by Mike Resnick
“I got a romantic assignation arranged for nine o'clock tonight, and I'd hate to see the love of my life get marched off to the hoosegow without a chance at one last fling with a handsome and caring young man like myself.”
“All right, Reverend Jones,” he said. “It's a deal. We've been trying to arrest her for three years; I suppose an extra few hours won't make all that much difference. Now we'd best be started.”
“After I eat breakfast,” I said. “And since I'm working for the British High Commission, I think it's only fair and fitting that you pick up the check.”
“All right, but be quick about it.”
Well, so as not to cause him undue consternation, I ate a light breakfast consisting of nothing but orange juice and oatmeal and steak and eggs and hash browns and toast and biscuits and a few cups of coffee, and then I went into the alley behind the Black Scorpion and found this beautiful brand-new truck waiting for me. Sure enough, the keys were in the ignition, just like the Scorpion Lady had promised, and I drove out to Phaya Tai Road and cruised up and down it til I finally found the Acme Fertilizer Company. I backed up to one of their shipping docks, and before I could even tell ’em who I was or what I wanted, they began loading the truck up with bag after bag of fertilizer, and after about twenty minutes, when it was filled to the brim, they had me sign for it and then I was on my way again.
I spotted Reginald McCorkle's car waiting for me just outside the fertilizer factory, and I followed him to the warehouse he had leased on Set Siri Road, and pulled into it behind him. He closed the door and turned on the lights while I climbed out of the cab of the truck.
“What now?” I asked him.
“Now we start examining your cargo and see what she's trying to smuggle out of the country.”
“Surely you got a staff to do that kind of menial labor, ain't you?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “There was no one I could be sure I could trust. There's just you and me, Reverend.” He unbuttoned his shirt cuffs and rolled up his sleeves. “Let's get to work.”
We each pulled a bag of fertilizer out of the back of the truck, and he tossed me a knife.
“Open them very carefully along the tops,” he said, “so that we can close them when we're through and no one will know that they've been examined.”
I did as he said, and poured the contents out on the dirt floor.
“What have you got there?” he asked, while working on his own bag.
“Looks like about fifty pounds of elephant shit to me,” I said. “Smells like it, too.”
“Sift through it carefully,” he told me. “There could be a bag of drugs or diamonds in the very middle of it.”
“Sift through it with what?” I asked.
“Your fingers, of course,” he said, kneeling down and going to work on his own pile.
After five minutes we had both determined that the bags contained exactly what they were supposed to contain, and nothing else.
“Ah, she's a sly devil, that one!” said McCorkle, never losing his enthusiasm. “Probably only one or two bags contain the goods.”
“You ain't seriously suggesting that after we pick all this stuff up and throw it back into the bags and seal ’em up that we do the same thing all over again with the other seventy or eighty bags?” I said.
“Do you know a better way?” he demanded.
“Not off hand,” I said. “But that don't mean there ain't one.”
“More work and less talk,” he said, pulling another bag off the truck. “Just keep thinking of the reward.”
Well, I spent the next five hours thinking of the reward, and the three hours after that thinking of a bath, and by the time four o'clock rolled around we had to admit that what I had in my truck was a few tons of elephant shit and nothing else.
“Probably this was just a test run,” he said when we'd gotten ’em all loaded back into the truck. “Once you deliver it and show up back at the Black Scorpion, she'll know she can trust you. Tomorrow you'll pick up the real stuff. I'll be waiting for you in the restaurant again.”
Well, I drove on down to the river, and spent about an hour hunting up the Scorpion Freight Company, and then I left the truck there like she had told me to, and walked the four or five miles back to my hotel. I'd done more lifting and working than I'd done in years, and I ached everywhere, and I took a long hot bath and finally stopped smelling like an elephant about halfway through it.
I showed up at the Black Scorpion club a little after nine, and dragged myself up the stairs to the Scorpion Lady's room.
“You look terrible, Lucifer,” she said.
“It's been a long, hard day,” I said. “We'll get around to the hanky-panky in a couple of minutes, but first I just gotta lie down here for a second.”
I walked over to her bed and collapsed on it, and the next thing I knew she was shaking my shoulder and telling me that it was six in the morning and it was time to take the truck back to the Acme Fertilizer Company and make another pick-up.
I walked over to the restaurant, all bleary-eyed, had my usual modest breakfast with a little more coffee than usual, and an hour later Reginald McCorkle and me were sifting through another five tons of elephant shit, looking for the elusive contraband that the Scorpion Lady was smuggling out of the country. Once again we didn't find it.
Well, this went on for the better part of two weeks, us examining tons of elephant shit every day, and me falling asleep on the Scorpion Lady's bed every night before we could get around to consummating our romance, and just about the time I was ready to call it quits and give up on the reward and just spend the next few years enjoying a little pre-connubial bliss, she told me that I was all through going to Acme Fertilizer Company and would now be making my pick-ups at the Prime Fish Hatcheries.
“Excellent news!” said Reginald while I was eating my breakfast. “Now we're getting somewhere! I had thought that the first day was a test, but obviously she is a very careful woman. She sent you there fourteen days in a row before she knew she could trust you, and now we're finally going to pick up her contraband goods.”
The truck was waiting for me in the alley, all cleaned and polished and looking like new, as usual, and I drove it over to the Prime Fish Hatcheries, where they loaded it up, and half an hour later me and Reginald were in his warehouse, looking at maybe twenty thousand dead fish.
“Damn, but she's a clever one!” he muttered.
“She is?”
“Obviously she's put the goods inside one or more of the fish, but only her contact can tell which ones. We'll just have to cut them open one by one until we come to whatever it is we're looking for.”
Well, we spent ten hours looking through fish guts for diamonds or microfilms or opium, and mostly what we found were fish guts. I smelled worse than ever when I left the truck at her freight office and trudged back to the hotel, and it took longer than usual to wash all the odors away, and as a result I didn't have no time for dinner before I showed up at the Black Scorpion, and I was so tired and weak from hunger that this time I didn't even climb the stairs and fall asleep in her bed, but instead I sat down at the bar to catch my breath and the next thing I knew the sun was shining in and the Scorpion Lady was shaking me awake, and then I gobbled some breakfast and me and Reginald spent another day cutting fish open with no hint of success.
Two weeks later the Scorpion Lady told me to skip the Hatchery and go back to the Acme Fertilizer Company, and Reginald attacked the elephant shit with the same enthusiasm he had attacked it a month earlier. As for me, I was discovering that the life of a millionaire businessman wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and I made up my mind that the next morning at breakfast I was calling it quits and spending the next few years romancing the true love of my life.
That night I was so tired that I didn't even make it out of my hotel. I fell asleep in the tub, woke up when the water got cold, and barely made it to my bed before I fell asleep again. I got up at about five thirty in the morning and
hopped a cab over to the Black Scorpion. It was locked, and I figured the Scorpion Lady must have had a pretty hard night too, because no matter how much I banged on the door nobody came down the stairs to let me in.
Finally I decided to go across the street and grab some breakfast and give Reginald my notice, but when I got there I couldn't spot him, so I just sat down and had the waiter bring me the usual.
I was just polishing off the last of my steak and eggs when a well-dressed Englishman walked over and sat down across from me.
“Are you Lucifer Jones?” he asked.
“The Right Reverend Doctor Lucifer Jones,” I corrected him. “And who are you?”
“My name is Winston Spiggot,” he said. “I work for the British High Commission.”
“Did Reginald McCorkle send you?” I asked.
“Reginald McCorkle is in no position to send anyone anywhere,” he replied. “In fact, even as we speak he is being sent home in black disgrace.”
“You don't say,” I said. “What all did he do?”
“He bungled his assignment, and let the Scorpion Lady escape.”
“Escape?” I said. “What are you talking about?”
“She fled the country during the night, when she got word that I had replaced McCorkle. I missed her by no more than an hour.”
“I don't suppose she left no forwarding address?” I said, trying to soothe my broken heart.
“Don't be foolish, Doctor Jones,” he said. “A number of people at the High Commission wanted me to take you into custody, but as I see it you were simply an unwitting dupe.” He paused. “Nonetheless, you have caused us a great deal of trouble, and I think it might be best for all concerned were you also to leave Siam.”
“Well, with the love of my life on the lam, I can't see no compelling reason to stay here,” I said. “But I think you guys have got her figured all wrong. Me and Reginald went over every truckload of fertilizer and dead fish with a fine tooth comb, and I guarantee she wasn't smuggling nothing out of the country.”
“Certainly she was,” said Winston Spiggot. “I wouldn't expect you to have figured it out, but McCorkle was a professional. He should have known.”
“What was it?” I asked. “Something in the fish or something in the elephant shit?”
“Neither.”
“You mean it was the fish and the fertilizer themselves?”
“Idiot!” he said. “You helped her smuggle twenty-nine brand-new armored trucks to Doctor Aristotle Ho's army!”
It was with a heavy heart that I took a boat down the Chao Phraya River to the ocean that afternoon and hopped the next ship north for Japan, where I planned to forget the duplicitous love of my life in the arms of as many Geisha girls as my anguished soul and bankroll could mutually accommodate at one time.
10. The Other Master Detective
It took the ship the better part of five days to reach Japan, by which time I was more than happy to take my leave of it, especially since the cabin girl with whom I whiled away a couple of pleasant afternoons happened to have a brother on the crew who took an instant dislike to me for no discernable reason, and spent half of the last evening hunting for me with a Samurai sword while I huddled in a lifeboat and counted off the last few hours until we hit shore.
Tokyo was one of the more crowded cities I ever saw. I've been mulling on it all these years now, and I think the reason is that they've got too many people crowding into too few streets, and if I ever go back I plan to tell the Emperor, or whoever's in charge these days, that it'd be a good idea to move some of ’em out to the suburbs.
Still, I was young and adventurous back then, and it didn't bother me none, because the more people there were, the more likely I was to find some who didn't mind sharing their money with an upstanding man of the cloth who was all ready to settle down and build his tabernacle and get to work on his life's calling.
There wasn't a lot of white folks in Japan in those days, and them that found themselves there split their loyalties between the Imperial Hotel and the Nikkatsu Hotel, and since the Nikkatsu was closer to the Ginza and had the biggest gaming room in town, I made a beeline toward it.
“Have you any luggage, Mr. Jones?” asked the desk clerk after I'd signed in.
“That's Reverend Jones, and no, I ain't got naught but the clothes on my back, me being a servant of God and all,” I said.
“Then I am afraid I must ask if you can afford to pay for your room,” he said.
I flashed him my six hundred dollars, which I hadn't touched since the kick-boxing matches in Siam, and he looked much relieved.
“Excellent, Reverend Jones,” he said. “Will you be wanting a room with or without?”
“With or without what?” I asked.
“With or without a Geisha.”
“With, I think,” I said. “They tend to brighten up a room, don't you agree?”
He marked something down on my form. “Do you want a single or a double?”
“I didn't know Geishas came in different sizes,” I replied. “I'll have to spend a moment or two considering it.”
“I meant a single or a double room, Reverend Jones,” said the desk clerk.
A single room sounded like I'd expend less energy chasing her around it, so that was what I asked for.
“Fine,” he said. “A bellboy will be by to show you to your room in just a moment. And if you would like anything at all, just ask.”
“Well, you might recommend a good restaurant,” I said.
“I'd be happy to,” he answered. “The Momonjiya, just across the street, specializes in monkey brains. If you find that too exotic for your taste, then go to the Taiko down the block.”
“The Taiko, huh? What do they serve?”
“The sexual organs of oxen, highly spiced.”
“Don't anyone around here cook no hamburgers?” I demanded.
He looked shocked. “Please, not so loud, Reverend Jones. We don't wish to offend the clientele.”
Well, I'd kind of lost my appetite during the conversation anyway, so I followed the bellhop to the staircase and up two flights to the third floor, where we walked down to the end of the hall, and he unlocked my door and kind of stood there jingling his change in his pocket, but since I hadn't had any luggage for him to tote I just laid my hand on his head and blessed him, and he walked off muttering to himself in Japanese.
I entered my room and took a look around. The bed wasn't much—it was a pile of silks on a wood board—but it beat the hell out of the furniture, which was more to look at than sit on. There was a knock at the door, and I figured it was the bellhop back to argue about the tip, but when I opened it the cutest little Geisha girl I ever set eyes on entered the room and minced over to the window.
“You have a beautiful view here,” she said in a voice that was a lot deeper than anyone looking at her would have expected.
“Well, now that you're here, I got two beautiful views,” I said. “What's your name, Honey?”
“Miyoshi,” she said, turning around and facing me.
“Well, that's a right pretty name,” I said. “And you can call me Lucifer.”
“Would you perhaps like a massage before your bath?” said Miyoshi.
I walked over to her. “How's about we indulge in a little mutual massaging?” I said.
I think I reached out to her to demonstrate what I meant, but things happened awfully fast then and it's kind of hard to remember. All I know is that about two seconds later I was flying through the air, and I landed on my back with a thud, and Miyoshi was kneeling on top of me with her fists doubled up and growling kind of deep in her throat.
“I guess I got to work on my timing, huh?” I muttered.
“I'm sorry,” said Miyoshi, and now her voice was yet another octave lower and most of her accent was gone. “It was a reflex action.”
“You got the healthiest reflexes I ever encountered, Miyoshi,” I said. “Now how's about hopping off my chest? I'm having trouble breathing.�
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“My name isn't Miyoshi,” said the Geisha, standing up and removing her wig, and I saw now that she was a man. “I am sorry for the deception, but it was necessary.”
“You're a Geisha boy?” I said, getting painfully to my feet. “I didn't know they came in both flavors.”
He shook his head. “I am Toshiro Mako of Interpol,” he said. “Perhaps you have heard of me?”
“I'm afraid not,” I said. “The only Oriental detective I know is Inspector Willie Wong of the Hong Kong Police.”
“That bumbling incompetent, with his stupid platitudes and his legion of apelike children!” said Mr. Mako contemptuously.
“You ain't on real good terms with him, I take it?”
“I am a master of disguise,” said Mr. Mako. “I speak seventeen languages, possess a black belt in karate, and hold the Chair of Antiquities at Pacific University in my spare time, but do I ever get any publicity? No, it's always that Hong Kong clown with his pidgin English and his idiot parables! He always gets the best cases!” Suddenly his eyes flashed with triumph. “But this time will be different! This time I, Mr. Mako, will make headlines the world over!”
“For impersonating a Geisha girl?” I said. “Them ain't exactly the kind of headlines designed to endear you to the public, Mr. Mako.”
He shook his head. “This is just a disguise, Doctor Jones,” he explained. “My quarry has a room down the hall, and I am keeping him under surveillance, just waiting for the opportune moment to strike.”
“Who are you after?” I asked him.
“Have you ever heard of Doctor Aristotle Ho, the Insidious Oriental Dentist?” he said.
“The name ain't totally unfamiliar to me,” I said. “Is he staying here at the Nikkatsu?”
Mr. Mako nodded his head. “Yes. He's got some criminal coup in mind. I haven't been able to determine what it is, but I plan to dog his steps night and day, and when he makes his move, I shall make mine.”
“He's already wanted all over Asia,” I said. “Why don't you just arrest him now and cart him off to the calaboose?”
“I want his entire organization,” said Mr. Mako as a kind of fanatical glow spread across his face. “Then let them talk about Willie Wong!”