Page 90 - Brokenclaw - John Gardner

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Bond thought this was an unlikely story, but he kept up the fiction. ‘Myra,

who are they?’
‘I . . .’ she began, then faltered and started again, ‘I don’t really know.
People I am indebted to.’
‘That’s as far as I got with her,’ Chi-Chi muttered.
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‘See if you can rustle up some coffee or something.’ Bond moved to sit near
Myra, but the girl half rose. ‘How stupid of me, I have food waiting for you.
I’m sorry to be so damned wet, but – well, I’ve so looked forward to seeing
Jenny, and this is a blow. I thought she was dead.’

‘Sit down,’ Bond spoke softly, gently, glancing up at Chi-Chi. His eyes tried
to indicate that they should play the good cop, bad cop routine. ‘Just coffee.’
Chi-Chi nodded and went towards the kitchen.
‘These people you say you’re beholden to – who are they, exactly?’
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‘Are you police?’ A very small voice.
‘No. If you tell us the truth, Myra, nothing bad will happen to you.’
‘Then . . .’
‘I should warn you, Myra,’ Chi-Chi stood in the passageway to the kitchen,

‘if you do not tell us the truth, we shall know. Then you will wish you had
never been born.’
Bond nodded to Myra, as though bearing out the Chinese girl’s words, while
at the same time showing his own compassion.

There was a long, drifting hesitation, then Myra started again. ‘I’d better
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begin at the beginning, for I was born in China, just outside Peking, as they
called it then, in 1948.’
So, Bond thought, she was older than he had suspected. Over forty in fact.

‘My parents had spent most of their lives in China. They were American
citizens, Baptist missionaries, and you will know that things were chaotic in
that strange country during the late 1940s . . .’
‘And after,’ Bond commented.

Myra gave a little nod. ‘When I was born, in the November of ’48, there
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was bitter fighting around Peking. But the memory of my childhood in Peking
itself was one of happiness. We lived in a small but pleasant house on the
outskirts of the city. My parents taught me and brought me up as a Christian,

which I thought odd, because the Communist Revolution was in full flood and I
knew that we were different by the time I was seven or eight. There seemed to
be no other Americans that we could mix with. In fact, we saw very few white

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