I crouched low on the balcony, in accordance with instructions, and found the loose floorboards that opened up a black hole. Feet first, I went down in, slanting at an angle that made descent easy. It seemed to be a sort of slot cut diagonally through the wall. I went down swiftly, coming into a small room, long and narrow, as if placed inside a thick wall.
No light was there. My flashlight showed a room perhaps eighteen feet long by four wide, furnished with table, couch and two chairs. I looked under the one rug on the floor. The trapdoor was there.
Flat on my belly, I put an ear to the trapdoor. No sound. I raised it a couple of inches. Darkness and a faint murmuring of voices. I pushed the trapdoor wide, let it down easily on the floor and stuck head and shoulders into the opening, discovering then that it was a double arrangement. Another door was below, fitting no doubt in the ceiling of the room below.
Cautiously I let myself down on it. It gave under my foot. I could have pulled myself up again, but since I had disturbed it I chose to keep going.
I put both feet on it. It swung down. I dropped into light. The door snapped up over my head. I grabbed Hsiu Hsiu and clapped a hand over her tiny mouth in time to keep her quiet.
“Hello,” I said to the startled Garthorne; “this is my boy’s evening off, so I came myself.”
“Hello,” he gasped.
This room, I saw, was a duplicate of the one from which I had dropped, another cupboard between walls, though this one had an unpainted wooden door at one end.
I handed Hsiu Hsiu to Garthorne.
“Keep her quiet,” I ordered, “while—”
The clicking of the door’s latch silenced me. I jumped to the wall on the hinged side of the door just as it swung open — the opener hidden from me by the door.
The door opened wide, but not much wider than Jack Garthorne’s blue eyes, nor than this mouth. I let the door go back against the wall and stepped out behind my balanced gun.
The queen of something stood there!
She was a tall woman, straight-bodied and proud. A butterfly-shaped headdress decked with the loot of a dozen jewelry stores exaggerated her height. Her gown was amethyst filigreed with gold above, a living rainbow below. The clothes were nothing!
She was — maybe I can make it clear this way. Hsiu Hsiu was as perfect a bit of feminine beauty as could be imagined. She was perfect! Then comes this queen of something — and Hsiu Hsiu’s beauty went away. She was a candle in the sun. She was still pretty — prettier than the woman in the doorway, if it came to that — but you didn’t pay any attention to her. Hsiu Hsiu was a pretty girclass="underline" this royal woman in the doorway was — I don’t know the words.
“My God!” Garthorne was whispering harshly. “I never knew it!”
“What are you doing here?” I challenged the woman.
She didn’t hear me. She was looking at Hsiu Hsiu as a tigress might look at an alley cat. Hsiu Hsiu was looking at her as an alley cat might look at a tigress. Sweat was on Garthorne’s face and his mouth was the mouth of a sick man.
“What are you doing here?” I repeated, stepping closer to Lillian Shan.
“I am here where I belong,” she said slowly. “I have come back to my people.”
That was a lot of bunk. I turned to the goggling Garthorne.
“Take Hsiu Hsiu to the upper room, and keep her quiet. I want to talk to Miss Shan.”
Still dazed, he pushed the table under the trapdoor, climbed up on it, hoisted himself through the ceiling, and reached down. Hsiu Hsiu kicked and scratched, but I heaved her up to him. Then I closed the door through which Lillian Shan had come, and faced her.
“How did you get here?” I demanded.
“I went home after I left you, knowing what Yin Hung would say, because he had told me in the employment office, and when I got home— When I got home I decided to come here where I belong.”
“Nonsense!” I corrected her. “When you got home you found a message there from Chang Li Ching, ordering you to come here.”
She looked at me, saying nothing.
“What did Chang want?”
“He thought perhaps he could help me,” she said, “and so I stayed here.”
More nonsense.
“Chang told you Garthorne was in danger — had split with The Whistler.”
“The Whistler?”
“You made a bargain with Chang,” I accused her, paying no attention to her question. The chances were she didn’t know The Whistler by that name.
“There was no bargain,” she said.
I didn’t believe her. I said so.
“You gave Chang your house — or the use of it — in exchange for his promise that Garthorne would be saved from The Whistler, and that you would be saved from the law.”
She drew herself up.
“I did,” she said calmly.
“You ought to be spanked!” I growled at her. “Haven’t you had enough trouble without mixing yourself now with a flock of highbinders? Did you see The Whistler?”
“There was a man up there,” she said. “I don’t know his name.”
I hunted through my pocket and found the picture of him taken when he was sent to San Quentin.
“That is he,” she told me when I showed it to her.
“A fine partner you picked,” I raged. “What do you think his word on anything is worth?”
“I did not take his word for anything. I took Chang Li Ching’s word.”
“That’s just as bad. They’re mates. What was your bargain?”
She balked again, straight, stiff-necked and level-eyed. I tried another angle of attack.
“Here, you don’t mind who you make bargains with. Make one with me. I’m still one prison sentence ahead of The Whistler, so if his word is any good at all, mine ought to be highly valuable. You tell me what the deal was. If it’s half-way decent, I’ll promise you to crawl out of here and forget it. If you don’t tell me, I’m going to empty a gun out of the first window I can find. And you’d be surprised how many cops a shot will draw in this part of town.”
The threat took some of the color out of her face. She bit her lips and let her fingers twist together, and then it came.
“Chang Li Ching is one of the leaders of the anti-Japanese movement in China. Since the death of Sun Wen — or Sun Yat-Sen, as he is called in the south of China and here — the Japanese have increased their hold on the Chinese government until it is greater than it ever was. It is Sun Wen’s work that Chang Li Ching and his friends are carrying on.
“With their own government against them, their immediate necessity is to arm enough patriots to resist Japanese aggression when the time comes. That is what my house is used for. Rifles and ammunition are loaded into boats there and sent out to ships lying far offshore. This man you call The Whistler is the owner of the ships that carry arms to China.”
“And the death of the servants?” I asked.
“Wan Lan was a spy for the Chinese government — for the Japanese. Wang Ma’s death was an accident, I think, though she, too, was suspected of being a spy. To a patriot, the death of traitors is a necessary thing, you can understand that? Your people are like that too when your country is in danger.”
“Garthorne told me a rum-running story,” I said. “How about it?”
“He believed it,” she said, smiling softly at the trapdoor through which he had gone. “They told him that, because they did not know him well enough to trust him.”
One of her hands came out to rest on my arm.
“You will go away and keep silent?” she pleaded. “These things are against the law of your country, but would you not break another country’s laws to save your own country’s life? Have not four hundred million people the right to fight an alien race that would exploit them? Since the day of Taou-kwang my country has been the plaything of more aggressive nations. Is any price too great for patriotic Chinese to pay to end that period of dishonor? You will not put yourself in the way of my people’s liberty?”