“If you anchor below Penha Hill, you’ll be in less frequented waters, but there’ll still be a sampan or two to watch out for.”
“And the crew?”
“My men.” It seemed to say everything.
I said: “All right. I have to go to Hong Kong, so as soon as I get back...”
“Hong Kong? How very fortuitous. I’m going there myself. Perhaps you’d like to honor me with your company? A small plane, a Bellanca, quite comfortable.”
“That would be very pleasant. The only thing is...I would like to go fairly soon.”
“Now?” He was on his feet, gesturing towards the door.
“Well, I don’t feel I should put you to so much trouble.”
“Trouble? I wish it were indeed trouble, so that I could more easily deserve your approbation. But it is a pleasure, and you are my guest.”
Well, that seemed friendly enough. I said: “If you’re sure it won’t tear you away from...all this.” I made a gesture at the little Chinese girl, and he smiled and said: “She’ll still be here when I get back, Mr. Cain.” I had a feeling I was being pressured, but he was so impossibly gracious about it that I couldn’t refuse. He said cheerfully: “Remember that the longer you live, the more I stand to make on my bets, Mr. Cain. If anyone should be waiting outside for you, I won’t make half as much, so let me show you a less obtrusive way out.”
I said: “My God, secret passages?”
He shook his head gravely. “Not even secret passages are very secret for very long, not in Macao. This way.”
We passed through the noisy fan-tan room again and went down a narrow staircase to the mahjong room, which was even noisier. The black counters were being shuffled loudly to the accompaniment of raucous yells from the winners. And nobody paid us the slightest attention. We went through a long, dark corridor and down some more stairs; and Bonelli opened an iron door with a heavy key; and we found ourselves in a cellar where Bonelli pointed to sacks of carrots piled high along the brick walls.
“Carrots from the mainland,” he said. “Imported whisky fetches such a high price here that I prefer to make my own. And there’s always the danger that legitimate supplies will be hijacked on the way in. All those junks you saw in the harbor—those that are not engaged in smuggling their own supplies are just as busy holding up those who do. So...we learn to provide ourselves from our own sources wherever we can.”
I said: “You’re a very enterprising man, Mr. Bonelli.”
He inclined his head gracefully, “We live in a criminal world, I’m afraid. It would be absurd not to profit from it, wouldn’t you say?”
“That’s exactly what I would say.”
“And I promise you that you will never drink carrot whisky in my house. We make it exclusively for the paying customers, whose tastes are sometimes a trifle provincial.”
The long, low room with its whitewashed walls and stone arches could have been one of the great wine cellars in the South of France. There were rows of stacked bottles, and great oak casks, and copper measuring pots, and a dozen pipettes hung on the walls, their long glass tubes reflecting the light from small, iron-barred windows. Ten or twelve Chinese women wearing the black pajamas cut from the cloth they call “Fragrant Cloud Linen” were busy pasting labels onto the bottles, and I stopped and read one of them. It was Johnnie Walker’s Black Label, and when I raised my eyebrows, Bonelli said smoothly: “Well, the labels are genuine. We have them printed in England; the local printing really isn’t very good.”
We went down a small flight of stairs again and along a corridor of whitewashed brick, and Bonelli said: “Mind your head.” I’m six-foot seven, and low doors are always a nuisance; this one was of heavy iron. He unlocked the door, and we went outside.
We were under one of the wharfs at the edge of the harbor. Across the bay I could see the island of Taipa and, beyond it and a little to one side, the hills of the island of Coloane. The whole colony consists of a mere six square miles, and it is hard to believe that there are over three million people living there; from coast to coast, Macao itself is only a mile across and three miles long.
Away to the northeast, the bright lights in the harbor of Lantao, Hong Kong’s “outer island,” were just coming on in the dusk. I could hear the shouts of the sampan men close by as they guided their fragile craft over the smooth waters, their women standing straight and slim in the stern with their long, shining, wet poles. I noticed that Bonelli was looking around carefully, peering into the shadows, a slight frown on his handsome, effeminate face.
I said: “Anything?”
He shook his head and then said gravely: “No, but don’t take my warnings too lightly, Mr. Cain. You should know that this is a terribly dangerous place for you just now. You are showing an interest in an operation that brings its organizers literally millions of dollars every month. It’s a continuing and highly efficient organization that has some of the best executive brains anywhere in the world. Their intelligence setup would put the CIA to shame, though perhaps that wouldn’t be very difficult; if you know what I mean. And their terror squads are as well drilled and competent as a Marine Commando. But with one difference: they have no one to answer to for their methods. In the last three months there’ve been eighteen murders in this little area alone, and God knows how many there were across on the mainland. Not all of them were caused by Ming’s outfit, of course; but many of them were, without a doubt. We’re back in a seventeenth-century jungle here, and it behooves you to remember that. All of the time.”
I said: “I wasn’t very impressed with their first attempt. If I’d carried a gun, I could have gotten that would-be assassin before he’d even picked up his rifle.”
He said easily: “And doesn’t that presuppose that they know you don’t carry one? I wonder how much they know about you?”
“You’ve got a point there.”
A small motorboat was approaching, a blue and white beauty, with a big outboard motor. A small, wiry Chinese was at the tiller, and he expertly brought the boat close by. He was a small, wiry man. Bonelli looked at him and smiled and said: “You know you have to watch out for the big men, don’t you? Yes, of course you do.” I wondered what the hell he was talking about.
A few moments later, we were stepping ashore at the tiny airstrip half a mile along the green coastline; and half an hour after that, Bonelli’s red and white, single-engine, six-cylinder, fuel-injection Bellanca was touching down at the brightly lit airport of Hong Kong.
Before Bonelli left me to my own devices, we arranged to meet again at midnight, and I went off to see my old friend, Superintendent Mann-Crawford, Special Detail, Her Majesty’s Hong Kong Police.
CHAPTER 3
Harry Mann-Crawford was British, of course, and the kind of empire-officer on whom the sun never sets. But he’d been an exchange student at Stanford when, for a short while, I was detoured from my studies of theoretical mathematics to teach physics there. And later, when I was attending the International Conference of Teachers of Oriental Languages in Calcutta, I’d run into him again. I’d told him, back in the old Stanford days: “Forget about physics, Harry, you haven’t got the brain for it. Stick to languages, or politics; there’s an aptitude there that shows through the veneer of empire...” He was a bright and cheerful young man with a restless sort of reise-fever in his blood. He’d taken a job with the Hong Kong police, at first to teach Mandarin and Cantonese, which he spoke marvelously well; and then, after a few years, he’d taken on the semisecret Political Department, and Harry had found his niche at last.
We’d corresponded once in a while over the years, and he was always insistent that he was in my debt because I’d changed his tracks for him.
We sat on the open balcony of the Knoc Chai restaurant and watched the bustle of the hopelessly crowded streets below. Harry said happily:
“It’s good, good to see you, Cain. How long is it, five years?”
“Damn nearly. I hear you’re a very successful policeman now.”
He grinned. “Well, at least I head the department.”
“And you know everybody within a hundred miles of here. I need some help, Harry.”
He said promptly: “Anything, Cain. Just don’t ask me to break too many laws too fast. I don’t mind bending them a bit for you.”
“I need a woman.”
