The Pekin Target

9: Rain

"You mean you don't wanna lay me, honey?" The rain thundered on the roof.

"No. I just want to stay here for a day or two."

She gazed at me from beneath her heavy black eyelashes. "But not like a love nest?"

I'd found her in a doorway, sheltering from the torrential rain the monsoon had brought to the city half an hour ago. She was all I had, but I'd better not tell her that, because those bloody penny-pinching secretary birds perched at their desks in the Accounts Department in London would go into instant moult when they saw my expense sheet.

"Not like a love nest," I told her.

There was a kind of eldritch laughter somewhere in the remnants of my soul and trying to get out, because this was an ultra-priority mission with a crack London director in control and a first-class director in the field with instructions to give me all necessary facilities from signals-through-Embassy to shields and support, and here I was in a Seoul back street soaked to the skin and trying to get a fifty-year-old whore with green eyelids to take me in from the rain.

"Are you stoned, honey?"

We were standing in the passage between the front door and the stairs and the door was still open and I could hear the sirens in the distance as more patrol cars zeroed in on the Chonju Hotel a few streets away, where a man was lying with his back broken under the weight of a brass gong. They wouldn't be looking for me yet: Clive Ingram, travel agent, was still ostensibly staying at the hotel and his overnight bag was still in his locked room; he might easily be dining out or seeing a film or holed up at the Pacific Club with friends, and wouldn't be reported absent until the morning. No one had seen me leave; the lobby had been full of people with white faces looking down at the body under the gong, and I'd gone out through a fourth-floor window and across the rooftops.

"No," I told the woman, "I'm not stoned." I got out my wallet and peeled off some notes. "What about a hundred thousand a day, minimum three days?"

She looked at me hard. "Don't fool around, do you?" She took the notes and led me upstairs. "You running drugs, are you?"

"There are two conditions," I said, watching the calves of her stout veined legs as we climbed the stairs. "One is that as far as anyone else is concerned I'm not here. And while I'm here you don't see any clients."

"That's no sweat. But what did you do out there, buster? You in some kinda trouble?"

"Not if you don't talk."

She was panting as we reached the big low room at the top of the stairs. Stained cotton rugs, two sagging divans, a cheap bead curtain over a door in the corner, a big Japanese lantern and a dead palm in a chipped reproduction Ming container. The wall was papered with old posters: Sadie Nackenberg's In Town… Sadie Be Good… If You Knew Sadie Like I Know Sadie… New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans. And hundreds of photographs.

"Showbiz," she said with an echo of desperate pride, "that was me. Those were the good days, like Streisand says. Where are you from?"

"London. My name's Clive Ingram."

"Hi. I'm Sadie. Born in Memphis, US of A. Been in a fight?"

"There was an accident." There were still scratches on my face from Li-fei's nails, and I'd fallen nine or ten feet onto a pile of stacked crates at the back of the Chonju Hotel when the creeper had given way.

"You on the run, mister?"

"My wife doesn't understand me."

"Uh-huh. She throw you out the window?"

"Something like that."

"Goddamn women's lib, it takes the joy out of everything." But she was watching me critically, wondering how far a hundred thousand won would go if one day she had to bribe the police. "Listen, I don't want no trouble here. This is a respectable place. I mean I don't want your wife here. Or whoever. I have a businesslike understanding with the cops, you know what I mean?"

Water was dripping from my clothes as I stood checking the usual things: exits, windows, telephone, visual security from the street and other buildings; tonight it wasn't easy: all I could see from the windows was the rain through the flimsy curtain.

"If you don't talk to anyone," I told her, "you won't have any trouble." But I'd have to be careful when I went into the street; by the morning the Homicide Bureau would be pushing the street patrols for results. "Is there a shower?"

"You bet. You don't have any dry clothes?"

"I want to go straight to bed. They'll dry overnight."

"I got some hangers. Bathroom's through that curtain and turn left. Careful with the faucet, it needs fixing, you can get yourself drenched." She looked at my clothes and gave a husky laugh. "What am I saying?"

The telephone rang twice while I was in the bathroom and I listened to the soft rasp of her voice through the thin white plaster wall, that's okay, honey, I didn't expect you a night like this, I'll miss you too, and so forth. I dried myself on a towel marked Seoul-Hyatt and wrapped myself in the blanket she'd given me. The phone rang again and I listened again, in case. I wasn't safe here, but I wouldn't be any safer anywhere else. Spur might have put me up, but I wouldn't have been able to sleep with that bloody thing crawling all over the floor; as soon as they found my room still empty at the Chonju in the morning the police would be checking every hotel in the city; the Embassy would give me a bed, but you don't go to ground in your Embassy when you're blown: London is terribly fussy about abuse of diplomatic hospitality overseas and in any case the opposition would expect me to go there for refuge and I'd never get out again without walking into a trap.

"You can see the kinda clients I got," Sadie told me the third time the telephone rang. "They call me up when they can't make it. Most of them are in the US forces out here, some of them lieutenants and upwards, fresh outa West Point but underneath the war-paint just boys from back home, and you know something? They miss their mothers; half the guys that come here don't even ask me for sex, they just wanna talk to someone who can speak the Queen's goddamn English. Gee, honey, you look real cute in that poncho."

The rain was still drumming on the roof and sending cascades into the street below. Five minutes away from here the girl with the cinnamon eyes would be listening to it, the girl with the Astra Cub.22. What had the Asian said to her when he'd stopped her outside her apartment?

He hadn't followed me back to the hotel: I'd checked to make sure I was alone. He'd taken a different route through the maze of alleys and reached there before me, not knowing at that time that I wasn't still in my room.

Did you kill him? he'd asked her outside her apartment.

No. He's not the man, she'd said.

It was possible. Anything was possible, but I had to look for a likelihood, a logical scenario. It could have been someone else who stalked me in the corridors of the Chonju but I didn't think so: it would have been too much of a coincidence. The man who had turned slowly in the air as he went down the marble stairwell had been Asian and he'd worn dark slacks and a white open-necked shirt; Soong Li-fei wasn't just an official interpreter for the airline: she'd had a brother who was in Pekin at the time of the funeral bomb — "It was something to do with that dreadful thing in Pekin" — and they'd killed him because he'd "done something wrong". She had a friend who had lent her a gun, and someone had told her that the man who'd killed her brother would be checking into the Chonju Hotel tonight, Room 29. She'd got Tung connections, strong ones, close ones, whether she knew it or not; and they'd tried to use her as a killing instrument and when she'd failed to kill me the young Asian had gone there to do it himself.

"I had one young guy," Sadie said, "who spent the whole time just showing me the photographs of his mom and dad and his kid sister, telling me about them. Then you know what he did? He tried to lay me, but there was no spring in his step and he said, 'Shit, man, when am I goin' to grow up?' We both of us ended up crying in each other's arms, at least that's what I tried to make it sound like, but you know what I mean, people think this job don't carry any responsibilities, can you believe it?"

"La vie est pleine de surprises," I told her.

She squinted at me over a cigarette. "How's that again?"

"An old Chinese proverb." I asked if I could use her phone and she said okay and I rang the British Embassy and spoke only in French, asking them to get the cypher clerk out of bed. He came on the line after ten minutes and I gave him Jade One, the code-word for the mission, and put the whole thing across in routine speech-code because it was all I could do without a one-time pad and he wouldn't have one, taken ill for «blown» and confined to his room for "gone to ground", and so forth, Ferris would have a bloody fit when he got this one: there'd now been a total of four attempts on my life and I'd had to kill twice and now I was blown for the second time since I'd reached the field and we still hadn't got any access to the opposition. It was like a two-way mirror that only they could see through; I'd worked only once before in the Orient but I was beginning to remember how it felt: nothing is what it seems; your feet are on shifting sands and the images you see are only reflections and the sounds you hear are only echoes and the logical process of Western linear thinking takes you through shadows and leads you into the ethereal haunts of illusion until you start losing your grip, and then you're done.

Fatigue, of course. Have to brace up, you know. Spot of Horlicks and a sound night's sleep, that's all you need.

Not quite. I need some magic.

"Attendez, ce n'est pas tout." I asked for information on Soong Li-fei, spelling her name out in French, saying she was allegedly an interpreter for Korean Airlines. I asked for information on Soong Yongshen, allegedly her brother and dead by ritual murder in Pekin. I asked who Youngquist was.

I also reported that although Ferris couldn't have told anyone that my new cover was Clive Ingram and that I was booked into the Chonju Hotel in Seoul tonight, the opposition had sent a woman there to meet me, with a gun.

Some kind of magic, yes, was needed here, to arm me against theirs.

The rain beat on the tiles overhead and I gazed into the watchful eyes of Sadie, the whore from Memphis, her thick black lashes narrowed against the cigarette smoke that drifted between us on the sultry air of the room.

Who is Sadie?

She's just a whore from -

Are you sure?

Fatigue, yes, ignore.

"Bien, c'est tout maintenant. Je repete: Ji — a — de — eu, un."

I rang off.

"She no speaka da English?" Sadie asked me.

"That's right."

I asked her where I was to sleep and she took me to a small room at the back of the building with a single bed in it already made up and an electronic alarm clock on the bedside table showing the correct time and a plastic baseball trophy on the dressing-table underneath an array of faded silk flags and pennants — ASU Sun Devils, Cincinnati Reds, Dodgers — and a tin-framed photograph of a young man with a crew cut and a winning smile, with fly spots clouding the glass.

"This is Danny's room," she said, a warmth touching her voice and lingering. "That's him up there. He's my son. I keep everything ready for him, when he comes to see me."

"A handsome boy. When do you expect him here next?"

She turned away. "Oh, not yet awhile, I guess. Hasn't been here for a year or two — he keeps pretty busy, see, works for the Hertz people in Hong Kong, but he always calls me up at Christmas time, never misses. You be okay in here?"

"Yes." I asked her if she had an English-language newspaper and she found one for me from the kitchen, the Korean Herald of today's date. Front page headline: WORLD SHOCK AT SECOND ASSASSINATION IN PEKIN.

I said good night to Sadie and shut the door and opened the small window at the foot of the bed and did a quick survey as the rain cascaded from the clogged gutters into the street below. This was the second floor and there was a narrow balcony directly underneath; it looked as if it might collapse if I hit it too hard but that would be all right: it would break the fall. Telephone wires, drainpipe (out of reach and dilapidated), a rope of dead creeper, four windows overlooking this one, two of them curtained.

I shut the window against the din of the rain and got into bed and looked again at the paper. Picture of Omer J. Rice, US Ambassador to the People's Republic of China, shot to death yesterday by an unknown assailant as he was leaving the Embassy. Vice-President Liu Faxian orders ceaseless and untiring efforts to find and bring to justice those responsible for these monstrous crimes; photograph of Faxian. US Embassy placed under massive day and night police guard as CIA investigators are flown in from Seoul, Tokyo, Taiwan and the United States to assist ANFU, the Chinese security service, in their enquiries. Report from the Tass agency in Moscow declares China a country where the diplomats of other nations are no longer safe. The body of Ambassador Rice to be flown by special plane to his home town of Springfield, Massachusetts. Chinese government placed in difficult and precarious position by these mystifying acts of violence against the West.

And on page three a grainy picture of a young Chinese national, Soong Yongshen, who was the apparent victim of ritual murder on the steps of Huang Chiung Yu, the Temple of the God of Paradise. Police were said to be following certain leads indicating a possible connection between Soong Yongshen and the funeral bombing of yesterday morning that had killed the British Secretary of State. Picture: British Secretary of State.

I looked for a long time at the photograph, aware of a memory stirring. This man's face was like another I'd seen yesterday in Pekin, somewhere in the crowd at the funeral. But sleep was coming down on me like a dead weight and I folded the paper and dropped it onto the bedside table and switched off the lamp, listening to Sadie's husky and muted voice in the outer room saying sure, honey, it was a hell of a night to be out, and in any case she'd be out of town for the next few days visiting a sick friend on the coast, so they'd have to take a rain check, and Jesus, they could say that again and no kidding.

I lay in the dark with one or two last thoughts circling, trying to form an equation in my mind. I remembered now whose the other face was, the one that was rather like the British Secretary of State's: it was the American Vice-President's; I'd seen him among the mourners in Tian'anmen Square. To an Asian they would look identical. The lilting voice of Soong Li-fei was in these last thoughts, telling me something again, that her brother had "done something wrong, something to do with the dreadful thing in Pekin", where the police were said to be following leads indicating a possible connection… between Soong Yongshen… and the funeral bombing of yesterday morning…

Thoughts circling in the dark, nothing very coherent, long time no sleep. Perhaps Soong Yongshen had made… a mistake… of some kind… yesterday in the square where the flowers had gone whirling into the dark sky and come drifting down in waves of sleep… sleep…

I woke at first light and heard Sadie doing something in the kitchen and went out there to see her, giving her a shopping list: some clothes, shoes, toilet stuff, a street map of Seoul and a map of South Korea. The rain had stopped and we could hear shutters banging along the street as people opened up their shops.

When Sadie had gone out I rang Spur. "Do you know speech-code?"

He tried some but it was out of date and I didn't want any confusion. I asked him if he spoke Russian.

"Niet." His speech was slow: I'd woken him up. "Chinese, bit of Japanese, bit of French."

I tried out his French but it wasn't good enough.

"There isn't a chance in hell," he told me in English, "that this line is bugged. Or have you got someone with you?"

It was mission paranoia and he'd spotted it. I said:

"So far they've tried to get me four times, do you want me to spell that?"

There was a silence; I suppose he was giving that soundless laugh of his. Then he said: "Time you retired, old boy, like I did. Make some money."

"Have you got any information?" I asked him.

"Yes. Are you ready?"

"No," I said quickly. "I'll come over."

"Just as you like. But not before tonight. I'm still working for you. Say about nine, all right?"

It crossed my mind to take the risk and ask him for it now, but I remembered how strong their magic was, the way they knew where I was moving, the way they'd been making one move ahead. Paranoia isn't all negative: it can keep you from getting too careless or too bold. By this time the police working over the Chonju Hotel would be asking the desk clerk for my description; last night they would have gone the rounds, knocking on every door and questioning the guests, getting their alibis and asking what they'd seen, what they'd heard. I'd left my things in Room 29 as a matter of routine procedure for a skip, to let them assume I was simply out for the evening, giving me time to use if I needed it. That time was now up, because I hadn't returned, and by now there'd be an all points bulletin posted for me throughout the city: Clive Thomas Ingram, British nationality, full description, wanted for questioning.

"All right," I told Spur, "nine tonight."

Then I rang off. It had been tempting to ask him to come and talk to me here, but that too would have been a risk: I didn't know how clean he was; he could be under constant or intermittent surveillance without knowing it, in spite of the care he'd taken to arrange the bottles like that in the window; he was tapping the spy rings in this city for the CIA and he was in place and without support; he'd once been in the field for the Bureau but that was over now and it doesn't take long before you lose your cunning. If he came here to see me he could bring my death.

Nor could I go to see him before I was ready to break cover: going to ground means exactly that and I couldn't leave here until Ferris had produced new papers for me and a change of identity; and even then I'd have to move by night and cross the street every time I saw a policeman. The longer I was missing from the Chonju Hotel the more they'd suspect me, and before this day's end I would become the subject of a manhunt.

While Sadie was still shopping for me I rang the Embassy and asked for the cypher clerk and we spoke in speech-code.

He told me that Ferris had signalled three times during the night to ask for my present location and an urgent rendezvous when he arrived in Seoul at noon today; and such is the loneliness of the ferret in the labyrinth, and such is his need for the support and comfort of his director in the field that the tension in me broke as I put the phone down and thought Christ, I've still got a chance.