“Where’s his notebook computer?” I asked.
We couldn’t find it, or the briefcase he’d carried it in, or any notes that may have been in the briefcase.
“Let’s hope he kept everything on that machine encrypted,” Jorge said.
We left the wallet where we found it, but took the cell phone and one of Jesse’s business cards. When we slipped out of the room, the entertainment director almost fainted with relief.
“Go ahead and call the cops,” I told him.
“Macanese police.” His eyes were hollow with tragedy. “You have no idea.”
With Sancho guarding my back, I went on the fantail and called every number that Jesse had set on his speed dial. For the most part I got answering machines of one sort or another, and any actual human beings answered in an irate brand of Mandarin that discouraged communication from the start. I tried to inquire about “Jiu Lu,” but I must not have got any of the tones right, because no one understood me.
In the morning I would call again, with the entertainment director as interpreter.
*
Most of the ship’s passengers disembarked that morning, all those who weren’t making the round trip to Shanghai and who preferred to remain in the languid, mildly debauched atmosphere of Macau, or who were heading by hydrofoil ferry back to the hustle of Hong Kong.
Whatever the Macanese police were doing by way of investigation, they weren’t interfering with the wheels of commerce as represented by the cruise ship company.
“There goes Jesse’s killer,” Jorge said glumly as, from the rail, we watched the boats fill with cheerful, sunburned tourists.
Rosalinda, who gloomed at my other elbow, flicked her cigar ash into the breeze. “This afternoon the boats will come back with his replacement.”
“Unless the killer is a Hopping Vampire who’s sleeping in his coffin at this very moment,” Sancho added from over my shoulder.
Most of those who came aboard that afternoon were people who had come to Macau on Tang Dynasty’s previous journey and were returning home by way of Shanghai. Only two actually made Macau their point of initial departure, and when we got ahold of a passenger manifest we made these the objects of particular scrutiny. One of them was an elderly man who trailed an oxygen bottle behind him on a cart.
He went straight to the casino and began to bet heavily on roulette while lighting up one cigarette after another, which certainly explained the oxygen bottle. The other was his nurse.
Given that I hailed from a family of Aymara street musicians who also formed a private intelligence- gathering agency, at the moment operating in tandem with a water ballet company aboard a passenger ship disguised as a Tang Dynasty palace, I was not about to discount the less unlikely possibility that the old gambler and his nurse were a pair of assassins, so I slipped the entertainment director a few hundred Hong Kong dollars for the key to the old man’s room and gave it a most professional going-over.
No throat-ripping gear was discovered, or anything the least bit suspicious.
Sancho and a couple of cousins also tossed the Hopping Vampires’ cabin, and they found throat-ripping gear aplenty, but nothing that couldn’t be explained with reference to their profession.
The entertainment director had got through to the people on Jesse’s speed dial who he believed were Jesse’s employers, but he was Cantonese and his Mandarin was very shaky, and he wasn’t certain.
Because of the smallish crowd on board, and consequent low demand, we were scheduled for only one show that night, and I confess that it wasn’t one of our best. The band as a whole lacked spirit. Our dejection transmitted itself to our music. Even the presence of our mascot Oharu in his poncho and derby hat failed to put heart into us.
After the show, Jorge and Sancho carried Oharu off to the Western Paradise Bar while I visited the entertainment director and again borrowed his passkey.
I found a yellow Post-It note and wrote a single word on it with a crimson pen.
And when Oharu stepped into his cabin with Jorge and Sancho behind him, I lunged from concealment and slapped the note on his forehead, just as the Taoist Sorcerer slapped his yellow paper magic on the foreheads of the Bloodthirsty Hopping Vampires in their stage show.
Oharu looked at me in dazed surprise.
“What’s this about?” he asked.
“Read it,” I said.
He peeled the note off his forehead and read the single scarlet word, “Confess.”
“You should have got off at Macau,” I told him. “You would have got clean away.” I held up the bloodstained ninja gear I’d found in his room, the leather palm with the lethal steel hooks that could tear open a throat with a single slap.
At that point Oharu fought, of course, but his responses were disorganized by the alcohol that Sancho and Jorge had been pouring down his throat for the last hour, and of course Sancho was a burly slab of solid muscle and started the fight by socking Oharu in the kidney with a fist as hard as hickory. It wasn’t very long before we had Oharu stretched out on his bed with his arms and legs duct-taped together and I was booting up Jesse’s computer, which I had found in Oharu’s desk drawer.
“Our next stop,” I told Oharu, “is Shanghai, and Shanghai’s in the People’s Republic, not a Special Administrative Region like Hong Kong or Macau. If we turn you in, you get shot in the back of the head and your family gets a bill for the bullet.”
Oharu spat out a blood clot and spoke through mashed lips. “I’ll tell them all about you.”
I shrugged. “So? Nothing we’re doing is illegal. All we’re doing is recovering an item on behalf of its legitimate owners.”
“That’s debatable. I could still make trouble for you.”
I considered this. “If that’s the case,” I said, “maybe we ought not to keep you around long enough to say anything to the authorities.”
He glowered. “You wouldn’t dare kill me.”
Again I shrugged. “We won’t kill you. It’ll be the ocean that’ll do that.”
Sancho slapped a hand over Oharu’s mouth just as he inhaled to scream. In short order we taped his mouth shut, hoisted him up, and thrust him through his cabin porthole. There he dangled, with Sancho hanging onto one ankle and Jorge the other.
I took off his right shoe and sock.
“Clench your toes three times,” I said, “when you want to talk. But make it quick, because you’re overweight and Jorge is getting tired.”
Jorge deliberately slackened his grip and let Oharu drop a few centimeters. There was a muffled yelp and a thrash of feet.
The toe-clenching came a few seconds later. We hauled Oharu in and dropped him onto his chair.
“So tell us,” I began, “who hired you.”
A Mr. Lau, Oharu said, of Shining Spectrum Industries in the Guangzhong Economic Region. He went on to explain that Dr. Jiu Lu, or Jesse as we’d known him, had worked for Shining Spectrum before jumping suddenly to Pacific Century. Magnum had suspected Jesse of taking Shining Spectrum assets with him, in the form of a project he was developing, and made an effort to get it back.
“This got Jiu scared,” Oharu said, “so he tried to smuggle the project out of Guangzhou to Taiwan, but his ship went down in a storm. You know everything else.”
“Not quite,” I said. “What is the project?”
“I wasn’t told that,” Oharu said. “All I know is that it’s biotechnology and that it’s illegal, otherwise Jui wouldn’t have had to smuggle it out.”
A warning hummed in my nerves. “Some kind of weapon?”
Oharu hesitated. “I don’t think so,” he said. “This operation doesn’t have that kind of vibe.”
I took that under advisement while I paged through the directory on Jesse’s computer. Everything was in Chinese, and I didn’t have a clue. I tried opening some of the files, but the computer demanded a password.