worth the trip.’
‘Don’t we all,’ answered Hatcher.
‘Let me tell you something maybe you don’t know about Sam-Sam,’ Cohen said, starting a rambling monologue that eventually had a point. ‘First time I ever met him was when I saw you, when the Tsu Fi sent me up here to Chin Chin land the first time. Sam- Sam was kind of the new kid on the block, okay? He came down from Peking because he was an ardent capitalist at heart, which didn’t go over well in Peking. This was about six months before that time I met him. I don’t know what he did in Peking, but whatever it was, he had developed the most blase attitude about killing I’ve ever seen. I mean he would just as soon put a bullet in your brain as step on a bug.
‘I was dealing mainly with Joe Cockroach, he was like the agent for everything. You made a deal with Joe and he got it all together — one price, one guy to pay. It was a comfortable way to do business. Also I trusted Joe. I knew him before in Hong Kong when he was in the import business. So maybe the third time I go up there, Sam- Sam comes up to me and says from now on its him and me doing business. He’ll make a better offer, he says. And I tell him, “Sam-Sam, I can’t do that because I’ve been dealing with Joe for too many years and, besides, things don’t work like that up here at the Ts’e K’am Men Ti.”
‘So Sam-Sam walks out on the deck — we were in this barge and I was in Joe’s office, Joe is outside doing something — and Sam-Sam walks out the door and next thing I know I hear two shots,
‘I know all that stuff, China,’ Hatcher said with a sigh.
‘Yeah, but here’s what you don’t know,’ Cohen said rather elegantly. ‘Joe Cockroach came to Hong Kong from China. He did this and that, nothing very successful, then he went up to Chin Chin land and got in the smuggling business. Then he sent for his brother to come down. His brother was Sam-Sam Sam.’
‘Sam-Sam isn’t going to be around,’ Hatcher said gruffly.
‘Yeah, right, that’s what we’re all hoping,’ Cohen intoned. ‘That Sam-Sam won’t be around.’
They fell silent again and Cohen began to doze, his head bobbing, then woke up suddenly, but drifted off again. In the eerie twilight before dawn he looked like some ancient Chinese philosopher.
Daphne and Hatcher sat beside him on the hardback benches provided in the snakeboat. Hatcher was leaning back, his long legs stretched out in front of him. Daphne reached out and slipped her hand in his. He squeezed it gently and held on to it as they peered straight ahead into the waning darkness.
She leaned over him and said softly in his ear, ‘You like this, don’t you, Hatch? Living with your heart in your mouth.’
‘It can become addictive.’
‘Did you ever marry, Hatcher?’ Daphne asked.
‘Nope.’
‘Is that the reason?’
He thought for a moment, and said, ‘Maybe.’
‘Ever thought about it?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said immediately, and was surprised at his answer. ‘The thought never occurred to me.’
‘Why not?’
Hatcher did not answer immediately. He thought of all the stereotyped reasons.
‘I live day to day,’ he said finally. ‘Marriage is also yesterdays and tomorrows.’
He turned and looked back at her. ‘Or maybe I’ve just been too damn selfish all my life to think about anyone else. Why? Is this a proposal?’
They both laughed softly in the darkness.
She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m not the marrying kind either.’ She paused for a moment and then asked, ‘Do you ever worry about dying?’
‘Nah,’ he said quickly, ‘I gave that up a long time ago.’
The river broke up into a dozen twisting streams and creeks that coursed through the thick jungle. This was the northern rim of the Southeast Asian rain forest. A few miles to the north, trees gave way to foothills and then mountains, but here the jungle was still fresh and verdant. Chinese patrol boats, limited in number, ignored the area, which was like pirate Jean Lafitte’s stronghold in the early 1800s, a drifting, lush green empire of assassins and privateers who could vanish in an instant up one of its many creeks and rivers or disappear into jungle hideouts defended by mines and booby traps. It was a sprawling black market, its barges and boats of contraband protected by nature and by the brigands who called themselves the Ts’e K’am Men Ti, the Secret Gate Keepers, and dominated with vicious authority by the ruthless Sam-Sam Sam, and his henchmen, the SAVAK killer Batal and the Tonton assassin Billy Death.
With the sun, the jungle creatures in this marginal rain forest began to awaken and the underbrush came alive with morning sounds. Adjutant storks squawked, gliding frogs bellowed and leaped from tree to tree, hornbills pushed through the foliage with their powerful beaks vying for food with fruit-eating bats. High above them all, eagles drifted leisurely through the blood-red sky seeking breakfast.
By noon they were near the small villages of Jiangmen and Shunde. They slipped past them. By mid afternoon they were deep in the jungle.
‘We’re coming to the Ts’e K’am Men Ti cutoff,’ Daphne said.
Hatcher studied the map she had sketched before they left. It showed a narrow cutoff snaking away from the main river to the south. Four miles up the cutoff was another branch that twisted off to the east through the jungle, then cut sharply west forming a narrow peninsula, an elbow in the stream, like the trap in a sink, and easy to block
