"That doesn't worry me."
She was frightened now, underneath the perfection of the pale porcelain skin, underneath the elegance of the softly articulated French. There was nothing I could do about that either: it wasn't my fault that I'd walked in here at gunpoint tonight.
"It would be dangerous for me," she said, "to tell you anything."
"I think you're running with the wrong set, Li-fei." I chose the Parisian idiom of the milieu and she looked suddenly bitter, her head going down.
"Yes. There are things happening that I don't — that I don't understand. But I understand that my brother is dead."
I listened to every word and the way she said it; I watched her cinnamon eyes and the way they changed when she spoke of her brother and when she spoke of other things, the ones she didn't understand; I listened and watched for the slightest sign that she wasn't in point of fact Soong Li-fei, an official interpreter for Korean Airlines, but an exquisite and deadly emissary of the Tung Triad who'd been sent here to trap me with the performance of an accomplished actress. There was no sign; but my mind was clouded with fatigue and the dizzying certainty of the impossible: that I was blown and within the next hour would have to go to ground and somehow stay alive.
I'd tested her, but it had been crude: when I'd put the loaded gun back into her hands the safety-catch had been on and the whole of my body's musculature had been tensed and prepared to hit the thing away again if she changed her mind and tried for a second time. I'd have to test her again when the chance came, before I could be sure. I asked her now:
"Did someone tell you I'd killed your brother? I mean did they give me a name?"
"No."
"What did they say? How did they put it?" I gave an edge to my tone and she heard it, and looked trapped.
"You are nothing to do with this," she said in sudden despair. "It was a mistake — you are not the man I'm looking for. Please let me go, and I promise you'll never see me again."
Choice: threaten her or make use of her. I could threaten to get the police here and accuse her of attempted murder if she didn't tell me what I wanted to know; but she might still decide it was safer to keep silent, whatever I chose to do: I had no means of knowing how unyielding she might be, how enduring, at the dictates of the torment that was driving her; the shock of her brother's death would have unbalanced her for a time.
"All right," I told her, "it was a mistake. Go home and give that gun back to your friend, and forget about vengeance; it could get you life imprisonment."
She closed her eyes for a moment in relief and then stood back as I opened the door for her, giving me a formal little bow and saying something softly in Chinese and then in French. "I thank you for your great kindness. May good fortune always be with you."
I went down the stairs with her past the great brass gong and left her at the entrance doors, which were still open to the warmth of the night. She walked down the steps into the windy street, and didn't turn her head.
Here in the old quarter of the city the streets were narrow, sometimes no wider than alleyways, and Soong Li-fei slipped through them as if carried along on the warm rain-smelling gusts of the monsoon, the dark silk of her dress shimmering in the lamplight as she vanished at a corner and reappeared as I turned after her; she had looked over her shoulder twice since I'd begun following her, but she couldn't have seen me: I'd been working my way- from cover to cover through the shadows of the fluttering fan-palms and past bicycles knocked over by the wind; the few people I passed walked with their heads down against the gusts, hurrying, some of them dodging into the small restaurants that were scenting the night air with the smell of kimchi and sinsollo.
"Hey, mister — you wanna girl?"
"No."
"You wanna boy?"
"No."
The wind sent another bicycle over with a clang from its bell. She had told me at least this much truth: she didn't live far from my hotel; she was already slowing her pace at the end of a narrow street of shop-houses and turning to go into a doorway; then a man came from the shadows and stopped her.
Contact.
He was asking her something and she was replying, explaining, shaking her head. He didn't think she was a prostitute: in this quarter she was too pretty and too elegant. I watched them from the distance of a stone's throw, keeping in the cover of shadow.
This was a contact, the first I'd made in security since I'd left London, the end of a thread that could lead me through the night and the wind to Tung Kuo-feng. But it wasn't going to be easy: there was the length of the street between the contact and me, and he was close to a turning; there would have to be some luck.
Soong Li-fei was already going into the doorway, leaving the man standing there alone; then he moved, and so did I, at first walking fast and keeping to cover and then breaking into a soft run as he vanished beyond the corner. I ran hard now, taking the risk that he'd hear me above the noise of the wind's rattling among the shutters and along the tiled roofs, but there was no sign of him as I swung into the alley at the intersection; it ran for fifty yards and opened into a small square filled with trees and parked horseless carts and a few benches. There was limitless cover for him here but I didn't think he'd used it; I didn't think he'd seen or heard me; I thought he'd simply moved into a doorway and gone inside, into one of a dozen buildings and with no clue as to which.
I walked twice from the square to the intersection and back, desperate for the sign of a half-open doorway, a silhouette against a light, the sound of a voice; but he'd gone. There was no point in my staying; if I saw him now I wouldn't recognise him for certain as the man I'd seen talking to Li-fei; in the distance and the lamplight I'd seen nothing more of him than that he was young bareheaded Asian in dark slacks and a white open-necked shirt.
I went back to the hotel the way I'd come, checking now and then to make sure I was alone. The big carved entrance doors at the top of the steps were still wide open, but there was no clerk at the desk. I looked for a copy of the Korean Herald in English behind the counter but found nothing; I'd get one tomorrow; I wanted to see the report of Soong Yongshen's death on the steps of the temple in Pekin before I signalled Ferris with information.
The time by the American Express clock on the wall was just gone eleven as I went up the stairs, my shoes quiet on the marble. Rock music was coming faintly from somewhere, and a woman's liquid laughter; a door banged in the street outside, or it was the wind shaking something; a sound was coming from the big brass gong on the wall, so low that it was hardly more than a vibration as it trapped the other sounds and held them like an unceasing echo.
Sleep. It was all I wanted now. She'd been going to kill me but it hadn't happened, and I was still here. Someone had made contact with her, someone who could have led me to Tung, but I'd lost him; so be it. Tomorrow was another day and with luck I'd outlive this one. But I'd get no sleep until I'd gone to ground; it was just the thought of it that slowed me a little as I climbed to the second floor, my senses lulled by the strange murmuration of the gong. The fatigue curve is not constant; it dips faster as time goes on. But I wasn't totally relaxed; one must never be totally relaxed in a red sector, if life is still held to be sweet.
Light was filtering through the grilled windows of the stairwell, throwing the restless shadows of the fan-palms in the square outside; faintly through the coloured glass I could hear them rustling; my own shadow came for a moment against the wall as I turned on the curving stairs.
The woman had stopped laughing. There was still within me the degree of alertness necessary for the memory to remain aware that she had been laughing before, and now had stopped. I was also noting other things, as the impressions of light and sound and touch went shuttling secretly across and across the undefined borderline between the conscious and the subconscious, arousing the interplay between the primitive and the modern brain that would turn incoming data into decision when the need came.