Lin Liang bowed: Wu Han was necessarily associated with him, and at half shares, the transaction being too important for either separately; but Wu Han was the soul of discretion, as silent as the legendary Mo.
‘Is he not the banker for the French mission?’
‘Scarcely. They have sent to change a little money into Java guilders for daily marketing, hut the only real connection is between Wu Han’s Pondicherry clerk and a man belonging to the mission, also from French India.’
‘Then please let it be known to Wu Han and his Pondicherry clerk that I should like any information about the French that can properly be given – lists of names and so on – and that I am ready to pay for it. But, Lin Liang, you understand as well as I do that in these things discretion is everything.’
Lin Liang was wholly persuaded of it; many of his own affairs too were of the most private nature; and perhaps for the future Dr Maturin might like to come by the door actually named Discretion, behind the hovel in which he and his miserable family had their unworthy being. He led Stephen through another court, surrounded by verandas, some with truly astonishing orchids hanging from the beams and slim young women with bound feet tottering rapidly away. Still another, bounded by a high wall with a rounded projection whose spy-hole commanded the low iron door; and on the other side a lane, or rather a path, wandered along a neglected canal.
Stephen wandered with it; he had some time to spare before his appointment with van Buren and he looked with more than ordinary attention at the orchids in the trees along the water or on the ground between them, an extraordinary variety of flowers and vegetation. He took specimens of those he could not recall having seen in Raffles’ garden
or dried collection, and he gathered up some beetles for Sir Joseph – beetles that in some cases he could not even assign to a family, so far were they removed from his experience.
By the time he reached van Buren’s door he was somewhat encumbered, but in that house burdens of this kind were taken for granted. Mevrouw van Buren relieved him of the flowers and her husband brought insect-jars. ‘Shall we carry on directly with our viscera?’
he asked. ‘I have reserved the spleen especially for you.’
‘How very kind,’ said Stephen. ‘I should like it of all things.’ They walked slowly across the compound – van Buren had a club-foot – to the dissecting house, where they were anatomizing a portly tapir. The garden gate happened to be open and as they passed it van Buren said, ‘If you were to use
this when you do me the pleasure of paying me a visit, it might save time, particularly at night, when the house is locked up and the watchman thinks all visitors are thieves; and time we must save, because in this climate specimens will not keep. Tapirs in particular go off as quick as mackerel, though one would hardly suppose it.’
His words were so true that they worked fast and silently, hardly breathing, sometimes shifting the mirrors that reflected strong light into the cavity, but communicating mostly by nods and smiles though once, pointing to the tapir’s anatomically singular forefoot, van Buren murmured, ‘Cuvier’; and when they had thoroughly examined the spleen in all its aspects, taking the samples and sections necessary for van Buren’s forthcoming book, they sat outside to breathe the open air. Van Buren spoke luminously not only of this spleen but of many spleens he had known, the comparative anatomy of the spleen, and the erroneous notion of force hypennécanique.
‘Have you ever dissected an orang-utang?’ asked Stephen.
‘Only one,’ said Van Buren. ‘His spleen is on the shelf with the human examples, a pitifully meagre collection. It is very difficult to get a really prime cadaver in this country: nothing but the occasional adulterer.’
‘But surely criminal conversation, illicit venery, even grossly over-indulged, will hardly affect a man’s spleen?’
‘It will in Pulo Prabang, my dear sir. The incontinent person is peppered: that is to say a small sack or rather bag partially filled with pepper is tied over his head, his hands are bound, and he is delivered over to the aggrieved family and their friends; they form a ring, beating the sack with sticks so that the pepper flies. Presently it kills him and I have the corpse; hut the prolonged and repeated convulsions that precede death distort the spleen most surprisingly and so change its juices that they are useless for comparison; they do not support my theory at all.’
‘Does the ape’s spleen differ widely from ours?’ asked Stephen after a pause.
‘Remarkably little. The renal impression above the posterior
border – but I will show you both without naming either, and you will decide for yourself.’
‘I should love to see an orang-utang,’ observed Stephen.
‘Alas, there are very few down here,’ said van Buren. ‘It was a great disappointment to me. They eat the precious durians, and they are killed for doing so.’
‘Absurd as it may seem, I have never seen a durian either.’
‘Why, my bat-tree is a durian. Let me show you.’ They walked out to the far end of the garden, where a tall tree stood in a little enclosure of bamboos. ‘There are my bats,’
said van Buren, pointing to clusters of dark, almost black creatures about a foot bong hanging upside down, their wings wrapped about them. ‘When the sun reaches the far trees they will begin to squeak and gibber, and then they will fly off to the Sultan’s garden and strip his fruit-trees, if the guardians do not take great care.’
‘Do they not eat your durians?’
‘Oh dear me no. I will find one if I can.’ Van Buren stepped over the low fence, took a long forked pole and peering up into the tree he poked among the leaves. The bats stirred and muttered angrily and one or two flew out in a circle, settling again higher up- a five-foot wingspan. ‘Some people eat them,’ remarked van Buren, and then he cried, ‘Take care.’ The durian fell with a heavy thump, an object the size and shape of a coconut but covered with strong thickset spikes. ‘The skin is far too thick for any fruit-bat,’ he said as he cut it open, ‘quite apart from the spikes. Ugly spikes: I have had several patients with dangerous lacerated wounds from a durian falling on their heads. The orang-utang opens them, however, spikes, coriaceous skin and all. This one is quite ripe, I am happy to say.
Pray try a piece.’
Stephen realized that the smell of decay came not from their dissection but from the fruit, and it was not without a certain effort that he overcame his reluctance. ‘Oh,’ said he a moment later, ‘how extraordinarily good; and what an extraordinary contradiction between the senses of smell and taste. I had
supposed them to be inseparably allied. How I applaud the orang-utang’s discrimination.’
‘They are charming animals, from what I have heard and what little I have seen: gentle, deliberate, with nothing whatsoever of the baboon, the mandril, or even the pongo, let alone the restless petulant wantonness of monkeys in the general sense. But as I say there are almost none down here. To see a miss, for I believe that is the true Malay, you must go to Kumai.’
‘I long to do so. You have been there, I collect?’
‘Never, never: with this leg I cannot climb, and at the end of all possible riding there are innumerable steps cut into the bare rock of the crater’s outward side. The path is called the Thousand Steps, but I believe there are many more.’
‘I have an almost equal disadvantage. I am tied to this place until the negotiations are brought to an issue, I hope a happy issue. Today I learnt of a connexion that may prove useful.’
Early in their acquaintance or indeed friendship Stephen had found that van Buren was utterly opposed to the French project, both because he hated Buonaparte and what he had done to Holland, and because he thought it would ruin Pulo Prabang, which he loved. They had many friends in common, particularly the more eminent French anatomists; each knew and appreciated the other’s work; and for once in his career as an intelligence-agent Stephen had laid aside dissimulation. He now told van Buren of his conversation with Lin Liang and of his hopes; and after that, as they sat on a shaded bench outside the dissecting-room, van Buren returned to his accurate, wellinformed account of the members of the Sultan’s council, their virtues, shortcomings, tastes, approachability.
‘I am infinitely obliged to you, dear colleague,’ said Stephen at last. ‘The moon has risen and I can see my way back into the town, where I mean to walk about among the bawdy-houses and places where they dance.’