Doctor Who_ Foreign Devils - Andrew Cartmel [3]
His host sighed. 'Never mind. I didn't really expect you to.' 'Then why ask?'
The man smiled. 'Perhaps to give you a chance to redeem yourself, however slightly. It was merely a symbolic gesture, of course, since I already have all the names of your customers.'
He reached under the cushions and drew out a shockingly familiar looking book, a large leather-bound ledger the colour of pale toffee with an ornate letter U embossed on its cover. Upcott felt a simultaneous mixture of outrage and alarm. 'Where did you get that?'
His host smiled again and handed him the book. There was an unfamiliar bookmark flapping from the ledger, a broad dark floppy tongue of leather. Upcott seized the book and opened it at the page marked. It was a detailed record of one of his most lucrative transactions to date, describing his meeting with a corrupt mandarin on Lintin Island in the Pearl River estuary, where he had landed and exchanged a hundred chests, a huge amount of smuggled opium, for a proportionately huge quantity of Chinese silver.
Upcott looked up from the ledger. 'Where did you get this?'
'From the premises of your book keeper in Macao, a personage who I am ashamed to acknowledge as one of my countrymen.' 'You broke into his premises?'
'No longer his. His building, business and all his possessions are now forfeit to the Imperial Treasury.' The fat man giggled. 'As is his life.'
'What the blazes do you mean, laughing about it like that?'
The Chinaman gestured at the leathery bookmark that Upcott was holding in his hand. 'It's amusing. Because you are holding his lying tongue in your hand.'
Upcott stared at the bookmark he was holding. It was dried, cured and flattened, but it was still recognisably a human tongue. He muttered an oath and threw it across the room, shuddering with disgust. The tongue hit the wall hanging of the red dragon and bounced off it, flapping to the floor.
He stared at the Chinaman. 'Who the hell are you?' he demanded. The Chinaman bowed politely, as though to acknowledge a formal introduction. 'The creator of smoke and stench, the fomenter of riots, the organiser of delightfully unusual meat roasts . . . In short, I am the Chief Astrologer.' 'You!'
'Yes. I must say I greatly enjoyed denigrating myself in the third person.'
'I don't believe you. The Chief Astrologer never leaves the palace.' 'Not never . . . but rarely. I am here on a special mission from the Emperor, who has a particular interest in putting an end to the opium smuggling in his realm.'
'This would be the same smuggling that involves constant bribery that causes silver to pour into the imperial coffers?'
'I'd hardly expect a barbarian like your good self to understand the delicate nuances of such a complex situation.'
Upcott felt a red cloud of rage gathering behind his eyeballs. He felt in his pocket for his pistols. Should he blow this arrogant little monkey to hell? Some tiny voice cautioned him to tread carefully and he gradually he forced himself to relax, releasing the guns again. 'And I suppose none of that silver ever ended up in your purse, fatty? You can't tell me . . . ' Upcott suddenly fell silent.
'Is something wrong?' asked his host solicitously. Upcott didn't reply. He was staring at the wall hanging of the dragon. The one the tongue of his Macao book keeper had just bounced off. The hanging depicted exactly the same dragon which writhed in a tattoo