Spaced Out by Michel Parry

Author:Michel Parry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

Smoke of the Snake

CARL JACOBI

* * *

Herrick arrived in Samarinda at night when it was late enough for him to slip unnoticed by the strict and watchful Dutch immigration authorities and sufficiently dark to remove all chances of detection by the native police.

He groped his way cautiously across the worm-eaten wharves, moved slowly with a familiar step through the evil-smelling blackness of the water front, and headed toward a line of distant street lights that glimmered like yellow eyes in the fog.

Borneo again—no different than it had been three years before. Kuching, Bandjermasin, Samarinda—they were all the same. Brooding, mysterious, rat-infested coastal towns, fever holes cut from the dark clutches of the jungle, populated by a few white men and the dregs of the Eastern circle.

Herrick drew up at the outskirts of the illuminated area, stepped into the doorway shadow of a steel-walled copra warehouse, lit a cigarette, and swore in disgust.

He was ship-tired, hungry, and thirsty. More than that, his nerves at the present moment were near the breaking point. Six months’ intermittent enjoyment with the powers of the poppy were not to be disregarded, and he hadn’t had a single pipe of opium since the day he left Makassar.

His need was desperate.

He waited until the street before him was deserted, then shuffled slowly forward, heading not toward the European quarter—too dangerous there—but deep into the winding, crooked alleys of the native sector.

As he walked he peered carefully at each darker building shadow, hung his right hand, unswinging, close to the pocket of his duck coat. The slight bulge there marked the presence of an easily accessible automatic, loaded with a full clip and ready for instant action. A man—even a man on the right side of the law—needed a gun in this sinister spiderweb, and Herrick with a ‘wanted’ sign hung out for him by both the British and Dutch governments and a price on his head in every port south of Sandakan, was not unaware of his perilous position.

A line of sordid shops, all identically the same, with drooling, half-darkened windows, slipped by him into the gloom. Herrick smiled grimly.

Old stamping grounds, these. He remembered it all. But he had sunk pretty low since he had walked by here in a fresh suit of whites and Pollyanna ideas about the East. He had gone down into the very gutter and he had changed a lot, mentally as well as physically. He felt the heavy stubble on his face, ran his fingers across the ragged scar that marred his left cheek, and looked down at his torn and filthy clothes. No, there was no danger of his being recognized. Even Liang Po wouldn’t know him, and Liang Po’s was his destination.

He found the place presently, sunk in that forbidding bystreet with its mongrel half-English, half-Chinese sign.

It was the Liang Po’s of old. No change. The same tobacco-filled air, the same rough tables, the same confusion of black, brown, and bleary white faces. A reed flute wailed above the

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