Two men, talking quietly, came up from below decks; now I knew where the companionway was. One of them said quietly: “You’ll get a better price in the bay, but you’ll have to watch out for the police there. They’ve got new boats, American ones.” I wondered how the Red Chinese had acquired American patrol boats. The other man answered the query for me: “Yes, I saw them painting out the Korean markings.”
A boat, a gun, a radio is made and sent far away to keep the peace or make a war, the products of the American factories standing out in the harbors all over the earth, and waiting to be off-loaded. Well and good, but a year or two later? Who knows where they may finish up? Corruption, bribery, theft, loss in battle...The chain is never ending; only the artifact is constant, well built and lasting, and it ends up in strange places halfway across the world from its place of origin. It doesn’t die easily, a weapon, and there’s no power on earth that can keep it where it’s supposed to be. We spew them out of our factories, and they get lost, and we spew out more; but they’re not lost, they’re merely someplace else, serving another purpose, not dying like the men who use them but going from one battlefield to another, sometimes secretly and sometimes with covert and sardonic pleasure.
I lay in the dark and wondered, now that I was on board The Blue Orchid, what the hell was I going to do next. A man in a bathing suit feels naked with only his wits and his muscles for protection; it’s as though a pair of pants is a suit of armor. Of one thing I was sure: once I made my presence known, I had to get out of there fast, before the surprise could wear off.
I peeked out from under the tarpaulin and looked at the moon; not a goddam cloud in sight. I studied the contours of the boats, looking for a space of clear water I could dive into quickly without sinking a sampan in the process, or banging my still aching head to a pulp on a half-sunken spar; the west looked a likely direction, and it was the quickest route to the shore.
And if Wentworth wasn’t there after all? Well, at least I would have had a swim in the cool waters of the bay, garbage or no garbage.
I crawled out from under, looked around carefully, stood up, and walked quickly to the companionway. I was halfway down it before I heard someone shout, and there was the sound of running bare feet beside me. But I was down there now, in a long, low-ceilinged room with bare teak walls, where eight or nine Chinese were lying down on paillasses against the walls, smoking opium; the air was ripe with the sickly scent of it. One or two of them stared at me with vacant eyes; a young girl, not much more than fifteen, was lighting a little pellet of paste, bending over the pipe of a recumbent old man who lay stark naked across the floor, the yellow skin loosely sagging over skeletal bones.
A young and stocky fellow dressed in the blue tunic of a railway worker dropped his pipe and got to his feet, lunging at me with a movement that was purely reflex; there’s something startling about the sudden appearance of a tall, semi-naked man like me—the boards of the ceiling brushed my head in the half-light; with their fear of devils, I must have looked like a strange god rising up out of the sea to damn them all to their own kind of purgatory, and it was with a touch of regret that I put my hand on the man’s face and shoved him away. He fell and yelled and dragged out a knife, and then the running steps were coming down the stairs, fast.
There was only one door, and I didn’t bother to try it. Instead, I put my foot against it and pushed, and it went flying off its hinges, and there was another room behind it, just as I’d thought, a much better furnished room, with a bright pressure-lamp hissing loudly, the lamp whose light I’d seen at the stern. There was a curved divan here; it was tapestry-covered and running around the wall, with a small wooden platform at one end of it, raised now like a lid to disclose a neat and quite efficient wash-basin and tap. There was a marvelous carpet on the floor, a Ghiordes-knot Chinese from Hupeh in pale greens and beiges, and a couple of leather poufs and a carved-ebony armchair. A small folding table had been set up here, and there were the remains of a dinner on it, what looked like queues d’ecrivisses and smelled as if it had been cooked a la nage, in court-bouillon and cognac; I remembered Markle Hyde’s scornful comments about Wentworth’s love of his stomach and a la nage is not only the simplest way to prepare crayfish, it’s also the best.
He was there all right, sitting at the table and swinging round to stare at me, a white damask napkin in his hand and a very surprised look on his face. I was on him before he could even drop the napkin, and I hit him just once, fairly hard, on the side of the head, and caught him as he went flying across the floor. I scooped him up, a featherweight, and swung round to put a foot in the stomach of the Chinese who was coming at me, knife in hand—a short, ivory-handled knife with a curved blade, the kind they use in Kirin, which lies north of Korea. There was another man behind him, and I used my foot again and caught him under the chin as he dived at me, and then I was stumbling over them as they both tried to get to their feet at once and grab at me in the narrow stairway. But they were behind me now, and I heard someone yell in Mandarin: “Get the gun.” And then I was on deck and jumping over the side into the garbage again.
The whole thing had taken maybe sixty seconds from the time I first peeked out under the tarpaulin.
I grabbed Wentworth by the collar and dragged him with me, swimming one-handed, fast, towards the shore. I heard a shot fired behind me, and then another and another, and all hell was breaking loose back there. A bullet plowed into the water uncomfortably close to my head, and I pulled my bundle down under me, swimming underwater for a minute, and hoped that my captive had at least half a lungful of air left in him. I came up on the far side of a sampan, banging into it noisily, and heard a woman yell an obscenity, and then I was streaking out for the shore again, and there was no more shooting.
I heard the sudden roar of the outboard cutting into the night, but they were too late, much too late. I was already at the wharf, and Captain Theophilo Ericeira was waiting for me, with the big, flabby Arab cook beside him. The captain was grinning, and he took Wentworth’s limp body from me, and sling him over his shoulder, saying: “Nao devemos ficar aqui, Senhor...We better not stay here.”
I said: “Take him round to Bonelli’s for me, will you?”
He nodded, and the Arab handed me the bundle which was a pair of pants and a shirt and some sandals. I slipped into the clothes quickly and said to him: “You better not wait here, maybe. There just might be more trouble than you can handle.” I’m always suspicious of a flabby man’s ability in a roughhouse. But the cook threw back his head and laughed, and said:
“Wallahi, ahssan minni mafish, walleh fi Misr...There is no one better than I am.”
I shrugged and said: “Your head, not mine,” and got down under the wharf and waited.
In a moment, the outboard bumped noisily against the timbers, and two men were there, the Chinese who had been sharpening the knife—he carried it now, glinting in the moonlight—and the one whose stomach I had bruised with my foot. They reached out to steady the little boat, standing up in it and grabbing at the mooring-rope. I bent down, took hold of the prow, stood up hard, and tipped it over. They both went splashing into the water, yelling, and I reached down and grabbed the first man and pulled him close up to me, holding him with one hand on his collar and the other on the wrist of his knife arm as he struggled.
I said: “Tell Alexander Ming I’ll give him his friend in exchange for ten minutes of his time, any place he wants, any time he wants. You understand? Meanwhile, I’m holding him captive at The Fan-tan House of the Seven Hills. The House of the Seven Hills.” I repeated it to make sure the message was getting home, and he stared at me, expecting to be broken in two there and then.
The second man was clambering up out of the water, his hands on the boards of the wharf, so I stomped on them once, just to make sure he knew he was de trop; he squealed and dropped back into the water, and I threw the first man down on him and left them there, struggling together in the water. But they’d been given a job to do, and they wanted to do it. They came up again over the edge, not learning the lesson, and I was about to do something about it when the Arab said softly: “This time, Effendi, a pleasure for me.” I watched. He bent down and lifted the two of them clean out of the water, one in each hand, and held them there, struggling. He turned to me and said: “You see, Effendi? What I do with them now?”
I said: “They’re undersize, throw them back in.” He did just that.
It took me three minutes to run to Bonelli’s place. Bettina was sitting up in bed, staring at Wentworth, who lay on the floor beside her, dripping wet and looking up at her in stark terror. Ericeira was there too, standing with one foot on Wentworth’s throat; not that he was about to get up and run, he was far too frightened. Mai and Bonelli were there, and Bonelli looked at his watch, making a ballet-dancer movement with his wrist, and said:
“Two o’clock. Have we had enough excitement for one night, Cain?”
Bettina was staring at Wentworth with an expression in her eyes that told me all I wanted to know. But I asked her anyway. I said: “It couldn’t be anybody else, but just for the record...?”
She did not take her eyes off him, and there was a look in them that made me glad I was not her enemy at this moment. She nodded slowly. She was trembling.
Suddenly she looked around wildly, saw a tall wine bottle on the bedside table, and grabbed it. She’d just begun to swing it to break off the bottom when Mai took her wrist firmly, arresting the movement, and said gently: “I will take care of him for you, Bettina. I will do it.”
I reached over and took the bottle away, and said: “Don’t forget you’re ladies, both of you. What has to be done, I will do.”
Wentworth was dripping dirty harbor-water all over the beautiful blue carpet, and I said to Bonelli: “Can we keep him on ice in the cellar for a while?”
Bonelli nodded slowly, looking at Wentworth thoughtfully. He looked at Ericeira and said: “The empty storeroom, perhaps? You’ll find chains and padlocks in the cupboard.” He frowned and then turned to me and said: “You don’t want to talk to him first? In the course of time, he might recover whatever courage he has. Just now, it all seems to have drained away, wouldn’t you say?”
I said: “It won’t make much difference. He’ll tell me what I want to know, when I want to know it. And I’ve got some thinking to do first. And I’m hungry.”
“Ah yes, of course, you haven’t eaten.” He was suddenly very apologetic, as though it were all his fault. He clapped his hands loudly and said: “A steak, perhaps? The quickest thing.”
I said: “Do you have any crayfish?”
He shrugged. “If that’s what you fancy, it’s merely a matter of sending the cook down to the docks.”
“Good. A la nage, then.”
He raised a surprised eyebrow but made no comment, and when the young girl came in, in answer to his summons, he told her what was wanted. She bowed and went out. Ericeira was bundling Wentworth through the door, not very gently, with a huge hand tight on his skinny neck, and I said to him: “I need him, Theophilo. Don’t lose him.” The captain grinned and shook his head. “I won’t lose him, Senhor Cain. Trust me.”
I sat on the bed next to Bettina and touched her forehead, feeling the heat there. Mai hovered, waiting, her head cocked to one side as though she were listening for a sign of something between us. I said to Bettina:
“Getting better slowly?”
She looked at me, her eyes troubled, and nodded. “Yes. And I didn’t thank you, did I?”
“Under the circumstances, thanks were hardly necessary.”
“They would have killed me.”
“Yes, they would.”
