Assignment - Sulu Sea (11 page)

“The trouble with being hunted, Samuel,” the old man would
say, “is that you start running and keep right on in a straight line, and let
panic ride you like the old man on Sindbad’s shoulders. You go on and on and
try to make good on strength alone, forgetting you'd never be hunted in the first
place if the other fellow wasn’t stronger and faster than you. And with sharper
teeth, so to speak. So don’t ever try to outrun the enemy. You got to shake the
weight of panic off your back and be smart. The race ain‘t to the swift, it‘s to
the clever.”

“And what do the clever ones do, Grandpa?” he’d asked.

“The same as the fox, maybe. Double back. Do the unexpected,
mainly.” The old man’s eyes twinkled cannily. “But is that enough for you,
Samuel?"

“I think not. It’s not enough just to run and escape.”

“Right, son. If you want to win for good, you can’t make it
by pumping your legs and getting out of breath and duckin’ down some dark hole
and hidin’ like a rabbit or a fox. You've got to hit back. So you double on him
and get on the other feller’s trail and While he’s looking for you in one direction,
you hit him from the other. If that sounds like unfair play, just remember it’s
one of the rules of survival. The feller who wins is the one who says which law
is right and which is wrong.”

There was some doubt in Durell’s mind about the validity of
the old man’s philosophy today, but he could not question the fact that old
Jonathan had been a fine tactician then, one of the shrewdest hunters of
animals and men in the delta bayou country. He could double back, however, and
hit ‘em while they were looking the other way. While Prince Ch‘ing’s men hunted
for him along canals and houses, he would drop in to pay a call on the Manchu
pretender himself, at the House of a Thousand Pleasures.

He did not doubt that the visit would be interesting.

He swam quietly through the dark, tangled shadows, avoiding
the open canals and
klongs
where crowded sampans, junks and brightly painted outrigger fishing boats
were moored in a miasma of charcoal smoke, cooking odors, the smells of
fish and crowded unwashed humanity. Eventually he came to a clear area, a
sort of open, watery square he had not seen on the route he had taken with Yoko
Hanamutra. From the safe obscurity between two thick piers, he could see across
the expanse of water in the long-fingered yellow light of a hundred
lanterns to a brilliantly outlined entrance of what could only be an enormous
dance hall or teahouse. This could be nothing less than the prince’s House of a
Thousand Pleasures, the main milking station, so to speak, for picking up the
thousands of coins from the impoverished and Quietly desperate inhabitants of
Dendang. As he watched, immersed to his neck in the tepid, oily water, he saw
two big Chinese make their way along the plank walk to the entrance. Pie was
quite sure they were the ones who had followed him, and the first was
definitely one of those from the hospital. He was relieved to note that
they did not have Yoko Hanamutra with them.

Quickly, he found a ladder and climbed to a small dark boardwalk
behind some shanty tin houses. The slimy feel of the canals clung to him, but
nothing short of a long soak in a tub could fix that. Luck, however,
touched him when he spotted a line of flapping clothes behind the nearest
tin shack. There was a coolie’s jacket, newly washed and dried, together with
worn dungarees, The jacket was large in the middle and tight in the shoulders,
but he was happy to exchange it for his muddy shirt. His wet gun troubled him,
and he took a few moments to dry it as well as he could, standing in the darkness
to face the open square of water and Prince Ch’ing’s establishment. He decided
he would have to gamble or pray it would fire if needed.

Fortunately, he was not the only white man who sought the
favors of Prince Ch’ing’s enticements. A gleaming mahogany launch was moored
before the big pavilion, and several of Pandakan’s European merchants were
going in, either to enjoy the gambling or the women that the prince made
available to his more select clientele. Durell walked quickly through the
crowded stalls that sold spiced meats, tiny broiled shrimp, cookies and ices.
No one paid much attention to him in this part of Fishtown. He could have been a
sailor, a beachcomber, anything, in his coolie jacket and the straw sandals
that had come from the same source as his dry clothes. Most of the local
patrons used an entrance other than the one where the launch was tied up, and
he headed for the smaller and less pretentious way in.

The smells of incense, cooking, human sweat and tension struck
him like a tangible blow as he went inside the House of a Thousand Pleasures.
The place was an immense, sprawling complex that surely covered several acres
built out over the harbor water. But it Prince Ch’ing were here, squatting like
a fat spider in the center of his web, he would find his quarry.

He was leaning more on instinct than logic to hunt here for
an answer to the riddle of the missing submarine. But considering the factors
that had formed a pattern in his mind, once he’d learned of Tommy Lee’s
troubles, he did not consider it unreasonable.

“You English stranger here? You American?”

The voice was a soft, birdlike singsong, spoken by a young Chinese
girl in a blue silk quilted jacket and black silk trousers, who smiled at him
from behind the bars of a huge birdcage of bamboo. The bars, Durell noted, were
reinforced with steel rods, and the gate in the birdcage, which was duplicated
by another behind the girl, was also of steel and merely painted to look like
bamboo. Thus there was a double barrier to this entrance to Prince Ch’ing’s
pleasure house.

“I’m both an American and a stranger, too,” Durell said, smiling.
“Is that so terrible?”

“All men are welcome here. You come from ship?“ the Chinese
girl asked. Her eyes smiled, but her young smile was nervous. Beyond her cage,
he saw a row of garish electric bulbs lighting a wide corridor to a big dance
hall, from which a weird concoction of Orientalized twist music emanated.

“You know no ships have stopped at Pandakan for a week,
honey,” he said. “I‘m off the beach, is all. It’s been a long trip and I‘m hot,
tired, thirsty and lonely.”

“We can take care of all your needs,” the girl piped, “provided
you have money. We want no trouble with Americans here.”

“I’ve got money—all I need for this place.”

He made his voice rough, and showed her the clip of loose
bills he had removed, along with his gun, from his wet clothes behind the
shack. The money was wet, but he hoped she wouldn’t notice, and it didn’t seem
as if she did. Her smile grew Wider, showing small white teeth.

“Oh, you very rich American gentleman, indeed! Please to
enter and be made welcome."

He did not see her touch anything, but the birdcage door slid
aside on noiseless tracks. Obviously someone else, observing him from
somewhere, had passed him on. He noted, however, that the opposite door in the
cage did not open at the same time. It could be a trap. It could be that Prince
Ch’ing had even anticipated his doubling back to attack him here. But there was
no help for it. If he retreated now, he would gain nothing and probably lose
everything.

He stepped into the birdcage with the little Chinese girl, and
the gate slid silently shut behind him.

“What pleasures you like?” she Whispered. “You like gamble,
special foods, you like to buy dreams, maybe? We have everything, all
pleasures, for all men. You like a girl, you tell me what kind, what color and
shape. You like more than one? You look very strong man, sir. What you like
first?”

“A little food and a little gambling, maybe. I feel lucky, tonight.”

“Yes, sir. Then you take the stairs to the right.”

The back gate of the bamboo birdcage with the steel doors slid
silently open and admitted him to the House of a Thousand Pleasures.

                                                                                               
chapter ten

HIS IMMEDIATE objective was to lose himself in the crowded public
areas of Prince Ch’ing’s Wide-open emporium of vice, lust, pleasure and greed.
There might be dedicated terrorists operating elsewhere in Pandakan, men who
schemed and plotted for this ideology or that, or disillusioned colonists who
saw four generations of labor and property seized, burned or abandoned. But here
in Ch’ing’s establishment, nothing was changed from the days of old, and vice
operated at its normal lucrative pace.

It was difficult to believe that this vast, glittery, tawdry
palace of pleasure was built on piers over the slow tidal rise and fall of the
harbor, in the center of the tangled squalor of Dendang. The gambling rooms
were decorated with streamers and lanterns and mirrors that reflected
distorted views of the roulette and fan-tan tables. From the top of the wide
stairway Durell stepped down onto a balcony that went around all four walls
above the gambling pit. There was even a cockfighting arena at one end,
patronized mostly by small brown Malays. Another section was devoted to
mah-jongg players, dice, and the spinning wheels of fortune common to any
county carnival. Slot machines added to the clatter, and the air was
filled with the bright murmur of a dozen languages, as brilliant as the
varied batik clothing on men and Women alike—white Indian dhotis, Malay sarongs
and
bajus
, Chinese
slacks and jackets for the men, with Malay
kabaya
, Chinese samfoo and
cheongsam and Indian saris for the women. Here and there, too, were youngsters
in Western-style blue jeans and shirttails. The hubbub of voices ranged from
Mandarin and Cantonese to Madurese and Bahasa.

Durell moved around the balcony, which was decorated with
small tables and an occasional private booth screened with bamboo. On the walls
were cages filled With monkeys, lizards, parrots and an occasional bird
of paradise, and the food was as varied as the patrons—
satay
, meat grilled on bamboo skewers, steaks of sea turtles that
unluckily had swum down from the South China Sea, spicy Indian chicken and
mutton curries. The waitresses were Malay or Chinese girls in pert, provocative
costumes. Durell moved to the next balcony, watching in the occasional wall
mirror that reflected the teeming activity and noise on the floor
below; but he could not see that he was being followed. Ten minutes was all the
time he allotted, then he moved into a wide corridor where customer traffic
surged toward the dance hall where couples pressed thickly together in the dim,
rotating lights.

A voice spoke at his elbow.

“Have you not yet found what you seek, sir?”

It was the girl from the birdcage. She had exchanged her simple
costume for a shimmering blue silk sheath embroidered with a golden Imperial
Dragon of old Peking, a symbol of the Manchus. Her young smile was warm, her
lips soft and moist-looking.

“Not yet," Durell said.

“You did not seem like a man seeking obvious pleasures. Dancing,
food, gambling—these are not for you. Something more must be available to
please you.”

“What do you suggest? And have you a name?”

“I am called Paradise,” she said gently. When he refrained from
making an obvious remark, she said, “Perhaps it is the House of Dreams that you
Wish? We could give you privacy, very nice, very comfortable, a girl to prepare
your pipe and recite poetry to you—”

“Prince Ch’ing seems to think of everything. Does he manage
this by himself?"

“The prince is the master of all you see,” she murmured.

“Including yourself?"

“He is my employer, sir. Have you decided what you wish?”

“Do you think I could see him?” he asked bluntly. When she
looked blank, he said: “Prince Ch’ing—I would like to meet him.”

“But why?”

“Let‘s just call it a business deal."

“You would have to go through—how you say?—official channels?"
She smiled brightly and meaninglessly. “He is very busy, important man. Very
few people see him.”

“Is Prince Ch’ing here now?”

“I cannot say. If you cannot find what you seek in his
House, however, he will be most disappointed. He prides himself on providing
all that man can dream of or desire."

“I’m sure of it,” Durell said grimly. “Every vice and rotten
lust in the human soul, at reasonable and even cut-rate prices. Maybe even on
the credit plan, right, Paradise?“

“I do not understand. sir,” she murmured.

He patted her cheek. “You don’t have to, maiden of the Flowery
Kingdom. Is the prince with the girls?”

“Usually, sir."

“Let's go there, then. Just point the way.”

She looked puzzled and worried. He was sure he had been
spotted when he entered the House of a Thousand Pleasures. and he was equally
certain she was assigned to bird-dog his moves. But if anything was known about
him, Prince Ch’ing would know it, and pretty girls and a weakness for them was
not in his dossier. He had the feeling that from somewhere in this vast, noisy
palace of entertainment, Prince Ch’ing watched and was amused by him.

Paradise led him to a flight of stairs where another
girl, also wearing the Imperial Dragon, gently guided him away from the public
corridors to a quiet, carpeted stairway and wide corridor decorated with old
Chinese porcelains and scrolls. He did not feel flattered by being rated
a better-paying client.

The upper corridor was illuminated by soft oil lamps behind
traditional ruby-red glass. Cloying incense filled the air. A girl in a
red and gold sarong smiled from a doorway of carved teakwood; and from behind
another doorway he heard a small, muffled scream. No one seemed
concerned, and he decided it was one of Prince Ch’ing’s thousand pleasures.

A dim lobby, Chinese in decor but with an Arabian Nights’
heaping of pillows and silk and tapestry, suitably adorned with women of all
sizes, shapes, colors and ages, met him when he paused on the next threshold.
Here Paradise waited for him again, and he wondered how she had gotten ahead of
him. Her face was pale under masklike makeup, and her eyes avoided his. From
among the groups of calm, nude women, a very ancient, incredibly wrinkled old
woman in heavy silken robes arose to survey him with eyes like dark raisins in
a face of spoiled suet. Incense coiled from a brass brazier set before a
many-armed, many-breasted, lewdly smiling image set prominently in a niche
behind the old woman. The walls were painted with murals that depicted an
astonishing variety of Prince Ch’ing’s alleged pleasures.