Assignment - Karachi by Edward S. Aarons

entrance.
    Her heart lurched and pounded suddenly. Two men had come into the alley from the street beyond. They were young Chinese, and their appearance was incongruous. They wore blue denims and sneakers and one wore a white baseball shirt with YANKEES printed on it. The other wore a gaudy Hawaiian type sport shirt, the tails hanging out around his belt. They moved swiftly and decisively toward her in the evening gloom of the alley.
    She choked down a silent scream. After all, Rudi had brought her here. It would be all right.
    The two Chinese came toward her, walking on their toes. One said, “Oh, babe.” The other said, “This is too bad, Miss Standish.”
    “I’m not Miss Standish,” Jane said quickly.
    “Sure, honey, you’re nobody.”
    They crowded close to her as she shrank against the wall, and then she saw the first Chinese boy’s eyes widen suddenly, unnaturally, and he made a quick movement and she felt something go into her belly and rip upward, with a hissing sound of cut flesh. A shattering scream tore out of her lungs and throat, like the sound of a slaughtered animal. She screamed again and then the Chinese boy pulled the knife out of her and she saw the blade, half shining, glistening with her blood, for just an instant as it flashed before her eyes. Then it came across her throat in a quick, expert movement and she felt herself falling, aware of no pain, aware of a darkness and warmth enveloping her and thinking dimly of Momma and Poppa in Gardens Falls, Indiana, before she died. . . .

    Everything was quiet in the alley. The second Chinese, who had only watched, turned and trotted away. Rudi came out of the door nearby. He was wiping his hands on his handker-
    chief. He did not look at the crumpled body of Jane King in the dirty alley.
    “It is done,” the Chinese boy said. He was the one in the baseball shirt. “You pay me now.”
    “Why not?” Rudi said.
    He took a gun from his pocket and shot the Chinese boy in the head. The single report was enormous, echoing back and forth between the yellow warehouse walls. The Chinese fell across Jane King’s sprawled legs.
    Rudi hesitated, staring up at the sky for a speculative moment, weighing the gun in his hand. Then he brought his arm up with a sharp, smashing gesture and struck himself once, twice, a third time across the face and forehead. He went down on hands and knees with blood spilling down his face, blinding him, and he remained like that, shaking his head, watching the drops spatter in the filth of the alley, and he did not look up as he heard Durell and Colonel K’Ayub run toward him at last. . . .

    The nearest police station was in a dark blue cinder-block building near the Johnston-May Oil, Ltd. wharves. Inside, where a Sikh sergeant sat behind a new metal desk, there were several uniformed police at work in a long, wide room with barred windows that gave a view of the river traffic. A fat, bald Frenchman was arguing with the Sikh sergeant, and a naked man, except for a dirty loin cloth, was being dragged by two big policemen into a back room. An air-conditioner wheezed in the windows, but across the room another window was wide open, letting in the hot stench of the waterfront. Fishing boats, Arab dhows, and a tanker moved in the fairway. Lights blinked on the ships and busy docks.
    The station smelled like all police stations the world over, Durell thought. It carried in its walls the stench of urine and vomit and blood, and above all, the smell of human fear and pain.
    The doctor was a gaunt Englishman, yellow with years of malarial bouts. Rudi sat in a chair while the doctor tended to his cut face. Durell and K’Ayub stood against the opposite wall, watching the patient who was bathed in hot light from a tin-shaded lamp over the chair. At the door was Sergeant Zalmadar, K’Ayub’s Pathan servant, big and tough and light on his feet, like most mountain people.
    “Could these wounds be self-inflicted?” Durell asked.
    The