Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 21, No. 4, September 1967

The Long Knives Wait by Bill Pronzini

Death comes easy in the China Seas. For me it would he soon I had defied a vice lord. He would remember.

I awoke in a sea of white. I tried to sit up. Pain flashed across my chest. Hands, strong yet gentle, pushed me back. I smelled antiseptic.

“Lie still,” a voice said. “Do not try to move.”

I felt drained. My eyes were heavy and would not stay open. I heard voices, but I could not understand the words. Perspiration soaked my body.

Something very cool touched my left arm. The odor of alcohol. Stinging prick of a needle. The voices began to dim almost immediately, and soon there was only silence.

When I opened my eyes again, my mouth was very dry. Hangover, I thought at first. But no, the dryness was somehow different. I started to roll over; my body would not bend. Bandages. I was wrapped in them. I lay still again, looking at the ceiling. It was a gleaming white.

I moved my eyes around the room. White table, white walls. Two white chairs against one wall, and in one of them a young Malayan girl in a starched white uniform.

Nurse. I knew that immediately. But what was a nurse doing in my crib? No, this was not... All white. Rumah sakit. Hospital. Why am I in a hospital? Why am I wrapped in bandages? I could not seem to focus my mind. I felt drugged.

The nurse was reading a magazine. I opened my mouth to call to her, but I could not make any sound. Panic. I tried to lift myself again, and there was a tearing sensation under the bandages. I cried out, and red spots appeared in back of my eyes.

Dimly, I saw the nurse drop the magazine and come running to my bed. She put her hands gently on my shoulders and pushed me still.

“Please,” she said in Malay. “I will get the doktor.”

She was gone then, and I lay there and looked at the white ceiling. My head began to clear, slowly.

I became aware of the pain in my chest.

It was somewhat like a tooth abscess, only magnified, throbbing with each breath, reaching a crescendo and then diminishing, and then rising again with the pounding of my heart. I bit my lip, and tears squeezed from my eyes.

I raised my hand and wiped away the wetness. I saw the doctor then, standing over my bed. He put one hand on my chin to hold my head steady, passing the other hand back and forth in front of my eyes.

“How many fingers am I holding up?” he said. His English was very good. Oxford British. He was young and Malayan, like the nurse.

“Two,” I said.

He nodded. “How do you feel?”

“Weak.”

“That is understandable.”

“There’s pain in my chest.”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“You do not know?”

“No,” I said.

“You were shot.”

I stared at him. “Shot?”

“One bullet,” the doctor said. “In the chest cavity. Inches either way...” He shrugged.

“How long have I been here?”

“Four days.”

“Four days?”

“You were in a coma until last night.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. I began to remember then.

It was raining.

I was walking in the rain. Going — where? To my crib? Yes, to my crib in Punyang Alley, walking in the rain. Chinatown. I had come from a bar in a Chinatown, nameless, a bar with yellow, hostile faces and fat, pink ladies painted obscenely on the gray walls.

There was an alley. I could see it through the rain, and I leaned against one of the supporting pillars of the Five Foot Ways there. Burning red Joss sticks recessed into the pillars were like hellish, glowing eyes in the darkness.

A voice called my name. I turned, looking into the alley, but I could see nothing through the wall of night. The voice called my name again, and the single word floated, disembodied, on the wind-swept rain.

“Who is it?” I said. “Who’s there?”

Silence, and the falling rain. I went to the mouth of the alley, peering into the shrouded black.

The night exploded in a searing ball of yellowish light and a sound like the maddening bawl of thunder erupted from the very center of the light, and I went to my knees on the wet cobblestones of the alley floor, sprawling forward onto my face, and I lay there with my cheek pressed against the cold, wet stones, feeling the chill of the rain on my neck and a hot, numbing warmth spreading through my chest like thick, boiling syrup.

Then the night closed in and there was nothing more.

I opened my eyes again. The nurse had a thermometer. She took my temperature. The doctor looked at it. “Do you have much pain?”

“Like a toothache,” I said.

“Is it sharp?”

“No.”

“Throbbing?”

“Yes.”

“Hm,” he said. “I should think you are out of danger now.”

“Can I have some water?”

He poured me a glass of water from a plastic pitcher on the night-stand. I drank it. He said, “Do you feel well enough to have a visitor?”

I looked at him. “Visitor?”

“There is a man waiting to see you. He has been waiting for some time, now.”

“What man?”

“From the polis.”

“All right,” I said.

The doctor left the room with the young nurse at his heels. After a moment a man came inside. He was small, bald near the crown of his head. English, I guessed. Transplanted. He wore a heavy raincoat over a neat brown suit. He held his hat in his hands. There was beaded water across the brim.

The man smiled.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

It was a rhetorical question. I closed my eyes.

“May I sit down?” he said.

“Help yourself.”

I heard him drag one of the white metal chairs near the bed and sit heavily.

“My name is Christian,” he said. “I’m with the Singapore police.”

I opened my eyes and looked at him,

He said, “Can you tell me what happened?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was drunk.”

He cleared his throat. “Do you recollect anything at all?”

“A little,” I said. I told him what I could remember.

“Did you see the person who shot you?”

“No.”

“Do you have any idea who it might have been?”

“No.”

“None?”

My grin was tight. “I’ve made enemies in my life.”

“Enemies who would attempt to murder you?”

“I’ve been in the South China Seas a long time,” I said. “I’ve done a lot of things and I’ve been a lot of places. Some of the people I’ve come in contact with aren’t exactly what you’d call the white-tie-and-tails set.”

“We are aware of your, ah, reputation,” Christian said.

“Then that answers your question.”

He took a white linen handkerchief from his pocket and rubbed a wet spot on his hat. “Perhaps this attempt on your life is connected with your... recent activities.”

“What does that mean?”

“You have been associating with members of the Pa’Cheng. Is this not correct?”

“No,” I said.

“You do not know a man — an art dealer, as he claims — named Wong Sot?”

“No.”

“You do know what the Pa’Chengis?”

“It’s a secret society,” I said.

“Yes,” Christian said. “A secret society comprised of gangsters and cutthroats who traffic in every illegal enterprise in Singapore.”

“I’ve heard that said.”

“Perhaps you somehow fell into their disfavor.”

“I told you,” I said. “I don’t know anything about the Pa’Cheng. I don’t know this Wong Sot you mentioned.”

“We could help if you would let us,” he said.

“Help to do what?” I said. “Look, why don’t you just leave me alone? Can’t you see I don’t want anything from you?”

“If the Pa’Cheng has made one attempt on your life, you may be assured it will not be the last,” Christian said. “If there is anything you know, we will offer you protection.”

“Protection?”

“Yes.”

I said, “If the Pa’Cheng were after me, all the protection in this city wouldn’t be enough.”

“That is exactly why we need your help,” Christian said. “To break this hold of fear the Pa’Cheng has on the people of Singapore.”

“Damn it,” I said. “I told you. I can’t help you, and you can’t help me. You’re wasting your time.”

“Perhaps you do not realize—”

“Look, mister,” I said. “How straight do I have to give to you? I don’t care one fat damn about you, or the police, or whether the Pa’Cheng suddenly becomes ruler of the world. Now, suppose you just get the hell out of here.”

There was a cord with a buzzer attached lying by my right hand. I put my finger on the buzzer and held it there. The Malayan nurse came in.

“What is it?”

“Get him out of here,” I said.

“Perhaps you should leave,” the nurse said to Christian. “He is very tired.”

“Yes,” Christian said. He looked at me. “I suggest you think about what I have said.”

“Get out,” I said.

“I will talk with you again, Vinelli,” he said. “Soon.” The nurse let him out, and after a time came back with the British-speaking doctor. They gave me a hypodermic and shut off the lights and closed the door.

I lay on the bed, feeling the pain in my chest, and waited for the sedative to work. Why did you get involved? I thought. You’re too old. You’re an old man. Why did you want to get involved?

Well, it doesn’t matter now. You’re a dead man, Vinelli. Christian had been right. You’ve had the mark put on you, and when the Pa’Cheng marks you you’re a dead man, any way you care to look at it.

It was really very ironic in a way. I couldn’t have helped Christian if I’d wanted to. I didn’t know anything. All the things I had known in my life, all the secrets I had carried, had made me many times a prime target for elimination. But this time, I did not know anything, nothing at all.

There was no reason that I could think of why the Pa’Cheng would want to kill me, except that I was a loose end. The Pa’Cheng does not like loose ends. I should not have gone to them at all. But you have to eat, and there was no money for food and no money for arac. And so I had gone to Wong Sot,

It had been very simple, the job I had done for them. Just a package. Just deliver a package...

It had been a square package, about the size of a small jewel box, and wrapped in gold paper. A single strip of gold ribbon circled it, and fastened on top was a tiny gold bow. The package sat in the middle of Wong Sot’s bare-topped desk.

I looked at it.

“I didn’t know the Pa’Cheng was in the habit of giving presents,” I said.

Wong Sot had a face like a prune. His skin was aged parchment, yellow and puckered, and looked the way skin will when it is soaked in water for any length of time. You could not tell the color of his eyes. The puckered skin formed tiny caves, with slits for openings, and when he smiled, as he did now, the slits sealed the caves and the eyes disappeared completely. He folded his hands across the protruding girth of his middle.

He said, “There are many things you do not know about the Pa’Cheng, my friend.”

I pointed toward the package. “What’s inside?”

“You should not concern yourself with the contents,” Wong Sot said. “Let us say it is merely a gift for an attractive young lady.”

“Why don’t you deliver it yourself?”

“A matter of expediency, you see,” Wong Sot said.

“Which means?”

“Simply that it would be a most inopportune time for myself, or any of my associates, to carry such a gift as this.”

“In other words,” I said, “police search.”

A sound like two sticks grating together came from Wong Sot’s throat. I supposed it was a chuckle.

“Precisely,” he said.

“If the police want what’s in this package, you’re taking a chance having it here.”

“Yes, somewhat. But it has only recently arrived, and the danger is not great as long as we do not attempt to, shall we say, transport the package elsewhere. We need someone whom we can trust to guard the package carefully until it can be delivered.”

“Is that why you had me brought in the back way?”

“Yes.”

I looked at him.

“How much?” I said.

“I see you are a man who does not waste words,” Wong Sot said. “Very good. I like that.” He opened a drawer in his desk and took out several bills. He laid them on the desk top. Three hundred Singapore dollars. One hundred, American.

I said, “Errand boys come high these days.”

His smile widened. A damned yellow prune, I thought.

“The Pa’Cheng pays well for services rendered,” he said.

I put the bills in my jacket. Wong Sot said, “You will deliver the package to a girl. Her name is Marlene.”

“Where do I meet this girl?”

“The Pagoda.”

Yes, I thought. It would be the Pagoda. “When?”

“This evening,” Wong Sot said. “Nine o’clock. There will be a table reserved for you. The girl will identify herself by name, and ask to join you at your table. You will offer to buy her a drink, and she will accept, ordering a stengah. You are to keep the package in the right-hand side pocket of your jacket.”

I waited. Wong Sot said nothing more. I said, “That’s all?”

A slight nod. It was very hot in Wong Sot’s office, and the sweet, nauseous odor of jasmine incense hung on the air. I stood and picked up the package from his desk. It was light. I put it into the right-hand side pocket of my jacket.

Then I turned my back on him and walked out. The back way.

The Pagoda is a dive.

It is a dive in the strictest sense of the word. Probably the worst in Singapore. It would have been closed long ago, if it were not for the fact that the Pa’Cheng owned and controlled it. It is in Sam Po Alley, or rather buried, like the rest of the city’s sewers, below it. You reach it by way of a wooden door on the alley. A huge Chinese, dressed in the garb of. Genghis Khan, replete with gleaming scimitar, stands guard there, and if you are not known or do not have one of the small cards given to regular customers as a pass, you do not get in.

When you pass through the second door, there are long, steep steps that lead down into the club proper. You cannot see anything from the head of the stairs. Flickering candles in green glass jars sit on each table, but they do not give off enough light to penetrate the thick, smoke-laden air that lies stagnate throughout the room.

At nine o’clock that night I sat at the table reserved for me, against one wall near the small stage at the upper end. A Chinese waitress in a silver wrap-around skirt brought me a gin-and-quinine.

I sat nursing the drink. Five Singapore dollars for gin measured with an eye-dropper. But no one seems to mind. The Pagoda caters to the thrill-seeker, the rich tourist with a full wallet and very little morals, the influential Chinese towkays — businessmen — and British and American sailors. It is not surprising to find a ranking government official or two seated at a dark table in one of the corners. For a price, you can get anything at all in the Pagoda.

A door opened to my left, shedding pale light, near the bar on the left-hand wall. In there, the Casino. Roulette, fantan, shell-a-point, and all the wheels and all the games run by slick-haired Chinese with oiled smiles and polite words, and One finger on the trick buttons hidden beneath the tables.

I had been there fifteen minutes when the girl came. She came up silently, and stood by my table, her face shadowed, long, raven hair framing her head, falling across her shoulders.

She was tall and slender, dressed in a pale blue cheongsam. Long, tapering legs, long, slender fingers holding a matching blue handbag at her waist, finely jutting breasts. And that raven hair.

I felt the muscles in my stomach tighten, seeing her like that, and long-buried thoughts flooded into my mind. Thoughts of another girl — a tall girl with long fingers and raven hair that fell across her shoulders. Thoughts of a quick smile and flashing gray eyes and a promise of twenty-five years ago, a promise that had died on two pieces of scented pink stationary two weeks before V-J Day.

The girl had moved a step closer to my table. I saw her face then. Eurasian, I thought. Thai, or Indo-Chinese bone structure, and an Oriental tilt to her eyes. Gothic nose, and lips full and painted a red that was too bright and too thick. French, perhaps. Her skin coloring was right.

But she was not beautiful. There was a hardness at her mouth, and lines across her forehead that even the heavy make-up she wore and the darkness of the room could not conceal. I guessed her age at thirty-five.

She said, “I am Marlene. May I join you?”

Yes, French. The accent was faint, but discernible. I said, “Be my guest.”

She sat stiffly, erect. Her eyes touched my face briefly, and then moved away.

I said, “Drink?”

“Yes, a stengah, please.”

One of the waitresses came by and I ordered the drink. I looked at Marlene.

“What do we do now?” I said.

She said nothing. When the waitress brought the drink, and I had paid for it, she took three small sips, set the glass down, and got to her feet. She came around to my side of the table and leaned across me, and her lips touched mine. There was no warmth in the kiss, and I could smell the musky odor of the cheap perfume she wore. Her lips stayed on mine several seconds, and then she straightened, smiling at me, and moved off through the tight ring of tables.

I watched her leave. Very nice, I thought. To anyone watching it would have looked like a simple pick-up. A proposition, a kiss to seal it, and the girl leaving, to be followed by the man. I smiled. The package that had been in my coat pocket was gone, now. She was very good. I hadn’t felt a thing.

I left then. I walked the streets, deeper into Chinatown. Overhead, thick, rolling clouds, billowed. It would rain soon.

I went to the Seaman’s Bar on South Bridge Road. I sat at a table in the rear and ordered a gin-and-quinine.

I drank some of the gin. The girl, Marlene, had pushed memories into my mind, and I could not seem to bury them again.

The bar seemed dark as a raven’s wing.

They kept me in the hospital ten days.

The first four days were very bad. I ran a heavy fever. Chills. Vomiting. I couldn’t keep anything on my stomach except light broth, and that not for long.

They fed me penicillin and some other kind of drug, and on the fifth day the fever broke. After that there were no complications. The Malayan doctor said I had contracted a mild pneumonia.

I had two visitors in those ten days. Christian both times. The first time was a carbon copy of the original. The same questions and the same answers. The second time he came I refused to talk to him. He left, but I knew he would be back. I wondered how long he was going to keep on with it. He was a persistent bastard.

At the end of the second week the Malayan doctor came into my room and inspected the wound in ray chest. There had been no pain for a long while now.

“Well,” he said when he had finished. “Your wound has healed quite rapidly, and there have been no signs of recurrence of the pneumonia. Providing you agree to remain rather sedentary for awhile, I would say you are well enough to be leaving us.”

I looked across at the single window on the far wall. A heavy rain whipped the chamadora palms in the hospital garden outside. They had been letting me walk out there to get my strength back.

I said, “How soon?”

“Any time you wish. Today, if you like.”

“All right,” I said. “Today.”

At three o’clock that afternoon, I stood on the hospital steps, looking out at the gently falling rain. They had given me a heavy wool topcoat along with my personal belongings at the desk inside, and although it was not cold, I had the coat buttoned up to my throat.

I was thinking about what the nurse at the desk had said. Christian had called, asking my condition. And there had been another caller as well, who did not give his name; he had said he was a personal friend. She had told both of them I was being released this afternoon.

Christian had already set his wheels in motion. A little man in a gray rain hat sat in an English Ford parked at the curb to my right. He was watching me, and trying to look inconspicuous about it. A tail. Well, all right. Let him tag along.

I wondered how long it would take.

A yellow Singapore taxi turned the corner, and I hailed him. I had close to eighty dollars of Wong Sot’s money left in my wallet.

I gave the cab driver the address of my crib in Punyang Alley.

But when we neared Singapore River I changed my mind, and told the driver to take me to Chinee’s instead, just off Maltby Place. He let me off in front.

I stood looking at the sagging grey building through the rain. Someone had broken a pane from the window, and the green shade covering it was torn. Chinee had tacked a piece of cardboard over the opening, and it was soggy from the rain.

I crossed to the door. I saw the little man in the English Ford, parked a few doors down. I wondered where Christian had found him. He was as obvious as a ten-year-old kid with his first detective kit.

I stepped inside.

Dark and somewhat chilly, and nearly deserted. At the long bar against the left-hand wall were two Chinese coolies in faded blue denim drinking Tiger Beer. Sitting alone at a table against the rear wall was a fat little man with no fingers on his right hand. They called him the Dutchman.

Behind the bar Chinee stood filling the cooler with beer. He looked up when the door opened and saw me. He stopped. I walked across the room. I took a seat at the upper end of the bar, away from the two Chinese.

Chinee walked down to where I sat. He is a giant. Almost seven feet tall, and there is not a single hair anywhere on his massive head. He leaned across the bar, and when he spoke his voice was very low.

“You should not be here,” he said.

“That’s some greeting for a sick friend.”

He said nothing.

“Why didn’t you come to the hospital?”

He wet his lips.

I smiled.

“So you’re afraid of them,” I said.

“Yes,” Chinee said. “I am afraid of them. Any man who is not is a fool.”

“They’ve never bothered you.”

“They came here,” Chinee said. “Two of Wong Sot’s men. The day after you were shot.”

“Here? Why?”

“They were looking for something,” Chinee said. “Something they thought you had given me to keep for you.”

“What kind of something?”

“I do not know.”

“They didn’t tell you?”

“No.”

“What have you heard?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Not a word.”

“The hell,” I said. “There’s nothing that goes on in Singapore that you don’t know about.”

“Tongues have grown silent,” Chinee said. He left it at that.

“All right,” I said. “What did you tell the Pa’Cheng?”

“The truth,” Chinee said. “That you gave me nothing.”

“Did they believe you?”

“Perhaps so,” Chinee said. “But they made threats. And the Pa’Cheng does not make idle threats. Whatever it is you have the Pa’Cheng wants very badly. It is not worth your life, and I will not allow it to be worth mine.”

“Listen,” I said. “I don’t have a damn thing. That’s the truth.”

“What are you going to do?”

“What would you have me do?”

“I would have you leave Singapore, Vinelli,” Chinee said.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Then you are a fool.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But how far do you think I’d get? The Pa’Cheng wields strong power in the South China Seas.”

“I have a friend who operates a tramp freighter,” Chinee said. “He is leaving for the Phillipines tonight. I could arrange something.”

“Forget it,” I said. “I’m too old to start running now.”

“What will you do? Sit and wait for the Pa’Cheng to come for you?”

“That’s right,” I said. “That’s just what I’ll do. I’m damn well going to find out what this is all about.”

“It does not matter whether you have what they are looking for or not,” Chinee said. “If they believe you have it, and you cannot produce it, they will kill you anyway.”

“I need a drink,” I told him. “It’s been a long time between drinks.”

Wordlessly, Chinee poured a water glass half full of arrack. I drank it, feeling the hot, acrid taste in my throat. I coughed, and for a moment I did not think the arrack would stay down. A long time, I thought.

His face an Oriental mask, Chinee said, “You will leave now, Vinelli. I do not want the Pa’Cheng to find you here.”

I shrugged. I took fifteen Singapore dollars from my wallet and laid the bills on the bar. “A bottle of arrack first.”

He brought me the bottle. He did not touch the money. I stood and went to the door. The table at the far end of the room, where the man known as the Dutchman had been sitting, was empty now. I smiled a little. The rain brings out many things, I thought. Even the vultures.

I opened the door, and stepped out into the rain.

They were waiting in Hontou Alley.

When I left Chinee’s, I walked west along Telok Ayer Street and into Chinatown and my crib in Punyang Alley. I thought at first about taking another cab, but I decided the short three block walk in the rain wouldn’t hurt me. It was not cold. The little man in the English Ford had abandoned his wheels, and was following me on foot now, about three-quarters of a block back.

The rain quickened somewhat as I walked, and the streets were almost empty this late in the afternoon. I stayed in close to the small shops lining the streets. The Five Foot Ways offered little protection, the rain slanting in at a heavy angle, and I knew I had made a mistake in walking.

I was drenched before I had gone two blocks.

When I came to Hontou Alley, I paused momentarily on the curb, pulling the collar on the overcoat higher around my neck. Then I stepped down off the curb, my head bent into the rain. I had taken three steps when I heard the roar of the car engine, accelerating rapidly, and the loud, grating clash of meshing gears.

I turned toward the sound, and through the rain I saw the looming shape of a small German sedan as it shot away from the curb part way down the block, tires spinning on the wet pavement, and the darkened headlights were twin eyes through the swirl of rain as I stood motionless on the street.

The car was almost on top of me when I reacted — simple reflex, conditioned movements.

I threw myself backwards, twisting in the air, and the bumper of the sedan tugged at my pant leg as it slammed past. I hit the pavement on my left side, my face and shoulders scraping the rough concrete, and a rush of fire shot through my chest. The bottle of arrack was in my left hand, and it shattered as I landed. I rolled off the sharpness of the glass and into the rushing rain-wash in the gutter, my mouth gaping open, and a stream of putrid water poured into my throat and nose.

I gagged, rolling again, into a sitting position with my legs splayed out, facing the corner. The German sedan had skidded into a looping fishtail trying to take the turn onto Telok Street with too much speed, and as I looked I saw it slide sideways into, an empty trishaw on the opposite side of the street, upending it, and then the car straightened, wobbling, tail-lights flashing in the rain as the driver pumped the brakes, and was gone, spewing sheets of spray from its tires.

I sat in the rushing water. A boy in a coolie hat ran up to me, shouting. I struggled to my feet. The boy began to babble in Cantonese. I could not understand what he was saying.

More people came running up, now, circling me in a tight ring. An Englishman in a bowler hat and trenchcoat pushed his way through.

“I saw the whole thing,” he said. “Bloody ass, driving like that. You all right, fellow?”

I managed a nod. “I’ve got my car,” the Englishman said. “You’d better let a doctor have a look at you.”

I started to answer him, but then I saw the little man who had been following me come running up the street, and I knew that if I waited around for him there would be questions, and probably an interview with Christian at police headquarters, and I did not want any of that.

I pushed through the crowd of people, stumbling across the street. I heard the Englishman yell something, and then another shout that must have come from the little man, but I didn’t stop. I ducked down the first alley I saw, running in the rain, and there was an agony of hot pain in my chest.

I ran to another alley, down there, and squeezed through an opening in a board fence. I thought my lungs would burst. Up ahead I saw a neon sign suspended above a tavern. The sign glowed a distorted wet crimson through the rain.

I stepped inside the tavern and went to the bar. I knew I had lost the little man now.

The man behind the bar, a short Chinese in a white coat, looked at me and his eyes grew wide and frightened.

“Arrack,” I said, still gasping. “Bring the bottle.”

He brought it, and backed away from me, his eyes still wide. I saw myself in the bar mirror. There was a discolored bruise covering most of the right side of my face, and my hair was wet, plastered down across my forehead. The overcoat was torn in two places.

I thought, they didn’t waste any time. I’ve only been out of the hospital for one hour. Quick and fast. No questions asked.

Damn pain in my chest. I stuck my hand under my shirt to see if the fall had pulled the wound open, but it seemed to be all right. I wondered if I were bleeding internally.

Another thought nagged at my brain.

No questions asked.

But why not? Chinee had said they thought I had something that belonged to them. There was the possibility that they had found whatever it was, but that did not seem likely, since Chinee had said there was complete silence. That had to mean it was something big, and the Pa’Cheng were enforcing tight security to keep word from leaking out. And if they had found this something they were after, then some word would have drifted on the grapevine.

All right. They still had not found it.

Then why try to run me down with a car?

To begin with, it wasn’t the weapon of the Pa’Cheng. It was crude and amatuerish; things that the Pa’Cheng are not. Then why? Why not pick me up, question me, if they thought I had what they were looking for? The Pa’Cheng has ways of breaking men to get the answers they want.

Why put a bullet in my chest in a dark alley?

Hell, yes, that didn’t make any sense either. None of it did. Somebody was trying to kill me, all right, but now I wasn’t so sure it was the Pa’Cheng at all. But who, then? and why? And what was it the Pa’Cheng thought I had?

A lot of questions there, and none of them had any answers.

And the only man I knew who did have some of the answers was Wong Sot.

I drank some of the arrack and put bills from my wallet on the bar. Outside, I could see a break in the darkness of the sky, and I knew the rain was over. The air had already begun to take on that hot, humid feel of the tropics.

I looked up and down the street for some sign of the little man, but he was gone. They would be waiting for me at my crib, I thought.

A boy in a covered trishaw pedaled past, and I hailed him. I had to take a chance of going back to my crib; I needed to change these wet clothes and I wanted the Walther automatic I kept in the bottom drawer of my dresser. Maybe there was a little fight left in me after all. I was going to see Wong Sot.

I told the boy to take me to Bilou Street, one street over from Punyang Alley. He dropped me there, and I went to the narrow alley between it and Punyang Alley, to where the side door of the building that houses my crib is located. I checked the alley carefully, but I saw no one. If anyone were waiting for me, they were waiting out front.

The building in which I live is ancient and sagging. The facade is colorless, and the only ornamentation is laundry hung to dry from horizontal poles jutting below the glassless windows. Inside are twenty cribs, eight feet square each, and there is one toilet per floor. Most of the cribs are inhabited by Chinese peasant families, some with five and six children. At night, you can hear the hunger cries of the children and you sleep with the smell of hopelessness in your nostrils.

I opened the side door of the building with my key. Both it and the front door on Punyang Alley are kept locked at all times, and are made of heavy wood, reinforced with steel braces.

I shut the door behind me and stood for a moment, letting my eyes become accustomed to the darkness. The long hallway is evilsmelling and narrow, and at the upper end, near the front door, are a flight of stairs. My crib is on the second floor, and I crossed to them. Here the darkness was complete.

I had one foot on the first step when they came out from beneath the stairs.

There were two of them. One was thin, almost emaciated, and his eyes bulged like a frog’s. He resembled a cadaver. The other was short, with the left side of his face pulled down where a knife scar ran the length of his cheek.

They were a nice pair. The cadaver’s name was Yip Se, and the other one was Wah Soo Sung. They were Wong Sot’s personal bodyguards.

Wah Soo Sung came around behind me and took my arms in a vice grip. The cadaver held a white bone-handled knife engraved with the seal of the Pa’Cheng, and the tip of the blade was touching the soft flesh in the hollow of my throat. They worked it very fast, and very neatly. I didn’t have time to blink.

Yip Se said, “Do not move. Stand very still.”

“I’m not moving,” I said.

“Wong Sot wishes words with you.”

“I want a few words with him myself.”

The short one let go of my arms. Yip Se took the knife away from my throat, watching my eyes to see if I would make any kind of move for it. I stood motionless.

Satisfied, Yip Se let the knife disappear into his clothes. He made a motion. We went out the way I had just come in, down the alley to Bilou Street. A car waited at the curb.

Now maybe I was going to find out what it was all about.

The sign on the rear door of the small, dusty shop on Barnaby Place read: Wong Sot, Art Objects, Deliveries Only. Chinese characters below it said the same. Yip Se opened the door with a key, and we stepped into a small storage room lit only by a bluish light suspended from the ceiling on a long cord.

We passed boxes of cheap carved figurines, worthless Chinese water color prints stacked in long rows on the floor, sculptured statuse on alabaster pedestals. Through a door then, into a hallway.

At the end was Wong Sot’s private office. It was the same way I had come in before.

Yip Se rapped twice on the door. Inside, Wong Sot’s voice said, “Yup lei.” We went in.

Wong Sot sat behind his desk. He had been looking out at a Chinese funeral procession with its paper-sculptured hearses and umbrella-carrying pallbearers, passing in the rear alley. But when the door opened he swiveled to face the room. The two Chinese grabbed my arms and shoved me up to the desk.

Wong Sot stared at me through the slits that hid his eyes.

“I will not waste unnecessary words, Vinelli,” he said. His voice dripped acid. “You would be wise to do the same by not lying to me. Where is the package?”

I stared at him. “What package?”

“I warn you,” he said. “Do not try my patience. I have waited three weeks for that package and I do not intend to wait any longer.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“You are indeed a fool,” Wong Sot said. “Do you think the Pa’Cheng can be trifled with?”

“I don’t know what the hell it is you think I’ve got, but I’m telling you I don’t have it.”

“I will not tolerate this!”

“Now listen,” I said, “I don’t like being a target, and I like it less when I don’t know why. Now here I am. But before you finish it, I’m damn well going to know the reason.”

Wong Sot was staring at me. It was very quiet. A fly buzzed near the ceiling, a fat, blue fly, and that was the only sound.

Wong Sot said finally, “You think the Pa’Cheng attempted to kill you?”

“What else am I supposed to think?”

“Ridiculous,” Wong Sot said. “Why would we order you killed?”

“If it wasn’t you, then who was it?”

“I do not know,” Wong Sot said. “When the first attempt was made, we endeavored to find out. It remains a mystery. We were as interested as you in your remaining alive. If you were dead, we cannot recover the package.”

“I’m going to tell you one more time,” I said. “I don’t know anything about any package!”

But as I said that I knew what package he was talking about. It hit me just like that. The package I had delivered to the Pagoda. What the hell?

Wong Sot said, “Well, Vinelli?”

“I haven’t got that damn package,” I said. “I delivered it to the Pagoda, just the way I was told.”

“You did not deliver it.”

“I damn well did deliver it,” I said. “I took it to the Pagoda and the girl lifted it from my pocket. Isn’t that the way it was supposed to happen?”

“That is the way,” Wong Sot said. “Only the package Marlene received from you contained nothing but confetti.”

“Confetti. It was the same package you gave me.”

“Impossible,” Wong Sot said. “I myself wrapped that package only a short time before you arrived. Now I do not intend to play this cat and mouse any longer. Where is the package?”

“I told you, I delivered it to the Pagoda.”

“The Pa’Cheng has methods of extracting the truth,” Wong Sot said slowly. “You would not enjoy them, Vinelli.”

“Listen,” I said, “who was the package supposed to end up with?”

“A certain party in Johore Bahru.”

“Is this party the one who told you the package contained confetti?”

“No”

“Who was it, then?”

“Marlene.”

“The girl who took it from me?”

“Yes.”

“How did she know?”

“She was present when it was opened.”

“All right, then,” I said. “She’s the one you want, not me. She’s got the real package.”

“Marlene is a trusted member of the Pa’Cheng.”

“I don’t care what she is.”

“She would not betray us.”

“No?” I said. “What does the package contain?”

“You know as well as I do what the package contains.”

“How many times do I have to tell you, Wong Sot?” I said. “What was in that package?”

He was silent for a moment, watching me. Then, “Cocaine, Vinelli. The package contains one quarter of a million dollars in pure cocaine.”

I took a breath. Narcotics. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that at all. I said, “Did the girl know beforehand?”

“Of course.”

“A quarter of a million dollars is enough to make anyone sell out his loyalties.”

“I do not believe it.”

“Which is exactly what she must have counted on,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

It had all fallen into place now. I had been set up, very nicely, neatly, set up.

I said to Wong Sot, “Don’t you see the way it is? The girl kept the original package and substituted the dummy herself. When the dummy was opened, she would claim the package I had delivered to her was the same one. She’s a trusted member of the Pa’Cheng, as you said; there would be no reason for you to doubt her word.

“But she couldn’t leave it there. If you got to me, and I could convince you I was telling the truth, she knew what would happen to her. So in order to insure her story, I had to be killed. When my body was found, she figured you wouldn’t look any further for the cocaine, that maybe you would think I had been killed by somebody else who wanted it and knew I had it. It would buy her the time she needed to get out of Singapore with the real package.”

“Idiot’s tale,” Wong Sot said.

“Is it?” I said. “Or don’t you want to admit you’ve been taken?”

“How could Marlene have done all these things?”

“She had help,” I said. “There’s no doubt about that. It was a man’s voice I heard that night in the alley, and there was a man driving the car that tried to run me down today. A boy friend, probably.”

“If what you say were true,” Wong Sot said, “then why did Marlene not leave Singapore immediately, even after the first attempt on your life failed?”

“She must have been scared,” I said. “She knew you were tearing Singapore apart, looking for the package. If she suddenly disappeared, she knew you would put two and two together and come up with her. But with me dead, there was no reason why, after awhile, she couldn’t quietly go off somewhere without your suspecting she had the real package all along. So she had to wait until I was released from the hospital and make another try at eliminating me. Which explains the car that tried to run me down this afternoon.”

Wong Sot sucked at the ring finger of his right hand. Then he pulled the phone on his desk to him. He dialled a number. He waited several minutes, his fat fingers drumming on the desk top. Abruptly he cradled the receiver. Frowning, he said, “There is no answer.”

He motioned with his hand, and Yip Se stepped forward. Wong Sot said something in fleet Chinese, and the cadaver nodded and left the room.

Wong Sot looked at me, “I have sent Yip Se to bring Marlene here. I still do not believe what you say, but I want that package very badly. I cannot allow any possibility to be overlooked.”

“Look,” I said, “you must have had me checked out pretty thoroughly before you brought me into this. You must have found that I could be trusted, or you Wouldn’t have let me carry the package.”

“That has bothered me somewhat,” Wong Sot said. “I am an excellent judge of men, and I am seldom wrong. But as you yourself said, a quarter of a million dollars in pure cocaine is enough to make anyone forsake his loyalties or his pattern of trust.”

“All right,” I said. “But there’s another thing. If I had the package, do you think I would have been hanging around for your men to pick me up? I would have tried to get out of Sinapore as soon as I left the hospital.”

“Unless you thought you could fool me by concocting a tale such as this one.”

“I’ve been around a long time, Wong Sot,” I said. “I’m not stupid enough to think I could fool the Pa’Cheng.”

I could see that my words were beginning to have an effect on Wong Sot. His prune face was contorted in deep thought. He said, “Sit down, Vinelli. There, against the wall. We will wait for Marlene.”

We waited almost two hours. I sat in the quiet of Wong Sot’s office, and through the window behind his desk I watched it grow dark. The sky had cleared completely now, and there was the mugginess of gathering heat in the air. My clothes stuck to my skin, and they still held the stench of the gutter rain water. The pain in my chest had subsided into a muted throbbing.

Wong Sot did not speak while we waited. He sat looking out of the window at the darkened alley.

At nine-ten Yip Se returned.

He was alone.

He spoke to Wong Sot. I watched Wong Sot’s lips tighten, and the slits where his eyes hid were fine lines, like a slash made on a portrait with a tiny brush. When Yip Se had finished, Wong Sot looked to me.

“She is gone,” he said. “Yip Se went to her home, and found it deserted. A neighbor said she told him she was planning to visit relatives in Penang. Yip Se searched the inside of her home. Her clothes and belongings are gone, items which would not be taken on a short visit to relatives.”

“She must have got scared,” I said. “That miss with the car this afternoon probably scared them plenty.”

“I must find her,” Wong Sot said. “If she has already left Singapore with the package, there are a hundred Asian markets where it could be disposed of.”

I said, “I don’t think she’s left Singapore. Not just yet, anyway.”

I could feel the intensity of his hidden eyes on me. “No?”

“They’ve still got to make another attempt at me,” I said. “With me dead, they would have time to sell the cocaine and get as far away from Singapore as possible before you guessed the truth. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have any time at all, and they might never get out of Singapore.”

“Perhaps you are right,” Wong Sot said.

“You should be able to find them,” I said. “Singapore isn’t that big.”

“I do not think that is likely. My people are most adept, but she had undoubtedly hidden herself well. We would find Marlene eventually, but that would, perhaps, be too late to recover the package.” He wet his parchment lips. “There is, however, one other way we can locate her.”

“Which is?”

“You, Vinelli.”

I stared at him. You prune-faced bastard, I thought. “So this is the way it is. You send me out to walk the streets, and when they make another attempt you grab them.”

“Quite right,” Wong Sot said, smiling.

“Quite wrong,” I said. “You can find yourself another boy.”

Wong Sot shrugged. “It is your choice, of course. However, if you do not do as I say, I will kill you.”

“What difference does it make if they kill me or you do? I’m just as dead, either way”

“Perhaps not. Yip Se and Wah Soo Sung are quite capable.”

“And suppose they’re not capable enough?”

He shrugged. “I am afraid you are expendable, Vinelli. My only concern in this matter is recovering the package, and seeing that Marlene is dealt with.”

Like a lamb, I thought. Just like a lamb tied to a stake, and the lions, in the Lion City, were on all sides. But I really didn’t have a choice. What else was there for me to do? Either way, this was going to be the end of it.

“All right,” I said to Song Sot. “We’ll do it your way.”

“You are being wise.”

I stood looking at him, at the flat Oriental smile and the yellow prune face, and then I turned and walked through the door.

This time I went out the front way.

Chinatown after dark is a paradox.

It is a swarming concourse of glaring neon lights. It is a milling throng of people, Chinese and Caucasians, Easterners, Westerners, Europeans. It is bedlam, voices raised into a jumbled cacophony, like a recorded tape played two speeds too fast, the cries of night hawkers chanting their wares in the market places, staccato explosions of firecrackers, the penetrating throb of music from itinerant Chinese opera companies performing wayangs along the sidewalks. It is color and gaiety, laughter and merriment.

But it is also blackness, deep impenetrable blackness, and in its alleys and basements, behind closed, locked doors, along foul-smelling hallways, there is no laughter and no gaiety. In the bowels of Chinatown, the gray balustraded buildings close over the streets like the walls of a prison. This Chinatown is phlegmatic, unfeeling, and at night, the air seems somehow more chill, somehow clammy, like the touch of long dead flesh.

I walked through the crowded bazaars and open market stalls along Maxwell and Neil Roads. I walked from the Thian Hock Keng Chinese Temple to the Hong Lim Green, along crowded palm-lined streets, brightly lighted, the smell of frangapani and gardenias rich and heady after the heavy rain.

And I walked into the belly — Sago Lane, The Alley of the Cobra, Singsep Place, and where I live, Punyang Alley. The click of my shoes on the pavement rang unnaturally loud in the stillness. I passed dark and shuttered shops, and along deserted street. And here the smell was that of garbage and unwashed bodies, perfumed incense and garlic, cooked opium and cooked rice, mixing in a potpourri of foul air that hung like a pall above the streets.

I walked the paradox for over an hour.

Nothing.

I left Chinatown then, and walked to Collyer Quay. My legs felt rubbery, and the pain still throbbed in my chest, and I knew I could not go on much longer. But I walked.

I walked across the Cavanaugh Bridge that spans Singapore River, past the Government Building and the legislative Assembly Hall, and along the sea wall of the River.

I prowled amongst the shadows of the storage warehouses between South Bridge and New Bridge Roads, and then northeast in the direction of Clemenceau Avenue, staring out at the silent forms of the prahus and the junks and the twakows.

Still nothing.

I began to wonder if maybe I had been wrong. Maybe they had already left Singapore. It was possible they had seen Wong Sot’s men take me from my crib in Punyang Alley, and had decided to fun without bothering with me. If they were still in Singapore, something should have happened by now. They would have been looking for me, and I had given them plenty of opportunity in the last hour and half.

When I reached Clemenceau Avenue I turned left, crossing the Singapore River again. I walked west, entering Kentong Bahru Road. I went two blocks, towards Outtram Road now and another swing back through Chinatown. A tiny creek, some ten feet below the level of the street, ran parallel to the road. It was bordered with thick ferns and white syringa bushes, and several mangosteen trees, laden heavy with fruit, grew on the opposite side.

I walked on the soft grass at the top of the bank. I stopped to light a cigarette, cupping my hands around the match. As I did, headlights made a wide swing onto Kentong Bahru Road behind me, sweeping light. The car rolled past, and then slowed, and I heard the screech of brakes as the car skidded to a halt a hundred feet up the road.

It was the German sedan.

He might have spotted me in town and waited for me to leave the relative safety of the streets before he made his play. Or he might have just been combing the city, and had somehow missed me. I didn’t have time to ponder it, now.

I heard the grinding of gears as he threw the sedan in reverse, and then the whine of the engine. The sedan shot backwards, towards me, and I went off the side of the road, sliding down the grassy bank.

I lost my footing and tumbled down, pain a screaming agony in my chest, rolling through wet ferns and spongy leaf mold. I banged into a katumpagan — Artillery Plant — and the stamens burst with small explosions that sounded almost like infantry fire, and cloud of pollen dust, like puffs of smoke, bit into my nose and eyes.

Tires screamed on the pavement above me, and I heard the car door thrown open. I clawed my feet under me and scrambled through the creek to the cover of the mangosteen trees on the other side.

I looked up at the road, and I saw him then, one man, silhouetted against the dark sky behind him, and in his hand I could see the outline of a gun. He stood still for a moment, peering into the darkness, and then he started down the bank.

Where the hell were those Chinese bodyguards? But as I thought that, the man, halfway down the bank, whirled and went to his knees, and I heard the slap of feet on the pavement. I saw them then, coming around the front of the sedan angled across the road, the short one in the lead.

The man’s first shot shattered the stillness of the night, and I saw Wah Soo Sung stop in mid-stride, both hands flying to his face, and then he staggered and fell sprawling to the side of the road. The man pumped two more shots, and I heard one thump into metal somewhere on the sedan, and Yip Se reeled, slowing, but held onto his balance, his teeth bared white in the darkness, and went off the side of the road in a sideways leap.

His feet dug into the soft ground of the bank and he crashed into the man before he could get off another shot, and they rolled, a tangled jumble of arms and legs, crashing as I had done through the ferns and bushes, and when they hit the creekbed they rolled apart.

There was no sound then. You could not even hear the rustle of leaves, and the cicadas and crickets were still. I came out from behind the mangosteens. Yip Se lay on his stomach, arms spread-eagled over his head, and he did not move. The man who had tried to kill me lay on his back in the stream of water in the creek bed, and in his chest, buried below the breastbone, was Yip Se’s bone-handled knife.

I went to him and knelt down. Dead. He had dark hair and a soft-lipped petulant boy’s mouth. I searched his clothes, but I did not expect to find anything. He had been alone, and that meant the girl was waiting for him somewhere. And with the girl would be the real package. But where?

I went through the stuff in his pockets. A wad of bills — Singapore and several French francs. A comb. Matches. A pack of cigarettes. In his inside coat pocket, a wallet that held a French visa, issued to a Claude Durais. His face stared back at me from the photo.

And in his side coat pocket I found a key.

A single brass key, attached by a length of bead chain to an irregular piece of ironwood. Emblazoned in gold letters on the ironwood was Tampines Court, and below that the numerals 10.

I stood, holding the key in my hand. Tampines Court. A string of bungalows off Tampines Road, near the Pasir Ris Beach Resort on the Northern end of the island. And I knew that was where the girl had to be. They must have been planning to go across the strait at Ponggol Point to Johore.

I put the key in my pocket and started up the side of the bank. Metal glinted in the grass. I bent and saw that it was the gun the Frenchman had had. A Beretta. I put it into my jacket.

When I reached the road, there was sweat soaking my entire body. I touched my forehead, and felt it fiery hot. Fever. Maybe the penumonia had come back. My knees were weak, and the pain in my chest forced me to breathe in short gulps of air. I needed sleep and I needed a drink and maybe I needed a prayer. But there was something else, first.

I looked to see if the gunfire had attracted anyone. No one in sight. I went to the German sedan. The keys still dangled from the ignition. I got inside and put in the clutch and turned it over. Misfire. Then it caught and held. I put it in gear and got out of there.

It took me twenty minutes to drive the fourteen miles to Tampines Road.

I wondered what the hell I was doing. I was done with it, now. All I had to do was call Wong Sot and tell him where the girl was, where the package of cocaine was, and I would be a free man. The Frenchman was dead. Wong Sot would do nothing to me, I knew, if he recovered the package. Then why? I thought. Why do you keep on with it? I did not have an answer.

Tampines Court was near Upper Changi Road, two miles from Changi Point and perhaps six from Ponggol Point. It was a flat string of fifteen bungalows, each with a private walk and garden. Behind the bungalows was a long stretch of clean white beach, and to the left were kampongs — stilt houses — where the Malay fishermen lived. To the right was marshland. A small road, which I had just come down, connected Tampines Road with the coast and the kampongs, and it was along this that the court was located.

I parked the sedan at the side of the road. I found the private drive for Bungalow Ten, keeping in the shadows of the coconut palms that grew beside it. A light shown through a window in front of the bungalow. The bamboo blinds were drawn. I stepped across the grass and through a hibiscus garden to the side of the window. I looked in through one of the chinks in the blind.

She was sitting in a thatched bamboo chair. She wore a green samfu — Chinese pajamas with short sleeves and a high collar — and she was very nervous. As I watched she lit a cigarette, and then stamped it out without drawing on it. She stood, and began to pace the room, looking at the clock on the wall opposite the window. It was almost midnight.

She continued to pace the floor. In the open doorway to the bedroom I could see four large suitcases, packed and ready to go. They were planning to leave tonight, all right.

I moved away from the window and went up onto the porch, walking softly. I tried the door. Locked. I took the key from my pocket and fitted it carefully into the slot. It wouldn’t turn. She had a key in the lock inside.

I rapped on the door. Inside, her bare feet padded on the floor. “Claude?”

I muffled my voice in the collar of my jacket. “Yes.”

The key in the lock turned, and she pulled the door open. “Did you—?”

The words froze on her mouth. The color drained from her face, her eyes going wide, a speckled green and brown. She tried to push the door closed again.

I blocked it with my body and shouldered it wide, the wood banging off the inside wall. I put one hand on her chest and shoved her away from me, into the center of the room, and then stepped inside and caught the door and slammed it shut again.

She stood for a moment, staring at me, I knew what I must look like. But then she came at me, hands raise like claws. She raked my right arm as I brought my hands up to protect my face, and I caught both her wrists and held them with one hand and slapped her hard. I dragged her to the bamboo chair and threw her into it.

“Your boy friend is dead, Marlene,” I said. “He’s lying in a creek bed on Kentong Bahru Road with a knife in his chest.”

I watched the shock register on her face, and then hot, blind rage.

“You killed him!” she screamed at me. “You killed him!”

She came out of the chair like a damned cat and I slapped her again, twice this time, and she sank back.

“I didn’t kill him,” I said. “The Pa’Cheng killed him.”

The fight went out of her then. Her face began to stretch, like pliable dough, and she seemed suddenly very old, very tired. She began to cry.

I said, “It’s all over, Marlene.”

She shook her head from side to side. It wobbled loosely like a puppet’s.

“I loved him,” she said. Her voice was flat and dead. “I loved him.”

“Sure,” I said. “And he talked you into the whole thing.”

“No. It was my idea. I knew about the cocaine. I wanted to go away with him, but we had no money. It was my idea.”

I felt no anger. But I was tired, very, very tired. “Where is the package, Marlene?”

Her eyes touched my face. “What are you going to do with me?”

“Where’s the package?” I said again.

“You’re going to kill me,” she said. “If I give you the package, you’re going to kill me.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not going to kill you.”

She stared straight ahead. “What does it matter? The Pa’Cheng will see that I am dead.”

“Give me the package,” I said, “and you can walk out of here. You can get on the boat or whatever. I don’t care what you do. I just want the package.”

She looked at me again. “You would let me go? Even after—”

“That’s right,” I said. “Even after you tried to kill me.”

“The Pa’Cheng will find me. Wherever I go, they will find me.”

“You made your own bed,” I said. “I’m letting you walk out of here. That’s all I can do.”

“All right,” she said. “You—”

She stopped. I saw the green-and-brown eyes widen, come alive with fear, and at first I could not understand the fear. But then I saw that she was looking past me, to the door, and a scream bubbled from her throat, and I spun around, looking there.

He stood framed in the doorway, hanging onto the jamb with one hand. I hadn’t heard him open the door. The front of his shirt was bloodied. In his right hand he held the bone-handled knife with the Pa’Cheng seal, the same knife he had used to kill Claude Durais on Kentong Bahru Road.

Yip Se. The cadaver.

His bulging eyes were huge and white, seeming to protrude on invisible wires from the sockets, and his yellow face had the consistence of wax, the way a corpse’s face will look after embalming. His mouth was twisted, pulled down away from his teeth, and a thin trickle of blood drooled from one corner.

I saw all this in the time it took me to recognize him, and then claw the Beretta from inside my jacket. But as I brought the gun out, I saw him reverse the knife in his hand and a dart of steel shot past me as he flicked his arm. The girl’s scream was cut off in mid-pitch, and I saw her gasp and then become quiet.

I would have shot him then. But as soon as the knife left his hand, Yip Se began to crumble, his hands clawing at the door jamb, and he fell in a heap on the floor.

I turned and went to Marlene. The bone-handled knife protruded from her chest, just above her left breast. She had died instantly, like Durais, both of them in the same way, with the same knife.

I stood looking down at her. The justice of the Pa’Cheng is swift, I thought. I felt nothing, except the faint sadness a man feels when a life ends, when he has seen it end.

I went to where Yip Se lay. He was dead this time, no mistake. He must have been unconscious in the creekbed. I had not bothered to check him. I wondered how he had found us. There must have been something in the Frenchman’s pockets that I had missed — the matchbook, maybe; I hadn’t looked at it.

I wondered too, if he had had time to call Wong Sot. I decided that he hadn’t. He had gotten here too soon after I did. He must have flagged down a car, or stolen one, and come straight to Tampines Court. That meant I still had some time left.

I moved Yip Se’s body inside the room, and shut the door again. I used my handkerchief to wipe the knob on the both sides; if I got out of this thing with Wong Sot I didn’t want Chrisitan or some other member of the polis sticking me with a murder rap.

Then I went looking for the cocaine.

It took me fifteen minutes to find it.

It was in two narrow, sealed cellophane bags, sewn into the lining of a lightweight cotton coat packed into one of the large suitcases I had seen from the window.

I stood with the bags held in my hands. All I had to do now was take them back to Wong Sot and that would be the end of it. The end of it? Or just the beginning? I looked at the sugary white powder, one quarter of a million dollars worth of living hell, and I thought, once this is cut and processed, how many injections are here? How many rides on the high white horse? How many momentary escapes from one reality into one even more terrible?

I did not know the answer. I knew only, now, the reason I had come here, the reason I had not called Wong Sot, and I knew the answer to the question I had asked myself driving out here.

I could not be a party to the parasitic feeding on human weakness that was the sale and distribution of narcotics. A man must draw the limit to what he will do, the depths to which he will sink, and of all the things I had done in my life, it was at narcotics that I had drawn my limit. I could not go beyond that now, not even if it meant my life.

I went into the bathroom and tore the bags of cocaine open and emptied them into the toilet bowl.

I jammed down the trip lever and watched the water pour into the bowl, watched the powder foaming, bubbling like a giant seltzer. And when the water was clean again, I turned and went out through the living room, past the bodies of Marlene and Yip Se, and out into the muggish night. The smell of the hibiscus in the cottage garden was sweet, and very fresh.

I did not look back.

I drove the German sedan back into Singapore, and parked it on a deserted side street near the river. Then I walked back two blocks to the only sanctuary I knew. Chinee’s.

They were closing now. Chinee was not there. I bribed the barman to let me inside, and bought a bottle of arrack. I sat alone at a booth through the beaded entranceway at the upper end of the bar, the only light a candle burning on the table.

The arrack did nothing to ease the fire that raged in my chest, nor to calm the pounding in my head, nor to stop the flow of sweat that drenched my body. I knew I should go to the hospital. But not tonight. Tomorrow, if I was able. Tomorrow I would go.

I thought about Wong Sot.

I wondered how long it would take him to find me. And what he would do when he did. I would tell him I had not found the package of cocaine. I would tell him perhaps Marlene and Durais had somehow hidden it, or gotten it out of Singapore. Perhaps he would believe me and perhaps he would not. Perhaps he would seek vengeance on me for the death of Yip Se and Wah Soo Sung. Or perhaps he would realize that I had nothing to do with the circumstances leading up to them, that I had been caught in the middle of all of it.

The workings of a mind like Wong Sot’s were impossible to prejudge.

I would know either way by morning.

Now, there was only tonight.

The bottle was half-empty when Chinee came in. He stood looking down at me. His yellow face was expressionless. I said, “Surprised?”

“No,” he said.

“When I left here this afternoon, I was a dead man. You said so yourself, my friend.”

“Perhaps you still are,” Chinee said. “The polis found Wong Sot’s bodyguard, Wah Soo Sung, and another man dead on Kentong Bahru Road.”

“Too bad,” I said.

“Did you have anything to do with it?”

“No,” I said.

“You can still leave Singapore tonight,” he said. “It is not too late.”

“I’ve made it this long,” I said. I smiled. “Maybe the scheduled execution of Vinelli has been canceled.”

“Not canceled,” Chinee said. “Merely postponed.” And he turned and left me alone.

I poured another drink. My hands had begun to shake uncontrollably, and most of the liquid spilled on the table.

Merely postponed. Yes, I thought. Postponed until tomorrow, and the executioner the Pa’Cheng, or postponed for a week, or a month, or a year, and the executioner some faceless, nameless enemy in the night.

I thought about the death I had seen tonight, and I thought about all the death I had seen in my life, and about the men I had been forced to kill, and about the violence that had made up such a great part of my life. I thought about how death and violence follow a man, lead him inexorably toward that one single inevitability, that one moment when his time arrives and he, too, must die in the manner that he has lived.

I drank deeply from my glass. He who lives by the sword, I thought.

When Chinee came back later the bottle of arrack was empty, and I lay face down on the sawdust-covered floor with my head cradled in my arms. He bent down to examine me, and when he saw my face he ran into the outer bar and put in an emergency call to the hospital.