There was a shot from above and behind me as I leaped to one side; and he doubled up in mid-motion, sliding along the ground with his own momentum. And clutching at a shattered ankle, he doubled up and grimaced horribly, landing on his back with his leg in the air and his shoulders twisted. I repeated the order:
“I said, nobody moves. Nobody.”
Mai said clearly: “I have them.” Her voice came from the same source as the shot.
I said: “Keep your eyes on them. Don’t even blink.”
“Of course.”
Only then did I turn to look. Mai had found a perch on the brick abutment, and I wondered how in hell she could have gotten there so silently. I said to the men at the table: “Turn up the lamp, just a little.” One of them reached out, not taking his eyes off me, and worked the little wheel; the lamp flared, and I said sharply: “Careful!” I did not want a sudden burst of flame that would smother the wick and plunge us all into darkness. I said: “Put your hands on top of your heads and lie down on the floor.” Two of them did so, sullenly lying on their faces, and I sort of snorted and said nastily: “On your backs, who do you think you are dealing with, for God’s sake?” You can’t really say ‘for God’s sake’ in Mandarin, so I said sahu cha mising, which must have sounded funny to them. But they both rolled over into a position from which it is harder to rise quickly, and still speaking Mandarin so that they’d understand, I said to Mai: “These are the men who tried to kill me on the wharf. Don’t take a single eye off them.”
Mai did not answer. She merely laughed, and the laugh chilled me to the bone. The injured man, his face tight with pain, was still lying there at the edge of the circle of light, moaning and grimacing so much that his intention was quite evident. A shattered ankle with bits of a .32 in it hurts like hell; but a Wuh-kei? Groaning? He was a brave man, but not much of an actor, and the groan was as theatrical a bit of business as I’d ever seen; he was just trying to fool me and not doing very well at it.
I said: “You too, Charlie, get with your friends unless you want something you can really groan about.”
He glared at me, and for a moment I thought he was going to make trouble, but then he dragged himself across the floor to the others, the look of pain replaced by a stolid stoicism now that he knew it wouldn’t work. I took my finger off the Luger’s trigger and laid it along the guard, and began a search of the cellar.
It wasn’t much of a hunt. There were water barrels and cans of oil, and coils of rope, and a dozen or so boxes of explosives, and a great stack of colored paper lanterns, and fuse wire by the ton, and thirty or forty crates of fireworks. There was also a small stack of expensive, American-looking baggage, a trunk and three suitcases, with a rather interesting name and address on them, which I made a mental note of.
And then, I found Bettina.
She was moaning softly, lying between two huge piles of lumber. She had not been tied up; instead, there was a sickeningly heavy beam lying across her stomach, pinioning her to the ground like a squashed butterfly. It was nearly a foot and a half thick, and thirty feet or more long; one day it would be carved as the central pillar of a tien, the oblong, column-divided inner room of a temple; and when I stooped to lever it off her, I found it weighed almost more than I could lift. I heard her rasping sigh as the pressure came off her stomach, and she rolled over and vomited, half-conscious, half in a coma. Her face was mass of bloodied bruises, and her clothes were in shreds, no more than rags, her breasts bare in the dim light of the distant lamp. I ran my hands over them; the slivers of bamboo she had feared so much were not there, though there was blood everywhere.
But her eyes came to life, suddenly, and she gasped and turned away, and then she looked at me and said, half-choking: “You son of a bastard bitch, Cain, if you offer me more money now, I’ll kill you. So help me God, I’ll kill you.” She started swearing then, using every kind of obscenity I’d ever heard. It was a good sign; I knew she was going to be all right.
I said: “Mai’s here, we’ve come to take you home.”
Her voice was a hoarse whisper: “I know. I heard her. I knew she’d come.”
She pushed my arms away and staggered to her feet, and then fell back as I caught her; and the swearing went on, and I picked her up and carried her to the steps; and Mai said cheerfully: “Hi, Bettina,” as we passed her, not moving her eyes or the little Walther from the straight-ahead position.
I said to Mai: “I’ll get her onto the street and come back for you.”
She shook her head: “No. Take her out, I’ll follow when you’re clear.”
“All right.”
I went up the steps fast, crossed over the unconscious watchman, slid the bolts on the door, and went out onto the street. Behind me, I heard a recovering goose flapping its wings. He came towards me and staggered in the doorway, and then fell flat on his back, squawking. I stood there with Bettina in my arms. She was unconscious now that the fresh air had caught her, and I waited for Mai. In a few moments, there was the sound of a shot down there, followed by two more in rapid succession, and I put Bettina down on the pavement quickly and ran back into the building. And then, there was the most God-awful explosion and the sound of bursting crackers, and Mai came running through the cellar door, slamming it behind her and reaching for a timber to prop it shut with. I heaved a beam into position and said:
“All right? Did they give you trouble?”
She shook her head. “I just couldn’t resist the sight of all those explosives.”
“The Wuh-keis?”
She shrugged: “Here they come now.”
The sound was enough to tell us, and they were yelling their heads off on the other side of the door, hammering at it with their bodies. There was smoke coming out from under it, the choking blue smoke of cordite. The door shuddered and held, and I said:
“They’ll get through it in time, perhaps. Let’s get out of here.”
Mai was already running out onto the street to look for Bettina, and I dragged the unconscious watchman out, then, on an impulse, dragged the two geese out too—it wasn’t their fault they’d goofed—and saw Mai crouching down beside Bettina. Mai had Bettina’s head in her arms and was crooning to her like a nurse with a baby. I picked Bettina up, and ten minutes later we were back in Bonelli’s private quarters. Bettina was stretched out naked on the bed while two young Chinese girls and Mai sponged her cruelly treated body with warmed and perfumed oil. Her eyes were open now, and she looked at me and almost laughed, a short, angry, bitter laugh. She said chokingly: “Well, Cain, was it worth it?”
I said: “Yes, it was worth it. Are you going to be all right?”
She was recovering fast enough to snarl at me: “No thanks to you, yes, I’ll be all right.” And then she said heavily: “I told them about you, Cain. I had to.”
“I know. I wouldn’t have expected anything else.”
“As soon as they saw I wasn’t Sally Hyde...”
“I know. You want to go back to Hong Kong now? When you’re better?”
“Back to that God-awful jail? Not likely.”
“Her Majesty’s pardon is waiting there for you. They won’t jail you.”
She looked at me strangely, “A hell of a time to tell me that, Cain. You haven’t finished with me yet. I know that. So why do you tell me there’s nothing to keep me here now?”
“I felt I should.”
“Okay. But it’s my turn now.”
“Your turn?”
She gestured at her bruised body. “It’s not the first time I’ve been beat up, and it’s not likely to be the last, either. But I want my turn at them, Cain. I don’t care what it costs. With or without you, you bastard.” She turned painfully under the caressing hands of the girls and said somberly: “I’ve some payments of my own to make now.”
“Just one thing I want to know. Tell me about the man who...questioned you.”
