“Sally Hyde’s ex-husband.” He was watching me, waiting. I said: “In that cellar, there were some suitcases with his name on them, and a note had been scrawled on a slip of paper wedged under one of the handles: Deliver to the Blue Orchid. A junk presumably?”

“No.” Bonelli shook his head: “The Blue Orchid’s a fisherman’s restaurant in the sampan harbor. There are a couple of hundred sampans there, all wedged in together; and among them, there is an old barge that serves as a restaurant, a club, a hideout—the Blue Orchid.”

“It doesn’t sound like a very salubrious place for a man like Wentworth to be staying at.”

“If it really is the same Wentworth. Surely, a common enough name in your country?”

“Yes, it is. But how many Wentworths do you suppose there are in Macao at the same time? With expensive luggage, the kind of luggage Sally’s ex-husband would have? And here at the same time she is here, hiding out somewhere? And tied up, one way or another, with Ming? Too many coincidences, Bonelli. It’s the same man. And it answers a lot of questions, doesn’t it?”

He stroked his chin delicately with one thin finger, an affected gesture, and looked at me thoughtfully and said:

“If Wentworth is working with Ming, could it possibly be that Sally Hyde got to Ming through him?”

“Precisely what I was wondering. But there’s one thing...”

“Only one?”

“Markle Hyde told me a little about Wentworth...Not a great deal, but nothing that suggested he was Ming’s sort of caliber, There’s a glimmering there of light; a bit vague at the moment, but—have you ever been to The Blue Orchid?”

He raised an elegant shoulder. “To a place like that? Hardly.”

I went back to see Bettina. She was covered now with a silk-and-down comforter, a gold and red dragon sprawled across her body. Without makeup, her face shining with oil and seeming paler than it was, she was really quite lovely. Mai was pouring her some green Japanese tea. I sat carefully on the edge of the bed and said: “I’ve got to be sure about this American, Bettina. I believe I can find him, but I don’t want to get the wrong man.”

She stared at me for a while and said at last: “Very slight, not much more than...what, a hundred and fifty or sixty pounds. Dark hair brushed across his forehead, a bit long. Brown eyes, with thick eyebrows, sort of level, not curved. And a bit of a queen,” I tried hard not to look at Bonelli when she said that, but she noticed the slightest flicker of his mouth and said with a snort, looking up at Bonelli with almost a smile on her face: “Oh, not a flaming, bloody pansy like you, just a touch of it.” Bonelli was shocked.

I sighed and said to him: “I’ll have to go to The Blue Orchid, of course.”

I knew the sampan harbor; some years ago I’d met a man there who made a respectable living by fishing corpses out of the water every morning and selling off the bodies to the hospital across the bay on the Chinese mainland.

I said: “It won’t be too hard to get on board, but it won’t be so easy to get off again. Any suggestions?”

Bonelli said promptly: “Yes. Keep away from it altogether.”

“I’ve got to find out if Wentworth is really there. And also to make sure he is the man who...who did that to Bettina.”

“Then winkle him out.”

“That won’t be easy, either.”

“Not easy, but safer. Meet him on your ground, not his. I tell you, friend, if all the people who want you dead could choose a place to find you fortuitously...that place would be the sampan harbor. You wouldn’t get within fifty feet of the barge.”

“Maybe. But once he knows I’m interested in him, knows that I’m even aware of his existence—no, he’s not about to be winkled out of a safe hiding place.”

He was pacing up and down, tall and slender and willowy, the white cuffs showing a broad swath under the sleeves of his black silk jacket. He took a tiny rose from his buttonhole—a violet-scented White Banksia—and sniffed it for a while, turning it round and round between his thumb and forefinger; he began to stroke the side of his Jong nose with it, delicately, like a man touching his mistress’s breast with a peacock feather; I wondered if he got as much of a kick out of it. He turned to me at last and said:

“Why? That’s the question, isn’t it? Why should Sally’s ex-husband suddenly turn up out of the blue?”

“There’s another why. Is this why Sally came here? Was she really looking for him, and not for Alexander Ming?”

“Or, is he looking for her too?”

I shrugged. “There’s only one way to find out, isn’t there?”

He said urgently: “Don’t try it, Cain. You’ll never get off that barge alive. You’ll never even get on it.”

“We’ll see.” Mai was looking at me strangely, a questioning sort of look. I said to her: “By myself, this time.”

She said coolly: “I will stay with Bettina, Mr. Cain.”

“Good.” I said to Bonelli: “She can stay here? She’ll be safe?”

“She can stay, and she’ll be safe. But I think you’re a fool.” He sighed. “I’ll have Captain Ericeira and a couple of his men right behind you all the way.”

I checked my watch; it wasn’t even midnight yet.

I said: “If I’m not back here by three o’clock, can you get Melindo to raid The Blue Orchid? And find me?”

“Or find your body. Yes, I can do that. Try and hold out till two o’clock, will you?”

“Two o’clock?”

“The numbers game. My number comes up then, and if that should be the hour you die...I stand to make quite a lot of money, Cain.”

Mai was looking at me with that somber melancholy look in her eyes again. I smiled at her and leaned over to touch Bettina’s cheek with the tip of my fingers. Her eyes were closed, and she opened them and looked at me unsmiling, and I said: “I’ll be back soon. With the man you want to meet.”

Bonelli was looking down at her, wondering how he could help and knowing there was nothing he could do to ease the pain. And then he did something that endeared him to me forever; he said suddenly: “Just a moment.”

He left the room without another word, and when he came back after a few moments, he was carrying another of his roses; I wondered just where he was growing them. It was a brilliant apricot color with a golden base to the heavily veined petals, and the scent of it was sweet and strong. He held it out to Bettina and said, almost shyly:

“For you, Bettina. You know what kind of a rose it is?”

She didn’t want to show that she too was touched. She shook her head, and Bonelli looked at me and smiled delightedly, and I told her:

“One of the best roses Meilland ever brought out. In 1953, I think. A cross between Peace, and Demain, and Mme. Joseph Perraud. It’s called Bettina.”

I could feel them all watching me as I moved away. I looked back and saw Bettina smiling now.

CHAPTER 8

The water was warm, but it was cooler than the air above it. And it stank. Its top three or four inches seemed to be composed entirely of week-old garbage that was too rotten even for the fish of the harbor to devour.

The sampans were crowded so closely together that there was scarcely room to move. There were a few stretches of open water not more than thirty or forty feet across and then more sampans lashed together and open water again, and another cluster. The shallow-draft boats were joined by ropes of crudely woven fiber and swung from the four-pointed anchors that kept them permanently in position. These were not boats for traveling; they were the homes of people too poor to find a space to live on the land.

Two acres of land, they say, is all that a Chinese needs to support a family of five or six; but land was scarce in the overcrowded colony, and most of these families were refugees from the mainland; and they were ever watchful for the Cantonese secret police, who came over once in a while to drag or beat and carry back home some helpless mainlander whose criticism of his old homeland was too vociferous. They disappeared at an alarming rate, the refugees; but nobody seriously worried about this; there were too many people in the colony anyway, and there were always new arrivals to fill up the already overcrowded sampans again. Life went on, with the children playing on the narrow decks. They wore gourds tied round their waists—it was part of their everyday clothing—as a protection against drowning should one of them fall in; these water people were almost all non-swimmers.

A Yangtze boat, Bonelli had said, would be my guide. I swam around in circles for a while, looking for the odd-shaped craft, and found it at last, its high teak prow rising up out of the water at an angle of twenty degrees off vertical, its sides twisted, one concave, the other convex, as though a giant hand had taken the finished boat and twisted it like a croissant. More than eight hundred years ago, a mariner had built the first complex Yangtze boat with mathematical precision, an extraordinary shape that, somehow, kept its course in the swift and tortuous river; and ever since, the Yangtze folk had built their boats this way, blindly following their ancestor’s lead. Here, among the tightly packed sampans with their rush shelters, it was a landmark that could not easily be missed. I swam around it, guided by the lights that were bright behind me, the lights of the town where the rich folk lived.

Over the stink of the garbage, I caught the pungent smell of wood-smoke, of fish frying in oil; I heard a child calling for its mother, and the reed-like intonation in reply. Over to my left, an old, old woman was punting her craft toward me, and there was a thick-set man in the prow, crouched on his heels and trailing a string in the water; I trod water for a moment, my head among the rotting watermelon rinds, waiting until he had passed.