Early in the trip, before they got to the river, everyone had been tense and wary, on the lookout for harbor patrols and customs boats. Now they relaxed as the long wooden boat cruised quietly along the river, hugging the bank to avoid being too obtrusive and followed by the impressive Cigarette.
Cohen was a strange sight, dressed in a cheongsam with a pistol belt around his waist, sitting like a crown prince on his canvas lawn chair, staring ahead into the darkness, muttering a continuing monologue questioning his sanity, Hatcher’s, Daphne’s — in fact, the whole damn trip. He had insisted upon arranging for the boats and the gunmen.
Finally Hatcher growled, ‘Listen, China, nobody stuck a gun in your ear and ordered you to come. It was your idea to round up the guns, get your beach chair there and come along for the ride.’
‘Well, I couldn’t talk you out of it,’ Cohen answered.
‘What’s that got to do with it?’
‘You know what I mean,’ Cohen said. ‘What the hell’s so special about this guy Cody anyway?’
‘I told you, we went to school together.’
‘That doesn’t float,’ Cohen said with disgust.
‘Hell,’ Hatcher said, ‘maybe I wanted to do one last job that had . . . some sense of. . . humanity . . . honor maybe.’
“War, he sung, his toil and trouble; honour but an empty bubble,” Cohen intoned.
‘Dryden,’ Hatcher replied. ‘How about “Mine honour is my life; both grow in one; Take honour from me, and my life is done.”
‘Richard the Second,’ Cohen answered, and after a moment’s meditation added, ‘I hope to hell all this poetry’s worth the trip.’
‘Don’t we all,’ answered Hatcher.
‘Let me tell you something maybe you don’t know about Sam-Sam,’ Cohen said, starting a rambling monologue that eventually had a point. ‘First time I ever met him was when I saw you, when the Tsu Fi sent me up here to Chin Chin land the first time. Sam- Sam was kind of the new kid on the block, okay? He came down from Peking because he was an ardent capitalist at heart, which didn’t go over well in Peking. This was about six months before that time I met him. I don’t know what he did in Peking, but whatever it was, he had developed the most blasé attitude about killing I’ve ever seen. I mean he would just as soon put a bullet in your brain as step on a bug.
‘I was dealing mainly with Joe Cockroach, he was like the agent for everything. You made a deal with Joe and he got it all together — one price, one guy to pay. It was a comfortable way to do business. Also I trusted Joe. I knew him before in Hong Kong when he was in the import business. So maybe the third time I go up there, Sam-Sam comes up to me and says from now on its him and me doing business. He’ll make a better offer, he says. And I tell him, “Sam-Sam, I can’t do that because I’ve been dealing with Joe for too many years and, besides, things don’t work like that up here at the Ts’e K’am Men Ti.”
‘So Sam-Sam walks out on the deck — we were in this barge and I was in Joe’s office, Joe is outside doing something — and Sam-Sam walks out the door and next thing I know I hear two shots, pumf, pumf, just like that, and I dash to the door and look out in time to see Sam-Sam with the gun still smoking and he grabs a handful of Joe’s shirt and lifts him up with one arm and throws him in the river. And he looks over at me and he smiles and he says, and this is a quote, he says, “Now it is not a problem anymore.” And he laughs. Six months later he controlled the whole damn river.’
‘I know all that stuff, China,’ Hatcher said with a sigh.
‘Yeah, but here’s what you don’t know,’ Cohen said rather elegantly. ‘Joe Cockroach came to Hong Kong from China. He did this and that, nothing very successful, then he went up to Chin Chin land and got in the smuggling business. Then he sent for his brother to come down. His brother was Sam-Sam Sam.’
‘Sam-Sam isn’t going to be around,’ Hatcher said gruffly.
‘Yeah, right, that’s what we’re all hoping,’ Cohen intoned. ‘That Sam-Sam won’t be around.’
They fell silent again and Cohen began to doze, his head bobbing, then woke up suddenly, but drifted off again. In the eerie twilight before dawn he looked like some ancient Chinese philosopher.
Daphne and Hatcher sat beside him on the hardback benches provided in the snakeboat. Hatcher was leaning back, his long legs stretched out in front of him. Daphne reached out and slipped her hand in his. He squeezed it gently and held on to it as they peered straight ahead into the waning darkness.
She leaned over him and said softly in his ear, ‘You like this, don’t you, Hatch? Living with your heart in your mouth.’
‘It can become addictive.’
‘Did you ever marry, Hatcher?’ Daphne asked.
‘Nope.’
‘Is that the reason?’
He thought for a moment, and said, ‘Maybe.’
‘Ever thought about it?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said immediately, and was surprised at his answer. ‘The thought never occurred to me.’
‘Why not?’
Hatcher did not answer immediately. He thought of all the stereotyped reasons.
‘I live day to day,’ he said finally. ‘Marriage is also yesterdays and tomorrows.’
He turned and looked back at her. ‘Or maybe I’ve just been too damn selfish all my life to think about anyone else. Why? Is this a proposal?’
They both laughed softly in the darkness.
She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m not the marrying kind either.’ She paused for a moment and then asked, ‘Do you ever worry about dying?’
‘Nah,’ he said quickly, ‘I gave that up a long time ago.’
The river broke up into a dozen twisting streams and creeks that coursed through the thick jungle. This was the northern rim of the Southeast Asian rain forest. A few miles to the north, trees gave way to foothills and then mountains, but here the jungle was still fresh and verdant. Chinese patrol boats, limited in number, ignored the area, which was like pirate Jean Lafitte’s stronghold in the early 1800s, a drifting, lush green empire of assassins and privateers who could vanish in an instant up one of its many creeks and rivers or disappear into jungle hideouts defended by mines and booby traps. It was a sprawling black market, its barges and boats of contraband protected by nature and by the brigands who called themselves the Ts’e K’am Men Ti, the Secret Gate Keepers, and dominated with vicious authority by the ruthless Sam-Sam Sam, and his henchmen, the SAVAK killer Batal and the Tonton assassin Billy Death.
With the sun, the jungle creatures in this marginal rain forest began to awaken and the underbrush came alive with morning sounds. Adjutant storks squawked, gliding frogs bellowed and leaped from tree to tree, hornbills pushed through the foliage with their powerful beaks vying for food with fruit-eating bats. High above them all, eagles drifted leisurely through the blood-red sky seeking breakfast.
By noon they were near the small villages of Jiangmen and Shunde. They slipped past them. By mid afternoon they were deep in the jungle.
‘We’re coming to the Ts’e K’am Men Ti cutoff,’ Daphne said.
Hatcher studied the map she had sketched before they left. It showed a narrow cutoff snaking away from the main river to the south. Four miles up the cutoff was another branch that twisted off to the east through the jungle, then cut sharply west forming a narrow peninsula, an elbow in the stream, like the trap in a sink, and easy to block in the event someone tried a hurried retreat back toward the main river. Leatherneck John’s was on the far side of the elbow.
Hatcher pointed to the tight little peninsula and traced his finger straight across its base, away from Leatherneck John’s.
‘This where we are?’ he whispered.
‘About there.’ Daphne nodded.
‘So if we got in trouble at the bar, we could forget the boat and come overland, straight back here, right?’