Floating City (2 page)

Devoid of conscious thought, afloat in the void of
haragei,
he smashed his elbow into her face, feeling with some satisfaction the crack of bone, feeling the heat of her inner tissue, the smell of her blood like a rose bursting open.

Then he had her right wrist and, taking hold of her forefinger, plunged the poisoned nail into her solar plexus.

The next morning, he made the steep, grueling ascent into General Quan’s territory. It had rained during the night, and the day was hot, unusual at this high elevation. Rock was sweating by the time he sighted the first of General Quan’s patrols.

He put down his bundles, set himself against the bole of a tree, and ate a bit of dried fish in the cool shade. He took some water from his canteen. When he was finished, he set about making a fire, hanging up his stewpot. He poured the contents of one of his bundles into the pot.

By that time, General Quan’s patrol had spotted the smoke from his fire. They were coming, AK-47s at the ready. There were five of them, he saw. Perfect. He began to whistle the Doors’ “Light My Fire.”

Wild Boy got out his rocket launcher, fitted the pieces together. When the patrol was in range, he loaded, fired, and took three of them out in a brilliant blaze.

“Get me General Quan!” he yelled in their peculiar dialect. “Tell him Wild Boy wants to see him.”

The remaining two soldiers scrambled away, and Rock settled down to wait. An hour later, they were back with someone of some rank. The two Shan kept their distance.

“Who are you,” the commander said, “to demand General Quan leave his compound?”

It was a matter of face, Rock knew. In Asia, it was always a matter of face. The man who forgot that, or thought he could circumvent it, would never survive in this part of the world.

“I am Wild Boy,” Rock said, hefting his rocket launcher. “I demand nothing. I requested an audience with General Quan. I am a courteous man. To demand is to act the barbarian.”

The commander, who had heard of Wild Boy, was nevertheless impressed by this speech. He grunted. “The general may grant you an audience if some concessions are made. For instance, recompense must be made for the three men you killed.”

“An unfortunate mistake. I was merely attempting to defend myself.”

“General Quan will not accept this explanation. There are now three families who will go hungry.”

“I will pay so that they will not go hungry,” Rock said, knowing the drill.

“Do you have gifts for General Quan?”

“Certainly. Only a barbarian or a witless man would come empty-handed to an audience with the emperor of the Shan.”

Thus mollified, the commander waved Rock upward. Rock packed his gear with great care. He made a show of breaking down his rocket launcher, stowing it away, to further allay whatever fears the commander might still harbor.

The commander led the way, the two soldiers flanking Rock on either side. He had no fear of them at all. He was now under the benevolent protection of General Quan. If the patrol was attacked at this moment, the men were bound to safeguard him even at the expense of their own lives.

General Quan’s compound was bristling with armed men when the patrol arrived. It seemed as if every available man had been ordered to be in attendance at Rock’s arrival. This rather primitive display of territorial superiority impressed Rock. It meant that he was being taken seriously. That boded well for the interview.

General Quan had been dispatched to the Shan five years ago to begin to funnel the fabulously rich vein of illegal commerce to be had here in the direction of his terribly impoverished country. He knew he had more to fear from the Chinese opium warlord then in control of the Shan Plateau than he did from the pitiful attempts by the ragtag Burmese army to clean up an area essentially impossible to police.

He was not to be seen when the commander ushered Rock into the main building. Rock was left alone, with not even a young girl to serve him tea. This was quite deliberate on the general’s part, since it further displayed his superior position.

An hour later, a young woman did enter. She was quite beautiful. She averted her gaze from Rock’s and knelt before a blackened hole in the floor across which was an iron post and, gathering dry twigs into a cone, started a fire. Carefully, she placed three hardwood logs across the flames. Then she rose and left.

Another half hour passed, during which time Rock heard nothing but the dogs barking outside, and orders being shouted by someone outside.

General Quan arrived in a flourish. He wore tanned leather breeches, and a rough muslin shirt over which he sported a goatskin American military flight jacket with a patch of the Fourteenth Air Force on the right sleeve. Unlike the other Shan warlords Rock had met, he wore no jewelry save a necklace of rubies and sapphires, the largesse of the Burmese lowlands. He was attended by two Shan bodyguards armed with machine pistols.

The young woman reentered with an iron kettle and a pair of earthenware cups on a lacquer tray. She hung the kettle on the iron post over the fire. Tea was served, hot, thick, and sweet, in the Thai tradition. It was quite bracing. Rock hadn’t had decent tea in six months, and he took his time, savoring it.

At length, he said, “I have agreed to make recompense for the disagreeable incident this morning. Of course I was at fault, and I wish to make amends to the families of those unfortunately dead.”

General Quan considered this. His commander had already reported as much to him, of course, but he was gratified to see that this Wild Boy had decent manners, after all. Not that his civilized comportment would stop General Quan from having this foreign devil killed. He had become far too dangerous to be allowed to remain in the Shan States.

General Quan could see the greed in the foreign devil’s eyes as easily as he could feel the slime on a slug. Wild Boy wanted a piece of the tears of the poppy—what else would bring a foreign devil all the way up here, an interdicted area as far as the Burmese government was concerned?

Huh, his
wa is
not so strong as the stories tell,
General Quan thought as he eyed the giant from over the rim of his teacup. Now that I have him here, I will humiliate him for the loss of face he has caused me among my men. Then I will bury him up to his thick neck and let the ants and the sun take care of him.

The only possible cloud on his horizon was Mai. Where was she? And why had she not killed this foreign devil, as she had been ordered to do? Perhaps, the general mused, she had not yet devised a clever way of meeting him. Then, unbidden, the thought arose, as black and ugly as dung, that something had befallen Mai. Perhaps she had been hurt in the jungle or again kidnapped by one of General Quan’s many enemies. His scrotum contracted painfully at the thought. What would he do without his precious Mai? She was his talisman; everything good that had happened to him had occurred while she was with him.

General Quan smiled at Rock. “More tea, perhaps?”

Rock nodded. “Thank you for your hospitality,” he said, bowing. “I am unworthy of such munificence.” As he watched the beautiful young woman pour, he wondered whether this one might be Mai’s sister. For as sure as he was sitting here now, Rock knew that Mai belonged to General Quan.

From his longtime contacts among the Wa, the Lu, and the Lisu, he had heard the jungle rumors about Mai’s prowess in effecting, as the Chinese termed it, the clouds and the rain, eliciting spectacular orgasms from her lover. But he had treated them as just that, rumors that picked up embellishments from each mouth that passed them on. Until Mai had taken him between her lips. Then he knew—the Ruby had told him with a certainty impossible to ignore.

When they had finished their second cup of tea, Rock said, “In addition to the recompense for the grieving families, I have brought the general a special present.” He began to unpack his stewpot and sacks. General Quan’s men reacted by lowering the muzzles of their machine pistols.

“Food!” Rock cried, laughing, as he ladled the stew into the pot, hung it over the fire. “Food fit for the gods themselves!”

The general watched the proceedings with a jaundiced eye. “I have been paid in rubies, sapphires, jade, and gold. But never with a meal.” He was not displeased, however. Good food was one of his passions, as Rock had heard from his contacts.

Wild Boy ladled out the stew, placing it before General Quan, who, leaning over the steaming bowl, inhaled deeply. “It smells delicious.”

He signaled to one of his bodyguards, who slung his machine pistol across his back, picked up the bowl, and dipping two fingers into stew, ate several mouthfuls. General Quan watched him expectantly.

At length, the bodyguard belched, gave a curt nod, and handed the bowl back to his leader. General Quan made no apologies for this seeming lack of manners, and Rock did not ask for one.

General Quan took up a pair of golden chopsticks encrusted with rubies and sapphires, settled the bowl in the palm of his hand, and holding it just under his chin, commenced to shovel the food into his mouth. He was like a mammoth machine; even Wild Boy was impressed by this engine of consumption. The general paused only once, and that was to gasp, “It tastes even more delicious than it smells.”

“You are most kind.” Rock bowed again. He held out his hand. “Please. Allow me to refill the general’s bowl.” He stirred the bottom of the pot with his ladle, then loaded up the bowl General Quan handed back.

While he watched the general continue his shoveling act, Rock said, “I had heard that the general enjoys his women fully as much as he does his food.” He turned his head in the young woman’s direction. “Now I know the truth to those stories.”

The general’s small eyes were almost closed with the pleasure of gorging himself on Rock’s magnificent stew.

“I have also heard,” Rock said, “that the jewel among the general’s women is one named Mai. Is she here, General? Might I see her?”

“Uh.” There was only a momentary lapse in the shoveling act.

“No? Oh, what a pity.” Rock smiled. “Well, I’m not surprised, I suppose. Such a rare treasure is not so easily on display, even for favored guests?”

“Uh.”

Rock shrugged. “But, then, who knows, perhaps Mai is not so far away from us at this moment.”

General Quan was almost finished with his second bowl of stew. His face was glistening with a combination of sweat and grease. He glared at Rock. “What nonsense are you speaking?”

“Have you reached the bottom yet? Of the bowl, that is?”

General Quan probed through the remnants of the thick sauce. “One more piece of delicious meat.” He picked it up with the tips of his chopsticks, was about to pop it in his mouth when something caught his eye. He held the piece of meat out so that he could see it better. He shook off the excess gravy.

What he saw was the unmistakable glint of a magnificent Burmese sapphire, and he thought,
Ah, the foreign devil is very clever—here is my real gift.

But then his eyes opened wide and everything he had just eaten came spewing out, along with a long, low wail.

The sapphire was embedded in a whole, human ear. His beloved Mai’s ear.

You will always find
some Eskimos willing to instruct
the Congolese on how to cope
with heat waves.

—Stanislaw Lem

Nicholas Linnear was waiting for his man. While he did so, he drank a warm beer and observed the cockroach as large as his thumb survey the filthy room as if it were the shogun in feudal Japan. He was in a third-floor front room of the Anh Dan Hotel, a thoroughly unpleasant establishment that nevertheless suited his purposes. The sickly light thrown by one disheartened forty-watt bulb exposed the cracks, noxious stains, and peeling and discolored paint. It worked when electricity was provided (which wasn’t all that often) if one touched two ends of the exposed live wires together at the point on the wall where a plate and switch should have been. The smells of raw sewage and stale sex pervaded the entire hotel, and outside the appalling clamor from Nguyen Trai Street was an incessant and disreputable companion at all hours of the day and night. This was Saigon, after all, and worse, Cholon, where sooner or later all the dregs of the city ended up.

Nicholas turned to look at Jisaku Shindo, the Japanese private detective hired by his partner Tanzan Nangi to unravel the mystery surrounding the murder of Vincent Tinh, the former director of the Saigon branch of Sato International, the giant
keiretsu
—conglomerate—Nangi and Linnear co-owned.

“Do you think he’ll come?”

“The friend of a friend said he would.” Shindo’s clipped speech cut through the humid atmosphere.

Nicholas mentally reviewed the activities of Vincent Tinh. Tinh, it seemed, had had a private agenda. He had used his job at Sato International as a mask to conceal his nefarious business, stealing and selling the proprietary technology of Sato’s ultrasecret Chi Project. Under Nicholas’s guidance, the Chi Project was creating a revolutionary generation of computers that was a quantum leap beyond anything currently on the market or elsewhere in development. Based on neural-network technology, the first-generation Chi computer processed data in the same way the human brain did.

Like most criminals—even those of the genius class—Tinh had been undone by his greed. Cobbling what he could purloin of the Chi technology with elements of the new American Hive computer (also based on a type of neural-net chip), he created here in Saigon a bastardized hybrid that he began to sell on the vast and immensely lucrative Southeast Asian gray market.

Because of Tinh, Sato-Tomkin—the American arm of Sato International—and Nicholas in particular, had been accused by the Americans of theft, illegal manufacture, and espionage leading to treason. Nicholas, who had hired Tinh in the first place, had a compelling personal as well as a professional stake in finding out how much damage Tinh had done before his demise.

Even more alarming, now that Nicholas was here and had listened to Shindo’s perspective on the situation, he had come to the conclusion that Tinh wasn’t the only key to the severe blow given to Sato International’s business and reputation.