The Vulcan Disaster

Chapter Ten

“Maybe,” I said, closing the drapes, “I’d better find out where it is I’m taking you.”

She stepped behind a screen; I could see only her face as she changed. She didn’t answer at first; her eyes were on my face.

“Oh, by the way,” I said. “If you have flat shoes here — and some slacks — those might be best.”

“Yes,” she said. I waited. I don’t know what I expected her to say — some cushy address three quarters of the way up Victoria Peak, perhaps, with a grand panoramic view of the Bay — but whatever it was, it wasn’t anything like what she said next. “Yaumati,” she said. “I live in the Typhoon Shelter. On a boat. But I have to stop somewhere first. In the Temple Street Market.”

“But it’ll surely be closed now.”

“Yes. But my friend will still be open. For me.” She must have read the disappointment on my face. Friend? “For you, too. Oh, yes. I’m sure of it.”

“You know,” I said, checking Wilhelmina in her holster, and the spare clips for her in my pocket “I was expecting something quite different. From a Tanka dwelling, I mean.”

“Yes. Well, Mr. Carter, many men boast of enjoying my... my favors, as they say, who have never spent so much as an hour alone with me. I remain my own person. No one, mind you, no one has ever been to my home before. No one who left this place with me, I mean. I...” She sighed. “I live a very private life. I have my own interests. This pays the bills. And they are considerable. You will see.”

“But Hermann Meyer—”

“Dear Hermann took me places. He would meet me at very public locations — the bar of the Peninsula Hotel, or one of the parks — and he would take me places. If I would have consented to have any man see me home, it might have been Hermann. But now...” She did not go on. Her hands went to her throat now, buttoning up something chaste and high-necked. She stepped forth in a simple cheongsam, as svelte and sexy as the Dragon Lady — and as unapproachable to the uninvited as Mme. Onassis. Her smile was warm and welcoming, though. “Now, Mr. Carter, I am convinced at last that I may be in great danger. I am glad to accept your offer of help. I trust you. It is as simple as that.”

And, as simple as that, she stepped up and kissed me.

Very straightforwardly. Without any frills. Without any faked passion. It was more like the kind of kiss — quick, matter-of-fact, and pointed — that a wife gives her man when she tells him to bring home some candles and incense and she’ll have some steaks on the fire and a bottle of something sexy chilling in the fridge. It was brief and incredibly stimulating. It told me that she was taking for granted the fact that we’d be lovers before morning.

“Okay,” I said. “Do you have your own wheels?”

“No, I...”

“Okay.” I picked up the phone and called a cab. The dispatcher was peeved at getting a fare to the area north of Jordan Road; obviously he wanted some nice little short fares Inside Tsim Sha Tsui — the kind that gobble up the sightseer’s dough on the strength of that first-mile bite. We were waiting at the front door when the cab pulled up. I loaded her in in a hurry and we pulled off down the street. As we did, the black Mercedes pulled away from the curb behind us and kept the pace with us; unhurriedly, too. Why force any issues until we were ready to get out?

Our path cut down to Salisbury Road on the waterfront and turned up Canton Road, past the Ocean Terminal. The Mercedes stayed with us, neither gaining nor falling behind.

“Can you run in a cheongsam? The necessity may present itself.”

Her hand went to my arm: electricity again. What the devil was it about her? “I had that in mind, Mr. Carter. I was a prizewinning athlete in my teens.” And where was that? I was thinking. “They won’t try anything until we are well inside the market, I believe. It is poorly patrolled at night. The address we are going to is three blocks above Jordan Road. Once there, I think we will be relatively safe.”

I wasn’t so sure. Maybe she knew something I didn’t, but those toughs behind us looked like people who meant business. The cab turned at Jordan Road; I told him to pull up at Shanghai Street. “But you said Temple Street,” the driver said.

I slipped him a bill: too much. “We’re going shopping for a porcelain tea service,” I said. “Now could you do me a favor and flip around right here? And tie up that black Mercedes just long enough to delay letting them park?”

“I...”

“There’s another bill in it.” I flashed it.

“Okay.” He picked them up in the rear-view mirror, just turning into Jordan Road. He did a speed turn in the street and began to drive like a drunken idiot down the middle of the road, weaving crazily.

I didn’t think it’d pay to wait and watch. “Come on,” I said, grabbing her hand. We ducked up Shanghai Street, double-timing, and didn’t slow down until we’d reached the first cross street; then we cut over to Temple and the deserted bazaar.

We stopped there, out of any view they could have of us. “Now what?” I said. “You said three blocks down.”

“Yes,” she said. “You see? Far up the street? A dim light on the left-hand side?”

“Yeah. Come on.”

That should have been enough lead for us. By all rights, the problems they’d run into with our enterprising cabbie should have stalled them just enough to let us fake them out, switching streets like that. Maybe it wasn’t our night. I was just about to congratulate myself on getting home free when Tatiana gripped my arm, hard, and pointed up ahead. “Mr. Carter! They’ve cut us off!”

So they had. And as I whirled and looked behind us, there were the rest of them. The car had dumped three of them at the first alley then pulled up ahead of us where the rest had hopped out. We were surrounded.

Worse, they were armed — and grotesquely so.

Matter of fact, I’d never seen such a weird assortment of weapons. Of the three ahead of me, one bore a sharp-pointed spear, around six feet long, another a razor-edged three-foot machete, the third a six-foot trident with a spread of perhaps two feet. As I rotated my head around, I could see the other group was identically outfitted.

“Hey,” I said in a low voice. “Tatiana. Back against the wall, out of the line of fire.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Well,” I said, “I’m not going to play fair, for one thing.” The three up ahead were farther away; I decided to deal with the closest first. I turned back toward Jordan Road, pulled Wilhelmina, and squeezed off three shots rapid-fire.

Two of them went home: the first caught the guy with the trident in the middle of the chest and blew him back three or four steps before he fell, his shirt nearly black with his own dark blood. The second caught the man with the spear in the left eye. It vanished in a red smear; the back of his head erupted, blowing giblety brains halfway down the street. The spear clattered on the pavement.

The third...

Wilhelmina jammed,

Faithful Wilhelmina, who rarely fails me, now failed to fire. Too late I remembered: I hadn’t cleaned her since I’d taken her back from the General. They stopped making new Lugers before World War Two; sensitive weapons get old and cranky; they have to be cleaned often and reassembled with care. My old friend hadn’t been.

The guy with the machete was upon me.

Behind me I heard Tatiana’s shrill scream. And footsteps. And a man’s sudden, violent bellow of rage: the kind of bellow a karate champ sometimes uses as a kind of weapon in itself. And the clash of metal against metal.

I didn’t have time to look around.

The machete sliced through the air past my head; if it’d caught me even a glancing blow it would have killed me easily.

I made a quick motion with my right arm; Hugo, my pencil-thin stiletto, was in one hand the moment I did it. And I danced quickly out into the middle of the street, hoping no one was behind me waiting to strike.

It wouldn’t do, I knew, to parry with Hugo. Not against those three feet of razor-sharp steel. The only chance I had was to make him lunge, and miss, and let me slice his wrist open. Then, with the tendons cut through and his arm disabled for life, I could slip in and gut him the way I’d gutted Tamura.

Behind me were the sounds of battle. What was going on? I didn’t dare look around. The trouble with my strategy was that this guy was a master with that sword. His swings didn’t expose him to danger. His recoveries were lightning swift. And that martial-arts stance of his — bowlegged, low-slung — offered me nothing to chop at closer than his ankle. Fat chance: the moment I dipped down to slice at his leg he’d behead me with that weed-cutter of his.

His next attack brought the sword down in an overhand slicing action that would have halved me at the part in my hair if it’d hit me. Quick as lightning, it turned into a lateral slash that missed my nose by inches.

I continued to circle, hoping against hope that I could draw him away from her (hoping that she was still alive back there). As I did, he attacked again. His next move came fast and furious as usual — but it had a hole in it somewhere. Don’t ask me where; I didn’t have time to think it out. I just let the adrenalin take over.

His two-handed slash was on the diagonal, sixty degrees from the ground. It wasn’t at me. It was at my feint. And it was right on target for where I’d have been if I hadn’t been faking it.

As it was, I just plain wasn’t there. And the backswing nearly tore his arm off. As he tried to regain control I put Hugo up just under his jaw and sliced, forward and down.

Hugo is like a straight razor on both edges. The cut he made was narrow, but deep. In the dim light I could see the pink vein sticking out of his neck, spurting blood. He dropped the sword; he put his hands to his neck; he fell to his knees, quivering and whimpering helplessly.

I turned to the scene behind me.

Tatiana stood with her back to the wall. Her eyes were not on me. They were on an incredible scene in the middle of the street.

One of the attackers lay dead in the gutter. His guts were out in the street in front of him, and the pavement was slippery with his blood.

That wasn’t what she was looking at.

In the center of the street the man with the trident and the man with the spear had, boxed between them, a little old white-haired man — a Caucasian, and in his sixties at least — armed only with a curious pair of knives. These he held, blades pointing to the sky, to his fore and aft, in a posture of two-way defense; I could see them clearly in the dim light. They were single-edged and massive, like Bowies, only bigger — a foot in length, perhaps two and a half inches wide at the blade. The handles were fitted with knuckle-guards in front, curious up-jutting hooks in the rear.

The old man was smiling serenely, as if the deadly game he was playing were no more lethal than chess. He was inviting their attack.

In a moment I saw why.

The man with the spear lunged forward.

The old man, for a second ignoring the man behind him, moved — not backward, but forward. The twin hooks engaged the thick spear-handle, diverted it from his body, slid swiftly up the wooden shaft. At the handle — the attacker was still lunging forward, confident of skewering the old man on that first rush — the forward knife disengaged from the spear’s wooden base. Its blade ran softly across the attacker’s neck, slicing through the same vein I’d hit on his machete-wielding partner.

The attacker dropped.

At that moment the second spearman — the man with the big, deadly-looking trident — attacked from the old man’s rear.

The old man’s head didn’t even turn. He caught the trident on his rear knife, turned it to the ground, and only then, with a single piercing cry, whirled to swing the lethal blade in his other hand in a wide arc.

The attacker’s head was down, drawn there by the old man’s pinioning of the trident. The blade sliced through his face, cutting it instantly in half. The wounded man screamed; his hands went to his ruined face. He sank to his knees.

Calmly the old man bent over one of the dead men and wiped his knife clean; he’d only soiled one blade. Then he looked up and smiled first at Tatiana, then at me. And he picked up the machete-like sword.

All the others were dead. The man with the ruined face was still kneeling, crying. Blood dripped from between the fingers that pressed the slit surfaces of his face together.

In a single powerful but effortless movement the old man swung the machete high, brought it flashing down... and the faceless man became a headless corpse. The bloody trophy of the brief battle rolled to rest in the gutter. The body slumped forward.

The old man bowed to the bodies. The bow was measured, respectful. I was still in the Orient after all.

“Hello,” he said to me. Then he turned to her, still smiling that same Buddha-like smile. “Tatiana, my dear. How glad I am that I was able to arrive on time.”

Her eyes still full of nameless terror, she melted into his arms. Patting her on the back, the old man turned that same smile on me. “Well,” he said. “You certainly acquitted yourself well tonight. My compliments.”

I bent over as he had done and wiped Hugo clean. “I’m lucky to be alive. But you... I’ve never seen anything quite like that before.”

“Oh,” he said, shrugging it off. “I am a man blessed by fortune. I have had much good luck in my life.”

Inside the circle of his arm the girl sobbed. She clung even more closely to him. Her weeping was loud and unashamed; disconsolate. I could understand nothing of it all. “That wasn’t luck,” I said. “You knew exactly what you were doing.”

“Ah,” he said. “Every form of contest has its own rules. A logical contest, as in choy li fut, has logical rules. It only remains to learn them. They will apply, to the extent that we learn them well.” The smile was calm, happy, forgiving. He turned to the girl in his arms. “But come, my dear. Time to take you home. There, there. It’s all right now. You’ve no reason to be frightened. No more. Now, now — come along. Mr. Carter and I will just go turn off the lights, and lock up, and we’ll be home in two shakes. There. There’s my good girl...” His wrinkled old hand patted her short cap of hair gently. He looked at me; winked. “Here, my dear, let Mr. Carter hold you. He can comfort you quite as well as I. I’ll just finish closing up; I’ll be done in a jiffy.” And he handed her to me. And I held her while he skipped nimbly down the block to that single light we’d seen burning; held her while her sobs grew lighter, softer; held her while she got control over her emotions. Finally, as his light went off and I saw him come out of the distant building and head our way again, she nestled her tear-stained cheek against my shirt and nodded up to me that everything was okay.

Okay? Everything was crazy. Who were these hired killers, with their medieval weapons? What were they up to? What was the girl up to? Who was the old man?

And how did he know my name?