The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories (32 page)

By the time the water ballet guys had finished all the dives safety procedures would allow, they'd prepared
Goldfish Fairy
to a fare-thee-well. The wire tangle had been shifted aft and, according to Laszlo, looked awful but would be relatively easy to clear when the time came. The mast had been partially shifted off the forward hatch, with the marks of the jacks plain to see, but the jacks themselves had been removed—if the Ayancas didn't bring their own, they were out of luck.

In a final bit of mischief, we shifted the buoy half a kilometer, then raced back to the
Tang Dynasty
just in time for our first show. Leila and I made plans to meet after the second show. Among other things, I wanted to hear her memories of the Olympics—I'd actually been to an Olympics once, but I'd been too busy dodging homicidal Gamsakhurdians to pay much attention to the games.

We'd barely got into the general wretchedness of the judging at synchronized swimming events when my cell played a bit of Mozart, and I answered to hear the strained tones of the ship's entertainment director.

"I thought you should know that there's a problem," he said, "a problem with your friend, the one in Emperor Class."

"What sort of problem?" I asked as my heart foundered. The tone of his voice was answer enough to my question.

"I'm afraid he's been killed."

"Where?"

"In his room."

"I'll meet you there."

I told Leila to go to Laszlo's room, and after she yelped in protest I told her that she had to contact everyone in the troupe and insist that no one was to be alone for the rest of the trip. Apparently my words burned with conviction, because her eyes grew wide and she left the room fast.

I sprinted to Jesse's room and called Jorge, who was our forensics guy, and Sancho, who was the strongest, just in case we needed to rearrange something.

The entertainment director stood in front of Jesse's door, literally wringing his hands.

"The cabin steward brought him a bottle of cognac he'd ordered," he said, "and found him, ah . . . " His voice trailed away, along with his sanguinary complexion.

"I'll have to call the police soon," he said faintly. "Not to mention the captain. It's lucky I was on watch, and not someone else."

I was so utterly glad that I'd bribed the man. There's nothing you can trust like corruption and dishonesty, and I made a mental note to slip the entertainment director a few extra hundred at the end of the voyage.

"Where's the steward?"

"I told him to stay in my office."

Sancho and Jorge arrived—Jorge with a box of medical gloves that he shared with us—and our confidant opened the cabin door with his passkey.

"I won't go in again, if you don't mind," he said, swallowing hard, and stepped well away.

I put on gloves and pushed the door open. We entered and closed the door behind us.

"Well," Jorge said, "I can tell you right away that it's not a subtle Oriental poison."

Nor was it. Jesse lay on his back in the center of his suite, his throat laid open, his arms thrown out wide, and an expression of undiluted horror on his face. There was a huge splash of blood on the wall hangings and more under the body.

"Don't step in it," I said.

Jorge gingerly knelt by the body and examined the wound. "You're not going to like this," he said.

"I
already
don't like it," I said.

"You're going to like it less when I tell you that his throat appears to have been torn open by the fangs of an enormous beast."

There was a moment of silence.

"Maybe we should talk to the Hopping Vampires," Sancho said.

"Nobody
can
talk to them," I said. "They don't speak anybody's language."

"So they claim," Sancho said darkly.

"Never mind that now," I decided. "Search the room."

I found Jesse's wallet and card case, from which I learned that his name was actually Jiu Lu, and that he was the head of the microbiology department at Pacific Century Corporation.

Well. Who knew?

I also found his cell phone, with all the numbers he'd set on speed dial.

"Where's his notebook computer?" I asked.

We couldn't find it, or the briefcase he'd carried it in, or any notes that may have been in the briefcase.

"Let's hope he kept everything on that machine encrypted," Jorge said.

We left the wallet where we found it, but took the cell phone and one of Jesse's business cards. When we slipped out of the room, the entertainment director almost fainted with relief.

"Go ahead and call the cops," I told him.

"Macanese police." His eyes were hollow with tragedy. "You have no idea."

With Sancho guarding my back, I went on the fantail and called every number that Jesse had set on his speed dial. For the most part I got answering machines of one sort or another, and any actual human beings answered in an irate brand of Mandarin that discouraged communication from the start. I tried to inquire about "Jiu Lu," but I must not have got any of the tones right, because no one understood me.

In the morning I would call again, with the entertainment director as interpreter.

 

Most of the ship's passengers disembarked that morning, all those who weren't making the round trip to Shanghai and who preferred to remain in the languid, mildly debauched atmosphere of Macau, or who were heading by hydrofoil ferry back to the hustle of Hong Kong.

Whatever the Macanese police were doing by way of investigation, they weren't interfering with the wheels of commerce as represented by the cruise ship company.

"There goes Jesse's killer," Jorge said glumly as, from the rail, we watched the boats fill with cheerful, sunburned tourists.

Rosalinda, who gloomed at my other elbow, flicked her cigar ash into the breeze. "This afternoon the boats will come back with his replacement."

"Unless the killer is a Hopping Vampire who's sleeping in his coffin at this very moment," Sancho added from over my shoulder.

Most of those who came aboard that afternoon were people who had come to Macau on
Tang Dynasty
's previous journey and were returning home by way of Shanghai. Only two actually made Macau their point of initial departure, and when we got ahold of a passenger manifest we made these the objects of particular scrutiny. One of them was an elderly man who trailed an oxygen bottle behind him on a cart. He went straight to the casino and began to bet heavily on roulette while lighting up one cigarette after another, which certainly explained the oxygen bottle. The other was his nurse.

Given that I hailed from a family of Aymara street musicians who also formed a private intelligence-gathering agency, at the moment operating in tandem with a water ballet company aboard a passenger ship disguised as a Tang Dynasty palace, I was not about to discount the less unlikely possibility that the old gambler and his nurse were a pair of assassins, so I slipped the entertainment director a few hundred Hong Kong dollars for the key to the old man's room and gave it a most professional going-over.

No throat-ripping gear was discovered, or anything the least bit suspicious.

Sancho and a couple of cousins also tossed the Hopping Vampires' cabin, and they found throat-ripping gear aplenty, but nothing that couldn't be explained with reference to their profession.

The entertainment director had got through to the people on Jesse's speed dial who he believed were Jesse's employers, but he was Cantonese and his Mandarin was very shaky, and he wasn't certain.

Because of the smallish crowd on board, and consequent low demand, we were scheduled for only one show that night, and I confess that it wasn't one of our best. The band as a whole lacked spirit. Our dejection transmitted itself to our music. Even the presence of our mascot Oharu in his poncho and derby hat failed to put heart into us.

After the show, Jorge and Sancho carried Oharu off to the Western Paradise Bar while I visited the entertainment director and again borrowed his passkey.

I found a yellow Post-It note and wrote a single word on it with a crimson pen.

And when Oharu stepped into his cabin with Jorge and Sancho behind him, I lunged from concealment and slapped the note on his forehead, just as the Taoist Sorcerer slapped his yellow paper magic on the foreheads of the Bloodthirsty Hopping Vampires in their stage show.

Oharu looked at me in dazed surprise.

"What's this about?" he asked.

"Read it," I said.

He peeled the note off his forehead and read the single scarlet word, "Confess."

"You should have got off at Macau," I told him. "You would have got clean away." I held up the bloodstained ninja gear I'd found in his room, the leather palm with the lethal steel hooks that could tear open a throat with a single slap.

At that point Oharu fought, of course, but his responses were disorganized by the alcohol that Sancho and Jorge had been pouring down his throat for the last hour, and of course Sancho was a burly slab of solid muscle and started the fight by socking Oharu in the kidney with a fist as hard as hickory. It wasn't very long before we had Oharu stretched out on his bed with his arms and legs duct-taped together and I was booting up Jesse's computer, which I had found in Oharu's desk drawer.

"Our next stop," I told Oharu, "is Shanghai, and Shanghai's in the People's Republic, not a Special Administrative Region like Hong Kong or Macau. If we turn you in, you get shot in the back of the head and your family gets a bill for the bullet."

Oharu spat out a blood clot and spoke through mashed lips. "I'll tell them all about
you."

I shrugged. "So? Nothing
we're
doing is illegal. All we're doing is recovering an item on behalf of its legitimate owners."

"That's debatable. I could still make trouble for you."

I considered this. "If that's the case," I said, "maybe we ought not to keep you around long enough to say
anything
to the authorities."

He glowered. "You wouldn't dare kill me."

Again I shrugged. "
We
won't kill you. It'll be the
ocean
that'll do that."

Sancho slapped a hand over Oharu's mouth just as he inhaled to scream. In short order we taped his mouth shut, hoisted him up, and thrust him through his cabin porthole. There he dangled, with Sancho hanging onto one ankle and Jorge the other.

I took off his right shoe and sock.

"Clench your toes three times," I said, "when you want to talk. But make it quick, because you're overweight and Jorge is getting tired."

Jorge deliberately slackened his grip and let Oharu drop a few centimeters. There was a muffled yelp and a thrash of feet.

The toe-clenching came a few seconds later. We hauled Oharu in and dropped him onto his chair.

"So tell us," I began, "who hired you."

A Mr. Lau, Oharu said, of Shining Spectrum Industries in the Guangzhong Economic Region. He went on to explain that Dr. Jiu Lu, or Jesse as we'd known him, had worked for Shining Spectrum before jumping suddenly to Pacific Century. Magnum had suspected Jesse of taking Shining Spectrum assets with him, in the form of a project he was developing, and made an effort to get it back.

"This got Jiu scared," Oharu said, "so he tried to smuggle the project out of Guangzhou to Taiwan, but his ship went down in a storm. You know everything else."

"Not quite," I said. "What
is
the project?"

"I wasn't told that," Oharu said. "All I know is that it's biotechnology and that it's illegal, otherwise Jiu wouldn't have had to smuggle it out."

A warning hummed in my nerves. "Some kind of weapon?"

Oharu hesitated. "I don't think so," he said. "This operation doesn't have that kind of vibe."

I took that under advisement while I paged through the directory on Jesse's computer. Everything was in Chinese, and I didn't have a clue. I tried opening some of the files, but the computer demanded a password.

"Where did you send the data?" I asked.

"I never sent it anywhere," Oharu said. "I was just going to turn it over to Mr. Lau when I got off the boat tomorrow."

"You have a meeting set?" I asked.

A wary look entered his eyes. "He was going to call."

"Uh-huh." I grinned. "Too bad for Mr. Lau that you didn't get off in Macau and fly to Shanghai to meet him."

He looked disconsolate. "I really
am
an Andean folk music fan," he said. "That part I didn't make up. I wanted to catch your last show."

Somehow I failed to be touched.

I shut down the computer and looked through the papers that Oharu had got out of Jesse's briefcase. They were also in Chinese, and likewise incomprehensible. I put them aside and considered Oharu's situation.

He had murdered my employer, and besides that cut into my action with Leila, and I wasn't inclined to be merciful. On the other hand, I wasn't an assassin, and cold-bloodedly shoving him out the porthole wasn't my style.

On the third hand, I could see that he was turned over to the authorities once the ship reached Shanghai and let justice take its course. Getting shot in the neck by Chinese prison guards was too good for him.

But on the fourth hand, he
could
make trouble for us. The knowledge that there was illegal biotechnology being shipped to Taiwan was enough to make the Chinese authorities sit up and take notice.

"Right," I said, "this is what's going to happen." I pointed to the ninja gear I'd laid out on the bed. "In the morning, the cabin steward is going to find your murder implements laid out, and it will be obvious that you killed our employer."

He glared at me. "I'll tell the police all about you," he said. "They're not going to appreciate Western spies in their country."

"You're not going to get a chance to talk to the police," I said. "Because by then you'll have gone out the porthole."

He filled his lungs to scream again, but Sancho stifled him with a pillow.

"However,"
I said, raising my voice a little to make sure he was paying attention as he flopped around on the bed, "we'll wait till we make Shanghai before you go into the drink, and we'll untie you first."