The Vulcan Disaster

In the meantime, there was the matter of Hermann Meyer — two of him, in fact: one of them dead, one of them alive. And there was a better than even chance that the killing of the one back in Saigon had something to do with the roll of film I’d been sent out to get. After all, Phuong had told me that Meyer’s apartment was to have been Corbin’s last stop on the way to her place. Corbin could very well have slipped the film to Meyer before coming downstairs. And the people who killed him could very well have taken it from him then.

They could, as a matter of fact, still have it. It could be sitting up at Meyer’s office right now, in the tender care of the men who’d killed him. I had no illusions, after all, about who had answered the phone. The only other people with a good reason to answer for Meyer and lie to the callers would be the Hong Kong cops. And those hadn’t been Hong Kong cops. The accent had been all wrong. What remains of the British Empire still operates by the old rules and the wrong, unfashionable accent can still keep you out of the good civil service jobs anywhere. And, considering the average wage in Hong Kong, you’d have to call the detective squad a fairly cushy civil-service appointment. I wouldn’t be strolling into Meyer’s office during business hours with a smile on my face, and I wouldn’t be visiting at any time, night or day, without some nice lethal iron under my arm.

And, most decisively of all, I wouldn’t be keeping that date for eleven o’clock tea.

Having made up my mind, the smart thing to do was to see about getting a replacement for Wilhelmina. Thinking about it made me furious at myself for having lost the old girl — 9mm Lugers with all the original parts intact are hard to find on short notice.

My call didn’t take long to be answered “Fredericks here.”

“Fred? Nick Carter. I’m here minus an old friend. Wouldn’t happen to have any spare hardware around, would you?”

“Nice special this week, sir, on 16-inch naval guns. With every purchase you get a French 75, no obligation whatsoever.”

Fred and I had a couple of jobs together years back. He was a funny guy, a wit, sometimes rather ridiculous, but there when you needed him.

“Capital, dear fellow,” I said, “but getting one of them into my shoulder holster is sure to be bad for my bursitis.”

“Quite, sir. One 9mm Luger coming up. Pen?”

“Room three-oh-five.”

“Bully.”

“Smashing.”

“Toodle-oo?”

“Rather.”

He rang off. The British sense of humor either is, or isn’t, vastly underrated but say something nasty about Fred, and you’d have me to answer to.

Downstairs in the coffee shop I checked out the papers, trying to get some perspective on the past days’ events by reading the same stories, one right after the other, in the British-oriented South China Morning Post and the pro-American Hongkong Standard. After a half hour of global crisis I was happy to switch over to the funnies: the Standard is big on American comics.

When I returned to my room there was a quite serviceable-looking Luger sitting on the bed with a big red ribbon around it and two spare clips sitting beside it. The card just said “73’s” — radio-shack jabber for “Love and Kisses.” I picked up the rod and hefted it. It was nice, but it wasn’t mine. I shoved it into the shoulder holster; it fit like a fist in the eye, as the expression goes. Good old Fred: he didn’t mess around.

There just doesn’t seem to be a thing you can do for busted ribs. You can truss the person up and ask him not to go to gymnastics class, perhaps, and you can give him a little medication now and then and a lot of encouragement. But the fact remains that even your common garden-variety green stick fracture has a lot going against it. Every time you breathe deeply, you’re moving bone surfaces which ought to be fixed firmly in place, and you’re putting off your chances of having the fractures knit just a little bit longer.

Keeping this in mind, I decided to keep the athletics of the planned break-in down to the bare minimum. If possible, I’d dig into my rich assortment of keys — the ones my understanding tailor sews into my coat at the right places, and which make my suits hang so well — and simply pick the lock.

That’s what I was telling myself all the way up Nathan Road on my way to case the joint. I’d just stroll past the door and take a look at it, and then perhaps I’d stroll back around the rear fire escape and see what could be seen from there, and then when night fell, perhaps, I’d...

I was still thinking about all this, and not about much else, when, coming up the stairs, I just missed bumping into the phony Hermann Meyer face to face.

It wasn’t the only surprise the afternoon had in store for me.