The Speaker of Mandarin Read Online Free PDF

darling? And she doesn't feel it's very wise to have spirits about, such an awful temptation, you know.'
    There seemed no answer to make to this. He accepted
    35
    ma?.
    a cup of tea. The music burst forth once more in a kind of Chinese version of 'Washington Post'.
    'What shall we do?' cried Lois Knox. She brought her hands together appealingly. The red nails were as long as a Manchu's. 'We shall be found stark raving mad in the morning.'
    'How about cutting the wires?' said Wexford.
    The deep voice from the other berth said, 'Not a good idea. I heard of someone who did that in China and they had to pay to have the whole train rewired. It cost them thousands of ynan.'
    'I'll see what I can do,' said Wexford. He drank up his tea and went off down the corridor to find an attendant.
    The only one he came upon, a very young boy, had nodded off to sleep, his head against the hard wall, in a little cubby-hole next to the bathroom. Wexford went on over the intersection into the next carriage, the sweat gathering on his body now and breaking out on his forehead and upper lip. Away from the fans the heat was as great as ever. There was nothing but dense blackness to be seen outside now and, dimly through the upper part of the windows, a few faint stars. In a compartment with Mr Yu and another young Chinese sat Mr Sung, the three of them poring over a map of the Li River spread out on the table.
    'Restaurant will open eight o'clock,' said Mr Sung as soon as he saw him. All the guides seemed to think that visitors from the west needed to eat and drink all day long in order to maintain equilibrium, and that any requests they received from tourists must necessarily be for food or tea or beer. 'I come fetch you when restaurant open.'
    'I want a pair of pliers,' said Wexford.
    Mr Sung, Mr Yu and the other man looked at him in blank inquiry. Wexford recalled how, in Peking, he had asked an interpreter where he could buy a packet of aspirin and had been directed to an ice-cream shop.
    'Players,' said Mr Sung at last.
    36 -_, .. A_
    'You want cigarettes?' said Mr Yu. 'You get plenty cigarettes when restaurant open.'
    'I don't want cigarettes, I want pliers.' Wexford made pinching movements with his fingers, he mimed pulling a nail out of the wall. Mr Sung stared amiably at him. Mr Yu stared and then laughed. The other man handed him a large shabby book which turned out to be an EnglishChinese dictionary. Redford indicated 'pliers' and its ideograph with his fingertip. Everyone smiled and nodded, Mr Sung went off down the corridor and came back with a girl train attendant who handed Wexford a pair of eyebrow tweezers.
    ~Vexford gave up. It was a quarter to eight and he began to look forward to a beer. In the intersection he met the little elderly woman who was travelling in what he had mentally dubbed - though it certainly was not - a menage a trots. She was carrying a packet of teabags.
    'Oh, good evening,' she said. 'This is quite an adventure, isn't it?' Wexford wasn't sure if she spoke with seriousness or irony, still less so when she went on to say, her head a little on one side, 'We English must stick together, is what I always say.'
    He knew at once then, he intuited, he hardly knew how, that she was getting at him. It was neither witty nor particularly clever, though she intended it to be both, and she was referring to his brief association with Lois Knox which she had perhaps observed from the corridor. Her express sion was dry, her mouth quirked a little. She was as small and.thin as a Chinese and the dark blue trouser suit she wore unsexed her. What was she to the man Fanning had told him was a retired barrister? Sister? Sister-in-law? Wife's confidante or best &iend's widow? As she went on her way into the next compartment he observed that her left hand was ringless.
    In the cubby-hole next to the bathroom the boy was still asleep with his head against the wall. Wexford saw what he hadn't noticed before, a cloth toolbag lying beside