VII
The little old Chinese with the rope neck didn’t open for me this time. Instead, a young Chinese with a smallpox-pitted face and a wide grin.
“You wanna see Chang Li Ching,” he said before I could speak, and stepped back for me to enter.
I went in and waited while he replaced all the bars and locks. We went to Chang by a shorter route than before, but it was still far from direct. For a while I amused myself trying to map the route in my head as he went along, but it was too complicated, so I gave it up.
The velvet-hung room was empty when my guide showed me in, bowed, grinned, and left me. I sat down in a chair near the table and waited.
Chang Li Ching didn’t put on the theatricals for me by materializing silently, or anything of the sort. I heard his soft slippers on the floor before he parted the hangings and came in. He was alone, his white whiskers ruffled in a smile that was grandfatherly.
“The Scatterer of Hordes honors my poor residence again,” he greeted me, and went on at great length with the same sort of nonsense that I’d had to listen to on my first visit.
The Scatterer of Hordes part was cool enough—if it was a reference to last night’s doings.
“Not knowing who he was until too late, I beaned one of your servants last night,” I said when he had run out of flowers for the time. “I know there’s nothing I can do to square myself for such a terrible act, but I hope you’ll let me cut my throat and bleed to death in one of your garbage cans as a sort of apology.”
A little sighing noise that could have been a smothered chuckle disturbed the old man’s lips, and the purple cap twitched on his round head.
“The Disperser of Marauders knows all things,” he murmured blandly, “even to the value of noise in driving away demons. If he says the man he struck was Chang Li Ching’s servant, who is Chang to deny it?”
I tried him with my other barrel.
“I don’t know much—not even why the police haven’t yet heard of the death of the man who was killed here yesterday.”
One of his hands made little curls in his white beard.
“I had not heard of the death,” he said.
I could guess what was coming, but I wanted to take a look at it.
“You might ask the man who brought me here yesterday,” I suggested.
Chang Li Ching picked up a little padded stick from the table and struck a tasseled gong that hung at his shoulder. Across the room the hangings parted to admit the pockmarked Chinese who had brought me in.
“Did death honor our hovel yesterday?” Chang asked in English.
“No, Ta Jen,” the pockmarked one said.
“It was the nobleman who guided me here yesterday,” I explained, “not this son of an emperor.”
Chang imitated surprise.
“Who welcomed the King of Spies yesterday?” he asked the man at the door.
“I bring ’em, Ta Jen.”
I grinned at the pockmarked man, he grinned back, and Chang smiled benevolently.
“An excellent jest,” he said.
It was.
The pockmarked man bowed and started to duck back through the hangings. Loose shoes rattled on the boards behind him. He spun around. One of the big wrestlers I had seen the previous day loomed above him. The wrestler’s eyes were bright with excitement, and grunted Chinese syllables poured out of his mouth. The pockmarked one talked back. Chang Li Ching silenced them with a sharp command. All this was in Chinese—out of my reach.
“Will the Grand Duke of Manhunters permit his servant to depart for a moment to attend to his distressing domestic affairs?”
“Sure.”
Chang bowed with his hands together, and spoke to the wrestler.
“You will remain here to see that the great one is not disturbed and that any wishes he expresses are gratified.”
The wrestler bowed and stood aside for Chang to pass through the door with the pockmarked man. The hangings swung over the door behind them.
I didn’t waste any language on the man at the door, but got a cigarette going and waited for Chang to come back. The cigarette was half gone when a shot sounded in the building, not far away.
The giant at the door scowled.
Another shot sounded, and running feet thumped in the hall. The pockmarked man’s face came through the hangings. He poured grunts at the wrestler. The wrestler scowled at me and protested. The other insisted.
The wrestler scowled at me again, rumbled, “You wait,” and was gone with the other.
I finished my cigarette to the tune of muffled struggle-sounds that seemed to come from the floor below. There were two more shots, far apart. Feet ran past the door of the room I was in. Perhaps ten minutes had gone since I had been left alone.
I found I wasn’t alone.
Across the room from the door, the hangings that covered the wall were disturbed. The blue, green and silver velvet bulged out an inch and settled back in place.
The disturbance happened the second time perhaps ten feet farther along the wall. No movement for a while, and then a tremor in the far corner.
Somebody was creeping along between hangings and wall.
I let them creep, still slumping in my chair with idle hands. If the bulge meant trouble, action on my part would only bring it that much quicker.
I traced the disturbance down the length of that wall and halfway across the other, to where I knew the door was. Then I lost it for some time. I had just decided that the creeper had gone through the door when the curtains opened and the creeper stepped out.
She wasn’t four and a half feet high—a living ornament from somebody’s shelf. Her face was a tiny oval of painted beauty, its perfection emphasized by the lacquer-black hair that was flat and glossy around her temples. Gold earrings swung beside her smooth cheeks, a jade butterfly was in her hair. A lavender jacket, glittering with white stones, covered her from under her chin to her knees. Lavender stockings showed under her short lavender trousers, and her bound-small feet were in slippers of the same color, shaped like kittens, with yellow stones for eyes and aigrettes for whiskers.
The point of all this our-young-ladies’-fashion stuff is that she was impossibly dainty. But there she was—neither a carving nor a painting, but a living small woman with fear in her black eyes and nervous, tiny fingers worrying the silk at her bosom.
Twice as she came toward me—hurrying with the awkward, quick step of the foot-bound Chinese woman—her head twisted around for a look at the hangings over the door.
I was on my feet by now, going to meet her.
Her English wasn’t much. Most of what she babbled at me I missed, though I thought “yung hel-lup” might have been meant for “You help?”
I nodded, catching her under the elbows as she stumbled against me.
She gave me some more language that didn’t make the situation any clearer—unless “sul-lay-vee gull” meant slave-girl and “tak-ka wah” meant take away.
“You want me to get you out of here?” I asked.
Her head, close under my chin, went up and down, and her red flower of a mouth shaped a smile that made all the other smiles I could remember look like leers.
She did some more talking. I got nothing out of it. Taking one of her elbows out of my hand, she pushed up her sleeve, baring a forearm that an artist had spent a lifetime carving out of ivory. On it were five finger-shaped bruises ending in cuts where the nails had punctured the flesh.
She let the sleeve fall over it again, and gave me more words. They didn’t mean anything to me, but they tinkled prettily.
“All right,” I said, sliding my gun out. “If you want to go, we’ll go.”
Both her hands went to the gun, pushing it down, and she talked excitedly into my face, winding up with a flicking of one hand across her collar—a pantomime of a throat being cut.
I shook my head from side to side and urged her toward the door.
She balked, fright large in her eyes.
One of her hands went to my watch-pocket. I let her take the watch out.
She put the tiny tip of one pointed finger over the twelve and then circled the dial three times. I thought I got that. Thirty-six hours from noon would be midnight of the following night—Thursday.
“Yes,” I said.
She shot a look at the door and led me to the table where the tea things were. With a finger dipped in cold tea she began to draw on the table’s inlaid top. Two parallel lines I took for a street. Another pair crossed them. The third pair crossed the second and paralleled the first.
“Waverly Place?” I guessed.
Her face bobbed up and down, delightedly.
On what I took for the east side of Waverly Place she drew a square—perhaps a house. In the square she set what could have been a rose. I frowned at that. She erased the rose and in its place put a crooked circle, adding dots. I thought I had it. The rose had been a cabbage. This thing was a potato. The square represented the grocery store I had noticed on Waverly Place. I nodded.
Her finger crossed the street and put a square on the other side, and her face turned up to mine, begging me to understand her.
“The house across the street from the grocer’s,” I said slowly, and then, as she tapped my watch-pocket, I added, “at midnight tomorrow.”
I don’t know how much of it she caught, but she nodded her little head until her earrings were swinging like crazy pendulums.
With a quick diving motion, she caught my right hand, kissed it, and with a tottering, hoppy run vanished behind the velvet curtains.
I used my handkerchief to wipe the map off the table and was smoking in my chair when Chang Li Ching returned some twenty minutes later.
I left shortly after that, as soon as we had traded a few dizzy compliments. The pockmarked man ushered me out.
At the office there was nothing new for me. Foley hadn’t been able to shadow The Whistler the night before.
I went home for the sleep I had not got last night.