the watch Ji now had, and it was the only thing the child still possessed that had belonged to him. But if there was an alternative to selling it to a pawnshop, Ji couldn’t see it.
Ji knew about pawnshops because Hayes had explained them to the child before they went to visit his friend Mott Tintwhistle. Ji thought about taking the watch to Tintwhistle himself, but then the child remembered that Titus Poole knew about Tintwhistle. And Ji was trying to stay away from any place Poole knew about—or might know about.
In the end, the child selected a pawnshop near the enormous white temple Hayes had called St. Paul’s. The shop was a narrow, musty place jammed with everything from carpenters’ tools and battered saucepans to fraying corsets and old carpet squares. In a corner near the counter, half buried beneath a dusty pile of fans, Ji even spotted what looked like an old Chinese bamboo flute.
“Help ye there, lad?” said the wizened man behind the counter when Ji hesitated to approach him. “If yer here jist t’ drool or if yer thinkin’ about meybe tryin’ to lift somethin’, ye can jist turn around and git.”
The old man reminded Ji of the ancient, withered peasant who used to sell chicken feet in the market in Canton. He was short and skeletally thin, his skin gray and wrinkled like old parchment, the whites of his lashless eyes yellow. He had that old-man smell, and his shop reeked of dust and decay and damp.
Taking a step forward, Ji laid the watch on the counter and said, “What will you give me for this, sir?”
The old man looked at the watch, then at Ji. “Where the hell did ye get that, yer lordship?”
“Canton,” said Ji. The “lordship” reference made no sense at all.
“Oh, ye did, did ye? And where might that be?”
“In the east.” Too late, Ji suspected that burst of honesty about Canton was a mistake.
“Ho. Sure it ain’t in the west?”
“No, sir. It’s in the east,” said Ji, not understanding the implications of the man’s question.
“Who’d ye steal the watch from, then?”
“I did not steal it.”
“Sure ye didn’t.” The man picked up the watch and held it to his ear to listen to the tick.
“It runs perfectly fine,” said Ji, watching him.
The old man’s lips pulled back into a nearly toothless grin. “Oh, it does, does it? Perfectly fine. Not real good, mind ye, but perfectly fine, ye say?”
Ji had the sense that they were holding two entirely different conversations, and the old man was the only one who understood both.
He said, “I’ll give ye a shilling for it.”
Ji stared at him. “But it’s worth at least ten pounds! I know because I priced comparable items in the shops before I came here.”
“So ye priced comparable items, did ye? Well, it may be worth ten pounds in a shop, new. But it ain’t new, now, is it? For all I know, it could stop runnin’ in an hour, or whoever ye lifted it off could walk in here this afternoon and claim it. And then I’d be out me shilling, now, wouldn’t I?”
“I did not steal this watch.”
“Sure ye didn’t, lad.” The man set the watch on the counter. “A shilling is me offer. Take it or leave it.”
“Five shillings,” said Ji, who had spent many a morning in the market watching Pema barter with everyone from fishmongers and butchers to greengrocers.
The old man snorted. “Two.”
“Two and a half—and the bamboo flute there by the fans. If it plays.”
The old man turned to stare at the instrument with an expression that told Ji he’d forgotten it was even there. “That?”
“Does it play?”
He extricated the flute from the jumble of other items and handed it to Ji. “You tell me.”
The dizi was old and worn, the scarlet silk thread wrapping the bamboo dark with age, the tassel bedraggled. But it had once been a fine instrument; the protective ferrules were of jade, and Ji couldn’t help but wonder what it was doing here, in this wretched dolly shop so far from China.
The child was afraid the dimo might be cracked or even missing. But when Ji sounded a tentative note, it hummed pure and true. At first Ji played with a soft-breath attack, and the tone was peaceful, floating. Then the child quickened, and the flute responded, the sound becoming sprightly and ethereal. For a moment, Ji was lost in the music, lost in a sound that spoke of plum blossoms and