To discuss the matter with others in the hong was unthinkable, of course, so Neel assumed that the answers to these questions would remain forever obscure to him. But a little while later, after he had delivered the ninety taels to the Seth’s bedroom, encased in a leather purse, he went to the daftar to fetch his papers and found an oddly encrypted message on his desk. A scribble had appeared on the sheet of paper that he used as an ink-blotter: a closer glance showed it to be in the Seth’s sloping hand.

Evidently, his own desk being splattered with ink, Bahram had decided to make use of Neel’s. After penning a reply to the note he had received, he had dried the ink on the blotting sheet. Now, peering at the sheet, Neel was able to decipher a few words:

… Innes …

… to confirm … will bring purse … Eho Hong at eleven …

Yrs Bahr …

*

Bahram knew exactly what he had to do that morning; Vico had coached him carefully on the details. He was to go over to James Innes’s apartment, which was in the Creek Factory. The money was to be handed over only after the delivery of the first set of crates: it wasn’t intended to be Innes’s fee – that would be paid later – it was meant for cumshaws, to be distributed to the local officials who had made the shipment possible. The first delivery was to be a trial run and Vico would not be accompanying it; he planned to stay back, in Whampoa, to make sure that the next set of crates was properly transferred, from the yawl that had brought them down from Hong Kong, to a pair of cutters.

Vico had planned everything so that Bahram’s presence in the Creek Factory would only be required for an hour or so – not a great length of time, certainly, but Bahram had never much cared for the Creek Factory and he would have been glad if his vigil were shorter still. Although he had never lived in that hong himself he had a more-than-passing familiarity with it for it adjoined his first place of residence in Canton, the Dutch Factory. The two buildings were separated only by a wall but they could not have been more different. While the Dutch Factory was sombre to a fault, the Creek Factory was a boisterous, freewheeling place inhabited by determined and headstrong Free-Traders – men like Jardine and Innes.

The Creek Factory was spoken of as such because it was flanked by a narrow waterway: it was the last building on that side of Fanqui-town – on the other side of the creek lay the godowns of the Co-Hong merchants. The creek gave the hong a distinctive character because many of its lodgings had little quays of their own, providing direct access to the river.

The Creek Factory’s residents often said they liked it because of its proximity to the water, but this had never made any sense to Bahram. The so-called creek from which the factory took its name, was really just a nullah – a combination of open sewer and tidal stream. The nullah was one of the principal conduits for the city’s refuse, and at low tide, when it shrank to a trickle and its banks were exposed to plain view, a more noxious sight was hard to imagine. The tides would often deposit the carcasses of dogs and piglets in the refuse-clogged mud and there they would lie, buzzing with flies and creating a vomit-inducing stench until they swelled up and exploded.