Singapore Wink (19 page)

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.”

CHAPTER XVII

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.

“Don't you ever sleep?” I said.

“You still hanging in there, Cauthorne?” he said as he brushed by me and into the room.

“By my thumbs.”

“Where's the booze?”

I started the long journey back to the bed. “Over there,” I said.

Dangerfield crossed to the bureau where the Scotch bottle rested, picked up a glass and poured his usual three fingers. He drank it down and for a moment I thought I was going to be sick.

“Hell of a long trip,” he said and poured himself another drink.

“Aren't you a little off your usual route?” I said and eased myself back into the bed.

Dangerfield took off his hat and sailed it at the couch. The hat landed on the floor but he didn't seem to notice. “Got a cigarette?” he said and I motioned towards the bureau again. He found the pack, lit one, and settled into an armchair.

“You got a nice room,” he said.

“Are you staying here?”

“I'm paying my own way, Cauthorne. I'm at the Strand up on Bencoolen Street. Six bucks a night, U.S.”

“Why won't the Bureau pick up your tab?”

Dangerfield snorted. “I didn't even ask. I just put in for a couple of weeks annual leave, cashed in my savings bonds, and took off. I got a little worried about you.”

“Why?”

“You don't look too good.”

“I feel the same way.”

“What happened?”

“The Dangerfield Plan happened,” I said. “It's a wonderfully brilliant scheme, special agent.”

“Okay; you're funny. What happened?”

“Sacchetti had someone take a shot at me yesterday morning. Last night he had someone beat me up when I dropped by to see him on his yacht.”

“His what?”

“His yacht.
The Chicago Belle
. Only he wasn't there.”

“Who was?”

“His wife and two of her friends. But don't worry; I got the message across. I told her about the three guys in Los Angeles.”

“What else?” Dangerfield said.

“Well, there's Carla Lozupone.”

“Where's she?”

“Across the hall, I guess.”

“What about her?”

“She saw Angelo, she said. But she lies a lot.”

“When?”

“Yesterday. She wanted to pay him a million dollars.”

“Goddamn it, Cauthorne, tell it straight.”

“Okay. Sacchetti is not only blackmailing Charles Cole, he's also blackmailing Joe Lozupone. The Lozupone girl flew here for one reason only. To pay off Sacchetti and to warn him that if he asks for another payment, he'll be dead. She said that Sacchetti went along except for one provision and that provision is that I get out of Singapore in seventy-two hours—forty-eight hours now, I guess. Then she gave me some more advice. She said that if I caused anything to happen to Sacchetti, her father would take a very dim view of it.”

“What else did you find out?”

“Sacchetti's got the fix in here.”

“How?”

“He married well.”

“And his father-in-law's got the clout?”

“He has it.”

I told him the rest of it then in chronological order from the time I left Los Angeles until he knocked at the door. I talked for almost half an hour and when I was through Dangerfield rose and started to pace the room. He paced silently for almost five minutes. Then he stopped and stood by the bed.

“Don't you ever get dressed?”

“Look, Dangerfield, we've only gone through phase one of your plan and it got me shot at and knocked silly. I'm just resting up for phase two. If my guess is right, that'll call for the water torture and the bamboo shoot that grows right up the ass.”

“When are we going to eat?”

“Always to the point at hand; that's what I like about you. Just ring the bell over there and give your order to the man when he comes.”

“You want something?” Dangerfield said.

“Coffee,” I said. “Lots of coffee. But right now I'm going to get dressed. That's after I get out of bed. Then I'm going to take a shower and if it still seems like a good idea, I'll brush my teeth, and after that, if I'm still conscious, I might even shave. So you see I haven't been idle. I have the entire morning planned.”

Dangerfield went over to ring the bell for room service. “You sure they didn't hit you on the head?”

“The only thing I'm sure of,” I said, “is my wild anticipation of events yet to come.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Such as phase two of the Dangerfield Plan and how we put it into operation.”

“Simple,” Dangerfield said and borrowed another cigarette from my pack. “We tell Angelo what I told you we'd tell him.”

“We?”

“You get in trouble, Cauthorne. You need a chaperone.”

“I won't argue that. But where do we find Sacchetti if he doesn't want to be found?”

“He lives on that yacht, doesn't he?”

“So I understand.”

“Then we go out to the yacht.”

I was sitting on the edge of the bed by then. Another hour or so and I'd make it into the bathroom. “All right,” I said. “We go out to the yacht. They don't like visitors out there, but we go anyway. What makes you think they'll let us aboard?”

Dangerfield sighed and then yawned. “Sometimes, Cauthorne, I think you've got shit for brains. He knows about the three guys and the telegram. You told his wife about that, right?”

“Right.”

“He won't believe it. But he'll want to know
why
we
want
him to believe it.”

“So he'll see us?”

Dangerfield cast an exasperated glance at the ceiling. “I swear to God they must have hit you on the head last night.”

It took me a while in the bathroom. The shower drove needles into my back and the razor seemed to weigh ten pounds. When I finally came out Dangerfield looked up from the remains of what seemed to have been an immense breakfast.

“You look real pretty,” he said. “Clean, too. I signed your name to the bill.”

“With a little more practice, you can sign my checks. Any coffee left?”

“Plenty.”

The telephone rang and I crossed over to answer it. When the voice said “Mr. Cauthorne?” I recognized it immediately. It belonged to Mrs. Angelo Sacchetti, and she didn't bother to identify herself.

“I gave my husband your message,” she said.

“I got his after you left last night. It was just as you promised: most sincere.”

That didn't seem to require any comment from her. “My husband has changed his mind, Mr. Cauthorne. He would like to see you as quickly as possible.”

“This morning?”

“If possible.”

“It is,” I said. “Where?”

“At my father's house; it's more convenient than the yacht.”

“All right. What's the address?”

She told me and we set the time for eleven o'clock. After I hung up the phone, I turned to Dangerfield who was pouring himself another drink.

“That was Sacchetti's wife,” I said.

“He wants to see us, right?”

“Right.”

“The Dangerfield Plan,” he said with a contented smile. “It seems to be working out just fine.”