I sat up slowly and ran my hands over my face. My right arm ached, but I could move it. My stomach was a sharp separate pain that almost doubled me up when I tried to take a deep breath. He must have kicked me in the legs, too, because they felt as if someone had been jumping on them.
“I feel rotten,” I said.
“You want a drink?” Nash asked.
“Have you got one?”
“Got some Scotch. Nothing to mix it with.”
“Just hand me the bottle.” I took a long drink of the Scotch. It went down and promptly came back up.
“That wasn’t such a good idea,” I said after I wiped off my face again with the towel.
“Maybe you’d better see a doctor,” Nash said.
“I’ll get one at the hotel.”
Nash sent his watchman to find a trishaw. He was back in ten minutes and both of them helped me up the steps of the quay. The watchman grinned at me again, skipped down the steps, tied the line from the boat to his toe, curled up and went back to sleep. I climbed into the trishaw with Nash’s help.
“You can drop me off at Fat Annie’s,” he said. “Unless you want me to go with you to the hotel.”
“No, I can make it okay. You’ve done enough.” I reached into my pocket and found my wallet. I took out five twenties, thought about it, and added another one. “Here,” I said. “I think you earned it.”
Nash took the bills, folded them, and stuck them into his shirt pocket. “What was all that talk about Sacchetti and the stolen stuff and the three guys coming in from Los Angeles?”
“You really want to know?” I said.
He turned to look at me. “Come to think of it,” he said. “I don’t guess I do. But you want to know something? You were lucky.”
“How?”
“Well, nothing’s broken.”
“That’s why I’m lucky?”
“You’re lucky about that,” Nash said, “but you’re even luckier that Sacchetti wasn’t there.”
“And if he had been?”
“Then there damn well sure would have been something broken.”
Chapter XVII
I was awake when someone knocked on my door around eight o’clock the following morning. I was awake because my head ached, my stomach throbbed with each breath, there was a tightening vise on my right shoulder, and a large dump truck seemed to have rolled over my legs during the night.
The young Chinese doctor who clucked over me as he wound some tape around my ribs the night before had said: “You have a very low pain threshold, Mr. Cauthorne. What do you do for a living?”
“I’m a poet.”
“Ah, then that explains it.”
The knocking continued at the door and I yelled “all right” and started to get out of bed. I found that it wasn’t something one did without careful pre-planning. Consultants should have been brought in. A committee should have been appointed to determine how to ease the sheet back. A seminar on how to place one’s feet on the floor would have proved useful. Highly skilled technicians would have been invaluable in solving the problem of how to walk across the room and open the door.
He had on a different suit this time, a bottle green one that was turning slightly purple at the knees. He wore a cream straw hat with a faded blue band and a brim that rippled up and down as if it had been shoved too far back on the closet shelf when it was stored away at the end of last summer or the summer before. His shoes were an off white and the perforations in their toes attempted to resemble fleurs-de-lis without much success. He also wore a big smile on his face which still needed a shave. The face belonged to Dangerfield.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” I said.
“You still hanging in there, Cauthorne?” he said as he brushed by me and into the room.
“By my thumbs.”
“Where’s the booze?”
I started the long journey back to the bed. “Over there,” I said.
Dangerfield crossed to the bureau where the Scotch bottle rested, picked up a glass and poured his usual three fingers. He drank it down and for a moment I thought I was going to be sick.
“Hell of a long trip,” he said and poured himself another drink.
“Aren’t you a little off your usual route?” I said and eased myself back into the bed.
Dangerfield took off his hat and sailed it at the couch. The hat landed on the floor but he didn’t seem to notice. “Got a cigarette?” he said and I motioned towards the bureau again. He found the pack, lit one, and settled into an armchair.
“You got a nice room,” he said.
“Are you staying here?”
“I’m paying my own way, Cauthorne. I’m at the Strand up on Bencoolen Street. Six bucks a night, U.S.”
“Why won’t the Bureau pick up your tab?”
Dangerfield snorted. “I didn’t even ask. I just put in for a couple of weeks annual leave, cashed in my savings bonds, and took off. I got a little worried about you.”
“Why?”
“You don’t look too good.”
“I feel the same way.”
“What happened?”
“The Dangerfield Plan happened,” I said. “It’s a wonderfully brilliant scheme, special agent.”
“Okay; you’re funny. What happened?”
“Sacchetti had someone take a shot at me yesterday morning. Last night he had someone beat me up when I dropped by to see him on his yacht.”
“His what?”
“His yacht. The Chicago Belle. Only he wasn’t there.”
“Who was?”
“His wife and two of her friends. But don’t worry; I got the message across. I told her about the three guys in Los Angeles.”
“What else?” Dangerfield said.
“Well, there’s Carla Lozupone.”
“Where’s she?”
“Across the hall, I guess.”
“What about her?”
“She saw Angelo, she said. But she lies a lot.”
“When?”
“Yesterday. She wanted to pay him a million dollars.”
“Goddamn it, Cauthorne, tell it straight.”
“Okay. Sacchetti is not only blackmailing Charles Cole, he’s also blackmailing Joe Lozupone. The Lozupone girl flew here for one reason only. To pay off Sacchetti and to warn him that if he asks for another payment, he’ll be dead. She said that Sacchetti went along except for one provision and that provision is that I get out of Singapore in seventy-two hours — forty-eight hours now, I guess. Then she gave me some more advice. She said that if I caused anything to happen to Sacchetti, her father would take a very dim view of it.”
“What else did you find out?”
“Sacchetti’s got the fix in here.”
“How?”
“He married well.”
“And his father-in-law’s got the clout?”
“He has it.”
I told him the rest of it then in chronological order from the time I left Los Angeles until he knocked at the door. I talked for almost half an hour and when I was through Dangerfield rose and started to pace the room. He paced silently for almost five minutes. Then he stopped and stood by the bed.
“Don’t you ever get dressed?”
“Look, Dangerfield, we’ve only gone through phase one of your plan and it got me shot at and knocked silly. I’m just resting up for phase two. If my guess is right, that’ll call for the water torture and the bamboo shoot that grows right up the ass.”
“When are we going to eat?”
“Always to the point at hand; that’s what I like about you. Just ring the bell over there and give your order to the man when he comes.”
“You want something?” Dangerfield said.
“Coffee,” I said. “Lots of coffee. But right now I’m going to get dressed. That’s after I get out of bed. Then I’m going to take a shower and if it still seems like a good idea, I’ll brush my teeth, and after that, if I’m still conscious, I might even shave. So you see I haven’t been idle. I have the entire morning planned.”