Marcia Muller: The Body Snatchers Affair

Mock Quan, in his highbinder’s guise.

Recognition stoked Quincannon’s wrath. Twice now that damned young hoodlum had tried to ventilate him, and by all the saints he was not going to have a third opportunity!

Mock Quan was no longer the coolly devious plotter; panic had him in its grip now. The fact that he’d made this assassination attempt in broad daylight — he must have been inside the parlor, gone back out the front way when the commotion started — was an indication of just how desperate he’d become. What scant few pedestrians there were scattered as he dashed up onto the sidewalk, his weapon, as was Quincannon’s, still in hand. Startled voices rose, a woman shrieked as if imitating a fire siren.

The chase had covered nearly half a block when Mock Quan barged into a sidewalk fruit and vegetable cart, toppling it and sending oranges, apples, cabbages, and assorted other comestibles rolling and thumping into the street. Though the collision staggered him again, he managed to stay on his feet. He cast a look over his shoulder, saw that his pursuer’s long-legged stride had halved the distance between them, and lurched sideways through a storefront doorway whose wind-whipped pennant identified it as a restaurant.

When Quincannon reached the eatery and flung himself inside, he immediately spied Mock Quan halfway across a long open dining area, just swinging around to face toward him. Mock Quan fired a wild shot, the lead pellet chipping wood from the wallboard two feet from the door as Quincannon dodged aside and dropped into a crouch. The handful of frightened patrons also threw themselves out of harm’s way, upsetting tables, filling the air with bowls of food and flying chopsticks. Quincannon held his fire; an answering shot would have been foolishly risky. Mock Quan didn’t fire again, either. Instead he spun and raced away into a narrow passage at the rear.

Quincannon zigzagged after him through wreckage and cowering diners. The passage led into a steamy kitchen peopled by more frightened Chinese, at the far end of which was a door through which the fugitive was just shouldering. The door debouched into another alley — an alley open at one end, closed at the other. Quincannon’s mouth twisted into a feral grin when he saw that his quarry had turned in the wrong direction.

Mock Quan’s step faltered when he realized he had boxed himself in. He cast a brief look over his shoulder. If he had halted, with the intention of triggering another round, Quincannon would have had no qualms about firing back in self-defense. As it was, the damned young scoundrel kept on running to the end of the alley, where a door was set into a two-story, pagoda-style building that formed the end of the cul-de-sac. As furious as Quincannon was, he had never yet shot a criminal from behind and never would, not even to wound. He charged ahead, drawing to within a dozen paces as Mock Quan yanked the door open and plunged through.

Quincannon followed, stepped cautiously into a tiny vestibule. Footfalls thudded on an ill-lighted staircase, then there was a metallic banging noise from above. He pounded up to a second-floor landing, where to his right he came upon another set of stairs that evidently led up from Fowler Alley. To his left was a doorway with a wrought-iron gate that had been shoved wide open — the banging sound he’d heard from below. Beyond the gate was a small, shadow-ridden anteroom, a perfect place for another ambush.

But Mock Quan wasn’t there; despite the blood-beat of exertion in his ears, Quincannon could make out the sounds of movement somewhere in a larger room that opened to his left, from which a reddish glow emanated. The bead curtain that separated the two spaces was still swaying and faintly clacking.

The noises stopped as he sidestepped to the curtain, carefully peered through. What he was looking at then was a temple, lit by several hanging red and gold lanterns. The pungent odor of incense came from a recessed side altar of red-painted wood with some sort of statue framed inside it. Lining one long sidewall were small altars, statues, teak tables, and other pieces of furniture, nearly all of them in red and gold. At the far end stood a pair of large carved altars, one that took up the entire wall, the other, fronted by a red prayer bench, set apart in the middle of the floor.

There was no sign of Mock Quan. Trapped and hiding somewhere, no doubt preparing to make his final stand. Under one of the altars, all of which were draped in embroidered cloths? No. Arranged atop the cloths were bowls of fruit and flowers, joss urns, other items Quincannon couldn’t identify, but he could see that none had been disturbed.

With his free hand he grasped several of the bead strands to keep them still as he eased through into the temple. Again to his left he spied a short ell that contained a red-painted platform supporting a drum and a heavy iron temple bell. This was where Mock Quan had gone. Quincannon sensed it even before the Chinese showed himself, coming up and out from behind the temple bell in such a violent hurry that he upset an ornamental altar standard, like a spear or pikestaff, and sent it clattering to the floor.

Mock Quan emitted a hissing noise loud enough to override the echoes created by the toppled standard, the pistol in his hand swinging up. Instinctively Quincannon ducked sideways, crouching again with his Navy on a bead. But Mock Quan failed to fire, though not for lack of intent. His weapon was either empty or it had jammed.

He stood stock-still for two or three seconds, his finger futilely jerking at the trigger, the gun wobbling in his grasp. Quincannon could have put two or three rounds into him during those moments, but a felon captured alive was always preferable to a felon delivered dead, even one as scurrilous as Mock Quan. Besides which, the young scoundrel may have been willing to desecrate a temple with gunfire, but John Frederick Quincannon wasn’t.

“Drop it and lift your hands, Mock Quan,” he said. “You’re done to a turn and you know it.”

The Chinese didn’t obey. He was still in the grip of his frenzy. He let out another shriek, hurled the weapon at Quincannon, and then charged him head down like a bull at a red cape.

Quincannon dodged the flying pistol, dodged the blind rush, and fetched the young rogue a solid blow on the temple with the Navy’s barrel. Obligingly Mock Quan went down and out in a heap, the slouch hat coming off to reveal his disgraced red mow-yung .

Quincannon stood looking down at him. He was no longer angry now that the chase and Mock Quan’s vicious lust for power in Chinatown had both ended in a satisfactory fashion; just weary and contemplative. The difference between despots such as Little Pete and would-be despots such as Mock Quan, he mused, was that while both were rapacious and reckless, the true tyrant was too arrogant to give himself up to either desperation or panic. The would-be tyrant was far easier to bring down because his arrogance was no more than a thin membrane over the shell of cowardice.

It was Mock Quan, not Little Pete, who had proved to be the craven son of a turtle.

There was no way he was about to tax his already weary body by slinging Mock Quan over his shoulder and carrying him out of the temple building in search of police assistance. He settled for tearing the black tunic into strips and using them to bind the coward’s hands and feet. Mock Quan was still unconscious when he finished.

It took him only a few short minutes to track down one of the police patrols. He identified himself and quickly explained the reasons for what had happened, including his discovery of Bing Ah Kee’s remains. The patrolmen, fortunately, were among the brighter members of their breed; although skeptical at first, they agreed to a request that Lieutenant Price be notified immediately, and while one of them used a police call box to contact the Hall of Justice and request a paddy wagon, the other accompanied Quincannon to the temple.