There in the storehouse with the cocky Prussian waiting, and the electrical eels half dead in the barrel and Mr Hendrik’s hand still on his arm, Wesley Lewis Jr looked into the Negro’s burnt molasses eyes, those huge, round, voodoo eyes, animal and cannibal. The crippled slave so much older than his years, in frockcoat and buckled shoes, for Christ’s sake.

‘And what would your master say to such a price?’ Wesley Lewis Jr said from between his clenched teeth.

‘Leave it done,’ Mr Hendrik said.

Wesley Lewis Jr pulled his arm free. Since they’d left Paramaribo together with their rare merchandise, he’d been thinking of it, how he might murder the Negro, be done with him and pocket the purse, make his way back to America. But he’d become fearful, at times even believed that Mr Hendrik knew exactly the thoughts percolating in his mind. Black magic, the obia, oh yes, he knew the sly, shifty Negro was versed in such things. He’d seen it. Like the night in Havana on the way, in one of the stinking lanes leading from the docks to the taverns, Mr Hendrik and himself suddenly surrounded by three men, one armed with a pistol.

‘Entregar o morir!’

Even with the limp, a broken body, in a flash the Negro had slipped a knife and slashed the wrist of the gunman. Before the pistol had clattered on the ground, the second man clutched at his throat and collapsed. The third ran, desperate for his life, followed by the bleeding gunman, crying out, ‘El diablo! El diablo!’

And that later midnight, docked in Rotterdam, Wesley Lewis Jr asleep in his hammock, then waking with a jolt and Mr Hendrik there above him, staring down, his bloodshot eyes glowing moon-yellow in the dark; and then, in a blink, gone! Only the creaking of briny timbers, the hull groaning, burdened, the dark ghouled. He was shaken for days. How often had the Negro watched him sleeping? What had he read in Wesley Lewis Jr’s dreams?

Josephine. He must surely have seen Josephine.

A most deceitful and murderous Negro!

Claus von Rolt said, ‘Then we are in accord?’

Mr Hendrik nodded.

‘Good,’ Rolt said and indicated for his assistant to take care of the barrel of eels. ‘We can take my carriage and complete our transactions over brandy in my home.’

LIQUORICE