He stared at me, and I repeated: “Any three, as long as they’re close to him. Or I’ll give you to Tiger here, or to Ming, whichever is worse.”

He swallowed hard. “Well, there’s Mori Patachiaow, and Gordon Valenski, and maybe Karl Peipin. They’re closer than most.”

“And what do they do?”

“Patachiaow heads the...the execution squads. If there’s any...any trouble, he’s the man Ming sends for.”

“Where is he now?”

“Now? Now he’s in New York, but he’s coming here tomorrow. Some trouble with the Chinese end of the operation.”

“What sort of trouble?”

“Hijackers. We lost a load of opium en route from Laos. Some smugglers held up the junk and took the load off.”

“And Valenski?”

“He’s in Hong Kong, head of the distribution end. My boss, I suppose you’d call him.”

“Coming here too?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“What about Peipin?”

Wentworth’s eyes were glassy. I couldn’t decide whether or not he was going to pass out from sheer fright at what he was doing or not. He said, gulping: “Peipin is head of the accounting department, the money man. Will you...will you help me get away?”

I said: “Probably not, so don’t count on it. Tell me how a man like you ever managed to get any authority with Ming?”

He said eagerly: “I don’t have any authority. I’m just a nobody, just one of the salesmen.”

I said: “I don’t believe all his salesmen would know as much as you seem to.”

“No, but...” He said, whispering, more hesitant than he’d ever been before: “He likes me.”

I said: “My God.” I went to the door and called Ericeira. I said: “Put him back in his cellar, on his little chain, will you, Theo?”

Ericeira said: “And suppose maybe they throw another bomb?”

I shrugged and didn’t answer, and Wentworth squealed, and when I closed the door again, the captain was already kicking him down the stairs.

Mai said, her voice very quiet: “Can we go back to Bettina now?”

I took her hand in mine, and together we went back into the other room.

Bettina was sitting on the edge of the bed now, a glass of wine in her hand. She wore a loose silk kimono of pale yellow, and the rose Bonelli had given her was in a small white-ceramic vase at her elbow. She looked up, and I asked: “Are the pains going away, slowly?”

She nodded. “Most of them. Are we making any progress?”

“We?”

Her voice was hard. “We. I’m in this too now, and don’t try to ease me out of it. Mai and me, side by side behind you, how does that grab you, Cain?”

I said: “I’ve done you enough harm, Bettina. I’d rather try and edge you away from this sort of thing, rather than deeper into it. Mai, yes, because she’s a good man in a fight. But you, no.”

“Then just give me a knife and five minutes with Wentworth. I’ll settle for that.”

“No. Not that either, Bettina.”

She said glumly, sighing: “No, I didn’t think you’d go along with that. You are a squeamish son of a bastard bitch, aren’t you?”

“Am I?”

I’d never really thought that, myself; but it’s always good to have someone else’s opinion.

Bettina looked at her wine with disgust, tossed it back and said: “I don’t know why I drink this goddamn wine. It always gives me athlete’s foot. Pour me a Scotch, for God’s sake.”

CHAPTER 10

Bonelli said thoughtfully: “The clichés, of course, become clichés merely because their truths are inevitable enough to last forever. I wonder who first said: Dead men tell no tales?”

I said: “Wentworth?”

“Or any of Ming’s other men. It’s absolutely unheard of for a man in these rackets to talk his head off at the first sign of danger. It’s axiomatic. The man who talks out of turn is a dead man, and surely Wentworth must know that? Nothing you could do to him would be half as bad as what he’ll suffer the moment Ming finds out about him.”

“He was scared.”

“Of course. But even so...”

“Not scared by what I’d do to him; scared by what he himself had done. There’s a very simple explanation. He’s not one of the hoods at all. He’s a businessman who happens to deal in the product that Ming prepares. For a brief moment, he stepped out of that role and became a terrorist beating up a helpless woman and, no doubt, enjoying it. He just didn’t stop to think that in his world this sort of thing is left to others, to the people who, I agree, would die horribly rather than talk to the wrong people. He stepped out of his little world into one he could never really enter; and the terrible thing he did in those few moments scared him much more than any ideas he might have had about retribution. He either had to commit himself, once he’d taken the first step, or seize on any chance to wash his hands of what he himself had done. I agree with you, he’s got no courage; but that isn’t why he talked so freely.”

“You’re judging a man with insufficient knowledge of him.”

He was absolutely right, of course. But my whole philosophy depends upon the probability of likelihoods; if you wait for truths, then you miss the train.

I said: “But perhaps you’ll agree with me about what Ming has to do now?”

He gave me a long, cold look, not liking the upset I was bringing into the smooth functioning of his chosen milieu. He said softly: “There can be only one thing, can’t there?”

“Aha! We’re beginning to think alike now.”

“That careless bomb downstairs.” He shrugged. “A childish endeavor that would have come off but for the fortuitous fact that your shoulders are stronger than my door.” He sighed and said: “That was a good teak door with solid brass hinges, did you know that?”

“I know that I’ve got an abominable ache in my back as a result of it. But it’s comforting to know, isn’t it? That Wentworth is really worth killing off?”

He corrected me gently: “Was worth killing off. Now our shadowy friend, who seems to know everything, probably knows that you’ve had a chance to examine him, so the situation has changed somewhat. Now it won’t be a matter of killing him off; it will be rather a question of kidnaping him back again, so that one little question can be asked and answered: How much did he tell? Am I not right?”

I said again: “We’re beginning to think absolutely alike.”