Assignment Madeleine Read Online Free PDF Page B

quickly and naturally.
    A hallway painted a queasy brown led into the kitchen.
Madame Jacques looked up from her cast-iron coal stove and nodded. She was
stout, gray, and mustached. “Up the stairs, m’sieu .”
    Durell turned up a narrow flight of enclosed steps to
the floor above. At the top of the stairway was a green door, and he
rapped on it in a quick, simple signal. Footsteps approached from the other
side and it was opened.
    “Hello, Hal.”
    “Welcome to Ears West.”
    They shook hands. Hal Remington was a middle-aged expatriate
who looked more Parisian than the New Yorker he had originally been. A poet and
an artist, he had come to Paris in the late Twenties when a large colony of
Americans had made it their adopted residence. Remington had a short, forked
beard, a flat face, and bright intelligent eyes under bushy gray brows.
He locked rather lie an aging and sardonic Mephistopheles, gone a bit to seed. The
room was a rat’s nest, cluttered with two studio easels, clothing scattered
everywhere, and unfinished canvases stacked heavily against the plastered
walls. There was a huge desk with an ancient Oliver No. 9 typewriter standing
among a heap of squeezed-out tubes of pigment. A wardrobe closet stood open,
and in the bottom section, built into a drawer, was a compact and powerful
radio transmitter and receiver. On the window ledge that overlooked the cobbled
street, two wet pigeons huddled and argued for space beside a pair of
high-powered binoculars.
    Durell looked out the window and discovered he could see the
front entrance of Madame Sofie’s salon.
    “Quite a view,” he said. “Comfortable here, Hal?”
    “I get some work done. And Madame Jacques has graduated from
the Cordon Bleu kitchens.” Remington kissed paint-stained fingertips. “At
last, after fifty-odd years, I find myself at peace with the
stomach. I am never hungry. As a matter of fact, amigo, I grow fat sitting up
here like a spider in one of your webs.” Remington looked out of the window,
too. “One of Brumont’s boys followed you here. That all right?”
    “Don’t underestimate the Deuxieme Bureau,” Durell said. “They watch us and pick up tips from American tourists at
Madame Sofie’s. And they know we watch them, in turn, from here. Friendly
rivalry for now. Anyway, it wouldn’t surprise me if Jacques takes a pay check
from Brumont as well as from our Embassy. Nice, clean competition.”
    “As long as were allies,” Remington said.
    Durell’s eyes darkened. “Let’s hope that never changes.”
    Remington lit a Gauloise. “Business has been slow, you know.
I’ve even done two paintings this month. Only two couriers through last week,
and a couple of cut-out assignments. I used to think your business had a lot of
excitement in it, Sam, but so far it’s been a bloody bore. But the pay is good
and I’m getting fat as I said. You’re here about Orrie Boston, aren’t you?”
    Durell nodded and sat down. “What do you have on him, Hal?”
    "Orders for you, somewhere.” Remington rummaged through
the rubbish on his huge desk. “Came in by code from Washington two hours ago.
Yours not to reason why, friend, yours just to do or die.”
    “Don’t be so cheerful. Let’s have it.”
    "You are to bring Charles L’Heureux back alive,”
Remington said.
    “No matter what?”
    “No matter what.”
    “Suppose he’s really guilty? Suppose he killed Orrie?”
    “We think he did. I’m sorry, Sam. That’s the word we got
from Marbruk. I knew Orrin Boston, too, don’t forget. We had some high old
times every time he made it into Paris.”
    “You'd better brief me on the background,” Durell said.
“What I got from Brumont may he out of perspective.   There’s a girl involved in it, too—one whom
Brumont uses but doesn’t trust. I have to take her on.”
    Remington nodded and chuckled. “The Sardelle, She snuggled up
to our Charley and liked what she found between the sheets.”
    “Anything on her I could