my father’s life.”

“That’s the chance you take.”

“And otherwise?”

“I call the police. You’ll go to prison. Your father won’t be helped that way, either, will he?”

She covered her eyes for a moment. “I don’t understand. Why was Frank killed? I didn’t do it, whatever else you may think of me. I picked up that piece of iron… I was frightened, I heard you downstairs, and I didn’t know what I was doing. But my fingerprints are on it now. Yes, I see what you mean. If I don’t trust you, I’m finished, one way or the other.”

A thought occurred to him. “Would they want to frame you for murdering Frank Greenwald?”

“No, no. They want me back in Europe. As a propaganda victory.”

“Then they don’t intend to leave Frank’s body here for long. Obviously, they think Art is dead, too. Which means they’ll be coming back.”

Fear touched her. “Soon?”

“Yes, soon. If they’re as efficient as I think they are.” He thought of Art Greenwald, dying outside. He couldn’t wait any longer. He picked up the phone again.

“Wait,” Stella said. “Will you trust me?”

He kept on dialing. “Should I?”

“I’ll tell you everything I can, everything I know. Please. Perhaps you can help. It’s just that — I know Mr. Blossom hates me, even when he says he loves me. He hates all of us who are here as I am. I couldn’t bring myself to feel that he was on my side. Can you understand?”

The telephone was ringing, far away across town.

“I can understand that,” Durell said.

“If you give me a chance — please, listen to me! — if you let me go now I can meet you later, I can — Don’t you see I want help? I want to trust you, Mr. Durell. Art Greenwald said you could do something about all this. Mr. Greenwald “talked about you as if — well, he seemed to think my only chance was to have faith in you.”

Somebody began speaking on the phone. Durell said: “I want Blossom, please. It’s urgent.”

“Just a moment”

“Can I meet you at your hotel? In an hour or two?” Stella Marni asked. She touched his sleeve. Her eyes were a desperate prayer. “Just don’t — don’t turn me over to Mr. Blossom. I’m afraid of him. I know that he — Everything will be lost if you do.”

Durell lowered the phone, covered it with his hand. When he looked at the girl, he suddenly found himself believing her. His mind jumped ahead to what would happen when Blossom took over. There was no avoiding Blossom’s jurisdiction now. And the metropolitan police would be in it, too. The girl would be lost, drowned, destroyed. He knew what would take place inside her. She would retreat into a silence that nothing could break. She would destroy herself under Blossom’s hate and antagonism, rather than yield anything.

He said: “All right. Take my hotel key. Be careful getting out of the building. The people who killed Frank may be coming back at any moment. Don’t let them grab you.”

Hope shone in her eyes. “Thank you,” she whispered.

“Go to my hotel room, lock the door, and stay there. Don’t answer the phone, don’t open the door to anyone but me. Make sure it’s me when someone knocks. I’ll give my name after I rap twice. Don’t talk to anyone or try to see anyone. Understand?”

“Yes, yes. I am grateful.”

“You may not be,” he said grimly. He thought of Art Greenwald and Art’s wife and the rain outside under the gargoyle. “Not after we’ve had our talk. Understand, I’m trusting you with my own neck.”

“I understand.”

He looked at her with cold eyes. “If you cross me, you’ll live to regret it.”

Blossom’s thin voice rattled in the phone. Durell gave the girl the key and asked Blossom, in rapid turn, to send a doctor, an ambulance, and the morgue wagon to the address on Fourth Avenue.

Chapter Five

Durell stood in the hospital corridor and watched two white-coated attendants wheel Art Greenwald out of the operating room. He caught only a glimpse of Art’s face as he was rolled by, and it was unrecognizable. The nurse who had been sent to summon him to the conference in the hospital board room waited impatiently for him, and Durell shrugged her off until the doctor came out of the swinging doors beyond.

“How is he, Doctor?”

“Not very good. We’ve done what we can.”

“What are his chances?”

“Perhaps one in five. By all reason, he should be down in the morgue with his brother right now. But he’s stronger than he looks. We’ll do whatever is possible, Mr. Durell, but he was hit hard. Some of the bone splinters were driven in rather deeply. Has he a family?”

Durell thought of Rosalie’s warm, happy face and the tightly knit family circle into which Art had drawn him and made him feel at home. “Yes, I’ll notify them.”

“Don’t let it go too long.”

“Has he been conscious at all?”

“I’m sorry, no.”

“Any chance he might be able to talk tonight?”

“Hard to tell. There’s deep coma now, of course; he might come out of it briefly, and maybe not. If he does, he probably won’t be rational. Best chance will be if the coma changes to natural sleep. I understand the FBI is keeping a man and a tape recorder at his side.”

“Right,” Durell said.

“Nothing more you can do, then, is there?” The doctor gave him a tight, meaningless smile and walked away.

The nurse said: “Please. Mr. Durell.”

“All right, I’m coming now.”

The hospital corridors were cloaked in a postmidnight hush as he followed the nurse’s white, slithering uniform down to the board room that had been set aside for a conference. Dickinson McFee was there, which did not surprise Durell. Blossom sat with several young FBI agents in a small group at one end of the polished conference table. There were also several uniformed cops, a homicide inspector from Center Street, and Blossom’s second in command, Tom Markey. Markey was a short, balding man in his fifties, slow-spoken, calm, with brown eyes reflecting all the unwanted wisdom gleaned in his profession.

“Sit down, Sam,” Markey said. “We’ve been waiting.”

“Good morning, General.” Durell said to McFee.

Dickinson McFee nodded curtly. He was a man of short stature, dressed in neutral gray, yet the force of his personality dominated any room he occupied. His powers as head of K Section went beyond any known definition, but he wore his responsibilities easily, with a mind that was cool, as retentive as an electronics calculator, and objective in all things. One glance at McFee’s stony face convinced Durell that he was in trouble. Blossom looked smug, his narrow face turned like a wedge toward him. his mouth curved in a smile without meaning, his eyes glittery with a faraway vision of triumph.

Blossom’s thin voice filled the room. “We’re going to have this out right now. The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee works with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and jurisdiction in this matter of the Reds’ repatriation campaign lies entirely within the province of the Attorney General’s department. We are the police agency in this matter, and I trust that fact is clearly understood by all present.”

No one said anything.

“We are particularly interested in Stella Marni.” Blossom went on. His eyes were pale and glittering. “We have worked hard on this case. I have given it all of my personal attention. Do you suppose for one moment that the disappearance, within the past two months, of dozens of Hungarian. Polish, and Bulgarian nationals, not to mention a few handfuls of other expatriates from satellite countries within the Soviet orbit, has gone unnoticed by us? We have our own leads, our own sources of information. We know the sudden rise of disappearances and repatriation are the direct result, not of a loosely organized coercion campaign from abroad, but of the activities of a ring right here in New York. Personal contacts, not threats in the mail from abroad, have been made in all recent cases. It’s a small ring, tightly organized, efficient, deadly, powerfully armed with facts on all the victims. I know the names of some of the members of that ring. But it you ask me for that information. I must regretfully decline to give it to you. We are building a case that might have been ready to present today, if it had not been for Durell’s interference, which led to the homicide he claims to have discovered.”

“Claims?” McFee repeated. “Do you doubt Durell’s statement?”

“His interest in this matter is not official, and therefore it is bound to be distorted by personal motives and emotions. I cannot accept anything Durell has told us. For example, you may wonder how an amateur like Frank Greenwald came close enough to this ring I spoke about to get himself murdered. You may think this implies an amateur has done more than the FBI.” Blossom smiled thinly. “What Greenwald discovered, or thought he had discovered, has been known to me for weeks. We haven’t moved because our case hasn’t been legally air-tight, that is all. And, of course, Greenwald has been intimately connected with these people through his infatuation with Stella Marni. He was accepted by them simply because of his amateur status. He was familiar with that studio in his building, naturally. He came to know Stella Marni when he saw her entering and leaving the place, months ago, when she first started to work as a photographer’s model for the man who leases the studio up there. That studio was not unfamiliar territory to Stella or Frank Greenwald. She visited there often. And in spite of Durell’s statement, we know that she was there last night. But Durell denies this.”

“Do you, Sam?” McFee asked quietly.

Durell said: “I have nothing to discuss with Blossom.”

McFee said: “Just because you don’t get along with Mr. Blossom…”

“He’s the wrong man for this case,” Durell said flatly. “I told him so this afternoon. He might as well be working for the other side, for all the good he accomplishes. He uses terror and hate to get these frightened people to talk. But nothing he can threaten them with can equal the blackmail that induces these people to go back home to death and imprisonment. They need sympathy and understanding, not more threats. They need intelligent help. Blossom gives them bigotry and a kick in the teeth. He doesn’t belong in this.”

Blossom’s face was pale. “I can afford to overlook your remarks. Just answer the question. Was Stella Marni at that studio tonight?”

Durell said nothing.

McFee spoke in a voice like iron. “Sam, your silence implies that you are withholding information the law needs. This isn’t our baby. Senator Hubert called tonight to make that clear, and so did some of the Joint Chiefs. I’ve conferred with the Attorney General. It’s not our business. Whatever you may think of Blossom has no bearing here. You are to co-operate with him by giving him whatever you know and then come back to Washington with me.”

“Is that an order?”

“Yes.”

“Sorry,” Durell said.

A faint rustle went around the conference table. Tom Markey looked dismayed. McFee’s face was inscrutable, his gray eyes resting on Durell’s angry face. Blossom made a small sound of satisfaction.

“So far, Durell, your meddling has got one of our key witnesses, Frank Greenwald, killed. And our primary target, Stella Marni, is missing. We had her covered like a blanket, but thanks to your interference, we’ve lost surveillance since eight o’clock this evening. She knows what we must know in order to break up this thing; she knows names, dates, and places. And finally, your meddling has put one of your own men in a dying condition right here in this hospital. Yet you have nothing to say?”

“Not to you,” Durell said.

“Then make your report to me,” McFee snapped.

“No.” Durell stood up. “Not here and not now.”

“Do you know where this girl is?”

“I can find her.”

“Did she kill Frank Greenwald?”

“I don’t think so.”

“But you are not sure?”

“I can’t prove she is innocent, if that’s what you mean. But I know this: I know she is frightened because her father is missing and she’s afraid to talk to Blossom because Blossom doesn’t give a damn about these political refugees and he hasn’t made any real effort to find Albert Marni. He’s in love with Stella Marni and she won’t have anything to do with him. Because of that, Blossom hates her and is out to smash her.”

Blossom lurched to his feet, his face paper-white. A cord of muscle stood out in his throat, and a pulse beat raggedly in his temple. He started toward Durell and Tom Markey jumped up and said something in a hurried undertone, shooting a glance at Durell, and pushed at Blossom’s chest to force the FBI man down.

“Those are all lies,” Blossom whispered. His breathing was ragged. “Every one of them.”

“Do you deny trying to force your attentions on Stella Marni?”

“Yes. Do you believe her word against mine?”

“Do you deny that you haven’t made any real effort to find her father?”

“I’ve got men on it”

“Turning up anything?”

“That’s our business. We’re not ready to discuss the case at the moment”

McFee stood up. For the first time since Durell had come to know him, he showed anger through his usual objective calm. The anger was directed at Durell. “Sam, this is too much. I don’t understand what’s eating you. Mr. Blossom has been with the FBI for much longer than you have been with us. His record is spotless. His percentage of case convictions stands higher than that of any other man in his district. There has never been the slightest criticism of his methods or his personal habits. Your remarks are too serious to be dismissed lightly.” McFee swung to Blossom. “I apologize for Durell. Do you have any objections if I take him with me back to Washington?”

Blossom looked down at his hands, flat on the table, and shook his head. “We want the information he possesses. He is a material witness to the murder tonight He’s also made serious charges against me, impugning my integrity in this case. I want that cleared up. An apology from you, General, is hardly enough.”

Tom Markey cleared his throat. “I think, gentlemen, we have all gone overboard with our tempers. I have known Sam Durell for many years. I realize he is upset because his friend is seriously injured, perhaps dying. I’m sure he will give us everything he can to help settle the matter when he has had time to think it over.”

“Don’t apologize for me, Tom,” Durell said. His anger, he knew, was now suicidal. He knew that the best thing to do was to shut up, keep quiet, let it all ride for now. But he couldn’t help himself. He had the greatest respect for the FBI and the unselfish men who devoted their lives to internal security. He knew that Blossom was one exception in thousands. He knew that, in a way, Stella Marni had confused his thinking as much as she had twisted Blossom’s perspective in the case. There was no reason why he should believe Stella against Blossom. Yet he did. He could not help himself. Every ounce of rational thinking and training urged him to co-operate, to apologize, to work with these men and do what he could, to turn in Stella Marni and go back to Washington with McFee and forget it. But it was impossible. He knew the dangers of a wild crusade for vengeance, but this went beyond a desire to satisfy himself personally about Art, if Art should die.

It was the girl.

He could see her, sense her, and feel her, and hear again the desperation in her words, whispering to him. There was a feeling in him of something left undone, of something still to be explored and settled between himself and Stella Marni. It had been something beyond her despair and terror and beauty, something he could not explain. How can you explain what makes you walk by a hundred women and suddenly feel yourself come alive at a single meeting of the eye, at the glimpse of a proud face, a knowledge of the way one walked, alive with pulses singing and a feeling of being incomplete suddenly, unless you could be with this particular one, this one out of all the hundreds?

He felt as if Stella Marni had somehow possessed him.

And knowing this, he suddenly felt less bitter toward Blossom.

The conference went on for twenty more minutes. Durell tried to be more amenable. But what he had learned from Stella and the few leads he intended to follow he kept to himself. The tensions at the board table relaxed slightly, and Dickinson McFee’s quiet manner contributed to it as much as Durell’s change of attitude. Blossom was not in the least satisfied; neither was Tom Markey, his second in command. There was a telephone call from Senator Hubert at the end of all the talk, and Blossom listened and replied perfunctorily while McFee seemed to be thinking of something else, and then Blossom pushed the phone away and stood up.

“That’s all for now, gentlemen. Durell, you’re to go back to Washington with the General and stay out of it. Understood?”

Durell nodded.

“Well need a statement from you, of course,” Blossom was cool and businesslike now. “That will be enough, for the present, provided you don’t meddle in this any further.”

McFee stood up. “I’ll take Durell with me.”

They left the hospital building a few minutes later. It had stopped raining, and the East Side streets looked washed and clean in the early-morning hours. Durell lit a cigarette gratefully and they walked a little way in silence. The wind was cold. There wasn’t much traffic. A few cabs cruised by, but McFee made no effort to hail one.

“Well, Sam,” McFee said. “You pulled out all the stops on that one.”

“I suppose I did.”

“Are you right about Blossom?”

“I’m willing to bet on it.”

“I respect your judgment as a gambler, Cajun. As a matter of fact, I talked in Washington about Blossom — pretty touchy, considering he’s in another department and I could be considered impertinent — and I also discussed him with Tom Markey. Markey is intensely loyal to Blossom, but both sources are disturbed. Blossom hasn’t been himself. Not since he met Stella Marni. All at once, according to Markey, Blossom changed. He’s kept most of the data in this case to himself: even Markey is in the dark about a lot of it. Blossom knows his business. His past record puts him pretty high in his department. But even the best of us has a weak spot, an Achilles’ heel, Sam. In Blossom’s case, it might be his years of confirmed bachelorhood suddenly meeting up with an irrational infatuation for the Marni girl. Anyway, Markey is completely at a loss over the sudden change he sees in Blossom.”

Durell dragged silently at his cigarette.

“Still,” McFee went on, “this isn’t officially our baby. You went at it the wrong way, Sam. even though I was going to send you up here to look into it, in any case. We’ve got the word from State. It may be a matter for the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, but these political refugees aren’t merely a domestic problem. Every man or woman who returns to his homeland is a propaganda victory for the other side. State is alarmed about the growing numbers of those turning away from us. Something has to be done about it. Of course, all this is off the record.”

Durell nodded.

“We know it isn’t simply love of homeland that makes these people return. Up until recently, it’s been the usual business of anonymous letters asking them to come home and mentioning relatives and friends in such a way that there is left no doubt that refusal means death and torture for those still behind the Iron Curtain. So they go home. But it’s never been on such a wholesale scale as it is lately.”

Durell was impatient to check at his hotel for Stella Marni. “Blossom said something about a ring operating right here in New York.”

“Yes,” McFee said thinly. “I’ve seen his reports. He did excellent work until he went haywire over the Marni woman. There’s an organized ring operating in town that uses underworld, gangster methods beyond anything we ever ran into before. Blossom knows a lot more about it than he’s put into his reports, I suspect. This ring is made up of Americans, Sam. They do it for money, I’m ashamed to say. They use these unfortunate people as merchandise in order to make a dishonest buck. I hate it and I hate them and I want them smashed.”

“You ordered me off the case,” Durell said.

“Officially, yes. But Art Greenwald is badly hurt. I like to take care of my own, and you feel the same way. I don’t have to question that. I’d like some satisfaction for what happened to Art, the same as you.”

Durell stopped walking and flicked his cigarette into the street. His face was hard. “Let’s not have any double talk between us, General. What do you want me to do?”

“Officially, you are being reprimanded and sent back to work in your office in K Section. The thing is forgotten and done with as far as we are concerned. Sidonie Osbourne will cover for you in Washington. So will I, up to a point You’re being reprimanded for insubordination and failure to obey discipline.” McFee sighed. He looked small and gray and tired. “It never ends, does it? This world we live in…” He paused. “How far did you get with Stella Marni? Was she at that studio?”

“Yes,” Durell said. “And I made a beginning.”

“Know where she is now?”

“Yes.”

“Going to see her soon?”

“As soon as you walk in the other direction, General.”

“Then I won’t delay you. I’ll send Tony Isotti up to help, if you want him. He’s just back from Budapest. Do you want him?”

Durell nodded. “All right.”

“Up here, you’re on your own, Sam. There will be a hell of a flap if it gets out that you have State’s private blessing on this thing. We’ve known about Blossom’s attitude for some time. Sour apple, as you would say. It happens. But if anything goes wrong for you, it’s your throat. Any objections?” No.”

The small gray man whistled for a cab, and one promptly appeared for him. It never failed. “Good luck then. Sam. Don’t communicate with me. I don’t want to know anything about this mess until it’s cleaned up. If you get into trouble, it’s your neck.”

“Will you see Rosalie Greenwald for me?” Durell asked.

“Of course. Good-by, Sam.”

McFee got into the waiting cab. Durell lit another cigarette and watched the taxi vanish around the corner, beading toward Queens and La Guardia Airport. The street was empty, but he turned his head sharply and considered the shadows behind him. He felt very much alone. It was not an unusual feeling, but he never liked it, and it had never happened quite like this before. The empty street felt alien and dangerous.

He walked two blocks before he found another cab. He was not followed. No one was behind him. As he rode uptown, he gave the driver some devious directions and then checked behind him again. Still nothing. Yet he had the feeling that there were eyes upon him.

He had told Stella Marni to wait in his room and that he would be along within an hour. But more than four hours had passed, and uneasiness possessed him. Perhaps he had been too trusting. Perhaps the girl had tricked him and made as big a fool of him as she had of Harry Blossom.

He rode up in the elevator to his floor and waited impatiently for the operator to take the car down, and then examined the hushed, dim hallway. There was nothing to see. Nobody was in sight.

He rapped twice on his door and spoke his name.

There was no answer.

“Stella?”

He tried the door. It wasn’t locked. Even before he pushed it open and walked in to snap on the light, he knew what to expect.

Stella Marni was not there.

Chapter Six

He stood in the center of his hotel room, frowning. He had come up from Washington with only a small suitcase, and he had left the leather bag on the luggage rack. It was now on the bed, thrown open, his few belongings scattered with a reckless and contemptuous hand. Nothing else in the impersonally furnished room had been disturbed. He started to light a cigarette, then paused, aware of a dim trace of Stella Marni’s perfume. So she had been here. It was hot in the room, and the steam radiator hissed, and he was perspiring.

His position was precarious if Stella Marni had crossed him. He had staked too much on her trust in him, and on the information he had hoped to glean from her.

He picked up the phone and called the room clerk and asked if there had been any messages left for him. There were none. The clerk had not seen Stella Marni. But then the clerk’s voice changed. There had been a visitor for Mr. Durell, from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A Mr. Blossom, who had gone up to wait in Durell’s room.

“What time was that?” Durell asked.

“Just twenty minutes ago, sir. Isn’t he there now?”

Durell hung up.

Stella had been here; he was more conscious than ever of her perfume. And Harry Blossom had hurried straight here from the conference, while he had talked with General McFee. Was Blossom looking for him? Or for Stella? Blossom couldn’t have known for certain that Stella was hiding here, but it might have been a lucky, vindictive guess. Blossom would enjoy pinning a charge like hiding a material witness to a murder — or a murder suspect — on him.

Stella and Blossom had been here in this room. And both were gone. Where? Durell drew his thumbnail across his narrow black mustache. He felt caught between two fires. He had taken a long chance in trusting that the girl would keep her promise to him. and he had lost that chance. But it might not have been Stella Marni’s fault. Blossom could have ordered her away with him.

He looked at his bag on the bed and his scattered clothes, and annoyance worked in him. pushing him back to the telephone again. He called the number of the FBI district office downtown and when he was connected he asked for Blossom. Special Agent Blossom had not checked in. He asked for Tom Markey next, and a moment later the slow, sober voice of the bald and middle-aged man replied.

“That you. Sara?”

“Yes.” Durell’s eyes were dark, without expression, as if he were sitting at a round green poker table in a game not between friends. “I’ve been trying to reach Blossom. I think I’ve got something for him and I’d like to see him. Top priority, Tom.”

“Don’t steam me. Sam. I saw how you two rubbed each other. Am I stupid? I know you too well to think you’ve had a change of heart. So what’s the pitch?”

“No pitch. I just want to see him.”

“To swap more insults? Listen, Cajun, you stay away from Blossom. He can be dangerous. He’s as good in his own way as you are in yours. I don’t want to see you two tangling with each other. Why don’t you go back to Washington with McFee?”

Durell smiled into the phone with the corners of his mouth. His eyes were still without expression. “Level with me, Tom. What’s the matter with Blossom? I know his record as well as he knows mine. It’s a damned fine one. But he gets a queer light in him when he talks about Stella Marni.”

“Ah. hell. Forget it.”

“Is he gone on her?”

“I guess so,” Markey admitted reluctantly. There’s nothing at all wrong with Harry Blossom, nothing. He’s got a thing on with this girl, is all. I jerked him about it, at first, but with him it isn’t a laughing matter. He’s got a wire loose about her, but hell straighten out. Especially if you don’t needle him too much about her and don’t tangle with him right now.”

“I have to see him,” Durell persisted. “Where can I reach him?” Markey said, “You’re supposed to go back to D.C., Sam.”

“Later. After I’ve talked with Blossom.”

“You sound sore about something.”’

“I am. He tore my room apart here at the Carlton.”

“Jesus, no.” Markey was shocked. “Sure it was Harry?”

“He left his name with the desk clerk, and he didn’t do that by accident. He wanted me to know it was he who searched my bag. Why?”

“He doesn’t like you.”

“Because I pushed him a little?”

“I told you, he wants Stella Marni all for himself. So you pushed him and he’s sore at you. You don’t want to see him right now, Sam.”

“Where does he live?”

“Sam, look…”

“I can find out easily enough,” Durell said. “It might take me all of ten minutes. I thought it might be simpler to ask a friend. Good night. Tom.”

“Now, wait, Sam.”

“Where does Blossom live?”

Durell heard Markey’s deep, resigned sigh. “Out to hell and gone in Brooklyn. But it’s not the Brooklyn you’re thinking of. This is down by the shore. He’s got a house there — used to be his mother’s — and he’s always lived there, as far as I know. Hard by the marshes. I’ve been out there a few times — good boating and fishing. If you know where and how. Conley Road, Number Seven-eighty-six. But I tell you it’s no good, Sam. He won’t talk to you. He won’t give you the time of day. This one is his baby and he’s wrapping it up himself.”

“How come you fellows put up with a prima donna?” Durell asked.

“Harry is all right. Hell be fine, once he gets this girl off his brain. Forget it. Sam. as a favor to me.”

“Thanks.” Durell said. “Say hello to Bunky for me.”

He hung up.

He knew that Markey was right. Forget it, steer clear of Blossom, stick to the other leads. Frank Greenwald had mentioned something called the New American Society. Look into it. And the coercion ring — two women, four men, Frank had said. Start digging under the rocks and stones. Check on that Krame fellow who has the studio. Trace back Frank’s moves. Find old Albert Marni.

He wanted to get to Stella.

He told himself that maybe this thing wasnt for him, and he could call McFee right now and get off it and then call Deirdre and have her wait up for him in her house on the Chesapeake and he could be there in three hours for coffee and sit with her by a fire in the fireplace when the sun came up this morning over the bay, with all the solitude and intimacy of her place just for the two of them.

He thought of Stella, remembered the crazy, hot look in Blossom’s eyes when her name was mentioned, and something chilled in him and he felt fear for her, because Blossom hadn’t taken her back to the district office for questioning. He had taken her someplace else. A private place. And Stella would have had to go along, like it or not, until it was too late when she discovered what Blossom might have had in mind…

Durell quit his hotel room abruptly. There was an urgency in him now. He was sure Stella Marni had some answers for him. And he wanted to know whether she had tricked him deliberately, or if Blossom had forced her away. He believed it to be the latter, since Stella had actually gone to his hotel room; she wouldn’t have gone there if she hadn’t planned to keep her promise to talk to him in exchange for her escape from the studio and the murder investigation. That time had been one of tremendous stress for her, and he wanted to see her against another background, one of quiet safety. She was an enigma, with her cool, intelligent eyes and the poise of a frightened goddess ready for flight. He wanted to see her again to satisfy himself personally about her, almost as much as for any other reason he could think of.

It took twenty minutes for the desk clerk to rent a car for him and have it delivered. Durell bought a large street map, studied it while he waited, discovered the shortest route to Conley Road, and drove there as fast as traffic permitted.

At two o’clock in the morning, the road was a dim ribbon snaking out of the monotony of lower Brooklyn toward the shore. The streets were dark, cold, and wet. When the houses thinned out and the shimmering water appeared here and there like tentative pseudopods thrusting into the solidity of land, Durell drove the rented Chevy slower, checking house numbers. There was a stretch of three vacant blocks where no houses were in evidence; then two or three appeared; then none again. He thought he had gone too far when he saw the house ahead and knew at once that this was his objective.

It was big and old, high and arrogant, stained gray by wind and weather, but well kept. The road came to a dead end just beyond it. There was a small channel behind the house, a dim tongue of water that reached back into a vast area of grassy marsh and finally merged with the winter sea. The air was cold and raw, smelling of salt. There were no lights in the house as he drove by and parked at the barrier at the end of the road.

Durell turned up his coat collar as he walked back. There was a combination garage and boathouse behind the Victorian house, and he trudged across the lawn toward it, shivering in the raw November wind that swept in from the sea. He saw now that there was at least one lighted window in the house, where a slit of yellow glimmered from under a drawn blind on the north side. The boathouse door was open, yawning darkly. Blossom’s car was there, between a skiff mounted on sawhorses and a small cabin cruiser up on a wheeled trailer. The car radiator was still warm. Turning, Durell walked back to the front porch of the house, found an old-fashioned iron bellpull in the door and yanked on it.

The faint murmuring of a man’s voice inside stopped abruptly.

He rang again.

Someone started to cry out and there came the sharp sound of a blow, then silence again; and then footsteps approached as Durell considered trying to break the door lock. The double-leafed, old-fashioned door with frosted-glass panes was suddenly yanked inward. Light streamed around Harry Blossom’s gaunt figure. He was in his shirt sleeves; his long yellow hair looped down over his forehead, and there was no surprise on his thin, bony face.

“Come in, Durell.” He grinned suddenly. “I’ve been expecting you.”

“You might have left a note and saved my time,” Durell said.

“I knew you’d be here. Come in. It’s cold out.”

Durell moved inside with a feeling of wariness. Blossom’s regulation gun was in an underarm holster, and the agent looked capable of using it despite his words and manner. He looked curiously around the wide central hallway. Blossom was a bachelor, and the place was kept as tidy and as meticulously as if his mother were still alive. There was a smell of mildew in the house, but the place was free of dust, comfortably furnished in the Victorian style his parents had chosen.

“Is Stella Marni here?” Durell asked.

“Straight ahead. Second door to your left.”

Durell looked at Blossom’s pale yellow eyes. The man breathed heavily, as if he had just finished a sudden sprint. “Go on,” Blossom said. “She’s all right. You don’t think I’d be fool enough to hurt her, do you?”

The room Durell entered was furnished as a small sitting room, with Queen Anne chairs, a Victorian love seat, a small Sarouk rug, heavy plush draperies on the tall windows. Sight and sound of the marsh wilderness outside were abruptly cut off. A small fire burned in a fireplace with an arched marble mantel above it. There was a smell of fear in the room.

“Hello, Stella,” he said quietly.

She sat stiffly in one of the Queen Anne chairs near the draped windows. Her hair had ruddy glints, stolen from the crackling fire. She looked briefly at him and then at Blossom and then considered her hands, folded in her lap. There was a mark on her left cheek, as if Blossom had slapped her. Durell had no doubt that he had. Yet he was conscious of deep relief at finding her here, seeing she was safe, with nothing drastic having happened to her. He heard a small gilt and cloisonne clock ticking busily on the mantel in its mounting between two bronze cupids. It was two-thirty in the morning and there were faint violet shadows under the girl’s eyes. Her green skirt and sweater modeled her long, perfect figure in classic lines as she sat on the chair.

“Go on, Stella,” Blossom urged. “Say hello to your friend.”

“I shouldn’t have believed you,” she said to Durell “You tricked me. You’re all — alike, aren’t you?”

“Tricked you?”

“You asked me to wait in your room so Blossom could pick me up,” she said.

“That isn’t true.”

“He said he wanted to ask a few more questions,” she went on in a flat, expressionless voice. Her fingers, trembling slightly, betrayed her. “I’ve grown accustomed to his persecution. He said he had a lead as to where my father might be, and that’s why I went with him, even when we didn’t go downtown to the office where he questioned me before, even when we drove all the way out here. He gave me hope. I actually began to believe he was taking me to my father. But we came here instead.”

“Are you all right?” Durell asked. “You’re not hurt?”

She shook her head. “How could I be all right? I trusted you. I thought at last — foolishly — that someone was really going to help me.”

Durell swung back to Blossom. “If she’s under arrest, she doesn’t belong here. What are you up to, Harry?”

“My own game. And I told you to stay out of it.”

“You dealt the hand and I’m in. If you think Miss Marni had anything to do with the Greenwald murder, you should have taken her downtown, not here.”

“I have my own methods.” Blossom was undisturbed. “Sit down, Sam. I have no beef with you any more. I’ve got you boxed now, you know. You’re in trouble. I warned you. You can’t say I didn’t give you a chance to step aside, but no, you had to keep meddling. Stella was at that studio tonight. I’m not a fool, I know she was there. Either she killed Frank Greenwald herself or she knows who did it.”

“Do you think she could slug two grown men, killing one and almost killing the other?” Durell asked.

“She could, if they trusted her.”

“Art didn’t trust her,” Durell pointed out.

“Well, she was there. She hasn’t admitted it yet, but she will. When she does, then we go downtown. She’s not leaving this country. She’s going to be tried for murder and conspiracy.” Blossom spoke with glistening eyes, as if the girl weren’t there. “We’re going to make a deal, Sam, because you’re not a fool, either. You know what you’ve done, getting this girl out of the studio, sending her to hide out in your hotel room so you could have her to yourself. But I jumped ahead of you, eh? I knew it was just the kind of thing you might try to do, and I was right.” Blossom’s thin voice rasped and he took the gun from his holster and held it negligently. “I thought I asked you to sit down. Twice.”

“Don’t throw a gun on me,” Durell said.

“Then do as I say. I mean it You’re in no position to argue. You could be held on this, too — concealing a murder suspect, withholding vital evidence, misleading the law. You’re out in left field, boy. You’re on your own, and you’re alone and in my hands.”

Durell ignored the gun and walked across the room to Stella Marni. Her hands were twisted tightly together in her lap. He drew them gently apart. “Come on, get up. Were leaving here. Blossom has no right to detain you in his own house like this. He’s in trouble himself.”

The girl looked up, her green eyes enormous. Something glimmered in their wide depths, hope rising through despair at what she had thought was his betrayal of her. Her lips parted softly and she stood up fluidly, gracefully, looking beyond Durell to Blossom.

“Hold it,” Blossom said.

His gun was pointed at them. His thin face shone with sweat. His eyes were crazy. “This girl is an important witness. She’s my witness, and she stays here until she tells me the truth.”

“Do you like her company?” Durell asked quietly.

“Maybe I do. She’s a bitch, but maybe I like bitches. She thinks I’m dirt. She talks about me as if I was a member of her own damned secret police. She hates my guts, but I still like to have her around.” Blossom’s grin was more of a grimace. “So move away from her, Sam, or I’ll have to kill you.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Try me. Move~”

The girl trembled. “Please… don’t do anything foolish. Blossom cannot hurt me any more. There isn’t anything I can tell him. I haven’t said anything at all to him. Don’t get into trouble because of me.”

Blossom said contemptuously, “Durell is already in trouble over you, baby. Like me. I don’t know what it is…” He paused and drew a deep breath. “Last chance, Sam. You’re duck soup. You can’t argue about it You went off the deep end, hiding her. and now you’re dead meat.”

“All right,” Durell said. He moved away from the girl toward the fireplace, toward Blossom, his tall figure resigned until, with a movement too fast for Blossom to check, he suddenly struck for the gun. His hand caught it, twisted it, forced the muzzle down. It went off with a shattering blast in the small, plushy room. The girl made a small screaming sound. Blossom sucked air, tried to wrench the gun up again. His eyes flicked to the girl, and there was nothing rational in his pale, flaring gaze. Durell drove his right band into the man’s hard stomach, twisted the gun lower. Blossom was like a tough, triple-ply strand of cable. He bent but he did not break. He tramped on Durell’s foot with his heel, and Durell smashed at his face, shouldered him back off balance. Blossom’s heel caught on an ornate hassock and he stumbled back, still clinging to the gun, and pulled Durell with him when he fell to the floor.

Blossom’s right arm and gun hand were pinned flat to the Sarouk rug by Durell’s weight. The gun crashed. And crashed again. Blossom was triggering it deliberately, heedless of where the slugs went. Glass broke across the room, the shards tinkling on a marble-topped table. Blossom’s breath hissed. His face was white, lips skinned back, teeth glistening. He might have been grinning.

“This is an order,” he gasped. “My case, my right — stop resisting — or I’ll make — charges.”

Durell suddenly snapped Blossom’s wrist back and the gun shot from Blossom’s fingers. At the same moment, Blossom succeeded in flexing a knee and kicking Durell across the room. He caught at the marble-topped table, his eyes seeking the gun, and he rolled toward it. Blossom came on him in a wild leap, arms outstretched. He was wide open for that instant. Durell checked his jump for the gun, spun, and swung hard. Blossom’s momentum doubled the impact of the blow, and he dropped as if he had been poleaxed.

Durell straightened, breathing deeply. Blossom did not move. He walked to the table, aware of the girl pressed against the nearby wall, her eyes big with fear, and picked up the gun. Then he returned to Blossom and rolled him over so his face was not pressed into the rug. No serious damage had been done. The house was isolated, and the shots Blossom had fired hadn’t alarmed anyone, if indeed they had been heard at all outside.

The fire on the marble hearth crackled quietly. It made copper highlights in Stella Marni’s blonde hair, glistened in the shine of her eyes, made her parted lips look wet and soft.

“Is he all right?” she whispered.

“He’ll come to in about ten minutes.”

“He will be wild. He will never forgive you. Hell make you pay and pay. You will lose your job. Why did you do it?” “

“I want to talk to you,” Durell said.

“Yes. Oh. yes. But not here.”

“Let’s go, then,” he said.

He found her coat hanging on a walnut clothes tree in the center hallway and held it for her when she shrugged into it. She was shivering. The marks on her face where Blossom had slapped her were more clearly defined. He looked back at Blossom on the floor of the little sitting room. Blossom’s fingers were scratching feebly at the silky rug. He emptied Blossom’s gun, pocketing the cartridges, and left the gun on a small table in the hallway before he followed the girl outside.

Chapter Seven

He drove east in the rented car, skirting a wide expanse of desolate salt-water marsh. A few lights from developments to his left winked feebly in the early-morning gloom, but they were more than a mile away, beyond the swamp and slough that had so far discouraged even the swarming, antlike contractors who had checkered this area of the island with their monstrous rows of impersonal, identical, assembly-line houses.

He was acutely conscious of the girl huddled on the seat beside him. He sensed her delicate perfume, the quiet perfection of her face and body, and he understood Blossom a little better.

“Where are we going now?” she asked in a small voice.

“I don’t know yet.”

“You took a terrible risk for me, didn’t you? After all, Blossom is an important law officer. I understand you are, too, but his orders are to be obeyed. Will you be in trouble now, because of me?”

“Yes,” he said. “Some trouble. A barrel of it.”

“I’m sorry. I mean, I know what trouble is,” she said quietly, “and I keep thinking about poor Frank, and why he died. Because he was in love with me, I mean.” Her Budapest accent was just a lacing of huskiness in her carefully chosen words. “I don’t want to bring unhappiness to anyone. That is why I must go back home. If I stay here against their orders, others will suffer, too. I thought it would be best and simplest if I just said I wanted to go home, when the Senator asked me. But it doesn’t work out that way, and now I do not know what to do. I feel as if you have taken matters out of my hands.”

“Yes.”

“Will Blossom set the police after you?” she asked.

Durell considered it for a moment. “I don’t think so. He stepped out of bounds himself, taking you to his own house instead of to the office, as he should have done. Of course, he can claim reasons for it, but he might find his explanation embarrassing. However, he might hunt for us on his own account. He’s sure to do that.”

She shivered. “He frightens me. I have never met such a man as he. In some ways, Mr. Durell, he is a little like you. He is so efficient. I mean, he knows precisely what he is doing, and he does not waste a single word or movement. But the way he feels about me, it is as if I were unclean, as if I should bathe every time he touches me. And he always touches me. She paused. “I suppose X explain all this very badly.”

“Has he ever said he’s in love with you?”

“Yes, many times. He offers to take care of all my problems, if I… if I should marry him.”

“Marry?”

She turned her pale face toward Durell; her smile was rueful. “Is that so incredible? Other men have asked me, before.”

“Perhaps too many men. Frank Greenwald, Harry Blossom — you have a talent for turning men’s heads, Stella, and changing them.”

He had meant to be blunt, but her reaction startled him. She turned very pale: she drew a deep breath, started to speak, clasped her hands before her, and shook her head. “You are unkind,” she whispered. “But it is true, I suppose. I cannot help it. It is — a long story. Some day I may tell it to you, but it is not a — not a nice story, at all. I am ashamed of it. I don’t want to attract men as I do. It is wrong, but…”

She was silent. Durell waited a moment, wondering why she had become so disturbed, and then he said, “It’s just that I don’t think Harry Blossom had any intention of going as far as marriage with you, Stella.”

“I know. It is part of his effort to convince me that I should tell him everything I know. He says that if I marry him I will automatically become an American citizen and nobody can harm me. But that would not help my father, would it? They will kill him, or take him back to Budapest, which would be worse than death for him.”

“You wouldn’t automatically become an American citizen. You’d have to go through the same procedure as anybody else. And even then, as you say. it wouldn’t help yow father. Haven’t you any idea where he is?”

“None. He has — vanished.”

“But you’re sure they’re holding him to make you do as they ask?”

“There is no other reason he would disappear.”

“Who has contacted you about it?”

“Only a voice on the telephone. A man. And two letters, unsigned. When Papa disappeared, the telephone call came first, then a letter the next morning, then another telephone call telling me what to say to Senator Hubert’s committee.”

“You’ve never actually seen any of these people, Stella?”

“No.”

Durell kept watching the rear-vision mirror. The road was empty and black behind them. Nobody followed. His headlights fanned out over bleak, cold marshland, and then a white-painted guard rail curved off into the darkness of the sea to his right and the tires rumbled hollowly over a small wooden bridge that spanned a salt-water creek. The road became a sandy path, and a long row of empty, ramshackle summer cottages flicked by under the glare of his headlights. They were on a small sand spit used as a summer colony, deserted now in this November weather. The road dwindled and came to an end. There was nothing ahead but a beach and the curling, cold combers of the Atlantic beyond.

Durell braked, then backed the car until he could turn around, and drove slowly back the way they had come. There were perhaps a dozen small summer shacks in all, standing on wooden pilings above the grass-grown beach. Most of the windows were boarded or shuttered against the winter gales, and probably none of them would be visited again for months to come, until the spring. He pulled the car off the sand road and jounced to a halt behind a green-painted cottage that had a chimney, indicating a fireplace inside.

Stella looked at him questioningly. “Why do you stop here? There is not a soul for miles.”

He smiled reassurance. “You’re not afraid of me, are you?”

“No, I… no, I trust you.”

“Harry Blossom will turn the town inside out trying to find us. We won’t last long if we go back to Manhattan. I know. You can’t hide forever. But one of these cottages ought to gain some breathing time for us, and you’ll be safe here.”

Her face went oddly blank and still for a moment. Then she spoke in protest. “But I cannot hide. I don’t dare. My father… If they think I have disappeared deliberately, they will have no mercy. They will believe I have betrayed them — double-crossed them, isn’t that the way you describe it? And they will kill him.”

“I’m getting tired of they’ and ‘them,’” Durell said. “I wish you would trust me, Stella.”

Her voice echoed despair. “I do not know what to do. You are alone, too, you have cut yourself off from any hope of co-operation from the police. What can you do, all alone? Harry Blossom will make things very difficult for you. You will have to answer all kinds of questions about the way you got me out of Mr. Krame’s studio and helped me avoid answering police questions.” She sat up straighter, breathing at a slightly faster pace. “Could you somehow find my father? In the next forty-eight hours?”

“I’m going to try,” Durell told her simply.

“If you could, then I would be free. I would not have to go back home…”

“That’s the general idea,” Durell said. “But first things first. You need sleep, and so do I. It’s three o’clock now, and there’s nothing we can do except to stay out of Blossom’s hands for the present. You have to trust me, Stella,” he said again.

She nodded slowly. “I do. I want to. Yes, I do.”

He got out of the car. The wind coming off the beach was cold and cutting, but the rain had stopped and beyond the shredding, low-scudding clouds were a few glimmering stars. The breakers crashed and thundered nearby as he walked through knee-high grass to survey the cottage he had chosen. Every window was boarded up, but the back door was secured only by a simple ward lock. Stella followed him, hugging herself against the icy, salt wind. He borrowed a pin from her, tinkered with the lock, and got it open in less than a minute.

“In you go. I’ll get some driftwood for a fire,” Durell said. “No one will ever know the difference out here.”

There was no electricity on the little sand pit, but there were oil lamps in every room and a kerosene stove in the big kitchen. The interior of the cottage smelled mildewed and damp, but it was comfortably furnished with simple maple furniture. Sand had blown in under the front door and formed a long tongue reaching toward the stone fireplace in the living room. There were two bedrooms with red linoleum floors and double beds. Stella took one of the oil lamps and investigated the kitchen pantry and called out with delight when she found shelves stocked with canned goods and canned coffee.

“How thoughtful of our unknown benefactors!” she laughed. “They have left us all the comforts of home, as you say.”

She was looking better now. There was a simple excitement in her explorations that erased some of the desperate tension she had shown before. Her blonde hair gleamed in the soft light shed by the kerosene lanterns. Durell told her to start the coffee boiling and went outside, taking a flashlight he found hanging beside the back door, and in ten minutes he returned from the beach with an armload of driftwood for the fireplace. The kitchen smelled of perking coffee in the gray enameled pot. A simple hand pump provided fresh water for their needs.

“It is silly, but suddenly I am absolutely starved,” Stella said. “And I feel good, somehow.” Her green eyes smiled as she came to stand close beside Durell at the fireplace. “I am so grateful to you. I do not know what I would have done at Blossom’s house if you had not come.”

“Don’t think about it now.” he said.

“Yes, you are right. For these moments, I will just pretend that everything is safe, that this is our little house and…” She paused, suddenly blushing furiously in the growing light of the fire. “I really am getting foolish, am I not? It’s just that I have been carrying such a burden all alone for so long, so much worry and trouble, and suddenly you come along and all at once I feel safe. Safe! I feel as if you will help me and make everything come out all right somehow.

Abruptly she turned and went back into the kitchen. Durell stared after her. The fireplace was drawing well, radiating heat in the dampness of the rustic, pine-paneled room. He did not follow Stella. Picking up the flashlight, he went outside and circled the house again. There was nothing to see. The crude causeway that led to this spot was lost in the darkness, and no car lights moved on the landward side. They were safe enough for the moment.

Stella had coffee ready when he returned and she was sitting on the floor in front of the driftwood flames, combing her long hair. Her smile seemed to light up and warm the formerly cool lines of her grave face; but it was a tentative and very timorous smile, and it did not last long. Her husky voice and scent filled the room. He looked at her eyes and wondered if she had been crying.

“I really am a very good cook,” she said. “Please sit down. You look so uncomfortable standing there like that. So tall and stern. Do I make you uncomfortable?”

“In a way. yes.” He sat down on a maple chair beside the patch of straw carpet where she knelt before the fire. Her eyes were bright and oddly expectant. He said: “You don’t mind spending the night here like this?”

“It may be unorthodox, a very little, and I am sure people would frown and suspect the worst.” She laughed softly, deep in her throat. “But the situation is not one that demands all the social niceties, is it?”

“Where did you learn English?” he asked.

“Do I speak well? It was in Budapest, of course. Oh. long, long ago. I used it there whenever I could. I practiced very diligently. I suppose I knew even in those early years that I would come to America someday. I was so ambitious! I worked so very hard! Those were difficult years, you know, when the Russians came in. We were hungry, unhappy. I swore an oath to myself that I would make things better for myself, I would force the shape of things for my future. It was not pleasant. I made myself into something — something quite different from the child who watched the Soviet Army march into the city.”

She paused, and for the briefest moment Durell glimpsed something different in her, too. It was as if a mask had slipped from the soft contours of her body. He felt strangely disturbed, conscious of the long curve of her thigh under the green skin, her slender waist where the wide leather belt was buckled with a replica of the insigne he had noticed on her beret that afternoon. She had taken off her shoes and her nyloned legs were outstretched toward the fire. He had never seen a woman so simply beautiful, and he told himself not to be a damned fool, Frank Greenwald and Harry Blossom were enough.

As if aware of his thoughts, she rucked her legs under her.

“Please don’t stare,” she murmured.

“But I like to look at you.”

“Most men do. It is something I learned long ago, when I was — that other person, that ambitious child. I learned to use men to my advantage. Is that frightening to you?” She smiled, shook her head, thick blonde hair swinging softly. “I am sorry. I know it is all right with you. And I can never repay the help you have given me tonight. If you had turned me over to the police. I think my father would have died tonight. They would not have trusted me to keep silent, faced with a murder charge.”

He was relieved to talk about something else. “And you have absolutely no idea where they may be keeping him?”

“No. None.”

“You said something about having only forty-eight hours in which to stay here. After that, I suppose you mean to go back to Hungary.”

“Yes.”

“By plane? or ship?”

“I do not know. I was told to obey orders and give my testimony today — yesterday — as I did, and after forty-eight hours — from yesterday afternoon, that is — arrangements would be made for me to leave this country and all would be well. And my father would come with me.”

“Do you believe that?”

“What choice do I have?” she countered. “I can only hope they will keep their part of the bargain, I must believe that. Otherwise. I think — I would want to destroy myself.”

He sipped at the coffee she had made. Outside, he heard the wind in the tall, wild marsh grass, a darkly brooding melody in counterpoint to the steady crash of the surf nearby. The driftwood fire crackled and sparked. Durell frowned and turned his thoughts back to other things.

A ring of Americans, Frank had said. Two women, four men. Doing the filthiest kind of work for the Communist satellites. To Durell, there was obscenity in the fact that Americans would help in this sort of thing. He was not consciously a patriot, although he loved everything in America, from the great city behind him, with its polyglot peoples, its glitter, and its slums, to the width and space and grandeur of the West, to the secret green fastnesses of the Louisiana bayous, and the strength and beauty of Washington. He had risked his life time and again to defend all this, and he knew with a quiet certainty that he would never hesitate to risk his life again. Treachery within, for the simple sake of cash profit, sickened him and made him want to crush it as one would crush an obscene parasite under one’s heel. The cost to himself was not important; he did not count it or consider it.

And there was more to it. Art, who might die. And this girl, Stella Marni. Looking at her, Durell felt an undeniable hunger. His face showed nothing of it. His face was lean and hard and dark; his eyes had seen gambles won and lost; his mouth had tasted the lips of many women, some in treachery, some in love. But Stella was different. She stood apart. There was something electric about her that responded to a need in him, although every instinct and every trained reflex in him told him not to trust this feeling. Women had destroyed more good intelligence agents than almost any other cause. Emotion should have no part in the game he played.

Yet he could not help himself. He was attracted to her. He wanted to know her. He wanted to solve the obscure riddle she presented to him.

In a short time, unless he could help her, she would vanish forever behind the curtain drawn across half of Europe, a victim of terror, coercion, blackmail. Less than two days. Somehow in that time he had to find her father, unmask the terror ring, free her of the grip they had on her that made her a slave, murmuring words she hated and did not believe.

And after that…

Again he shrugged and switched the course of his thoughts.

“Why do you suppose Frank was killed, Stella? He was supposed to meet you at Krame’s studio, and he got there ail right, somehow, with his brother. Art. But before that at your apartment he received a phone call that excited him enough to make him break away from me. It was something important, of course. He was trying to help you, Stella. I got the distinct impression that perhaps he had learned something vital.”

“And that is why I suppose poor Frank was killed,” Stella whispered. Her eyes did not meet his. “I was fond of Frank, and maybe I would have married him, after all. He was persistent, but he was kind and good. But I warned him, I tried to be cool toward him in order to make him stop his foolish and inexpert interference. These people are dangerous, they are experienced in danger and violence, and poor Frank was — well, he was just a pleasant, overweight, comfortable businessman.” She paused, spread her hands on her thighs, and studied them with grave and minute concentration. “Well, you know what Frank was like.”

“Could he have learned where your father was being held as a prisoner?”

“Perhaps.”

“Didn’t he give you any hint as to what he was doing?”

Stella said reluctantly: “I never gave him a chance to talk about it. I was always warning him not to interfere. I did not want to see him hurt. But apparently he kept right on asking questions, and I suppose he did stumble upon something very dangerous, which he wanted to tell me, and which caused them to kill him. I think his brother was just an innocent bystander, so to speak.” She looked troubled, frowning faintly in the firelight.

“Innocent, yes,” Durell agreed.

“You were fond of this man Art?”

“Very fond of him.”

“And that is why you are helping me? To get the man who killed him?”

“Art isn’t dead yet. He may die tonight, perhaps he’s dead right now, but there’s a faint chance he may pull through.”

She shivered. “Do not look at me like that, please. It is frightening.”

“I can’t help it. I hate people who prey on the hopes and fears and lives of others, who make trade in torment, who have lost so much contact with humanity that other human beings represent only so much merchandise from which a profit can be wrung.” He stood up restlessly and walked away from her. This woman, he thought. She was too disturbing in her troubled beauty to remain near for very long. She made him want to take her in his arms and somehow comfort her. Looking down at her from the fireplace, he said: “Frank was very interested in something he called the New American Society.”

“Oh, that. Yes. But it is an innocent organization, I am sure. I belong to it myself. So did Papa. It is only a social club for people like Papa and me, where we can express a little nostalgia for the old times, before the war.”

“You were only a child before the war,” Durell said.

“I only went there because of Papa. He enjoyed it so. It is nothing.”

“But Frank mentioned it. Perhaps I should start there to look for your father.”

there was always somebody there, Stella said. The club was licensed to serve food and liquor, and you could find some of the elderly members there at all hours, from breakfast time on. It was a private house in Greenwich Village, near Sheridan Square, and there were even sleeping quarters available for new arrivals from overseas or for regular members who wished to stay overnight. Stella described the place without much interest. The heat of the fireplace and the snugness of their temporary safety made her eyes look sleepy. Now and then she put her head back and closed them for long moments, and finally Durell got up and searched the cottage for bedding. But there were no blankets in any of the closets, and away from the area about the fireplace in the living room, the chill clamminess of the November night was penetrating. When he came back he found Stella asleep on the couch in front of the fire.

There was a look of touching innocence about her as she lay curled under his topcoat He stood looking down at her, frowning, for a long time. It was quiet in the cottage now, and the wind had died, and there was only the still, sullen roar of the combers breaking on the beach outside. Stella slept like a child, except, he told himself, she was not a child, but a woman, and a very disturbing woman. There was perfection in the arch of her brows, in the way her dark lashes made tiny delicate fans against the damask of her cheeks. Her lips were parted, soft and moist. He watched her breasts rise and fall with her easy breathing.

And then she suddenly started and made a whimpering sound and cried out in words he could not understand. She was dreaming, and it was not a pleasant dream. He saw her mouth change from the innocence of a child’s to twisting torment and anguish. He did not waken her. He put more driftwood on the fire, moving silently, and then sat down in a chair nearby.

He did not expect to sleep himself. He took his gun and put it on a small table within reach and turned out the oil lamp. The firelight cast leaping shadows through the room he had appropriated.

For the first time in hours he thought of Dickinson McFee. He did not know how far McFee would back him in what he had done. He did not minimize the seriousness of his conflict with Blossom. Blossom swung a lot of weight, and his superiors would be justified in making an issue of his actions tonight. McFee might just let him hang by the thumbs, having clearly warned him he was on his own. Whatever happened, Durell thought, it had better come out all right or he would be back in Bayou Peche Rouge — if not in a federal pen — dealing poker hands for Andy Ti-Bo in the back room of the Bayou Rose Cafe.

All at once, he slept.

He slept lightly, not dreaming, but with one part of his mind aware of the sounds of the surf and the dying crackle of the fire, alert for the sound of an approaching car. He was not sure what time it was when Stella suddenly screamed.

He was on his feet, the gun in his hand. The room was almost dark, with only the dying embers of the driftwood fire making a dim ruddy glow throughout the room. Dawn had not yet come. He looked first at Stella on the couch and saw her sitting bolt upright hugging herself, hands crossed and holding her shoulders, her face white with terror.

She stared at him without recognition.

“Stella, what is it?”

“Who — I don’t know — I was frightened.”

She shuddered violently. He listened for sounds of danger, but there was nothing, and he put down the gun and crossed the room to her. The air was cold and damp again. She shrank away violently from his touch. “Don’t!”

“You had a nightmare,” he said quietly.

“Did I? I… I don’t remember. I thought…” Her mouth shook. She covered her face with her hands. “I am sorry,” she whispered. “I do remember. All of it. It comes back to me now and then.”

“What comes back, Stella?”

“I’ve never told anybody.”

He forced her hands away from her face by gripping her wrists. Her eyes stared beyond him into some unimaginable horror. “Tell me,” he said.

“It is too ugly. You would hate me.”

“Try me,” he urged.

“I am foolish,” she breathed. “H-hold me for a moment Please. I have the most horrible feeling. As if I am all alone. All alone in the world.”

“No,” he said. “You’re not alone, Stella.”

When she started to speak after a moment, it was again as if a mask slipped, but this time he saw no ruthless core of hard ambition revealed under her beauty.

“I was fourteen when the Russians entered Budapest,” she began quietly. “Nobody knows what happened to me then. I never told anyone. Not even Papa. I was pretty, attractive even then, a child in a woman’s body. They — they caught me one night — three drunken ones, like beasts — in an alley near the apartment where Papa and I lived. Near the river. The beautiful Danube.” Her voice was harsh, bitter. “It did not run blue, it ran red with blood. And some of it was mine when those drunken soldiers forced me to — forced me…” She paused, her body in the grip of great shudders as Durell held her. “I never told anyone. But that was the night I swore my oath. I developed an ambition to be the one in power, safe and secure, not the terrified little girl in a dark alley, with those monsters tearing at my dress, breathing their drunken breath all over me.” She paused, swallowed. “I decided I would learn English, get away, come to America. Everything I was, all that was in me, I bent to that ambition. And I thought I knew how to accomplish it. I would use men, men who wanted me, men who fell in love with met And I did. I did. Again and again. And yet — something happened to me that night. Something froze inside me. I could not love in return. The act itself, the giving of love — it was impossible for me. It still is. I can never be — I can never forget how it was with those Russians. And to use men for my own purpose — it is like a narcotic with me still. With poor Frank Greenwald, with Harry Blossom. With Frank, I wanted to love him back, to repay him, to be kind and gentle with him — but when he touched me, something inside me crawled, like cold snakes, all through me. I couldn’t. I couldn’t.” She stirred in Durell’s arms. “Don’t look at me. You can let me go now. I know you want to. Now you know the truth about me, you must consider me a vile, unnatural thing.”

“No,” he said gently. “No.”

She burrowed against him, her arms around him in unexpected violence. Her body shook. His coat, which had covered her, slid to the floor, unheeded. As he held her he felt a great wave of pity for her lost childhood, lost girlhood, forsaken womanhood. Her scented hair brushed his face. He felt the pressure of her body against his and heard the sobs that shook her. He murmured something and kissed her, not meaning to kiss her, but doing it, anyway. Her arms tightened about him.

“Am I such a monster?” she asked frantically. “Do you hate me? I want to die. I know I shouldn’t think about it, but I cannot stand it. I have tried and tried, wanting to be calm. But there was nobody I could turn to, no one to trust. Poor Frank was no help. And he was killed because of me. I cannot bear to think about it. It was all my fault. It is no excuse that one is the product of the world we live in. My fault…”

“No,” Durell said.

“And you will be killed, too. I know it. I hold you and I know you will soon be dead. And you are the only man, the first man who — who makes me feel as if there might be hope, a chance.”

“Look at me. Stella,” Durell said.

“No. No, I don’t want you to see my face.”

“Look at me.” he said again.

“Help me,” she whispered. “Help me.”

He forced her hands down again and drew her head back, tilting her chin until he could see her eyes. Her cheeks were wet with tears. Her gaze searched his with a frantic despair, and then he kissed her again and her lips clung to his and he held her in the dimness of the dying fire, with the sound of the ocean’s surf all around, until she stopped trembling with her fear, and then, when he kissed her again, something else took the place of her dark terrors.

“Sam?”

“Yes, Stella.”

“I want you. Take me. Please take me. I want to try. If I could forget how it was in Budapest — Could you be gentle? I have hated men for so long, and yet I know it is a sickness with mc. in my heart…”

They slid to the floor together, before the fire. Her body writhed in his arms, desperate, frantically trying. He did not know what made him open his eyes to look at her when he kissed her once more. Her eyes were open, too, enormous, studying him, and there was something cold and hard and detached in their green depths, like a flame of ice, leaping and exultant…

Chapter Eight

Durell drove into New York at ten o’clock in the morning and turned north in his rented Chevy from the Brooklyn Bridge to thread his way to Washington Square. The day was overcast, threatening more rain, or perhaps snow. He was not sure if Blossom knew about his rented car, but none of the prowl cars he passed paid any attention to him.

He used a pay phone in a drugstore to call the hospital about Art Greenwald, but Art’s condition was unchanged. He was still in a coma. The supervisor asked his name and he did not hesitate to give it.

“I have a message for you, Mr. Durell. You are to call a Mr. Isotti at the Crescent-Plaza at once.”

“Thank you.”

McFee hadn’t wasted time sending Isotti into town to help. Durell was not sure he wanted help at this moment, and before he made his second call he bought several newspapers and drank a cup of coffee while he studied them. There was nothing at all in the Times about the murder of Frank Greenwald, and only a small item about it in the Daily News, which surprised him until he recognized the censoring touch of Blossom’s district office. Stella Marni was not mentioned in connection with the murder, but her picture was in the center fold, a flash shot taken of her yesterday at the Foley Square courthouse when she had testified before Senator Hubert’s committee that she wanted to leave America, preferring her homeland to New York. Durell studied her photograph carefully, trying to reconcile this image of a cool, defiant woman with the frightened, lovely girl he had left only an hour ago. The two images refused to merge into one, and he gave it up to find a cab and ride uptown to Isotti’s hotel.

Tony Isotti was a slim dark man, young for the job he was doing, but dedicated to it more than most. He had fallen in love with a girl in Prague during a mission for K Section last year, and she had disappeared without a trace. He blamed himself for her disappearance. He was sure she was dead because of her association with him and because it was probably known in MGB headquarters in Moscow by now who he had been and what he had accomplished. Only Isotti’s eyes gave him away; they were cold and black and flat and eternally angry. He was dangerous now, rated as a little too hotheaded for most assignments, but competent with gun, knife, or judo, a swift and deadly killer.

Now as he sat in the hotel lobby he looked like a Yale man waiting for a date, dressed in checked jacket and dark slacks, with a solid-color gray vest, his thick black hair neatly brushed. He stood up and shook hands with Durell. “Hello, Sam. You didn’t check back at your hotel, so I left word around for you. All right?”

“Fine. What did McFee tell you?”

“To do anything that needs doing.”

“It’s spadework, at this moment Routine digging.”

“Whatever you say. You look beat. A rough night?”

“It could have been worse,” Durell said. He looked at his watch. Ten-thirty. He felt a quick urgency to make better use of the time that was chipping away at Stella’s safety. “I’m going to check on an organization called the New American Society, personally. Meanwhile, you tackle it from the research side. Find out who organized it, get a membership list, the names of officers and philanthropic sponsors, if any — everything about them.”

“Hell, that’s library work.” Isotti looked disappointed.

“Sometimes it pays off. I’ll check back here with you later in the afternoon.”

“McFee said this might be a rough one. I didn’t figure on sitting on my haunches totting up dossiers.” He grinned suddenly, but his flat eyes were as bleak and cold as the gray November light “They say at K Section that you get the wild and woolly ones, Sam. I was delighted when the little man said I was to work with you. I’ve got an ax of my own to grind in this thing, you know.”

“Which is why you sit and do research. It may pay off better than using your fists.”

Discipline asserted itself in Isotti’s glum, quick nod. “Whatever you say. Set up a contact, huh?”

“Get back here by two o’clock this afternoon. I’ll leave a message at the desk if you’re not in. Dig deep, Tony. I think we’ll need everything you can discover.” Durell paused. “And don’t get careless. Art Greenwald was careless last night, and you know what happened to him. If this ring smells you digging into them, even at a library or a newspaper morgue, there can be an accident. To you.”

“I can take care of myself,” Isotti said.

“See that you do.”

Durell started to turn away, and Isotti said: “One thing, Sam. When I checked for you at your hotel, Deirdre Padgett answered. She flew up here last night on the one-o’clock plane. She’s anxious to hear from you.”

Durell was startled, but his face showed nothing. He felt a moment of guilt, and then resentment, because Deirdre had not remained here in the first place when he had asked her to, and then he told himself he was foolish to castigate himself about it.

“All right, Tony, thanks. Get to it.”

He retrieved his rented car and drove along Central Park South before turning back to his hotel. The trees were bare, the greenery turned brown, and the city seemed to huddle for warmth within itself under the bleak gray sky. He left his car in a lot after circling the block three times for a parking space, and went into the hotel to find Deirdre.

She was in the coffee shop, the clerk told him. He scanned the other people in there with practiced care, but he saw no sign of Blossom or his fellow agents, and he walked toward her. She sat in calm serenity, her dark hair perfect under a small red hat, her dark blue eyes watching him first with unconcealed warmth and pleasure, then with caution. Her smile was natural. She wore a red wool suit that matched her hat, and white gloves. Durell bent to kiss her and her mouth was cool.

“I hope you weren’t worried about me.” He smiled.

“No, darling.” She patted his hand lightly. “I used to worry, you know. But now I know you can take care of yourself. Now I just… have faith in you. It’s all I have.”

He drew a chair out at her table and signaled the waiter for a pot of coffee. He was aware of Deirdre’s cool, objective eyes and he spoke out of a need to fill the awkward little vacuum of silence that began.

“I thought you weren’t coming back. Tony Isotti told me you flew up on the morning plane.”

“Yes. I didn’t really have any work to do in Washington.”

“Then why?…”

“I guess I was a fool. I guess I didn’t want you to take me for granted. Your invitation for me to spend the night here was so casual, darling. That sort of thing can be upsetting now and then.”

He said: “Dee, we know each other too well to begin playing this son of game with each other. I’m glad you’re here now.”

“Are you?” Her voice was a soft challenge.

“What is it?” he asked. “Why the cross-examination?”

She smiled ruefully. “I suppose I’m making noises like a jealous wife, and I’m not your wife, am I? And I may never be. When I learned you are not permitted to marry anyone who isn’t fully cleared for security, the same as you are, I went and got myself cleared. And still we’re not married. You’re off to the West, or to Europe, or you disappear into Russia for a month, and I simply sit and wait for you to come back each time as if nothing had happened. I’m beginning to think well never be married, Sam.”

“You’re depressed. Why?”

She sighed. “I saw Harry Blossom an hour ago. He came here to the hotel, looking for you.”

“Wild?”

“No. Quite calm.” She poured coffee for Durell and herself. “He told me what you did to him last night. He said you spent the night with Stella Marni.”

“Yes, I did,” Durell said carefully. “And that troubles you?”

“She’s a beautiful woman. Harry Blossom says she has a power over men, he says she can twist a man like you around her little finger.”

“Blossom should speak for himself.” Durell said. “But if you remember, you asked me to help her yourself.”

“Not to the point of spending the night with her, Sam.”

He smiled. “You’re jealous. That it?”

She did not smile in return. “Yes, darling. Very, very jealous. I love you, Sam. All of a sudden I’m afraid I’m going to lose you. And if I do, it will be my own fault. I got you into this. It’s true, I wanted you to help Stella Marni. She needs help. But Blossom says…”

“To hell with Blossom. Don’t you trust me, Dee?”

“I know how you are, Sam. I know I’m not the only woman in your life. I knew that long ago. But I kept hoping I was something special.”

“And you are,” he said.

“But not special like Stella Marni.”

“Dee, I don’t think we ought to talk about this now.” The coffee he swallowed tasted bitter. “Blossom has a thing about that girl. It’s turned him from a damned good agent into a sick paranoiac. He’s lost all sense of balance and proportion. He’s as much a victim of this affair as any refugee going home in terror of death and imprisonment I don’t know what he told you or suggested about Stella and me…”

“You spent the night with her. Did you comfort her, Sam, as you once comforted me?”

“She was frightened,” Durell said.

“Did you make love to her?”

“In a way.”

“Was she good? Better than me?” Deirdre insisted. Her face was very white. “Answer me, Sam.”

“Nothing happened. She was close to hysterics. I helped to calm her down and got her to sleep.”

“Am I supposed to believe that?”

He stood up, anger surging in him, an anger that he never thought in all his life would be directed against this lovely girl he knew so intimately. “You’ve got to believe it, because that’s what I tell you and it’s the truth. And if anything else had happened, I’d tell you that, too.”

“Would you, Sam? Why are you so upset about it, if nothing happened?”

He stared down at her in masculine frustration. He saw the glitter of tears in her lovely eyes and he wanted to shake her and tell her — He did not know what he wanted to tell her. There was nothing he could say that would not hurt her even more, in her present state of mind. He could not deny to himself how the very essence of Stella Marni had stolen into him. It was simply there, and he could not explain it. And he could not cast her out.

Deirdre looked up and bit her lip and considered her gloved hands on the table. “I’m sorry, Sam. I couldn’t help myself. I love you too much to be complacent about you, I guess, even though I hate myself for acting like a possessive female. But Blossom told me so many things about Stella that i hadn’t known before. He called her a witch, a sorceress.”

“Blossom is crazy about the subject,” Durell said harshly.

“I know. I could see that. And I’m suddenly afraid it might happen to you, too, Sam.” She stood up gracefully, her smile tremulous. “Please forgive me. I should have known better, darling.” She drew a deep breath. “I’ve taken a room here and I’ll stay in town as long as you’re working on this case, if you’ll let me. Come up with me, Sam.”

Their eyes met, spoke of intimacies in the past, of quiet, tender love and the wild ecstasies of passionate moments.

“Dee, I’m sorry. There is no time,” he said.

“No time — for me, Sam?”

“Dee, be reasonable. Stella Marni is in danger. I shouldn’t even be spending these minutes here with you. I have too much to do, and I’m in trouble myself, and somebody else is likely to get killed if I don’t stop this thing fast.”

“Just half an hour, Sam.”

“Not now.”

She turned white. “I see. Last night you said you wanted me, but today you don’t. Shall I go back to Washington, Sam? Perhaps I’ve been a worse fool than I thought.”

“Dee, I love you. If you don’t know that now, you’ll never know it. But…”

“Don’t say anything more.” Abruptly she picked up her purse and then paused. Her eyes were dark and miserable. “If I say anything else, I know everything will be finished between us. I feel small and ugly and humiliated. I know your work comes first, and if you say there isn’t time just now for me, then I know it’s the truth, too. But I can’t help being selfish. I want you. Now. I’m sorry.” She kissed him lightly. “I’ll be waiting here for you whenever you come back.”

He stood quietly watching her proud, lovely walk as she left the coffee shop. Her name leaped to his tongue, but he checked it and did not call after her or follow her. He wanted to go after her and beg her forgiveness, to let her know, somehow more convincingly than he had done, that be did want her and needed her.

But he let her go.

Chapter Nine

He was followed from the hotel.

He was not able to identify the tail, but he knew the man was there. There was a bar at the corner and he turned into it and ordered bourbon and stood at the bar so he could watch the street Nobody passed along the sidewalk that he recognized. His thoughts swung from Deirdre to Stella and then to the job at hand, in a confusion that was rare to him. He had known all the rules, had listened to all the advice, had ingested all the catchwords that warn an agent against involvement with the subjects of his investigation. He had the example of Harry Blossom before him, and Frank Greenwald beyond that Yet he was involved. He had come here to help in a problem that needed a humane approach, needed sympathy and understanding, and perhaps he had gone too far. His thoughts about Deirdre were chaotic. He felt torn between Deirdre and Stella, not understanding himself, wanting them both, knowing that the chances were good he might never have either. What he felt for Stella was a thing entirely apart from Deirdre. And the problem of ending the blackmail and terror of people like Stella was, again, something else apart from either woman.

He had another bourbon, felt nothing from it, considered two men who had drifted into the bar, and went out again.

He was followed.

It was done carefully, expertly, almost invisibly. He was accustomed to surveillance, to overt contact and the shadow type of operation. He had been, at various times, both the subject and the shadower, the hunter and the hunted. He knew the difference between expert and amateur work. This was expert, and when he doubled back to trap the shadow behind him, it vanished in the lemony daylight of November noon. He took evasive action then, marking in his mind the big shape of the man he had noted, the long arms, the forward thrust of a giant’s head glimpsed from the tail of his eye, and after twenty minutes, when he was reasonably sure he was alone, he retrieved his car and drove down Fifth Avenue to Greenwich Village.

The New American Society was housed in a red-brick building that had obviously been refurbished, painted, and redecorated. It was one of a row of similar houses converted to apartments in a small, narrow street that led toward the West Side docks on the North River. The street was like an island out of the last century, miraculously untouched by the endless change of New York. It was quiet and empty under the gray November sky, isolated from the rushing traffic around it.

There was only a small sign on the door to indicate the building’s use. The door was not locked. Durell went in and found himself in a small, tidy foyer with welcoming signs printed in a dozen East European languages framed on the blue walls. There was a smell of foreign cooking in the hallway, a small reception desk like that of a miniature hotel lobby, done in padded red leather and brass nails, but nobody was behind the desk. To the right off the hallway was a sitting room furnished in more red leather, with two heavy sofas that would have gone for premiums at an antique gallery. But nobody was in the sitting room, either.

The rattle of china drew him farther along the softly lighted corridor and he looked into a tiny but efficient dining room with a pass-through window in the rear, through which he glimpsed the stainless-steel equipment of a community kitchen. Two elderly men and a white-haired woman who looked dressed for the Gay Nineties were seated in the dining room, each at a small individual table. One of the men looked up from a German-language newspaper and nodded, wiped enormous white Hindenburg mustaches, and murmured, “Guten Tag.” Durell answered briefly in German and backed out.

From the main corridor a flight of carpeted steps led upward, and he was about to ascend when a girl appeared at the top and floated down. She did not seem to walk, but actually to float. Her wide yellow skirt swirled and her tiny feet in high-heeled shoes scarcely seemed to touch the carpeted treads. She came down toward him with the jingling sound of tiny silver bells. There were bracelets on her wrists, little tinkling bells for earrings, and, Durell suspected, more jingling silver elsewhere. Her dark red hair was piled high on her head in a complicated pattern of waves and curls, and she had a bust measurement, above a waist he could have encircled with his hands, of a woman twice her size. She was in her early twenties, he guessed, and at first glance she was the sort of doll that elderly men loved to dandle on their knees while they had their ears nibbled.

She spoke with a lisp, which did not surprise Durell at all.

“Welcome to the New American Society. You’re a stranger here, aren’t you? My, and you’re a handsome one, too! Do you speak English?”

Her hand was hot and intimate in his and she stood very close to him, still on the lowest step of the stairway, and she still had to look up at him. At closer inspection, she still seemed to be in her early twenties, but there were little signs that indicated she was slightly shopworn.

“Well, my, how you stare!” she said. “Don’t you speak English?”

“If you’re the official greeter,” Durell said, “I’m surprised the average membership age isn’t much lower. Especially the male membership.”

“Well! Himself does talk!” she said. She laughed, but not with her eyes. Durell had looked at and appraised feminine figures often, but he had never had the reverse experience before. He felt as if she had stripped off his clothes, examined him, and decided she liked what she had discovered and was determined to take it. Her tongue peeped briefly between tiny white teeth. “And himself speaks with a Southern accent, just like little old me!”

“And just who are you?” Durell asked.

“My, so direct. You’re an American. Gosh, what a relief! I get so tired of listening to all the jabber in those gosh-awful tongues, and I’m sure they’re all scandalizing me.” She shook hands again, squeezing Durell’s fingers tightly. “I’m Gerda Smith.”

“Smith?”

“It was Schmidt once. Horrible. Really, I should have changed it ages ago. And yes, I’m the official greeter. Actually, I’m Mr. Damion’s secretary, but these poor old souls who come here from just everywhere simply act like lost sheep, and John — I mean, Mr. Damion — he feels they should be made to feel right at home,”

“I’ll bet you do a nice job of it, too,” Durell said.

Her eyes narrowed instantly. “Is that a crack, friend?”

“None intended.”

“Who are you, anyway?”

“Jones,” Durell said. ‘To see Mr. Damion.”

“Selling anything? If you are, we don’t need it, don’t want it, and already have it.”

“Not a salesman,” Durell said.

She decided to be coy again. “I’ll bet you’re not a little old salesman, at that. I’ll just bet you’re another cop. But you don’t look exactly like a cop, either.” She cocked her head to one side and decided to frown prettily. It added a couple of years to her age. Then she took a deep breath, and standing as she was on the step above Durell, she made him feel he ought to back down a bit before he was accused of indecent advances. He stood still. Her figure was real, all her own. “Are you a cop?” she asked. “Maybe one of those G-men, I’ll bet.”

“No,” Durell said.

“Is your name really Jones?”

He nodded. “To see Mr. Damion. He’s the president of this organization, isn’t he?”

Her plucked eyebrows were still puckered. “Are you a newspaperman?”

“No, Gerda. May I call you Gerda? I feel as if we may become friends. Is Damion in?”

“Yes, but the police have been asking and asking about that awful thing that happened to poor Mr. Greenwald, and he was such a nice man and so generous in his gifts to our little club. Really, Mr. Damion has had a trying night. And morning, too. I really feel sorry for Mr. Greenwald, don’t you? I’m sure you read about it in the papers. A man like him, so settled, if you know what I mean, and just losing his head completely over that Marni bitch.”

“Bitch?”

“Yes, and I don’t apologize for my language! After all, she’s not doing any of these poor people one bit of good, testifying the way she did yesterday, and what kind of gratitude is that, I ask you, when she was doing so well right here in this country that took her in when she didn’t have a penny, and saying she wanted to go back and everything. So I say she’s a bitch. And if I ever see her again I’ll call that to her frozen old face, because she’s the one to blame, really, for poor Mr. Greenwald getting killed and…”

“Hold it,” Durell said. “Please.”

She put her tiny hands on her tiny waist, still standing on the step above him. “Now don’t tell me that chilly creature’s got you all wrapped up for the deep freeze, too! Really, I…”

“Take it easy, Gerda. I’m just here to see Mr. Damion, remember? I’m not a cop, not a salesman, not a reporter. I’m a friend of Frank Greenwald’s, though, and I need some information. Greenwald was pretty close to your Mr. Damion, wasn’t he?”

“Well, lately, yes,” she admitted dubiously. She pouted. “All right, then. His office is upstairs, second floor. Our rooms for overnight guests are just over them.” Turning, she went up two steps, silver bells and bracelets jingling away, and then she stopped so suddenly that Durell bumped into her and he expected to hear her giggle and tell him not to get fresh. Instead, her brown eyes slid sidewise and she said in a voice that had no inflection at all: “If your real name is Durell, I’d suggest you be mighty careful.”

It was a bombshell, and Durell paused and did not reply for a split second, which was too long, and he knew it was too late to cover his surprise.

“How do you know my name?”

“I’m sharp as tacks.” Her eyes were bright and amused and not at all stupid. “The reason I mention it is there was a man here from the FBI, and his name is Blossom, and he was here practically at the crack of dawn, waking up Mr. Damion — Mr. Damion sleeps here, you know — and he asked if you had been around, and if you had, what did you want and where could he find you? And while he didn’t exactly say you were a criminal, or anything like that, anybody could see he was no friend of yours, Mr. Durell, not with that tape over his nose and the nasty way he spoke about you.”

“Did he tell you I was a friend of Frank Greenwald’s?”

“He didn’t say who or what you are, but he described you and made a real big point about telling me to telephone him the minute you set foot in here, if you ever did.”

“And will you call him?” Durell asked.

She giggled. “My word, no. I just don’t like that man.”

“And you like me?”

She giggled again. “Himself is direct, sure enough, isn’t he?” she asked herself aloud. “If himself is real nice and behaves good and takes Gerda to lunch, maybe Gerda might like himself, too.”

“Not lunch,” Durell said. “Make it dinner.”

“It’s a date. Seven-thirty,” she said promptly. And then, as if she had just thought of it: “In case you’re wondering about it, why I’m here at the crack of dawn, too, I mean, why, it’s simple. I sleep here, too. And not with Mr. Damion.”

“Good,” Durell said. “May I see him now?”

“Sure enough.”

She floated up the stairs without any sudden pauses this time, and Durell followed in the wake of silvery bells and a touch too much of perfume. There was a billiard room in the front of the second floor, then a card room occupied by two bearded old men playing chess, then several blank doors and a door to the rear that simply said: “John Damion.” Gerda opened the door for him and stood aside, but not quite far enough, so that Durell had to brush past her in order to enter. Gerda winked and showed him the tip of her tongue between her white teeth and whispered, “Seven-thirty, honey,” and led him into a tiny reception room and then through a room with a round conference table and more red leather chairs and then into a small office at the very end of the suite.

“Mr. Damion? This is Mr. Jones,” Gerda said, and backed out.

John Damion had been standing at the window, staring at nothing more interesting that the blank brick wall of the house beyond. He was a tall, slender man with a ruddy face, a shock of thick white hair the color of yesterday’s snow, and a neatly clipped white military mustache. His thick black brows and black eyes were in sharp contrast to his hair. He could have passed for a Wall Street broker, a retired Army colonel, the executive vice-president of a big corporation — anything but the good shepherd of a flock of lost and frightened sheep.

His eyes were worried and he tried to erase the frown in an effort to be pleasant and cordial. “Jones? I don’t believe we’ve met, but if I can be of service to you … I assume you have an inquiry about one of our refugees, perhaps employment…”

Durell waved a hand. “I’m sorry to impose upon your time. The name is Durell.” He waited for the man’s surprise to pass, noted Damion’s quick, thrusting glance at the telephone, and said: “All I want is a few minutes of your time. In a way, Frank Greenwald referred me to you, last night Before you call Mr. Blossom, would you talk to me?”

“I can’t see why not,” Damion said slowly. He sat down behind his desk, spread his big workingman’s hands flat, and stared at them for a moment, as if conscious that the rest of his neatly groomed appearance did not fit with those strong, gnarled hands. “I’ve answered a great many questions this morning about Frank, and I don’t suppose a few more will do any harm. But I should warn you that Mr. Blossom specifically advised me against helping you in any way, Mr. Durell.”

“Did he tell you why he holds that attitude?”

“No, he did not. His whole manner when he mentioned you was rather odd, I thought. I am an honest, law-abiding citizen, Mr. Durell, and I have a rather big job to do here, perhaps too big for me these days, but I don’t want to do anything contrary to the public interest or to any law-enforcement agency that approaches me for co-operation. Still, I must say that Mr. Blossom’s attitude was not calculated to win my friendship. I did not care for the way he spoke about Stella Marni or the rest of my troubled people here, and he would give me no guarantee that they would be safe if I were completely frank with him.”

“So you weren’t.”

“I did not lie to him.”

“But you didn’t tell him the whole truth?” Durell asked.

Damion shook his head and shifted restlessly. “Perhaps if you could explain to me what your exact status is in this matter…”

“I’m a friend of Stella Marni. And Frank Greenwald.”

Damion lifted his heavy black brows and shot him a curiously hard glance. “In spite of Stella’s testimony yesterday?”

“I know that she is being forced to do what she does.”

“She told you that?”

“Last night. And this morning.”

“For God’s sake, if you know where she’s hiding…”

“I won’t tell you,” Durell interrupted. “I think I can convince her that she’s knuckled under long enough. I think I can persuade her to make a fight of it, even at the risk of her father’s safety. If I can get her to do that, the whole complexion of this thing will change. She’s frightened now, she’s accustomed to terror, to bowing her head to what she thinks is inevitable force. I want the chance to show her that things are different here, that somewhere along the line all of us have to make a stand.”

Damion sank back in his chair. “Thank God. It’s about time.” He pushed thick fingers through his snowy hair, and they were shaking slightly. His eyes were keen and probing as he surveyed Durell’s tall, competent figure. “I don’t know who you really are, Mr. Durell, but Stella Marni does need help, a lot of it. I don’t care what the papers say about her. She just happens to be one of the unlucky ones around here who are being forced to make a public example of themselves, for propaganda purposes. It was a setup for them, for those bastards who are making life miserable and worthless for these poor folks. Stella is beautiful, intelligent, and damned photogenic. A perfect propaganda vehicle for what they want her to say. So they took old Albert and gave her her orders: Do what we tell you, say what we tell you to say, or Albert gets buried. If he’s not dead already. That wouldn’t surprise me one little damned bit, either.”

“Frank thought he knew where Albert Marni is being kept a prisoner,” Durell said flatly.

“Yes.”

“Do you have the same knowledge?”

Damion leaned heavily forward against his desk. “Just who are you, Mr. Durell? What is your interest in this? Is it personal, because of Stella? Or is it official?”

“A little of both.”

“Official, then. How?”

Durell looked hard at the white-haired man. Damion’s concern for the people under his care rang as true as fine steel. There was honesty in him, a deep concern, and a real desire to help. There were times when you had to take a man on surface evidence and trust him, Durell knew, and this meant trusting him with vital information and perhaps your very life. He had instinctively warmed toward this man, and he had not often been far wrong in his estimates of other men. It was a risk, but it was time for a calculated risk.

He said briefly: “I’m an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency branch of the State Department, Mr. Damion. We’re interested in this matter unofficially. I am not here with any overt authority. Our jurisdiction conflicts with that of the Attorney General’s office, and we have no intention of interfering with their work or of hampering their investigation of this matter in any way. Nevertheless, I’m looking into it We want to satisfy ourselves about the murder — possibly two murders — last night. One of the victims, Frank’s brother, worked for us. He might die. We don’t like to let somebody else pick up our marbles.”

Damion drew a deep breath and looked at him with new respect. He spread his big hands on the desk again, chewed his while mustache for a moment, and stood up.

“I believe you’ve leveled with me,” he said quietly. “So I’ll admit I wasn’t completely honest with Blossom. As I said, I didn’t quite lie to him, but I didn’t tell him everything, either. Frankly, I don’t think he’s working in Stella’s interest. And while I know the national interest is over and above the fate of any single person, I’m convinced that Stella Marni is acting against her will in going back to Hungary and testifying as to her disillusionment here the way she has done. You see, Mr. Durell, I love Stella.” Quickly he held up a huge hand. “Not the way Frank did. Or other men, I suppose. I’m old enough to be Stella’s father. I helped Albert and Stella when they first arrived here, I got Albert a job, I gave Stella what assistance I could. She’s a fine, sincere girl. I believe in her and I don’t think I’m wrong about her. I suppose I could be, but I don’t think so. And I don’t believe that Blossom means to do her any good.”

Durell waited. Damion drew another deep breath. “Frank Greenwald and I have been trying to identify the members of this coercion ring that’s been terrorizing these people. Last night I spoke to Frank on the telephone — he was at Stella’s apartment then.”

“Yes, I was there,” Durell said. “You told him something that excited him a lot.”

“I suppose so. I told him I had a hunch as to where Albert Marni was hidden. We were to meet at a taproom not too far from here, on the water front. But he never showed up. I was a little late, I admit, but the bartender I questioned said he hadn’t been there.”

“Why were you late?”

Damion shrugged meaty shoulders. “Club business. Miss Smith had some papers for me to sign — applications to the immigration authorities for some new political refugees who had come here. I couldn’t delay it. So I was late getting to meet Frank last night. I don’t know what happened to him. I don’t know who killed him, Mr. Durell. But some of it was my fault, I’m sure, and I can’t forgive myself.”

“Just what was your hunch?” Durell asked.

“Let me assure you, it wasn’t anything more than that — just a wild idea. I simply wanted to talk to Frank about it and learn what he thought of it.” Damion leaned over and pulled a folded copy of the New York Times from his wastebasket, and shoved it across the desk toward Durell. It was folded to the shipping news, and an item had been encircled with a red pencil. “Just a hunch. But up to the last time I spoke to Stella — that was yesterday morning — no provision had been made as to how she was to leave the country. Yet she told me she was advised that she would go within forty-eight hours. That was yesterday. Tomorrow night that ship sails.”

Durell scanned the marked news item. It was in tiny print, a list of scheduled sailings, and among them was a Polish freighter, the Boroslav, from Gdynia, at Pier 27. It could be, he thought. He considered Damion’s rugged, tired face for a moment. It could also be a trap.

“Have you gone down to the pier to look at this ship?” he asked.

“No, not yet. I was going to do that with Frank. When he didn’t show up, I came back here to see if he had misunderstood me.”

“But nobody had seen him here?”

“No.”

“You mentioned the ship to him over the phone?”

“Yes, I think I did.”

There was an intercom box on Damion’s desk, and Durell looked at it. The switch was open. There were also buttons on Damion’s telephone that indicated an intercom office telephone system as well. He got up suddenly and silently and walked to the office door and yanked it open. The room with the round conference table in the center was empty. So was Gerda Smith’s little receptionist’s office beyond. Silver Bells wasn’t there. But there was a matching intercom box on her desk as well.

It didn’t have to mean anything.

John Damion had guessed his suspicion. “My staff here is absolutely above reproach. They are all devoted, unselfish people, trying to help our unfortunate members. We try to provide a home away from home for them, so to speak, until they adjust themselves to our American way of life. The officers of this organization serve without pay, without publicity, without any remuneration whatsoever except the satisfaction of helping retrieve lost, frightened souls from whatever particular hell they’ve run away from.”

“What is your official position with this outfit?”

“I’m executive secretary.”

“Without pay?”

“Only my expenses.”

“Room and board?”

“Yes.”

Durell closed the outer office door, glancing at a wall clock in gold and black as he did so. It was now eleven o’clock in the morning. If Damion was right about the Boroslav, he had less than thirty-six hours to pull a rabbit out of the hat, to keep Stella Marni from going back to almost certain death or imprisonment, and to find Albert Marni.

“You didn’t mention the Boroslav to Blossom when he was here earlier?”

“No, I didn’t. As I told you, I don’t think Mr. Blossom has the interests of our people at heart. Perhaps I was wrong. I’m a good citizen, Mr. Durell. I’ve been worrying about it. I don’t like to hold back information from law-enforcement officers. But at the time, because of his angry and insulting manner, I hesitated to mention it because after all it’s nothing more than this item in the newspaper, and it doesn’t necessarily have to mean anything.”

“Except that Frank Greenwald was killed after you mentioned it,” Durell pointed out.

“Yes, there’s that. Do you think I ought to call Blossom and tell him?”

“Yes, I do,” Durell said. “But can you wait, say, two hours?”

“If you wish it.”

“I’d appreciate it,” Durell said.

Damion nodded. His big hands were clenched. “Mr. Durell.” He paused. “I hesitated to ask you this. You said your interest in Miss Marni was twofold — official and personal.”

“True.”

“Are you in love with her?”

“I only met her last night,” Durell objected.

“But she has that effect on men. I know. I’m as fond of her as a man can be, considering the difference in our ages. The men who’ve become interested in Stella in that way haven’t had a very good time of it, even discounting what happened to Frank Greenwald.”

“So?”

“Just be careful, that’s all.”

“Thanks. I mean to be.” Durell said, and he went out.

He did not see Silver Bells on his way to the door.

Chapter Ten

Durell found a secondhand-clothing store two blocks from the New American Society and purchased a faded denim shirt, dungarees, work shoes, and a black leather jacket lined with fleece. The shoes pinched a little when he tried them on, but they would have to do. With the package wrapped in plain brown paper, he found a public rest room in the subway station on Seventh Avenue and locked himself in a closet to change his clothes, then left his suit to be pressed at a local tailor’s and his shoes at a cobbler’s for new heels. He carried no identification with him that connected him with the CIA. His gun was tucked under his blue work shirt and leather jacket.

He made two telephone calls. The first, to his hotel, reported no messages at the desk for him. He wanted then to talk to Deirdre, knowing how it was with her, if she felt at all about their last parting as he did at this moment, hating himself for having hurt her. He did not call her. His second telephone call was to the hospital, and he was advised that Art Greenwald was in the operating room, undergoing emergency surgery. Rosalie, Art’s wife, was there, but Durell was given no chance to speak to her. He debated then trying Washington, to talk to McFee, but decided to hold off, for now at least, and quit the booth.

A cold wind was blowing off the North River when Durell reached the water-front docks under the roar and shadows of the West Side Highway. The river looked dirty and gray with the tide coming in, and on the Jersey side a pall of industrial smoke made the Palisade cliffs hazy and dim with smog. The Boroslav, at Pier 27, was a small 6,000-ton freighter of prewar construction, painted white once, but with neglect showing in the huge flakes of red rust on her sides and a generally unkempt air about her. He moved on into the shadows of the vast, echoing shed. Trailer trucks were backed up to the loading platforms, and there was a din of motors, whistles, and the harried shouts of laboring longshoremen. No one paid any attention to him in his working clothes.

He was still aware of the risk he had taken by telling Damion his true identity, but his hunch, based on his quick estimate of the man, had paid off in this lead. Not even Stella Marni had known the path chosen for her exit from New York. The information might prove to be all wrong, and in that case he would have to start over again. But he had a feeling of certainty as he entered the shed that this was the right path.

Weak sunlight played on the muddy, roiled surface of the North River. He stepped aside to let a string of handtrucks roll by, laden with wooden crates of farm machinery. The Polish freighter was loading foodstuffs and nonrestricted industrial equipment, to judge from the Detroit and Indianapolis stencils on the crates. The cargo was not his concern. The cargo would have been checked out by Customs and other agencies detailed to keep vital materiel from prospective enemies. He lit a cigarette and thought of Stella, alone in the little beach cottage he had broken into. Alone and waiting. He hoped she could wait with patience. He himself had learned how to be patient the hard way, in the rigorous training school established in the Virginia hills, in the closing days of the war when he was ten years younger and still full of the sullen heat of the bayou country. On countless occasions with the old OSS and later with G2, waiting had been more vital than action, waiting and watching and listening. He had been bored, sometimes, exhausted, too. But he had learned never to make the last crucial move until the time was exactly right. Stella did not have training of that sort. She was a frightened girl hiding behind her mask of cool impersonal detachment. He knew her now. And he knew she was not the proud goddess disdainful of men, the remote and chilling woman she had seemed to be.

He pushed her aside in his mind with a deliberate effort. Nobody had challenged him in the busy shed, where he wandered alongside the white, rust-streaked plates of the freighter. An officer on the bridge was shouting something down to the longshoremen astern, his voice garbled and echoing through a hand amplifying phone. Most of the loading was being done through tie cargo hatches aft of the center superstructure. But there were two loading ports in the side of the ship open to gangways nearby. So far as Durell could see, no one was on guard, and several men came and went on errands by that route, to and from the ship.

He walked that way. He had no longshoreman’s badge authorizing him to be here, and he could be challenged at any moment. A burly man in cap and woolen jacket stood checking a manifest list nearby, and he looked up as if to speak to Durell as Durell walked toward the nearest gangway. But at that moment there came a crash and breaking sound from somewhere down the shed and a man’s voice lifted in a hoarse shout of alarm. The checker put aside his writing board and ran down the stringpiece toward the ship’s stern. A winch cable had snapped and for a moment there was a swirl of confusion and curses at the opposite end of the shed.

Durell walked quickly up the gangway and boarded the ship.

He was a little forward and below the high superstructure amidships, in a long gray-painted corridor that smelled of Diesel oil and cooking. To the left he verified his senses by spotting the entrance to the ship’s galley. He turned aft, found a ladder that took him up to the next deck above.

A seaman hurried past him at the head of the ladder, muttering to himself in Polish. He paid no attention to Durell beyond a quick, blank look, and Durell walked with a purposeful, busy stride, as if he had a specific destination to reach. The general layout of this type of 6,000-ton freighter was familiar enough to him. Cargo holds fore and aft, with crew’s quarters below the center superstructure, a few cabins above for a dozen passengers at most, and then quarters for the ship’s officers. Hunting for Albert Marni might be like searching a rabbit warren. If Marni was a prisoner aboard, on the assumption that this might be considered a relatively safe place to hold the old man while Stella went through her ordered paces before the Senate subcommittee, he could be held anywhere. In the holds, the crew’s quarters, or up above in one of the cabins. During the loading operation, however, the holds might be a little dangerous, and Durell dismissed that area for the moment. The crew’s quarters would be logical, except that with the longshoremen aboard and the recent defection of the six Russian merchant sailors prominent in the news, there might be distrust on the part of the command for that area, too. Considering everything, only the officers would be top security risks for the abductors. It could be. Conceivably, during the loading operations, at any rate, Albert Marni would be moved topside, out of the area where the dock workers might wander.

Durell stepped out on deck, found a second ladder going up under the bridge, and mounted it. For the moment he was in plain sight of the cargo officer on the wing above, who was directing the longshoremen on the dock and the deck aft. There was no side deck amidships. To go aft, he had to enter the superstructure and walk along a partially open companionway. And as he stepped through the bulkhead door, he saw the short, burly officer waiting for him at the opposite end of the corridor, perhaps eighty feet away. Everything in the man’s attitude suggested that he had been waiting to intercept Durell.

“You, there! Just a moment!”

Durell called, “Hello,” and walked toward him with a smile. The burly man in the blue uniform was momentarily puzzled and disarmed. Durell said: “I’ve been looking for you, mate. There’s some trouble up on the bridge — you’re wanted up there.”

The man said something in Polish, enough words to permit Durell to continue covering the distance between them. Suspicion flared in the officer’s pale eyes too late to save him. Durell’s attack was direct and swift. He chopped at the man’s neck with his right, chopped again across the bridge of the man’s nose, and paralyzed tiny eye muscles, breaking nerve connections, rupturing blood vessels to the brain. A strangled sound came from the man. He made a tentative move toward his right-hand pocket and never finished it as Durell hit him again with a judo blow that toppled him forward to the deck.

Durell caught him before he fell, hauled him back to a doorway leading to the cabins. The man was heavy and solid. His heels caught on the bulkhead tread and one of his shoes came off. A strangling noise came from him. His eyeballs rolled white and pale blue and his tongue showed between his teeth. It had taken only a second or two to reduce him to helplessness by paralyzing vital neural centers. And Durell had deliberately held back all of his strength from the blows.

It could have been an accident that this officer seemed to have been waiting for him. He hoped so. The other alternative, that a telephone call from the New American Society had put the ship’s officers on the alert, was not to be dismissed, however.

A corridor led directly across the ship through a small, darkly paneled dining saloon. Nobody was in sight. Another corridor went fore and aft from the saloon, with four cabins forward, four aft, equally divided on port and starboard sides. Durell tried the first cabin astern and pushed open the shutter door. It was empty. A portrait of Stalin greeted him and he wondered why it hadn’t yet been removed with the new gang in power. His burden showed signs of reviving and Durell removed a small blue-steel pistol of Czech manufacture from the right-hand pocket of the mate’s blue uniform. The gun was loaded. He sat down on one of the bunks and watched the man on the floor for a moment.

Control returned swiftly now as the body recovered from the neural shock. The man sat up, coughing, his eyes wild and bloodshot. He sneezed three or four times and started a nosebleed and he was busy with a handkerchief for several moments. Then he looked up and saw Durell through running eyes and shook his head and reached into his pocket abruptly.

“I have it, tovarich,” Durell said. “Take it easy.”

The other’s voice was hoarse as he stared at his gun in Durell’s hand. “Who are you? By what right do you attack me?”

“Shut up.” Durell said. “Just listen.”

“I demand…”

<<<I warn you to keep quiet. Raise your voice, and you will be a dead man shouting into emptiness. Do you understand?”

The officer swallowed, subsided, scrunched back until he sat with his shoulders against the bulkhead. It was hot in the cabin. The mate was a man in his middle thirties, partly bald, with a heavy musculature and malignant black eyes. He breathed, quickly and lightly through his wide, partly opened mouth. His physique and general condition had to be remarkable to permit this quick recovery from Durell’s attack. Durell suddenly reached across and grabbed the man’s left hand and turned the palm edgewise and saw the hard, horned ridge developed only by judo.

He spoke with satisfaction. “You’re not Polish. You don’t get calluses like that handling a ship. You’re MGB.”

“I will answer nothing,” the man said huskily.

“You will tell me about your passengers.”

“We carry no passengers.”

“Only one is aboard now. Where is he?”

“You are wasting your breath. I do not understand you. I warn you, return my gun. I shall lodge a complaint with the authorities. This vessel is Polish territory, and you have violated…”

“This vessel is in New York Harbor and subject to the laws governing all alien vessels who enter it. Where is Albert Marni?” Durell asked sharply.

The man licked fat lips. “Who?”

“You understand me. Albert Marni. The old man. Where is he?”

“I do not know what you are talking about.”

Durell stood up. He put the gun down on the bunk deliberately and he stood before the man sitting on the deck with his bands at his sides.

“Friend, you were wailing for me. Which means you knew I was coming. If you were just an ordinary officer aboard, it could have been an accident. But you’re not. You’re in political control here. Maybe you don’t trust your full complement of officers aboard, but as an MGB agent, you’re not entirely alone in knowing why I’m here. You have a few trusted men aboard with you. And that means time is running out for me. They will be expecting your report on the bridge at this moment. I figure I have perhaps two minutes before they start wondering about you up there, another minute or two for them to start worrying. Maybe five minutes in all before they come looking for us. Unless you answer my question, they’re going to find you dead. Do you understand that?”

“You do not frighten me,” the mate said harshly. His mouth opened wider and Durell saw he was going to yell. He hit the man once, chopped again, and the mate’s shout changed to a strangled scream that died in his battered throat. He pitched forward, twitching, and lay still.

Durell stood quietly listening. There was no alarm. The shouts of the longshoremen and the rumble of machinery in the ship’s hold had effectively drowned out the single cry of the MGB agent.

Quickly he dragged the limp body to the tiny water closet, crammed the man inside in a sitting position, and slammed the narrow louvered door shut. Then he stepped into the corridor again, a swift and silent shadow opening and closing the cabin doors on this side of the dining saloon. Each stateroom was empty. He went back across the saloon, checked the four forward cabins. Empty. No sign of Albert Marni.

It could have been a false lead, but he did not think so. Not with the MGB man waiting for him.

A narrow ladder led to the officers’ quarters, aft of the bridge. Durell climbed it swiftly, aware of time running out too fast. The mate would not be the only Soviet agent aboard this Polish freighter. There would be at least one other, probably two, and certainly the captain would be considered a sound security risk by the other side. He had two minutes left, three at the most.

He found Albert Marni in the captain’s cabin.

The captain’s name was Grozni, according to the small metal plate on the door. Albert Marni sat on a bunk with a chess set of finely carved Indian ivory on a board on his lap, and Captain Grozni, to judge by the braid on his blue uniform, sat opposite him with his left hand poised to make a move. The captain’s right hand held a long-barreled pistol. It was pointed at Durell. The captain spoke English with an Oxford accent.

“Come in, sir. Shut the door. We have been expecting you.”

Durell saw the panic and dismay in old Albert Marni’s eyes. His own gun was lowered, and the split second it would require to raise it to firing position would be enough for Grozni to shoot him dead. He stepped over the threshold and closed the cabin door behind him.

Albert Marni looked older than he had appeared in the picture Durell had seen of him in Stella’s apartment yesterday. Older and more tired and infinitely frightened. He had a halo of white hair, a sad and gentle face, dark eyes lost in aged wrinkles. He spoke in a tired, whispering voice.

“I do not know who you are, sir, but they have been waiting for you for half an hour. You do not have a chance. They deliberately allowed you to come aboard.”

“Hold your tongue, Marni,” the captain said.

Grozni had a round, bearded face, a big head that was totally bald. He looked big and brutal, a man in his forties, with violence stamped on him by way of a crooked scar that ran down one cheek to be hidden by his beard. Yet there was curiosity in his eyes, and caution, and his deep voice was mild enough.

“Captain Grozni.” Marni said, “this man can help us. You’ve told me how you feel…”

“Shut your mouth!” Grozni whispered.

In the moment that the captain’s eyes swung back to the pitiful old man, Durell jumped across the room. He was direct in his violence, offering no quarter, expecting none. He slapped the gun out of Grozni’s hand and heard it clatter against the steel bulkhead, and then he locked both hands together and brought down all the weight of chest and shoulders in a blow to the back of the captain’s neck. The bearded man was built like a bull. He surged out of his chair and Durell’s knee lifted and caught him under his jaw and lifted him, arms flailing, across the narrow cabin. Even then, Grozni did not go out entirely. He hit the bulkhead and slid down to a sitting position on the deck, eyes glazed, shaking his head and muttering to himself in Polish.

Durell picked up the captain’s gun and turned to Albert Marni.

“Come along, Mr. Marni. We’re getting out of here.”

“But… I cannot go,” the old man whispered.

“Get up. We’ll make it fast.”

“My legs, sir. I don’t know who you are, but the captain has the keys, and I cannot move.”

Durell pushed aside the chessboard, and the ivory pieces clattered to the floor. Heavy chains on the old man’s thin ankles shackled him to the steel bunk. He swung around, stood over the dazed captain. Blood stained the captain’s beard. “You have the keys?”

“You will regret this,” Grozni muttered. “Mr. Marni stays aboard my ship. Ask him. He will not leave with you.”

“The keys, Captain,” Durell said dangerously.

“Ask him if he will go ashore with you!” Grozni shouted. “Ask him, you fool!”

Durell looked at the old man, saw the sickness and lack of hope. “Well?”

“The captain has not been bad to me. I stay here. I go home.”

“Why?”

“I wish to,” the old man muttered. “I want to go home.”

“Then why did they chain you like an animal?”

“I do not know.”

“Did they tell you anything about your daughter?”

Terror flared in the old, rheumy eyes. Marni’s breath made a thin, papery sound in the silent cabin. “It has nothing to do with Stella.”

“If they told you they are holding her as a prisoner, they are lying. I know where she is. I have Stella, and she is safe. Do you understand me? You don’t have to stay aboard because you are afraid for her. They can’t hurt her now. They don’t even know where she is.”

The old man’s hands came up, his white hair in a wild halo around his seamed face, and he appeared to grow suddenly younger with unexpected hope. His hand clutched at Durell’s arm. “This is the truth? You do not lie to me?”

“Stella is safe. They don’t have her.”

Slowly, the old man nodded. “I see. It is always lies. They do not know how to live except by lies, by threats, by pain and terror and misery.” Marni’s voice grated, grew stronger. “They know no truth but their own religion, and their only god is power. The power to hurt, to torture, to frighten, to kill. Yes. Get the keys. The captain has them. I believe you and I will go with you.”

The captain spoke from his sitting position on the floor. His voice was strangely calm. “You will never get ashore alive. Either of you.”

Durell said: “Then you will die with us, Captain. And if you are counting on your second mate, you can forget about him. He is not concerned with this any more.” He moved away from the old man. “Take the keys from your pocket and slide them across the deck.”

Grozni’s eyes opened wide for a moment, accepting what Durell had told him, and then he gave the keys to Durell. Durell handed them to the old man, not taking his stare from the Polish captain. “Free yourself, Mr. Marni.”

“It is not that easy to strike off one’s chains,” Grozni whispered.

A half minute ticked by before Albert Marni’s shackles clanked on the deck. The old man stood up, tottering, and leaned against Durell for support. “Please. I am ill. I have been ill for some time, but they refused to give me medical attention. Captain Grozni was kind, but he could do nothing.”

“Come along,” Durell said. “You too, Captain. You understand what will happen if you try to raise an alarm.”

Grozni wavered to his feet, rubbing his throat where Durell had struck him. His bald, shaven head looked shiny in the harsh cabin light. Durell followed him into the passage with Marni shuffling painfully behind them. The officers’ quarters were quiet. Albert Marni turned down the ladder to the passenger deck on shaky legs. His breathing was ragged and uneven, and now a new terror gleamed in his watery eyes.

“Please. Whoever you are, do you tell me the truth? Is my Stella safe? They do not have her?”

“She’s safe,” Durell assured him.

“They beat me. They made me write a note to her, to tell her to obey orders. They will kill her if she does not obey. They would have beaten me to death, I think, but Captain Grozni stopped them.” Great beads of perspiration glistened on Marni’s wrinkled face. He halted suddenly, his hand at his chest. “I can go no farther. There is a weakness in me.”

“Try,” Durell urged him. “Just down to the dock.”

They stepped out on the deck overlooking the shed roofs and the pier where the longshoremen worked the cargo. Everything looked normal down there. The officer on the bridge was shouting something through his megaphone, and then he looked down, straight at the captain and Durell and Albert Marni. He shouted in Polish to the captain.

“Answer him,” Durell snapped. “Tell him you are going ashore for a few moments.”

The captain smiled. “And if I tell Jankewitz something else?”

“You’ll pay,” Durell said grimly. “Answer him.”

The captain cupped his hands and shouted briefly up to the officer on the bridge. The man up there stared down at them, his face a pale patch of white against the lowering sky above him. Then he turned abruptly and vanished from the wing.

The captain laughed.

“March,” Durell said. “Down to the pier.”

If the captain had raised an alarm, Durell was only one man against the entire crew. The way ahead led down the passage to the stairs that opened on the cargo hatch in the side of the ship where he had entered. Durell hurried the captain along, but he could not hurry Albert Marni. The old man dragged along, gasping and panting. Durell had left the captain’s gun and the mate’s pistol in the cabin, but he kept his hand on his own gun inside his black leather jacket.

They were on the cargo deck when they met their first interference. Two burly seamen stood guard at the open gangway that led to the pier and safety. Grozni stopped abruptly. His eyes were narrow, his mouth tight under his disheveled beard. His scar glistened whitely.

‘Tell them to stand aside,” Durell ordered.

“They will not obey,” Grozni whispered. “You do not understand. I am not the true master of this ship. Stepov, the second mate, is the political commissar. The Boroslav is a special kind of ship; she is not truly Polish. Stepov is the master here. He gives the orders.”

The two seamen came forward slowly, their bulk filling the passage. Durell said swiftly: “Won’t they obey any order you give?”

“No. Those two take orders only from Stepov.”

“Then you’re a prisoner aboard, yourself?”

“In a way. We are all prisoners of one thing or another. They suspect how I feel about their murdering regime. One’s tongue slips occasionally, forced by anger. But they know I am safe. They know I must obey orders.” Grozni shrugged. “They would like to replace me, but who could they get in my place? They need every shipmaster they have. And I wear my chains, like Albert Marni, even if they are not as visible as his.”

Durell said carefully: “Wouldn’t you like to be free, too?”

The captain said thinly: “What I would like to be and what I can afford to do about it are not the same. I have a family in Gdynia. My wife and three beautiful daughters. I love them all. They watch me. They do not trust me, but they watch, and if I make a wrong move, my family dies. So ask me nothing, please. If I could help…”

The first of the two seamen said something in Polish, gave a brief command. The captain answered angrily. The second seaman took out a short length of pipe and replied in harsh, contemptuous tones.

“I can do nothing,” Grozni said to Durell. “They order you to turn the old man loose.”

The two seamen were advancing down the passage, sure of themselves. One reached for Albert Marni and flung him aside against the bulkhead. Durell caught the man’s arm and twisted, felt bones wrench and muscles tear. The man screamed and Durell shoved his arm high up behind his back and slammed him forward, head first into the steel wall. The man collapsed. Then a massive arm clamped around Durell’s throat as the second man leaped on him. His head was snapped back with terrific force. The light faded before his eyes. He let himself go, relaxing suddenly, reversing the thrust of his weight, twisting at the same moment. The man’s convulsed face blurred before his eyes. Durell slammed a fist at the open mouth, jabbed a thumb into the corded neck. The grip on his throat slipped and he twisted his head sharply, dropping out of it entirely. His legs were unsteady for a moment and he tripped over the first seaman, crumpled against the bulkhead. The other shouted for help and Durell hit him in the throat, heard the whistle of a blow slamming past his head, and drove a foot into the seaman’s belly. The other made a sound like a stricken horse and dropped his steel pipe and reeled away.

Grozni stood still, looking at Durell. Albert Marni looked like a tiny scarecrow in his shapeless blue suit, his thin neck like a pipestem sticking from his oversized white shirt collar. Grozni wet his lips.

“You are an expert. Not an ordinary policeman, eh?”

“Think what you like.” Durell’s neck ached. “But thank you for not interfering.”

“I have seen men trained to kill with their bare hands. Like those two. And you, as well. You are their opposite here, eh?”

Durell considered him. “If your family in Gdynia were free, Captain Grozni, free and safe, would you come over to our side?”

“Instantly. But that is impossible.”

“Not entirely so,” Durell said quickly. “Perhaps we can help.” He watched a small light gleam into life in the captain’s eyes. “You will hear from me. Have courage, Captain. And thank you again.” He turned to the old man. “Come along, Mr. Marni.”

The old man nodded, swallowed, tried to move a step forward, and suddenly collapsed. Durell heard the sound of running feet slapping the passageway behind them. He had not forgotten the officer named Stepov. With a nod to the captain, he picked up Albert Marni’s frail body and walked to the open cargo hatch and strode down the gangway to the pier. Albert Marni felt limp and dead in his arms.

Chapter Eleven

It was raining again. A heavy overcast made the city drab and gloomy at two o’clock on that November afternoon. Lights in the windows of Manhattan’s tall buildings made a bright pattern against the premature dusk. Durell stood in the hospital corridor with Tom Markey, the sub chief in Blossom’s FBI district office. A nurse went by, while Markey chewed his pipe and appreciated the slide and rustle of her nylon uniform. When the nurse had turned the corner of the corridor, he said bluntly:

“Don’t think we haven’t been on the ball, Sam. We’ve been well aware of the Boroslav and the passengers she might haul out of the harbor. As a matter of fact, we’ve searched the ship twice. Hell, we’ve known about this ring operating in New York for over six weeks. You don’t have twenty-three Hungarian nationals, seventeen Poles, and four Rumanians disappear just like that. Knowing something exists, however, and proving it in court are two different things. We know there’s a pipeline between the New American Society and ships like the Boroslav. The people on the Boroslav could have been tipped off we were coming to search the ship, of course. They could have played the old shell game with Albert Marni — it’s easy enough when you don’t have enough men to dragnet a ship like that. More damned holes to hide a man in than you’d suspect Anyway,” Markey sighed, “we didn’t find him. How you happened to get him so easily is another story. But don’t think because an amateur like Frank Greenwald seemingly got a line on the ring when we didn’t that we haven’t been working on it. We’ve known everything Frank stumbled on for weeks. But it’s proof we need, man. Something to stand up in court.” Markey looked shrewdly at Durell. “How come you did find him like this, Sam?”

“Marni? I think they wanted me to find him. They knew I was coming. Somebody tipped them off. It has to be somebody in the New American Society.”

Markey chewed his pipestem. “Damion?”

“I don’t believe so. Otherwise, why did he mention the Boroslav at all? He could have kept his mouth shut about it.” Durell shook his head and stared broodingly down the quiet hospital corridor. “No, either somebody has Damion’s phone bugged, or his office is tapped with a mike somewhere.”

Markey smiled wryly. “We’ve got bugs all through the place. I told you, we’ve been working this case. We’ve got your conversation with Damion down on tape, all of it. But our office didn’t think anything would come of your trip to the Boroslav, so we didn’t interfere. That doesn’t rule out the chance that somebody else put a bug in Damion’s office and trapped you on the ship when you went there.” Markey frowned. “Something we might have overlooked. We’ll have another look-see.”

“What good would that do?” Durell objected. “We’re not ready for a move as overt as that yet. You said yourself you’ve been digging in this for six weeks, with nothing to take to court yet. But I agree with you that the New American Society has a funny smell to it. On the surface, it seems okay. I think Damion is honest enough, dedicated to his job. But it’s the other members, especially the officers, who interest me. I’ve got Tony Isotti digging into it.”

“We’ve done all that,” Markey said quietly. “Blossom has all the data.”

Durell said heavily: “Blossom, yes.”

“He’s been a good man, Sam,” Markey said quietly. “One of the best. This new business — the way he’s acting — how long do you think he’d have lasted at the head of our New York office if it had been going on for some time? He’s never been like this before. Harry Blossom is just sick, Sam, Sick over that girl, Stella Marni. He’s worked so damned hard all these years, like an iron man, never cracking, nothing touching him…” Markey sighed. “You wouldn’t know him, the way he used to be. I feel sorry for him. Something’s got to give pretty soon for Harry, or the top blows off for good. One thing, in all good conscience, and trying to be fair to Harry, I’ve got to get his files. I’ve phoned Washington about it. We’ve had trouble with this case from the start, because Harry kept everything to himself. He hasn’t even let me see the reports on the New American Society officers.” Markey made an angry sound. “Well, why did they want you on the ship? Why did they let you snatch Marni away?”

“I think their primary objective was to put me out of action. It was a trap. Somebody doesn’t like the little bit I’ve managed to get done, that’s all. I wouldn’t have made it if the captain wasn’t secretly sympathetic.”

“Yes. Grozni.” Markey’ nodded. “We’ve got a line on him, but he can’t be moved and I don’t blame a man for that when he loves his family. And they’re still in Gdynia.” Markey looked up under shaggy brows. “Can you do anything about that?”

“I’m going to try,” Durell said. “Grozni might be more helpful if he knew his people were safe. I think he’s already helped by doing small things. You had no trouble tracing things to the Boroslav— you said you’ve searched it twice. Even an amateur like Frank Greenwald, and another like Damion, got a lead to the Boroslav. Maybe we can thank Grozni for it. Anyway, their trap for me backfired. I got out of there with the old man.”

Markey looked tired. His normally pink face was pale and drawn, and his eyes were muddy from lack of sleep. Durell knew him to be competent and thorough, one of the finest men working out of the Attorney General’s office. Markey shook his round head and stared down at the dottle in his pipe and looked with sudden shrewdness at Durell.

“Where is Stella Marni, Sam? What did you do with her?”

“She’s safe enough.”

“We want to talk to her again.”

“Later. When I’ve let her know about her father. I have a hunch shell tell quite a different story now to Senator Hubert and his committee.”

“Hope so. I’d still like to talk to her myself.”

“I’ll bring her in,” Durell said.

“Suppose the old man dies?”

Durell shrugged and drew a deep breath. “That makes two of them. Art and Marni. Art came out of the operating room just about breathing, I understand. They picked pieces of bone out of his head for two hours. And now we have the old man. A coronary, nobody can say how bad yet. But bad enough. Nip and tuck for both of them.”

“You’re lucky to be on your feet, yourself,” Markey pointed out. “I ought to feel damned annoyed with you, Sam. You could have called me into it this morning. We could have put a net over that ship that nothing could have slipped through.”

“Then you wouldn’t have found Marni,” Durell said. “I told you, it was me they were after. They never thought I’d get off that ship alive.”

“Then what else do you know, Sam? It must be something they think is damned dangerous to them.”

“I wish I knew what it was. Then we’d be able to wind this up.”

“You must have a piece of something.”

“If I do, I don’t recognize it.” Durell said.

Markey spoke flatly. “Then it’s the girl. Stella Marni. You’ve got her. They want her. They’ll be wild now, Sam. They can’t afford to let her go and do a switch on the testimony she’s been giving the committee. If she tells the true story now about how she’s been forced to say what she’s been saying just because of threats to her father, all the propaganda hay they’ve been making will go up in smoke. It will be one of their worst boomerangs; the ones who planned it from the start will see their heads roll. So the girl is the key. And I don’t trust her with you, Sam. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. You’re too apt to go off into the wild blue yonder. I want to know where she is.”

“I’ll bring her in,” Durell said again.

“She needs contact surveillance every minute of every day until this thing is cracked and smashed and stamped out. They may try to kill her. In fact, unless they kill her, they’ll have to snatch her in place of her father. She’s in the worst kind of danger at this minute, and you know it. Sam.”

“She’s safe for now,” Durell said. “Trust me, Tom. We can get along, you know that.”

“You didn’t do too well with Blossom,” Markey said quietly. “And I’m not Harry Blossom. I’m not in a twitch over this woman.”

Durell looked sharply at the FBI agent’s face, but Markey’s round features, the face of a family man except for the cold and calculating eyes, simply looked thoughtful. “What did Blossom tell you about me last night?”

“Nothing,” Markey said. “But he’s got some bumps and bruises he won’t discuss, either. And a wild hate that’s been driving him since dawn.”

“He didn’t put in another report on me for anything?”

Markey lifted deceptively mild, shaggy brows. “Should he have?”

“Maybe not. I can’t figure him.” Durell felt restless. There was no point in hanging around this hospital where he had brought Albert Marni. Tom could take that end of it from here. And nobody was permitted to see or question Art Greenwald, even if Art had been in any sort of condition to answer questions, which he wasn’t And assuming, again, that Art could shed any light whatever on his brother’s death last night.

He walked with Markey toward the hospital entrance. On the slick, rain-wet granite steps, Markey paused to fill and light his stubby pipe. Durell said: “Who’s covering the murder investigation, Tom? Are you working with Homicide East, or what?”

“A Lieutenant Durkin is on it from the precinct, and a good dozen men, as you suggest, from the Manhattan East Squad. Frank Greenwald died from two blows on the back of the head, both identical wounds. Same as Art got, but he only took one. Frank was killed instantly, without ever knowing what hit him.”

“Heavy blows? The kind that would take a strong man to deliver?”

“Hard to say. They found a length of pipe in that studio, bloody, bits of hair and bone on it, according to lab analysis, which doesn’t leave any doubt about its being the murder weapon.”

“Check for prints?” Durell asked.

“Only Stella Marni’s,” Markey said in a fiat voice. His glance flicked up to Durell’s expressionless face for a moment. “So you see what I mean.”

“I don’t think she killed them.”

“Maybe.”

“Two strong, healthy men?”

“It could have been done by a woman. By surprise. All at once, and quickly.”

“I don’t believe it.” Durell said.

“I know you don’t. Maybe you don’t want to believe it, like Harry. That’s why I want the girl out of your hands, Sam. I don’t want you strolling down the same path Blossom has taken.”

Durell was angry. “Don’t be a damned fool, Tom.”

“I told you before. Blossom was one of our best men. I’d have staked everything on him, up until a month ago. Now he’s got Stella Marni in him, like a disease, and he’s sick with it, crazy with it. But just because a man is sick you don’t forget all the great things he’s done in the past and turn your back on him. I’ve been talking to Washington. I’m getting authority to take over the case — once I get my hands on the files Harry kept to himself. But we don’t throw a man like Blossom to the wolves without giving him every chance. I’m hoping he’ll snap out of this thing he’s got with Stella Marni, be like he used to be. A top man, Sam.” Markov’s voice had lifted, then grew calm again. “Well, all right. You’ve got the girl now, haven’t you? And you haven’t turned her over to me or to Homicide.”

‘“Have you checked this Krame who owns the studio?”

“Done what we can. He’s in Miami Beach.”

“Sure of that?”

“Registered at the Carillon.”

“You spoke to him?”

“No, he was out for the evening. The Miami Beach cops were asked to hold him for questioning, but we haven’t got a report back yet We ran him through the BCI here, but there’s no criminal record on him. Got his description from other tenants in the building, poked into his business — he runs a kind of haphazard photographic studio, does some free-lance portrait work, artistic stuff, and also a good deal of commercial photography in advertising layouts for some of the smaller Madison Avenue outfits. First name’s John. Single, aged thirty-four, no known associates with Communist or criminal elements. But there’s a connection with Stella, all right. When she first came here from Hungary, she worked as a model and Krame used her in his studio for some advertising work. And of course Frank Greenwald met her when he saw her coming and going in the building, right past his office door on the way up to that studio in the tower.” Markey blew angry air through his nostrils. “It ties up, but not tight enough. Krame visited the New American Society — he took Stella to dinner there, or was her guest, we’re not sure which. We’re not sure of too much in any direction, because Blossom played the whole case so close to his vest.”

“Well, Isotti will find out,” Durell said.

Markey considered the dreary, rain-swept street with blank, tired eyes as they stood on the hospital steps. He relit his pipe with care. “Level with me, Cajun. Did General McFee assign you to this deal after that conference?”

“You know better than to ask me that.”

“If he did, I’ll buy whatever you’re trying to sell me, Sam. But I want that girl. You don’t have to worry about Blossom any more, as far as she’s concerned. I told you, Harry is off the case, he’s going to be transferred. And it’s my baby now. I told Washington how Harry is about this, and they’re going to give him a change of scene. The boss found it hard to believe, the way Blossom’s changed all of a sudden. But that’s over the dam now. I want Stella Marni, understand? I want to know where she is and who she’s with every minute of every day from now until we file the case. I don’t want to find her dead, Sam. I want her to make her speech to Senator Hubert when she knows her father is safe; I want her to blast this thing wide open. If she’ll do it.”

“Do you doubt that she will?” Durell asked.

“You’re overprotective toward her. Nothing is in the bag until the string is drawn tight. Hell, Sam, you know that”

Durell looked at his watch. “I’ll bring her to you at four o’clock.”

“I’ll go with you to get her.”

“No. She’s afraid of you, Tom — not you, personally, but what you stand for, because of the way Blossom treated her and the way she was mishandled in your office. Not your fault, but there it is. She’s scared and suspicious and she knows what might happen to her a year from now, or five years from now, if she changes her song. She recognizes it’s a big risk, because the people we’re up against have long memories. But she trusts me, I think. I can swing her around to help us. That’s why I want to be alone with her and bring her in myself. You’ll have her by four o’clock.”

“Your word on that?”

“My word,” Durell said.

Markey shoved his pipe into his pocket, kept his hand on it “The roof blows off if you miss, Sam. But go ahead.” He drew a deep breath. “And I’m a God-damn fool.”

Fifteen minutes later, Durell retrieved his clothes from the tailor on Greenwich Avenue, his shoes from the cobbler, and changed in the subway rest room. On the street again, he found a telephone booth in a smoky bar and phoned Washington.

It took five minutes to be connected with Clem Anderson, in K Section of the CIA. Anderson was in charge of Middle European Operations, a small mild man in whose mind rested all the controlling strands of a web of agents at work in the satellite countries. Ordinarily, security would have prohibited Durell’s contact in this manner; but he put the call on a high-priority basis and swung a little of his weight as sub chief of K Section.

“Clem? Durell here. In New York. It’s a public phone, so be careful. I need some help and some action fast, and you can give it to me. There’s a man here, a ship captain named Grozni, Polish, from Gdynia. I’ve got to pry him loose, but his family has him anchored. Understand?”

“Sure, Sam. Gdynia, you said?”

“Wife and three daughters. Are the railroads running?” Durell was referring to the underground system of helping refugees who wanted to flee Communist rule to the West. “This takes top priority. There will be some risk,” he said, “because it’s a rush job.”

Anderson said carefully: “It will take some time to set it up. You don’t know how the family feels?”

“They’ll gladly go, from what I can guess. I need Grozni with a free mind, Clem. As soon as possible.”

“In a week.”

“No. Forty-eight hours, tops.”

Anderson whistled. “Sam, be reasonable! Our man in Gdynia is overloaded now.”

“Can you make contact tonight?”

“By tomorrow morning. He’ll have to dig. That all you got on the family?”

“Wife, three daughters. Four in all. It has to go fast. I have to know they’re safe fast.”

Anderson was silent for a moment. “It’s a tall order, Sam. We don’t like to rush these things. It has to go through our West Berlin contact. Code radio. And even then, contact is sometimes uncertain.”

“Do what you can,” Durell said. “Top priority.”

“Sure, Sam. You’ll call back?”

“Yes.”

Durell hung up, opened the phone-booth door, lit a cigarette. The taproom looked normal. He took a cab from there to the lot where he had parked his rented car.

And he was followed again.

This time he definitely spotted the shadow. A hulking giant of a man in a short woolen jacket that was much too tight for his massive shoulders, a wide-brimmed dark hat pulled low over an anthropoid face, and heavy workingman’s shoes. Durell spotted him on Eighth Street going east, again in the subway, again at the parking lot. This man was not an ordinary shadow. A tail is usually chosen for anonymity of appearance and movement; but this man moved blatantly, his pale eyes resting boldly on Durell as if weighing and measuring him.

Durell did nothing about it, not for ten minutes. From the subway station he walked west, stopped for a pack of cigarettes in a corner cigar store, went into a bar for a beer, which he left practically untouched, stopped at a Nedick’s for a cup of hot coffee, and then, abruptly and without warning, took evasive action that erased the giant shadower from his trail in a matter of minutes. Then he turned back to the parking lot where he had left his rented Chevy.

He turned in his ticket at the booth, walked back along the rows of cars toward his own. The rain came down harder, with little spits of snow mingling with the steady wash that filled the gutters and made deep puddles on the asphalt His lined topcoat was in the car. He looked back once, but the big man who had been following him was definitely gone, and then he opened the front door and started to reach in for his coat.

Harry Blossom sat there, waiting for him.

The blond FBI agent with the face like a hatchet blade said: “Get in, Sam. No fuss or feathers. I’ve been waiting here over an hour.”

Durell looked at him and then slid carefully behind the wheel. “What is it now?”

“Just a talk,” Blossom said. “Want to steer you straight. And first, let me say there’s no hard feelings for last night.”

“You’re singing a different tune all at once.”

“Sure. I feel different. Maybe I… well, it’s like getting over a fever. You can see things clearly again, all of a sudden. Don’t get sore again, Sam. I’ve got a gun on you. I don’t want to have to use it, because I want you to listen to me instead of arguing with me.”

Blossom was subtly changed. The angry, flickering light was gone from his pale eyes. There was a strip of court plaster on his left temple, a bruise at the corner of his mouth, and more tape across the bridge of his nose. But he was freshly shaved, with a clean white shirt and a dark blue necktie and a look of calm about him. His thin, harsh voice was quieter and more confident, yet there was an undercurrent of urgency in his words.

“What I want,” Blossom said carefully, “is just to talk some sense into you now, Sam. After all, we’re both on the same team. I know you from way back, I know what you can do and what you can’t do. I know all about you, Cajun. And Stella Marni is going to dig your grave for you unless you listen to me.”

“You’re not on the case any more,” Durell said.

“True enough. I tried to get an ax into your neck because I was crazy. Somebody should have put me in an institution. And the ax hit me instead. I’m due at the Los Angeles district office tomorrow night. They’re putting the whole country between us. But I’ve still got a little free time here. Tom Markey took over and told me to get drunk or get a girl or see a movie or just get on the first plane, anyway. I didn’t promise I’d do any of those things. What I’m doing is trying to make up for the mistakes I’ve made. I’m trying to set you straight. Stella Marni is going to kill you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The beautiful babe. Stunning Stella. The gal with the gorgeous figure and a heart straight out of a frozen hell. The devil’s mistress, Cajun. You think you’ve got her where you want her, but the real situation is the other way around. She’s got you. Not exactly where she wants you yet. That’s in your grave. But she’s pushing you there.”

Durell felt angry. ‘Talk sense or get out, Harry. I’m busy.”

“I know. Are you going back to her now?”

“I’m turning her over to Tom Markey.”

“Does she know that yet?”

“She won’t object. Her father is safe now,” Durell said. He tried to fathom what lay behind the faint glittering of Blossom’s eyes, but something was going on in the thin man’s mind that defied definition. “You’re making some pretty strong accusations against the girl, Harry.”

“I’m sorry if it bothers you, Sam. I think I know more about that she-devil than any other man this side of the Atlantic. I ought to. I spent enough time on the subject. Day and night, awake and asleep. I tried to give her every break I could think of. I bent over backward and I refused to believe anything I found out that counted against her. I dreamed about her. She was in my blood as no one else has ever been before. And then last night, after you slugged me and took her out of my hands, I walked on the beach and thought it all out. A man can’t work at his job for fifteen years and give his sweat and brains and guts to it and then just kick it in the teeth. Not even for Stella Marni. I wanted to, Sam. I was ready to. I’d have gone over the hill, back to Hungary with her. On her terms. She’d have liked that. Does that surprise you?”

“Maybe not,” Durell said.

“Sure. You’ve had a taste of her. Like honey, but there’s arsenic under that sweetness. I vomited it all up last night on the beach. You think I’m crazy, I guess. Maybe I was. But I’m not crazy now.”

“Get to the point,” Durell said.

“All right. Look, I know what happened to me. I’ve been a lonely man, never married, never had a woman I could love. I’ve always lived alone in that damned house out on the shore. And the first time I saw Stella, I knew something special had happened.” Blossom’s thin voice grew softer for a moment. “When she looked at me, she didn’t have to say anything, actually. I knew what was there. It was in her eyes, like a promise, a kind of special excitement I felt was just for me; and she made me feel it was in her, too. She was extraordinary. She’s the most beautiful girl in the world, Cajun, and I wanted her right there, during that first routine interview we had, when I was lining up witnesses for Senator Hubert. I took her to dinner that night. I know how cold and distant she looks to most men. She’s torture for every man who watches her walk and breathe and sees how she’s put together. That night at dinner she let me think it was there just for me. For me alone.”

Durell said: “So you fell in love, Harry. It’s not uncommon. It happens to most men.”

“This was different. Not because it happened to me — happened for the first time. But because Stella is different That night I went up to her apartment with her, that very first night. Saw how she was, how she lived. Next day her father disappeared and she switched her testimony. It damned near killed me. I went to see her. I was pretty sore, but I tried to understand how she felt. She wouldn’t let me in at first. She was taking a shower. Told me to go away. I wouldn’t. So finally she came to the door, wearing something you could almost, not quite, see through.” Blossom swallowed. He was sweating in the closed car, with the rain tapping on the roof, running in rivulets down the windshield. His eyes were hot and unnatural as he remembered. “I was like a guy who’s been on a desert island too long. I never saw a woman like her. Perfect,” he whispered. “Everything. I kind of went crazy. I couldn’t keep my hands off her. She stood there with all that warm flesh, showing it to me, and she just laughed at me. Everything she had offered me last night was right there, and I was down on my knees in front of her, Sam, I was crying. I don’t care who knows it, I was begging her. And she just laughed at me.”

Durell lit a cigarette. He didn’t want to watch Harry Blossom’s face. “You don’t have to tell me about all this.”

“It doesn’t make any difference. Not now. I was hooked and she knew it and I knew it. Like a hophead on the main line, screaming for more jam. Crawling and begging for it. She gave me a little. Just enough to keep me groveling for more. I made a fool of myself, no mistake, we both knew it, and when she looked at me she laughed and despised me, and still she kept me. It amused her. I hated her and loved her and I was never the same again after that night. I was a crazy man until you woke me up last night, Sam. Last night I gave it to her straight. I offered to chuck everything for her, quit the Bureau, cover up everything I knew about her, if she’d only give me what I wanted.”

Durell’s cigarette tasted fiat and stale. “You tried to buy her and she turned you down?”

“Right.” Blossom pinched the bridge of his narrow nose. “So after you kicked some sense into me, I walked the beach in the rain and I was sick there on the sand and then I just sat there and thought it all over. It’s too late for me to do anything on the case now. I’ve made too many mistakes, screwed it all up, because of Stella. The bitch is in my blood and bones, Sam. I still can’t hurt her, even though I curse her. But I can keep her from hurting you.”

“You’re on the wrong track, Harry. Take it easy.”

“I’m just warning you. You think you know Stella Marni and you think you can handle her. But you can’t. You’ll come to grief.”

“Like you?”

“Worse than me. She laughed at me. She’s afraid of you. You’re more dangerous to her than I ever was.”

“In what way? What are you implying?”

Blossom’s face worked and he was silent, staring at the bleak, rain-swept area of the parking lot. It was growing dark. His breathing was ragged, and he shook his head at his own thoughts.

“You’ve said a lot of strange things. Make some sense out of them.”

“I’ve warned you, that’s all.”

“If you have any facts about Stella Marni, give them to me. Or to Markey. Don’t talk in riddles. Don’t rave about how good or bad she is. Prove something.”

“Sorry, boy. You’ve had it.” Abruptly Blossom elbowed the car door open and stood with bent, narrow shoulders in the rain. Turning, he looked back into the car at Durell. His bony face seemed oddly broken, as if the keenness of the hunter’s blade had been shattered against some obstacle that had yielded without breaking, yielded and blunted the fine, keen mind behind that face until it was twisted and warped and dulled beyond repair. Blossom said tiredly: “If you’re going to Stella now, wherever you’ve got her, take care. Or you’re a dead man.”

Slamming the door, Blossom turned and strode away toward the street.

Chapter Twelve

He was more disturbed by Blossom’s words than he was willing to admit. He felt a sense of urgency, a need to return to Stella to make sure she was safe, to question her again. Last night had been a time of trial, of hysteria and overtaut emotions for her. He had been gentle with her, restraining the questions he wanted to ask. Now he had to face the hard fact that there was more she could tell him. She had held back vital information that could clear up the terror that threatened those like her who had sought asylum here in America.

The heavy, sullen rain had brought a premature darkness over the city. Lights were bright in the shop windows as he drove south along lower Broadway toward Canal Street and the Brooklyn bridges. He was not followed now. The giant seemed to have disappeared. He took evasive action anyway, checking his mirror frequently to make sure the same cars were not always behind him.

In the lower Twenties he saw the building where Frank Greenwald had maintained his chemical-supply business. The studio where Frank had been murdered looked down from the street like a tall Gothic tower atop the otherwise ordinary building, conical in shape, the ornamental ports and gargoyles looking small from the street level. He glanced up at it twice before he suddenly braked and swung the car in toward the curb.

No mistake. There were lights in the ports of John Krame’s studio, high in the dark mist up there. For a moment he hesitated, torn between a need to return to Stella and a sudden curiosity about those lights. Unless the police were still probing around up there, the studio should be dark. Krame was supposed to be in Florida.

Durell found a parking spot and got out and walked back to the building.

Seen in the murky afternoon light, it looked shabby and unimposing, the lobby tracked with muddy footprints to and from the double elevators, which were now operating. Durell got into the nearest elevator and rode up to the twelfth floor. The building was different in these daylight hours, when the various offices and lofts were filled with working people and businessmen. But the twelfth floor, which Frank Greenwald had reserved all for himself, was empty and desolate.

The elevator man was gray and bored. “If you’re looking to do business with the Greenwald Company, mister, there ain’t any anymore. Mr. Greenwald got himself killed last night. Didn’tcha read about it?”

“I read about it. Are the cops up here now?”

“Just for a couple hours this morning. Wouldn’t know about now. I just come back from coffee. You a cop, mister?”

“I’m looking for John Krame.”

“Hell, he’s down in Miami.”

“Then I’ll leave him a note.”

He waited until curiosity faded to resentment and then resignation in the elevator man. The cage descended and he was alone in the corridor that led to Frank Greenwald’s business premises. The pebbled glass door he had entered last night was dark now. And locked. Turning, he walked back and stared up the iron spiral stairway that led to the tower and Krame’s studio, where he had found Greenwald and Stella. There was no sound from up there, and he drifted upward as silently as a shadow to the top landing.

The spiral stairway came right up through the studio floor. Lights gleamed from the banks of fluorescent tubes hanging from the tremendously high, domed ceiling, and baby spots shone from a series of pipe scaffolds. He heard the murmur of a man’s voice before he raised his head above the floor level. He paused. There was a door at the top landing, but it was open, and it was through this that he had seen the banks of lights. A moment later he heard a jingling sound and quick, tapping footsteps and then the clink of glasses. A woman giggled and then sighed and then giggled again.

Silver Bells, Durell thought.

Excitement moved in him. If Gerda Smith was here, if he had been lucky enough to find her in this place, then there was a direct connection between the offices of the New American Society and this photographer’s studio where Frank Greenwald had been killed. It made sense. He looked back into the shrouds of darkness below him on the circular stairway. Nothing. Nobody had followed. Carefully he mounted several more steps, which brought him onto the top landing behind the partly open door. From here he could see clearly into the vast tower room.

The area of the studio visible through the doorway yielded nothing. Rain beat against the high round windows and the big studio window on the north side. The model’s dais, draped in velvet under a battery of pink and amber spots, was empty. The props and stacks of flats to the left looked untouched since last night. The air felt cool and damp.

Gently, slowly, with the tips of his fingers, he pushed the door open slightly wider.

He found himself staring into the startled eyes of Gerda Smith.

They had not been expecting company. She was naked, on a couch in a Duchess of Alba pose, a camera on a tripod near her, spots of pink and amber gels focused on her body, shadowing her head. The photographer, however, was not behind his camera. He sat on the couch with her.

Gerda screamed.

The man jumped up and spun around in a low crouch to face the spot at which she pointed. He saw Durell in the doorway and froze. He was a heavy-set, redheaded man. with his hair clipped in a crew cut that should have given his features a youthful appearance, but which only emphasized the coarseness of his face and the sullen droop of his surprised mouth. He wore a dark red singlet and dirty white duck trousers, but he did not look like a sailor. He looked like a man caught in the preparatory acts of love.

“It’s him!” Gerda screamed. “It’s Durell, Johnny!”

She snatched at a fold of velvet drapery on the couch, cursing in a manner that surprised even Durell; she yanked desperately in an attempt to cover up her extraordinary rounded body. The redheaded man straightened slowly, exhaled. His eyes jumped beyond Durell, across the studio to the bar and a table cluttered with camera equipment. Then he said harshly: “Whoever you are, nobody invited you in, mister.”

“The door was open,” Durell said. “If you’re John Krame, I want to talk to you.”

“Not now.”

“You’re supposed to be in Florida,” Durell said.

“Maybe I was. They still fly planes up and down the coast. So I came back this morning. So what?”

“Johnny,” Gerda said. Her voice was like a tiny, silent scream. “Don’t stand there talking to him. Do something!”

“What would you like me to do, baby?” Krame asked. His manner was contemptuous of the girl, and he did not turn to look at her when he spoke. His brown eyes measured Durell with cool objectivity. “‘Come on in and close the door, .mister. You can see what you busted up. Just don’t hang on the ropes there.”

“Johnny!” Gerda said again.

“Shut up, baby. I’ll handle this.”

“But he knows now! Get him, Johnny!”

Krame’s mouth shaped soundless laughter, but his brown eyes were cold. There was a hard, competent efficiency about him, a core of brute strength in the way he carried himself. His hand flicked backward, knuckles cracking across the girl’s face. Gerda fell back with a squawk of surprise, pain, and outrage. Her pale body flashed in round, plump curves and shadows as the velvet drapery slid away from her legs.

“You’re too eager, baby. In lots of things. He’s got a gun. Haven’t you, mister?”

“Yes, I have,” Durell said.

“You’re tough, Gerda says. She took a liking to you.”

There was something strange about Krame, Durell thought He looked casual, almost amused, but the spotlights overhead gave him away. He had big, square hands and they were clenched hard and the tendons of his muscular forearms were visible, moving a little under his pale skin. Not tanned skin. Pale. If he had been in Miami at all, he hadn’t been lolling on the beach in the sun. He’d been busy with other things, indoors. He noted the tight planes of the redheaded man’s face, the hard, square jaw, the Slavic cheekbones under thick, bony red brows. He looked amused, yes, but he was not. He looked dangerous, as a big cat pacing through the jungle looks dangerous.

Durell flicked a glance at the girl. “Too bad Gerda tried to get me killed, if she likes me,” he said. Gerda’s tiny face reflected naked hatred. “You called the Boroslav after you heard Damion tell me that Albert Marni might be aboard, didn’t you? You heard me tell Damion who I was and what my job is.”

“You son of a bitch,” she whispered.

“But it didn’t work, did it?”

“You were lucky. Or that fool Grozni sold out.”

“Doesn’t Damion know which side of the fence you work on, Gerda?”

She scrubbed her face where Krame had knuckled her. There were flaring red marks on her cheek, and her face was white except where her cosmetics stood out in blotches of color. He saw that the only things she had been wearing when he interrupted them were the silver bells she wore on her wrists and ankles and ears. On anyone else, it might have been provocative. He was sure that more than one man had made love to her to the tune of the silvery little bells.

“Damion is just a stupid jerk,” Gerda whispered.

“Baby, baby,” Krame said softly. “I told you, you talk too much. Now shut up. Once and for all, baby, close the trap, nail it shut. Durell and I are going to have a little talk. He’s got some things right and a lot of it all wrong, and maybe if I can straighten him out on a few items, things won’t be so bad.”

“Such as?” Durell asked.

“Such as Stella Marni. And your guess about Gerda, here.”

“You killed Frank Greenwald,” Durell said suddenly. “You might have been in Miami recently, but you were right here last night.”

“Wrong. I was in Miami. I can prove it. You don’t pin murder on me,” said the redheaded man. His voice was easy, but his tawny eyes were tight and cautious, like a stalking tiger. “I’m a guy who likes a fast buck and the ladies. I like Gerda here, I like this place, I like money the easy way. Sure. But I know when to stop. I don’t kill, mister. I don’t kidnap.”

“You leave that for the other members of your gang. You and Gerda, that’s two of you,” Durell said. “That leaves another woman and three men to work your racket on the refugees. Who are they?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Krame said, smiling. “I’m not over a barrel, mister. You are. You’re in the ditch right now. You and I are going to make a deal.”

“Johnny …” Gerda said.

“No deal,” Durell said. “You’re talking to the cops.”

“I wouldn’t be too hasty,” Krame said. He spoke easily, with confidence. “Not unless you’re anxious to go back to Stella and find her dead.”

It could be a bluff, Durell thought. The redheaded man might be playing for time, looking for an angle. He was smart, mentally agile, and his pale brown eyes were confident It could be, Durell thought, that in coming up here into this hornet’s nest he had stumbled onto the very head of the ring he had set out to destroy. Luck, maybe. But he did not trust entirely to luck. Rather than try to read Krame’s closed face, he shot a glance at the girl huddled on the couch. Gerda’s eyes had opened wide at Krame’s remark about Stella, and then had narrowed and become veiled.

It was a gamble, and Durell was a gambler. It was in his blood, and he had been trained to it as a boy by his grandfather, who had owned and worked an old Mississippi side-wheeler. There was no trick, honest or crooked, that he did not know about cards or gambling devices. And he knew how to apply his knowledge of percentages to human factors, as well. He decided Krame was bluffing.

Without making a reply, Durell turned away and walked to a table nearby, where a telephone rested. He picked it up and dialed the FBI district office number, his eyes dark and brooding as he watched Krame and the girl. Neither made a move. When the number was answered, Durell said: “Get me Tom Markey, please.”

“He’s on the Washington line,” the girl said. “Can you call back in five minutes?”

“I’ll wait. Interrupt him and tell him it’s urgent. This is Sam Durell.”

“Yes, sir. Ill see what I can do.”

Durell waited. Krame made a laughing sound. He held his hands out, big stubby fingers spread wide. The girl behind him on the couch looked frightened, but there was a strange confidence in the redheaded man.

“Maybe you didn’t understand me, Durell. You talk to that FBI guy, and Stella Marni gets dead. You like her, don’t you? Be an awful waste, a gorgeous piece like that on a morgue slab. You talk to Markey and that’s where she’ll be.”

“You don’t have her,” Durell said.

“We know all about last night, the way you tangled with that Blossom screwball. We know you had her with you last night. We know where you left her. I offer an even swap. Stella for her papa.”

Bluff, Durell thought. But bluff of the best kind. The sort that was based on a grain of truth. How did this man know about his run-in with Blossom? It was impossible for him to know about it. Yet he did. He seemed sure of himself. Desperate, but sure.

“Where is she now, Durell?” Krame asked tauntingly. “How do you know she’s where you left her?”

Markey’s voice began to rattle in the phone. Durell said: “Just a minute, Tom.”

“That you, Sam? You got the girl?”

“Just a minute.”

He put a hand over the mouthpiece and looked at Krame. Krame laughed silently, his face a mask of light and shadow in the glare of the overhead spots and floodlights. Behind him, seen as if at a great distance, Gerda sat forward on the couch, one leg and thigh and curve of hip exposed from under the velvet drapery she held at her throat, the naked contours of her body highlighted under the spots, shadowed in the hollows…

Durell saw the silent laughter and the girl’s tight expectancy and the shadow sliding along the floor, all at once.

He saw the shadow too late.

Turning, he glimpsed the brutal, grinning face of the giant who had trailed him today, just an instant before something crashed down on the back of his head and the whole queer spectrum of lights and shadows and the high, grotesquely vaulted ceiling went spinning quickly into a deep puddle of darkness.

Chapter Thirteen

He was alone.

The darkness was bitterly cold.

He was in a clammy vacuum where water dripped monotonously with an echo of cold steel. The feeling that he was blind, when he opened his eyes and saw absolutely nothing, brought stark panic to him. There was nothing he could see. A total of nothing. His arms and legs were not tired. He was free to move, but for a long minute he did not move at all. letting strength and control return to his nerves and muscles. He had the feeling that he had not been out too long, perhaps ten or fifteen minutes at the most, but he knew that this was deceptive and he could not count on it.

He listened to the drip-drip of water falling steadily on steel. It resounded hollowly. Eyes open wide, he strained again to penetrate the darkness. There was nothing to see. He had never known such absolute blackness.

He was underground, then. Such total absence of light could be obtained only under the earth. Unless something had happened to his eyes.

His head ached, pulsing with a slow rhythm of pain, and he lay motionless, wondering why his arms and legs were free, wondering about the intense, raw cold he felt. Not underground. That would be warmer. He was in a cramped, fetal position, and after a few moments he became aware of steel under him, too, riveted rusty plates that were icy to the touch. And he was aware now, too, of the hollow drumming of rain overhead, very close to him. He began to shiver. His teeth chattered and he clamped his jaws together hard.

He thought of Stella, waiting for him.

He thought of Deirdre, waiting for him.

He wondered what Tom Markey would say and do when he failed to show up.

There was a feeling of pressure all around him, of a small, enclosed space slowly moving in to crush him, and he recognized the panic of claustrophobia and fought it off, concentrating on the ebbing pain in the back of his head, the coppery taste of nausea in the back of his throat. He straightened his legs slowly. His feet touched steel before his knees were fully level. He sat up. His head scraped steel just above him.

For a moment then, without light or anything but the sense of touch to guide him, he experienced a violent vertigo, a loss of orientation that gave him a sensation of swinging, tipping, sliding, falling into the still blackness around him. He waited, very still, for several minutes before it passed. Then he began to probe the darkness with care, feeling the cold wet plates under him, against his shoulders behind him. The walls curved. He got on his knees and felt the ceiling overhead as it lifted to a point not more than five feet high and then curved sharply down again on the opposite side.

He was in a solid iron cage, not more than six feet in diameter, a circular cage five feet in height at its peak, shaped roughly like the top half of a giant steel acorn.

It defied his understanding.

For several minutes he explored his prison solely by the sense of touch, examining the rivets that held the plates together, finding a heavy battery of cables that went from the peak overhead down through the floor. There was a small leak overhead, and water dripped steadily through it, and he assumed it was still raining outside and the iron shell that caged him was exposed to the sky. He shivered violently in the cold, and he could not control the chattering of his teeth.

Never in his experience had he known anything like it.

He could not imagine where he was.

A cold wind whistled through the joints in the plates, and he had no fear of suffocating, yet there was a wild pressure in his chest and for long moments his heart hammered beyond control, adding to the pulse of pain in his head where he had been struck down. When he thought of the giant he had glimpsed in that last moment of consciousness, he remembered Krame and Silver Bells and Krame’s words about Stella. A different fear possessed him then. He knew that somewhere at this moment there were men looking for Stella, hunting her ruthlessly, with only one aim. Stella Marni had to be killed. She had to be shut up before she could change her testimony and expose to the whole world the truth of what had been done to her and her father. She had to be silenced.

Durell fumbled in his pockets with hands that shook with the cold. He found his cigarettes, his wallet, searched for matches, found a small packet. His gun was gone, of course. He traced four paper matches in the invisible booklet and his hands shook so that he waited for a time, tucking them under his armpits before he dared risk striking for a light.

His heart thudded with fear that he was blind.

Again he had the feeling he was sliding, reeling, falling into black space.

He struck the match.

In the tiny flare he felt an enormous wave of relief wash over him. He could still see. And then he felt a wave of incredulity at what his eyes opened for him. His estimate of an acorn-shaped steel shell was verified. The plates curved upward close overhead, so he could not stand upright, and from the peak they arched down to the circular steel floor, six feet wide, wet with condensation and even a patch of ice where the wind blew through an uncaulked seam between two of the plates. His topcoat was poor protection against the bitter cold that crept out of the steel walls of his lightless cage.

He struck another match.

This time he was able to see more details of his tiny prison. Directly behind him the wall was not curved in the same arc as the rest of the plates, but was flat, and his fingers traced the outline of a small hatch of steel before the match guttered out in the draft that poured into the cell. There was no lock or handle on the narrow, three-foot-high door. No way to open it from this side, at any rate.

He had only two matches left, and he decided to save them.

He considered yelling for help, but postponed that for a moment. He was thirsty. His head ached. He tried to figure out where he could be.

Only one place, he finally decided. His thoughts raced, flared with panic, grew cool and objective again. Only one possible place. High up above the vast ceiling of Krame’s studio. High in the very pinnacle of the building tower.

No one could have devised a more ingenious, safer prison.

He was isolated in a tiny steel cell perched above the city, and he could shout until his lungs burst and no one would hear him. He could die here and no one would find him until the building was razed. He was sealed up, bottled and corked. No amount of cleverness, no test of strength could help him.

The shout burst from his lungs involuntarily.

His voice was monstrous, echoing in distorted inflections, bouncing back and forth inside the acorn cage. His head pulsed and throbbed. It was ready to burst. He shouted again. He took off his shoe and banged the heel against the cold steel plates of the floor. He was suddenly sweating.

“Krame! Krame!”

And: “Gerda! Gerda!”

Nothing happened.

He was alone up here.

They had deserted him.

*

Time was a sluggish black river carrying him through hours of frozen hell and burning thirst. He eased his thirst a little by finding the tiny tongue of ice that had been formed by the cold wind on the rain that had dripped between the plates, and he hammered at it with the heel of his shoe until he broke off a small chunk no larger than his thumb and sucked at it. Time was a weight that slowly closed in upon him with inexorable pressure, soon to crush him. He knew that Tom Markey was looking for him with angry disillusionment now. He knew that Stella was waiting for him with terror and despair as her companions.

He tried to sleep, and for a time he dozed, and he dreamed of Stella as Blossom had described her, half naked, taunting him with the sculptured perfection of breasts and buttocks, her lovely hair brushing his face, the perfume of her seeping through him in delicate torture. Deirdre was in the dream somewhere, too, crying out to him. And for a time, too, he dreamed he was back home, a boy again, in the bayous with his grandfather, hunting through the heavy, still heat of the green channels and chenieres down toward the sparkle and glitter of the wide blue Gulf. He was a boy again, sweating in the Louisiana sun on the deck of the Three Belles, the side-wheeler that old Jonathan had run up on the mud flats and made his home.

He awoke sweating and gasping, panting for air.

From the bitter, icy cold of a short time ago, the steel cage that imprisoned him had turned into a miniature furnace. The metal walls were almost too hot to touch. The air was a long tongue of flame that he sucked in and out of his lungs. His throat closed against it and he sat up, coughing, scraping his head painfully against the curving roof. A shout leaped to his lips and died before it was born.

A thin crack of sunlight came through the same spot where ice had formed before he slept.

He took off his coat, his jacket, his shirt. Sweat ran down his chest, soaked his belt and trousers. He did not dare lean his naked shoulders against the steel walls of the acorn. The tiny crack in the plate joints admitted just enough light to verify what he had discovered by using his matches a few hours before. He could not understand the change in temperature for several moments, and again panic shook him. He dug his fingers into his thighs until the pain helped clear his mind.

Slowly he figured out what had happened.

Somehow, he had slept through the night and it was daylight now, the next day, and the rain had ended. The sky must be clear and sunny, and although it was November, the sunlight beat on the copper sheathing outside the tower and transmitted its heat to the structural steel within until the temperature had soared fantastically.

He did not know what time it was. His motions and his thoughts were clogged by the heat. His watch had stopped. If it was still early morning, there was a dangerous chance that the temperature of his cage would rise until it killed him.

His thirst returned, emphasized by the water he had lost in sweating while he slept. But there was no ice left now. And the condensation that had dampened the cage a few hours ago had given way to dry, rust-flaked heat unendurable to the touch. Through a red haze of despair, he wondered how long he could live up here, with no food and no water, no chance to escape. The use of the cage to keep him a prisoner indicated a cruel, twisted genius. That would be Krame, he thought slowly. He allowed hate to rise in him, turning his thoughts away from his physical torment, and he concentrated on the wavering vision of Krame’s round, brutalized face with the cropped red hair and silently laughing mouth. He thought of ways he would like to kill Krame, slowly, plucking out nerve endings, snipping muscles and tendons and flesh from here and there. The red madness lasted only for a few moments. His trousers were soaked with sweat, his chest was slick, water ran down from his disheveled hair and dripped from his jaw to trace paths down his back and chest muscles.

He couldn’t breathe.

He yelled again.

He hammered on the steel plates with his shoe, heedless of the torture of echoing sound that pierced his ears with intolerable reverberations. Somebody had to hear him. Someone had to come soon. If Krame wanted to kill him, it could have been done hours ago, last night, when the giant had slugged him. Why was he a prisoner, then? Why was he kept here, ignored, without even a humane sip of water, a bite to eat, a breath of cool air for his lungs?

The temperature mounted slowly and inexorably with each passing minute. His strength ebbed. He sat still, bent forward from the waist, all of his being concentrated solely on the effort of drawing in a breath, exhaling, and breathing again. He began to hear odd sounds, echoing metallic whispers, voices that spoke to him. Hallucinations. He stood up with a lurch and slammed his fists against the steel trap door in the side of the acorn, beating against the hot steel until his knuckles bled. He sucked at his blood and felt a greater thirst because of the salt that was left in it.

He watched with dulled eyes that no longer focused as the thin sliver of sunlight moved across the iron plates. It came from the east, he judged, and after a time it grew shorter and waned and withdrew. The heat continued. He tried to determine if it was growing worse, but he had gone beyond any fine distinction in the degree of his torture. He had never felt so utterly helpless in his life.

There were times when he dozed, succumbing to the feverish heat and the cramped position he was forced to maintain. Darkness washed over his mind in deeper and longer waves.

He was not sure when he heard the first distant, dim clang of metal striking metal. At first he thought it was another trace of his fevered imagination, another element in the distorted dreams that chased themselves across the heated mirror of his mind. He opened his eyes. He thought it was a little cooler in the cage. There was no sunlight in the crack between the plates now, only a little grayness, and he crawled over to it and tried to see through the riveted edges of the plates and glimpsed only a vague grayness that might have been the clouded November sky. No bright sunlight. If an overcast had come up over the city, it very possibly had saved his life.

Now a clanging came distinctly from under the floor plates and then a scraping noise and then the rasp of steel and the clink of bars being dropped. Durell swung around, crouching, to face the trap door.

It opened slowly.

A gun appeared, black against the strange burst of light that blinded him after the long hours he had endured in darkness. Then the face of the huge man who had struck him down appeared behind the small swinging door, followed by the giant’s shoulders.

“Hello,” the man rumbled. “Still with us, tovarich?”

Durell stared hypnotized at the gun in the huge fist.

“You stay just like that, eh? You don’t move closer to me. Or I shoot and you die quick up here, all alone. You like the room? Is nice? Is private enough?”

Durell licked his dry, cracked lips. His voice sounded harsh and croaking when he spoke. “Where is Krame? I want to talk to him.”

“Is busy. You talk with me. I bring you water.”

“Thanks for small favors.”

“Eh? You no want water? Not thirsty?”

“I’ll take whatever you can spare.”

From his crouching position in the center of the acorn, Durell could see through the narrow opening, which was just wide enough to admit the giant’s shoulders. There was bright space beyond, the under surfaces of the ceiling above Krame’s studio, the arch of the walls, the huge porthole window on this side, the heavy cable from which the battery of fluorescent light tubes hung. He wondered how the big man had climbed up here. A ladder of some sort, but a tricky one, set up in the center of the studio floor because of the inward arch of the tower walls that ended in the floor of his cage.

The big man had a bullet-shaped head covered with a thick thatch of grizzled brindle hair, a prognathous jaw, big teeth, and a broken nose. He pushed a thermos of water into the cage with the hand that held the gun. For a moment Durell was tempted to grab at the thick hairy wrist, but the giant’s pale eyes were too watchful and ready. He knew he could die very easily up here and never be found.

“Is there anything to eat?” Durell asked.

“Not now. Maybe later, when you feel like talking. I got some news for you, mister. Krame tells me to let you know. Albert Marni ain’t in the hospital no more. We got him back again.”

“You’re lying,” Durell said.

“Was easy. He look too sick to walk, but I make him feel better quick. I hit the nurse, I kill a cop, I pick him up like he a little child and we go down freight elevator and Krame meet us on street with a car. Last night, two o’clock, we did it. Is true. We got Albert Marni again. You a fool to take him from the Boroslav yesterday.” The giant grinned. His teeth were big and yellow and crooked. “Is all for nothing, eh? All you suffer up here. We got him again, so we got Stella, too. Is nice woman, that Stella. Much woman. I like her. She like me, too. She tell me so.”

“Where is she?” Durell asked.

“Is no matter now for you. She do what we want, we got her papa back, she obey orders like everybody else. She show up, we don’t worry about her now. We put her on ship with papa and she go home. Tomorrow morning the Boroslav sails. Stella will be on it.”

“Isn’t she with Krame?”

“You sleep now,” the giant said.

“Wait a minute. Wait. What’s your name?”

“Karl.”

“All right, listen to me, Karl. Help me. I’ll make it worth while. Listen for a minute. Hold that door open.”

The giant said: “What can you give me?”

“You name it. Money? Women?” Durell asked. He was panting. The open trap door was like a tantalizing mirage, just out of his reach. “I can get you whatever you want, Karl. The government will pay you to let me out of here. They’ll give you whatever I tell them to give you, understand? It’s important. You can believe me. Anything you ask for. You’ve got to let me out.”

“You a fool,” Karl said softly.

The door slammed shut again.

*

A steel cone, a hemisphere six feet in diameter at the bottom, the floor of his cage, and less than six feet high — this was his world. His legs ached with cramp. He felt the heat oozing away from the walls, evaporating like water under a hot sun. There was no more light coming through the crack, but he was not sure if it was night again or if it was because the sun had gone behind the thick overcast in the west. The air in the cage was growing foul. Now and then he twisted about and put his mouth to the rusty, tiny crack in the steel plates and tried to suck the cold, fresh November air into his lungs, and this revived him and he began to think a little more rationally, now that he had seen Karl and knew he was not abandoned here indefinitely, simply to die. They wanted something more from him, or they would have killed him at once. And this thought gave him hope and the will to live and a slow lessening of the nightmare panic that had roweled him through all the long hours past.

The heat left and a coolness came into the cage and he knew that presently the bitter cold would come again. He sipped some of the water from the thermos bottle, and then drank half of it all at once in an effort to maintain his strength and clarity of thought.

He wondered if Karl had told the truth about abducting Albert Marni from the hospital. It would be a daring and dangerous move, a sign of desperation, but it could have been done if Krame was really desperate enough, if he needed absolutely to regain control of Stella. He decided that Karl had had no real reason to lie to him about it.

And Karl would be back.

The thought gave him his first real glimmer of hope. A sense of cunning took over, and he went around the cage on hands and knees again, searching for something, anything to help him escape. The cage was totally bare. Then he found the thermos bottle Karl had left him, and he deliberately finished the pint of water in it and weighed the empty cylinder thoughtfully. Then he took off the leather belt around his waist.

He smashed the thermos bottle against the steel wall, heedless of the noise. He had hammered with the heel of his shoe often enough for the sound to raise no extra alarm, if anyone were below in the studio. When the thermos rattled with broken shards of glass, he used the prong of his belt buckle to extract several razor-sharp slivers from the outer cylinder. He scattered these with care on the floor just an inch or so inside the narrow metal hatchway. There was one longer piece of glass, about four inches in length, that he was lucky to find, and the end of this he wrapped in a strip of cloth torn from the tail of his shirt, so that when he gripped it in his fist, about two inches of the sharp, curved triangle was exposed as a crude hand knife. He checked the scattering of broken glass on the steel ledge inside the hatch, where Karl had rested his weight before, and then took his belt and coiled it with the buckle inside, the tip held between his clenched fingers.

It would do.

“Karl!” he yelled. “Help! Help, Karl!”

He slammed his shoe against the floor and yelled again. The clamor he raised inside the steel cage was deafening. After a moment or two he paused and listened. Nothing. He yelled again, hammered again. This time he heard very dim squealing noises of metal far below him. He called Karl’s name once more and then waited.

It was about three minutes before he heard the clang of a bar being dropped away from the outside of the acorn, and then the door squealed faintly. Bright light flooded the inside of his cage. Durell was on his knees, his toes touching the edge of the arching sides of the cage behind him, his position a little to the left of the hatch opening. He remembered that Karl had looked to the right at first, when he had last appeared. After he had climbed up past the battery of lights, the inside of the acorn would appear to Karl like a black hole, until his eyes adjusted to it. Durell stared into the empty blackness. Then Karl’s huge head and shoulders filled the opening for an instant; his face was in shadow, with the bright light streaming in from behind him.

Angrily, Karl said: “What is it, mister? What’s all the yelling for, eh? You sick or something?”

“Yes, I’m sick,” Durell said. “I’m sick of you.”

He had the tongue end of the belt in his hand when he flicked it forward. It uncoiled with the speed of a striking snake, and the bright buckle slashed hard across the ugly, angry face that peered at him. Karl gasped and then roared in rage and pain and brought his gun slamming down hard on the floor inside the cage. The heel of his fist bit into the sharp slivers of glass Durell had sprinkled there and a queer scream of pain and fury burst from him. At the same moment Durell flung himself forward, the glass knife replacing the belt in his grip. The glass edge slashed across Karl’s wrist and blood spurted in a great gout as vein and artery were cut as if by a razor. Karl’s gun roared. The sound was enormous inside the cage, utterly deafening. The bullet slapped around the top of the cage like an angry hornet and then Durell slammed his fist into the giant’s stunned face.

Apparently Karl’s grip outside the cage was not too secure.

He screamed.

His head jerked backward, fell away from Durell’s blow.

He disappeared.

There was a long ululating scream and then a far thud and then sudden silence, leaving only the bright light streaming in through the open steel hatch.

Durell lifted himself slowly to hands and knees, shaking his head to rid his ears of the intolerable ringing echo of the gunshot. He was panting, and his heart pounded crazily. He stared blinkingly at the open door. It remained open. Nothing more happened. And after a moment he stuck his head through the hatchway and looked down.

He saw the floor of Krame’s studio, thirty feet below, beyond the banks of photographic lights. A portable steel scaffolding had been pushed into the center of the floor, tangled with the light fixtures and baby spots and drop nets used as photographic props. A ladder led up from the pipe scaffolding to a shaftlike entrance in the ceiling like that of a conning tower in a submarine, and this in turn yielded to the trap door.

Karl lay on his back on the floor below.

Even at the distance from which Durell looked down upon him, he could see that the man’s neck was broken. Karl was dead.

Chapter Fourteen

According to the clock over Krame’s desk, against the far wall of the studio, it was two o’clock in the afternoon. About thirty hours since he had left Stella in the beach cottage. He wondered if she was still there. She had promised faithfully to wait there until he returned, no matter what happened. But it would be trying her patience and trust beyond credulity if she had remained in hiding in the cottage for ail these long hours he had been imprisoned. A sense of desperate urgency filled him, but he didn’t leave the studio at once.

He found the bar and pushed aside the sticky, unwashed glasses that still remained as a token of Krame’s dalliance with Gerda Smith, and opened a bottle of brandy and took a long swallow, then another. The liquor burned and exploded with warmth in his stomach. He found a small refrigerator behind a Japanese silk screen and took from inside a half loaf of stale French bread, some butter and Bel Paese cheese. He ate hungrily, chafing the stiffness from his arms and legs while he studied the vast, empty spaces of the studio. There was no sign of John Krame or Gerda. He was not interested in Karl’s broken body under the portable scaffold.

The brandy made him feel a little drunk, but the bread and cheese soon counteracted its effect. Except for the bruise on the back of his head and the muscular stiffness from his cramped imprisonment, he was not too much the worse for wear. He had slept, or at least dozed, through many of the hours that had just passed.

There was nothing in the studio to interest him except a heavy steel Mosler safe mounted on rollers near the desk. The safe had a solid combination lock that defied his brief efforts to open it. Giving it up, he went to the telephone and called Tom Markey’s office.

Markey answered the first ring himself.

“This is Sam,” Durell said. “Don’t blow your stack before you listen to me, Tom. I’ve had a little trouble.”

Markey was silent for a long moment. “You’ve got more trouble than you think,” he said finally. “Don’t call me your friend any more. I trusted you yesterday. I asked you to bring in Stella Marni.”

“I’m going after her right now.”

“No, you’re not. You’re off the case. McFee pulled you off last night when I complained to Washington. I raised the biggest stink I could about the way you’ve played footsie with me. and I don’t apologize for it. For my money, you’re out in left field and the ball game is over.”

“I’ve been slugged,” Durell said. “I’ve been a prisoner.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“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-mache substance, a thing that was shredded and somehow unfinished and inhuman.

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

Chapter Fifteen

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.

She clasped her hands in her lap and leaned forward. The pale winter sunlight caught in her long golden hair and gave it burnished highlights. He wanted to touch her, to lift her up, to hold and comfort her. He couldn’t do it. He didn’t move.

“Somebody was in the house waiting for us,” she went on. “It happened so fast, I am not sure how it was. Blossom stood there and I was sitting here and he told me what he was going to do to me. He wanted me, but because I didn’t love him I think he began to hate me. He was — I think he was a little crazy. I couldn’t understand all of what he said. I tried, but it did not make much sense. He accused me of terrible things. He said I didn’t really care for my father’s safety and that I was testifying to Senator Hubert’s committee the way I was doing because I really wanted to, because I felt that way. And then — then somebody shot him.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“Didn’t you see anybody?”

“No, I… I was looking at Blossom, listening to him. There was somebody in the doorway, I could just see movement in the corner of my eye — and then the shot came and he fell like that, into the fireplace, and all the ashes puffed up around his face and… and…”

“Don’t think about that”

“I’m sorry, Sam.”

“Did the killer get away in a car?”

“Yes, I think so. I heard him running away and then…”

“It was a man?”

‘The footsteps were heavy. Yes. A man.”

“And then a car drove away?”

“Yes. But I didn’t see that. I don’t know what happened. I didn’t seem able to move. All I could think was that this was the end of everything. Papa would be killed because I would be arrested and couldn’t obey their orders any more and everything was lost and I’d go to prison here…”

‘Take it easy,” he said. “Didn’t you hear the car approach?”

“No.”

“But you heard one leave?” he persisted.

“Yes.”

He frowned down at her. For a moment, when he turned his head to glance at the dead FBI agent, he wondered if Blossom had not been right all the way down the line. Whatever Blossom’s mistakes, he had paid for them. Stella’s story was thin, too thin to be credible. He studied the room for evidence of the gun. He saw nothing that resembled a weapon. He told Stella to get up and she stood, wavering, and leaned on him, and he felt the soft pressure of her trembling body against him and he tried to ignore it He took the cushions off her chair, but the gun wasn’t there. He got down on his hands and knees and scanned the floor under the furniture, looking in the corners. Then he went out in the hall and looked up the wide stairway, where a bronze cupid held an electric torch atop the newel post. No gun anywhere. He felt slightly better about it It still could have been hidden in the few moments between his parking the car and entering the room.

When he returned, Stella stood exactly where he had left her, facing the doorway. Her large green eyes were wide, watching him soberly.

“Sam, don’t you believe me?”

“I don’t know what to believe.” He spoke harshly and he saw the way she flinched at his words and he tried to soften them. “When Blossom finally located you at the cottage, did he have his own car with him?”

“I suppose it was his, yes. The gray one.”

“Did you notice if you were followed when he came here?”

“I did not have time to notice anything. He was in a strange state of mind. He wept and begged and threatened me, and you know what he wanted. He wanted what I offered you the other night, Sam — what I can offer you again. I…” She paused, flushing. “It is difficult to be frank about such things, is it not? Perhaps, with Blossom, my sins came home to me. Not long ago I would have reveled in his torment, remembering that alley in Budapest, those men who took me and changed me and made me into something I now despise. I would like to be quite a different person from what I was for so long. I would like to forget the ambition I have, the feeling I have for men, my lack of capacity for — for love. I would like to be the woman I pretend to be, in truth. After you, Sam, I could not consider Blossom for a moment, not even to save Papa’s life, not for anyone in the world. All I could think of was to wait for you to come back, to tell you this, how I feel about you, how you have given me hope and… and a different future.”

Beyond her, through the tall Victorian windows, he saw the vista of beach and marsh and empty road winding toward the mainland. A gull balanced on the thin edge of the lonely winter wind above the weathered cupola on the boathouse. If Stella hadn’t killed Blossom, he thought, who had? She could have hidden the gun just before he drove in. He had not searched too thoroughly, perhaps because he wanted to believe and trust her. He understood what she had just said. She was in love with him. She wanted him with the same wild, strange impulse that he felt for her. She was beautiful, everything a man could desire in a woman. She had made many men love her, and some had died for her. Or because of her. But she had been a cold and forbidding goddess then, driven by dark impulses bred in the fires and hatreds of war. But to him she had uncovered the lonely image of a lovely, despairing woman.

“Sam,” she whispered. “Will you arrest me?”

“Not exactly, Stella.”

“Do you think I killed Harry?”

He looked at her and smiled briefly. “No.”

“Thank God,” she whispered. “I would have died if you looked at me the same way Blossom used to.”

He was not prepared for the way she came to him and put her arms around him and kissed him. Her mouth was moist and open and her eyes were heavy-lidded, glistening under dark lashes like tiny fans on her soft cheeks. All in an instant, her body was a consuming flame against him, and her clinging lips held secret ecstasies just for him. His hands sought her, he returned the kiss. For moments it was silent in the room except for the muted thunder of the surf and the whimpering of wind outside.

She began to shudder against him. “Please … let us go outside.”

He took her hand and they moved quickly through the house to the back door. The wind caught her hair, blew it across her mouth.

“What will we do?” she asked. “Where shall we go?”

“I’m going to turn you over to Markey,” he said softly.

She looked stunned. “But you…”

“He’s in charge of the case now. You’ll be safe with him.”

“The man with the pipe?”

“That’s the one,” Durell said.

“We’re going to him right now?”

“Now,” he said.

But she did not walk toward his car. She went toward the boathouse instead, onto the little pier over the channel that twisted through the salt marsh toward the sea. He walked after her with a long stride. Behind the boathouse, she stood facing the vast wilderness of flat marsh and open, turbulent sea. There was an inexpressible loneliness in the scene, an isolated torment reflected in her face. It made him feel as if he were alone and isolated with this girl from all the world for this moment. He knew he should be on the telephone right now, calling Markey about Harry Blossom’s murder. One part of his mind still questioned the reasons for and the manner of Blossom’s death. If the killer had been one of Krame’s men, why wasn’t Stella taken with him? Why had she been left here, stunned and terrified? It didn’t make sense. The cool, analytical part of his mind questioned the complete truth of what Stella had told him. Something more had happened here. She was keeping something from him. She knew her father was a prisoner again, and she was a prisoner once more, too, chained by her fears for the old man’s safety.

The other part of his mind was concerned only with Stella Marni as a helpless woman, needing solace and a moment of comfort. There was a bright fever in her, the fever of a woman who had been through hell. Her strength had not been equal to the terrible pressures that had been put upon her. He knew she was close to destruction. And she was too lovely to be destroyed.

There is a little time, he thought.

She spoke while she faced the sea, not looking at him, her hands gripping the pier rail. “When I go back with you, Sam, it will start all over again. Senator Hubert, his questions, the FBI, the cameras, the reporters.” Suddenly she covered her face with her hands. “I couldn’t endure it again.”

“You’re not going back to Europe,” he said.

“But if they have Papa…”

“Your father wants you to stay.”

“But they will kill him!”

“Promise me, Stella.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know, I don’t know…”

He said urgently: “Change your testimony, Stella. Tell them the truth. Tell it to the whole world! You’ll do more good that way than by surrender. They may be forced to give back your father. They wouldn’t dare hurt him if you told the world what has happened to you and all the others like you. Don’t you see what great good you could do, Stella?

“I… I’m not sure.”

“Tell the truth,” he said again. “How people like you came here for asylum, for peace and the right to live in dignity, without fear. How you’ve been coaxed and threatened, how they promised you better things that turned out to be ashes and dust for those who fell for the promises. Tell them about the anonymous letters, the hints about relatives and friends still behind the Curtain, the threats of what would happen to them if you didn’t choose repatriation. You don’t have to go back, Stella. The truth is the most powerful weapon of them all. It can destroy all the evil they’ve done to you, Stella. We need the truth desperately, to end all this, and you’re the one who can do it.”

Her eyes searched his face and something moved within their depths. Perhaps it was hope that changed everything about her. Her smile was tentative and shaken, but it was a smile. Then it faded abruptly.

“They would never let me. They would kill me.”

“They killed Blossom, but they let you live.”

“Only because they must think I’ll go on with the testimony that I want to go back to Budapest. If I change that, then they will kill me. You don’t know. Somewhere, somehow. They will do it.”

“Don’t be afraid of them, Stella.”

“Could you stop them?”

“Yes. While I’m alive, they won’t hurt you.”

“They may try a year from now. Or five,” she said. “Where will you be then?”

“With you. Near you,” he said. “I promise.”

Her fingers traced the line of his mouth, wondering. They were cool, trembling. The wind whimpered around the corner of the boathouse. The little chop in the channel splashed among the tall yellow reeds. She looked beyond him, and there was a difference in her eyes that he did not understand, a tiny look of triumph, of sudden hope under the gray November sky, hope in the center of all that loneliness of sea and marsh and white-frothed water. A gull wheeled overhead, screaming briefly.

“Must we go right now?” she whispered.

“There is no point in waiting.”

“Just for a little time, Sam.”

She came against him, that strange brightness in her eyes that looked beyond him at something he could not see…

Chapter Sixteen

He did not hear the car approach over her quick whispering in his ear. He was conscious of the wind that smelled of the sea and the salt marshes, of the pale lemon glow in the western sky where the sun was setting, of the fragrance of Stella’s skin and the excitement of her importunities as her lips sought his.

The car came silently and the men in it went through the house quickly, with only a casual glance at Harry Blossom, dead in the fireplace. There were three of them and one nodded and they went out through the back door and considered Durell’s car, and then they separated, approaching the boathouse. Each man had a gun ready.

The first warning Durell had was the subtle change of Stella’s expression. Her eyes widened and glowed, and her parted lips moved soundlessly as she looked beyond him. The flimsy board planking behind the boathouse creaked. Durell swung, pulling free of Stella’s hands, and saw the first man suddenly looming dark against the pale winter sky. The watery sunlight glinted on the gun. He swiveled, got his legs under him, and thrust upward savagely. Stella screamed as he flung her aside. Her eyes were wide, glistening. The gun slammed and the bullet boxed his ear. He twisted left, saw the sudden loom of two other figures blocking their escape around the other corner of the boathouse. He saw John Krame’s cropped red hair, his soundlessly laughing mouth, the guns covering him.

“Hello, Stella, baby,” Krame said.

His pale amber eyes flicked to Durell and he raised the gun in his hand and said: “You’re for me, friend.”

He fired.

Durell was not there. There was no place to go except over the rail into the channel. There was no time to think or take Stella. Instinct took over and his body arched through the air in a flat dive that took him low into the lapping tidal water behind the boathouse.

The shock of it was paralyzing.

His hands touched bottom ooze, pushed away, thrust him forward. Reeds scraped and dragged at his clothes. The water was only six feet deep, but the outgoing tide thrust him strongly to the right. He did not fight it. The icy water and the lack of preparation made his lungs scream, and he struggled to keep his jaws clamped against the single deadly inhalation that would drag sea water into his chest and drown him. There was no time to think of what was happening to Stella on the tiny porch behind the shed.

He swam underwater as hard and as long as he could. When his head broke through into the air, he was facing downchannel, away from the boathouse. Instantly he heard the sharp, spiteful crack of a gun, and a bullet splashed inches from his face.

He dragged in a breath of air and dived again.

The second time he surfaced, he was in among the reeds on the opposite side of the channel. The water here was only hip-deep. He was facing the boathouse now. There was another shot, but the bullet went far to the left and he guessed he could not be seen from the porch.

It had happened too fast, too suddenly.

He could see Stella and Krame through the curtain of yellow grass that sheltered him. The other two men were leaning on the porch rail, searching the channel for him, their guns ready, their faces hard in the fading yellow light. Stella’s pale green sweater stood out vividly against the white boathouse wall. She was talking to Krame, who towered over her, smiling, his red bead bent to listen. He said something and she shook her head. She looked directly down the channel to where Durell was hiding.

He could not understand the expression on her face. From this distance, he sensed excitement in her parted lips, her quick gesture, her nod to something Krame said.

Durell crouched, shuddering with cold, up to his neck in the icy salt water. His legs ached with cold, but he did not move, not wanting to disturb the reeds over his head and give away his position. He watched Krame put a hand on Stella’s arm. She pulled angrily away. Again she looked down the channel and said something. Krame shook his head. He called to the two hoodlums and the men came away from their posts.

Apparently they thought they had hit him and killed him when he had surfaced the first time. Maybe Stella had convinced Krame of that.

She made no effort to resist when Krame ordered her back to the car. She followed quietly, with her lithe stride, beside the redheaded man, behind the hulking gunmen. A moment later the sound of their car motor came to Durell over the wind-ruffled water. His wrists and ankles were numb. His teeth chattered. The sunlight faded from lemon to gray as the car appeared briefly, circling over the rough lawn to vanish behind Blossom’s weathered Victorian house and then speed up the road.

Durell stood up slowly and waded back to the opposite shore of the channel.

Ten minutes later he stood wrapped in a large towel, drinking bourbon in Blossom’s kitchen. The dead agent still lay untouched in the sitting room, and Durell did not bother to look at him again. He helped himself to sliced cold beef and some bread, which he swallowed between long pulls at the bourbon. He did not think be would ever be warm again. He left his clothes in a wet bundle on the kitchen floor and rummaged upstairs in Blossom’s bedroom, the only one furnished, and found a blue serge suit that fitted reasonably well, added a white shirt and dark figured tie, fresh socks. Blossom’s black shoes were too narrow to be comfortable, but they were better than his own sodden cordovans. He finished the beef and the bread, took one last drink of bourbon, and felt better, physically, but no other way.

There could be no explanation to General McFee about his delay, his loss of Stella Marni. the general disaster that had followed him. There were no excuses he could give to Blossom, because Blossom was dead, and so was Frank Greenwald; and unless he was too far wrong, Stella Marni would be on the Boroslav bound for Hungary within the next few hours.

He could never explain Stella Marni to anyone. Whatever she was, whatever she had done to him, he did not quite understand himself.

He was no better or worse than Harry Blossom, in some ways. Blossom was dead. And for all intents and purposes, as far as Washington was concerned, Sam Durell could be dead, too.

Slowly and gradually, his anger came.

He sat still in the growing dusk in the sitting room and looked at Blossom’s ashy, dead face, but he did not see Blossom or the curved fireplace of Vermont marble, or the faded plush curtains over the tall windows that yielded an evening view of lavender salt marshes and darkening sea.

He went over everything that had happened from the moment Art Greenwald had talked to him in Washington three days ago, asking him to help his brother. He hadn’t helped much. Frank was dead, and maybe Art had died by now, too. And then Deirdre had joined the picture and he had hurt her grievously, not wanting to hurt her ever. But it was done. There were Blossom’s warning words. Blossom’s sudden destruction as a man and a fine agent. And his failure to work with Tom Markey. He went over everything. He spared himself none of the mistakes he had make.

His anger grew.

He knew now which had been the biggest mistake of all.

He moved differently, with purpose and organization, when he stood up. He knew what had to be done.

He found the telephone in a hall alcove under the wide dark stairs. It was growing dusk when he called the hospital to inquire about Art Greenwald. The supervisor gave him no information except to state that Art’s postoperative condition was as well as could be expected.

He phoned his hotel next and asked for Deirdre Padgett. It rang in an empty room. She was not there.

His next call was to Clem Anderson, in Washington. When Anderson’s mild voice replied, Durell asked what had been done about Captain Grozni’s family in Gdynia.

“Been waiting to hear from you, Sam,” Anderson replied. “I gave it top priority, as you asked. We contacted the family — mother and daughters. Living in an apartment at Drodensing Street Our man talked to the subjects personally. They’re on their way West.”

“How?”

“Fishing boat on the Baltic. I’m supposed to hear the minute they land. But anything can happen, Sam. They might have been caught, the boat stopped by a patrol — anything. We don’t know they’re safe yet.”

“How much longer do we wait? I need Grozni,” Durell said impatiently. “He won’t play ball unless his people are absolutely safe.”

“I hope to hear in about an hour, Sam. Can’t do more.”

“All right. Thanks, anyway.”

Durell’s next call was to Tony Isotti. Tony spoke quickly:

“Sam, we’re in trouble. Don’t talk. I think the line is bugged. Markey is after us with all his shootin’ irons. I’m only here to pick you up and take you back to Washington. McFee’s orders. It’s a real hassle, shaping up into a board of inquiry for you. The Attorney General and State have been like a couple of cats spitting at each other. McFee wants the White House to mediate. So far it hasn’t nil the newspapers, but if it leaks, our throats get cut.”

“It’s not that bad, Tony,” Durell said.

“Where in hell have you been?”

“Detained. But not willingly.”

“Are you all right, Cajun?”

‘I’ve got some things for you to do,” Durell said. “I know we’re off the case officially now. But did you check out the officers of the New American Society?”

“Yeah. John Kxame president, H. T. Lament treasurer, William X. McChesney secretary.”

Durell was not surprised. “You’re sure about Krame?”

“It wasn’t easy to get. They had a dummy list of executives. Park Avenue people who went through the motions and didn’t know the score.” Isotti laughed sourly. “For every nominal officer, they had a shadow executive doing the real work. You’ve got the right names.”

“Where does the money come from?”

“Philanthropies, subscriptions, and points unknown.”

“Any foreign money?>>>

“Could be. I ran my head against a blank wall there. The books have a few items specified by the usual charity sour. but it’s only a pittance. Most of the cash income is listed under miscellaneous.”

“What about Lamont and McChesney?”

“Lamont has a police record under a couple of aliases as a con man specializing in charity rackets. Comes from Quebec, originally. Also some felony raps against him in Kansas City, and one here in New York for heisting a fistful of jewels from a society woman out on Long Island. He did four years’ time in Ossining from ‘38 to ‘42 for gas-station stickup. He was young and wild and woolly then. No real violence since that time.”

“McChesney?”

“Fourteen arrests, no convictions. A pet of the local vice squad. They’d love to rap him, Sam. Suspected of pimping, peddling horse, smuggling Swiss watches, distributing feelthy films. Not a junkie himself, but seven arrests on suspicion of distributing, as well as a number of minor con rackets. He’s on the Attorney General’s subversive list, too, as a member of front organizations. They have him down as a strong-arm goon for subversive outfits, strike busting, the usual labor racketeering. Real pretty history, but slippery as an eel. Married to a former night-club dancer, Gerda Smith, once billed as the Bell Dancer. She works for the society, too.”

“It figures,” Durell said. “Birds of a feather. What about Damion?”

He takes care of all the business front. Far as I could see, he’s blank. An honest John who handles all the legitimate collections and babies the members. Retired as an accordion manufacturer, naturalized citizen born in Poland, has just enough private income to let him play with his pets. He may be clean.”

“Good, Tony. Meet me at the society house in an hour.

“Sam, we’ve got to get back to Washington.”

“Later. We’ll wind this up tonight. Have you got an extra gun?”

“Sure, but…”

“Bring it for me.”

“Sam, do you know what you’re doing?”

“Bring me a gun. In one hour.”

Durell hung up. He sat still, his eyes bleak and brooding, was quiet in the house. He wished for a cigarette, but he had none. After a moment he asked the operator for the New York FBI district office. Tom Markey was at his desk. Durell spoke rapidly and Markey was ominously silent for the first few minutes. Then Markey said:

“I’ve got a bug on you, Cajun. We’ve traced the call. You’re at Blossom’s place. You stay there, bear me?”

“I’m coming into town. Did you crack Krame’s studio?”

Markey seemed annoyed. “Yeah. Found the hoodlum you say you killed. And the cage up in the tower. Quite a spot. This big fellow with the broken neck was Karl Poltovsky — a dock worker. Also acted as part-time cook at the New American Society.”

“And the safe?”

“We got Krame’s books. You can read about it in the papers. You stay where you are, Cajun. Stay there with Harry Blossom, hear?”

“Harry is dead,” Durell said.

There was another long silence while Durell described what had happened. He did not withhold anything. There were times when it had to be played by ear, and times when organization was the only way to produce results. He counted on Markey’s innate sense of duty and decency, on Markey’s training, to put the case first, above any personal vexations.

“So they’ve got the girl again,*’ Durell said. “And her father. They won’t trust her any more. Maybe they’ve killed her already. They won’t risk letting her testify to Senator Hubert’s people again, and that means if they don’t kill her they’ll smuggle her out of the country fast. Tonight, probably, on the Boroslav.” Durell paused. “We need her, Tom.

“We’ve checked out the ship twice. We’ll do it again, but…”

“Not yet. We have to knock over the New American Society first. Pick up Krame, McChesney, Lamont, the Smith girl. They may use a plane instead of the ship, but I’m betting on the Boroslav. They could play the shell game with Stella Marni aboard, even if we had fifty men for the search. We can get a few from Immigration and Customs, but not enough. Stella could be hustled from one hiding place to another aboard that rat’s nest and we’d never find her.”

“We could get an order to hold the vessel in port,” Markey said, grudgingly agreeing with Durell’s plan.

“The minute someone shows up with a paper in his hands, there will be a diplomatic stink and we’ll never find Stella. They’ll use another route to smuggle her out, or just kill her. This way, as long as they think we believe the ship is clean, they’ll take her there,” Durell said earnestly. “I can find her, if she’s aboard. Go along with me on this, Tom. You have every reason to be sore, but play ball just this once.”

“You’re crazy,” Markey said; but his voice was not angry now.

“I’m sorry about Harry.”

“He asked for it. Just as you’re asking for it.”

“Meet me in an hour, Tom.”

Markey spoke with a last burst of exasperation. “Man, do you know what it costs? Senator Hubert’s flown to Washington, yelling you’ve thrown everything at sixes and sevens. You came to town and the whole case…”

“One hour, Tom,” Durell said.

He put down the phone and swung into action.

Chapter Seventeen

Forty minutes later he was in Manhattan. He called the hotel for Deirdre but she still was not in her room or in the lobby. Then he drove west on Canal and turned north toward Greenwich Village. It was dusk, and the city was a miracle of lights seen through the chill mists. It was almost five o’clock when he parked near Sheridan Square and walked down the little cobbled backwash of a street where the New American Society had its headquarters.

The hooting of tugs came from the river, and traffic on Greenwich Avenue was muted. There were only a few hurrying people on the sidewalks. The air was raw and cold. The street lights came on as Durell passed a parked car where a man sat idly behind the wheel and another man sat smoking a cigarette. There was a shadow in a doorway across from the corner, twenty feet from a small Italian grocery.

Tony Isotti was in the grocery, eating a slab of cheese and a handful of crackers while he talked in Italian to the dark, pretty girl behind the counter. He looked youthful and handsome, with his hat pushed back over his dark curly hair. He looked like a college boy. He said, “Hi,” to Durell, whispered something to the girl that made her giggle wildly, and walked to the doorway of the grocery with Durell.

“On the button,” Tony said. “You want the gun here?”

Durell nodded and took the short-barreled Colt .32 and put it in his pocket, looking down the street. “Those are Markey’s men in the cars?”

“He’s waiting in the Olds sedan.”

“Come on.”

They crossed the cobbled street. A few lights shone in the old-law tenements that flanked the Olds sedan. Markey sat with his pipe clenched between his teeth, beside a dark man in a blue topcoat. The FBI agent’s face was grim, set in bulldog fashion. His eyes were not happy as he surveyed Durell and Isotti.

“I’ve got a man on the roof, another in the alley back there. Two at this corner, two at the other. All I could scrape up, without calling in the local cops. This one is off the record, Sam. We flop it, and I’m through. The whole thing is really too hot for this kind of play.”

“I’m right,” Durell said. “I know I’m right.”

“We picked up Lamont in a Times Square bar. He’s outraged. Not talking. We’re holding him at our office for now. Won’t say where the others are, but we think McChesney is here. Maybe Krame, too. Lot of people in there for dinner, I think. I hope to God you’re right on this one, Cajun.”

“What about Gerda Smith?”

“Inside. With Damion.”

“Then let’s go. Do you want to run it, Tom?”

“It’s your baby. You cradle it, rock it to sleep.”

“Good,” Durell said.

*

The raid began with the precision of a military operation. Durell, with Markey and his driver and Tony Isotti, went to the front door. In the big sitting room on the right were a dozen elderly people playing cards or chess or just conversing. Their faces were startled, reflecting old fears as the four men burst in. Markey’s driver kept them where they were. Tony darted ahead into the kitchen and came out with two women cooks and a male chef who cursed fluently in Bulgarian until Tony herded them into the sitting room with the guests. Isotti came back grinning.

“There’s a dame locked in the john back there.”

“Get her out,” Durell ordered. “With the others.”

A querulous voice called down from the upper floor, asking what the difficulty was. Markey and Durell went up the steps first. One of the women in the sitting room behind them suddenly began to scream on a high, hysterical note. From the hallway at the head of the stairs came a sudden silvery jingling and Durell glimpsed a swirling skirt, a tiny woman’s body, provocatively large bosom, white heart-shaped face.

“Gerda!” he yelled. “Hold it!”

She turned and ran. A door slammed. A moment later all the lights went out, throughout the house.

Durell swore softly. There was enough evening glow outside to filter through some of the windows, making dark pools of shadow in the hallways. There was a third floor, where the sleeping rooms were located. Durell halted on the second landing, drew his gun, and sent Tony Isotti upstairs to check the top level.

A shot suddenly cracked in the alley behind the house.

The woman downstairs kept on screaming.

Durell and Markey hit the door to the office section of the second floor. Behind them, a man came out of the billiard room with a cue stick in his hand. He dropped the stick and ducked back again.

“Get him,” Durell snapped.

Without waiting to watch Markey, he slammed his shoulder against the outer office door again. It was solidly locked. He hit it again and it splintered a little, but the lock did not give. He heard Tony yell upstairs; another shot crashed. Durell drew back a few steps and kicked hard above the latch. Metal snapped and the door burst inward. He plunged through quickly. A dark shape lunged at him from behind Gerda’s desk and Durell took the man’s charge on his shoulder, lifting him off his feet and crashing him across Gerda’s desk. A chair splintered and the man went down, a gun spilling from his hand. Durell kicked it aside. The man climbed up and tried to swing, and Durell chopped at him with his gun and slammed him back against the wall.

“Let me go,” the man gasped. “What’s the raid for?”

“Name?”

“McChesney. What is this?”

“You’re under arrest.”

“You a cop?”

“Where is Damion?”

“I don’t know.”

“Gerda?”

“Gone. Out the back way, you bastard.”

Durell hit him open-handed across the mouth and pushed him stumbling toward the door, where Markey appeared and caught him and sent him on his way downstairs to join the others in the roundup. From far in the distance came the keening sirens and Durell hoped Markey could explain the raid to the metropolitan cops. Then he hit the door to the conference room. This was locked, too. Apparently McChesney had been caught between two locked doors. Durell took his gun and fired two bullets through the lock and watched metal jump and the door swing inward.

“Take it easy, Sam,” Markey said.

The board room was almost totally dark. “There’s a master switch somewhere here,” Durell said. “Gerda pulled it. Find it, Tom.”

Nothing moved in the dark room ahead. Dimly, Durell made out the long tables and chairs neatly ranked along the wall. Beyond was the door to Damion’s office. It would be locked. He drew a deep, frustrated breath. There was no sign of Gerda Smith. He wanted to tear the truth from her. He wanted to know where they had put Stella Marni. He moved across the room and this time a shot came from the rooftop, following a harsh yell. Heavy feet pounded on the ceiling above, from the third floor.

Durell broke the lock on Damion’s door and slammed in.

Gray dusk outlined the window behind Damion’s desk. There was no one here. Gerda had disappeared. Dead end.

A groaning came from behind the big desk. Durell went around it and found Damion on the floor under the overturned swivel chair. The man’s white hair had blood on it and his eyes were open and glazed as Durell hauled him upright. Markey straightened the chair and the big man dropped into it as Durell snapped: “What happened to you?”

“Gerda …”

“Where is she? And Krame?”

“Gone. My head hurts…

Durell looked exasperated. “Is there any other way out of here?”

“Back stairs… old servants’ staircase… closet door…”

Durell spun, yanked open the first door he saw, faced shelves of stationery and office equipment, pulled open the second door beside it, and saw narrow steps angling up and down. The running footsteps on the third floor had stopped. Tony Isotti came into the office behind them. There was a welt on the young man’s jaw.

“That McChesney punk will spill his guts.”

“Good,” Durell said. “Have you seen Gerda Smith?”

“Uh-uh.”

“She and John Krame are the real brains of this outfit. They can tell us where to find Stella Marni.’*

“If she’s alive,” Markey said.

“She’s alive, don’t worry,” Durell said.

An open office safe stood to one side of Damion’s desk. The heavy steel door yawned on a miniature snowstorm of papers and books. “Check that, Tony,” Durell said. “They’ve cleaned out whatever records they kept there, but they were in a hurry, so maybe they overlooked something.”

He went on up the narrow back stairs. The door to the third floor was closed, bolted. He shot it open. There were sirens outside now, and screams from below. He found himself in a long corridor that ran from the front to the rear of the house. Darkness shrouded every corner. Some of the doors were open, and one of Markey’s young agents came out of one of them.

“I’ve got them all in here, sir. There were some people taking naps up here. They’re just confused.”

“Is there a small blonde with tiny silver bracelets?”

“Yes. sir.” The agent grinned. “She doesn’t speak English.”

“The hell she doesn’t,” Durell said.

He pushed past him into a bedroom furnished with department-store maple and a blue broadloom rug. Four people crowded against the wall between the bed and the dresser. A middle-aged couple in identical gray flannel robes held hands, r eyes soft and resigned. A boy of about ten stood with them. And Gerda Smith.

The only light came from the street lamp outside. Gerda’s small face was turned in anger toward Durell. Her eyes were trapped, like those of a wild animal. There came a sudden spray of silvery sound as she jerked away from the cowering family and threw herself across the bed, legs flashing and skin billowing as she rolled away on her back. Her thighs were long and white and firm. An instant later she plunged through the open window.

Durell yelled and dived after her. The elderly woman screamed. Durell hit the sill and saw the steel web of a fire platform with stairs going up and down against the side of the house. There was no more than six feet of space between this building and the next, and several windows across the areaway were open. He looked up for the girl, then down. She was running to the second-floor landing below, skirts flying again, silver bracelets and bells jingling. Durell hit the stairs perilously hard. Gerda looked back over her shoulder at him, her tiny face masked with fear. She hesitated on the landing. A window was open in the opposite house. She was trying to get up enough courage to jump when Durell caught her and flung her savagely away from the rail. She bounced against the brick wall and the fire escape shook.

“Oh, you bastard,” she gasped.

“Is this the way Krame got out?”

“You’ll never catch him!”

She came at him with tooth and nail, a tiny hurricane of fury, terror, and female viciousness. Durell caught her, felt the heavy swing of her breasts against his arm. Her nails raked hotly across his face and she kicked with her high spiked heels. He grabbed her by the waist and threw her against the wall again. She would not be held. She made a thin whimpering sound and pushed her hair away from her eyes and slapped and struck at him.

“Hold it,” he said. “This wont buy you anything.” Suddenly he let her go, and she plunged to the platform rail. Durell’s face was hard, without expression. “Go ahead. I don’t owe you anything. Not after you left me in that cage with Karl. You want to jump, go ahead. Jump.”

She stared at him, breathing hard. Her dress was torn in half a dozen places, her flesh gleaming whitely in the gloom. Somebody shouted down at them from the roof — one of Markey’s men — and another man ran up the alley, paused, and looked up.

“Mr. Durell?”

Durell called down: “Anybody else take this route?”

“A big guy jumped into the next house. I look a shot at him, but I think I missed. We’re searching the block now.”

“Keep on with it.”

“You need any help up there?”

Durell looked at Gerda Smith. “No. No help at all.”

She gripped the rail with both hands, breathing hard, her head lowered. She made sick noises, and Durell did not help her. Then she raised her head and looked with longing at the opposite window, so near she could almost reach it. Yet she was afraid to jump.

Durell said: “Where is Stella Marni, Gerda?”

“To hell with you.”

“Are you still loyal to these snakes? Krame ran out on you. We got McChesney here, Lament in a bar on Forty-second. They’re spilling it all over you and Krame. Even if they didn’t, I’ve got you for murder, anyway.”

Her head came up, eyes hot and wild. “I never killed anybody!”

“You and Krame. You killed Frank Greenwald and Harry Blossom.”

“No! That’s a He! It was…” She bit her lip.

“Who, Gerda?”

“No.”

Durell said: “Where is Stella Marni?”

She laughed viciously.

Durell said: “I’ve got you for attempted homicide against me, if nothing else. Who cleaned out the safe here, Gerda?”

“Krame did that.”

“He took all the outfit’s papers with him?”

“You’ll never get anything out of him, you…”

Durell slapped her. His face was hard as her head snapped back and then he caught her and yanked her away from the rail and slammed her against the wall. Her heel caught in the iron slats of the platform and broke; she stumbled and fell, sliding half under the railing until her frantic hands caught the steel pipe. She screamed and froze there, hanging half over the edge of the platform, with the alley three floors down. Durell did not reach to pull her back. He looked at her long, exposed thighs and hips.

“H-help me,” she whispered.

“You get a charge out of playing with tough cookies,” he said. “With Krame and Damion and every other man in the outfit. You don’t know what tough is.”

She screamed again. “Pull me back! I’m afraid!”

“It won’t be any loss if you fall and break your neck.

“Help me!” she screamed.

“Where is Stella Marni?”

“You’ll… never find… her.”

“Is she dead?”

“You’ll… never know.”

Tom Markey called for him from the platform below. Out on the street, two green-and-white prowl cars had halted with sirens moaning. A crowd had collected and spotlights ranged the brick wall of the house and the alley. The lights came on suddenly as one of Markey’s men found the main switch. The raid was almost over. Durell watched Gerda carefully hitch her hips backward, the skirt falling over her head as she slid to safety from under the platform. For a long minute she lay face down on the iron platform, panting. When she leaned up on one arm, pushing her hair back from her face, her body convulsed and she began to retch over the edge of the landing.

Tom Markey crawled out through the window, his face sober. “It’s a dud. Except for McChesney and Lamont Damion doesn’t know who hit him. He has no idea what was in the safe. His own records, sure, but there was a locked compartment that Krame used, and Krame had the only key to it. Krame got away.” He looked at Gerda. “Who is this one?”

“McChesney’s wife. Krame’s girl,” Durell said. “Krame ran out on her. He didn’t even try to take her with him, and she’s a little upset.”

Gerda looked up at him with swimming eyes that reflected only misery. Her hatred was gone. She looked small and helpless, like a precocious street waif in adult clothing who had stumbled and fallen into the mud. When she moved, the sound of silver bells on her wrists and ankles made a forlorn sound against the dark and cold of the night.

“Where is Stella Marni?” Durell asked again.

“Leave her alone, Sam,” Markey said. “I’ll get a statement from her in my office.”

Durell slashed the air with his hand. “There isn’t time. The Boroslav sails tonight — unless we’ve got evidence to hold her.”

“Immigration cleared the ship half an hour ago,” Markey said heavily.

“When does she sail?”

Markey looked at his watch. “Fifty minutes.”

Durell did not want to admit the fear in him. Everything possible had gone wrong. He had lost Stella. She might be dead by now. She could have been a tremendous force for good, telling the truth to the world. No human life was so small or unimportant that it wasn’t worth fighting for. Alive or dead, he had to find her.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Gerda whispered.

He bad not realized he was staring at her. “The last time, Gerda. Save your neck. Tell us where Krame took her.”

Her mouth curled and she laughed thinly, hysterically. “She got to you, didn’t she? Like she got that fat Frank Greenwald and that crazy Harry Blossom. You’re in love with her, aren’t you? The big tough cop! Just look at you! The bitch got under your skin, didn’t she?”

Durell wondered. “Gerda, if you don’t talk, well throw the book at you. You know where Krame has gone. You can turn witness for the government and get leniency for yourself. Or you can keep your mouth shut and take the rap for all of them. It’s your choice. Krame was the brains of the outfit, and maybe he’ll be out of the country by morning. But we’ve still got you. Krame made the deal to bludgeon these poor people into going back home, and he’s the one who’ll get paid off. He’ll be taken care of. I’m sure he told you about the rewards be was promised for running this ring. But you won’t get any of it, Gerda. You’re going to a federal pen. Maybe we can’t break the world’s headlines with what we’ve got, but there’s enough in it to put you away for a long time. Long enough so you won’t be pretty when they let you out. And all those years you’re in the pen, Krame will be living it up high, because he didn’t give a damn about you and ran out on you to save his own skin.”

The girl stared at him. Her mouth shook and she suddenly pressed her hand against her cheek as if to test the softness of her young skin and wonder how it would be years from now, when she was free again.

“Yeah. Yeah, Johnny Krame ran out on me,” she said with slow wonder. “Y’know, he could’ve waited a second, just a second, to help me jump. Given me a hand so’s I wouldn’t be afraid. But no. Not Johnny Krame. He never even looked back. He just kept going.”

“Let’s go,” Markey said to her. “We’re finished here.”

“Wait. Can’t we… can I make a deal, like Durell says?”

Markey shrugged. “It depends on what you have to offer, miss.”

She drew a deep breath. “Krame is scheduled to sail tonight on the Boroslav, all right. It was all set up just in case something like this happened.” Gerda looked at Durell. “Stella Marni and her precious papa are aboard, too. But I’ll bet a thin dime you never find ‘em.”

Chapter Eighteen

Durell took ten minutes to call Washington once more. Impatience seethed in him while he waited to make contact with Clem Anderson again. His voice rasped when he asked if there had been any news about Grozni’s family.

“Not too bad, Sam,” Anderson told him. “We just got a code message from our man in Copenhagen. Our man’s fishing smack was chased by an East German patrol boat and they put in at Ronne, on Bornholm Island. That’s Danish territory. The whole crew landed there, including Grozni’s wife and daughters, and asked for political asylum. The story ought to hit the newspapers in an hour or so. Okay?”

“They’re all safe?” Durell asked.

“Fine and dandy. They’re anxious to have Captain Grozni know so he’ll stay here and wait for them.”

Durell expelled a long breath. “Good. That’s going to help.”

He hung up, turned to Markey. “Let’s get to the water front.”

It took fifteen minutes to reach the Boroslav’s berth. The pier looked different at night. The cargo had all been loaded and the noise and confusion were gone from the sheds and dock area. A cold wind blew from the North River and the tide was high, smelling of the sea and flotsam that drifted in the murky harbor water. Over on the Jersey side of the river, the winking advertising signs made rhythmic patterns of color that alternately brightened and faded on the scene. Durell parked his car a block from the pier entrance and Markey pulled up silently behind him. The local police had offered men for a raid in force, but Durell had declined with thanks. The Immigration office was sending a squad, but they would not be here for twenty minutes yet.

Markey tapped the dottle from his pipe into his palm. Tony Isotti surveyed the pier and vacant, dark sheds. Overhead, traffic hissed and rumbled on the elevated highway.

“I don’t see what this can buy for us, Sam, except an international headache,” Markey said quietly. ‘They only thing to do is keep her from sailing with an order from Immigration. You won’t find the girl working alone.”

“I want to try first,” Durell said tightly. “She’s got to be aboard.”

“And if she isn’t? Or we don’t find her?”

‘Then we’ll stop the sailing. Then we’ll use the local cops and the Immigration people to bottle up the pier — not that it will do us much good. It will only sign Stella’s death warrant. Or Krame’s. Even then, my feeling is we won’t find either of them. And I want Stella Marni. If we go after her in force, we’ll lose her.”

“Is she as important as Krame?” Markey asked quietly.

Durell did not answer directly. “Let’s go, Tom.”

He walked toward the pier entrance. There were two watchmen in an inner office beyond a steel chain drawn across the ramp to the sheds, and one of them suddenly burst from the door and started to run down the pier toward the bulking shadow of the freighter. Durell vaulted the chain and caught the man and clipped him with his gun and the man went skidding face down on the rough pier planking. He hadn’t made any noise. Turning, Durell saw the second watchman staring in simple astonishment. He was a scrawny old man with a yellow muffler knotted around his dirty neck and a stained gray fedora set squarely on his bald head.

The watchman did not know anything. He had not seen anything. He had been smoking and reading in the shack with Danny, and what was the idea of Danny running off like that, and why did Danny get slugged? Markey told him he was to answer questions, not ask them. But the watchman had not seen anyone who resembled John Krame. Nor had he seen Stella Marni.

“Ain’t no woman gone aboard that ship,” the old man muttered. “What dame would want to?”

Durell sent the old man and his dazed companion back into the custody of one of the car crews and walked into the shadows of the sheds with Markey. The FBI man was dubious. “She sails in twenty minutes. We can’t cover this tub properly, just the two of us.”

“Go on back to your office, then,” Durell said irritably.

“What’s the matter with you, Sam’.’”

“She’s aboard. She’s got to be aboard.”

“And how do you expect to find her? And what if she decides to sail for home? You can’t hold her, Sam. She’s all cleared for sailing. If they’ve got her father, you think she’ll let them kill him, just to do us a favor?”

“You talk too much,” Durell said. “And it’s all negative.”

“You’re as nutty over that girl as Harry Blossom ever was.”

Durell made no reply. A single gangplank was still connected to the pier. Steam was up on the Boroslav, and floodlights played on her afterdeck. where a dozen seamen worked at securing hatch covers. The gangplank was lighted by two spots attached to the roof of the shed, making sharp areas of brightness and shadow along the rust-streaked sides of the freighter. The throb of the ship’s idling engines made the damp air pulse. Durell tried to see if anyone was on watch on the bridge, but the windows up there shimmered blankly and it was impossible to tell.

“Keep your other men posted here in the shed,” Durell said quietly. “Nobody goes off the ship for any reason until we get back.”

“We?”

“You and me, Tom.”

Tony Isotti said: “Hell, I’d like to go along for the ride.”

“You stay here, Tony.”

Markey said: “Well, it’s been a dandy life so far.”

A tug hooted out on the river and a probing spotlight ranged the misty river and touched the Boroslav’s stern. A brief whistle answered the signal from the freighter’s single raked stack. One of the deck hands working aft shouted something in Polish. His companions laughed. Durell drew a deep breath and walked boldly and quickly up the gangway to board the ship.

Tom Markey was hard on his heels. They were exposed to the glare of the floodlights for perhaps five seconds.

The gangway led to the deck above the one by which Durell had boarded the ship before. Dim bulbs in wire cages illuminated the steel passage that led along the narrow deck of the superstructure. Quickly he crossed the empty dining saloon to the stairs leading up to the officers’ quarters behind the bridge. There was no alarm. They met no one, saw no one. He did not waste time searching the passengers’ cabins. He knew that Stella and Albert Marni would not be hidden in any of the obvious places. He headed for the captain’s stateroom.

A small placard on the brown wooden shutter door gave the captain’s name: Grozni. The louvered door was closed but not locked. Light sifted through the slats and made a ladder pattern on the white bulkhead opposite. Durell moved soundlessly to take the knob in his hand, then paused to listen. There was only the trembling throb and beat of the ship’s idling engines. Then the tug hooted out on the river, much closer now. He heard Tom Markey breathe quickly and lightly and glanced at the FBI agent’s face. Markey’s eyes were icy, his face shining a little with perspiration. He had a gun in his hand and he nodded and Durell turned the knob and then pushed the door inward with the flat of his hand and stepped into the cabin.

Captain Grozni lay on his bunk in his shirt sleeves, reading a Polish-language newspaper. His bearded face twisted with alarm, surprise, and then anger as Markey closed the door behind Durell. He stared at the gun in Durell’s hand and wet his lips, sitting up slowly. The newspaper went rustling to the deck.

“Don’t say a word,” Durell whispered. “Not a sound.”

The captain nodded. His breathing was suddenly gusty.

“Where is Stepov, your second officer? Your boss, the political commissar aboard. Where is he?” Durell asked softly.

“I do not know,” the captain said in his precise Oxford English. “Why have you come back? You were lucky the last time, I had a moment of ideological weakness that has made me suspect…”

“We want Stella Marni.”

“She is not here.”

“And we want her father,” Durell went on. “And one more. The redheaded man, John Krame.”

“You must be insane.” The captain’s voice was not loud and not frightened and not angry, either. He swung his legs off the bunk and sat gripping the wooden edges, his narrow shoulders hunched under his khaki shirt. His brindle beard looked unkempt. The newspaper was crumpled under his feet “This might be called piracy,” Grozni said. “You have no authority for coming aboard. Or is this another of your government’s nuisance and search raids? Do you think we have an atom bomb here? We have been checked and checked again. The cargo hatches were sealed by your own Customs men an hour ago. How did you get aboard?”

Durell said flatly: “Your guards aren’t too alert. Probably Stepov is too busy discussing matters with Krame to attend to it.” His grin was hard and tight. “We want the girl, the old man, and Krame. Alive. All of them. Do you understand?”

“I cannot help you. I must ask you to leave my ship.”

Durell said: “Lock the door, Tom.”

Markey locked it.

“Stand there. Listen for anyone coming.”

The captain said: “What do you think you can do, just the two of you?”

“You’re going to help us,” Durell said. “It’s your big chance. Captain Grozni. You can have safety and political asylum here, freedom from bloody-handed masters like Stepov.”

The bald, bull-like man spoke with quiet violence. “No. What I told you before — about my family in Gdynia — I would be insane to risk their lives.” He was sweating suddenly. “Of course I would like to help you! I did so once, and you would not have got ashore with the old man without me. But this time — no. They have always suspected me, Stepov and his men always watched me — and now they are doubly cautious. They have only kept me aboard as nominal master of this ship because they needed me. But I have a feeling this is my last trip. Do not ask any more of me.”

“Captain Grozni,” Durell said quietly, “When I saw you last, I promised I would do what I could about your family. We have our organizations and methods. Every year, tens of thousands of people like you flee to freedom in West Europe. I made arrangements for your family to follow the same path. We have been successful. In an hour, the newspapers will have the story. Your wife and daughters were taken from Gdynia in a fishing boat and have landed at Ronne, in Denmark. They are safe. They have asked that you remain here in New York until they can join you. Every effort will be made by our State Department to hurry their entry into the United States.”

Grozni stared with incredulous eyes at Durell. “This is true?”

“You have my word for it. You must believe me. You must take what I say on faith, at this moment, but in an hour you will have the proof. Unfortunately, we cannot wait for an hour. We need your help now, this minute. We need you on our side, Captain. Now is the time for you to join us.”

Grozni was sweating. Doubt, hope, suspicion, and sudden elation swept in succession across his face. His fists were clenched.

“You ask much of me,” he muttered.

“Make up your mind,” Durell said. “Freedom against slavery. Master of your own ship, or a flunky taking orders from a snake like Stepov. It’s your choice. Make it fast. Are Stella and her father aboard? And Krame?”

Grozni shook his head, scrubbed fingers through his beard, breathed heavily. Various sounds drifted through the leather curtains over the porthole. The tug was coming alongside. The shouts of deck hands and the thumping of the tug’s diesels echoed against the ship’s plates.

“My wife and daughters — in Ronne? Safe?”

“Yes. Absolutely/’

The captain wet his lips. He shuddered. “Yes. Then I help. They are aboard. All three of them. But you could never find them, you understand, unless you knew. In Stepov’s cabin there is a small ward closet and behind it is a space next to the ship’s funnel. You have to take a wrench and remove the bolts in the plates. It is the second cabin to the left. Wait, I will go with you.”

Durell was already turning away. “Come along, then.”

Markey unlocked the cabin door and flung it open.

Second Officer Stepov stood there.

There was no doubt he had overheard what had been said in the cabin. It was stamped on his wide, flat face, in the malevolent eyes that jerked for an instant to the captain’s stunned features. He had a gun and he swung it at Markey.

Markey ducked and took the blow on his shoulder and his gun triggered in reflex, the explosion enormous in the narrow passage, destroying in a split second all hope of secrecy. Stepov’s gun answered, and Captain Grozni jerked backward on the bunk and clapped a hand to his side and then fell off the bunk and sat on the deck. He seemed to be smiling through his astonishment. Durell tried to get at the mate and Markey lurched in his way and Stepov turned and ran, yelling an alarm.

Durell jumped over Markey and caught the mate and swung him savagely, with the momentum of his flight, into the steel bulkhead. Stepov’s yelling ended in a bubble of pain. Durell stole a moment to look at Grozni. The captain was all right. The bullet from Stepov’s gun had only creased his side. He swung back, and saw that Stepov had already partially recovered. The man was built like a bull. He raked Durell’s face with his gun as he brought it up, and Durell slammed a fist into his belly. Stepov bounced off the bulkhead again, kicking savagely. Durell slid past his boot and let Stepov’s big fist heat at his face while he hit the man twice more. Stepov’s gun squirted from suddenly nerveless fingers. The man’s eyes filmed with fear. He coughed on blood that ran from his broken nose, tried to slide away from Durell, and slipped and fell. Durell pulled him upright and thrust him back toward the captain’s door and the man fell over Markey and his head hit the steel deck with a queer sound and he lay still.

Markey looked dazed. Durell straightened, listening. Footsteps ran along the deck overhead. A whistle blew, thin and piping. But no one had entered the passageway yet.

“Hold them both here, Tom,” Durell snapped.

He turned and ran down the corridor. Footsteps pounded somewhere behind him. He knew that Stepov had at least two other deputies aboard whose business was killing. And there was always Krame.

The cabin he wanted was unlocked. He drove in, paused, and yanked open the shutter door to the closet. A few uniform coats hung there, two pairs of black shoes, and a box from a Fifth Avenue shop that spilled delicate lingerie when he shoved it aside. The cabin was otherwise impersonal and anonymous. He pushed aside the uniforms and searched the closet for a tool, and found a wrench in the cabinet above the corner washbowl. It fitted the bolts in the white-painted plate that formed the back wall of the closet, and they turned easily on oiled threads when he went to work on them.

An army of Customs inspectors would not have found this door through the false wall to the funnel compartment.

The door was hinged, opening inward. Durell pushed at it with his gun ready. He glimpsed a dimly lighted cubicle and felt the heat radiate from the funnel wall like a blanket rolling out to smother him.

Nothing happened.

He flattened against the closet wall. The deck trembled. He could see a thin segment of the room beyond, dimly lighted, with rust-streaked walls, the end of a cot and a steel chair just within his line of vision. Albert Marni sat on the cot. staring straight at him. The old man’s rheumy eyes were incredulous, fearful. His mouth opened and closed.

“Stepov?” someone called. “What in hell are you doing?”

It was Krame. Durell did not answer. He saw the old man’s gaze flick aside in sudden terror, and then a shoe scraped the steel deck, paused, scraped again. “Stepov?” Krame called again.

The old man on the cot looked through the doorway again at Durell. His bushy hair stood out like a white aureole around his face. If there had been hope in his eyes, it was gone now. He shook his head in a small, frightened gesture.

Krame said: “What’s the matter with the old man, Stella?”

And then he appeared in the doorway, face to face with Durell.

He was in his shirt sleeves, and there were great patches of sweat on his broad chest and under his arms. He wore no shoes. A revolver was clipped in a leather underarm holster. His heavy face was angry and puzzled. Stunned surprise flared in his pale amber eyes, erased almost instantly by hatred and rage.

“Hold it, Krame,” Durell said.

The redheaded man’s hand was on the edge of the steel door. Without warning, while he nodded as if in dumfounded agreement, he slammed the door back on its hinges. The steel plate banged against the muzzle of Durell’s gun, pushed it aside. Durell jabbed a foot through the opening, hit the panel with his shoulder, and tumbled through before Krame could slam the door shut all the way. The edge of the steel door scraped his shin and he landed off balance on one knee, spinning with the gun in his hand, looking for Krame.

Krame was drawing his gun from his holster. There was a frozen moment when Durell’s desperate glance took in the whole picture inside the cubicle. Stella was here. She had changed her clothes somehow, en route between Blossom’s house and the ship, and she wore a gray jersey dress that hugged the long, classic lines of her body, clinging softly to the curves of her hips and thighs. She did not look frightened. She stood against the wall in the corner, where she had been out of his range of vision from the doorway. Her hand twisted a small strand of pearls at her throat. There was a paradox in her manner and appearance, in her parted lips that glistened almost with eagerness in the dim light of the single bulb in the room.

Then Krame swung like a big cat, with blinding speed. He caught Stella’s arm, swung her around while a small sound of dismay came from her, then yanked her close to him, interposing her body between himself and Durell’s gun.

The man’s mouth shaped his silent laughter.

“Surprised she’s still alive, Durell?”

“Get away from him, Stella,” Durell said flatly.

Her eyes were wide with fear now. “Sam, be careful You don’t understand. He’ll kill me.”

Krame said heavily: “Drop your gun, Durell.”

Durell straightened. Krame’s gun bored into the girl’s back. He looked hard at Stella’s taut, pale face. Krame looked triumphant. The old man cowered on the bunk and shook his head negatively, his mouth open, but no sound came from him. Krame was sweating.

“You want Stella to die?” Krame whispered. “Drop it!”

Durell’s gun felt heavy and alive with a purpose of its own. He wanted to fire, to see Krame’s silent laughter fade into dust. An elemental hatred surged in him, a yearning to meet flesh with flesh, bone against bone. But Stella was in the way.

“Stella, get away from him,” he rasped again.

“I can’t.”

“He won’t hurt you,” he said.

Krame laughed. “Try me. Go ahead and shoot. But you shoot through her, friend. And I won’t wait forever.”

There was no sound anywhere else in the ship. No sign of Tom Markey. No help was coming. Durell straightened slowly. He raised his gun. He was going to fire. He saw Stella’s face turn paper white, incredulous. Her mouth opened and she swallowed, staring at his gun, shrinking against Krame. She made a little moaning sound.

“Sam, for God’s sake, please!”

Durell said: “It’s no good, Krame. We’ve got Gerda, Lamont, McChesney. They’re talking. They’re weak sisters. Karl is dead. We’ve got your lists, we know your methods, we know those whom you threatened and those you killed. You can’t get away.”

“Wrong. I leave in ten minutes, friend, when this ship sails. And Stella comes with me. So drop your gun!”

From the cot came a whisper like dry leaves rustling together. It was old Albert Marni. “Shoot, Mr. Durell. Go ahead. Shoot.”

Stella screamed. Her eyes were enormous. She moved as if to jerk free of Krame’s grip, and Krame suddenly drew back his massive forearm and swiped her aside with a brutal blow across her face and throat. She reeled toward the cot and her crouching father. Krame’s gun roared in the narrow compartment. But Durell had moved faster than the redheaded man. He didn’t want to kill Krame. He wanted Krame alive. There was only four feet between them and he covered the space before Stella was completely free of the field of fire, knocking up Krame’s gun so the bullet spattered on the overhead. The gun went spinning, clattering to the deck under the cot.

Durell chopped again, but Krame recovered fast, gaining an arm lock that made pain spurt through his hand. His gun was torn loose, too, but he did not see where it went. Krame held on to his arm lock and they spun around in a tight, hard circle. For a long moment the only sound in the room was the hiss of Krame’s breathing as he poured strength into his leverage to push Durell backward. Then Durell heard the slide of Stella’s shoe as she suddenly darted behind him and snatched up the gun he had dropped.

“Baby?” Krame gasped. “Baby?”

She swung at Krame, missed, hit Durell’s shoulder. Swung and missed again. They burst apart as if an explosion had gone off between them. Krame’s elbow slashed across Stella’s body and she went down, he head slamming the coaming at the threshold. Albert Marni scampered to one side as Durell and Krame crashed to the deck, locked together.

Krame was on the bottom. Durell crammed a forearm against the man’s throat and lifted to drive his weight to crush Krame’s larynx. The man heaved up with enormous strength and tried to flip free. Durell came down again harder. Something snapped and Krame made a gurgling sound and rolled left, then right. His face was ashen. Sweat stood out on his stubbled jaw. He no longer laughed.

Durell hit him with his left, grabbed his cropped red hair, slammed his head against the steel deck, slammed it again. Krame’s eyes rolled white and a queer sound came from suddenly slack lips.

“Enough,” he whispered.

His voice sounded broken.

Durell stood up. He looked at Krame and Krame did not move, spread-eagled on the deck. He was soaked with sweat in the hot little room. Wondering, he looked at Stella. She was moaning, lying on one hip, hands pushing up from the deck. Her father had not touched her or helped her. The old man was watching her with horrified fascination. Her head was down, her hair screened her face, and Durell could not see what she looked like.

Then Markey and Isotti appeared in the doorway.

Chapter Nineteen

It was ten o’clock. Durell smoked a cigarette and drank coffee and listened to Isotti on the telephone to Washington. Two of Markey’s men were transcribing notes taken from interviews with McChesney and Lamont. Krame hadn’t talked yet, but his testimony was not necessary. They had found the papers needed to clinch the case in the purser’s safe aboard the Boroslav. Rosters of names, next of kin, notes on how the victims had been approached, with results usually indicated by the date of departure for the mother country behind the Iron Curtain. Senator Hubert was flying up from Washington to take charge of the next investigating session. Headlines were being written that exposed the entire vicious ring that had preyed on those who had come here for safety and freedom, only to find themselves relentlessly followed by the faceless terrors of the past.

But now it was over.

Durell had talked to Dickinson McFee and had spoken briefly with Deirdre Padgett, still waiting for him at his hotel. She had sounded cool and remote. He felt tired. His exhaustion was something that went deep into his bones.

He stood spread-legged in the living room of Stella Marni’s cool, exquisite apartment on the East Side. It was raining again, and a cold, gusty wind battered the bright magic of the city. Durell closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again as the doctor came out of Stella’s bedroom. Not over yet, he told himself.

“You can talk to her now,” the doctor said. “But she’ll be asleep in about twenty minutes from the sedation I gave her.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

McFee had been quietly pleased with his results. Immigration and Customs people were swarming all over the Boroslav at this moment, holding the vessel for thorough investigation. Captain Grozni had turned up at the FBI office asking for political asylum. Stepov had been found with a suicide bullet in his brain. There had been no place to go for Stepov.

He walked into Stella’s bedroom. She lay on her side with her face to the wall. She did not move and he thought she was asleep and then she said in a small voice, “Sam?”

He sat down gently beside her. He had closed the door, and they were as alone as they would ever be, he thought, and it would never matter how many doors he closed; Stella would always be alone, as when he had first seen her, walking in the rain down the Foley Square courthouse steps.

“Sam?” she whispered again.

He could not see her face. Still gently, he touched her bare shoulder and turned her so she lay on her back, looking up at him. There was an ugly bruise on her jaw and a cut on her left temple where she had fallen after she had picked up the gun and Krame had struck her down. She gave him a wavering smile. She wore no make-up at all, and without the cosmetics she seemed to lose her illusion of being a cool, remote goddess. She looked drowsy, like a woman in love, Durell thought.

“I’m so glad you’re all right,” she whispered. “The doctor tells me it’s all over. Is my father in the hospital again?”

“He has a bad heart, Stella. He’s not permitted to talk. He tried to tell me about you in the ambulance, he was very upset and excited, but the doctor stopped him before he talked too much. He’s got a good chance of pulling through, however. If he wants to pull through.”

Stella’s green eyes clouded. “I don’t understand. What do you mean?”

“He told me he wants to die,” Durell said bluntly.

“But that doesn’t make sense! Just when…”

“He kept talking about you. When you were a little girl in Budapest, before and during the war, and later, when the Communists took over Hungary, when the Red Army marched in. He told me how ambitious you always were, how hard you studied English, how you wanted to come over here, how it was the single high goal you had set for yourself.”

“Yes.” She nodded. “But why should he say such a thing to you? To want to die is… is…”

“I thought you might explain it,” Durell said quietly.

She was silent, and she turned her head to one side, and he saw the smooth curve of her cheek and throat and the golden down of hair on the nape of her neck and the smooth white swelling of her breast under the blanket. Her voice sounded small and far away, like a sleepy child’s.

“Sam? All I could think of, when you dived into that channel at Blossom’s house, was how I wanted to die, too.

It was all over then. I lost all hope. There was nothing left. Can you understand?”

“Perhaps.”

She would not look at him. “Don’t you know I love you?”

He said nothing.

She turned her head back abruptly, staring. Her hand lifted to touch his mouth. “Don’t you, darling? Whatever I am, whatever I can give you, is all yours. You surely must know that after — after that time when we were alone, in that cottage. Other men have been in love with me and wanted me; it was like that all my life, darling, I don’t know why. There was always just something that made men — that made them follow me. I didn’t care. I was never interested. I had other things to think about.”

“Your ambitions,” he suggested quietly.

“Yes, perhaps there was too much of that. But I am glad now. Because I waited for you. And now everything will be all right, will it not? You will help me stay here, darling? You will not go away?”

“Not yet,” he said.

A tiny frown touched her perfect brows. “You sound strange.”

“We’ve had a hard time, Stella.” He stirred as if to get up from his seat on the bed beside her. “Perhaps you should sleep now.”

“No. I want to know what you mean. You look strange. You look at me — not the way you looked before.” Her husky, accented voice was a stronger whisper now. “Please explain to me. It frightens me. I had hoped you loved me a little, too. I thought we had discovered something — something wonderful in this nightmare of mine. Something beautiful was going to come out of it. You gave me that hope. Do you know what I mean, darling? It was something I could cling to. It gave some meaning to what was happening to me, and I was not so terribly afraid then, after I met you.”

She was more beautiful than he had ever seen her. She sat up suddenly, careless of the blanket that slipped to her waist, and burrowed her warm, smooth body against him with a quickly frightened, pathetic movement. He was conscious of the round, firm pressure of her breasts against him, and he said quietly, “I’m sorry, Stella.”

“Sorry?”

“For you. For everything.”

“I don’t…” She moved her head from side to side, quietly anguished. “Oh, please, what is it? What do you want to say?”

“It’s quite simple,” Durell told her. His eyes were dark, almost black in intensity. “Let me ask you something, Stella. Are you going to change your testimony to the investigating committee, now that your father is safe? We have Krame in custody, the whole gang, in fact, and none of them can hurt you.”

“There will be others,” she said, clinging to him.

“There will always be others, yes. The fight is never over. But for you it can be over, once you tell the truth, once you let the whole world know the difference between freedom and slavery.”

Her hands slipped slowly from his shoulders. Her head was bowed as she moved back a little. He saw the perfection of her breasts, the slim tapering of her waist, the swelling of her hips lost in the blanket that covered her.

“Sam, I can’t,” she whispered.

“You won’t change your testimony?”

“I can’t.”

“Do you still want to go back to Budapest?”

“Oh, no! But…”

“But what?” he persisted.

“I’m so tired of it all,” she whispered. “So tired. I’m sleepy now, darling. I… I don’t want to think about it this minute. I just couldn’t sit in that witness chair again. Not right away, darling. Don’t ask me. Can’t you see I want a little time to rest, to think, to breathe, just to know I’m safe?”

“You’ll never know you’re safe until you decide which side you’re loyal to.”

“But I have decided! Long ago! There was never any doubt.”

“There is,” he said flatly.

She sat back suddenly, pulling away as if the touch of him burned her. She became aware of her nakedness and pulled the blanket up to her throat. The gesture made her look young and helpless and inexpressibly lovely. But there was a difference now. It was difficult for Durell to define it. It was in her eyes, in a different awareness she had of him, a subtle caution and the beginning of alarm that changed the way she looked at him, the way her mouth curved, the way she held herself.

“Once more, Sam,” she said. “Does it make so much difference if I am so tired and ill now that I beg of you to let me rest because I want to avoid all the publicity and the newspaper stories that will smother me if I do as you ask?”

“Yes, it makes a difference.”

“Then you don’t love me,” she said softly, wonderingly.

“No.”

She stared, caught her lip between her teeth. “I thought you did. I was sure of it. You were like…” She paused.

“Blossom?”

“No, I didn’t say that.”

“But you meant it.”

“Why don’t you love me, Sam?”

He said it quietly, and she didn’t make a sound except for one quick, tight exhalation of her breath. A clock ticked somewhere in the softly light, delicate room. She stared at him with wide, blank, uncomprehending eyes.

“You’ve killed, Stella,” he said quietly. “You killed Frank Greenwald and you sent Art to the hospital and you killed Harry Blossom. More than that, you killed hope in the hearts of a hundred frightened, innocent people who only wanted to rest and have a little peace and security in which to spend their remaining years. There were four men and two women in Krame’s ring, taking orders from Stepov. We’ve got the four men: Krame, McChesney, Lamont, Karl. And one of the women: Gerda. And you’re the second woman, Stella. Last, but not least. You and Krame. You two were the real brains behind all the secret terror you caused, the deaths, the reluctant departures for unknown punishments back home.”

“Sam,” she whispered. “Sam. No. You can’t believe…”

“Listen to me,” he said harshly. “Why does your father want to die? Because he knows what you are, what you have been, what you plan to be in the future. He knows his kidnapping was only an excuse to give you a cover story, to enable you to testify as you did. You did a lot of damage, you gave a great boost to the enemy’s propaganda, with what you said. And yet, because of the kidnapping of your father, you posed as an object of pity, beyond real police suspicion. If it were otherwise, you would have been unmasked long ago as a professional agent. But your father knows the truth about you. He knows that you used him as you used everyone else — as a tool to get what you wanted. So he wants to die. It’s quite simple, after all, when his heart is broken and he sees no reason to go on living alone and deserted.”

Stella Marni stared at him with great green eyes that clouded and cleared and clouded again.

He spoke in a flat, tired voice. “Nobody else could have killed Frank Greenwald. Nobody else could have put Art off guard. It took strength to crush in their heads the way you did, but not strength that was beyond you. You had that iron bar and it worked simply and fast. And poor Harry Blossom. He tried to tell me the truth about you. He practically told me he had thrown over every principle and trace of ethics he’d ever had, because he was in love with you, crazy about you. and he was willing to let you go, willing to follow you to hell if you would only give him a crumb of your beauty. And you enjoyed tormenting him. He knew the truth about you but you knew you were safe as long as he loved you as he did. In the end, when he began to come out of it and handed you an ultimatum, you simply shot him. You killed him and sat there looking at him until you heard me coming. Then you ditched the gun. Where? Out in the weeds?” He looked at her, but Stella’s face was suddenly blank. “You were waiting for Krame. You stalled me out at the boathouse, hoping Krame would show up for you. And when he did and I had to dive into the channel, you went quietly away with him thinking I was dead, too. And in the ship, when you grabbed up my gun while I was fighting Krame, you weren’t trying to slug him with it. You didn’t miss him and hit me by accident. You were aiming for me. Your father knew it. We discussed it. You were trying to get me.”

Stella whispered: “You can’t believe any of that You don’t. You couldn’t.”

“I believe it because I can prove it,” Durell said.

She shook her head violently. “No. Sam, you held me in your arms, you love me, you do!” Her eyes were wet with sudden tears. “No, don’t talk like this. Do not do this to me now. It is not true!”’

“It’s true,” Durell said. “You should have made sure of the job when you slugged Art Greenwald. He’s been half over the edge for three days, ready to die in silence. Pretty rough on you, too, I suppose — and that’s one more reason you played for me. to keep in touch with Art’s condition, to learn if he was able to talk. Well, he’s safe now. He’ll recover. Half an hour ago he began to remember what happened to him. He told us what happened in Krame’s studio that night Frank had learned the truth about you, too, Stella. And Frank and Art confronted you with it. Frank had gone to the Boroslav after Damion’s call that night and he saw you there, perfectly at home and comfortable. When he charged you with it, you killed him — and tried to kill Art, who was a witness. But you missed there. Art is alive. And he’ll identify you. And if that isn’t enough, Captain Grozni has come over on our side and he’s ready to tell us everything he knows about the operation.”

Her face was a pale cameo carved in chalk. Her eyes accepted Durell’s words and she suddenly nodded, her head jerking like a puppet on a string. Her hands fell limply to her sides. The bruise on her jaw looked vivid against the pallor of her skin. Her breath sighed.

“What are you going to do with me, darling?”

“You’re under arrest for murder and espionage,” Durell said. He looked at her for a long moment. “I guess that’s about it, then, Stella.”

She stared in confusion and disbelief as he started to get up from the edge of her bed. “Sam… I do not understand you… how you can do this to me…”

She could not comprehend how he could stand there, so tall and dark and cold, looking down at her beauty and knowing her ecstasies were all his, just for a word, just for a nod and a promise. The invitation was there. Her mouth parted again in asking and surrender and pleading.

She was still the most beautiful woman Durell had ever seen. And she revolted him.

“Sam, darling…”

“Good-by, baby,” he said.

He turned and walked into the other room, where Markey’s men were waiting to take over.

When he closed the door, her screams began.

*

It was a few minutes before midnight when Durell walked down the lonely hospital corridor from Art Greenwald’s room. Art would be all right now. Now that the tide had turned in his favor, a swift recovery was promised. Durell’s footsteps made soft, hollow sounds in the deserted hallway. He felt a curious vacuum inside him, an emptiness that he had tried to satisfy with Art and could not. He had done what had to be done, and this was the job he had set out to do. There was some satisfaction in erasing a vicious evil, but he could not erase the memory of Stella Marni’s face and body from his mind. He saw her again as he had left her, and as she had been on the night they had spent alone together. He felt a sense of loss, and knew it for what it was — man’s eternal attraction toward destructive and suicidal forces. The eternal Lilith. Man was still a child playing with matches and surprised when he was burned. He knew that Stella Marni’s source of powerful attraction for him and others stemmed from that same darkly glowing source, the mystery of what was evil, the challenge of danger, and potential of destruction.

He had won against that, and yet he felt the primordial loss and curiosity of what might have been.

The sky had cleared, scoured by a cold wind that burnished the stars and gave infinite depth to the vault of the heavens. Durell turned up the collar of his topcoat and walked down the hospital steps toward his parked car. He was due in Washington in the morning — McFee had had an urgent note in his voice when he had requested him to attend a special conference at the White House. Top priority, condition critical. So it would start again — the hunting and the being hunted, the cold and silent war of the intelligence service, where no bugles blew and no glory shone and death could come with a silent knife blade in a dark and dirty alley on the other side of the world.

There was somebody in his car, waiting for him, and when he opened the door he saw it was Deirdre Padgett.

“You were so long, Sam,” she said. “Rosalie Greenwald told me you were here.”

Her face and voice were soft and anxious. She wore a dark coat and a small blue hat like a tiny tricorne over her raven hair. When he looked at her for a moment in grateful silence, Durell knew that here was a far greater beauty than what had tempted him in Stella Marni. He suddenly felt awkward and humble beside her.

“I tried to reach you at the hotel, Dee.”

“I know. They gave me your messages.”

“I didn’t think you’d care to see me again.”

Deirdre smiled. “I suppose I never will get used to the things you do, or the waiting, and the not knowing if you’re alive or… or…”

Suddenly she was in his arms, her lips seeking his, and her words broke in a little cry of utter loneliness that found an echo inside him. He held her tight and felt a warmth grow in him and a fear, too, at how close he had come to following the hypnotic flame that might have led him to the brink of the devil’s unknown world. He had pulled back in time and he was home again, safe again, for now. For as long as Deirdre was here and waiting for him.

Presently she sat quietly beside him in a silence that said all that needed to be said, and he started the car and they drove away.

Table of Contents

Edward S. Aarons Assignment — Stella Marni

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen