The Vulcan Disaster

Chapter Twelve

I scuttled around the low table as fast as I could; quick as I was, though, Tatiana was faster. She pulled him back, laid him out on the tatamis, checked his pulse, and — before I could stop her — pulled a pin out of her purse, felt in his mouth for his tongue, pulled it out, and pinned it to his cheek. I winced a little at that, but on second thought I let her work. She obviously knew what she was doing, and it was one sure way of keeping him from choking to death on his own tongue, helpless as he was.

“Watch him,” she said, and skipped away into another room. She returned testing a syringe, the little needle squirting a clear liquid into the air. I held his arm as she expertly gave him a shot of something; then we watched as the pain left his face and he fell into an increasingly more peaceful sleep.

We sat there for a moment, knees touching on the mats, sitting back on our stocking feet, looking at him. Then I let out all that held breath in a big sigh. “What was that? The only thing I ever saw that was even remotely like it was a grand mal seizure and that wasn’t...”

“No,” she said. “That was something else. Nick, in the prison hospital they did something to his mind, to his brain — some experimental surgery. Anyway, it’s been getting worse, these last few years. He’ll be going along as you’ve seen him — brilliant, masterful — and then all of a sudden this thing reduces him to...” She waved a helpless hand, looking up at me; her eyes were full of tears.

“Can’t anybody do anything?” I said.

“Without the records of the operation, nothing. Nobody seems to know precisely what it was that they did to him. And the gradual deterioration has begun to accelerate, little by little. Attacks that once came months apart now come weeks apart, even days sometimes. He’s in the middle of a particularly terrible swing of these things right now. This is the third this week. That was one of the reasons I asked you to help me tonight, Nick. Ordinarily he’s quite adequate to protect me, all by himself. You saw what it was like. But now, oh Nick, fighting those men — he could have had one of these things in the middle of the fight. They would have butchered him — and me.”

I put my arm around her. “Look, let me get you guys back to the States. There’s got to be something somebody can do.”

“We’ve been to all the doctors, Nick. The best in London. The man whose identity Will assumed had a pension. I saw to it that the British Government flew him back for tests.” She nestled her small head into my chest. “Nothing. Nothing at all. The pension would have paid for anything... even treatment in a home... but Will wouldn’t stand for it. You know how he is.”

“Yes,” I said. “I think I do. He wanted to die in harness. So he went back to where it was happening. He was a Far East expert, and he settled down at the hub of Far Eastern activity, and he’s been working like nothing had happened ever since.”

“Right.” She gave me a squeeze. “I knew you’d understand. Maybe you’re a little like him yourself. He has this quality of remaining undefeated, no matter what the world throws up to him. ‘If the world hands you a lemon,’ he says, ‘make lemonade.’ But now, with these things coming on him thick and fast...” She turned her wet face up to me and hugged my sore ribs with a sudden intensity that surprised me. “Oh, Nick, I’m so alone. I’m so afraid. I need... I need...”

The message was clear. What she needed was me. And I didn’t have any qualms about that. Not when she reached up and kissed me hard, twice, and, still kneeling above Will’s inert body, unbuttoned that dark cheongsam with deft fingers, all the way down, to make that golden body ready for me. By the time she’d sunk back against the mats, the lust in her eyes gleaming through the tears she hadn’t bothered to wipe away, I was ready for her; but even then, the passion my first touch unleashed in her came as a surprise. I was taken aback by it, but only for a moment. After that it was thunder and lightning, and typhoon winds blowing outside on an otherwise peaceful sea, and clinging to each other so hard we both left bruises...

Afterwards I always want a smoke; but I’d lost the last of my brand when I took that dumb spill in an alley in Saigon, and you can’t buy my special blend in Hong Kong, and I won’t smoke anyone else’s. I settled for a cup of green tea, which she served me sitting up naked, her perfect skin still free of goosebumps in the damp chill of a Hong Kong late evening. I looked at her with still-hungry eyes; I’d never seen anything like her — or maybe what I mean to say is that I’d never had quite the same reaction to another woman. Even now, telling about it, I couldn’t tell you whether her breasts were large or small, for instance; all I can say is that — like all the rest of her — they were just right. Can any man say more about any woman?

We checked Will out, though, and unpinned his mouth now that he was sleeping soundly, free of those little jerks and twitches. She put a pillow under his head and covered him tenderly, with a solicitude I envied even as I knew the same care would be mine if I needed it or wanted it. Only when she rose to finish dinner did she relent and throw that black cape over her shoulders, but, sensing my wholehearted approval of her flawless, golden-brown body, she left it open in front, all the way down, and contrived to face me as she worked. When she had the broth ready she poured it into the doughnut-shaped bowl that surrounded the hotpot to let it simmer. She had her eyes on me all the time. I sighed and went to get her, and took her back to the tatamis for another session. This time it was slower, more relaxed, more sensuous; we took our time about everything. And I do mean everything.

Then we got up for dinner and I was ready for plenty of it. The Chinese can eat a hot-pot soup, lingering delicately over each new flavor as the ingredients, added serially, gradually pile up the cumulative richness of the stock, and then, having finished the soup, can sit down and pack away a full meal. And, I might add, not gain an ounce. Don’t ask me how. With us foreign devils, hot-pot soup alone is guaranteed to stave off hunger for a week afterwards. Even with the shrimp left out.

At the end of the meal I stumbled over an additional surprise. I was just saying, “I understand you heard that Meyer had had a second offer for the arms if he could secure the shipment.”

She said: “Oh? Did you hear it from Hermann?”

I said: “No, from your father.”

She said: “From... from who?”

I said: “Your father. Will. Well, adopted father, then.”

She said: “Nick, Will isn’t my father. Adopted or otherwise.”

I said: “Well, what is he?”

She said: “My husband.”

“Husband?” I said. I almost dropped the teacup. “But I thought...” I looked over at him, sleeping peacefully now on the mats, the covers up to his chin.

“Oh,” she said, and put a reassuring hand on mine. “No, Nick. It isn’t what you’re thinking. And you’re right: if he’s anything to me it’s a father. But when he brought me out of China, and my mother was killed as we ran the border, we had an immediate problem of how to establish some sort of diplomatic identity. He had a false identity of his own, which he assumed. Papers were issued quickly; the man whose identity he had taken over had been a war hero, with a pension and a World War II Victoria Cross. But I? I was thirteen. I had nothing. Adoption was out of the question; Will was a single parent, and a male. The only way to get me any claim on citizenship was to marry me. I am listed now as Mrs. Arthur Jeffords: that’s Will’s official name.”

“And you’ve survived all these years this way?”

“Yes,” she said. “Will and I... we’ve never been... you know. Yet in my own way I have been true to my strange marriage. I have had lovers: a few, anyway. But they have never had any claim on me. Never until...”

I plowed onward. “And you have the income from your work, and the income from Will’s pensions, to live on. And that’s it?”

“Well, no,” she said, pouring tea again. “Will does have his little business. He has a little tattoo parlor on Temple Street, in the middle of the market. He also functions as a Chinese-language scribe, in a community where few can read and write. But these businesses he maintains mainly in order to keep in touch with the facts of the community’s existence at the basic, rock-bottom level. As a scribe, he intercepts messages within the Chinese community; as a tattoo artist he overhears sailor talk. He operated at first in Wanchai; then, when the action shifted to the peninsula, to a little place in Tsim Sha Tsui, not far from where I work. He...”

“Yes, Nick, the action’s over on this side now,” Will said in a weak voice. He was sitting up, looking at us, his hands rubbing his temples again. “Excuse me for butting in... but I came out of it a moment or so ago.”

“Hey,” I said. “Do you think you should be sitting up so soon?”

“Oh, quite all right,” he said. “I just feel as though I had drunk a 55-gallon oil drum full of jungle juice and had the great Katzenjammer of the world to contend with. Tatiana, my dear: do you suppose I could have a bit of tea?”

“Oh, Will. Certainly. I’ll fix you some soup...”

“Yes, yes, that would be fine. Thank you. Anyhow, as I was saying, Nick, the action’s over here now. That’s the thing about Fiddler’s Green.”

“Fiddler’s Green?” I said.

“That’s the old name of Sailortown, in these shore cities. It’s where the action is... but it changes from time to time, as channels silt up and the turning basin changes, and ships are diverted to new areas of the harbor for docking and loading. The original Fiddler’s Green of Hong Kong — the place the city was named for — was Aberdeen, where the other big floating village is. The Cantonese name for Aberdeen is Heung Kong Tsai, or ‘small fragrant harbor.’ It gave its name, suitably mispronounced by the British, to the whole colony.”

“Then,” Tatiana said from the galley, “it moved to Wanchai. Many of the Caucasian sailors still hang out there, as the tourists tend to congregate in Tsim Sha Tsui.” I noticed she’d buttoned up the robe; somehow I felt better about that. Will went on:

“But with the Ocean Terminal’s completion in Kowloon — and, I suppose, with the additional flow of people through Kai Tak, and the gradual reclamation of more of the shoreline! — Kowloon has assumed greater importance. There was a time, not so long ago, when all deep-draft ships had to lie at anchor well out in the bay and get unloaded by cargo lighters. Now the important ones can deal with cargo at dockside, right here in Kowloon — a railhead, mind you.”

“And the unimportant ones? Or the ones which... the ones like our missing ship, with the arms cargo?”

“Ah,” he said. He’d regained at least part of the merry smile. “Now that sort of thing is why I moved to Yaumati, or, more correctly, Yau Ma Tei” — he gave the words a proper Chinese singsong that mocked the simplistic British pronunciation — “and installed myself on Temple Street.” The smile was knowing; the drawn face winked at me. “Cargo not bound for the main slips here is still unloaded well out into deep water, with the old tub lying at anchor. The lighters which serve this entire sector of the Bay all dock at Yau Ma Tei, in this picturesque shelter, when they are not working. Their captains and crews are my friends and neighbors.”

“Hey,” I said, “that means...”

“That means I may have a lead on where the arms shipment was unloaded before noon tomorrow, if I’m lucky. It means I am almost sure to have one by nightfall. The longshore workers are not easily fooled by falsified ships’ manifests, you know: they can’t read them in the first place. And there is no containerized service here. If crates of rifles came ashore here, they came ashore as crates of rifles, not as crates of oranges, and my friends will know precisely where they went.”

“Great,” I said. “And...”

“And if you’re interested, perhaps we can take ourselves a little stroll tomorrow night. And see what we can turn up. Who knows? By the time Tatiana’s second show is done we may have a lot more answers than we have now.”

“In the meantime, I wonder what I ought to do about those orders to phone in daily and keep in touch. I’ve stirred Basil up, but I’m damned if I want him in on this thing. No. The more I think about it the more I want to hand this all to him with a nice pink bow tied around it. Fait accompli...”

“My God,” Tatiana said, coming up with Will’s soup bowl and another pot of tea for the three of us. “You two are exactly alike. Stubborn as mules.”

“Comes with the job, my dear,” Will said with a tiny ritual bow before taking his first spoonful of soup. “Why, you should have seen some of the things David and I cooked up, working in Tokyo before the War, to keep a certain big cheese from taking credit for work we’d done.” He shook his head with a wry, faraway smile, remembering. He was himself again.

“Remind me,” I said, “to pump you about David Hawk.”

Will looked up, eyes wide. “He’d have me assassinated in some dingy alley. He would. And he wouldn’t pick any bumbling oafs to do it, either. He‘d send an expert, like you. And the man would come back with my scalp.”

“Not if you’re the man you were tonight.”

“Oh, I can still call upon the old stuff, now and then,” he admitted. He took a sip of the aromatic tea and smiled. “But then of course you also saw the other side of me tonight. No, Nick, I won’t last much longer. These things are coming thick and fast. I recovered quickly enough tonight, thanks to the fact that Tatiana acted as quickly as she did. But when it happens to me when she isn’t here... The last time, I was out of commission for four days. My dear friends in the Tanka community sent up the kind of prayers one sends up for the dead. They were more than half right, too. There is a part of me you can effectively write off as dead.”

“Will.” Tatiana’s hand, warm and tender, was on the old man’s knee. “No, please.”

“No, darling,” he said with a resigned — even serene — smile. “This thing Nick and I seem to have uncovered with your help, I have a feeling that it may well be the last job I get to do. If we do it well, why, nothing could make me happier than to go out, right here in Fiddler’s Green, still in the traces like an old drayhorse.” His hand covered hers; he smiled up at both of us. “And if we manage to finish the job to boot...”

The smile widened; the old merry gleam was back in it again.