Читать книгу Bamboo Terror - William Ross - Страница 6

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Michael Hazzard, Expatriate

THIS WAS THE last time that Michael Hazzard would ever walk down any street after dark with his mind a million miles away. Things only had to happen to him once, and he never made the same mistake twice.

He had gone about a hundred yards down the street, after leaving his office, when suddenly he was grabbed from behind and slammed into the mouth of a small alley. Before he had a chance to come back out of his day dreaming, his arms were pinned behind him, and a rough scar-faced Oriental was using his belly and rib cage for a punching bag. Hazzard let fly with his right leg, and the toe of his shoe caught 'Scarface' right where it hurt the most. Then while Scarface was doubling up like a wet noodle, Hazzard spun the one on his back around, grabbed his wrist, pushed, pulled, and snapped. The man let out a howl, and when he dropped to his knees, Hazzard gave him a face full of size 11 1/2C.

There was a grunt behind him, and Hazzard turned just in time to see Scarface come lunging off the ground. Scarface must have either been stupid, or a rank amateur at this kind of rough and tumble business. One of the basic rules of fighting for keeps like this is: never stop to think after you grab your opponent. You have to react with an instantaneous conditioned reflex in everything you do—or you are dead. Scarface's conditioned reflexes were probably limited to picking up beer glasses, because he was now pulling one of the biggest boners of his life.

He threw himself forward, grabbed the front of Hazzard's shirt with both hands, and stopped. It took Hazzard so much by surprise that he did not react too fast himself. But there he was, holding onto Hazzard's shirt front, and staring up with his mouth open in the classic expression of stupidity. Hazzard did not know what the hood was trying to prove, but he decided to give the quizzical look in the man's eyes a real fast answer, one of the oldest tricks in the book. He brought his arms up fast inside of Scarface's bent elbows, then down again behind the neck, and pulled—all in one fast, smooth motion. At the same time Hazzard bent his neck forward. Splock! . . . And he had squashed Scarface's nose all over the top of his head. Hazzard had used this method so many times that he had become an expert with it. It is guaranteed to take all the fight out of anybody, but if you try it—you have to be very careful. It is like the old story about not getting the feathers in your mouth. You have to be fast!

Hazzard had just stepped back to take a good look at these two would-be roughhouse boys when somebody slipped silently up behind him with a blackjack. All the tin cans and boxes in the alley seemed to start rushing up at Hazzard's face. Then he suddenly realized that they were not coming up. He was going down. He had not counted on there being a third one hidden in the alley, and cursed himself for letting all the skills he had learned over the years go stale.

Just before Hazzard passed out he heard someone say, "Get up you useless sons of the devil. Our work here is finished."

The sound of a noodle vendor's flute finally filtered into Hazzard's foggy brain and he slowly opened his eyes. For a moment he could not figure out where he was, or what he was doing there. Then he saw the tin cans and rubbish and it all came back like a bad dream. He was soaked with sweat and stiff as a board. He grunted and groaned himself to a sitting position. It felt like a herd of elephants had been walking on his chest and stomach, and when he finally made it to his feet, he bent over and threw up all over the alley.

Nobody saw him as he staggered out into the street. Even if someone had seen him, it would not have bothered them very much. Japan is a weird country. Drunks were always staggering around and lying in the gutters and even the police never bother about them very much.

Hazzard was beat, and he knew it. There was a lump behind his ear that throbbed like a jack hammer, and he found that he could not breathe if he straightened up. He knew he had to find a place to lie down, and he had to find it quick. Everything was going round and round, and he could not focus his eyes on anything for more than a few seconds.

The nearest place was his office, and he fiddle-footed and stumbled along until he got back to the building. He thought he would never make the stairs. Every few steps he had to stop, kneel down, and grab the wall.

Inside the office he dragged a chair up to the little washbasin, sat down and soaked his head under the running faucet. This only seemed to make the throbbing worse, and he thought he might drown in the basin if he passed out.

Gathering up a wet towel, he flopped his six-foot-two frame down on his five-foot-two Japanese-size couch, and passed out as the room started to go around in circles.

Hazzard was in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, strapped to a big slab of ice, with the wind howling over his naked body. A short distance away a group of beautiful nude Eskimo girls were dancing around a great big warm bonfire. They kept looking over at him, smiling and winking. One big tall lanky one was keeping time by beating two little sticks together. Hazzard had to get loose and get that tall one. He gave one big pull at the ropes, and bam!—he was lying on the floor of his office.

He could hear the typewriter out in the small reception room; that accounted for the two little sticks. Then he looked up and saw the fan. Someone had placed it at his feet, and when it blew over his sweat-heavy clothes it was just like an arctic blast. Bright sunlight was streaming through the window, and the sight of it started his head throbbing again. He switched off the fan, rolled back on the couch with a groan, and put the towel over his face.

The typing stopped, and then the towel popped up. Hazzard opened one eye, and gasped. Nothing could hurt bad enough to make him close that eye again, and so he opened both of them.

Michiko was bent over him peering down. It is hot in Tokyo in August, and Hazzard had just discovered that Michiko did not wear a brassiere when it was hot in August. The low cut blouse was billowing down, the sunlight was streaming in, and there were two of the cutest little breasts that Hazzard had ever seen.

She had been in the office working for Hazzard ever since he had started out in his unsuccessful business six months before, and he never had thought that she could be built like this. Most Japanese girls aren't. Maybe it had been the baggy skirts and blouses she had always worn before, he was thinking. Hazzard shook his head slowly and decided that it was about time he took a new look at his "Girl Friday." Michiko had been in the office for six months, and he now realized that he had never really noticed her. 'I must be slipping,' he thought.

"Mike-san, daijobu desu ka?" she asked.

He snapped out of his dream and looked up at her face. She had lovely dark almond-shaped eyes. The kind women are always faking with eyebrow pencils, only Michiko's were real. Hazzard found himself wondering what other hidden mysteries of the Orient she came equipped with.

"Mike-san, you all right?" she asked again.

"Yeah, I'm all right," he said and tried to lift himself up to a sitting position. "I've just got the world's biggest headache, that's all," and then the bells went off in his head again, and he flopped back on the couch.

Michiko straightened up, put her hands on her hips, and with that 'mother-scolding-the-naughty-boy look' in her eyes she said, "Hangover, we? You should be more careful. Not drink so much."

"I wish it was a hangover," said Hazzard, and reached back to caress the grapefruit-sized knot behind his ear. Then he looked up at Michiko again. "What are you doing here so early in the morning, my little flower of the Orient?" he said as he managed to sit up.

This caused a big widening of those lovely dark eyes and a burst of Japanese girly giggles. "Early morning? It is almost time for lunch," she quipped. "Mike-san, what did you drink last night?"

She cocked her head and looked at him sideways through half-closed lids. This made the skin on Hazzard's back start to goose-step down his spine. He had an almost uncontrollable urge to grab her and take a nip out of one of those exquisitely shaped ears. Hazzard had a passion for nibbling at female ears. He had found out that it set off a remarkable chain reaction in most women. He found himself wondering now if Michiko knew about this. He shook his head. This train of thought was not going to get him anywhere but into trouble and he forced himself to look at the floor. It needed sweeping, and so did the inside of his head.

"Michiko, do you have any aspirin?" he asked.

"Yes," she answered, "how many do you want?"

"A whole bottle. The large economy size."

Michiko sighed and went out to her desk in the small reception office. Hazzard watched her go and shook his head again. As much as he knew about the Orient, he would never be able to figure out the women. He had not paid Michiko for the last two months, and in spite of his continuous bad humor, and ordering her around like a servant, she seemed to have no complaints and kept coming to the office every morning. She treated him like a little child most of the time, making him carry an umbrella at the slightest hint of rain, forcing cold tablets on him if he so much as sneezed, lecturing him to eat more vegetables, change his shirts at the least sign of dirt, and cut down on his beer and whiskey. Just like a mother, or even a wife. This made Hazzard straighten up, all these things had been happening for the last six months, and the warning bells were just now going off—he must be slipping. The last thing he wanted right now was to be tied down by marriage. He had more things to worry about, and getting emotionally mixed up with Michiko would only complicate things.

Ever since the Korean War, Hazzard's life had been one big jumble of mixed up events. He had been captured by the Chinese, released at the end of the war, almost given a general court-martial, spent a year in the hospital with TB, disability retired from the army, and then decided to return to Japan and study the language.

He had run into an old friend, Lieutenant Bill Madden, at Tenth Corps Headquarters in Korea and had accepted an invitation to visit Madden at his outfit's Command Post, the 555 Artillery Battalion, commonly referred to as the Triple Nickels. A week later he had telephoned Madden and driven a jeep up to the battalion CP to drink over old times. That night the Chinese broke through the Korean division up north and before they had a chance to realize what was going on the Reds were swarming all over the area.

The rest of the war was spent in various prison camps in North Korea. The communists never did find out that Hazzard was an intelligence officer, and had assumed that he was just another artillery captain. The war came to an end and Hazzard was sent back through Panmunjom where the prisoner-of-war exchange was taking place. From here he was sent to St. Luke's Army Hospital in Tokyo.

Three days later he received two of the biggest shocks of his life, one after the other. The first one came when the doctor had informed him that he had tuberculosis. The second shock came in the afternoon when he had a visit from a major in the Adjutant General's office. As an intelligence officer in possession of certain knowledge vital to the security of the United States, he had placed himself in a position where he had fallen into the hands of the enemy. This was something that he had been continuously warned about since arriving in the Far East. The government was now preparing charges against him, which, if investigation showed that he had collaborated with the enemy in any form whatsoever, would lead to a general court-martial.

Everything had finally come out all right, but not until after he had sweat out six months at Fitzsimons Army Hospital in Denver. The government had dropped all charges, and the ward doctor had told him that all traces of tuberculosis had cleared up completely under medication. There would be no operation necessary. Another six months of hospitalization ended with Hazzard being retired from the service with a monthly pension.

He took an apartment in Denver, bought a second-hand car and spent a hell-bending three months of tom-catting through the Rocky Mountains. The day finally came when all of the money he had saved during his year in the hospital was only a memory. It was time to think about doing something serious.

Learning that he had four years of schooling coming to him under the GI Bill of Rights, he decided to return to Japan and study both Japanese and karate, something which both time and money had prevented him from doing before.

Four years went by, four years of intense Japanese language study and full-time karate lessons. He had thrown himself into each of these with a passion, and now he was considered fluent in the language, and a deadly weapon in karate.

It was then that he had conceived the idea of opening up a private detective agency in Tokyo. He would be the only foreigner in the business, and his knowledge of both the language and karate would insure him of a steady clientele. It had been a pregnant idea, but the result was stillborn.

Hazzard still longed for the excitement and thrill of the dangers and brain-taxing challenge that his life as an intelligence officer had offered, but a foreign private detective in Japan was something that astounded the government officials. The main reason seemed to be that it had never been done before, and to the Oriental mind this was enough to keep Hazzard from getting a license.

It had taken six months, tons of paper work, miles of red tape, and countless interviews with polite but obstinate officials before he was allowed to go into business. He had so many restrictions on what he could and could not do that it hardly seemed worthwhile, but after going through all the red tape and constant frustrations, he had decided to stick it out. With his license had come a warning, very polite, but a warning—one mistake and he was out of business.

He thought over the last few months that he had been in business, the complete absence of clients, and of the steadily mounting pile of bills that lay unpaid on his desk. It was beginning to look like he would never have a chance to make a mistake before Private Eye Hazzard folded up.

His apartment, the office, and food took most of his pension, leaving him only a few thousand yen every month to buy an occasional beer with. Everything else was on a 'catch-me-if-you-can' payment basis. When the mail came it was always from people asking for payments on something or other. When the phone rang it was the same people; they were sorry to bother him, but when was he going to pay. He hated to owe money to anyone, but he was now being slowly squeezed by the vise of bankruptcy and he could think of no possible way to pay off his creditors.

If something did not come up within the next few months, he knew that he would have to leave the country and return to the United States. He would never be able to renew his visa in Japan with a bankruptcy behind him. He could only wait, hope, and worry. In this business you did not go out and grab customers in off the street, you could only advertise and sit waiting for the phone to ring or the door to open. If there was a list of first-class jerks in the world somewhere, Hazzard figured that his name was probably at the top.

The sound of raised voices cut into his thoughts from outside the door. Someone was talking in rapid, angry Japanese. It was a man's voice in high-pitched falsetto, and Michiko was 'sumimasen-ing' him to death. The aspirins were late, the racket was pressing on his already splitting skull, and Hazzard did not like the tone of the man's voice. He was just about to go out and tell the man to take a flying leap at the moon when he heard the outer door slam and Michiko appeared, as unruffled as ever, with the box of aspirin in her hand.

"Here, aspirin," she said and handed the box to Hazzard as she continued on to the sink for a glass of water.

"Who was that you were talking to?" he asked.

"Oh, I do not know. Just some man asking for money."

"Another bill collector," Hazzard said out loud. He looked up at her almond eyes and she smiled gayly back. "Michiko, why do you keep working for such a stupid boss?"

This was a question she dared not answer, and all she could manage was a widening of her eyes and a small, "Eh?"

Hazzard opened the box of aspirin. There were only three little white pills left. He took the glass of water from Michiko and swallowed all of them.

"You know, Michiko," he said in a reflective mood. "Tokyo needs an American private detective like I need another hole in the head. In business for six months and the only client we've had was that little old German lady who wanted me to find her lost poodle." He got up and walked to the window. The knot on the back of his head started to ache again, and he could see down the street to where he had met 'Scarface and company' the night before. Then half to himself he muttered, "And then last night I get worked over in the alley. Why?"

Michiko's puzzled voice came from behind him, "Worked over?"

Hazzard was forever explaining the meaning of odd phrases in English to Michiko and other people he ran into in his wanderings around Tokyo, but this time he decided it better to evade the question.

"Oh, never mind, you wouldn't understand." He saw the pouting look of disappointment on Michiko's face, and quickly added, "Well, Lotus Blossom, I think I still have enough loose change to take us both to lunch. It will probably be the last meal either of us will ever eat, so we might as well make the most of it."

The expression on Michiko's face changed to smiles and girlish glee. Hazzard reached out and brushed back a curl that had fallen over Michiko's forehead. She seemed to like this, and leaned forward. Then the telephone rang. Hazzard cursed to himself. He did not know whether Alexander Graham Bell had intended it that way or not, but his gadget seemed to have an uncanny way of screwing things up in a royal fashion.

"It's for you," Michiko said as she handed him the phone.

Putting his hand over the mouthpiece, Hazzard whispered, "Who is it?"

This brought the famous Oriental answer, a wide-eyed smiling shrug.

"Hello," said Hazzard.

"Is this Mr. Hazzard?" said a man's voice.

"Yes."

The voice was right out of the movies. If the man now said that his name was Sidney Greenstreet, Hazzard would believe him.

"My name is Brown, John Brown," said the voice, and Hazzard thought that the man could have picked a more original name to go with the voice. "Mr. Hazzard," the voice continued, "I have a small matter of urgent business that I would like to discuss with you at your earliest convenience, preferably today."

"That would be fine, Mr. Brown. Just one moment please," and Hazzard held the mouthpiece and winked at Michiko. The pause was supposed to impress Brown that Hazzard was a busy man and had to consult his schedule. "If you could come over about . . ."

"I shall be at your office this afternoon at exactly one thirty," interrupted Brown.

Hazzard stared at the phone and mumbled, "Why, yes, that would be fine. . . ."

"Thank you very much Mr. Hazzard. Good-by," and John Brown hung up.

Hazzard put the phone down. It could be a gag, he thought. The voice, and then the name. No, it was too ridiculous not to be true. He looked at Michiko and said, "Let's go eat," and they went out for a bowl of noodles. Things might be looking up. John Brown might be just what was needed to pay the rent.

John Brown, a heavy set, cultured, Sidney Green-street type of man, sat back comfortably in his leather chair behind the large mahogany desk in his study. He had just leaned forward and carefully laid the telephone receiver in its cradle. Leaning back again in his chair, he made a tent with his fingers, and looked intently at the three men sitting opposite him across the highly polished desk.

The two thugs had not fared too well the night before. One of them had his arm and shoulder heavily bandaged and strapped in a tight sling. The one with the long scar on his face could barely see over the large bandage that covered his crushed nose.

Mr. Brown let his gaze wander over the two burly thugs. Then he glanced at the third man and spoke in a calm even voice, "Well, Chang, he is still alive."

"I told you we did not kill him," replied Chang. "He might have a large bump on his head, but other than that, he does not have a scratch."

Brown nodded his head toward the two thugs. "Well, these two idiots do not look very healthy today. Looking at them, I find it hard to believe that Mr. Hazzard does not have a scratch," he said with a touch of sarcasm.

"Our Mr. Hazzard," replied Chang, "happens to have been trained in karate, and I wish you had told us that little fact last night. Then we wouldn't have come out so badly. Or perhaps you did not know."

Mr. Brown smiled. "Oh, I knew. There is very little I do not know about him. But telling you would have spoiled the fun. These two have been paid well enough for a few bruises, and you admit you are satisfied with the results." Glancing at his watch, his voice went on, "I am very anxious to meet this Mr. Hazzard in person. He seems to be quite a man."

Chang nodded his agreement with what Brown had said. "Yes, I am satisfied, but we have no time to waste."

"I am to meet him at one thirty," said Brown. "Leave the rest to me."

Chang grunted a reply and rose quickly from his chair. The two thugs followed meekly as he walked out of the door.

Brown waited until he heard them leave the house, then he opened the top drawer of his desk with a small silver key that hung from his watch chain and carefully withdrew a small, unpainted wooden box. Reaching into the drawer again he took out several long plain envelopes and placed these and the wooden box in his leather brief case. From a side drawer he picked up a small automatic pistol, checked it to make sure it was loaded, and slipped it into his pocket.

A glance at his watch told him that it was now time to leave for the office of Michael Hazzard, private investigator.

John Brown smiled to himself as he settled his bulky form in the soft leather rear seat of his chauffeured Mercedes-Benz. He would soon meet the man about whom he had been reading countless reports during the past few months. Hazzard's record was more than impressing.

Michael Hazzard:	Age, 3 8
	Height, 6' 2"
	Weight, 195 lbs.

Twelve years experience with various United States intelligence agencies:

1942-1945	Office of Strategic Services. Attended OSS intelligence school. Parachute training completed at Fort Bragg. Parachuted into occupied France to organize resistance fighters.
1946-1950	Coordinated activities of underground agents in Soviet satellite countries.
1950-1954	Chief of Special Intelligence Group operating in China and Korea.
1955-1956	Contracted tuberculosis, spent one year in Fitzsimons Army Hospital, Denver, Colorado. Placed on retired status upon dismissal from hospital.
1957-1960	Attended the Japan Karate Association School, Tokyo.
1961-	Took extended trip around world. Returned to Japan. Opened private investigation agency six months previously. Business going very poorly, and slowly into debt.

This was the gist of the many reports that John Brown had read. The finer details of the many escapades that Hazzard had been involved in, the many times he had barely escaped with his life, his efficiency with various weapons—all this and much more had been discreetly destroyed by Brown. Yes, it was going to be very interesting to meet the fabulous Michael Hazzard upon whom he had spent so much time and money. It was to be hoped that Mr. Hazzard was worth the trouble.