“Well—I’m damned!” said the sergeant. “That’s a very queer thing. Where the devil can it come from?”
CHAPTER 14
AT SAM PAK’S
The exterior of Sam Pak’s presented the appearance of a small and unattractive Chinese restaurant, where also provisions might be purchased and taken away.
As one entered, there was a counter on the left; the air was informed with an odour of Bombay duck and other Chinese delicacies. Tea might be purchased or drunk on the establishment, for there were two or three cane-topped tables on the other side of the shop. Although midnight had come and gone, lights were still burning in this shop, and a very fat woman of incalculable nationality was playing some variety of patience behind the counter, and smoking cigarettes continuously.
A curious, spicy smell, mingling with that of the provisions indicated that joss-sticks might be purchased here; rice, also, and various kinds of cold eatables, suitable for immediate consumption. Excepting the fat lady, there was no one else in the shop at the moment that Nayland Smith and Sterling entered.
They had been well schooled by a detective attached to K Division, and Nayland Smith, taking the lead, leaned on the counter, and:
“Cigarette please, Lucky Strike,” he said, his accent and intonation that of one not very familiar with English.
The lady behind the counter hesitated for a moment, and then put another card in place. Laying down those which she still held in her hand, she reached back, abstracted a packet of the desired cigarettes from a shelf, and tossed it down before the customer, without so much as glancing at him.
He laid a ten shilling note near to her hand.
“Damn thirsty,” he continued; “got a good drink?”
Piercing black eyes were raised instantaneously. Both men recognized that at that moment they were being submitted to a scrutiny as searching as an X ray examination. Those gimlet eyes were lowered again. The woman took the note, dropping it into a wooden bowl, and from the bowl extracted silver change.
“Who says you get a drink here?” she muttered.
“All sailors know Sam Pak keeps good beer,” Nayland Smith replied rapidly, in that Shanghai vernacular which sometimes passes for Chinese.
The woman smiled; her entire expression changed. She looked up, replying in English.
“How you know Chinese?” she asked.
“Live for ten years in Shanghai.”
“You want beer or whisky?”
“Beer.”
The woman pushed a little paper pad forward across the counter, and handed the speaker a pencil.
The paper was headed “Sailors’ Club.”
“Please, your name here,” she said; then, glancing at Sterling, “your friend too.”
Nayland Smith shrugged his shoulders as if helplessly, and then, laboriously traced out some characters to which no expert alive could possibly have attached any significance or meaning.
“Name of ship, please, here.”
A stubby finger, with a very dirty nail, rested upon a dotted line on the form. They had come prepared for this, and Nayland Smith wrote, using block letters in the wrong place “s.s. Pelican”.
“Now you, please.”
The beady eyes were fixed on Sterling. He wrote what looked like “John Lubba” and put two pencil dots under Smith’s inscription—s.s. Pelican.
“One shilling each,” said the woman, extracting a two shilling piece from the change and dropping the coin into the wooden bowl. “You members now for one week.”
She pressed a bell-button which stood upon the counter near to her hand, and a door at the end of the little shop was opened.
Nayland Smith, carefully counting his change, replaced it in a pocket of his greasy trousers, and turned as a very slender Chinese boy who walked with so marked a stoop as to appear deformed, came into the shop. He wore an ill-fitting suit and a red muffler, but, incongruously, a small, black Chinese cap upon his head. Perhaps, however, the most sin gular item of his make-up, and that which first struck one’s attention, was an eye-patch which obscured his left eye, lending his small, pale yellow features a strangely sinister appearance. To this odd figure the stout receptionist, tearing off the form from the top of the block, passed the credentials of the two new members, saying rapidly in Chinese:
“For the files.”
Sterling did not understand, but Nayland Smith did; and he was satisfied. They were accepted.
The one-eyed Chinese boy signalled that they should follow, and they proceeded along a short, narrow passage to the “club”. This was a fair-sized room, the atmosphere of which was all but suffocating. Ventilation there was none. A velvet-covered divan, indescribably greasy and filthy, ran along the whole of one wall, tables being set before it at intervals. At the farther end of the place was a bar, and, on the left, cheap wicker chairs and tables. The centre of the floor was moderately clear. It was uncarpeted and some pretence had been made, at some time, to polish the deal planks.
The company present was not without interest.
At a side table, two Chinamen were playing Mah jong, a game harmless enough, but interdict in Limehouse. At another table, a party, one of whom was a white girl, played fan-tan, also illegal in the Chinese quarter. The players spoke little, being absorbed in their games.
Although the fog had cleared from the streets of Limehouse and from the river, one might have supposed that this stuffy room had succeeded in capturing a considerable section of it. Visibility was poor. Tobacco smoke predominated in the “club”, but with it other scents were mingled. Half a dozen nondescripts were drinking and talking—mostly, they drank beer. One visitor seated alone at the end of the divan, elbows resting on the table before him, glared sullenly into space. He had a shock of dark hair, and his complexion was carrot-coloured. His prominent nose was particularly eloquent.
“Gimme another drink, Sam,” he kept demanding. “Gimme another drink, Sam.”
Save for two chairs set before the table upon which the thirsty man rested his elbows, there was no visible accommodation in the “Sailors’ Club”.
“Go ahead!” Nayland Smith whispered in Sterling’s ear. “Grab those two chairs.”
No one took the slightest notice of their entrance, and walking towards the bar, they seated themselves in the two vacant chairs. The one-eyed boy stood by for orders.
“Two pints beer,” said Nayland Smith in his queer broken English.
The boy went to the bar to give the order. And the barman to whom he gave it was quite easily the outstanding personality in the room. He was a small Chinaman, resembling nothing so much as an animated mummy. His chin nearly met his nose, for apparently he was quite toothless; and there was not an inch of his skin, nor a visible part of his bald head, which was not intricately traced with wrinkles. His eyes, owing to the puckering of the skin, were almost invisible, and his hands when they appeared from behind the counter resembled the talons of some large bird.
“Gimme another drink, Sam,” hiccupped the man on the divan. “Never mind those blokes—gi’ me another drink.”
One elbow slipped and his head fell right forward on the table.
“O.K. sir,” came a low whisper. “Detective-sergeant Murphy. Something funny going on here to-night, sir.”
Nayland Smith turned to the aged being behind the bar.
“Give him another drink,” he said rapidly in Chinese. “Charge me. He is better asleep than awake.”
The incredible features of Sam Pak drew themselves up in a ghastly contortion which may have been a smile.
“It is good,” he whistled in Chinese—”a sleeping fool may pass for a wise man.”