Mr. Moto Omnibus Page 8

  It must have been an hour later that I heard the lock of my door snap back with a sound which made my nerves leap strangely. It was not my actual situation but the complete uncertainty of what might happen next that was making me unstrung. Actually the thing that occurred was the last that I expected. The door snapped open and instead of a man that Russian girl came in. She wore a blue dress and a sable scarf hung around her neck. The wind outside had ruffled her hair, making it look as warm and chaotic as fire.

  She closed the door carefully before she spoke and stood for a moment watching me with that worldly glance of hers, and I could not tell what she was—a friend or an enemy—from that glance.

  “Good morning,” she said. “Good morning, Casey Lee.”

  “I begin to think, Sonya,” I said, “that I should be happier if I had never met you. What are you after now?”

  “You,” she said, but she did not smile.

  “How do you mean, me?” I asked.

  Sonya shrugged her shoulders. “You ought to understand,” she said. “If you can’t, please try to think. Why should I be introduced in here? I’m not bad-looking, am I?” Her throaty voice was like her looks—mysterious, alluring. In fact, I had never seen anyone easier to look at and I told her so.

  “Well,” she said, “don’t you see? That’s why I’m here. Mr. Moto thought you might be more likely to tell me about what happened to a certain message than anyone else. I think it was rather kind of Mr. Moto, don’t you? He’s not a brutal man.”

  “You mean you’re here to seduce me?” I inquired.

  “You’ll be reasonable, now, won’t you, Casey dear? It will be so much better. We don’t want to be unpleasant. Oh, Casey, please, please, tell me everything you know—” It seemed to me that her voice was unnecessarily loud, before I guessed the reason. She was speaking so that someone outside the door might hear, and her actions were different from her voice, for while she spoke she drew me down beside her on the edge of the bed. “Casey,” she whispered, “did they hurt you?”

  I shook my head.

  “I am thankful,” she whispered. “They didn’t see me last night. And you didn’t tell them. Thank you, Casey.”

  I did not answer because her actions were entirely beyond me. I did not know whether to suspect her or to trust her. I put my hands on her shoulders and looked hard into her eyes. She returned my glance without faltering.

  “What are you here for, Sonya?” I asked.

  “The message,” she whispered. “There must be some message! I didn’t find it. They didn’t find it. They think you were down there. Did you find anything, Casey?”

  I smiled at her, and my thoughts were very bitter, now that it seemed perfectly clear that she was there to worm something out of me. “You tell Mr. Moto to be damned,” I said. “I didn’t tell him about you—and I won’t tell anything.”

  “But do you know,” she whispered “—do you know anything? You must.”

  “I guess I’m stubborn!” I said. “I’m not talking, Sonya.”

  “Casey,” she whispered, “please, it isn’t that. He thinks you’ve memorized the message and destroyed it. If that is so, the message can’t go any further. That’s why they murdered Ma.” She paused and looked at me somberly. “That’s why they’re not going to let you off this boat alive, because this message can’t go any further.” Her eyes held my glance, but her eyes revealed nothing. I could not tell whether she was telling the truth nor could I entirely catch her meaning.

  “You mean,” I inquired, “that I’m going to be locked in here indefinitely?”

  She shook her head and the gold in her hair danced in curious rays of light.

  “No,” she said very softly, “you won’t stay on the boat. Your body will be thrown overboard. You will have drowned yourself.”

  I recoiled from her, edged myself away, and I felt my hands grow cold and my tongue grow thick. There was no use in deceiving myself that I was receiving a hollow threat when I looked at that Russian girl’s eyes. There was no use in trying to believe that she was incapable of playing such a part, now that she had spoken. I remembered her in the cabin with the knife, and the memory of that, as much as my own danger, made me sick and dizzy. I was afraid because I was facing the prospect of dying in cold blood, but I was more afraid of her. Pride—for I suppose synthetic heroes are always proud—made me struggle to conceal that fear, made me prefer to die then and there rather than have her know the way I felt and I was determined to tell them nothing.

  “So it’s murder, is it?” I inquired.

  She nodded, as though she found it hard to speak, and I saw her slim white hands clasp and unclasp in her lap.

  “Casey dear,” she whispered, “you could call it that. I should rather call it a secret agent’s life. If you had lived in my country you would know. It’s part of the profession. You must not blame them. Don’t you see, it’s the only thing they can do?”

  I cleared my throat because her nearness seemed to choke me.

  “Casey,” she whispered, “there must be some message. Will you let me read it, please?”

  I grinned back at her, or tried to grin, but my lips were stiff and cold and my facial muscles seemed cramped by the effort.

  “Sonya,” I said. “This business has taught me a good deal. It’s taught me that there is still something worth dying for. Go back to your gang and tell them anything you like. Then perhaps you’d like to come back and see that I can die decently. In the meanwhile, if you have any decency, you’d better go away.”

  I had intended to continue further in saying what I thought of her, but her expression made me stop. She had grown deathly white. She was staring at me as though I had slapped her face.

  “Casey,” she whispered, “I came here to help you.”

  “My dear,” I answered, “I don’t want your help. It’s time I learned to help myself. I had nearly forgotten how.”

  “No,” she whispered, “no!” She had pulled the sables from her neck and she was ripping at the lining. “Listen to me! Please, please listen. I have nothing to do with this. I am trying to help you. Please, I don’t want to see you killed.”

  “Would it make you any calmer,” I inquired, “if I told you I don’t believe a word you say?”

  She had pulled something from her furs and was holding it in her hand. A metal crank for the port window.

  “Don’t you believe me now?” she whispered. “This will turn your window down. Hide it in your bag. They won’t search again. They sent me here, but I’m trying to help you, Casey.”

  I felt the cold metal in my fingers.

  “You don’t understand,” she whispered. “I want that message as much as you. I did not know about it until I saw that it was Ma. I don’t want them to have it. They mustn’t have it!”

  I passed my hand across my forehead and my face was wet and clammy. “What’s all this nonsense about?” I demanded. “What is this message?”

  She was silent for a moment. “You won’t believe me, I suppose,” she said finally. “The word is from my father. Don’t ask me any more. We can’t talk here. They’re only keeping him alive until they get his papers.”

  “That’s interesting,” I said. “Why don’t you tell the truth?”

  She raised her hands helplessly. “It is the truth—it is, if you only understood the situation.” She rose. “This is too dangerous. I must be going now. They are listening at the door. Won’t you trust me? Won’t you believe me? They’re going to kill you. I swear they are. You’re caught in something that’s desperate. They would have killed you already if it weren’t for that American friend of yours—that Mr. Bloom on this ship. They don’t want him to suspect anything. You’ll be safe until he leaves at Shanghai tomorrow. Casey, will you listen to me, please? When this ship comes into the river opposite the city, as it will early tomorrow morning, open that porthole, jump out and swim ashore. Throw the crank out when you go, or they’ll know I brought it to you. If you have trouble, ask for
a man named Wu Lai-fu and tell him what has happened. Say the name to anyone along the shore, and then go away and never come back! Ask Wu Lai-fu to help you. He’s the only one who will. I shan’t see you again, I think. Good-by—” She looked younger when she said it. Her eyes were begging me to believe her. She looked unhappy—close to tears.

  “Thanks for that window crank,” I whispered. “I’ll throw it out.”

  “And one thing more,” her voice was strained. “Don’t eat anything they give you, Casey Lee. Hide some of it, as though you had. Don’t touch anything—do you hear?”

  “Thanks,” I answered. Now that she was leaving, I was grateful and I wanted to show her that I was grateful. I took her hand, a small cold hand. “You weren’t meant for this, Sonya,” I said.

  “No,” she answered. “Neither were you. God help you, Casey Lee.”

  I wanted to speak to her again, but she shook her head and opened the door. I heard it locked behind her, but she still seemed to be there in the cabin. There was a suspicion of that gardenia perfume and the window crank was in my hand. . . . Who was she? I did not know. What was she? I did not know. But at last I was sure that she had meant kindly by me, that she had risked more than I cared to consider by telling me what she had. What did she mean by her allusion to her father and his papers? It was more than I could tell. Nevertheless, it added to the sum of knowledge in my possession to an extent that made me aware that somehow my country was involved, and this suspicion made me stubborn. The dead man Ma had asked me to communicate with Jim Driscoll and I was determined to do it, if I lived.

  There is no need to describe the day of waiting, shut in that cabin, or the night either. The steward brought my luncheon in and I tucked part of it away in my suitcase as Sonya had suggested. At seven in the evening there was another tap on the door, and in came dinner with a bottle of champagne. A visiting card was tied around the bottle, bearing Mr. Moto’s name and four words were scrawled beneath it. “With my sincerest compliments.” I left the bottle untouched, but stored away some more of the food. No one came to take the tray away. I was not disturbed again. They may have had their reasons for believing that I could make no trouble after the evening meal. I lay for a long while on my bed, listening to the noise of the ship. I must have dozed off in spite of myself, for my next recollection was one of smoothness, and my cabin window was dusky with early dawn. I stared out for a while upon a strange world that was different from Japan, teeming with a patient vitality, serene, in spite of poverty, famine and war—the world of China. The ship was running at half speed up a broad river called the Whangpoo, as I found out later, one of those tributaries on the watery delta of the great Yellow River, connecting the city of Shanghai with the sea. The water flowing past our ship was colored a thick sedimentary yellow which reminded me of the muddy rivulets one made in the country as a child, when the frost has left the ground in spring. The current, I saw, was swift and the distance from shore was wide enough to make me doubt my ability to swim it. The shore itself was low, with green fields which I learned later were rice fields squared off by dykes and ditches. The life on the river was amazing to a stranger who had never seen the East. Besides occasional launches and tugs which might have plied a waterway at home, there were Chinese junks under sail, moving ponderously under great banks of brown canvas slatted with bamboo, looking like an illustration from a book—the relics of another age. They seemed to be as high in the bow and poop as the vessels of Columbus, and at the bow of each a pair of painted eyes made the hulls look like living monsters. Aboard one of them that passed near us a crew stripped to the waist was pulling her mainsail halyard, singing a rhythmic chanty that might have risen from the capstan of a clipper ship. I wished I might have been with them there aboard that junk. Then, in addition to these sailing vessels, the river was filled with smaller craft which were propelled by men with huge sculling oars, and which had deckhouses of matting in their bows. Now and then one of these boats moved hopefully toward the Imoto Maru, and once I saw the owner picking up refuse with a net. I only knew later that I was having a glimpse of a strange side of Chinese life—the river life of China, and of a river fleet on which men lived and died without hardly ever stepping onto land. But that first glance gave the impression of a land so teeming with humanity that part of that humanity was pushed into the water.

  Even in that gray of early morning I could tell that we were coming to a country where life was cheap because of its abundance. A short time later I saw buildings and wharfs along the shore. From the size of the place, this could be nothing but Shanghai and if Sonya was right, it was time for me to go, provided I wished to live.

  I made my preparations quickly, since they were completely simple. First I shot the bolt on my door, then I kicked off my shoes, took off my coat, and wrapped my scanty supply of money with my passport inside my oilskin tobacco pouch. As I did so, my glance fell on my flask and I jammed it into my hip pocket also, in the belief that I might need a drink if I should be cold and tired. Then, as quietly as I could, I began opening the port. Something—I have never known what—must have made some watcher outside my door suspicious, for just as the window was halfway down, I heard the doorknob turn and then there was a knocking. I did not answer that knock. No cabin window ever went down as fast as mine, and a moment later I had wriggled my shoulders through it and stared into a surge of yellow water. There was no chance to dive. A straight fall of easily twenty feet out of the ship was all that I could achieve. Even that fall was not too soon, for when I was in mid-air I heard a shout which warned me that someone had seen me go. I struck the water flat with a force that shook me badly, without shaking my sense entirely away. Once under water, I stayed until my lungs were nearly bursting. Then, when I came to the surface for breath, I had a glimpse of the ship behind me. They had seen me. I heard shouts and saw men leaning over the rail. Someone had whipped out a pistol and I dived for a second time. When I rose again, the force of the current had driven me away from the ship—perhaps for a hundred yards. I was gasping for breath and struggling with that current when I saw one of those small boats beside me. Just as I saw it, I knew that I would never have the strength to reach the shore, so I struck out toward it and snatched upward at its side. Then a wiry muscular arm reached out and seized my collar, and then another arm. I found myself being lifted bodily out of the water, choking.

  There was an excited chattering of voices around me. Shrieks of children, squawks of chickens, and a grunting of pigs. I was on one of those vessels which I had seen following the ship, lying on my back in a cargo space, looking forward at the entrance of a matting-covered cabin. I was surprised at the number of persons on that small craft. There must have been three generations, all family, there, staring at me. An old man with a drooping wisp of gray mustache, bare to the waist, with ragged trousers, was asking me some question. Women were staring at me from under the matting cabin. Three younger men had dropped the sculling oar and were shouting excitedly at their elder; and children, boys and girls in ragged cotton clothes, round-faced, with dark slits of eyes, seemed to be crawling from every crack. The old man was pointing over the side, shouting at me, and I could gather what he meant by his gestures. He was preparing to take me back to the Imoto Maru. I shook my head.

  “No, no!” I shouted, but it did no good. And then I remembered the name—the name which both Ma and Sonya had mentioned. I pulled myself up to a sitting posture, choking a cough.

  “No, no!” I shouted at them. “Wu Lai-fu!”

  I have never known three syllables to have such a definite result. The old man looked startled. The younger ones stopped their talking, and taking advantage of the pause, I reached in my hip pocket and drew out a handful of money and pointed to the land.

  “Wu Lai-fu,” I said again.

  No Masonic symbol could have been more useful. The old man bowed and took the money. The younger ones leaped to the sculling oar and began working toward the shore. I staggered to my feet and looked acro
ss the water at the black hull of the Imoto Maru. They had seen what had happened; an officer on her bridge was shouting at us through a megaphone, and to my surprise the crew was lowering a boat. I cupped my hands and shouted over the water.

  “Good-by, Mr. Moto,” I shouted. “Excuse me, please. I am so very, very sorry.”

  8

  NO REMARK I had made in a long while seemed to me so laden with wit or gave me greater pleasure. It was so scintillating from my own viewpoint that I began to laugh, and to my surprise, that boatload of strangers began to laugh too, either out of politeness, or because they had some intuitive idea of what was happening. At any rate, their interest in working in toward shore was most intense and gratifying. The men at the scull were bending at their work, grunting sharply as their bodies moved back and forth, while the old man stood beside me, staring at the ship. Finally he nudged me with his elbow, pointed and displayed a row of toothless gums. The lifeboat was being raised again; with good reason, I think, for we were in the middle of other small craft by then, all of such conventional pattern that it would have been hard to have picked us from the rest. Then the reaction came over me and my teeth began to chatter, but in spite of my physical wretchedness, I shall never forget the sights of that early morning, because they were as unfamiliar to me as though I had arrived upon the moon. The boat was being worked into a bay or inlet below a great modern city whose tall buildings were rising out of the morning mist. The body of water was jammed so thickly with boats and small craft that one could walk to shore by stepping from boat to boat, for almost half a mile, so that the cove had been transformed into a floating city, where every craft seemed to have a definite place. The laundry was hanging out to dry and women were scolding and food was cooking and babies were squealing wherever one cared to look. Our boat ran up alongside some others near the shore and our men made it fast. Then one of the young men started to go ashore and I had leisure to look at the people about me. We all had an excellent chance to examine each other, due to an almost complete lack of privacy and inhibition. The crews from the other junks and their women and children began to gather around us until, as I stood there in the hold, I seemed to be in an amphitheater, surrounded by curious chattering people, yet I always remember they were friendly enough and even merry. One of the old women, who handed me a cup of tea, motioned me inside the matting cabin to sit down. Tea never tasted better than the cup I drank there, enthroned on a pile of rags which were probably filthy with vermin; but I was in no condition to worry about cleanliness. The old man was repeating “Wu Lai-fu” and motioning me to be patient.