Dragonfire

by Bill Pronzini

  “May I help you?”

  “Yes. My name is Andrew James. I’d like to see Mr. Emerson, please.”

  “I’m afraid he’s not in. Hell be at our Peninsula plant all day. Was it a business matter?”

  “More or less. How about Mr. Bexley? Is he in?”

  “No, you just missed him. He left not more than three minutes ago.”

  “Big fellow wearing a three-piece suit and a hand-painted tie?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “We bumped into each other out at the elevators,” I said. “We’ve never met, though, so I didn’t know who he was.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well—is Mr. Tedescu available?”

  “He’s in his office, yes, but he may be busy. May I tell him why you’re here?”

  “It has to do with your company stock. I understand Mid-Pacific is going public soon and I’m interested in buying shares when that happens.”

  “I see,” she said. “Will you have a seat, please?”

  I had a seat. She got up and went through one of the doors, closing it behind her. I looked at the magazines on the table; except for a copy of Fortune, they all dealt with the electronics industry and most were trade publications. I didn’t open any of them. It would have been like trying to read something written in a foreign language.

  The secretary came back pretty soon, leaving the inner door open this time. “Mr. Tedescu will see you, Mr. James,” she said. “Follow me, please.”

  She led me down a short corridor past two more closed doors into a good-sized office at the far end. The room was cluttered but not messy, dominated by a massive oak desk and a table with draftsman’s tools and electronic designs spread over its surface. A short, plump man stood behind the desk, between it and three tall windows. The view in which he was framed would have been impressive on a clear day; now, under the overcast sky, the city and bay beyond looked gray and dismal, as if all the color had been bleached out of them.

  The secretary went away and the plump guy came around the desk to greet me. He was in his forties, dark-haired, and the ruptured blood vessels in his cheeks marked him as a habitual drinker. He also had the biggest pair of ears I had ever seen, the kind that would have saddled him with the nickname Dumbo when he was a kid. But he didn’t seem self-conscious about the ears; in fact, he wore his dark hair in an old-fashioned brush cut, as if to emphasize their jug-handle quality. A badge of distinction in an otherwise nondescript appearance.

  “Mr. James?” he said, giving me his hand. “I’m Orin Tedescu.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Tedescu.”

  “Same here.” He had a sharp, penetrating gaze and he used it to size me up as we shook hands. But there was no recognition in it; if he knew or suspected who I was, he managed to conceal the knowledge. “What happened to your arm? An accident?”

  “Yes,” I said, “an accident.”

  “Too bad. I broke my leg once a few years ago; fell off a bicycle. Can you imagine that?” He wagged his head in a rueful way. “Well, Miss Addison tells me you’re interested in buying some of our stock.”

  “I may be, yes.”

  ” A wise choice—you won’t regret it. Here, have a seat. I can only give you a few minutes, I’m afraid; I’m on a tight schedule today.”

  ” I understand.”

  I sat in one of two visitors’ chairs, and Tedescu went around behind the desk again and plopped himself down in his own chair. It was big and wide, made of leather and oak, and it dwarfed him somewhat. Unlike his partner, Bexley, he didn’t look much like a typical business executive. He was wearing casual slacks and a blue shirt open at the throat, and there were bluish stains on his hands—ink of some kind.

  He put his elbows on the chair arms, laced his pudgy fingers together. The smile he gave me seemed genuine. “So,” he said. ” You’re a speculator, Mr. James?”

  “Not exactly, no.”

  “What is it you do for a living?”

  “I’m a small businessman,” I said.

  ” Electronics-related?”

  “No. I own a chain of laundromats. They make me enough so I can afford to dabble in the market.”

  ” Have you been successful at that, too?”

  “I’ve done pretty well. My broker keeps after me to expand my portfolio, but I guess I’m too cautious to tie up all my extra capital.”

  “May I ask who your broker is?”

  “Waller and Company.”

  He nodded. “A good firm. Are they the ones who told you about Mid-Pacific?”

  “Actually, no,” I said. “I have a friend in the electronics industry, works for an arm of IBM. He heard you were going public and suggested Mid-Pacific might be a good investment.”

  “And that’s why you’re here? Size us up, find out more about us before you decide to take the plunge?”

  “Yes. I’m the cautious type, as I said.”

  “Nothing wrong with that. I’d better tell you, though, that you’re a little premature. It’ll be a few months yet before we put any stock up for sale—probably not until after the first of the year.”

  “I’m in no hurry. Besides, I don’t like to rush into an investment.”

  “Well, we appreciate your interest, in any case.” Tedescu scraped through the clutter on his desk, came up with a package of filter-tipped cigars. He said as he lit one, “How acquainted are you with Mid-Pacific?”

  “Not very. I understand you manufacture a component for industrial computers.”

  “Yes. A microcircuit. I could give you a technical rundown on it, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t mean much to a layman.”

  “That’s not necessary. Computer technology is big business these days; that’s all I need to know.”

  “Very big business,” Tedescu said. He clamped the cigar between his teeth. “We started on a shoestring five years ago; today we’re on the verge of becoming a ten-million-dollar corporation. The sky’s the limit in computer electronics, Mr. James.”

  “You have two partners, is that right?”

  “Right. Phil Bexley and Carl Emerson.”

  “Emerson is the controlling partner?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve been told he owns the patent on your microcircuit. Is he the one who designed it?”

  Something happened in Tedescu’s face, a subtle change as though strong emotion—anger or bitterness—had come up near the surface. “With my help, yes,” he said. “The original concept was Carl’s.”

  “You’re a designer, too?”

  “I am,” he said, and the emotion was in his voice now. Just a trace of it, but enough to let me recognize it as bitterness.

  “What about Bexley? What does he do?”

  “Handles marketing and production.”

  “And Emerson?”

  “Business development,” Tedescu said. The bitterness was there again: he did not like Carl Emerson worth a damn, I thought. “I suppose you could say he’s responsible for building Mid-Pacific into what it is today.”

  “The three of you own all the company stock, as things stand now?”

  “Yes. Carl has fifty-one percent; Phil and I divide the balance.”

  “Why is that? I mean, why not three equal shares?”

  Tedescu’s eyes shifted away from me; he leaned forward to jab out his cigar in an onyx ashtray. “It was Carl’s idea to form the company,” he said. “The original microcircuit concept was his, as I told you, and he arranged to put up most of the money we needed to get started.”

  “Sounds as though he’s pretty well off.”

  “He wasn’t then, no. He had some capital from private investments and he managed to float a couple of loans through business contacts.”

  “What did he do before?”

  “He was with Honeywell. So were Phil and I; that’s how we met.” Tedescu put his penetrating gaze on me again. “Are you always this curious, Mr. James?” he asked mildly.

  “Just my nature, I guess. Do you mind my ask
ing all these questions?”

  He shrugged. “Not at all.”

  “Was it Emerson’s idea to go public with your stock?”

  “It was.”

  “For purposes of expansion?”

  “That’s right. We have patents pending on two new designs. All we need is sufficient capital to begin manufacture.*’

  “Are the new designs also Emerson’s?”

  “No,” Tedescu said, “they’re mine.”

  “I see.”

  The smile he gave me seemed forced. “The fact is, we have a plant in Silicon Valley that we’re in the process of expanding now.” Silicon Valley was another name for Santa Clara County, a section of the Peninsula between Redwood City and San Jose where dozens of computer-related firms had established themselves in recent years. “Next year we hope to have a second plant, with a dozen new employees. And larger offices here in the city.”

  “Can you tell me how much stock you’re planning to make available?”

  “I’m afraid not. That decision hasn’t been reached yet.”

  “But it’ll be enough so that I can buy, oh, say a thousand shares?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “That will be a substantial investment, you know.”

  “I think I can afford it. What will a share sell for?”

  “I can’t tell you that either. But a thousand shares will probably cost you a nice piece of change.”

  “From what you’ve told me, it would be well worth the risk.”

  “No question about that. Mid-Pacific will be a gold mine in a few years. A thousand shares could make you a rich man.”

  “That’s good to hear,” I said, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t good at all.

  Tedescu glanced at his watch, my cue that the interview was finished. I took it; I’d got all I was going to get out of him. “Well, I’ve taken up enough of your time, Mr. Tedescu. Thanks for talking to me; I appreciate your candor.”

  “Not at all,” he said. He was already on his feet. “My pleasure. I’ll show you out.”

  He took me down the corridor and opened the door to the anteroom, and we shook hands again. I said, “I’ll be waiting for an official announcement.”

  “Yes,” he said. He sounded preoccupied now. “You do that, Mr. James.”

  He shut the door as soon as I was through it. Behind her desk, the secretary, Miss Addison, gave me another impersonal smile. I didn’t answer it; I did not feel like smiling even to be polite.

  Outside, the streets were crowded with office workers on their way to lunch. I wanted a cup of coffee and a place to do some quiet brooding, but all the coffee shops and lunch counters were jammed and I wasn’t in a mood to share space with anybody. I made my way back to Montgomery, to the garage where I’d left my car. It was quiet in there, at least. I sat slumped on the car seat with my eyes closed, resting.

  It looked bad for Eberhardt—very bad. Mid-Pacific was solvent and upwardly mobile, on the verge of major status in the computer industry; their stock, when they put it on the market, wouldn’t come cheap, and would escalate rapidly in value if what Tedescu had told me was true. A thousand shares could make you a rich man. Yeah. A much more effective bribe than cash, a much more lucrative payoff— the kind that might tempt the most honest of men. Everybody has his price, so they say. You just don’t know what it is until it’s offered to you.

  I kept trying to tell myself it wasn’t that way, he hadn’t gone over—not for any reason. But the evidence seemed damning; and I could not find another plausible explanation for the stock-transfer form in his safe. It made me feel dark inside, fed the anger, gave it a kind of hard focus. I was caught up in this thing now and I had to see it through, no matter that I no longer had an investigator’s license, no matter what it cost me. It was personal. It was Eberhardt and the bribe angle and Mau Yee and the wound in my shoulder and the stiffened arm and a world full of injustice; it was everything, it was me. Until I got to the bottom of it, I could not get on with the business of putting my life back together. It was like a cancer that had to be cut out. Nothing else had any meaning until it was gone.

  I stirred myself, straightened on the seat, and started the engine. There wasn’t anything more I could do about Mid-Pacific Electronics and its three principals, not until after Ben Chadwick came up with the information I had asked him for. It was time to see what I could find out about Jimmy Quon. Time for a visit to Chinatown.

  Eight

  There was a long line of cars waiting to enter the Portsmouth Square garage, as there always was during the noon hour; it took me twenty-five minutes to get inside and deposit my car. The square itself was jammed with people, most of them elderly Chinese sitting on benches or playing cards or Oriental versions of checkers and dominoes on permanent concrete tables. I threaded my way through them, huddled inside my overcoat, and went up Washington to Grant Avenue.

  The tourists were out in droves, despite the weather; there were more white faces along Grant than Chinese. The street, Chinatown’s main thoroughfare, had undergone a cosmetic facelift in recent years. Everywhere you looked there was what the younger generation of Chinese referred to derisively as “pigtail architecture”—pagoda-style building facades, streetlamps, even public telephone booths, designed to give the tourists an “authentic” Chinese atmosphere. But Grant Avenue wasn’t the real Chinatown; it was glitter and sham, a Disneyish version of Hong Kong or Canton, a visitors’ enclave of souvenir shops, Chinese art and jade merchants, fancy restaurants, dark little bars. The real Chinatown was along Stockton and Kearny streets, in the back alleys and narrow streets on both sides of Grant. That was where you found the bundle shops, where seamstresses worked fourteen-hour days at their sewing machines for starvation wages; the tenements and projects; the social clubs and gambling parlors and dingy Chinese theaters; the joss houses, the herb shops, the exotic groceries, the Chinese-language newspapers; the Chung Fat Sausage Company and the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory and the First Chinese Baptist Church and the Chinese Cemetary Association and the ironically named Hang On Realty and Insurance. That was where you found the poverty, attitudes, and way of life that had changed remarkably little in over a century.

  The address I had copied down for Kam Fong turned out to be on the block between Grant and Kearny, at the end of an alley not quite wide enough for two people to walk abreast. Six numbers, large enough to be read from the alley mouth on Jackson, were painted like graffiti on a board fence where the passage dead-ended. When I got to the fence I found a closed door in the right-hand wall, and when I opened that I was in another alley flanked on one side by doorways. The second doorway was the one I wanted. A pair of mailboxes were racked up beside the door; neither of them bore a name. Under the boxes were doorbells, and I laid my thumb against each of them in turn.

  Nothing happened inside. It was gloomy in the passage; not much light penetrated from above. It made me think of the old myth about a honeycomb of underground passageways beneath the streets of Chinatown, where sinister Orientals lurked and opium dens provided celestial dreams; even Hammett and his Continental Op had been guilty of perpetuating it. The myth had been born because a number of hidden, above-ground alleys like this one did exist, and in the days of the tong wars highbinders and hatchetmen had used them as escape routes from the police; the ignorant and the fanciful among the Caucasian population had reasoned, by illogical extension, that there was a similar subterranean network. The legend had been debunked decades ago, but myths, like dreams, die hard. There were still some, here and there, who believed it to this day.

  I pressed the doorbells again. Pretty soon a window slid up above me, releasing a wave of cooking odors and the faint singsong of Chinese music from a radio or phonograph. I peered up past the metal framework of a fire escape at an elderly woman with a face like a wrinkled yellow grape.

  She said something in Chinese, realized I was not of her race, and switched to heavily accented English. “What you want?”

  “I’m looking for Kam
Fong.”

  “Not here. Never here, noontime.”

  “Do you know where I can find him?”

  “Restaurant, maybe.”

  “Which restaurant?”

  “Mandarin Cafe. You try there.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Kearny Street. Yes?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

  The wrinkled face withdrew and the window banged shut.

  I went back out to Jackson, down to Kearny. It did not take me long to find the Mandarin Cafe; it was in the same block, over near Pacific—a hole-in-the-wall sandwiched between a barbershop and a Chinese dance studio. Inside was a long, narrow room crowded with tables and people, nearly all of them Chinese. They had the heat turned up in there, and combined with stove heat from the kitchen and body heat from the patrons, it gave the room an unpleasant tropical atmosphere spiced with the odors of mandarin cooking. The heat made sweat pop out on my forehead, made me feel vaguely nauseous. Nobody else seemed to mind it, but then none of them had just spent six days in the hospital recovering from a bullet wound.

  I opened the buttons on my overcoat. While I was doing that, a Chinese waiter came up and shook his head at me. “Sorry, no tables now. You wait?”

  “I’m not here for lunch,” I said. “I’m looking for a man named Kam Fong. You know him?”

  “Kam Fong?”

  “He lives around the corner on Jackson.”

  The waiter hesitated, and then shrugged and pointed toward the back of the restaurant.

  “Which table?” I said. “I don’t know what he looks like.”

  “Far corner. By kitchen door.”

  He went away. I squinted through the miasma of heat, picked up the table near the kitchen door, and made my way back there. It was a table for two, but Kam Fong was eating alone. He was a wizened little guy of indeterminate age, with a wispy mustache and glossy black hair and skin the color and appearance of tallow. He had a plate of fried pork and cabbage in front of him, and a big dish of rice and a pot of tea, and he was sitting hunched forward, working on his food with a pair of chopsticks and plenty of appetite. The meal had all of his attention; he didn’t see me coming and he didn’t look up until I pulled out the chair across from him and sat down.