The Half-Life by Jon Raymond

Author:Jon Raymond
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781596918870
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

6

COOKIE AND HENRY emerged from the tailor wearing conical hats, ankle-length robes of combed silk, and wooden shoes. Over the robes they put on collarless jackets, and under them knee-high breeches, and around their shoulders they strung jade necklaces, which was something they had noticed the merchants of Canton seemed to do. They squinted their eyes at each other and stuck out their teeth and Henry did a funny, shuffling jig, which Cookie found mildly amusing from inside his layers of finery.

They loaded their jars of castoreum into a wooden wheelbarrow and made their way toward the gateway into Canton. On the far end of the wharf, there was a single portal that allowed workers in and out of the city, marked by an elaborate arch covered in carved dragons and colorful shingles and guarded day and night by armored guards. Cookie and Henry had no real plan for how to get through it. Foreigners, as they had been told innumerable times, were prohibited from the city's streets. And yet they avoided thinking about that. They believed that in convincing each other they were invisible, they would also convince the world.

They had directions, written on a scrap of rice paper, to the home of Howqua, whom, they had learned since their meeting with Jim Lee, was a very famous hong merchant indeed, renowned throughout Canton as the shrewdest and most versatile entrepreneur of his generation. He had amassed a large fortune in his brief career by acting as middleman for many of the products sold in the region. He owned land, buildings, and factories used by Chinese and foreign merchants alike, speculated in commodities, even cornered the market in pepper as a young man. He loaned money. And perhaps more than anyone else, he understood the increasingly interconnected nature of the emerging trade networks that had lately stenciled themselves onto the globe. He sold artworks at auction in London and Paris, underwrote expeditions to Greenland and Argentina for fur and exotic goods, and invested his capital in American railroads.

Cookie and Henry jostled among a large crowd of Chinese men streaming in and out of the wharves and the city. They hulked over the diminutive citizens and hunched down to blend in better. The crowd moved at a steady pace, weaving and clotting, trudging toward its destination of the gate. Up ahead, the entrance loomed, colorful tiles encrusting the shapes of lions and pillars and spheres. On either side of the passage stood men in wooden armor, holding long, pointed spears that glinted in the light. Their faces were covered in woven masks, like turtle shells. Behind the mesh their eyes could be anywhere.

Henry pushed the wheelbarrow ahead of him and kept his own eyes on the cobbled road. Cookie walked beside him and did the same. All around them murmured babbling, incomprehensible voices. The clipped, singsong cadences of the spoken Chinese rose and fell, tripped and trilled. A baby swaddled in thick blankets smiled at Cookie, which he took as a good sign.

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