I said mildly: “As long as so much is understood...”
He switched tacks suddenly and said again, as though checking the extent of my knowledge: “You do know who I am and what I stand for, don’t you? Or shall I give you a catalog of my good works? The foundations, the libraries, the endowments, the hospitals?”
The sardonic touch was back again. Somehow, it pleased me. And another bell was tinkling another note. I waited, and he said:
“Yes, atoning for a greedy past, that’s what you’re thinking, Cain, isn’t it? Thirty years of good works, and let’s not hide the fact that I’ve done an enormous amount of good over a very long time. I’ve put my money where it could help. I’m a respected pillar of society, and God dammit, I’m a good man, a damn good man. And you’re asking yourself what this has to do with Ben Stirani. You’re also asking yourself where my money came from in the first place, because nobody knows that, and just why I should take such pains to be such a damn fine fellow. You’re asking yourself: if Stirani’s still alive, then what the hell has he got to do with a man of my fine and upright reputation? Because that’s what my reputation is, Cain, and you know it. All right, stop guessing, I’ll tell you.” He took a deep breath and said: “I am Ben Stirani. Or rather, I was.”
I took my drink and wandered over to the big window. There was a fine garden of roses framed in rich turf, out there. And beyond, in the harbor, the fiber-mat sails of the junks were patched in brown and lavender, yellow and orange, looking like futuristic bats’-wings in colors of rust and burnt sienna. Their masts were forward-sloping, their sterns high in the design that is peculiar to the waters of Macao. They would be loaded, I knew, with gasoline that was in transit from Hong Kong to Red China via the Macao harbor, where the officials turned a blind eye to the rusting drums piled high on the time-blackened teak decks. Behind me, Markle Hyde said—and the tone of his voice had changed again:
“I am Stirani, Cain. And I need help. Badly.”
I turned and watched him. It seemed that all that strength had drained out of him. I said: “And the police are after you?”
He snorted. “Before I left the States, I told them. I told the D.A., just a few days ago, told him the whole damn story. Alexander Ming used to work for me in the old days, and I told the D.A. all about him too. I gave the D.A. a list of names, of places, a rundown on all Ming’s background and current activities.”
I said: “Then why didn’t they slap you inside?”
He grunted. “You never heard of self-incrimination? Times have changed since the old days. Maybe, if they’d pushed hard enough they could have put me away for a while, if no damned lawyers interfered, and if that was what I wanted. But it wouldn’t do any good, so what’s the point?” He said sarcastically: “And before you start backing out of this assignment, ask me why it was necessary for Stirani to disappear, why he gave up a racket that was bringing in millions of dollars every month.”
I said: “All right, tell me.”
“So sit down, for God’s sake, and listen.” I sat down.
He said shortly: “A man in my position makes plenty of enemies, and one of mine was my old buddy Ming. He turned on me and tried to take over. That wasn’t his name in those days, but...I got him put away for life, and he escaped, and he went gunning for me, in his own subtle way. Next thing I knew, my son was hooked on drugs. In brief, it killed him. You didn’t know I had a son, did you? How could you? Nobody knew. That’s one of the prices you have to pay when you’re in the rackets. You keep your kids hidden. He was a good boy, Cain, and they got to him and killed him. So, Ben Stirani retired and put around a story that he was dead, and he came back as Markle Hyde and devoted the next thirty years to helping others, and don’t tell me that that doesn’t count for something.”
I said: “It counts.”
“Markle Hyde, philanthropist, the man you could count on if you wanted a hospital built, if a kid wanted an education, if the underprivileged wanted boys’ clubs.” He said again: “Don’t say that that doesn’t count.”
“And now?”
“Now, the vendetta goes on. When Mark—my son—died, the D.A. got an anonymous tip, thirty-two pages of facts and figures. And Ming, who was just getting to be where I had always been, was put out of business and had to run for his life. He had quite an organization going, and I broke it up for him. And to hell with honor among thieves and all that crap, this was my personal life at stake, my family. And then...then there was peace and quiet, and nobody knew that Markle Hyde and Stirani were the same man, and Markle Hyde went on with his good works, his atonement, until...”
His voice drifted away. He had found a seat in a deep, red-leather sofa and was sitting there, his hands dangling down between his knees, looking suddenly less robust and a lot older. He looked up at me, and his eyes were on fire. He said:
“A daughter too, and they found me at last and got to her. Nearly thirty years later, but vendettas never end, do they? The mixture the same as before. They hooked her on narcotics too. A tough, strong-willed girl, with all of my determination. And still...they hooked her. Oh, they were clever about it. She’s a—how shall I put it? She can’t keep still for five minutes; she’s always off at a moment’s notice to the end of the world some place—who knows what for? Give her half an excuse and she’s off, at the drop of a hat, to Timbuktu, or Athens, or Lima, or Outer Mongolia for God’s sake. She went to Uganda, and came back with malaria, and you know something? In the States we’ve got the best doctors in the world, but give them a simple case of malaria and they’re lost, because it’s something they never see, a strange and exotic disease that calls for a specialist. Who gets malaria in the States? So it was a problem. We put her in a hospital, and she only got worse. They gave her Atabrine at first, and then quinine, and still she didn’t respond, so I went to the hospital to find out what the hell they were doing to her there. The doctor was puzzled: she was showing symptoms he couldn’t understand, coma and short intervals of lucidity, and she said one day that the needle had hurt her arm—only she was being treated orally, no injections at all. The doctor took a quick look at her arm, and promptly gave her some tests, and then just as promptly called the cops.”
I’d read about it in the newspapers, just a short, disdainful paragraph two years ago.
I said: “Sally Wentworth, July, the year before last. I read about it.”
He said sharply: “You only read what they printed. We stopped publication of what really happened. Wentworth is her married name. It was a marriage that lasted a couple of years and ended in divorce, and he was a vicious, useless son of a bitch with a Boston accent and a taste for good food, a pernickety little bastard who thought the world was made just for him. He married my daughter and treated her badly, so I pulled out all the stops and ruined him, and he dropped back into the gutter where he belonged. Anyway, the cops came, and thank God it was a bright young officer who knew a thing or two. We set a watch on the ward, and that night an intern came in and gave her an injection, only it wasn’t an intern at all; it was one of Ming’s boys, just a thug, and his hypodermic was full of heroin. God knows how long this had been going on—we never found out because that night he hanged himself in his cell; at least, that’s what it looked like. We put Sally on a withdrawal course, the best in the world, with a dozen men standing by her day and night. A specialist from New York, one from India, and another from Japan. She was hooked bad, deep in up to her ears, and they told me she’d never recover—it was too far gone. But she did, by God, she licked it. It took a long, long time, and when she came out, she was so thin and bony that she wouldn’t even leave her room for fear of the outside world. She was a skeleton with nothing but dried flesh on her bones. A young and attractive woman, and my God, she looked...”
He stood up and started walking around, gesticulating fiercely. “Have you ever seen a walking skeleton, Cain? I don’t mean a very thin woman. I mean a yellow rag stretched over sticks, with black hollows for eyes, a skull that doesn’t even seem to have its own skin.”
I put down my glass and turned to the window again. There were white puffs of cloud in the blue sky, and the fishermen, the recent danger gone, were back at their nets, their thin, brown hands working expertly with the twine.
Markle Hyde said: “Young and attractive, and as tough as a fresh-cut steak. For a while she was quiet and restrained and withdrawn, and she would look at herself in the mirror and say nothing, And then one day she came to me and said abruptly: ‘Alexander Ming is in Macao. I’m going there.’ I asked her where she got her information, but she only shrugged and said: ‘Information is where you buy it.’ And then...then she was gone. She came here, Cain, and I came here looking for her. And there’s no sign of her anywhere.”
“And Ming?”
He was sharp, the old man. He shook his head and said sadly: “No, all my old contacts are gone, gone a long time ago. I’m out of my depth now.”
I said: “But your daughter must have had some. How would she find out about Ming’s whereabouts, otherwise? Doesn’t that mean she had the kind of friends she ought not to have had?”
He thought about it for a while, fighting back the anger. He said at last: “She’s thirty-two now, and that means she had ten or twelve years of at least knowing just who the old crowd was. She must have reached some of them, or she’d have never found out where Ming is, if he really is here. But if he is...” He swung round on me and said violently: “My God, Cain, do you realize what I’m saying? She’s gone gunning for the top man of the biggest goddamn racket in history! She’s come here, alone, to break up a mob that makes the Mafia look like a Rotarian Convention!”
“Then she’s a fool.”
“But she’s my daughter. And I want her back. I want her back alive and well, and...” All the violence went from his voice, and he said quietly: “If you refuse me, Cain, I’ll double the money, and go on doubling it till you accept. I’ve more money than you’d ever dream one man could acquire in a dozen lifetimes, and I’m giving you a blank check, because you’re the only man in the world I can turn to.”
I said: “Just tell me what makes you say that. Tell me where you got my name. The man you sent to me in San Francisco was not particularly communicative.” He’d been an accountant, the man who had sent me here, a dried-up stick of a man with a bland, persuasive manner; all he had to say meant, in other words, that when a man like Markle Hyde calls for help, you go to him. And here I was.
Hyde said, looking at me shrewdly: “A man I’ve never met gave me your name. I went to the D.A.’s office for help; and there was nothing they could—or would—do. A friend of a friend put me in touch with Interpol, and they couldn’t help much either—how could they? But apparently one of their men knows you...a Colonel Fenrek? He gave me your name and told me about you.”
Fenrek was an old friend from Paris, from Interpol’s Department B7.
Hyde said: “Fenrek wrote me a letter. He said you could handle this for me if I paid you enough and appealed to what he called your old-fashioned sense of justice.”
“Good. Then I know I have nothing to worry about on your account. Fenrek will have had you investigated from top to bottom before he’d mention my name to you.” He was a very thorough man, Fenrek; the mention of his name suddenly brought back old, nostalgic memories.
Hyde grimaced. “My past is out now. Markle Hyde is dead, a phantom that served a purpose. Now, we work in the open.”
I said emphatically: “No. If you want me to find your daughter, I work alone, I don’t want any Stiranis getting in my hair.”
“All right, if that’s the way you want it.”
“Just tell me one thing. You came here looking for her; what did you plan to do? Just make the rounds of the Hotels?”
