CHINA KING
The Beginning of a Crime Story
When I opened the door he was sitting there with a gun in his hand. He was a lean and evil man with a scar on his cheek that had not been there when I saw him last and the stench of unwashed clothes about him. There was another scar on his upper lip which I had reason to remember. My fist put it there in a brawl on a ship’s deck one hot night off the mangrove coast.
“It’s been a long time, Jack,” he said, grinning at me, “a very long time.”
If there was any change it was not for the better. He was older, of course, and his tongue-tip kept touching the thickness in his lip where the scar was. That wasn’t a good sign.
“How’d you get in?”
“A few years ago you wouldn’t have asked that. You’d have known.” The smile left his lips and his eyes veiled a little. “Ask me what I’m here for and I’m not going to like it.”
He was an inch taller than my six-one, though a good thirty pounds lighter. But I made no mistake about China King. Even without the gun he was no bargain in any kind of fight.
“Want a drink?” Ignoring the gun, I crossed to the sideboard.
“Sure,” he said, “just so I watch you mix it.”
When he had a bourbon in his hand he took a sip, then grinned. “Taste, kid. You got it. But you always had it. Clothes, liquor, and women.”
He chuckled then. “Whatever became of the Malay babe you picked up in that place on High Street? When you moved in there I figured you were due for a throat-cutting. Her old man was a big muck-a-muck up in the Federated States.”
“We got along,” I said. “We got along all right.”
This was trouble, real trouble. Nor was it anything I had coming to me. China King and all like him were a thing of my past, my drifting days. That was over now, and I wanted no part of him. When a man drifts from port to port and lives as he can, he meets many people, good and bad. China King was poison.
“Nice place you got, kid. The first time I met you was in Shanghai. You were broke and on the beach.”
“All right.” I was a little irritated. “What do you want, China?”
His face changed as if he’d been slapped. His thin shoulders hunched and there were ugly lights in his eyes. “You know what I want! I want fifty thousand dollars! I want it right here in my hand, an’ don’t try stallin’ me!”
“I haven’t got fifty grand and never had it.”
Something in my voice made him look twice at me. “It had to be you!” he said angrily. “Only two of us got out alive.”
“Maybe.”
“What does that mean?”
“What about Forbes?”
“That limey? He’s dead. I killed him.”
Opening a drawer in my desk I put my hand in. “If it’s a gun,” he said, “I’ll kill you.”
“It’s a magazine,” I told him, and took it out. The magazine was more than three years old. The picture I showed him was a group of three men…three top-flight business executives representing three separate airlines celebrating a merger into Trans-Orient. The man on the right was the new president of the company, Paul Greenway.
China swore. “How could I have missed? I had him dead to rights.”
“You didn’t get me, China. And you had me right where you wanted.”
“You.” There was no bitterness in his tone. “You were always a fool for luck.”
Fifteen years can be a long, long time. And the Far East was a wide world away and in those days it was a place to make a fast buck. Gunrunning, pearl poaching, smuggling, buying and selling the stuff big ships couldn’t afford to handle, looting, gambling…fifty ways to make it and a hundred to lose it again.
Seven of us were in on the deal, seven men from all over the world and every man out for himself. We were lifting tribute silk from the Forbidden Palace in Peiping and peddling it to a Greek who sold it again in India. It was not stealing…not in the usual sense. We were under orders from a Chinese official; ostensibly the money went to buy guns but that was none of our business. Only we made our share in the process.
Up to a point, we did. The Chinese decided on a double cross…cutting out the Greek and the rest of us once the pipeline was set and the connections made. When we brought out the second load they were waiting for us with guns.
It was a hijack. A good old Yankee-style hijack. Only it didn’t work. It didn’t work because we were a suspicious lot of lads, and all of us had been around a little. We knew what the score was, and when that dark boat moved in alongside and they ordered us to stop, we took our time.
We knew the voice: It was our Chinese official. We would have stopped for nobody else. Then we saw three men rise out of the waist of that boat with tommy guns. We were ready for trouble, and even as they opened fire we dropped flat and heaved three homemade grenades into their laps.
That was it. One of our boys copped it. He was gone before he hit the deck, and a Chinese boatman with him.
Six of us left, and a load of silk.
We never stopped, just kept going down the coast. We didn’t go near Shanghai and we avoided Hong Kong. We went to Macao, made a quick deal, and we were sitting on top of three hundred thousand dollars.
Three hundred thousand dollars…six men from nowhere. Forbes was an Englishman, he had been chief mate on a Chinese steamer line but did too much smuggling on his own hook. There was the Portugee, a beachcomber named Finley, a little rat named Joe Hollinger, China King, and me. Fifty thousand apiece, if we all lived. If some of us died, there would be more to split.
That idea came to all of us, I think. For myself, fifty grand was plenty, more than I’d dreamed of having at this stage of the game, but I knew the rest of them.
“We’d better get away from here,” Forbes advised. “There’s too many in Macao who have wind of this.”
So it was Hong Kong we started for, and Hollinger opened the game. He picked a fight with the Portugee and before anybody knew what had happened, the Portugee was on his knees with his gut ripped open. Hollinger was short, mean, and ready for trouble. “He asked for it,” he said, and I slipped the safety off my Colt.
Five men and nobody felt sleepy. We were off Tingkao village in the approaches to Hong Kong when the lid blew off. Who started it I never knew. Suddenly, everybody was shooting at once. Forbes shot Hollinger and China King shot at me, and I did some shooting, too.
Somebody splashed in the water, and then I went over the side myself. The water was shallow in that wide sandy bay, and I got to shore. There was another shot, then silence…but I did not go to Hong Kong. Instead I went to Canton and from there flew to Shanghai…and safely in a room in Shanghai I counted my money.
When everybody started to shoot, King shot at me and I went into the bottom of that boat, stuffed my shirt with money, and went over the side. They thought I was gone when King shot, and they were busy killing each other. My take was seventy thousand….I neither knew nor cared what happened in the junk, but it was pleasant in Europe that spring, and from Paris I went to Rome, then to Nice and through North Africa. I was broke when I got back to the States, but it had been worth it.
Hollinger, Finley, the Portugee…they copped it.
“Somebody got away with the boat,” King said. “It had to be you or him.”
There was no need to mention the seventy thousand. “It was a long time ago. It’s best forgotten.”
He sneered at me. “I ain’t forgettin’ it. I’d figured it was you,” he scowled, “but you never drank nor gambled them days, an’ I know you hit the beach in the States flat busted. You never drank enough to wet a man’s whistle. You couldn’t have gotten rid of three hundred grand so fast.”
He was right about that. Even seventy thousand had given me trouble.
He got up and poured himself a straight shot of bourbon. “I think I’ll see Forbes.”
“I wouldn’t,” I said. “I’d lay off.”
He left me then, and after a while I went to bed. But I couldn’t sleep. Forbes had always impressed me as a cold-blooded proposition, and certainly he had done his share of the shooting, but whatever else had happened, that was past. He had gone on and made a place for himself in the world and I couldn’t let him look into the eyes of murder without a warning. So I rolled over and picked up the telephone.
It took me more than an hour to get to him. When I did his voice was brusque and impatient. “Yes? What is it?”
“Greenway, if your name used to be Forbes, I just want to say that China King is in town. He wants to see you.”
His hesitation was brief, then he said in a quiet, perfectly cool voice, “This is Paul Greenway. My name was never Forbes. I do not know any China King. Good evening.”
So I went to sleep. If he was not Forbes he had something to wonder about. If he was, he knew what was in store for him. No matter what happened, the burden was off my shoulders.
Two nights later I came up to my door and dug for my key. My hand stopped there and I listened.
My radio was playing, and louder than I usually play it. Somebody was in my apartment, and that could only mean it was China King.
At first I thought about calling the cops. Then I shrugged and opened the door and stepped inside. It was King, all right, only he wasn’t sitting on the divan waiting for me. He was lying on the floor and he had been shot twice in the stomach. What he failed to get that night off Tingkao he had now, a bellyful of it.
And so had I.
There was no gun, but I had a very good hunch. Opening the drawer of my desk I looked for my pistol. It lay just where it had always been. I sniffed the barrel….It had been fired.
There could have been a lot of men who wanted to kill China King, but I did not believe more than one of them was in Los Angeles…and trust Greenway to have known about me, and to have guessed who the call was from.
Sitting very still in my apartment with a dead man at my feet, I tried to remember all I had known of the man we had called Forbes.
It summed up to very little. We called him a limey, but whether he was actually English or not, I did not know. We had met in Shanghai the way drifters do meet. None of us had known the others well. I’d known the Chinese who got us all into it, had seen King, Finley, and Forbes around. Forbes was a cold-blooded fish, a good poker player, and a cool head under fire. He would be a dangerous opponent, and now, of the seven, only two remained.
Knowing something of the man, I knew he would have an alibi; I knew also that he would have arranged to point this killing definitely at me. It was not enough that it be clear, but there must be no mystery to invite inquiry, and I was the only one who could point a finger at Greenway.
The only one…In that case I’d be better off dead, from his viewpoint. Dead, I could not talk. Dead it would appear that either I had shot King and killed myself, or had been wounded and died later, or was killed by a friend of King’s or the police.
Hence, his best bet was to kill me. The man I had known as Forbes would reason just that way.
How much did he know about me? That would be important now. What would he decide that I would do upon finding the body of King?
Call the police? Or remove the body to some other place? He would suspect me of the latter move. If that was so, and if he wanted to kill me, then he or his killer would be someplace near my car, which was parked in the space behind the apartment house.
COMMENTS: This is a much more interesting story fragment than it may seem on the surface. The underlying idea, that a group of desperate characters, near strangers to one another, perform a dangerous or illicit act in order to gain a “treasure” and once they do can no longer trust one another, can be found in more than a half dozen of Louis’s stories and novels. These include “What Gold Does to a Man,” “Desperate Men,” Kid Rodelo (“Desperate Men” was the short story that became the novel Kid Rodelo), a couple of story fragments here in Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures, and the best of all of them, the short story “Off the Mangrove Coast,” to which this piece has certain connections. It will also show up as a subplot in Louis’s soon-to-be-published first novel, No Traveler Returns.
The basic idea contains elements of B. Traven’s classic The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but in “Off the Mangrove Coast,” Louis added a brilliant refinement: It’s not much of a treasure. The fact that there really isn’t enough money to go around increases the likelihood that one of the men will try to kill the others for the chance to get it all.
Was there some element of this story that was true to Louis’s life? Is that why he returned to this plot over and over? He did tell some stories to this effect, but so far, I have no way of knowing if they actually happened. One thing that appears in this story that is true is that he did run into a man named Joe Hollinger, both at sea and with the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus. And, it seems, a knife was Joe’s preferred weapon.
This is also a sequel of sorts to the story fragment titled “Jack Cross.” The “silk caper” mentioned is referenced in both stories, and the time period seems right. At a guess, “tribute silk” was silk either given the Chinese emperors in tribute or intended to be given as tribute to allied governors or heads of state. Possibly stock of this silk remained in the Forbidden City for some time. The other oddball crime mentioned here is “pearl poaching,” which probably refers to sneaking into Australian territorial waters without the appropriate permits and diving for pearl shell. Before cultured pearls, the real market was for mother-of-pearl from the inside of the oyster (it was used for many of the things we now make out of plastic, like buttons, combs, and the keys on musical instruments). The pearls themselves were so rare that it was a waste of time diving in the hopes of finding one. However, if you were in the mother-of-pearl business and earned a living from the thousands of oysters you brought up, the pearls themselves served as a windfall profit.
Contrary to what one might think from reading some of the overtly macho material Louis wrote, he was a fairly mild-mannered guy. He had great presence, but certainly by the time I came along, he had little to prove in any way other than just trying to be a good writer. Though he could certainly tell adventurous tales about his life, he was a gentle man who could inspire that same gentleness in others.