your head as you hit it. Otherwise you might've got it.' He sipped from the beer he'd placed on the edge of the table, smacked his lips, and leant over to make his shot. The cue slid easily forward over the crook of his finger and thumb, the ball seemed to run inevitably towards the black, there was a click and the black sank into the pocket.
'Well, if we could have a table down at the Woosung forts next week,' Johnson said encouragingly as he finished his beer, 'you'd soon get the hang of it.'
'What's it like down there?' Denton asked. 'I saw them when I arrived, but I couldn't really make much out.'
'Just a guardpost really. We go down there to make sure they don't discharge contraband before they get into the harbour.' He paused as one of the boys approached and muttered to him. 'Where?' Johnson asked, glancing round towards the door. 'All right, bring him up to my room.'
He turned back to Denton with a faintly excited smile. 'One of my informers wants to see me,' he said quietly, as if he didn't want the others to hear. 'Come along, you might find this interesting.'
Denton followed him up to the second floor. At first glance, as Johnson turned the gaslight up, Denton thought the room was completely bare. But looking round again, he saw three straight-backed wooden chairs, which reminded him of a schoolroom, and a watercolour of a sailing ship pinned to the wall. Still, the room was cheerless. There weren't even any curtains. He felt obscurely that its featurelessness was in keeping with the level, monotonous landscape of Johnson's character.
Johnson gestured to the chairs, neatly placed against the wall. 'Make yourself at home,' he said. But as he remained standing himself, Denton merely smiled, then went across to the painting. It was of a three-masted ship with many sails, all billowing before the wind. The sky was blue except for some fluffy, yellowish clouds, there were sea-gulls curling round the mastheads and flecks of white foam on the choppy blue water.
'How d'you like it?' Johnson asked behind him.
'Very nice.'
'Did it myself.'
'Really?' Denton felt he ought to show added interest now, and he stepped nearer, peering at it closer. The figurehead on the bowsprit was a mermaid with golden, wavy hair that fell loosely down round full round breasts with little red nipples. He was slightly shocked. All the mermaids he'd seen before had had ringlets that decently obscured their nakedness. He couldn't reconcile this immodesty with what he knew of Johnson. But perhaps it was all right in art? he wondered doubtfully.
'See the mermaid?' Johnson asked with innocent pride. 'Life-like, eh?'
'Yes. Yes it is,' Denton agreed hastily, looking instead at the row of portholes running along the vessel's side.
There was an almost inaudible rapping on the door. Immediately, a short, lean Chinese slipped inside and closed it. He glanced briefly askance at Denton, then stepped swiftly to the corner, where Johnson followed him. They began speaking in quick, furtive whispers. Denton watched the man's queue twitching as he shook or nodded his head in reply to Johnson's slow, careful questions. It was as though he was trying to convince Johnson while Johnson was sceptical and dubious. He was dressed like a coolie in a cheap, patched black tunic and wide floppy black trousers that ended above his ankles. On his bare feet he wore rope sandals, and Denton noticed how his toes kept curling and uncurling all the time, as though they were squirming with uneasiness. After some time, Johnson counted some notes out into his hand, snapping each one cautiously between his finger and thumb. The man's lips worked silently as he counted the money in time with Johnson. He stuffed it into a pocket inside the waist of his trousers and left, glancing briefly at Denton without expression. There was a white scar on his temple.
'Three o'clock tomorrow morning,' Johnson said, putting his wallet away. 'A cargo of salt. Not very big, but worth catching. Want to come? It's right down river, past the forts.' His faintly nasal voice was still mild and even, as though he was merely inviting Denton to another game of snooker.
17
THE JOURNEY DOWNSTREAM took over an hour. They travelled in the same launch that had taken Mason and Denton to the Alexander the First, with the same chubby coxswain, whom Johnson called 'Lolly' in a tone that was at once familiar and colourless. Standing with Johnson in the prow, where the thick warm air fanned their faces, Denton kept patting and feeling the weight of the revolver he'd draw from the Customs House armoury. 'Not that we ever use them of course, but....' Johnson had said in his drab, monotonous voice.
Two Chinese Customs men with ancient rifles and wild-looking swords squatted in the stern of the boat, chatting loudly with the coxswain. The light from the boiler, glowing on their high-boned cheeks and slanting eyes, gave them, Denton thought, a lurid, sinister appearance. Sparks like little fireflies occasionally darted over their heads in the black smoke streaming from the funnel, and the sparks seemed to increase the fierceness of their looks. Yet all the while Johnson talked on in his amiably inexpressive voice about the hikes he'd taken round Shanghai last winter. As if they were only out for a picnic.
Soon after they'd passed the dark, broken heaps of the forts at Woosung, where the solitary yellow light gleamed on the smooth silk of the water, the launch slid slowly into a little creek and lay still with its engine scarcely turning. There were two hours to wait. The humid heat weighed on Denton's lids. He kept dozing off, despite the dull throb of tension in his stomach, to wake with a startled jerk as his head, loosening on his neck, lolled to one side or the other. The Chinese Customs men and the coxswain were all quiet now and seemed to be asleep. Only Johnson was still alert, humming softly to himself as he watched from the bow.
Denton slithered from one half-awake dream to another until Johnson's hand on his arm awoke him. Johnson's head was cocked on one side, his eyes turned up as though he was listening. Denton listened too. At first he could hear nothing except the run and slap of the water against the boat's hull, but then the soft plash of oars and a steady creaking sound carried faintly across the river. His stomach lifted. There was something menacing about that repeated creaking and plashing.
Without a word the two Chinese had risen together in the stern and gripped their useless-looking rifles. Johnson hissed to the coxswain and a second later the engine rattled and clanked. The deck shook and quivered as the launch thrust out of the creak at full speed. Almost immediately ahead were two sampans, low down in the water. The oarsmen were frantically trying to reach the bank before the launch closed on them easily, and when they saw it was hopeless, they gave up leaning on their oars as the launch came alongside them. The coxswain called out, translating for Johnson, and in a few minutes the sampans had been taken in tow, while the two smugglers sat dejectedly in the well of the launch, bound back to back.
Denton felt let down. It had all been so quick and ordinary.
'They can row quite fast with that single oar, can't they?' Johnson said pleasantly. 'If we'd left it much later, they'd've got clean away.'
Denton glanced at the nearest prisoner. His face in the flickering light of the boiler was leathery and grim. It seemed all shadows below the eyes, as if the cheeks had been hollowed out by hunger or disease. His lids looked inflamed, the whites of his eyes bloodshot. The man stared out vacantly over the river, while beside him the two Customs men were playing a game with little narrow playing cards no wider than two fingers, laughing boisterously. The coxswain listened, grinning widely, turning his head now and then to join in the banter.
Johnson was lighting his pipe. 'What will happen to those two?' Denton asked him.
'Oh well, you can't tell with a Chinese court.' He drew and puffed, the tobacco glowing bright and dull in the charred bowl of his pipe. 'Depends if they've got any pull, really.'
'But isn't there a set penalty?'
'Anything from death to being in the cangue for a bit. That's like the stocks, the cangue.' Johnson looked at his pipe, pushed the smouldering tobacco down and placed the moist stem back between his teeth. 'It's shame really, isn't? They're probably opium addicts, have to smuggle to get the money for their opium.' He shrugged with detached resignation, still as uninvolved as if they'd been talking about a picnic spoilt by rain. 'Bit of a shame, but there you are.'
Soon