Ellery Queen's Champions of Mystery vol. 33 (1977)

by Ellery Queen

  I nodded. Then became annoyed because he had decided what I was before I had told him. “How do you know? Have I revealed my flat crude accent?”

  “Oh, please. I meant to be complimentary. It’s the way you look.” He seemed gently amused, as though my flash of feminine temper was pleasing. “American women have a free, swinging way about them as though they own the world but have had it so long they’re not aware of their ownership.” He hesitated momentarily. “American men, now, they’re something different.” He slipped back into his obsequious expression. “But you’ll have an American husband, so I suppose I shouldn’t commit myself on American men.”

  I shrugged. “I’m a widow.”

  He ducked farther into himself, his shoulders reaching toward his face. It was really astonishing how much of a “nothing” he could become. Actually he was quite a large solid man. Yes, almost as large as Harry. But such a difference. This man so soft and gentle when he spoke. Harry almost maudlin with noise. “Terribly sorry,” he said. “But of course I was much too general about American men. The British can be overbearing too. Perhaps it’s just that we’re not so open about it.”

  “Hypocritical?”

  His laugh was understated, smooth. How delightful, how refreshing, how charmingly frank, his expression said. “Vulnerable spot, hypocrisy, so many of the human race share in it. Yes, you’ve caught us out, we British I mean. We’re noted for looking bland, while feeling quite differently. Giving myself away, eh? Possibly we’re annoyed at the American man looking as if he owns the world, when we’re quite sure we do own it. Oh, look, watch that large junk skim past the harborline of the Hong Kong side. Quite a picture, what?”

  Yes. Quite a picture. Exotic, entrancing. Which is why I was in Hong Kong. Before that, Singapore, Samoa, Australia, anywhere, everywhere, for the past six months, frantic to exchange the pictures on the inside of my mind for those on the outside.

  “Fascinating,” I agreed. “Tomorrow I’ll see it all from Victoria Peak. It should be a beautiful panorama.”

  A young couple walked past us, the girl in bright yellow slacks and striped cotton jersey. She climbed out on the prow of the junk, beyond the seats, wrapped her arms around her knees, threw back her head to the warm gentle breeze. “You’re braver than I am,” the boy said to her. “Too close to the drink for me.”

  “Who thinks he owns the world?” I asked the man beside me. “That boy is American, but he sounds as mild as—” I stopped short of saying “as mild as you look.”

  “I do look rather like a nothing, don’t I?” Not disturbed, merely quizzical.

  I hesitated. “Well, yes,” I said deliberately. “If you must go prying into minds you’ll have to take the bad with the good.”

  He laughed again. Then, as though he felt he had gone too far, the laugh switched to an unctuous smile and he began pointing out places of interest. The only ones that stuck in my mind were the squatters’ hovels, smudged in as dark shadows between the brightly lighted homes of the wealthy. Squatters without lights or water, clinging to the sheerness of mountainside and life, tenaciously refusing to give up. Why? I kept thinking, why endure so much just to live?

  But I knew why. I was born in a Chicago tenement, Polish, and stayed there until I was 17. Four in a bed when I was small, cut down to two sisters and me when we grew too big for four. At 17 I quit clinging and climbed to a rented room with a hot plate. All by myself. Alone for the first time in my life.

  Clinging is easy, it’s the climbing that’s hard. It took a lot of climbing to find Harry. The boss. The Big boss. Owned the downtown Chicago building—that and a lot more—where I ran the elevator. So I climbed to the mountaintop. And after a while all I wanted to do was jump off. But people don’t. They hang onto life. Like Harry, reaching, motioning, the blood streaming from his mouth—

  “You know a great deal about Hong Kong,” I said desperately. Talk to me, keep talking.

  “Not really. Only around the harbor, because as a boy I was taken sailing here and it’s changed the least. The war came, you know. Japanese prison camp for the British, my father was a Navy officer. So they scraped up our family and tucked us away. Boring waste of time. Can’t blame the Japanese, though. We would have done the same to them. But this must sound like ancient history to you.”

  “I’ve read books,” I said. “But in case you’re wondering how old I am, I’m thirty-one.” None of his business, why had I bothered to tell him? Nobody’s business about me. Especially that of men who might be eager to comfort a lonely vulnerable widow. And her money.

  “I was thirteen when I went to prison camp,” he said. “Look, you’ll find this section interesting, it’s quite famous. Aberdeen, the main settlement of the Water People in Hong Kong. Perhaps you’ll want to get out a bit of change, they’ll be begging around our junk as we near the restaurant.”

  Ahead the gaudy lights of the Floating Restaurants sparked the dusky sky. Sampans darted from the protecting flanks of the family junks, skimmed toward the tourist junk. Women and children called out, voices high-pitched and nasal, hands pleading upward. I felt in my purse, found coins, tossed them. But the throw was too high and the coins fell into the dark sea.

  The children screamed at me, their faces incensed by this foolish loss. Their anger struck me like a blow, a reminder of impoverished childhood when a lost penny was tragedy. But more than that, a reminder of fate. My aim was always missing its mark. Like with Harry. So rich, so glamorous with possessions. Fat even became him when he was 35 and I was 19.

  “Shall we dine together?” the man in brown asked, very formally.

  A fleeting wish crossed my mind to be in evening dress, in a beautiful supper club, a sparkling place for lovely clothes and happiness, instead of nothing ahead except eating a Chinese dinner with a stranger.

  “Perhaps we can do it another time, I would like that too,” the man in brown said gently.

  I stared, mouth parted. His eyes probed mine. Strange eyes, pale blue, unreadable as though under a sheath of glass. It was an effort to turn away. I leaned over the railing, but the cries and reaching hands in the sampans whirled me back toward the man.

  Our junk bumped against the gangway of the lighted restaurant. The man in brown tucked his hand under my arm, helped me up the gangway, and led me to a large round table where tourists were already being seated. In desperation I struck up a conversation with a friendly couple from Indiana, anything to avoid the man beside me. Finally he touched my arm. I turned.

  “Forgive me, I realize I’m often disturbing. But”—and he shrugged—“I can’t rid myself of this ability to read minds any more than I can rid myself of my arm. Short of cutting off the arm, of course, or getting a lobotomy for my brain. But too drastic, don’t you think? Besides, reading minds is a great aid to me. I’m a professional analyst, a clinical psychologist. In industry. And to do a bit of mind reading saves time.”

  I willed my own mind to go blank. But it bubbled like a seething cauldron, as though his gaze was a stirring spoon, digging at its bottom, bringing lost thoughts to the surface.

  “Would you rather I went away?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “After I finish dinner.” The cringing set of his shoulders became pronounced, but his eyes were amused. “I’m very hungry.”

  I wasn’t. The strange fish things which had started as delicious now tasted like the harbor, defiled by those thousands of crowded, screaming, born-and-die people in those thousands of junks. I began to think of the catfish Harry had brought me when we went to his Ozark fishing lodge on our honeymoon, how he held the revolting thing before my face, pushing it at me to hear me scream, grinning at me—both Harry and the fish—the fish with rubbery spikes around its mouth ready to stab me.

  That was the first time I had noticed how big and yellow Harry’s teeth were, how his breath as he laughed at me spewed the smell of cigars he continually chewed. He actually put the catfish on my arm, only to tease me he said later. Because I
had fainted.

  “Are you ill?” It was the friendly woman from Indiana, her face concerned. I realized then that my eyes were frozen into a stare. I shook my head. “No, it’s just I don’t care much for fish.”

  After the fruit was served, the man in brown excused himself. Soon we all left for the return to Kowloon. Our junk slid past new housing projects for workers, the huge buildings like enormous henneries with the lights left on to make the hens lay more. People, and more a-borning, stacked layer on layer, my God! The closeness, the intolerable intimacy!

  Then I heard, unmistakably, a voice. Not outside. Inside. A voice that kept asking: Why are you frightened, why are you frightened? Over and over. But it wasn’t my inner voice. It was British, insinuating, the voice of the man in brown worming into the crevices of my mind where he had no business to be. I whirled, expecting to see him behind me.

  But he was on the opposite side of the deck, looking toward the dark open sea spotted with the speeding lights of small boats. For a sickening instant I wished Harry were back, booming, pawing Harry as a buffer against this mind-reading stranger. Like a cannon set off in a prayer room, Harry was. I could never think when he was in a room with me. Only when he left it.

  The junk slipped into the Kowloon wharf. I hurried through the streets, past cooking cauldrons on the sidewalks where Chinese waited for late-night suppers, into the gaudy shopping district with stores still open, merchants hawking wares to the crowds walking up and down. It was late, but nobody bothered me. Except for staring.

  Perhaps I looked frightened. Perhaps that made them stare. Except that men—even women, but in a different way—always stared at me. Harry did, all the years we were married. Molly Baby the way you look is really something I really bought me a Baby Doll I did——don’t kid your old man Molly it was money not love give us a kiss. Grab, pull, snatch. Of course he had the right. That’s what Harry and the law said. He was my husband. Baby I could drown in those smoky dark eyes you got lips like rose petals. Almost twelve years.

  “I belong to myself, why couldn’t you understand that!” I said to myself.

  But I must have said it out loud. “I quite understand. Of course you do,” a British voice said behind me.

  I whirled. The man in brown—he hadn’t yet told me his name, nor had I told mine—was smiling at me. “One does not give away, easily, a valuable possession.”

  “Why are you following me?”

  “I’m sorry.” Obsequious again. “Really I wasn’t following you. My hotel’s this way. And you’re headed in my direction, possibly going to the same hotel. Tell you what, we’ll exchange places. I’ll walk ahead and you follow. Very oriental.”

  He bowed slightly, went around me, and walked toward the tall hotel, with the Sikh doorman pacing in front of it. It was the first time I became aware of his back. I hadn’t noticed it before, only his meek, fawning face. Seen from the front, the shoulders seemed bent in a half bow. But from the back they were massive, hugely muscled, bent forward by the weight and power. His arms were extraordinarily long. They swung loosely, ending in great blobs of hands.

  From the back he looked like Harry. A great hulking bear of a man. No, no, he couldn’t be! He couldn’t be possessed by Harry, motivated by a dead man. He was a stranger, he came from Calcutta, how could Harry have found him—or could he? Ghosts have no barriers.

  At the hotel entrance the man turned, looked back briefly, his milk-toast face smiling. No. Not Harry.

  The next morning was lovely, shining. I forgot the dreams and tremors of the night before. I felt like a child in an amusement park as the cable car climbed steep Victoria Peak, giving a slant-visioned view of Hong Kong below. I’m happy, I’m having fun, why shouldn’t I be happy, I was thinking as I left the cable car at the top of the peak.

  It was a different suit, this time tan with brown overplaid. But the same strange, hulking man, buying picture postcards from a woman vendor. Following me! No, he had come ahead, had been waiting for me—I had said so the night before.

  I hurried past him, looking straight ahead. When I was a good distance away, out on a ledge where a spyglass was placed for viewing the harbor, I turned.

  His back was toward me. And it had been no night trick of vision. He did look like Harry, his back massive, its hunch predatory, the muscles clearly defined even in well-tailored coat sleeves. His figure grew larger and larger, pushing out the air and space until I was breathless. I hurried, almost running, past him and the souvenir stand toward the tour bus that was waiting.

  Next stop, the Tiger Balm Gardens. Hideous, demonic. Filled with grotesque figures caught in still-life agonies, materialized from the demons who sometimes hovered over me in the dark as I tried to sleep. Tortuous stairways winding into hot balconies that led into other stairways seeming to go nowhere.

  And on one of the stairways I felt Harry behind me. Perspiration ran cold down my back. My skin crawled with the knowledge that Harry’s great ghost hands hovered above my shoulders, ready to pull me toward him. I turned, hands spread to push him away.

  The British stranger stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up, smiling.

  I ran up the stairs, across a balcony, down another stairway, crossed an open space to another flight. When I was halfway up, the stranger came in view, started down. I went backward, stumbled. His arm reached forward, grotesquely long, his fingers open, grasping. He caught my head, steadied me. Smiling gently.

  He said, “Why are you frightened? Are you ill? You do look ill, perhaps it is too warm for you, you’re not used to the tropics.”

  I pulled my hand free, pressed against the stairway’s wall.

  “Surely you’re not frightened of me, obviously I’m a harmless sort of chap. Even though it’s true, yes, I did come on this tour today because you said you would be on it. But nothing frightening about that, why blame a man for wanting to be better acquainted with a woman so—fascinating.” Gentle. Talking softly, as though I were a horse to be gentled. I had heard the groom talk that way to Harry’s thoroughbreds in Kentucky.

  “I—I’m not frightened. It’s—you read minds. It isn’t normal to read minds.”

  “Oh, yes.” He nodded. “Difficult to be around that trait in this day and age. Perhaps in future, when everyone does it, it will be easier. Force a new morality. You know, evil thoughts will become evil deeds. Or perhaps they do even now. But, my dear, a lovely creature like you shouldn’t worry about thoughts. You’ll be forgiven, you know.”

  He took my hand again. I trembled, but I let it stay. “Such a lovely girl, but lovelier if you were not troubled. You’re unique, you know. Outwardly the exquisite stillness of a Greek statue. But inwardly a trapped bird, fluttering, seeking escape. From what?”

  Prying, probing! I jerked away. “Do you intend to follow me until I leave Hong Kong?”

  “Well”—an oblique smile—“if I do you’ll have no escape, will you? That is, if I truly read minds. I’ll know where you plan to be. So why not be friendly and enjoy this brief stay in Hong Kong? You’ll be leaving tomorrow.”

  I hadn’t told him I would. I hadn’t even told the hotel. I had only told myself this morning on Victoria Peak when I first saw him.

  “Why not have dinner with me tonight? In some unusual place, something very posh and oriental. I’m staying at your hotel. Samuels is my name. Francis Samuels, Mrs. Sanders.”

  That wasn’t mind reading: it’s simple to discover names in a hotel.

  I nodded agreement. Better to know where he was than to feel him hulking after me like a nemesis. “Dinner then. Now, please. I’m going back to my bus.”

  At the bus I turned. Samuels was on an upper balcony, his huge hateful back toward me, blended into the Tiger Balm Gardens, a gargoyle among gargoyles.

  The bus was empty of tourists, they were still occupied with the Gardens. The bus driver stood outside, talking with other drivers. But I wasn’t alone. Harry was waiting for me. I couldn’t see his hand—you can’t see a ghost e
xcept in the dark—but its shadow moved on my knee.

  “Go away, Harry,” I said. “For God’s sake, go away.”

  For God’s sake I’m staying Molly—shows no hard feelings—God may give you a gold star for that lovey you’re too pretty to he mad give us a love sweetie.

  Loud. The way he always talked. Inside my mind, hurting it, pummeling it with his laugh—Huhuhuhuhuh!

  “You sick, Missy?” The bus driver was leaning over me. I became aware that my face was pressed against the window, my hands clawing at its glass. Despite the air-conditioned coolness I dripped with perspiration.

  “You bettah soon,” the driver assured me. “Next stop, Repulse Bay, sit under tree by watah. I call othahs soon.”

  But the soft breeze from the sea did no good. All I wanted was to get back to the hotel, go to bed—no, better still, pack and leave today. For where? Japan. Cool and clean, perhaps near Mount Fuji. In some small secluded inn where no one spoke English and, if they did, would be too polite to ask questions. I would hire a maid to stay in the room with me, to keep Harry away.

  The late day flights into Japan were filled. I made a reservation for the following morning, took two aspirins, and went to bed.

  Mollylovey gotchagotcha——Harry’s got his pretty little baby.

  I swam away from Harry, under deep water, struggling for breath. Any moment the water would choke me, gurgle into my lungs. Then I would be helpless. Harry’s arms would encircle me like an octopus, I would go down, down. Yes, I was down, down! With Harry’s face pressed into mine, his eyes big and astonished. The water around us turned blackish red. One of us was bleeding. It was I, exploding from the water’s pressure and Harry’s arms. I gasped, made a feeble lunge—

  I sat upright in the hotel bed, my heart fluttering and plunging. Then I saw the blood on the sheet. My nose was bleeding. I went to the bathroom, let ice water run on a washcloth, placed it on my neck.