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After a few minutes the girl returned accompanied by the uniformed Duty Officer in charge of the airline's operations for the evening. As she had suggested, he was young and looked pretty unsure of himself.
"Hello, you're our new man from London Office, aren't you?" he greeted Smith, shaking his hand. "We were wondering where you'd got to. Rita tells me that you had a bit of trouble with Customs."
Smith came straight to the point. "Somebody planted a box in my hand-luggage. It was a young Asian girl. I'm pretty sure she was in the seat directly behind me. They haven't told me her name, but they said she came from a respectable family. Can you find out who she was for me?"
"Who she was?" The young man seemed puzzled. "Why? What good will that do?"
"I don't think they believed me. They've kept my passport and they want me to report to the local police every day. If I can't prove my story I could be in big trouble. Really big trouble."
"I think you'd better come into the office," the young man replied in an "official" tone that Smith found greatly irritating.
He was ushered to a small inner office which had two desks, each with a computer terminal. They sat down at opposite sides of the desk nearest the door.
"Are you suggesting that you go after this person yourself, Mr. Smith?"
"I think I may have to. They seem to think she's somebody super-special. I think they just let her go. I don't know if they questioned her, or searched her properly or anything. They seem to be assuming that she's the innocent party and I'm the guilty one."
The young man hesitated. "Look, we'll help you all we can of course, but we have to go through proper channels on this. We can't just wade in. I mean even if you knew who she was, what could you do about it?"
Smith hesitated. "I don't know really. But I've got a feeling that if I don't do something nobody else will."
The other stood up and paced slowly over and back for a moment, obviously deep in thought.
"You say she was in the seat behind you. So we could find out a bit about her from the passenger list. I'll need to get authorization. Just give me a few minutes." He sat down at the terminal opposite Smith and began to type. This went on for a few minutes.
"Okay," he said at last, "I got through to Head Office, and they say wait. Don't give out any confidential information at this stage." He looked up. "So that's it, I'm afraid. My hands are tied for the moment. Why don't you get a good night's sleep and come back in the morning? By then we should have authorization. And could you please give me a full written report of everything that happened. As detailed as you can make it. Okay?"
Smith felt his shoulders slump. "Okay," he said with a sigh. "Will you make sure whoever is on duty in the morning knows what's going on?"
It was a deliberate slight and the other picked it up.
"Of course, Mr. Smith," he returned coldly, "that goes without saying."
O
By the time Smith made it out to the street, carrying his leather case, his bulky black hold-all tucked under his arm, dusk had settled on the tropical landscape and the warm breeze that ruffled his hair, carrying with it the scent of chicken-wings and skewers of pork roasting on street-side barbecues, brought him at least a faint flicker of the exhilaration he normally felt on arriving at some exotic new destination.
So far, nothing too terrible had happened. He was under suspicion, but he knew that he was innocent, and no matter how deep they probed there was nothing they could find out about him that would do him any harm. Rationally he couldn't see how the incident could ever amount to any more than an inconvenience. But he was aware that he was not under British or US jurisdiction here, and he didn't know how much reliance he could place on local legal processes. Still very much preoccupied with his misfortune he strolled idly across the car-park in the direction of the main road, ignoring the shouts of "You want taxi, Sir?", "You want Rolex watch, Sir?", "You want nice girl, Sir?", "You want chicken-wing on stick, Sir?" and all the rest of it until he got to the road. There was a bus-stop in front of a line of food-stalls, and after that a line of parked motor rick-shaws, plying for hire, shouting for him to "Sit down please!", "Get in, please!", "Where you want to go?!", "Very cheap rickshaw!" and other things in this vein. Smith ignored their cheerful shouts and selected an older, rather thoughtful-looking driver who sat on the saddle of his little machine without speaking and waited for Smith to walk right up to him.
"Do you speak English?" Smith asked quietly, not even bothering to shout over the tumult of voices inviting him to board other vehicles.
"English, German, French, Japanese.... no problem," the old man assured him solemnly.
"Okay. I need somewhere to stay for the night. Preferably somewhere nearby. Do you know some place?"
"No problem, Sir. My mother has guest-house. Very clean, very cheap, very near airport. I take you there, ten minutes."
"My name is Fan," he added as an afterthought, "like turn around on ceiling." He kick-started the little two-stroke engine and set off sedately if noisily down the main thoroughfare, turning left at the first side-road. A little up the track, by a tumble-down bamboo shack that seemed to be a gate-house to a farm of some kind, they turned right and started up a rough farm-track. After a drive of about half a mile they got to a fairly large farmhouse. Its construction was still traditional to the extent that it was raised-up on wooden stilts, but it seemed relatively modern and well-appointed. The space underneath the building had been given-over to a sort of barbecue area and modest bar/restaurant, and there were three or four guests, very much of the back-packing tourist variety, sitting around eating, drinking and socializing. This place was rather a lucky find, Smith thought to himself, he liked the atmosphere. It obviously generated a bit of trade for the local rickshaw drivers as well because reaching it on foot would have been highly impractical.
Fan's mother, when he met her, seemed if anything a little more youthful than Fan himself. She was a tiny tough wiry old woman, with a deeply-lined face that bore a friendly no-nonsense expression, and she unloaded Smith's bags and whisked them up the steps to his room with the strength and agility of a seventeen-year-old.
"Your mother is very fit!" Smith commented pleasantly.
"My mother was a farmer for fifty-six years. My mother is probably fitter than either of us, Mr. Smith! When my mother young, money did not come easily in this country."
Smith nodded. Tourism to places like this had done at least some little good, he supposed.
While Smith unpacked his things in what turned-out to be a very pleasant little room with a large fan in the middle of the ceiling, the man who bore that device's name had an animated conversation with his mother down at the al fresco food-bar. He went down to join them. There was some kind of meat roasting on their little outdoor barbecue and it reminded him that he was very hungry.
"Could I get something to eat?" he asked, strolling up to Fan and his mother.
"Anything you like, Sir. My mother make very good food."
He asked for barbecue chicken and fried rice with a glass of the local beer to wash it down. Fan invited him to join him where he was sitting.
"My name is Smith," he introduced himself. "Leonard Smith. Most people just call me Smith."
Fan nodded. "You come here for holiday, Mr. Smith?"
"No. I'm here on business. And I didn't get off to a very good start."
Feeling a bit sorry for himself, and needing a shoulder to cry on, Smith had related the whole of what had happened to him at the airport to Fan by the time Fan's mother arrived with the food. Immediately Fan started to re-tell the story, in his own language, to his mother. Then, at a point that Smith judged to be about half way through the account, he suddenly stopped dead and turned to stare at him.
"Mr. Smith," he said in a totally different tone, "I just think of something. The girl who was crying."
Smith looked up from his food. "The girl who was crying? What do you mean?"
"Earlier today... I am not sure of time, but about two or three hours before I saw you, young girl came out of the airport crying. That is unusual... girl to cry."
Smith's face lit up. "A young girl, you say? About twenty, twenty-three years old?"
"Yes. About that old. Wore blue American-style suit.... two bags. One big, one small."
Smith was becoming more and more excited. "Hair about shoulder length? Black, shiny? A little shoulder-bag as well as the other two?"
"I did not notice the shoulder-bag. But very pretty girl. Shy, I think. Look down at the ground a lot."
Smith stood up in his excitement. "It's her, Fan! It's her! Where did you see her?"
"She come out of the airport, same door that you come out. Then she walk over to taxi-rank, same as you. And she take taxi. Everything same as you."
"And then what? Where did the taxi go?"
As soon as Smith had said it he knew it was a stupid question. Fan merely shrugged. "How I know where taxi go?" He paused for a moment. "But I know who drive taxi."
"You know who drove the taxi! Fan, you're a life-saver! Can we find this taxi-driver? I'll pay you well?"
"Taxi-driver name is Chelim. Man about my age. Good friend of mine. But I do not know where Chelim is right now."
"His home, Fan. Could we try his home?"
Fan shook his head thoughtfully. "Chelim would not be at home now. Chelim would be working. Chelim always work late at night."
"But he would come back to the taxi-rank at the airport to pick-up more fares, right?"
"I don't know, Mr. Smith. The airport is good to find people in the daytime. At night the bars are better. Girl-bars in the city center."
"Girl-bars in the city center," Smith repeated. "Is there any chance we could find him there?"
"Some chance.... I guess," Fan ventured doubtfully.
O
Under different circumstances Smith would have found the late-night girlie-bars a source of the utmost fascination, with their loud but oddly dated rock-music, glaring, dancing neon-signs, garish photo-displays on the signs outside, and hordes of scantily-dressed teenage girls clustered at street-corners and outside the bars, trying to attract customers (in one sense or another) and distributing little business-card advertisements proclaiming such things as: "Your Second Drink is Free", "Live Sex-Show Every Hour", and "Show with Girl and Snake, Both Very Dangerous". It was noisy, lively and in many ways irresistible, especially if you didn't look too closely at the seams. But Smith's mind was on other things.
Fan drove his little three-wheeler slowly and purposefully through the surging mass of humanity that seemed to flow through the bar-land district like a heavy, viscous liquid, overflowing perpetually on to the street from both sidewalks, lazily separating to allow the passage of the little vehicle. Every time he spotted another rickshaw he would shout something to the driver in his own language; a phrase that, after so many repetitions, Smith could readily recognize as meaning "Have you seen Chelim here tonight?"
In one or two cases the answers had been in the affirmative, but the trails were never very warm. A Rickshaw driver might perform eight or ten trips between the bars and the hotels in any given hour, so by the time Smith and Fan would arrive at Chelim's reported destination he would be long gone on some new mission. But the size of barland was finite, little more than half a mile in any given direction, so Smith thought that by the law of averages they must coincide with Chelim in some street sooner or later. This finally occurred at about fifteen minutes to midnight, as Fan was pulling out from one of the little narrow bar-lined strreets on to the main thoroughfare that linked them together. "It's him!" Fan shouted excitedly, "there is Chelim on main road!"
They gave chase and Fan used his raucous little air-powered hand-squeezed horn to attract his attention. Chelim was on his own in the rickshaw but seemingly in a bit of a hurry.
"Where you go so fast?" Fan shouted across in English as the two of them pulled-in to the kerb, "My good friend here want talk with you!"
Fan climbed out and the two drivers exchanged a few words in their own language. "This very good, Mr.Smith," Fan called out, "we very lucky!" As they continued to talk in their own tongue Smith got out of Fan's rickshaw and came over to find out what he meant. "We talk about girl who cries," Fan explained with an air of accomplishment, "very good luck we find Chelim now. Chelim go to pick-up girl who cries right now."
With a little more explanation from the two men Smith managed to understand that she had asked to be taken from the airport to a big, luxurious house at the far end of the city: then, when Chelim was leaving, she had asked him to return at midnight to take her on another journey, but this time he was to wait for her on the road - he was not to come down the driveway to the door of the house itself. And, by an enormous stroke of luck, Fan had just stopped Chelim as he was leaving the bar-district to keep his rendezvous. It could hardly have worked-out more conveniently. Without wasting any more time, Chelim got back on the road and Fan's rickshaw followed in convoy. Smith's excitement began to build. There might not be very much he could do when he saw the girl again but at least he would have the opportunity of confronting her with her behavior.
O
The house where the girl lived was positively breath-taking. It was hard to believe that they were in the same city that Smith had seen from the air, with its ugly tower-blocks and little bamboo shacks on stilts by the sides of the canals. This was a virtual palace. The building itself, its outline softened by tall, elegant trees, silhouetted against the glow of the distant city lights, was at the end of a long private driveway that ran off a broad tree-lined avenue. The grounds were surrounded by high stone walls, with security-cameras nestling discreetly in slots within the coping-stones. Stone heraldic dragons perched atop the two towering gate-posts, between which a spidery wrought-iron gate, constructed to a pattern of the finest intricacy, barred the way of any unwanted callers.
Smith couldn't help whistling in amazement as their motor-rickshaws drew to a halt on the opposite side of the street.
"It's out of a fairy-tale, isn't it?" he said in a hushed undertone.
Fan wanted to hide his rickshaw in the shadows down the avenue slightly and let Chelim make his pick-up, then give chase. "We will see when they move off," Fan explained, "there is only one way out of the road. They will pass us by, and then we shall follow."
Smith wasn't so sure. "I don't want her to get away again," he argued, "if we do that we could lose them. I want to confront her right here, right now."
"Don't worry," Fan assured him, "Chelim know we follow. He not go too fast."
The real reason for Fan's caution was that Chelim had told him to keep out of the way for a moment so as not frighten-off his customer. Eventually Smith guessed this and let Fan have his way. They hid their vehicle under the heavy shadow of some trees a few hundred yards down the street. Then they waited.
O
The girl was not a very good time-keeper. It was coming up to half an hour after midnight when they saw her diminutive figure moving up the road, keeping close in to the wall (which was probably a blind-spot for the cameras), wearing a smart two-piece business-suit and a very respectable-looking cloth hat with a narrow brim, and carrying a small handbag. The outfit had the effect of making her look a lot older than her actual years. She had come on to the road from a side-gate somewhere, avoiding the main driveway of the huge house. Her appearance, Smith could see, constituted a partial attempt at disguise. If the cameras happened to pick her up the people in the house probably wouldn't recognize her. It was important to her not to be found-out. This was undoubtedly a girl with something to hide.
As her rickshaw passed theirs, Smith got the first clear glimpse of her face since he had been on the 'plane. She looked pale and drawn now: not at all the chirpy young woman who had flirted with him beneath the baggage-lockers.
Her gaze was fixed straight ahead, her thoughts wrapped-up in some worrying internal dialogue, and when they started their engine to follow she did not look around.
The route taken by Chelim and his passenger was long and convoluted. From the genteel outskirts of the city they drove back into the chaotic center, down the side of one of the major canals, on to a dirt-track that followed the course of a smaller one, down a side-alley lined with crude wooden shacks and smelling of untreated sewage, and finally through a set of broken wooden gates into what looked like a small disused goods-yard.
Fan stopped outside the yard, which annoyed Smith, as he could see his chances of talking to the girl face-to-face slipping away. He switched off the engine and the lights and spoke to Smith in a hoarse whisper. "I know this place," he said excitedly, "is very bad place. Here is gambling, and lady-house, but not ordinary lady-house. Very bad things."
Smith, who didn't really know what to expect from even an "ordinary" lady-house, could scarcely imagine what the old man was suggesting. Fan tried to be more explicit. "I think that here they make movie... of people die! You understand?"
Smith felt suddenly very queasy. What, in heaven's name, he thought, was a girl who lived in a house like that doing mixed-up with a place like this?
"Mr. Smith," said Fan earnestly, "I think this getting very dangerous for us on our own. Maybe we should go back to road, wait for Chelim there."
Smith was becoming definitely annoyed. "But they might come out some other way. Or she might stay there all night. I want to see her. I want to wait here, or else go in."
"You want go in there! No. That would be crazy, Mr. Smith! That very dangerous place. Even police not go in there. That place belong to a man named Miller. American man. Very bad man. Very dangerous."
Smith sat for a moment and thought hard. He found that he somehow couldn't get the girl's face out of his mind. Her face and the way that she had looked when her rickshaw had passed them by: so haunted and desperate, a poor, beautiful lost soul.
"You know, Fan," he said at last. "I'm not really angry with her any more. What do you think's going on in there?. Do you think she was smuggling drugs for this Miller person? Do you think she's in there telling him that she failed? That I handed that box to the customs men?"
"Perhaps."
"You know, I hadn't thought about it before, but maybe I did her a lot more harm than she did me. I wonder if she's paying the price right now. I wonder what that price is going to be."
"Whatever price it not your fault, Mr. Smith. If people do wrong they must face consequences."
Smith took in a deep breath. Suddenly he felt very cheap. A prim Sunday-School moralist. His high-minded principles might have got this girl killed. Maybe it was happening at this very second.
Smith felt himself suddenly engulfed by a great surge of unfocused guilt. "I can't just sit here," he said at last, "I'm going to have a look around."
"No, Mr. Smith!" Fan pleaded, "That crazy. Get you killed. Maybe get both of us killed! Please! Not do that!"
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