Forever and a Death

by Donald E. Westlake

  But could the man seriously harbor a grudge? Was that even possible? It seemed to Ha that it was not possible, though the people he was on his way to see would try to convince him otherwise.

  Well, he thought, either they will convince me after all or I will have at the very least had an excellent lunch at the Peninsula.

  2

  Kim found the Peninsula Hotel astonishing, and she’d found it so even before she’d first seen it. When the four of them arrived yesterday at Hong Kong International Airport, a uniformed chauffeur had been there, holding up a sign with fairchild printed on it. He had led them to a white Rolls Royce sent by the hotel to pick them up. The hotel, it seemed, kept a fleet of these white Rolls Royces for the use of its guests. That was the first astonishment.

  Then there was the hotel itself, an imposing C-shaped structure, ten stories tall, with a newer twenty-story addition above the central part. Fountains splashed in front, the doormen wore white uniforms, and the lobby was huge, all gold and white, colonnaded, columned and corniced. A string quartet played Mozart, and clumps of package-tour travelers with nametags and identical shoulderbags and harried expressions, who would have cluttered and dominated most settings, here seemed to be swallowed and muted by these vast dignified spaces.

  And now the suites. It had been decided, mostly by Andre Brevizin, consulted via long-distance telephone call, but with Inspector Fairchild in full agreement, that a show of luxury would make them more credible to the Hong Kong police. “It is a city centered on the acquisition of money,” Brevizin had said. “You’ll never be listened to there if you look poor.”

  So here they were in suites, the inspector in one, Luther and George and Kim in another, across the hall. Brevizin was covering the cost of the inspector’s suite, while Luther had made one more international phone call and then told George and Kim, “It’s all right. My father will pay.” George had tried to argue, but Luther had smiled his now-sad smile and said, “No, don’t worry. It’s good for him sometimes to pay.”

  Their suites were in the new tall addition, so they had views out over the nearby buildings. Inspector Fairchild had what was considered the better view, south toward Hong Kong Island across the harbor, but Kim found the northern view over Kowloon and the New Territories endlessly fascinating, a colorful gaudy jumble like a really complex jigsaw puzzle in which you had to study every piece for a good long time.

  When, that is, she could bear to look away from the suite itself. The wide central room was luxuriously furnished in deep blue, gold and ivory, and contained a full bar. One part of the room was a kind of office, with a fax machine and an elaborately furnished desk. Chinese prints on the walls and some Chinese pieces of furniture reminded you where you were. Off the main room, to left and right, were large bedrooms, also with spectacular views, and marble bathrooms with Jacuzzis. Kim moved between these rooms in a happy daze. She was a long way from Planetwatch III.

  Luther’s father, whether he knew it or not, had also treated them all to a wonderful dinner last night, downstairs at Gaddi’s, one of the hotel’s three terrific restaurants, and she and George had then slept in cool quiet on their giant bed, the jeweled lights of Kowloon outside making a muted rainbow of the room, and they inside it. Her ribs felt almost healed by now; making love was no longer a problem in engineering.

  * * *

  When the phone rang, the ornate clock over the bar in the living room read exactly one o’clock. “He’s prompt, this inspector,” George said.

  The three of them had been sitting here in the living room waiting, George reading another of his paperback thrillers, Kim looking out at the colorful city below, Luther just staring at his hands and quietly thinking.

  And then the phone rang. Luther answered, murmured a bit, then hung up and said, “It’s time.”

  Kim had decided to dress for maturity at this meeting, so this morning she’d gone to one of the hotel shops and bought a very plain just-above-the-knee dark blue skirt, black pumps, and a short-sleeved white blouse with a ruffle at the throat, charging it all to the room, which was to say, Luther’s father once more. She felt more than her usual self-confidence as the three of them trooped across the hall to the other suite. They had invited the inspector to meet them here to avoid the distractions and lack of security of a restaurant and also to emphasize the luxury just a bit.

  Hotel staff had set up an elaborate round table for them by the windows, with Hong Kong Island gleaming over there like cutlery in a drainboard. The table was covered in white linen, the service was all white and gold, and two white-uniformed, white-gloved waiters seated them, with Inspector Ha facing the view most directly.

  The inspector was a little man who seemed to Kim quite wrong for the part. Inside a very serious and distinguished dark blue uniform decorated with much insignia and braid was someone who looked like he might be a messenger or a pushcart vendor. I wonder, Kim thought, if he can see past our appearances, our uniforms. And whether he’ll see past Richard Curtis’s.

  Wine was poured, sparkling water was poured, small plates of delicious food were presented, and the two waiters retired behind the bar, handy if needed but out of earshot of the conversation at the table.

  Inspector Ha said, “My friend Wai Fung in Singapore tells me you intend to alarm me.”

  Fairchild said, “It seems only fair. You shouldn’t be the only one in the room not alarmed. The danger is to your city, after all.”

  Inspector Ha said, “Wai Fung was vague about the threat, but promised you would all be more specific.”

  Fairchild said, “You explain it, George,” and George did, describing briefly the work he’d done for Richard Curtis on Kanowit Island, and that Curtis had told George he would be using the method, the soliton, again in a larger way, in a dangerous and illegal way, and that he would get a lot of gold by doing it. When he finished, Fairchild said, “We don’t know exactly where he intends to pull this off, but when last heard from, he seemed to be headed in this direction.”

  “There’s no record of his having entered Hong Kong recently,” Inspector Ha said, “I checked on that this morning.”

  Luther said, “There wouldn’t be. He’s trying to keep his skirts clean.”

  With a gesture at the windows, Fairchild said, “We think he’s probably on one of those boats out there. One yacht out of a hundred, five hundred.”

  George said, “As for where he’ll do it, this is a very specific technique, it isn’t something that can be done just anywhere. It needs a combination of landfill and tunnels.”

  Inspector Ha put down his fork and leaned back in his chair. To Kim, he looked grayer.

  Fairchild said, “You know his target.”

  Inspector Ha nodded at the windows. “Hong Kong Island has been added to and added to. The island used to end far back at Queens Road. Just about everything you’re looking at on the flats is reclaimed land.”

  They all looked at the gleaming towers, and Kim remembered the great bruise of water thundering at her from Kanowit. She suddenly felt cold.

  George said, very quietly, “Inspector, you’re using the wrong word.”

  “What word?”

  “Reclaimed,” George said. “Everyone likes to talk about reclaimed land. ‘The new airport is on reclaimed land.’ It’s a wonderfully solid word, but it is a distraction.”

  Ha said, “From what?”

  “The Dutch reclaim land,” George said. “They build dikes, and force the sea back, and the lands they find are called polders. They’re solid and real, the same lands they always were except they used to have water on them.”

  He waved a hand toward the window. “That isn’t reclaimed. It’s landfill.”

  Inspector Ha said, “Reclaimed is more…dignified.”

  “But landfill is what it is,” George insisted. “Inherently unstable, never quite solid. And now I suppose you’ll tell me there are tunnels under there.”

  “Yes, of course,” the inspector said.

  Fai
rchild said, “What are they? A subway line, something like that?”

  “No no,” Inspector Ha said, “many tunnels. In Hong Kong, as you know, air-conditioning is a necessity. The most efficient and inexpensive way to cool those buildings over there is with water from the harbor. There’s a tunnel from the seawall in to almost every one of those buildings. The longest is to the Bank of Hong Kong, at three hundred yards.”

  “Three football fields,” George said. “But those would be pipes, not tunnels.”

  “Pipes in tunnels,” Inspector Ha said. “The pipes have to be maintained. There are design differences from building to building, but the basic structure is a tunnel of concrete ten to fifteen feet in diameter, with three separate foot-wide pipes in it, one to bring water in, one to bring it out, and the third as standby.” Frowning at George, he said, “But you suggested these tunnels, for this soliton thing to work, have to be interconnected. The air-conditioning tunnels are sealed from one another, going only from the seawall to one specific building.”

  “But,” George said, “they won’t be far from one another. At night, a crew could make side tunnels, and then conceal them again.”

  Fairchild said, “Inspector, how deep underground are these tunnels?”

  “Fifty feet.”

  “And the bank vaults, how deep are they?”

  “Usually, about the same.”

  Fairchild said, “That’s what he plans to do, then. Steal as much gold as he can lay his hands on, probably out of the Bank of China, open up the cross tunnels, flood them, set off the soliton.”

  Inspector Ha said, “But that would be— That isn’t theft, that’s mass murder!”

  George said, “At the end of it there won’t be any evidence.” He gestured again at the windows. “Everything you see out there,” he said, “will fall into the harbor, turn into mud and debris. No one will know what if anything was stolen. No one will know what happened or how it happened, or who was responsible.”

  Inspector Ha digested this. “I am not convinced.”

  Fairchild said, “I understand how you feel. But we know Curtis plans to use this thing, we know he’s killed at least one person to cover his tracks and tried to kill these two here, and we know his anger is aimed at Hong Kong.”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt Mr. Curtis’s intent,” Inspector Ha said. “I can see that he has the motive and I accept that he has the means. But what of the opportunity? Strangers can’t merely wander around in those tunnels, you know. The construction job you’re suggesting, digging cross tunnels, breaking into bank vaults, couldn’t be done without somebody noticing.”

  “We don’t know how he plans to do it,” Fairchild said, “but we are certain sure he does intend to.”

  “There’s one way I can think of he might do it,” George said. “Curtis is in construction, that’s his primary business. In Hong Kong, there’s so little space, even with all the landfill—all the reclaimed land—that buildings are constantly being torn down so new ones can be built. Fifteen-, twenty-year-old buildings are demolished. Right now, there are probably twenty construction sites over there.”

  “More,” Inspector Ha said.

  “What if one of them belongs to Curtis?” George asked him. “Through a dummy corporation, a dummy name. It would look as though he’s building upward, like everybody else, but secretly he’d be burrowing down.”

  Luther said, “Maybe he has Jackie Tian fronting him.”

  Inspector Ha looked alert. “Jackie Tian? What does he have to do with Richard Curtis?”

  “Two weeks ago,” Luther told him, “he visited Curtis in Singapore. A friend of ours—now disappeared—who works for Curtis, saw a fax from Tian to Curtis saying a diver they were going to use had been arrested and they’d have to find another.”

  Martin Ha got to his feet and walked around the table to stand and look out the window. Kim was surprised to see that he stood straighter now, he seemed to fit the uniform better. Looking away from them, out toward the view, he said, “I must tell Wai Fung you’ve succeeded. I am alarmed.”

  3

  For Luther, the last few days had been muffled, without resonance, like a pistol shot in a padded room. Or as though his brain and all his senses were in that padded room. Nothing came through to him with much impact or clarity. It was as though he watched the world now on a television monitor, listened to it through a not-very-good sound system.

  He still went through the motions. He thought about the problem of Richard Curtis, he took care of his own needs, he responded quite normally to Kim and George and the others, but it was all simple momentum, nothing else. He went through these motions because there was no way to stop them, short of death, and he didn’t much feel like death right now; it would simply be the state he was already in, intensified.

  He supposed he grieved for Jerry, but even that was muffled. He couldn’t find in himself much enthusiasm for revenge or justice, though he continued to trudge along with the others in Curtis’s wake. What he was realizing, and even that slowly and without much force, was that in grieving for Jerry he was grieving for a part of himself. Jerry had been his id, the outward expression of all those emotions and instant reactions that Luther had never quite managed to feel or express on his own. Without Jerry, he was merely the cool and amiable somnambulist he used to be, but now with the added memory of there having been once a Jerry.

  He wondered what would become of him now. He was done with Planetwatch, of course, that had merely been the place Jerry had led him. None of the previous scenes of his life seemed worth repeating, but what else was there? He might even go back to Germany, ignore his father, live one way or another on his own. Not that it mattered.

  It might be interesting, in fact, to stay here in Hong Kong, particularly if they didn’t after all manage to thwart Curtis. To stay at the Peninsula—switching to a Hong Kong view room, of course—to sit in a comfortable chair by the window, and to watch the towers across the way begin to tremble, to shudder, then to fall to their knees, window panes snapping out into the air like frightened hawks, walls dropping away, floors tilting, desks and filing cabinets and people sliding out into the world, then to feel the power ripple in this direction across the harbor, to see it come like a ghost in the water, to feel it tug at the landfill on this side, the buildings swaying, the yachts and junks and huge cargo ships all foundering and failing and staring with one last despairing gaze at the sky, then the harbor boiling, this very building bending down to kiss the sea…

  What a spectacular sight. Who would want to look at anything else after that?

  Well, yes, that was possible. In the meantime, though, the effort was still being made to save that city over there, and all its people, and all its gold, and all the many ships in the harbor. Inspector Ha was on the telephone, talking to assistants, making plans. Soon, they would all go inspect one of the air-conditioning tunnels.

  That would be interesting.

  * * *

  The last part was a metal staircase down through a conical concrete tube slanting through the earth beneath the bank. The elevator only descended so far.

  Luther was at the back of the pack of seven descending toward the tunnel. The bank building’s head of security was first, in his tan uniform and Sam Browne belt, then the building’s operations manager in white shirt and hardhat, then Inspector Ha, Tony Fairchild, Kim, and George. Luther preferred being last, it meant he didn’t have to wonder what expression, if any, was on his face.

  The tunnel was a roughly circular concrete tube, twelve feet across, with a flat metal floor. The three water pipes, gray plastic, a foot in diameter each, were above their heads, filling the upper curve. Electric lights in translucent white plastic shields were spaced at long intervals on the walls, alternating left and right and giving just enough illumination to move around.

  To the right, the tunnel ended in seven or eight feet at a blank concrete wall, just beyond where the three pipes bent upward and out of sight. To the left, the tun
nel was absolutely straight, the distance vague and difficult to see.

  The security chief and building manager and Inspector Ha all had flashlights, and they now played them on the walls to both sides as the group moved slowly forward, toward the seawall. Inspector Ha had told the building people only that information had been received that a potential breach of the tunnel was being planned by people whose ultimate goal was the bank vault, which was just a foot or so through the wall to their left at the point where they started their inspection. The security chief had said that kind of attack was impossible, they had motion sensors, not for the tunnel but certainly for the vault, but Inspector Ha had explained that all tips from normally credible sources had to be looked into, and he personally would at least like to know what the tunnel looked like, so here they all were.

  There wasn’t much conversation once they began, moving forward very slowly, playing the light over the curve of the walls, one or another of them occasionally moving closer to study a section. The wall was pitted concrete, and took the light with many tiny black shadows, like a moonscape, so it had to be stared at very closely before you could be sure exactly what you were seeing.

  Luther trailed the others. The air was cool but slightly dank, probably because of the water streaming through two of the pipes overhead. It made him think of the family’s tomb in the cemetery outside Dusseldorf, where five generations of Rickendorfs and their spouses were stowed away in stone drawers, or the cremated ones in urns on an ornate stone shelf. There had been family occasions, mostly church-related, when the whole family had driven out to visit the cemetery, when Luther was much younger and his grandparents still alive, but those customs had fallen into disuse now. It used to amuse him to think of presenting Jerry’s body to the family for storage in the tomb in the drawer beneath the one reserved for himself; now, when he remembered that, he could only think: No, no one will visit Jerry’s grave, ever.