“Yes. Yes, it is.”
“And who’s likely to come here?”
She was quite at ease now, leaning back and talking as though we’d been friends for a long time, as though it was time she should say politely: Would you care for a drink?
Her eyes glistened, and she said: “Suppose you tell me instead just who ‘the others’ are?” I knew it had been worrying her.
I said carelessly, watching her: “The whole place is lousy with them. Cops, mostly.”
She frowned. “This is Red China, have you forgotten that?”
I lied some more. “No. We’re just hoping that the Reds won’t find out until it’s too late. Once we’re gone, they can scream their heads off for all they’re worth, but they won’t. They are not going to admit that they’ve been sheltering Ming and his friends, not to anybody. And where is Ming now, by the way?”
She said promptly: “In Turkey.”
I knew this was not true either. O jeito again, only Sally, in spite of that high intelligence—or perhaps because of it—didn’t know how to play the game with any degree of persuasion. I heard the slightest sound at the door I’d come through, so slight that had I not been waiting for it and straining my ears I would have missed it. I made a mental note to tell Mai later on that she ought to learn how to open a door in absolute silence, the next best thing isn’t good enough; if you’re going to be heard at all, even by someone waiting for the sound, you may as well make a noise like a thunderstorm and have done with it.
But Sally heard nothing; her watery brown eyes were still on me, and she was wondering just how much of what I was saying was true, wondering if, now that I was seated and couldn’t move so fast, she should try for a good loud scream again.
I said: “Tell me when you first started truly hating your father?”
“When my brother died, that’s when.”
“Your father’s fault, you think?”
“Well, of course! The whole idea of heroin for the kids, my father practically invented it! If he’d been an insurance salesman, you think his kids would have grown up in a world where drugs were as common as apple pie? They were the source of our spending money, something we knew was bad but not so bad that it had to be rejected. Now I know better, and that’s why I hate him. Now I know that if we’d been brought up in a normal way, without all that money—and without the disgrace of it being discreetly tucked out of sight and not talked about unnecessarily, and even then in a deprecating sort of way—then it all might have been very different. But it’s too late now.”
“You’re still on them?” I didn’t believe she was, and she shook her head.
She said: “No. I’m not. But look at me, Mr. Cain. Just take one look and sicken yourself. I’ll be like this till the day I die, and that won’t be far off either. So until then...till then, I’m going to taste the power that he had, and I’m going to enjoy it just as much.” Her voice had taken a fierce kind of desperation.
I said gently: “Not enjoy it.”
She said savagely, insisting, persuading herself more easily than she could persuade me: “Enjoy it! There’s nothing in the world I can’t have now, except my health. That’s gone. So I’ll have everything else instead! Most of all, I’ll have the power to make this happen to others. I’m not going to be the only skeletal wreck in this world.”
“You think that’s a good philosophy?”
“No. But it’s the only one I have. Here, no one can see me, ever again, except those who are afraid to stare, to laugh, to snicker. And here, I pull strings and people dance, they dance or die, and I’m a kind of skeletal god, a god for everyone except myself. No, it’s not a good philosophy, but you can’t tempt me to look for anything else.”
“And you’re happy to work for a man like Ming?”
She stared at me in genuine surprise. “To work for Ming?” There was even a laugh in her voice, a harsh and terrifying laugh. “I thought you’d guessed! I don’t work for him. He works for me now. It took me less than a month to persuade him that my brains are better than his, that I can offer him more than he can offer me. And in that time, our output’s tripled, did you know that? The Turkish fields have quadrupled their yield. We’ve doubled our sales force, and we’re on the way to bigger and better things. Before I die, Mr. Cain, I’m going to put this enterprise into the top market. It’s going to make General Motors look like a one-man business. I’m going to make every government in the world realize just how powerful the poppy is when someone with my brains waves it around. Do you realize that this racket is made up entirely of hoodlums? The ignoramus who dropped out of school when he was twelve years old, the punk with no learning who’s picked up what he has to know and has gotten where he is because he is tough...Do you realize what the addition of a little true erudition can do to a setup like this? I learned how to learn in the best schools in the world, and I’ve got something they can never acquire. I’ve got learning.” She said again: “And every government in the world is beginning to jump to the sound of it.”
I said quickly, searching for hope: “To make them fight the harder? A kind of suicide? Is that your subconscious hope?”
The fire went from her at once, and I caught a glimpse of the honest, intelligent woman she once had been. She said slowly: “Keep your dilettante psychiatry to yourself, Mr. Cain, and don’t try to impute altruistic motives to me, not any more. Not any more, Mr. Cain. I’m god, an evil god, with all the power in the world in my hand, and I’m going to push it till the whole damn thing blows up. And I don’t give a damn what happens when it does.” She sank into silence for a while, and then said thoughtfully: “No, not to make them fight harder. To wallow in the only thing I know about. The poppy field. A child running through the pretty flowers with bare feet, with the dew still shining on them, crimson poppies and scarlet, and the green-brown hills...”
She broke off and was silent. So was I. How do you tell a sad, mad woman that everything has gone?
There was one thing I had to know. I asked her: “Tell me how your ex-husband comes into all this? He’s not somehow the kind of man I’d pick for you. And yet...”
Her voice was full of loathing. “Him! Almost the only mistake I ever made in my adult life.”
“But you went back to him.”
She was genuinely surprised. “Went back to him?”
“At least, you were corresponding.”
“Of course! I had to find out where Ming was. After I’d told him who my father really was, I was pretty sure that he’d tell Ming about that, once the great Markle Hyde had ruined him. That’s the kind of man he is. So I used him. And, having used him, I just dropped out of his sight along with everyone else’s. A nasty piece of work, Mr. Cain, not worthy of your attention, or mine.”
“Yes. Yes, I’d noticed that.” It was good to hear her talking sense again.
There was still no sound, but Mai was in the room. I did not want to turn my head or even flicker my eyes, but I knew she was there, directly behind Sally and to my right, up against the wall somewhere. I knew that she was sizing up the position, since she too realized that time might be running out. I knew she wanted to urge me to get moving, to get out of here fast while the fates were still with us.
And she was right, of course.
I said heavily: “Sally, it might be too late, I don’t know, but I’m taking you back to your father. He’ll know what to do for you.”
The moment of sadness had gone, and there was a dreadful sardonic anger there instead. “Take me back? To begin all over again?”
“No. To try to end it.”
“No hope, Mr. Cain. And you can’t take me back either. I’m going to shout for help.”
A woman who is going to scream doesn’t tell you all about it first; she wanted to know what I would do if she did.
I said calmly: “Go ahead. I’ll have you out of here before the sound has gone six inches.”
