“Take Hsiu Hsiu to the upper room, and keep her quiet, if you have to strangle her. I want to talk to Miss Shan.”
Still dazed, he pushed the table under the trapdoor, climbed up on it, hoisted himself through the ceiling, and reached down. Hsiu Hsiu kicked and scratched, but I heaved her up to him. Then I closed the door through which Lillian Shan had come, and faced her.
“How did you get here?” I demanded.
“I went home after I left you, knowing what Yin Hung would say, because he had told me in the employment office, and when I got home—When I got home I decided to come here where I belong.”
“Nonsense!” I corrected her. “When you got home you found a message there from Chang Li Ching, asking you—ordering you to come here.”
She looked at me, saying nothing.
“What did Chang want?”
“He thought perhaps he could help me,” she said, “and so I stayed here.”
More nonsense.
“Chang told you Garthorne was in danger—had split with The Whistler.”
“The Whistler?”
“You made a bargain with Chang,” I accused her, paying no attention to her question. The chances were she didn’t know The Whistler by that name.
She shook her head, jiggling the ornaments on her headdress.
“There was no bargain,” she said, holding my gaze too steadily.
I didn’t believe her. I said so.
“You gave Chang your house—or the use of it—in exchange for his promise that”—“the boob” were the first words I thought of, but I changed them—“Garthorne would be saved from The Whistler, and that you would be saved from the law.”
She drew herself up.
“I did,” she said calmly.
I caught myself weakening. This woman who looked like the queen of something wasn’t easy to handle the way I wanted to handle her. I made myself remember that I knew her when she was homely as hell in mannish clothes.
“You ought to be spanked!” I growled at her. “Haven’t you had enough trouble without mixing yourself now with a flock of highbinders? Did you see The Whistler?”
“There was a man up there,” she said, “I don’t know his name.”
I hunted through my pocket and found the picture of him taken when he was sent to San Quentin.
“That is he,” she told me when I showed it to her.
“A fine partner you picked,” I raged. “What do you think his word on anything is worth?”
“I did not take his word for anything. I took Chang Li Ching’s word.”
“That’s just as bad. They’re mates. What was your bargain?”
She balked again, straight, stiff-necked and level-eyed. Because she was getting away from me with this Manchu princess stuff I got peevish.
“Don’t be a chump all your life!” I pleaded. “You think you made a deal. They took you in! What do you think they’re using your house for?”
She tried to look me down. I tried another angle of attack.
“Here, you don’t mind who you make bargains with. Make one with me. I’m still one prison sentence ahead of The Whistler, so if his word is any good at all, mine ought to be highly valuable. You tell me what the deal was. If it’s halfway decent. I’ll promise you to crawl out of here and forget it. If you don’t tell me, I’m going to empty a gun out of the first window I can find. And you’d be surprised how many cops a shot will draw in this part of town, and how fast it’ll draw them.”
The threat took some of the color out of her face.
“If I tell, you will promise to do nothing?”
“You missed part of it,” I reminded her. “If I think the deal is halfway on the level I’ll keep quiet.”
She bit her lips and let her fingers twist together, and then it came.
“Chang Li Ching is one of the leaders of the anti-Japanese movement in China. Since the death of Sun Wen—or Sun Yat-Sen, as he is called in the south of China and here—the Japanese have increased their hold on the Chinese government until it is greater than it ever was. It is Sun Wen’s work that Chang Li Ching and his friends are carrying on.
“With their own government against them, their immediate necessity is to arm enough patriots to resist Japanese aggression when the time comes. That is what my house is used for. Rifles and ammunition are loaded into boats there and sent out to ships lying far offshore. This man you call The Whistler is the owner of the ships that carry the arms to China.”
“And the death of the servants?” I asked.
“Wan Lan was a spy for the Chinese government—for the Japanese. Wang Ma’s death was an accident, I think, though she, too, was suspected of being a spy. To a patriot, the death of traitors is a necessary thing, you can understand that? Your people are like that too when your country is in danger.”
“Garthorne told me a rum-running story,” I said. “How about it?”
“He believed it,” she said, smiling softly at the trapdoor through which he had gone. “They told him that, because they did not know him well enough to trust him. That is why they would not let him help in the loading.”
One of her hands came out to rest on my arm.
“You will go away and keep silent?” she pleaded. “These things are against the law of your country, but would you not break another country’s laws to save your own country’s life? Have not four hundred million people the right to fight an alien race that would exploit them? Since the day of Taou-kwang my country has been the plaything of more aggressive nations. Is any price too great for patriotic Chinese to pay to end that period of dishonor? You will not put yourself in the way of my people’s liberty?”
“I hope they win,” I said, “but you’ve been tricked. The only guns that have gone through your house have gone through in pockets! It would take a year to get a shipload through there.
