Читать книгу Shanghai - Christopher New - Страница 33

TWO WEEKS LATER, Denton was transferred to a different section of the port, along the French Bund. He was on night duty, and he shared the patrol of the whole sections with Johnson. Johnson seemed oblivious of the change Su-mei's alchemy had worked on Denton, and even of the passing of time; he still treated him like and inexperienced griffin and saw himself as a benevolent paternal advisor, impervious to Denton's distant off-handedness. 'If there's any help you want with those forms, just sing out,' he would offer in his friendly monotonously deadening voice. Or, 'Have you done the manifest for the Camboge? I'll check the duty for you if you like.'

Denton put up with it, only occasionally frowning with irritation and answering curtly when Johnson's mild persistence spoiled his concentration.

One night in July, when the moist heat hung like a still, vaporous curtain and a typhoon warning signal had gone up in the harbour, Johnson's launch broke down. He joined Denton on Lolly Kwai's boat for the journey back to the Customs House. 'Looking forward to your first typhoon?' he asked avuncularly 'We had a really bad one a couple of years ago. There were ships blown right onto the Bund. Not against the Bund,' he went on with his maddening talent for needless exposition. 'Actually on it, on the road itself.' He waited smiling, to see the effect of his revelation on Denton's face.

'Yes, I heard about it,' Denton said carelessly. 'By the way, what happened to those two smugglers we caught last summer?' Maliciously, he emphasised the word 'we' - Johnson had taken all the prize money.

'Didn't I tell you?' Johnson's equanimity was undisturbed. 'They were strangled. I had to go to the Chinese court in Chapei to give evidence. Rather an unpleasant way to die. They do it slowly.' His flat, even sympathy made strangling sound like a mild digestive discomfort. 'I had a wonderful hike round Hankow on the prize money. I suppose you got a bit too, for that cotton on the Alexander the First?'

'Yes. So did Lolly Kwai, of course.' Denton glanced back at the wheelhouse.

'Ah yes. You'll find he's jolly useful,' Johnson said encouragingly, as though Denton had only arrived a day or two before. 'I expect your fiancée will be coming out soon?' Denton hesitated. Johnson must have been the only officer in the mess who didn't know it was all over - who didn't even know about Su-mei. He felt a pitying thought, like the flutter of a bird's wing, stir his mind. Johnson was so isolated that he didn't even know that. He was so boring because nobody talked to him, and nobody talked to him because he was so boring. Behind his dull, perpetually good-natured smile, he lived a solitary life of crowded ostracism. 'No,' Denton said, his voice relenting slightly. 'As a matter of fact it's all over. We've broken it off.'

'Oh, all over, is it?' Johnson nodded, as though the news was unsurprising and unremarkable, like a change of plans for the summer holidays. 'Well, there are plenty of things to do out here of course.' He began to hum a tune in his nasal, toneless voice.

Denton felt his brief, vague ripple of pity had been wasted. He looked away at the lights of the French Settlement, his mind passing from Johnson's indifferent 'plenty of things to do' to the thought of the green-shuttered house of pleasure in rue Molière, which Jacob Ephraim still praised so highly, and then to Pock-mark Chen and Su-mei. She'd been right, she'd had no more trouble with him. Apparently the Green Triangle weren't strong enough to challenge the Red Triangle after all. And his own status had protected her from Pock-mark Chen. She continued to pay the Red Triangle, but she wouldn't tell him how much. When he'd remonstrated with her occasionally in the early days for paying at all, she'd stared at him with a child-like amazement, as though he'd suggested she should walk out into the street without her clothes on. 'They're just extortioners,' he'd said. 'No,' she protested. 'They look after people.' To her it was like paying tax to an unofficial government, one that could protect her in fact from the real one - or so she believed. Yes, that amazement was child-like. Although she could be shrewd and wise about some things, he thought of her, and it flattered him to do so, as a child. She was still only seventeen, Chinese style - he'd bought her a gold hairpin on her birthday - but her parents had sold her in a famine as soon as she'd begun to menstruate and she must have been used by many men since then. Yet she still seemed unspoilt to him, unspoilt and even innocent. Those early times when she'd seemed merely mercenary had soon passed. Now she never asked him for money. He gave her some every week and she took it, in that curious face-saving way that forbade her to thank him; but she never asked for it. Sometimes she bought him little presents with the money he gave her, or that she earned as a sing-song girl, like the seal on which she'd had his name engraved in Chinese characters, and the little ornaments she'd placed about his room. Of course she only sang in restaurants now, she had no other 'protector' as she called him. And she was clever, too - the way she picked up English! Quicker than he'd learnt Chinese in the beginning - though he hadn't had a 'sleeping dictionary' then, of course.

As he idly watched the dim lights of the quays slip past, haloed with misty rings, he noticed something moving near the shore. His glance slid over the vague shape, moved on to a ship, then slid back again. The shape was a string of sampans moving quietly along beside the wharves, with only one weak yellow lamp flickering in the leading boat.

He called softly to Johnson, who was on the starboard side of the bow, cooling his bland, smug face against the breeze the launch itself was making. The air smelt of fish and oil and the heavy sulphurous smell of the Chinese factories in Pootung on the other shore.

'Yes, what is it, old chap?' Johnson asked brightly.

Denton pointed. 'Those sampans look a bit suspicious. Let's go in and look at them.'

Johnson gave the order to Lolly Kwai at once, while Denton was still turning to the wheelhouse. Denton suppressed the twinge of irritation he felt. He watched the sampans moving unconcernedly along in the dark. Either they hadn't noticed the launch, which was unlikely, or else they had nothing to hide. But Johnson was smiling with the faint, complacent air of alertness that was the nearest he came to excitement - he seemed to think there was something in it. 'A little prize money would come in handy,' he murmured, narrowing his eyes. 'I haven't had any since Easter.'

They drew closer. Denton could see now that there were four sampans altogether, with two men in the leading one. One sat in the bow gazing incuriously at the approaching Customs launch; the other was barely rowing at the stern, just stirring the water to guide the little convoy closer to the wharves as it floated down on the current. The sampans were heavily loaded, but the two men's obvious unconcern convinced Denton they must after all be perfectly innocent.

Lolly Kwai hailed them. 'What are you carrying in those sampans?'

'Silk bales.' The one rowing spat into the water.

'Where to?'

The man nodded at a large Fukienese junk moored at a pontoon a couple of hundred yards downstream.

Johnson interrupted Lolly's next question in his own flat, awkward Chinese. 'Where is the silk going?'

'Foochow.'

'Have you paid likin?'

The two men stared at him blankly.

'Likin!' Lolly shouted bullyingly. 'Have you paid likin?'

The bigger one looked at the other questioningly. They both shrugged.

'I'll have a look,' Denton said. But with a 'No, you might fall in and you can't swim,' Johnson had already dropped neatly down onto the sampan, which was almost awash with the weight of its cargo. 'You keep an eye on these chaps, see they don't make a bolt for it.' His smile had become the slightly superior smirk of the schoolmaster who was alive to the pranks of the children and was showing a colleague how to deal with them. But there was an acquisitive sharpness in his eye as well, and Denton guessed he was after the main share of any prize money there might be going. Lolly Kwai must have thought so too; he was muttering something disparagingly under his breath. They leant over the rail, watching Johnson struggling with the corner of an old, frayed sail that had been lashed across the cargo. He turned and gestured to the two men, who were watching him with sullen indifference, to untie the knots. The bigger one moved unwillingly forward and reached for something on the deck. Johnson bent over the rope again. Suddenly the Chinese straightened up and hit him with some sort of club. Denton heard the heavy, smacking thud on the back of Johnson's skull and the soft, almost drowsy, gasp that he immediately gave. His body sagged at once as if it had turned to jelly, and slithered down over the side of the boat into the river. At the same time both men dived over the other side and swam away into the shadow of the nearby wharf.

There were perhaps two seconds of startled silence while they stared at the gently widening ripples where Johnson had slid beneath the water, then Lolly suddenly shouted and two sailors jumped in. They dived, surfaced, shouted, dived and surfaced, again and again. Denton gripped the rail, his arms quivering, staring numbly at the black water where the sailors' heads kept bobbing up, then vanishing. He felt a tingling on his scalp at the back of his head, just where the blow had struck Johnson.

All around him there were shouts, questions, answers. Someone brought a lamp and held it over the water. The light glistened peacefully on the silky surface while the shouts grew less excited and the two sailors in the river spent a little longer breathing gulps of air before each dive. Gradually they all became silent, and the two sailors stopped diving altogether, clinging to the side of the sampans. Lolly Kwai looked at Denton inquiringly, his usually genial face lugubrious.

'Perhaps he swam to the shore?' Denton suggested, unbelieving himself.

Lolly shrugged, then shook his head. There had been something conclusive about the way Johnson had slid down below the surface, as though his body had been weighted with lead. 'It is a long time already,' he muttered.

Denton drew his watch out and examined its large dial under the lamp. Twenty past three. They'd been searching for nearly an hour already. He imagined Johnson floating near the bottom with the same bland smile on his face, only his eyebrows faintly raised in surprise. He closed the watch with a snap and put it away. 'I'll have to report it to the French police,' he said dully. 'Take the sampans in tow.' His limbs had stopped trembling. As the boat got under way again, he stared down at the dark, oily water with the last unreal hope that Johnson might yet suddenly pop up his head and wave to them with his cheerful, self-satisfied grin. But at the same time he felt a tremulous, rising sense of relief. Suppose he had boarded the sampan instead of Johnson?

While he was making a long, detailed statement to a French police officer who chewed his pen in ferocious concentration as he tried to translate Denton's sentences into official French, Lolly got the covers unlashed from the impounded sampans. The cargo was nothing but sacks of sawdust. He shook his head gloomily when he showed them to Denton by the grey cheerlessness of the first light. 'It was a trick. No silk at all. They wanted to get Mr Johnson.' He paused, thrusting out his underlip and scratching his slightly stubbled chin. 'Mr Johnson or you.'

The typhoon came and the harbour emptied as all the ships steamed downriver to ride the storm out in the open sea. But it wasn't a bad one, the winds were no stronger than a gale at home, and there was only the continuous rain that fell steadily for two days and nights from a sky vast with clumsy, tumbling grey clouds. The canals flooded onto the streets and sedan-chair bearers walked waist deep in muddy water; the rickshaw and wheelbarrow coolies couldn't work for a day until the floods subsided. Watching the rain from his window, Denton saw a wheelbarrow go floating down the street at the height of the flood, with an anguished coolie plunging after it.

Then the clouds began to thin, to fall apart and let in gaps of blue. The rain eased, and by the evening of the third day the sky was clear and serene, a pale greenish blue with a faint orange tinge where the sun had set, as though that too had been washed by the rain.

Four days later, Johnson's body floated to the surface, bloated and decomposing. It was picked up by the river police three miles down-stream, against the walls of the Bund. Denton was called to the mortuary to identify the body. The dingy waiting room didn't seem to have changed since the first time he'd gone there with Johnson himself to help identify his informer's body. The same clerk was yawning over the same maroon-coloured ledger, the same attendants were chatting and playing cards at the back of the hall. It almost seemed as though the same mute, hollow-eyed men and women were still waiting on the same bare benches for their missing relatives to be brought in.

A senior police inspector turned towards him with a smile of recognition. 'Hello, Denton, haven't seen you since that dinner at your chief's house. How are you getting on?'

It was Everett, the man who'd shared his cabin on the Orcades coming to Shanghai.

'Just been promoted,' Everett said proudly, glancing down at the shiny new pip on his shoulder. He gave Denton a cloth to hold over his nose. 'I'm afraid the body isn't really cold yet, it still smells.'

Denton gazed at the distorted and rotting corpse. The swollen features retained hardly any trace of that insistently affable smugness that Denton had come to detest. It was not a face he was looking at, Denton thought, but the putrid carcase of a face. Only the short, dark hair seemed the same, as though it hadn't died at all. Looking at the hair alone, still dripping on the ice, you could imagine Johnson had just been in for a swim. Denton pressed the cloth closer to his nose. It had been soaked in some strong disinfectant stuff, but he could still smell the powerful sickly-sweet scent of decaying flesh that he'd first caught in the burial house Wei had shown him last summer. When the attendant turned the head, Denton saw a livid, ulcerous bruise at the base of the skull.

He looked away with a sudden queasy turning of his stomach. 'Yes, that's him,' he muttered. 'That's about where he was hit, too.'

Outside, while the two attendants shuffled indifferently past on sandalled feet, carrying in another corpse, Everett paused for a few 'inquiries,' as he called them with a slightly self-important inflection in his voice. 'I suppose you didn't get a good look at the man who struck him?'

'No, it all happened so quickly. He was quite big, that's all.'

'Would you know either of the two men again?'

Everett was jotting down his replies in a little black notebook, and the official act, the official tone of voice, irritated Denton. He shrugged. 'No, it was pitch dark.' He watched a stone-eyed young Chinese being led into the mortuary by a police corporal.

'Would anyone have known he was to be on the launch at that time?'

Denton's chest caught suddenly with the awakening of the thought that Lolly Kwai had left to sleep in his mind. 'He wasn't supposed to be there at all,' he said slowly. 'He only came along because his boat had broken down.'

Everett glanced up at him, then continued writing. 'Looks as though they were after you, then,' he said as he closed the book. 'Shall I take that?' He took the cloth which Denton had been absently holding in his hand and dropped it in a rattan basket.

'They?' Denton repeated. 'Who?' 'In Your line of business,' Everett shrugged, 'there are bound to be people it's dangerous to offend. As in mine.'

Denton thought of Ching scratching his pallid cheek with that talon of a nail in Mason's office. Obviously Mason was taking bribes and Ching had wanted him to buy Denton off too. They were both put out by his refusal perhaps, but this.... He shook his head incredulously, and yet he kept seeing Ching's face, his faintly ironic smile, mocking his unbelief.

'I think it was only meant as a warning,' Everett was saying soothingly. 'It probably just went too far. They hit him too hard, that's all.'

'Unless they knew I can't swim.'

'Oh no, if they wanted to finish someone off, they could do it quite easily. But they don't like drawing too much attention to themselves by killing a foreign devil.' He paused as the stone-eyed Chinese came back down the corridor followed by the corporal, who was noisily clearing his throat and looking for somewhere to spit. The man's eyes were perhaps a little stonier, his mouth a little more stiff. 'It'd be different for a Chinese, of course,' Everett went on. 'They don't mind killing them - nobody takes much notice. Know anyone who might have a grudge against you?'

'I may have got on the wrong side of a ship's agent called Ching - '

Everett's eyebrow's rose. 'There are all sorts of stories about him,' he said with a note both of respect and of warning. 'I should watch your step if I were you.'

Denton felt suddenly as though his back was exposed - he even glanced round over his shoulder at the patient yet hopeless relatives waiting on the benches. 'How? What do you mean?' he asked uneasily.

'Well, just don't run any risks, that's all,' Everett said coolly. 'I'll have this statement copied out,' he went on at once, before Denton could answer. 'And then if you'd come to the Central Police Station to sign it....'

'It was Ching,' Su-mei said simply when he told her that night. She pulled the long, gold pin he'd given her for her birthday out of her hair and held it between her teeth while she reached up for the smaller ones.

'How do you know it was?' Again he felt that feeling that his back was exposed, vulnerable.

She shook her head. He took the pin from her mouth. 'How do you know?'

She shrugged. 'He is high up in the Red Triangle. You made trouble for him and he got Mason to try to bribe you.' She shook her hair loose. It fell down in a loose glossy mass round her shoulders. 'You must be careful.'

He felt sure she was right, but still he didn't want to believe it. 'How can he be so dangerous? He is only a ship's agent! And Mason - '

'He does many things,' she interrupted matter-of-factly, gazing at her face in the mirror. Her eyes switched to his reflection beside hers. 'Every Chinese in Shanghai knows about Ching. You foreign devils never look behind things.'

He made a dismissive gesture with his hand. 'Stories, that is all,' he tried to scoff. 'Only stories.'

She shook her head, watching his reflection with cool eyes. 'He is not like Pock-mark Chen. He is an important man. You foreign devils never understand.'