Assignmnt - Ceylon Read Free Page B

somewhere near Dematagoda Road. There was a clash of brazen noise nearby, the mindless roar of an inflamed crowd. He smelled smoke in the humid afternoon air. He thought of making for the US embassy at 44 Galle Road, in the Kolluitiya district. Too late for that.
    The mob poured down the narrow street like a flood released from a bursting dam. As riots go, it would scarcely make the local headlines. But Durell sensed an immediate and personal danger in it. He saw the red banners fluttering, with Sinhalese, Tamil, and Arabic script, heard the chanting of “Naga! Naga! Naga!” and saw several streams of men pour toward him like the reaching pseudopods of some elemental beast.
    He jumped from the taxi behind the bullock cart. The driver slid out on the other side and vanished. Durell let him go. He put his gun away and pressed back against a fruit stall. The pungent smell of ripe melons touched him, along with the smell of the crowd. There were smashing sounds, yells. More smoke drifted across the narrow street. A woman screamed, making a high ululating sound in the steamy air. People ran everywhere, jostling and striking each other in an effort to escape. Some stalls were smashed. A window was shattered, a crystalline sound above the yelling.
    Durell felt the presence of someone near him. A wildeyed man with a red rag tied around his head edged around the bullock cart. The man was wiry, dressed in a worn Western shirt and stained slacks. There was blood on his left arm. He was bald, brown-skinned. Black, Durell thought. A black American. Not this one.
    The man screamed at him. A knife flickered. Hi r ed help. Durell hit the man with the edge of his hand against the neck, not hard enough to kill him. The man went down, strangling; rage faded from his dimming eyes. Durell moved around to the front of the cart. The narrow lane was a flood of shouting, struggling men. He kept close to the buildings, felt himself bumped and shoved, backed into a doorway. The killer was nearby. He could feel it. He recognized none of the congested faces around him. He felt for the doorknob behind him, turned it. He smelled stale cooking, the effluvium of poor sanitation, and stepped backward. His heel touched the lowest tread of stairs behind him. Carts and stalls were being overturned by the angry mob. A torch was thrown at the bullock cart he had just quit.
    He backed up two steps, heard a sound above and behind him, felt dismay at the tall dark figure looming at the head of the dingy steps above him.
    A professional job, Durell thought.
    A press of ragged men blocked the street door. He could not get out that way. He had been neatly boxed, first by the taxi driver who’d dropped him in this special spot, then by the rioter’s halfhearted attack that backed him into this doorway. The thoughts flicked through his mind in split seconds.
    “Hello, Cajun.”
    The voice echoed in the steep, dark staircase. He could not see the face above him. But the dim light ran a liquid finger along the barrel of a Luger in the man’s hand.
    “Sorry, old man.”
    “Why?” Durell called up to him.
    “It’s my job.”
    “To kill me?”
    “All in the day’s work, old man.”
    The voice was garbled by the echoing walls of the narrow, dingy staircase. It tickled something in the back of Durell’s memory. He could not place it. The straddlelegged man above raised the long-barreled gun a few millimeters. Outside, the crowd roared and smashed things and chanted slogans, as crowds did everywhere in the world. He smelled curry cooking. He thought of Aspara and the beach and the placid Indian Ocean. He cursed his failure to rate his shadow as important, from the first.
    “So long, old man.”
    It was the other’s mistake. The warning gave Durell time to move. There was a dark-painted brown door to his left. He spun, smashed at it as the Luger suddenly crashed. The door panel was flimsy. He felt the bullet tug at his shirt sleeve. A professional, up there, but