Monday, 1st November 1897, Bombay
The smell reached Leroux before the cart did. After months on the North-West Frontier — frosted mornings, air so clean it cut — Bombay came at him thick and wet: a thousand meals sizzling in copper pans, the drains beneath, the foetid undertow he had taught himself not to name. Then, threaded through it, something else. He shaded his eyes as an ancient cart creaked past, the bullock lumbering to the tap of a barefoot driver’s stick, a sheen on the man’s skeletal back. A sheet covered the load. As the cart passed, a tangle of human feet slid into view over the tailboard, big and small, some of them unnaturally dark.
He crossed the road into a caustic haze that stung his eyes. Upwind, a fire-cart pumped a milky torrent through the second-floor window of a house wedged among its ramshackle neighbours. An officer in a white pith helmet directed the work with a baton while two Indians wrestled the hose, faces turned from the blowback. A heap of rags smouldered in the gutter. The locals stood off and watched, muttering, puzzled by the antics of the foreigner who set light to their belongings in the street.
Leroux quickened his pace under the shaded arcade of Elphinstone Circle, its classical order holding firm against everything around it, and climbed a wide flight of steps to the eight pillars of the Town Hall, seat of the Bombay Presidency. He counted the steps out of habit — thirty — into a marble foyer that echoed and gleamed, oversized windows drawing a cool draught through the building. He checked the scrap of paper in his pocket, climbed to the third floor, boots loud on the tiles, and stopped at an unmarked door. He faced the peephole and took off his battered slouch hat.
An unfamiliar face opened it, but behind the desk beyond, the white whiskers of Rear Admiral Lewis Beaumont spread in welcome above a ruddy complexion. It was the first time in over a year Leroux had seen the Director of Naval Intelligence.
‘Good to see you.’ Beaumont rubbed his meaty hands as the ceiling fan clicked overhead. Nobody in London was ever glad to see Leroux; it was why he had spent six months on the smuggling trails.
‘Shipping me home, sir?’
A twinkle in the blue eyes. ‘Not yet.’ He wouldn’t say why, and Leroux didn’t press. Both of them knew what Leroux had seen in Johannesburg, and how far from any parliamentary enquiry London wanted him kept. It suited Leroux too.
Beaumont opened a manila folder moored in the centre of the desk. ‘How was the Frontier?’
‘Hasn’t changed in a thousand years. The Afghans sell opium. The Indians sell them rifles. Nobody stops either.’
‘Still a cynic?’
‘Still alive.’
Leroux looked to the man who had let him in, standing to one side, hands clasped behind his back — a crisp wing collar under a black frock coat, alert eyes, thinning grey hair cut close.
‘Too young to be so grim,’ Beaumont said, warmth in the gravel of his voice. ‘Mr Vincent, Commissioner of Police. I’ve told him what you are. No need for discretion.’
Vincent’s handshake was firm and brief, and he did not trouble to hide what he thought of it. ‘I’m told you’re the unorthodox sort. We’ve had three inspectors on this and nothing to show for it. So now we try a man with no warrant, no uniform, and no record I’m permitted to read.’ He returned to his place by the wall. ‘The Admiral assures me you get results.’
‘I try not to disappoint.’
‘We have a problem,’ Beaumont said, ‘and I thought of you.’ He slid a photograph across the French polish: a man in his Sunday best, late twenties, European, intense-eyed. ‘Michel Dupont. He worked for Dr Waldemar Haffkine, at his laboratory here — they’ve been fighting these outbreaks. Haffkine believes the plague comes in through the docks. Dupont went to prove it. He’s gone missing.’
‘That’s a matter for the Commissioner,’ Leroux said.
‘We questioned everyone who saw him last,’ Vincent said, an edge on it. ‘We searched the docks. We searched the warehouse he was walking to. Nothing. I don’t send policemen down rat-holes on a hunch. The Admiral does.’
‘You came from London for a missing chemist?’ Leroux said.
‘I’d already left.’ Beaumont tapped the photograph. ‘Our measures aren’t working. The Indians blame us for bringing the plague and hate us for the way we fight it — the segregation camps, the house searches, the burning.’ He nodded at the window and the smoke beyond it. ‘The mills are idle, the poor are desperate, and there’s rebellion in the air. Then the one man following our one lead vanishes. I don’t believe in that kind of coincidence.’
Leroux turned the photograph so the young face caught the light. A kind mouth, serious eyes. ‘You think someone’s spreading it deliberately.’
‘I’m ruling nothing out. There are men who would give a great deal to see India catch fire.’
‘What do you want from me?’
‘Dupont. Retrace him. He found something, and if I’m right it killed him. Start with Haffkine.’
‘The docks?’
‘The first cases were all tied to the Victoria Docks — men who worked there, or visited. It still has the highest count. The disease spread outward from that point, but Haffkine swears the source is the docks themselves. Which says it comes off the ships. Except the ships and their crews have been quarantined for months, and still it comes.’
‘And Dupont was last seen —’
‘At the Customs House,’ Vincent said. ‘Asking after a single crate. Who it was consigned to, whether he could open it. They refused. He left, and no one saw him again.’
‘Consigned to whom?’
‘Christopher Walter’s warehouse, next door to Customs.’ Beaumont mopped his brow with a square of starched linen. ‘No shipper named. Only that it came from Hong Kong.’
‘We searched that warehouse,’ Vincent said. ‘No crate, no Dupont, and clerks who’d never heard of either. And I’ll thank you to remember that Walter is a respected man. Influential. I can’t turn his premises over twice on the strength of one missing chemist.’
‘What does Walter trade?’
‘Opium out to China. Porcelain and silk back,’ Beaumont said. Leroux had guessed before he asked.
‘You think the crate carries the plague.’
Beaumont exhaled. ‘It’s all we have. You’ve seen smuggling in the Johannesburg gold fields and on the Frontier. You’ll know it when you see it.’
‘You want me to find one poisoned crate in the second city of the Empire.’ Leroux set the photograph down; the eyes seemed more haunted for the handling. ‘Is this London’s idea, or yours?’
Beaumont pressed his lips against a grin. ‘You’re wasted on the Frontier.’
He did not make it an order, and they both knew he couldn’t. Little enough kept Leroux in the Empire’s service now — the work, mostly, and a man he had promised himself he would one day find. He wouldn’t find him on the Khyber. The fan pushed warm, damp air across his cheek. Somewhere below in the heat the plague was moving through the people who could not afford to leave. That was reason enough.
‘Where do I find Haffkine?’
Monday, 1st November, the laboratory
Those who could leave had left. The cab skirted the dock district as though it were a wound, the driver flicking the reins at a horse that trotted freely through half-empty streets. After weeks of picking up stony tracks, Leroux almost enjoyed the flap of the flimsy canopy and the jolt of the bench seat over unsprung wheels — until they passed the work of the plague commission.
A search party had a tenement surrounded. Soldiers held the crowd while men in aprons carried a woman out by her wrists and ankles, rigid, shrieking, and set her in the road so her house could be flushed with disinfectant. A second cart waited for the ones past shrieking, the quicklime already loaded, a haze of white dust hanging over it. A boy no older than eight sat on the kerb beside the cart, watching, waiting for someone who was not going to walk out. No one had thought to tell the child to look away. Leroux held his eyes until the cab carried him past. This was the mercy of Empire — the searches, the burning, the lime — and he understood, for the first time, why it might soon be answered with knives.
The cab set him down by the Gothic arches of the Victoria Jubilee Orphanage, its windows crammed with eager young faces, a banyan tree full of myna birds shrieking above them. He passed the iron gate and the bright eyes that followed him and slipped into the next doorway, the chatter thinning behind him as he climbed a narrow stair. Newly strung electrical cable straggled down the wall as though a cat had unravelled it. He followed the strand to a frosted-glass door lettered in gold leaf, standing ajar, and knocked.
‘Dr Haffkine?’
‘Entrez.’
Leroux answered in French — the inheritance of a half-French, half-Dutch father. ‘An unusual name for a Frenchman.’
‘Easier than my own. Vladimir Aaronovich Mordecai Wolff Chavkin, at your service. I was born in Odessa.’ A weary gesture. ‘Please.’
Leroux sank into a leather armchair. The doctor had been writing a letter; a drift of papers had been shoved aside to make room for it.
‘You’ve come about Michel.’
‘Yes.’
Haffkine screwed the cap onto his pen and shut his reddened eyes. ‘I’ve been trying to write to his wife. I can’t find the words. He was a good man. Careful.’
‘Those are the words.’
‘He knew that if this spreads, it takes the weak first. The young. The poor. I thought my vaccine would hold him.’ The doctor pressed his face into his hands, and a tear fell before he spoke again.
‘Your vaccine?’
‘For the plague. Experimental. The first trial was — encouraging. Michel took it, came through the reaction. I let myself believe he was protected.’
‘We don’t know he had the plague. He’s only missing.’
‘I am a scientist, Mr Leroux. I deal in probabilities.’ He gestured at the window, the city, the smoke. ‘A man walks into the heart of it and is never seen again. The authorities are frightened out of their wits. They tip the infected dead into a pit, cover them with lime, and call it done. Missing. What am I to write his wife? There is not even a grave to point her to.’
‘Nothing that’s turned up says he had the plague.’
‘Let us not pretend.’ Haffkine opened his fists. ‘The vaccine is not infallible. I gave it to him myself. He had the usual mild reaction and went down to the docks the next morning.’ He laid a hand flat on the stack of papers. ‘Perhaps half who take it are made safe.’
‘And the other half?’
‘React badly, or take the disease regardless. And die.’ He looked at his own hand. ‘I cannot forgive myself.’
He drew the top sheet from the pile and passed it across: a summary of the trial. Fourteen prisoners given a placebo, one survived exposure. Fourteen given the serum, seven lived. Leroux read it twice. Prisoners, then — men who could not refuse. He said nothing about that. Better odds than none, and even so, Dupont had walked into the docks knowing them.
‘He knew what he was risking. Whatever took him, it wasn’t your arithmetic. My job is to find what he found.’ Leroux set the sheet down. ‘Tell me where he was looking.’
‘Victoria docks. You know what he was looking for?’
‘A crate at the Customs House. Shipped from Hong Kong, consigned to Walter’s warehouse, declared as porcelain. Dupont wanted it opened; they refused. He left for the warehouse and never arrived. The police found nothing at either.’
‘Hong Kong.’ Haffkine sat forward. ‘Yes. That fits.’
‘Why?’
‘The plague has been in southern China for years — Hong Kong worst of all. And the trade between there and this port never stops.’ He drummed his fingers. ‘We know it began at the docks. We do not know how it moves once it is here. But I have an old colleague in Hong Kong who may. When last he wrote, he felt he was close.’
‘The Medical Service could use him. They’re scrubbing the whole city with alkali.’
Haffkine snorted. ‘Which kills what sits on a surface. That is not how it travels, and they will not hear it.’
‘This colleague…’
‘Alexandre Yersin. We were at the Pasteur Institute together, in Paris. He runs the laboratory in Hong Kong now, and he has done what no one else could — isolated the organism that causes the plague. Learn how it spreads, and you can stop it.’
‘Why would Dupont care about one crate?’
Haffkine spread his hands. ‘If he had found something worth reporting, he would have reported it — sick or not.’
‘Then let me finish what he started. If he found something, you’ll have a hero to write about, not a missing man.’
The doctor smoothed the letter flat, and some of the weight went out of his face. He turned to the flasks ranked on his shelf. ‘Some protection is better than none. Will you take the vaccine?’
One in two. Leroux thought of the pit and the lime and the boy on the kerb who had not been told to look away. A year ago he would have taken the needle without a thought for which half he fell in; he had not, then, greatly minded either way. Something had shifted in him since, though he could not have named it. He stood, his shirt peeling from the small of his back, and nodded — and was faintly surprised to find he wanted the good half. Haffkine turned from the shelf with the needle raised, a bead of serum trembling at its tip, bright in the light.
Monday, 1st November, Juye, Shandong Province, China
Father Stenz pushed the girl out of the back door and into the dark. Her hair hung tangled across her face and she held the hem of her torn dress bunched between her thighs as she went barefoot through the mud. He crossed himself, straightened his robe, and went to answer the front door.
Two visitors came in with the wind behind them, and he had to put his shoulder to the door to shut it. The gusts found every gap in the mismatched planks and worried at the paper pasted over the single small window.
‘A storm is coming,’ Stenz said to the taller of them.
‘Unfortunately, my son, you don’t know the worst of it.’ Father Nies removed his hat — a circular band of black velvet, three inches deep — and showed a shaved tonsure and temples shining in the torchlight, the grey hair drawn back from the crown into the short pigtail the Chinese called a queue. Only the rounded eyes and the unkempt beard gave him away as European.
Stenz thought of the last confession he had heard. He knew the worst of it better than his old mentor imagined. ‘It is good to see you,’ he said, and meant it. When he had first come out to China, it was Nies who had taught him everything.
‘How long has it been?’
‘A year this Christmas. Since I founded my own mission — and all thanks to you.’ In that year his mentor had aged: the face thinner, the ears somehow larger for it.
‘Father Henle is recovering from a fever,’ Nies said. He guided the second guest, who leaned on a staff and held his cloak close, to one of the two chairs at the small table, took the other for himself, and worked loose the toggles down the front of his tunic. ‘Bring some water.’ Nies laid a hand on Henle’s forehead. Drips fell from the old man’s hood.
Stenz went for the pitcher, smoothing the moustache that drooped at the ends in the Chinese manner and had taken him two years to raise on his smooth face. He dressed as his confrères did, in local clothes. It fooled no one up close, but at a distance, on their mangy mules, it might spare them the attention of bandits.
Father Henle roused himself. He unhooked his wire spectacles and let them hang on their string against his chest, rubbed his eyes, and took a sip.
‘I’m afraid this is all I can offer you,’ Stenz said, hurrying to one of the two cots in the corners, straw mats under the bedsheets. He set Henle’s bag down over a stain on the sheet that had not yet faded. Henle considered the roof, which would weep under the rain to come, and the bare earth floor, and something kindled in his eye. ‘This ranks among the better accommodations I have lately had the pleasure of.’
It was a rare honour to host Father Henle, and on All Saints’ Day of all days. This angular man with the lined brow had built the Shandong congregation to more than a hundred missions, and was known through the province for piety, charity, and judgement. Tonight they would honour the heroes of the Church, triumphant in heaven. Tomorrow, on Poor Souls’ Day, they would pray for the departed in purgatory with the Christians of the village. That should frighten a few more into the flock. And Stenz would see the penitent man again. A true believer, that one — not like most of the others. If a headman ruled against a villager in some dispute, the loser came to the mission, professed a little faith, and borrowed the backing of the Church. The headman’s authority was undermined, and he and the village seethed, and there was nothing they could do about it. Since the last treaty, Christians stood under the Emperor’s protection, deserving or not. The resentment sat over the district like the smell of the flooded fields.
Henle pushed the cup away with a small cough. ‘I have had more than enough water today.’
Nies leaned across and set two fingers on his companion’s wrist. ‘I administered the Kneipp cure this morning. A vigorous application of water, to restore the balance of the blood and drive out the fever. Most effective.’
Henle rolled his eyes. Stenz arranged his face into interest at the fashionable treatment of short sharp dousing with cold water.
‘There are worse trials coming,’ Henle said, reclaiming his wrist. ‘We must be careful. These are hard times, and the trouble is spreading through the province. Last week they beat a Christian, burned a church, and put about slander of the worst kind concerning me.’
‘When the Yellow River floods, only bandits grow,’ Nies said, untying his queue and shaking out his hair. ‘There have even been cases of the plague.’
Stenz glanced at Henle — the face flushed with its temperature — but Nies gave a small shake of the head, and Stenz turned to the clay stove set into the wall and knelt to lay a fire, though the night was mild. ‘Did you see bandits on the road?’
‘No,’ Henle said.
A light tap at the door made all three of them start. A Chinese boy, scarcely into his teens, bowed to the room, his smile reaching almost to his ears. He tossed two balls of pressed rice-husk and sawdust onto the fire and the flare of them lit the dimples in his cheeks.
‘This is young Zhao, one of my flock,’ Stenz said.
The boy began a second bow and abandoned it, his eyes going to the old priest. ‘Hanshinfu!’
‘Yes, it is I.’ Henle smiled, and his gaze settled on the brown beads hanging at the boy’s neck.
Zhao hopped from foot to foot.
‘Is that my rosary?’ Stenz said.
‘Only borrow! Hanshinfu priest beautiful to see!’
‘And where did you get that red scarf?’ The boy had a length of red cloth knotted at his waist like a sash.
‘Villager give me.’
Stenz grunted. He drew a few leaves of paper from his tunic and laid them on the table — salvaged pages of an English–Chinese dictionary. ‘My Chinese has been improving,’ he assured Henle, and turned to the boy to ask for the rosary back.
‘Tyi uo ko nyen tshu.’
Zhao blinked at him, then swept the table and wiped it with a cloth.
‘Tyi uo ko nyen tshu!’ Stenz said, louder.
‘Bu tung ti,’ the boy said, lower lip out, looking to Henle for a ruling.
‘The little tyke says he doesn’t understand you.’ Henle spoke to Zhao in Chinese, ordering food, and the boy skipped out singing, ‘Yan-kui-tze.’
‘He is teasing you, Foreign Devil,’ Henle said. ‘Your grammar is passable. Your pronunciation leaves something to be desired.’
Stenz gathered his papers. ‘Then I must redouble my efforts.’
Henle laid a liver-spotted hand on his arm. ‘Volo per diligentiam sarcire — as I told my own teacher, a good many years ago now. I will make up in diligence what I lack in talent.’ Stenz stood a fat log on its end for a stool. ‘Thank you, Father,’ he said, taking Henle’s hand and kissing it.
‘Now,’ Henle said. ‘Tell me about your congregation.’
Stenz clasped his hands, the wide flared sleeves of his shirt brushing the floor. ‘The wealthier villagers have taken the Cross. They believe you have great influence with the Governor.’
‘Why should they believe that?’
Stenz bowed his head. ‘I have sung your praises. I fear I sang too loudly. The rich men used to pay for the heathen festival; now, as Christians, they cannot. The heathens are angry.’
‘We will speak to them tomorrow,’ Henle said.
‘In Peking the Franciscan Bishop laughed at me,’ Stenz said, ‘when I told him I would preach in Shandong. He said I would come back quickly — without my head. It was a jest. But then I heard you were beaten on the road not long ago.’
‘God be praised that I have taken my share,’ Henle said, ‘and can now speak from experience.’
‘Bandits?’
Father Nies coughed. ‘Not only bandits. Hongmen. There are whispers that a Shaolin monk walks the earth again. That the Vast Family will rise.’
‘The Hongmen are here?’ Stenz said.
‘So the rumours go. And some of the mandarins now defy the Emperor and persecute us openly. A Christian was sentenced to a hundred strokes of the bamboo for nothing more than his faith. The Emperor is either unable or unwilling to govern his own subjects.’
Stenz bit his lip, hard enough to taste blood.
‘You are bleeding,’ Henle said.
The metallic taste only reminded Stenz that he did not know how to ask what he needed to ask.
‘Is something troubling you?’ Henle’s voice was level, his eyes patient.
Stenz edged forward on the log. ‘I cannot say.’
Nies and Henle exchanged a look. ‘Then do not.’
‘But this person—’
‘—cannot be identified in any way,’ Nies said.
‘You are bound by the seal,’ Henle said.
‘But what he saw. What he was asked to—’
‘—will the man be there tomorrow?’ Nies said.
Stenz stopped. Even to point at him sideways meant a monastery and perpetual penance.
‘You may advise him to speak outside the confessional,’ Henle said. ‘And we will say no more on it.’
Zhao returned with rice, a steaming stew, and tea.
‘Stay in the village tonight,’ Stenz told him, and dismissed him. With his guests in the only beds, Stenz would take the boy’s room by the gate.
Nies bent over the pot and sniffed suspiciously. ‘Catfish?’
‘Vegetables and tofu.’ Henle produced a small paper twist and shared out macaronis, which they softened in the broth. ‘A treat for Allhallowtide. Let us say grace.’
They talked of better news from Germany and scraped their bowls clean, then knelt at the chalice and chanted the Alleluia. Stenz felt the day’s weight go out of him, hour by hour, in the quiet of the prayers. As midnight came they recited the Requiem Mass for the Poor Souls. Tomorrow, he thought, would be the time — he would take the penitent aside and ask him to speak freely. The three men stood as the wind worked through the straw of the roof and the first rain hit the door.
‘Do the attacks worry you?’ Stenz asked his mentor.
‘I have prayed for the grace of martyrdom,’ Nies said. ‘Most likely it will not be granted me. It seems my blood is not judged red enough.’ He put an arm around Stenz. ‘But let us take no chances.’ His hand went into the wide sleeve and came out with a revolver that must have been holstered against his ribs. The metal was dull, pitted with rust.
Henle turned away from it, and his face had gone the colour of altar wax. ‘A soul that truly loves God lives always in peace. You would do better chasing the scorpions out of the room. One bit me only a fortnight ago.’ He closed his eyes, finding as ever the silver lining. ‘China is so bountiful it lacks for nothing. With those little devils about, I have no need of a cilice.’
Nies stifled a yawn. Stenz caught himself staring at the gun. Perhaps the Franciscan Bishop had not been joking after all. He bade them goodnight and crossed the tiny courtyard to the porter’s room by the gate where Zhao usually slept; the boy would be back in the village by now. The door slammed on the wind behind him and his hand hovered over the bolt. He reminded himself to trust in the Lord, left it unbolted, and unrolled a blanket that covered most of the floor. Rain drummed on the roof, steady as a blessing, and he wrapped his tunic into a pillow. No one would come out on such a night. He drew the blanket closer all the same, the Bishop’s jest going round in him like a dog settling.
On the edge of sleep he came up onto his elbows. The rain had stopped. Fat drops fell singly from the eaves and the crickets filled the spaces between. What had woken him? A sharp crack. Too sharp for thunder. Nies’s revolver? Footsteps passed his door, slapping through the puddles. Another crack, and the smack of a ball against brickwork — gunfire, no other sound like it. Stenz pushed himself back against the wall. Shouting outside, muffled, in words he could not divide. A body thumped against his door. Grunted. But did not try the latch.
‘Stay inside,’ a voice said through the wood. That Chinese Stenz understood. He crawled to the door and set his ear against it. A few yards off, something heavy went into the entrance of his house, once, twice, and then boots were kicking through the splinters. More voices. An order. Torchlight ran flickering through the cracks and lit the feet of the man outside — posted there, Stenz supposed, believing Zhao slept within, to keep the boy from witnessing or interfering. What did they want? He had given out what few alms he had only yesterday. The shouting swelled. They were inside the house now. What had become of Nies and his gun? Then a voice he knew, pitched to carry to the back of the largest cathedral: ‘Scha liao jin!’ A man has been killed. Henle — warning the Christians nearby, and warning them in Chinese, so that the bandits would not guess at other Westerners about. Even now, that presence of mind. Stenz screwed his eyes shut. A whimper got out of him. He pulled his knees in and reached up and slid the bolt home, slowly, so that it made no sound, and wiped his sleeve across his mouth, tasting salt. He sat with his arms around his knees while men went charging through the small chapel, the kitchen. A last scream cut through it all and stopped.
‘Where is Father Stenz?’ someone called, and then a run of curses beyond his Chinese. They still believed the one unsearched room held only the boy. But it was only a matter of time. Stenz curled tighter. Nothing he could do would make any difference. He told himself so twice.
New shouts, from beyond the courtyard — and his heart lifted, because these were Christian voices. The man at his door pushed off from it and was gone, chased away by the yelling as it closed in. Stenz reached up and worked the bolt and opened the door an inch. Villagers he knew were banging staves together in the lane, roaring their victory. He came out among them and hoped they took his tears for joy.
He stumbled to his house, his bare toes finding the mud. The blood had not yet gone into the earth where the two priests lay. Nies had made it as far as Henle’s cot and fallen face down, one arm stretched out to his friend. He was dead. Henle lay on his back, his feet still touching the floor, breath coming in halts, blood in bubbles at his mouth. His eyes moved at the sound of Stenz’s voice. His hands were at his belly, holding in a twisted mess of gut; one hand was cut to the bone where he had tried to take the sword that opened him. His blood had soaked the bed and drowned the older stain. Stenz gagged, and knelt, and began the absolution, anointing the head and the hands, which were cold and damp, praying for recovery and for salvation in the same breath. A faint smile moved on Henle’s darkened lips as Stenz stumbled through the last rites. The old man folded his hands at his breast, his shirt dyed through every shade of crimson, and his lips moved. Stenz leant in. It came as barely a whisper.
‘Sanguis martyrum est semen Christianorum.’
The blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians. There was a light in Henle’s eyes at the end that Stenz would never afterwards be free of — the look of a man setting out on the mission he had prayed for. Stenz drew the lids down. His ears rang with his own shame. He would never have such courage, and now he knew it.
Stenz slumped against the bed. The revolver was gone. So were his purse of paper money and the chalice. But this had not been robbery; the manner of the killing said something else. The village headman appeared in the torchlight, grim-faced. He held out a lacquered scroll-case, dirty from where it had fallen, and unrolled a single sheet of bamboo paper. The brushwork was beautiful. It was Stenz’s name.
The headman’s brow creased. He reached to the door jamb and worked free a scrap of cloth snagged on a nail, and held it up to the torch: silk, with the sheen still in it, red. His face changed.
‘The Society of the Great Swords,’ he said. ‘They came for you.’
Wednesday, 3rd November, Bombay
Beaumont had taken him a room at the Royal Bombay Yacht Club. The service was discreet, which was a mercy, and the curtains held off the clamour from the fishermen’s shacks along the pier below. Leroux doused the lamp, pushed away a half-eaten plate of yellow dhal and rice, and lay back on the cool linen. He swallowed, and the swallow hurt.
Was this how it began? Haffkine’s needle two days gone, and now a heat behind the eyes and a throat like a rasp. One in two. He drank off a glass of water and made himself lie still. The fever came up over him in the dark like a tide across a flat, and he let it take him, too tired to be afraid of it.
He surfaced before dawn with the sheets wrung out under him and his head, when he tested it, clear. The fever had broken; he had drawn the long straw. Somewhere in the small hours Lara had come and gone, the way she did, and for once he had not gone chasing her into the dark. He got up, threw the curtains open on the cry of gulls following the high-prowed boats that rowed in on the calm of the dawn, and tipped the last of the water jug over his head. His joints ached. The warehouse was the last of his leads. He would take care with it. Watch it first to see who visited before searching.
Breakfast smoke hung over the streets as the driver took his horse past the Bombay High Court, a great gothic castle of dark basalt. They rattled along beside the mass of iron track reaching out from Victoria Terminus, lashing the country down north to south and east to west. A statue of a woman with a torch and a wheel stood on the station’s huge octagonal dome. The driver could not say who she was. Leroux knew her name was Progress.
The Customs House squatted before a small but growing stack of crates, porters already at their steady toil between the piers. The office would not open for two hours, so Leroux walked on to Walter’s warehouse — a plain two-storey brick building, long, tiled, with wide doors set every twenty yards and no windows. Nothing like the wood-and-corrugated-iron sheds that held cheap goods. At the back an iron staircase came down from a small door in the upper storey. Behind the building lay a siding where bales of cotton in coarse burlap had been unloaded beside a railcar, waiting on the mills of Manchester. Leroux found himself a shaded perch among the bales and made himself comfortable, the goods entrances along the side all in his view, cranes and the odd mast rising beyond the roofline. According to Vincent, the customs officer had no idea why Dupont had troubled over that one crate; the paperwork was clean. Officials looked away readily enough when a merchant undervalued his cargo to dodge the duty — but the contents here had been declared as porcelain, which was dear. Something else, then. The weight. The look of it. A smell, perhaps.
The plain black door at the top of the stairs looked the likeliest way in — lighter than the goods doors, and set where a man could work it unseen. A European foreman came out, ground a cigarette under his boot, shuttled down the stairs and rattled the chains off a padlock to open a bay. The warehouse ground into motion. Gangs of porters hauled chests out into the heat, their sandals raising the dry-season dust. Opium for China. Leroux took a swig from his water bottle. He had grown up on the veld, running wild with his friend Tom, and from a branch in a tree the two of them had watched lions stalk springbok, waiting for the moment to take the weakest of the herd. The hours went by and no one came for the cotton. His mind drifted back to the little farm and the mission school where his mother had taught while his father was away in the gold mines. Then it came.
A man stepped out onto the stairs, fair under his stubble. A stray, left the herd. He blinked, shaded his eyes, and swept the yard — and caught, a fraction too late, on Leroux in the shadows before finishing his sweep a touch too smoothly. He sat down on the top step, drew a small tin from his pocket, lit something in it, and held a little pipe over the flame. A long draw. He rested his head against the wall, blind to the sun on him. Another draw, and he stood slack-limbed and swayed back inside.
A European would have rank in that building. A man who sampled his own product had troubles, and this one looked hunted with it. The weak link. Leroux wet his cracked lips and screwed the cap back on the bottle. More chests left; none arrived. The shadow of the bales stretched to the warehouse wall and the man had not come out. As the day wore down Leroux drew off, out of sight of the door, crossed the tracks, and doubled back to an empty freight car behind the bales. The slide of its door groaned and put up a crow, kraa-ing into the last of the sunset. He climbed in, worked over to the far side, cracked the door, and settled to his watch again. The porters melted away; the cargo doors banged shut, bolts and chains and padlocks going home. A lantern swung along the wall from the hip of a nightwatchman, turned, and went off between the buildings, its beam wandering.
A metallic rattle brought Leroux’s eyes to the staircase door. A line of light widened; a man looked left swept right, paused at the bales and then continued. He was the height and build Leroux had hoped for. The man came quickly down the stairs and hurried off behind the warehouses. Leroux slid from the car and kept to the far side of the tracks, holding him in sight as the buildings dwindled and grew shabbier. The man ducked into the first of a row of lean-tos: half a dozen tables under a palm-leaf roof, a counter at the back. He wriggled onto a stool and a turbaned barman with glistening arms filled him a glass. It was not tea, and he had not come for the company. Leroux ignored the reek of old sweat and the faces turned up from a day of hauling boxes in the sun, and set his hands on the sticky counter beside his mark. The man drank without looking up, the grime on his collar days old.
‘I’ll have one of those,’ Leroux said, in the smattering of Urdu he had off the Frontier, sure the barman — a Sikh, a northerner — would follow it. The Sikh narrowed his eyes, towering, and glanced at the warehouseman. At the smallest nod he poured. Leroux sipped. Sweet, strong: the fermented sap of the coconut palm they called toddy, the cheapest way there was to forget your troubles.
‘You police?’ the man said, a waver in it.
‘No.’
The man studied the bottom of his glass and finished it. The Sikh filled it again. Leroux felt eyes between his shoulder blades; they were the only two Europeans in the place and the barman knew the warehouseman.
‘Why are you following me?’
‘Looking for a friend.’
The man snorted. ‘You got friends drink in here?’
‘A friend who took an interest in your warehouse.’
‘Doesn’t ring a bell.’ He set the glass down with studied care. Even through the opium his eyes were strained, his face tight.
‘A scientist. Not police, not customs. He risked his life trying to stop this plague spreading. He had a wife and a daughter.’
The glass shook as the man’s grip closed on it, and he brought it to his lips. ‘You talk like a policeman.’
‘I can help you.’
‘I doubt that.’
The Sikh came back with the bottle. ‘The Gora giving you trouble?’
A small shake of the head, and the man tapped the rim of his glass.
‘They say it’s good against the plague.’
Leroux straightened. ‘You worried about that?’
The man clung to the edge of the counter, chewing his lip, his head giving little twitches, in conference with himself.
‘He came to the warehouse,’ Leroux said. ‘Didn’t he?’
The man made a fist.
‘The police needn’t know. I’ll keep you out of it.’
He hunched over his elbows, shaking his head, his eyes wet in the sooty light of the tallow.
‘I think you’ve been near the plague. It can be treated, caught early. The plague. That’s what the scientist was trying to stop — that’s why he came, and it’s why I’m here.’
The man screwed his eyes shut and rubbed at his face as if to work the tension out of it.
‘Any fever? Headache? Swelling — the neck, the armpit, the groin?’
He wrapped his arms round himself, rocking on the stool, chin buried.
‘He made me do it,’ the man whispered.
Leroux glanced back. The locals had lost interest.
‘Got me on the poppy. Made me do it.’
Leroux leaned in. ‘Do what?’
‘Hide the crates.’
‘The scientist didn’t care about smuggling.’
The man shook his head. ‘I know. Not those crates — that’s just the trade. But when the Chinaman came there were special ones. Nobody knew but him and me.’
‘What became of those?’
‘Meant to bypass customs altogether. But the Chinaman took sick, and I was on the poppy and forgot, and one went to the Customs House by mistake. That’s where your man saw it.’
The man drew a shaky breath. ‘None of this should ever have happened,’ he mumbled, sagging. Leroux laid a hand on his shoulder.
‘Your name?’
‘Jones.’
‘What happened to the scientist, Jones?’
‘He … killed him.’
‘Over the crate.’
Jones nodded, eyes pinched shut.
‘What’s in it?’
‘Don’t know. But I’m to find out tonight. The Chinaman told me to fetch a cart, take the crate to Victoria Terminus, break it open behind the kitchens and leave it.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘In the warehouse, with the crate. Sick. The plague.’ He looked up. ‘Is that the crate’s doing?’
‘I think so.’
‘He’ll be wondering where I’ve got to.’ Jones hugged himself. ‘He’ll kill me if I don’t do it. The police will—’ He shuddered at the thought of a Bombay gaol. ‘And Mr Walter has a terrible temper.’
‘Help me, and none of that happens.’
The man was putty. The Chinaman had hooked him to bend him, and now he was drowning in fear and guilt and hunting a way out. ‘This scientist. What was his name?’
‘Dupont. Michel Dupont.’
Jones fished out his clay pipe; Leroux caught his hand.
‘Not now.’
‘He’s in the harbour. I — I can’t go back there.’
‘Just get me in. For Dupont. You owe him that.’
Jones edged off the stool. Leroux got him upright and steered him to the door and back towards the warehouse, an arm across his shoulders, talking low to hold him together, praying his nerve would keep. Step by step the man firmed under his hand, and made up his mind. As they reached the corner of the building, Jones held up his hand. ‘Wait,’ he whispered.
Jones went out and hailed the nightwatchman. A word or two passed, and Jones climbed the stairs while the watchman turned back to his round. Leroux slipped across and up the rusting steps as keys jangled above him. Inside, Jones felt about in the pitch dark, found a lantern, struck a match. Below, chests of opium ran off into the gloom, stacked neat on one side; woven bamboo caskets lined the other. Jones went down the stair with a hand on the banister, pausing to listen, throwing the light to the rear where the floor changed from beaten earth to plank and a row of office doors stood.
He took hold of a hatstand in the corner of the first office and drew it towards him. Beside Leroux a wall of shelving swung out, concealed rollers trundling and leaving no mark on the hardwood. A narrow staircase went down, the wall levered open by the hatstand. Jones put a finger to his lips and went first. Leroux picked up a crowbar and followed.
‘I’m back,’ Jones called, pushing aside a drape at the foot of the stair. The lantern swept a room the full width of the warehouse, holding perhaps a tenth of the crates above. Sturdy pillars carried the ceiling; the air was fresh, ventilated somehow. Jones threaded between the crates to the back wall, knocked on a panel, caught a small handle and worked a board up, back an inch, and aside. Jones stepped through the small doorway, more of a hatch. Leroux held back in the dark.
‘Zhang? It’s me.’
A rasping breath. ‘What kept you?’
‘Trouble finding a cart. Stay where you are — I’ll manage.’ Behind his back Jones’s hand beckoned.
Leroux slipped into the gap and crouched at Jones’s back. A small room, the air foul. One crate stood by a pillar to the right, where Jones set his lamp. On a bed in the left corner the Chinaman lay under a filthy sheet, skin shining in the light of a second lantern guttering on a chair beside him. Purple blotches ran up his neck above a sweat-soaked red scarf, some risen to swollen yellow heads. The Chinaman put out a hand, feeling for his lamp with his eyes shut, and the fingertips were blackened, some of the nails gone. The smell reached Leroux and turned his stomach — gangrene. The eyelids came open. The beam of Zhang’s lantern jumped to Jones’s face, fixed in terror, and Leroux was a half-second slow going out of the light.
‘Traitor!’
The Chinaman rolled to his side, his free arm coming up with a Colt. For an instant Leroux had the dead eye of the barrel on him, the cylinder turning, and threw himself right. A flash. The blast shook the room. Jones slammed into the partition, the thin wood bursting, and went through it after the bullet, leaving only his calves and boots hanging in the room.
The Chinaman fell back with the recoil, panting. Leroux pressed tight behind the pillar and weighed the crowbar in his hand. Four yards, and no crossing them before the man got off a shot. He put a palm to the crate: the woven bamboo shifted easily, no protection at all, no porcelain in it — it would not stop a Colt at any range, but it hid him. The pillar was solid, barely wide enough. The Chinaman fired again; splinters rained from the support above Leroux’s head. The gap in the partition lay closer to hand. Jones’s lamp burned on top of the crate, and even doused, there would be no avoiding from the glare of the other. The Chinaman’s breath rattled and wheezed. He would not trust his legs to carry him the short distance and end it, and seemed content to wedge himself in the corner, the gun laid over his knees, covering the way out.
Stalemate. Sweat ran down Leroux’s cheek. He worked to steady himself and clear his head. He ran a finger over the resin seal of the crate — unbroken — and pulled the docket pinned to its side. Inspected. Porcelain. A lie. He put his ear to the bamboo and, under the man’s rasp, was sure he heard scraping.
‘Can’t you keep quiet a minute,’ he called.
A rattling laugh came back. ‘Yan-kui-tze. You Westerners have no patience. Your time will come soon enough.’
Leroux pressed his ear closer, worked the claw of the crowbar into the seal and prised. He kept his head down; he did not need to look. Scratching, and now a squeak. Rats. Were they spreading the plague with rats? The bamboo had been waterproofed with animal glue, and someone had drilled small holes near the top — near invisible, but air enough.
‘Can you hear me, Yan-kui-tze? You’re too late.’
Leroux settled on his haunches, rocking to the beat of the Zulu war dance Tom had taught him in their boyhood fights, and braced to lunge for the gap. The man’s reactions would be dulled; he told himself so. He balled up the docket and pitched it out. The Colt roared, and the crate rang with a metal note. The man had not fired at the paper — he had struck the front corner, low, and torn a hole clean through. Curls of sharp metal splayed out: a tin lining, to stop the rats gnawing free. Another shot widened it, another bullet spent. A whiskered nose came questing through into the new air. It burst in a spray of blood and splinters as the Chinaman fired again, cackling, as the hole opened wider and the first rat wriggled loose. Leroux brought the crowbar down and clipped its tail, but it was gone. The next ran over the tool and under the bed. One bullet left.
The man was dying, only not fast enough. Leroux had to stop the rats, and get to Beaumont with what he’d found. Quarantine the cargo coming in. Trap what was already loose. Keep them, at the least, off the railway — from Victoria Terminus the plague would run through all India like fire through dry grass. One bullet. He might come off with a graze.
‘I can fetch you a doctor.’
A sick laugh. ‘No doctor saves us now. Come out. I’ll make it quick.’
‘I prefer slow. Three-score-and-ten slow.’
‘You’ll beg for it.’ The cackle again.
‘I’m vaccinated. The disease can’t touch me.’
The sheet stirred — and then glass shattered by Leroux’s side and kerosene came racing across the floor in flame, the fumes for a brief mercy against the stench. The Chinaman had thrown his lamp.
‘You hide like cornered rat! Come out, Yan-kui-tze!’
Fire climbed the pillar and the partition; the glue on the crate flared and singed Leroux’s hair. Rats poured out, streaking for air. One bullet. Leroux flung the crowbar at the man and in the same motion swept the lamp off the crate and hurled it at the ceiling over the bed. The oil came down in rain and the flames ran across the sheets. The Chinaman shot upright, the broken lamp in his lap, arms beating, nightshirt alight, the bed a hissing inferno. His eyes found Leroux, huge with hatred. He jammed the muzzle of the Colt into his mouth, and the scream cut off, and the back of his head went against the wall.
Leroux scrambled up, arm across his face, choking in the smoke. Fire was already running the ceiling, drawn through into the outer room. He dragged his jacket over his head and dived through the gap, rolled in the dirt, threw his jacket off and beat at his smouldering trousers. Rats ran over him, their shrieking thin under the roar of the blaze; the stacked crates popped and spat above. He gained the stair, took the cool air, and slammed the door on the furnace behind him — it would not hold the fire long, but it might pen the rats a while. Sparks came up through the planking and swirled into the rafters. He went up the next flight two and three at a time to the back door, and blessed Jones for leaving it unlocked, and fell out onto the landing gasping.
‘Hey! You! What’s all that banging?’ The nightwatchman’s lantern was full in his eyes.
‘Call the fire service!’ The place had to burn; only let it burn alone.
‘Where’s Jones?’
Leroux leaned over the rail. ‘He’s not coming.’
‘Who are you?’ The watchman had his baton up, but his gaze went past it to the smoke boiling out into the night, and his jaw with it. ‘That’s thousands of pounds of goods going up!’ He stood rooted as Leroux came down to him.
‘Everything in there has to burn. Don’t let a soul open those doors.’
Beaumont pulled off his striped tie and dropped into a leather couch that sighed under him.
‘I told you to look into the warehouse — not burn the bloody thing to the ground.’
‘Couldn’t be helped, sir. I barely got out with my life.’
‘Spare me the melodrama, your hat’s scarcely singed. And half of Bombay was in the arms of Morpheus with the smoke. I trust you found something to show for it.’
‘Rats.’
‘Rats?’
‘Rattus rattus, to be exact. Black rats, in a crate. I’ve told Haffkine. He’s had a letter from a colleague in Hong Kong, a Dr Yersin, confirming that rats carry the plague bacillus in their blood. But we still don’t know how they pass it to humans.’
‘And this crate was in some hidden part of the cellar.’
‘The whole cellar was hidden — most of it given over to smuggled cargo. Walter must have known that much; you can’t build a cellar like that, nor move that volume through it, and not know. They paid a customs officer to look away and skipped the duty. But Jones — the manager — told me only he and the Chinaman knew of the one crate Dupont was after, and Dupont came on it by accident. That crate was never meant to touch the Customs House at all. It was kept apart, in a walled-off room at the back where the Chinaman slept.’
‘Then Walter likely knows nothing of it,’ Beaumont said, his relief soured with frustration.
‘And Jones and the Chinaman are both dead.’
Beaumont steepled his fingers. ‘Our merchants all keep a counterpart in China to run that end of the trade. Walter’s man, I believe, is Comprador Kwang. It may have come from there.’
‘Nothing on the paper said where it shipped from, but Jones said the Chinaman came out on the ship with the crate, like an escort — and not for the first time. This one reached the Customs House by mistake; the Chinaman was too far gone with the plague to turn it aside. Whatever Dupont saw — the drilled air-holes, a sound, a smell — it was enough to make him ask questions. He went on to the warehouse. Jones lured him into the back room, the Chinaman killed him, and Jones put the body in the harbour and took back the crate.’
‘And Jones was to run the crate to Victoria Terminus.’
‘And empty it behind the kitchens.’
‘Good God.’ Beaumont sat forward. ‘From there it would spread everywhere, and quick.’
‘That seems to be the idea. Someone is doing this on purpose.’
‘The last thing on earth I wanted to be right about.’ Beaumont stroked his beard, his cold eyes going to the window and the sweep of Elphinstone Circle, its Greek and Roman graces bright in the sun. Those civilisations had gone to dust. ‘Empire is dear, and India pays for it — the jewel in the crown, the one colony that turns a profit and then some. Take it away and the whole edifice comes down. Someone means to arrange precisely that.’
‘The Chinaman burned the place down on himself and put a bullet through his own mouth rather than talk. Whoever’s behind it is a fanatic.’
‘Every source I have has come up empty. And who isn’t envious of the Empire? The Tsar. The Kaiser. The French, always. But I’ve nothing to take hold of.’
‘The trail runs to Hong Kong.’
‘Revenge for the Opium Wars, eh? — They wouldn’t dare. They’re weaker now than they have ever been and the Emperor’s young and sickly.’
‘Could be anyone trading through the place.’
Beaumont rocked back and drummed his fingers on the mahogany. ‘You should know Walter is on the warpath. I lunched with him at the Byculla Club — apoplectic; the poor devil could scarcely get his kedgeree down. He allows some cargo may not have paid its full duty, but there’s a loss adjuster from the insurers nosing about, and the nightwatchman’s given him a European in a Boer slouch hat. Walter wants blood and he can make life difficult. Best you make yourself scarce.’
‘Is Hong Kong far enough?’
‘I’d say exactly far enough. HMS Spartan sails tonight.’
To find out what happens next to Peter Leroux — and who is deceiving who — the full novel is available now.
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