Assignment Unicorn Read Online Free PDF Page B

back door in time. I
didn’t know what was happening. I still don’t. I hid out on the other side of
the plantation, past the trees. It’s a big swamp out there. Then I headed for
the village, the other side of here. Nobody was there but an old man.
    He had a radio. He told me about Premier Shang and Daddy.”
    “These lockets. Did you get a look at them?”
    “Sure. They were all the same. Like gold coins.”
    He waited.
    Maggie stood up and brushed the tight seat of her denims.
“They had an animal engraved on them. Like a unicorn,” she said.
     
    8
    CHARLEY LEE had somehow managed to walk out of the Donaldson
plantation house and had driven away in the rented Toyota. Maggie refused to go
into the house. She never wanted to see it again. She said there was an old
jeep in the village, and if there was any gas in it, they could use that to get
back to town. Otherwise, it was an eight-mile walk.
    The jeep was in the village. Nobody else was there, not even
the old fisherman she had mentioned. The houses stood vacant and forlorn,
the fishing boats were drawn up tidily on the beach the other side of the
promontory. The concrete dock where the plantation products were loaded onto
barges stood empty and glaring in the hot sun. The wind had died. The air was
humid, breathless. Nothing stirred. The place was dead.
    It was well after three o’clock in the afternoon when Durell
got the girl a room at the Willem Van Huyden Hotel. The room was big and airy,
with high ceilings, wooden fans, louvered windows. A gallery opened out of french shutter doors and overlooked the klong . It was reasonably quiet,
except for the muted shouts of the sampan men on the canals, a hum of traffic
over a nearby bridge, the muted echo of the gamelan orchestra in the lobby,
getting ready for teatime. A poster in the lobby announced that a Filipino rock
band would play in the bar starting at nine that evening.
    Durell ordered a meal sent up for the girl from the dining
room, then went upstairs with Maggie and locked the door from the inside. His
height topped the girl’s by only two inches. He sent her into the bath to
shower and clean up, then went down again to the shops in the lobby, locking
her in first, and bought a batik blouse and slacks, stockings and boots,
a pair of white pumps, a straw hat with a wide brim, several shirts—small-size
men’s—a woven straw purse, a native woman’s dress in colorful silk from
Thailand, somewhat like a Hawaiian mumu . He added a comb, brush, toothpaste, toothbrush,
lipstick, powder. He went back upstairs.
    She was sitting at the tall windows in a Bombay chair,
wrapped in a towel, her feet tucked under her ample hips. She wasn’t interested
in the things he had bought for her.
    “Maggie, I have an appointment at four o’clock with Colonel
Ko. Do you know him?”
    “I’ve met him. The local fuzz?”
    “Sort of. Will you wait here until I come back?”
    “I don’t have any place else to go.”
    “Will you stay right here, in this room?”
    “Sure.”
    “And lock yourself in,” he said.
    “You don’t have to worry about me. Why are you going to all
this trouble?”
    “Why not?” he asked.
    “You’re funny,” Maggie said. “Strange, I mean.”
    “How, strange?”
    “Daddy told me you were quite an orientalist. Said you speak
half a dozen Asian languages, including Mandarin. Right now, for instance, I
can see you discussing T’ang pottery, or maybe interpreting those crazy bits
from the Tao Te Ching . Is
that the real Sam Durell behind those sunglasses? Or is the real Durell the guy
who came barreling into the warehouse behind that freight car, with your .38,
scaring me half to death?”
    “I don’t know,” Durell said.
    “You a kind of schizo ?”
    “No, I don’t think so.”
    “You have the best of both of your likable worlds, is that
it?”
    “Perhaps.”
    There came a knock on the door. It was the waiter with the
meal Durell had ordered for the girl. The waiter was a quiet,