“An American. Small, dark, a good, Boston sort of voice, a man too goddamn fastidious to lay a hand on me. He left that to the others.”
“The others who were there when we broke in?”
“That’s them.” She said, whispering: “Don’t ever get yourself raped by a Chinese, Cain. They’re too cruel with it.”
I said harshly: “Give me a day or two and I’ll find your American for you. I’ll bring him to you.”
She turned away, disgusted. “You sure as hell don’t know much about Macao, Cain. You’ll never find him.”
“I know his name. I know where he lives.”
I could feel surprised Mai’s eyes on me, but I was watching Bettina. She held my look for a while, and then she turned away and began to cry. She said through her tears: “You bastard, do you have to watch me cry? Get out of here, for God’s sake!”
Through the open windows with their heavy, curlicued bars, the sound of a siren was loud and insistent. It was only a half-mile or so to the warehouse, and the flames were taking good hold now.
I went and stood on the tiny veranda and watched the glow of the fire; the firecrackers were all going off, and we could hear the shouts of people in the streets. I turned and found Bonelli beside me.
He said, watching: “My old warehouse—we had a fire there once when I owned it. An insurance fire. Only the rains came and put it out before it could really take hold. It cost me a lot of money, that rain storm.”
He was making conversation, aware that I felt for Bettina more deeply than he did and not wanting to tell me again of the warnings he had given me.
He said: “Some people can stand anything if they know that sooner or later it will end. But at the time, she could not have known you would save her. Even after the things they did to her down there.”
“And how can I make it up to her, can you tell me that?”
A bright red rocket went sailing across the sky, trailing a plume of white magnesium smoke, and burst into a million golden stars. I always liked a good firework display.
Bonelli was silent for a while, and then he repeated Bettina’s question: “Was it worth it, Cain? Was it really worth it?”
I perched myself on the iron railing and turned to look at him. I said: “Do you know a man named Wentworth?”
“No. But if he has any interests in this part of the world, I can soon find out about him. It shouldn’t be too hard.”
“If you don’t know him, it presupposes that he has no interests in Macao?”
“I’d say so. Unless he operates under another name.”
There was a sudden light of intelligence in his eyes. He said sharply: “Wentworth? Yes, I remember now. I never met him.”
“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.”
