“Hey,” I said. “Do you think you should be sitting up so soon?”
“Oh, quite all right,” he said. “I just feel as though I had drunk a 55-gallon oil drum full of jungle juice and had the great Katzenjammer of the world to contend with. Tatiana, my dear: do you suppose I could have a bit of tea?”
“Oh, Will. Certainly. I’ll fix you some soup...”
“Yes, yes, that would be fine. Thank you. Anyhow, as I was saying, Nick, the action’s over here now. That’s the thing about Fiddler’s Green.”
“Fiddler’s Green?” I said.
“That’s the old name of Sailortown, in these shore cities. It’s where the action is... but it changes from time to time, as channels silt up and the turning basin changes, and ships are diverted to new areas of the harbor for docking and loading. The original Fiddler’s Green of Hong Kong — the place the city was named for — was Aberdeen, where the other big floating village is. The Cantonese name for Aberdeen is Heung Kong Tsai, or ‘small fragrant harbor.’ It gave its name, suitably mispronounced by the British, to the whole colony.”
“Then,” Tatiana said from the galley, “it moved to Wanchai. Many of the Caucasian sailors still hang out there, as the tourists tend to congregate in Tsim Sha Tsui.” I noticed she’d buttoned up the robe; somehow I felt better about that. Will went on:
“But with the Ocean Terminal’s completion in Kowloon — and, I suppose, with the additional flow of people through Kai Tak, and the gradual reclamation of more of the shoreline! — Kowloon has assumed greater importance. There was a time, not so long ago, when all deep-draft ships had to lie at anchor well out in the bay and get unloaded by cargo lighters. Now the important ones can deal with cargo at dockside, right here in Kowloon — a railhead, mind you.”
“And the unimportant ones? Or the ones which... the ones like our missing ship, with the arms cargo?”
“Ah,” he said. He’d regained at least part of the merry smile. “Now that sort of thing is why I moved to Yaumati, or, more correctly, Yau Ma Tei” — he gave the words a proper Chinese singsong that mocked the simplistic British pronunciation — “and installed myself on Temple Street.” The smile was knowing; the drawn face winked at me. “Cargo not bound for the main slips here is still unloaded well out into deep water, with the old tub lying at anchor. The lighters which serve this entire sector of the Bay all dock at Yau Ma Tei, in this picturesque shelter, when they are not working. Their captains and crews are my friends and neighbors.”
“Hey,” I said, “that means...”
“That means I may have a lead on where the arms shipment was unloaded before noon tomorrow, if I’m lucky. It means I am almost sure to have one by nightfall. The longshore workers are not easily fooled by falsified ships’ manifests, you know: they can’t read them in the first place. And there is no containerized service here. If crates of rifles came ashore here, they came ashore as crates of rifles, not as crates of oranges, and my friends will know precisely where they went.”
“Great,” I said. “And...”
“And if you’re interested, perhaps we can take ourselves a little stroll tomorrow night. And see what we can turn up. Who knows? By the time Tatiana’s second show is done we may have a lot more answers than we have now.”
“In the meantime, I wonder what I ought to do about those orders to phone in daily and keep in touch. I’ve stirred Basil up, but I’m damned if I want him in on this thing. No. The more I think about it the more I want to hand this all to him with a nice pink bow tied around it. Fait accompli...”
“My God,” Tatiana said, coming up with Will’s soup bowl and another pot of tea for the three of us. “You two are exactly alike. Stubborn as mules.”
“Comes with the job, my dear,” Will said with a tiny ritual bow before taking his first spoonful of soup. “Why, you should have seen some of the things David and I cooked up, working in Tokyo before the War, to keep a certain big cheese from taking credit for work we’d done.” He shook his head with a wry, faraway smile, remembering. He was himself again.
“Remind me,” I said, “to pump you about David Hawk.”
Will looked up, eyes wide. “He’d have me assassinated in some dingy alley. He would. And he wouldn’t pick any bumbling oafs to do it, either. He‘d send an expert, like you. And the man would come back with my scalp.”
“Not if you’re the man you were tonight.”
“Oh, I can still call upon the old stuff, now and then,” he admitted. He took a sip of the aromatic tea and smiled. “But then of course you also saw the other side of me tonight. No, Nick, I won’t last much longer. These things are coming thick and fast. I recovered quickly enough tonight, thanks to the fact that Tatiana acted as quickly as she did. But when it happens to me when she isn’t here... The last time, I was out of commission for four days. My dear friends in the Tanka community sent up the kind of prayers one sends up for the dead. They were more than half right, too. There is a part of me you can effectively write off as dead.”
“Will.” Tatiana’s hand, warm and tender, was on the old man’s knee. “No, please.”
“No, darling,” he said with a resigned — even serene — smile. “This thing Nick and I seem to have uncovered with your help, I have a feeling that it may well be the last job I get to do. If we do it well, why, nothing could make me happier than to go out, right here in Fiddler’s Green, still in the traces like an old drayhorse.” His hand covered hers; he smiled up at both of us. “And if we manage to finish the job to boot...”
The smile widened; the old merry gleam was back in it again.
Chapter Thirteen
We had ourselves a nightcap for good luck, and then Tatiana fixed me up a Japanese-style bed on the mats before the galley and kissed me good-night and went off to her own little cabin next to Will’s. After an hour or so had passed, in she padded, all warm and soft and naked and tousle-haired, and tucked herself in with me, and things got all chummy again. It’d been many lonely months since her last man and-she needed some reassuring the way women do. And of course I didn’t need much persuading. Bum ribs or no.
But then, after she’d slipped off into a tranquil sleep beside me, I found myself still too wound up, tired as I was, to get to sleep easily. I would have loved a smoke. I settled for lying back and letting the boat rock gently under me and for thinking about a lot of the events of the past two impossibly crowded days, and about a few questions I’d managed neither to answer nor to ignore.
For instance:
Three contenders for that shipment? Who were they all? I didn’t even know who the two Israelis were, except that they were a couple of cold, bloodthirsty bastards. But what were they up to? Were they renegades, perhaps, working for the OPEC people or one of the Arab Bloc nations? Free agents of some kind? I thought I knew better than to take them for official Israeli undercover types; I’d worked with some of them before, and this didn’t seem anything like their style, but I wasn’t sure.
Mercenaries? Not likely. Wild cards, emissaries of some foreign power we weren’t on to yet? Possibly. But without closing my mind on the matter, I was willing to guess that what we had here was the dedicated terrorist type, working for God alone knew who — but in it as much for the thrill of it all as anything. They seemed like paid professionals, after all... but then there was that strange business about the decoration of Meyer’s corpse.
But now: who were the other two contenders? I’d have to remember to pump Will in the morning. He’d mentioned the mysterious Mr. Komaroff, and it’d rung a bell with him. Who could that be? Someone attached quite recently to the local KGB unit — too recently to be on the lists posted in D.C.? I wouldn’t have put it past Will to be one up on David Hawk on nuts-and-bolts intelligence matters here, especially if Hawk got his information in large part from people like Basil Morse. I promised myself a snoop through Will’s mental dossier on the Russian gentleman in the morning.