“Lucky I was here this morning,” he said so that I would have to ask why. I think he sometimes sat up half the night figuring out his morning opener which would cause me to ask about something that I didn’t know.
“I’m grateful.”
“Might have missed him if I hadn’t arrived early.”
“You’re always early and it’s earned you a head start in life’s great race.” It also gave him the chance to read the mail first, both his and mine.
“He wants five thousand,” he said.
“Sounds like a bargain.”
Vicker lowered his feet, brushed some imaginary lint from the lapel of his burnt orange, raw-silk jacket, put his coffee cup on my desk where it was sure to make a ring, and reached for his silver lighter and cigarette case. He was about my height and about my weight, but I always thought of him as lean and of myself as skinny. He had a smooth, oval face, nicely tanned, and his black hair was thick and straight. He wore it long for the times and it looped down over his high forehead and then back in a style that would become popular years later. His eyes were deep-set and dark brown and he could hold them perfectly steady in the middle of an enormous lie. They also had that cool glow peculiar to persons who will never need glasses. Some commercial airline pilots in their fifties have eyes like that. Vicker’s nose was a right triangle and he sported a carefully clipped mustache above thin lips that he sometimes licked around lunch time. His chin was unremarkable in any respect.
When Vicker finished lighting his cigarette and putting his case and lighter back where they belonged, he blew some smoke at his brown and green foulard tie and said, “He’s yours, you know.”
“I didn’t.”
“They’re on to him,” he said.
“All right,” I said. “Who?”
“Pai Chung-liang.”
“He’s not worth five thousand.”
“He meant Hong Kong, not U.S.”
“He’s still not worth it.”
“He wants to go to Singapore. He said he has relatives in Singapore.”
Pai Chung-liang was a middle-aged man who worked in the Bank of China and occasionally passed us fresh snippets of information of varying authenticity. He swore, for example, that the bank, which serves as Peking’s financial arm as well as its Hong Kong diplomatic, espionage, and cultural headquarters, had a cache of 6,129 rifles and carbines, 100,000 rounds of ammunition, 197 cases of grenades, and enough food to withstand a four-month siege. Just who the siege-layers would be, he didn’t say. He didn’t even guess. But some of his information about Peking’s financial transactions had proved interesting, if not vital, and we paid him enough to make it worth his time.
“What did he do, call?” I said.
“Around eight-fifteen.”
“How did he sound?”
Vicker thought for a moment. “Desperate, I’d say. Panicky even.”
“How does he know they’re on to him?”
“He didn’t say. He just said that they are.”
Pai was a shy, slight man, short by even Chinese standards, barely over five feet, who liked flowers and figures. We had needed someone inside the bank and Pai was the best I could do. I got to him when his wife became ill and needed the services of an expensive surgeon whom Pai couldn’t possibly afford. It was one of those things that you hear about when you’re standing around some cocktail party, halflistening to a doctor talk about his rare ones. Mrs. Pai had been one of the rare ones and when the expensive surgeon mentioned that her husband worked for the Bank of China I began to listen in earnest. I employed the usual flimflam to reach Pai. We made a deal. The life of his wife in exchange for whatever information he thought might prove interesting. I think Pai loved his wife very much, even more than he did figures and flowers. He was embarrassingly grateful, even after she died on the operating table under the skilled hands of the noted surgeon, and he wanted to know how he could demonstrate his gratitude. I told him and he readily agreed, partly because he was grateful, partly out of pique at the bank because it had done little about his wife’s illness, but mostly because of the 500 Hong Kong dollars that I agreed to pay him each month.
Pai Chung-liang was another living testimony to my skill as a corruptor of civil servants. I wondered how his superiors had found out and even if they had. Perhaps Pai was just bored with Hong Kong and thought that Singapore would be pleasant in late August and if he could get an additional five thousand out of me, it might prove even more pleasant than he had anticipated.
There was the chance, of course, that he was telling the truth and if he were, he would soon be telling them about us. Not that there wasn’t much they didn’t already know, but we still had to go through the motions of maintaining our tattered cover.
“I’m going to pay him,” I said to Vicker.
“You just said he wasn’t worth it.”
“He’s not, but I’m still going to pay him.”
“Of course,” Vicker said thoughtfully, “it could be a setup.”
“I know.”
“I never did trust the little bastard.”
“That puts him at the bottom of a long list,” I said.
The telephone rang then and it was Pai. “Mr. Dye?” he said in his soft, shy voice and I said yes.
“I called earlier this morning.”
“Are you on a safe phone?”
“Yes. Very safe. I did not go to my employment this morning.”
“I understand,” I said.
“I have some vital information.”
“About the bank?”
“Yes and no. But they have become suspicious and the information I have is vital to you. Personally.”
“And you’re asking five thousand dollars?”
“Yes. I would not do so unless I needed it desperately. I must go to Singapore. I have relatives in Singapore.”
“That’s what I hear.”
“Oh, yes. My conversation with Mr. Vicker this morning. He is your trusted colleague, is he not?”
“Yes.”
“I see.”
“All right, Mr. Pai, where and when do you want to meet?”
He suggested a number on Upper Lascar or Cat Street. We had met there twice before in a gewgaw shop stuffed with carvings, lacquered ware, ceramics of doubtful merit, very bad Ming-type copies of Chinese mustangs, gongs of various sizes, and the inevitable scrolls. The old man who owned the place locked the doors and left whenever we appeared. His hour’s absence cost another HK $100.
“Anything else?” I said.
“Only one thing, Mr. Dye. I strongly urge that you come alone.”
“Fine,” I said.
I hung up and looked at Vicker. “He suggests that I come alone,” I said.
Vicker smiled a little, but not very much. “Then I’d better go with you.
“Maybe you’d better.”
“How’d he sound to you?” he said.
“Just as you described him: desperate and panicked.”
We arrived at the shop a little before ten, which was the agreed-upon time for the meeting. I paid the old man his $100 and he left, leaving the door unlocked on the promise that I would snap it shut after Pai arrived.
“If he’s skittish, maybe I’d better get in the back,” Vicker said.
There was a rear room, small and stuffy, which the old man used for an occasional nap. It had a six-inch peephole that was shielded by a flimsy see-through of split bamboo.
I stood near the six-hundred-year-old table that the shop owner used for a desk and looked out into Cat Street, which was as packed as usual. I sniffed and thought I could smell opium, but it may have been my imagination, although on Cat Street that wasn’t necessarily true. I saw Pai Chung-liang burrowing his way through the crowd. He wore a white linen suit and clutched a plastic briefcase under his arm. He paused at the door of the shop, looked carefully both ways, and then slipped in looking for all the world as if he’d just made off with the factory’s weekly payroll. He hadn’t been born to the business.