The Luminaries

comfortably upon the brick bed of his stove, he took her dress apart with a needle and thread. He replaced the tiny nuggets around her hem with leaden makeweights, so that she would not notice the sudden lightness of the fabric when she woke; if she stirred in her sleep, he held a cup of strong liquor to her lips, and encouraged her to drink it down.

Ah Quee tried to describe how the gold had been hidden in the flounces of Anna’s gowns, but with Mannering’s arm still around his body, he could not supplement his description with gestures, and therefore turned to metaphor in order to describe how the metal had been sewn into her corset and around her bustle—‘like a suit of armour,’ he said, and Ah Sook, who was always pleased by poetic expressions, smiled. Anna had four dresses in all, Ah Quee said, each containing, in his estimation, roughly a thousand pounds’ worth of pure ore. Ah Quee worked until each dress was empty, smelting every last flake of the dust into his signature blocks, and inscribing each one with the name of the claim to which he was bound—quite as though he had come upon it honestly, and legally, in the gravel pit of the Aurora. For a time, he added, he was very happy: once his surety had been repaid, he could return to Kwangchow at last, and as a wealthy man.

‘Well?’ Mannering said to Ah Sook, stamping his foot with impatience. ‘What’s the story? What’s he saying?’

But Ah Sook had forgotten his role as translator. He was gazing at Ah Quee in wonderment. The story was incredible to him! Thousands of pounds … Anna had been concealing thousands of pounds about her person, for months! That was a fortune large enough to retire a dozen men, if not more, in luxury. Anna might have purchased the entire beachfront with that kind of sum … and even then, she would have money to spare! But where was that fortune now?

In the next moment Ah Sook understood.

‘Sei qin,’ he breathed. So the fortune that Ah Quee had lifted from Anna’s dresses had ended up, by some caprice or misdirection, in the possession of the hermit, Crosbie Wells. But what was this misdirection in aid of—and who was to blame?

‘Speak English!’ Mannering shouted. ‘Speak English, d—n you!’

Suddenly very excited, Ah Sook asked Ah Quee how the fortune might have come to end up hidden in Wells’s cottage. Ah Quee replied, bitterly, that he did not know. He had never heard the name Crosbie Wells before that afternoon. As far as he knew, the last person to touch the retorted fortune was the Aurora’s current owner, Emery Staines—and Staines, of course, was nowhere to be found. Ah Quee explained that it was Staines who took the Aurora’s returns from the camp station to the Reserve Bank at the end of every month—a duty that had plainly not been carried out.

‘All I’m hearing is noise and nonsense,’ said Mannering. ‘If you don’t tell me what it’s all about, Johnny Sook—I’m telling you—’

‘They’ve finished talking,’ said Frost. ‘Just wait.’

Ah Sook was frowning. Did Emery Staines really steal from his own vault, only to stash the smelted fortune in a hermit’s cottage, twelve miles away? Where was the method in that? Why would Staines steal his own fortune, only to gift it to another man?

‘I’ll give you the count of five,’ Mannering said. His face was purple. ‘Five!’

Ah Sook looked at Mannering at last, and sighed.

‘Four!’

‘I tell you,’ Ah Sook said, holding up his palms. But what a lot there was to tell … and how few words he possessed, to contain the explanation! He thought for a moment, trying to remember the English word for ‘armour’, in order to preserve the poetic metaphor that Ah Quee had used. At last he cleared his throat, and said,

‘Bonanza not from Aurora. Anna wear secret armoury, made of gold. Quee Long find secret gold armoury that Anna wear. Quee Long try to bank armoury gold as Aurora gold. Then Staines thief from Quee Long.’

Dick Mannering, naturally enough, misunderstood this.

‘So the bonanza wasn’t from anywhere in the Aurora,’ he repeated. ‘Emery made a strike somewhere—but he kept it secret—until Quee here discovered it. Then Quee tried to bank Emery’s gold against the Aurora, so Mr. Staines took it back.’

That was confounding! Ah Sook began talking rapidly to Ah Quee in Cantonese —which Mannering, evidently, interpreted as a sign of assent. ‘Where is Mr. Staines now?’ he demanded. ‘Stop with your other questions. Ask him that. Where is Mr. Staines now?’

Obediently Ah Sook broke off, and relayed the question. This time Ah Quee responded in a tone of patent distress. He said that he had not spoken with Emery Staines since December, but he was very desirous to see him again, for it had not been until the Aurora’s quarterly return was published in early January that he had realised that he had been cheated. The fortune he had found in Anna’s dresses had not been banked against the Aurora as he had intended it to be, and Ah Quee was certain that Mr. Staines was responsible for this error. By the time he figured this out, however, Mr. Staines had disappeared. As to where he might have disappeared to, Ah Quee had no idea.

Ah Sook turned back to Mannering, and said, for the second time, ‘He not know.’

‘Did you hear that, Dick?’ said Charlie Frost, from the corner. ‘He doesn’t know.’

Mannering ignored him. He kept his revolver levelled at Ah Sook’s face, and said, ‘You tell him that unless he plays fair with me, I’m going to kill you.’ He twitched the gun, to emphasise his point. ‘You tell him that: either Johnny Quee talks, or Johnny Sook dies. Tell him that. Tell him now.’

Ah Sook dutifully relayed this threat to Ah Quee, who made no answer. There was a pause, in which every man seemed to be expecting one of the others to speak—and then suddenly Mannering made a lightning motion with his right hand, knocked Ah Quee forward, grabbed a fistful of his pigtail, and jerked his head violently back. His pistol was still pointed at Ah Sook. Ah Quee did not make a sound, but his eyes filled instantly with tears.

‘Nobody misses a Chinaman,’ Mannering said to Ah Sook. ‘In Hokitika least of all. How would your friend here explain it to the Commissioner, I wonder? “Unlucky,” he’d say. “Sook die—valley unlucky.” And what would the Commissioner say?’ Mannering gave a vicious wrench to Ah Quee’s pigtail. ‘He’d say—“Johnny Sook? He’s the hatter with the smoke, is he not? Laid out most afternoons with the dragon in his eye? Selling poisoned tar to chinks and useless whores? He’s dead? Well, then! Why in heaven would you assume I care?”’

This venom was unprecedented, as Mannering and Ah Sook had always been on equable terms; but if Ah Sook was angry, or insulted, he did not show it. He gazed back at Mannering with a glassy expression, and did not blink or break his gaze. Ah Quee, whose neck was still bent backwards, so that the muscles of his throat showed against his skin, was likewise still.

‘Not poison,’ Ah Sook said after a moment. ‘I not poison Anna.’

‘I’ll tell you this,’ Mannering said. ‘You poison Anna every day.’

‘Dick,’ Frost said desperately. ‘This is hardly on point—’

‘On point?’ Mannering shouted. He aimed his revolver about a foot away from Ah Sook’s head and fired. There was a clap—Ah Sook cried out in shock, and flung up his arm—and then a pattering noise, as the powdered rubble ran away from the hole. ‘Here’s on point,’ Mannering shouted. ‘Anna Wetherell is laid out flat at this man’s filthy joint’ (he pointed the revolver at Ah Sook) ‘six days out of seven. This man’ (he gave Ah Quee’s scalp a furious wrench) ‘calls Staines a thief. He apparently uncovered some secret that has something to do with gold, and something to do with a bonanza. I know for a fact that Anna Wetherell was with Emery Staines the night he disappeared —which was also the night, by the way, that a bonanza showed up in a very peculiar location, and Anna lost her bloody mind! D—n it, Charlie, don’t tell me to talk on point!’

In the next moment all four men spoke at once.

Ah Quee said, ‘Li goh sih hai ngh wiuh—’

Frost said, ‘If you’re so sure about the Aurora—’

Ah Sook said, ‘Ngor moh zou chor yeh—’

Mannering said, ‘Somebody gave that gold to Crosbie Wells!’

And then from behind Charlie Frost came another voice: ‘What in all heaven is going on?’

It was the commission merchant, Harald Nilssen. He ducked under the low lintel of the hut and looked