Assignment - Karachi by Edward S. Aarons Read Free Book Online Page B

different reactions in different men. In Donegan, it made for poor judgment and cowardice.
    “When did you speak to the real Miss Standish last?” Durell asked.
    “She’s all right. She’s at this villa I got for her and the Austrians—the von Buhlens. I phoned them less than ten minutes ago.”
    “And you spoke to Miss Standish, personally?”
    “Yes. I tell you, she’s all right.”
    “Let’s hope so,” Durell said.
    He left Donegan’s office a few moments later and paused in the small anteroom outside.
    Jane King’s leather chair was empty.
    The girl had gone.

chapter five
    SHE walked quickly through the crowded, noisy streets, away from Mr. Donegan’s modern office, but not too quickly to attract attention. The heat outside struck her like a brazen fist, making her flinch. She felt as if all her thoughts had glued together into an amalgam of despair, compounded by the hot sun, the smells, the fear and desperation that gnawed at her belly. For a time she thought she was going to be sick again and throw up on the street. But that would not do. A policeman might stop and be solicitous, and she could not attract sympathy or pause to say who she was or where she was going.
    She couldn’t have answered, anyway. She did not know her destination.
    Everything had gone so wrong since last winter in Switzerland, Jane thought. From a wonderful, miraculous success in New York, getting her job as secretary and companion and —yes, friend, too—to Sarah Standish, things went steadily downhill from a dizzy height of satisfaction.
    Bicycle bells jangled in the street, a beggar crawled across the sidewalk toward her, hands outstretched like claws. She avoided him, walked around a domed mosque, crossed a small park where men in white muslin and women in veils sat in lethargy under the shade of peepul trees. Every now and then she turned her head and looked behind her. No one was following. Voices lifted on the oven-heated air, speaking Urdu, Pathan, English and Portuguese. All at once she longed for the familiar flat tones of her Midwestern home in Garden Falls, Indiana.
    A short, fat man with a terribly scarred face, wearing a white silk suit and a topee, stopped in her way on the path through the park.
    “May I help you, madam? Do you wish a taxi?’’
    “No—no, thank you.”
    “You are lost, please?”
    “No, I’m not.”
    She walked around him, thinking, But I am lost, terribly
    lost, and I can never go home again, because I don’t know what will happen to me.
    She paid no attention to where she was going. The heat dazed her, the nausea rode in her stomach. Something had to be settled. She couldn’t stand it any longer. Rudi would have to decide.
    It had been wonderful to write home to Momma and Poppa, in that quiet white clapboard house on Elm Street, and tell them about her job and Sarah Standish and all the amazing things she saw and did; how she lived in the lap of luxury and traveled everywhere with one of the richest women in America. To get a job like that was a stroke of fortune; but now all her luck had turned bad.
    She saw a policeman at the other end of the park and she turned and walked the other way, casually, aware of a heaviness in her legs and exhaustion in her lungs. She dodged one of the diesel tramway cars, forced herself around a covered tonga. Tricycle cabs sought her as a fare. She kept walking, ignoring the beggars on the sidewalk, the crisply uniformed Pakistani military men, the occasional European.
    She had escaped Durell, but nothing else, she thought.
    How ironical that she’d had to pose as Sarah here, for the one day! It was a circlet of thorns, crowning all her folly that had begun so long ago in Switzerland.
    She had been the first to meet Rudi von Buhlen, because Sarah always made herself inaccessible to informal approaches. Rudie was the first man Jane had made love to.
    Jane paused in her walking. She had crossed Napier Road and was in the Juna Market, a native bazaar. Here