“And just try to break it up!” O’Hara muttered, with the wry smile that came of long experience with the cunning ways of the Yellow Quarter.
O’Hara even knew who would be the principal players around Mark Sin’s gaming table. There would be Wing Lung the silk merchant, Kim Yao the goldsmith, Meng Tai the apothecary, Long Jon of the Tea House — and yes, no doubt young Chang Loo, the two-handed spendthrift who was treading a silken path since he had fallen heir to the wealth of his uncle, Chang Pao.
“Beggar on horseback!” O’Hara growled, recalling the many stories about young Chang’s unceasing round of carousing and drinking and reckless gaming. Chang Loo had not even made a pretense of mourning his dead uncle — no white sorrow-robes for him, no period of fasting and seclusion, no ancestor joss burning in the Plum Blossom.
Moving like a black shadow, O’Hara proceeded through Half Moon Street and into Lantern Court. In passing, he glanced at the shuttered windows of No. 14, standing dark and silent as a Ming tomb.
“I wonder what old Chang would say if he knew how his hard-earned money was being thrown around,” O’Hara thought to himself. Well, when young Chang’s follies had eaten up all the Rice Face dollars, he could replenish his purse by stripping the old house of its valuable antique furnishings and start all over again.
“If Chang Loo lives that long!” O’Hara thought. For the slant-eyed upstart was arrogant and quarrelsome in his cups, conducting himself with the haughty insolence of a red-button mandarin.
There was a whispered tale of a rash insult to a certain tongster — one of the dreaded Red Lamp men — a deed which might well have cost Chang Loo his shadow had not Tai Gat the limping mafoo come to his rescue. But instead of being grateful, young Chang had screamed drunken curses at his uncle’s servant, and hurled a stone wine-bottle at his head.
“Guess I’d better give that blasted fool a talking to, before he gets a knife between his ribs,” O’Hara said to himself as he groped his way across Lantern Court. The slow rain was beginning to drip eerily from hidden eaves, and somewhere in the darkness an unseen musician was playing a moon-fiddle.
Presently O’Hara found the narrow opening to Mandarin Lane, and so came out upon Canton Street. He walked past the dark houses, peering up at an occasional lighted window. Then O’Hara felt cobblestones under his feet, and knew that the bleary yellow glow to his right was the lamp-post at the entrance to the three-sided Court called Manchu Place.
And O’Hara stopped dead in his tracks, for in the murky depths of Manchu Place a tiny light winked on and off, on and off — and his ears caught a whistled signal, low and toneless and continually repeated.
Following the sidewall with outstretched hand, O’Hara moved toward the mysteriously winking light. “Flashlight!” he decided, and tried to make out the vague, blurred figure directing the beam.
The winking light focused briefly on the shuttered window of a house, clicked on again, centered now on a doorway above five brownstone steps. The toneless whistle sounded again.
O’Hara, quietly moving his gun to the pocket of his slicker, crept nearer the winking beam, closing in at an oblique angle.
“What goes on here?” he demanded sharply. “Don’t move, you! Stand there, and hold that light steady! I want a look at you!”
The beam steadied and seemed to freeze into rigidity as O’Hara stepped forward, but as he reached the brown-stone steps he broke out with a muttered oath, for there was no one behind the light! At his challenge the quick-witted shadow had simply placed the flashlight on the top step and slipped away into the shrouding fog.
O’Hara snatched up the flash and swung the beam to and fro in a half circle, then clicked it off while he stood motionless, listening. His ears picked out the faint pad-pad of slippered feet — a whispering sound that fled and died.
“A flashlight in a fog,” O’Hara muttered. “Now what in thunder would he be hunting for?”
As if in answer to his question, a muffled cry shrilled through the murky dark — the raucous “Awk-awk!” of a parrot!
O’Hara whirled toward the sound, and when the squawk was repeated, his flash beam picked out the parrot. The Feather Devil was perched on the window sill of a vacant house, seemingly hypnotized by the glare of the electric eye turned upon it, for it made no effort to escape O’Hara’s reaching hand.
“Awk!” said the parrot plaintively, and snuggled down in the crook of his arm. It was cold and wet and bedraggled, and one wing appeared to be injured. But it was green, this Feather Devil — all green — and a startling thought leaped into O’Hara’s mind.
Could it be Choy, the parrot stolen from Yun Chee’s house? Had it somehow managed to escape from its captor? And if this were so, the man with the flashlight might have been the masked killer of the tea merchant.
“And I let the guy run out on me!” O’Hara groaned. “Me, with a gun in my fist, and him not ten feet away! But at least I’ve got the parrot, and believe me, this Feather Devil gets a Number One going over!”
Unconsciously O’Hara’s hand had tightened on the bird, and he felt something soft under his fingers, something that made him quickly focus the flash beam. There was a tight little scroll of cloth wound around the parrot’s leg!
Steadying the flashlight under his arm, O’Hara unwound the ragged strip of cloth, eyes glinting as he saw that it was covered with ragged columns of Chinese writing in a deep red tint.
“Blood!” O’Hara exclaimed. “It’s written with blood!”
With the precious scroll tucked away in his pocket and the Feather Devil nestled inside his slicker, O’Hara hurried back to the precinct station. “Hey, Driscoll!” he called, sticking his head in at the Squad Room door. “Get Sang Lee the scrivener! And take it on the jump!”
O’Hara went into his office and put the green-feathered bird on the edge of his desk while he closed the door and pulled down the windows. “All right, birdie, let’s have a good look at you. Sort of mussed up, eh? What’s your name — Choy?... Come on, speak up. Choy?”
“Awk!” the parrot said, and made a clumsy swoop to the top of the desk lamp. It swayed there for a moment, preening its ruffled feathers, then slid off awkwardly to the desktop.
“Hey, keep your tail-feathers out of the inkwell!” O’Hara exclaimed. “What’s the matter — got a lame foot? You’re wobbling around like you were drunk—”
O’Hara broke off short on that word, and leaning over the bird, sniffed. There was an odor, a most unmistakable Oriental odor.
“Samshu!” O’Hara burst out. “By God; it is drunk! A drunken parrot! What in hell’s going on here, anyway?”
Chapter Three
A Plastered Parrot
The parrot wobbled along the edge of the desk, swaying. Its beak opened and a gurgling sound like a hiccough issued from its throat. Then it rustled its feathers and trumpeted “Shao! Shao! Shao!”
“What’s that?” O’Hara stiffened alertly. “Say that again! Go on, speak up!” and he jostled the bird with his finger.
“Shao! Shao! Shao!” The raucous word rattled out like machine-gun fire. The angry parrot sidled away, hiccoughing.
O’Hara sat down, slowly, not taking his eyes from the bird. Not the murdered Yun Chee’s Choy, after all. This was Shao — Shao, old Chang’s parrot! How had it escaped from the silversmith’s house in Lantern Court? And what desperate message needed writing in blood, to be sent out into the night with a drunken parrot as its fantastic messenger?