“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.
Another sampan passed, an English sailor sitting in the stern, being paddled to one of the floating brothels by a tall, thin woman whose face caught the reflected yellow lights as she passed me in near silence, with just the faint sound of her pole in the water to mark her passing. My bare toes tangled in a sunken net, and I struggled to free them, then swam on slowly till I located the barge that was called The Blue Orchid.
It was low in the water, a converted barge of the kind used to carry brushwood on the mainland, the brushwood they used for flood control, wedging it into the banks of the flooding rivers. (If anyone took this wood to use for fuel, he was imprisoned and soundly beaten.) The tall center-mast was still there, but the sail had long since rotted away, and only a few shreds hung there, gray as a shroud. The bamboo-and-rattan shelter along two-thirds of the deck was high and spacious, with a line running from its rear end to the short and stubby aftermast, and some singlets were hanging from it. Along the side I could see there were seven small portholes, an unusual design here; I wondered how much of the barge would be below the surface, and why it was so low in the water. It was about eighty feet long and fifteen feet wide, and its keel, I knew, would be recurved, the better to ride the troughs of the waves at sea.
I swam carefully round it, listening to the sound of the chatter on board. There was a powerful little outboard motorboat swinging from the stern—a fast and luxurious little boat of a kind I would not have expected to find here; it was a good sign. There was also a clear, bright light streaming out of the high cabin windows in the stern, much brighter and cleaner than the usual kerosene lamps would have cast; another good sign; I made a mental calculation of just where that cabin would be. I swam on.
Someone had once loved this boat; the heavy timbers were ornately carved and painted in bright colors. A replica of the God of Anger, one eye closed in a fierce leer, carved in wood and painted brightly, was scowling into the water, peering down at me from the prow. I took a deep breath, and plunged under the surface of the dark water, and went down deep, fifteen feet or more, before I found the underside and came up on the other beam. More cabins, then, below deck, the old holds converted to make sitting room for the customers and perhaps a private room or two as well, with sand for ballast to hold her low down in the water. I scratched my bare back on barnacles as I came up, and a spike caught in my bathing trunks and ripped them.
I swam aft, and then up forward again, listening to voices; they were all aft, where the scent of a charcoal brazier was strong; I beard the clink of glasses, and a man’s strong laughter. I checked the sampans close by; they were crowded with the silhouettes of twenty, thirty, fifty people against the night sky; they were squatting on rickety decks, crouched over fires of smoldering fagots, or wandering about and shouting across the water to one another.
Speed then, to get aboard and below decks quickly, before some inquisitive fisherman should yell a warning. I found the mooring-chain and pulled myself cautiously up it, looking back over my shoulder to the sampans, where the casual danger lay; nobody seemed to be paying attention to anything but his own problems. The moon was bright, but it was low in the sky ahead of me.
I pulled my head up to the thwart and rested there, searching out the deck for a sign of life. I could hear a rhythmic, swishing sound, a strange sound not easily identifiable. Steel on stone? In the darkness, I could make out the shape of a man half-turned towards me, sharpening a long knife with an old-fashioned fid of a stone, easing it along the blade in smooth, straight strokes, like a farmer sharpening a scythe. I pulled my way along a little, leaving the chain and using the heavy teak bulwarks as a hold, inching my way to get behind him. A quick look back over my shoulder again, and then I was silently over the top, slithering quickly towards the cover I had decided on—a tarpaulin thrown carelessly over a pile of plump sacks. I lay on the bare deck there and hoped no one would see the trail of water I must have left behind me. I lay for a long, long time in silence until I felt that I was part of the old boat itself and no longer an intruder. I could hear snatches of conversation in the rough, coarse accents of the North.
“...And no work on the dock except for those something Cantonese...”
“There is food. It is not necessary to work. There is food and a place to stay.”
Someone else called out: “Bring wine,” and soon some bare, female feet padded silently past my hiding place, stepping in the water I had left on the deck; she paid it no heed. I heard the man with the knife dip his stone into a bucket of water and begin honing again; and when the woman passed by on her return trip, I heard her say: “You’re splashing water all over the deck.” He did not answer her, nor did the rhythmic sound of his knife stop.
