Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

By that time it would be 11:00 or 11:30, and he’d have Rico and Dotty up — Rico to trim his hair, Dotty to trim his nails. Not every day of course, about once in a week. Twice, if he and June had some big engagement on. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to go to a barber — the barber came to him. It was done just right — everything just right. Not too much talk — that would have been clownish; but not too little either — that would have been stiff and ungracious. Then they’d both leave, thanking him, and if he’d given them a little something more than the customary tip, which he did every now and then, he’d repeat his instructions, so they’d be sure to get them right.

“Now remember, buy at twenty, as I told you. Put the order in! right away, so you’ll catch it on the fly first thing die market opens in the morning. But don’t hold on. Put in a ‘sell’ order at twenty-five and you’ll make a nice little profit. And, mind you this is just for you two. If you say a word to anyone, spread it around, it’s the last time I’ll ever—”

“I won’t even tell my own husband,” Dotty would vow.

“Good,” he’d say solemnly. “Because husbands have big mouths. I happen to be one myself, and I know.”

And by then it would be about time for whatever lunch date he had.

Today it was with Don Warren. Don Warren and Doug Elliott had been friends long before they became client and broker. In fact, they had been college classmates together. Don was waiting for him at their usual table, in their usual restaurant.

After he’d shaken hands with him and sat down, Elliott began to worry one fingernail with the corner of his mouth, moistening it and blowing his breath on it. “Dotty’s a very good manicurist, but this split goes down just below the cuticle. Even she couldn’t do anything with it Except smooth it out a little.”

“How’d you come to do it?”

Elliott looked up at him disarmingly. “Strangling blondes,” he said with winning frankness.

Warren uttered the polite chuckle that friendship called for — but no more — then gave him a rueful look. “You’ve always had the weirdest sense of humor,” he complained.

Elliott strugged meekly. “I wasn’t trying to be funny,” he murmured, then opened up the large menu-folder with the concentration of a man whose efforts to be sprightly have not been an unqualified success, and who therefore turns resignedly to something else...

The telephone rang in the Hong Kong hotel room. Lyons had been expecting it to for the better part of an hour, and the delay had started to get on his nerves. He stopped pacing nervously back and forth and went over to it. He was in a man’s black silk Japanese kimono, with a single white idiograph embroidered on the back of it. It was too short for him, and his muscular bare legs, quite un-Japanese in their hairiness, stuck out ludicrously from it.

The desk clerk said, “There’s a gentleman down here to see you, sir.”

Lyons didn’t ask the name. He just said, “Send him up,” and put the phone back.

He went over to his valise, which was standing unlocked at the foot of the bed, and upended the lid. He took out a revolver, checked it for load and thrust it into the elastic waistband of his undershorts. Then he closed the kimono over it, but kept his hand near it on the outside.

Someone knocked.

“Come in,” he said.

The door opened, and a man holding a briefcase came in. He closed it after him, and then stood there without coming any nearer. He was a Caucasian with tawny-colored hair and hazel eyes.

All Lyons knew was that he had never seen him before. By the same token, neither had the man ever seen Lyons before.

“Good evening,” the man said in slightly accented English. “I’m selling cameras and photographic equipment. Could I interest you?”

“I already have a camera, thank you. It’s a Nikko, a Japanese make.”

Both of them spoke in a rather stilted, unlifelike way, as though they were repeating a lesson they had memorized. Or like actors running through their lines at a first reading of a play.

“Are you satisfied with it?” the man asked.

“I get very good results,” said Lyons. “Would you like me to show you some of them?”

He went to the valise again and took out a pair of socks. They had been rolled into a ball, toe-to-heel, and the tops turned back over them. From within them he took out a small plastic vial, of the sort that usually contains pills or tablets.

The man was opening his briefcase. He took out a long Manila envelope, sealed but unaddressed, and put it on the table near him.

He took the vial and uncapped it. Lyons took the envelope and opened that.

The man unwound the first few frames of a tightly rolled strip of microfilm, held them against the light and scanned them. Lyons counted over American currency, in denominations of fifty and a hundred.

“You do get very good results with it,” the man agreed.

As though this were some sort of mutually understood signal, the man put the vial away in his briefcase and Lyons put the Manila envelope away in his valise.

The man went to the door, opened it and looked out into the hall to see if anyone was in sight.

Then he said, “Good evening,” once more with a foreigner’s typical unfamiliarity with English usage, evidently meaning it for good night.

“So long,” Lyons answered.

The door closed, and the man was gone.

Lyons picked up the phone and asked the clerk: “What time does the ship for Nagasaki sail, did you say?”

“Not until nine in the morning, sir.”

Lyons hung up. He had to kill the night here.

He put the gun back in the valise first of all. Then he counted several hundred dollars out of the Manila envelope and stacked the bills into his wallet. He started to get dressed, to go out and have a night on the town.

The Chinese girl in the ricksha said, in an astonishingly genuine Cockney accent that must have rubbed off on her from long association with merchant-mariners and limey tars, “Don’t tyke too long, byeby. We imes to get there before the plyce closes down, doncher knaow.”

“I’ll be right with you, China-doll,” Lyons tossed at her, hopping out and following the elderly Chinese gentleman into an unlighted shop entrance. “Wait outside here for me, till I see what this old gazabo has up his sleeve.”

The old man was unlocking a padlock that secured the door. Then he went inside a short distance, lighted up a pumpkin-shaped, pumpkin colored paper lantern and let it ride up toward the ceiling again. Then he went a little deeper in, repeating the process with a yellow-green one. He let down a bamboo roller shade that blanked out the shop window from the street outside.

“So what is this big deal?” Lyons asked him impatiently. “You’ve been pestering me for the past hour in the last bar we were in, until you got my sales resistance worn down to nothing. And my curiosity up to boiling point.”

The old merchant giggled. “I show. I show.” But first he transferred the padlock around to the inside of the door and refastened it.

“What’s the idea of that?” Lyons asked, lidding his eyes at him with sleepy wariness but without showing any actual alarm. “Don’t try to get funny with me, because I can handle myself, and the girl’s right outside there, anyway.”

“No, no, I am gentleman, not holdup bandit,” protested the Chinese gravely. “Is just so no one can disturb while I am showing you this.”

“That valuable, huh?” said Lyons ironically.

“Oh, very. Very.” He went into the back and was gone a long time Finally Lyons began to fidget. He called out, “Hey! you in there, how about it? Wha’d you do, go to sleep on me?”