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I winked at him, in what I hoped was a mysterious manner. ‘Exactly. Things being brought in and out of the country… maybe not as they are supposed to be.’
‘Oh, I see,’ the cabbie said, though this obviously wasn’t the case. ‘Well, good luck to you, guv!’
Turning his coach around, he cried an encouragement to his horse and drove off towards the western, safer parts of the city. Looking after him, I suddenly wished I could follow. But I had made my choice.
With a sigh, I turned to face my destination. Not that I could see very much of it - it was mid-day, and the broad street was crowded as could be. Carts loaded with goods and large omnibuses packed full to bursting with dockworkers drove up and down this broad way of British Commerce, and people stood on all the street corners, waving their wares and yelling at the top of their voices to get the attention of potential customers. I supposed they thought yelling would give them an advantage over the large, but completely silent, billboards and posters which spread over many of the exterior walls.
I probably should have been grateful for all the noise. Nobody paid attention to me as I wandered down the crowded street. While in the West End of London, people had given my baggy trousers and loose-fitting old tailcoat strange glances, here, nobody looked twice at the strange little figure wandering down the street. A lot of people here wore clothes that didn’t fit them well, probably because they had originally not been theirs. It was quite liberating in a way, swimming in a sea of people who didn’t pay any attention to me and wanted nothing from me but that I returned the courtesy. It made me feel… free.
Of course, the aforementioned sea of people also blocked my view of number 97.
I slowly made my way down the street. As I got closer to my destination, I started to draw more curious glances from the surrounding people, as if they found me unusual to look at. I had to admit, I returned the feeling: the farther down East India Dock Road I went, the more the faces of passers-by changed in shade and form: from glances I caught of their faces, I thought noses were broader than usual, and their eyes strangely slitted. I thought I was imagining things, until one of the street-hawkers approached me, starting to address me in a strange tongue I had never heard before. At the sight of his face, I jumped back in shock.
Holy Hell! Who plucked me up from the earth and put me down in Peking?
Then it came to me. Of course! I had heard once that, in the some parts of the East End, there lived a large group of workers from China. This must be it. Chinatown.
Looking frantically from one strange face to another, I tried to remember what else I had heard about this area of my own city that was a foreign country. Only now did I see the colourful ribbons suspended over the street, the dragons painted on house walls, and the strange cuts of people’s clothing.
Think! Think! Isn’t there anything you recall about this place?
Vaguely, I seemed to remember somebody calling it the filthiest, most disreputable rat hole in all of London. Who had this information come from again?
Ah yes, my aunt.
So, hopefully, it’s actually a quiet neighbourhood with nice, well-behaved people.
I caught the gaze of a particularly slant-eyed youth, who was staring at me over a knife he used to clean his fingernails.
Hopefully.
Making some apologetic gesture to the hawker, who had now taken something strange-smelling and steaming from his tray and was waving it in front of my face, I retreated hurriedly. Pressing myself as closely to the walls of the houses as I could, I made my way down the street without any further delay. As if it could protect me from the strange environment, I turned up the collar of my tailcoat and buried my too-European face in the depths of Uncle Bufford’s old, moth-eaten Sunday best.
I went down the street as quickly as I could manage without running, counting the numbers on the opposite side as I did so.
Number 89, a butcher’s shop…
Number 91, an apartment building…
Number 93, an… an…
Well, I wasn’t exactly sure what it was. It was some kind of unidentifiable building, with a few ladies around the entrance whose clothing seemed to be even more loose-fitting and considerably more revealing than mine.
Number 95, a liquor store…
Number 97, a… Hell’s whiskers!
Quickly, I jumped back into the nearest alley. The man I had spotted on the opposite side of the street turned his head; he must have caught my movement out of the corner of his eye. As he turned, I saw I had been right in thinking I had recognized him.
Warren.
Warren was here. And where Warren was, Mr Ambrose would not be far behind.
He looked around once more, then, shrugging, started to haggle again with a Chinese hawker over the price of some oriental artefact he was apparently trying to purchase. Or, more likely, pretending to purchase. He wasn’t here to buy something exotic for the mantelpiece. He was here for the same reason I was here. The building right across the street from the alley in which I was hiding.
It was an impressive brick bulk: a broad façade, at least forty yards, with higher portions of the building rising threateningly up out of the roof in the centre and at every corner. Originally, it must have had many windows, but now it was obviously a warehouse, since most of the windows had been bricked over.
Or… was it? Behind the few, narrow openings in the brick walls, I could see movement. Not what you would expect in a warehouse where tin plates and cotton trousers waited for weeks before they were shipped to God only knew where. And the narrow, high parts of the building at each corner, connected by walls and walkways… they looked almost like watchtowers.
On the highest of the towers, I saw, blinking in the mid-day sun, the brass number 97.
Over the top of the building, in the distance, I could make out tops of masts, swaying in the breeze. The street wasn’t called East India Dock Road for nothing. The docks of the East India Company, the centre of its web of power extending over half the world to the distant, tropical sub-continent of India, were only a few dozen yards away. Right next to this building.
There! There it is again!
Once more, I saw something move through one of the narrow windows, and caught the flash of a red uniform.
This is no bloody warehouse!
I waited, hidden in the shadows of the alley. After a while, Warren disappeared. In his stead, other men appeared, some European, some Chinese, some an unidentifiable mix. All lingered in front of number 97 for a little while before disappearing, only to reappear some time later, hovering and watching. Nobody would have noticed. Nobody, that is, who hadn’t seen many of these faces before in Mr Ambrose’s office.