One of these men was a balding, stockily built American in his early thirties with a short-stemmed bulldog pipe burning perilously close beneath a luxuriant walrus mustache the size of a shoe brush. The pipe smoke, drifting upward through this formidable red growth, created the image of a smoldering sunset over Vesuvius or a Pittsburgh slag heap glowing fitfully in the dusk.
Between puffs Gordon Pymm took another sheet of paper and let his pen — re-phrasing his thoughts as politely as possible — state that the rumored existence of an easily worked deposit of manganese ore in the Kang-tsu district could only have been the product of a mind in the last stages of decay.
He concluded his part of the report to the Western Seas Mining Syndicate and reread the results with satisfaction. Professional objectivity had triumphed over his personal feelings.
The survey had been made difficult enough by mountainous terrain and record bad weather, alternating between sudden snows and chilling rains.
Gordon accepted these things, as would any civil engineer working across a hostile landscape. But when a landscape becomes so hostile that it emits nine-millimeter bullets, the profession loses some of its appeal.
Gordon sealed the report in a manila envelope and began sorting through the mail that had accumulated in his absence. Two engineering magazines and a package with the return address of a New York bookstore were placed to one side unopened. Flood Control in Large River Basins and The Design of Silting Dams In High Erosion Areas could wait.
Behind Gordon, on the canal side of the study, a tall broad-shouldered man with the lithe build of a long-distance swimmer sat at a massive rolltop dresk. A collection of framed photographs, mostly black and whites but with a few duotones and hand-tinted ones among them, covered the wall behind his desk and overflowed toward the courtyard door.
Feng Da-wei put aside his pen, picked up his writing brush, and began a letter to his mother in St. Louis. The large strong hand holding the brush floated effortlessly above the paper as the fine tip laid down flowing columns of Chinese characters in the Tsao Tzu style of calligraphy his mother had taught him. David spoke to her of the report he had just completed, and of other things.
The brush took more ink and made word-pictures of her son; first, as a threadbare Taoist priest along the mountain backroads, then as an itinerant herb doctor with a wooden chest of leaves, roots, seeds, and oils slung across his shoulder by a leather strap as he plied his profession in small villages.
As the priest who sold wen yi kwei charms and as the doctor who dispensed small powders with quotes from the Pen Ts’ao healings, he observed all things closely, asked many questions, and listened well.
From these weeks of gathering he had distilled his intelligence report to the Syndicate.
David passed lightly over the bandit attack on the survey camp and gave full credit for the camp’s survival to the unholy fear inspired in the superstitious bandits by Gordon’s dragon-smoke mustache.
A few pages later he washed and laid aside the writing brush. Pressing the face of his stone chuan stick against a pad of vermilion ink, he stamped his personal “chop” below his signature.
He stood up from the desk to flex his arms and shoulders. His soft brown robe, worked with a narrow pattern of yellow thread along the edges and cuffs, yielded to the movements as water yields to the swimmer.
From the courtyard doorway he watched the trailing skirts of the squall move eastward to the sea.
Then he turned toward Gordon at his desk, and in his pronounced midwestern accent said, “The sky is clearing up over Tai Hu Lake. I wonder what riled it up so?”
“There is a perfectly logical explanation for it, David.” Gordon folded the letter he had been reading and replaced it in its envelope. “I saw a shooting star last night. Judging from its direction I would say it fell smack in the lake.”
David shook his head in mock sadness. “You are beginning to sound like a superstitious backcountry Chinese. Either a bandit bullet hit you in the head or you’ve been in China too long.”
“And I expect to be here a lot longer if this letter from Charles Ketty is any indication. He wants me to be resident engineer for a dredging project on the Grand Canal.” The corners of his red mustache lifted above an impish smile. “No more bandits. No more bullets.”
“Congratulations, Gordon, and who is Mr. Ketty?”
“He was a guest lecturer at my college. I worked in his drafting section at Chicago Dredge and Marine during my last summer at school. He’s a good man. Taught me a lot in those three months.”
“When will you see him?”
“When we go to Shanghai with our reports. I’d like you to meet him.”
David motioned toward the Tai Hu Lake. “Fine. Our boat will get us in there sometime early in the afternoon — if there are no more shooting stars.”
Soochow Creek, the Broadway of Shanghai, was bustling with launches, sampans piled with fresh vegetables, houseboats, and freight barges. Shanghai was built on water commerce. From the thousand-mile-long Grand Canal, along Soochow Creek and the Whangpoo River into which it flowed, and down the mighty Yangtze, a thousand different cargoes met and mingled in this great seaport.
As the craft carrying David and Gordon neared the boat landing beyond Garden Bridge, David heard his name called in Chinese. From the poop of a small junk, a man and a little girl waved and shouted a greeting.
David’s face broke into a smile. He waved both arms and shouted back across the sunlit waters, “Lao Erh! I lo ping an!” as the two craft swept by each other.
“Who is the cute little girl, David?”
“She is called Little Orchid. Her father, Lao Erh, owns the boat.”
As their suitcases were being brought ashore, Gordon relit his pipe and looked at David. “There was something about Little Orchid — a look, if you will — that seemed strange.”
David could feel the sadness come over his face. “Oxygen aphasia. She fell overboard a few years ago and struck her head on something in the water. Nearly drowned. When they finally got her back on board, her heart had stopped beating. She was revived and they saved her life — if you could still call living in a damaged mind any kind of life.” He turned back to the boat. “Get us a couple of rickshaws, will you, Gordy, while I pay off our skipper. We’ll finish our business at the bank first and then I’d like to pay a courtesy call on Lao Erh and his family. I’ll join you and Mr. Ketty at the Astor House bar about four.”
A cool breeze from the river fluttered the cloth banners strung between the stalls in the market square. David paid the butcher and put a package of fresh pork into the net shopping bag hanging from his wrist. He found a candy stall and bought a large paper of sugared plums. The pork was his calling gift for Lao Erh’s kitchen. The sugared plums would get him a shy smile and kiss from Little Orchid. He slung the net bag over his shoulder and walked toward the river.
Out on the muddy Whangpoo a big high-pooped Ningpo junk with a great eye painted on its bow slipped by on its way to the sea and a six-hundred-mile return journey south to Foochow for another cargo of building timbers. Several more of these ponderous seagoing junks, with piles of poles lashed to their decks, were anchored in the stream. David worked his way through the crowded street toward the Inn of the Eight Immortals a few blocks downstream from the market where Lao Erh moored his boat while he was ashore hustling cargo for the upriver towns.
Near the inn he detoured around some workmen mixing whitewash in the doorway of a godown. The mingled, musty odors of a hundred old cargoes wafted to him from the dark interior of the low-roofed warehouse.