‘I told you... I don’t know.’
Lepski got to his feet. He picked up his shield and put it in his wallet. He was now sure she did know who was after Baldy and this could come out only under an official interrogation. He was wasting time trying to get anything further out of her.
‘Okay, Mai, get your clothes on. We’re going to Headquarters.’
‘I told you, I don’t know! You can’t take me back!’
‘Don’t get excited,’ Lepski said. ‘You’ve got to come, baby. You’ve already talked too much. So get your clothes on. Don’t mind me. I’m a married man.’
Then two things happened almost at once. The door flung open and Mai screamed as she threw herself flat on the divan, burying her face in the cover as if trying to hide herself.
Lepski swung around.
A short, squat man, a white handkerchief masking his face, was already shooting. Lepski saw the gun flashes, saw Mai bounce high on the divan, saw blood spray the wall as bullets smashed into her head. Then he threw himself flat, clawing at his gun as the door slammed shut.
He was up again, gun in hand, racing for the door as feet pounded down the stairs.
He could hear Do-Do screaming and again the deafening bang of a gun. He reached the head of the stairs to find Do-Do’s vast body blocking the corridor. He took the flight in a leap, crashing onto the lower landing, jarring his bones, staggered, recovered himself as he heard the roar of a high powered car taking off.
By the time he had got onto the waterfront, the large, excited milling crowd made any attempt at pursuit impossible.
Chapter Six
As red streaks began to lighten the night sky, Harry Mitchell came cautiously out of his cabin. He had on swim trunks and was carrying Baldy Riccard’s suitcase. The only two things he had kept from the case was the Luger automatic pistol and the box of cartridges. These he had hidden under a loose board by his bed.
He stood in the doorway for a long moment. The time was 04.55. No lights showed. Nothing was to be heard except the rustling of palm leaves as the slight breeze stirred the hot air.
Satisfied he had the place to himself, he walked quickly and silently down to the beach and into the sea. He turned on his back, holding the suitcase on his chest, and with powerful leg movements, headed away from the shore. When he was above deep water, he twisted over, releasing the case. Then diving, he followed its slow descent until it settled on the ocean bed. He surfaced and peered down, but the suitcase was gone: only the inky water marked the spot where it was.
He swam slowly back to the beach, and as he began to walk across the sand to his cabin, he saw a light go up in Solo Dominico’s room.
He reached the cabin, shut himself in and dried himself off. Then he put on slacks, a short-sleeved shirt and rope soled shoes.
He had a little over twenty minutes before he had to join Solo. He sat on his bed and lit a cigarette. While he smoked, his mind went to the previous night. He felt hot blood move through his veins as he pictured again his explosive coupling with Nina. As a sexual experience, this had been unique. He thought of his dead wife, Joan, who had been afraid of sex, and with whom he finally was unable to live. The draft order, calling him to the Army, when he had almost made up his mind to leave her, had given him the welcomed excuse. So he had gone. He had realised when he got the news of her suicide that he had failed to conceal his eagerness to leave her. He hadn’t intentionally meant to hurt her, but because the two years he had lived with her had stifled him as nothing he could imagine could ever stifle a man, he had become indifferent to her feelings. If he had been more patient, he told himself, more understanding, if he had made an effort to help her, they might have ironed out their problems. Thinking about this and thinking honestly, he doubted it. Sex to him was the most natural thing: something to enjoy, not to brood about, not to make more important than anything else in his life. Sex was to have when the urge came and to wait for when the urge wasn’t there. Her complications and her fears had hurt him, then finally bored him.
There was a letter waiting for him when he left the ship at Saigon.
She said she was a mess. One of the things for which he had once loved her was her complete honesty. She said she should never have married, and she was sorry.
She concluded:
I guess I’m not the only woman who feels as I do, Harry. It’s not that I am incapable of loving a man — it’s the bed business I can’t go along with. I do love you... enough to give you your freedom. Be happy, Harry. Find some other girl who is not the mess I am. I am a mess... such a mess. I don’t want to go on. They say you come back again. With luck, I might have a second chance. It would be wonderful if we met again, after years and years, and I wasn’t the mess I am now, wouldn’t it?
He had a telegram from his father saying she had been found in the bath with her wrists slashed and he had better apply for compassionate leave and come home.
But there was a battle about to begin, and Harry didn’t apply for leave. He went into battle, depressed and shocked and guilt ridden. By the time the battle was over, after he had seen the dead and the wounded, after he had dropped out of the hot sky through a hail of machine gun bullets, after he had spent two weeks in a foxhole, hating himself for his own awful body smell and after he had killed four little yellow men, Joan’s suicide was no longer important.
More important to him had been Nhan, the Vietnamese girl whom he had discovered on a street corner, stirring a delicious smelling soup made in a battered can that had once held a gallon of sweet-sour cucumbers. The whiff of cooking had made him stop, and he had squatted by her side, accepting the bowl of soup she had offered, and they had talked.
Nhan spoke fair English. She wore her long, black hair in a pigtaiclass="underline" that told him she was a virgin: only married Vietnamese women wore their hair up.
He had been on leave for two weeks. Every morning around 11.00, he had arrived at the street corner to drink Nhan’s soup. Then one day, he discovered he was in love with her. Later, she told him she had fallen in love with him the moment she had seen him.
They had begun an association which was to Harry the fulfillment of a dream: love with no complications.
He stubbed out his cigarette, wincing as he thought of that day when he had come back to Saigon after four weeks in the bullet torn paddy field and was told Nhan was dead. A bomb, viciously tossed into the market, had killed ten Vietnamese, including Nhan, plastering their bodies against a wall in a messy horror that had to be hosed away by the fire brigade.
Harry rubbed his temples with his fingers. Now last night and the beginning of something new. This was his first encounter with a woman who felt about sex as he did: utterly uninhibited, using him to satisfy her sexual demands. Thinking about this, Harry decided it was what he needed. He was sick of complications: so sick of women who gave themselves to him only to involve him, to shackle him, to stifle him in their web of possessiveness.
Nina, with her sensual beauty, had been a devastating surprise of the unexpected. Now, she promised to give him what he had been seeking.
He remembered Randy’s warning: She’s for nobody, unless you want to tangle with Solo.
Solo didn’t worry him. He was sure that if it came to a real fight, he could take Solo, but that wasn’t the problem. Solo was Nina’s father.
He rubbed his temples, frowning. She had come to him. She had thrown herself at him. Could Solo complain? His chattel, she had said. What right had any father to regard his daughter as his chattel?
Complications... problems... complications... problems.