The Mulberry Empire. Philip Hensher

have to say to this. My mind, I confess, is a trifle stumped.’

      Masson took the coin and looked at it, wondering as usual at the way Das talked, like Tacitus after a drink or two. The coin was a Queen Anne penny, probably palmed off on Das by a Company private too sharp for his own good. Masson considered telling Das that it was a coin of the reign of the Empress Agrippina before it occurred to him that Das might be testing him in some obscure manner. He told the shopkeeper what it was.

      ‘That,’ Das said, smartly snapping the coin back into his fist, ‘was more or less what I had supposed it to be. Thank you, my dear sir. And how may I help you today? A cup of chai first, certainly.’

      He clapped his hands and the toothless dirty old woman who was always in the boutique, fingering the goods – perhaps Das’s wife, there was no means of knowing – mumbled off into the recesses of the shop.

      ‘I really want nothing of you, Mr Das,’ Masson said. ‘Chai would be splendid.’

      ‘Perhaps a perusal of your treasures, Mr Masson?’ Das said as the chai arrived. Masson took the stinking sweet orange confection, tea and milk and sugar and water boiled together for half an hour. As always at Das’s shop, the water it had been made from was so filthy, the chai could have been strong or weak, and Masson had to rid himself of the irrational idea that Das made his tea out of the water his crone familiar washed her grubby old body in. The crone smiled and shook her head from side to side, letting go of the cup, leaving a dirty thumbprint over the clay rim. ‘Always welcome, always welcome. Or perhaps he would like to see a few minor curiosities I acquired in the course of several perambulations about this great metropolis, hmm? No obligation, my dear sir, merely an oddity or two I feel you would be interested by, and – I confess – one or two more I should be grateful to have the benefit of your undoubted and excellent wisdom regarding their history, provenance and significance. Queen Anne penny, indeed.’

      The exchange of business was a necessary preliminary to their conversation, Masson had found. Das preserved some necessary dignity by reminding himself that they had begun in a business relationship, and would not, entirely, get beyond that. It might have been designed, too, to remind Masson that he would not come to know everything about Das, that whatever expertise he acquired about Das’s stock, he was always there on sufferance. Das reached across the table, stained with rings, and gestured at a small knife, curved and graceful like a miniature scimitar. Masson picked it up carefully and turned it over. A cockroach ran across the table, making Masson jump; it had been sheltering under the blade, and Masson now discreetly flicked it onto the floor with the tip of the knife. Das hated to see an insect killed, and tutted mildly, either at Masson’s squeamishness or to suggest that the thing was of no significance.

      The blade was curved, whether for grace or use. Though the handle was encrusted and filthy, the quarter-inch at the blade’s edge shone. This knife had been used regularly, and recently. Masson had heard of oriental knives that cut flesh as easily as butter, and placed the tip of his forefinger on the edge of the blade. It rested there, the blade trembling slightly in Masson’s hand.

      ‘You are left-handed, I perceive,’ Das said.

      ‘I use both equally well,’ Masson said, fixed on the thin contact between finger and blade, insubstantial as a point in geometry.

      ‘That is bad luck, very bad luck,’ Das said, drawing back from Masson with his shock of red hair and his divided soul. He made a warding-off hiss, like the noise of hot metal in water.

      Masson smiled his wide open devouring smile. ‘On the contrary,’ he said. ‘It’s a piece of very good luck.’ And he moved the knife, a small movement, half an inch, putting no pressure on the handle. There was a sudden heat in the finger, and underneath the blade, the colour had fled the dirty finger, a little field of tripe-white as the blood drew back under the blade. Masson made his pain-noise, the same hissing Das had made, the same sound of hot metal in water. The blood returned and welled up, wine-dark, in the little flap of severed flesh the knife had made. White, translucent, an onion’s slice. Masson put down the magnificent knife, and sucked his salty finger for a minute. When he took it out, the finger was clean, and white in his dirty hand.

      ‘A good knife,’ he said, picking it up again.

      ‘Whence does it originate, in your opinion?’ Das asked.

      Masson turned the knife over again. The handle was so encrusted with rust and dirt that it was hard to see if it were decorated. He ran the nail of his forefinger over the surface, and there was some raised pattern – he followed the line – some arabesque – some writing, surely. By the whiplash feel of it, he supposed it to be Arabic, some belligerent verse of the Koran. Not Indian; he somehow knew this, without knowing how he knew. He guessed at Persian. It felt like damascene work, anyway.

      He said this to Das as he was feeling the knife. Das clapped his hands with pleasure. ‘Indeed, indeed, excellent, quite on the nail, as you would say,’ he said. ‘I had an interesting visitor this week, a traveller, who had acquired some curiosities. I cannot account for it, but he was eager to disembarrass himself of some old Persian treasures. That, I think, is the finest of his hoard, alas, and sadly in want of care, but the other objects I acquired from him have their own interest and even, I dare say, some measure of value. Would you, by any chance, care to …’

      ‘In a furious hurry, was he, your friend?’ Masson said. ‘And I have no doubt that you found yourself in possession of a large quantity of Persian antiquities without requiring too much of the gentleman?’ Das looked outraged at the suggestion that he might be in the habit of consorting with thieves. It took a moment to make him realize that Masson was only casting the first shot in the exchanges over the final price, and for a while he seemed unwilling to show his newly acquired objects at all.

      But in the end, he yielded to the undeniable argument of lucre, and Masson was soon looking, with hungry eyes, at an array of metalwork spread out on Das’s table. For a moment he was incongruously reminded of this morning’s exercise with the dismantled musket, as he pored over the miscellaneous array of mostly Persian, mostly indifferent antique objects. In the end – it took an hour – he settled, besides the knife, for a little silver dish and three unfamiliar coins, interesting in appearance, unaccountably so. As was customary these days, he paid Mr Das with a combination of his army pay and the restitution of one of Masson’s own early purchases, before he had developed a proper eye. This process of secondary haggling occupied another half an hour, as Masson attempted to return to Das some of the worthless trash he had originally passed off on Masson at any price. Das, indignant at being insulted in such a manner that it should be suggested that his shop should ever be soiled with such bazaar trinkets, and denying furiously that he was the first source of the trash, attempted to inveigle out of Masson the beautiful little silver medal he had sold him no more than three weeks before, presumably having realized its worth in the interim. At length an agreement was reached, leaving both Masson and Das sore and suspicious, and they settled down to talk, undisturbed by customers, the army, Suggs or Sale.

      ‘Mr Das,’ Masson began. ‘Speaking of your visitor last week, if you were to travel and were obliged to live on the proceeds of what you could sell on your travels, what goods would you take?’

      ‘I do not understand your question, Mr Masson,’ Das said. He picked his nose meditatively and examined the contents before flicking it at the floor. ‘I have no need or desire to travel, as you well know, I am sure.’

      ‘Indeed, indeed,’ Masson said. He persevered. ‘In a hypothetical situation, however, if you were obliged to travel, and the only means of support you had was the sale of what goods you could carry, what would you take with you to sell?’

      ‘Ah,’ Das said, now having got the point. ‘Like my friend, earlier this week, in flight from his own shadow and selling his worldly goods at a highly disadvantageous rate, I can assure you.’

      ‘Disadvantageous to him, Mr Das.’

      ‘Indeed, indeed,’ Das said. He had a disconcerting habit of taking up Masson’s expressions and repeating them, a minute or two later.