She did well to wonder. Lying cold in death, one couldn’t help but speculate whether she had ever had any premonition that, before the year was finished, the hand that had penned the entries in the diary would lie cold and still while another girl would have usurped her belongings and tried to take over her identity.
Or was this woman dead? The body on the train had been that of a blonde girl. Betty Crofath’s license showed that she had light hair. But Betty Crofath seemed to be a citizen of the United States. Surely no girl who had been born in the United States would have been on terms of friendship with the Japanese and the Germans. Was the identity of Betty Crofath a mask?
I spent the entire afternoon studying the diary, then shortly before nine o’clock, taking due precautions to see that I was not followed, went to keep my appointment at the Dragon Tooth night club with Ngat T’oy.
Chapter Five
The jazz orchestra squeezed out a syncopated rhythm of popular music. Very few people tried to listen. All about was the sound of conversation. Some woman, her voice keyed up with alcohol until it had all the strident insistence of a locomotive’s whistle, kept shrilling above the other voices. Over at the table next to mine, a man was telling a low-voiced story. The women of the party were waiting for the proper moment when they could be moved to shrieks of laughter by a story they had probably heard somewhere or other at least six months ago.
Over on the right, a middle-aged man was talking insistently, persuasively to a woman half his age, who was beginning to become bored. The man kept pouring out words.
At the table behind me, two rather quiet, reserved men sipped sparingly at liquor and exchanged occasional words. Their manner indicated that they had some joint purpose, some sort of perfect understanding.
I shifted my position slightly so that I could give them the benefit of an oblique scrutiny. Situated as I was, I could never afford to overlook those about me, even for a moment. These men seemed not in search of entertainment. Definitely they were not on the prowl. They...
And then I was pushing back my chair, for Ngat T’oy was coming toward me. These public meetings in Chinatown were risky for us both. She knew it as well as I. Yet the danger was only to ourselves, whereas if I went to see Soo Hoo Duck too frequently, the danger would involve not only a great man, but a cause as well. Therefore, for necessary conferences, Ngat T’oy and I met as we could. One thing I had long ago learned, an Occidental and a young, attractive Chinese girl may mingle without attracting too much attention in a Chinese night club or a Chinese restaurant — and nowhere else.
I held Ngat T’oy’s chair for her.
A woman who tries to be seductive usually merely flaunts herself, just as a woman who dismisses sex from her mind tends to become a biological nonentity. Occasionally, some woman manages to strike just the right note. Such a woman will never be whistled at but every masculine eye will follow her across a room, and when she is seated, an almost audible collective sigh will go up from the onlookers.
I could all but hear the sigh as I seated Ngat T’oy and went back around the table to seat myself opposite her.
“We would give much to have known more of this woman,” she said. “Did you find out anything at all?”
“A very little. I have clues.”
A waitress appeared to take our orders, and we ordered ’ng ga pay, that spiced oriental cordial which has the tang of herbs, a flavor as distinctly pungent as that of a dried litchi nut, and the kick of a mule.
At that moment, a gong filled the room with strident sound. The lights dimmed to a purple and all conversation ceased as though the flow of words had been cut sharply off with a knife.
Oy Ching Wong bounded to the little stage.
Various races have different standards of beauty. And there is a world of difference between the Orient and the Occident, but I have yet to meet any competent judge who has had the advantage of walking the streets of Shanghai in the evening after the theater hour who has not been willing to admit that China produces some of the most beautiful women in the world.
Oy Ching Wong was from Shanghai. She had that peculiar lithe grace and the smooth, flat stomach which is the heritage of rice-eating peoples the world over. Her dance was a combination of tawny-skinned nudity, oriental mysticism, and that rhythm of motion which makes it seem as though the body is writing poetry.
One could hardly hear a sound in the entire audience while the low strains of music pulsed through the half-darkened room and the lithe young body on the stage, with its smooth, old-ivory skin, held the audience in a trance.
When it was over, when Oy Ching Wong had gone, and after that first dazed moment during which the audience was coming back to earth, and before the roar of applause beat against the confines of the small room, I saw one of the two men at the table behind me move unostentatiously over to the telephone booth.
Then, for as much as a half a minute, everything at the night club was at a standstill. The audience went wild with enthusiasm, beat the applause up to a crescendo, begging for an encore.
But Oy Ching Wong — like one of those priceless adventures of life itself which are so frequently encountered unexpectedly — gave no encores.
When things had quieted down, I said to Ngat T’oy, “There are two men at the table behind me. It is difficult for me to watch them. One of them is telephoning. Do you know the other?”
I waited for her inscrutable black eyes to shift over to the other table — and I waited in vain. She said, without taking her eyes from mine, “I have never seen either of them before, Ed.”
I smiled as I realized that Ngat T’oy would no more have seated herself at my table without having first appraised the persons around me than she would have thought of crossing a busy street intersection without looking at the traffic.
The Chinese waitress hovered around our table ostensibly putting down our glasses. “The man in the telephone booth,” she said in Chinese, “is talking to someone, and his eyes keep shifting to this table. He has taken a newspaper clipping from his pocket.”
The dance orchestra struck up music. I raised my eyebrows in a question to Ngat T’oy.
She smiled her assent, said casually to the waitress, “In the office. Have an evening paper for us.”
We moved out onto the dance floor.
Ngat T’oy had that peculiar something which makes dancing seem a music-filled dream, and we floated along just over the floor, not quite touching it with our weight, but having just support enough to use our feet for guidance. For the moment, wars and murders were distant, remote things that peopled an outside world of grim nightmares while we were drifting smoothly along a stream of music headed toward the stars.
All too soon, the dance was over. We were back in the realm of reality, my arms still tingling with the feel of Ngat T’oy’s warmth, but the ice-cold realization of danger stinging my brain into action.
The manager’s office had been fixed up as a background for interviews with influential customers, publicity agents and sight-seers. It contained carved wood, deep rugs, crystal chandeliers, an elaborately carved, massive incense burner and several of the wooden figures of Longevity which the Chinese like to keep for good luck. The place was heavy with cloying incense. A green-shaded desk light threw white illumination on the pages of an evening newspaper lying on the desk.
Nor did it take us long to find that which we felt was significant. In the lower right-hand corner of the front page appeared in a small headline: “PULLMAN DEATH MAY HAVE BEEN MURDER.”
Below that was a very brief dispatch under an Indio date line: