'I spoke metaphorically,' Ah Wong said coldly. 'The manifest, Mr MacHinery.'
'Aye.' MacHinery rose, opened the Gladstone bag he'd left in the middle of the floor of Ah Wong's sumptuous apartment, fished out a manifest and handed it over.
'Why the bag?' Ah Wong asked in idle curiosity.
'Why the bag?' MacHinery echoed bitterly. 'The GRASSHOPPER'S two nights in Singapore and if you think I'm going to spend them aboard yon bloody flea-ridden, cockroach-infested hellhole, you — '
'Silence!' Ah Wong opened the manifest. 'Ah, yes. Sides of beef, one hundred. Of pork, two hundred. Bananas, onions, beans, peppers, eggplants, butter. Yes, yes, all seems there. Best Bandung cauliflowers, eighty crates. Lettuce, fifty. Yes, all in order.' He broke off, looked thoughtfully at MacHinery and said in Cantonese: 'I am going to kill you, my friend.'
'Whit was that?' MacHinery asked blankly.
'Nothing.' Ah Wong smiled. 'I thought you might be a linguist.' He picked up a telephone and spoke quickly in Cantonese, referring to the manifest from time to time and ticking off items with a pencil, then replaced the phone. He smiled again. 'Just ordering up some meat and vegetables from my go-down, Mr MacHinery. From your own cargo.'
'And the very cream of the crop, I'll be bound,' MacHinery said bitterly, 'Nae bloody flies on you Chinese.'
Ah Wong smiled yet again. The kind of smile, MacHinery thought grimly, that you might expect to see on the face of a spider when a particularly juicy fly landed on its web. Ah Wong, for his part, thought it unnecessary to inform MacHinery that he was of pure Armenian stock and had changed his name partly for business reasons in a Chinese-dominated field of commerce, but mainly because he regarded the honourable name of his ancestors as sullied beyond redemption by its frequent inclusion in Interpol files throughout the world.
'No need to be bitter, Mr MacHinery,' Ah Wong said pleasantly. 'I thought you might like to stay for dinner with me.'
'Dinner?' After a brief struggle, a conciliatory smile appeared on MacHinery's face. 'Well, noo, Mr Wong, that is kind of you. Very, very kind. I'll be honoured to accept.' MacHinery hadn't sat down again, and now he paced the room restlessly, the sheen of sweat bathing his entire face. He was shivering more violently than ever and one side of his face had begun to twitch.
'You are not well, I'm afraid,' Ah Wong said again.
'I'm fine.' A pause. 'Dammit, no, I'm no'. I'll hae to go oot for a minute to get some medicine. I–I know the cure for this.' He gulped. 'I feel sick, Mr Wong, awful sick. Where's your bathroom? Quick.'
'Through that door there.'
MacHinery left abruptly and closed the door behind him. He turned on both basin taps, pulled the lever that operated the toilet cistern and used the sound of running water to drown the slight clicking noise made as he lifted the Venetian blind that shut out the hot Malayan sun.
Parked on the opposite side of the street below was a dark van with blue-tinted side windows and a ventilator on top. The ventilator was motionless. MacHinery thrust out a hand, waved briefly, withdrew his hand, waited until he saw the ventilator revolve just once, then lowered the blind as cautiously as he had raised it. He turned off the taps and went back into Ah Wong's apartment.
'You feel better, Mr MacHinery?' It was no light task for Ah Wong to get concern into both voice and face but he made it after a struggle.
'I feel bloody awful,' MacHinery said candidly. He was shaking now like a broken bed-spring and his teeth were beginning to chatter. 'I must go oot, Ah Wong. I must. Ma medicine. I'll no be but minutes.'
'Any medicine you care to name, Mr MacHinery, I have it. Among other things, I'm the wholesale supplier to many chemists' shops.'
'You'll no' find the medicine I need in any bloody chemist's shop,' MacHinery said violently. 'A jiffy, Mr Wong. That's all I'll be.' He headed for the doorway, then stopped abruptly. There was a man standing there. By courtesy definition, MacHinery thought, he might be called a man. He looked more like the early prototype of the Neanderthal caveman, only bigger. Much bigger. He had shoulders like a bull, hands like two bunches of bananas and a brutalized moronic face that might have been carved from granite by a power-chisel.
'John,' Ah Wong introduced him. 'My secretary. I don't think he wants you to leave, Mr MacHinery.'
'Aye. Your secretary. No mistaking the intellectual type, is there?' MacHinery shuddered violently again and dropped his voice. 'One side, laddie.'
'Don't be foolish,' Ah Wong said sharply. 'He can break you in half. Come now, Mr MacHinery. Just sit down and take your coat off. Madness to wear it in this heat and sweating as you are.'
'I'm allergic to sunlight,' MacHinery said between clamped teeth. 'Never take it off. One side, you.'
'There's no sunlight in here,' Ah Wong said softly.
'I must get oot,' MacHinery shouted. 'I must. Damn you, Wong, you don't know what you're doing to me.' He made a bull rush for the doorway and tried to dive under John's outstretched arms. His head and shoulders smashed into a five-barred gate. At least, it felt like a five-barred gate. A couple of power shovels closed over MacHinery's upper arms, lifted him effortlessly off his feet and bore him back to the armchair in the centre of the room.
'You are extremely foolish,' Ah Wong said sadly. 'I want to be your friend, Mr MacHinery. And I want you to be mine. I think, Mr MacHinery, that you can offer me what a man in my position so very rarely acquires — an unswerving allegiance that neither money nor oaths could buy.'
MacHinery struggled futilely in the grip of giant hands. He said in a strangled voice: 'I'll kill you for this, Wong.'
'Kill me? Kill your doctor? Kill the one man who can give you the medicine you need?' Ah Wong smiled. 'You are singularly lacking in intelligence. Take his jacket off, John.'
John removed MacHinery's jacket. He did it by the simple process of ripping the white lining down the back middle seam and pulling off the two separate halves.
'Now the shirt sleeves,' Ah Wong murmured.
John twitched his fingers, the buttons burst from their moorings and the sleeves were pulled up beyond MacHinery's elbows. For a long moment all three men stared down at the inside of MacHinery's forearms. Both of them were covered by a mass of pale-purplish spots, none of them more than half an inch distant from its fellows. Ah Wong's face remained as immobile as ever. He bent over MacHinery's Gladstone bag, flung a shirt to one side and picked up a narrow rectangular box. He slid a catch, opened the wooden lid and extracted a hypodermic syringe, holding it by the plunger.
'So very conveniently to hand,' he said gently. 'Your medicine goes in this, doesn't it, MacHinery? And there's hardly a place left in your arms for you to use it, is there? A junky, Mr MacHinery. A dope addict. And now you're climbing the walls, as they say, because you're overdue your next shot. Isn't that it, Mr MacHinery?'
'I'll kill you for this, Ah Wong.' MacHinery's voice was weak, mechanical. He was jerking violently in his seat, 'So help me God, I'll kill you.' He arched himself stiffly in his armchair, his eyes showing white, his mouth strained opened. 'I'll kill you,' he croaked.
'Kill me?' Ah Wong asked quietly. 'Kill the goose that lays the golden eggs? Kill your doctor, as I said before? Kill the doctor who not only recognizes all the symptoms but can prescribe the medicine for it? Prescribe it and supply it. Supply it now. Heroin, is it not, Mr MacHinery?'
John's grip eased, MacHinery struggled to his feet and gripped Ah Wong by the arms. 'You have the stuff?' he whispered. 'God, you have the stuff? You have it here?'
'I have it here.' Ah Wong looked into the stricken eyes. 'My friend Benabi. He is even more brilliant than I had thought. Always the weak link in our organization was the courier from Djakarta to here. But not any more. You will have as much of the white powder, Mr MacHinery, as often as you like, whenever you like, for the remainder of your days.'