then she began to speak. ‘I’m from Indo-China—the North. My father was a Scot. Mother was Indo-Chinese. I went to school in India, spent the war there. Afterwards I returned to my father’s plantation. He’d been on some special service during the war, in Malaya. Things were just beginning to settle down again when the trouble started between the French and the Viet Minh.’
Hagen nodded. ‘That must have messed things up pretty badly. Especially as you were living in the North.’
‘Yes, things couldn’t have been worse. It wasn’t long before we were completely surrounded by Communist territory. At first they didn’t bother us, but then one day…’
For a moment she seemed to have difficulty in finding words. She turned her head away a little and Hagen reached across again and took her hand firmly. ‘Go on, angel. Get rid of it.’
She smiled tightly. ‘My mother. They killed my mother. Father and I had been out for the day. We got home just as three Communist soldiers were leaving. My father had an automatic rifle. He shot them.’ She gazed away out over the water, into the past. ‘He did it very expertly. He must have had quite a hard war.’
‘Finish your drink,’ Hagen told her. ‘Brandy is the best pick-me-up I know.’
She gulped the brandy too fast, choked and made a wry face. After a moment she continued. ‘Dad couldn’t forgive himself for not getting us out sooner. You see he’d been preparing for quite some time. He had a thirty-foot launch hidden in a nearby creek and we were going to go down-river to the coast and then south to Hanoi.’
‘Why had he delayed so long?’ Hagen demanded.
She traced a delicate pattern with a finger in a pool of spilled brandy. ‘Because he’d promised to take something with him and it wasn’t ready.’
Hagen swallowed some of his brandy and said, ‘Was it all that important?’
‘If you’d call a quarter of a million dollars important,’ she said calmly.
Hagen finished his brandy and put the glass down very carefully. ‘How much did you say?’
She smiled. ‘I’m not exaggerating. A quarter of a million—in gold. There was a Buddhist monastery near the plantation. The gold was theirs. They knew that sooner or later the Communists would arrive to loot the place. They decided that they’d rather see their treasure doing good in the hands of some relief organization than swelling the war chest of Ho Chi-minh.’
‘Did you say in gold, angel?’ Hagen asked.
She nodded. ‘Gold bars. That’s what caused the delay. They melted down some statues. It was the only safe way of transporting the stuff.’
‘What happened?’ Hagen demanded. ‘What did your father do with it?’
She fiddled with her glass for a little while. ‘Oh, he had it loaded into the cabin in boxes and we set off. There were just three of us. The deck-hand was our Malayan house-boy, Tewak. We reached the coast and ran into a gunboat. There was a fight. I remember my father ramming the other boat and throwing a hand grenade. I don’t know, really. It’s difficult to recall these things clearly. It was confused—and besides, he was badly hit.’ She brooded for a moment and then looked up suddenly. ‘Do you know the Kwai Marshes, just over the border from Viet Minh into China?’
Hagen nodded. ‘I know it. It’s a pest hole. Hundreds of miles of channels and reeds, lagoons and swamp. Rotten with disease.’
She nodded. ‘That’s the place. That’s where Dad took the boat. She was leaking badly. He ran her into the Kwai Marshes. She sank in a little lagoon surrounded by reeds.’ Hagen waited for the end. She sat back suddenly and said briskly: ‘After that it was simple. My father died the next day. It took Tewak and me three days to get out of the marshes. We went down the coast to Haiphong and from there to Saigon. Luckily I had a little money in a bank there.’
‘What about the gold?’ Hagen said. ‘You told the French authorities, I suppose?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘I told the French. They weren’t interested in sending an expedition into Communist China to retrieve a mere quarter of a million dollars. It wouldn’t keep the war going for ten minutes.’
‘I see,’ Hagen said carefully. ‘So the gold is still there?’
She nodded. ‘Still there. I’ve tried to get a boat to take me back to the marshes. At first people were too scared to take the risk. Now, I’ve not got enough money to pay. That’s why we came to Macao.’
‘We?’ Hagen said.
She explained. ‘Tewak. He’s stayed with me the whole time. He has friends in Macao. We came here because it was our last hope. He’s been trying to borrow a boat for the past three weeks.’
Light suddenly dawned on Hagen. ‘It was Tewak who rang you last night?’
She nodded. ‘That’s right. He asked me to get a taxi at once and meet him where you found me. When I got there he wasn’t to be seen. After the taxi had left those two men appeared.’
Hagen said, ‘It looks as though the Reds don’t intend to let that gold slip through their fingers.’
‘Not if I can help it,’ she said, and for a moment her face was cold and hard.
‘You know the position where the boat sank?’ Hagen asked, casually.
‘Oh, yes,’ she told him. ‘I memorized it. One could search for ever in those marshes without it.’
Hagen stood up and leaned on the parapet, and stared out over the water into the far distance. His eyes didn’t see the ships in the bay or the ferry from Kowloon as it ploughed its way towards Macao. They saw a quiet lagoon surrounded by giant marsh reeds and a thirty-foot launch lying in clear water, and the boxes in the cabin that contained the discoloured gold bars. A quarter of a million dollars. His palms were sweating slightly and his mouth had gone dry. It could be the one stroke a man dreamed of. The big deal. No more waterfront hotels in stinking, godforsaken ports. No more smuggling and gun-running, being betrayed and twisted and double-crossed at every turn. If he could lay hands on that gold he could be set for life. He turned back to the table and she looked at him sadly. ‘Cheer up, angel,’ he said. ‘Things have been pretty rough but they’ll get better. Just wait until you’ve got your hands on all that loot. You’ll be able to live like a princess.’
She looked puzzled for a moment and then understanding came and she hastened to correct him. ‘The money for the sale of the gold is not for me.’ Hagen sat bolt upright in his chair. ‘I’ll only get a little for expenses. The rest goes to the relief organization in Saigon just as the monks and my father wanted.’
She was absolutely sincere in what she had just said. She really meant to give all that money to some crackpot relief organization. For a moment Hagen was tempted to tell her the facts of life, but that could wait until later. ‘How deep was that lagoon, angel?’ he said.
She looked surprised. ‘I couldn’t be sure but not very deep. Perhaps twenty or twenty-five feet. Why do you ask?’
He shrugged and lit a cigarette carefully. ‘I have a boat. I’ve done some pearling. I’ve also been to the Kwai Marshes.’
She
