It was not, indeed, for a period of several more weeks before Simpson greeted him at his desk one morning and said, “What in tarnation ever happened to that fellow Hathaway?”
“Beats me,” West said.
“Did you know he was a crook?”
“What?”
Simpson nodded. “Embezzler. Took two hundred grand, back east. That’s why he was yelling about getting to a bank when he was here that day. Wanted to get cash as soon as he could. And the business about wanting a house away from everybody and telling you he’d left town and all that. Wanted to make sure his tracks were covered.”
West blinked. “How’d you find all that out?”
“I’ve got two FBI guys in my office inside. They tracked him this far. You and I and a teller at a bank out in Glendale are the ones who saw him most recently. The teller’s in my office too. Come in.”
Nelson West stood up. “The teller can identify Hathaway?”
“Name wasn’t Hathaway at all,” Simpson nodded, leading the way into his office. “Alias. Real name was Gerson or something. Had phony credentials and everything...”
The only thing that had gone wrong with his rules for crime, West realized brokenly, was Rule Three... you can never trust anyone else.
Including, he amended it now, your victim.
The Nine Eels of Madame Wu
by Edward D. Hoch
Madame Wu’s shop on a small street in East Bangkok was crowded with tourists that April afternoon and so she had to get the teenaged neighbor girl to watch the place while she went to the canal to release her eels. It was a ritual which had not varied in Madame Wu’s life since the American, Sid Crawford, had moved in with her. That had been nearly ten years ago now, during those crumbling final years of the Vietnam War.
While Madame Wu tended her shop of Chinese curios, Crawford made his living from February to June of each year by engaging in the traditional Bangkok sport of kite fighting. The events were usually held in the early evenings at the Pramane Ground near the Grand Palace, where a strong southerly wind provided fuel for the sky battles. And on the afternoons before Crawford’s especially important fights Madame Wu went to the Klong Maha Nak, the canal near her shop, to release the traditional eels. Nine was a lucky number in Thailand, and setting free that number of eels was considered to bring good fortune.
Madame Wu bought the eels in a water-filled plastic bag from a street urchin who sold them for that purpose. She often suspected he later recaptured some of the same eels from the canal to sell all over again, but that was not her concern. She was interested only in assuring Crawford’s victory in the kite fight above the Pramane Ground.
She went to the lily-strewn waters of the canal alone and dumped the writhing mass of eels into it, watching them splash and swim away, darting through the dark masses of lily pads until they disappeared from view. Then she returned to the little apartment above her shop, where Crawford was putting the finishing touches on his kites.
“I have released the eels,” she told him. “You will have good luck.”
He looked up at her and smiled. He was a slim man now in his middle forties, with a streak of grey knifing through his otherwise black hair. The handsome American, they had called him when he first came to Bangkok — but, if he was no longer quite so handsome, then neither was Madame Wu herself. They had both drifted uncertainly into middle age.
“I have little faith in your eels,” he admitted, “but if the ritual pleases you that’s enough. Will you be coming with me this evening?”
“Of course. I will close the shop early.”
“That is good, Anna,” he said, attaching another barb to the string of his star-shaped kite.
She had told him once how she came to be called Anna. Her Chinese parents, newly settled in Bangkok, had chosen to name her after Anna Leonowens, the Englishwoman who’d journeyed to Siam in 1862 to instruct the king’s many children. Crawford still called her that, though to the customers of her shop and the other merchants on the street she had long been Madame Wu.
No one ever used Crawford’s given name, either. When they arrived together at the Pramane Ground, a large open space just north of the Grand Palace, she heard several men calling out, “Crawford!” He waved each time but did not stop, walking through the gathering crowd of spectators with Madame Wu at his side, striding purposefully, like the champion he was.
The Pramane Ground was used regularly for events as diverse as weekend markets and royal cremations, and every May the king himself inaugurated the planting season by sponsoring a ploughing ceremony on the site. But on these spring evenings when the south wind blew strong and free it was given over to the kite fights.
Madame Wu could not remember now the sequence of events that had propelled Crawford to the forefront in the sport. It had started in a bar, certainly, as had so many events in her life. A drunken challenge, a large bet made in haste, and then they had gone across to the open space by the palace. She remembered only one thing about that first evening. She had tugged at Crawford’s sleeve and pointed across the street and said, “There is where Anna’s second house stood, when she was governess for the king’s children.”
The battle in the sky was waged between two kites — a five-foot-long “male” kite in the shape of a star with a thick barbed string, and a much smaller “female” kite with a thin unbarbed string but a long tail able to ensnare the points of the star kite. The star kite could tangle or cut the smaller kite’s string with its barbed cord and win, or it could lose the battle by being dragged to the ground by the smaller kite.
That first evening, Crawford flew a small kite, and he took naturally to the sport, maneuvering his kite so skillfully that the star kite was pulled ignominiously to the ground. But in the years that followed he had become an expert at flying both types. Whenever there was a challenger with money to bet, Crawford took him on. Now he mainly flew the larger star kites, often cutting through an opponent’s string in a matter of minutes.
On this night, in a contest important enough for Madame Wu to have freed nine eels, Crawford was being challenged by a Pakistani youth who’d built a solid reputation in the sport since his recent arrival in Bangkok. Already she could see that the betting was heavy, and Crawford himself had wagered a large amount of cash on the outcome. Spectators were lining up, waving tight wads of money.
“Will you win?” she asked him, experiencing an uncharacteristic twinge of doubt.
He glanced around at the faces in the crowd, as he always did. “Why not? You freed your eels, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but—”
“Then I’ll win,” he said with a smile. “It is written in the heavens.”
“You make fun of me now.”
“After so many years? I would be a fool!”
She’d asked him once, years ago, why he always studied the faces in the crowd so carefully. “Because,” he had replied, “someday someone will come to kill me.” His answer had terrified her, and all that night she’d lain awake sobbing, unable to accept even the remote possibility of his death. She’d never asked him the question again, though he still gazed out at the gathering crowds each evening before a kite fight as if anticipating some danger that never arrived.