Читать онлайн «A Lotus for Miss Quon»

A LOTUS FOR MISS QUON

By JAMES HADLEY CHASE

Chapter One 

1

HE had come upon the diamonds one hot Sunday afternoon in January.

It had happened in this way: he had had a solitary lunch prepared by Dong Ham, his cook and served by Haum, his house-boy, and then he had gone up to his bedroom for a siesta. In spite of the air-conditioned coolness of the room, he had been unable to sleep. He had listened with growing irritation to the high-pitched chatter of his servants below, the discordant sound of someone’s distant radio playing Vietnamese music and the nerve shattering racket of passing motor cycles.

Usually, he was able to sleep in the afternoon in spite of the noise, but this afternoon he had found sleep impossible. He had reached for a cigarette, lit it and then resigned himself to the depression of his thoughts.

He had come to loathe Sundays in Saigon. When he had first arrived, he had found the social round amusing, but now it bored him. He was bored by the same faces, the same idiotic: small-talk, the same dreary scandals, and he had gradually withdrawn from the set who ate, drank, and danced together day in and night out.

During the week, he had his work to distract him. He worked for a shipping company - not a particularly interesting job, but the pay was good: a lot better than he could have hoped to have earned back home in San Francisco. He needed money for he had extravagant tastes: he drank more than was good for him, and also he was saddled with monthly payments to his ex-wife who had divorced him a few months before he had sailed to the Far East.

Now as he lay on the bed, feeling a trickle of sweat running down his massive chest, he thought bleakly that in three days’ time, he would have to send his wife yet another cheque. He had only 8,000 piastres in the bank. When she had been paid, he would have very little left to last him to the end of the month which was quite some time ahead.

Well, it served him right, he thought. He had been reckless to have bought that picture. It had been quite an unnecessary extravagance, but all the same, he thought of it with great pleasure. He had come across it in a dealer’s shop in Duong Tu-Do, and it had immediately arrested his attention. It was an oil painting of a Vietnamese girl wearing the national dress of white silk trousers, a pale-blue sheath tunic and a conical straw hat. She was posed against a white wall over which climbed a rose-coloured bougainvillea. It was a set piece, but well painted, and the girl reminded him of Nhan. She had the same innocent expression; the same childish way of standing, even the same doll-like features. The girl in the painting could have been Nhan but for the fact he knew Nhan had never posed for an artist.

It was then that he remembered the picture was still unpacked and still had to be hung. He felt the urge to see how it looked on the wall in the downstairs room. Eager for an excuse to do something other than lying on his bed, he got up and walked barefooted down the stairs into the living-room.