Assignment - Sulu Sea (12 page)

The old woman spoke in a breathless English. “Mr. Durell, surely
you cannot he the fool you pretend to be.”

“I don‘! remember giving my name at the door,” he said, and
smiled.

“Was it necessary? You come here voluntarily where we would
have tried to persuade you to go. Why do you do it? Why have you visited us so
quickly?”

“So quickly?”

“You arrived in Pandakan only short hours ago,” the old Witch
breathed. “Miss Panapura flew off to her grandfather’s schooner. You
spent little time reaching this place. It is truly remarkable. You are either
very clever, very lucky, or very stupid.”

“That’s quite a choice. Perhaps I can add two and two, and
come up with this place. Where did you learn English, venerable grandmother?”

The old Chinese hag regarded him with malevolence. “I am not
your grandmother, and while I should be empress over all China, in the name of
the Manchu family, I find myself mistress of a hundred and twenty girls,
each different, and they provide pleasure to men as I direct them. This may

not be considered honorable in your country, and it is degrading
to heavenly blood, blessed by tradition, but what Prince Ch’ing says is good,
is good; and what he says is bad, is bad. He says you are very, very bad, Mr.
Durell.”

“Well, it’s a topsy-turvy world, madam.” He smiled. “And may
I see the prince?“

“No. You are to be disposed of.”

“I see. Dropped down a chute to the lions?”

She smiled. “Perhaps. It depends on your degree of co-operation.
The speed of your action is disturbing. You are to be questioned. If your
answers are satisfactory, perhaps nothing at all of consequence will happen to
you. You may even be persuaded to enjoy the pleasures of our girls. But if we
are not satisfied, Mr. Durell, I fear you know what must be done with
you.”

“I’ll speak to Prince Ch‘ing," Durell conceded.

“He is too busy to see you. You will speak with one of his
managers.”

“It‘s Prince Ch’ing, or nobody.”

“Are you in a position to argue, Mr. Durell? Please to look
about you," the old woman said.

He heard the swift, heavy footsteps of men threading their Way
among the heaped-up cushions and dimly gleaming ivory, brown and black hips and
thighs and breasts of the silently watching girls.

He was expected, he supposed, to yield in despair to the overwhelming
odds. But the only hope for success was to do just the opposite. He was certain
that the old harridan before him was someone of importance; perhaps she managed
all this, and she might even be the brains behind Prince Ch’ing. But she was
important, no doubt of it, and she carried herself with an air of accustomed
command.

He did not turn as the footsteps rushed up behind him.

The old woman stepped back, but not quickly enough. He had
no time for courtesy or gentility. He caught her pipe-stem arm under the heavy
brocaded silk and swung her about with enough violence to lift her literally
from her feet and place her abruptly between the three ugly brutes who approached
and himself.

They skidded to a halt.

“Tell them to stop, grandmother,” Durell said softly. “Unless
they care to stick their knives through you.”

The three men were big and square-shouldered, with shaved
skulls and slanted, glittering eyes in brutal faces. Steel flickered in
their hands. Durell felt the old woman writhe like an animated skeleton in his
grip, but he did not relent.

“Hold still,” he said. “You seem rather brittle.”

“Monster!” she hissed. “How dare you touch me!”

“Send your children away, or your arm might be broken. At
your age, grandmother, it takes a while to knit bones.”

She spat out a clicking, nasal stream of vituperative Mandarin,
but he guessed she was assailing the three chagrined musclemen for their
slowness rather than wasting her breath on Durell. He backed away with her
slowly until he felt the wall at his back. In this dim, rosy light that might
have served for a sultan’s palace of concubines, he noted again the erotic
tapestries and murals, the astonishing postures of male and female nudes in
bronze and paint, and the quiet eyes of the score or more of women lounging in
the room as so much decoration.

“Send your playboys away, grandma,” he said harshly.

“I cannot,” the old woman gasped. “They do not obey me.”

“Don’t lie now. It’s a bad time for it.”

“Imperialist spy! American fool! They only wish to escort you
to Prince Ch’ing. You saboteur, you pif of a Western agent of colonialism, you
agitator-”

He squeezed her arm and she hissed with pain. “I’ve heard that
recording before, and it’s a bit worn. Even the Soviets don’t waste their
breath using such old-fashioned terms today. But Peiping is like a kid
stumbling on a chest of new toys, right? Forget ‘em, grandmother. I’ll give you
a count of three to get your playboys away from the bunnies and out of here.”

“I do not understand your speech. I cannot —”

He started to count, and suddenly knew the old woman was
terrified; she might be telling the truth. The three knifemen were
circling Warily, their blades in plain sight, their broad yellow faces blank,
their eyes opaque. There was a rustling as the staring, silent girls drew away.
And at that moment a door opened to his left and three more girls in thin,
silken robes that concealed nothing and exaggerated everything, entered the
room, chattering with animation. Durell took quick advantage of the
interruption.

He thrust the old beldame abruptly into the arms of the nearest
thug and leaped over a banquette of plum-colored satin directly into a mass of
naked girls. Their shrieks and cries mingled with the scream of the old woman
and the bellows of the three men. The door behind the three newcomers was still
open. He swung through it into a long corridor lined with red carpeting and
more pornographic wall paintings. The doors on either hand were closed, but
there was dim, atonal music from somewhere, and a man’s voice, thickened with
pleasure, touched him. He ran to the end of the corridor.

A flight of steps went up and down, and ahead was a small
balcony open to the night air. There was a wide central court, one flight
down, a small formal garden lit by glowing stone lanterns, with formalized
Chinese shrubbery. In the center of the garden was a tall, needlelike pagoda,
the obvious center of Prince Ch’ing’s astonishing complex of pleasure houses.
The thud of running footsteps behind Durell alerted him. He slashed at a heavy
curtain, set it to swinging as if he brushed it going up the stairs, and turned
in the opposite direction, dropping quickly down to the level of the garden courtyard.

For the moment, he had divided his pursuers. Two had been
misled and run up the stairs. But one of them chose to descend to the garden.

Durell waited in the shadows behind a tall stone lantern. The
man was fast and reckless, a kris gleaming in his fist. Durell chopped at
the back of a thick, fatty neck, striking to paralyze the neural center. The
man dropped head-first into the sunken lily pool, making the big golden
carp thrash in alarm. The noise seemed loud, but there was no alarm, and Durell
pulled the man‘s face out of the water and ran for the pagoda entrance,
assuming that this must surely be the central control area of the place. If
Prince Ch’ing could be found anywhere, it would be here.

There were outside stairs winding up the exterior walls, with
open windows and doors. Thick glass partitions revealed a series of interior
tableaux, of men and women in dimly lighted, silken webs of tangled arms and
legs in incredible posturings. He reflected briefly that there was
no accounting for taste, and came abruptly to the top of the outer stairs. From
the garden below came shouts of anger as men poured in from all directions, He
had to get out of sight. He chose the first door, tried the handle, found
it unlocked, and stepped in.

Two girls, one golden and one ebony, turned on their cushions
to glare at him. They had been attending to a stout, matronly woman. Durell put
a cautionary finger to his lips, surprising them with his conspiratorial
request for silence, and ran across to the opposite door.

He found himself facing an elevator shaft that yawned open
behind a flimsy sliding gate. He looked down. Five floors below was
a glimmer of black harbor water. Above was the bottom side of the elevator cage
itself.

If Prince Ch’ing were here, he must be one flight up,
where the elevator had been halted. Durell found a flight of steps and
took them three at a time.

The Manchu pretender waited for him at the top.

                                                                                               
chapter eleven

THERE was only this one chamber at the top of the elaborate pagoda
spire, which Durell could see now had been constructed as one vast symbol of
erotic intent. This room was obviously an office, a central command post for
each of the thousand pleasures dispensed in Prince Ch’ing‘s house.

Astonishingly, the prince was alone.

He was bigger than any man Durell had ever seen before. His
Chinese skin was the color of old ivory, and just as bloodless. He wore a vast,
golden-embroidered mandarin’s coat, but he did not adorn his head with the
traditional cap and peacock feather. His skull looked small, abnormally tiny on
his monstrous and massive shoulders, his pendulous chest and enormous, bulging
belly. His feet were invisible under the cloak. So were his hands, lost in the
voluminous sleeves. His face was shaven except for a long, thin mandarin’s
moustache, a jet-black that matched the heavy, furry caterpillars of brows
above his eyes. His bald scalp gleamed with scented oil.

“Come in, come in, Mr. Durell,” Ch’ing said in Oxford accents.
“Truly, you are an impetuous man."

There was the hammering of pursuing feet behind him.

“Call off your
dogs
first.”
Durell took his gun and thrust it at Ch’ing’s huge belly. He did not know if it
would fire, after his swim, but Ch’ing didn’t know that, either. “Call them
off quickly, please.”

“Naturally. No need for us to be antagonists, sir.” The huge
man turned his head slowly. “Paradise, my dear?“

From the shadowed corner of the ornate tower room stepped
the girl he had first met in the birdcage. Again she had changed her
costume, this time to something silk and transparent to exhibit the tempting
roundness of her body. She tapped a felt-headed stick to a golden gong. The
note reverberated softly and the rushing footsteps halted. A man called
querulously. Prince Ch’ing nodded to the girl again and Paradise struck the
gong a second time.

“Now we will not be disturbed, Mr. Durell. Please make yourself
comfortable. Paradise will bring you tea, food, anything you may desire.”

“She can't make Simon Smith live again, can she?”

“Alas, no. But we are not immediately responsible for his death.
The injuries that hospitalized him in the first place are the cause of
his dying.”

“After your‘ hatchet men snatched him.”

“That was indeed unfortunate.”

“What did you want from a simple sailor, Prince
Ch’ing?"

The enormous, fat man smiled silently. Paradise came and knelt
and took off one of his silken slippers and exposed a tiny, almost feminine
foot, soft and pink and ironically delicate in view of the huge weight it must
support. She began to apply a creamy salve to the instep With the practiced gestures
of a masseuse.

“Forgive me, Mr. Durell. I suffer from certain decrepitudes.
One may be rich, but as every man knows, riches rarely buy health. Such sayings
are common to all men and all nations. And why not? They are true. Ever since
my imperial ancestor, a prince of the Ch’ing house, came to the Spice Islands
centuries ago, there has been one of us here in Dendang, to rule and help our
people. You look skeptical of my title, you see, and it may be well to clarify
its validity for our future negotiations. There was a Ch’ing here when the
first Portuguese sailors ventured dangerously on these seas in the
sixteenth century. Then there grew a powerful Sultanate of Pandakan, aided by
the old Sundanese Empire, and finally the British East India Company came
to these islands in 1787, and in a faraway city of Europe, traded them to the
Dutch for other concessions. Now the Hollanders are gone, and the little
Republic that ousted them is also shattered, and we suffer military rule, under
the estimable Colonel Mayubashur. And the crowds in the street chant, ‘
Merdekal
Merdekaf
Freedom!
Freedom!’ Freedom from what, Mr. Durell?”

The Chinese prince smiled blandly. “Nothing will change. The
Ch’ings will remain. We are over three hundred islands floating on the
Sunda Shelf, surrounded by Pacific deeps more deadly than the tides of
politics that sweep the world. The islands shall remain, however. And I, too.
They may change the name of our huge neighbor, Borneo, to Kalimanten; but the
 
jungles will stay there, the umbrella trees
and the malarial swamps and the Dyak and Dusan peoples, simple and primitive
souls, who need a father to look after them.”

“And you are their self-appointed father, Prince Ch’ing?”

“They need me. And although I suffer, I serve them.”

“In the name of
merdeka
, of freedom?“ Durell asked. “I find it
difficult to feel pity for you. Nor have you answered my question. Why did
Simon Smith concern you at all?”

“You Americans are so direct! Ah, you spoil the pleasures of
bargaining. Obviously, Simon knew something of interest and of use to me.”

“And what was that?”

“Alas, he did not live to tell me.”

“Why so anxious to question him at all?”

“Mr. Durell, you are an enigma here. I know who you are, you
see. But I am not quite sure why you are here. Let us he frank with each other.
My enterprises are imperiled by the quarrel for sovereignty over the Tarakuta
Islands. I am rich and powerful, and although you may not approve of my means
or my source of wealth. this has been accomplished and is of no further
importance. We have embarked upon perilous times, and the typhoon threatens us.
I bragged a moment ago, when I spoke of the timelessness of Tarakuta and
Pandakan. I may be in personal peril, you see. But it is not the kind of peril
that threatens you at this very moment.”