“Did death honor our hovel yesterday?” Chang asked in English.
“No, Ta Jen,” the pockmarked one said.
“It was the nobleman who guided me here yesterday,” I explained, “not this son of an emperor.”
Chang imitated surprise.
“Who welcomed the King of Spies yesterday?” he asked the man at the door.
“I bring ’em, Ta Jen.”
I grinned at the pockmarked man, he grinned back, and Chang smiled benevolently.
“An excellent jest,” he said.
It was.
The pockmarked man bowed and started to duck back through the hangings. Loose shoes rattled on the boards behind him. He spun around. One of the big wrestlers I had seen the previous day loomed above him. The wrestler’s eyes were bright with excitement, and grunted Chinese syllables poured out of his mouth. The pockmarked one talked back. Chang Li Ching silenced them with a sharp command. All this was in Chinese—out of my reach.
“Will the Grand Duke of Manhunters permit his servant to depart for a moment to attend to his distressing domestic affairs?”
“Sure.”
Chang bowed with his hands together, and spoke to the wrestler.
“You will remain here to see that the great one is not disturbed and that any wishes he expresses are gratified.”
The wrestler bowed and stood aside for Chang to pass through the door with the pockmarked man. The hangings swung over the door behind them.
I didn’t waste any language on the man at the door, but got a cigarette going and waited for Chang to come back. The cigarette was half gone when a shot sounded in the building, not far away.
The giant at the door scowled.
Another shot sounded, and running feet thumped in the hall. The pockmarked man’s face came through the hangings. He poured grunts at the wrestler. The wrestler scowled at me and protested. The other insisted.
The wrestler scowled at me again, rumbled, “You wait,” and was gone with the other.
I finished my cigarette to the tune of muffled struggle-sounds that seemed to come from the floor below. There were two more shots, far apart. Feet ran past the door of the room I was in. Perhaps ten minutes had gone since I had been left alone.
I found I wasn’t alone.
Across the room from the door, the hangings that covered the wall were disturbed. The blue, green and silver velvet bulged out an inch and settled back in place.
The disturbance happened the second time perhaps ten feet farther along the wall. No movement for a while, and then a tremor in the far corner.
Somebody was creeping along between hangings and wall.
I let them creep, still slumping in my chair with idle hands. If the bulge meant trouble, action on my part would only bring it that much quicker.
I traced the disturbance down the length of that wall and halfway across the other, to where I knew the door was. Then I lost it for some time. I had just decided that the creeper had gone through the door when the curtains opened and the creeper stepped out.
She wasn’t four and a half feet high—a living ornament from somebody’s shelf. Her face was a tiny oval of painted beauty, its perfection emphasized by the lacquer-black hair that was flat and glossy around her temples. Gold earrings swung beside her smooth cheeks, a jade butterfly was in her hair. A lavender jacket, glittering with white stones, covered her from under her chin to her knees. Lavender stockings showed under her short lavender trousers, and her bound-small feet were in slippers of the same color, shaped like kittens, with yellow stones for eyes and aigrettes for whiskers.
The point of all this our-young-ladies’-fashion stuff is that she was impossibly dainty. But there she was—neither a carving nor a painting, but a living small woman with fear in her black eyes and nervous, tiny fingers worrying the silk at her bosom.
Twice as she came toward me—hurrying with the awkward, quick step of the foot-bound Chinese woman—her head twisted around for a look at the hangings over the door.
I was on my feet by now, going to meet her.
Her English wasn’t much. Most of what she babbled at me I missed, though I thought “yung hel-lup” might have been meant for “You help?”
I nodded, catching her under the elbows as she stumbled against me.
She gave me some more language that didn’t make the situation any clearer—unless “sul-lay-vee gull” meant slave-girl and “tak-ka wah” meant take away.
“You want me to get you out of here?” I asked.
Her head, close under my chin, went up and down, and her red flower of a mouth shaped a smile that made all the other smiles I could remember look like leers.
She did some more talking. I got nothing out of it. Taking one of her elbows out of my hand, she pushed up her sleeve, baring a forearm that an artist had spent a lifetime carving out of ivory. On it were five finger-shaped bruises ending in cuts where the nails had punctured the flesh.
She let the sleeve fall over it again, and gave me more words. They didn’t mean anything to me, but they tinkled prettily.
“All right,” I said, sliding my gun out. “If you want to go, we’ll go.”
Both her hands went to the gun, pushing it down, and she talked excitedly into my face, winding up with a flicking of one hand across her collar—a pantomime of a throat being cut.
I shook my head from side to side and urged her toward the door.
She balked, fright large in her eyes.
One of her hands went to my watch-pocket. I let her take the watch out.
She put the tiny tip of one pointed finger over the twelve and then circled the dial three times. I thought I got that. Thirty-six hours from noon would be midnight of the following night—Thursday.
“Yes,” I said.
She shot a look at the door and led me to the table where the tea things were. With a finger dipped in cold tea she began to draw on the table’s inlaid top. Two parallel lines
