It is a street of go-downs, of warehouses, of broken down stores and battered fences and discarded rubbish. At dark, the workers go back to their wives and their children and their gambling, and there are only the huge scavenger cats to give the blind alley a breath of life. And these are not cats as you and I know them; they are huge, and scraggy, and appallingly savage. During the day, no one sees them, because they’re down in the sewers looking for the rats that are almost as big as they are, but at night they come out and scour the slum streets for a change of diet. They are well fed but always, it seems, on the verge of starvation; it seems there just isn’t enough food lying around to feed their vicious, demanding tempers. You can hear them snarling and fighting, and the sounds are the sounds of the jungle.
And vet, less than a hundred yards away, on the other side of the barrier that the buildings are, the nighttime noises of the Avenida Almeida Ribeiro had scarcely started; it was only nine o’clock. The tourists were always told here: Keep to the brightly lit streets. Stay away from the dark alleys; and the warnings were justified. Even the police would not cross that barrier without first calling, on their helmet-radios, for backup support.
In these dark side-streets, the drunks were rolled, the unwary were slugged; and death was much a part of the colony’s daily ritual as life itself.
We moved silently together, Mai and I, moving quite slowly, staring into the darkness and listening for any alien sound. A cat snarled and spat, a great behemoth of a beast with shaggy, clotted fur and rib-cage bones, drawing back on its hind legs and baring its white teeth, ready to pounce on me like a tiger. I kicked out at it with my foot, and it seized my shoe and bit hard, then turned and scampered away.
Mai said: “There is someone ahead of us.”
Her sight in the dark was incredible. All I could see was a shadow in the gutter fifty feet ahead. We moved closer to the stone wall and crept on. There was a red glow over our heads, a glow from the lights of the main street; we could hear the traffic over there. But here, all was pitch black, and silent, and smelly. There were cobbles under our feet, and they were wet with running garbage. The shadow in the gutter moved, and we both froze. I took Mai’s arm, pulled her silently behind me, and moved on a few paces; the shadow keeled over and snored; it was a half-naked drunk from one of the ships, and someone had taken his clothes. I hissed a signal to Mai, and she rejoined me; I heard the safety-catch of her little Walther go back on.
And then, as I turned to her, there was a flurry of violent movement; and there was just time enough for me to know that I should not have turned my back on a seeming drunk. A small, lightweight bundle of savagery crushed onto my face, an astonishingly soft bundle that wasn’t like a weapon at all. Something ripped sharply through the shoulder of my jacket, and claws dug into my flesh, and white teeth were tearing at the bag of wet, sour-smelling grain I was carrying, the grain from Bonelli’s distillery. A starving cat. The claws ripped my clothes as I hurled it away from me, and it snarled and screamed with a most un-feline noise. I took another look at the drunk; he hadn’t moved.
A match flared, and we moved into a dark corner and watched as a beggar settled into the stinking corner that was his home, lighting a joss-stick to keep the night-devils away with the scent of the fragrant, clay-smoldering incense.
We found the barrel and the pipe Bonelli had told us about, and the pipe was comfortingly strong as I tugged at it. Mai said, whispering: “Me first.” I shook my head in the darkness, and she insisted: “There’ll be no danger at the top—unless the fastenings are not strong enough.” She was already climbing before I could argue.
I stood there and watched her silhouette against the warm, red glow of the sky as she negotiated the spiked iron-grille that jutted out from the wall around the pipe. She swung over it lightly and easily, like an acrobat swinging her fragile body out and up and over. She whistled, and I followed her up there, climbing hand over hand and ripping my trousers on a spike as I passed the grille; it wasn’t very difficult. We could see the lights of the avenida on the other side of the building throwing up their bright reflections, red and white and blue and amber and green.
A tile rattled as I moved my weight across it, and I felt that Mai, beside me now, had frozen at the slight sound. We waited for a raucous sound of the geese down there below us, but nothing came, and in a moment I moved on and found the skylight. It was locked, and I peered through the greasy glass to try and find the bell that Bonelli had said was there; I could see nothing.
Over to the left was the air vent, a tube of galvanized iron canted at an angle of thirty degrees; it was six inches or so across and still emitted the foul, daytime stenches of the unwashed bodies who worked below. I untied the neck of the canvas bag and stuck my fingers into the uninviting mess to stir it around and make it friable, and then dribbled it slowly, infinitely slowly, down through the tube, I put my ear to it and listened for a long, long time, then dribbled more of the sickening mash down there. I listened again and heard a solitary squawk; there was no anger in it, no panic even, just a faint, inquiring sound of curious interest. I fancied I could even hear the shuffle of webbed feet on the concrete floor, I dribbled the rest of the grain down, checked my watch, and whispered: “Now, we wait.”
Mai nodded in the faint glow and pulled my arm to- wards a solid protuberance that might have been an old stanchion of iron set in the rubble walls to hold them together and prevent their toppling in a typhoon. I unwrapped the rope from around my waist and fastened one end to the protuberance and gave it a heavy tug to make sure it was safe.
Mai whispered: “How long?”
I have figures at my disposal for almost everything, but not, unhappily, concerning the time it takes for a goose to get incapably drunk on sour-mash grain; I thought about it for a while, wondering about the metabolism of geese, and decided it was a question of likelihoods again. I whispered: “We’ll give them twenty minutes.”
We lay down on the hard tiles by the side and stared up at the sky in the cold night air. Mai looked at me somberly and said softly; “She might be on the Tang-si in the harbor after all.”
“No. It’s not likely.”
“But possible.”
“No, not even possible. They knew that you’d come to me, and they couldn’t know, I hope, that I’d have access to a crooked policeman. So, his story is more likely to be true than the one you were given. They’re waiting for me on the junk, and Bettina’s down there in the cellar.”
“You sound very sure.” Her voice was troubled.
I said: “Don’t blame yourself, Mai. It was bound to happen, one way or another. You couldn’t have stopped it.”
“I should have stopped it. That’s what I was there for.”
“Ssshhh...”
There was a scuffing sound at the edge of the roof, and then, the most God-awful scream; another pair of those damn cats. We watched them at work for a moment, and then the male, satisfied, leaped lightly away and left the female there, preening herself in the darkness.
Mai leaned in towards me and put a hand on my chest, saying nothing, but just lying there silently beside me, her body very close. Her dark, slanting eyes were on my face, and when I looked at her, she put her head on my shoulder and moved a trifle closer. In a little while, smelling her perfume and knowing that this was a good time for cats but not for men, I checked my watch again and said, very quietly: “Time now.”
Three men in the cellar, Melindo had said, and I guessed there’d be a watchman too on the main floor, though, in keeping with the habit of the place, he would probably be sleeping and relying on his geese to wake him if an intruder called.
I strapped some masking tape to the pane of the skylight and cut it out with a glass cutter, then removed it carefully, leaving a hole big enough to reach through and grope around for the bell. I found its clapper and unhooked it, then unlocked the panel and opened it up. I waited a long while, just in case the sudden draft down there might cause concern, and then I dropped the rope down into the void, signaled Mai to follow me, and went down it quickly, landing silently on the dark floor twenty feet below. Mai was beside me almost before I got my bearings.
There was almost no light at all, and we waited a long time to get our eyes accustomed to it. But at last we could make out the shadows of crates piled one on top of the other, and a pile of heavy lumber of the type they use for the spars of junks. We moved among them, searching; we could hear some quite stentorian breathing somewhere, the heavy, rasping breathing of a man with asthma. Guided by the sound and by the smell of a burning joss-stick, we found a glimmer of light in an angle formed by some boxes; and there he was, the watchman, lying curled up on some old sacks, his mouth wide open and a dribble of saliva on his chin.
By the light of his little burner—a clay statue of a seated bodhisattva in which pounded clay mixed with dried verbena was smoldering—I watched him for a while to make sure that the sleep was real.
It was time to find out a little bit more about my companion and her legendary abilities. I whispered to her; my mouth very close to her ear: “Can you put him to sleep, harmlessly? An old man...Don’t hurt him.” She nodded.
We both crouched down beside him then, one on either side, and I watched as her fingers played, light as feathers, with the auricular and the occipital nerves, one thumb touching the posterior scapular and the other applying light pressure to the nerve that leads to the trapezium; not the combination I would have chosen myself, but adequate for an old man whose arteries had probably hardened. He stirred once—he wouldn’t have done that if she’d used the posterior thoracic as well, but I suppose that her hands were not big enough for the proper reach—and then his old eyes opened briefly as though there were just one split second of consciousness in which he knew what was happening and was powerless to do anything about it; and then, suddenly, he stiffened with a jerky, spasmodic movement, and was out like a light. I felt his pulse, which was moving fast, and knew that he’d be all right.
There was a slight, indefinite sound over to our left, on the other side of the crates that had formed the old man’s bedroom. Mai slipped away while I moved in the other direction, both of us reaching cover in the flash of an eye; and then I heard the unlikely sound of her well-stifled giggle. I went over silently to warn her, and found her looking down on the ghostlike bodies of the two geese; one of them was snoring, and the other, lying on its side in a most unlikely posture, was staring at her with a solitary, unblinking eye; the eye closed as I moved in, and all was quiet. We crossed together to the cellar door.
Now, I knew, the difficulties would start.
I oiled the huge lock from the tiny vial I carried, and then oiled the heavy hinges as well. I waited a few seconds, then went to work on the lock with the pick Bonelli had given me. The sound of the tumblers dropping into place seemed thunderous, and Mai drew a quick breath as the last one fell into position. She looked a warning at me, and I nodded and put my ear to the door; there was no sound on the other side, and my common sense told me that the sound had really been quite small, but magnified by our own sense of danger. I gave the hinges a few more squirts of oil for good measure, and then swung the heavy door open.
The warmth that came up from down there told me what I wanted to know; there were living people there—that much was certain. I could smell the scent of their bodies, I could smell, too, the rather gaudy perfume that Bettina had been using too much, and I was glad now of her extravagance with it. And there was the faintest mutter of voices. I pulled out my Luger and signaled to Mai to back me up; she nodded.
I keyed up every sense in the silence. The Chinese say we smell horrible; I wondered if their keen noses could catch the intrusion of underarm deodorants. Down the steps I moved, broken stone steps—no timbers, thank God!—counting them as I went. Nine, not ten or twelve as Bonelli had suggested; I checked carefully for two or three more, but there were none. Ahead of me, there was a stack of sixteen-by-sixteen teakwood beams that reached almost to the ceiling—several thousand dollars’ worth of exquisitely grained hardwood that was as tough as steel and heavy as lead and as smooth as silk.
I was in the shadow of an arched embrasure now, a brick projection over my head; I examined the brickwork well, for this was where someone should have been, commanding a good view of the cellar and its entrance; nobody; carelessness.
I listened. The voices came again—low, indistinct, but a dialect with the intonation of the North. I moved forward, inch by inch, and the movement brought into sight three heavy-set Chinese in black pajamas. They were sitting at a rickety table and staring at the cards in front of them; I couldn’t see what game they were playing, but then one of them threw down his cards and said: “Djinn.”
I stepped out quickly, my gun very ready, and said in Mandarin: “Nobody moves, not a movement of any kind.” The man who was facing me flickered his eyes and looked at me. His hand, reaching out for the money, froze; he was the one who had called gin.
And then, suddenly, one of the two men whose backs were to me swung round and dropped and flew almost horizontally across the ground towards me, coming for my ankles in a movement so fast that I just couldn’t believe it. He was heading straight for me and—to hell with the gun pointing now at the top of his head—diving for my legs with his arms both raised and ready. It was one of the Wuh-keis who had jumped me on the wharf, the third of the little execution party.
