Jack of Spies (10 page)

“Blimey,” was Jed’s first reaction.

“They’re on their way out,” McColl told him. “Getting themselves ready for the outside world. Are you sure you want to go through with this?”

“Of course,” his brother declared, a sliver of doubt in his eyes.

McColl spoke to one of the staff, who led them upstairs and into a small, paneled room. There was a wooden couch against each wall and a large scroll painting of misty mountains on the one facing the door. The pillows were made of porcelain—and felt like it. In the center of the room, a low Chinese table with upturned ends held a small oil lamp and a joss-stick holder. The latter was already burning, infusing the room with its odor, but McColl could also smell the opium, heavier, sweeter, like bait in a trap.

They laid themselves out on the couches, the other two looking slightly self-conscious, and watched as a young girl lit the oil lamp and heated the sticky balls on wicked-looking needles. The look on her face was intensely serious and reminded McColl of Jed as a small boy, trying to write his own name for the first time.

He took a few deep drags on the offered pipe and lay back. “It’s not instantaneous,” he warned the others, but it felt quicker than the last time he had taken it. The lines of wall and ceiling seemed to soften, curling like a burning piece of paper, only so much slower. He looked across at Jed, who smiled back at him, and the smile itself seemed to stretch, like something out of Lewis Carroll. He looked again and, for once, saw his mother’s face in his brother’s. He remembered skipping down the street with her, hand in hand, jumping over those paving stones with cracks and laughing fit to burst. He could feel his own smile stretching, and such pleasure in the memory.

Time loosened its hold. When the girl returned with the pipe, he couldn’t have said whether hours had passed or only moments. Both Jed and Mac had beatific smiles on their faces, and the flame of the oil lamp was dancing shadows on the ceiling. The smoke from the joss stick coiled like Caitlin’s hair, and when he closed his eyes, he saw the green of hers. He felt no anger, no anxiety, no disappointment. And if there was sadness, it was oh, so sweet. Everything was as it should be.

When the girl eventually led them downstairs, his watch said
they’d been there for three hours. Tea was provided, and they sat in silence for a while, giving each other
Can you believe it?
smiles and sipping from the patterned porcelain cups. As the drug began to wear off, McColl felt his sense of serenity slowly start to fracture, and he almost cried out in resentment.

The city itself was still wide awake, and while he settled their bill, his companions decided on a second visit to the Lotus Flower. They tried to persuade him to join them, but Jed seemed more than a little relieved when he refused. “I have a call to make,” McColl explained, without divulging whom it was to or his fear that no one would answer. Back at the hotel, he asked the operator to get him the number, had a moment of hope when the phone was picked up, then listened to the
amah
intone, after a suspiciously long interval, that “missee not home.” Much to his distress, he could picture Caitlin at the top of the stairs, silently shaking her head.

He thanked the clerk, walked back outside, and worked his way through the traffic on the Bund to the parapet above the river. He just had to accept it, he told himself—it had been wonderful, strange, and for only one night. It might be awkward at first on the ship, but they would soon get over it. She, it seemed, already had.

The sound of running feet pulled his eyes from the river, and he barely had time to shift his body before the man was upon him. A knife glittered in the yellow light as it arced toward him, and his outthrust fist smashed across the side of his assailant’s head at exactly the moment the blade cut agonizingly into his abdomen. McColl was briefly aware of the man falling, picking himself up, and running away, and of shouts from several directions. He was, he realized, on his knees, the knife still buried in his body, the blood seeping through his questing fingers. He resisted the temptation to pull the knife out, and his last thought was self-congratulatory, that he had at least learned something from Gandhi and his fellow medics on the long slog down from Spion Kop.

Stateroom 302

McColl could feel and just about hear the low throb of the engines—the ship was under way. Jed and Mac would be leaning over the rail and waving China good-bye, but he was flat on his back in an upper-deck cabin, and all he could see of the outside world was a circle of gray sky.

He had spent a good portion of the last few days either asleep or deep in drug-induced unconsciousness, so that much of what he knew of recent events was hearsay. He did remember the jolting rickshaw ride to the General Hospital, but all he could recall of his arrival there was a bewildering kaleidoscope of anxious faces. The next thing he knew, he was coming to in a private room, with an anxious brother looking on. As Jed had later admitted, he hadn’t relished telling their mother where he’d been while his brother was getting murdered.

McColl was, it seemed, out of danger but confined to bed for at least a week. The knife had pierced his liver, which was better news than it sounded—apparently, as organs went, this one healed quicker than most. He had spent the first day staring at the ceiling, occasionally dozing off despite the pain. Whenever the door to his private room opened, he hoped it would be her, but
it never was. Perhaps she hadn’t heard, though that was hard to believe—the story of the Englishman almost killed by a Chinese person had made the front page of the
North China Daily News
. There was a small, extremely blurred picture of him, along with a bigger and clearer one of the Maia, which had to be good for business.

Even Cumming had heard the news from someone and sent a get-well cable.

The hospital doctor had reluctantly agreed to his joining the
Manchuria
and that morning a horse-drawn ambulance had transported him down to the steam-tender quay. He had been looking forward to the trip downriver, but all he saw from his stretcher were chimney tops, upper masts, and an occasional seagull. And after that there was the final indignity of being winched ashore by one of the liner’s derricks.

McColl and his brother had planned to share a cabin, but Jed and Mac had decided to bunk together while he convalesced. Which was something of a relief—Jed was exhausting at the best of times, and he felt utterly drained of energy.

He couldn’t even summon up what seemed an appropriate level of anger. His assailant had not been caught, and the man’s motives remained a mystery. Perhaps he’d seen McColl in the street and taken an instant dislike to his face. Perhaps he hated all foreign devils and had picked him out at random. Or maybe the man was off his head. The only other possibility was that someone had hired him to kill McColl, which seemed ludicrous. Who would want him dead? His only current enemies were the Germans, and they would know that the intelligence gleaned in Tsingtau had already been dispatched. As far as McColl was aware, spying in peacetime was not considered a capital crime by any of the great powers.

Over the next two days, the
Manchuria
steamed slowly eastward across the East China Sea toward its next port of call, the Japanese city of Nagasaki. After working his way through Mac’s
Sherlock Holmes stories and Jed’s
Riders of the Purple Sage
he was forced back on the sundry newspapers the two of them had collected for him in an hour’s scouring of the ship. Some were several months old, but most of the stories were still news to him. There were the usual disasters—an early-November storm over the American Great Lakes had killed more than 250 people—but also a cheering series of debuts. A ship had traversed the Panama Canal; the first transcontinental US highway had been dedicated; the Ford Motor Company had introduced something called an assembly line, which put automobiles together in a fifth of the time and would of course make them cheaper. More welcome still, peace had been declared in the Balkans, and the prospect of a wider war seemed to have receded. There was even good news for suffragettes everywhere—Norway was the latest country to give women the vote, following New Zealand, Australia, and Finland. Caitlin would be pleased.

He knew she was on board. Jed and Mac came by at regular intervals to regale him with news—the sighting of a whale, the consistency of the plum pudding, a rundown of their fellow passengers. She turned up in the last of these, among the women they considered attractive. McColl had said nothing about meeting her in Shanghai, but the two of them had recognized her from Peking. “Remember that American journalist you fancied?” Jed asked. “She keeps staring at us, and I’ve no idea why. She smokes in public, and I think she’s one of those radical women. She is a looker, though.”

His brother and Mac were having the time of their lives, McColl thought. Jed had a job waiting for him at home—his school career had been less than distinguished, and college had never been an option—and McColl wondered how small the boy would find a Glasgow insurance office after having circled the globe.

The ship’s physician and surgeon both came to see him, the one to check his general state, the other to admire his Shanghai colleague’s stitchwork. Neither had anything other
than rest to suggest—time, it seemed, would work a cure. And by the time they docked in Nagasaki, McColl was making trips to the toilet and able to dispense with the bedpan. That morning, after Jed and Mac had gone ashore in search of a samurai sword, his steward arrived with a short note from her—she hoped he was feeling better and would soon be up and about. Her handwriting seemed wholly in character, somehow both bold and controlled, but he found the whole thing strange. There was obviously no way she could come to his cabin, but why had she waited three days to send the message? He wondered whether to send a reply, and what he would say if he did. “Thank you for your note” seemed somewhat ludicrous after those hours in the candlelit room.

Soon after dark the ship weighed anchor and headed north and east up the Kyushu coastline; by midmorning it had passed through the narrow Kanmon Straits and was beginning its two-day passage of the Inland Sea. On the second of these, the weather changed for the better and McColl finally felt well enough to sit outside on the promenade deck. He had been enjoying the play of sun on sea for almost an hour when her silhouette loomed above him. “You must be better,” she said.

“Yes, I am.”

“Can I join you for a minute?”

“Of course.” She was wearing the same black coat, with a rose-colored hat and matching scarf.

She settled herself in the adjoining chair. “It was terrible, what happened to you in Shanghai.”

“I’ve had better days.” He smiled. “It was the shock more than anything else—one moment I’m standing there looking at the river, the next I’m on my knees with a knife in my gut. It happened so fast.”

“And you’ve no idea why the man attacked you?”

“None at all. I hadn’t made any enemies in Shanghai, or at least none I was aware of.”

“I only found out the morning we left—I saw a copy of the day before’s paper. I would have come to the hospital if I’d known.”

There was a hint of appeal in her eyes, but he didn’t know what for.

“So what’s in the
Times
?” she asked eventually, nodding toward the paper in his lap. “I’ve been shutting the world out since we boarded.”

“Oh, it’s all old news.”

“Anything new on Irish Home Rule?”

“Nothing, but there wouldn’t be. The bill doesn’t get its third reading until the spring, but it’ll pass. And the Ulstermen will opt out if the Nationalists let them, fight them if they don’t.”

“How do you feel about that?” she asked, looking him straight in the eye.

“Home Rule? I’m all for it.” The cheer from farther down the deck was for an accurate punt on the shuffleboard court, not his political opinion.

“And Ulster opting out?” she pressed him.

He considered. “Well, I suppose if the Irish are justified in throwing off English rule, then they can hardly insist on ruling Ulster from Dublin.”

She bridled at that. “You could say that we’ve put up with minority status for eight hundred years and now it’s Ulster’s turn.”

“You could,” he conceded. “So are you one of those Irish-Americans who give money for fighting the English?”

“I agree the English should leave,” she retorted. “But there are other battles that interest me more.”

“Women’s battles?”

“Yes, but not only. Working people’s battles. The poverty’s better hidden at home, but it’s still there. And there’s so much less excuse.”

He said nothing. Inside the ship the Filipino band had started
serenading those enjoying an early lunch. “Don’t you agree?” she asked.

“I agree that it’s there. How quickly anything can be done about it is another matter.”

She shook her head slightly, loosing a few stray locks. “We have to try.”

“I suppose so. But how?” He wondered if she wanted to kiss him as much as he wanted to kiss her.

“Well, by writing and by organizing. Writing so that people know what the situation is, then organizing them politically, so that the bosses have to listen to them.”