The Vulcan Disaster

Chapter Six

Rudyard Kipling once wrote of the Orient that the dawn comes up like thunder there. Well, I’ve watched the sun rise all over the Far East and actually, it’s the other way around. It’s the moon that comes up like thunder in Hong Kong, particularly down by the tip of the Kowloon Peninsula, in the elegant shopping area that radiates out from Nathan Road. One minute it’s afternoon, the next it’s night, and when the lights of the city start winking on, one by one, you can sometimes get to wondering what you ever needed sunlight for. As long as you stay on the main arteries, that is.

I could see it all out the window as “Meyer” got on the phone again, the gun still in his hand. He spoke in rapid idiomatic French to a flunky on the other end, then in German to the flunky’s boss — and I had a good guess who that might be. I was just thinking about the best way to jump him and go for his gun when the other guy came in. He took over with the gun-waving then, pulling a big deadly .44 Magnum out of his belt and waving me over to a chair in the middle of the room.

I sighed, settled down, favoring the ribs, and gave the two of them the once-over.

The guy on the phone was medium-sized, running perhaps ten pounds lighter than my own 180 pounds, and built with an athlete’s big chest and good wind. The face was vaguely Mediterranean: French-Algerian, perhaps? Greek-Egyptian? The polyglot communities of the urban Levant are so genetically mixed that the generalizations don’t come easy. The eyes, strangely, were blue: icy blue. The face didn’t run to strong expressions either way. There was a tiny scar under one eye; otherwise the face, like the hands, was well kept and well preserved. I can’t describe his ears for you because nobody’s ever worked up a precise lingo for describing them — but I could draw them, with ninety percent accuracy, and I could pick him out of a lineup on ears alone. People in my racket don’t make IDs on faces. Anyone can change a face. Things like ears, though, or the bone structure of hands are the best giveaways. Ask any cop.

The other bird was bigger and tougher and might have been the first man’s brother. The eyes were just as blue, the hair just as straight and brown — but the shoulders were a full inch or so wider, and the upper arms filled his coat sleeves all the way out, and I hoped that I would never have to tackle him. One bear hug from those knotted arms on my already busted ribs would make a sound like a garbage truck running over a Tinkertoy set, and it wouldn’t make me feel very good either. No: sock him and run... or, perhaps, give Hugo some exercise...

He finally hung up. Something fishy was going on, he’d been saying, and he wanted to get to the bottom of it all. I sighed.

“Well,” he said, holstering the Webley inside his jacket — tailored, I noticed now, to hold the big gun — and turning to me. “Time for our... ah, travelogue, Mr. Cowles. You will be so kind?” He motioned me up.

I got up with a groan. The chest didn’t hurt until I moved, but then it didn’t much matter what direction. “Fine. Where are we going?”

“Wanchai first, I think. We have an appointment there — ah, yes, I see you were following the telephone conversation — at somewhere between six and six-thirty. Someone who claims he knows you. I’m sure the two of you will have... well, something or other to talk about.”

“I’m sure we will,” I said. I kept my eyes on his face, trying to find some sort of national — perhaps ethnic — handle to grab him by. “That’s funny,” I said at last, pausing at the door and looking back at him again.

“Yes?”

“I was going to say, That’s funny; you don’t look Jewish.”

I watched his face for a reaction. And I got one, all right. Nothing fancy. A momentary twitch of one eyebrow. The mouth didn’t move at all. But I knew I had him pegged. I think that the only people in the world who don’t understand Jewish humor are the Israelis, who find it boring and irrelevant.

That wasn’t the main thing I’d noticed, though. The thing that had tipped me had jumped out and called for my attention when I was making my little ear-and-hand inspection and trying to draw mental pictures of the two that I’d be able to reproduce later when I had pencil, paper, and half an hour to spare.

The tattoo wasn’t a big one, and it was in a place where it was easy to hide; the webbing between thumb and forefinger, where merely half-closing the hand would cover it altogether. But it showed — on both of them — when they pointed guns at me, and I’d remembered it.

It was a tiny, but quite distinct, Star of David.

The big one drove; the other — “Meyer” — sat in the back of the black Jag with me, the Webley once again pointed at my ribs. The route was one of the more scenic ones, around the tip of the peninsula to Canton Road and up past the Kowloon wharves and godowns and the big Ocean Terminal to the Jordan Road car ferry. On the way, we passed the old railroad terminal, where a man, if he had the dough, the time, the visas, and the brass, could book passage all the way to Europe via the Kowloon-Canton Railway, the Trans-Siberian Railroad, and connecting lines. The view of the Island was gorgeous as usual, even from a few feet above sea level.

I was beginning to dislike this business of playing things according to the other guy’s scenario. This way, he’d wind up finding out pretty much what he wanted to know about me — and, unless I changed tacks, I wouldn’t be finding out anything about him at all. I checked my watch, nice and ostentatiously. “Hey,” I said. “The ferry’s behind schedule. You’re going to be late for your appointment with the General.”

He looked at his own wrist, frowned, and said, “That’s odd. I wonder what...” Then it dawned on him, and he did a delayed take and turned those icy eyes on me, the cold glare in them visible in the boat lights out the window. “What General?” he said. His mouth was an expressionless slit. He had the kind of face where no-expression-at-all is a bad expression and means trouble coming up — lots of it.

“Why, the one who just flew out of Saigon with another nice big deposit for his bank account at the Hongkong and Shanghai,” I said. “The one you met with this afternoon in the office of the late Mr. Meyer. Surely you know the guy: he’s little, and he has this funny bullet head and little Clark Gable mustache. He runs around in a chauffeured Rolls Silver Cloud, and he sells Long Pot heroin, and he dabbles in a few other business ventures—” here I took a breath and started really winging it — “one of which is about to end in the conclusion of a satisfactory agreement between your... associates... and his organization.”

It sure sounded nice coming out that way, I had to admit to myself. I also had to admit that I hardly had the foggiest notion of what I was talking about.

He studied me silently as the other guy drove the car onto the ferry. When we stopped, the boat was rocking gently under us; the straits were feeling the evening tide. “Most interesting,” he said. “You speak, for instance, of me as though I were dead.”

“No,” I said. “I speak of Meyer as though he were dead. Somebody — and I do wish we could drop the guessing games — bumped him off in Saigon. And left an interesting calling card. Precisely why you’re impersonating him remains to be seen. Does the General know about the impersonation? Or are you playing games with him the way you’re playing games with me? Because if you’re crossing him and he finds out about it, I wouldn’t want to be you. Remember the tiger cages? That was what the little guy and his friends used to use for trustees. You wouldn’t want to see what they did to the real hardcases.”

“More and more interesting,” he said. “Well, all in good time. You will learn a little more about me, I will learn a little more about you. And then, perhaps, we will conclude our little tour.”

“Yeah,” I said. “With a little walk off a pier down Aberdeen way. I hear the fish are hungry around here. That’s why there aren’t any seagulls in Hong Kong. The fish don’t leave anything for them to eat.” I was just volleying, keeping the ball in the air. One thing I knew, and that was that before he bumped me off he wanted to find out what the General knew about me. That was okay with me; I wanted to know what the General knew about me too. After she’d made her little decision, back in the plane, I wasn’t sure which side Phuong was on. Her own, most likely. I didn’t envy her that insecure life of hers.

I sighed, thinking about that. If you got to thinking of it that way, you had to admit that the one guy she hadn’t seen fit to trust — well, for more than a couple of blocks’ flight through Saigon, anyhow — was me. It didn’t exactly make me feel like the Rock of Gibraltar. I sighed again and sat back in the big leather seat, enjoying the view.

These guys traveled first class. Whatever else they may have been, they were professionals — although at what trade remained to be seen. This wasn’t any maiden trip out onto the thoroughly risky waters of international dirty deeds of whatever kind. No. These boys had been everywhere and done everything in their racket twice and had been bored both times. Everything was going so smoothly, as a matter of fact, that I was tempted — just once — to stick my head out the car window and screech like a hoot-owl, just to see what they’d do. I would have bet they’d had a contingency plan to cover that, too. What’s more, I would have bet they’d already used it at least once.

The real thing that stopped me from doing that — or anything comparably far-out — was mainly curiosity. I wanted to find out everything I could about this can of worms I’d opened by mistake back in Saigon. I had a feeling I’d blundered into something very, very big — and something that was only partly related to the mission I’d been sent out on.

Whatever that was.

Moreover, I was still hanging tenaciously to the proposition that had kept me alive all these years, despite odds that were guaranteed to short out your pocket calculator: that I could do all those other things and still come out alive, regardless of who they sent in there against me. And when you come down to it, maybe one of the prerequisites for the job is the ability to hold an opinion like that, regardless of the odds, and make it come true.

That was one of the things that tended to tell me these two guys were in pretty much the same racket as I was. They knew that and they were using it. They knew I wouldn’t holler until we’d had our little confrontation, and they were so confident of this that “Meyer” even put away the Webley and relaxed back against the seat as the ferry pulled into the slip with a series of frontal and lateral bumps and the driver started the engine of the Jag again.

At that point, I almost jumped him. But he knew I wouldn’t. He laced his fingers over one knee and looked at me with an expression I’d have called wooden in anyone else, but which passed, in his limited vocabulary of expressions, for a mocking smile. “Patience, Mr. Cowles,” he said in that peculiar accent of his. He really was a most amazing linguist. I get by around the world, but I have to work at it. This guy probably picked up languages the way you’d catch a cold. The accent had been serviceable in the three languages I’d heard him speak so far — and I hadn’t heard him speak Hebrew yet. “Patience,” he said again. “We’re almost there.”

The car ferry drops you off on Hong Kong Island in the middle of the old Wanchai quarter, the part the maps call Victoria Central District. You’re at the foot of Connaught Road Central; you turn past the fire brigade’s HQ, you wind through a few narrow streets where the doubledecker trams don’t go, where the only signs not in Chinese are the odd Gulf Oil signs, where it gets harder and harder with every passing block to get a straight answer out of anybody unless your Cantonese is fluent and your currency available for dispensation. It’s not far off the main track, but it’s a different world. Kowloon is full of gaudy massage parlors and bars and whorehouses of one kind or another, but they’re strictly tourist stuff. The Oriental businessman in Hong Kong for a weekend heads for the Island, where the action is just as rough (and sometimes twice as kinky) and much more discreet. Fredericks told me you could still hire an old-fashioned Shanghai flowerboat down by Causeway Bay, with a modest curtain between you and the pilot, and dally your way past all the floating teahouses and musicians’ rafts to your decadent heart’s content. Moonlight on the Bay, the soft chunk of paddles, the sibilant lap of the waves on the side of your sampan... well, Fred was a romantic, under that oaken British exterior.

Unfortunately, Wanchai can also be a tough part of town particularly if you’re not among friends. And I wasn’t. It wasn’t any scented sampan we were heading for; the Jag pulled into a big, drab warehouse on one of the more poorly lit side-streets.

I’d been hoping for a breather, but I was disappointed. The big Silver Cloud was there inside the double door, waiting for us. The heavy-set Oriental I’d seen before saw us through, then moved to shut the big doors behind us. This left the warehouse in the dim light cast by a single overhead bulb hanging above, and slightly to one side of, the Rolls. Our driver pulled the Jag smoothly up to a point just outside the circle of light the bulb cast on the concrete floor.

“Splendid,” my seatmate said. “Mr. Cowles? End of the line, I think. You’ll get out now, there’s a good fellow.”

I eased my way out, loosening Hugo in his scabbard as I did. Any ideas I might have had of bolting just then were forestalled when the driver, gun in hand, stepped up just in time to hand me out.

I was standing there, blinking in the half-light, when the Oriental silently moved forward to open the door of the Rolls. The passenger, still in shadow, hesitated; then he climbed slowly out, just as I became aware of “Meyer” coming up behind me.

It was time, I decided, for a little brass. After all, nothing else I’d tried had worked half as well so far. I waited and let him take my face in; I watched the eyes narrow in recognition, the mouth purse slightly, the hands tense up on the swagger stick he carried even in mufti.

“Hello, General,” I said. “You’re absolutely right. I’m not Cowles. There isn’t any Cowles.”

“Go on,” he said. I heard an angry intake of breath behind me, and the Webley dug hard into my kidney.

“But that’s okay,” I said. “Welcome to the tea party. We’re all phonies here. I’m a phony. Probably you’re a phony; I’ll lay a hundred bucks you’re not registered here under your real name and your bank account says James Bond.”

“Shut up,” the voice behind me said. The gun dug harder into my back.

“Let him talk,” the quiet voice of the little man said.

“Thank you,” I said. “Anyhow, the biggest phony of all is ‘Meyer’ here.” My hand went to my pocket, but that didn’t alter the position of the gun in my back. They’d searched me, hadn’t they? “He isn’t Meyer, you know. Meyer’s dead, back in Saigon. These birds killed him and cleaned out his desk. Now they’re here impersonating...”

The gun barrel went up, then down. I ducked, just in time. It caught me a nice hard one on the neck — a wallop that would have brained me if I’d stood still. Then I came out of the half-crouch, pulled my hand out bearing Pierre and, giving “Meyer” a shove, heaved Pierre into the air, aiming at that naked light-bulb. Then I dived for the shadows as two shots rang out in the echoing warehouse. I missed the bulb; one of the wild shots “Meyer” got off must have hit it by mistake. The light went out. I hit and rolled. Pierre went off, nearly silently as usual, and there was a lot of coughing and cursing going on between the cars. The .44 Magnum squeezed a round off in my approximate direction, sounding for a moment like one of those French 75’s Fred had been talking about. I rose to hands and knees, puffing, and struggled up, into a bent-over shuffle, heading for what I fervently hoped would turn out to be a far wall. My shoes made just enough sound to tell me by their echo that I still had quite a way to go.

Then their voices stopped me dead.

“Meyer”: Let him go. That’s a blank wall. Spread out and we’ve got him...

The General: No, no, never mind. I will fetch him myself...

“Meyer”: But...

The General (raising his voice): Mr. Cowles. (Sotto voce again.) Bring the girl. (Louder again.) Mr. Cowles, we have the girl. I’m sure you wouldn’t want us to hurt the girl, now, would you?

Phuong’s voice: No! No, Nick! Stay away! They’ll kill you! They... No! Please! Don’t...

Her voice broke; faltered; then rose in a shrill scream of unbearable pain.