Quiller's Run

by Adam Hall

  Katie was standing up too and I took her arm and she went with me between the little tables and the hawkers’ stalls and the trunks of the trees, neither of us saying anything. Of course I was making a big deal of it in my mind because of the security situation but in point of fact the whole thing had happened so fast that no one had actually seen the details; all they’d seen was a man standing up from his chair and accidentally knocking some fruit out of a hawker’s hands. But the rule is to get away, fade, leave as little as possible in people’s memory. Creating a scene is not terribly good cover.

  We stopped to talk for a moment under a magnolia tree at the edge of the park.

  ‘Is that the most help I can be?’ Katie asked me. ‘Just to get information?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Her eyes didn’t leave my face. I had the thought that she wanted to catch the memory of what I looked like in case she never saw me again.

  ‘I was watching the crowd,’ she said, ‘behind you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I don’t want them to find you again.’

  ‘Maybe they won’t.’

  The woman in the chongsam was just at the edge of my field of vision, a blob of colour in the distance.

  ‘I’ll think of someone,’ Katie said, ‘who can tell you about Mariko Shoda. That’s what you need most of all, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A good source of information,’ Katie said in a moment, ‘would be Johnny Chen.’

  ‘How much can I trust him?’

  ‘All the way.’ She wrote on a slip of paper and gave it to me. ‘You can find him there.’

  ‘All right. I’ll phone you as soon as I can.’

  ‘I don’t know where I’ll be.’ If I gave her the number of the Red Orchid there was a risk; she wasn’t trained. ‘I’ll phone you at the High Commission tomorrow.’

  ‘All right. And take this.’ She wrote on an official card. ‘That’s my flat, in Victoria Street. I’ll be home all evening.’

  I got her a cyclo.

  ‘You’re not coming with me?’

  ‘I’ll walk. It’s the other way.’

  She touched my arm. ‘Martin, you already know how dangerous Mariko Shoda is, so shouldn’t you just call it a day?’

  ‘I’m committed.’

  She compressed her lips. ‘I see.’

  When the cyclo started off she looked back once, but didn’t wave.

  I began walking, and after ten minutes the woman in the chongsam was still with me, and after an hour there were two of them and I used right angles, windows, crowds, cabs and any kind of cover that would give me five seconds and a vanishing point, but I couldn’t lose them, and at the end of another hour there were three, so it hadn’t just been nerves, not just nerves.

  CHAPTER 7

  JOHNNY CHEN

  Who are you?’ I didn’t move. ‘My name’s Jordan.’

  Lamplight fell slanting across the rough timber wall.

  ‘What do you want here?’

  I couldn’t see him. He was behind me.

  ‘Some information.’

  ‘But why come here?’ He dug into the psoas muscle.

  ‘Katie sent me.’

  ‘Sent you?’

  ‘She told me where to find you.’

  The balcony was thirty feet up and there was nothing I could do anyway. By his tone he wasn’t playing.

  ‘What name did she tell you?’

  ‘Johnny Chen.’

  He began whistling softly, no actual tune.

  My face was still bleeding from the flying glass.

  ‘Open the door.’

  I turned the loose brass handle.

  There was a low light in the room, and a smell I couldn’t identity, a chemical smell.

  He patted me down. ‘Get over there, face to the wall.’

  Crates everywhere, crates and rope and a cluster of jade vases, a Buddha. The light brightened as he switched another lamp on. Pictures of aeroplanes on the wall, photos of crashes.

  He was dialling.

  Perhaps I’d got it wrong, or she’d got it wrong, and I wouldn’t be able to trust him, or trust her. This wasn’t Bureau. Feeling my way through the dark.

  The blood itched on my face. It had taken me another two hours, nearly till sundown, to shake the tags, and even then it had needed luck: I’d gone into an office block and gained enough time to get round a corner and wait. It had worried him, this particular tag, and he was running flat out, his rubber-soled track shoes squeaking on the marble floor like a bird chirping, and when I tripped him he span in a twisting arc and smashed through the glass door like a bomb, fragments flying. It was luck because they hadn’t had time to cover the rear entrance.

  ‘Johnny. Look, there’s a guy here says his name is Jordan.’

  American accent, Oriental intonation.

  ‘So why didn’t you call me to say?’

  Someone gave a sigh, or a yawn, not Chen. I wanted to stop the itching but he wouldn’t like it if I moved. He wouldn’t have put the gun down yet.

  ‘I was in Laos.’ He raised his voice. ‘Okay, turn around.’

  He was sitting in a bamboo chair with his flying-boots crossed on a table, half desk, half table, the gun on his lap. ‘What’s he look like?’

  I took in what I could, a low divan with rumpled clothes in the shadowed corner, more crates, bamboo furniture, mostly chairs, some cheap handmade rugs. It was a cavernous place, a warehouse, only two doors, no windows.

  ‘Let’s have a snort!’

  It was by the river, with the river smell mingling with the chemicals. Unrefined opium, at a guess.

  ‘Okay. But Katie, don’t ever send anybody here without talking to me first. But you’re beautiful.’ He put the gun onto the table and sat upright. ‘Sure, see you around.’

  He rang off and threw me a packet of cigarettes and I caught it and threw it back. ‘Trying to kick it? Sit down, Jordan.’

  I took a chair near him. He was a full Chinese, scarecrow-thin, close-cropped hair beginning to grey at the temples, a weathered face, something wrong with one ear. ‘Tsou-k’ai . Pieh ch’ao wo.’

  The blankets on the divan moved and a naked woman rolled over and then stood up in the lamplight, ivory-skinned, tiny breasts, jet black pubic hair, walking to the inner door with her knees uncertain, like a young colt taking its first steps. She closed the door.

  ‘She was starving,’ Chen said. ‘Pick ‘em up for nothing.’ He lit a black cigarette with a gold tip from the packet. ‘So what’s the story, Jordan?”

  I told him I was with Laker Foundry, and about the leak.

  ”Let’s have a snort?

  Parrot.

  ‘So what precise information do you want?’

  ‘I need to know as much as possible about Mariko Shoda.’

  He gave me a dead stare. ‘Mariko Shoda…’ Smoke drifted under the lamp. ‘Jesus Christ.’

  A cistern flushed behind the wall. ‘Katie said you could tell me something about her.’

  ‘Mariko Shoda…’ He got out of the chair, tall for a Chinese, walking like a cat, crouched a little, eyes on the floor, thinking. ‘What did Katie tell you about me, Jordan?’

  ‘That you run a small freighter service and know your way around the southeast.’

  He nodded, straightening up, looking around the walls. ‘Sure. I fly everywhere. I flew with the Yanks in ‘Nam, made good money - this is me here, come and have a look, my whole life history.’ He went on talking while he showed me the photographs, four of them of light plane wrecks with Chen standing on the top with a big grin and his arm in a sling or a pair of crutches under him. ‘What I’m doing now is kinda worse than those days in ‘Nam, because you’re strictly on your own and the name of the game is Russian roulette, you’re due in at an illegal airstrip somewhere up there in Burma or maybe Laos and it’s night and all they can give you is a couple of flares this end of the strip and it’s thick jungle, Jesus, and maybe you’re down to the last sniff of gas
, even in the auxiliary tank, which is often just a waterbed inside the cabin with you, a potential fireball if you crash - and sometimes you’re not sure the strip is still in friendly hands and you can go down into machine-gun crossfire, that’s happened to me twice, look at this old crate, see the holes? But even if the strip is still friendly you can hit bumps or misjudge the flares or whatever, and there’s a gentlemen’s agreement - you’re a helluva long way from any kind of medical aid out there so if you’re trapped in the wreckage or it’s on fire they just put a bullet in your head, like you do with horses.’

  He led me back to the desk and we sat down. ‘You use a drink?’

  ‘Not just now.’

  ‘So what happened to your face?’

  ‘New blade.’

  He laughed in his throat. ‘You want to go clean up?’

  ‘In a minute.’

  ‘She’s not still in the bathroom. So you want some information on -‘

  The telephone rang and he picked it up. ‘At first light. Sure, if you can. What’s going to be the ceiling over the coast?’ He listened and then said, ‘Hell, no, I’m not putting down anywhere, they just hung another bunch of guys over there, did you hear about that?’ He listened again and asked for an updated met report and rang off. ‘I don’t ever do any trading, see, I’m just a transporter, I never take possession — that stuff over there is waiting for shipment, and anyway most of the freight I hump isn’t drugs, it’s arms.’ He got out of the chair. ‘C’mon and take a look.’ A nail screamed as he levered one of the crates open and showed me neat rows of ammunition, perfectly stacked, the steel and copper glowing in the light. ‘It’s .223, 7.62, 9mm. Nothing to write home about in this batch; the more interesting stuff’s in the other crates but I don’t want to break the seals. Semi-automatics and some fully-auto calibre .50s, mostly Belgian, and some very nice riflescopes from Hungary. And some inserts’ - he kicked a crate with his ripped leather flying-boot - ‘put them in a shotgun and you can feed it with 9mm or .223 ammo, just the trick for your trigger-happy anti-communist citizens up north around Phnom Penh or Saravane. You want any stuff like that for trading on the side, you know where to find it.’ He went back to the desk again. ‘Then there’s other stuff that’s worth shipping around; bit of gold, gems, things like that, cut a small profit when you can. You want some coffee, Jordan?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Jesus, you must have some very interesting secret vices.’ He lit another cigarette. ‘So you want some information on Little Kiss-of-Steel. Well I guess I don’t have much but maybe it’s more than most people do.’ He blew out smoke. ‘She’s still only twenty-one, Cambodian, no bigger than this kid in here you saw just now, lives very simply and controls maybe forty, fifty million US dollars’ worth of business every year, half in drugs, half in armaments. People who regard her as a friend give her presents - an apartment in London or Paris or New York or Tokyo or a palace in Rangoon, or maybe a yacht off Khiri Khan or a shipment of diamonds from South Africa. People who regard her as an enemy also give her presents, to calm her down - a permanent suite at the Manila Mandarin, gold ingots from Pakistan with her name carved on them or a fleet of limousines. She moves around in privacy, using her own 727 and going through the VIP lounge with dark glasses on and a dozen bodyguards to keep people away, because she doesn’t like being photographed.’

  He got up again and unlocked the drawer of a massive Japanese lacquered cabinet across the room and came back with an eight-by-ten photograph and gave it to me. ‘Rather a lot of grain, but the best I could do.’

  I turned it in the light. ‘This is Mariko Shoda?’

  ‘That is Mariko Shoda.’ He sat down, leaning his arms on his knees, dropping ash. ‘I was in transit in Saigon and I happened to know she was coming in, so I took a chance and hung around while my crate was being refuelled, and I was lucky, if that’s what we’re going to call it. She came out of her 727 without her dark glasses on and I had a zoom lens ready and bingo, isn’t she pretty?’

  The grain was so bad that I had to hold the picture at arm’s length to smooth out the dots. It was an arresting face, yes, high cheekbones and large eyes, black hair cut like a boy’s. Her head was half-turned as if she suspected someone was watching.

  ‘What was the distance, Johnny?’

  ‘Two or three hundred yards. But whenever she lands anywhere, see, she not only has a whole bunch of bodyguards close around her - they’re all women, by the way - but she has a whole lot more waiting around the area, placed there before she arrives. One of them saw me take the picture. I didn’t know that, but I wasn’t taking any chances either so I mailed the film for processing right there at the airport.’ He shrugged. ‘They got me that night, on the street. I still had the camera and they pulled it open and took the film that was in it - no problem, it was a new one, blank - and smashed the camera and then worked me over.’ He tugged one of his earlobes. ‘This is my own, but the left one’s a prosthesis they stuck on for me at the hospital. I hear Shoda very clearly with it - no photographs, please.’ He took the picture and said on his way to the cabinet, ‘I can let you have another print, Jordan, if you want one. Nice pinup.’ He locked the drawer again and came back. ‘But tell me something - are you going to try getting near that gal?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  He pursed his mouth. ‘That could be difficult. She’d have to want a meeting, and even then you should maybe think twice. She has all these bodyguards, but she does her own thing a lot of the time. People always tell me the same tiling about Little Kiss-of-Steel - don’t stand too close, and above all don’t touch. And she’s very spiritual - she always prays for you before she kills. Of course, she may take a shine to you, but even then I’d be careful. She has a keen sense of the priorities, like the praying mantis.’

  The phone was ringing and he picked it up and spoke in Hokkein, which I didn’t understand. I got up and went to look at the stuff on the wall: photographs, pinups, philosophical maxims - There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots — some faded lading bills with customs franking, a woman’s black lace glove and a dried monkey’s head and a Player’s cigarette packet with what looked like a bullet-hole through it and a lock of black hair in a blue ribbon. I wanted to know as much about him as possible, and particularly why he’d met me with a gun in my back and ten minutes later had shown me around the place without even telling me to keep my mouth shut. Did he trust Katie that much?

  ‘The way Shoda works,’ he was saying, putting the phone down and coming over, ‘is something quite remarkable. She never goes out to public places like restaurants, and when she has to visit somebody downtown, the most anyone sees of her is between the limo and the building, dark glasses and bodyguards and the whole bit - and those bodyguards are kind of cute too; have you heard of the Kunoichi?’

  I said I hadn’t.

  ‘It’s the deadly sisterhood of the Ninja, originally Japanese. Like the geishas, they were trained in singing and entertaining, see, so they could get access into the household of an enemy warlord, and just when he’d gotten her nice and cosy in his arms he’d end up with an icepick through the ear into the brain - one of their favourite tricks, in my language the ssu chieh wen - the kiss of death. You know something? I was in Phnom Penh maybe around six months -‘

  A beeper sounded and he broke off at once and went to the desk and picked up his gun. ‘You just stay there, Jordan, I’ll be right back.’

  He went out through the door where the girl had gone, not the one where he’d brought me in at gunpoint. So this was the alarm I’d tripped on my way up the outside staircase, and there must be another one covering the entrance he was going to check on now. I was tempted to get out of my chair and take a look at the crates and the other two desks and the Japanese cabinet but I stayed where I was because I didn’t know this man yet, and I didn’t know if he’d simply asked the girl beforehand to trigger the beeper and give him an excuse to leave the room so that he c
ould see what I did while he was gone. I hadn’t got access yet, the most vital phase of the mission, access to Shoda, and maybe he could give it to me.

  He came back through the same door and went to the desk and dropped a small chamois bag onto it, using a key on the padlock. ‘Chu-Chu!’ The key stuck and he had to worry it. ‘Chu-Chu, c’mon in here!’

  She was wearing a cheap cotton shift now, and looked younger than ever, glancing at me and standing awkwardly in the middle of the room, watching Chen.

  ‘Hold out your hand, sweetheart.’ He opened his own, palm upwards. ”Hand — this thing, right?’

  She obeyed him hesitantly, and he fished in the leather bag and dropped a ruby onto her palm. ‘A present, okay? Worth a thousand dollars, maybe more.’ He stood over her, pleased with himself, with her, with his gift. ‘You’re my thousand dollar baby.’ She gazed steadily at the gem; it was cut, polished and glimmering on her palm, and I sensed the uncertainty in Johnny Chen now: he’d ‘picked her up for peanuts’, probably from a refugee camp on the Cambodian border or from parents who needed food for themselves more than a daughter’s mouth to feed, and now she was his, Johnny Chen’s, but he didn’t know how to get through to her. Perhaps on an impulse he’d taken over a life, and wasn’t sure what to do with it.

  ‘Present, Chu-Chu. Present.’ He circled his hands, awkwardly. ‘Means I love you.’ He kissed her on the brow and touched her cheek and came away. ‘You can stay here now,’ gesturing to the divan. ‘Chu-Chu stay, okay?’

  She walked away with the gem held out in front of her, gazing down at its colour; I was aware of the softness of the nape of her neck, the back of her knees.

  ‘Okay, she’s just a kid,’ Chen said defensively. ‘But kids like her get raped every day over there, up at the borders, in the villages. She doesn’t get raped, she gets loved, okay?’

  ‘I can see that.’