Book Four
Chapter 19
The King and Peter Marlowe waited with growing anxiety. Shagata was long overdue.
'What a stinking night,' the King said irritably. 'I'm sweating like a pig.'
They were sitting in the King's corner and Peter Marlowe was watching the King play solitaire. There was a tension in the sultry air settling the camp from the moonless sky. Even the constant scratchings from beneath the hut were hushed.
'I wish he'd get here if he's coming,' Peter Marlowe said.
'I wish we knew what the hell happened with Cheng San. Least the son of a bitch could've done was to send us word.' The King glanced out of his window towards the wire for the thousandth time. He was seeking a sign from the guerrillas that should be there — must be there! But there was no movement, no sign. The jungle, like the camp, drooped and was still.
Peter Marlowe winced as he flexed the fingers of his left hand and moved his aching arm into a more comfortable position.
The King looked back. 'How's it feel?'
'Hurts like hell, old chum.'
'You should get it looked at.'
'I'm on sick call tomorrow.'
'Lousy piece of luck.'
'Accidents happen. Nothing you can do about it.'
It had happened two days previously. On the wood detail. One moment Peter Marlowe had been straining in the swamp against the weight of the fanged tree stump, hauling it with twenty other sweating pairs of hands into the trailer, and the next moment the hands had slipped and his arm had been caught between the stump and the trailer. He had felt the iron-hard barbs of wood rip deep into his arm muscle, the weight of the tree stump almost crushing his bones, and he had screamed in agony.
It had taken minutes for the others to lift the stump and pull his numbed arm free and lay him on the earth, his blood weeping into swamp-ooze —the flies and bugs and insects swarming, frantic with the bloodsweet- smell.
The wound was six inches long and two wide and deep in parts. They had pulled out most of the root daggers from the wound and poured water over it and cleaned it as best they could. They had put on a tourniquet, then fought the tree stump onto the trailer and labored it home to Changi. He had walked beside the trailer, faint with nausea.
Dr. Kennedy had looked at the wound and doused it with iodine while Steven held his good hand and he was starched with pain. Next the doctor had put a little zinc ointment on part of the wound, and grease on the rest to stop the clotting blood from melding with the dressing. Then the doctor had bandaged the arm.
'You're bloody lucky, Marlowe,' he had said. 'No bones broken and the muscles are undamaged. More or less just a flesh wound. Come back in a couple of days and we'll take another look at it.'
The King looked up sharply from the cards as Max hurried into the hut.
'Trouble,' Max said, his voice low and strained. 'Grey's just left the hospital, heading this way.'
'Keep him tailed, Max. Better send Dino.'
'Okay.' Max hurried out.
'What do you think, Peter?'
'If Grey's out of the hospital, he must know something's up.'
'He knows, all right.'
'What?'
'Sure. He has a stoolie in the hut.'
'My God. Are you sure?'
'Yes. And I know who.' ,
The King put a black four on a red five and the red five on a black six and cleared another ace.
'Who is it?'
'I'm not telling you, Peter.' The King smiled hard. 'Better you don't know.
But Grey has a man here.'
'What are you going to do about it?'
'Nothing. Yet. Maybe later I'll feed him to the rats.' Then the King smiled and and changed the subject. 'Now the Farm was one helluva'n idea, wasn't it?'
Peter Marlowe wondered what he would do if he knew who it was. He knew that Yoshima had a plant too, somewhere in the camp, the one who gave old Daven away, the one who had not been caught yet, who was still unknown — the one who was looking for the bottled radio right now. He thought the King was wise to conceal the knowledge, then there would be no slip-up, and he did not resent that the King did not tell him who it was.
But even so, he examined possibilities.
