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