Somehow, in the few hours we were to spend at Port Blair, I had to get those serial numbers altered by an expert.
We had been walking the black, narrow? dockside streets for two hours when Aza-Kra suddenly stopped.
“Something?”
“Wait,” he said. “... Yes. This is the man you are looking for. He is a professional forger. His name is George Wheelwright. He can do it, but I do not know whether he will. He is a very timid and suspicious man.”
“All right. In here?”
“Yes.”
We went up a narrow unlighted stairway, choked with a kitchen-midden of smells, curry predominating. At the second-floor landing Aza-Kra pointed to a door. I knocked.
Scufflings behind the door. A low voice: “Who’s that?”
“A friend. Let us in, Wheelwright.”
The door cracked open and yellow light spilled out; I saw the outline of a head and the faint gleam of a bulbous eye. “What d’yer want?”
“Want you to do a job for me, Wheelwright. Don’t keep us talking here in the hall.”
The door opened wider and I squeezed through into a cramped, untidy box of a kitchen. A faded cloth covered the doorway to the next room.
Wheelwright glanced at Aza-Kra and then stared hard at me; he was a little chicken-breasted wisp of a man, dressed in dungarees and a striped polo shirt. “Who sent yer?”
“You wouldn’t know the name. A friend of mine in Calcutta.” I took out the passports. “Can you fix these?”
He looked at them carefully, taking his time. “What’s wrong with ’em?”
“Nothing but the serial numbers.”
“What’s wrong with them?”
“They’re on a list.”
He laughed, a short, meaningless bark.
I said, “Well?”
“Who’d yer say yer friend in Calcutter was?”
“I haven’t any friend in Calcutta. Never mind how I knew about you. Will you do the job or won’t you?”
He handed the passports back and moved toward the door. “Mister, I haven’t got the time to fool with yer. Perhaps yer having me on, or perhaps yer’ve made an honest mistake. There’s another Wheelwright over on the north side of town. You try him.” He opened the door. “Good night, both.”
I pushed it shut again and reached for him, but he was a yard away in one jump, like a rabbit. He stood beside the table, arms hanging, and stared at me with a vague smile.
I said, “I haven’t got time to play games, either. I’ll pay you five hundred American dollars to alter these passports—” I tossed them onto the table—“or else I’ll beat the living tar out of you.” I took a step toward him.
I never saw a man move faster: he had the drawer open and the gun out and aimed before I finished that step. But the muzzle trembled slightly. “No nearer,” he said hoarsely.
I thought, Five minutes, and held my breath.
When he slumped, I picked up the revolver. Then I lifted him—he weighed about ninety pounds—propped him in a chair behind the table, and waited.
In a few minutes he raised his head and goggled at me dazedly. “How’d yer do that?” he whispered.
I put the money on the table beside the passports. “Start,” I said.
He stared at it, then at me. His thin lips tightened. “Go ter blazes,” he said.
I stepped around the table and cuffed him backhand. I felt the blow on my own face, hard and stinging, but I did it again. I kept it up. It wasn’t pleasant; I was feeling not only the blows themselves, but Wheelwright’s emotional responses, the shame and wretchedness and anger, and the queasy writhing fear: Wheelwright couldn’t bear pain.
At that, he beat me. When I stopped, sickened and dizzy, and said as roughly as I could, “Had enough, Wheelwright?” he answered, “Not if yer was ter kill me, yer bloody barstid.”
His voice trembled, and his face was streaked with tears, but he meant it. He thought I was a government agent, trying to bully him into signing his own prison sentence, and rather than let me do it he would take any amount of punishment; prison was the one thing he feared more than physical pain.
I looked at Aza-Kra. His neck-spines were erect and quivering; I could see the tips of them at the edges of the veil. Then inspiration hit me.
I pulled him forward where the little man could see him, and lifted the veil. The feathery spines stood out clearly on either side of the corpse-white mask.
“I won’t touch you again,” I said. “But look at this. Can you see?”
His eyes widened; he scrubbed them with the palms of his hands and looked again.
“And this,” I said. I pulled at Aza-Kra’s forearm and the clawed blue-gray hand came out of the muff.
Wheelwright’s eyes bulged. He flattened himself against the back of the chair.
“Now,” I said, “six hundred dollars—or I’ll take this mask off and show you what’s behind it.”
He clenched his eyes shut. His face had gone yellowish-pale; his nostrils were white.
“Get it out of here,” he said faintly.
He didn’t move until Aza-Kra had disappeared behind the curtain into the other room. Then, without a word, he poured and drank half a tumblerful of whisky, switched on a gooseneck lamp, produced bottles, (pens and brushes from the table drawer, and went to work. He bleached away the first and last digits of both serial numbers, then painted over the areas with a thin wash of color that matched the blue tint of the paper. With a jeweler’s loupe in his eye, he restored the obliterated tiny letters of the background design; finally, still using the loupe, he drew the new digits in black. From first to last, it took him thirty minutes; and his hands didn’t begin to tremble until he was done.
5
The sixth day was two days—because we left Otaru at 3:30 p.m. Sunday and arrived at Honolulu at 11:30 p.m. Saturday. We had lost four and a half hours in traversing sixty-two degrees of longitude—but we’d also gained a day by crossing the International Date Line from west to east.
On the sixth day, then, which was two days, the following things happened and were duly reported:
Be Done By As Ye Do was the title of some thousands of sermons and, by count, more than seven hundred frontpage newspaper editorials from Newfoundland to Oaxaca. My cable to Freeman had come a little late; the Herald-Star’s announcement was lost in the ruck.
Following this, a wave of millennial enthusiasm swept the continent; Christians and Jews everywhere feasted, fasted, prayed and in other ways celebrated the imminent Second (or First) Coming of Christ. Evangelistic and fundamentalist sects garnered souls by the million.
Members of the Apostolic Overcoming Holy Church of God, the Pentecostal Fire Baptized Holiness Church and numerous other groups gave away most or all of their worldly possessions. Others were more practical. The Seventh Day Adventists, who are vegetarians, pooled capital and began an enormous expansion of their meatless-food factories, dairies and other enterprises.
Delegates to a World Synod of Christian Churches began arriving at a tent city near Smith Center, Kansas, late Saturday night. Trouble developed almost immediately between the Brethren Church of God (Reformed Dunkers) and the Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarian Baptists—later spreading to a schism which led to the establishment of two rump synods, one at Lebanon and the other at Athol.
Five hundred Doukhobors stripped themselves mother-naked, burned their homes, and marched on Vancouver.
Roman Catholics in most places celebrated the Feast of the Transfiguration as usual, awaiting advice from Rome.
Riots broke out in Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, Philadelphia and New York. In each case the original disturbances were brief, but were followed by protracted vandalism and looting which local police, state police, and even National Guard units were unable to check. By midnight Sunday property damage was estimated at more than twenty million dollars. The casualty list was fantastically high. So was the proportion of police-and-National-Guard casualties— exactly fifty per cent of the total....