Shanghai (4 page)

Two older workers, the firm's most trusted China hands, slid into the office soundlessly and closed the door behind them. One took his place at a writing desk, pen and ink at the ready, while the other stood silently beside him.

No one spoke. The silence stretched out, broken only by the
clop-clop
of horses' hooves and the hawking of fishmongers from the cobblestone streets below. A train whistle sounded sharply, and for just a moment Vrassoon's eldest son felt inexplicably weak in the knees.

The Vrassoon Patriarch sat with his fingers steepled in front of his face. They all waited. They had all waited many times before for Eliazar Vrassoon to speak. Finally he unsteepled his fingers and scraped the long fingernails of his right hand across his freckled scalp beneath his thinning grey hair. He remembered the glory days in Baghdad, riding with his father to one side of the Grand Vizier—the power around, behind, and through the throne. Then had come the expulsion. Of course they had known it was going to happen and had already transferred their assets to London and Paris and, most importantly, to Calcutta.
To Calcutta,
he thought wistfully. “Calcutta before …” he said aloud. He said the word
before
a second time—as if it were a time very, very long
ago. Then he cast aside the thought, because now China loomed on the horizon.
The mother of all jewels,
he thought, lapsing into the purple prose of his native Farsi
.

It was getting late, and Eliazar needed to see the mad girl shortly, as he did at this hour every Thursday since he had taken the baby from her. He owed her at least that—although the meeting always distressed him, and Bedlam was so far away.

He turned to Ari and signalled him to approach. The younger man did and leaned down to his father.

“How long after the treaty is signed will the land auction take place?” Eliazar asked.

“There is the hope that it will happen shortly after the conflict ends, whenever that may be. In the early spring, perhaps, but it is hard to know how much resistance the Manchu Emperor will mount. The details of several prospective dates are being finalized by the Foreign Office.”

“By
our
people in the Foreign Office?”

“Naturally, Father.”

“And how long after that to extraterritoriality?”

The younger Vrassoon hesitated.

The Vrassoon Patriarch shook his head. Not for the first time, he wondered whether his first-born was strong enough to hold together all that he had wrought. He doubted it. Fortunately, his youngest seemed to be made of sterner stuff. The Patriarch looked to the elder of the two China hands. “Cyril, your thoughts.”

“At first it all seemed so simple, sir. The Chinese took to opium ships in their harbours the way the Scots would take to a freighter loaded down with Glenlivet sailing up the Firth of Forth.”

If this was intended as a joke, no one laughed. Finally the Vrassoon Patriarch said, “And now?”

“Now, not so simple, sir.”

“Why should it be simple, Cyril? You have been in my employ for almost twenty years. When did we last make an important decision that was not complicated?”

“Granted, sir. But the Chinese are different from the Mesopotamians or the Hindus. They are arrogant. They actually believe that they are winning the war.”

The Vrassoon Patriarch thought about that for a moment. He glanced at his watch fob. The mad girl would be waiting for him. “Nothing stops demand, Cyril. If a product is wanted—desired, yearned for—there is no force on earth able to stem the tide.” He thought,
The sale of dreams is unstoppable,
and nodded. Then he said, “If governments would only learn that lesson, the world would be an easier place—and more peaceful. Legalize it and tax it and we all win.”

“Agreed, sir. But the Chinese do not accept that their populace both does and will always demand vast quantities of our opium.”

“Fools! Do they believe they can change human nature? That they are gods on earth?”

“Perhaps, sir, perhaps they believe that. More likely they are just practical. They are willing to engage in lengthy wars and to lose in the present in order to win in the future. Their entire history supports that kind of thinking, sir. They have, in fact, been ruled by Manchus, who are not Chinese at all, for over two hundred years. But the Chinese culture long ago seduced the Manchus, who are now more Chinese in many respects than the Han Chinese.”

“Then surely these foreign authorities can be undermined.”

“Absolutely. For a decade, over a decade, we have all but openly traded our opium at Canton. More recently
we have managed to move past the silliness of anchoring off Linten Island and having the Chinese skiffs come out and off-load our product—but, despite all our years of trading and our contacts, we have not moved very far past that. With the exception of the three hundred acres the Manchu authorities assigned to foreigners in the marshes south of the city upon which we have warehouse space—as do the Americans, Scottish, British, and even those damnable Hordoons—it remains an offence punishable by death for any non-Chinese to set foot on Chinese soil. The Mandarins, although they take our bribes, have always resisted our request for real land in the Celestial Kingdom.”

“I've warned you not to use that phrase!” The Patriarch's voice was hard. “There is only one Celestial Kingdom, and it is not on this earth.”

Silence again seeped into the room. The stern religious views of Eliazar Vrassoon were well known and forced upon everyone who worked for the massive, octopus-like company, even to the farthest reaches of the Vrassoon empire.

“Sorry, sir.”

“This company has fed you and yours and made you wealthy. It can just as easily impoverish you and yours. Is that clear?”

There was a moment of real shock in the room. The Patriarch did not issue idle threats.

“I want to know when extraterritoriality will be realized.”

“Father,” his son began, “we haven't even forced a treaty from the Manchu Emperor yet.”

“A foregone conclusion,” his father snapped. “If Britain can rule the hordes of India, it can force land concessions from these Buddhist heathens.”

The son heard the edge of panic in his father's voice. How much of the company's fortune had his father committed to the British expedition that was heading toward Nanking? Even he didn't know the details of that. He had, in the past, watched in horror as his father endangered the entire wealth of the company, first by a dangerous stock offering and then by vast expenditures in Calcutta. But both had proved, in the long run, to be brilliant business decisions.
Why then am I so concerned about this Chinese venture?
the young man asked himself. And the answer flooded into his mind: because of the Chinese—because of their arrogance, because of their vast numbers, and because there was something else at play here that neither he nor any other person here understood.

A furious knocking at the door sounded loudly in the room.

“In!” the Vrassoon Patriarch shouted.

A dust-covered man, still stinking of horses, held out a fingerprint-stained envelope, then left the room. The Patriarch grabbed it and turned toward the window. The London haze was lifting; for the first time in weeks there was an inkling that the sun might pierce through the fetid air. Eliazar Vrassoon flicked open the seal, read the progress report quickly, and turned to the others.

“Assuming they've kept the same pace reported in this document, our boats should be approaching the Yangtze River even as we speak.”

“Our boats, Father?” Ari asked.

“The British Expeditionary Force—
our
boats.”

North China Sea Mid-November 1841

The grease-covered man swore viciously as blood shot from the gash on his hand and splatted against the exposed pistons of the steam engine. His cussing startled the English mariners in charge of the boiler room and engine, not because they were unused to foul language, but because the angry expletives were in a polyglot of Farsi, Hindi, cockney English, and a language none could identify—Yiddish.

The man's extraordinary linguistic tirade finally ended with a triple denunciation of the female genitalia, all in Farsi, preceded by a very common English verb used in its all too common gerundial form. Then the
man took the red kerchief from his neck, swiped the blood from his hand across his filthy shirt, and said, “Start her up, gents. See if my blood larded her enough.”

Moments later the damnable engine turned over and HMS
Nemesis,
for the first time in a day and a half, began to move. The men gave a cheer for the odd, red-haired Baghdadi Jew whom they knew only by his Christian name, Maxi.

Maxi Hordoon smiled, his large white teeth seeming even whiter in his grease-smeared face. He gave the engine a little kick with his boot and headed for the deck. Under his breath he said, “Fuckin' steamboats almost did us in, they did.”

And they had. Years earlier, in a desperate move to increase their opium sales to northern China, Richard, over Maxi's objections, had leased two sidewheeler steamers.

“They're garbage, brother mine,” Maxi had said.

“But they can make three round trips from Canton to northern China before the weather sets in,” Richard had claimed, “as opposed to the two that's the maximum for even the fastest clipper. Come on, Maxi, think what we could do with fifty percent more profit each year. Fifty percent more, Maxi!”

Despite his reservations and his well-earned fear of monsoon season at sea, Maxi said, “Let me at least take a look at these new mechanical marvels before you throw our money away.”

Maxi examined the two sidewheelers, and although they were better than the ones constructed by Miller and Symington, they weren't as secure as Henry Bell's version, called the Comet. Maxi spent almost a week with the boiler men, concerned about the transfer of
steam to the pistons. Then he questioned the use of sea water in the boilers but was assured that as long as the boilers were cleaned after each trip, the salt residue wouldn't hurt the mechanism. He nodded but wasn't thrilled.

In the end, Richard leased two of the steamships from their agent in Hong Kong, Barclays Bank of London.

Things went well at first, but the turnaround time after each leg of the trip was just barely enough to give the boilers a cursory cleaning, so that the last leg of the third trip took longer—a lot longer than expected. Less than a day's steaming from the Bogue entrance to Canton, the monsoon caught up with them.

Maxi did his best to get more speed from the engine, but the salt residue buildup in the boiler proved too much. They just couldn't outrun the storm. It fell on them with a fury that felt personal. The tilt of the boat in the mountainous waves pulled the paddlewheel out of the water over and over again. Then the sea snapped open the hatches and quickly swamped them. Maxi could still feel the swirling water rising around him as he tried to restart the engine of the lead ship. But the water had gotten into the piston shafts, and the boiler fires had been snuffed out by the cold sea water.

Maxi was the last to leave the ship. He had actually considered going down with it, then thought better of it. “God'd laugh if I died in this piece of crap,” he said as he dove off the stern of the sinking vessel.

He and Richard lost not only the two steamships, but also all the silk, silver, and tea they'd accepted as payment for their opium. It almost ended them. The other trading houses circled round them like vultures waiting for a gutted soldier to finally die. But Richard
held out, dodging one creditor after another, begging space on one ship and securing it with supposed goods from another. Richard kept them alive. He was smart and shrewd, and the Hordoon brothers made it to the next trading season, although they still owed Barclays Bank for both of the steamships.

Maxi would never forget when Vrassoon's man approached them and, with a smile, offered them work at a shilling on the pound. Richard had to hold Maxi back. Maxi wanted to pull the man's head off and cut him into little pieces.

“Liver of blaspheming Jew,” Richard said.

“Wha'?”

“Just a quote, Maxi.”

Maxi thought about asking where the quote came from, but decided instead to say, “You read too much, brother mine. You ought to take care about that. Too much of that reading and yer dick'll fall off, and imagine what our local chefs would make outta that.”

Richard laughed. Maxi smiled.

He smiled again now as he watched the Chinese coastline slip past, and wondered at his life. Who would ever have believed that he, Maxi Hordoon, would be standing, legs apart, hands on hips, on the foredeck of the steamer HMS
Nemesis
of the British Expeditionary Force—as it made its way to the mouth of the mighty Yangtze River?

At the Bend in the River Late November 1841

The village of Shanghai's noonday sun streamed through the slatted shutters of his workshop as the Master Carver limped in. Three journeymen carvers were working on different large chunks of third-quality jade, held in place by wooden vises. The sounds of their cutting and smoothing tools produced a gentle whistle in the air. Since he was a boy, the Master Carver had always loved that sound.

Near the south-facing, open window, his older son was completing a large, complex piece carved from the interior of a bull elephant tusk. It had taken him almost two years, and now it was nearing completion. The
Master Carver put both of his aged hands on the sculpted ivory top of his cane and leaned forward to view the work, and encourage his son. Although it was clear to him that this son did not really have the true carver's gift, fortunately his younger boy did.

The Master Carver hobbled to the very back of the shop to watch his gifted son learning the art of painting intricate country scenes on the interior of small, narrow-necked glass bottles. Not only did he have to manipulate the extremely slender paintbrushes with great care, he also had to paint upside down. The Master Carver remembered his own struggles with this art. The young man looked up from his labours and grinned at his father. The boy was alive with delight. It lit up every angle of his sharply defined facial features. The Master Carver put a hand gently on his son's forehead and smiled. He would tell this one of the Narwhal Tusk soon. But not now.