The Vulcan Disaster

But now: who were the other two contenders? I’d have to remember to pump Will in the morning. He’d mentioned the mysterious Mr. Komaroff, and it’d rung a bell with him. Who could that be? Someone attached quite recently to the local KGB unit — too recently to be on the lists posted in D.C.? I wouldn’t have put it past Will to be one up on David Hawk on nuts-and-bolts intelligence matters here, especially if Hawk got his information in large part from people like Basil Morse. I promised myself a snoop through Will’s mental dossier on the Russian gentleman in the morning.

Then, too, there was that “third party” of Will’s. Neither of us knew anything about that one. I had only Will’s hunch to go on in believing it existed, and all his hunch said was that the present facts didn’t work if there were only two parties. I fell asleep promising myself a long chat with Will about that the next morning, too...

But it didn’t work out that way.

When I woke up, both of them were gone. On the bulletin board next to the galley, next to Tatiana’s shopping list, a pair of notes were pinned to the wall. I took them down and read them.

My dears—

The cargo-lighter crew gets up with the bloody birds around here; I’d better, too, if I’m to get anything out of them. Tatiana: In the meantime please call all the rolling mills, here and on up into the New Territories, and see if any contracts have been let for cutting up any cargo vessels for scrap in the last week or two. Then meet me at the little seafood place in the front of the Ocean Terminal at eleven. Nick: Break into Meyer’s old place again, will you, and finish the job that got interrupted yesterday. We need at least a superficial peek at the whole file cabinet, but we need to go through the files for the letters G and K with a fine-toothed comb. Chronological files for the past two months, too, if Meyer kept things that way. Snitch the whole bundle if you can. Then give me a call at H-643219, around noon. The files ought to keep you busy until then. By God, I’m enjoying myself.

Will

I knew what he meant; I was almost beginning to enjoy this confusing trip for the first time, with a couple of leads at last and a bare outside chance to get somewhere during the next few hours. I read the note again. Yes, they’d either drop the load and junk the boat or they’d put back out to sea and change the flag and registry and name again, depending on whether the General’s confederates had made the transfer yet. If they hadn’t, they’d be playing it smart to hightail it.

And what was this business of the G and K files? “K” could be “Komaroff,” but what about the “G”?

Tatiana’s note was briefer:

Nick darling—

It was so hard leaving you this morning. I can’t wait until the evening. Keep safe...

T.

I looked around. No phone on the boat. She’d have had to go ashore to make her phone calls. I had a sudden thought, and stuck my head out on deck, wondering what that left me to get ashore with, but there was a flat-bottomed rowboat tied up alongside the junk. I dressed, had coffee, and went outside to get things started for the day.

It was a beautiful, clear morning — the kind you always hope you’re going to have when you come steaming into a place like Hong Kong, with its steep mountains plunging into the rich blue of the sea. If there were any problems in the Crown Colony — poverty, crime, the threat of Red China hovering overhead — you didn’t want to know about them as you drank in the sheer beauty of the place.

Sculling slowly through the nest of docks and slips, I had time to look around me and to savor some of the strange and intriguing sights and sounds of the waterfront community and to feel a little sorry that I hadn’t made it with Tatiana beside me, telling me all about it, or with Will spinning rich sailor yams about the Islands and Fiddler’s Green. As it was, it was a fine ambience on a clear morning, and it got me, little by little, into a fine mood well before I docked the little boat and went ashore.