The Fools in Town Are on Our Side (3 page)

It was the only drop-in business that Minneapolis Mutual's tenth-floor island office on Pedder Street ever got, but it bothered me enough to take out $10,000 worth of straight life on myself that afternoon. I even wrote it up under the amused tutelage of my secretary. But since no one ever came around again, other than the odd office-supply salesman, I let the policy expire after a couple of years.

About the only thing I ever did learn about selling life insurance was that Southeast Asia is a rotten territory.

After Joyce Jungroth left, the copy of
Bartlett's
clutched to her under-inflated bosom, I leaned back in my chair, the one with the moulded back that was supposed to correct posture, and pondered the instructions from Las Vegas.

For six months I had been trying to convince a plump, fiftyish Chinese agent that he should double. It had been an odd courtship and for my efforts I had been treated to long recitals of random quotations from Chairman Mao. Nevertheless, Li Teh kept all of the appointments. When he finally ran down, I would murmur something inane such as, “How true,” and drop two hundred-dollar bills on the floor or deck or even desk, adding: “Think about it, won't you?” Li always took the money.

I learned eventually that Li Teh had been barely thirty years old when he had entered Hong Kong in late September of 1949, virtually indistinguishable from the swarmy horde of Chinese who sought sanctuary in the colony after Chiang Kai-shek boarded the C-47 called
Meiling
, in honor of his redoubtable wife, and skipped to Formosa, remembering to pack along the $200 million (U.S.) gold reserves of the Central Bank of China.

The thing that did distinguish Li Teh from his fellow
pai hua
, or refugees, was capital, a goodly amount in American dollars that Mao's forces had stripped from a money belt found on the dead body of one of the more corrupt members of the Generalissimo's personal staff. It was enough to allow Li to open a camera shop in Kowloon on Nathan Road with a franchise from an East German manufacturer who before
World War II had been famous for the quality of the firm's lenses. The shop prospered and Li opened another one on Kimberly Road a few years later, this time specializing in Canons and Nikons from Japan.

From there it was only a short step to Swiss watches (I'd bought one from him), transistor tape recorders, miniature television sets, and transistor radios—anything that hard currency tourists could tote along with them. Had it been his own capital, Li would have been a rich man by the time he was fifty, but his profits were either plowed back into his burgeoning businesses or funneled to Peking where his backers found ready use for the dollars and pounds and francs and marks.

I always thought that Li was a better businessman than he was a spy, although he was that too, dealing in information of all kinds, stealing it when he could, buying it when he couldn't. Once a month he journeyed by train to Peking, a long, hard, uncomfortable trip, bearing a suitcase jammed with as much cash as the profits from his various enterprises would permit. It would have been simpler and more efficient, of course, to have deposited the funds in the Bank of China, but Li also carried along whatever information he had been able to pick up or scrounge and although it was, I understand, welcomed in Peking, it was not met with the same degree of warmth that greeted the hard currency.

Li was a communist and, I suppose, a good one. He once told me that it had all begun in 1938 when as a student he had managed to escape from a Nationalist Army press gang that had roped him to eleven other students. He made his way to Yenan in North China where Mao had located his provisional command post or field headquarters. Although still a teenager, Li was obviously bright and, for China, well educated. He had been allowed to live in one of the clean whitewashed caves that was the home of a senior officer who assumed responsibility for Li's military training, party indoctrination, morality, and introduction to espionage techniques and practices. The officer was of middling rank in the communists' intelligence apparatus and as the officer rose, so did Li Teh, until 1949 when they dispatched him
to Hong Kong, his even then widening girth encircled by a money belt stuffed with American dollars.

As one of Hong Kong's fairly prominent businessmen, Li had half-convinced his Peking superiors that he should live up to his reputation. They had given him what must have been grudging, reluctant permission, and he drove a Porsche, which he loved, dwelt as a widower in an elegant apartment building not too far from the Bank of China and the Cricket Club, and entertained frequently with a certain amount of grace and even style. He was a member of the Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce, three civic organizations, and one private Chinese club that offered a quite excellent bill of fare. Li did all this with the approval if not the good grace of his superiors, whose tolerance of the high life ran out on the last day of each month when they scrutinized his books to make sure that he wasn't left with a dime that he could call his own.

So Li Teh lived a little too well and as a consequence he was broke. Worse, he was in debt, and moneylenders in Hong Kong are even less forgiving than their loan-sharking colleagues in the States. So I corrupted Li Teh with money. It was what I was paid to do and it was what I knew best. In some circles they even said I was very good at it.

Our last meeting was held in a temporarily vacant godown and we followed the usual script except that Li cut his lecture short by almost six minutes, and even what he did say was delivered in a mechanical, totally uninspired manner. When he was through, he was silent for several long moments. I waited. Finally, in a voice so low that I could scarcely hear it, he said: “Your best price?”

“You name it.”

He decided on a moon shot. “Three thousand dollars a month.”

I tried to counter. “Hong Kong, of course.”

“American.”

We were sitting on a couple of empty packing cases. Li Teh leaned back and folded his arms over his bulging belly, which was smoothly cased in a dark green sharkskin suit that must have cost about one hundred and fifty (U.S.) dollars which, in Hong Kong, is a steep price
for a suit, even a tailored one. His eyes were half-closed and he sat there, rocking a little, a fat, unlaughing communist Buddha, content in the certainty that he had just set a price which the buyer couldn't possibly afford to turn down. It was an example of supply and demand at its best. Or worst.

“All right,” I said. “You've got it—if it's worth it.”

“It will be.”

“What?”

“Verbal reports twice each month. Nothing in writing.”

“Whose?”

“My own.”

“And if they're worthless?”

He smiled pleasantly. “Then, Mr. Dye, I seriously doubt that you will pay.”

I smiled back. “You've come to know me well.”

“Yes, I have, haven't I?”

“When do you plan to return?” I said.

“To Peking?”

“Yes.”

“Two weeks from now.”

“Good,” I said. “That'll give me a chance to obtain clearance.”

That troubled Li. To prove it, he arched his eyebrows. “You do not yet have clearance?”

“I never anticipate good news so I didn't ask for it.”

“And bad news?” Li said.

“I never anticipate that either.”

“Then you must surely live a rather bland existence, Mr. Dye.”

I nodded and produced two one hundred-dollar bills and laid them carefully on the packing case which Li was using as a perch. Never once had I handed money to him directly. He ignored the bills.

“In our business, Mr. Li,” I said, “a bland existence is sometimes desperately sought.”

 

 

The jewelry store that I found was near Taylor and Bush Streets, about three
blocks from the hotel. It was a small shop, and when I tried the door, I found it locked. Inside, I could see a clerk, or perhaps the owner, hurrying toward the door. He unlocked it quickly. The man in the brown suit had stopped three or four doors down, where he made a careful inspection of some hernia trusses and artificial legs that an orthopedic shop had on display.

“I keep it locked now,” said the man who opened the door. “I've been robbed three times in the last six months, so I keep it locked now.”

“You probably discourage more customers than you do thieves,” I said.

“Who cares?” he said. “I'm going bankrupt anyhow. If the punks don't ruin me, the insurance rates will. You know, I remember when this used to be a fairly honest town. Now take a look at it.”

He was a thin, short man of about fifty who wore thick-lensed, heavily framed glasses that made his brown eyes pop a little. He looked worn and used up. His thin mouth was an almost lipless, bitter line and his nose kept sniffing as though he could smell his impending economic doom.

“I'd like to see a watch,” I said.

“Any special kind?”

“I want an Omega Seamaster, stainless steel, the kind with the calendar thing on it.”

“It's a good watch,” the man said because he had to say something and he probably felt that there was no sense in wasting salesmanship on someone who had already made up his mind. He darted behind a counter and handed me a watch. It was exactly like the one they had taken from me in the prison, except that this one had a leather strap.

“Do you have one with an expansion bracelet?” I said.

“No, they all come with the strap, but we can put an expansion on for you in a jiffy.”

“How much?”

“For the watch or the expansion bracelet?”

“For both.”

He told me and it was fifty dollars more than I had paid Li Teh in Hong Kong, but that was what Hong Kong was for, among other things. Cheap watches. “All right,” I said. “I'll take it.”

“It'll only be a minute or two,” the man said, picking up the watch and heading for the rear of the shop where the resident expansion-bracelet expert apparently waited. I turned and looked out the front window. The man in the brown suit stood before it, seemingly transfixed by the display that lay behind the plate glass which was imbedded with thin, gray, metallic strips that would sound an alarm if anyone tried a smash and grab with a brickbat.

“Here we are,” the man said, returning a few minutes later with the watch, and as always, I wanted to say “where?” but there seemed to be no sense in it. I paid for the watch, checked to see that it was correctly set, and slipped it on to my left wrist. The shopowner started to put the black case that had contained the watch into a paper sack. I told him to keep it.

“But it contains the guarantee.”

“I don't want that either,” I said.

Out on the sidewalk I paused for a moment beside the man in the brown suit who still seemed mesmerized by the window display. I
looked but could see nothing special other than some watches, several trays of junky rings, and a medium-sized clock with a small sign boasting that it was within three seconds of absolute accuracy. I glanced at my new watch and was vaguely pleased to see that it still kept the right time.

“Fascinating, isn't it?” I said to the man in the brown suit, turned, and started to walk back: toward Sutter Street and the Sir Francis Drake.

He was a good tail when he wanted to be. In fact, very good. He made all the right moves, as if he had been making them ail his life, but now made them only out of habit, as if he didn't care whether he was spotted or not.

I stopped a few doors from the hotel in front of a bookstore on Sutter Street and inspected the latest crop of best-sellers. Through the diagonally placed window I could read the names of the authors and the titles as well as keep the sidewalk behind me in view through the reflection of the glass. I had heard of some of the authors but only two of the titles, but that's what comes from not reading a newspaper for a hundred days or so. The man in the brown suit was walking toward me rapidly now that it was downhill and the going was easier.

Almost fat, I thought. Overweight by twenty pounds, at least. Perhaps thirty. Around five-ten, probably forty-five or forty-six, but possibly a dissipated forty-two. The brown suit wasn't shabby, just unpressed, and his black shoes needed a shine. The collar of his white shirt was too small and its points stuck up in the air. He wore a blue and purple striped tie and for a moment I wondered if he were color blind. When he was about twenty feet from me, I turned and watched him approach. He walked on his heels, bringing them down hard on the sidewalk. If his body was overweight, his face wasn't. It was all planes and angles with a set of dark brown eyebrows that looked as if they should be combed. His hair was brown, too, but dotted with splotches of dirty gray as though certain spots of it had once been shaved and when they grew back, they had grown back a different color. Underneath the fuzzy brows was a set of eyes that regarded me
fixedly as he approached. When he drew near enough I could see that one was brown and one was blue and neither of them contained any more warmth than you would find in a slaughterhouse freezer.

He was about three feet away when he stopped and looked me up and down carefully with his two-toned eyes. “Your name's Dye,” he said in a quiet, hard tone that made it more like a threat than a statement of fact.

“My name's Dye,” I said. “Why the tail job?”

“I wasn't sure it was you until you started back for the hotel. The desk told me you'd gone to the bank, but all I had was a general description. You fitted it pretty well, so I tailed you.”

“I noticed,” I said.

“You wouldn't have if I'd been trying.”

“But you weren't.”

“No.”

“All right,” I said. “What's on your mind?”

“I'm with Victor Orcutt,” he said, as if that explained everything.

“What's he sell?”

“Nothing.”