Robert Gulik - The Chinese Gold Murders

"One happy little family!" Po Kai remarked from the stairs. "Call the men from the next boat!" the fat woman panted at the waiter, who was scrambling up."

"Call all the bastards together!" Ma Joong shouted with enthusiasm. He broke a leg from his chair to be used as a club. "Slowly, auntie, slowly!" Po Kai called out. "Better be careful. These two men are officers of the tribunal."

The woman grew pale. She quickly motioned the waiter to come back. Falling on her knees before Chiao, she whined, "Please, sir, I only wanted to teach her how to behave to you!"

"I told you to keep your dirty hands off her!" Chiao Tai snapped. He gave the girl his neckcloth to clean her face. She rose and stood there trembling.

"Go and comfort her a bit, brother," Ma Joong counseled. "I'll put that fellow with the knife on his feet again."

Yü-soo took up her robe and went to the door in the back. Chiao Tai followed her into a narrow corridor. The girl opened one of the doors that lined it and motioned Chiao Tai to go inside. Then she went on.

Chiao Tai saw that the cabin was very small. A bed stood under the porthole, the only other furniture was a small dressing table with a rickety bamboo taboret in front of it, and a large red leather clothes box against the wall opposite. Chiao Tai sat down on the clothes box and waited till Yü-soo came in.

As she silently threw her robe on the bed Chiao Tai said awkwardly, "I am sorry, it was all my fault."

"It doesn't matter," the girl said indifferently. She bent over the bed and took a small round box from the windowsill. Chiao Tai could not take his eyes off her shapely figure.

"Better get dressed," he said gruffly.

"It's too hot in here," Yü-soo said in a sullen voice. She had opened the box and was rubbing ointment on the welts across her hips.

"Look," she said suddenly, "you were just in time! The skin is not yet broken."

"Won't you please put that dress on?" Chiao Tai said hoarsely.

"I thought you'd be interested to know," the girl said placidly. "You said yourself it was your fault, didn't you?" She folded her robe up, placed it on the taboret. She sat down carefully and started to do up her hair.

Chiao Tai looked at her well-formed back. He told himself angrily that it would be mean to bother her now. Then he saw her firm round breasts reflected in the mirror. He swallowed and said desperately, "Don't do that! Two of you is just too much for any man.

Yü-soo looked round at him, astonished. Then she shrugged her shapely shoulders, rose and sat down on the bed opposite Chiao Tai.

"Are you really from the tribunal?" she asked casually. "People here often tell lies, you know."

Grateful for the diversion Chiao Tai pulled a folded document from his 'boot. The girl wiped her hands off on her hair, then took it.

"I can't read," she remarked, "but I have good eyes!"

Turning over on her belly, she reached down behind the bed and brought out a flat, square package, tightly wrapped in gray paper. Sitting up again, she compared the seal on Chiao Tai's pass with that impressed over the folds of the wrapper. Handing the pass back to him, she said, "You are right. It's the same seal."

She looked pensively at Chiao Tai, slowly scratching her thigh. "How did you get that package with the seal of the tribunal?" Chiao Tai asked curiously.

"Look, he has come to life," the girl said, pouting. "You are a real thief catcher, aren't you?"

Chiao Tai clenched his fists.

A MEETING IN A FLOWER BOAT

"Look here, woman!" he blurted out. "You just got hurt, didn't you? You don't think that I would be so mean as to want to sleep with you now, do you?"

The girl gave him a sidelong glance. She yawned, then said slowly, "I am not so sure I'd think that mean of you."

Chiao Tai quickly got up.

When he came back in the main cabin he found Po Kai sitting at the table, his head cradled in his arms. He was snoring loudly. The fat woman sat opposite him, looking morosely at a cup of wine. Chiao Tai settled the bill with her, and warned her that she would get into serious trouble with him if she maltreated the Korean girl again.

"She's only a Korean war slave, sir, and I bought her from the government in the regular way," she said sharply. Then she added ingratiatingly, "But your word is of course law to me, sir.

Ma Joong came in, looking very pleased.

"After all, this is rather a cosy place," he remarked. "And that plump girl is first class!"

"I hope soon to have something better for you, sir!" the woman said eagerly. "There's a brand-new one on the fifth boat, a real beauty and well educated too. Just now she is being kept reserved for a certain gentleman but, well, those things don't last forever, as you know! Maybe in a week or two="

"Splendid!" exclaimed Ma Joong. "We'll be back. But tell those men of yours not to wave knives at us. That upsets us, and when we are upset we are liable to become a bit rough." Shaking Po Kai's shoulder he shouted in his ear, "Wake up, gay songster! It's nearly midnight, time to go home!"

Po Kai raised his head. lie gave the two men a jaundiced look. "You two are utterly vulgar," he remarked haughtily. "You'll never understand my lofty spirit. I prefer to wait here for my good friend Kim Sang. Your company is distasteful to me, you think only of drinking and fornication. Go away; I despise you!"

Ma Joong roared with laughter. He pushed Po Kai's cap down over his eyes, then he went up with Chiao Tai and whistled for a boat.

WHEN Ma Joong and Chiao Tai came back to the tribunal they saw a light in judge Dee's private office. They found him closeted there with Sergeant Hoong. His desk was piled with dossiers and document rolls.

The judge motioned them to sit down on the stools in front of the desk, then said, "Tonight I examined together with Hoong the magistrate's library, but we couldn't discover how the tea had been poisoned. Since the tea stove stands in front of a window, Hoong thought that perhaps the murderer had pushed a thin blowpipe through the paper window pane from outside, and had thus blown the poison powder into the pan with tea water. But when we went back to the library to verify this theory, we found that outside the window there are heavy shutters, which haven't been opened for months. That window gives onto a dark corner of the garden; therefore the dead magistrate used only the other window, in front of his writing desk.

"Just before dinner I received the four city wardens. They seemed rather decent fellows to me. The warden of the Korean settlement came also, a capable man. It seems that in his own country he is an official of some sort." The judge paused a while, glancing through the notes he had been making while talking with Hoong. "After dinner," he resumed, "I went over with Hoong the most important files in the archives here, and found that all the registers are kept carefully up to date." He pushed the file in front of him away, and asked briskly, "Well, how did it fare with you two tonight?"

"I fear we didn't de too well, magistrate," Ma Joong said ruefully. "Me and my friend will have to learn this job from the bottom up, so to speak."

"I have to learn it myself, too," Judge Dee remarked with a wan smile. "What happened?"

First Ma Joong reported what the owner of the Nine Flowers Orchard had told them about Tang and his assistant, Fan Choong. When he had finished judge Dee said, shaking his head, "I don't understand what is wrong with that fellow Tang; the man is in a terrible state. lie imagines he has seen the ghost of the dead magistrate, and that seems to have shocked him deeply. But I suspect there's something else, too. The man got on my nerves. I sent him home after I had taken my after-dinner tea.