Then over in 2nd Company headquarters Nautaung saw the Filipino Lau’rel sitting on a log in front of a small fire, holding something in his hand turning it over and over. Ever since the airdrop yesterday the Du Lau’rel had been very quiet and seemed a great distance away. Nautaung started for his headquarters, stopped once and looked back at the Filipino, then continued on. He would talk to the Du Lau’rel tonight at the party. Nautaung would have a drink with him.
Ayeee. It would be good to manau again.
CHAPTER IX
José Francisco Piedro Lau’rel sat by the fire of his headquarters at 2nd Company only half hearing the steady boomalay of the drums. He laid the letter on the log beside him, poked the fire, adding several branches.
One hand clasped the silver medallion that hung from his neck as he looked out across the valley grass to the snake line of weaving undulating Scouts, their bare feet stomping anciently, rhythmically to the beat of the drums. Lau’rel stared at the huge blazing bonfire that cast large shimmering shadows, listening to the murmuring low wail of the war song; hearing and seeing it all clouded and distant as if looking through a piece of gauze.
He picked up the letter and stared at it, his foggy eyes fixed on his shaking hands. Six times now he had started to open the envelope and still was unable to. It was not that he was saving it to savor as a person will save the best part of their favorite food, it was just a terrifying distrust of what might lie between the lines.
He rubbed his thumb over the soft fine tissue of the envelope. Very slowly the gear of his mind slipped out of neutral and again he saw, distortedly hugely magnified before him, the long sensuous hand of Nickie as she held the pen caressingly loose, stroking off the address. His stomach fluttered and he put the letter into his breast pocket and held his hand to it. He stared into the fire.
It was before the war in Hong Kong, in the Crown Colony, at Eddie’s club that he saw her for the second time. She was with a ship’s chandler; a puffy skinned short and sloppy fat Greek by the name of Regas. Later he had seen Regas everywhere: fatter, sloppier, looking more distasteful every time they met.
Lau’rel stood at the bar watching her dance with this vile looking Greek who smoked opium and was dancing with her now, dancing for all his obesity as light as a ballet dancer, around and around until the sweat ran off his face and through his dinner jacket until it was wet wrinkled through.
They drank champagne and the Greek was gesturing and laughing and waving about the room. He had four drinks sitting there watching them and when he saw the Greek put his sweaty fat hands on her tawny round shoulder, and when she laughed, he threw down a bill and started for the door. He gave them one final glance and the Greek caught his eye: “Lau’rel,” the Greek shouted. “I say, I haven’t seen you in weeks, old chap,” he said in his exaggerated English accent.
“I’ve been to Manila, Gus,” Lau’rel answered pausing by the table. “How are you, Gus?” Lau’rel asked lamely looking at Nickie, not able to take his eyes off her.
“Pretty, isn’t she, Lau’rel?” the Greek said putting his hand under Nickie’s chin and turning it so Lau’rel could see her profile.
“Very pretty,” Lau’rel said wornly, seeing the Greek’s pudgy-wet hand on the halfcaste’s delicate chin.
“Heah, heah,” the Greek pointed to a chair. “Do join us for a drink?” he asked politely.
“Thanks,” Lau’rel said. “I could do with a brandy.” He sat down feeling an intense hate for the Greek quaking in his stomach; a hate he did not know he was capable of; a hate that gave him a sudden poise as if all his forces had gathered in a knot and he could flick them on and off like a light switch.
He ordered.
“How’s business?” the Greek asked.
“No complaints,” he was looking at Nickie. “What’s her name?”
“Dear, dear. I’m sorry,” the Greek interrupted. “That really wasn’t very polite of me. Nickie, this is Mr. Lau’rel. José Lau’rel.”
“How do you do, Mr. Lau’rel?” she extended her hand. “It is a pleasure,” she forced it falsely, formally.
“Mr. Lau’rel is in the coffee business,” the Greek said. “His family is highly respected in the Philippines. Very highly respected, aren’t they Lau’rel, old boy.”
“Rather well known,” Lau’rel said staring at Nickie. “How long have you been in town, Nickie? I certainly haven’t seen you about.”
“I haven’t been here long,” she said lingeringly. “I’m from Rangoon.”
“I’ve spent a good deal of time there, you know,” Lau’rel said.
“Have you now?” the Greek interjected. “I didn’t know that, Lau’rel.’ Spent some time there myself.”
“I didn’t like it,” Nickie said.
“You like it here?” Lau’rel asked. The brandy came.
“I suppose,” she pouted looking at the Greek.
“Nickie’s half Burman, aren’t you Nickie?” the Greek said possessively, sipping his champagne.
“Yes, Gus,” she replied.
“And half White Russian, aren’t you Nickie?” the Greek smiled.
“Yes, Gus,” she said.
“What’s your last name?” Lau’rel asked.
“Kukir. K-u-k-i-r,” she spelled.
“I knew a Kukir in Rangoon,” Lau’rel said. “A fine man and well educated. He was with an oil company. Did you.…”
“You knew father,” she said excitedly.
“About eight or ten years ago, I should say,” Lau’rel replied. “You must have been very small then. How is your father?”
“He’s dead,” she said softly, lowering her black eyes passively.
“I’m sorry,” Lau’rel said.
“Tell me about father,” she smiled childishly, almost pleadingly.
“Some other time,” Lau’rel said. “I do have some business to attend to. Where are you staying?”
“At the Royal. Do call,” she invited.
“That’s my hotel. I’ll call,” Lau’rel said feeling the Greek’s penetrating glare.
He had called her on the phone the next day. Four times he had called and when at three in the afternoon she still hadn’t answered an unfamiliar panic seized him. He had come back from the office early and sat all afternoon and into the evening in the lobby just off the bar drinking gin, his eyes focused on the lift door, then on the lobby door. When she hadn’t come in by eleven he bribed the Moslem room clerk with a ten rupee note, only to find her bed hadn’t been slept in at all.
That night he lay in his bed, the gin bottle on the night stand, seeing her sad faint smile before him. She was helpless and alone and too easily fooled. It was perfectly obvious. He wanted to warn her. Someway he had to find her and warn her against the things that she was ignorant of, like the Greek. He owed it to her father, to himself. Finally he slept a vague, twisting tortured sleep.
The next afternoon he reached her on the phone, and she said she couldn’t see him for four days. She seemed rather curt and cold and not like herself, Lau’rel thought. He wanted to demand that she see him right then, or at least that evening, but he couldn’t seem to muster the courage and his voice quivered and shook until his only desire was to hang up.
He sat in the luke warm tub wondering if she had recognized the weak fright of his voice. Then he began to take stock of himself, wondering what had happened to make him act this way. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. He had never really, truly been afraid of a woman before, and he tried desperately to calm himself enough to analyze what was happening.
It was no use. It only bewildered him more and he began to distrust himself for even thinking about it, so he began to drink more.
The four days went like an eternity.
At five sharp on the fourth day he bathed and stretched out on the chaise longue in his living room and started in to drink double gin and tonics. By six he had pulled himself together, and at six-thirty, as he adjusted the red sash under his dinner jacket he w
as comparing his own dark handsomeness against the sloppy fat of the Greek’s. He compared backgrounds, reputations, and personalities, and soon he began to whistle. Then after a final quick double he left for her rooms.
She opened the door herself and stood before him tawny and supple in a white brocade strapless evening dress. The wispy, secret odor of her perfume reached out to him; and he stood stunned and embarrassed by her loveliness.
“Come in, José,” she said warmly, as if they were old and familiar friends. She motioned with a willowy wave of her arm.
“Oh. Oh, thank you, Nickie. Yes of course. Thank you, Nickie,” he stammered.
She closed the door and turned to face him in the center of the parlor: “I’m so glad to see you, José,” she smiled. “I thought maybe you had forgotten our engagement, busy man that you are.” She looked him up and down. “You’re absolutely handsome,” she clasped her hands in front of her bosom.
He felt himself smiling an awkward almost aching smile.
“Sit down. Sit down,” she motioned him to the couch soothingly, as if she had suddenly grasped his unease. They sat down. “And what will you drink, gin-tonic?”
“Fine. Fine,” he muttered trying to pull himself together again, feeling absolutely, horrifyingly sober.
“Chokra. Chokra.” She clapped her hands and called in Hindustani. A young turbaned Hindu came in the room. “Jamal, gin-tonic lao. Ek Dum. Ek Dum,” she said in that cool authoritative way that is the way of women who are born to be served.
Lau’rel reached inside his dinner jacket and took out his cigarette case: “Smoke?” he offered.
“Oh, let me see,” she took the case out of his hand. She ran her hand over and over it and examined it thoroughly like a little girl looking at her first doll. “It’s beautiful,” she looked up at him. “Where did you get it?”
“My brother sent it to me. He bought it in New York several years back. American make. Good workmanship, isn’t it.”
“I’ve never seen one like it. Is it real gold?”
“I’ve never bothered to find out, really. It is expensive I believe.”
The bearer came with the gin-tonics, then vanished silently.
“Where are we going tonight?” she asked like a child expecting a surprise.
“I’ve made reservations at the Yacht Club for dinner. We can dance there a bit, then wherever you like.”
“The Yacht Club,” she said excitedly. “Oh, I’ve never been there. I’m so glad. Are you a member, José?”
He took a deep swallow of the gin-tonic: “Oh, yes,” he said a little proudly. “I’m vice-commodore of the Club.”
“You have a boat?” she asked very excited crossing her legs up under her dress and turning squarely to him on the couch.
“Oh, yes,” he said feeling better, wondering what ever could have knotted him up before. “Oh, yes. I have a little schooner. Sleeps eight. I get a lot of fun from it, really,” he smiled.
“Can I see it?” she asked excitedly.
Her eyes were wide and exhilaratingly alive.
“Can I? Will you show it to me, José? Please.”
“Of course, Nickie. Of course, dear,” he said in a fatherly way. He thought that he had never seen eyes as lost as hers.
He drank one more drink while she finished hers, then he called for the car. She put a black lace shawl over her head and across her shoulders and they started for the lift. As they walked down the hall she reached for his hand and found it. It was the first time he had ever touched her and her hand felt cool but warm all at once, and he could feel the long sensuous fingers and the warm blood tremor as it rushed through the veins of her wrist.
The Club was crowded. It was dance night for the presentation of the Crown Trophy, best sportsmen of the year. The orchestra was playing the tango Siboney as they stood in the entranceway waiting for the head waiter. It was a big, square, lowceiling room Nickie saw, softly candle lit, sinkingly richly redcarpeted. On the right she saw the orchestra and the dance floor and on her left a white marble bar beneath a crystal chandelier, where Colonial British looking people clustered in small groups, casually drinking and chatting, their women impeccably groomed.
The other two sides of the room opened out onto a colonaded verandah, a ship’s rail ran along the edge that protruded out over the sleek black water of the bay, and from the ceiling of the open portico strings of Japanese lanterns dangled above the heads of other Yacht Clubbers seated in low semi-circular lounge chairs.
He felt Nickie grip his arm and lean over against him, her black eyes laughingly young, vitally alive.
“Commodore Lau’rel,” the Hindu headwaiter greeted. “Miss-sahib,” he bowed to Nickie. He turned back to Lau’rel: “Sorry you had to wait, sir. It is a very big night for the Hong Kong Yacht Club. I have everything ready for you.”
He led them across the room between tables, around the dance floor. She held tight to Lau’rel and he could feel the eyes as they pierced her, the men wondering where he had found her, the caustic jealous murmuring of the white women as brownly, elfishly Nickie glided by them.
They were seated out near the verandah but not far from the dance floor and the waiter lit their candlelamp. There was an orchid lying across Nickie’s damask table mat; an orchid perfectly shaped and of so deep a purple it was almost black. She looked up at him bubbling all over, holding the flower first by the sharp outline of her breasts, then to her hair, then finally pinning it down on her side where the line of her hip indented to her waist.
They ordered gin-tonic, then another.
The orchestra was playing a set of Strauss waltzes and Nickie was telling Lau’rel fragments of her childhood in Burma:
“I was so happy then, in the hills with father. He taught me to shoot and trap and showed me all the fine things in the jungle. When I was the littlest girl he began to take me with him.”
Lau’rel nodded. “They said he was the finest geologist in all Burma. Extremely well educated man.” Her hand was over his on the table and he felt the sharp point of her forefinger nail running catchingly over his wrist.
“Oh, he was a fine oil man. He even drilled himself a couple of times. He loved to gamble. Real oil men do, you know. He tutored me nights; taught me French and Russian, and English, and he used to read me fairy tales and poetry and all the Holy Scriptures; the Pitakatayan, the Baiden, the sermons of Gautama,” she smiled earnestly, sweetly reminiscently. “And the Ramayana,” her voice lifted excitedly.
The nail dug deeply into his wrist sharp against the skin.
“I loved the Ramayana story. Did you ever read it, José? Did you?” she tilted back her head slightly to one side childishly.
“Oh, yes, at school.”
“Were you ever in the hills or the jungles of Burma, José? Or to Maymo? Or the Shan Hills?” she asked rapidly her eyes wide.
He felt her throbbing with the thought of her native land. “No, dear. Never. I almost went up on the river boat once but I came down with the bug, you know. Dance?”
“Oh, yes,” she smiled, seeing the little half-moon of a scar under his right eye, white against his dark skin. He held her chair and she stood up very close to him and put her finger gently to the eye, then puckered her lips slightly. “Where did you get it?” she asked playfully, as if they were the only two in the room. “It’s quite attractive you know,” she was running her finger over and over it delicately, absorbingly.
He felt the many piercing eyes from the nearby tables as they stood there closely, only inches apart, beside their table. The bird-like flapping of self-conscious embarrassment winged through him redly. “Oh, ah,” he stammered and reached up and closed his hand over her tiny wrist and slowly brought her hand down away from the scar. “It’s rather a secret,” he said feebly, embarrassedly. “I, ah, I’ll let you wonder about it for awhile,” he forced a grin.
“Oh José!” she pouted and stamped her foot like a child. “Tell me now.”
He gripped her wrist tig
htly and steered her to the floor laughing falsely. They were playing Vienna Woods.
By the second dance he felt composed and loose from the many gins and suddenly very gay.
“Your features are so square, José, like the stone temple Gods of Indo-China. They are not real Philippine features it seems,” she had tilted her head back slightly and was examining his face unashamedly, scrutinizingly as if it were a design on a new earring she had just bought.
“Oh, I’m Spanish mostly. My family came from Spain originally, you know. Most of the old Manila families did.” He brought her closer to him, her cheek to his.
They danced three more times and he began to feel the gin and the exuberance of gaiety in the room. She was loose but tight in his arms and he formed pictures of boiling blood racing through her veins from a vat that was her heart, and for one fleeting second remembered a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus that hung in his room when he was a little boy.
They finished out the set and returned to their table.
The loudspeaker: “Attention. Attention please. The Board of Governors has asked me to announce that they have passed a resolution offering every aid to Her Majesty’s Navy. A Nautical Coastal Patrol is to be formed composed entirely of civilian membahs. All owners of power-craft over twentyseven feet are asked to attend a meeting in the Men’s Bah Tuesday next at seven P.M. I repeat seven P.M.”
There was murmuring and scattered applause.
“José, I’m getting hungry. Can we eat soon?”
“Of course. At once,” he signaled for the waiter who was three paces rear.
They ate and drank and danced and ordered a second bottle of champagne.
“But Nickie dear,” Lau’rel was saying. “Don’t you have any plans at all? Any ambitions? To marry? To have a family? None?” he asked incredulously.
“None,” she laughed. “Not a care in the world,” she said bubbly, champagne bubbly.
Her long sensuous hands, the nails blood red, were crossed under her chin: “But Nickie, your future. How do you live, dear? You have no income? How?”
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