Assignment Madeleine by Edward S. Aarons Read Free Book Online Page A

over his neck and nestled against his belly.
“I do not wish to discuss it with you. I spit on you.”
    “Yet you take my money.”
    “At home I am an accountant, and I know that money is
money,” Pepi said. “It's all good and all bad, and I’m not a philosopher about
money. One has no choice. It is needed.”
    “What will they do to me, Pepi? Have you heard?"
    “If I had my way,” the guard said, “we would do to you as
the rebels did to the people of Marbruk. One fights fire with fire;
it is as simple as that, to my mind. They kill and torture and mutilate. It is
no better fate than you deserve.”
    “But the captain will not have me shot at dawn, eh?”
    The guard shrugged. “No, and I am sickened to have to
relieve your mind of that.”
    The guard moved away, climbing down the steps to the stone floor
of the huge barn. Charley listened to his footsteps die away, standing in an
attitude of acute attention. Finally he heard only the endless rattle of the
wind and the hiss of sand blown in through the window. He went back to the cot
with the cognac bottle.
    He was a big man with powerful shoulders. His curly blond
hair was cropped short over a broad, weathered face. His eyes were greenish, reflecting
hard and ugly things. He had seen too much of North Africa, for too long. He
had heavy brows that were black in contrast to his pale, boyish hair. His khaki
shirt was open down to the waist, and the hair on his chest was also dark. His
khaki trousers were ragged and sweaty, torn at the cuffs. His sandals were
cracked. He looked at his hands around the cognac bottle, big, strong hands
that had helped him out of many a bad corner. But he couldn’t remember as tight
or bad a corner as this.
    He wanted to laugh and curse all at once. He had reached
down low this time, really low; but he saw himself as if crouching in the dirt
only for the final spring to the top, to ultimate success.
    He wondered if Madeleine had gotten his message. Better to
do without her in this—for that matter, he'd like to forget her entirely, since
he was tired of her and looked upon her as an Arab mongrel, hardly fit
for the life he planned ahead. And he still didn’t trust her fully, knowing she
was Brumont’s agent. Still, he needed her now. She could misdirect the agent
coming for him, like a magician's assistant on stage. And even if it were only
for a moment, it would be a crucial moment. The time for escape, and that would
be enough.
    Charley sighed, thinking how he would have to take Madeleine
with him for a short time, anyway. Until he found another woman, perhaps. He
wasn’t constituted to lead a monogamist life for long.
    He lay back on his hard cot and drank from the cognac
bottle, then fished in his ragged shirt pocket for a Gauloise cigarette.
Only three left now. Tomorrow would be the last round of the game. It was too
bad that Orrin Boston’s suspicions about the money and el-Abri had forced his
hand prematurely. But it would work out all right. You had to learn to
improvise, because the only thing certain in this world was that everything was
uncertain.
    The wind blew steadily through the window. Sand scratched at
the floor. Charley turned his body toward the wall. Against his wish, he
remembered the pine woods of Maine and his boyhood in the Thirties. The old
man’s potato farm went under the auctioneer’s gavel, the quarry job had finally
killed him, and the years on relief after that were no things of joy for a kid
to remember. There wasn’t much for a growing boy to do in those days.
Occasionally he got a job as guide for New York hunters who tossed him tips
like throwing bones to a dog. You went hungry often, and you fed yourself on
hatred, which could keep you warm. And after a while the hatred filled
your belly like a hot and satisfying meal.
    Later, in the war, he already knew how to take care of
himself and make a good thing out of what others regarded as nothing. In the
confusion of North Africa, he saw a future