Дональд Уэстлейк - Forever and a Death

Jerry watched the captain pause at a door some way down the hall. He never looked back. He fumbled with the key in the door, dropped his messages, scooped them up, hurried inside. The door slammed, as the elevator arrived.

As they rode down, Jerry said, “Why did you stop me? If we just kept at him—”

“No,” Luther said. “He’s covering up, he’s hiding something, and it scares him so much he won’t talk. He really won’t talk, Jerry, he’s too scared. So all we know is, there’s something hidden. We’ll have to find out what it is some other way.”

The elevator door opened at lobby level, and as they stepped outside Luther said, “The first question, of course, is how did he know she was pretty?”

Jerry thudded to a stop, as though he’d walked into an invisible wall. He spun around for the elevators, crying, “We have to—”

“No, Jerry,” Luther said, holding him by the arm again. “We’ll find out, but we’ll find out someplace else. And it is possible, of course, that Kim’s parents showed him a photo of her, though unlikely.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Exactly. But we know he pretended not to speak English with them because he was afraid of making exactly that kind of slip. So what we now know for sure, there’s more to the story. Come on, we’ll go back to the hotel and decide what to do next.”

Jerry was dissatisfied, but he let Luther lead him. They took a cab across to their own hotel, with its larger and more impersonal lobby, and as they were crossing it a voice called, “Jerry! Jerry!”

Jerry turned, and saw coming toward him, hurrying toward him, face grimacing with strain, the ghost of Kim Baldur. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he fainted.

Trembling, Zhang Yung-tsien dropped his two messages onto the floor, while trying to unlock the door to his room.

He was so nervous, so afraid those two strange men would rush up behind him and push him into the room, trap him there, force him somehow to tell them what they wanted to know, that he fumbled with the two flimsy slips of paper on the floor, and lost his balance, and would have toppled forward into his room if his shoulder hadn’t hit the doorjamb.

His fingers felt like fat sausages, but he clutched at the crinkled slips of paper, and straightened, and lunged into the room, the door automatically closing behind him. He fell back against the door, eyes closed, the key and messages held tight in the hands crossed over his chest. His breath was loud in his ears.

They did not pursue. No knock on the door, no shouts in the hall. They’ve given up.

Zhang opened his eyes, and there was the room, his home ashore until Mallory should be ready to leave port. It was a small room, but very neat, the colors pale without sentimentality, not like the pastel palette of the Americans. The room’s creators were Japanese, not Chinese, but still he had felt more at home here than in the American-made world he had so much to inhabit.

One of his messages, from his wife, Yanling, was in Chinese, the ideograms neatly penned. The other, yet another question from the insurance company adjuster, was written in English, the letters just as neat. He had trouble focusing on either, and held one in each hand, looking back and forth from one to the other, then finally giving up and placing them side by side on the dresser.

He was having trouble with his breath, he couldn’t seem to inhale. The air in the room felt cold and lifeless, and it was hard to gain nourishment from it. He crossed to the window to open it wide, and immediately the warm moist air from outside flowed in to conquer the air-conditioning. He could feel it as a soft caress against his skin.

What was he going to do? What could he do? The people kept coming to ask questions, and he was so afraid, so confused, that he never knew how to answer, what to tell them, what to try to conceal.

The girl was alive. Could he have told her parents that? But then so many more questions would have come from them, questions he was terrified to answer. What had happened on the ship? What had been intended , and by whom? And what was Captain Zhang’s role in it all?

The girl was alive, or she’d been alive when she’d left the ship with that engineer. But was she still alive, were either of them still alive, or had some other of Curtis’s men caught up with them? Should he say the girl was alive, if he didn’t know?

But what if she were still alive, and finally came forward, and told everything that had happened on the ship? Then people would know he had lied, and they would demand to know why.

He had never wanted to be involved in this. He was good at his work, and that was all he’d wanted. He wasn’t supposed to have these burdens.

He sat on the side of the bed. Next to the telephone were a ballpoint pen and a notepad, the name of the hotel at its top in Japanese and English. Zhang picked up pen and pad and wrote, under the letterhead, “Yanling.”

What would he say next? What would he tell his wife? There was insurance; they would be taken care of. This way, there would be no shame and no disaster. But how could he tell her all that, on a scrap of paper in a hotel room, under a name in Japanese and English?

“I love you,” he wrote, and put the pad and pen back next to the telephone, and got to his feet.

It all started because of the girl, the diver. If she had not launched herself into the sea, nothing bad would have happened.

Zhang reached the window, and bent forward. Without pausing, he put both hands on the windowsill and launched himself headfirst into the air.

“I’m really sorry, Jerry,” Kim said yet again, and yet again he gave her his rattled martyr look and said, “It’s all right, Kim, it really is.”

When she’d first seen him collapse like that, downstairs in the lobby, she’d thought he’d been shot, that one of Richard Curtis’s killers had found her and fired at her and missed and killed Jerry. But then Luther dropped to his knees beside him, and called, “Jerry! Jerry!” and Jerry’s eyes fluttered, and Kim realized he’d only fainted.

Not only; she wouldn’t dare say he’d only fainted. Jerry was taking it all very seriously. And it’s true he’d hit the floor hard, falling sideways, bruising his left hip and raising a shiny bump on his head, above his left ear, just in front of the hairline. Luther kept putting fresh wet, cold washcloths on it, from the bathroom sink, so it wasn’t getting any worse, but it wasn’t getting any better either.

As Luther and Kim together had helped the quivering Jerry back to his feet, he’d looked at her with still-frightened eyes and said, “You aren’t a ghost. You’re real.”

“I’m real, Jerry,” she promised him, and for the first of many times she said, “I’m really sorry,” and he assured her it was all right, and she and Luther helped him to rise and walk to the elevator. They went up in it together and into their room, which was a surprising mess, clothing and luggage and personal effects strewn just everywhere, the bed rumpled and unmade.

Kim helped Luther straighten the top cover so Jerry could lie down. Luther went away for the first of the wet washcloths, and Kim told her story.

Parts of it she had to tell more than once, particularly the suggestion that George Manville, Richard Curtis’s chief engineer on the Kanowit Island project, creator of the shock wave that had reconfigured the island and threatened the delicate coral of the barrier reef and almost killed Kim herself, wasn’t a villain after all. Not a bad man, but a good one.

“He saved my life ,” she told them more than once, and described how astonishingly Manville had shot the killer, and how brilliantly he’d arranged their escape from the ship, and how, through some friend of his in Houston, he’d even made contact with a lawyer here in Brisbane who was going to help them all, but how now it was all messed up.