Chu Kee had a mind sufficiently logical to pay close attention to Occidental arguments illustrating the fallacy of these beliefs; but he was sufficiently steeped in the lore of his race to neglect none of the time-honored precautions.
When Chu Kee saw Terry, he gravely removed the huge, horn-rimmed spectacles which windowed his eyes and, by so doing, paid Terry the implied compliment of setting aside his years, in acknowledgment of the younger man’s wisdom.
Terry clasped his hands in front of him, shook them gently in the Chinese manner of greeting.
“As sunshine warms the dying leaves of autumn, so you have given new life to my heart,” said Chu Kee in Cantonese.
Terry answered in the same language. “It is I who have come to bask in the sunlight of your great wisdom.”
Chu Kee gravely indicated the seat which was reserved for the most honored guest. Had Terry conformed to strict Chinese etiquette, regardless of the urgency of his visit, he would have taken time to protest that he was unworthy of such a chair and made a pretence of seating himself in some other, allowing his host the opportunity to make many flattering speeches. But Terry had no time to waste with the intricacies of Chinese etiquette, and so, lest his failure to do so should seem curt, he served tactful notice upon his host by switching to the English language, which enabled him to come at once to the object of his visit without giving offence.
“Where’s Sou Ha?” he asked.
Chu Kee tapped a gong. A carved panel slid back in the wall. The wrinkled face of a servant regarded him impassively. Chu Kee breathed the name of his daughter. The panel slid shut. A few moments later, a door opened.
The name of a Chinese daughter represents that which the daughter stands for in the mind of her father. Sou Ha, as nearly as the language of the white man can give it meaning, signifies “Embroidered Halo.”
Terry got to his feet as she entered the room, delicate as a flower petal, as freshly tonic as dawn in the mountains. Her eyes, black as wet obsidian, regarded him appraisingly. The lips which smiled at him had been daringly emphasized with lipstick. The long tapering fingers touched his hand in greeting. “Why the official summons? I was only delaying to make myself beautiful.”
“Lily-gilder!” he accused. “Painter of roses, would you add to perfection?”
She laughed, and the sound of her laughter was like the tinkling of strips of glass dangling from a Chinese wind lantern.
Without using a word, by the simple dignity of a gesture, Chu Kee asserted the prerogative of his years and dominated the conversation. This moon-faced Chinese, who could blandly mask his thoughts beneath a suave coating of Oriental evasion, could also gear himself to the life of an Occidental business world. His hand, with its long, fat fingers, the nails encased in golden sheaths studded with bits of jade, gestured to chairs. When they were seated, he said to Terry: “Speak, my son.”
Picking up his spectacles from the desk, he adjusted them to his eyes, thereby signifying that he too had put aside the niceties of Chinese etiquette.
“You knew Jacob Mandra?” Clane asked.
Embroidered Halo stiffened in her chair for a moment, but as Clane’s eyes turned to her, she showed only that courteous interest which one must give a guest, while she waited, as becomes a dutiful daughter, for her father to be the first to speak.
“He is a bail-bond broker,” Chu Kee said in an English which had no accent, yet held just the faint suggestion of hissing sibilants.
“I knew him,” Sou Ha remarked tonelessly.
“What about him?” Chu Kee asked. “Are you, my son, in the power of this one? I have heard that he is evil.”
Terry Clane had spoken of Jacob Mandra in the past tense. The papers had, as yet, said nothing about his death. And Sou Ha herself had used the same tense.
It was as though she realized the trend of his thoughts. “Is he dead, then?” she asked.
“I didn’t say so.”
“But you asked if we knew him.”
Terry nodded and said nothing.
Chu Kee’s face, as benignly bland as a June moon, was turned politely towards Clane, and Terry knew that, were the Chinese to sit there for hours, his expression would not change by so much as a line. But Sou Ha’s eyes were narrowed. Watching her from the corner of his eye, Clane thought her nostrils were slightly dilated.
Terry strove to make his voice highly impersonal. “When I last saw you,” he said to Chu Kee, “you mentioned that an increasing amount of opium was finding its way into Chinatown; that no longer were only the very aged men wooing the poppy, but the young men were being taught to embrace a vice towards which they had an hereditary weakness.”
Sou Ha said quickly, “That’s right, Father. You remember you told Terry that you thought some white man was at the bottom of the thing, and that when his identity was learned our people would deal with him in their own way.”
The calmly courteous lines of the placid face remained serenely untroubled as Chu Kee shifted his eyes to his daughter. But in that shifting glance there was a parental rebuke too subtle for the eye of the ordinary Occidental, yet as deadly in its significance as though it had been a blow. He switched back to the Chinese language.
“One of the compensations of life, my daughter,” he said smoothly, “is that when the eye of the parent becomes dim and his memory uncertain, he may have dutiful children to lend him the sharp vision of youth and the quickness of perception which is the property only of the very young.”
Terry Clane knew better than to turn his eyes towards Sou Ha by even the fraction of an inch. So far as any external evidence was concerned, he saw nothing significant in the remarks of Chu Kee. Pretending to look straight ahead, with all his attention nevertheless focused upon what he could see from the corner of his eye, he observed Sou Ha stiffen into rigid immobility.
“Did you,” Clane asked, “ever locate the white man who was behind this opium ring?”
In the pause which followed, the Chinese girl was as a delicate statue carved from old ivory. Terry Clane knew that she would not speak again until given permission to do so.
Chu Kee managed to convey surprise without raising his eyebrows or appreciably changing the tone of his voice.
“You mean that this man was Jacob Mandra?” he asked.
“I didn’t say that.”
“If you have any information about the head of the poppy ring, I trust the bonds of friendship between us will loosen your tongue,” Chu Kee observed, speaking once more in Chinese.
Clane said slowly, “I have no information. I merely asked a question.”
“No information whatever?” Chu Kee inquired, and, while his tone was casually courteous, Clane sensed that the answer might somehow be momentous.
“I have no information.”
Chu Kee didn’t move, but Sou Ha almost imperceptibly settled herself in her chair. It was as though she had expelled a breath she had been holding.
Terry Clane, knowing then that despite the friendship which existed between Chu Kee and himself, the Chinese had thrown up a barrier between them in this matter, and that he would never get any information save such as he might surprise from them, turned his eyes deliberately to Sou Ha.
“Did you,” he asked, “know anything about this man?”
Under the steady impact of his gaze she became perfectly wooden. The animation faded from her eyes. Her face was a mask. It was as though she had switched off all her animation and left him only a lifeless exterior upon which to gaze.
Terry got to his feet, bowed.
“If it will set your mind at rest,” he said significantly to Chu Kee, “there is, so far as I know, no evidence connecting Jacob Mandra in any way with anything Chinese, other than the fact that some young and beautiful Chinese woman is said to have called upon him shortly before his death; and that he was killed by a Chinese weapon.”