The Vulcan Disaster

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.