The lanterns were out and the garden was lifeless. The faint gurgle of the brook was the only sound there was. Hollinger stole over the bridge, a looming, top-heavy figure out of all proportion to its microscopic measurements; he was still without shoes, never having recovered his footgear after that first flight. He obliterated himself under the uptilted roof-projection that shadowed the rear of the house, with only the heels of his torn white socks showing in the gloom.
Only taut paper faced him. They didn’t use locks or bolts apparently but hitched the frames up fast in some way on the inside. He took out the razor blade and made a neat hair-line gash down alongside the frame, then another close to the ground, making an L around the lower corner. He lifted it up like a tent-flap and ducked through. It cracked a little, but not much, fell stiffly into place again.
The house seemed deserted. Hollinger couldn’t be sure whether or not the manager slept here after hours. The geishas and other employees probably didn’t. He could hear bottled crickets chirping and clacking rhythmically somewhere ahead and didn’t, unfortunately, realize that crickets are used as watchdogs in Japan. They stop chirping whenever a stranger enters the house. They did that now. The sound broke off short almost at the first tentative steps he took, and didn’t resume.
He worked his way forward feeling his way along the cool slippery wooden flooring with a prehensile toe-and-heel grip, shuffling the multiple deck of screens aside with a little upward hitch that kept them from clicking in their grooves. He waited until he was nearly midway through the house, as far as he could judge, before he lighted his first match. He guarded it carefully with the hollow of his hand, reduced the light to a pink glow. The place seemed deserted.
He tried six of the cubicles before he got the right place. There it was. Traces of Mallory’s blood still showed black on the floor. The smeared ink-track on the lantern was just a confirmation. He lit the wick and the lantern bloomed out orange at him, like a newly risen sun.
The location of the blood smears told him which of the four sides to case. The screen out in place at the moment was, as she had said, intact. He ran his fingers questioningly along its frame, to see if it felt sticky, damp, with newly-applied paste. It was dry and gave no signs of having been recently inserted. He could see, now, that the inserts weren’t glued into the frame at all, they were caught between the lips of a long, continuous split in the bamboo and held fast by the pressure of the two halves of the wood closing over them again, helped out by an occasional little wooden nail or peg. They couldn’t be put in a hurry.
But they could be taken out in a hurry, couldn’t they? He shoved it all the way back flush with the two lateral screens, and squinted into the socket it had receded into. There were two frame-edges visible, not just one. He caught at the second one, and it slid out empty, bare of paper! But there were tell tale little strips and slivers of white all up and down it where the paper had been hastily slashed away.
He just stood there and nodded grimly at it. “Unh-hunh,” he said.
Probably the frame itself would be unslung tomorrow and sent out to have a new filler put in. Or destroyed. They hadn’t had the opportunity tonight, with the place buzzing with police. He didn’t think the rest of the staff had been in on it — just the manager and the murderer. The fact that the girl’s last-minute change of position hadn’t been revealed to them in time showed that. The geishas waiting on the couple would have tipped them off if they’d been accessories. They hadn’t, and Mallory had been killed by mistake. But she’d only arrived the day before — why did they want her out of the way, not him?...
Hollinger pondered.
There was no audible warning. But his shifting of the slide had exposed the assassin’s compartment beyond the one he was in, and the lantern-light reaching wanly to the far screen of that threw up a faint gray blur overlapping his own shadow — a shadow with upraised arm ending in a sharp downward-projected point. Seeing that shadow saved his life.
The dagger came down behind him with no whisper of sound and he flung himself flat on the floor under it, rolled as he hit. It nailed down the loose overlapping width of the Russian’s coat, bit through it into the plank, skewered it there. His assailant, thrown off balance, came floundering down on him.
They both had sense enough not to try for the knife, which was jammed in the floor halfway up to the hilt.
Hollinger couldn’t have chosen a worse position if he’d spent a year beforehand working it out. He was flat on his stomach with what felt like the sacred mountain of Fujiyama on top of him. He couldn’t use either arm effectively; and he was pinned down by eight inches of steel through a coat he couldn’t work himself out of. He nearly broke his back trying to rear up high enough to swing his shoulders around and get his arms into play.
Apelike hands found his throat, closed in, got to work. Two or three backhand blows glanced harmlessly off a satiny jaw-line. Hollinger gave that up, brought his legs into play instead. He got a scissors-lock on the short thick neck of the Oriental, squeezed.
The throttling hands left his throat to try to pry his legs off. He let them be wrenched apart without much resistance; the hold had been just a stop-gap — too passive to get him anywhere. They broke, jockeyed to get into better positions, blowing like fish on land.
Hollinger rolled over on his back, the razor-edged dagger cut its way free through his coat, remained bedded in the floor. He scrambled to his feet, staying low, resting his knuckles on the floor for a counter-balance till he was ready.
The Japanese had planted his feet wide apart like a croquet-wicket. He crouched low so that his chest was nearly touching the floor. The coppery, rippling muscles of his chest peered through the opening of his flimsy kimono.
Hollinger straightened, came up at him swinging. The right he sent in should have taken care of anyone. But it went wide, streaked upward into the air. The Jap cupped a slapping hand to his elbow, gripped the thumb of that hand at the same time. Hollinger felt himself leaving the floor like a rocket, twisting through the empty frame. He landed with a brutal thud in the compartment behind them, where Mallory had been killed. The fall left Hollinger squirming, half-paralyzed. The Japanese whirled to face him, stamped both feet in a new position, crouched again.
Jiu-jitsu. Hollinger knew he was sunk, unless he got a lucky break. He stumbled up again, weaved around warily, arching all over and with his ears humming. What good were dukes against a system of invisible weights and balances?
The hands shot out at him again, open. His own dizziness saved him: he gave a lurch to one side, his reflexes still stunned. The Japanese wasn’t quick enough in shifting position: his legs and shoulders swung, but for a second his flank was exposed. Hollinger didn’t waste the opening. He sent in a quick short jab to the vital nerve-center under the ear. That rocked the Japanese for a second, held him long enough for Hollinger to wind up a real one. He sent home one of those once-in-a-lifetime blows. The yellow man’s face came around just in time to get it between the eyes. The squat figure went over like a ninepin, and Hollinger stood swaying, his bleary eyes watchful, waiting for the other to come at him again but the Japanese was finished. He lay there gasping, threads of blood leaking from his ear, nose and mouth. His eyes stared stonily, without sight in them, at nothing.
Hollinger let out a groan and then let himself slide to the floor.
A couple of minutes went by. No one else came in. That was all to the good because Hollinger felt that one whack with a flexible fly-swatter would finish him off.
The Japanese began to groan after awhile, twitching his shoulders, arms, legs. But there was a board-like stiffness about his middle that caught the sailor’s eye. It had cost the Japanese the fight whatever it was. A wedge of white showed, in the kimono-opening, below the rising and falling coppery chest. Underclothing maybe. Whatever it was had kept the yellow man from pivoting out of the range of Holllinger’s finishing blow.