The Luminaries

cuffs. Nilssen reached down and caught her behind the ears. ‘What is going on?’ he repeated. ‘For heaven’s sake, Dick—I could hear your voice from fifty paces! The celestials are all staring out of their windows!’
    Mannering tightened his grip on Ah Quee’s pigtail. ‘Harald Nilssen,’ he cried. ‘Witness to the prosecution! You’re just the man to lend a hand.’
    ‘Quiet down,’ Nilssen said, lowering Holly to the floor and placing his hand upon her head, to calm her. ‘Quiet! You’ll bring in the sergeant in another moment. What are you doing?’
    ‘
You
went to Crosbie’s cottage,’ Mannering continued, without lowering his voice. ‘
You
saw that the gold had been retorted—did you not? This yellow devil’s playing us for fools!’
    ‘Yes,’ Nilssen said. Somewhat absurdly, he was attempting to brush the rain from his coat. ‘I saw that the gold had been retorted. That, in fact, is the reason why I’m here. But you might have asked me quietly. You’ve an audience, you know!’
    ‘See?’ Mannering was saying to Ah Quee. ‘Here’s another man, come to make you talk! Here’s another man to hold a pistol to your head!’
    ‘Excuse me,’ Nilssen said. ‘I did
not
come to hold a pistol to anybody’s head. And I wouldn’t mind asking again what it is that you are doing. It looks ugly, whatever it is.’
    ‘He won’t hear any kind of reason,’ said Frost, who was anxious not to be implicated in this ugliness.
    ‘Let a man speak for himself!’ Nilssen snapped. ‘What’s going on?’
    We shall omit Mannering’s answer to this question, which was both inaccurate and inflammatory; we shall omit, also, the ensuing discussion, during which Mannering and Nilssen discovered that their purpose in journeying to Chinatown was one and the same, and Frost, who could intuit quite plainly that the commission merchant was holding him in some suspicion over the sale of the Wells estate, maintained a rather sullen silence. The clarifications took some time, and it was nearly ten minutes later that the conversation turned, at last, to the goldsmith Ah Quee, who was still being held by the nape of his neck in a posture of much discomfort and indignity. Mannering suggested that his pigtail be cut off altogether, in order to impress upon the man the urgency of the matter at hand; he tugged at Ah Quee’s head as he said it, taking evident pleasure in the motion, as if weighing a spoil. Nilssen’s code of ethics did not permit humiliation, however, just as his code of aesthetics did not permit ugliness; again he made his disapproval known, prompting a quarrel with Mannering that delayed Ah Quee’s release still further , and excited Holly to the point of riotous and irrepressible joy.
    Finally Charlie Frost, who had been hitherto very successfullyignored, suggested that perhaps the Chinese men had simply not understood Mannering’s line of questioning. He proposed instead that the questions be put to Ah Sook again, and this time in writing: that way, he said, they could be sure that nothing had been lost in the act of translation. Nilssen saw the sense in this idea, and approved of it. Mannering was disappointed—but he was in the minority, and presently he was forced to agree. He released Ah Quee, returned his revolver to its holster, and retrieved his pocketbook from his vest, in order to compose a question in Chinese script.
    Mannering’s pocketbook was an artefact about which he was not unreasonably proud. The pages of the book had been laid out rather like an alphabet primer, with the Chinese characters written beneath their English meanings; Mannering had devised an index by which the characters could be placed together, to form longer words. There was no phonetic translation, and for this reason the pocketbook occasionally caused more confusion than it allayed, but on the whole it was an ingenious and helpful conversational tool. Mannering set the tip of his tongue in the corner of his mouth, as he always did when he was reading or writing, and began thumbing through the book.
    But before Mannering found his question, Ah Sook answered it. The hatter stood up from where he had been seated, next to the forge—the hut seemed very small indeed, once he too was standing —and cleared his throat.
    ‘I know secret of Crosbie Wells,’ he said.
    This was what he had discovered in Kaniere that very morning; this was what he had come to Ah Quee’s dwelling to discuss.
    ‘What?’