As it turned out, it didn’t take a key. It was one of those locks that account for most of the rip-offs in America. I forced it with a credit card, stuck through the jamb and maneuvered up behind the bolt — one of those diagonal-cross-section things. I took one look to the right and left of me, and then slipped inside.
The light in there was dim. I picked my pocket flash out and ran it around the room. There wouldn’t be much left out in the open, I was sure. I sat down first at a secretary’s desk, then at what appeared to be Meyer’s, and rifled the both of them before coming to the conclusion that somebody had done a remarkably efficient job of cleaning up before me. Then I got up and headed for the file cabinet in the corner.
Okay. There you have me, frozen forever in a nice candid shot: both hands on the filing cabinet, the drawer half open and a legal-size file halfway out and open for my inspection. Only my head is turned back toward the door behind me, and there’s a stupid, and justifiably annoyed, expression on my face as all the lights go on and “Mr. Meyer” — I’d have known him in the densest crowd by now — steps through the door with a big, nasty-looking .357 Webley in one hand and gives me this microscopic smile:
“Oh,” he says. “Cheerio. It’ll be Mr... ah... Cowles, I think? A few hours early for our appointment? Splendid. Hands high, please. Atop the cabinet. There. Splendid. Yes. Yes, I’ll take that, please: nasty thing. German. None too accurate either, I’ll wager. Well, Mr. Cowles, I’m in luck. I’d so looked forward to showing you the Island, and here it appears I’ll be able to do so a day early. Now I won’t take no for an answer. You will be my guest. There’s a good fellow. My chauffeur’s just downstairs, waiting to take us to the ferry...”
Chapter Six
Rudyard Kipling once wrote of the Orient that the dawn comes up like thunder there. Well, I’ve watched the sun rise all over the Far East and actually, it’s the other way around. It’s the moon that comes up like thunder in Hong Kong, particularly down by the tip of the Kowloon Peninsula, in the elegant shopping area that radiates out from Nathan Road. One minute it’s afternoon, the next it’s night, and when the lights of the city start winking on, one by one, you can sometimes get to wondering what you ever needed sunlight for. As long as you stay on the main arteries, that is.
I could see it all out the window as “Meyer” got on the phone again, the gun still in his hand. He spoke in rapid idiomatic French to a flunky on the other end, then in German to the flunky’s boss — and I had a good guess who that might be. I was just thinking about the best way to jump him and go for his gun when the other guy came in. He took over with the gun-waving then, pulling a big deadly .44 Magnum out of his belt and waving me over to a chair in the middle of the room.
I sighed, settled down, favoring the ribs, and gave the two of them the once-over.
The guy on the phone was medium-sized, running perhaps ten pounds lighter than my own 180 pounds, and built with an athlete’s big chest and good wind. The face was vaguely Mediterranean: French-Algerian, perhaps? Greek-Egyptian? The polyglot communities of the urban Levant are so genetically mixed that the generalizations don’t come easy. The eyes, strangely, were blue: icy blue. The face didn’t run to strong expressions either way. There was a tiny scar under one eye; otherwise the face, like the hands, was well kept and well preserved. I can’t describe his ears for you because nobody’s ever worked up a precise lingo for describing them — but I could draw them, with ninety percent accuracy, and I could pick him out of a lineup on ears alone. People in my racket don’t make IDs on faces. Anyone can change a face. Things like ears, though, or the bone structure of hands are the best giveaways. Ask any cop.
The other bird was bigger and tougher and might have been the first man’s brother. The eyes were just as blue, the hair just as straight and brown — but the shoulders were a full inch or so wider, and the upper arms filled his coat sleeves all the way out, and I hoped that I would never have to tackle him. One bear hug from those knotted arms on my already busted ribs would make a sound like a garbage truck running over a Tinkertoy set, and it wouldn’t make me feel very good either. No: sock him and run... or, perhaps, give Hugo some exercise...
He finally hung up. Something fishy was going on, he’d been saying, and he wanted to get to the bottom of it all. I sighed.
“Well,” he said, holstering the Webley inside his jacket — tailored, I noticed now, to hold the big gun — and turning to me. “Time for our... ah, travelogue, Mr. Cowles. You will be so kind?” He motioned me up.
I got up with a groan. The chest didn’t hurt until I moved, but then it didn’t much matter what direction. “Fine. Where are we going?”
“Wanchai first, I think. We have an appointment there — ah, yes, I see you were following the telephone conversation — at somewhere between six and six-thirty. Someone who claims he knows you. I’m sure the two of you will have... well, something or other to talk about.”
“I’m sure we will,” I said. I kept my eyes on his face, trying to find some sort of national — perhaps ethnic — handle to grab him by. “That’s funny,” I said at last, pausing at the door and looking back at him again.
“Yes?”
“I was going to say, That’s funny; you don’t look Jewish.”
I watched his face for a reaction. And I got one, all right. Nothing fancy. A momentary twitch of one eyebrow. The mouth didn’t move at all. But I knew I had him pegged. I think that the only people in the world who don’t understand Jewish humor are the Israelis, who find it boring and irrelevant.
That wasn’t the main thing I’d noticed, though. The thing that had tipped me had jumped out and called for my attention when I was making my little ear-and-hand inspection and trying to draw mental pictures of the two that I’d be able to reproduce later when I had pencil, paper, and half an hour to spare.
The tattoo wasn’t a big one, and it was in a place where it was easy to hide; the webbing between thumb and forefinger, where merely half-closing the hand would cover it altogether. But it showed — on both of them — when they pointed guns at me, and I’d remembered it.
It was a tiny, but quite distinct, Star of David.
The big one drove; the other — “Meyer” — sat in the back of the black Jag with me, the Webley once again pointed at my ribs. The route was one of the more scenic ones, around the tip of the peninsula to Canton Road and up past the Kowloon wharves and godowns and the big Ocean Terminal to the Jordan Road car ferry. On the way, we passed the old railroad terminal, where a man, if he had the dough, the time, the visas, and the brass, could book passage all the way to Europe via the Kowloon-Canton Railway, the Trans-Siberian Railroad, and connecting lines. The view of the Island was gorgeous as usual, even from a few feet above sea level.
I was beginning to dislike this business of playing things according to the other guy’s scenario. This way, he’d wind up finding out pretty much what he wanted to know about me — and, unless I changed tacks, I wouldn’t be finding out anything about him at all. I checked my watch, nice and ostentatiously. “Hey,” I said. “The ferry’s behind schedule. You’re going to be late for your appointment with the General.”
He looked at his own wrist, frowned, and said, “That’s odd. I wonder what...” Then it dawned on him, and he did a delayed take and turned those icy eyes on me, the cold glare in them visible in the boat lights out the window. “What General?” he said. His mouth was an expressionless slit. He had the kind of face where no-expression-at-all is a bad expression and means trouble coming up — lots of it.