Carnival of Spies

by Robert Moss

  He found her a useful source because of her other lovers. One of them was a banker who was sending millions abroad in Shanghai silver dollars that could be resold for ten or twenty percent more than their face value in London or New York because the American treasury had decided it needed to hoard silver as well as gold. May had promised to find out what ship would carry the next consignment. One act of piracy could pay for a hundred machine guns, five thousand rifles. But the bags of silver coins would be heavy. And he would need a friendly captain.

  “Have you been drinking?” May asked.

  “Not enough. Let’s have some cognac.”

  “As you like.” The boy was waiting outside the door. She gave him his instructions and said, “You’re sad tonight. Are you thinking about your wife?”

  “No.” The ash spilled from his cigarette. May brushed it off his bare chest and kissed his nipples, the way he might have kissed hers. He began to feel mildly aroused. But he said, “Let’s talk. Who else have you been seeing?”

  “You’ll be jealous.”

  “On the contrary. You know it excites me.”

  “Very well. But give me a cigarette.” He helped her light it, and she went on, “I saw Tu Yu-seng. Do you believe me?”

  “Of course. He’s your protector, isn’t he?”

  Tu Yu-seng — Big-Eared Tu, they called him, because his ears stuck out like bat’s wings — was the boss of the Green Gang. It was said that nobody could run a bar or a cabaret or a gambling den in Frenchtown without paying him. It was also said that he controlled the detective section of the police in the French Concession. The taipans sipping whisky at the Long Bar or tea at the Astor House might never admit his existence, but they, too, paid their dues. Nor did Tu’s influence end there. The generalissimo, Chiang Kai-shek himself, had taken the vows of the Greens as a young man — terrifying vows that bound a man to give his life to the society, if demanded, and guaranteed that the society, in exchange, would always protect him. The Greens had carried out their part of the bargain in 1927, when their gunmen and axemen went through the streets killing Communists. The generalissimo would be paying his dues to the end of his days.

  May held her cigarette between thumb and forefinger, like a Russian.

  “Where did you see him? Here?”

  “I went to his house.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Like an emperor’s palace. There were mechanical birds, singing in a tree with gold and silver leaves.”

  “I don’t care about the birds. Why did he send for you?”

  “You don’t think I have talent?”

  She lay back with her legs apart and blew smoke at him. “Of course.”

  “There was a party,” she explained. “There were generals from Nanking, even the finance minister. A German, too.”

  “A German? What German?”

  “An officer from the front. I don’t remember the name.”

  “Von Seeckt?” He screwed an imaginary monocle into his face. “A man in his fifties? Very arrogant, very Prussian?”

  “All of that, but not in his fifties. His name was similar, though.”

  Johnny thought hard. He had made a personal hobby out of studying the members of the German military mission that was planning the destruction of the Reds in Kiangsi. He had drawn up a plan to assassinate von Seeckt. It had been approved. But he had been forbidden to take part himself, and one of the Chinese involved had lost his nerve at the last moment and thrown his grenades too soon, missing the general’s car and turning a dozen nameless civilians into chopped meat.

  He had not reported the episode to James Killen, his well-intentioned but rather insular British contact. One day, given the chance, he might mention it to Colin Bailey. He thought Bailey would understand. Von Seeckt and Emil Brandt were two sides of a German evil. But one of them was going to self-destruct. It was best to focus his hatred, for now, on the one that might not.

  He mentally rehearsed the names of other members of the German advisory team, which Hitler had recently doubled in size: Falkenhausen, Zorn...

  “Steinitz,” he suggested. “Colonel Martin Steinitz. Is that the one?”

  “It might be—” May yawned. “Why are you so interested? You ask too many questions. What are you? A policeman?”

  “I don’t pay you to ask questions. And I pay you well enough, don’t I?”

  “Not as well as Tu.”

  “Did you sleep with him?”

  She crossed her legs and hugged herself as if she felt a chill. “Not him. One of his lieutenants. He carries the marks of the smallpox — everywhere.”

  “Who went with Steinitz?”

  “Some girl — a Russian, I think. You know what they are. The latest fashions, furs, and not two bits of cash to scrape together. She looked like a model from Chanel. But hard, very hard. I think your Colonel Steinitz likes that. He really fell for her.”

  “What is her name?”

  “They called her Lena. I never saw her before.”

  “But you can find out, can’t you?” He took a handful of Mexican silver dollars — still the preferred currency in Shanghai — and shaped them into a neat stack on the bedside table.

  The boy came with a bottle of Martell. Johnny paid him off, too.

  “Is that all you want?” May asked, after draining her glass. She straddled him, letting her breasts swing over his face.

  “No,” he said, closing his eyes again. He was no longer in Shanghai. He was with Sigrid, in a room in Paris where the afternoon light spilled through the shutters and dropped to the floor like ripe sheaves of wheat.

  May loved to be taken out. That satisfied her that she moved in a different dimension from the taxi dancers downstairs at the Cockatoo Club or the varnished Chinese whores who paraded two abreast down the Nanking Road, with their amahs at their heels. Like all the denizens of Shanghai, she also loved to gamble. So Johnny took her to the Canidrome. The greyhound she picked in the third race was so heavily drugged that it collapsed on all fours in the home straight. May was outraged. He consoled her with champagne, but she was still fuming when he broached the reason for their meeting.

  “What did you find out about Lena?”

  “She’s too skinny for you,” May snickered.

  “Did you find out where she lives?” Johnny persisted. “I can go one better. Colonel Steinitz found out, too.”

  “You mean he visits her?”

  “I gather he is infatuated.”

  “Give me the woman’s address.”

  May told him, and he made a mental note. The apartment was on the wrong side of Soochow Creek. He knew the area slightly. Some affluent Chinese lived there, but no Europeans, except for a few White Russians.

  “We could go to a dinner dance,” May suggested. “We could go to the Cathay.”

  The woman would have made the perfect wife for one of the English taipans, Johnny thought. Indifferent to sex but in love with appearances. The Cathay produced one of the starchier evening entertainments on offer in the settlement. Members of May’s profession got in as long as they were suitably attired and not obviously oriental.

  “Not tonight,” he said.

  “Are you going to see Lena?”

  “Perhaps. I don’t know.”

  “Why do you care so much about this German officer?” May looked angry. “I bet I know. I bet you’re a Communist.”

  “What do you have against Communists?”

  “They pretend that sex doesn’t have a price.”

  “If I were a Communist, would you betray me?”

  “It would depend on what I was paid.”

  5

  Johnny watched the sweat gleam on the lean, dark back of his rickshaw driver. The man’s leathery feet in their straw sandals drummed noiselessly on the pavement. The night smelled of camphor and oil. On sampans pushed nose to tail on the muddy bank of Soochow Creek, families were eating and swapping tales, their laundry hung out on oars that made some of the boats look like wounde
d flying fish.

  They were still in the settlement, but they had left the wide boulevards of the European city. There was no sign of the shells and bombs that had gutted whole streets in Hongkew only two years before, when the Japanese had landed troops at Shanghai. The singsong houses and restaurants, the pawnbrokers and silver shops had sprung back, rank and prolific as tropical weeds. A brass band thumped out a tune from an upstairs window above a department store, primitive but effective advertising. The people in the street were a sea of blue.

  He touched the shoulder of the rickshaw puller with the toe of his shoe.

  “Man, man!”

  He dismounted at the end of Lena’s street. There was an herbalist’s shop near the corner with ginseng and dried frogs on display in the window. There was also a black car blocking half the narrow street. Two Chinese toughs loitered on the driver’s side, smoking cheap cigars. Opposite was a dress shop with a copy of a Molyneux evening gown in the window. On the second floor, Lena’s apartment.

  Johnny had come with no fixed plan except to watch and to open his lungs. The hot season was on its way; in the night the humid exhalations of the mud flats rose up through the cement and tar.

  Lena and her colonel interested him. He had heard something from Otto Braun about this Steinitz. He was a passionate Hitlerite, according to Braun, but also a soldier who knew his business. He had helped to draw up the plans for Chiang’s extermination campaign. If he was dallying in Shanghai for reasons other than personal pleasure, it was no doubt to arrange the delivery of a new shipload of arms or to squeeze more money out of the Chinese bankers who paid for the generalissimo’s campaigns.

  Steinitz was a promising target. If the girl could be bought — or persuaded — they could find out the colonel’s secrets through her.

  The idea was seductive. It might even be a way to strike at two enemies at once and drive the last nail into Emil’s coffin. Moscow trusted conspiracy more than common sense. Anyone with his eyes open could see that the Communists in the south were lost unless they changed their strategy. Otto Braun could see it; he had actually asked the centre to recall Emil to Moscow on the grounds that his policy was suicidal. Braun had the Kiangsi leaders on his side, including the big, flat-faced peasant philosopher, Mao Tse-tung. But the Central Committee was in Shanghai, and it was run by recent graduates of the Lenin School whose dogmatism made Torquemada look like a freethinker. They would back Emil as long as Moscow did. In the fights that broke out between Emil and Braun, Johnny tried to avoid taking sides. When forced to state his position, he deferred to Emil. But his secret reports to Starik were a damning cumulative indictment. First-hand evidence, through Steinitz, of the plan to crush the Kiangsi soviet — the plan Emil had done everything to advance — would surely settle Emil’s hash when the accounts were drawn up in Moscow.

  Failing that, Johnny thought he would quite enjoy putting a bullet into Colonel Steinitz.

  He went into the corner pawnshop. There seemed to be a great many samurai swords. He went out the door on the other side, leading into a street the Chinese called Iron Road. He saw it was possible, by climbing over fire escapes and pocket gardens, to get to the back of Lena’s building.

  He retraced his steps and saw Steinitz march briskly towards his car. He had a handsome, haughty face, marred by the jagged white seam of an old scar that must have been stitched up in haste. He was carrying a leather satchel.

  Johnny waited for several minutes after the car moved off. Then he went through the entrance next to the dress shop. On his left, there was an open door: Chinese in black pyjamas playing mah-jongg. They watched him pull back the metal grille and step into the lift, but nobody questioned a European.

  He tapped on Lena’s door.

  “Who’s there?” The girl called out in English.

  “I have a message from Colonel Steinitz,” he responded in German.

  For what seemed like a long time there was no response. He wondered if she was inspecting him through a concealed peephole. He pressed his ear up against the door. He could hear Mozart on a scratchy recording.

  He knocked again and was rewarded with the scrape of metal as she released the bolts inside the door.

  But she didn’t open it. She merely called out, “Come in.”

  Even as he turned the handle, he knew it was a trap. The room was a black hole. In the first instants he could see nothing. He only sensed her movements as she slipped behind him, too late to fling himself out of range. The touch of the silk rope against his throat was exquisitely smooth and cool. But he clawed and grabbed at her hands, trying to prise them loose. There was amazing strength in the woman’s arms. The garrotte is not a weapon for women — at least, not for many. The room was a pattern of purplish blotches in front of his eyes when he managed to grab a fistful of hair and wrench her head over to one side. Instantly, the vise around his windpipe was relaxed. He could hear the light rhythm of her panting as she darted across the room.

  He made a leap at her, caught hold of a leg and went crashing on top of her. Glass and porcelain exploded across the floor. She wrestled and bit. She broke something over his head — a bottle or a vase — and went gouging for his eyes, two fingers extended like the talons of a bird of prey.

  “You’re a fighter. I have to give you that,” he said when he finally had her pinioned, her arms twisted up behind her back.

  He heard a sharp intake of breath. Perhaps he was holding her too tight. But he had no intention of starting another round.

  He found a light switch. She was wearing black silk pyjamas. Her skin glowed against them like ivory. Her eyes were pale and bright, ice-blue. One of them would be very black by morning.

  “Good God.” He released her arms. He was too shocked for a moment to say anything more. Finally he said, “Is this how you receive all your former lovers?”

  “Only the ones who deserve it,” Helene replied, and laughed till her ribs hurt.

  In the little ways, at least, Helene was the same. After sex, or after a fight, she demanded to eat. Johnny took her to a place where Europeans rarely went. The restaurant advertised its cuisine with a newly fried chicken, varnished to a bright vermilion and suspended above the door. Most of the Chinese customers ate standing up at a counter, but there were a few tables at the back.

  “I didn’t know you at the door. But I knew you weren’t from Steinitz,” Helene explained, pausing in her demolition of a plate of fried dumplings.

  “What did you think I was?”

  “Police. Or Gestapo.”

  “Gestapo? Here? But why?”

  Her chopsticks moved from the dumplings to a bowl of saffron-coloured rice.

  “Because Steinitz is one of us.” She took a mouthful and said, “We have been very careful. He is closely watched. The Greens have people everywhere. But who can object to a kept woman? It’s only human, isn’t it? Besides, they think I’m a White Russian. Who else would live in this part of Hongkew? And they saw Steinitz meet me in the house of the grand vizier, no less. You know that’s what he likes to be called, don’t you? Big-Eared Tu.” She wiped her mouth. “The man is disgusting. But he truly is the grand vizier of Shanghai.”

  “How did you manage the introductions?”

  “I met Steinitz before, of course. In Berlin. But none of his people know that. They saw him falling in love with me in Tu’s house. What do you think of that?”

  “Not bad. How did you get invited?”

  “An acquaintance. One of those gentlemen who likes Chekiang silk and dainty feet and doesn’t care where he finds his money.”

  Johnny realized that a powerful Chinese, a member of the Green Gang, perhaps even a relative of Big-Eared Tu, had been recruited by Helene’s network.

  “It’s dangerous work,” Johnny observed. In Shanghai, by his observations, a bribe worked only until a bigger bribe was available.

  “More dangerous since you decided to drop in on me,” she countered. “You stumbled in like a pathetic amateur. You could ha
ve got all our heads cut off.”

  “Believe me, I had no idea of the relationship. I thought it was a stupid affair of a bar girl, someone who could be bought. Nobody warned me about Steinitz. They didn’t even tell me you were in Shanghai.”

  “Emil Brandt isn’t the only game in town,” Helene sniffed. “And it’s just as well.”

  He got into the habit of visiting Helene when Steinitz was out of Shanghai, in Nanking or at the front. They drank together and talked about the old days, and about Sigrid.

  “Poor Johnny,” Helene said to him. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you. It was the same when Sigi and I were kids. Everybody wanted to give her the treats, she looked so sweet and innocent. Besides which, she was the littlest one. Whenever we had a fight, I’d get belted for it. I was the tomboy, the bad girl, the one who was always running away from home. But guess who won most of the fights? She did.”

  For Johnny, talk about Sigrid, however banal, was better than nothing. He had received only a few short letters from her, not much better than postcards. One was postmarked Brussels, another Copenhagen. She made no reference to the long letters he had written her, painting word pictures of the city that he thought might please her. He wondered if she had even received them.

  If there had ever been jealousy or hostility between him and Helene, it had been leached away by the passage of time. Sitting with her, completely at his ease, he thought at times they were almost like an old married couple. But there remained an unbridgeable gap defined by professional caution. They could talk about Heinz and laugh at the games the three of them had once played together, and Johnny could express his contempt for Emil for denouncing Heinz to the party. This much was common ground. But Johnny did not dare to go further. He could not attack Max, not to a woman who, by all appearances, remained one of Max’s most devoted protégées. He must let nothing slip that would tell her what he had become, nothing to hint at the driving purpose that had supplanted his lost faith in the party: the determination to put a bomb under the little Stalins, and the big one in Moscow too, with the help of British Intelligence.