in the morning when the municipal cart came round to collect them. The mosquitoes and flies vanished, though, and the decaying summer smells in the rank little canals were bitten back by the cleansing cold.
Mason, Jones and Clark, another officer, had hired a houseboat to take them up the river past Soochow for some shooting at the end of January. But Clark caught the 'flu and the others asked Denton if he would like to go in his place. It was an invitation that had been hanging vaguely about like an unwanted relative since Denton's first few weeks in Shanghai, when Jones had been quite friendly with him. But then Jones, perhaps following Mason's lead, had taken to mocking him slyly for what Denton supposed they thought was his priggishness. Since Emily had jilted him, though, he had relaxed his rigid moral austerity, and though he was never more than coolly amiable, Jones' teasing had grown milder, almost good-natured. Denton sensed he had been asked now only because nobody else was free and they needed someone to share the expenses, but nevertheless he accepted.
Even so, Denton suspected the invitation wouldn't have been revived but for the illusion both Jones and Mason had that he'd lost his virginity after the New Year's Eve party in the mess. Although the ladies of senior Customs and municipal officials had been there, the party had been much more boisterous than a tame Christmas celebration held the week before. And Denton, slightly drunk despite the pledge, had announced that he'd 'broken it off' with his fiancée. It was at the end of the evening, when the ladies had all gone and Denton's head was wobbly, and Jones had suggested visiting a 'house' to mark Denton's 'liberation,' as he called it. Denton had gone along with the crowd of them as far as the entrance of the place, in Bubbling Well Road. But as the others climbed the stairs, he'd slipped stealthily away, trembling with both fear and desire. Then he'd wandered the bitter streets and alleys by himself, all the way down to the docks where the sailors' brothels were, veering between fearful desire and disgusted remorse.
He passed several brothels, his head turned sternly aside at the last moment, while girls chirped at him from the open, dimly-lit doorways. In the end, tired and cold, his eyes sore, his mouth dry, he'd found his way back to the empty mess with its jaded decorations, and gone to bed feeling as guilty as if he really had followed the girls up the seedy mysterious stairways he'd glimpsed as he passed.
The next day was Sunday. He sang in the choir at the cathedral and prayed with a sick empty feeling in his stomach for forgiveness of his craving lust and drunkenness. Yet, while he prayed, the image, not of the sordid places he'd seen the night before, but of that more alluring green-shuttered house on rue Molière, where he'd first met Ephraim, had kept stealing seductively across his mind. And that image had brought another with it, the image of the article on circumcision in the German journal. Ephraim had accosted him on the waterfront one day in the dead of the year between Boxing Day and New Year's Eve, and insisted on lending him the journal with its strange Gothic script. 'I have been looking for you every day,' he exclaimed almost accusingly. 'Now you must have tea with me.' Unable to think of an excuse, Denton had let himself be led into the Central Hotel by the voluble Jew and prevailed on to drink lemon tea in a glass. 'Just like the Russians. Lemon tea and vodka - the only things they have produced in a thousand years,' Ephraim had declared loudly, with a glint in his brown eyes, daring anyone to deny it. Stiffly and hesitantly he'd sipped the tea under Ephraim's quick, warm encouragement, and listened reluctantly at first, to his spontaneous, child-like self-revelation, to his eager offers of friendship, talk, hospitality and happiness, all of which Ephraim was certain were his to give. And gradually he'd thawed, despite his brittle shyness, as he listened to Ephraim's continuous flow of ideas and anecdotes - about his business, Odessa, the Russian pogroms, the rituals of the Jewish religion.... Sometimes, in his enthusiasm, Ephraim had gripped his arm again with that unexpectedly powerful grip. At first Denton had stiffened and recoiled, but by the time he got up to go he'd grown so used to it that he scarcely even noticed it. He'd taken the German journal back to the mess, and although no one could read German there, he'd kept it discreetly out of sight in the top drawer of his desk, beneath Emily's letters and photograph.
The houseboat was a long barge-like vessel towed by a steam launch with a patched, faded, junk sail above its cabin. The three of them sat in the sunlight, protected from the wind, and watched the fields slide slowly past, brown and rich, waiting for the next sowing. The scattered villages they saw, cowering under the bare branches of leafless trees, looked poor and shabby, as if all the wealth of the country went into the land while the people lived like cattle. The huts were dingy, windowless and unpainted, the walls cracked and flaking as though they had mange. Peasants leant on their hoes and gaped at them as they passed.
Jones knew a German businessman in Soochow and he arranged for the houseboat to be moored at a jetty near the house his friend had leased. The jetty was empty except for a few covered sampans in which whole families huddled, gazing at them over their rice bowls with the listless envy of the wretched for the unreachably rich. The street behind the jetty was empty too, although it was early afternoon.
'Funny,' Jones said, feeling his wispy moustache that never seemed to grow any thicker. 'You'd think there'd be quite a lot of people about at this time of day.' They walked down the street to a two-storied Chinese house, the freshly-painted shutters all closed. Jones knocked on the door and a dog began barking inside, loudly and fiercely. After some time, while they glanced up and down the deserted streets, there was the sound of a shutter being unbolted and opened on the first floor. An amah appeared, grumbling and sour-faced, as the shutter swung open and dashed back against the wall.
'Mr Henschel?' Jones shouted up, first in English, then in a Shanghainese that Denton was advanced enough by then to know was very bad. 'Where's your master?'
The woman shook her head peevishly, pointing down the street and shouting down to them in an angry, complaining voice.
'What's the old girl jabbering about?' Mason asked. Jones shrugged.
'Something about some bandits, I think,' Denton said uncertainly. 'I can't understand her accent very well. It must be a dialect.'
The shutters slammed shut and they heard the bolts squealing as she tortured them into their sockets. They stood looking at each other.
'Well, she pointed that way,' Mason said, nodding down the street. 'Why don't we go and take a look?'
They began walking on slowly, uneasy in the eerie silence.
A suspicion began to tug at the corner of Denton's mind. Hadn't the amah used the word for 'kill'? Was it another execution they were going to? Or had the bandits killed someone? The emptiness of the street unsettled him as they strolled along. The silence was sinister, unnerving. He glanced back. The launch and the houseboat looked small and remote at the little jetty.
They came to a canal with a hump-backed bridge over it. The street went on, was crossed by other streets, passed over more canals. And everywhere the place was deserted, except for a toothless old beggar the other side of the bridge, whose head was shaking uncontrollably as he gazed up at them, silently holding out his box. They didn't even bother to question him, it seemed so hopeless.
'Looks a bit rum,' Mason muttered, his normal hectoring tone subdued. He was unsettled, too. 'Where is everybody? The place looks in pretty good shape, they can't have had any trouble.'
It was true, Denton thought, the place was well cared for. The houses were neatly and freshly white-washed, and the little stone steps that led down to the canals were firm and sharp, unlike the crumbling quays they'd passed on their way upstream.
'Venice of China,' Jones murmured. 'That's what they say this place is. Only where the hell are the Venetians?'
Then Denton heard, far away, that sudden yell of a thousand exultations that had haunted his first nights in Shanghai. 'Why don't we go back and wait at the boat?' he suggested quickly, knowing instantly what the sound had meant.
But Mason had heard it too. 'There's a meeting going on somewhere,' he said slowly. Then his eyes brightened. 'By god, I know what it is: they're holding an execution or something. Everyone's gone to the execution, that's what the old girl meant - they've caught some bandits! Of course! Come on, I bet your friend's there, Jonesy, having a grandstand view.'
And Denton followed them. Unwillingly, his stomach already