Chiao Tai jumped up and rushed down, with Ma Joong on his heels.
The Korean girl had been stripped naked and laid across the table. The waiter was holding her hands, another man her legs. The fat woman was beating her across her hips with a rattan stick.
Chiao Tai knocked the waiter down with a hard blow on his jaw. The other man let go of the girl's legs and drew a knife from his girdle. Chiao Tai vaulted over the table, threw the woman with her back against the wall, caught the knife-wielder's wrist and gave it a quick twist. The man fell back with a yell of pain; the knife clattered to the floor. The girl let herself roll from the table, tearing frantically at the dirty rag with which she had been gagged. Chiao Tai helped her up and freed her of the gag. The other man stooped to pick up the knife with his left hand, but Ma Joong gave him a kick in his ribs that sent him doubled up into a corner. The girl was retching violently; suddenly she started to vomit.
'One happy little family!' Po Kai remarked from the stairs. 'Call the men from the next boat!' the fat woman panted at the waiter, who was scrambling up.'
'Call all the bastards together!' Ma Joong shouted with enthusiasm. He broke a leg from his chair to be used as a club. 'Slowly, auntie, slowly!' Po Kai called out. 'Better be careful. These two men are officers of the tribunal.'
The woman grew pale. She quickly motioned the waiter to come back. Falling on her knees before Chiao, she whined, 'Please, sir, I only wanted to teach her how to behave to you!'
'I told you to keep your dirty hands off her!' Chiao Tai snapped. He gave the girl his neckcloth to clean her face. She rose and stood there trembling.
'Go and comfort her a bit, brother,' Ma Joong counseled. 'I'll put that fellow with the knife on his feet again.'
Yu-soo took up her robe and went to the door in the back. Chiao Tai followed her into a narrow corridor. The girl opened one of the doors that lined it and motioned Chiao Tai to go inside. Then she went on.
Chiao Tai saw that the cabin was very small. A bed stood under the porthole, the only other furniture was a small dressing table with a rickety bamboo taboret in front of it, and a large red leather clothes box against the wall opposite. Chiao Tai sat down on the clothes box and waited till Yu-soo came in.
As she silently threw her robe on the bed Chiao Tai said awkwardly, 'I am sorry, it was all my fault.'
'It doesn't matter,' the girl said indifferently. She bent over the bed and took a small round box from the windowsill. Chiao Tai could not take his eyes off her shapely figure.
'Better get dressed,' he said
'It's too hot in here,' Yu-soo said in a sullen voice. She had opened the box and was rubbing ointment on the welts across her hips.
'Look,' she said suddenly, 'you were just in time! The skin is not yet broken.'
'Won't you please put that dress on?' Chiao Tai said hoarsely.
'I thought you'd be interested to know,' the girl said placidly. 'You said yourself it was your fault, didn't you?' She folded her robe up, placed it on the taboret. She sat down carefully and started to do up her hair.
Chiao Tai looked at her well-formed back. He told himself angrily that it would be mean to bother her now. Then he saw her firm round breasts reflected in the mirror. He swallowed and said desperately, 'Don't do that! Two of you is just too much for any man.
Yu-soo looked round at him, astonished. Then she shrugged her shapely shoulders, rose and sat down on the bed opposite Chiao Tai.
'Are you really from the tribunal?' she asked casually. 'People here often tell lies, you know.'
Grateful for the diversion Chiao Tai pulled a folded document from his 'boot. The girl wiped her hands off on her hair, then took it.
'I can't read,' she remarked, 'but I have good eyes!'
Turning over on her belly, she reached down behind the bed and brought out a flat, square package, tightly wrapped in gray paper. Sitting up again, she compared the seal on Chiao Tai's pass with that impressed over the folds of the wrapper. Handing the pass back to him, she said, 'You are right. It's the same seal.'
She looked pensively at Chiao Tai, slowly scratching her thigh. 'How did you get that package with the seal of the tribunal?' Chiao Tai asked curiously.
'Look, he has come to life,' the girl said, pouting. 'You are a real thief catcher, aren't you?'
Chiao Tai clenched his fists.
A MEETING IN A FLOWER BOAT
'Look here, woman!' he blurted out. 'You just got hurt, didn't you? You don't think that I would be so mean as to want to sleep with you now, do you?'
The girl gave him a sidelong glance. She yawned, then said slowly, 'I am not so sure I'd think that mean of you.'
Chiao Tai quickly got up.
When he came back in the main cabin he found Po Kai sitting at the table, his head cradled in his arms. He was snoring loudly. The fat woman sat opposite him, looking morosely at a cup of wine. Chiao Tai settled the bill with her, and warned her that she would get into serious trouble with him if she maltreated the Korean girl again.
'She's only a Korean war slave, sir, and I bought her from the government in the regular way,' she said sharply. Then she added ingratiatingly, 'But your word is of course law to me, sir.
Ma Joong came in, looking very pleased.
'After all, this is rather a cosy place,' he remarked. 'And that plump girl is first class!'
'I hope soon to have something better for you, sir!' the woman said eagerly. 'There's a brand-new one on the fifth boat, a real beauty and well educated too. Just now she is being kept reserved for a certain gentleman but, well, those things don't last forever, as you know! Maybe in a week or two='
'Splendid!' exclaimed Ma Joong. 'We'll be back. But tell those men of yours not to wave knives at us. That upsets us, and when we are upset we are liable to become a bit rough.' Shaking Po Kai's shoulder he shouted in his ear, 'Wake up, gay songster! It's nearly midnight, time to go home!'
Po Kai raised his head. lie gave the two men a jaundiced look. 'You two are utterly vulgar,' he remarked haughtily. 'You'll never understand my lofty spirit. I prefer to wait here for my good friend Kim Sang. Your company is distasteful to me, you think only of drinking and fornication. Go away; I despise you!'
Ma Joong roared with laughter. He pushed Po Kai's cap down over his eyes, then he went up with Chiao Tai and whistled for a boat.
SEVENTH CHAPTER
