The Case of the Backward Mule Read online

  Terry Clane bent to the half-parted lips.

  Behind them the aged Chinese servant quietly closed the door.

  Sou Ha’s eyes opened. She smiled in Terry Clane’s eyes, then disengaged herself. “I couldn’t do it.”

  “Couldn’t do what?”

  “Couldn’t be Chinese. I tried, but I have lived here too long. My emotions got the better of me.”

  “Meaning that the Chinese do not have emotions?” Terry taunted.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “The Chinese have emotions, but conceal them. They do not surrender to them. I tried to discipline myself and I lost. I am glad that I lost. The civilization of the Orient is superior to that of the West, but we have lost much by not learning how to kiss.”

  She laughed up at him. “My father,” she said, “would be shocked. But after all, why did he send me to a California college if he didn’t want me to learn the ways of your country?”

  “Why, indeed?” Clane asked, smiling.

  She was pure Chinese. Her features held the classic lines which represented a cultured aristocracy that could trace its family back for some three hundred years. But superimposed upon this Chinese background was something that was distinctly Western, a certain jaunty independence, an ability to meet fate upon equal terms and to laugh at life.

  “Where’s your father?” Clane asked. “And how is he?”

  “He’s fine. He hoped you’d come tonight.”

  “I’d have been here sooner,” Clane said, “if it hadn’t been for the police.”

  “Over the escape of Edward Harold?”

  “Yes.”

  “But, good heavens, you just arrived from the boat. How could you be expected to know anything about that?”

  Clane smiled at her.

  “Oh well, I know,” she said. “I suppose I’d feel the same way if I were the police. Did they find out anything?”

  “I hope not.”

  “Did you know anything?”

  He laughed. “Now you are like the police.”

  “Terry,” she said, “tell me. Did you … did you engineer it?”

  “You mean the escape?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “I thought perhaps you had. It was … it was done so adroitly.”

  “As a matter of fact, I didn’t know anything about it until after I was interrogated by the police. They told me.”

  “Will they catch him?”

  “I’m afraid so. They have his fingerprints. They have his photographs. They have suffered humiliation. They want him badly enough. I’m wondering if perhaps that don’t want revenge badly enough so that won’t catch him too soon, but will wait a while.”

  “Terry, what do you mean?”

  Clane said “I’m not too certain about the police. Sometimes they are vindictive.”

  “But I don’t understand what you mean about not catching him.”

  Clane said “He was convicted of murder. He had perfected an appeal. It might well have been that there were some holes in the case. The Supreme Court might have set aside the conviction. All right, he escapes. While he is a fugitive from justice he has no standing in court. The Supreme Court will dismiss the appeal on proper application.”

  “You mean the police will try to have the appeal dismissed?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then?”

  “And then after the appeal has been dismissed and it is too late for Harold to do anything to save himself, the police might find him. Then he would be whisked away to the death cell with no possible hope for a review of his case unless the governor should decide to give him executive clemency, and he’d hardly do that to a man who had made the police force lose face by engineering an escape.”

  “Then the police know where he is and are just going through the motions of trying to catch him until after that can … oh, Terry, that seems terrible.”

  “It’s just a thought that I had,” he said. “Something to be considered. It doesn’t fit in with the facts of the case—yet.”

  She said. “Come. We must talk with father. he’s waiting. He’ll know you’re here.”

  She led the way to another door. Turning at right angles, she stood slightly back and let him precede her through the doorway, saying “Father, he has come.”

  Chu Kee arose from the straight-backed chair in which he had been seated and hurried forward. The placid calm of his countenance was broken by a smile. For a moment only he paused to clasp his hands in front of his breast, shaking hands with himself in Chinese style. Then he too forsook the impassivity of the Orient to envelop Clane’s hands with long, sensitive fingers. “My son,” he said in Chinese, “it has been long.”

  “It has been long, my Teacher,” Terry Clane said. “But absence has made the reunion all the more pleasant.”

  “Pain,” Chu Kee admitted, “is but the appetizer which makes pleasure the more palatable.”

  Clane laughed and said in English “You have a proverb for everything. Don’t I remember that at one time you said pleasure was but the sleep of life, that progress was made through overcoming hardship and learning to endure pain?”

  Chu Kee’s eyes twinkled. He continued to talk in Chinese. “The snow-capped mountain may seem a jagged crag from the north, while it looks as a soft snowball from the south. Yet it is the same mountain. Only the viewpoint has changed. Will it please you to sit down and tell me about what you did in China?”

  Chu Kee escorted his guest over towards the row of ceremonial seats which graced the wall of the room, men suddenly smiled and said “Perhaps you would be more comfortable in the cushioned chair?”

  Terry Clane shook his head. “I have learned to enjoy the things of China,” he said, and permitted himself to be seated in one of the straight-backed inlaid chairs, chairs which to the average white man would have been unendurably hard and uncomfortable.

  “Really,” Clane went on, “when you get accustomed to them, they’re much better than the cushioned chairs. You’re sitting upright in these chairs and with your back straight, not slouched down on the end of your spine. You are well, my Teacher?”

  “Life has given this unworthy one health,” Chu Kee agreed. “And you, my son?”

  “Never better.”

  The servant brought tea in Chinese cups that were more like covered bowls nestling in doughnut-like saucers.

  “You have accomplished that which you set out to do?” Chu Kee asked blandly.

  “I am hopeful that my trip was a success.”

  “Others thought it so?”

  “Yes.”

  “That is well.”

  There was a period of silence during which they sipped their tea, then Chu Kee said abruptly “Your friend, the Painter Woman, where is she?”

  Clane looked at him with startled surprise. “You don’t know?”

  “I do not know,” Chu Kee said gravely.

  “But I thought … well, in a jam like this, I thought she’d come to you.”

  “I too thought she would come to me,” Chu Kee said. “As one who is close to you, she also is close to me. That which is mine is at the disposal of a friend of yours.”

  Terry Clane sat in silence, digesting that information.

  “You have not heard from her? There has been no message?”

  “There has been no message.”

  “There will be one,” Chu Kee said in a tone of quiet assurance. “She knows what boat you were on?”

  “Yes.”

  “She will read that it has arrived and will get some word to you.”

  “That would be extremely dangerous,” Clane said. “The police are looking for that very thing to happen. They will try to intercept any message she sends.”

  “The Painter Woman is clever,” Chu Kee said as though that effectively dismissed the possibility of police intercepting her message.

  They were silent for the space of several seconds. Then Chu Kee, picking up his cup of tea, held it in his clasped hands, le
tting the heat of the liquid warm his long, sensitive fingers. “There is gossip,” he said at length.

  “About what?”

  “The Eastern Art Import and Trading Company.”

  “And what is the gossip?”

  “I do not hear it all, but evidently there has been much loss and much profit. These men play at politics in the Orient.”

  “I have heard they are interested in the Philippines,” Clane said.

  “One hears many things,” Chu Kee murmured.

  “This was supposed to be authentic.”

  “Many profits and many losses,” Chu Kee went on almost dreamily. “First there was a great loss, then there was a period of recovery, and of late there has been a big, a very big, profit. These men are becoming powerful because one of them is shrewd.”

  “One of them, my Instructor in Wisdom?”

  “This Ricardo Taonon, the Eurasian,” Chu Kee answered obliquely after the Chinese custom, “is a man of great wile. His mouth says that he is a great friend of China.”

  “Empty words?” Terry Clane asked.

  “Words, certainly,” Chu Kee said gravely. “The significance of those words is not yet known. I have men who are investigating. They are shrewd men — and that are puzzled. The man is deep. He plays a game which does not appear on the surface.”

  After that there was a period when there was no talk. Silence enveloped them in an aura of friendship where each drew strength and pleasure from the presence of the other, sitting there in a row on straight-backed cushionless chairs sipping the hot pale amber of tea which is only for the palate of the connoisseur.

  This tea had been grown at a certain elevation above sea-level. A hundred feet higher or lower produced tea of a different quality. Only leaves of a certain tenderness were picked at, a very particular time, gathered by the most attractive maidens in the village, who selected each leaf with the care that a diamond merchant would bestow in choosing a stock of gems, inspecting each carefully for flaws and blemishes. To drink such tea rapidly is a crime against good taste. Such tea is to be sipped carefully in small quantities so that the delicate aroma penetrates to the nostrils. The flavour is nectar to the tongue.

  The silence endured for three minutes, for five, for ten.

  Clane finished his cup of tea. Sou Ha made a motion towards the tea-cup to refill his cup, but Clane bowed and smiled. “It is enough, Sou Ha. I have work to do.”

  “There will be a message,” Chu Kee said confidently.

  “And in a message is danger.”

  “This Ricardo Taonon,” Chu Kee cautioned. “You knew him in China?

  “I met him in Hong Kong, yes.”

  “Did you learn, perhaps, anything of his connections?”

  “No. He seems to know everyone, but he has no close friends. Apparently he’s on friendly terms with everyone, particularly the influential people, and there it ends.”

  Chu Kee said “My own men found him very difficult to appraise in Hong Kong. He is an interesting man. You will walk very carefully, my son, and keep to the middle of the street.”

  Clane bowed his leave-taking, gently shook hands with himself after the Chinese custom. “I will walk slowly and carefully,” he said, “and keep to the middle of the road.”

  Sou Ha showed him out, her soft, pliable hand resting on his arm. “It is better,” she said, “that you leave by another door than the one through which you entered.”

  Clane nodded acquiescence.

  She led him along soft Oriental carpets, rooms which flanked the long corridor, whose perpetually closed doors were merely a front of poverty to conceal the luxury of that which lay behind. “You will be careful, First-Born?” she asked.

  “As careful as can be, yes.”

  “My father thinks you are in danger.”

  “Why?”

  “He does not always confide in his daughter. Tell me, you have no idea where the Painter Woman is?”

  “No.”

  “Then she is with this man who has escaped,” Sou Ha said. “She has decided to live with him so long as he lives and to the with him when he is … I am so sorry, my friend, have I hurt you?”

  “No.”

  “You still love her?”

  “I gave her her freedom when duty called on me to return to the paths of danger, paths that would take me far from civilization, far from the contact of mail.”

  “And did she desire this freedom which you gave her so lightly?”

  “I explained to her that it was out of the question for her to come with me, that I would be gone for years.”

  “Oh, you explained,” Sou Ha said, and then laughed musically.

  Clane looked at her.

  She guided him to a door. “In my country,” she said, “there are many very wise men. You have studied under these men, First-Born. You have learned to concentrate, you have acquired much knowledge. And by meditation you have ripened that knowledge into wisdom.”

  Clane looked down at her, his eyes questioning.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “But these wise men,” Sou Ha went on, “steeped in the lore of their wisdom, know nothing of women. Therefore, daocy can teach nothing of women.”

  She pressed a button. An electric mechanism shot back steel bolts on the inside of the door.

  “And how does one go about acquiring this knowledge of women?” Terry Clane asked.

  Her eyes laughed up at him. She came close to him. “You may kiss me again.”

  A few moments later Terry Clane stepped out of the quiet luxury of that sumptuous room into the carpetless poverty of a dusty corridor illuminated by a single unshaded incandescent which dangled down from twisted green wires, faded and fly-specked.

  The door behind him swung noiselessly shut and Clane could hear the whirr of the electric mechanism as the heavy steel bars were shot home.

  The kiss of the Chinese girl tingled against his lips. The touch of her hand was still warm upon his cheek and her words still ringing in his mind. These wise men with their knowledge which had been gleaned through the ages, their secrets of meditation by which knowledge might be transmuted into wisdom, could teach nothing about women because that knew nothing about women.

  And how did one learn about women?

  He saw once more her laughing eyes, the red of her warm lips. “You may kiss me again,” she had said.

  And Terry Clane, sure of himself when he had been within the fastness of a monastery high in the seclusion of snow-capped mountains, suddenly felt the tranquility of his mind vanish into nothing as he walked along the bare boards of the corridor and descended the narrow flight of stairs towards the smelly side street of San Francisco”s Chinatown.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  YAT T’oy, TERRY CLANE’S MAN of all work who had been sent on to San Francisco two months in advance with instructions to secure, furnish, and provision an apartment or some suitable fiat, was still in the waiting-room at the pier, sitting just as he had been when Terry left. When Clane returned, that man was occupying the same hard wooden bench with motionless calm. The waiting figure was steeped in a patience so infinite that it could only have been the heritage of centuries. This patience is the passive side of action, which recognizes that infinity is not an intangible something which begins with death, but is an ever-present reality that surrounds the philosopher with the calm consciousness of ceaseless time.

  Yat T’oy expressed no surprise and no emotion as Terry Clane entered the waiting-room. He rose and said “I have baggage all together. You wish go to home now?”

  There was no curiosity as to where Clane had been during the intervening hours, no question as to how Clane had known where Yat T’oy could be found. The Chinese servant had simply waited until Clane had come. Clane had arrived, and that was all there was to it. The master had his own affairs. If the master chose to confide in the servant, that was well. If he did not so choose to confide, that also was equally well. All of which didn’t mean that Yat T’oy’s inscrutable ey
es didn’t take in everything and his active mind didn’t know virtually everything which touched upon Terry Clane’s life or might conceivably affect his happiness.

  Yat T’oy would have committed murder on behalf of his master without even so much as a moment’s hesitancy. He would have only needed to know that something stood in Terry Clane’s way to do his utmost to see that the obstacle was removed. And while he knew and respected Clane’s desire to remain within the letter and the spirit of the law, nevertheless, Yat T’oy placed great reliance upon an eight-inch dagger which reposed in a cunningly concealed sheath harnessed to the back of his shoulder blade. Yat T’oy was an expert in the use of the razor-bladed weapon. However, Yat T’oy knew enough of the temperament of his master to say nothing about those occasions when Yat T’oy, sharing the anxiety which came from being in a tight spot, due to some personal enemy of his master, knew secretly that the cause of that anxiety had been permanently and skilfully removed.

  His creed was one of deep-seated, unswerving loyalty. All other things were minor.

  Yat T’oy was small of stature and he had been shrunk by age and hard work. His face was wrinkled and dried, but his eyes were as bright and alert as those of a bird. There was nothing that missed the comprehensive gaze of Yat T’oy, and that which he saw, he remembered in detail and duly reported to his master.

  “Place to live very hard find,” he said in staccato English.

  “But you have a place, Yat T’oy?”

  “I have a place.”

  “Good place?”

  “Not number one. Perhaps by’m’by later one get more better.”

  It was characteristic of Yat T’oy that when he talked with Terry Clane in the pidgin English of the treaty ports, he was in no mood to be interrogated in detail, and so Clane didn’t press him, but hailed a cab, watched Yat T’oy supervise the stowing of the baggage, then climbed in and let Yat T’oy give the cab-driver the address.

  When they arrived at the four-flat building where Yat T’oy had secured a big flat on the south half of the second storey, Clane was agreeably surprised. “Why, Yat T’oy, this is perfect! I had heard it was almost impossible to get anything here in San Francisco. How on earth did you do it?”