Assignment - Budapest by Edward S. Aarons Page B

from the boathouse on the beach where he had been stationed. For an instant, it looked to Durell as if the trap had been sprung, in old Jonathan’s words, to bite the biter. Then Mester fired, aiming well, and Zoltan Ske plunged face down on the lawn. Durell tripped over him and fell on his wounded shoulder, and an incredible shock of pain exploded all through his right side. He lost the gun he had taken from Bela Korvuth. He heard Mester shouting, and forced himself up again.
    Lew Franklin ran up. “Sam, for God’s sake, how did you get in there?”
    “Never mind,” Durell gasped. “Go after Korvuth.” George Mester joined them, a chunky man with gray hair. “He’s in the woods, over there.”
    “Then get after him.”
    Lew Franklin nudged Zoltan Ske with his toe. In the rain and the darkness, Franklin looked young and uncertain. “What about this one?”
    “I’m afraid he’s dead,” Durell said. “Damn it, I wanted to question him.”
    “Jesus, I’m sorry, Sam,” Mester said.
    “It’s all right.”
    Both men looked at him, sensing something in his voice that should not have been there. “They were in the house, with Miss Padgett? They had her boxed in?”
    “They wanted me,” Durell said. “Korvuth had a gun on her. He thought it would keep me from making the play.”
    “Oh, hell,” Franklin said. “I heard a shot in there, but I didn’t think you’d-—”
    “Korvuth shot her,” Durell said flatly. “Go ahead, get him.” “What about you? You’re bleeding—”
    “It’s my arm. Nothing to worry about.”
    He watched the two men turn and run back across the lawn to the black edge of the scrub pine woods that bordered the marshes and the cove to the north. His stomach squirmed. He thought he was going to be sick. His legs felt weak. He held his right arm tightly, above the wound, and wondered how bad it really was. When he turned to walk back toward the house, the dark night reeled around him, but it was no darker or more despairing than the blackness inside him. He did not look back at the shapeless lump of shadow that Zoltan Ske’s body made on the frozen lawn.
    The front door stood open, streaming yellow light on the wet, crystalline grass. Durell swallowed. There was a feeling of unreality to the light, a feverish red tinge to it, as he walked slowly back up the steps into the house. He did not want to go inside. It was as if a vast, iron door had clanged shut inside him, since that moment he had made his move with Korvuth’s gun on Deirdre. He had sacrificed her for the job. There was no other excuse he could give. He could not think about this and remain sane. It was as if something had torn apart inside him and he walked as if balanced on a delicate razor’s edge, an empty pit of remorse to one side, a dreary waste of the future on the other. But he moved ahead mechanically to do what had to be done, a man who was more like a machine than flesh and blood.
    He stood looking in the doorway to the library for a long tormented moment. There was a taste of bitter acid in the back of his throat.
    Deirdre had not moved from where she had fallen in a crumpled heap to the carpeted floor. A pool of blood had gathered under her body, as brilliant and red as the sweater she wore. He noted the way the curve of her hip and thigh was held under the skirt and he remembered the fine, miraculous integration of her skin and flesh and bone. There was nothing about her that he had not known. She was as much a part of him as the bloody, shaking fingers he raised from the edge of the door.
    “Dee?”
    Her face was upturned, like a pale, crushed flower. Her eyes were closed. She did not seem to be breathing.

Chapter Six
    Sam Durell walked into the room slowly and knelt beside her. The wound was in her shoulder, below the collar bone, and from the slow pumping of blood he knew a large vein had been severed. He lifted her limp wrist and felt for a pulse. There was a dim and faraway beat that felt