Assignment Nuclear Nude

by Edward S. Aarons

  He walked over to a Malay policeman who stood watching with a detached air as the flames burst higher, disregarding the streams of water from the fire hoses. Yes, the cop said in answer to his question, there had been an explosion, sir. No, no one had been killed, none of the employees were missing.

  "You know Mr. Liscomb?" The Malay's eyes were dark brown, innocent and calm. "Of course, sir, everyone in Singapore know Mr. Liscomb. Fine gentleman, yes. He was injured, I am most deeply sorry to say."

  "How badly?" Durell asked.

  "I have not that informations for you, sir. He was taken away to safety only a few minutes ago, to the good Dr. Halsey's clinic-sanitorium. All Americans prefer the clinic, sir. You say you are a friend of Mr. Liscomb?"

  "In a way. We had business dealings."

  The Malay murmured politely and speculated that perhaps the fire was the result of gangster Triad activities. "We do our best to control such terrorist things, but they are widespread, everywhere, large and small, demanding bribes, fingers, they call it. Petty racketeers, most of them. Perhaps Mr. Liscomb committed the error, sir, of trying to deal with a shakedown racket himself, instead of coming to us. It happens so, sometimes."

  Durell asked the location of the Halsey Clinic, watched the fire a moment longer until the policeman strolled away, and then he walked on.

  He felt hemmed in, without a safe base of operations, exposed in streets controlled by underground enemies determined to stop him or get him out of Singapore. No time had been wasted by the opposition. He was impressed by the speed and the eflBciency of the moves made against him.

  Levy Liscomb had a broken leg, bums and cuts and bruises, scalp lacerations, a broken nose, and an evil temper. Because of internal injuries, his condition was listed as critical. He was a short, stout man who looked Eurasian, despite his name, perhaps partly Chinese, except for his bright, hard blue eyes. The clinic was small, antiseptic and quiet, an oasis in the midst of Oriental noise and pungent aromas. The nurses wore crisp white nylon and were uncommonly attractive. There was some initial objection to DurelPs visit to the patient, until Levy heard his voice in the corridor and roared a demand that Durell be admitted. The Indian intern reluctantly gave way and retreated when Levy screamed that he close the door behind him.

  "Five minutes only, Mr. Liscomb," said the sad-eyed Hindu. "Then we must prepare you for surgery. Your leg needs immediate attention."

  "Get the hell out of here," Liscomb grated. He lifted singed eyebrows to Durell. His eyes were slightly misted from the morphine pain-killer in him. "Hello, Cajun."

  "East meets West," Durell said.

  "And I get the broken bones. My silly fault, must say. The damned plastic was in a jade shipment from Hong Kong. Legitimate wrappings. I haven't been booby-trapped like this in eight years."

  "You're lucky," Durell said.

  "I may live. I hope so. But you're a walking dead man, Cajun."

  "Who says so?"

  "The word is out all over the city. The Lucky Mountain Triads have your name."

  "Who runs them? Could it be Han?"

  "Nobody knows. But it's not Han. He's Five Rubies. And aren't you ?"

  "Yes. I was initiated into the Five Rubies when I was last here, years ago," Durell said. He was concerned about Levy's condition; the man's breathing was all wrong. "I don't know if my membership is still valid, though. Take it easy. Levy. Are you safe here?"

  The Control man was sweating with pain, despite the narcotics he had received. Durell looked at his chart, hung neatly over the footboard of Levy Liscomb's bed. It didn't tell him anything good. The K Section man had a round, brownish face, and his teeth gleamed white between drawn hps as a spasm made him grimace. "Safe enough, I think. I have a long-term arrangement here. Like an insurance policy."

  "Your cover at Great China apparently isn't all that good. Levy," Durell said.

  "Nobody has secrets for long in Singapore, lad. Goddam it, but I was stupid, though."

  "Why were you hit? It's me they want, not you."

  Levy Liscomb clicked his tongue. "I was supposed to help you. All out, priority red. But now I can't do a damned thing for you, and they've put you out on the street, Cajun."

  "I'll manage. What can you give me on Madame Hung?"

  Levy Liscomb grunted, cursed, mumbled something that Durell could not catch. His eyes closed for some seconds, then opened again with a startled effort. "I'm being called by the Sandman, Cajun. I may not make it." Liscomb spoke in short gasps. "Listen, I had time to blow our safety files. There was a Red Code message for you from General McFee. Nobody less. Came in an hour ago. You have to go all out. Two things. Get the painting. Get the Hung woman. Kill her, Cajun. I think she's the one who arranged for me to get blown in here. McFee gives her top priority."

  "Where do I find her. Levy?" Durell asked. He stood beside the bed, tall and soUd, his blue eyes almost dark with a brooding anger and compassion. "Do you know, Levy?"

  "Ask—ask Mr. Han."

  The Indian doctor came in just then and whispered to himself as he saw Liscomb's condition and quickly took the injured man's pulse and blood pressure, checked the leg bandage, flipped back Liscomb's eyelids, pursed his chocolate brown lips, and ordered Durell to leave at once. Nurses and an anesthetist crowded into the room. For a moment, it looked as if Liscomb had fainted. Durell knocked aside the doctor's hand on his arm and bent over the gasping patient.

  "Levy, one more thing," he said urgently. "The painting—did you get a line on it?"

  There was a long shuddering breath. Then a whispered exhalation. "Cathay Airlines. Flight two oh two. Day after tomorrow at seventeen hundred hours-^ "

  The doctor grabbed Durell's arm again. "I must insist, sir, on your prompt departure. Surgery is ready for this man. It is doubtful if he will survive."

  Levy was unconscious. His color was like clay. Durell nodded and stepped aside, away from the bed. "All right," he said. "Try to keep him alive."

  "You have not helped," said the doctor stiffly.

  Durell looked at Liscomb, surrounded by crisply starched white uniforms, nodded again, and yielded to the pressure of the doctor and the nurses and went out.

  He telephoned to the hotel where the girls were to stay, and he was relieved when Linda finally answered. She had been calm and elBBcient, and had retrieved all their luggage from the airport, and Durell thought of the odds and ends of gimmickry built into his attache case by K Section's lab boys.

  He rarely relied on these gadgets, any more than he relied on the support of others in the business, human fallibility being what it was. He preferred to work alone, and resented the sense of responsibility he felt for Linda, Pan, and Anna-Lise. They had forced themselves on him, and he had no reason to be concerned about them, he told himself, except for any use he might be able to make of them. He could use them somehow, surely—but he didn't like the thought of the price that one or all of them might have to pay in his private war with Madame Hung. Durell was a lonely man, and he trusted only himself in this matter. He was alone now as he walked away from the chnic where Levy Liscomb might live or die. He could forget about any help from K Section's Control now. He had the feeling that every move he made was being watched, and when he spoke to Linda on the telephone at her hotel room, this was his major concern.

  "You'll have to get out of the hotel," he said to her. "It's a matter of waiting things out, and finding a safe place to do it. We'll have to hide, for a time."

  "Why?" she asked.

  "Everything is blown We're left standing out in the open, like Uttle clay pigeons."

  She didn't sound upset or in a panic. "So what do we do?"

  "We'll find a safe house. A base of operations. Put Pan on the line, please."

  "In a minute. Did you see my father?"

  "Yes."

  "Is he very angry?"

  "Yes."

  "With me?"

  "Yes."

  Linda was silent. He thought she had gone off the telephone to get P
an, but then she said in a surprisingly meek voice, "I don't like the idea of fighting with Daddy. Didn't you teU him how we feel about what he's trying to do?"

  "Would it do any good?" he asked.

  "Sam "

  "We're wasting time. Put Pan on the phone, Linda."

  "Sam, do you think we girls are right? Fighting with our fathers, doing everything we can against them "

  "I don't know what's right or wrong for you, Linda. I just do my job. Any questions I have about it are strictly my own business. And we don't have much time now."

  "Don't you ever think about your work, and whether you're doing the right thing?"

  "I think quite a lot about it. We'll talk later. When we're in a safe place. Now, for the last time "

  "All right, Sam."

  The small, delicate voice of the Chinese girl came on the line a moment later. She sounded calm and sweet and intelligent. He was beginning to revise his opinion of the girls. Wealthy in their own right, born to luxury far beyond the conception of the average individual, accustomed to command, there was a stability in them that was a pleasant surprise.

  Pan listened to his suggestion, thought for a moment, then said, "My old wash-amah. She retired and owns a tenement in the Chinese quarter. It will soon be dark, and if we can get in without being seen "

  "Can you manage it?"

  "How long do you want us to stay there?"

  "I don't know. I'll join you in an hour."

  "Can you find the place?" Pan gave him complicated directions. "It's not in a very nice neighborhood."

  "All the better. I'll find it. In one hour. And, Pan ?"

  "Yes, Mr. Durell?"

  "Be very careful, please."

  "Yes, Mr. Durell."

  She hung up. He still felt very much alone.

  9

  The wash-amah brought them wooden bowls of rice and chicken and cups of clear pale wine. Her name was Li Yon, and her total devotion to young Pan was evident in the way she looked at the Chinese girl, shouted, scolded, complained, muttered, and wore herself out trying to make them all comfortable. Durell suddenly felt hungry, and remembered he hadn't eaten in eight hours, since being on the plane. Li Yon wore a white coat, floppy pants, and clopping shoes; her gray hair was pulled back in a tight bun, and her aged face was wrinkled and seamed and alive with endless vitality as she performed her miracles for them.

  "People come in here, people come out, see you maybe, talk too damn much. I make you not to be seen, heya?"

  The tenement in the teeming heart of Singapore's Chinese quarter was an apartment compound beflagged with colorful lines of wash, banners, signs, belabored by noise from radios, television sets, the click of Mah-Jongg players, the murmur of bearded old men and the shrilling of children. The voices of women in argument seemed to come from everywhere. Although night had long fallen, the lights and signs pushed the darkness away. It was surprisingly cool and comfortable in Li Yon's rooms, which were arranged in railroad-flat style, with all the rooms opening on a second floor gallery through sagging, wooden-shuttered doors and windows.

  The girls were arbitrarily ordered out of their chic Western clothes and put into Chinese student imiforms procured by Li Yon. The wash-amah brooked no arguments, even from Pan, but allowed them to retain their golden medallions. Muttering, she handed Durell some faded dungarees, a singlet, worn sandals, and a cheap pair of sunglasses.

  "You sailor man now, you bad man, jump ship, long time ashore, no money, hey?"

  "Very good, Li Yon."

  "You bet very good. Damn excellent. I warn you."

  "Of what?" Durell asked.

  "You are man called Cajun?"

  He was surprised. "Yes."

  "Bad people look for you. Much talk in my club. Other wash-amahs hear much, talk-talk all the time. But this not what I warn you about." Li Yon's wrinkled face was pushed close to Durell's. She had gold teeth and a shell comb in the tight knot of gray hair at the nape of her neck. "You big man, you bad man, you worry Li Yon much, I afraid of you. But I kill you myself, if my darling Pan so much as get one single little scratch, you hear?"

  She held up her little finger, and the rest of her big, calloused hand was knotted in a tight fist. *'You understand? My darling Pan good little girl, must not be hurt in any way."

  "I'm trying, Li Yon."

  "Okay. Now you hear me, to do as I say. Go to Cathay Cinema, second floor, no movie, it be filthy picture, so you ignore. Go straight to second floor. They wait for you in that place."

  "Who is waiting, Li Yon?" he asked patiently.

  "Who do you think?" She was pugnacious and reproving. "Bad men, gangsters, your blood brothers, all evil. I see tattoo on you, you play Man from Marshes, hey? But you no play t'ai chi with me. No shadow-box." She shook her head. "I see you think yourself a real chianghuk'o, a man of the rivers and lakes, heya? Big shot, all cozy gamblers. So they will kill you."

  "Then do you think I should go?"

  "I only poor wash-amah, you go or not go, I don't care. But no hurt must come to my darling Pan, understand?"

  Durell stood up. "Thank you, Li Yon."

  "I give you one big damn fine Chinese funeral when your brothers kill you."

  Durell laughed. "Thanks," he said again.

  A few minutes before midnight, he arrived at the Cathay Theater. Taller than most of the people in the narrow, noisy, crowded alley, he managed to look like a number of other drifters and beachcombers, unemployed and at odd«s with the world about him. He let himself be carried along by the press of foreign bodies, the conical straw hats, the shuffling feet that scuffed the walkway. He took his time. Amid the babble and chatter and the shrill music, he listened for the footstep of an enemy; he looked for the face of death. Madame Hung yearned for his end like someone in the fifth day of thirst. Her hatred for him, ever since that long-ago day when he had met and defeated her in the Dasht-i-Kavir desert of Iran, poisoned che air he breathed. She was evil incarnate. She darkened the night and whispered her thirst for his life like the hissing of a snake.

  He wondered if Levy Liscomb was still alive in the clinic.

  He bought a bowl of noodles at a food stall and ate with his back to the alley wall, watching the polyglot population of Singapore's streets go by. He saw no one who looked particularly dangerous. The sky beyond the glare of flashing Ughts seemed filled with stars, and the heat of the day had given way to the usual cool sea breeze.

  The Cathay Theater was a movie house that specialized in Chinese films made in Hong Kong. It was in a two-story stucco building that looked as if it had once been an abandoned warehouse, not far from the waterfront. An alley ran along the left side as he faced the entrance doors. The Chinese girl cashier yawned at him from under the heavy mascara on her eyelashes. From inside the cinema came a clash of cymbals on the sound track and a shrill, frenetic weeping and hoarse argument. The street here was well-lighted. The crowd was somehow comforting, when he considered the dark and empty alley.

  An iron stairway led up to a landing and a closed door on the second level above the movie house. He could still hear the sound track from the Chinese film when he paused there. The wind off the waterfront shifted, and now he smelled a fish market and the stink of open drains and garbage from the heart of Chinatown. As he stood on the landing, his eye was caught by the three dragons there—the Triad societies were devoted to multiples of three in their ciphers and symbols. The first dragon was of the loud-mouthed variety in the shape of a bell beside the door; above the door was the hermit dragon, painted on a board, indicating seclusion; and the third was in the shape of a tiger, the strongest of dragons, forming a bronze door-knocker before him.

  Durell tapped the loud-mouthed dragon on the bell, three times, then rapped the tiger dragon's tail against the door panel six times, quickly and Ughtly.

  He waited.

  From the cinema house below came the shrieking of a female impersonator and the ear-shattering clamor of tambours.

  The door opened.
<
br />   A tall Chinese in a tight gray Western suit stood in a glimmer of light. He had narrow eyes and a sharp nose, more Mongol than Chinese, and he spoke with a sharply clipped cockney accent.

  "If you're Durell, chum, come right in. Ceremonial's about to start. Initiating a new boy, y'know. So welcome to our City of Willows."

  There were passwords that Durell dredged up out of his memory of his former initiation into the Five Ruby lodge. He went along with the ritual patiently, knowing that at the proper time he would get the cue that would explain why he had been asked here. He was not alarmed by Li Yon's prediction of his death. Even if true, and he walked into a trap, there was no help for it. This was the only road he could use that might take him to Madame Hung. He couldn't wait for her to attack again. She wouldn't miss a third strike. And although he knew that his coming to this Triad lodge might indeed be the most dangerous step he could take, he accepted it and endured it as a calculated risk.

  The Five Ruby lodge had descended by devious steps from the original rebels of centuries past who fought to overthrow the barbarian conquerors of Imperial China. Early groups such as the White Lotus, the Yellow Turbans, or the Society of Harmonious Fists, all claimed descent from the ancient iBghting monks, whose religious scruples barred the use of weapons such as the knife or axe. Out of their saying, "Make your jfinger a knife, your arm a lance, your palm a sword," came the art of judo. They were Robin Hood bandits, dedicated to rebellion against oppression. Since the creed of Mencius was proclaimed, announcing that "Heaven does not speak to man," men who were dedicated to justice gathered in the north as Tongs, and in the south as Triad lodges.