Captain Heikefelt poured them both another schnapps.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘but the owners had to take blankets from a company in England, in payment of a bad debt. It was either blankets or nothing. So they took blankets. Thousands of blankets. You never saw so many.’

He tipped his head back again and swallowed his schnapps. ‘Skoal,’ he said, wiping his mouth.

‘Skoal,’ said Collis, and tipped his own schnapps down. The second one was definitely better than the first. More warming, and less of a shock to the system. Given time, Collis felt that schnapps might even woo him away from stone fences, which were easily the worst drinks for hangovers in the entire liquid thesaurus.

‘It seems to me that blankets, in this climate, are going to be something of a commercial liability,’ said Collis.

Captain Heikefelt shrugged. ‘It gets cold in San Francisco in the winter. I guess people will want blankets.’

‘You try and tell them that now. You’ll be lucky to sell them for fifty cents apiece. How many do you have?’

‘Twenty-five short tons of five-pound blankets. That’s ten thousand blankets.’

‘Ten thousand?’ said Collis. ‘The whole population of San Francisco is only eighty or ninety-thousand. You’re going to sell ten thousand blankets to eighty-thousand people in the middle of the warmest fall they’ve had for six years?’

‘I have to,’ said Captain Heikefelt. ‘That’s what the owners told me to do. Me, I’d rather sell coffee, and picks and shovels. How about one more schnapps?’

They said Skoal together this time, and tipped their drinks back simultaneously. Collis felt very warm indeed, and extraordinarily pleased with himself. It was remarkable how schnapps seemed to have the capacity to make him feel so pleased with himself.

‘Usually,’ Collis told Captain Heikefelt with great gravity, ‘usually I can only buy commodities that I can sell quickly. Coffee, salt, ice, those kinds of things.’

‘Ice you have to sell quick,’ agreed the captain.

‘Yes,’ said Collis, ‘but usually I can only deal in commodities that I can unload within twenty-four hours. I don’t have the storage space for goods that sell slowly. And nor does anyone else. There’s a great shortage of space in San Francisco.’

‘I know,’ said Captain Heikefelt. ‘I’ve been told that before.’

Collis stood up and went over to the porthole. It was still foggy outside, although he could just distinguish the dim outline of the distant wharves and warehouses.

‘I’ll tell you what I can do, though,’ he said in a confidential tone. ‘Because you’re a splendid fellow, and you look like the kind of man who can do a little business on the side, on his own account, and keep it under his hat, I’ll make you an offer for those blankets.’