Long past the stage of asking how the old man knew things, Da Silva unsheathed it carefully in the limited space and offered the hilt to him. Mohan Das took it, which made the captain feel decidedly uncomfortable, and scrutinized it for some minutes. The only sound was the rhythmic thunder of the rain, like a huge engine very close by. After a while, the captain could stay silent no longer. ‘Well?’ he demanded.
‘A formidable weapon,’ said the old man, handing it back. ‘Silver and steel. I would think it should suffice.’
‘You would think?’ Da Silva repeated, holding the knife loosely in his sweating hand. ‘You aren’t sure?’
‘Senhor capitão, nothing is sure. But I believe you are well enough armed, should you wish to pursue this thing.’
The captain’s mouth and throat were so dry by now that he took a mouthful of tea in desperation. It shocked his taste buds, being black, bitter and astringent. But being also devoid of either condensed milk or sugar, it was more palatable than the sweet glop he had drunk in Gomes’s office. He drained the glass, and suddenly realized that the great piston sound of the rain had ceased. I wonder when that happened? he thought, and put away his knife.
‘Do you know where I might find it?’ he asked. Mohan Das closed his eyes and slowly opened them again.
‘I think it will find you, senhorcapitão,’ the old man said quietly, and Da Silva felt a shiver along his spine despite the heat of the day.
The idea of silver bullets having once occurred to Zé, he found himself quite unable to shake it off. After a while he gave up even the pretence of studying and just stared into space. The gentle, almost imperceptible motion of the ship was soothing, but a strange sense of urgency was building in him, fuelled by his own imagination. He was supposed to be meeting his new friend Vik soon, who had promised (he was almost sure) to take him to see a man who could perform the famous Indian rope trick. But that could wait. Zé had already seen enough of India and its denizens to realize that their sense of time was a flexible notion, even in those who possessed timepieces, which Vik certainly didn’t.
He wondered later whether if Felipe, his fellow ‘prentice, had been around to talk to, he would even have been thinking about it. But it was Felipe’s watch, it being the captain’s policy to keep the two boys on separate duties in order to keep them out of mischief. Which precaution was patently not working right now.
At length Zé got up and, after checking that the coast was clear, padded aft in his bare feet to the captain’s cabin. His heart was pounding as he turned the door-handle and slipped inside.
Empty, the cabin smelled of his father in some indefinable way that was more than the odour of smoke. It was also close and airless, and Zé felt himself start to sweat again. This brought on the sudden dread that the captain might be able to detect that he had been in here by his smell, and he had to sit firmly on the irrational fear.
Zé looked at the tantalus with its anchored decanters of brandy, port and madeira without feeling tempted — an episode of sampling all three in unwise quantities at the age of eleven had rather put him off the idea of alcohol — and his gaze passed on to a framed photograph of his mother. He approached the desk still staring at this, and a drop of perspiration ran down his nose and fell on the blotter. A section of his father’s spiky handwriting, reversed, ran immediately into a blob, the black ink fringing to a strange bronze colour. Zé flinched back, muttering an oath that his mother would have boxed his ears for.
Nervously, he slid open the desk drawer, but feared to hunt through the chaos within lest he leave a sign of his presence. He fingered a silver hip flask — which he could not recall ever having seen his father use — but immediately rejected it as being too big, and then guiltily had to wipe his smeared fingermarks off it with his shirt-tail. The gun that he had expected to see was not there, but a box of ammunition for it was. Zé poked at it, finding ordinary bullets, and took one out carefully. He took another overview of the drawer’s contents, and sighed. As he closed it, his gaze lit on a key-fob.
And then the answer struck him, and he castigated himself for an idiot. He could use his lucky silver dollar.
When he slipped ashore, a silver bullet sat in his trouser pocket where previously there had been a coin.
Zé wormed through the crowds in search of Vik, and spotted him fairly quickly. He was tall for his age, which Zé estimated to be about a year older than him, and that made him easier to see in a throng of people.
‘Namaste,’ he said, and Vik replied with ‘Boa tarde.’ Which made Zé smile. Languages were such fun. He had been brought up in Venice, where Portuguese had been his family’s private tongue. And now they were based in Lisbon, the Venetian dialect of Italian served the same purpose. Any new language delighted him, though — the way everything fitted together so neatly — and had the added bonus that people genuinely seemed to appreciate his attempts to learn it. Even if his accent occasionally caused amusement.
Vik grinned at Zé, white teeth flashing (except for one gap), and Zé passed the other boy one of the captain’s cheroots. Along with alcohol, this was another vice he did not share with his father, also due to having sampled rather too much of it at an earlier age.
‘Come,’ Vik said, tucking the smoke somewhere in his grubby clothing, and set off at a pace that left Zé panting in his wake. The crowd flowed round them, gulped them down, digested them, and he was overwhelmed by its assault on all his senses. Smells, intriguing and inviting and revolting by turns. Some foods and spices were identifiable, and some made his mouth water while others seemed utterly disgusting. Sewage, too, was a familiar stink, as was the powerful odour of unwashed humanity. But there were a thousand others that were totally unrecognizable.
The noise, too, was indescribable, people shouting in a dozen or more different dialects, singing, chanting, perhaps praying, but what was the strange brazen instrument he could hear? Dogs he heard, too, and donkeys, goats and cows, but also something that — exciting thought — could be an elephant, perhaps. Of motorized traffic there was very little, the internal combustion engine not only being a relative newcomer but there being, also, a conspicuous lack of roads that vehicles thus powered could run upon. But he heard motor horns, nonethelesss: what else could that mechanical braying be?
Beggars thrust deformed limbs at him, hawkers everything from jewellery and little carved statues to fruits and flowers and sweetmeats and cups of glutinous tea. At times Zé nearly lost Vik in the tumult. There was so much to see that he almost wished he could, and drown in the sensory overload. Sweat was pouring down his face and body, but he hardly noticed it, except when it stung his eyes. A three-legged yellow dog, so agile it hardly seemed to miss its lost limb, darted by with a bone, black with flies, in its mouth, trailing a faint carrion stink of tainted meat; and a fat child stumbled by in half-hearted pursuit, squealing like a stuck pig.