I went slowly to a chair, trying to arrange words in my mind. This old joker was spoofing me with an exaggeration — a burlesque — of the well-known Chinese politeness. I’m not hard to get along with: I’ll play anybody’s game up to a certain point.
“It’s only because I’m weak-kneed with awe of the mighty Chang Li Ching that I dare to sit down,” I explained, letting myself down on the chair, and turning my head to notice that the giants who had stood beside the door were gone.
I had a hunch they had gone no farther than the other side of the velvet hangings that hid the door.
“If it were not that the King of Finders-out” — he was at it again — “knows everything, I should marvel that he had heard my lowly name.”
“Heard it? Who hasn’t?” I kidded back. “Isn’t the word change, in English, derived from Chang? Change, meaning alter, is what happens to the wisest man’s opinions after he has heard the wisdom of Chang Li Ching!” I tried to get away from this vaudeville stuff, which was a strain on my head. “Thanks for having your man save my life back there in the passage.”
He spreads his hands out over the table.
“It was only because I feared the Emperor of Hawkshaws would find the odor of such low blood distasteful to his elegant nostrils that the foul one who disturbed your excellency was struck down quickly. If I have erred, and you would have chosen that he be cut to pieces inches by inch, I can only offer to torture one of my sons in his place.”
“Let the boy live,” I said carelessly, and turned to business. “I wouldn’t have bothered you except that I am so ignorant that only the help of your great wisdom could ever bring me up to normal.”
“Does one ask the way of a blind man?” the old duffer asked, cocking his head to one side. “Can a star, however willing, help the moon? If it pleases the Grandfather of Bloodhounds to flatter Chang Li Ching into thinking he can add to the great one’s knowledge, who is Chang to thwart his master by refusing to make himself ridiculous?”
I took that to mean he was willing to listen to my questions.
“What I’d like to know is, who killed Lillian Shan’s servants, Wang Ma and Wan Lan?”
“Does the stag-hunter look at the hare?” he wanted to know. “And when so mighty a hunter pretends to concern himself with the death of servants, can Chang think anything except that it pleases the great one to conceal his real object? Yet it may be, because the dead were servants and not girdle-wearers, that the Lord of Snares thought the lowly Chang Li Ching, insignificant one of the Hundred Names, might have knowledge of them. Do not rats know the way of rats?”
He kept this stuff up for some minutes, while I sat and listened and studied his round, shrewd yellow mask of a face, and hoped that something clear would come of it all. Nothing did.
“My ignorance is even greater than I had arrogantly supposed,” he brought his speech to an end. “This simple question you put is beyond the power of my muddled mind. I do not know who killed Wang Ma and Wan Lan.”
I grinned at him, and put another question:
“Where can I find Hoo Lun and Yin Hung?”
“Again I must grovel in my ignorance,” he murmured, “only consoling myself with the thought that the Master of Mysteries knows the answers to his questions, and is pleased to conceal his infallibly accomplished purpose from Chang.”
And that was as far as I got.
There were more crazy compliments, more bowing and scraping, more assurances of eternal reverence and love, and then I was following my rope-necked guide through winding, dark halls, across dim rooms, and up and down rickety stairs again.
At the street door — after he had taken down the bars — he slid my gun out of his shirt and handed it to me. I stuck it in my pocket and stepped through the door.
“Thanks for the killing upstairs,” I said.
The Chinese grunted, bowed, and closed the door.
I went up to Stockton Street, and turned toward the office, walking along slowly, punishing my brains.
First, there was Dummy Uhl’s death to think over. Had it been arranged before-hand: to punish him for bungling that morning and, at the same time, to impress me? And how? And why? Or was it supposed to put me under obligations to the Chinese? And, if so, why? Or was it just one of those complicated tricks the Chinese like? I put the subject away and pointed my thoughts at the little plump yellow man in the purple robe.
I liked him. He had humor, brains, nerve, everything. To jam him in a cell would be a trick you’d want to write home about. He was my idea of a man worth working against.
But I didn’t kid myself into thinking I had anything on him. Dummy Uhl had given me a connection between The Whistler’s Hotel Irvington and Chang Li Ching. Dummy Uhl had gone into action when I accused him of being mixed up in the Shan killings. That much I had — and that was all, except that Chang had said nothing to show he wasn’t interested in the Shan troubles.
In this light, the chances were that Dummy’s death had not been a planned performance. It was more likely that he had seen me coming, had tried to wipe me out, and had been knocked off by my guide because he was interfering with the audience Chang had granted me.
In the office, a message from Dick Foley was waiting for me. He had rented a front apartment up the street from the Irvington and had put in a couple of hours trailing The Whistler.
The Whistler had spent half an hour in “Big Fat” Thomson’s place on Market Street, talking to the proprietor and some of the sure-thing gamblers who congregate there. Then he had taxicabbed out to an apartment house on O’Farrell Street — the Glenway — where he had rung one of the bells. Getting no answer, he had let himself into the building with a key. An hour later he had come out and returned to his hotel. Dick hadn’t been able to determine which bell he had rung, or which apartment he had visited.
I got Lillian Shan on the telephone.
“Will you be in this evening?” I asked. “I’ve something I want to go into with you, and I can’t give it to you over the wire.”
“I will be at home until seven-thirty.”
“All right, I’ll be down.”
It was seven-fifteen when the car I had hired put me down at her front door. She opened the door for me. The Danish woman who was filling in until new servants were employed stayed there only in the daytime, returning to her own home at night.
The evening gown Lillian Shan wore was severe enough, but it suggested that if she would throw away her glasses and do something for herself, she might not be so unfeminine looking after all. She took me upstairs, to the library, where a clean-cut lad of twenty-something in evening clothes got up from a chair as we came in — a well-set-up boy with fair hair and skin.
His name, I learned when we were introduced, was Garthorne. The girl seemed willing enough to hold our conference in his presence. I wasn’t. After I had done everything but insist point-blank on seeing her alone, she excused herself — calling him Jack — and took me out into another room.
By then I was a bit impatient.
“Who’s that?” I demanded.
She put her eyebrows up for me.
“Mr. John Garthorne,” she said.
“How well do you know him?”
“May I ask why you are so interested?”
“You may. Mr. John Garthorne is all wrong, I think.”
“Wrong?”
I had another idea.
“Where does he live?”
She gave me an O’Farrell Street number.
“The Glenway Apartments?”
“I think so.” She was looking at me without any affectation at all. “Will you please explain?”
“One more question and I will. Do you know a Chinese named Chang Li Ching?”