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