Free Assignment Madeleine by Edward S. Aarons Page B

to the garden behind the café, and then the jeep
driver followed.
    Durell did not see it happen. He came through the gateway in
time to hear the thud of the thrown knife as it landed in the soldier’s back.
He heard the grunt forced from the bearded man's open mouth, then the crash as
the soldier fell. Durell dropped to one knee and crouched in the shadows
against the high, vine-grown wall. The Arab girl had turned at the sound. She
was beyond the fountain, on the other side of the garden, near the back door to
the café. She screamed.
    Durell’s gun was in his hand. He felt hard stones under his
knee, he saw the shadows moving intangibly against the walls of the dark,
silent houses around them. The man with the knife could be anywhere. He looked
briefly at Jean. The soldier was dead. The knife had been thrown with
deadly aim. Its hilt shone with polished wood and that part of the blade
extruding from the Frenchman’s back glistened in the moonlight.
    The Arab girl screamed again. Durell felt the fury of
frustration. The ambusher was too well concealed. He wasn’t moving to betray
his position. There was nothing to shoot at.
    Then there came a shout from the house to his left, and a
muffled shot. A whistle blew, high and shrill, from the street beyond the
café entrance. Another shot cracked. Durell stepped over the dead man and ran
through the café to the street. The Arabs in the café sat frozen at their
tables. Their dark faces were like stone.
    In the street, a French patrol was fanning out toward the
nearest corner. A man stood on one of the high roofs there, holding a rifle.
One of the troopers took aim and fired carefully. The man was a dark
shadow, rigid for a moment against the moonlit sky. Then he fell, cartwheeling
to the street three floors below. His body made an ugly breaking sound as he
hit. The French soldier who had fired the shot got up and walked toward
the body and kicked it futilely.
    “He was a sniper the rebels left behind,” a young lieutenant
said breathlessly. “Was anyone hurt?”
    “One of your comrades lies behind the café with a knife in
his back,” Durell said.
    “Your driver?”
    “Yes.”
    “These murderers grow more fanatic every day. I knew Jean
well.” The lieutenant sent two men hurrying through the cafe. Durell looked for
the Arab girl, but he didn’t see her. He pocketed his gun. The young lieutenant
was staring at him. The Frenchman said, “You will need another man to escort
you back to the hotel.”
    “I’m not going back to the hotel just yet,” Durell said.
     
    The command post in the farmhouse was only a short drive
from town. Durell took the jeep there himself. The sentries waved him past the
barbed wire into the compound, which was floodlighted by powerful spots
placed on steel posts. Durell noted the weary anger and tension on the faces of
the troops.
    DeGrasse was in his office. He still wore his black beret,
but he had unslung the set of grenades dangling from his shoulders. He looked
exhausted. He listened to what Durell told him about the murder and nodded.
“Another one, then. It is often this way. For no reason, a good man dies. I
shall have to write to his wife.”
    “And the assassin?”
    “He was also a man. And dead, too. One wonders monsieur,
where the balance lies.”
    DeGrasse agreed to let him talk to L’Heureux alone. Durell followed
a guard to the big barn across the compound and walked up the steps to what had
been the loft, now divided into cells. The soldier unlocked the heavy wooden
door and stepped back with his rifle ready, speaking to the man inside.
You have a visitor, pig.”
    Durell went   The guard
outside snapped on a light   Charles
L’Heureux sat up slowly on the cot. He grinned at Durell.
    "Well, chum. All the way from Washington?”
    “I've come to take you back with me,” Durell said.
    ‘You got an American cigarette?” L’Heureux asked casually.
"I'm all out.”
    Durell tossed a pack to the prisoner in silence.