“Sure.”
“No problems of resemblance? Look-alike, that sort of thing?”
“Skinny and blonde is enough. They’ll find out soon enough that she’s not the real Sally Hyde, but that’s what I want. I just want the name floated around. I want someone to say: this woman might or might not be Sally Hyde, and if she is not, then what the hell goes on? A little confusion always seems to confuse, doesn’t it?”
He nodded absently. There was something on his mind. I called for more drinks to fill in the gap; and when the waiter had brought us Courvoisier in the thinnest snifters I had ever seen and had gone back into the shadows, Harry took a deep breath and said: “All right, I think I’ve got just the gal for you.”
“Ah. Do tell.”
“She’s twenty-seven, sophisticated, attractive in a dangerous sort of way, and thoroughly armor-plated. You may have quite a job handling her, but for the right kind of money—it would have to be quite a lot.”
“No problem. Promise her the sky if she wants it.”
“And how much can I tell her?”
“Everything I’ve told you. The more the word gets around of what I’m up to, the better I like it.” I looked at my watch. “I’m due at the airport at midnight; is there time to go and see her now?”
Harry smiled and shook his head. “Where she lives, no visitors this time of night. She’s in jail.”
“Oh? On what sort of charge?”
He laughed. “Here, we call it pandering. You probably call it white slavery, or something equally dramatic.”
“I didn’t think that was very illegal in the Orient.”
Harry said rather pompously: “British territory, old boy. Anglo-Saxon morality, all that bloody nonsense. I’ll have her on the ferry tomorrow afternoon. Fair shakes?”
“Fair shakes, whatever that means. What’s her name?”
“Bettina. Bettina Harkan.”
“Nationality?”
He grimaced. “None. One of the unfortunates. No known nationality. Born in Canton of Armenian parents. Her home is Hong Kong, and she lived a long time in the States. A long time.”
“Ah, then her English is at least good.”
“Hardly, old boy. An American accent as ripe as your own.”
I sighed. That’s the trouble with the English. Surround them with the panoply of empire, Sam Brown belts, and khaki shorts, and they can’t remember that they lost that war.
He said: “She’s an attractive sort of woman, Bettina, if a little highly polished. But she’s been tied up with almost every racket in these waters at one time or another, and we’ve constantly warned her to keep out of trouble or get picked up. But we’ve never really been able to pin anything on her until recently.” He said, suddenly suspicious: “I’ll get her back when all this is over, won’t I? She’s got a three-year sentence to serve.”
“Suppose we talk about that when the time comes?”
He hesitated, a trifle worried, and then he said cheerfully: “Oh well, it’s the first favor you ever asked of me. All right, when the time comes. Just remember that a Queen’s pardon isn’t normally given for service to individuals. I’ll be sticking my neck out a long way.”
I said gently: “That’s what necks are for, Harry.”
We had some more Courvoisier together and talked about old times, and then I asked him: “What do you know about Carlo Bonelli?”
He shrugged. “No businessman who makes Bonelli’s kind of money in this part of the world can really be very honest. Fireworks factories, gambling houses, a bit of smuggling on the side. Nothing really too bad, though he’s inclined to be non grata here too. Just inclined a little, we’ve never really tried to bar him from the colony.”
“Can I trust him?”
“No.”
“Well, that sounds hopeful. My life seems to be in his hands at the moment.”
Harry said earnestly: “Well, watch him carefully, Cain. Very carefully.”
“And if you had to look for Alexander Ming, where would you start?”
Harry said piously: “I’d resign my commission and go and breed chickens somewhere. Never did want to finish my life floating face down in the harbor. But for what it’s worth, Ming comes and goes with the most absolute impunity. Hong Kong, Macao, Istanbul, San Diego. Nobody ever knows where he is until he’s not there anymore. There’s a rumor around that he is in Macao at this moment, but that probably means he’s gone already, if he really was there. He has an uncanny knack of just dropping out of sight.”
“The masterly art of the sudden disappearance?”
“Yes. And then, unexpectedly, he turns up again from nowhere, just when we’ve decided he’s back in the States or somewhere.”
“Doesn’t that presuppose a hideout close by?”
Harry shrugged. “Of course. One of the junks in Macao harbor, probably. Or even in Red China, who knows? But there’s some backing this time for the rumor. That he’s in Macao, I mean.”
“Oh?”
“The word is that the outflow of prepared heroin is somehow getting much heavier.”
“Just recently?”
