Walter squirmed about, settling down. The sheets of paper with the oaths written in blood crackled inside his shirt. All the weird freaks who live in this world, he thought with a shake of his head.
Lockston always fell asleep quickly, but first (and this was the part he always liked best), coloured pictures of the past flickered through his head, or maybe pictures of things that had never really happened at all. They swirled around, jostling each other for a place in the queue and gradually merged into his first dream, which was the sweetest.
All of this happened now. He saw a horse’s head with its pointed ears quivering, dashing hell-for-leather towards a stretch of land overgrown with brownish grass; then a great, high sky with white clouds, the kind you only get over huge open spaces; then a woman who had loved him (or maybe she was pretending) in Lucyville back in sixty-nine; then from somewhere or other a dwarf in a bright-coloured body stocking, whirling around and jumping through a hoop. And this, the final vision to surface out of the depths of his totally forgotten past, maybe even out of his childhood, merged imperceptibly into a dream.
The sergeant murmured wordlessly as he marvelled at the little circus artist, who turned out to be able to fly and blow tongues of flame out of his mouth.
Then a less pleasant dream began, about a house fire – that was because the sleeping man felt hot under the blanket. He started squirming about, the blanket slipped off on to the floor and once again all was well in the realm of dreams.
Walter woke up long after midnight. Not of his own volition, though – he heard a ringing sound somewhere in the distance. Still groggy with sleep, he didn’t realise straight away that it was the doorbell, the one that had been hung at the entrance to be used during the night.
The agreement with Asagawa and the Russian vice-consul was this: no matter what happened, the sergeant was not to leave the station. To hell with it if there was a fight, or a knifing, or a murder. It could wait until morning.
And so Lockston turned over on to his side and tried to carry on sleeping, but the jangling continued as loud as ever.
Should he go and take a look? Without going outside, of course – who knew what was out there? It could be a trap. Maybe the bad men had come to get their pieces of paper?
He picked up his revolver and walked silently out into the corridor.
There was a cunning little window made of dark glass in the front door. You could see out of it, but you couldn’t see in.
Lockston glanced out and saw a Japanese whore on the porch, wearing a striped kimono, the kind that the staff in the International Hotel had.
The native woman reached up to the bell pull and jerked it with all her might. And then at last she started screeching too.
‘Poriceman-san! Me Kumiko, Hoter Intanasyanaru! Troubur! Sairor kirred! Kirred entirery! Birriard room! Fight stick! Howr in head!’
Clear enough. Some sailors had had a fight with the cues in the billiard room and someone had got his skull stove in. The usual stuff.
‘Tomorrow morning!’ Lockston shouted. ‘Tell the boss I’ll send a constable in the morning!’
‘Impossibur morning! Need now! Sairor die!’
‘What am I supposed to do, glue his head back together? Get away, girl, get away. I told you, tomorrow.’
She started ringing again, but the sergeant, reassured, was already walking back along the corridor. No way was the head of police dashing out in the middle of the night for some stupid nonsense like that. Even without the important papers tucked under his shirt, he still wouldn’t have gone.
When the bell finally stopped sounding, it was really quiet. Walter couldn’t even hear his own footsteps – in the socks his feet moved across the wooden floor without making the slightest sound. If it wasn’t for that absolute silence, the sergeant would never have heard the faintest of faint rustling sounds behind the door of the office.
Someone was in there!
Lockston froze and his heart set off at a gallop. He put his ear to the crack of the door – sure thing! Someone was going through the desk, pulling out the drawers.
Why, the sons of bitches, coming up with something like that! Deliberately luring him out of the room, and then… But how had they got in? When he went out into the corridor, he locked the door behind him!
Now you’ll get yours, you low snakes!
Holding the revolver in his left hand, he slipped the key into the keyhole without making a sound, then turned it, jerked the handle towards him and burst into the room.
‘Don’t move! I’ll kill you!’
And the sergeant would have blasted away, too, but there was a surprise waiting for him, in the form of a tiny figure, about three feet tall, standing by the desk. Just for a moment Walter imagined he was still asleep and dreaming about the dwarf.
But when he clicked the lamp switch and the gas flared up, it wasn’t a dwarf at all, but a little Japanese boy, entirely naked.
‘Who are you?’ Lockston blurted out. ‘Where are you from? How did you get in?’
The little imp darted nimbly towards the window, jumped up like a monkey, squeezed sideways through the bars, squirmed into the opening of the small windowpane and would surely have got clean away, but the sergeant was up to the challenge – he dashed across the room just in time to grab him by the foot and drag him back inside.
At least now he had the answer to his third question. The naked urchin had climbed in through the window. Even for him it was a tight fit, as the bruises on his thighs testified. And that was why he was naked – he couldn’t have squeezed through in clothes.
Well, how about that! He’d been expecting absolutely anyone – spies, assassins, wily ninja – but instead this little runt had shown up.
‘Right, now answer me.’ He took hold of the kid’s skinny little shoulders and shook him. ‘Kataru! Dareh da? Dareh okutta?’ [viii] The little rat gazed unblinkingly at the huge red-faced American. The little upward-turned face – narrow, with a pointed nose – was impassive, inscrutable. A ferret, a genuine ferret, the sergeant thought.
‘So, going to keep mum, are you?’ he asked menacingly. ‘I’ll loosen your tongue for you. Mita ka?’ [ix] He unbuckled his belt and pulled it out of his trousers.
The little lad (he was only about eight, he couldn’t possibly have been any older) carried on looking at Lockston with the same indifferent, even weary air, like a little old man.
‘Well?’ the sergeant roared at him in a terrible voice.
But the strange child wasn’t frightened, in fact he seemed to brighten up a bit. In any case, his lips crept out to the sides, as if he was unable to restrain a smile. A little black tube stuck out of his mouth. There was a whistling sound, and the sergeant thought he had been stung on the chest by a wasp.
He looked down in surprise. There was something that glittered sticking out of his shirt, where his heart was. Was that really a needle? But where had it come from?
He wanted to pull it out, but somehow he couldn’t raise his hands.
Then suddenly his ears were filled with a low droning and rumbling, and Walter discovered that he was lying on the floor. And now the little boy he had just been looking down on was towering over him – a huge figure, blocking out the entire ceiling.
A massive hand of unbelievable size reached downwards, getting closer and closer. Then everything went dark and all the sounds disappeared. Light fingers ferreted about on his chest, and it felt ticklish.
Vision is the first.
The last sense of all to die
Is the sense of touch.
OFF WITH HIS HEAD
In the twilight at the end of a long day Asagawa paid a visit to Pier 37, a special police mooring for arrested boats. The Kappa-maru, a large fishing schooner arrested on suspicion of smuggling, had been standing there for more than two weeks already – in recent times, junks from Hong Kong and Aomin had taken to roaming the bay. They cruised in neutral waters, waiting for a moonless night, when fast boats could put out from the shore to collect crates of wine, sacks of coffee, bundles of tobacco and woven baskets of opium. The Sakai brothers, who owned the schooner, had been caught and were now in jail, but the inspector had thought of a good use for their little ship.