The Vulcan Disaster

The main staircase at 68–72 Nathan Road led up a narrow well, with every landing walled off by frosted glass, the kind they rarely put in office buildings any more. The frosting is translucent and borders on the transparent; if somebody’s standing next to the glass on the opposite side, you can make out how big he is, and what color suit he’s wearing, but you can’t see any facial details.

Not that I needed them. Even with the nondescript, every-day-Continental-tourist suit he had on I knew who he was even before I reached the landing. The door was slightly open; he held it that way with one hand on the handle, and he was talking to someone I couldn’t see, and the voice would have given him away all by itself. It had an odd quality about it which I’d be hard put to describe: a nasal thing, and a certain lack of depth. I could even recognize it speaking German:

“...Est is etwas besonderes. Ja, meinherr, ich glaube, ich glaube. Also... morgen um neun Uhr? Ja? sehr gut, sehr gut. Wiedersehen...”

The accent wasn’t that of a native speaker of German. It was being used as a sort of business lingua franca, and by an expert and practiced polyglot. But it was very definitely a second language.

The hand tightened on the door, prepared to swing it wide. I scurried up a few more steps, stopping above his landing at a blind spot, hoping for a few more words. But that apparently, was all; his guest was shooed out into the stairwell below me, and “Meyer” shut the glass door behind him. Curious, I stuck my head out into the stairwell again, hoping for a glimpse of his caller.

Then I looked again.

Then, while he was still on the stairs, I scuttled up to the next floor, burst through the glass door, and ran to the window that overlooked the street. If it was who I thought...

And damned if it wasn’t. The more I thought about the matter, the more I was coming to think I’d fallen into a streak of good luck, not bad, back in Saigon. I didn’t know just what it was that I’d stumbled into, but it was getting more interesting with every hour.

The visitor who’d been to see Meyer picked up his bodyguard (how could I have missed him? I must have walked right past him) at the door and walked halfway down the block. As he did, a big grey Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud moved smoothly up beside the pair of them and let them in.

The bodyguard was a thick-set, round-faced Oriental who gave the instant impression of great physical strength. I’d never seen him before.

The guy he’d been guarding was also somebody I’d never seen before — but there was no mistaking that erect military bearing, that spiky little mustache, that very un-Oriental bullet head atop that spindly Indo-Chinese frame. I’d seen him on television enough to recognize him in a moment. I also owed him for a plane ride, and he owed me a 9mm Luger automatic of great sentimental value. He was little Phuong’s “protector,” and I would have given a lot just then to know what he was doing in that building, talking with people he had no business knowing — or did he? I promised myself, right then, to come up with a lot of the answers before I left town.

“Meyer” finally left at a quarter after five. I took as few chances as possible, waiting to see him appear in the street below and then set out at a brisk pace down Nathan Road before I slipped down and opened that frosted door. Even then I took a leisurely stroll down the hall and back, satisfying myself that nobody had remained behind in the adjoining offices, before I zeroed in on the door of the late Mr. Meyer.

As it turned out, it didn’t take a key. It was one of those locks that account for most of the rip-offs in America. I forced it with a credit card, stuck through the jamb and maneuvered up behind the bolt — one of those diagonal-cross-section things. I took one look to the right and left of me, and then slipped inside.

The light in there was dim. I picked my pocket flash out and ran it around the room. There wouldn’t be much left out in the open, I was sure. I sat down first at a secretary’s desk, then at what appeared to be Meyer’s, and rifled the both of them before coming to the conclusion that somebody had done a remarkably efficient job of cleaning up before me. Then I got up and headed for the file cabinet in the corner.

Okay. There you have me, frozen forever in a nice candid shot: both hands on the filing cabinet, the drawer half open and a legal-size file halfway out and open for my inspection. Only my head is turned back toward the door behind me, and there’s a stupid, and justifiably annoyed, expression on my face as all the lights go on and “Mr. Meyer” — I’d have known him in the densest crowd by now — steps through the door with a big, nasty-looking .357 Webley in one hand and gives me this microscopic smile: