“They never ask questions at Rao Laut,” said Keller. “If there happens to be a doctor there, he comes aboard to see you haven’t smallpox. If there isn’t, he doesn’t.”
Keller was right, the big German island was the spot of spots for them. They wanted no seaboard ports, no big island ports where English was talked and questions were sure to be asked. Salving a derelict in the Pacific means months and maybe years waiting for your salvage money, especially if she is a foreigner, that is to say anything that hails from anywhere that is not the British Empire or America. They did not want to wait months or years, their lives were spent in the grip of events, and in even a month it was hard to say where any one of them might be from Hull to Hakodate. No, they did not reckon on salvage money, and they did not want inquiries. They would have piled her on the Bishop, that great rock right in their track and south of Laut, only for the dope. It was impossible to bring those tins into any port in an open boat.
At Laut it would be easy to get the stuff landed in one of the canoes or sampans always plying in the bay—the only question was a buyer, and Keller said he would easily find that.
The first they knew of the island was a perfume of cassi coming through a dawn that having lazily snuffed out a star or two, simply leapt on the sea; a crimson and old gold dawn trailed with a smoke cloud like the fume of joss-sticks, cloud that broke to form flying flamingoes that were shot to pieces by sunrays from a sun bursting up into a world of stainless azure.
The island lay right before them, a high island with broken reefs to east and west and clear water all to the south, where beyond the anchorage and the beach lay the town wherein the four copra traders of Laut carried on their trade and the Japanese and Chinese pearl merchants and the Australian and Californian turtle shell buyers foregathered at the so-called club kept by Hans Reichtbaum.
In the bay were two schooners, a brigantine and some small craft at moorings, and somewhere about nine o’clock the Haliotis, moving like a swan across the breeze-ruffled blue, dropped her anchor in twenty fathoms, a far faint echo from the woods following the rasp of her chain.
That was all the welcome Rao Laut gave her when Reichtbaum, in pyjamas, shading his eyes on the club veranda, watched her swing to her moorings and returned to his breakfast wondering what sort of customers the newcomers would turn out.
It was their second night at Laut, and Bud and Billy leaning on the after rail of the Haliotis were contemplating the lights on shore. A tepid wind from the sea fanned their cheeks and against the wind the island breathed at them like a bouquet.
In two days they had taken the measure of the place and plumbed its resources, and the brain of Keller working swiftly and true to form had rejected all possible avenues for opium trade but one—Reichtbaum.
At the first sight of the German, Keller’s instinct had told him that here was his man.