Charlie Chan in the Temple of the Golden Horde

by Michael Collins

  In the shadows under the pine, Chan watched all this. He waited, but nothing more happened, and he went on to his car.

  X

  AT HIGHWAY PATROL Headquarters in Half Moon Bay, Lieutenant Forbes listened to Chan tell of Angela Smith.

  “You should have reported that knife attack on you last night, Inspector,” Forbes said.

  “It was only the defensive action of a disturbed girl, not necessarily connected to the death of Benny Chan,” Chan said. He smiled. “Also, you have given me permission to work on the case. A detective at work does not report all incidents at once.”

  “So I did,” Forbes grinned. “Okay, Mr. Chan, but you think now the girl really did see something connected to Benny Chan?”

  “I don’t know, but she spoke of a violation of the sacred scroll, and as far as we know now, only Benny Chan had the scroll before you found it abandoned on the beach. Whatever she meant by violation, who else but Benny could have done it? Who else could the girl have seen pursued by demons?”

  “If he was pursued by anyone that night, they damn well must have been demons,” Forbes said. “We’ve been over that ground again, and found no marks or footprints. And I can’t find anyone who saw any strangers in the area that night. Ghosts, maybe?”

  “Or skilled men, well-trained in remaining unseen,” Chan said. “Wearing light sneakers designed to leave little trace in grass or on rocky ground.”

  “You know something I don’t?” Forbes said.

  “Hints, no more. And it is too early for guesses,” Chan said. “But I suggest an urgent search to locate Angela Smith.”

  “We’ll get right on it,” Forbes agreed. “What will you do?”

  Chan took out the envelope he had found in Angela Smith’s room at the Temple. “Smith is a common name. A young girl sent to the Temple because she is sick is most likely to have letters from her family. Yet the only letters found are from someone with a different name.” He read the return address on the envelope, “J. Farley, 1499 Tunnel Road, Santa Barbara. I think I will talk again to Betty Chan, to see if the name of Farley means anything to her.”

  “Let me know what she says,” Forbes said.

  Chan nodded, and went back out to his car. The late afternoon sun was going down now to the west over the ocean, and the chill of evening was settling over San Francisco as he reached his hotel again. He called Betty Chan at once. No answer again. He called The Kung Fu Tze Book Store. Miss Chan was out on an errand. He left a message, went up to shower and change his clothes and then went down to the coffee shop for a quick meal.

  He was finishing his tea when the bellboy paged him for a telephone call. He hurried to the phone.

  “Betty? I must see you.”

  There was a silence. Then a soft, shaking voice:

  “It isn’t Betty. Who is Betty? Do I know Betty?” The voice giggled. “I know Benny. Poor Benny Chan who drowned in a dark ocean. But Benny couldn’t drown, oh no? Not Benny! The demons, they made Benny drown! Yes! I…” The voice seemed to moan, as if the person on the other end were thrashing against ropes. “Inspector? Are you Inspector Chan?”

  “Yes, I am Charlie Chan,” he said, and it was a woman’s voice, a girl. “Angela? You are Angela Smith? Please, where are you?”

  “Where am I?” The voice was silent, and Chan could almost see the girl looking all around her to find out where she was. “I’m here! Don’t you know that? I’m here, I know that, I’m not crazy! Oh, no, not crazy, not yet! I saw! You hear? I saw!”

  “You saw what, Angela?” Chan said gently, soothing.

  “Saw him, you hear? What did I see? I don’t know! Demons! But what were they? What did they want? Poor Benny, he ran and they ran and…” She broke off.

  “Angela?” Chan said. “Tell me where you are.”

  Silence.

  Then, “I have to talk to you, tell you!” she said. “Come to the motel. Now. I’m in the motel! Hurry, please!”

  “I will be there. What motel is it, I forget?” Chan said.

  “Why, The Big Basin Motel, of course. In Pescadero. I’ll be waiting. Pescadero,” she giggled, “what a funny name.”

  Then she was gone.

  Chan hurried back, paid his bill, and walked swiftly out to his rented car. He drove south once more.

  Chan saw the car behind him after he passed through Half Moon Bay. The lights of the car that came suddenly from some side road just south of Half Moon Bay, and remained there, making no attempt to catch or pass him even though he drove more slowly than most American drivers. Other cars passed Chan over and over, but the single car remained there behind him.

  Night now, the sea mist rolling in over Highway One, and the lights behind were diffused and ghostly in the wet air. Chan watched them for some miles, Pescadero not far ahead by now. Had Angela Smith called anyone else? Someone at The Temple near Half Moon Bay, perhaps? Told them she had called Chan? So they had watched for his Toyota and followed now?

  Or was the car following only him, to see where he was going? It was necessary to find out, and as he drove he looked for a side road. He saw one to the right just five miles north of Pescadero, and turned in quickly. He drove on along the rutted dirt of the rural road toward the sound of the surf.

  Headlights came through the thickening mist behind him!

  Chan drove on, searching for some cover, some haven to hide and observe the following car. The dirt road wound on, climbing as it neared the rocky cliffs above the ocean. The head lights followed, neither closing in nor slipping back. The narrow road took a sharp left turn, dropped down into a deep hollow, and turned right again around a giant boulder, where Chan saw a dark house off to the left.

  Without hesitation, the lights behind lost for the moment around the curves and boulder, Chan turned off the road and came to a stop behind the dark house. He slipped from his car swiftly, flicked the safety off his pistol, and circled the house to the front where he crouched alert and watching the dirt road.

  The car came around the boulder. A big, black Cadillac. Its headlights probed the fog like deadly antennae as it moved ahead slowly. Chan saw three vague heads all peering ahead in search of something - of his car! Then the big car stopped.

  It stopped in front of the dark house. The motor went off. The big car sat there, lights on but not moving, as if the three men in the car were listening. They were trained men. They had lost him, and instead of rushing blindly ahead they sat silent listening for the sound of his engine.

  Chan waited.

  The doors of the car suddenly opened, and two men got out.

  They stood for a moment, talking to each other, and then the third man joined them. The third man nodded, drew a pistol, and leaned against the car. The other two turned and went off around the dark house on the far side from where Chan waited.

  As silently as a ghost, Chan left the corner of the house and circled around behind the big car in the fog. He crept up on the big car. In the distance he heard a car door open and close - the door of his own car where the other two men had found it. Soon, they would follow his moves around the house and be back. Chan did not hesitate.

  He was on the man at the car like a great cat before the man knew anything. With two quick moves of Tai-Chi-Chuan, the man lay on the ground unconscious, his pistol falling uselessly to the hard ground. Chan peered close at the fallen man - it looked like the man he had seen following himself.

  He wasted no time searching the man. Men like that never carried any identification. Instead, he turned quickly reached in and started the car, switched on the headlights, put it into drive, and sent it slowly ahead down the dirt road toward the sound of the ocean. Then he jumped back into the shadows, and began to circle again toward the dark house.

  The other two men came running from behind the house. They shouted in the night, and ran straight toward the moving car. It was a mistake. In their surprise they forgot what they were there to do, ran after the car and forgot Chan. He reached the dark house again, climbed i
nto his car, and waited.

  On the road the big Cadillac railed steadily some five hundred yards, lurched, and came to rest with its nose in a deep hollow, its engine running. Chan saw the two men reach it and peer inside. He started his small Toyota, turned in a screech of tires, and drove away along the dirt road the way he had come before they saw him!

  Somewhere behind voices shouted. Too late. They could not catch him now. Soon he was back on the highway, and now there were no headlights behind him. He drove on to Pescadero and The Big Basin Motel.

  In the fog it was a large, well-lighted motel on the north edge of the town, set back from the highway around a blue-lighted pool. The sea fog wreathed it, and no one was in the pool that steamed in the cool night. Music came from a large coffee shop, and there was a warm pleasant atmosphere to the mist-haloed lights.

  In the office an efficient young man shook his head when Chan asked for Angela Smith.

  “No one registered by that name, sorry.”

  “I’m sure she is here,” Chan insisted. “It is a police matter, I am Inspector Chan. Miss Smith is a tall girl, in her early twenties. Pretty, long blond hair, brown eyes. She is, perhaps, quite nervous.”

  “Oh, sure, Inspector. That’s Unit Five, registered as a Miss Jones. There isn’t any trouble, is there? She seemed like a nice, quiet girl. She hasn’t given us any trouble, had her dinner sent to her room.”

  “Where, please, is Unit Five?”

  “Second from the end on the left facing the pool.”

  Chan went out. A small car was parked in front of Unit Five - a car with the magical symbols of The Golden Horde drawn on its sides. Music came from inside, and the voice of a man. Chan knocked. The man’s voice, he realized, was some actor on the television set. The new young people - even now the girl watched television!

  Chan tried the door. It was unlocked. He went in. The TV set blared and flickered, the smiling actor talking to some woman not on the screen. But no one sat and watched the actor. He talked and laughed to an empty room. Chan glanced all around. No one was in the room.

  Water ran in the bathroom. His pistol out, Chan pushed open the bathroom door. No one was in the bathroom. He went out into the main room, looked into the two closets. They were empty. He saw the open rear window, went to it and looked out.

  Trees grew in a thick clump some ten yards behind the motel, and through the mist Chan saw something moving in the shadows of the tall trees.

  “Angela?” he called, waiting.

  There was no answer, but the something moved again - low under the trees, a figure that seemed to move and wait. Nervous, she must have gone to hide in the safety of the trees. Chan went out and around to the rear. He saw her.

  She was standing erect under a tall redwood, barely moving as if watching his every move.

  Except that as he approached her he realized that she was too tall. Three feet too tall.

  Too tall, and moving slowly from side to side, her head down, her arms loose and limp at her side, swinging in the fog

  Chan stood and looked up at her. The rope around her neck went up over a branch of the redwood. A chair from the motel room lay on its side under her. She hung like a fruit on the tree. Dead.

  Chan stood there for some moments before he picked up the chair, stood on it, and cut her down.

  XI

  THE POLICE PROBED through the brush under the trees, their floodlights turning the area behind the motel as bright as day in the sea mist. The ambulance was there, the Coroner’s man working over the body of Angela Smith, alias Jones, alias whatever her real name had been.

  Forbes stood with Chan some distance away from where his men, and the Sheriff’s men, were working. His tired eyes looked toward the dead girl, and then toward the dark trees macabre now in the glare of the floodlights.

  “Nothing in the bushes or in the room so far. Not a match that doesn’t belong in the room; and nothing of the girl’s. She must have come as she was. The car belongs to the Temple, they reported she’d taken it. If only we’d spotted it a few hours sooner.” Forbes shook his head angrily as if he had never gotten used to death even in his trade.

  “The clerk at the desk saw no one, heard nothing?” Chan said.

  “Not a thing,” Forbes sighed. “It’s a busy motel, has a restaurant, people coming and going all the time.”

  “An age of television. Who hears strange voices or noises over the noise of actors blaring into the night?”

  Forbes turned as the Coroner’s man came up. The doctor was drying his hands.

  “Looks like strangulation, died by hanging. The chair’s in the right place. About an hour ago, I’d say. Can I take her?”

  “No other marks on her, Doctor?” Chan asked.

  “You expect some?” the doctor said slowly.

  “Possibly.”

  “Well, yes and no. She’s got some bruises on her upper arms, small ones, could be old. A small swelling on her jaw. Nothing else. No rape or sex recently. Nothing under her fingernails.”

  Chan nodded, and Forbes motioned for the doctor to take Angela Smith. Then Forbes walked away around the motel and into Unit Five. He closed the door behind himself and Chan. He lit a cigarette, sat down, looked up at Chan.

  “You don’t believe it was suicide, Inspector Chan?” Forbes said. “A sick girl, almost crazy you said yourself. Highly on edge, neurotic, at the Temple to be calmed down. Rambling when she spoke to you on the telephone tonight. Probably paranoid, seeing demons. She tried to attack you with a knife. It looks like everything you’d expect of a suicidal kid.”

  “It would seem so, no evidence otherwise,” Chan said, “except those bruises on her arms and the swelling on her jaw. No limbs of the tree were near enough to bruise her arms, and it is unlikely she fell and hit her own jaw.”

  “But she could have, and small bruises happen easily to a young girl.”

  “Tonight she insisted that I must meet her, she had something to tell me.”

  “Who knows what? Some crazy hallucination. Maybe she was so far out she scared herself too much. It happens.”

  “Suicides happen, and accidents, but when both come together they cause great wonder. Also, it is strange when unknown men follow people involved with the accident and the suicide.”

  “All right, I agree. I wonder some, too,” Forbes said. “I’ve got to admit that suicide fits everything I’ve heard about this Smith girl, but maybe it fits a little too well. Too easy an answer, like being handed it on a silver platter.

  “And I wonder about a girl who runs away from a barred-window place, swipes a car, has no luggage not even a handbag, and happens to bring a rope with her,” Forbes said grimly. “There’s no rope traces in the car, and the desk clerk says the girl never went out.”

  “Such facts give rise to questions,” Chan agreed dryly.

  “But if she was killed, why? By whom? What’s the motive? What do we know, Mr. Chan?”

  “I think the girl saw Benny Chan the night he died. I think she saw someone pursue the drowned handyman.”

  “All right, but why was Benny drowned, if he was?”

  “That of course is the question. If deaths are not what they seem, the cause is hidden well,” Chan said. “Careful men in suits who have been following Betty, Chan and C.V. Soong have made no moves, appear to be only watching. They may be agents of China or Russia, but if so they have made no apparent attempt to steal the scrolls except the one Benny carried. Even then, the theft was bungled if tried, and professional agents should not make such a mistake.”

  “Then what the hell are they after?”

  “Cannot say yet. Perhaps they watch for something we do not yet know, something that has not happened yet, or someone who has not yet appeared,” Chan said slowly. “Betty Chan thinks she has been observed, perhaps followed, by men other than the men in suits. Strange watchers who wear capes and wide hats and keep their faces hidden.”

  “Capes and wide hats?” Forbes said. His eyes went distant for a
moment, remembering something. “We had a report, maybe a year ago, from the S.F.P.D. It was a general report, for our information. Seems that the old Tongs are being revived up in San Francisco. Only a rumor, really, but we know the Tongs have made a comeback in Hong Kong, Singapore, Macao, and other places outside Red China where there are large Chinese population. Even in Taiwan, I’ve heard, despite Chiang’s puritanism.”

  “Or because of it,” Chan said. “I am aware of the unhappy revival of the Tong in those places. Terrorists and extortionists, criminals who live off their own people like the Mafia. I was not aware they had already reached San Francisco.”

  “Some of the S.F.P.D. say they have, only a few gangs right now, but maybe growing,” Forbes said, and he looked at Chan. “I hear that one of the Tongs calls itself The Yellow Claw Society after one of the old Tongs, and they wear capes and wide hats!”

  Chan was silent for a long minute. His dark eyes seemed to be seeing the pain and sorrow of the past caused by the old Tong Societies and their blood feuds and terrorism. It was one of the sadder moments in the history of his people - lost strangers in a strange land where they weren’t welcome, hounded by everyone, and then robbed and murdered by their own gangsters.

  “Why would a Tong be connected with Benny Chan?” he asked.

  “The scroll?” Forbes wondered.

  “It would not seem likely, and gangsters would not have lost the box on an open beach,” Chan said. “No, Lieutenant, there is much here as yet unexplained.”

  “Could Benny have been a member of a Tong? Or the sister? Maybe your impossible Chinese agents are interested in the Tong for some reason, and know a connection between Benny and the Tong.”

  Chan nodded sadly. “It is always possible. Fear of Tong vengeance might have been greater than the fear of water in Benny Chan. I think it is time to change actions to bring hidden forces into the open.”

  “How, Mr. Chan?”