Needles

by William Deverell

  “Lies.”

  “And on Saturday, two days ago, you received a further two hundred thousand dollars from the accused.”

  “No . . . this is incredible.” Cudlipp was staring at Cobb wildly.

  “Mr. Sheriff,” Cobb said, “please bring Special Officer Flaherty into the courtroom.”

  There was quiet.

  In a moment Flaherty stepped casually through the doorway.

  Cudlipp’s face went the color of old stained ivory.

  “You know her as Alice Carson,” Cobb said.

  Special Officer Jessica Flaherty smiled prettily as she looked about the courtroom, enjoying the attention.

  One of Smythe-Baldwin’s juniors rolled his eyes to the ceiling and dropped his pencil.

  Judge Horowitz peered at her over his spectacles.

  M. Cyrus Smythe-Baldwin was suddenly wishing he were in his garden planting tulip bulbs.

  For Au P’ang Wei, the edge of the precipice was crumbling, and he was falling, falling.

  Cobb paused a long time, looking sad and solemn. Then he said: “You gave the money to her to hold for safe-keeping. You will be pleased to know that the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars remains safely in her custody. You can count it if you wish.”

  Flaherty gaily held up a thick wad of bills.

  Cudlipp’s starched face went totally blank. He stood for a moment in the witness box, swaying like a buoy in the wind upon the sea. He moved back a step, and his heel caught on the single stair that led to the witness box, and he swivelled on his heel artfully, as if the movement had been choreographed. With a ballet-like movement, he stepped gingerly down and away from the box and took three short precise paces in the direction of Jess Flaherty, who stood motionless in her demure three-hundred dollar suit. Cudlipp shook his head slowly, then moved ghost-like to face Au P’ang Wei above him in the prisoner’s dock.

  There was expression now on the acupuncturist’s face. However, it was expression that could not be read by Westerners familiar with only their specific forms of facial aspect. It involved a tightening of all the muscles of Au’s face. It was a look known to Oriental experts in psychosis.

  Cudlipp was tranced. Slowly his knees gave way, and he sank to them on the carpet, his eyes remaining fixed upon the man in the dock. For several moments he knelt, a petitioner at the shrine of a god. He stretched his arms before him in urgent pleading prayer. Then he fell forward onto his face and began to shudder and cry.

  Court was adjourned until the following morning.

  Monday, the Twentieth Day of March,

  at a Quarter Past Seven O’Clock in the Evening

  Even the hum and static of five thousand miles of telephone cable did not drown the tremor that Ma Wo-chien, the ancient overlord of his Ch’ao-chou family, detected within the gently undulating speech of Au P’ang Wei, his third grandson. The subtly discordant notes, the disharmony of Au’s words, were a cause of great anxiety to the old man, who lacked much of the calmness of spirit that he sought from his descendants and followers. Ma Wo-chin, in fact, could be irascible, and in his frailty would often scream at his retainers, sending them scurrying in fear from his presence.

  Seated now in the great decorated hall of his Victorian mansion atop Pottinger Peak, where he could look down over his fleet of trawlers and junks moored in Tai Tam bay, he felt anger and bitterness toward the man on the other end of the line, a man whom he had taught, a student in whom Ma had observed a brilliance of mind in earlier years. The third grandson had excellent qualities — a firm business sense, a strong hand, an ability to effect difficult decisions and enforce them. But (Ma had of late begun to realize) Au P’ang Wei was not a truly well person. Ma had been displeased at reports of certain unnecessary cruelties, and now entertained a grave concern about a deepening rift in Au’s mind that foretold unhappy difficulties in the maintenance of the Vancouver link, a link that the elders had hoped would ultimately complete a circuit to Montreal and New York, perhaps thence to Amsterdam and Paris, where there were many Ch’ao-chou.

  Au had been brought into the inner folds of the family as a child when his parents died, and the patriarch Ma Wo-chien had taught him personally, and paid for his training in schools of acupuncture, and later, in medical school in England — which Au, for reasons unclear, had quit despite high grades.

  “You do yourself and our people a great disservice, Au P’ang Wei,” the old man shouted. “You shall return. You shall return. Arrangements will be made tonight.”

  “In time,” Au said calmly. “In time.”

  “I am most displeased,” said Ma, spitting his words out. “You have put everything in danger. Yourself as well. Uselessly. You expose everyone to destruction. You have under-valued the skill of this man Cobb and over-valued the obviously poor quality of the policeman. Ai, you have been a great failure! A great failure, Au P’ang Wei.”

  “The matter of Cobb is in hand. The arrow is already fitted to the string.” Au spoke calmly, but the strain in his words did not escape Ma’s ears, still keen. “And I will return when I am ready to return, venerable grandfather. You will understand that I mean no disrespect: but I am master here, and there has been no vote of the elders. I will stay until full accounting is complete.”

  “And what do you mean by that?”

  “The old mind is slow and soggy,” Au said. Ma burned. “One does not stop the digging of the well until water is reached,” Au continued. “There are tasks yet to perform. There is a man who would destroy me, who dares test my power.”

  What garbage was he speaking? Ma wondered. What sickness was this? “Yours is the voice of a man whose mind is fouled by illness, Au P’ang Wei. What tasks? I am sending Jin Feng. He is well-trained. Leave him the tasks.”

  “There are two tasks,” said Au. “The duty of performing these shall be mine. I am honored by your expressions of concern.” Au spoke icily. “And I do not need the assistance of Jin Feng.” Feng was Au’s cousin of the fourth generation, and was close to the inner circle.

  “You will hear me,” Ma said. “The vicissitudes of fortune are such that you have lost your use to us in Canada. Things change and stars move, Au P’ang Wei. Ai, there will be a great reckoning!” Ma flung an empty teapot at one of his prize chow dogs, and sent it scampering out of the room. A manservant came quickly in, picked up the broken pieces and vanished. Ma stared angrily out the window, seething, trying to bring himself under control.

  Au’s voice remained even. “The custom is settled by ancient agreement. It will take weeks to collect the elders. I learned the customs in your house, Ma Wo-chien. Do you forget? Is your mind grown dim? Is the sun so near the west mountains, old man?”

  With great effort Ma summoned all his resources of reason. “To endanger yourself is one thing,” he said. “To endanger the whole of the great plan is another thing, scandalous and unnecessary. Rigidity in matters such as this, where my counsel is urgently given, may be investigated by the elders, with possibly direful consequences to yourself. I need say nothing more.” He swore, with a guttural exclamation.

  “The elders will know that my purpose is to make our business safe here and to improve the line to America and the Atlantic,” Au paused. “You see,” he continued in a hushed tone, “they are plotting to destroy me, and they must be taught that this cannot be done, that such conspiracies only injure their makers. You cannot understand how persistent these men are: Cobb and these others.” He paused again, and his voice continued on an even lower, darker note. “Cobb is behind it. They purchased his services at great cost to bring destruction to me. The man Cobb.” His voice shook, and Ma knew now that his grandson was very ill. “Cobb,” he repeated. “Cobb. he is the sting in my eye. I must pull it out.”

  “And what,” Ma said coldly, “will his death bring us? What advantage, Au P’ang Wei? You are merely hurling eggs against stone.”

 
“Ah, Grandfather, at your feet I also learned the principles of deterrence that have so successfully guided our efforts in this country. Cobb is the symbol and the heart of all the forces arrayed against us here. Upon his death, I will be strong. We will be strong. Our family will prosper.”

  Ma recalled now that there had been an episode like this when Au had returned from England twenty-five years ago. Jin Feng would have to act quickly and cleanly.

  “I will not sanction it,” he said.

  “In your house, Ma Wo-chien, one command draws a thousand answers. But it is not so here. It is my choice in this place, and our people here take my direction.”

  “Pah! I will convene the elders. You will be sent to a clinic for your health.”

  Au laughed. “My health! I have the health of a tiger.”

  “The health of mind, Au P’ang Wei.”

  “The edges of your mind are no longer sharp, Grandfather. Mine is as clear as a mirror.”

  “Stained with the glaze of self-deception. Jin Feng arrives Friday by plane. Eight a.m. by cp Air. Hong Kong, Honolulu, Vancouver. You will meet him.”

  “No,” said Au. “It will not be safe. The trial is over for me and I shall be in hiding.” Au was starting to speak quickly now, his voice a high sing-song. “And by the time he arrives, the work will be done. The traitor Plizit and the destroyer Cobb. Ah, of Cobb you know nothing — he has followed me secretly for ten years, seeking my destruction.”

  Ma tried reason again. “Can these tasks be of such supreme necessity? Must they be done immediately, in any event?”

  “The Westerners have a saying: strike the iron on the anvil when it is hot.”

  “Perhaps,” Ma continued in his reasoning tone, “the tasks seem important merely for the time.”

  “The tasks are important. The traitor and the destroyer cannot live, or their passing years will be proof to the world of the weakness of Ch’ao-chou.”

  “Perhaps you will consider the wisdom of many decades,” said Ma Wo-chien. “Consider my advice that you should take rest until the elders have met and discussed this.”

  “It is as a mirror, old man.”

  Ai, Ma thought. A mirror distorted, that returns a twisted reflection of the man.

  “The informer, yes,” Ma said. “That is clear. The man Plizit is anathema to good order and profit . . . Plizit, yes. The elders will accept it. Cobb: you must realize he is merely a mechanic, a worker for and within the system of his country. There was no betrayal. The test is betrayal. The elimination of those who enforce the laws is wrong and without precedent.” Ma Wo-chin argued his case carefully.

  But Au had learned the laws of the Ch’ao-chou. “There is precedent. The officer Sung, in the early years. It was sanctioned. You performed it personally. The year 1905 on the Western calendar. How the memory has faded, Ma Wo-chien.”

  “He was corrupt, and took our money, and effected arrests.”

  “Convene the elders. By then it will be done, and you will be seen as a fool.”

  “Au P’ang Wei!” the elderly man’s thin voice cracked. “You will have Jin Feng met at the airport!”

  “Yes. I will do that. He will be needed here to help carry on.”

  Thank the stars for that, Ma Wo-chien thought. Otherwise, it would be difficult for Feng to track Au down. The elders would later ratify the action.

  “Good-bye,” Au continued. “I seek no blessing. I trust you will give to all our people the words that I hold them in my thoughts.” Au hung up. The old man, he thought, had finally succumbed to the decrepitude of age, and had begun to babble like a weak fool. Jin Feng . . . Yes, he would be needed. It was time to spawn new organizations in the family. It was time to bring to fruition great plans, to destroy the enemy and gain strength thereby, to destroy a great foe — and doing so, make a brother of him, and become strong through this brotherhood. . . .

  And the pain came. He touched the point for it, and it relented.

  Then he closed his eyes. The pain came back.

  Prince Kwan, his brother, came to him, and began to purr. Au stroked him gently behind the ears and along the spine, and along the myriad points of pleasure.

  And the pain was on him strongly, and was deep within, and it carried him back to a time of young manhood . . .

  . . . When the older man saw Au, standing before them in plain view in the deepening twilight, brazenly almost, he called to his son, who had dallied behind. “The bleedin’ louse wants another taste of it, ’arry. Let’s kill the cruel bastard.” This time Au, limping and bearing unhealed wounds, was ready for them, his bowels on fire with the need for vengeance. Harry moved first, and Au deftly slid the needle into the Archway of the Gods point, along the spine meridian between hip and pelvis. A clean penetration. Harry’s body immediately went numb and his autonomic system began to misfire, and this caused spasms. His breathing became hesitant and irregular, and soon stopped. The father, burly and red-faced and smelling from the numerous pints of half-and-half consumed that evening, wore a look of disbelief, and began to back up slowly. Au walked toward him with the other needle, and when the man turned and started to run, Au leaped and stabbed twice before finding the heart meridian on the right side of the buttocks, at the Hill of the Two Rivers point. The muscles of the man’s heart froze and he stopped in his tracks and fell. . . .

  Au had collected his first trophies that night, in the mews behind the Raven Arms public house, the local where Harry and his father gathered with friends each night. When the bodies were found next morning in the brome grass beside the lane, Au was in quarters on a freighter at the Mersey docks, waiting to be returned to Hong Kong. The acts of vengeance had removed the pain that had gripped him, a pain of that same force and quality as that which now demanded the removal of Foster Cobb from this earth.

  Tuesday, the Twenty-first Day of March,

  at Two O’Clock in the Afternoon

  Set by the frozen southern shore of Tlakish Lake in the small community to which it gave its name (Village of Tlakish Lake, pop. 342, elev. 417 metres), the lake and town sit quietly in the valley, contemplating each other’s navels, bored with their marriage. There is little to do at this time of year in the Tlakish Valley, and the boredom settles like a dull fog on the group of bungalows and cabins that cluster aimlessly about a grocery store, a service station, and two or three shops by the lakeshore dock. Tlakish Lake waits for the summer — when the town is full of yelling bow-legged men on the rodeo circuit; when the tourist campers arrive, jammed with fishing gear; when the streams and lakes of the Chilcotin Hills churn with rainbow, Dolly Varden, and kokanee; when the summer grasslands are home to wandering herds of Herefords which loaf about as carefree as the grizzlies and bighorn sheep.

  Spring has touched British Columbia elsewhere, but in the Chilcotin rangelands east of the Coast Mountains, a barrier to the soft Pacific winds, the air is cold and sharp, and snow is still banked high along the lee of the hills. The lake provides a landing strip, and chartered planes are often seen to land here to pick up and carry away the bodies of men so overcome by ennui that they must flee south to Vancouver to recharge their spirits.

  At two p.m. on this, the first day of spring, the telephone rang and reserve officer Joe Bigelow, happy at playing cop, eagerly took the details. Then he called Bob Klosterman at Lasko’s Groceteria and Coffee Palace, where the constable usually stopped off for a mid-day milkshake break with whoever was hanging around. Klosterman and Gary Sedyk were the only two regular RCMP members of the Tlakish Lake detachment.

  “There’s a guy phoned,” Bigelow said. “There’s a car in the snowbank, slid down the road. Guy said someone is wedged in there, kinda hurt. Guess you might want to pick up the van and the winch.”

  “Where is this? Who called?” Klosterman spoke excitedly. He had pictures of pulling someone’s mangled body from a wrecked car.

  “On the Kwahale
e Creek Road, he said, about forty or fifty miles from town. . . ”

  “Damn! That road is closed.”

  “Not sure who it was phoned. Said a man on a logging road survey crew up there radioed down to him, and he phoned in. Kinda roundabout.”

  “What survey crew? That’s all closed up there. Aw, damn. Is that it? What else he say?”

  “Well, that’s it. That’s all he told me.”

  “Joe, you know, try to get people’s names and where they are.”

  “Sorry.”

  “No time for sorry. Call Gary at home. He better go with me. Tell him to meet me down there, rig up the van with chains. You’ll have to run the ship for five or six hours. And call Doc Fairweather and have him ready, just in case, for when we get back. I’ll be right there.”

  For the rest of the afternoon and for the early evening, Joe Bigelow, RCMP reserve officer, a man who all his life — forty-three years — had hungered to be a policeman, would keep the peace alone in the valley of Tlakish Lake. In real life, Joe Bigelow and his wife ran a motel in Prince George. His service to his country as a volunteer reservist in the RCMP was poor compensation for his more subservient role at home, where he was a subaltern to a stern commanding officer. Mrs. Bigelow shot from the lip first and asked questions later, if at all, and she ran a strict house.

  Two weeks ago, Bigelow had been assigned the job of guarding Laszlo Plizit, and it was a chance gladly accepted to escape the rigors of his life at home.

  This afternoon, after Klosterman and Sedyk departed in the van east to the Kwahalee Creek Road, Bigelow, alone in the detachment except for Plizit in the back, settled easily into the routine — which involved propping his feet on the desk, folding his arms, and falling into dream-riddled sleep. There was nothing else to do except, at meal time, to fetch some hot food for Plizit from Lasko’s café. As Bigelow dozed off he could hear pop music from Plizit’s radio.

  Somehow Bigelow had suppressed his qualms about the prospect of having to deal with professional gunmen from Vancouver, but they came out at night, and twice last week his loud nightmares had awakened the Klosterman family, in whose home he was staying. As days and nights passed, however, Bigelow’s dreams, fuelled by cheeseburgers and chips, settled into brave but uncertain reveries of Gary Cooper, strapping on his gun to await alone the arrival of the noon train, while the cowardly townspeople scurried for shelter.