Assignment — Angelina (13 page)

"Erich, take it back. Take a long walk. Don't hurry."

The man sounded as if he were strangling. "Jessie, you're my..."

"I'm nothing to you. Do as I say."

She shut the door in Erich's white face, bolted it, and walked back, smiling, to where Mark waited for her.

Earlier that day, in the morning, Durell returned to the Waggonner Building off Fourteenth Street in Washington. The blonde typist with the jeweled harlequin glasses sat at the same desk and, for all Durell knew, she was typing the same letter. The rack of uniforms that represented the manufacturing company of McGuire, Sloan & Levy were now all air force blues.

A thin rain was falling, but Mr. Wittington still wore his rumpled seersucker suit. His thin face was impassive as he waved Durell to a chair and then lifted his hand to smooth imaginary hair on his bald scalp. Kincaid stood by the window, looking young and military.

Wittington did the talking. "MacCreedy won't get anywhere, Durell. It may seem to you like a job for organization, the sort of thing the FBI does very well, indeed. But they won't find Erich Corbin."

"My fault," Durell said. "I almost had them."

"Just as well you didn't take them. You see, we — our Special Bureau — do not want them in custody yet. That is not our affair."

"They're murderers," Durell said.

Wittington fanned the air. "Only incidental."

"Not to the people who were murdered." Durell said. "If MacCreedy can pick them up..."

"We know where Corbin is. MacCreedy does not. For your information, they're in New York. Back at their former apartment, and obviously feeling safe and secure. Nobody knows this except our man who spotted them and we three in this room. They are not to be intercepted, interrogated, or interfered with." Mr. Wittington leaned forward, his thin shoulders hunched in his seersucker suit. His bald head gleamed. "Do you know why, Durell? Because we still don't know what Erich Corbin is after. It's not the small pickings of a few bank robberies. We're fairly certain of that. It's something bigger. Much bigger. I have a very dissatisfied feeling in my bones, Durell. I don't like it at all. It is my feeling — and for once the machine Mr. Kincaid relies upon now backs me up — my feeling is that the bank robbery in Peche Rouge was nothing, a mere trial, on a small scale, for something bigger. We don't know what it is. And we must find what it is before it happens. If we pull in Corbin, he won't talk. And if we pull in Fleming or Slago, they won't talk, because the chances are that Corbin hasn't told them yet."

"Then why did they tip their hands with the Peche Rouge bank?"

"It is also my feeling that Corbin felt it necessary to convince his partners that his gas operated successfully. It was nothing more than a calculated risk. So far as he knows, it worked fine."

"They have the formula now. And the antidote. I didn't stop them from finding it."

"No fault of yours. We sent you down there too late." Wittington looked up as Kincaid made a vague sound. "Something troublesome, Daniel?"

"I want to know about" the girl," Kincaid said. "This Angelina Greene who came up here with Durell."

"She's in my apartment now," Durell said.

"And busy making telephone calls to all sorts of underworld associates, apparently." Kincaid looked angry. "Why did you bring her?"

"To know what she's up to. Short of taking her into custody, she can't be stopped from carrying out her plan for revenge. You have to understand the bayou people..."

Wittington interrupted. "We know all that. I approve."

"I didn't know I was under surveillance." Durell said. "I didn't know you bugged my telephone."

"Do you object?"

Durell shrugged. "No. It's a sort of occupational hazard. I brought the girl with me to keep in touch with her activities. It was either that, or jail her. And she may turn up something useful. If she does, I'll be right on top of it."

"Is that your only reason for bringing her?" Kincaid asked.

Durell was angry. "I knew her a long time ago."

"Intimately," Kincaid said.

"Then you know all about that, too."

"Everything," Kincaid said. "And I don't like it."

Wittington made another pass at his imaginary mane of hair. "Never mind. Daniel, you worry too much. Durell can handle her. It may be for the best, as he says." He stood up, glared at the rain-dotted window as if the weather were a personal affront, and said: "Take her with you to New York, Durell. Understand, you're not to worry Corbin or his people. Not until you find out what his next move is to be."

"Any suggestions?" Durell asked.

"You might meet them. After all, they know you saw them at that fishing camp. You might try to join them. It's up to you. Just take care of yourself."

"But I can't touch them?"

"They need more rope. And you don't tell MacCreedy or his New York people. They have jurisdiction and they might move in anyway, but then well never learn what Corbin is after." Wittington went to the door and paused. "It isn't Corbin who worries me. It's his objective. Whatever it is, it is an obvious weak spot that he feels he can crack with this nerve gas of his. We don't know the objective and can't guess at the weak spot. If we stop him, we may never know. And we must find out. We've got to plug all the gaps in bux armor, Durell. Corbin may fail through over anxiety on our part to check him, but then somebody else may try. And we may never know about
that
one until it is too late."

His apartment was on a quiet side street not far from Rock Creek Park. It was raining harder when Durell paid off his taxi and walked to the entrance. The furnishings in his room were simple and utilitarian; a leather armchair and couch, a heavy desk with a three-spot lamp over it, books in a low bookcase under the windows. Deirdre had brought over the paintings on the wall and had bought the curtains and helped furnish the bedroom.

He heard Angelina when he unlocked the door, and when he came in he saw her put down the telephone. She wore a small visored hat tilted back on her dark hair, and a transparent raincoat belted over a gabardine suit of pale blue. She looked lovely and smart and very unlike the girl in denims and shirt in the bayou country. She could have appeared anywhere and been accepted everywhere.

"Sam," she said, "you were not gone very long."

"Who were you talking to?"

"A man who knows somebody named Big Socks Johnson, who is a minor executive of the syndicate, and who employed Mark Fleming until a couple of months ago."

'You get around."

"I told you, I have contacts. My investments..."

"What did the man who knows the man tell you?"

"Mark Fleming is in New York, with Slago, at the Belmont on West Forty-seventh Street."

He looked at the small, smart traveling case near the door. "Were you ready to go there now? Did I come back too soon?"

"I was going to wait for you, but I am going there."

"You'll get yourself killed," he said.

"Then come with me."

"I intend to. Could we have some coffee first?"

"I don't like the kind of coffee they drink up here."

"You'll like mine," Durell said. "Jonathan sends it up to me regularly. It's from home."

"In that case, yes."

He went into the kitchen and started water boiling in the coffee pot and wondered wryly why Mr. Wittington didn't have as much information as Angelina had obtained with her telephone calls. Perhaps it wasn't quite that simple, though. He was impressed with the girl, not just with what she had learned, but with the way she looked and the way she was. He wondered if the Bowie knife strapped to her thigh troubled her when she walked. He heard her come into the kitchen and looked at her. She had taken off her white gloves and the cute hat, and he watched her get coffee mugs from the cupboard.

"Sam?" She spoke with her back to him. "Don't you find it strange, our being together again, the way we used to be?'

"It's not quite the way it used to be," he pointed out.

"Well, that's not my fault."

"I know."

She said down at the kitchen table. "Who is Deirdre Padgett?'

"My girl."

"Are you going to marry her?"

"I don't know.

"But if she's your girl, and if you've known her long..."

"A couple or years."

"But you haven't married her?"

"No. How did you learn her name?"

"She telephoned from Paris, about an hour ago." Angelina grinned, but her eyes were dark and somber. Don't worry; I explained who I was."

"That wouldn't be any help."

"I told her I was here purely on business."

"Ill bet."

"Are you angry with me?"

"No."

"And you're really in love with her?"

"Yes."

"Then why is she in Paris?"

"That's a good question." Durell told her about Deirdre's job as a fashion editor with a Washington newspaper. He couldn't explain why they had never married. He couldn't tell her it was his fault, that if there was anything in the world he feared, it was hurting Deirdre; in his business it was better not to have permanent arrangements that caused someone to love you too much. Deirdre had always had other arguments to counter this, but she had not yet shaken him and he was beginning to believe she never would.

"Sam, what is your job?" Angelina asked suddenly. "I mean, just what do you
do?"

"I'm with the government."

"Are you a G-man?"

He laughed, because she sounded naive. "No."

"But you're a cop of some kind?"

"Of some kind, yes."

"Your job is to get Corbin and Fleming and Slago, isn't it.

"My job is to get them at the right time and the right place, and not before, and if you do anything to throw a monkey wrench into this tiling, I'll have to..." He paused.

She smiled. "What, Sam?"

"I'll treat you as if you were one of them," he said flatly.

Her smile was erased as if by a sponge. She took a sudden, shaken breath, "I think you mean that," she whispered wonderingly.

"I do."

"No wonder this Deirdre is in Paris."

He poured coffee and drank it and enjoyed the chicory flavor of the Louisiana blend. Angelina stared at her folded hands on the table. "Sam, haven't you ever thought about me in all these years?"

"Yes, quite often."

"But there's nothing left for us, is there?"

"I honestly don't know."

"Don't you want to find out? We have time right now. Or are you afraid?"

"I've got a job to do," he said. He grinned. "And you've got a sharp knife there."

Her face was pale. "Damn you. Do you have to remind me?"

"I'm sorry."

"Sam, if I told you now that I still love you, and always have, and tnat I would give anything to you — if you believed that, Sam, and then I spoiled this job you have to do, would you do that thing to me, as you said?"

"Yes, Angelina."

She looked at him without understanding.

BY three o'clock that afternoon, Durell was in New York. He took a room across the street from the house in the East Seventies, and from the window he could see Corbin's elegant doorway, with its shiny brass knocker and antique house numbers. There was nothing so elaborate in the house where Durell found the room. His window was diagonally opposite the Corbin apartment, and the house was just an old, shabby rooming house, not reconditioned and refurbished as Corbin's was.

It was still raining in New York when he had arrived with Angelina, who insisted on sharing the room with him.

"There's not much privacy," he said.

"I don't want privacy."

"It's blackmail," he said. "You know that, don't you?"

She smiled, taking off the white visored hat, setting down her grip, shaking rain from her raincoat. "Yes, Sam."

"Promise me something, then."

"Of course, Sam."

"Don't do anything. Just stay here with me. Don't call your underworld friends about your investments, and don't go playing cops and robbers on your own. Forget about your revenge."

"To everything you ask, yes, except the last. I can't forget Pete."

"Then make yourself comfortable. We may have a long wait."

He watched Corbin's house from behind the thin curtains in the bay window. Now and then he heard Angelina move about, unpacking, testing the big double bed. The street was an ordinary cross-town street, with small maples struggling uneasily in the midsummer rain. Between five and six o'clock the number of pedestrians increased. Two men appeared, walking dogs. Some cabs stopped at various houses, and men got out and went into the smug, smart doorways across the sidewalk. They lived in a different world from the men who lived on this side of the street. But that's the way it is in New York, Durell thought; twenty paces, and you're in a different world.

He didn't see Erich or Slago. Nobody came out of the house with the red doorway.

"Sam, may I go out and get some food?" Angelina asked. "There's a hot-plate here, and I could do a little cooking."

He had to admit he was hungry. "Be careful. Don't let them see your face from their windows."

"Naturally. I won't be long."

He watched her leave and then he watched from the window again. He knew how to do this. He could have stayed at the window all night, all the next day, perhaps for a week. He had been trained in patience, in watchfulness, in waiting. But he didn't intend to wait forever.

It continued to rain. He saw that the house he watched was generally quiet, with only one couple entering the red doorway during the time Angelina was gone. There was a high iron picket rail around the top of the roof, and this interested him, because the rail and the potted, stunted orange trees up there indicated a roof garden or a terrace. And this in turn indicated a reasonably accessible entrance from the roof.