Yellowthread Street (13 page)

Spencer looked interrogatively at Auden. The gun wasn’t pointing at him so he didn’t notice it. He said to Auden, ‘I didn’t even touch him—’ He asked, ‘Did I?’

Auden cocked the hammer of his Colt and thought of the squat magnum round lying directly after the regulation .38.

He said to Spencer, ‘Shut up.’

There was a tiny hole in the wall of the Mongolian’s hiding place. He could see into the second room. It was in darkness. He heard the gangsters stop outside the second room and he chuckled.

‘O.K.,’ Crushed Toes said to The Chopper Man outside the second room.

The door smashed open and the room lit up. The bullets went chop! chop! chop! choppety-chop! chop! chop! chop! into the walls of the room. The Chopper Man was lit up in his own muzzle flashes. He looked like a madman working a blast furnace. The Mongolian moved his stomach up and down with mirth. He did a little dance with his eye still to the wall. He said, ‘Eeee-eee-ee!’ to himself and juggled his belly up and down in merriment. The flashes stopped. The ejected brass cases went tinkle, tinkle, on to the floor outside the room and a shadow peered into the darkened room and said, ‘Empty.’

The shadow went away. The Mongolian hammered his fists silently on the wall and did a little dance. He went over to his old position to one side of the door and rubbed his fingers against his palms in anticipation.

A voice outside said, ‘Next,’ and the Mongolian moved towards the door.

The Chopper Man inserted a fresh magazine into his chopper and drew back the cocking handle. The gangsters stood poised outside the door to the third room.

The Mongolian moved forward to the door and laid his hand gently on the knob.

Crushed Toes stood to one side of the third door and drew a breath. There was only one more floor to go after this. He nodded his head to The Chopper Man and said, ‘O.K.’ and the Mongolian came out of the room like an express train.

The Mongolian shrieked, ‘Aaahhh!’ and hammered one of the gangsters in the throat with his fist. The gangster went into the wooden railing and smashed it. It shattered into kindling and sailed off into the abyss of the stairwell drop down four floors. The gangster went after it. The Chopper Man said, ‘Ut—!’ and the Mongolian hammered him in the groin and sent him flying into the kicked-down door of the second room. The Club (With Nails) raised his club. The Mongolian wrenched it off him and threw it after The Chopper Man. The Chopper Man’s chopper lay where The Chopper Man had dropped it: at the Mongolian’s feet. One of the eastern-end parked car gangsters drew his pistol. The Mongolian reached down and drew the chopper. The eastern-end parked car gangster aimed his pistol. The Mongolian pressed the trigger of the chopper and turned him into a blur. The bolt went click on an empty magazine. The Mongolian threw the gun at Crushed Toes. It missed. Crushed Toes had his own gun out. It was a broom-handled Mauser automatic. He couldn’t get the hammer back. The Mongolian hit him and knocked him against the remaining two gangsters. Crushed Toes got the hammer back in midflight and levelled it at the Mongolian, but the Mongolian stepped back inside the third room and slammed the door, and when the gangsters had put themselves together sufficiently to smash down the door he
had gone out the open window to the fire escape, which way, up or down, they did not know.

The four remaining gangsters picked up themselves, their weapons, The Chopper Man and The Chopper Man’s chopper, and huddled in mid-battle for a conference.

Feiffer saw Cho’s body in the middle of the roadway. A stream of blood had coursed from it while Cho had been in the quick process of dying, but now that he was dead it had stopped. The Japanese, too, was dead. Just inside the doorway to
Edgar Tan and Company,
Edgar Tan was dead. Feiffer said to Mr Boon, and Mr Haw, and Low Fat, ‘You three are under arrest just for a start.’

He and O’Yee had picked up Constable Sun from patrol on their way to Camphorwood Lane, so it was Feiffer, O’Yee, and two constables, Mr Boon and his friends faced, not to mention Auden and Spencer, and most certainly not to mention Auden’? big gun.

Mr Boon said, ‘Our lawyers will—’

‘Shut up!’ Feiffer said. He said to Auden, ‘You hit them didn’t you?’

‘Yes!’ Mr Boon said, ‘he hit us!’

‘Good,’ Feiffer said. He ordered the two constables to put them into the paddy wagon they had come in. He said to Auden, ‘Well?’ He looked over at the temporarily silent building. ‘They’re in that building over there. Right?’

‘Right.’

‘How many?’

‘Six.’

‘Plus the Mongolian.’

Auden nodded. ‘Plus the Mongolian. I think the Mongolian’s done most of the killing.’

‘Cho?’

‘I think so. Either him or Sen. One of Boon’s little helpers. They call him Shotgun Sen. That was what killed Cho.’

‘Where’s Sen now?’

Auden indicated a dark patch of something on the roadway. It looked like an old blanket someone had set fire to, stomped on, and then pulverised with rocks. Auden said, ‘That’s him there. More or less. The Mongolian again.’

Feiffer’s eyes stayed on the body of Constable Cho. He asked O’Yee, ‘Did you know him well?’

O’Yee shook his head.

‘Neither did I. Married?’

O’Yee shrugged.

‘He was,’ Spencer said, ‘I met his wife once in Nathan Road. He had two children.’

The two constables came back, Sun and Lee. They both looked at where Cho’s body lay. Constable Sun said, ‘We can get the body, Inspector.’ They also knew he had a wife and two children, more familiarly than a chance meeting in Nathan Road. Constable Lee said, ‘He was a friend of ours.’

Feiffer glanced at the building. ‘First we get the people who did it.’ He said to Lee and Sun, ‘They’re in that building.’

‘They’re armed,’ Constable Lee stated as a rehearsal for the coroner’s inquest which would ask why it was that he and Constable Sun had been unable to wound any of the people, only kill them. He drew his pistol. He said, ‘Sun and I’ll go in, Inspector.’

‘We’re going to do this properly,’ Feiffer said. ‘We’re going to converge on the inside of the building in a logical way and we’re going to arrest everyone inside, whoever they are.’

‘If possible,’ Constable Lee said. He looked to Inspector O’Yee for support.

O’Yee said, ‘Policemen get killed the same as anyone else—’

Constable Sun said, ‘Yes, sir.’ He drew his pistol as well.

‘O.K.,’ Feiffer said. He considered the building and the other structures around it, ‘O.K., this is the way we’ll do it . . .’

He thought to himself, ‘And I’d better be right.’ He caught the look on Spencer’s face: frightened. And Auden: anxious to try out that damned gun of his. And O’Yee: he
had already had one gun, real or not, pointed at him so far tonight. And the two constables—

He thought, ‘I’d better be right the first time,’ and wondered what he himself looked like right about now.

‘Yellowthread Street Police Station, WPC Oh speaking.’

‘Minnie?’ Nicola Feiffer’s voice queried, ‘this is Nicola Feiffer. Is my husband there?’

‘No, Mrs Feiffer,’ Minnie said. She was the only one there. ‘He is out at the moment. Should you not be asleep? Is anything the matter?’

‘No,’ Nicola’s voice said, ‘I should be asleep. It’s almost four o’clock in the morning.’ She said, ‘I suffer from insomnia when Inspector Feiffer’s on night duty.’ She said, ‘You’re not married, Minnie?’

‘No.’

‘Do you know where he’s gone? Do you expect—’

‘I could not say, Mrs Feiffer.’ She glanced at the printed notices she had marked for distribution to the roof-top schools in the morning. Incongruously, they dealt with the need for road safety on the way to school. She said, ‘It is only a routine matter, I think.’

‘So are the multitudinous seas incarnadine.’ She said, ‘Do you know what an ounce is, Minnie?’

‘It is a European measurement of weight.’

There was a brief silence on the line. Mrs Feiffer said, ‘I’m sorry I—’ She said, ‘—disturbed you. It was just that—’

‘Everything is very quiet here, Mrs Feiffer,’ Minnie lied. ‘It is probably just a routine matter. Inspector Feiffer will be back soon I am certain.’

‘Is Inspector O’Yee there to keep you running about for him?’

‘Inspector O’Yee is also out with your husband.’

‘Oh,’ Mrs Feiffer said. She sounded very alone and lonely. ‘Um, is Inspector Auden there?’

‘He is also out. There is no one here but myself. I am sorry, Mrs Feiffer.’

There was another pause. Minnie said quickly, ‘It is nothing to worry about.’

The line was silent. Minnie said, ‘Mrs Feiffer? Are you still there?’

‘Yes.’ Minnie had a picture of her touching her hand to her face. She had a picture of Mrs Feiffer’s eyes. ‘Yes,’ Mrs Feiffer said again, ‘you can’t break the rules about—you can’t say where he is because it’s against the rules.’ There was no malice in her voice. It was a fact she accepted. She said, ‘I understand.’

‘Perhaps if you telephone a little later he will be here—’

‘Yes. Yes, I’ll do that. I’m sorry I—I’m very sorry I bothered you—’

‘It is no bother.’

‘Yes. Thank you.’ Mrs Feiffer knew what it meant when more than two detectives were sent out together at four o’clock in the morning. She said, ‘Yes—’

There was another pause.

‘Mrs Feiffer—’

‘Yes,’ Mrs Feiffer’s voice said. ‘Yes. It’s—it’s all right. I—I just couldn’t sleep, that was all. Um—goodnight, Minnie, and thank you.’

‘Goodnight,’ Minnie Oh said.

The line went dead.

In their apartment, Nicola Feiffer put her hand to her mouth. She looked at the open window in her bedroom. In the absence of a breeze, the curtains were very still.

The night was so dark.

The gangsters’ plan was this: two of them, Crushed Toes and an eastern-end parked car gangster named The Shot In The Back Of The Head, would go back down to the third floor and begin working downwards room by room. The
Chopper Man would take the fire escape through the window of the third room and move carefully up to the roof. The Club (With Nails) would move up to the fifth floor and check the rooms there. If nothing was found, they would retrace their routes, the men on the roof and the fifth floor down towards the ground floor, and the two on the ground floor up towards the roof.

The detectives’ plan was to send one man up the fire escape to cover the roof while the others entered the building through its main and only entrance. On the ground floor the uniformed officers would cover O’Yee and Feiffer from the stairs while the third man, Auden, covered them in the corridor. In that manner, with safety in numbers, they would work their way up to the roof and effectively search the entire building.

They were both good plans, each concocted independently of the other, but it was inevitable that on about the third floor, without a possibility in the universe of avoiding it, the two groups of belligerents, each searching for a third belligerent, would run head-on into each other.

Feiffer went over his plan for a second time. He said, ‘If we run into the gangsters along the way I want them arrested, disarmed, and handcuffed to the nearest railing.’ He said to Sun and Lee, ‘Is that clear?’

Sun and Lee looked at him. Their heads moved imperceptibly in the most unclear of nodding agreements.

Feiffer looked at Spencer. This was, as far as Feiffer knew, his first piece of armed violence—he was still an unknown quantity. Feiffer asked him, ‘All clear, Bill? Anything you want to ask?’

Auden waited with the contemptuous carelessness of a man who owned a Colt Python. Auden said to Spencer, ‘It’s all fairly straightforward.’

Spencer shrugged. He put a suggestion forward hesitantly. He said, ‘Don’t you think this is more in the Riot Squad’s line, Inspector? After all, they’re trained for this sort of thing.’

‘It isn’t a riot!’ Auden told him. It was ridiculous. ‘It’s just a simple gunfight with a few gangsters!’

‘It isn’t a gunfight either,’ Feiffer said. He didn’t want those bullets from Auden’s gun tearing holes in anything that moved. He said to Spencer, ‘The Riot Squad are already committed to the water thing. This is our problem. I wouldn’t feel justified calling them in.’ He added, with a trace of annoyance at people who kept putting up the damned Riot Squad as the saviours of the northern hemisphere, ‘We can handle it quite well enough by ourselves.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Bill Spencer said. ‘It was just a suggestion.’

‘You take the fire escape,’ Feiffer told him. ‘All you have to do is keep a watch that no one comes out of a window and tries to get on to the roof. I don’t think anyone will. We’ll meet you on the roof.’

Spencer began to say something. He changed his mind. He said, ‘Yes, sir.’

‘O.K.,’ Feiffer said, ‘Then let’s get on with it.’

They all drew their pistols and went quickly across the road towards the entrance to the building.

‘Around the back,’ Feiffer ordered Spencer, and Spencer disappeared down the dark alley at the side of the building towards the fire escape.

At twenty-three minutes past four in the morning, they entered the building to do battle.

In the cells in Yellowthread Street, Mr Skilbeck and the African were discussing police brutality with Chen and The Fourth Gangster.

Since Chen spoke not a word of English and Mr Skilbeck and the African spoke only American, and The Fourth Gangster did nothing but groan, it was very much a one-way conversation.

They were each in separate cells, but if they leaned against the barred doors they could see each other.

The African said to Mr Skilbeck, ‘Fucking cops.’

Mr Skilbeck nursed a bruise on the back of his neck where someone had hit him. He said, ‘Yeah!’

‘Fucking cops,’ the African said.

‘That’s right,’ Mr Skilbeck said. He leaned out and called to Chen, ‘That’s right all right, isn’t it?’

Chen did not speak. The Fourth Gangster groaned.

‘He doesn’t talk English,’ the African said. ‘They probably scared the crap out of him.’

‘Poor bastard,’ Mr Skilbeck said. ‘What could an old guy like him have done?’

‘What did
I
do?’ the African called back, ‘It was just a joke—what did I do?’