The Lonely Sea: Collected Short Stories

'You mean — you mean I'll never have to worry aboot it again? Never have to lie or beg or cheat or steal to get it? It will always be there?'

'While you remain in the employment of Benabi and myself, it will always be there.'

'I'm your man for life,' MacHinery said simply.

'I don't doubt it.' Ah Wong looked at him in distaste, shook off his hands, picked up the phone and spoke rapidly. He replaced the phone and said: 'One minute. No more.'

'My God!' MacHinery said stupidly. 'When I think of the number of times I've chased roond Singapore, near screaming ma head off for the stuff, wondering where I could lay ma hands on it, where the source of supply was, I could — '

'You're at the source now, Mr MacHinery. No need to wonder any more.'

'You — you supply the whole town?'

'Much of it.'

'But — but have you never worried aboot whit you're doing? Have you ever seen a man, a far gone junky, who canna get the stuff? Or a man trying to dry oot? Both going mad. Insane screaming mad. Have you never seen it?'

'Don't be so naive, Mr MacHinery. Of course I've seen it. The sensible ones stick to a pellet of opium. But the sophisticates — ' his lips curled — 'must have it straight. If I don't supply it, others will.' He smiled contemptuously. 'Now perhaps you'd like to inform the police?'

'I'll cut ma throat,' MacHinery whispered. 'I'll blow ma brains oot. But I'll never, never tell.'

'I know you won't,' Ah Wong said drily. 'Ah, here it comes,' A servant crossed to the table and dumped a crate of vegetables on top of it.

'Cauliflowers?' MacHinery said stupidly.

'Best Bandung,' Ah Wong agreed. He lifted one, gingerly slit the heart with a knife, extracted a twist of cellophane and poured a little white powder into MacHinery's trembling hand. Try it.'

MacHinery placed it on his tongue, tasted it, tasted it again, then whispered: 'Dear God. This is it. This is it. And — and this is the way it comes into Singapore?'

For years,' Ah Wong said calmly. 'An ordinary cauliflower, the heart carefully parted, the heroin inserted, shellac for preservative and to glue the stems together then carried in the crates. Three times the customs have searched the GRASSHOPPER from stem to stern — but who would ever think of cauliflowers?'

'Damn the cauliflowers,' MacHinery said hoarsely. His voice shook, his hands trembled more violently than ever. 'Mix it up for me, for God's sake!'

Ah Wong nodded, went to the bathroom and returned in a minute with a small vial of milky liquid. He nodded to the syringe lying on the table. 'Your medicine, Mr MacHinery.'

'For pity's sake fill the hypo for me,' MacHinery begged. 'My hands — '

'I can see them,' Ah Wong said. 'Unsteady, we might say.' He lifted the hypodermic, depressed the plunger and inserted the needle in the vial. 'Sufficient, I should say, Mr MacHinery?'

'Aye, aye, that'll do.' MacHinery grabbed the hypodermic by the plunger, hesitated, then blurted out: 'God alone knows I'm just a junky, but a man still has his pride. Even a junky. The — the bathroom. And I feel sick again.'

'You make ME sick,' Ah Wong said dispassionately. 'Go on.'

MacHinery hurried into the bathroom, pulled the cistern lever, opened the Venetian blind and thrust the hypodermic out of the window. Five men came swarming out of the van below. MacHinery withdrew his arm and, still holding the hypodermic gingerly by the plunger, laid it carefully on the windowsill. He waited twenty seconds then walked back into Ah Wong's apartment just as the outer door crashed open and the five men from the van, uniformed policemen with guns, burst into the room. MacHinery nodded towards John.

'Watch the big lad,' he advised. 'If he twitches an eyebrow, shoot five or six bullets into him. Not at his head — they'd bounce off.'

Ah Wong stood stock-still, his face inscrutable. After a moment or two he said softly: 'What is the meaning of this outrage?'

'Inspector Hanbro,' the leading policeman introduced himself. 'Warrant for your arrest, Mr Wong. Receiving, being in illegal possession of and distributing knowingly proscribed narcotics. I have to warn you — '

'What tomfoolery is this?' Ah Wong's face had gone very stiff, very watchful. 'What wild rubbish — narcotics, you said?'

'Narcotics, I said.' Hanbro turned towards MacHinery. 'This man will testify — '

'This man,' Ah Wong said incredulously. 'This derelict Scots engineer — '

'Curiously enough, he was an engineer once,' Hanbro said. 'Also Scots. Hardly derelict. Changed his profession years ago. Mr Wong, may I introduce Inspector Donald MacHinery of the Hong Kong Vice Squad? Seconded to Singapore for — ah — special duties. The faces of my own men are too well known in those parts.'

'You can take him away, Inspector Hanbro,' MacHinery said tiredly. 'I don't know how many wrecked lives and suicides lie at his door and it doesn't matter any more. We have enough on him to put him away for life.'

'I'm innocent of all charges,' Ah Wong said dully. 'As one of the biggest merchants and most influential citizens in — '

'Shut up,' MacHinery said shortly. 'You were right, Mr Wong. Your former courier, the previous chief engineer on the GRASSHOPPER, WAS your weak link. He got drunk one night in Djakarta and talked too much in the presence of a plain-clothes man. Just enough for a lead, no more. We knew he wouldn't talk — men who talk in your business invariably die before the night is out — so we let him be while I established myself on the waterfront as a drunken junky engineer. When the time was right the Djakarta cops picked him up and held him incommunicado and there I was waiting, the ideal substitute. Your pal Benabi wasn't even smart, far less brilliant.'

'You can't prove a thing. You can't — '

'We can prove everything. Ten years in Hong Kong and I talk Cantonese as well as you do. Better — you Armenians have difficulty with some vowel sounds. Yes, Armenian, Mr Wong — we know all about you. I heard you give the numbers to your go-down — they will correspond exactly to the numbers on the crate.'

'It's only your word — '

'The police had your line tapped, for good measure.'

'Tapping is inadmissible evidence — '

'And,' MacHinery went on remorselessly, 'every word of our conversation is preserved for posterity. The bottom half of that Gladstone bag of mine — a very efficient recorder, I can tell you. Further, the marks you made on that manifest will match the crate numbers removed from your go-down. Graphite tests will show that it was the pencil on that table that made the marks and fingerprint tests will show that you were the last to handle that pencil. That signet seal shared by yourself and Benabi — any court in the East will recognize the significance of that. That crate there, lying on your own floor, with dope in every cauliflower head — how are you going to explain that away? Good lord, man, there's even enough evidence in the bathroom to have you put away for life — a hypo full of heroin with your fingerprints all over the glass cylinder.'

'You're a junky yourself.' Ah Wong's voice was a dazed whisper. 'Narcotics addicts can't testify. I–I know all the symptoms. You — '

'Symptoms?' MacHinery smiled. 'I've already stopped shivering. No bother. And as soon as I remove the three jerseys under my shirt I'll stop sweating, too. Pale face makeup. Junky's eyes — didn't you know red peppers give exactly the same effect?'

'But your arms,' Ah Wong said desperately. 'Look at them. Riddled with punctures. How — '

'Sharpened knitting needle sterilized and dipped in aniline dye. Don't ever try it, Mr Wong. It's most damnably painful.'

LANCASTRIA

The Tillyer family had come a long, long way. Not so long, perhaps, in terms of actual miles — a moderately fast car could have covered the distance between the Fairey Aviation factory In Belgium, where Clifford Tillyer had worked as a technician, and the port of St Nazaire, in a day. But the Tillyers hadn't travelled across the smiling peacetime plains of Northern France in a fast and comfortable car: they had travelled, instead, across the war-torn chaos of a newly capitulated country, a country where demoralization, for the moment, was as complete as the defeat: and they had travelled either in overcrowded, haphazardly-routed refugee trains that sometimes covered only a few miles a day, or in the backs of trucks that crawled slowly along roads packed with thousands of refugees fleeing to the south.