Assignment - Sulu Sea by Edward S. Aarons Page B

the other way. While Prince Ch‘ing’s men hunted
for him along canals and houses, he would drop in to pay a call on the Manchu
pretender himself, at the House of a Thousand Pleasures.
    He did not doubt that the visit would be interesting.
     
    He swam quietly through the dark, tangled shadows, avoiding
the open canals and klongs where crowded sampans, junks and brightly painted outrigger fishing boats
were moored in a miasma of charcoal smoke, cooking odors, the smells of
fish and crowded unwashed humanity. Eventually he came to a clear area, a
sort of open, watery square he had not seen on the route he had taken with Yoko
Hanamutra. From the safe obscurity between two thick piers, he could see across
the expanse of water in the long-fingered yellow light of a hundred
lanterns to a brilliantly outlined entrance of what could only be an enormous
dance hall or teahouse. This could be nothing less than the prince’s House of a
Thousand Pleasures, the main milking station, so to speak, for picking up the
thousands of coins from the impoverished and Quietly desperate inhabitants of
Dendang. As he watched, immersed to his neck in the tepid, oily water, he saw
two big Chinese make their way along the plank walk to the entrance. Pie was
quite sure they were the ones who had followed him, and the first was
definitely one of those from the hospital. He was relieved to note that
they did not have Yoko Hanamutra with them.
    Quickly, he found a ladder and climbed to a small dark boardwalk
behind some shanty tin houses. The slimy feel of the canals clung to him, but
nothing short of a long soak in a tub could fix that. Luck, however,
touched him when he spotted a line of flapping clothes behind the nearest
tin shack. There was a coolie’s jacket, newly washed and dried, together with
worn dungarees, The jacket was large in the middle and tight in the shoulders,
but he was happy to exchange it for his muddy shirt. His wet gun troubled him,
and he took a few moments to dry it as well as he could, standing in the darkness
to face the open square of water and Prince Ch’ing’s establishment. He decided
he would have to gamble or pray it would fire if needed.
    Fortunately, he was not the only white man who sought the
favors of Prince Ch’ing’s enticements. A gleaming mahogany launch was moored
before the big pavilion, and several of Pandakan’s European merchants were
going in, either to enjoy the gambling or the women that the prince made
available to his more select clientele. Durell walked quickly through the
crowded stalls that sold spiced meats, tiny broiled shrimp, cookies and ices.
No one paid much attention to him in this part of Fishtown. He could have been a
sailor, a beachcomber, anything, in his coolie jacket and the straw sandals
that had come from the same source as his dry clothes. Most of the local
patrons used an entrance other than the one where the launch was tied up, and
he headed for the smaller and less pretentious way in.
    The smells of incense, cooking, human sweat and tension struck
him like a tangible blow as he went inside the House of a Thousand Pleasures.
The place was an immense, sprawling complex that surely covered several acres
built out over the harbor water. But it Prince Ch’ing were here, squatting like
a fat spider in the center of his web, he would find his quarry.
    He was leaning more on instinct than logic to hunt here for
an answer to the riddle of the missing submarine. But considering the factors
that had formed a pattern in his mind, once he’d learned of Tommy Lee’s
troubles, he did not consider it unreasonable.
    “You English stranger here? You American?”
    The voice was a soft, birdlike singsong, spoken by a young Chinese
girl in a blue silk quilted jacket and black silk trousers, who smiled at him
from behind the bars of a huge birdcage of bamboo. The bars, Durell noted, were
reinforced with steel rods, and the gate in the birdcage, which was duplicated
by another behind the girl,