VII. THE APPARITION OF TREASON
Dugan momentarily had the nightmarish feeling that the American captain had recognized him through the disguise of the Chinese coolie clothes, the deeper disguise of his natural complexion, and the final covering of Asiatic manners which he had assumed. The flyer was probably one of the several Americans whom the Chinese Communists had reported as dead, but whom they kept for possible use as hostages at a later date. Before Dugan could think of some way of speaking to the captain, the man turned and went back into the building.
As soon as he had gone, Dugan began to wonder if the whole thing were an illusion. This was the last place for an American to be. Americans were Fascists and oppressors, so far as these local people were concerned. The only thing to do was to ask Wu, his captor.
"I beg to ask you," he started, using the respectful form of the second-person singular, nin with the sound ah added to it to give formal courtesy to the inquiry, "was that not an American captain whom you saluted?"
Wu's face clouded over with ostentatious secrecy. But even under the exaggerated pretense of mysteriousness, he looked truly frightened.
"Not your business, Comrade An. Nor mine. Come along."
"But he looked so strange…" Dugan whined his protest, trying to wheedle information in a loutish way; but the statement was true.
Dugan, himself a human chameleon, had developed a talent for sensing the assumed roles of other people. There was something inhuman, something far worse than un-American in that blank white face of the captain who had waved to them and had gone back into the building. The man had a broad, low, heavy-browed forehead. His full lips had smiled at them with a hint of controlled contempt. There was something measured in the way that he had moved. His pace was not American. Nor, said Dugan to himself, was it Russian. It was the stance and movement of a man under drugs, of a sick man who has just learned to walk again. It was an adult walk — measured, arrogant, firm — but it was blank. Walking was as individual a process as handwriting, once you got to recognize the different kinds of walking that there were. No two human beings ever walked in quite the same way. The walk of a Japanese woman, for example, was as different from the stride of an American girl as water-brushed ideographs were from finishing-school penmanship. But that alleged captain now… he did not walk the walk of an American, or of a Russian. Certainly not of a German. It was not the walk of a cripple, or of an eccentrically nervous individual.
As he followed Wu into the building, Dugan shivered at the thought of the "American." That was a very bad kind of human being to have around: it was a person without proper origin; and perhaps it would have to be destroyed as an obstacle. To the Chinese peasant-soldiers lounging around the police building, there was nothing unusual about the self-styled captain, but to Dugan that masked walk, that blind firm gait, was as bold as a flag of treason.
But whoever the "American" might be, Dugan felt confident that he could cope with him. A spy who knew no better than to conceal his old identity, without assuming a new one all the way down to his bones, was not too much of a threat.