by Eric Ambler
“Could we afford the Bangkok trip?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Let’s see what it would cost anyway.”
He smiled at her, but she was looking down at her drink now.
“Greg, what are you going to do about Captain Lukey?”
He got up with a sigh. “I don’t know. While we were in the plane I tried to think about it. We went to get a cheque signed and—” he hesitated—“get off the beaten track. Well, we did both. Logically, all I have to do now is go to the customs office with Tan and Lukey, sign some papers and collect sixty-two thousand five hundred dollars. But …” He broke off.
“But you don’t know if you want to be logical.”
“That’s right. What do you think?”
She went over and kissed his cheek. “Maybe we should get some sleep,” she said.
CHAPTER NINE
GREG WOKE at six-thirty in the evening. His body ached all over and he had a metallic taste in his mouth. Dorothy was still asleep. He went into the sitting-room, shut the bedroom door softly behind him and rang for some ice. When it came, he got out the remains of the bottle of whisky purchased for his first meeting with Captain Lukey, and made himself a drink. As he drank it, he realised that he would be feeling very hungry, but for one thing : he could still smell the jail.
He thought carefully about that. Before they had gone to bed, both he and Dorothy had thoroughly washed every inch of themselves, their hair included; and they had given every stitch of clothing they had been wearing to the room boy with orders to burn or otherwise dispose of it. There could be only one reason for the phenomenon. “Thank you, Doctor Freud,” he muttered sourly.
He reached for the telephone and asked the operator to see if Mr. Lane Harvey of the American Syndicated Wire Service could be found at his office or at the American Club.
Harvey was at the Club, and sounded as if he had been there for some time.
“And how was fabulous Bali?” he asked.
“Great.”
“And those nubile young ladies with the fecund breasts and the sidelong looks? How were they? Or maybe I’d better ask Mrs. N. about them.”
“Maybe you had. Look, I want to have a word with Colonel Soames. Do you mind telling me how I can get in touch with him?”
There was a momentary pause before Harvey answered. “The Policeman? Sure. Just call up police admin. They’ll put you through to his office.”
“I meant this evening.”
“Oh. Well, I don’t have my book with me right now, but I’ll be going back to my office some time. Supposing I call you later.”
“Thanks. I’m at the Raffles.”
“I’ll call you.”
His tone was careless and he hung up almost before the last word was out. Greg suspected that the promise had already been forgotten. He put some more ice in his drink and then looked up the word ‘Police’ in the telephone directory. There was a long list of entries none of which was ‘Police admin.’. He was edging his way through the listings under ‘Government’, when the telephone rang.
“This is Soames,” said a well-remembered voice.
“Colonel Soames, I was just trying to contact you.”
“So I gathered. That’s why I’m phoning. What can I do for you?”
“I need advice. I’d like to see you as soon as I can.”
“Won’t the morning do?”
“I was hoping …” Greg broke off. “Look, I’ve been in Labuanga. I got back today. It’s sort of urgent.”
There was a pause. “Very well, Mr. Nilsen. I’ll meet you in the Raffles lounge in fifteen minutes. Will that be all right?”
“Fine. Thanks.”
He went back into the bedroom. Dorothy was fast asleep. Very quietly, he collected the clothes he needed and returned to the sitting-room. When he was dressed, he left a note for Dorothy telling her where he was, and went down to the lounge.
II
Colonel Soames arrived with the sandwiches Greg had ordered. He was wearing a white dinner jacket.
“Hope this won’t take long,” he said briskly. “I’m due at a dinner party at eight-thirty.”
“It’s a longish story,” said Greg; “but I’ll cut it as short as I can. What are you drinking?”
“Is that coffee you’ve got there?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll have some of that. Now, what’s the trouble?”
The Colonel was a good listener. He did not stir as Greg told him the history of his dealings with the Tan brothers, Captain Lukey and the Party of the Faithful. Twice only, he interjected brief questions to obtain a clarification of detail. Once, he signalled to the waiter to bring some more coffee. When Greg had finished he sat back.
“That’s all?”
“Yes.”
“What did you say that fellow’s name was? Gani?”
“Yes. Major Gani?”
“Very interesting. Might come in handy to our people sometime. Much obliged to you.” He paused. “You said you wanted advice, though.”
“Help would be a better word.”
“For a rank amateur you don’t seem to have done so badly without help. You’ve been lucky, of course, but didn’t someone say luck was a form of genius?”
Greg leaned forward. “Colonel, you said at lunch the other day that you’d considered having me deported.”
The Colonel chuckled amiably. “If I’d known what I know now, I probably would have. Can’t have amateurs fooling about in the arms racket. Disgraceful state of affairs!”
“Supposing you had deported me,” Greg went on; “and supposing I’d just been on the point of concluding a piece of business that netted me sixty-two thousand five hundred Straits dollars. Would I have been allowed to complete it?”
The Colonel’s smile faded and he eyed Greg curiously. “That would have depended. I was only gingering you up a bit. You wouldn’t have been deported unless the Indonesians had made a formal and specific complaint against you. In that case, naturally, we’d have tried to stop you completing.”
“Once I was out could I have come back?”
“Of course not.”
Greg nodded. “That’s what I wanted to know. Right, Colonel. As a favour to me, I’d like you to have a deportation order made out against me.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Naturally, I’d like it done without any fuss or publicity. I figure there wouldn’t be any, unless I tried to contest the order, and obviously I wouldn’t do that. I’m sure that if I were to have a word with the American Consul first there’d be no trouble there.”
The Colonel was staring at him angrily. “If this is your idea of humour, Nilsen, I think it’s in very poor taste.”
“I’m quite serious.”
“Then you must be up to some game I don’t know about. I think you’d better tell me what that is.”
“Certainly. I want to call this whole deal off.”
The Colonel scowled. “I see. Had a better offer for the stuff. My dear chap, if you think you’re going to use me to get you off the hook, you’re very much mistaken.”
“I haven’t another offer. I don’t want another offer. I just want out from the whole filthy business.”
“But not neglecting to take your commission, I imagine.”
“No deal, no commission, nothing.”
The Colonel shook his head wearily. “All right, what are you up to? Come on, let’s hear it.”
“I’ve told you. I want out.” He paused, then shrugged. “You may as well know the whole idiotic truth. When I went into this thing it was a sort of a joke. I was told these arms had been hijacked from Communists. I thought it would be highly amusing to help put them into the hands of anti-Communists. Don’t ask me how I managed to sucker myself into thinking that I was doing something pretty smart. That’s another cute little story. The thing is, I fell for all that double talk of Tan’s in Manila like a kid. No, that’s unfair. My own sons would have had more sense.” He paused again. “We
ll, then I got what I deserved. I had a chance of seeing a bit of both sides of this fascinating little war. Oh yes, I found a Communist bastard all right, and he was right where you might have expected him to be. But I found a Fascist bastard there as well.”
The Colonel laughed shortly. “And wasn’t he where you might have expected him to be?”
“I guess he was.” Greg’s lips thinned. “But you have to remember this, Colonel. I’d been dealing in make-believe. Now for a real hundred per cent Rover-boy like me, just a lick of reality can be terribly uncomfortable and disturbing. To say nothing of the fact that Rover-boy managed to put his wife as well as himself into a very dangerous situation, where they not only became a source of acute embarrassment to their country’s representative, but had to be rescued by him as well. So you see, Colonel, the joke’s now over. My wife’s a very tolerant woman. She hasn’t said ‘I told you so’, and she won’t. But I have a bad conscience and she knows it. I think she’d like me to do something about that. So, that’s what I’m trying to do.”
The Colonel sneered. “I see. You’d like to wash your hands of the whole thing, and make believe none of it ever happened.”
“Yes, that’s about the size of it, I guess. More make-believe, as you say. Well, maybe that won’t work, but there are some things I can do.”
“Like having yourself deported? What would that accomplish?”
“One thing. It would put Tan back right where he started. Originally, he couldn’t move those arms from Manila because of some legal snag, or so he said. I’m his sole authorised agent. If I’m expelled from here, I can’t sign them out of bond or transfer ownership. That means he can’t move the arms from Singapore because of a legal snag. So he’s back where he was before I came along, and those arms are back behind the eight ball. He can’t take legal action against me because the circumstances are beyond my control. He can have his cheque for a thousand dollars back. Finish.”
The Colonel looked perplexed. “I see your point, but, my dear fellow, you’re not seriously asking me to have you deported, are you?”
“I am.”
“I’m not Himmler, you know. I’d have to justify such a request, and I don’t see how I could.”
“Why not? You said yourself that a complaint from the Indonesian Government could do the trick. I bet there’s one on the way right now.”
“If what you say about General Iskaq is true, I should think that extremely unlikely. He’d have to send his complaint through Medan and that’d mean he’d have to answer a lot of awkward questions first.” He shook his head. “No, I’m afraid it won’t do. If that’s your idea of washing your hands, you can forget about it.”
“Well, thanks for listening.”
The Colonel glanced at his watch. “I’ll have to be off.” He hesitated. “Of course, it’s none of my business really, but I can’t help thinking that you’re being a bit hard on yourself, Nilsen.”
“Yes?”
“And on one or two other people as well.”
“Including Tan?” Greg asked sarcastically.
“I wasn’t thinking of him. You see,” the Colonel went on thoughtfully, “I’m something of a prig myself, too, on occasions, so I can understand how you feel. But one thing I have noticed. When all the hand-washing, clean-slate stuff begins, it usually has the effect of landing someone else in the soup. Funny thing, moral indignation.”
Greg said nothing.
“This idea of yours, for instance.” The Colonel broke off to murmur something in Malay to a passing waiter. “It wasn’t such a bad idea really, selling Communist supplies to anti-Communist forces, hoisting them with their own petards or whatever the phrase is. Not bad at all.”
“Maybe. If they really had been Communist supplies.”
“They were that, all right.”
“You don’t mean to say you believe that story of Tan’s about collateral for a debt?”
“No, but I had one of my chaps take a closer look at the stuff. The types of weapons, the manufacturers, the ammunition batch numbers, the quantities—it all corresponds to a very familiar pattern.”
“What pattern?”
“Terrorist arms cache. That’s exactly the kind of parcel the Chinese were shoving across the Thai border into Malaya four or five years ago. Couldn’t mistake it.”
“Where did Tan get it then?”
“How should I know? Probably stole it. Does it matter?”
“No, except that, if he did, that makes me a receiver of stolen goods as well.”
The Colonel sighed. “As well as what, my dear fellow? Of what other crimes against God or man are you accusing yourself?”
“Arrogance, ignorance, stupidity, and trying to make a fast buck out of men trying to kill one another. Will that do for the moment?”
The waiter put down two stengahs in front of them.
“As I doubt if I shall reach my hostess in time to be offered a drink before dinner, this is just a precaution,” the Colonel explained. “After all the breast-beating you’ve been doing, you could probably use one, too.”
Greg was silent.
The Colonel drank half the contents of his glass, and then dabbed his lips with a black silk handkerchief. “Nowadays,” he said, “we don’t hear the phrase ‘merchants of death’ very much. It’s all very sad. The idea that the act of selling arms somehow tricked people into making wars they didn’t want never really stood up to very close inspection, did it? But it was good to have a fine, top-hatted bogy-man to put all the blame on. The trouble is we’ve learned a thing or two since nineteen-thirty-nine. Now, we can’t even blame the politicians—not with much conviction anyway. The real bogy-man crawled out of the mud with our ancestors millions of years ago. Well, we all have a piece of him, and when we start to put the pieces together it’s like one of those nuclear fission things—when the mass reaches a critical point a chain reaction starts and, poof!”
Greg raised his eyebrows. “I always thought there was a standard justification for any sort of illicit peddling, whether it was in drugs, smut or arms. ‘If I don’t, somebody else will.’ Isn’t yours a bit new?”
“I wasn’t talking about illicit peddling,” the Colonel replied huffily; “and I wasn’t attempting to justify anything. I was merely trying to correct your rather muddled view of your obligations at this moment. Selling arms or selling the wherewithal to make them—what’s the difference? What does your Government do with the die-castings you make for them—feed the hungry or put them into ballistic missiles?”
“The United States Government isn’t selling arms for profit.”
“I must remember that when the nuclear war starts. It’ll be a great comfort.”
Greg’s temper was beginning to fray at the edges. “As I said before, Colonel, you change hats rather easily. Which one are you wearing at the moment?”
“Major Sutan’s, probably.”
Greg looked at him, startled.
The Colonel picked up his drink and examined it dubiously. “Of course,” he said slowly, “you’ve had a trying time, a surprise or two, and not very much sleep. Apt to warp a man’s judgment, those things. Same as a hangover. Alcoholic remorse and all that.” He looked up with a small smile.
“What are you getting at, Colonel?”
“Well now. Let’s suppose I’m Sutan. Rightly or wrongly, I’m buying arms with which to fight for something—freedom, power, social justice or one of the other delusions. You offer to sell me arms and I accept your offer. We’re both men of good faith, eh? I give you a cheque and then something unforeseen happens. As a result, I and my friends have a choice. We can wash our hands of you and your wife and leave you both to rot, or we can, at some cost to ourselves, see that you go free. It’s not an easy choice, but we decide in your favour, and you go free. To show your appreciation, you promptly call the deal we’ve made off, and try and arrange things so that nobody else can call it on again. How does that sound to you?”
Greg sighed. “As it was in
tended to sound, of course. However, the facts are a bit different.”
“I’m sure they are. But you began by asking for advice. Then you asked me to help you. I couldn’t do that, so perhaps you’ll accept some advice after all. It’s not your conscience that’s troubling you, Mr. Nilsen, but a slight injury to your self-esteem. Officially, I’m not particularly interested now either in you or in what happens to those arms. Unofficially though, I would suggest that you do something about recovering your sense of humour.”
“So that I can laughingly go ahead with the deal as planned?”
“Oh, I’ve no doubt you’ll find a way of penalising yourself in the process, like sending that thousand dollar cheque back to Tan.” He got to his feet. “I really must be going now. I think I’ll let you pay for my drink.”
“Good-bye, Colonel.”
The Colonel hesitated, then sat down again. “I don’t like to leave you in this despondent mood,” he said. “If it’s laughter you need, it’s just possible that I may be able to help you.”
“I’ll stop you if I’ve heard it.”
The Colonel ignored the remark. “What was your arrangement with Tan in Manila about payment?” he asked. “What were you to do with the money from Lukey?”
“Pay it into the Merchants’ Security Bank here for the credit of his account.”
“Was anything particular said about what you were to do if you received the money in cash?”
“No. Why? I seem to be missing the point of this story, Colonel. You know, I doubt very much if we laugh at the same things.”
“Hov/ about poetic justice? That can sometimes be quite entertaining, can’t it?”
“Oh, sure.”
“Well, your Mr. Tan in Manila wasn’t what you might call frank with you, was he? Don’t you think you’re entitled to a little joke at his expense?”
“What sort of joke?”
“You could give Tan Yam Heng here the money to bank for his brother.”
“And give him a chance to take his double commission after all? Is that the idea ?”
The Colonel pursed his lips. “Something like that. Of course, you’d make the fellow give you a receipt in duplicate for the full amount. Keep one copy for yourself, send the other to Manila.”
