“Of whom are you speaking, September?” asked Slim.
September looked at him. At this moment the tiniest hamlet in North Siberia would have flatly refused to have been proclaimed the birth-place of so idiotic looking an individual.
“If it is the man for whom I have come here to look,” continued Slim, “then I shall rid you of him in a more agreeable and swifter manner than the police.”
“And for what man are you looking, sir?”
Slim hesitated. He cleared his throat slightly. “You know the white silk which is woven for comparatively few in Metropolis....”
In the long line of ancestors, the manifold sediment of whom had been crystalised into September, a fur-trader from Tarnopolis must also have been represented and he now smiled out from the corners of his great-grandson’s wily eyes.
“Come in, sir!” the proprietor of Yoshiwara invited Slim, with true Singalese gentleness.
Slim entered. September closed the door behind him.
In the moment when the matutinal roar of the great Metropolis no longer bellowed up from the streets, another roar from inside the building became perceptible—the roar of a human voice, hotter than the voice of a beast of prey, mad-drunk with triumph.
“Who is that?” asked Slim, involuntarily dropping his own voice.