A jumble of lighters, small junks, and sampans were tied up side by side and end to end along the river bank in front of the Inn of the Eight Immortals. Little Orchid was alone, sunning her pet canary at the foot of the ship’s mast. David sat down beside her and put the net bag between them on the deck.
“Do you remember me, Little Orchid?”
She clapped her hands together and laughed up at him. “Yes. I saw you on the boat with a yang kuei tze, a foreign devil with a funny dragon-flame mustache.”
“That was my friend. He’s one of the good foreign devils.” David held out the net bag to her. “Here’s a present for you.”
Little Orchid solemnly took the bag from his hands, stood up, and walked to the rail of the boat. Holding the bag out over the river, she muttered a short prayer and dropped the bag. David heard the splash as four pounds of pork and a pound of sugared plums headed for the bottom of the Whangpoo. He could not have been more surprised if Kuan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, had suddenly kicked him in the least bony part of his anatomy.
Little Orchid sat down beside him again, and with a shy smile on her face asked, “Do you like my canary?”
“Yes. It’s a beautiful canary.” David waited the space of a couple of breaths and in a mild tone asked her, “Why did you do that?”
“The River God is sick. I sacrifice to make him well again.”
David drew up his long legs and rested his chin on his knees. “How do you know the River God is sick?”
“He must be. He swallowed a yang kuei tze last night.”
David nodded understandingly. “Swallowing foreign devils is certainly bad joss, even for a River God.” He stood up and smiled down at the child. “I’m sure he’ll be well soon. Tell your mother and father I’ll visit them tomorrow.”
David returned ashore and hired a rickshaw to take him to the Astor House Hotel. Behind him, the River God was quietly disposing of a fresh-pork and sugared-plum lunch. He thought about it for a while and came to the conclusion that somewhere on this bright and cloudless day there was a half-drowned American sailor nursing a hangover while he scrubbed the decks of a gunboat and thought of his next shore leave.
The after-business crowd was trickling into the bar of the Astor House Hotel when David arrived. Gordon Pymm and a tall thin man with a sunken chest were deep in conversation at a corner table. Their solemn faces were not what David had expected of a meeting of two old friends. David stopped at the bar and ordered a shandygaff and a bowl of melon seeds sent to the table. He nodded politely to the Eurasian pearl dealer seated at the center table with two Japanese businessmen and followed the waiter to Gordon’s table.
“David, this is Charles Ketty. We’ve been sitting here going over the bad news.”
Mr. Ketty shook David’s hand as if David were a long-lost brother. “Mr. Feng. You don’t know how glad I am to meet you. According to Gordon here, you might be able to do me a great favor.”
David said to Gordon, “What’s this about bad news?”
“It looks like the Grand Canal job is off — if it ever existed. Charles has apparently been the victim of a confidence scheme and he — his company — is out a sizable number of double eagles. The people at the Shanghai Merchants Bank thought you might be able to help me, I don’t see much hope in it.” He turned to his downcast guest. “Tell David what happened this afternoon, Charlie.”
“I had an appointment with Mr. Beazley this afternoon at the Tientsin Club. He was to be there with an official from the Bureau of Inland Waterways. This official was to sign the dredging contract on behalf of the Chinese government. I was to sign for my company and the whole thing would be in the bag. This is why I was sent all the way out here from Chicago, Mr. Feng.”
“Who is Beazley?”
“I thought — that is to say, my company in Chicago thought — that Mr. Beazley was a reputable intermediary with the Chinese government. According to his letters to us, he had successfully represented several European and American firms in obtaining lucrative engineering contracts from the Chinese. We do a good business overseas, most of it in South America. But things have been slack lately, so we jumped at the chance to establish ourselves in the Far East. The Grand Canal dredging project was right down our alley. Just what we needed.”
David shifted in his chair. “Mr. Ketty, you say you thought Mr. Beazley was a reputable intermediary. What did he do at the Tientsin Club this afternoon that made you change your mind?”
“Nothing, Mr. Feng. Beazley never showed up for the meeting.”
“And the Chinese government representative?”
Charles Ketty shook his head, “Neither one. I hung around until mid-afternoon thinking they might have been delayed. I finally left word with the club manager and went around to Beazley’s hotel. He had checked out. Hoof, hide, hair, and tallow, with no forwarding address. Then I thought of the money.”
“Had you paid him an advance against his commission?”
Charles Ketty looked down at the table top for several seconds and then at Gordon.
“Squeeze. Bribe money,” said Gordon, supplying the words for his friend. “Charles is an engineer, and a damn good one to boot, but he’s no China hand. Before you arrived, I was trying to explain to him that squeeze is a way of life here. If you want to do business you have to grease the bureau chief and the right government minister or you’ll go home with an empty rice bowl. Before Beazley checked out of his hotel he checked out of the bank with fifteen thousand dollars that wasn’t exactly his.”
David gave a low whistle. “Did he forge your signature, Mr. Ketty?”
“He didn’t have to, Mr. Feng. A few days before I left Chicago we received a cablegram from Beazley advising us that a French firm was bidding against us and if we didn’t meet or better their bribe offer immediately we could kiss the contract goodbye. Like I said, things have been a little slack for us and we needed this contract. So we arranged a telegraphic transfer of funds between our bank in Chicago and Mr. Beazley’s account at the Shanghai Merchants Bank. Yesterday morning, after we agreed to meet at the Tientsin Club, he withdrew the entire amount in the form of Shanghai gold bars. The clerk at the bullion window told me he watched Beazley load the bars into the pockets of a heavy canvas vest. That was the last anyone saw of him until about an hour ago when the Harbor Police fished him out of the Whangpoo River. He had been killed with a single knife thrust through the heart.”
“Did you recover the gold bars?”
Mr. Ketty leaned forward slightly in his chair. “That is the great favor I want to ask you, Mr. Feng.”
David Feng changed out of his American style street clothes into a pair of silk slippers and the loose comfort of his favorite brown robe. Gordon had gone out earlier to visit Madame Wu, whom he described simply as a “charming woman from San Antonio” and the proprietress of a “resort” on Kiansi Road.
He poured himself a cup of tea. As he sipped its fragrant warmth in the quiet of his room, he set his mind to stringing the beads of information he had collected that evening.
Professor Linwood, a missionary teaching at the Shanghai Law College, had a hobby. While other men of his age might boast collections of exotic butterflies or rare stamps, Bert Linwood collected information. His files, dating from 1910, were devoted solely to swindlers and flimflam artists who plied their trade on the China coast. “A harmless diversion, Mr. Feng, and one I’m sure your late father would not have disapproved of,” he once said. “Sinful rascals, all of them, but the many shades and hues of their misspent lives provide an acceptable chromatic substitute for a man, such as myself, who has been color blind from birth.”