“Why, the one who just flew out of Saigon with another nice big deposit for his bank account at the Hongkong and Shanghai,” I said. “The one you met with this afternoon in the office of the late Mr. Meyer. Surely you know the guy: he’s little, and he has this funny bullet head and little Clark Gable mustache. He runs around in a chauffeured Rolls Silver Cloud, and he sells Long Pot heroin, and he dabbles in a few other business ventures—” here I took a breath and started really winging it — “one of which is about to end in the conclusion of a satisfactory agreement between your... associates... and his organization.”
It sure sounded nice coming out that way, I had to admit to myself. I also had to admit that I hardly had the foggiest notion of what I was talking about.
He studied me silently as the other guy drove the car onto the ferry. When we stopped, the boat was rocking gently under us; the straits were feeling the evening tide. “Most interesting,” he said. “You speak, for instance, of me as though I were dead.”
“No,” I said. “I speak of Meyer as though he were dead. Somebody — and I do wish we could drop the guessing games — bumped him off in Saigon. And left an interesting calling card. Precisely why you’re impersonating him remains to be seen. Does the General know about the impersonation? Or are you playing games with him the way you’re playing games with me? Because if you’re crossing him and he finds out about it, I wouldn’t want to be you. Remember the tiger cages? That was what the little guy and his friends used to use for trustees. You wouldn’t want to see what they did to the real hardcases.”
“More and more interesting,” he said. “Well, all in good time. You will learn a little more about me, I will learn a little more about you. And then, perhaps, we will conclude our little tour.”
“Yeah,” I said. “With a little walk off a pier down Aberdeen way. I hear the fish are hungry around here. That’s why there aren’t any seagulls in Hong Kong. The fish don’t leave anything for them to eat.” I was just volleying, keeping the ball in the air. One thing I knew, and that was that before he bumped me off he wanted to find out what the General knew about me. That was okay with me; I wanted to know what the General knew about me too. After she’d made her little decision, back in the plane, I wasn’t sure which side Phuong was on. Her own, most likely. I didn’t envy her that insecure life of hers.
I sighed, thinking about that. If you got to thinking of it that way, you had to admit that the one guy she hadn’t seen fit to trust — well, for more than a couple of blocks’ flight through Saigon, anyhow — was me. It didn’t exactly make me feel like the Rock of Gibraltar. I sighed again and sat back in the big leather seat, enjoying the view.
These guys traveled first class. Whatever else they may have been, they were professionals — although at what trade remained to be seen. This wasn’t any maiden trip out onto the thoroughly risky waters of international dirty deeds of whatever kind. No. These boys had been everywhere and done everything in their racket twice and had been bored both times. Everything was going so smoothly, as a matter of fact, that I was tempted — just once — to stick my head out the car window and screech like a hoot-owl, just to see what they’d do. I would have bet they’d had a contingency plan to cover that, too. What’s more, I would have bet they’d already used it at least once.
The real thing that stopped me from doing that — or anything comparably far-out — was mainly curiosity. I wanted to find out everything I could about this can of worms I’d opened by mistake back in Saigon. I had a feeling I’d blundered into something very, very big — and something that was only partly related to the mission I’d been sent out on.
Whatever that was.
Moreover, I was still hanging tenaciously to the proposition that had kept me alive all these years, despite odds that were guaranteed to short out your pocket calculator: that I could do all those other things and still come out alive, regardless of who they sent in there against me. And when you come down to it, maybe one of the prerequisites for the job is the ability to hold an opinion like that, regardless of the odds, and make it come true.
That was one of the things that tended to tell me these two guys were in pretty much the same racket as I was. They knew that and they were using it. They knew I wouldn’t holler until we’d had our little confrontation, and they were so confident of this that “Meyer” even put away the Webley and relaxed back against the seat as the ferry pulled into the slip with a series of frontal and lateral bumps and the driver started the engine of the Jag again.
At that point, I almost jumped him. But he knew I wouldn’t. He laced his fingers over one knee and looked at me with an expression I’d have called wooden in anyone else, but which passed, in his limited vocabulary of expressions, for a mocking smile. “Patience, Mr. Cowles,” he said in that peculiar accent of his. He really was a most amazing linguist. I get by around the world, but I have to work at it. This guy probably picked up languages the way you’d catch a cold. The accent had been serviceable in the three languages I’d heard him speak so far — and I hadn’t heard him speak Hebrew yet. “Patience,” he said again. “We’re almost there.”
The car ferry drops you off on Hong Kong Island in the middle of the old Wanchai quarter, the part the maps call Victoria Central District. You’re at the foot of Connaught Road Central; you turn past the fire brigade’s HQ, you wind through a few narrow streets where the doubledecker trams don’t go, where the only signs not in Chinese are the odd Gulf Oil signs, where it gets harder and harder with every passing block to get a straight answer out of anybody unless your Cantonese is fluent and your currency available for dispensation. It’s not far off the main track, but it’s a different world. Kowloon is full of gaudy massage parlors and bars and whorehouses of one kind or another, but they’re strictly tourist stuff. The Oriental businessman in Hong Kong for a weekend heads for the Island, where the action is just as rough (and sometimes twice as kinky) and much more discreet. Fredericks told me you could still hire an old-fashioned Shanghai flowerboat down by Causeway Bay, with a modest curtain between you and the pilot, and dally your way past all the floating teahouses and musicians’ rafts to your decadent heart’s content. Moonlight on the Bay, the soft chunk of paddles, the sibilant lap of the waves on the side of your sampan... well, Fred was a romantic, under that oaken British exterior.
Unfortunately, Wanchai can also be a tough part of town particularly if you’re not among friends. And I wasn’t. It wasn’t any scented sampan we were heading for; the Jag pulled into a big, drab warehouse on one of the more poorly lit side-streets.
I’d been hoping for a breather, but I was disappointed. The big Silver Cloud was there inside the double door, waiting for us. The heavy-set Oriental I’d seen before saw us through, then moved to shut the big doors behind us. This left the warehouse in the dim light cast by a single overhead bulb hanging above, and slightly to one side of, the Rolls. Our driver pulled the Jag smoothly up to a point just outside the circle of light the bulb cast on the concrete floor.
“Splendid,” my seatmate said. “Mr. Cowles? End of the line, I think. You’ll get out now, there’s a good fellow.”
I eased my way out, loosening Hugo in his scabbard as I did. Any ideas I might have had of bolting just then were forestalled when the driver, gun in hand, stepped up just in time to hand me out.
I was standing there, blinking in the half-light, when the Oriental silently moved forward to open the door of the Rolls. The passenger, still in shadow, hesitated; then he climbed slowly out, just as I became aware of “Meyer” coming up behind me.