Росс Томас - The Singapore Wink

“It was no performance,” I said. “I was just delivering a message.”

“And now you’ve done it,” she said.

“Yes.”

She tapped a finger against the arm of the chair. “My husband thought that you might not heed his earlier message.”

“You mean the one that came with the bullet?”

“If you like. In such an event, he gave me certain instructions. So it would seem, Mr. Cauthorne, that we both have our assignments.”

“Let’s go,” I said to Nash.

She said something in Chinese and the two men with guns moved a step or two towards me. I backed up.

“My husband said that you might need to be convinced of the sincerity of his earlier messages. You will find these two gentlemen most persuasive.”

“You’re kidding,” I said.

She rose and moved to the door. “No, I’m not kidding, Mr. Cauthorne. Nor am I quite sure how they will go about convincing you. I really don’t care. Good night.” She opened the door, turned to say something in Chinese to the two men, and then left.

“What was all that?” I said to Nash.

“You mean the Chinese?”

“Yes.”

“She told them to mind the furniture,” he said and backed toward a corner.

The tall, lean Chinese turned to Nash. “You,” he said, “sit over there.” Nash quickly sat in one of the heavy carved chairs.

“What are you going to do, just watch?” I said.

“Friend, I don’t have much choice.”

The stocky Chinese with the crescent-shaped scar tucked his automatic into the waistband of his slacks. The tall, lean one slipped his revolver into his hip pocket. I found that I had backed as far as I could. I stepped away from the wall and turned my left side to the two men who moved in slowly, their arms low and extended before them.

The stocky one was first. He came in fast, his left hand extended with the knuckle of his middle finger sticking out in the proscribed method. He aimed at my throat and I caught his hand, found the nerve that I wanted between his thumb and forefinger, turned, pulled down, and let the weight of his body snap his arm. He yelled once and I kicked at his head but missed and caught him in the neck. The tall, lean Chinese was better. Much better. The edge of his right hand slammed into my jaw just below my right ear. I tried for the base of his nose with my left palm, but he ducked and I caught him on the forehead instead. He stumbled back and stepped on the broken left arm of the stocky man who lay on the floor. The stocky man screamed once and then seemed to faint. The tall, lean Chinese fumbled for his revolver and got it out of his hip pocket as I jabbed at his throat. He brought the gun down hard on my right shoulder and my arm went numb. I tried once more to jab his throat with my left hand, but the revolver came down again, this time on my neck. It may have come down several more times, but by then I was long past caring.

The Indian in the dirty white turban squatted on the fifth step that led down from the quay to the water and grinned at me with yellow teeth. He said: “Aaaah!” when he saw that my eyes were open.

I tried to sit up and the nausea hit. I vomited the puppy and the rest of the dinner I had eaten at Fat Annie’s over the side of Nash’s runabout. When I was through, I sank back on the bench-like seat Somebody groaned and if I hadn’t hurt so much, I would have felt sorry for him. Then I realized that it had been my groan and I was glad that I could feel sorry for myself.

Someone wiped my face with a wet cloth. I opened my eyes again and saw Nash bending over me, a fairly clean towel in his hand.

“How do you feel?” he said.

“God awful.”

“You’ve been out for a half hour or more.”

“What happened?”

“You got beat up.”

“How bad?”

“He knew what he was doing. After he slugged you with the gun, you went down and he kicked you a few times. Twice in the stomach. Does it hurt?”

“It hurts.”

“You damned near killed that other one.”

“The short one?”

“You broke his arm.”

“Good.”

“Well, that made the tall one mad and he kicked you a couple of extra times on account of that.”

“Then what?”

“Then he and I carried you up the stairs. He wouldn’t help me get you down into the boat so I sort of had to bump you down the ladder.”

“Nothing broken?”

“I don’t think so. I checked you over and I don’t think there’s anything broken. He didn’t kick you in the head so you probably don’t have a concussion unless you got one when I bumped you down the ladder.”

I sat up slowly and ran my hands over my face. My right arm ached, but I could move it. My stomach was a sharp separate pain that almost doubled me up when I tried to take a deep breath. He must have kicked me in the legs, too, because they felt as if someone had been jumping on them.

“I feel rotten,” I said.

“You want a drink?” Nash asked.

“Have you got one?”

“Got some Scotch. Nothing to mix it with.”

“Just hand me the bottle.” I took a long drink of the Scotch. It went down and promptly came back up.

“That wasn’t such a good idea,” I said after I wiped off my face again with the towel.

“Maybe you’d better see a doctor,” Nash said.

“I’ll get one at the hotel.”

Nash sent his watchman to find a trishaw. He was back in ten minutes and both of them helped me up the steps of the quay. The watchman grinned at me again, skipped down the steps, tied the line from the boat to his toe, curled up and went back to sleep. I climbed into the trishaw with Nash’s help.

“You can drop me off at Fat Annie’s,” he said. “Unless you want me to go with you to the hotel.”

“No, I can make it okay. You’ve done enough.” I reached into my pocket and found my wallet. I took out five twenties, thought about it, and added another one. “Here,” I said. “I think you earned it.”

Nash took the bills, folded them, and stuck them into his shirt pocket. “What was all that talk about Sacchetti and the stolen stuff and the three guys coming in from Los Angeles?”

“You really want to know?” I said.

He turned to look at me. “Come to think of it,” he said. “I don’t guess I do. But you want to know something? You were lucky.”

“How?”

“Well, nothing’s broken.”

“That’s why I’m lucky?”

“You’re lucky about that,” Nash said, “but you’re even luckier that Sacchetti wasn’t there.”

“And if he had been?”

“Then there damn well sure would have been something broken.”

I was awake when someone knocked on my door around eight o’clock the following morning. I was awake because my head ached, my stomach throbbed with each breath, there was a tightening vise on my right shoulder, and a large dump truck seemed to have rolled over my legs during the night.

The young Chinese doctor who clucked over me as he wound some tape around my ribs the night before had said: “You have a very low pain threshold, Mr. Cauthorne. What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a poet.”

“Ah, then that explains it.”

The knocking continued at the door and I yelled “all right” and started to get out of bed. I found that it wasn’t something one did without careful pre-planning. Consultants should have been brought in. A committee should have been appointed to determine how to ease the sheet back. A seminar on how to place one’s feet on the floor would have proved useful. Highly skilled technicians would have been invaluable in solving the problem of how to walk across the room and open the door.

He had on a different suit this time, a bottle green one that was turning slightly purple at the knees. He wore a cream straw hat with a faded blue band and a brim that rippled up and down as if it had been shoved too far back on the closet shelf when it was stored away at the end of last summer or the summer before. His shoes were an off white and the perforations in their toes attempted to resemble fleurs-de-lis without much success. He also wore a big smile on his face which still needed a shave. The face belonged to Dangerfield.