Durell moved around the balcony, which was decorated with small tables and an occasional private booth screened with bamboo. On the walls were cages filled With monkeys, lizards, parrots and an occasional bird of paradise, and the food was as varied as the patrons—satay, meat grilled on bamboo skewers, steaks of sea turtles that unluckily had swum down from the South China Sea, spicy Indian chicken and mutton curries. The waitresses were Malay or Chinese girls in pert, provocative costumes. Durell moved to the next balcony, watching in the occasional wall mirror that reflected the teeming activity and noise on the floor below; but he could not see that he was being followed. Ten minutes was all the time he allotted, then he moved into a wide corridor where customer traffic surged toward the dance hall where couples pressed thickly together in the dim, rotating lights.
A voice spoke at his elbow.
“Have you not yet found what you seek, sir?”
It was the girl from the birdcage. She had exchanged her simple costume for a shimmering blue silk sheath embroidered with a golden Imperial Dragon of old Peking, a symbol of the Manchus. Her young smile was warm, her lips soft and moist-looking.
“Not yet," Durell said.
“You did not seem like a man seeking obvious pleasures. Dancing, food, gambling—these are not for you. Something more must be available to please you.”
“What do you suggest? And have you a name?”
“I am called Paradise,” she said gently. When he refrained from making an obvious remark, she said, “Perhaps it is the House of Dreams that you Wish? We could give you privacy, very nice, very comfortable, a girl to prepare your pipe and recite poetry to you—”
“Prince Ch’ing seems to think of everything. Does he manage this by himself?"
“The prince is the master of all you see,” she murmured.
“Including yourself?"
“He is my employer, sir. Have you decided what you wish?”
“Do you think I could see him?” he asked bluntly. When she looked blank, he said: “Prince Ch’ing—I would like to meet him.”
“But why?”
“Let‘s just call it a business deal."
“You would have to go through—how you say?—official channels?" She smiled brightly and meaninglessly. “He is very busy, important man. Very few people see him.”
“Is Prince Ch’ing here now?”
“I cannot say. If you cannot find what you seek in his House, however, he will be most disappointed. He prides himself on providing all that man can dream of or desire."
“I’m sure of it,” Durell said grimly. “Every vice and rotten lust in the human soul, at reasonable and even cut-rate prices. Maybe even on the credit plan, right, Paradise?“
“I do not understand. sir,” she murmured.
He patted her cheek. “You don’t have to, maiden of the Flowery Kingdom. Is the prince with the girls?”
“Usually, sir."
“Let's go there, then. Just point the way.”
She looked puzzled and worried. He was sure he had been spotted when he entered the House of a Thousand Pleasures. and he was equally certain she was assigned to bird-dog his moves. But if anything was known about him, Prince Ch’ing would know it, and pretty girls and a weakness for them was not in his dossier. He had the feeling that from somewhere in this vast, noisy palace of entertainment, Prince Ch’ing watched and was amused by him.
Paradise led him to a flight of stairs where another girl, also wearing the Imperial Dragon, gently guided him away from the public corridors to a quiet, carpeted stairway and wide corridor decorated with old Chinese porcelains and scrolls. He did not feel flattered by being rated a better-paying client.
The upper corridor was illuminated by soft oil lamps behind traditional ruby-red glass. Cloying incense filled the air. A girl in a red and gold sarong smiled from a doorway of carved teakwood; and from behind another doorway he heard a small, muffled scream. No one seemed concerned, and he decided it was one of Prince Ch’ing’s thousand pleasures.
A dim lobby, Chinese in decor but with an Arabian Nights’ heaping of pillows and silk and tapestry, suitably adorned with women of all sizes, shapes, colors and ages, met him when he paused on the next threshold. Here Paradise waited for him again, and he wondered how she had gotten ahead of him. Her face was pale under masklike makeup, and her eyes avoided his. From among the groups of calm, nude women, a very ancient, incredibly wrinkled old woman in heavy silken robes arose to survey him with eyes like dark raisins in a face of spoiled suet. Incense coiled from a brass brazier set before a many-armed, many-breasted, lewdly smiling image set prominently in a niche behind the old woman. The walls were painted with murals that depicted an astonishing variety of Prince Ch’ing’s alleged pleasures.
The old woman spoke in a breathless English. “Mr. Durell, surely you cannot he the fool you pretend to be.”
“I don‘! remember giving my name at the door,” he said, and smiled.
“Was it necessary? You come here voluntarily where we would have tried to persuade you to go. Why do you do it? Why have you visited us so quickly?”
“So quickly?”
“You arrived in Pandakan only short hours ago,” the old Witch breathed. “Miss Panapura flew off to her grandfather’s schooner. You spent little time reaching this place. It is truly remarkable. You are either very clever, very lucky, or very stupid.”
“That’s quite a choice. Perhaps I can add two and two, and come up with this place. Where did you learn English, venerable grandmother?”
The old Chinese hag regarded him with malevolence. “I am not your grandmother, and while I should be empress over all China, in the name of the Manchu family, I find myself mistress of a hundred and twenty girls, each different, and they provide pleasure to men as I direct them. This may
not be considered honorable in your country, and it is degrading to heavenly blood, blessed by tradition, but what Prince Ch’ing says is good, is good; and what he says is bad, is bad. He says you are very, very bad, Mr. Durell.”
“Well, it’s a topsy-turvy world, madam.” He smiled. “And may I see the prince?“
“No. You are to be disposed of.”
“I see. Dropped down a chute to the lions?”
She smiled. “Perhaps. It depends on your degree of co-operation. The speed of your action is disturbing. You are to be questioned. If your answers are satisfactory, perhaps nothing at all of consequence will happen to you. You may even be persuaded to enjoy the pleasures of our girls. But if we are not satisfied, Mr. Durell, I fear you know what must be done with you.”
“I’ll speak to Prince Ch‘ing," Durell conceded.
“He is too busy to see you. You will speak with one of his managers.”
“It‘s Prince Ch’ing, or nobody.”
“Are you in a position to argue, Mr. Durell? Please to look about you," the old woman said.
He heard the swift, heavy footsteps of men threading their Way among the heaped-up cushions and dimly gleaming ivory, brown and black hips and thighs and breasts of the silently watching girls.
He was expected, he supposed, to yield in despair to the overwhelming odds. But the only hope for success was to do just the opposite. He was certain that the old harridan before him was someone of importance; perhaps she managed all this, and she might even be the brains behind Prince Ch’ing. But she was important, no doubt of it, and she carried herself with an air of accustomed command.
He did not turn as the footsteps rushed up behind him.
The old woman stepped back, but not quickly enough. He had no time for courtesy or gentility. He caught her pipe-stem arm under the heavy brocaded silk and swung her about with enough violence to lift her literally from her feet and place her abruptly between the three ugly brutes who approached and himself.
They skidded to a halt.
“Tell them to stop, grandmother,” Durell said softly. “Unless they care to stick their knives through you.”
The three men were bi
g and square-shouldered, with shaved skulls and slanted, glittering eyes in brutal faces. Steel flickered in their hands. Durell felt the old woman writhe like an animated skeleton in his grip, but he did not relent.
“Hold still,” he said. “You seem rather brittle.”
“Monster!” she hissed. “How dare you touch me!”
“Send your children away, or your arm might be broken. At your age, grandmother, it takes a while to knit bones.”
She spat out a clicking, nasal stream of vituperative Mandarin, but he guessed she was assailing the three chagrined musclemen for their slowness rather than wasting her breath on Durell. He backed away with her slowly until he felt the wall at his back. In this dim, rosy light that might have served for a sultan’s palace of concubines, he noted again the erotic tapestries and murals, the astonishing postures of male and female nudes in bronze and paint, and the quiet eyes of the score or more of women lounging in the room as so much decoration.
“Send your playboys away, grandma,” he said harshly.
“I cannot,” the old woman gasped. “They do not obey me.”
“Don’t lie now. It’s a bad time for it.”
“Imperialist spy! American fool! They only wish to escort you to Prince Ch’ing. You saboteur, you pif of a Western agent of colonialism, you agitator-”
He squeezed her arm and she hissed with pain. “I’ve heard that recording before, and it’s a bit worn. Even the Soviets don’t waste their breath using such old-fashioned terms today. But Peiping is like a kid stumbling on a chest of new toys, right? Forget ‘em, grandmother. I’ll give you a count of three to get your playboys away from the bunnies and out of here.”
“I do not understand your speech. I cannot —”
He started to count, and suddenly knew the old woman was terrified; she might be telling the truth. The three knifemen were circling Warily, their blades in plain sight, their broad yellow faces blank, their eyes opaque. There was a rustling as the staring, silent girls drew away. And at that moment a door opened to his left and three more girls in thin, silken robes that concealed nothing and exaggerated everything, entered the room, chattering with animation. Durell took quick advantage of the interruption.
He thrust the old beldame abruptly into the arms of the nearest thug and leaped over a banquette of plum-colored satin directly into a mass of naked girls. Their shrieks and cries mingled with the scream of the old woman and the bellows of the three men. The door behind the three newcomers was still open. He swung through it into a long corridor lined with red carpeting and more pornographic wall paintings. The doors on either hand were closed, but there was dim, atonal music from somewhere, and a man’s voice, thickened with pleasure, touched him. He ran to the end of the corridor.
A flight of steps went up and down, and ahead was a small balcony open to the night air. There was a wide central court, one flight down, a small formal garden lit by glowing stone lanterns, with formalized Chinese shrubbery. In the center of the garden was a tall, needlelike pagoda, the obvious center of Prince Ch’ing’s astonishing complex of pleasure houses. The thud of running footsteps behind Durell alerted him. He slashed at a heavy curtain, set it to swinging as if he brushed it going up the stairs, and turned in the opposite direction, dropping quickly down to the level of the garden courtyard.
For the moment, he had divided his pursuers. Two had been misled and run up the stairs. But one of them chose to descend to the garden.
Durell waited in the shadows behind a tall stone lantern. The man was fast and reckless, a kris gleaming in his fist. Durell chopped at the back of a thick, fatty neck, striking to paralyze the neural center. The man dropped head-first into the sunken lily pool, making the big golden carp thrash in alarm. The noise seemed loud, but there was no alarm, and Durell pulled the man‘s face out of the water and ran for the pagoda entrance, assuming that this must surely be the central control area of the place. If Prince Ch’ing could be found anywhere, it would be here.
There were outside stairs winding up the exterior walls, with open windows and doors. Thick glass partitions revealed a series of interior tableaux, of men and women in dimly lighted, silken webs of tangled arms and legs in incredible posturings. He reflected briefly that there was no accounting for taste, and came abruptly to the top of the outer stairs. From the garden below came shouts of anger as men poured in from all directions, He had to get out of sight. He chose the first door, tried the handle, found it unlocked, and stepped in.
Two girls, one golden and one ebony, turned on their cushions to glare at him. They had been attending to a stout, matronly woman. Durell put a cautionary finger to his lips, surprising them with his conspiratorial request for silence, and ran across to the opposite door.
He found himself facing an elevator shaft that yawned open behind a flimsy sliding gate. He looked down. Five floors below was a glimmer of black harbor water. Above was the bottom side of the elevator cage itself.
If Prince Ch’ing were here, he must be one flight up, where the elevator had been halted. Durell found a flight of steps and took them three at a time.
The Manchu pretender waited for him at the top.
chapter eleven
THERE was only this one chamber at the top of the elaborate pagoda spire, which Durell could see now had been constructed as one vast symbol of erotic intent. This room was obviously an office, a central command post for each of the thousand pleasures dispensed in Prince Ch’ing‘s house.
Astonishingly, the prince was alone.
He was bigger than any man Durell had ever seen before. His Chinese skin was the color of old ivory, and just as bloodless. He wore a vast, golden-embroidered mandarin’s coat, but he did not adorn his head with the traditional cap and peacock feather. His skull looked small, abnormally tiny on his monstrous and massive shoulders, his pendulous chest and enormous, bulging belly. His feet were invisible under the cloak. So were his hands, lost in the voluminous sleeves. His face was shaven except for a long, thin mandarin’s moustache, a jet-black that matched the heavy, furry caterpillars of brows above his eyes. His bald scalp gleamed with scented oil.
“Come in, come in, Mr. Durell,” Ch’ing said in Oxford accents. “Truly, you are an impetuous man."
There was the hammering of pursuing feet behind him.
“Call off your dogs first.” Durell took his gun and thrust it at Ch’ing’s huge belly. He did not know if it would fire, after his swim, but Ch’ing didn’t know that, either. “Call them off quickly, please.”
“Naturally. No need for us to be antagonists, sir.” The huge man turned his head slowly. “Paradise, my dear?“
From the shadowed corner of the ornate tower room stepped the girl he had first met in the birdcage. Again she had changed her costume, this time to something silk and transparent to exhibit the tempting roundness of her body. She tapped a felt-headed stick to a golden gong. The note reverberated softly and the rushing footsteps halted. A man called querulously. Prince Ch’ing nodded to the girl again and Paradise struck the gong a second time.
“Now we will not be disturbed, Mr. Durell. Please make yourself comfortable. Paradise will bring you tea, food, anything you may desire.”
“She can't make Simon Smith live again, can she?”
“Alas, no. But we are not immediately responsible for his death. The injuries that hospitalized him in the first place are the cause of his dying.”
“After your‘ hatchet men snatched him.”
“That was indeed unfortunate.”
“What did you want from a simple sailor, Prince Ch’ing?"
The enormous, fat man smiled silently. Paradise came and knelt and took off one of his silken slippers and exposed a tiny, almost feminine foot, soft and pink and ironically delicate in view of the huge weight it must support. She began to apply a creamy salve to the instep With the practiced gestures of a masseuse.
“Forgive me, Mr. Durell. I suffer from certain decrepitudes. One may be rich, but as every man knows,
riches rarely buy health. Such sayings are common to all men and all nations. And why not? They are true. Ever since my imperial ancestor, a prince of the Ch’ing house, came to the Spice Islands centuries ago, there has been one of us here in Dendang, to rule and help our people. You look skeptical of my title, you see, and it may be well to clarify its validity for our future negotiations. There was a Ch’ing here when the first Portuguese sailors ventured dangerously on these seas in the sixteenth century. Then there grew a powerful Sultanate of Pandakan, aided by the old Sundanese Empire, and finally the British East India Company came to these islands in 1787, and in a faraway city of Europe, traded them to the Dutch for other concessions. Now the Hollanders are gone, and the little Republic that ousted them is also shattered, and we suffer military rule, under the estimable Colonel Mayubashur. And the crowds in the street chant, ‘Merdekal Merdekaf Freedom! Freedom!’ Freedom from what, Mr. Durell?”
The Chinese prince smiled blandly. “Nothing will change. The Ch’ings will remain. We are over three hundred islands floating on the Sunda Shelf, surrounded by Pacific deeps more deadly than the tides of politics that sweep the world. The islands shall remain, however. And I, too. They may change the name of our huge neighbor, Borneo, to Kalimanten; but the jungles will stay there, the umbrella trees and the malarial swamps and the Dyak and Dusan peoples, simple and primitive souls, who need a father to look after them.”
“And you are their self-appointed father, Prince Ch’ing?”
“They need me. And although I suffer, I serve them.”
“In the name of merdeka, of freedom?“ Durell asked. “I find it difficult to feel pity for you. Nor have you answered my question. Why did Simon Smith concern you at all?”
Assignment - Sulu Sea Page 9