The Vulcan Disaster

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.