“She doesn’t sound to me somehow like a philatelist.”
“One of the best. A very valuable collection, some of them over a hundred and fifty years old.”
“The earliest postage stamps date back only to eighteen-forty.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know about that, I only know what she tells me. Valuable, anyway, does it matter?”
“No, I guess not.”
He nodded. “Give me a few hours; you’ll have everything.”
“And I’ll need a good supply of ready cash, quite a lot of it.”
“That too.”
It was somehow symptomatic of the old man’s way of life that we never got closer than this to talking about such prosaic things as a fee. In spite of his lurid, evil past, he was a good man now; I didn’t think we should have to go on paying for our sins forever, however bad they were. And one thing was certain; he’d tried hard to make up for it. There was a love there, too, for his daughter that was touching, sad and unsure, and desperate.
I got up and started to leave, and when I reached the door, he said, pleading: “Cain?”
I turned, expecting it.
He said: “Cain, she’s all I have in the world. The past is all out now, and Markle Hyde is destroyed, destroyed after all those careful years. But I don’t give a goddamn about that. Sally’s all that matters. Find her for me, please? Before it’s too late?”
I said: “I’ll find her.”
I used the back door to sneak out of the house, just to be sure, and went over to find Carlo Bonelli.
CHAPTER 2
There are three hundred thousand Chinese and Macanese in Macao and only a couple of thousand Portuguese. But even the latest overtures from the ever threatening mainland, though they had caused considerable change, could not rob the colony of its distinctive Vasco de Gama flavor.
But it seemed to me that in the fan-tan house where I finally ran Bonelli to earth, all those three hundred thousand Orientals were firmly and noisily entrenched. It was called The House of the Seven Hills after the seven hills of the city, and was three stories high, with long, oblong holes cut in the ceilings over the rush-covered tables so that more customers could be accommodated on the upper floors and still watch the games going on below. Upstairs they were shouting out their bets and lowering their money in wicker baskets on long strings, and the huge, brown table tops were bright with the colored metal markers.
The Chinese dealers wore black pajama suits, and they were dipping their brass cones into the piles of button-like, white-bone counters and counting them out in sets of four with small, shiny, ebony sticks; one, two, three, or four buttons would be left over at the end of the count, and great shouts would go up from those who had bet on the right number.
The table was littered with money. I saw Macanese, Chinese, Hong Kong, America, English, and Portuguese currency; I saw a thousand-dollar bill, American, changing hands; and one man was using gold Napoleons and arguing vociferously about their current value.
Bonelli was a tall, thin, elegant sort of European of the old school, a man of forty or so with an easy, watchful smile and an affected manner that did not hide the intelligence in the dark, suspicious eyes. He swayed when he moved, and used his long, delicate hands like a ballet dancer. His gray silk suit was impossibly chaste, his mahogany-colored tie impeccably knotted, and he even wore a tiny lilac-colored rose in his buttonhole; it was one of the old Miniature China Roses, of a kind not seen much nowadays, a variety called Sweet Fairy which De Vinck first propagated in 1946, if I remember correctly, and I thought it was a very fitting choice. He carried a long cigarette-holder, and there was the smell of mild Latakia tobacco in the air.
He waved the holder at me, and smiled easily, and said.
“Why don’t we go into my office, Mr. Cain?” He wrinkled his delicate nose at the smells here and said: “I really hate all this noise, but every shout is another little bundle of notes in the bank, and so I’ve taught myself to tolerate it.”
We moved off, and there were more guards there than there are in Fort Knox. He saw my mild look of surprise and said, as two tight-knit Portuguese in uniform, revolvers at their waists, stepped aside and unlocked a variety of decors for us:
“Really quite necessary, I assure you, Mr. Cain. In my business—unfortunately, wherever a great deal of money is being handled, the undesirables seem to flock in great numbers, and they can really be quite dangerous. But once inside, we’re very well protected.”
The office was a Chinese nightmare. There were ornately carved chairs and benches in polished ebony, with marble inserts and red silk seats, and brass dragons all over, and gilt-framed paintings out of China’s ancient history; one of them was a fragment of a fresco that showed a group of arhats feeding the poor, a splendid painting on silk that dated, I guessed, from the late twelfth century; I thought it might be by Chou Chi-chang. I asked Bonelli about it, and he smiled and said: “No, his pupil, Lin Ting-kuei. You know about these things?”
I thought that was a damn fool question, so I said nothing.
Over a beautifully sculptured divan, there was an old map that attracted my attention, a delicately painted map in fine black line and water-color. I looked at it for a while and said: “Robert Hart, surely? No one else ever made maps quite so beautifully.”
There was a little silence, and when I looked round, Bonelli was examining his fingernails and saying: “They told me you had a rather varied knowledge, Mr. Cain, but, mannagia la miseria, what makes you think that’s a Robert Hart?”
“It’s not?”
He said smoothly: “Just a fake, I’m afraid. A counterfeit.”
He gestured at one of the hard chairs, and took one himself when I sat down, and clapped his hands once with the imperiousness of the old-time aristocrat. Two astonishingly attractive young Chinese girls came in, one of them carrying a brass tray with a bright green porcelain teapot on it and two blue porcelain cups. She bowed and set it down beside us and began to pour, and the other girl bowed and waited, half-smiling; Bonelli said: “A little music while we talk, would you like that?”
He spoke to her in a dialect I did not recognize, though I know Mandarin and Cantonese, of course, since I once taught a seminar in Advanced Oriental Studies at the Sorbonne, while I was on loan from Stanford.
The girl bowed again and picked up a dulcimer, the sixteen-string dulcimer they call the yang ch’in; she sat down on a silk pillow in the corner and began to strum the instrument softly. It was a pleasant, drowsy sort of sound, almost hypnotic in its soporific effect. We sipped the tea—it was red-leaf congou from South China, and delicious—and Bonelli said:
“Well, do you want to talk about Sally Hyde, or about the man who took a shot at you this afternoon?” Before I could answer, he asked: “Did you get a good enough glimpse of your assassin to see that he was a Northerner?” He somehow made it sound very important.
I grunted noncommittally, and Bonelli said: “Although there’s an amusing little game going on that I really must tell you about first, una cosa molto delicata.” He was sipping his congou tea with. his pinky held out, moving his ballet dancer’s waist a trifle, in a gentle, swaying motion, as though he were floating on the delicacy of the room’s fragrance.
“Oh? What’s that, Signor Bonelli?”
He said carefully: “My business is gambling, Mr. Cain. A few factories here and there which I keep as a reminder of the past and as a cushion against the future. But mostly, my business is in fan-tan houses. We play fan-tan, we play mahjong, we play bird cage, we play the lottery game. The Chinese, as you know, will bet on anything, and at this moment there’s a very exciting game being played, for quite large bets.” His English was delightful, fluent and easy with just the touch of an accent and an unlikely word thrown in here and there with almost a sense of deliberation, as though he did not want to be accused of being English. He said: “The name of this game is: How long before Cabot Cain is killed? And the favored numbers this afternoon are between eighteen and thirty-two. Not days, Mr. Cain, hours. Does that intrigue you?”
It was a shocking thought. I had not been over-disturbed by the futile attempt on my life a little earlier; because somehow—perhaps because of its casual manner—I sensed that it was a warning more than anything else; and warnings always come in threes; it’s historic. But I said: “You mean the whole damn colony is interested enough in my presence to make book...Well, I’ll be damned.”
“Not in your presence, no. But in your death.”
The sound of the dulcimer was a comforting, tinkling, drowsy sort of sound. The girl began to sing softly, one of the old love songs in an ancient five-tone scale, and Bonelli, cocking his head to one side and raising his hand for silence, said in a moment: “Did you know that the twelve-pitch scale for the pipes was fixed as long ago as the sixteenth century?”
