They could, as a matter of fact, still have it. It could be sitting up at Meyer’s office right now, in the tender care of the men who’d killed him. I had no illusions, after all, about who had answered the phone. The only other people with a good reason to answer for Meyer and lie to the callers would be the Hong Kong cops. And those hadn’t been Hong Kong cops. The accent had been all wrong. What remains of the British Empire still operates by the old rules and the wrong, unfashionable accent can still keep you out of the good civil service jobs anywhere. And, considering the average wage in Hong Kong, you’d have to call the detective squad a fairly cushy civil-service appointment. I wouldn’t be strolling into Meyer’s office during business hours with a smile on my face, and I wouldn’t be visiting at any time, night or day, without some nice lethal iron under my arm.
And, most decisively of all, I wouldn’t be keeping that date for eleven o’clock tea.
Having made up my mind, the smart thing to do was to see about getting a replacement for Wilhelmina. Thinking about it made me furious at myself for having lost the old girl — 9mm Lugers with all the original parts intact are hard to find on short notice.
My call didn’t take long to be answered “Fredericks here.”
“Fred? Nick Carter. I’m here minus an old friend. Wouldn’t happen to have any spare hardware around, would you?”
“Nice special this week, sir, on 16-inch naval guns. With every purchase you get a French 75, no obligation whatsoever.”
Fred and I had a couple of jobs together years back. He was a funny guy, a wit, sometimes rather ridiculous, but there when you needed him.
“Capital, dear fellow,” I said, “but getting one of them into my shoulder holster is sure to be bad for my bursitis.”
“Quite, sir. One 9mm Luger coming up. Pen?”
“Room three-oh-five.”
“Bully.”
“Smashing.”
“Toodle-oo?”
“Rather.”
He rang off. The British sense of humor either is, or isn’t, vastly underrated but say something nasty about Fred, and you’d have me to answer to.
Downstairs in the coffee shop I checked out the papers, trying to get some perspective on the past days’ events by reading the same stories, one right after the other, in the British-oriented South China Morning Post and the pro-American Hongkong Standard. After a half hour of global crisis I was happy to switch over to the funnies: the Standard is big on American comics.
When I returned to my room there was a quite serviceable-looking Luger sitting on the bed with a big red ribbon around it and two spare clips sitting beside it. The card just said “73’s” — radio-shack jabber for “Love and Kisses.” I picked up the rod and hefted it. It was nice, but it wasn’t mine. I shoved it into the shoulder holster; it fit like a fist in the eye, as the expression goes. Good old Fred: he didn’t mess around.
There just doesn’t seem to be a thing you can do for busted ribs. You can truss the person up and ask him not to go to gymnastics class, perhaps, and you can give him a little medication now and then and a lot of encouragement. But the fact remains that even your common garden-variety green stick fracture has a lot going against it. Every time you breathe deeply, you’re moving bone surfaces which ought to be fixed firmly in place, and you’re putting off your chances of having the fractures knit just a little bit longer.
Keeping this in mind, I decided to keep the athletics of the planned break-in down to the bare minimum. If possible, I’d dig into my rich assortment of keys — the ones my understanding tailor sews into my coat at the right places, and which make my suits hang so well — and simply pick the lock.
That’s what I was telling myself all the way up Nathan Road on my way to case the joint. I’d just stroll past the door and take a look at it, and then perhaps I’d stroll back around the rear fire escape and see what could be seen from there, and then when night fell, perhaps, I’d...
I was still thinking about all this, and not about much else, when, coming up the stairs, I just missed bumping into the phony Hermann Meyer face to face.
It wasn’t the only surprise the afternoon had in store for me.
The main staircase at 68–72 Nathan Road led up a narrow well, with every landing walled off by frosted glass, the kind they rarely put in office buildings any more. The frosting is translucent and borders on the transparent; if somebody’s standing next to the glass on the opposite side, you can make out how big he is, and what color suit he’s wearing, but you can’t see any facial details.
Not that I needed them. Even with the nondescript, every-day-Continental-tourist suit he had on I knew who he was even before I reached the landing. The door was slightly open; he held it that way with one hand on the handle, and he was talking to someone I couldn’t see, and the voice would have given him away all by itself. It had an odd quality about it which I’d be hard put to describe: a nasal thing, and a certain lack of depth. I could even recognize it speaking German:
“...Est is etwas besonderes. Ja, meinherr, ich glaube, ich glaube. Also... morgen um neun Uhr? Ja? sehr gut, sehr gut. Wiedersehen...”
The accent wasn’t that of a native speaker of German. It was being used as a sort of business lingua franca, and by an expert and practiced polyglot. But it was very definitely a second language.
The hand tightened on the door, prepared to swing it wide. I scurried up a few more steps, stopping above his landing at a blind spot, hoping for a few more words. But that apparently, was all; his guest was shooed out into the stairwell below me, and “Meyer” shut the glass door behind him. Curious, I stuck my head out into the stairwell again, hoping for a glimpse of his caller.
Then I looked again.
Then, while he was still on the stairs, I scuttled up to the next floor, burst through the glass door, and ran to the window that overlooked the street. If it was who I thought...
And damned if it wasn’t. The more I thought about the matter, the more I was coming to think I’d fallen into a streak of good luck, not bad, back in Saigon. I didn’t know just what it was that I’d stumbled into, but it was getting more interesting with every hour.
The visitor who’d been to see Meyer picked up his bodyguard (how could I have missed him? I must have walked right past him) at the door and walked halfway down the block. As he did, a big grey Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud moved smoothly up beside the pair of them and let them in.
The bodyguard was a thick-set, round-faced Oriental who gave the instant impression of great physical strength. I’d never seen him before.
The guy he’d been guarding was also somebody I’d never seen before — but there was no mistaking that erect military bearing, that spiky little mustache, that very un-Oriental bullet head atop that spindly Indo-Chinese frame. I’d seen him on television enough to recognize him in a moment. I also owed him for a plane ride, and he owed me a 9mm Luger automatic of great sentimental value. He was little Phuong’s “protector,” and I would have given a lot just then to know what he was doing in that building, talking with people he had no business knowing — or did he? I promised myself, right then, to come up with a lot of the answers before I left town.
“Meyer” finally left at a quarter after five. I took as few chances as possible, waiting to see him appear in the street below and then set out at a brisk pace down Nathan Road before I slipped down and opened that frosted door. Even then I took a leisurely stroll down the hall and back, satisfying myself that nobody had remained behind in the adjoining offices, before I zeroed in on the door of the late Mr. Meyer.