We had lunch at Yung Ki restaurant. The food was heavenly. ‘You needn’t check into your hotel before three,’ Mr Pal said. ‘If you want to do any shopping, I suggest you do it now, although you may well have a little time tomorrow. Your flight isn’t till 10 p.m., is it?’ ‘That’s right. Yes, I would like to look at a few shops,’ Feluda admitted. ‘Let me take you to Lee Brothers. I know them well. You’ll get good quality stuff, and at a reasonable price.’ Lalmohan Babu wanted to buy a pocket calculator. ‘It might come in handy,’ he said to me as an aside, ‘to calculate the royalty from all my books.’ He found what he wanted—a calculator so small and so flat that I failed to figure out where the battery went in. I bought a few rolls of film for Feluda’s Pentax; and Feluda bought a mini Sony audio cassette recorder. ‘From now on,’ he told me, ‘remember to switch this on when a new client visits us. It will make life a lot easier if we can record conversations.’ We returned to Mr Pal’s flat at three. He couldn’t take us to the hotel himself since he had to go to his shop. ‘That’s all right, Mr Pal,’ Feluda said to him. ‘You have already done so much for us. We’ll take a taxi, don’t worry.’ ‘All right. But do let me know how you get on. I’ll be thinking of you!’ We came out of the building and found a taxi waiting just outside the front gate. Taxis in Hong Kong looked different. Instead of black and yellow, they were red and silver. ‘Pearl Hotel,’ said Feluda. The driver nodded and started the car. Lalmohan Babu seemed unusually subdued. When I asked him why, he said it was because his mental horizon had spread enormously in a short span of time. ‘If it spreads any further, I don’t think I could cope!’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘I had only seen Chinese workmen and Chinese shoemakers in Calcutta. I would never have believed they could build a city like this if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes!’ Mr Pal had told us that the hotel was less than ten minutes from his flat. But our chauffeur kept driving for much longer than that. It was most puzzling. Feluda frowned, then raised his voice and said, ‘We said Pearl Hotel!’ ‘Yes,’ said the driver without turning his head. He was wearing dark glasses, so I couldn’t see his eyes. Surely he had heard us right the first time? And surely there couldn’t be more than one hotel by the same name? The taxi passed through a number of small lanes and finally, after about twenty minutes, stopped at a street corner. There was no doubt that this was an area where only the Chinese lived, far removed from the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the high streets. The buildings were tall and narrow, and

terribly congested. Heaven knew if the sun ever went in through those small windows. There were only a few small shops that bore no resemblance to the tempting departmental stores we had seen earlier. All of them had signboards written in Chinese, so there was no way of telling what the shops sold. ‘Where is Pearl Hotel?’ Feluda asked. The driver raised a hand to indicate that we’d have to go into the lane on our right. I looked at the meter. What it showed in Hong Kong dollars amounted to a hundred rupees. But there was nothing we could do except pay up. Having done this, we picked up our luggage and turned to go. Even without looking at Lalmohan Babu, I could tell that he had turned visibly pale. Everything he had heard about the crime rate in Hong Kong must have been flashing through his mind. We turned right. The lane was narrow and dark. But before anything else registered, shadows leapt out of the darkness and surrounded us. In the next instant, I felt a blow on my head and passed out. When I came round, I found myself lying on the floor of a dingy room. Feluda was sitting on a wooden packing crate, smoking a Charminar. There was a funny smell in the room that made me want to close my eyes again and go to sleep. I learnt later that it was the smell of opium. Apparently, the British used to produce opium in India and sell it to the Chinese. This made the British rich, and the Chinese got hooked. Lalmohan Babu was still unconscious, but was beginning to stir. Our luggage had disappeared. There were four or five packing crates in the room, a cane chair that lay tilted to one side, and a Chinese calendar. Through a tiny window fairly high on the wall came a faint shaft of light, which meant that there was still some daylight left outside. There were two doors, one on my right and the other in front of me. Both were closed. The only sound to be heard was the chirping of a bird. The Chinese, I had noticed elsewhere, were fond of keeping birds in cages. ‘Wake up, Lalmohan Babu!’ Feluda said. ‘How long will you sleep?’ Lalmohan Babu opened his eyes and winced in pain. ‘My God! What a horrific experience!’ he exclaimed, sitting up with some difficulty. ‘Where on earth are we?’ ‘In the massacre chamber,’ Feluda replied calmly. ‘It’s just like one of your stories, isn’t it?’ ‘My stories? Ho!’ Perhaps the act of saying ‘Ho!’ brought on a fresh twinge of pain, for he made a face. Then he lowered his voice slightly and said, ‘What just happened to us beats anything I’ve ever written. I’ll give up writing altogether, I swear. Enough is enough.’ ‘What! You mean you’ll never write again?’ ‘No, never.’ ‘All right. Your statement has just been recorded, remember. You can’t go back on your word.’