by Adam Hall
“What did your brother do wrong, would you think?”
“I don’t know.”
I’d been in this city three hours and no one had followed me in from the Chinese mainland and only Ferris knew where I was staying and already I was blown and I didn’t even know how to start believing it.
She wanted to go but I kept her.
“How do you know he did something wrong?”
“I was told.” My voice hadn’t changed and my face hadn’t changed but her eyes were wider now as she watched me, her own nerves picking up the alarm in mine. There was nothing I could do about that.
“Who told you?”
“It would be dangerous for me to say.”
“That doesn’t worry me.”
She was frightened now, underneath the perfection of the pale porcelain skin, underneath the elegance of the softly articulated French. There was nothing I could do about that either: it wasn’t my fault that I’d walked in here at gunpoint tonight.
“It would be dangerous for me,” she said, “to tell you anything.”
“I think you’re running with the wrong set, Li-fei.” I chose the Parisian idiom of the milieu and she looked suddenly bitter, her head going down.
“Yes. There are things happening that I don’t - that I don’t understand. But I understand that my brother is dead.”
I listened to every word and the way she said it; I watched her cinnamon eyes and the way they changed when she spoke of her brother and when she spoke of other things, the ones she didn’t understand; I listened and watched for the slightest sign that she wasn’t in point of fact Soong Li-fei, an official interpreter for Korean Airlines, but an exquisite and deadly emissary of the Tung Triad who’d been sent here to trap me with the performance of an accomplished actress. There was no sign; but my mind was clouded with fatigue and the dizzying certainty of the impossible: that I was blown and within the next hour would have to go to ground and somehow stay alive.
I’d tested her, but it had been crude: when I’d put the loaded gun back into her hands the safety-catch had been on and the whole of my body’s musculature had been tensed and prepared to hit the thing away again if she changed her mind and tried for a second time. I’d have to test her again when the chance came, before I could be sure. I asked her now:
“Did someone tell you I’d killed your brother? I mean did they give me a name?”
“No.”
“What did they say? How did they put it?” I gave an edge to my tone and she heard it, and looked trapped.
“You are nothing to do with this,” she said in sudden despair. “It was a mistake - you are not the man I’m looking for. Please let me go, and I promise you’ll never see me again.”
Choice: threaten her or make use of her. I could threaten to get the police here and accuse her of attempted murder if she didn’t tell me what I wanted to know; but she might still decide it was safer to keep silent, whatever I chose to do: I had no means of knowing how unyielding she might be, how enduring, at the dictates of the torment that was driving her; the shock of her brother’s death would have unbalanced her for a time.
“All right,” I told her, “it was a mistake. Go home and give that gun back to your friend, and forget about vengeance; it could get you life imprisonment.”
She closed her eyes for a moment in relief and then stood back as I opened the door for her, giving me a formal little bow and saying something softly in Chinese and then in French. “I thank you for your great kindness. May good fortune always be with you.”
I went down the stairs with her past the great brass gong and left her at the entrance doors, which were still open to the warmth of the night. She walked down the steps into the windy street, and didn’t turn her head.
Here in the old quarter of the city the streets were narrow, sometimes no wider than alleyways, and Soong Li-fei slipped through them as if carried along on the warm rain-smelling gusts of the monsoon, the dark silk of her dress shimmering in the lamplight as she vanished at a corner and reappeared as I turned after her; she had looked over her shoulder twice since I’d begun following her, but she couldn’t have seen me: I’d been working my way-from cover to cover through the shadows of the fluttering fan-palms and past bicycles knocked over by the wind; the few people I passed walked with their heads down against the gusts, hurrying, some of them dodging into the small restaurants that were scenting the night air with the smell of kimchi and sinsollo.
“Hey, mister - you wanna girl?”
“No.”
“You wanna boy?”
“No.”
The wind sent another bicycle over with a clang from its bell. She had told me at least this much truth: she didn’t live far from my hotel; she was already slowing her pace at the end of a narrow street of shop-houses and turning to go into a doorway; then a man came from the shadows and stopped her.
Contact.
He was asking her something and she was replying, explaining, shaking her head. He didn’t think she was a prostitute: in this quarter she was too pretty and too elegant. I watched them from the distance of a stone’s throw, keeping in the cover of shadow.
This was a contact, the first I’d made in security since I’d left London, the end of a thread that could lead me through the night and the wind to Tung Kuofeng. But it wasn’t going to be easy: there was the length of the street between the contact and me, and he was close to a turning; there would have to be some luck.
Soong Li-fei was already going into the doorway, leaving the man standing there alone; then he moved, and so did I, at first walking fast and keeping to cover and then breaking into a soft run as he vanished beyond the corner. I ran hard now, taking the risk that he’d hear me above the noise of the wind’s rattling among the shutters and along the tiled roofs, but there was no sign of him as I swung into the alley at the intersection; it ran for fifty yards and opened into a small square filled with trees and parked horseless carts and a few benches. There was limitless cover for him here but I didn’t think he’d used it; I didn’t think he’d seen or heard me; I thought he’d simply moved into a doorway and gone inside, into one of a dozen buildings and with no clue as to which.
I walked twice from the square to the intersection and back, desperate for the sign of a half-open doorway, a silhouette against a light, the sound of a voice; but he’d gone. There was no point in my staying; if I saw him now I wouldn’t recognise him for certain as the man I’d seen talking to Li-fei; in the distance and the lamplight I’d seen nothing more of him than that he was young bareheaded Asian in dark slacks and a white open-necked shirt.
I went back to the hotel the way I’d come, checking now and then to make sure I was alone. The big carved entrance doors at the top of the steps were still wide open, but there was no clerk at the desk. I looked for a copy of the Korean Herald in English behind the counter but found nothing; I’d get one tomorrow; I wanted to see the report of Soong Yongshen’s death on the steps of the temple in Pekin before I signalled Ferris with information.
The time by the American Express clock on the wall was just gone eleven as I went up the stairs, my shoes quiet on the marble. Rock music was coming faintly from somewhere, and a woman’s liquid laughter; a door banged in the street outside, or it was the wind shaking something; a sound was coming from the big brass gong on the wall, so low that it was hardly more than a vibration as it trapped the other sounds and held them like an unceasing echo.
Sleep. It was all I wanted now. She’d been going to kill me but it hadn’t happened, and I was still here. Someone had made contact with her, someone who could have led me to Tung, but I’d lost him; so be it. Tomorrow was another day and with luck I’d outlive this one. But I’d get no sleep until I’d gone to ground; it was just the thought of it that slowed me a little as I climbed to the second floor, my senses lulled by the strange murmuration of the gong. The fatigue curve is not constant; it dips faster as time goes on. But I wasn’t totally relaxed; one must never be total
ly relaxed in a red sector, if life is still held to be sweet.
Light was filtering through the grilled windows of the stairwell, throwing the restless shadows of the fan-palms in the square outside; faintly through the coloured glass I could hear them rustling; my own shadow came for a moment against the wall as I turned on the curving stairs.
The woman had stopped laughing. There was still within me the degree of alertness necessary for the memory to remain aware that she had been laughing before, and now had stopped. I was also noting other things, as the impressions of light and sound and touch went shuttling secretly across and across the undefined borderline between the conscious and the subconscious, arousing the interplay between the primitive and the modern brain that would turn incoming data into decision when the need came.
I reached the second-floor passage, my shadow moving again on the wall, this time with the other shadow as if we were dancing; but we were not dancing; this was more serious, and as time slowed down I was aware only of the primitive animal-brain impressions: the flare of alarm along the nerves and their response; the swift rushing of adrenalin and the contraction of muscle; the locking of the breath as the strength of the organism gathered with the force of a storm and then broke loose. Nothing was thought out; everything was done in the light of ancient wisdom, tapping the store of racial memory wherein it is recorded, for all of us, what must be done to survive when there is no time to think.
Something snapped, possibly his arm. I remember very little about it, but that first sound was sharp. For an instant I felt his breath fanning against my face before the force in me, which was in essence the force of the living creature refusing to be killed, reached its peak and he span slowly with his back curving against the low balustrade and his arms flying upwards, the hands set in the shape of empty claws; then he was flung away from me and began going down as I watched, down the lamplit stairwell, his body turning slowly until one of his shoulders hit the huge brass gong and broke it away from the wall, so that it fell with him like a giant discus, striking the marble floor below and sounding his death knell with a clangour that shook the night.
Chapter 9
Rain
“You mean you don’t wanna lay me, honey?” The rain thundered on the roof.
“No. I just want to stay here for a day or two.”
She gazed at me from beneath her heavy black eyelashes. “But not like a love nest?”
I’d found her in a doorway, sheltering from the torrential rain the monsoon had brought to the city half an hour ago. She was all I had, but I’d better not tell her that, because those bloody penny-pinching secretary birds perched at their desks in the Accounts Department in London would go into instant moult when they saw my expense sheet.
“Not like a love nest,” I told her.
There was a kind of eldritch laughter somewhere in the remnants of my soul and trying to get out, because this was an ultra-priority mission with a crack London director in control and a first-class director in the field with instructions to give me all necessary facilities from signals-through-Embassy to shields and support, and here I was in a Seoul back street soaked to the skin and trying to get a fifty-year-old whore with green eyelids to take me in from the rain.
“Are you stoned, honey?”
We were standing in the passage between the front door and the stairs and the door was still open and I could hear the sirens in the distance as more patrol cars zeroed in on the Chonju Hotel a few streets away, where a man was lying with his back broken under the weight of a brass gong. They wouldn’t be looking for me yet: Clive Ingram, travel agent, was still ostensibly staying at the hotel and his overnight bag was still in his locked room; he might easily be dining out or seeing a film or holed up at the Pacific Club with friends, and wouldn’t be reported absent until the morning. No one had seen me leave; the lobby had been full of people with white faces looking down at the body under the gong, and I’d gone out through a fourth-floor window and across the rooftops.
“No,” I told the woman, “I’m not stoned.” I got out my wallet and peeled off some notes. “What about a hundred thousand a day, minimum three days?”
She looked at me hard. “Don’t fool around, do you?” She took the notes and led me upstairs. “You running drugs, are you?”
“There are two conditions,” I said, watching the calves of her stout veined legs as we climbed the stairs. “One is that as far as anyone else is concerned I’m not here. And while I’m here you don’t see any clients.”
“That’s no sweat. But what did you do out there, buster? You in some kinda trouble?”
“Not if you don’t talk.”
She was panting as we reached the big low room at the top of the stairs. Stained cotton rugs, two sagging divans, a cheap bead curtain over a door in the corner, a big Japanese lantern and a dead palm in a chipped reproduction Ming container. The wall was papered with old posters: Sadie Nackenberg’s In Town … Sadie Be Good … If You Knew Sadie Like I Know Sadie … New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans. And hundreds of photographs.
“Showbiz,” she said with an echo of desperate pride, “that was me. Those were the good days, like Streisand says. Where are you from?”
“London. My name’s Clive Ingram.”
“Hi. I’m Sadie. Born in Memphis, US of A. Been in a fight?”
“There was an accident.” There were still scratches on my face from Li-fei’s nails, and I’d fallen nine or ten feet onto a pile of stacked crates at the back of the Chonju Hotel when the creeper had given way.
“You on the run, mister?”
“My wife doesn’t understand me.”
“Uh-huh. She throw you out the window?”
“Something like that.”
“Goddamn women’s lib, it takes the joy out of everything.” But she was watching me critically, wondering how far a hundred thousand won would go if one day she had to bribe the police. “Listen, I don’t want no trouble here. This is a respectable place. I mean I don’t want your wife here. Or whoever. I have a businesslike understanding with the cops, you know what I mean?”
Water was dripping from my clothes as I stood checking the usual things: exits, windows, telephone, visual security from the street and other buildings; tonight it wasn’t easy: all I could see from the windows was the rain through the flimsy curtain.
“If you don’t talk to anyone,” I told her, “you won’t have any trouble.” But I’d have to be careful when I went into the street; by the morning the Homicide Bureau would be pushing the street patrols for results. “Is there a shower?”
“You bet. You don’t have any dry clothes?”
“I want to go straight to bed. They’ll dry overnight.”
“I got some hangers. Bathroom’s through that curtain and turn left. Careful with the faucet, it needs fixing, you can get yourself drenched.” She looked at my clothes and gave a husky laugh. “What am I saying?”
The telephone rang twice while I was in the bathroom and I listened to the soft rasp of her voice through the thin white plaster wall, that’s okay, honey, I didn’t expect you a night like this, I’ll miss you too, and so forth. I dried myself on a towel marked Seoul-Hyatt and wrapped myself in the blanket she’d given me. The phone rang again and I listened again, in case. I wasn’t safe here, but I wouldn’t be any safer anywhere else. Spur might have put me up, but I wouldn’t have been able to sleep with that bloody thing crawling all over the floor; as soon as they found my room still empty at the Chonju in the morning the police would be checking every hotel in the city; the Embassy would give me a bed, but you don’t go to ground in your Embassy when you’re blown: London is terribly fussy about abuse of diplomatic hospitality overseas and in any case the opposition would expect me to go there for refuge and I’d never get out again without walking into a trap.
“You can see the kinda clients I got,” Sadie told me the third time the telephone rang. “They call me up when they can’t make it. Most of them are in the US forc
es out here, some of them lieutenants and upwards, fresh outa West Point but underneath the war-paint just boys from back home, and you know something? They miss their mothers; half the guys that come here don’t even ask me for sex, they just wanna talk to someone who can speak the Queen’s goddamn English. Gee, honey, you look real cute in that poncho.”
The rain was still drumming on the roof and sending cascades into the street below. Five minutes away from here the girl with the cinnamon eyes would be listening to it, the girl with the Astra Cub .22. What had the Asian said to her when he’d stopped her outside her apartment?
He hadn’t followed me back to the hotel: I’d checked to make sure I was alone. He’d taken a different route through the maze of alleys and reached there before me, not knowing at that time that I wasn’t still in my room.
Did you kill him? he’d asked her outside her apartment.
No. He’s not the man, she’d said.
It was possible. Anything was possible, but I had to look for a likelihood, a logical scenario. It could have been someone else who stalked me in the corridors of the Chonju but I didn’t think so: it would have been too much of a coincidence. The man who had turned slowly in the air as he went down the marble stairwell had been Asian and he’d worn dark slacks and a white open-necked shirt; Soong Li-fei wasn’t just an official interpreter for the airline: she’d had a brother who was in Pekin at the time of the funeral bomb - “It was something to do with that dreadful thing in Pekin” - and they’d killed him because he’d “done something wrong”. She had a friend who had lent her a gun, and someone had told her that the man who’d killed her brother would be checking into the Chonju Hotel tonight, Room 29. She’d got Tung connections, strong ones, close ones, whether she knew it or not; and they’d tried to use her as a killing instrument and when she’d failed to kill me the young Asian had gone there to do it himself.
“I had one young guy,” Sadie said, “who spent the whole time just showing me the photographs of his mom and dad and his kid sister, telling me about them. Then you know what he did? He tried to lay me, but there was no spring in his step and he said, ‘Shit, man, when am I goin’ to grow up?’ We both of us ended up crying in each other’s arms, at least that’s what I tried to make it sound like, but you know what I mean, people think this job don’t carry any responsibilities, can you believe it?”