I reached the second-floor passage, my shadow moving again on the wall, this time with the other shadow as if we were dancing; but we were not dancing; this was more serious, and as time slowed down I was aware only of the primitive animal-brain impressions: the flare of alarm along the nerves and their response; the swift rushing of adrenalin and the contraction of muscle; the locking of the breath as the strength of the organism gathered with the force of a storm and then broke loose. Nothing was thought out; everything was done in the light of ancient wisdom, tapping the store of racial memory wherein it is recorded, for all of us, what must be done to survive when there is no time to think.
Something snapped, possibly his arm. I remember very little about it, but that first sound was sharp. For an instant I felt his breath fanning against my face before the force in me, which was in essence the force of the living creature refusing to be killed, reached its peak and he span slowly with his back curving against the low balustrade and his arms flying upwards, the hands set in the shape of empty claws; then he was flung away from me and began going down as I watched, down the lamplit stairwell, his body turning slowly until one of his shoulders hit the huge brass gong and broke it away from the wall, so that it fell with him like a giant discus, striking the marble floor below and sounding his death knell with a clangour that shook the night.
9: Rain
"You mean you don't wanna lay me, honey?" The rain thundered on the roof.
"No. I just want to stay here for a day or two."
She gazed at me from beneath her heavy black eyelashes. "But not like a love nest?"
I'd found her in a doorway, sheltering from the torrential rain the monsoon had brought to the city half an hour ago. She was all I had, but I'd better not tell her that, because those bloody penny-pinching secretary birds perched at their desks in the Accounts Department in London would go into instant moult when they saw my expense sheet.
"Not like a love nest," I told her.
There was a kind of eldritch laughter somewhere in the remnants of my soul and trying to get out, because this was an ultra-priority mission with a crack London director in control and a first-class director in the field with instructions to give me all necessary facilities from signals-through-Embassy to shields and support, and here I was in a Seoul back street soaked to the skin and trying to get a fifty-year-old whore with green eyelids to take me in from the rain.
"Are you stoned, honey?"
We were standing in the passage between the front door and the stairs and the door was still open and I could hear the sirens in the distance as more patrol cars zeroed in on the Chonju Hotel a few streets away, where a man was lying with his back broken under the weight of a brass gong. They wouldn't be looking for me yet: Clive Ingram, travel agent, was still ostensibly staying at the hotel and his overnight bag was still in his locked room; he might easily be dining out or seeing a film or holed up at the Pacific Club with friends, and wouldn't be reported absent until the morning. No one had seen me leave; the lobby had been full of people with white faces looking down at the body under the gong, and I'd gone out through a fourth-floor window and across the rooftops.
"No," I told the woman, "I'm not stoned." I got out my wallet and peeled off some notes. "What about a hundred thousand a day, minimum three days?"
She looked at me hard. "Don't fool around, do you?" She took the notes and led me upstairs. "You running drugs, are you?"
"There are two conditions," I said, watching the calves of her stout veined legs as we climbed the stairs. "One is that as far as anyone else is concerned I'm not here. And while I'm here you don't see any clients."
"That's no sweat. But what did you do out there, buster? You in some kinda trouble?"
"Not if you don't talk."
She was panting as we reached the big low room at the top of the stairs. Stained cotton rugs, two sagging divans, a cheap bead curtain over a door in the corner, a big Japanese lantern and a dead palm in a chipped reproduction Ming container. The wall was papered with old posters: Sadie Nackenberg's In Town… Sadie Be Good… If You Knew Sadie Like I Know Sadie… New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans. And hundreds of photographs.
"Showbiz," she said with an echo of desperate pride, "that was me. Those were the good days, like Streisand says. Where are you from?"
"London. My name's Clive Ingram."
"Hi. I'm Sadie. Born in Memphis, US of A. Been in a fight?"
"There was an accident." There were still scratches on my face from Li-fei's nails, and I'd fallen nine or ten feet onto a pile of stacked crates at the back of the Chonju Hotel when the creeper had given way.
"You on the run, mister?"
"My wife doesn't understand me."
"Uh-huh. She throw you out the window?"
"Something like that."
"Goddamn women's lib, it takes the joy out of everything." But she was watching me critically, wondering how far a hundred thousand won would go if one day she had to bribe the police. "Listen, I don't want no trouble here. This is a respectable place. I mean I don't want your wife here. Or whoever. I have a businesslike understanding with the cops, you know what I mean?"
Water was dripping from my clothes as I stood checking the usual things: exits, windows, telephone, visual security from the street and other buildings; tonight it wasn't easy: all I could see from the windows was the rain through the flimsy curtain.
"If you don't talk to anyone," I told her, "you won't have any trouble." But I'd have to be careful when I went into the street; by the morning the Homicide Bureau would be pushing the street patrols for results. "Is there a shower?"
"You bet. You don't have any dry clothes?"
"I want to go straight to bed. They'll dry overnight."
"I got some hangers. Bathroom's through that curtain and turn left. Careful with the faucet, it needs fixing, you can get yourself drenched." She looked at my clothes and gave a husky laugh. "What am I saying?"
The telephone rang twice while I was in the bathroom and I listened to the soft rasp of her voice through the thin white plaster wall, that's okay, honey, I didn't expect you a night like this, I'll miss you too, and so forth. I dried myself on a towel marked Seoul-Hyatt and wrapped myself in the blanket she'd given me. The phone rang again and I listened again, in case. I wasn't safe here, but I wouldn't be any safer anywhere else. Spur might have put me up, but I wouldn't have been able to sleep with that bloody thing crawling all over the floor; as soon as they found my room still empty at the Chonju in the morning the police would be checking every hotel in the city; the Embassy would give me a bed, but you don't go to ground in your Embassy when you're blown: London is terribly fussy about abuse of diplomatic hospitality overseas and in any case the opposition would expect me to go there for refuge and I'd never get out again without walking into a trap.
"You can see the kinda clients I got," Sadie told me the third time the telephone rang. "They call me up when they can't make it. Most of them are in the US forces out here, some of them lieutenants and upwards, fresh outa West Point but underneath the war-paint just boys from back home, and you know something? They miss their mothers; half the guys that come here don't even ask me for sex, they just wanna talk to someone who can speak the Queen's goddamn English. Gee, honey, you look real cute in that poncho."