So it meant he couldn’t do it that way, that’s all.
Another way. All right, let’s do it.
Bennett felt increasing urgency and increasing determination. He would do it, and now. He left his former room, now truly for the last time, and took the stairs down one flight.
He hurried to Baldur’s room, pulled the pipe out from under his shirt, and knocked on the door.
“Hello?”
Close to the door, imitating Diedrich’s voice and accent as best he could, he called, “Kim? Have you seen Luther?”
“Jerry?”
The door opened, and Bennett cocked the length of pipe up by his shoulder, and in the doorway was the girl. He hesitated, just a second — but in that second, she recognized him, and saw the pipe in his hand, and understood what he planned.
They lunged at the same instant, she to shut the door, he to push it open. She almost managed to slam it shut, but he wedged his foot in the space, ignored the pain when the door hit his foot, and shoved against it with his whole body.
She was strong, surprisingly so, and she was screaming helphelphelp! but he was stronger, and slowly he forced the door farther open.
Noise down the corridor. The elevator door was opening down there. Bennett heaved, and the door sprang open, and he leaped inside.
She was still screaming. She ran across to the bathroom as he slammed the front door and followed. She got into the bathroom before he could reach her, and he heard the snick of the lock, but he didn’t care. A bathroom lock?
Pounding on the door they’d just left. A male voice yelling KimKimKim! The German fellow? Deal with him next, deal with the one in the bathroom now.
He lifted his foot and kicked the bathroom door next to the knob, and at the same time he heard the German kick at the front door. But that door was much stronger than this one. He could finish here with plenty of time to take care of the German.
He kicked the bathroom door again, and it snapped open, and he sprang forward, and she sprayed hairspray into his eyes, pressing hard with both hands on the top of the aerosol can, spray shooting into his startled eyes and into his nose and into his open mouth.
He couldn’t see! It burned his eyes and he couldn’t see, but she was still in the confines of the bathroom, and he moved forward, arms spread, and she kicked him between the legs.
He felt her brush past him, but could do nothing about it. Bent, the pipe dropped, he scraped at his face, turning, trying to see, wiping at his eyes, and the first thing he saw was the girl opening the door, and then some man he’d never laid eyes on in his life before came running into the room.
Bennett raced out of the bathroom to the window, flung it open, rolled over the sill and out onto the fire escape just before the man could reach him. Rolling on his back on the fire escape, he kicked up with both feet into that face as the man started out after him, and the man fell back into the room.
Bennett tore down the fire escape and in among the sheds, running the maze, finding a way out of here to the street, while the Chinese painters watched him in amazement.
18
George Manville?
Kim stared at him, this apparition, as astonished by Manville’s presence as by that other man who’d suddenly attacked her with an iron pipe. She stared at him as he chased the other man across the room, the man diving out the window, George trying to go out after him, the other man kicking him back, kicking him in the face, George falling backward.
Only then did she come out of her momentary paralysis, start to move. Dropping the hairspray can on the bed, she hurried over to George, went to her knees beside him, called his name.
He was stunned, and there was a fresh scrape on his right cheek, bleeding a little, like four shallow claw scratches. He focused on her, or tried to: “Where is he?”
She moved to the window, looked out and down, and saw the man just dropping from the bottom of the fire escape into a jumble of lean-tos and sheds down there. Hearing chatter above her, she looked up and saw two painters pointing at the fleeing man. Seeing Kim, they pointed at her, and started to laugh.
What did they think was going on here, what did they think the story was? Kim smiled weakly at them and turned back to the room, to find George shakily getting to his feet, propping himself with the bed. “Sit down, George, sit down,” she said, holding his arm, helping him to sit on the side of the bed. “I’ll get a cloth.”
She hurried back to the bathroom, now with its broken door, and ran warm water over a washcloth. Bringing that out to George, she bent over him to dab at the scratches, to clean away any dirt there might have been on that man’s shoes, and found herself meeting George’s eyes, three inches away.
He smiled at her, crinkling the area of the wound.
“God, it’s good to see you,” he said.
In the police van, he explained some of what had been going on, and how he happened to be here. “After Curtis smeared me,” he said, “I had to go along with him, at least for a little while, so he’d clear my name.”
“I thought that was the reason,” she told him, although in fact she hadn’t been at all sure.
The police van was large and roomy, meant to carry a dozen officers at a time. In it now were only the police driver and a second policeman in front, plus Kim and George in back. They were traveling without siren or flashing lights, crossing Singapore toward Tanglin police station on Napier Road. “Your friend Luther’s there,” George had told her, “he was telling the police about Jerry when I came in.”
Now, on the way, he said, “I was being held at a station Curtis owns in the middle of Australia, very isolated. When I found out Curtis wasn’t keeping his part of the bargain, that he was still trying to send that man of his to kill you, the one who came out to the boat—”
“Him,” she said, and shuddered, remembering the man. “Don’t tell me he’s in Singapore.”
“He’s dead,” George said, the word coming out very flat. She would have asked him to explain more, but he went straight on, saying, “I got away from there and made my way back to Brisbane, and went to see the lawyer again. Brevizin. That was Wednesday. At first, he didn’t want to see me at all. Curtis had been to him—”
“Curtis is everywhere,” she said.
He shook his head and said, “It seems like that sometimes. Anyway, Curtis had hired him to take care of any legal problems with his yacht and with Captain Zhang killing himself. You see, the whole point was, if Curtis is his client, I can’t be.”
“He is everywhere,” she repeated.
“Well,” George said, “ultimately I did convince Brevizin to see me, and I told him what had been going on, everything I knew, and he finally agreed to look into it. Friday afternoon he called to tell me we were going to meet a police inspector named Tony Fairchild, which we did.”
Kim said, “And had Curtis been to him, too?”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” George told her. “He interviewed Curtis because of Zhang’s suicide, and Curtis told him I was not only back working with him but was here in Singapore. He had somebody, God knows who, pretend to be me and talk to Fairchild from Singapore and convince him it was all a tempest in a teapot.”
Kim said, “Why go through all that?”
“Because otherwise Fairchild and Brevizin were going to meet, and they would have found out right away they’d been told conflicting stories, and they’d have known there was something there to be investigated. This way, everyone just let it drop.”