As did Jerry. Turning, he saw the girl at the counter just handing the key and the message or messages to a man who was indeed not in uniform but in a rather shabby brown suit. The man had a gloomy and defeated air about him.
It was as they crossed the lobby toward the man, who must be Captain Zhang, that Jerry said, “Let me do the talking,” and Luther gave his agreement. Meanwhile, the man had turned away from the desk, moving toward the elevators on the farther side of the lobby, and Jerry had to trot to try to catch up.
Though the girl at the desk solved that problem, calling, “Captain Zhang. You have visitors.”
The captain turned around, still holding his key and messages, looking more frightened than curious, and very wary when he saw two men he didn’t know approaching him.
Jerry stopped in front of him. “Captain Zhang?”
“Yes?”
“I’m Jerry Diedrich from Planetwatch. We talked the other day, by radio.”
Now the captain looked like a frightened rabbit, backing away, eyes slipping to the sides, looking for a hole to hide in. “No no,” he said. “You must talk to the company, Mr. Curtis—”
Jerry pursued him, saying, “When Kim Baldur’s parents came to see you, you didn’t speak English.”
“I could not talk to them,” the captain said. He was almost running backward, unwilling to turn away from them but wanting desperately to escape. “I cannot talk to you. Mr. Curtis has lawyers, you must see them. Please, not me.” He was at the elevators now, and one was just opening, releasing three businessmen with briefcases, deep in discussion. The captain ducked around them into the elevator, and Jerry and Luther went in after him.
The captain stared at them in horror. “You can’t follow me!”
Luther said, “Of course we can,” and leaned forward to press button number 4. “You’re in 423,” he said.
The door closed; they started to rise. The captain tried to be stern, not very effectively. “I have nothing to say to you,” he insisted. “I wrote a report for the authorities, that’s all—”
“You signed a report,” Luther corrected. “Some of Curtis’s lawyers wrote it.”
The elevator door opened, and the captain could be seen to be torn between horrible choices. He didn’t want to stay in here with these two people, but he didn’t want to let them approach any nearer to his room either.
Luther held the door, and spoke in an almost kindly way. “Your floor, sir.”
The captain stepped out, jittering, and they went out with him. But then he refused to go any farther. He stood where he was in the hall, in front of the elevators, sullen but unmovable. “I have nothing to tell you,” he said. He wouldn’t look at them either, but kept frowning at some invisible spot at waist height between them. “I did my report. I was very upset by what happened. I thought I would lose my job. I need my job, I have a family, I have daughters, I thought we were all destroyed. I felt... I felt very bad for that girl, so young and pretty and... it was not my fault. I would never hurt another person, you must believe me. I would never hurt anyone. It’s not my fault.”
Jerry said, “What about her parents? You pretended you couldn’t speak English. What about them?”
“I felt so— I couldn’t talk with those people, such sad people, I have daughters, I have daughters, what could I say to those people? How everybody looked for her and nobody found her, and if they found her she’d only be dead. They know that, I can’t say that. How could I talk to those people? I pretended, because I felt such badness for them.” He shook his head. “And I cannot talk to you. If you follow me to my room, I will call the desk and have them send people to take you away, arrest you. You must leave me alone.”
He turned away, scurrying off down the wide pale corridor. Jerry would have followed, but Luther grabbed his arm, holding him back. Jerry looked at him, surprised, and Luther shook his head, then turned to push the down button for the elevator.
Jerry watched the captain pause at a door some way down the hall. He never looked back. He fumbled with the key in the door, dropped his messages, scooped them up, hurried inside. The door slammed, as the elevator arrived.
As they rode down, Jerry said, “Why did you stop me? If we just kept at him—”
“No,” Luther said. “He’s covering up, he’s hiding something, and it scares him so much he won’t talk. He really won’t talk, Jerry, he’s too scared. So all we know is, there’s something hidden. We’ll have to find out what it is some other way.”
The elevator door opened at lobby level, and as they stepped outside Luther said, “The first question, of course, is how did he know she was pretty?”
Jerry thudded to a stop, as though he’d walked into an invisible wall. He spun around for the elevators, crying, “We have to—”
“No, Jerry,” Luther said, holding him by the arm again. “We’ll find out, but we’ll find out someplace else. And it is possible, of course, that Kim’s parents showed him a photo of her, though unlikely.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Exactly. But we know he pretended not to speak English with them because he was afraid of making exactly that kind of slip. So what we now know for sure, there’s more to the story. Come on, we’ll go back to the hotel and decide what to do next.”
Jerry was dissatisfied, but he let Luther lead him. They took a cab across to their own hotel, with its larger and more impersonal lobby, and as they were crossing it a voice called, “Jerry! Jerry!”
Jerry turned, and saw coming toward him, hurrying toward him, face grimacing with strain, the ghost of Kim Baldur. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he fainted.
11
Trembling, Zhang Yung-tsien dropped his two messages onto the floor, while trying to unlock the door to his room.
He was so nervous, so afraid those two strange men would rush up behind him and push him into the room, trap him there, force him somehow to tell them what they wanted to know, that he fumbled with the two flimsy slips of paper on the floor, and lost his balance, and would have toppled forward into his room if his shoulder hadn’t hit the doorjamb.
His fingers felt like fat sausages, but he clutched at the crinkled slips of paper, and straightened, and lunged into the room, the door automatically closing behind him. He fell back against the door, eyes closed, the key and messages held tight in the hands crossed over his chest. His breath was loud in his ears.
They did not pursue. No knock on the door, no shouts in the hall. They’ve given up.
Zhang opened his eyes, and there was the room, his home ashore until Mallory should be ready to leave port. It was a small room, but very neat, the colors pale without sentimentality, not like the pastel palette of the Americans. The room’s creators were Japanese, not Chinese, but still he had felt more at home here than in the American-made world he had so much to inhabit.
One of his messages, from his wife, Yanling, was in Chinese, the ideograms neatly penned. The other, yet another question from the insurance company adjuster, was written in English, the letters just as neat. He had trouble focusing on either, and held one in each hand, looking back and forth from one to the other, then finally giving up and placing them side by side on the dresser.
He was having trouble with his breath, he couldn’t seem to inhale. The air in the room felt cold and lifeless, and it was hard to gain nourishment from it. He crossed to the window to open it wide, and immediately the warm moist air from outside flowed in to conquer the air-conditioning. He could feel it as a soft caress against his skin.
What was he going to do? What could he do? The people kept coming to ask questions, and he was so afraid, so confused, that he never knew how to answer, what to tell them, what to try to conceal.