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.'
32
JOHNSON WAS THE FIRST EUROPEAN to be murdered in Shanghai for two years, and the North China Daily News carried a report of the inquest on its front page. The verdict was murder by persons unknown. The next day the paper's editorial, recalling the atrocities of the Boxers, urged the foreign powers to consider stationing a permanent garrison in the city. There was an announcement on the same page that the Shanghai Volunteers would welcome recruits from every foreign nationality and every walk of life.
Customs officers were authorised by Mr Brown to carry revolvers at all times when on duty, instead of merely when going on a raid. Denton learnt to shoot accurately with his on the police firing range and began to feel heroic. But often he felt that exposed feeling, as though someone were creeping up behind his back.
Johnson's possessions were auctioned in the mess. There were fewer people there than usual, and Jones, in his last week as mess treasurer, began the auction in a voice that was strangely subdued. There wasn't much to buy, but as the last item, Jones announced, with a little smirk, that some unusual paintings had been found in the bottom of a sea chest that Johnson had kept under his bed. 'Always tightly locked,' he added, stroking his slim moustache.
'Let's see them!' Mason called out, but Jones, still smirking coyly, said the committee had decided they should not be publicly exhibited. Any officer who was interested could examine them on the table, where they were at present placed face down.
There was a snickering, yet still constrained, pause for viewing. Only Mason seemed unaffected by Johnson's death, and he was soon giving a loud, lewd commentary, while the others merely chuckled. The paintings were all crude erotic pictures of women, each done in great detail, but in violent colours, as if Johnson had hated what he so carefully depicted. Johnson had never been known to have a woman in his room and Denton, gazing with fascinated disgust, wondered what he might have done to one if he had. He tried to imagine what it must have been like to live through the furtive turbulence and twisted rage that the pictures represented. But he couldn't. All he could visualise was that bare room of Johnson's, with the carefully made but empty bed. And the picture of the sailing ship he'd seen on the wall, with those realistic woman's breasts on the figurehead, breasts which now seemed so significant. He could hear the note of pride in Johnson's voice when he'd said he painted the picture, and that too seemed significant now. But what was it like to have lived his remote, distorted life - to have been him night after night alone in his room? That, he couldn't imagine.
Mason bought all Johnson's pictures for two dollars each. A week or two later, he claimed to have sold them to a Chinese brothel-owner at a two hundred per cent profit. 'If you ever go there, it'll remind you of the poor old blighter,' he declared at the bar, his eyes for some reason straying blankly over Denton's as he spoke, without a glimmer of acknowledgement.
The murderers were never found, but there were no more attacks on Customs officers and gradually they all forgot Johnson's death, or put it safely away in the past, in history. Ching disappeared from the docks, no longer acting as the Russian line's agent. In any case, Russia and Japan were at war, and no more Russian ships called at Shanghai. Su-mei said he was living in Chapei, in a house surrounded by bodyguards.
The heat of summer slowly eased. On the afternoon of the autumn lantern festival Denton went into the street of the silversmiths to buy some earrings for Su-mei. He wandered in and out of the long, cave-like shops until eventually he found an old silver pair of rings, shaped like heavy tear-drops, which the bald, bowed shopkeeper with crafty little eyes said had come from Peking. Usually, in spite of Ephraim's repeated strictures, he paid by chit, but this time he had a fair amount of cash on him. The shopkeeper squinted at each coin and rang it sharply on the counter before he wrapped the earrings in red paper and gave them to Denton.
As he left the shop, the usual swarm of beggars clustered round him, stretching out their hands and whining with quiet, insolent insistence. Most of them, he knew, were professionals, especially the ones with babies in their arms - at least they were all living infants this time - carefully calculating how to work on the guilt of the sentimental rich. But one man was so mutilated, professional or not, that the callous of indifference that had gradually hardened over Denton's natural sympathy was abruptly softened. The man's legs had been cut off high above the knees, and the stumps were covered with worn leather patches. He was dragging himself along by his hands, trailing his stumps behind him, and his arms and shoulders had become large and powerful. He glared at Denton with an accusing, bitter stare, as though he were personally responsible for his amputated legs. Yet, he is a professional, Denton thought detachedly. But what else could he be? He gave him a dollar. The beggar rang the coin suspiciously against the cobble stone and then dragged himself off without a word, as if he thought he'd got no more than his due. And perhaps it is his due, Denton thought, half-guiltily feeling the expensive earrings in his pocket. Perhaps it's even less than his due. The other beggars crowded round him more thickly now, waving their hands determinedly under his face and fixing their eyes demandingly on his. He pushed his way through them. 'No, no more,' he said curtly, striding on. He couldn't give them all money. Was he responsible for all the suffering in the world? 'No!' They took no notice, shuffling along beside him, whining and plucking his clothes. 'No more!' He was shouting now. And then abruptly, involuntarily almost, he had stopped and was dropping the rest of his change into their outstretched hands, young, old, clean and dirty, ashamed at the same time of his weakness, his sentimentality. As if those few cents would solve any problems! As if charity was the answer! But then what was? All the money was gone; but still the soft, plucking hands reached out and the whining voices cajoled and coaxed him. He shook his head again and brushed through them, climbing into a waiting rickshaw. The coolie regarded him with a sly, calculating look. Good for a big tip, his eyes seemed to say.
'Where to, master?' he asked in pidgin.
'Chinsan Road.'
'Long way, master. You pay one dollar?'
Denton shrugged. He'd given so much away, why bother about fifty cents more or less now? 'This time I will pay one dollar,' he said in Chinese. 'But don't think I don't know it should be fifty cents.'
'You speak Chinese? Very good.' The coolie grinned, put out his half-smoked cigarette, placed it carefully in his pocket then lifted the shafts.
As the coolie pushed his way through the still hopeful beggars, shooing them gruffly and scornfully away, Denton noticed two people gazing at him from across the road. They were a man and a woman, both taller than the average, dressed in faded black cotton trousers and jackets.