The Vulcan Disaster

“Oh,” he says. “Cheerio. It’ll be Mr... ah... Cowles, I think? A few hours early for our appointment? Splendid. Hands high, please. Atop the cabinet. There. Splendid. Yes. Yes, I’ll take that, please: nasty thing. German. None too accurate either, I’ll wager. Well, Mr. Cowles, I’m in luck. I’d so looked forward to showing you the Island, and here it appears I’ll be able to do so a day early. Now I won’t take no for an answer. You will be my guest. There’s a good fellow. My chauffeur’s just downstairs, waiting to take us to the ferry...”

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.