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hangouts and never had enough money for more than one drink at the Hilton or Raffles, though I looked as if I might have belonged in those hotels. I certainly looked like a member of the Tanglin Club, the Swiss Club, the Cricket Club, and all the others where my chits were signed for me by fellers who liked my discretion. I was always welcome in the clubs, but that was a business matter. And they did not laugh at the Bandung: they knew me there.
    Â 
    In the taxi I mentioned the Bandung to Leigh; he didn’t say no, but he thought we should stop at Hing’s first—“Let’s have a look at the
towkay
” was what he said. We got stuck in rush-hour traffic, a solid unmoving line of cars. There was an accident up front, and the cars were passing the wrecked sedan at a crawl to note down the license number so they could play it on the lottery. There was a bus in front of us displaying the bewildering sign
I Don’t Know Why, But I Prefer Sanyo.
The local phrase for beeping was “horning,” and they were horning to beat the band. We sat and sweated, gagging on the exhaust fumes; it was after five by the time we got to Hing’s.
    Little Hing was sitting in the shop entrance reading the racing form. He sat like a roosting fowl, his feet on the seat, his knees drawn up under his chin. Seeing us, he turned his bony face and bawled upstairs, then he locked his teeth and snuffled and paddled the air with his free hand, which meant we were to wait.
    â€œYour Oriental politeness,” I said. “He’ll spit in a minute, probably hock a louie on your shoes, so watch out.”
    We had made Big Hing wait; now, to save face, he was making us wait. Hing spent the best part of a day saving face, and Yardley said, “When you see his face you wonder why he bothers.”
    Gopi, the
peon
, brought a wooden stool for Leigh, but Leigh just winced at it and studied Hing’s sign:
Chop Hing Kheng Fatt: Ship Chandlers & Provisioners
, and below that in smaller assured script,
Catering & Victualling, Marine Hardware, Importers, Wholesale Drygoods & Foodstuffs, Licensed Agents, Frozen Meat
, and the motto, “
All Kinds of Deck & Engine Stores & Bonded Stores & Sundries
.” “Sundries” was my department. The signs on the shops to the left and right of Hing, and all the other shops—biscuit-colored, peeling, cracked and trying to collapse, a dusty terrace of shophouses sinking shoulder to shoulder on Beach Road—were identical but for the owner’s name; even the stains and cracks were reduplicated down the road as far as you could see. But there was something final in the decline, an air of ramshackle permanency common in Eastern ports, as if having fallen so far they would fall no further.
    â€œWhat’s your club in Hong Kong?” I asked.
    â€œJust one, I’m afraid,” he said. He paused and smiled. “The Royal Hong Kong.”
    â€œJockey or Yacht?”
    â€œYacht,” he said quickly, losing his smile.
    Little Hing spat and went back to his racing form without bothering to see where the clam landed.
    â€œMissed again,” I said, winking at Leigh. “I’ve heard the Yacht Club’s a smashing place,” I said, and he looked at me the way he had when I said “Honkers.” “You’re in luck, actually. You have a reciprocal membership with the Tanglin here and probably a couple of others as well.”
    â€œNo,” he said, “I inquired about that before I came down. Bit of a nuisance, really. But there it is.”
    He was lying. I knew the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club and the Tanglin Club had reciprocal memberships and privileges; a member of one could sign bar chits at the other and use all the club’s facilities. So he was not a member, and there we were standing on the Beach Road sidewalk, on the lip of its smelly monsoon drain, at the beck and call of a surly little
towkay
who had