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

“Maybe she no like that,” said the waiter, bland as ever.

Lyons crushed a paper tip into his breast pocket and managed to regain control of himself. “Ask her if she’ll please join me at my table. Say I’d like to meet her very much.”

Now, as he sat waiting, he didn’t want Matsuko to show up anymore. But that was all right, because Matsuko didn’t, in any case.

She didn’t keep him waiting too long, considering that she’d changed from head to foot into street clothes. Western, of course. A plain black wool dress with six strands of white milkbeads tight around her neck. Even her hair had been done over. The bulging Japanese pompadour studded with flowers and pins was gone — he saw now that it must have been a wig — and she wore it now in a sleek little doll-bob with doll-bangs across her forehead. She smelled faintly of jasmine.

She came to a posed halt just far enough away from the table so that she didn’t seem overanxious to get to it, one hip a little out of line, one foot pointed toe-forward, both hands holding the patent-leather envelope bag against the indentation of her waist.

“Good evening,” she said in very presentable English.

His chair clicked like a dice roll with the swiftness with which he stood up. “Will you give me the pleasure of your company?”

“If you wish,” she said demurely.

He circled the table and held her chair for her, and she eased into it. He was gone. He didn’t have a chance, and didn’t want one.

The waiter was beside them, solicitously.

“An anisette,” she said, but to Lyons, not directly to the waiter. She let him see that he was her host. She was tactful that way, she was knowing.

“An anisette,” he repeated to the waiter, although the waiter was standing closer to her than he was to Lyons himself.

“Did you like my dance?” she asked him, to break the ice while they were waiting.

“I didn’t see it,” he said. She waited for him to finish, and he did. “I only saw you.”

She smiled to show that she accepted it as a compliment and not a slur.

“Would you care for a cigarette?”

“I rarely smoke,” she said. And then quite unexpectedly added, “I will, though, if you want me to.”

There was a good cue there, and he took it. “I don’t want you to do anything you don’t care to.” A moment’s meaningful pause.

She didn’t pretend not to understand. “We haven’t come to that yet. That’s far ahead of us.”

The waiter put her glass down to one side of her in order not to block their view of one another.

She raised the glass. “To our friendship,” she said politely.

“No good,” he said.

“Why no good? Why can’t we be friends?”

“Oh hell, you know damn well we can’t,” he groaned, half under his breath.

She made a very slight warding-off motion with one hand, and smiled a little, to take the sting out of it. “I don’t like to disappoint anyone, you in particular, so let’s have things well-regulated in advance. In a little while — not immediately — but in a little while I’m going to get up and go home. It’s late, I’ve danced, I’m tired and I have to get up tomorrow.”

“What makes you think I’m not going right with you? I have a car outside.”

“Very well, then you may take me as far as where I live. It will save me the trouble of having to find a taxi at this hour of the night.”

“What was that ‘as far as’?” he asked suspiciously. “Don’t I get to go inside with you? What is it, off-bounds or something?”

“I happen to live with my family.”

“Oh, come on now,” he groaned. “Don’t pull that old thing.”

“I honestly do,” she insisted. “A complete assortment of them. Father, mother, two younger sisters, one baby brother. You can ask the manager here at the club, if you don’t believe me. He had to interview them before they permitted me to sign the contract with him. They’ve accepted my Western ways, my way of earning a living, but still I can’t bring someone into the house with me. That broad-minded they are not.”

“I’m going to have some night!” he lamented, throwing his face up toward the ceiling.

“What makes you think there won’t be others,” she said chastely, “after this one is over?”

“Whatever became of that little radio you used to keep on in the end room upstairs?” Ruth asked him unexpectedly at breakfast the next morning.

“I sold it.”

He took another sip of his coffee, then asked “Why do you ask about that now? That’s been gone long ago.”

“Kind of sudden, wasn’t it? You used to spend hours tinkering with it, locked up in there.”

“Locked up? How do you know I was locked up?”

“I tried the door accidentally once or twice.”

“Accidentally, I bet,” was all he said.

“Another thing I keep thinking about,” she went on presently, “is all those people who keep coming to the house by mistake. A roofing contractor, when there was nothing the matter with the roof. An electrical repairman, when there was no power failure. I’ve watched from the window sometimes, when they leave. They never go to any of the other houses. It’s always only to this house they come.”

“So?”

She was silent for a short time. Then she said, “Look, I’m not a fool, John. I went to U.C.L.A., same as you did. In fact that’s where we met, remember? Level with me. What’s up?”

She waited for it to sink in.

“What do you mean, what’s up?” he said finally.

“Just what I said. What’s up? What are you up to? What are you doing? Do I have to draw you a picture?”

He stared at her silently.

“All right, then here it is — listen to it. You make a hundred and fifty a month with the Acme Travel Agency. You don’t even have an office. So where and when do you sell your tickets? Yet you go away on these little side-trips, come back with five thousand dollars in your money belt. The time before that it was fifteen hundred.”

“Maybe I’m a dope smuggler,” he jeered. “Have a shot on me.”

“That was what first occurred to me,” she admitted gravely. “Only the drug traffic flows the other way. Out of China, not into it. So it wouldn’t be that.”

“You name it, then.”

“It all adds up to only one thing. Why try to deny it? You’re engaged in espionage work of some kind or another. You’re nothing but a — a common, ordinary spy.”

“How revolting!” he said sarcastically.

“There’s nothing in it to be proud of that I can see. Maybe I have the wrong slant. A soldier fights openly on the field of battle. That’s honest, at least. But this is — is sneaky, behind-the-back, in-the-dark kind of fighting. I never could see where it was romantic or glamorous. Never could see that at all. It’s dirty and it’s below the belt. It’s juvenile, it’s adolescent, only an immature mind could think other—”

“Like mine,” he supplied for her.

The door opened tentatively, and she said sharply, “Stay in the kitchen, Mikki, until we call you.” Mikki did not know enough English to make a very good eavesdropper, even if she’d wanted to.

They were silent for a long while.

Then she said, dully, shaking her head in continued disbelief, “My own husband a spy. After nine years I find it out.”

“We’re not married that long,” he said almost facetiously, as though he enjoyed tormenting her.

“No, but we’ve known each other that long. I don’t know, something about it sticks in my craw. Why didn’t you tell me at the start?” she cried out bitterly. “Why didn’t you give me a chance to decide at that time whether I wanted to go on with you or not? Not let me give up six or seven years of my life, and then stumble on it by accident.”