Portuguesee, Filipino, what you want?' - girls brushed against him longingly in the street, laying their hands on his arm with a caressing, feather-light touch. He was frightened of them, yet he couldn't keep away. In his room, he would listen more keenly, tantalised, for the chuckles and murmurs through the wall at weekends or whenever Mason was off-duty. On his visits to restaurants with Wei, he watched the sing-song girls with long furtive glances, especially the one Wei had sing for them the first time. Noticing his half-concealed interest, Wei often suggested that restaurant and often engaged the same girl to sing. Denton knew her name now: Su-mei.
The weather grew colder. He wore his overcoat in his room at night when he sat down to study his Chinese.
One evening in February Ephraim joined him at his usual corner table at the Central Hotel, behind the glossy green leaves of a palm tree. He was rubbing his hands together and smiling gleefully. 'Today I have made twenty thousand dollars, my friend.' He sat down and gripped Denton's arm with his familiar pressure. 'Twenty thousand in one day!'
'Oh? How?'
'How does anyone make a profit? By buying cheap and selling dear!' He gazed at Denton goggle-eyed, shaking his head amusedly at his naivet‚. 'By buying cheap and selling dear! The only law of business, my friend.'
The waiter brought him his vodka unbidden, and Denton listened with a twinge of envy while Ephraim recounted with self-congratulatory chuckles and extravagant gestures how he'd held onto a consignment of opium because he was sure the price was going to rise - and of course he'd been vindicated. As he drank, he became more voluble, more expansive, his mobile, slightly sallow, face glowing with warmth and pride. 'You see, we Jews must have a national home - that is why we work to make money. To found our national home where we can be safe from the Cossacks. Have you seen our magazine in Shanghai? Israel's Messenger? You will like it, an educated man like you. I will bring you a copy to read. It has many interesting pieces, not just for Jews, but everyone. Politics, art, literature.... It is the organ of the Zionist movement in Shanghai,' he added, as if that were its ultimate distinction.
'In English?' Denton asked cautiously.
'Of course. There is a translation of that article on circumcision in the next issue.'
As he drank his way into the fourth or fifth vodka, always vainly pressing Denton to join him, he switched without a pause from the Zionist movement to the future of Shanghai. 'Mark my words,' he gripped Denton's arm again, 'Shanghai will be another city-state like Venice or Florence in the Renaissance.... You know?'
Denton nodded vaguely, unwilling to betray his large uncertainties about Italian Renaissance city-states.
'We are growing like them, and for the same reasons,' Ephraim rushed exuberantly on. 'From nothing we are already the third largest port in the world, the largest city in China - '
'Isn't Peking - ?'
'Peking? Pah! Finished! Shanghai, I tell you, will be a merchant state as powerful in world trade as Venice was in Italy. It is the door to China. And we shall hold the key to the door.' He filled his glass again from the bottle (the waiters knew that he never wanted a glass of vodka, but a whole bottle). 'Look at our government. Who rules Shanghai? China? Of course not. Britain? You British founded it, but it is not a British colony.'
'The foreign consuls?' Denton suggested mildly.
'Pah! What can they do? The power has passed to the Municipal Council - a merchant oligarchy. There you are - Venice without its Doge! We even have the canals!'
'Without its what?' Denton asked unsurely.
'Without its Doge. Duce, a leader, a chief. Ah, one day I shall sit on that municipal council, you mark my words. And we will control China from there, the whole of China.' He drank with a flourish and smacked his lips, leaning back with closed eyes to savour his dream.
Denton was still uncertain. Who did Ephraim mean by 'we'? 'Do you mean the Jews will have a national home in China?' he asked hesitantly.
But Ephraim hadn't heard him. His mood had suddenly changed, his brown eyes frowning now. He shook his head sadly, recalling perhaps the vicissitudes of life in Odessa. 'Ach, what are you doing, Jacob, always talking and talking?' he upbraided himself in a melancholy voice. 'It will all pass, it will all pass. Venice fell, Florence fell, even Jerusalem fell.... So why won't Shanghai fall too?' He sighed heavily, resignedly, pushing out his glistening underlip. 'So what are you doing, always talking and talking about your national homes and your Shanghai like Venice? Ach, ach, ach....'
Denton watched in embarrassed silence while Ephraim lamented, rocking slowly back and forth on his seat. But then, as suddenly as it had come, the mood passed. He leant forward, finished his glass and screwed the cap on the bottle, calling for the bill with a peremptory snap of his fingers. He paid as always in cash. 'Never pay with chits,' he advised Denton early on. 'Never pay with chits. They always cheat you.' He stood up, took the half-finished bottle under his arm and walked with Denton towards the door. 'Tonight, I shall celebrate with a girl,' he said decidedly. He stopped to peer into Denton's face. 'What about you?'
Denton shook his head uncomfortably, looking away from the lighted porch, on which palms and rubber plants stood like doormen, to the darkness of the river beyond the Bund. 'I must be getting back to the mess,' he said.
Ephraim gazed at him reproachfully. 'Ach, you're not still thinking of that girl in England, are you?'
'No.'
'She's gone.' He ignored Denton's denial. 'Why don't you forget her? Come,' taking Denton's arm encouragingly, persuasively, in his grip, 'I know just the girl for you.'
But Denton, as always, pulled himself away. He watched Ephraim climb into his sedan chair and wrap himself round with a rug. Ephraim waved, nursing the vodka bottle on his knees. The chair swayed as the bearers moved off. To the house with the green shutters? Denton wondered. An oil lantern glowed on one corner of the chair. Denton watched it bobbing away, imagined it arriving at the house, saw Ephraim getting out, being greeted by sensuous girls with long hair and high, rouged cheeks....
He heard his name called in Chinese. The sound came from the rickshaws clustering across the road from the hotel. He looked across at them, frowning. His name was called again, quietly and urgently. He walked down the steps and into the shadows where the rickshaw coolies were squatting between their shafts, smoking or dozing, wrapped in rags and old sacks. Again he heard his name called, and this time he made out the podgy figure of Kwai, the coxswain of the Customs launch he'd first been on with Mason.
'Mister Denton,' he hissed from the edge of the rickshaws. 'Come quickly.' He was smiling excitedly, the bringer of good news. But then he always smiled, as though he thought the whole of existence was a genial comedy. Every officer except Mason called him Lolly Kwai. Mason, refusing to be so familiar with any Chinese subordinate, called him curtly by his name alone, if he troubled to use even that.
Lolly Kwai nodded into the shadows thrown by some plane trees. 'This fellow says there will be some smuggling tonight.'
Denton peered into the trees, but couldn't see a thing. 'Where?'
'On the Alexander the First.'
'But I checked their cargo this evening. They're sailing tonight.'
Lolly shook his head, smiling broadly. 'Come and talk to the man. He wants money.' He led him past the trees to another rickshaw standing by itself. A young Chinese with a wisp of beard straggling from a large mole on his chin was leaning back in the shade of the raised awning. He scarcely glanced at Denton, the whites of his eyes flickering once in the dark and then remaining still. He looked only at Lolly Kwai, his face half-turned away from Denton as though he didn't want to be seen. The three of them whispered in Chinese, Lolly Kwai smilingly translating into pidgin when Denton couldn't follow. There were a hundred bales of cotton outside a godown on the wharf where the Alexander the First was berthed. Just before she sailed, having already got Customs clearance, they would swiftly load the bales and so avoid paying tax on them.
'What about the wharf police?'
The young Chinese shrugged meaningfully.