And one of Melindo’s little rackets was the procuring of tailed pigs for exchange on the Macao side of the frontier.
I had chosen the word “venal” well; and Bonelli had equally well chosen the man. Venal was right. Venality was heavily scored in every line on his weather-beaten, used-up face. He was a tall, stooped man with a shock of black hair, and sallow complexion, and a sense of withdrawal about him, as though he felt the need for curling up inside himself and springing out when the occasion arose. His gray-blue uniform was soiled and frayed, and his small house on the slope of the hill was overrun with children, ten, twelve, thirteen of them. He looked them over and said to me broodingly: “How can a man stay honest with so many mouths to feed?”
I got the impression that he had long ago given up the battle and was letting things come his way as best they might. Later, Bonelli told me that he was paying Melindo a reasonable salary to keep him informed of any police activity that might, conceivably, interest him one way or another.
We sat in the small living room, in which the dominant piece of furniture was a huge, old-fashioned bed, while his wife made tea for us in the outside kitchen. She was Chinese, the wife: a squat, prematurely aged woman with a shiny, leathery face and a permanent smile that seemed to tolerate all the indignities that poverty could pile upon her. The whitewashed walls were scribbled over with ill-spelt words in childish Portuguese and neatly formed Chinese characters, and told of everything from nursery thymes to telephone numbers to simple mathematical sums. A tiny stream was running past the open doorway, and there were bright red poppies and wisps of pale blue lobelia growing on its bank.
I said: “Well, now’s your chance, Melindo. You can work for one of the richest men in the world. No need to know just who he is, but somebody kidnaped a woman in broad daylight out of the Penha Palacio. And I want to know where she’s being held. I want to know fast. It was some time this afternoon. Suite a hundred and two on the third floor. It overlooks the old wharfs, and the only way she could have been removed is out the window and down the fire-escape. That means that somebody must have seen what was going on. You don’t lug an unconscious woman down three flights of fire-escape without somebody or other seeing it. The word will get around, and for my money the whole underworld will know all about it and know that it has to keep its mouth shut. But for your money, they can damn well open up.” I said: “You can name your own price, Melindo. And I’ll pay more for speed.”
Bonelli said smoothly: “An easy twenty dollars, Melindo. Twenty dollars American.”
I threw him a look and said: “Let’s think in terms of hundreds, Melindo. With a big bonus for speed. And another big bonus because I know who took her.”
Melindo’s black eyes were quite without expression. He said: “You better tell me, Senhor, just who it was, if he deserves such consideration.”
I saw Bonelli silently hoping I’d hold my tongue. I didn’t. I said: “Alexander Ming, one of his men.”
Melindo’s hands were twitching slightly. His wife came in and put down the tea things and poured from a chipped and dirty pot; she dropped a few violet petals onto the hot tea, then sat in a corner with two young children on her lap. She began to feed one of them, pulling out a huge breast and suckling it, smiling and cooing gently.
I said again: “Name your own price, Melindo.”
He looked up and said softly: “Can I trust to your own generosity?”
With all those kids around, a childhood story came back to me, of a boy in a candy store who was told by the owner to help himself, go on, take a big handful. The boy refused, and the generous owner reached into the barrel and came out with a handful. Later, the boy said gleefully to his pal, explaining the strategy: You see, his hands are bigger than mine.
I said, looking at the soiled and ragged children: “Yes, you can, and my hands are indeed bigger than yours.”
He stood up then, his tea unfinished, and said: “Tell me, Senhor, where I can find you in an hour. Will you wait here, perhaps?”
I looked to Bonelli, and he nodded, and I said: “Come to the fan-tan house, The House of the Seven Hills. I’ll be there. And if you need men to help you...put them on the payroll.”
He left then, a sad and crafty man heading for riches and mortal danger, climbing over the garden fence and taking a short cut down the hill to the bay where the sampans were. We watched him go and saw Ericeira standing in the shade of a banyan tree, watching and waiting. And when we walked along the hot macadam surface towards the town, I knew that the skipper was still there behind us, keeping out of sight and remaining watchful. His competence was a great comfort to me.
Below us, the city was a panorama of brilliant colors, the pastel shades of its houses brightened by the gaudy flags and the glaring signs of the stores. There were bamboos there, and vines and flame-trees, with hibiscus and bananas, great rhododendrons and azaleas, and bright patches of green bracken. The sounds of the city came up to us here as we wound our way down to meet them.
Across the blue water, the ferry was puffing towards Hong Kong, a white tail of water behind it. There must have been a hundred junks in the tiny harbor. And across the bay, the hills of China were blue in the evening light. I looked at my watch; it was half-past five.
Bonelli was moving delicately, like a woman, down the steep slope, his body swaying gently. He seemed strangely out of place here, his elegance exaggerated and unseemly. He stopped abruptly, looked down on the town, and said broodingly: “How long will it take them to find out that she’s not Sally Hyde?”
I said: “They’ll know that right away. What they won’t know is why she’s posing as Sally Hyde.”
“She’ll tell them, of course.”
“At once, I hope. My hope is that they won’t believe her.”
He frowned, puzzled, and I said: “It might take some time before she convinces them that I’m the only one they have to worry about.”
He said: “Some time...and some energy, and some pain.”
“Yes.” The thought was enough to make me shiver. I remembered how Bettina had stroked her breasts and told me: They stick slivers of bamboo in you.
Bonelli said: “He can’t just let her go, you know that, don’t you?”
“He could, without any damage to himself. But I don’t suppose he will. A question of teaching me to mind my own business.”
“And you feel that Markle Hyde’s money can pay for all that woman’s agony?”
“No. I don’t.” I couldn’t help being short with him. He was drawing away from me because they’d acted faster than I’d expected. It was a mistake, and I was horribly aware of it. I said, excusing myself and not feeling at all comforted by my excuses: “I assumed that the word would have to be passed around for quite a while before anyone would rise to the bait. Instead, the real Sally Hyde made that one comment in the Essence of Heavenly Light, and that was enough. So when she apparently turned up a couple of days later, they moved in. That can only mean that the barman she spoke to had a direct line to Ming, it wasn’t just a fortuitous contact. And Sally Hyde must have known that. That’s why she spoke just once and then went smartly into hiding. The ball she started rolling moved faster than I thought it might.”
“And now?”
“Now we wait for Melindo.”
I filled in the time by taking Bonelli to the bar they called the Essence of Heavenly Light. It was hard to restrain my anger as I marched up to the barman; I wanted to kill him there and then, but instead I said to Bonelli: “Is this the man?”
He shook his head, “No, not he.”
It wasn’t worth asking where the man had gone that Sally had spoken to. He’d be well away from there by now, in one of the rabbit warrens of the city, or on a sampan in the harbor, or perhaps lying dead on its bottom.
We went back to the fan-tan house and waited. Melindo turned up an hour and a half later while we waited impatiently in the office. Waiting is always the hardest part, and I felt I wanted to get something, anything, in my fists and twist the life out of it. It was an ugly feeling. He showed no sign of fear, but there was a hesitancy about him which made me think he might not be of much further use. But he’d done well. He said, eyeing the bundle of bills I took out of my pocket:
“A woman from Hong Kong, Senhor, who is not what she pretends to be.”
So they knew already. I said: “Go on.”
“A chambermaid, a servant from the hotel put something in her whisky bottle while she was making up the beds, and a little while later two men went in through the fire-escape, just as you said, and took her down to the wharf. Another woman, a Chinese, was left behind unconscious.”
I said sharply: “And I want to know why they left her there.”
