Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 77, No. 4. Whole No. 451, March 25, 1981

The Shanghai Gold Bars by Ta Huang Chi

This is the 575th “first story” to be published by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine... a bold debut in the world of fictional detection; even before the author knew his first story would be published, he planned to make his detective, Feng Da-wei, a series character...

The author, Ta Huang Chi, was born in 1927. He has been a ship’s officer and a guided-missile engineer. At present he is writing and illustrating a book on Chinese chess. He has no hobbies, but admits he “dabbles in Chinese poetry, computer programming, and a bit of clay sculpting when the mood is upon me”...

Feng Da-wei was born in July of 1900. The exact date is unknown, but his baptismal certificate and the records of the Evangelical Gospel Order in St. Louis, Missouri indicate July 20th. This date is surely accurate within a day either way, since the Feng baby was only two or three days old at the time he came into the keeping of Reverend and Mrs. Myles Stainford.

In May of that year the Stainfords received a letter at their mission in Lingtan ordering them to report at Shanghai in August to act as resident instructors to newly arrived groups of missionaries — missionaries whose knowledge of China and the Chinese consisted of little more than colorful fictions current in the American midwest. The letter had taken a month to reach them.

In early June the Reverend and Mrs. Parkinson arrived in Lingtan to replace the Stainfords. They arrived with several cases of Bibles and some ugly, but unconfirmed, rumors.

In July, satisfied that his replacement was now familiar with the mission and local conditions, Reverend Stainford and his wife started their long journey to the coast. It would take them twelve days, traveling by mule cart, to reach the first of several rivers that would eventually carry them to Shanghai.

On the evening of the tenth day they reached what once had been a small farming village, but was now gray ashes on dark brown earth. Black, wide-winged birds circled above, while others strutted, grotesquely fed, across the corpses in the street. Here, the ugly rumors had become an uglier reality. They searched for survivors and found two — a young woman, unconscious, one out-flung arm charred to the bone, with a newborn baby clutched in the other. The baby slept fitfully on the mother’s bloodstained blouse.

They made night camp near a small stream several li beyond the village where they took turns sleeping and watching over the woman. Myles Stainford was beside her when, during the fifth hour of starlight, she opened her eyes, called softly for her husband, and died. Two days later three weary people reached the river.

After selling the cart and both mules, they took a mud-floored room at an inn and set about arranging for supplies and a sampan to take them downriver at first light.

Later, on that powder-dry Chinese night, the Reverend and Mrs. Stainford hurried across the walled courtyard of the district magistrate’s yamen, bid a polite tsai chen to the frightened watchmen at the gate, and walked back down the dusty street leading to the inn. The elderly magistrate had confirmed the wild tales they had heard along the waterfront.

After the first minutes of prescribed polite questions of health and family had been mutually asked and replied to, one terrible phrase had dominated the conversation — I Ho Chuan — The Society of Righteous Fists. The English-language press had dubbed them “Boxers” and had not taken them too seriously in the beginning. Now the whole world would hear of them.

The Boxers had risen in their thousands, cut all lines of communication between the capital and the sea to the east, and even as they spoke, were besieging the foreign legations in Peking. Missionaries, the hated Je-so teachers, were being hunted down and killed. Missions burned. Chinese converts butchered.

“You must think of your wife. Flee to a treaty port, honored friend,” the magistrate had said. “You are not safe even in my own poor house. Your mission at Lingtan is now ashes and the Je-so, Parkinson, is dead with all his family and servants. Liao pu te! Fearful, fearful!”

It is written that God moves in mysterious ways. Reverend Stain-ford never questioned these ways and never, like some, cried out, “Why me, Lord?” It wasn’t lack of faith that stayed his words but fear of the booming reply, “Why not, Stainford?” This explains, in part, why a certain Chinese baby did not end up in a specific church orphanage when the Stainfords finally arrived in Shanghai that August.

Martha Stainford loved babies. Myles Stainford liked children but disliked babies, and this particular baby reminded him of a boiled Chinese owl. Whenever he mentioned the church orphanage as the proper place for the baby — after all, the church would certainly be sending them back to the interior when their present work was complete — a look would come in her eyes. A look of such pained longing that he reluctantly agreed to keep the baby until they were assigned to a new mission. He also agreed that David would be a fine name for the baby. From the mother’s dying words he knew that the family name was Feng. David, in Chinese, became Da-wei, and it was as Feng Da-wei that he was baptized on the following Sunday.

In the months that followed, Myles Stainford went about his work content in the knowledge that his role of temporary father would soon end.

It ended later at night that Christmas Eve when they were told to leave for Kwangsi province before the Chinese New Year began on February 19th. Sometime around midnight Martha had quietly got out of bed. Half an hour went by. He found her sitting crosslegged among the small presents around their candle-lit Christmas tree. She was staring at a floppy-eared, gingham-vested bunny propped at the base of the tree as she rocked the sleeping David in her arms. Her face was that of a mother holding her child for the last time, waiting for that nameless, uninvited thing that never knocks and, without speaking, takes away all light forever. Moving quietly, Myles sat down beside his wife and gingerly took the child into his own arms.

On February 14th in 1901, the Stainford family arrived in Kwangsi. The unpacking of a floppy-eared, gingham-vested rabbit was duly noted by an intelligent pair of small dark eyes peering from a teakwood cradle...

A rain squall born of the great Tai Hu Lake left its watery womb at noon, swept east in a broad gray pattern across farmlands, blotted from sight the towering pagodas, and wove itself into the latticework of canals that made Soochow the Venice of China. The advance winds of the storm played onto a checkerboard of courtyarded homes, sending a foam of flower petals after the specks of birds fleeing to quieter horizons.

At one of these comfortable, walled homes the wind flicked off a heavy roofing tile and planed it clattering along the eaves of the study.

Two men sat in the paneled room below the storm. Each man knew only the sound of his pen nib scraping across paper.

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.

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.”

The thin file on Alvin Arthur Beazley indicated no specialty and, for that matter, no particular talent. It was the sad portrait of a loser as inept at his dreamings as at life. He had been stationed in the Philippine Islands as a corporal in the Quartermaster Corps from which he was dishonorably discharged in 1922 after serving ninety days in the stockade for misappropriation of government supplies. Big dreams. Petty theft.

His dreams of making it big led him to Shanghai, where no passports were required and no questions were asked. He got a job as a warehouse superintendent for an American export company. His quartermaster experience brought him a raise. He began to dream of bigger and better jobs. The dreams continued, but the job ended abruptly when his employers discovered that he knew more about boats with false bottoms than an honest employee should. Big dreams. Petty theft.

“And where,” David inquired of the room, “is the chance path this loser found that led him to bars of gold and the muddy Whangpoo?”

For at the end of this path was a canvas vest containing sixty-three Shanghai gold bars, each weighing ten Chauping taels. These three-and-a-half-inch standard bars were a half inch thick and nearly an inch wide. Such bars were recently quoted at $238.19 on the Shanghai Gold Stock Exchange. David was about to assay a few guesses just as Gordon returned from Madame Wu’s.

He was smartly dressed for an evening on the town. There was a trace of lipstick on his left cheek. A yellow Texas rose sprouted from the buttonhole of his lapel.

“You certainly look the better for wear, Gordon. Shall I put the flower in some fresh water?”

Gordon took off his coat and sat down. “It is altogether obvious, Mr. Feng, that you are a young and unpolished heathen.” He helped himself to a cup of tea. “If it weren’t for the fact that I have spent my life performing good works among the less fortunate such as yourself, I would bounce this teapot off your benighted skull.” He freed himself from a dark blue tie and unbuttoned his collar. “The evening was a fruitful one. I shall now report to you on it — omitting only those things a true gentleman never discusses.

“According to Virginia — Madame Wu to you — our Mr. Beazley had been a frequent visitor. He was known for a loose mouth and a tight wallet. Up until a few weeks ago he was a Friday-night regular. No one in the place — I checked with the bartender and a few others — saw him again until last Wednesday night. They remember it well because he actually bought a round of drinks and tipped the bartender.”

Gordon paused and raised a finger. “Now here’s the interesting part. That same evening he shared a bottle of house champagne with Madame Wu. Between bouts of the bubbly he hinted that his ship was about to come in.

“In a jocular sort of way Madame Wu asked him if he meant his ship of fortune. To this, Beazley replied, ‘If that’s what you call a Ningpo junk then the answer might be...’ ” Gordon’s voice trailed off as he shrugged.

“Go on,” David urged. “Might be what?”

“That’s as far as he got. Some drunk wandered over from the bar and Beazley clammed up. A few minutes later he got up and left. Poof! Never seen again.”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” David mused. “I imagine Madame Wu attached no more value to this hollow pretense of great expectations than it deserved at the time. He had probably bored his acquaintances with similar stories of impending great wealth until no one took him seriously.” He told Gordon what he had learned from Professor Linwood and then added, “I talked to Captain Huang Liu of the Harbor Police. He questioned people in the area where Beazley’s body was found and learned nothing. Not surprising. Beazley could have been killed anywhere ashore and his body dumped in the river.”

“Or killed on a boat,” added Gordon. “They could have quietly slipped him into the Whangpoo River without a ripple or witness.”

“True enough. Now to the question of motive. It would appear that Beazley was killed for the gold bars, although there may be something beyond that.”

“What brought that to mind? There is more than enough motive in the gold bars.”

“On the surface, Gordon, I have to agree. But why gold? Beazley could have just as easily withdrawn the money in paper currency — it would certainly have weighed a lot less. No, I have a feeling that the form of this sudden wealth was no less important than the wealth itself. The Shanghai Gold Stock Exchange on Kiukiang Road is the largest trading center dealing in these gold bars. There are others, including the Chartered Stock and Produce Exchange. Standard bar gold is a common unit of exchange in banking and international finance. In many cases it is better than money in China.”

Gordon took a few thoughtful puffs at his unlit pipe. “That would imply that Beazley had indeed hit on something big. Maybe too big. Where does that leave us?”

“I don’t know.”

Gordon stood up and draped his coat over his arm. “Maybe Ketty will remember something that might help. We’re having breakfast at the Cathay tomorrow. Care to join us?”

David shook his head. “I missed Lao Erh today. If I leave early enough in the morning, I can probably catch him before he sets out upriver. Ask Mr. Ketty if we could meet for dinner tonight.”

An early-morning fog muffled the sights and sounds along the Whangpoo River. Shop banners hung limply in the gray light filtering down through the mists. An occasional sound came from ships anchored on a darker grayness, where sailors waited for the sun and an idling wind to set them free. Only a few carts moved on the street outside the entrance to the Inn of the Eight Immortals. Here the dank airs of the river yielded at the door to the warmer air and richer smells of charcoal fires and simmering food.

David gave these an appreciative sniff. When his stomach voted one to nothing, he entered and seated himself at a back bench near the open doorway that led from the eating area to the inn rooms in the rear courtyard. He was about to reach inside his quilted jacket for the narrow ebony case containing his chopsticks when he heard the pause of straw-sandaled feet behind him. He looked up into the smiling face of Lao Erh.

“Have you had your morning rice, Da-wei?”

David motioned to the bench. “Not yet, old friend. And you?”

Lao Erh sat down and beckoned to a waiter. “I have come to take food to the boat. Little Orchid and I do not feel like cooking this morning. My wife is visiting relatives ashore. But I will share tea with you.”

The waiter placed two steaming bowls of tea on the bench and left with their orders. “How is Little Orchid this morning?” David asked.

Lao Erh took a partially smoked Rose Blossom cigarette from his pocket and lit it from a hanging lamp. He exhaled the smoke and sadly shook his head. “The water sprite still possesses her. She offers sacrifice to the River God and talks of a strange man with the sun in his belly. I’m glad her mother is not here to see this. She has burned incense enough before our Lady Kuan Yin.”

“And how is business? Good, I hope,” said David, changing to a less painful subject.

Lao Erh brightened. “At least some of our prayers are heard. Ling Fu, a man from Shansi, has hired my boat to take some cases of tools upriver. He has paid me in silver.”

Lao Erh looked about to see if anyone could hear him. Then in a lower tone he said, “He has paid me twice the amount I would have asked and brings three men with him to replace my crew. When I protested this, he offered to pay my crew’s wages while they sit idle ashore. He is blasphemous and curses the gods. I think he has the evil eye. He is not the man I would choose for a journey, but I will need a new sail before winter and who am I to turn away good silver?”

“These cases of tools, Lao Erh, I did not see them when I talked to Little Orchid yesterday. Are you loading them now?”

“No, he and the three ruffians he calls his crew will do that tonight. After it is dark I am to take my boat a short distance from here where a Ningpo junk lies at anchor. The cases will be off-loaded from the junk. Then I will tie up along shore to wait for daylight before sailing upriver.”

Something stirred in David’s mind at the mention of a Ningpo junk. He raised the tea bowl to his mouth and took a few thoughtful sips. Beazley’s words to Madame Wu came back to him. Could this be the “ship of fortune” in that last, uncompleted remark? But there was another phrase Lao Erh had spoken earlier that brought back a picture of Little Orchid, four pounds of pork, and a pound of sugared plums. He tried to think. What was it? The thought of his good friend Lao Erh being involved with a man like Beazley made him feel sick. He nearly dropped his tea bowl. “The River God is sick!”

A startled Lao Erh looked at him. “Your thoughts have been soaring above Mount Tai, elder brother. Are you well?”

“Who is the strange man?”

A look of pity came over Lao Erh’s face. “I see no strange man, Da-wei.”

“Not here. The one on your boat. Little Orchid told you she saw a strange man with the sun in his belly. Who was he?”

Lao Erh’s face relaxed. “The yang kuei tze? A foreign devil with the sun in his belly? Surely, Da-wei, you do not believe the phantoms of my poor daughter’s mind? You are a scholar. You have traveled beyond the Western Sea to their lands, but even you have never seen a foreign devil with the sun in his belly. If such a one were to come aboard my poor boat, I would be frightened to my grave. Think what my wife would say!”

“Your wife did not see him. Nor did you or any member of your crew. But he was there, and Little Orchid saw him. Your eyes tell me you think I have lost my wits. Listen, and I will tell you a story about a thief who dreamed too much.”

When David finished speaking, a wide-eyed Lao Erh said, “Liao pu te! What fearful men are these who come to me? To me, a simple boatman, who asks little from this life! What shall I do?”

“First, I want you to describe these men to me. What did their leader look like? The man who hired you?”

Lao Erh held his hands out a few feet apart. “He is about this wide at the shoulders,” he said. “Average height, but thick, strong. Heavy like a wrestler or boxer. His hair is long and he wears a red sweatband tied across his forehead. And a pin. There is a small jade pin in the sweatband. As I said before, he spoke in a coarse Shansi dialect.”

“And the three crewmen, did you see them too?”

Lao Erh struck the bench with his fist. “Hun tan! Rotten eggs! All of them. Yes, I saw them — may fox spirits take them all. Two were about my size. The other was very thin and tall, but not so tall as you, Da-wei. They, too, spoke the Shansi dialect.”

The waiter handed a warm package of food to Lao Erh and a bowl of meat dumplings and rice to David. Lao Erh gave the waiter a few coppers and stood up to go.

“There are two things you must promise to do,” David said to him. “Don’t arouse any suspicion in their minds, and don’t leave Little Orchid alone on the boat until after this is over.”

Lao Erh nodded. Clutching the food under his arm, he hurried to the street.

David took out his chopsticks and put the “nimble lads” to work. He had almost forgotten how hungry he was. The first dumpling vanished in a few quick movements of the chopsticks.

His first thoughts were for the safety of Lao Erh and Little Orchid. The Harbor Police had a station less than a mile away. Captain Huang could slip a few men on board Lao Erh’s boat at dusk and have an armed steam launch nearby with a boarding party in readiness. Lao Erh and his daughter could then be moved to a neighboring boat out of harm’s way. Ling Fu and his rogues would walk into a trap. The gold bars they carried would be enough evidence to send them to the headsman.

David speculated that Beazley had visited the boat with Ling Fu. It would be like him to insist on savoring every aspect of his unfolding dream. With all the arrangements completed, Ling Fu would have demanded to see the gold. Beazley must have shown him the vest of gold bars hidden under his clothing. This would be Little Orchid’s “man with the sun in his belly” that had worried Lao Erh. In that moment Beazley ceased to be a business asset. Ling Fu then dissolved their partnership in the Whangpoo River. The mysterious “cases of tools” and the gold bars could then change hands with no one the wiser.

David cleaned his chopsticks and put them in their case beneath his jacket. The fog was lifting. Working-day sounds returned to the street. A shabby-robed Taoist priest with a wooden begging bowl entered from the courtyard and passed among the tables. The customers offered him more silence than coins. David put three silver pieces in the outstretched bowl and walked out onto the street to the accompaniment of many scriptural blessings.

He passed the godown with its crew of painters applying the last whitewash to its interior. Beyond the market he could see the flag of the Harbor Police near the ferry landing. Traffic was moving again on the Whangpoo.

The armed steam launch was not at the Harbor Police dock. A sergeant told him Captain Huang had been called downriver. David wrote out a description of Ling Fu and his men and left it with the sergeant. “Tell Captain Huang I’ll be back around noon. Those four have to be staying close by.” The sergeant suggested a wine shop called The Green Phoenix run by a Shansi man.

The proprietor of The Green Phoenix proved to be a monument to discreet ignorance. He suggested a brothel in Joss Alley. It took David half an hour to find the brothel. He collected only a string of curses from the bleary-eyed madame who showed a neat turn of phrase. He left this gutter virtuoso still screaming from a second-story window and resumed his search through the foul alleys of the hutung.

Five hours and as many miles later he emerged from the alleyways and narrow streets. It was noon. He was tired and hungry. Captain Huang would have to wait a few minutes.

The Inn of the Eight Immortals was crowded to near capacity. From the doorway he could see an empty seat at an eating bench occupied by three men. David considered joining them. As he hesitated, they were joined by a fourth man with long hair and the muscular build of a boxer or wrestler. There was a small jade pin in the dirty red sweatband around his head. Two of his companions were of average height and build. The other was tall and thin. Ling Fu and company were taking their noon rice.

A crowd collected outside the inn when the four Shansi men were marched out followed by Captain Huang brandishing a pistol too big for his small hand. Captain Huang Liu was enjoying himself. He paced up and down before the prisoners and waited. Two policemen armed with rifles stood behind them. A sergeant emerged from the inn.

“The gold isn’t in their room, Captain,” he reported, “but I found this knife.”

Captain Huang holstered his pistol and examined the double-edged dagger. “Where is the gold?” he bellowed at the prisoners. There was a long silence. “Which one of you dung-heaped sons of a turtle murdered the foreign devil?” Again there was silence. Captain Huang sighed. “So you wish to travel the path of pain.” He motioned to the sergeant. “Take them to the station. There are ways to oil rusty tongues.”

David took Captain Huang to one side. After a few moments of whispered conversation the captain gravely nodded his head. “An excellent thought, Mr. Feng. I’ll meet you there.” Captain Huang turned to his sergeant. “March these beauties to the godown!” he snarled.

The painters at the godown put their brushes aside to join the crowd gathering in front of the windowless warehouse. Captain Huang waved the throng to silence and delivered a long speech about the longer arm of justice under the new Republic of China. He was beginning to repeat himself when the voice of an old man in the rear of the crowd cried out, “Chieh kuang! Chieh kuang! Make way! Make way for the Summoner of Spirits.”

All eyes turned to a shabbily robed Taoist priest, supporting his twisted body with a staff as he made his painful way toward the prisoners.

Captain Huang stepped back a pace from this hooded apparition. One of its hands was hidden in the long dusty sleeve of a robe while the other hand, trembling and streaked with the grayness of death, clung feebly to the supportive staff. The crowd shrank back as though a cold wind had blown from the ashes of a dead fire.

The neck of the apparition was bent forward and down as one who has for too long gazed on the numbered hells of the underworld. No light fell on this face. The blackness beneath the hood swung with hideous slowness back and forth before the faces of the frightened prisoners. It was like watching an ancient cobra bestirred from its guardianship over a long-lost temple.

“There!” The other gray-streaked hand emerged from its sleeve and pointed to the black interior of the godown. “Take them,” the voice croaked, “and place them therein. Let them stand apart, facing the wall. Close the door. Seal them in darkness for nine times nine heartbeats.”

The specter let his outstretched hand join its withered companion on the staff. “In silence will come the God of the River. Water sprites shall prepare his way for the marking of guilt upon the back of him who killed the yang kuei tze. Go! Let it be done.”

Captain Huang released the hold his hand had instinctively taken on the butt of his holstered pistol. No word was spoken, no order was given as the prisoners were driven into the godown. They were placed five paces apart facing the wall. Willing hands swung shut the doors. After what seemed more like a thousand heartbeats than eighty-one, the old priest gave a slight motion with the head of his staff.

The doors were opened. Four frightened men stumbled out into the sunlight. Captain Huang lined them up facing the doorway, their backs to the crowd. A moan of terror went up from the crowd.

“Seize him!” David Feng shouted, straightening up and throwing back the deep cowl that had obscured his face. “That one, with the white mark on his back.”

Ling Fu pivoted. With eye-popping ferocity he drove his fist into Captain Huang’s belly. Ling Fu reached out to either side, seized two soldiers in an iron grip, and smashed them together like exploding cymbals. A rifle went off. The murderer rushed forward in a crouch, locked his powerful arms around David’s legs, and threw him over his shoulder to crash against the godown wall. The terrified crowd opened and closed behind Ling’s bellowing charge and berserk rage, and Ling was gone.

David had a dazed, worm’s-eye view of a soldier holding a rifle on three trembling prisoners. Two painters helped Captain Huang to his feet. The onlookers volubly compared notes with each other.

A sergeant chained the hands of the prisoners. At a command from Captain Huang they were assembled in marching order with ropes linking their necks together. David sorted himself out from the empty paint buckets and bits of broken scaffolding. He took off the borrowed robe, now reduced to whitewashed tatters, and scrubbed his hands and face in a water barrel.

“It was a great plan, Feng Da-wei.” Captain Huang moistened a handkerchief from the water barrel and wiped his face. “We found the murderer, but I fear we have lost him forever and the vest of gold bars as well. I’ll send a party into the hutungs to look for him, but I can’t search every Ningpo junk in the Shanghai area.”

“The loss of face is mine, Captain. I should have anticipated his reaction.” David felt the lump on his head. “By the Great Fo he is a wicked fighter!”

“Wicked and stupid as well.” Captain Huang watched the prisoners being marched away followed by the jeering crowd. “Those three sons of turtles blame Ling Fu for the bad luck that fell upon them. They say he spat at a shooting star a few nights ago. The gods are unforgiving in such matters.”

David bundled up the tattered robe. “There is an old priest sitting in a cold room at the Inn of the Eight Immortals. With your permission, Captain, I’ll stop at the market and buy him a new robe to cover his nakedness.”

Captain Huang laughed. “By all means. Clothe his naked Reverence and give him my thanks.”

His head hurt. The lump on his scalp throbbed. He was in no mood to haggle. David paid full asking price to the astonished seller of robes and delivered the garment to a grateful priest, made more grateful still by an additional gift of cash from his apologetic benefactor.

David’s thoughts turned to Lao Erh, who by now was probably in an apprehensive sweat awaiting sundown and calamity. He returned to the market and bought a large cut of fresh pork and a paper of sugared plums. This was one gift he did not want to end up at the bottom of the Whangpoo in the stomach of the River God.

He found Little Orchid sitting on a small teakwood chest with a bowl of cooked rice in her hand. He watched the child take individual grains of rice from the bowl and add them to others that formed the outline of a bird on the deck planks. She was smiling and humming. David put his parcels on the hatch cover and walked aft to the master cabin.

Lao Erh was holding a wet cloth to the side of his face. His chin was smeared with blood from a split lower lip. He sank down on a stool and moaned through the compress, “He was here.”

David didn’t have to ask who. Ling Fu had left his signature on the smashed furniture and Lao Erh’s face. “Why did he come to your boat? The police are looking for him in the hutungs. Did he want you to help him escape on the river?”

“He came for the small chest, Da-wei, the one he brought aboard when he hired my boat. He asked me if the police had been here. Before I could answer, his fist drove me into blackness.”

David swore in three dialects and rushed out on deck. Little Orchid was sitting on the hatch cover. The bundle of pork rested untouched beside her leg. She was staring at the river and eating sugared plums from the paper in her lap. David knelt beside the small teak-wood chest and opened the lid. The chest was empty.

“Eight-legged confusion!” He closed the lid and sat down beside the silent little girl absorbed in sugared plums and contemplation. She looked up and offered him a bite of plum. He shook his head. “Tell me about the man who came here today. Did you see him do anything?”

Little Orchid pointed to the empty chest. “I saw him take the sun from there and put it in his belly.”

“Did he see you?”

“No, I was over there making a rice-bird.”

“What did he do?”

“He went away,” she replied.

“Where did he go?”

Little Orchid took the plum out of her mouth and pointed with it to the railing on the river side of the boat. David went to where she had pointed and looked over the side. A rope ladder hung down to a small skiff. The rope forming one side of the ladder was broken. David turned to her and asked, “Did he go away in a boat?”

Little Orchid threw back her head and squeaked with laughter. “You are such a silly funny man! No one needs a boat to travel to the River God!”

Charles Ketty was a happy man. “It was an excellent piece of work, Mr. Feng. Thanks to you — and to Captain Huang’s grappling crew — I feel like a new man.” His bony hands smoothed a wrinkle from the white tablecloth. “A superb meal, gentlemen. I believe it is time for dessert. Gordon, if you will be kind enough to hand me my briefcase there.”

Gordon passed the briefcase across the table. “Speaking of dessert, Ling Fu certainly found his. A double helping all within an hour. First the River God marked him as a murderer and then drowned him — vest of gold and all.”

Charles Ketty let his hands rest expectantly on the lid of the briefcase. He looked at David and said, “Gordon explained how you aged the appearance of your hands with a mixture of rice flour and mud. You must have given a stellar performance as the Summoner of Spirits.” He opened the briefcase. From it he took six gold bars, which he arranged in front of him on the tablecloth. “I could have paid you your fee in American dollars, Mr. Feng, but I enjoy a bit of theater as much as you do.”

He tapped one of the bars with his fingers. “There are six bars here as authorized by my company. I will gladly add another, Mr. Feng, if you will tell me by what magic you managed to place the white mark on the back of Ling Fu without being detected.”

“By the magic of belief, Mr. Ketty. Sun Yat-sen freed China of the old Manchu rule, but older beliefs and superstitions will be a long time dying. The four men facing the wall in that darkened godown fully expected the River God to place his damning mark on the back of the murderer. Three of them knew they had nothing to fear in this matter. But not Ling Fu. A man foolish enough to spit at a shooting star is also foolish enough to try to outwit the gods. Ling Fu was just such a man.

“Once the doors of the godown were closed, this clever fellow turned around in the pitch-black darkness and placed his back firmly against the freshly whitewashed wall so that the River God would be forced to place the mark on his chest. Captain Huang cooperated with my plan. You know the results.”

“Very ingenious, Mr. Feng, but what would have happened if your plan had failed at that point?”

David smiled and reached across the table. “Then at this point, Mr. Ketty, I would not be accepting the seventh bar.”